This entry is adapted from a Facebook post I made earlier today.

One of the commenters on this "Rising" video sez, "Catering to Biden Republicans may usher in a true third party." Krystal Ball is pretty canny, but does she see the same implications of the Democrats' nationally televised slide to the right?

The Biden Republican phenomenon is a continuation of the #NeverTrump Republicans who came to light in 2016. It's related to how MSNBC tends to invite Military-Industrial Complex types on to talk foreign & defense policy, yet seldom invites peace activists to provide contrasting views.

I foresee a major realignment in the next decade, more of a flow than a sudden seismic shift. What emerges will depend on whether millions of Democrats stick with the party our of habit or bolt in disgust. It may even strengthen the Libertarian Party while the left unites under the Greens, the People's Party, or a brand new coalition.

Scenario

• The Republican Party is no longer in denial about its fascistic tendencies, but rather embraces them. Middle-of-the-road Republicans abandon the GOP to the Trump/Tea Party wing, fleeing either toward the Democrats or the Libertarians.
• The Democratic Party holds down the neoliberal center-right, with a few progressives hanging in because Democratic candidates still spout the same old culturally liberal rhetoric. At least for a while, it will dominate the political landscape (my Democratic friends say huzzah & amen)—assuming Climate Apocalypse holds off another decade or two.
• The Green/People's Party Alliance occupies the left-of-center territory, including a substantial number of people who had given up voting. It may even grow to become the main opposition party.
• The Libertarian Party gets the aforementioned NeverTrumpers, plus folks who hate corporatism & militarism but think Medicare for All & Green New Deal socialism goes a few bridges too far.

Needless to say, I don't think a dominant Democratic Party is a good thing. It will still be the "reasonable" head of the two-headed War & Wall Street Party, more beholden to mega-donors than to voters or citizen advocates, still OK with drone strikes & deportations & market-based solutions to every crisis that comes along.

Krystal and the Greens
I have whined here and elsewhere about Krystal Ball's reluctance even to hypothesize about the Green Party or the incipient People's Party as a haven for progressive voters. But look at the group with whom she's hanging out today:

Warning: I use the word I in this post quite more than I normally like to, especially at the beginnings of paragraphs.

I would like to express humble and sincere gratitude to David Martin Davies and Texas Public Radio for the opportunity to present my case on yesterday's Texas Matters podcast. My conversation with Davies, which lasted about 20 minutes, was edited down to about ten. It means a lot that Texas and US media outlets are even recognizing the existence of the Green Party, even if it took something like getting kicked off the statewide ballot for them to notice.

I hope that nobody listening to the podcast gets the idea that I am personally bitter or even upset about my candidacy being canceled; however, I am appalled at how establishment Democrats resort to such tactics, and not just in Texas. In the next week or so I hope to post a summary of party-suppression activities in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and elsewhere.

I am also grateful that the latter part of the interview did not survive the editing process. Davies tacked into the same question that media types have been asking Greens, when they do bother to cover us, for the last 20 years, to which we have been giving the same answer for 20 years, and which media outlets never seem to remember. It was, of course, the Dreaded Spoiler Effect Question!

As is my habit, I answered the question Davies asked. I did not redirect the question into something like Y'all have been asking that same question since 2000, and our answer hasn't changed much, so can we please move on to questions of policy, and how our platform addresses hot topics like climate disruption and killer cops? I'll admit, I got a bit testy, and I hope that Davies knows that my testiness was directed at the hackneyed question, not at him personally for asking it.

So I testily ticked off some of the arguments disproving the Spoiler Effect and offered Ranked Choice Voting or Approval Voting as a solution. Davies went with the standard That's not the system we have, and I countered with That's the system we should have if we really care about democracy. Changing our state's voting methods would require an amendment to the Texas Constitution, which must pass both houses of the Legislature and then be approved by popular vote; it's a tad more burdensome than the referendum in Maine that adopted Ranked Choice Voting statewide (and which has survived multiple legal challenges).

Part of the reason for my gratitude is that I made a boo-boo during that part of the conversation—possibly two:

1. On the question of Jill Stein "spoiling" Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin four years ago, I may have fired back with something like Let's talk about the numbers of folks in those three Rust Belt states who voted for Obama in 2012 and 2016, then switched to Trump in 2020—far greater numbers than those who voted Green. I don't have that portion of the interview to verify whether I got the years wrong in the heat of the moment.
2. In that same part of the conversation, I know that I said something along the lines of The Democrats can't keep their own voters on the ranch. Big oops. As Greens and Libertarians are fond of saying, there's no such thing as a party's own voters. No party or candidate owns your vote; they must earn your vote. Despite my unfortunate phrasing, the point is that Democrats (in general) kvetch about Greens and other left parties because they believe themselves entitled to all votes to the left of the political center. That's why the party leadership talks a progressive game, but their actions reveal their contempt for Progressives.

Meanwhile...
As David Cobb has observed many times since 2000, the Democratic Party is where progressive ideas go to die. I observed it myself when I was a Jerry Brown delegate to a Senate District 15 convention in 1992. That's precisely the problem in the Age of Trump: Progressive Cassandras have been howling about how you have to defeat populism with populism, while the Democratic Party keeps trying to rebrand itself as a force of moderation as it embraces the Military-Industrial Complex and the Corporate State more tightly each election cycle.

Meanwhile, half the voting-age population doesn't vote, having found nothing to vote for in the major parties.

Meanwhile, disaffected Progressives are fleeing to the Greens and the Movement for a People's Party.

Meanwhile, endless wars climate change student loan debt upward redistribution of wealth drug wars cops killing POC with impunity corporate personhood et cetera ad nauseam.

The Green Mouse hath roared, and it scareth the Blue Donkey. So the Donkey reverteth to its habit of hauling the Green Mouse into court.
​
The purpose of this entry is to address the recent lightning-fast and successful legal move by Democratic candidates to keep Tom Wakely, katija gruene, and me off the 2020 general election ballot. We could also mention Charles Waterbury, and we will a few paragraphs down.

The facts in this case extend in multiple directions, making it difficult to form a coherent entry with smooth transitions. So the subheadings will mark shifts in topic. There may be multiple typos and misstatements below, so don't be shy about pointing them out in Comments.

Before diving into this irony-rich matter, I would like to state unequivocally that I am not personally upset about this development. I bear no personal animus toward Democratic Senate nominee MJ Hegar. However, I do bear heavy and sustained animus toward the US Corporate Empire for which she flew helicopters in Afghanistan.

My level of disdain for the Democratic Party as an institution, which was already as high as ever I can remember,  is just a tad higher as of today. It's very telling that this Democratic US Senate candidate's Issues page contains almost nothing on foreign policy; the closest she gets is something like let's not put immigrant kids in cages. Democrats don't want you thinking about foreign policy, especially not our state of Endless War. That's why Bill Clinton kept pushing kitchen-table issues while ignoring the horrors of post–Gulf War economic sanctions in Iraq. The Clinton campaign's It's the Economy, Stupid! has devolved into ZOMG! Trump!!!

As for the Hegar campaign's use of Joan Jett's "Bad Reputation" as background music in a campaign video, I leave you to draw your own interpretations. I earnestly hope that Joan got paid for it.

One downside to viewing the world and art through progressive eyes is that it spoils a lot of otherwise entertaining movies.

Last night, after returning from our weekend getaway to the Piney Woods, Kayleen & I watched her DVD of "Charlie Wilson's War" (2007). I hadn't seen the movie, and Kayleen hadn't watched it in quite a few years.

​Oy. It's both highly enjoyable & deeply disturbing. Tfw when the screenplay & the performances are excellent but you get that bitter aftertaste of pro-war propaganda.

Lufkin native Charlie Wilson represented TX-2 back when that district was farther north than today, and back when a Boll Weevil Democrat could still get elected in Deep East Texas (we might call them Blue Dogs today).

Director Mike Nichols and writer Aaron Sorkin had to give in to the CIA getting its grubby paws on their creation. The result:

1. There's a subtext that Republicans and Democrats on the Hill are equally enthused about covert and overt interventionism overseas.
2. This is depicted as a not-necessarily-bad thing, because the "good guys" in the flick are the ones responsible for the intervention.
3. Seeing and talking with Afghan refugees in Pakistan, the victims of Soviet atrocities, tugs at the heartstrings of characters & audience members alike. But there's no mention of how the US routinely commits the same atrocities.
4. There's that scene toward the end when Wilson finds that the people who were so willing to bankroll the transfer of weaponry to the Mujaheddin refused to appropriate money to repair Afghanistan; there's the hint that he foresaw that their intransigence would come back to bite the US in the ass. This is a (CIA-approved) swipe at George W. Bush, who was president when the film was released: In mid-2001, Dubya received the intelligence reports of what the Mujaheddin alumni were alleged to be planning, but he didn't act on them.

While Wilson certainly doesn't represent ALL Congressional Democrats, or even all centrist Democrats, the film still stage-whispers that Dems in DC & Hollywood are OK with US-funded proxy wars. This is cleverly personified in Wilson's top aide Bonnie Bach (Amy Adams): Witness her transformation from conscientious progressive-ish to starry-eyed cheerleader for Operation Cyclone.

As I said above, oy.

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.