Years ago, when I was younger, callow and a lazy newspaper columnist, I opened my mail one morning and a story fell into my lap.
The letter was from a former resident of the Pixley Home, a long-closed child welfare agency in Fort Wayne. Back in the day, if you lacked the resources to support your own children, you didn’t get cash or food stamps or other help from the government. Rather, the government would take over the care and raising of your children in a place like the Pixley Home, sort of an orphanage for children who weren’t orphans. This woman’s time at Pixley was sometime in the ’30s or ’40s, when the Depression, and then the war, disrupted many families. Kids at Pixley might have only one parent, often a widower father but sometimes a woman who had no family of her own to help with her burden. Child care outside of a grandmother or aunt was virtually nonexistent, so if you had to work to support yourself and had no one to watch your children? You surrendered them to a place like the Pixley Home.
If it sounds cruel to you, you’re not the only one.
Parents could visit their children, of course, on Sundays. And parents could get their children back, once they were back on their feet. I don’t recall what the process was to reclaim them, but I do know children generally stayed for months or years.
Anyway, the woman who wrote was trying to put together a reunion of Pixley kids, and hoped I could publicize it. I dug up a picture of the old building, called a few of the other residents that she had already tracked down, and wrote a column describing this merry, loving place, because that’s how my correspondent remembered it. She described it as something out of Little Orphan Annie, with stern-but-kind caretakers, big group dinners and so forth. It was like having a couple dozen brothers and sisters, all sleeping in dorms and bunk beds. About the worst thing she remembered was the weekly dose of castor oil everyone had to take.
The column ran, a few more Pixley kids were found as a result, the reunion went as planned and then, a few weeks after that, another letter arrived.
Like the first, it was written by an older woman. Only her memories of the Pixley Home were very different. She described a particular delivery man who would hang around after he’d offloaded his groceries and find a way to corner her in a quiet place. You can imagine what happened next. She certainly hadn’t forgotten it. She said she told the matrons about him, but nothing was done. It’s safe to say that decades later, she was still pretty upset about it. She certainly didn’t want to go to a happy reunion, and didn’t. But she wanted me to know.
Jeff has written about this elsewhere, and he’s right: Sexual abuse of children and women is absolutely nothing new, and was far, far more widespread than any of us know. My Fort Wayne neighbor’s mother-in-law was profoundly deaf from birth, and it happened to her. If you wanted a perfect victim, why not choose a girl who couldn’t talk? Or a girl in an institution? Or a servant or other low-status worker with no power and few resources to fight back?
The good ol’ days weren’t, in other words.
I thought of this other Pixley girl a couple years ago, when a father in one of the Larry Nassar sentencing hearings lunged at the defendant, calling him a son-of-a-bitch and asking for “one minute alone,” etc. He was subdued by deputies before he laid a hand on Nassar. So now his daughter, molested by Nassar at 13, has to further deal with the sight of her father being taken from the courtroom in handcuffs.
I want to tentatively raise my hand and ask a question: Is it possible to acknowledge every one of Nassar’s victims, to let them speak and describe how they were hurt by him, and still give them what they need to live the rest of their lives, not as victims, but as survivors? Because as creepy as having some doctor stick his ungloved fingers in you might be, having that define the rest of your life is far, far worse.
All of these stories are terrible, and some are unendurable. A father whose guilt over not protecting his daughter drove him to suicide. A victim who committed suicide herself.
When I read that ESPN piece about Todd Hodne, the rapist who played briefly at Penn State, I was struck by…well, by so many things. But what elevated it, in my eyes, was the careful attention paid to what happened to the women after they were raped by this behemoth. The girl who, at 16, successfully fended him off found strength in what she’d done, strength that has buttressed her throughout her life. Betsy Sailor, the woman who tried so hard through her terror to remember every detail, so she could testify later in court, similarly carried that good-deed-that-came-of-a-terrible-one into how she lived. Others were broken, or nearly so, by what happened. One woman remembered her mother, a Hodne victim, and the anxiety she was never able to shake afterward.
Of course you can’t blame those who didn’t turn straw into gold; no one knows how they’ll come through a trauma until it happens.
I was also struck, reading the Hodne story, that we’re finally getting better at how we treat women (and men) who endure these crimes. Victim impact statements are only part of it. We obviously have far, far to go. But there’s a glimmer of a bright side to look on, at least sometimes.
I don’t want to bring y’all down today, but the Pixley Home has been knocking around my head for a while now, and it needed to come out.
Bloggage?
In Michigan, the state GOP continues to delaminate. The guy in that story is deep in the DeVos organization, as I recall, and if he’s out, well, Katy bar the door.
If you were wondering if there’s a worse businessman in the world than Donald Trump, I do believe we’ve found him:
Boeing should have rejected then-President Donald Trump’s proposed terms to build two new Air Force One aircraft, the company’s CEO said Wednesday.
Dave Calhoun spoke Wednesday on the company’s quarterly earnings call, just hours after Boeing disclosed that it has lost $660 million transforming two 747 airliners into flying White Houses.
Then-President Trump, an aviation enthusiast, took a keen interest in the new presidential jets, involving himself in everything from contract negotiations to the plane’s color scheme. As part of the deal, Boeing signed a fixed-price contract that required the company, not taxpayers, to pay for any cost overruns during the complicated conversion of the two airliners.
Then-Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who was dismissed in December 2019, personally negotiated the Air Force One terms with Trump at the White House and the former president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
P.S. Dennis Muilenberg left his “dismissal” with a $62 million exit package.
Deborah said on April 27, 2022 at 5:25 pm
Imagine how tacky the color scheme and interior design of the new Air Force Ones must be if Trump dictated them.
I read a column somewhere on the internet about how to interview a sexual assault victim, it was based on how an interviewer met with one of the Nassar victims. It described how to be gentle and sensitive while asking a victim to live through some of the trauma again by talking about it. Apparently that’s not always done.
The Pixley Home was probably not a great memory for a lot of folks.
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Julie Robinson said on April 27, 2022 at 5:38 pm
Jeff could probably tell us the percentage of kids in foster care who have been abused in one way or another. I’m sure it’s shockingly high. How many have the natural resilience to escape without scars is probably shockingly low. Those I’ve known have a lot of damage.
We’re all just plodding along here with lots of coughing, and I’m feeling crummy even though I still test negative and don’t have a fever. I made the mistake of commenting on a WaPo story about Novak Djokovic; a calm, rational statement, and it brought out the crazies and attacks. These people actually think my family got Covid because we are immunized and have been masking. Woah. I won’t do that again!
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Jim said on April 27, 2022 at 6:19 pm
Places like the Pixley Home were extremely common. When my greatgrandmother died in the late nineteen teens my grandmother and her six younger siblings were sent to a Hungarian orphanage near Pittsburgh. She had to work there to help offset the cost.
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LAMary said on April 27, 2022 at 6:42 pm
My grandmother lost her parents and three siblings to an epidemic in the 1890s in Wisconsin. She and her two surviving sisters were sent to work as house servants. They were still very young. One of my grandmother’s jobs was to light the stove in the morning, a job that left her with burn scars for the rest of her life.
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Julie Robinson said on April 27, 2022 at 8:07 pm
One of my grandpas lost his father as a toddler, and his mom remarried a widower with other children. He often went hungry and had to leave school after 6th grade to hire out to other farmers. A great-grandma spent her youth cleaning houses to pay for her brothers to go to college, and had foot problems from wearing hand me down and too-small shoes. My FIL lost his mom as a toddler and remembered his stint in the CCC with great fondness because he got three square meals a day. Perspective is everything.
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David C said on April 27, 2022 at 8:21 pm
Boeing could have told him to pound sand but they didn’t because they thought doing so might cut them out of other contracts. They were probably right. Any time a business gives money to the GQP they need to remember that with this bunch there will always be strings attached to any contract they get. Disney played footsey with the FLA GQP and still they’ll try to burn them. Fascism isn’t going the be the business paradise they imagine.
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alex said on April 27, 2022 at 8:35 pm
My maternal grandfather’s parents divorced in the 1890s and their children all ended up in some sort of orphanage but I’m not sure what that was all about and it was never discussed.
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Jeff Borden said on April 27, 2022 at 10:26 pm
These Pixley facilities certainly sound similar to the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, where poor Catholic girls impregnated by Catholic boys were sent away in shame to toil in near slavery. The children they bore were dealt to “good families” willing to pay dearly for a healthy infant.
Outrageous and yet not surprising.
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Dexter Friend said on April 28, 2022 at 2:37 am
I missed the column nance wrote about the Pixley Home; I assume it was a “Telling Tales” story. I had never heard of the place, but everybody knew about The State School in Fort Wayne. Troubled and other kids labelled “retarded” were committed there and the adults I knew called the kids “inmates”. Our neighbor, circa 1956, was sent there as she was certainly a troubled teen. She made odd screeching noises , ran around barefoot all the time, and when she ran a nail through her foot one summer, we never saw her again, as she was committed to The State School. One anecdote I remember involved an old man telling about that place citing a naked from the waist up teen girl making it out to the street and showing herself off in a provocative manner. I was like 6 years old and very confused as to why this old man thought that to be so funny, as he told his story in the gas station to a small bunch of men who were laughing like hell. I was there to buy a Baby Ruth and a Pepsi.
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Jeff Gill said on April 28, 2022 at 6:30 am
I’ve got a 7 am home visit so will have to come back to the subject, but the abuse in foster homes question is fair, just not quite what you might think. It’s akin to the suicide rates in the military: they are high, shockingly so in isolation. But if you take young men ages 18 to 34 as a cohort, active duty military rates are lower. Right, you’d have to scrub the data to compare properly, but in general, that’s a closer comparison than to “all Americans” which is the metric that makes military suicide look horrible in most stories. Or compare to “those with regular access to firearms” like police: active duty military have a lower suicide rate than police officers, in general, or at least comparable.
Same problem in foster care. We often say a third of foster parents are saints, a third are pragmatic public minded economic necessity caregivers, and a third bear watching. We’d up the percentage of saints if we could, but they’re in short supply (another supply chain failure!). In general, the problem with figuring out what’s going on with foster kids is looking at how to compare their outcomes when known to realistic data sets. I spend more time with those aging out of foster care, and those 18-22 year olds are a unique group usually through no fault of their own . . . but they need to be treated individually in a group oriented system, let alone by our data analysis. More later.
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FDChief said on April 28, 2022 at 7:44 am
Ironic thing about that Boeing deal, tho? It will end up saving a planeload of tax dollars (if you come at it from the “We the People reeeeally want to gift our Chief Executive with a fancy flying White House” POV).
The whole story is packed full of TrumpStupid(TM) from the beginning (the big reason Trump kicked off the project is his fourth-grader tantrum that the iconic light-blue-and-white AF1 color scheme was too girly) to end, but the bottom line is that he got this lickspittle Boeing CEO to screw over his own company so he could wedge his lips further up Tubby’s enormous backside.
Frankly, everyone involved is so loathsome that picking sides incolced “rooting for injuries”. Jesus wept.
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Suzanne said on April 28, 2022 at 8:15 am
The need for good foster homes is why my son, who works in social services including at one time child protective services, has no use for pro-life adherents. If they really gave a damn about babies, they’d all be foster parents he has told me many times.
Love him or hate him, Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project coined the perfect phrase which the Boeing story proves is true: Everything Trump Touches Dies.
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Jeff Borden said on April 28, 2022 at 8:29 am
The legend of tRump’s business skills was created by Mark Burnett, who produced the gawdawful “The Apprentice” and recast this fifth-rate grifter and serial bankrupter of companies into J. Pierpoint Morgan. Anyone who can destroy not one but two casino companies is inept beyond all measure.
All my newspapers today say the amoeba Kevin McCarthy received a standing ovation from House leadership yesterday after he insisted he NEVER, ever asked the Orange King to relinquish his crown. If he becomes speaker, we are in for a very bad time of it. Meanwhile, a hemorrhoid who represents Wisconsin in the House, Glenn Grothman, blasted reporters at the conference who kept asking about the Jan. 6 riot and insurrection. “Nobody but you cares,” he declared.
The QOP is going to get away with it.
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ROGirl said on April 28, 2022 at 9:59 am
My father and his sister were sent to live in the Hebrew Orphans Home in Detroit when their parents died. They were there for 5 years, until they had had enough with my father doing things like loosening screws from doorknobs, or so I was told by a cousin. After that they were taken in by older siblings. My father started college at 16 and moved to Ann Arbor for that.
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Deborah said on April 28, 2022 at 10:17 am
So true Suzanne, so true.
My maternal grandfather was a toddler when his mother died giving birth about a year after they had immigrated to the US. His father left his 4 children in care of the oldest, she was 9, to go back to Germany to find a new wife. They lived in rural northwestern Missouri then. My great grandfather came back with a new wife a couple of months later and they didn’t have any children after that. Imagine leaving a 9 year old alone on a remote farm for that long with 3 younger siblings and one of those was a baby.
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Heather said on April 28, 2022 at 10:21 am
The mom and aunt of a former boyfriend spent some time in some sort of Pixley-like home when they were small because their parents couldn’t take care of them for some reason. I remember being a bit shocked when he told me. Even if you escape abuse, that sounds like a really traumatic situation to undergo (I am not judging, as I do not know the circumstances).
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Sherri said on April 28, 2022 at 1:10 pm
Does anyone think that the MPD is unusual?
https://minnesotareformer.com/2022/04/27/some-of-the-most-jaw-dropping-statements-in-the-state-human-rights-report-on-mpd/
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David C said on April 28, 2022 at 6:45 pm
My great-grandmother died in the 1918 flu pandemic and my grandmother and her two sisters was farmed out to various relatives. She told my aunt that a couple of them beat them all but especially grandma. I don’t think she ever really got over it.
Glenn Grothman is my Congresscritter and he’s a genuine piece of shit.
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susan said on April 28, 2022 at 7:22 pm
Sherri @17… Nope. I like this headline in yesterday’s Star Tribune: “Minnesota officials hope a consent decree will force Minneapolis police to make changes” Ha ha ha ha! Why don’t they take a look and see how well that “consent decree” worked out for Seattle and its nasty-ass Police Department.
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Julie Robinson said on April 28, 2022 at 7:55 pm
David C, that’s exactly what happened to my FIL. His mom had been pregnant, and the wheels came off for his dad. Ray spent time with various relatives and then his dad would come back and they would hobo it around. At one point they slept under the piers in the Palm Beach area and fished during the day. They ate what they caught, and if they were lucky enough to catch and sell extra, they got to eat something besides fish.
During WWII he returned to Palm Beach to work in the air traffic control tower. He worked his way up to head the tower in Fort Wayne, but his hardscrabble past never left him.
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Dexter Friend said on April 29, 2022 at 1:27 am
LA Mary, what’s the vibe out there regarding the LA Times reporter and the LA County Sheriff?
The Post is a rag but there’s no paywall:
https://nypost.com/2022/04/27/la-sheriff-alex-villanueva-targets-alene-tchekmedyian-over-leaked-video/
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Jeff Gill said on April 29, 2022 at 6:34 am
My first five years with the juvenile court our offices were in the old Children’s Home for the county; it was considered a humane and pioneering facility in 1889 when new, but developed a sketchy reputation by the 1970s and closed slowly through that decade . . . I think the last four or five residents left in 1976. As has been noted, this, not TANF (formerly AFDC) funds, were how government assisted families who couldn’t care for their kids. Very few orphans per se lived here, though it was like many such facilities called “the county orphanage” for much of its life. To be orphaned didn’t entirely mean “parents dead” back before the 60s/70s, it meant your custody was surrendered, and I’ve also struggled to find clear indications of how a parent got their kids back, because they clearly often did. Of course, I don’t entirely understand the metrics for how parents who lose custody do or don’t get children back from foster care. I’m not saying it’s capricious — our local Children Services folk do the best work they can — but trying to be children centered in the middle of multiple issues of addiction and criminal convictions means every case is different.
Anyhow, my point is (and I’ve mentioned this before, maybe more than once) we would have visitors in my offices on a fairly regular basis, people who had lived there as children, now older and even quite elderly. Policy was to extend to them every courtesy unless we had kids in shackles waiting for assessments or hearings downtown. But if the office was clear, we would usher them around through the much changed layout of the rooms. My boss had her office in the former superintendent’s suite (fireplace, unused, cabinetry; some “kids” said they’d never seen the inside of where “the warden” lived!) and my office was one of four desks in what had been the older boys’ dorm.
These visitors very sharply divided into two groups, with almost no middle ground. They either loved their memories of the time they spent at the Children’s Home, or they hated the place with a white hot passion. For some, arriving was getting their own bed, clean sheets, and food hot & plentiful. There was worry about a parent still “out there,” but in general, it was a relief and a blessing and friends made and a time when things got normal again.
But for others, it was hellish, a separation from siblings (girls on the other side, younger upstairs), odd shapeless food and equally so clothing, and caregivers who were not. I tried to sort out if the difference was by era or decade — good staff vs. bad — but quickly realized that wouldn’t explain it. Which view was closer to the truth? You just couldn’t look at it that way. Each was how they came to the home and how they were processing those years even still. Many tears on those tours, by both groups if for different reasons, and often mixed with a few of my own.
This link has a view of the building in better days; we left it in 2012 & it was torn down in 2013: http://wiki.lickingcountylibrary.info/Licking_County_Children%27s_Home
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Deborah said on April 29, 2022 at 11:14 am
Is Elon Musk just trying to sell more of his cars to the rightwing or what? He only seems to be insulting the left on Twitter now and they are by far the ones who buy his cars. The most leftest fringe person we know owns a Tesla. There are are a lot of Musk bros who seem like incels to me, also I don’t think they can afford to buy Teslas.
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LAMary said on April 29, 2022 at 11:14 am
Speaking for myself I think Alex Villanueva is a thug but every sheriff we’ve had in the 40 years I’ve lived here has been terrible. The video of him threatening the reporter should keep him from getting re-elected but I thought the revelation that there were deputy gangs, gang tats and all, running the county jail, shaking down prisoners’ family members, beating up prisoners would have him kicked out in the last election.
I saw one Villanueva ad for the upcoming election and he’s saying only he can keep us safe from crime. I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets re-elected.
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Icarus said on April 29, 2022 at 12:47 pm
My mood right now:
Recruiter: Hey we are looking for a LEFT-HANDED WIDGET Maker. I see that you are a Left-handed Widget Maker. Are you interested?
Me: sure.
Recruiter: Great, send me your updated resume. Because the resume I have, the one that shows your vast experience of being a Left-Handed Widget Maker just isn’t good enough, for reasons.
Me: !@#$.
EDIT: my frustration is that 1) if I were still working at last employer, my resume would be fine and 2) the contract gig I’m working on isn’t game changing experience. No one looking for a Left-Handed Widget Maker will choose me over another LH Widget Maker based on the 6 months of pushing a button on a lame project that I’ve been working on.
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Sherri said on April 29, 2022 at 2:28 pm
Things that make you slam your head against your desk, or the banality of evil…
Illinois state law prohibits schools from fining students for misbehavior. No problem! Some schools and districts just have their handy-dandy school resource officer issue tickets instead, so that the municipality is fining the student, not the school.
Just another way SROs create more problems than they solve.
https://www.propublica.org/article/illinois-school-police-tickets-fines
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Deborah said on April 29, 2022 at 5:36 pm
Whoa Sherri, thanks for bringing that to my attention, I had no idea Illinois was fining students for anything like that. I have never heard of that ever anywhere. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Especially for minor infractions. Wow, that is absolutely absurd.
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A. Riley said on April 29, 2022 at 11:44 pm
A few years back I was hired to put together a commemorative book for a formerly-privately-funded Home for Wayward (but not too wayward) Girls in the near Chicago suburbs. It’s no longer in existence; the grounds are a park now. Anyway . . .
It was founded during the Jane Addams era with all the best, most philanthropic, high-minded intentions IN THE WORLD. It had its own school where maybe two dozen not-very-wayward girls learned skills to support themselves (and their babies), lived in pretty cottages with houseparents (and their babies), and so on. All very refined and Progressive.
Well, the years went on, and the distinguished founders and the next generation of donors died; it struggled along on a shoestring for quite a while, but it really didn’t have a chance. It didn’t have the institutional support or fundraising clout of places like Boystown or Maryville, so it started taking state funding and state clients. The state, having too many people to serve and nowhere near enough staff, money, or places to serve them properly, sent kids without regard to whether or not the place could do much more than keep them out of the rain — which meant a steady stream of really troubled teens coming to the door, both boys and girls, who needed a lot more therapeutic care than this little place could give.
Imagine all these troubled teens from all over, suddenly dropped off in this pretty little campus meant for not-very-wayward girls in this pretty little suburb (read white upper-middle-class suburb), without adequate care or supervision — well, you can guess how the neighbors took that.
The Board, the well-meaning old people who had been supplying the shoestring for the home for not-very-wayward girls for all these years, kept trying to raise money in the same ways that had worked in the past — this commemorative book was going to be part of a campaign culminating with a gala at a downtown hotel — but no. It finally had to say goodbye to its last few staff and residents a few years back, close the doors, and sell the real estate.
It’s a sad story and I’m sure it’s a lot sadder than I ever got to hear — after all, I was hired to write a puff piece, so they told me the happy stories. There must be thousands of little homes like this that were founded with the best intentions and subsided into poverty and worse — and another thousand that were founded with more businesslike or cynical intentions.
Anyway. Your stories of the Pixley home and the others brought back that memory.
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Dexter Friend said on April 30, 2022 at 3:03 am
J.D. Vance has secured Trump’s blessing, and now every fucking time I turn on the radio I hear Trump saying, “This is your favorite President, Donald J. Trump. and you must get all your friends to come out to vote for J.D. Vance for U.S. Senate.” Vance the stated “never Trumper” has come around. Now he’s an always Trumper. These Trumpers in Ohio have gone from dick-licking to ass-eating.
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Mark P said on April 30, 2022 at 9:10 am
Trump has endorsed former football head injury sufferer Herschel Walker for the Republican nomination for Senate in Georgia. Walker had to move to Georgia from his home in Texas to run. You might wonder why Walker, until you read about how he has consistently lied about how much money his companies make, how many people he employees, and even what companies he actually owns. He’s a minor league version of Trump himself. He has also been accused more than once of domestic abuse. But that was not actually him, it was one of his multiple personalities, so we’re all good here.
If you put Walker next to our current Senator Raphael Warnock, the contrast could not be any more stark. Walker has a good chance of winning over Warnock if he gets the nomination, and it is simply incomprehensible to me.
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Jeff Borden said on April 30, 2022 at 9:49 am
There’s a front page story in today’s NYT about Ohio’s horrific GOP primary for the seat of Rob Portman. It argues that Ohio –more than any other state in the nation– has been completely transformed by tRumpism. The article notes how the old guard of Voinivich, Kasich, Boehner and even DeWine has been eclipsed by the crazies. The fauxbilly is touring with white nationalist Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia and alleged underage sex enthusiast Matt Gaetz of Florida, who know zero about the Buckeye State but are experts in rabble rousing. Mandel is calling in Ted Cruz of Texas, perhaps the most hated man in the Senate, to boost his profile. It’s staggering to me as a former Ohioan.
Mark P., Walker stands an excellent chance of defeating Warnock despite his heavy personal baggage because he played at the University of Georgia, which was clearly the best preparation ever to become a U.S. senator. After all, Alabammy elected Tommy Tuberville, the former football coach, who once described the three branches of government as the presidency, the legislature and the military.
We’ll never confront and conquer the many challenges ahead with a slate of fucking idiots in Congress. And that’s on us.
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Suzanne said on April 30, 2022 at 10:20 am
I watched an economic forecast webinar a few months ago put out by an investment company that I have some money with. The presenter made an offhand comment about Herschel Walker likely winning his election because he is very popular in Georgia but made no mention that Walker is also batshit crazy. The underlying message was that he’s a Republican so he’s good for the economy.
This is how the country dies.
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Deborah said on April 30, 2022 at 11:43 am
Warnock is African American and Walker is too. The GOP had to search high and low (mostly low) to find a black person stupid enough to call themselves a Republican. Because Georgia has a large African American population they figured they’d go for Walker and the whites will go for him just because he’s a Republican and a Trumper. This is obviously only my own know nothing speculation but how anyone in their right mind could vote for Walker over Warnock is beyond me.
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Jeff Borden said on April 30, 2022 at 12:33 pm
My sister has registered as a Republican so she can vote for Dolan, the non-craziest of the GOP lot, but she feels he had zero chance.
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alex said on April 30, 2022 at 12:42 pm
The Illinois GOP moved Alan Keyes from Maryland to Calumet City in a lame effort to keep Barack Obama from winning his Senate seat back in the early aughts and Georgia’s playing the same game, only Herschel Walker has high name recognition whereas Keyes was unknown. Black people weren’t fooled, though, and took the whole effort as a Republican insult to their intelligence, which it was, and we can only hope that the same will be true of Georgia.
Keyes lost so badly you could almost feel sorry for him.
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Dexter Friend said on April 30, 2022 at 5:19 pm
Jeff Borden: You are correct. What a miserable state of affairs.
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Jeff Gill said on April 30, 2022 at 9:33 pm
Matt Dolan has a chance in Ohio. I did some door-to-door today for him, and the contacts I had were pleasantly surprising. Lots of Trump exhaustion and outright dismissal, and I didn’t hit a single Mandel or Gibbons fan.
I don’t love the subtext of all his ads, but I’ve gotten to talk to Dolan twice, and I’m impressed as heck by him. Ryan will get my vote if Dolan doesn’t make it onto the ballot, I have to say. All the other GOP options are intolerable to me . . . but if DeWine gets enough support (he will win in any case, it’s a question of by how much) I think he could pull Dolan up to a winning margin with him. DeWine voters are going to trend pragmatic and functional, and those folks are more likely to tap Dolan.
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jcburns said on April 30, 2022 at 10:16 pm
Jeff, Ohio needs a second Democratic senator, no matter if that Dolan guy is on the ballot or not. Sherrod Brown needs backup. Ohioans deserve better. Don’t be out there doing work for (any) Republican. They’ve disqualified themselves as a party.
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Dexter Friend said on May 1, 2022 at 2:43 am
Ryan is a straight-up, no bullshit good guy.
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Deborah said on May 1, 2022 at 12:25 pm
I agree with JC.
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Jerrie in MidMd said on May 1, 2022 at 1:25 pm
I also agree with JC. However good and reasonable a Republican looks before election, they don’t stay that way when they’re in Washington.
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