As previously mentioned, this blog is on the lookout for Jill Stein articles and interviews that venture outside the standard questions and canned responses. This one on the Village Voice's website offers a bigger-picture perspective and gets a lot of facts solidly correct.
It also serves to remind me of how to respond when people correctly point out that the Green Party's national platform and Stein's own words contain several positions that might be deemed un- or anti-scientific. Namely, the Greens are the only party in this presidential election with a comprehensive plan to transform our energy economy to renewable sources, put millions to work, and forgive college debt nationwide. Online polls with self-selected respondents can be ridiculously non-reflective of the population as a whole. The results often depend on how effective respondents are at getting their friends on social media to respond to some news outlet's Big Question of the Day. This NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll, however, looks somewhat legit. The sample size for this week's poll is more than 10,000, which is pretty solid. Unfortunately, the sample population skews heavily white and relatively affluent. See the Methodology explanation and demographic breakdowns on the last page of the embedded PDF. You'll have to scroll to page 5 of the document to get to the one question in which Gary Johnson and Jill Stein are mentioned. The poll, which has been collecting results since January, added this four-way-race question only last week. Johnson's 9% showing is fairly consistent with the Quinnipiac and Monmouth polls recently released.
Beyond the inclusion of Johnson and Stein, in itself worth celebrating, we see yet again:
You can now read my 1997 Web novel Eastern Daylight in its entirety on this site. It was never intended to be published in print form or sold for actual money. For what it's worth, it is my gift to the world of words.
If you like the free sample, perhaps you'll want to own copies of the later works. Bear in mind that Daylight wears its influences on its elbow-patched sleeve. It was originally dedicated to "The Four Toms of the Apocalypse: T.S. Eliot, Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins, and T. Coraghessan Boyle." Fans of Pynchon and Robbins will almost certainly detect how much of their styles I liberally cribbed. The two iUniverse novels show this author staking out his own stylistic territory. I must admit that I prefer the style of Small Town more than that of Earthworm, primarily because the former is easier to read aloud, with tighter sentences and less fancy vocabulary. But by a small margin I prefer the plot and characters in Earthworm. Let's see if we can make this last, or if it's just a one-off. Somehow, while examining the Quinnipiac Poll results, I missed that Gary Johnson and Jill Stein were also included in the Monmouth University poll this week. Even better, Monmouth puts Stein's aggregate at 4% (after rounding).
The unfortunate qualifier is that a) Monmouth's sample size is half as large, and b) all the respondents are registered voters in New Jersey, Monmouth's own state, rather than a nationwide sample. I have always loved the word Quinnipiac. The Quinnipiac River in Connecticut is not the most majestic of the old New England rivers, certain no match for the splendor of the mighty Connecticut/Quinnehtukqut. Still, the river opens up into New Haven Harbor, which combines old-school industrial ugliness when older-school picturesque vistas.
Back in my Connecticut days, I even liked crossing the old Quinnipiac Bridge: It was a thrill ride with a risk of actual death for vehicles and their drivers, especially in high winds and hard rains. It is the only bridge I have ever crossed that involved simultaneous roll, pitch, and yaw. For good or ill, that bridge is gone now. To skip past the rest of this nostalgia trip, click the Read More link below. Quinnipiac University is one of Greater New Haven's five colleges and universities, along with Southern Connecticut State, UNH, Albertus Magnus, and—uh, what's that other one near Toad's Place? Even with 20 times the population of New Haven, Houston also has five four-year universities, two of which are quite large, but none of which dominates the landscape the way Yale does. QU is in Hamden, a town immediately north of New Haven, once home to Eli Whitney's workshop. If you're not from up that way, you've probably never heard of the university or its town...unless you follow opinion polls. How does an obscure liberal arts college in an obscure Connecticut town get to be the home of a prestigious political polling organization? Indeed, why does another obscure Connecticut town still play host to America's number one sports network? Jill Stein and her 2016 presidential campaign appear to have graduated from highly specialized and progressive political sites to more mainstream publications. Recently, once or twice a day I find a link to a new interview with Stein linked from the GPUS Facebook page.
The most recent wave of articles and interviews comes from the open letter to Senator Bernie Sanders that the Stein campaign published in April, asking Sanders to consider running as the Green vice-presidential candidate if/when he loses the nomination. The letter did not receive much attention on publication. As the delegate math has drifted toward the almost certain nomination of Hillary Clinton, the press has begun to notice that a) both major parties' presumed nominees have huge negatives, which is definitely news, and b) voters are actively seeking alternatives. I read most of these interviews, but often I just scan them to see whether they contain anything fresh. The questions always tend to be the same, starting from the assumption that most readers don't know about Jill and the Green Party, or what they think they know is wrong. Of course, the answers to those questions are also typically the same from one interview to the next: Dr. Stein is refreshingly consistent, knowing the importance of staying on-message. The good news for us Steiniacs is that she is getting better at changing up the wording in her responses. For your reading pleasure, we have assembled some links to those interviews on this page. Yes, some of them are from obscurish lefty sites; you won't often see Rachel Maddow plucking items from Truthout. Some, but not all, are also linked or excerpted on the Stein campaign's News page. Mint Press, 1 June (summary and analysis of the 26 May Rolling Stone piece) Rolling Stone, 31 May Yahoo News, 31 May Policy.Mic, 31 May (this one starts from the student debt angle—props!) Salon, 31 May Rolling Stone, 26 May (Tessa Stuart) Gentlemen's Quarterly, 26 May (in case anyone forgot what "GQ" actually stands for) The Hill, 25 May (not an interview, really, but it contains some quotes) Truthout, 24 May Vice, 23 May NY Daily News, 19 May (definitely not the same old interview, lots of lolz) |
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