Is the Republican Party dead in the water?

I pretty much think so.  Do a search on "racial tweets?"  Holy crap!  I was stunned when I saw much hate there is in the Republican Party, it's like a cancer in their bones.  Now you have some 34,000 in Texas wanting to secede from the United States.  You do know these are the same people who, back when Bush wanted to go to Iraq, damned every one who disagreed as unpatriotic.  When Obama was elected for his first term, instead of taking a step back and analyzing what had gone wrong and what they needed to do to put themselves on an even keel, the Republicans moved farther to the right.  They just don't seem to understand the electorate moves right down the center line, swaying a little to the right but then back again to the left, but just a little bit.  The electorate knows if they go too far to either left or right this ship is going to capsize.  The Republicans don't understand this at all.

I was going to use a picture of the Titanic but too many people lost their lives with that one, the Yorktown is better, it was dead in the water but survived.  Actually, I believe the Republican Party needs to decided if they're going to be on the Titanic and sink or on the Yorktown and float.  If they're going to float they're going to need to something about the racism.  The only way they're going to win another presidential election is by incorporating blacks or / and Latinos and the racists, well, they'll probably have to find another party.  The GOP might split into two  parts, or three parts: social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and the Tea Party.  In order for the Republicans to put another man in the white house I suspect one of those three groups is going to get the shaft.  I'm betting it's the Social Conservatives.  

Simply put, Rosetta Stone is pretty damn difficult

A long, long time ago, when I was going to Lebanon Valley College, I had to take a foreign language.  Notice, I said take, not learn since you were not really expected to become fluent in that tongue unless, of course, you were a language major.  In high school I had tried Spanish and didn't like it so I chose French and liked it.  When I graduated I was three credits short of it being a double major.  A few years ago, after I was laid off by xpedx so they could out source my job to Poland, I took part of my severance package and went to France.  To my surprise the French I thought I remembered quite well didn't quite jive with what the locals were speaking.  I thought about this for a long time, I mean, how could I be so bad at something I had enjoyed so much.  Then I saw one of the many commercials for Rosetta Stone.

For those of you who don't know, this is what the real Rosetta stone looks like.  What did it do?  It allowed archaeologists to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs into other languages they had already translated.  This rock allowed them to understand just what the ancient Egyptians were painting on the walls of their tombs and carving into their statuary.  However, this is not what I ended up buying.

I bought this instead.  Most people have seen their commercials on television and they do make it seem like a foreign language is easy to learn.  They are, however a bit misleading.  Rosetta Stone works on the immersion theory where if you immerse yourself in, say French, comprehension will be simple.  Wrong.  For myself, I didn't find it that difficult but then I have a background.  For an individual who is starting from scratch it may be overwhelming.  They don't tell you that you should set up a class schedule or that if you're doing less then three or four hours a week you're going to fail.  There is a lot of memorization which needs to take place.  You don't hear something three times and repeat it three times and remember it forever.  The program does work.  They do, however, need to stop implying you can learn a new language in a couple of weeks simply by sitting in front of your computer.  They need to tell the unsuspecting public that if they want to immerse themselves it has to be more then an hour or so a week.  People spend a lot of money on this program with out understanding just how much work is involved.  That's a flaw for Rosetta Stone which should be fixed.