1. This article sums up the "Republican problem".  The money quote is as follows:

Do not underestimate the willingness of a whole lot of Republicans to vote for someone that they want more than someone that they think can win.

And that is the problem in a nut shell. What most Republicans fail to comprehend, or just don't care about, is that when you vote for a candidate in an election, you are voting for an individual who will lead and represent the entire country. Not just you and your own ideology. Not only that but they are our face to the wider community, so on the national level they represent us on a global scale. When you nominate someone to run in an election, you should really consider if they're going to be palatable to the broader population (i.e., centrists and independents) because if they're not, they're not going to win.  I'm not sure what the GOP could have done differently in 2008 (not including the gaffe of picking Palin for VP). John McCain was as a good a candidate as the GOP could have mustered. He is mainly a centrist, though he started attempting to lean right as the election approached, and well ... he blew the opportunity to govern when the economy tanked. His bigger problem though was that Obama himself tapped the centrist/independent market better than McCain did, and he had the support of the far left whereas McCain didn't have the support of the far right. In this election, I fear the same thing will happen to the GOP. Romney is going to have a hard time getter the far right nutjobs ... people who would seemingly rather cut off their nose to spite someone else's face. That means he needs to pull in more of the independents in 2012. However, can he survive the religious wacko's to get to the general election?

2. Interesting findings here.

... on the conventional farms, 67 percent were resistant to the antibiotic erythromycin, while only 18 percent were on the newly organic farms. And 42 percent of the same pathogen had a multidrug resistance on conventional farms, but that number dropped to 10 percent on the organic ones.

I wonder if that means we'll see a bigger push toward organic farming, and a larger demand for organic farming as well. I also wonder what sort of impact this might have on antibiotic resistance in medical settings.