In no particular order:
Presidential Nominating Teleconference? According to the GPUS website, the Green Party's Presidential Nominating Convention is still scheduled to take place in Detroit. There is no information up about whether it will be conducted online. This is also a good opportunity to remind recently selected national delegates to register. Even if it happens online, the registration fee is still $100, which helps defray costs like renting space at Wayne State University; after all, at least some of the national co-chairs will still be traveling to Detroit. Oral Argument Date Set in Ballot Access Lawsuit The rap battle starts 23 June. This bit of information hit Ballot Access News before a lot of Texas Greens found out; I found out just yesterday. BAN refers to the federal lawsuit in question as Dikeman v. Hughs, which I guess is fair, given that 2018 Libertarian senatorial candidate Neal Dikeman is listed first among the plaintiffs. The outcome will determine whether Libertarians and Greens will still need to pay filing fees that go toward financing Democratic and Republican primary elections.
I'm a little late with this. Didn't think to put it on the blog at the beginning of the week, then let it slip until after Earth Day. Sometimes life gets in the way.
Before we get to the major thrust of this entry, I'd like to share this bit of email I received today: Dear DAVID BRUCE COLLINS,
Yippee! I'm pending! I'm in electoral purgatory until the filing fee lawsuit against the Secretary of State gets resolved!
XR Earth Week Activities
Extinction Rebellion is urging environmentally conscious folks to spread the word, hassle politicians, and express their grave disappointment with Big Capital. They recommend ten different actions that you can take, and each weekday of this Earth Week gets a different focus.
Planet of the Humans Executive-produced by Michael Moore; written, directed, partly filmed, and narrated by Jeff Gibbs (who is new to me, I must confess). I can't 100% recommend this flick: Josh (Gasland) Fox took to Twitter after watching it on YouTube, where Moore dropped it on Earth Day, to gripe about how Gibbs cherry-picks the most confirmation-biased bits to prove his point that big renewable energy projects are a scam and not as environmentally friendly as they're painted.
All that said, I believe Gibbs's film makes some worthy points about how (a) biomass plants do not deserve the "green energy" designation and how Big Capital has co-opted environmental advocacy groups. He clearly has no love for Bill McKibben and less than none for Al Gore. But the way he paints McKibben as a villain uses the same tricks that Moore has used for 30 years. The portrayal doesn't pass the sniff test, even though McKibben is by no means perfect: He takes a lot of heat within Deep Ecology circles for his silence on the carbon footprint of animal agriculture.
As a longtime Green and Green New Deal supporter, experience tells me that we cannot magic our way out of our current mess and expect to maintain our current consumption habits. Thinking that we can is naïve at best. We need to start curbing our planetary appetite, the sooner the better, preferably immediately. The sooner we can, the less we'll have to rely on totalitarian measures that force an ever grimmer austerity on us all. Despite Gibbs's sincere environmentalism, he has edited his interview clips in such a way that it nakedly gives ammunition to anti-environmentalists, which to me is the film's most dangerous peccadillo. Not gonna lie: It could have gone better. But it could also have gone a lot worse. I'm happy with the process and results, despite some bumps. I'm happy to get a chance, however virtual, to see old comrades and meet some relatively new ones.
We had about 32 delegates, representing eight Texas counties, show up at the Green Party of Texas's first-ever online convention. We also had a lurker to two. Among the best news that I can report is that personalities that have clashed at past state meetings remained not just civil but amicable to each other and the rest of the delegates. The 2020 Green Party of Texas Annual State Meeting and Nominating Convention will happen Saturday 18 April at 9 am. You will not need to worry about arranging travel and lodging to attend: Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it will be a video conference. Other parties' conventions have also received dispensation from the Secretary of State's Office to have their conventions online.
The actual site of the convention will be at an apartment complex in Austin. Delegates can attend via Zoom. GPTX strongly recommends registering via the event on the txgreens.org Calendar. That's the only way to receive notification of the Zoom Meeting ID and password. These state conventions normally spread out over two days, but the plan is to fit everything into Saturday between 9 am and 3 pm. The somewhat abbreviated agenda will include some of the usual highlights:
The statewide candidates are Charles Waterbury for Supreme Court Position 1, katija gruene for Railroad Commission, and David B. Collins for US Senate. Diane Wood, a longtime member in Tarrant County, has announced that she will nominate herself for the position of co-chair. There was some worry about whether a candidate for state co-chair could even be appointed, since no members filed to run last December along with the candidates for public offices. The Secretary of State's Office has confirmed that this provision applies to the primary-nominating parties and is not a problem for convention-nominating parties such as the Greens and Libertarians. Just wanted to keep this announcement short and tidy. Look for follow-ups with more information in the next few days.
In a Twitter thread early this morning, in response to Mike (The Humanist Report) Figueredo's rather catty reply to Sharon Stone's wretched tweet, before I heard that Bernie Sanders had suspended his presidential campaign:
While searching for a digital copy of a past GPTX Annual State Meeting, I stumbled on this ancient press release, buried deep in the Greens folder in my Documents library:
The author of the press release was Earl Gerhard. For those unfamiliar, Gerhard was heavily active with the Harris County & Texas Green Parties in the early days. The highlight of his activity was getting Greens to volunteer for activist Ada Edwards's District D City Council campaign, helping to push her past Third Ward real estate broker Gerald Womack. He was also involved with Greenwatch TV in those days.
HCGP has a history of losing valuable people like Earl to burnout, death, moving away, or the border collie howl of progressive Democrats running for president. Earl faded away without much fanfare due to some combination of factors. The 2004 Green National Convention was one of the biggest highlights of my activity within the party: seven of us in a rented van that left San Antonio one evening night, stopped to pick up some Dallas folks in the middle of the night, and continued on to Milwaukee & back. Sooooo many cool memories:
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