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I agree this site must have a large number of readers, my trip report shows 7200 views, Guido’s cat has over 42000, no doubt many are from multiple visit but their must be a large number of “lurkers “ . I would point out that advertising does not need to be paid.  A business owner could come on here and answer questions and such and it would be known  who he was.  Think of macaroni21/ shamelessmac.  This is fairly common in Puerto Vallarta Facebook groups.

I thought you were going to stay in Pattaya at your friend's apartment for the duration?

Yes.  Absolutely, Sis.   With all due respect, that is not the question.   The question is:  what did it teach us? 1 in 3 Americans are clearly authoritarian followers.  They love this shit.  They love their authoritarian nationalism.  Here is a really scary post on X from one of them: There is only one good thing I can say about this.   He did not say, "That lesbian bitch deserved to die." The tone reminded me of a post I read in the early days of Iraq that sounded just as extreme.  The guy argued that all residents of Baghdad would have to strip naked and leave the city, including Muslim women, to make sure they were not carrying WMD.  Instead of stopping WMD, The Land Of The Free started a fucking bloodbath. Americans at their worst.  There's a lot of that going around right now.   That said, Ruy Teixeira, on cue, is being a scold about the extremists in the Democratic Party that he reviles.  Teixeira (and John Judis) have weight.  Because as much as anyone they were the intellectual architects of The Emerging Democratic Majority.  Trump was elected in part because people didn't like what they saw as open borders. The Bankruptcy of the Democrats’ Elvis Presley Approach to Immigration “Don’t Be Cruel” makes for a great song but terrible policy. So the appropriate question is, what does this teach us?  I think it is far too early to answer that question.  But I agree with Teixeira that "don't be cruel" is a virtue.  But not an immigration policy.  Obama was Deporter In Chief, remember.  He was also a two term President.  There is zero question in my mind that this "open borders" stuff hurt Biden and Harris. Jim Clyburn, the most powerful Black Democrat in America in 2020, argued that "Defund The Police" hurt the Democratic Party.  We might have had a bigger win in 2020 but for that, he argued at the time.  If Democrats want to be able to win in states like Missouri and Iowa and Ohio and North Dakota and Indiana again (all states where there were Democratic Senators under Obama) we better learn something.