Before anyone says anything about it, avocados and avocadoes are both accepted plural forms, according to Merriam-Webster.
I invite you to click the Twitter link below and read the entire thread. It's not really about avocados. Remember: Retweets do not equal agreement. I RT'd it to make it easier to find for the purposes of this blog entry.
I have adored and admired Amanda Palmer since a friend turned me on to her in 2009. I'd heard Dresden Dolls cuts a few times on college radio, but their material didn't really grab me at the time. Amanda was one of the first accounts I Followed when I finally jumped on the Twitter bandwagon in 2013.
So despite her long thread that starts with avocados and concludes with her determination to help Biden/Harris get elected, by any means at her disposal while she remains in Aotearoa/New Zealand as a long-term guest, I am not canceling Amanda. I am not unFollowing her. I agree with Amanda that quibbles over individual issues should not be inflated into irreconcilable differences. The avocado discussion is not really such a small thing, but we could point out the destructive side-effects of the production of nearly everything we eat. I still eat avocados. I still occasionally eat quinoa. I remain married to a woman who eats meat, fer chrissakes. I agree that the Left should unite. But I absolutely do not agree that we should unite behind a center-right party and its presidential tandem. About this time in 2016, I was following presidential preference polls—not because I believed them accurate, but because some nationally known and respected polls were including the names Jill Stein and Gary Johnson in their crosstabs.
As of t-minus 89 days before Election Day, I haven't found any polls with the cojones to include the names Howie Hawkins and Jo Jorgensen. They and any other relatively small parties' nominees are merged into the all-purpose mystery candidate known as Other. The biggest reason that irks me is that Hawkins (Green) and Jorgensen (Libertarian) are already officially nominated by their respective parties; Joe Biden and Donald Trump are merely presumptive nominees. I'm going to starting checking every other day or so, maybe thrice a week, for the first sign of a polling organization that lists the Sunflower and Hedgehog nominees by name. If you see a four-or-more-candidate presidential poll before I do, please put something in the comments below.
Hey, I sense a theme here.
Recently, in my free moments, I have been thinking quite a bit about the necessity of political parties other than the two that have held sway for 160 years. I have been envisioning the evolution of the United States into a multi-party democracy more than usual. Yesterday's entry featured my Twitter thread about how electing Joe Biden in 2020 practically assures a Republican victory in 2024. That's assuming he isn't replaced in the first half of his term by his running mate, who turns out to be FDR-level awesome and just what the nation needs. The entry from the weekend before (25 July) featured a tirade against Jef Rouner's tirade against voting for third parties. Mostly I focused on the reasons many self-identified Progressives cannot in good conscience vote for Biden. What I didn't get into very deeply is that there are some good, healthy, positive reasons for voting for non-Duopoly parties in the US. That's out subject today. Third-party voting isn't entirely a matter of casting a protest vote against both heads of the two-headed War & Wall Street Party; it's also about building a new system to replace the imperialist, corporatist system that, despite its imposing grandeur, is already crumbling around us.
Thanks to my Senate campaign and some self-appointed message amplifiers on Twitter, I'm getting a lot of followers lately. My personal/campaign Twitter account has acquired more followers in the past two months than it had in the previous seven years.
As an introvert who has never been much of a self-promoter, this is really odd to me, but it's not unwelcome. I can say with assurance that there are plenty of Twittizens who don't even second-tier lefty YouTube channels but have far more followers than I. Follow @dbcgreentx if you care to...or don't if you don't. The thread below got a lot more response, a lot more quickly, than I expected or am used to.
My US Senate candidacy feels a tad more legit now.
I had to email the appropriate editor at Ballotpedia with my photo, as I had somehow forgotten to include it in my profile submission, and it's awfully hard to edit a profile once it's submitted. Below the fold are a few excerpts from my responses to the Candidate Connection questionnaire. The questions are not presented in the same order as on the actual questionnaire—e.g., the lighter human-interest stuff like "What's your favorite book and why?" was toward the end, whereas here it's closer to the beginning. Kayleen and I have both decided that the PNC, which is scheduled for an eight-hour block from 11 am to 7 pm Central Daylight Time on Saturday, will be difficult if not impossible to get through without a stiff drink or two. Listening in on the Platform Committee hearings last night and the night before confirmed our decision. Still, today's press release has me all excited.
The late, legendary Barbara Jordan was the first-ever Congressmember from Texas District 18, which she helped create as a state senator, and which I have inhabited for the past nine years. From the very beginning of her tenure, she admonished staff that not only must there be no impropriety in the office, but there must not even be the appearance of impropriety. She knew better than to give ammunition to colleagues or press who might seize any opportunity to bring down an outspoken black liberal woman from the old Confederacy's largest city.
Have the insiders in the Green Party of the United States engaged in enough appearance of impropriety that attorney and rabbi Dario Hunter can build a case against them?
Nothing will be official until 11 July, but Howie Hawkins of New York has amassed a simple majority of the 350 delegates apportioned for the Green Party's Presidential Nominating Convention. There are fewer than 50 delegates still to be selected. This news is hardly unexpected given how the quest for the nomination has played out. Hawkins entered the race with an actual track record of running for high offices in New York State, and he is considered a co-founder of the Party. (Second-place candidate Dario Hunter has actually been elected to a school board in Youngstown, Ohio.) The Green New Deal on which Dr. Jill Stein ran in 2012 and 2016 started with Hawkins, whether or not he actually coined the term. In case you haven't caught the news, Teamster activist Hawkins has selected long-haul truck driver and activist Angela N. Walker as his running mate. For those of you keeping identity politics scoresheets, Walker checks off not only the African American and Woman boxes, but also the LGBT+ box. An Armed Forces veteran like Hawkins, Walker also has electoral experience, including a run for sheriff of Milwaukee County (Wisconsin) in 2014. They have also both worked with Socialist Party USA, which has endorsed their ticket; Hawkins-Walker will likely appear on the ballot lines for SPUSA and GPUS in New York, which allows fusion candidacies. On a personal note, I have donated to the Hawkins and Hunter campaigns, and I did not have a stated preference between them. My habit is never to presume anyone's nomination until it's signed, sealed, and delivered; I'm not happy about the way he has acted in public appearances as if his nomination was in the bag, appearing on programs such as Redacted Tonight VIP without more than an indirect reference to the other Green presidential candidates. However, I will be glad to be able to answer the inevitable question from the mis- and underinformed, "Who's your (y'all's) candidate?" without saying, "Well, the nomination hasn't been determined yet, and we have about six candidates contesting for it..." by which the asker has fallen asleep. At least Laura Palmer is optimistic. The GPTX co-chair said last night in a Green Party Houston Zoom conference that she is interpreting as good news the Secretary of State's Office's reply to the list of electoral nominees that she filed. If there's any truly good news, it's that SOS did not remark in this reply that the candidates who had not paid filing fees would not be granted official candidate status.
I don't see how SOS could avoid enforcing the statutory fee or petition requirements for minor-party candidates as set forth in last year's HB 2504. We still have to wait for the outcome of the pending lawsuits to see whether SOS can waive those fees legally and without major parties throwing a major hissy fit. We have made it a matter of public record that only two of the eight nominees ponied up to run for office, those being Hal J. Ridley, Jr. (US House District 36) and Brody Mulligan (Texas House District 92). As of now, it's a little less unofficial that GPTX has three statewide nominees in addition to the presidential ticket. We'd certainly feel better if all nine million or so who vote in the general election have more Green choices than just the top of the ticket, rather than the 150,000 or so in Ridley's and Mulligan's districts. The Green nominee for US Senate, yours sincerely, may begin doing something like campaigning soon. It will be a very low-key effort. As I told Laura, as much as I'd love to travel the state as I did in 2012, the current pandemic makes that impractical; making a lot of noise on the Internet seems to be the only way to go, but there's so much other noise competing for voters' attention. The watchword for now is "wait & see." In last night's online meeting of the State Executive Committee of the Green Party of Texas, state co-chair Laura Palmer revealed that the Secretary of State's Office had some questions about katija gruene's occupying two places on the 2020 general election ballot. As a result, ms. gruene decided to stay in the statewide race for the Railroad Commission seat and drop out of the Texas House District 51 race.
The Texas Election Code does not state explicitly that one person cannot run for more than one office in the same election—or, at least, I have not found such language. However, no one person may serve in two elected offices in the event of winning both races. Hypothetically, if gruene could be elected to both positions in the event of a sudden Green Wave, she should not take a chance on a dual victory. Possibly Moot Point This is the paragraph where we remind readers that gruene is not officially on the ballot for either position, despite being nominated for both. She did not pay the new HB 2504 filing fees to run, nor did she submit petition signatures in lieu of the fees. The fee provision for candidates irrespective of party is in legal limbo, pending the lawsuits filed in hopes of overturning it. |
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