Category: Election 2020

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

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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.

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

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

Ventura 2020?

The North Star Shines Light on Some New Angles

DBC Sez...

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