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Que Sera for Sale, Biz Education and Oxi Fresh Expansion

Que Sera Sera owner Boo Noble has decided to take a break from the restaurant business and is putting the long-standing restaurant up for sale.

Healthy Seniors Tested in Bid to Block Alzheimer's

In one of the most ambitious attempts yet to thwart Alzheimer's disease, a major study got underway Monday to see if an experimental drug can protect healthy seniors whose brains …

Crime

Police Probe Ties Between Vegas shooters, Bundy

Investigators are looking into whether the husband and wife who shot and killed two Las Vegas police officers over the weekend had been at Cliven Bundy's Nevada ranch during a …

Health Care

Audit: More Than 57,000 Await First VA Appointment

More than 57,000 U.S. military veterans have been waiting 90 days or more for their first VA medical appointments, and an additional 64,000 appear to have fallen through the cracks, …

Politics

Poll: GOP Excitement Still High, McDaniel Leads

Enthusiasm among an older and overwhelmingly white electorate has not waned in the Republican primary runoff for U.S. Senate, a Democratic polling firm finds.

Environment

Summer Flounder Stirs North-South Climate Change Battle

Northern and southern states are in conflict over the summer flounder, the population of which has been migrating north as climate change warms the Atlantic Ocean.

Person of the Day

Fannie Lou Hamer

Through her years as an activist, Fannie Lou Hamer worked tirelessly for voting rights, prosperity and health in African American communities, and to desegregate schools.

Politics

Analysis: Apathetic Dems Could Decide GOP Primary

The conventional wisdom in the Mississippi primary for U.S. Senate is that state Sen. Chris McDaniel has the momentum going into the runoff against incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran.

National

Texas GOP Advances 'Reparative Therapy' for Gays

The Texas Republican Party would endorse psychological treatment that seeks to turn gay people straight under a new platform partly aimed at rebuking laws in California and New Jersey that …

Health Care

VA Head Says 18 Vets Left Off Wait List Have Died

In a new revelation in the growing VA scandal, the organization's acting head says that an additional 18 veterans whose names were kept off an official electronic Veterans Affairs appointment …

National

Pentagon Has Protocol for Returned Captives

Once released from captivity, a soldier like Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl enters a series of debriefings and counseling sessions, all carefully orchestrated by the U.S. military, to ease the soldier back …

Politics

McDaniel, Cochran Readying for Round 2 in Epic Primary 'Fight'

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Republicans huddled Thursday over the slow-motion showdown of the Mississippi Senate runoff, with allies of Sen. Thad Cochran aiming to sharpen his message and supporters of …

Crime

3 People Shot at Seattle Pacific University, Suspect in Custody

SEATTLE (AP) — Three people were shot Thursday afternoon on the campus of Seattle Pacific University and a suspect was in custody, police said.

June 5, 2014 | 1 comment

On apathy and not giving a damn: My new column in The Guardian on Senate race

By Donna Ladd

I've been asked a couple times recently by national media to comment on the Senate race between Thad Cochran and Chris McDaniel (and, oh, Travis Childers). I begged out of an MSNBC request a couple weeks ago because I just couldn't get excited to talk about it. But when The Guardian wanted to contract me this past Monday to write a column, I said OK. But my main thought was, "I just don't give a damn." I've watched election after election pass with no candidate for even moderate Mississippians to vote for. Our city and state are brimming with good people who want progress for the state, and we get stuck with the worst candidates, brimming with backward ideas, and told we HAVE to vote for the Democrat among them any way.

Meantime, we watch the Democrats lose over and over again.

I don't want "apathy," as somebody accused on Twitter. I want just the opposite: I want Mississippians to demand better from the candidates then the most reasonable one loving all over the NRA and bashing women's reproductive freedom. We need to demand, at least, that Travis Childers, the Democratic nominee not campaign against our rights, and actually address solutions to health care, povery and other vital 21st-century populist issues. If he wallows in the mud with the wingnuts, it's not ME who is encouraging apathy. It is up to him and the Democratic Party to break that apathy and be inspiring, rather than try to out-conservative the conservatives.

I don't identify with any political party (don't even really like the concept), so perhaps it's easy for me to take this stand in an international newspaper. But the response has been overwhelmingly positive, especially from southerners; my Twitter feed and Facebook post on it are filled with cheers. It's as if everyone wanted to say this, but didn't quite know how to say it out loud. But I said it. Read more here, post under The Guardian piece if you want (many great comments of various positions), and then come on back and talk about it here on southern soil.

The Mississippi primary? Frankly, my dear conservatives, I don't give a damn

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