Surely this was a typo, right? A misprint?

unrecognizable.

not to black folk

a half century ago in the reddest part of Texas. In 7th grade before I even realized that I was gay my classmates tried to set me on fire. The school principal told my Mom that I would have to learn to fight. In 9th grade my geography teacher, a tennis coach, told my classmates that I should be killed. I couldn't eat in the cafeteria so I used to go to the library until the librarian told me not to come back. Then I went across the street and hid behind a dumpster during lunch break. I absolutely recognize where this country is going.

Damnedably similar to my coming of age experience. The threats, beatings, covered with bruises and constant vigilance against attacks from behind still haunt my nightmares, although a PTSD therapy (methylene blue enhanced exposure therapy, relatively extensive, U of Washington Seattle) helped calm that bugaboo down.
I also had no refuge. No reasonable adults nor my parents intervened, matter of fact encouraged the bullies. It's a whole book I wrote about it. Westboro Baptist Idiots were involved via Phelps relatives, still idiotic religious zombies.
I ran away to spare my life. Nearly a year and 1/2 on the streets, then fortunate enough to find an elderly man who sheltered me until I was nearly 18.
Oh do I ever get steamed about this "groomer" shit. They're trying their best to make suicidal environments for LGBTQ all over again.

that you were able to get some relief with PTSD therapy. I think that calling us groomers is another instance of authoritarian projection. It is frightening to see all the progress that we have made hanging in the balance.

But left no quarter when it came to a genuinely bad start in adulthood-- I know of no one else in my family that didn't start out with an inheritance, some quite substantial. It was my homophobic father's insistence that I got nothing. Mom just went along "whatever your father says".
I got some worthless, worn out hand-me-downs from my brothers. I had to rely on my Aunt and Uncle at first who weren't so "stiff", gave me odd jobs until I could start gainful employment.
But ever get ahead of living paycheck to paycheck? Own a real home? My "home" has wheels. I barely afford truck payments to haul it around traveling job to job.
"Unstable"-- my family labels me. Whoops? Who inherited a solid, now million dollar home? (Every one of those boomers live in an inherited home) Who never ever spent a night on the streets frightened and praying I wouldn't get mugged, raped, accosted or arrested? Those prayers didn't work about all of the above when just trying to survive until I lucked into and talked myself into a living situation.
No, I don't want charity but have had to rely on just exactly that sometimes, matter if fact recently right here from DU!
I took that charity and got another job at my age.
I'm close to retirement. It certainly won't be fancy. Much of the time off-grid boondocking.
If you are haunted by nightmares, Google up treatment trials. Baylor appears to be starting one soon that pays some stipend to participants. txbdc.utdallas.edu/txbdc/trials/ptsd/index.html
Unclear if they're recruiting, but can't hurt to call.
A lot of these got discontinued in the pandemic, but now some are starting up again. Sure helped my sanity tremendously.

be very difficult to be so close to that much money and not receive an inheritance. I'm sure that there are wealthy people with a lot of empathy, but it seems more often that money, and the sheltered Ivory Tower life that it brings, prevents people from being empathetic even when it is their own relatives who are suffering. And the lack of financial stability during youth and young adulthood is devastating to one's future.

Thank you for the information on treatment trials. I may just try that, although I moved from Dallas to Florida when I retired a few years ago. I was extraordinarily fortunate and was able to become a registered nurse. It didn't pay as much back then, we had to work unpaid overtime every day, but after thirty years at a public hospital I qualified for a pension.

The country I grew up in discouraged girls from studying science.

Good fucking riddance to the country I grew up in.

I attended a white school while my best friend next door went elsewhere. His dad wore the same uniform as my dad, but that didn't matter. As a girl, I couldn't even have a paper route.

Couldn't agree more, good fucking riddance to the country I grew up in. We're not a whole lot better, but we are better.

Parts of us are the same but louder.

It's the "louder" part that makes it so difficult for some of us to recognize.

But some things did exist in the country I gre up in which would help if we could get them back. things like labor unions and a minimum wage adjusted for inflation (although it would need to be enforced better) and the rich actually paying taxes.

It's not enough just to be white and be able to spell your name.

And, yes, those parts of the American Dream you listed seem to have been part of the ladder that was pulled up once they became devalued by the fact that, you know, those people can earn a living wage too.

We demolished vibrant communities in our cities with the fury of a WWII carpet bombing raid in order to install highways that would make it easy to live apart in idyllic suburbs where every white man could be the ruler of his quarter acre empire.

$3000/ year for tuition, room and board at American University 1965 to 1966.. did it with a scholarship and work.minimum wage, $1.25/hour plus tips.. and yes, strong unions and high taxes on the rich are missed. The Big problem was that opportunities for me were unavailable to many friends, and even my opportunities were limited by my gender.

Nor were mass shootings nearly a weekly occurrence.

When you read USA history you find out that the USA has always been a racist country, with a population of greedy people where the mighty dollar rules, where power has a false value, where those in front of the cameras become idolized by stupid ignorant people (the Kardashian anyone?).

What the USA has been great at is marketing to its citizens and the World that this is the greatest country on earth, not only now but that it has always been the greatest country, reason why trump was so successful on selling his "MAGA" crap and never explaining when "America was so great that we would be willing to go back to it."

I read history, I read biographies and they tell the truth about us, we are what we have always been, the difference today is that technology allows us to see, almost immediately, what we are and have always been. Many think politicians were sincere, honest etc., in the past because we could not see what they were doing, a lot of that corruption became buried and we never learned about it unless we take the time to read history and find good books that will tell it honestly.

So no, what you see is what we have always been, don't fool yourself believing otherwise, lets instead educate our children the right way to try to change the future to become better people.

"States' rights" specifically means the "rights" of states to discriminate against everyone who isn't perfectly aligned with their demographics and ideology. The trojan horse is a government that is more accountable and less oppressive while their actions specifically create government that is less accountable and more oppressive.

"Make America Great Again". This is an example of anti-progressive sloganeering. The trojan horse is they will take away new ideas that are allegedly bad and replace them with older ideas from an earlier time when certain aspects of society were allegedly better. The reality is they want to implement new ideas that are specifically designed to revive the shittiest aspects of days gone by like rich people paying zero taxes and unfettered hate and discrimination.

Make no mistake the new GOP really isn't that different than the old GOP. They still want to make the rich richer at the expense of everyone else. They still want their overreaching authoritarian government. They still want to promote exclusiveness at the expense of inclusiveness. The only difference is today they don't have to hide behind any auspices of intellectualism or tolerance.

and watched the funerals of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy.

by much of the populous at the time. Things started to change back then
but have stalled and even gone backwards in the years since. I do think
progress is being made. Vietnam still affects us even five decades later.

Stay well.

but also remember the assassination of JFK. I also remember that for years and years the tens of thousands of 18year olds who could be drafted and sent to Viet Name that were intentionally not allowed to vote because they weren't 21.......

I also remember in early 68'? when by that time, there was MAJOR opposition to the war, and un-believably, Johnson upped the draft to an additional 250K. It seems the profits of the Military Industrial Complex had gotten to him.........

There was a Frenchman? who, when our nation was first being formed, stated that "a Democracy will work until individuals or a political group figures out that they can vote themselves money"...............

for the US Senate as the 2 nominees for each main party.

...and one of them was named "Kingfish".

Now as long as they have an (R) next to your name with their endorsement, they have at least 45% of the vote.

come into direct contact with the racist, xenophobic, hate-filled, mysogistic Americans that have always been here since the founding. They were lying low - unseen, unheard and unrecognized - before social media came to their rescue.

The bad stuff was always there. It’s just unleashed now.

Thank you.

He's running against a caricature of the Dems that looks like a malignant clown to the people on the other side. The complete worthlessness of Walker, Trump, MTG tells us what we look like to the other side. They've got us so wrong.

... that is controlled by the Fascists.

Making Herschel Walker into a viable senatorial candidate is pathetically astounding and shameful.

machine will come up with for 2024. "Kyle Rittenhouse for Congress" seems more and more likely.

They could make a pond salamander into a candidate for Senator.

They are able to do the same with pond scum as well.

The point is, grumbles from the Turtle notwithstanding, that for the GOP's party machine, the quality of the candidate does not matter, and for the solid core of their base, it doesn't matter either. They apparently have not gotten the message that quality of candidate does matter somewhat to the undecided or moderate. Their only hope is to gerrymander districts in such a way that the Faithful will always be in the majority, and then GOTV to make sure their candidate wins.

-- Mal

Joseph Goebbels was a guru at marketing, he helped Hitler get to power and stay in power, but at the end of the day it is our fault for not reading, for not educating ourselves and believing lies that deep inside we know to be just that.

And make no mistake, the so called socialism, communism, fascism, are all totalitarian movements are all one and the same. I am reading a book on just that, the book is focused on South American where the so called "socialism" has been able to sell itself very well and now the countries who voted for them are paying dearly. The same is happening in Europe, Spain is on the verge of falling to a regime where the leader was trained by Hugo Chavez.

Having said all that, what trump tried is the same formula that all those totalitarian regimes use, the methodology is the same, the name is what changes, but they all use populism to get there, reason why trump used the ignorant crowd of the USA to move his agenda ahead, they are the ideal subject for a totalitarian because they are not only ignorant, easily excited with hate, and very violent.

It's easy to convert fear into hate and bigotry. "Conservatives" in Georgia will vote for Walker simply because they've been conditioned by propaganda to hate liberals and liberalism. And there's no hope whatsoever of getting them to unplug from the propaganda machine; we'll simply have to outnumber them, no matter how small the margin.

It is going to cone down to who shows up to vote.

I'll take any kind of win.

I don't care if it's by .00001

I don't know why so many people fret over polls. I think most people lie about their choices. They never seem to match the results anyway.

When I was asked for information after voting I said I believe in a secret ballot. The interviewer said that wasn't one of the answers. So I said, "Oh, well." and walked away. I wonder what column I was put in that day.



❤️ pants

Of one his senior handlers saying, “Make sure the (blank) doesn’t go off script,” he would still only be down 4 points.

you can (and I will) blame the F-tards in spades!

We 'use' to have another popular saying regarding democracy - n' that was, "the voters tend to get the democracy (government) they deserve." I'm sticking with that one.

There is no other conclusion to be made. Yeah, sure, there are some decent people there, but the majority have made it clear who populates that corner of Georgia and what sort of people they are.

(and, no, NOT picking on GA, or the 'south' - I can tell you from experience that it thrives, in greater or lesser degrees of concentration, in all corners of this country. and many others I might add)

And DJT opened a lot of eyes to just how many - and how far flung - the ignorant, racists, goobers extended.

Is if you’re white and they are a POC.

I mean MTG was re-elected handily for that very reason. Proving that as long as you can count on racism in the Deep South there, you can do or say whatever obnoxious thing pops into your thought-free skull.

One of my work buddies retired in about 2000 or so, and tried to move back to AL and the family home. He did not last a year.

He’d call me up and tell me stories that pinned my ears back. The racism, the stupidity, intolerance and selfishness he said he saw on a daily basis broke him pretty quickly. He said what bothered him most was the general IQ level, which he seemed to think was pretty low. I guess you can only talk to stupid people for so long.

So he moved to ID. Not less racism there, just mostly white folks.

Same class of intelligence.

I have no idea how popular/unpopular Kelly was, and I could make some assumptions about why she lost that would be nasty, mean spirited and fact free.

Instead I’d point out that in 2021 the vote totals were 4.3 million, and Warnock won by less than 2%. Vote totals in 2022 were about 3.8 million.

Is it just as simple as getting out the vote? Was there a more compelling message in 2021 that motivated the voters? IDK.

I do know that you won’t ever get to a 40 point lead in GA if your a POC, especially if you’re running against white folks, and I’ll lay that pretty solidly on the racism that’s been entrenched there since forever. I’ve seen enough Amoud Arberys shot down in cold blood in the Deep South to make that stick.

It’s fighting back now.

It didn’t use to have to do that. It could work quietly and without overt conflict.

I had an acquaintance say to me the other day, “We didn’t have problems with racism when I was growing up because no black people lived there.”

I was utterly stunned by the complete unawareness of why that might have been the circumstances in that enclave not far from Northeast urban corridor.

criminals like trump get into office.

half the voting public are stupid, traitor loving, anti-americans.

But you do have a valid point that "conservative" candidates have reached new lows -- and the most appalling aspect of this is that so many of our fellow Americans are eager to put idiots and scoundrels in high office.

Unfortunately there's no typo and don't call me Shirley.

Im sitting here at in my home surrounded by Trump-Walker supporting idiots who just want to win.


Get out the vote! It’s going to be a close one.

For the governor to monkey with it?

And polling sites prior to early election

The core of Republican voters don't care about anything but which side the candidate is on. And that core is larger than we'd like to think.

-- Mal

It absolutely boggles the mind that there is even 1% of the electorate that would consider Walker to be an acceptable choice.

in America. I'm glad to see he's up.

to be made if it is a bigger spread than the 4%. If it is portrayed as a horse race, the Media profits a great deal, and also the Republican Party profits immensely off of campaign donors. If it is a bigger percentage, the media isn't able to get readership/viewership AND, just as importantly the Republican donors all dry up.

We’re talking about a state that re-elected Marjorie Three Affairs 75-25 less than a month ago. OF COURSE Warnock is only ahead four points.

I truly believe that you could run any of the 25 worst dictators, tyrants and despots in the history of the world on the Republican ticket and get them elected in half the country.

So a lot of people think he’s the better candidate.