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These Republicans: A Short, Brutal, Primer

In the late 1970's, the Republican party got some bad news. That news was that they were outgunned. The sheer number of people who identified as “Democrat” significantly outnumbered the voters who identified as “Republican”. With the ethnic diversification and urbanization of the United States ever increasing, the strongholds of what might be Democratic power seemed to growing as the primarily rural and white mainstays of the Republican party were shrinking. Now put down your value judgments on any of this and step slowly away. Just understand the environment. Just before the 1980's, the Republican core America was, in fact, shrinking. The Democratic core America was, in fact, growing. It was a reality of the time that has shifted with many Latinos later joining the Republican party which at the time was unexpected by Democrats and with certain Urban areas remaining conservative despite conditions normally friendly to Democrats, something unexpected by Republicans. But we

Oops I did it again... and again... and again...

If you've been paying any attention to political news, which if you're reading this you do, you're probably pretty saturated with the continuous commentary on Rush Limbaugh and his attack on Georgetown University Law student Sandra Fluke. But before we let the topic completely go, there's one more piece worth examining. Despite reading countless articles about this, I found most analysis of HOW the scandal came about to be lacking. They focused on trying to make the arguments about the underlying issue, birth control, and did a poor job of examining the actual nature of the interchange between Rush, the public, his sponsors, and our collective psyche as the American people. But few if anyone examined the confluence of events that led to the scandal, even though that analysis answers a lot of questions about everything from Bill Maher to the question of partisanship and how this issue really transcends it. So what happened to Rush? We know what he said, but what did