Category: Election 2020

Is Al Gore Officially a Prophet Yet?

2/8/2019

Remember what Al Gore said about Greenland in "An Inconvenient Truth"? It's happening. https://t.co/2p5Dpr2QAE
— David Bruce Collins □☮ (@dbcgreentx) August 2, 2019

Back in 2016, former Vice President Al Gore came to Houston to deliver the two-day Climate Reality Project speaker training, and Kayleen signed up for it. She got to spend some time with one of her heroes: She had shown excerpts from An Inconvenient Truth to her World Geography students back in her teaching days.

Gore, a Democrat to his very marrow, became less of a hero in her eyes when he came out in favor of his old friend Hillary Clinton in her quest for the presidency. The whole movement lost its luster as Kayleen discovered that the overwhelming majority of those present for the training placed their faith in the Democratic Party and its candidates to solve the impending climate crisis. Cuz we know that President Barack Obama dedicated his entire eight years in the White House to reversing climate change, starting at the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009--NOT!

So Kayleen, dejected, never did any Climate Reality speaking gigs. As consolation she did meet a new friend who came to the training from Zimbabwe, and who is now studying climate science in Paris. So we may have someone to visit if we ever make it to France.

None of the text below, which mentions several Democrats by name, is meant to imply that I'm turning into a Democrat. Generally, I vote for Democrats in local races in which there is no Green running. I will promote candidates and elected office-holders whose views I find genuinely progressive—regardless of how the Democratic Party establishment may treat them, regardless of occasional votes that seem at odds with the progressive agenda. I will defend them from baseless smears propagated by any party or media outlet. (Your findings of progressivity may vary, and that's OK: even Greens don't agree on everything.)

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Sketch Comes Through and Other GPTX News

14/6/2019

At a lunch meeting Wednesday, Laura Palmer informed me that her husband Don "Sketch" Palmer was the angel who got harriscountygreenparty.org back online for another six years. As mentioned earlier this week, hcgp.org is no longer in HCGP's possession, and the Party will not likely spend the thousand bucks to ransom it.

As of last week's Annual State Meeting of the Green Party of Texas, Sketch is the newly elected GPTX treasurer. Here is the complete listing of the State Executive Committee, delegates and the Green National Committee, and current regional coordinators. The regional coordinator system may be retired soon.

Just prior to the ASM, I relented to Laura's plea to stand for an at-large position on the SEC, and fortunately for me I was not elected.

The Post 2504 Landscape
A Green buzz is reverberating through Texas and all around the nation in the wake of HB 2504 becoming law and guaranteeing a ballot line for 2020. The National Committee has a vested interest in having a strong Green presence in the second-most populous state. Veteran Greens like me, who have faded from the scene to avoid intra-Party squabbles, are becoming active again. Among those with whom I have conversed, the focus have shifted more than ever toward recruiting candidates for 2020 and amassing the funds to back them up.

Perverse Alliances: HB 2504 Passes House (Revised)

11/5/2019

Dude, I should be checking Ballot Access News more often. PDiddie sent several old-guard Harris County Greens a psst! by email this morning, linking to his new post concerning the progress of HB 2504 in the current 86th Texas Legislature (not the 92nd as I mistakenly wrote yesterday.)

The bill passed the House on a mostly party-line vote, 77-57, with five reps absent, and the Speaker not voting. Absent a major filibuster or a classic Dan Patrick Calendar Clusterfuck, this bill should sail through the Senate and get a signature from Governor Abbott.

In brief, HB 2504 allows candidates from convention parties (i.e., those that do not hold primary elections) to pay the same filing fees that candidates from primary parties do. In lieu of the fees, convention candidates may submit petition signatures, just as primary candidates currently may.

As if that weren't enough of a gift, another Republican's amendment to the bill, as passed by the House, reduces the criterion for retaining ballot access from 5% of the vote in a statewide race to 2%. Not in the next election, but in any of the previous five. Guess what? In 2014 and 2016, Green candidates crossed that 2% threshold in three four-way races. Since 2010, in races that the Democrats sat out, at least one Green has earned 5% or better, some scoring as high as 10%.

As Naomi Klein might say, This Changes Everything.

Transcribing a Twitter Thread

21/2/2019

This is me not caring about the Democratic race for the 2020 presidential nomination—not caring so hard that I'm writing about it again.

To be more precise, I am writing yet another post about Tulsi Gabbard, the candidate whose rhetoric thus far best embodies progressive ideals—yes, better than Bernie in that regard. And she delivers that rhetoric so calmly and smoothly. I'm beginning to wonder if she ever raises her voice to be heard over a cheering crowd.

This morning, inspired by the clip of Rep. Gabbard on The View, I took to Twitter and hammered out a nine-part thread. Rather than link to the tweets or embed them, I figured I should preserve them here. As of this afternoon, to my complete lack of surprise, Gabbard has yet to respond. She and her crew keep a rather busy schedule.

This was also inspired in part by a recent reminder in a secret Facebook group: The author of the post referred to Gabbard as a "tool of empire" and warned that as long as she remains a Democrat she will play a sheep-dog role in the campaign after the party nominates yet another centrist warmonger.

Figueredo has a lot to say about this View segment; Kulinski has even more. The first portion of her appearance is below the fold.

Foresight Is 2020

15/2/2019

The 2020 General Election is less than 21 months away! The first primaries happen in less than a year! The first debates may happen in four months! And I still don't care!

The more the major network news vomitoria try to handicap the Democratic presidential reality show/beauty pageant—collecting polling numbers about undeclared and even speculative candidates, and completely omitting some who have declared—the more eagerly I want to push that shit away. MSNBC has given Tulsi Gabbard some air time, and that's probably for the last time.

The closest I get to caring about the 2020 mess concerns what strategies the Texas Greens or Movement for a People's Party might concoct toward a ballot access drive. In Texas, the collection of petition signatures begins the day after the state primary in March, with a statutory duration of 75 days. Crikey, if only the whole presidential campaign lasted a mere 75 days!

As Humanist Report sage Mike Figueredo admonishes us, be prepared in the coming months for a succession of disappointments from your progressive Democrat idols. In this video, I like the way he paints Barbara Lee as an "establishment progressive"—i.e., one who takes boldly leftish positions fairly consistently but still gravitates toward "viable" candidates like her fellow Californian Kamala Harris.

For amusement value, meanwhile, I recommend PDiddie's now-weekly takes on America's Next Top Democrat:

Not Morphing Back into a Democrat, Don't Worry

22/1/2019

First, an apology to my dozen or so regular readers. My intentions for this blog in 2019 have fallen into disarray. I have been posting only sporadically, mostly because I find myself with less time to write, or even to read the stack of books on my bedside table, and even less time to think deeply about what to write. Work, home life, and artistic endeavors have made my plate fuller than usual thus far, not that that's a bad thing in itself.

In re-reading recent posts, it has not escaped my attention that my attention has focused on some Democratic politicians. Why would this longtime Green even care about the political ambitions and positions of Reps. Gabbard and Ocasio-Cortez? It's not because I'm a middle-aged white dude with a thing for attractive young women who can talk intelligently about matters of policy. (I'll candidly admit to heavy long-term crushes on Abby Martin and Eleanor Goldfield, but those two are NOT Democrats and that's NOT the explanation.)

The best answer I can offer to that is that the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party has fascinated me from a distance. Can this ethnically diverse, mostly young freshman cohort swim against the tide and pull their party back to the left? Can they get their agenda past the neoliberal gatekeepers in the Capitol?

There was a reason—well, several—for my giving up on the Democratic Party more than 20 years ago. If anything, Team Donkey has become more corporatized and corrupted than it was when President Clinton took his political triangulation performance art to DC. I'm not exactly optimistic about a party that Sen. Joe Manchin can call home even trying to dismantle late-stage capitalism and all its feudalist tendencies.

But I'm rooting for that outcome anyway. Socialism or barbarism, y'all.

Beto-Bob Is #117; Centrist Dems Still Don't Get It

12/12/2018

Robert Francis O'Rourke has just three weeks remaining as a Member of Congress from El Paso. Texas voters determined last month that he will not be advancing to the US Senate. So, with his irrelevance looming large, why bother Monday-morning-quarterbacking his progressivity or lack thereof? Mostly because serious people are talking seriously about running him for president in 2020. It's not just the breezy speculation of starry-eyed rank-and-file Democratic voters.

For a number of reasons, that particular dog won't hunt. The tweet below shows us why.

Beto O’Rourke isn’t in the progressive caucus, he’s in the moderate ‘New Democrat coalition’, his voting record is the 86th most progressive in the house. Pelosi is to his left. That’s... not good. pic.twitter.com/wkXT7L8Cv2
— Secular Talk (@KyleKulinski) December 12, 2018

Repeat after Me: "I Don't Vote for Warmongers"

8/10/2018

Ho-hum. Kayleen and I have lost another friend, both on Facebook and in real life, due to his advanced Trump Derangement Syndrome. He wasn't a close friend, but I'll miss his humor-laden political posts and his keen insight on soccer for someone who's relatively new to the game. I wish him well in the new, improved life he is currently undertaking. His occasional post-midnight drunken rants, however, I shall not miss.

In this man's mind, all of us who voted for Jill Stein and Gary Johnson in 2016 are responsible for throwing the presidential race to the Republicans. We purposefully ignored Democrats' warnings about how a Trump presidency would alter the Supreme Court irreparably, now giving us Justice Brett "Devil's Triangle" Kavanaugh and possible lifetime appointments for more accused pussy-grabbers.

When reminded that a) those votes weren't stolen from Hillary Clinton because they didn't belong to her in the first place, and b) third-party votes in Texas did not affect who won the state's 38 electoral votes, this fellow busted out some hyperbole about Stein "getting the 0.000001% of the vote that she deserved" or words to that effect, thus defeating his own argument.

It's rather startling how this little episode has brought certain things into sharper focus:

To the delight of Democrats in Texas, I am now convinced that our state Green Party will not make a magical come-back in 2020 unless the situation changes drastically in the next year or so.
I've determined that there's only one proper and concise response when people ask me why I didn't just fall into line behind Clinton: "I don't vote for warmongers*."

More on both of these later in this post.

Ventura 2020?

5/10/2018

Wow. I'm kinda conflicted about this, and not for the reasons you might think.

Through Arlington school board candidate Hunter Crow's post on the GPTX Facebook page, I learned this morning that apparently Jesse Ventura wants to run for president as a Green. The key word is "apparently," because it isn't self-evident that Ventura had anything to do with the creation of the website.

Still, The Governing Body has recently spoken in speculative terms about a presidential run.

As of now, the Jesse Ventura 2020 site is a bit rudimentary:

The title of the main and only page doesn't even get his name right: my browser tab says Jesse Venture 2020.
It has space reserved for the Green Party Banner, but the webmaster has not added the banner image yet.
There are representations of his top three issues: stopping US military madness, ending the war on drugs, and truly reforming campaign finance. If your pet issue or litmus test for voting is Medicare for All, you may have to wait for the site to be fully fleshed out.
The page's main feature, found near the bottom, is a clunkily edited video collage of some of Ventura's media appearances that illustrate his evolution into a Green supporter.

This Facebook page looks even less legitimate.

The North Star Shines Light on Some New Angles

7/6/2018

In his version of the Texoblogosphere rundown this week, Gadfly linked to this rambling report on last weekend's Left Forum in New York, courtesy of The North Star. The Forum provided a lot of critiques, positive and negative, on left political movements including the Green Party of the US. In its final paragraph, the report references the same Bruce Dixon Black Agenda Report column to which I linked last week. Here is a slice:

Bernie Sanders may have brought people into the movements, but at the end of the day, the Dixon/Black Agenda analysis of Sanders being a sheepdog stands. And Bernie Sanders played that role well, which is why there is currently so much resistance to fully breaking from the Democrats. Electing progressive Democrats will result in capitulation and co-optation, and more will be ready to come over and help to build a new political party.