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Greens' Electoral Dysfunction? We'll Survive It

30/11/2016

Firesign Theatre's classic "I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus"

Well, well. If I believe what I'm seeing on various Green-oriented Facebook pages, my beloved Green Party has profound internal disagreements over the wisdom of Jill Stein's recount effort. Some partisans are wringing their hands about a possible schism. That would be a shame, but only temporarily.

It is now officially OK to call it "Jill Stein's recount effort." It's not the Stein/Baraka campaign that is spearheading the requests, since Ajamu Baraka has stated quite explicitly that he does not support it. It's not the Green Party's effort either, and it never was: The National Steering Committee voted against it, 5-3 with one abstention. Dr. Margaret Flowers, Green nominee for US Senate in Maryland, is one of many Green who spoken vigorously in opposition; plenty of candidates, as well as rank-and-file Greens, have approved of it.

Even some within the party are suspicious about the recent revelation that the Wisconsin recount will cost more than originally stated*—suspicious, that is, of Stein herself, not of the Wisconsin Secretary of State's Office and its attempted extortion. I feel for Stein, trying to do the right thing, getting jerked around by state officials, and feeling nibbles on her bum from people who were her staunchest allies mere weeks ago.

Recount Pseudo-Update

28/11/2016

Jill2016's recount effort has raised $6,280,787.

Recount funds raised as of about 11 am, Monday 28 November

Friday 25 November, just before Wisconsin's deadline, the Stein campaign filed the official paperwork for recounting the 2016 presidential vote there. Over the weekend, they got the news of just how many hoops they would need to jump through to make the Pennsylvania recount happen, and how many of those hoops were flaming. The Pennsylvania deadline is this afternoon. Michigan's deadline is Wednesday the 30th, and it's not apparent whether the necessary $7 million will be raised to pursue a recount there.

There is far too much news on the topic of the Jill 2016 recount since I posted on it last Thursday. There is also misinformation by the ton floating around the Internet. To counter a lot of the misinformation and speculation as to the motives behind the effort, the campaign has added this FAQ page.

The mainstream media outlets (trigger warning: Fox News) are still paying attention; most of them are actually saying Jill Stein's name in connection with the story. Of course, interviewers will ignore the answers on the FAQ page and ask the same dumb questions anyway.

Recount As Easy As MI, PA, WI

24/11/2016

About $3 million raised so far for recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Funds raised for recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The graphic above shows the take, as of 7:30 Thanksgiving morning, on Stein/Baraka's Recount page. As I put this entry to bed at 9:15, the amount has broken the $3 million barrier. This fundraiser began yesterday morning. This one-day haul by far eclipses the funds that poured into the Stein campaign at the end of July, immediately after Hillary Clinton's nomination was made official in Philadelphia.

If a presidential campaign is still actively raising funds after Election Day, it usually means that the campaign concluded with some debt. The Green campaign of Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka did end up with a little less than $100,000 in debts, a small percentage of the $3.5 million raised. But in this case, the goal is to help defend our votes against malevolent manipulations of the vote tallies, starting with three states where analysts have declared such skullduggery likely.

Make that two states and a commonwealth, if you want to be technical about it: the States of Michigan and Wisconsin, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Congratulations, PA Greens!

22/11/2016

My half-brother and two of his sons are visiting Houston this week, having driven down from Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. That's good news. But there's other news from the Keystone State that has me positively giddy.

The Green Party of Pennsylvania announced yesterday that it is officially a minor party, no longer merely a "political body" in the eyes of that state. GP of PA has satisfied the criteria imposed by Pennsylvania's election code by having at least one candidate receive more than 2% of the vote in a statewide race.

The press release fudges the numbers a bit: Kristin Combs in the race for Treasurer, and Jay Sweeney for Auditor General, arrived at "3%" only by rounding up to the nearest whole percentage. Here are the official statewide results.

The official tally guarantees not just ballot access for the 2017-18 electoral cycle, but the option for residents to register Green.

Sweeney was also one of three Green candidates for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. It's not every state that allows a candidate to run for two offices.

Just last year, a lawsuit forced Pennsylvania to modify its strict ballot access laws—specifically in regard to the criteria for petitioning to get on the ballot in the first place—which the court deemed blatantly in favor of the two major parties.

Texas requires 5% of the vote in a statewide race to retain ballot access. If the Lone Star State had the same 2% criterion, the Green Party of Texas would also have extended its ballot access through 2018, with three statewide candidates earning 2% or better this year. This election was the first in which more than one Texas Green candidate broke 2% in races with both major parties represented.

My Takeaway
The Green message hasn't exactly spread across the nation like a political prairie fire, but our numbers are increasing year by year. For someone who has been in the trenches since 2000, the progress may seem agonizingly slow, but it is measurable. From the steadily increasing percentages, I take whatever encouragement I can get. The announcement from the PA Greens has given me a transfusion of hope.

The Two-Headed Party of Wall Street keeps finding ways to stem the third-party tide: election laws, virtual media blackouts, online harassment from paid trolls, etc. But the duopoly's apologists cannot ignore the fact that a majority of voters are tired of its shit.

Meanwhile, parties that actually stand for something (other than corporate hegemony) must resort to expensive petition drives and lawsuits just to get a seat at the kids' table, rather than eating scraps tossed on the floor.

"Bleeding Edge" Consuming DBC

21/11/2016

Assuming that it leaves enough of my brain uneaten to process what I'm reading, I expect to finish Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge (2013) soon. I have about 100 pages to go.

Yesterday Kayleen observed that I seemed a bit "elsewhere" through most of yesterday. I blamed it on the book. Even when I wasn't busy reading this novel, the eighth in Pynchon's 50-plus-year career, I was reliving it, or reverberations of it, like a waking dream, the way the subconscious mind scrambles and reassembles inputs that the conscious mind cannot immediately interpret.

Since I'm only about 80% through the book, this is not a review. I'm not even going to summarize the plot or dissect any of the characters; you can get the summaries and dissections elsewhere. You can also get analysis of obscure references here. But I do want to convey some impressions from what I have read so far.

In many ways, Bleeding Edge is Pynchon's open-eyed love letter to New York City, and to Manhattan in particular. This is an aspect of the book that I have yet to see noted in any of the reviews I have read on Goodreads or elsewhere. TP loves NYC despite its many flaws. Great cities, like great people, often have greater flaws; NYC's greatest flaw is that the biggest parts of the engine of worldwide capitalism live there.
For a story that takes place in New York, the cast of characters is rather heavily white. The main character's receptionist is a notable exception, and there are plenty of Jewish and Italian-American characters, but this may as well be an incredibly twisted episode of Friends overlapping an equally twisted episode of Seinfeld.
One big knock against it is that protagonist Maxine Tarnow deals with far too many more-or-less interchangeable white male characters, who enter the story at one point, are referred to at random intervals, and reappear about 100 pages later, leading me to wonder, "Who was this guy again?" At least all the Russians keep things interesting.
The book is friggin' hilarious, but it is a 477-page inside joke. Readers without an intricate knowledge of New York's history and geography, of pop culture (including Pokémon), and of information technology may not get as many LOLs from it as I have. It makes me wonder what laughs I may have missed.
Most remarkably, the hilarity continues even after 11 September happens, about two-thirds of the way in. Pynchon gives us only a brief period of not-so-funny as the characters try to sort out the events and their causes. In real life, people in NYC and around the world may have paused the laugh-track, M*A*S*H-style, and dealt appropriately with the tragedy, but the world as a whole did not get less funny or absurd.
The puns. OMG, the puns.
So far, I haven't come across Pig Bodine or any analog thereof. This omission has led me to suspect that Pynchon did not actually write the book, but instead farmed it out to a professional Pynchon impersonator. But then, as the wiki notes, there was no Bodine to be found in The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, or Inherent Vice.
At least I have found a passage about an improbable pizza parlor, another Pynchonian trope. There's even a pizza scene in Mason & Dixon. A book about New York that didn't involve pizza would be so wrong.

Let a Hundred Angry Progressive Postmortems Bloom!

18/11/2016

This is getting kinda fun. Progressives are telling the Democratic Party, "Change or die."

Let's begin with not-so-young-any-more Turkish-American Cenk Uygur. A few days before the election, Uygur announced in a Young Turks segment that, he would be voting for Hillary Clinton, despite his sympathy with the Green platform and his residency in a "safe" Blue state (California). A week after the election:

So, what should real progressives do now? They should tear that house down. The DNC is not misguided; it is guided exactly as it is supposed to be. We have to start all over again. The party of Hillary Clinton and Evan Bayh are never going to win over the American people. Voters couldn’t have been clearer in this election—they can’t stand the establishment. But the DNC will never get that message because they are the establishment.

Like many progressives, Uygur wobbles between Democrat, Green, and independent (maybe Socialist too, but I've never heard him say so). Policy is more important to him than party identity. Like most Americans, when push comes to shove, he doesn't want to back a loser, and Clinton was the presumed winner when Election Day began. His announcement seems aimed more at swing-state than himself, urging them to do whatever they can to stop The Donald.

Wake Me Up When Michigan Is Called

16/11/2016

Michigan, with its 16 electoral votes, is the last state not to have its results declared in the presidential election. The Donald's margin currently stands at 11,612 per Real Clear Politics or 11,423 per Politico. Either way, it's about 0.25%, with some votes still to be counted.

When Michigan's count becomes official, it probably won't make the evening news. Did anybody see a news item about New Hampshire finally being called for Clinton? I didn't.

If as-yet uncounted absentees and mail-ins close that 11,000-plus gap, it will be a mere consolation prize for the Clinton campaign, unless 22 GOP electors flip their votes to change the outcome.

But the presidential race is just one story out of many.

The Plank in Our Green Eye

15/11/2016

This morning I dived into a Facebook thread started by David Cobb, the 2004 Green presidential nominee and co-founder of the Green Party of Texas. Rahul Mahajan, the 2002 Green nominee for Governor of Texas, popped by to note that, irrespective of party, all left and leftish political organizations need to unite for a common purpose: opposing and defeating Trump and Trumpism.

Mahajan also expressed his lack of confidence that the Green movement could lead such an opposition: We Greens suffered from disorganization back in 2002, and we're just as bad today, if not worse. In addition, he noted, we have been finger-pointing at the Democrats for nominating a crappy candidate and hindering the progress of a candidate who had a better chance of beating Trump, but we haven't been willing to take an accounting of our own failures.

Greening the House of Representatives

14/11/2016

Congress is a mess, as most of us are aware. The elections for Congress are pretty messy as well.

I took a good look at the vote tallies for the House of Representatives today. Here are some facts, followed by what I'll call, for lack of a better term, inferences based on the figures. Most of the figures were culled from Real Clear Politics, although RCP did not have any counts for Mississippi, so I checked Politico.

NOTE: None of the vote tallies are entirely official yet. Small numbers of precincts are still unreported in some states, and at this moment Washington State still has a significant chunk unreported in some districts.

TFW Ur Beating Out Yr Prez Candidate Bigtime

10/11/2016

At the beginning of 2016, some of us Green Regulars in Texas put our heads together and determined that Railroad Commission candidate Martina Salinas would be the Party's best hope of obtaining 5% of the vote in the general election this year. That 5% would secure the Green Party's ballot access for 2018. She received 3.26% in a four-way contest, 285,558 votes, which in Green circles in this very red state is pretty phenomenal.

Salinas does actually work full-time, as a construction inspector (not supervisor, as previously reported), and thus she did not have much time or money to assemble a full campaign infrastructure. She used a Facebook page for web presence rather than constructing a website (or paying somebody to make one) with her own domain. She did travel some, including a few trips to Houston and reconnecting with her fan base in the Rio Grande Valley. She did have some yard signs made.

Imagine how Salinas might have done if she'd been able to devote more time and resources to the campaign. Her Libertarian opponent Mark Miller, a retired oil & gas guy, finished with 5.27% and unlocked ballot access for the LP.

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