Screenshot of the final delegate tally from the Presidential Nominating Convention, complete with misspelled names. Howie Hawkins received 210 votes, needed 178 to win.
I spontaneously decided to live-tweet this Presidential Nominating Convention thingy. See the link to the thread below.
Apart from the nominations, the best news of the day is that the Credentials Committee and the GPUS Steering Committee reviewed and rejected the challenges leveled against the delegations of four states and one caucus. As mentioned previously in this space, the challenges, mostly filed well after the deadline for such things, alleged that our delegates (yes, including those from Texas) were chosen using fishy math. Second-best is that, at least for delegates, this was the most stress-free Presidential Nominating Convention ever, in my view and that of several longtime Greenies of my acquaintance.
I work in IT, which, as most modern Americans are aware, stands for Information Technology. But my particular focus is a different IT, Instructional Technology. I work at a small university, helping instructors build online courses.
In post-secondary education, one of the hot terms is flipped classroom. The first time I heard someone use it, I had a pretty good idea of what it meant: student-centered or student-directed learning. I've known since my earliest teaching days that one of the most effective ways to learn facts and concepts involves teaching them to others. In political wonkery, one of my hobbies, I have only recently become acquainted with yet another IT: Inverted Totalitarianism. The true meaning of that term, I thought I could guess. But I could also guess incorrectly, and I did. Until today, I didn't even bother to look up inverted totalitarianism, because the implications of putting those two words scared me. It's actually way more complex and way scarier than I originally thought.
A Republican Senate committee chair uttered the words "collusion with Russia" in connection with 2012 & 2016 Green presidential nominee Jill Stein...and Democrats everywhere started licking their chops. The committee has launched an investigation the possibility of collusion...and before any relevant facts could be presented, much less analyzed, Democrats everywhere have concluded that Stein must be guilty of that very act.
Even Joe McCarthy would be scratching his head over this mass hysteria. Wonkette managed to respond to the news with a post that achieves meta-self-parody with a half-twist. It's that genuinely and supremely awful. Hell no, I won't link to it; go find it yourself.
I'm glad to know that Dr. Jill Stein has time not only to reply to the barrage of establshment-Democrat hatred she faces in social media, but to generate her share of noise. As of this moment, he is her most recent in a whole chain of tweets spaced about 20 minutes apart.
You'd think she was running for something, or perhaps just gearing up for another campaign. She could lie low and enjoy having made some history, but she's practicing her political medicine both defensively and aggressively instead.
Of course, the more Dr. Stein tweets, the more she invites attack, not just from high-profile operatives like Neera Tanden, but also from street-level Democrats who accuse her of working for the Putin-Trump axis because they can't envision actual Americans of their own volition attacking the Democratic Party from the left. The vitriol of some of the replies to Stein's tweets from aggrieved Democrats is palpable. Fortunately for us in the bleachers, Caitlin Johnstone has collected Stein's exchange with Tanden (minus replies from the rabble) and reproduced it on Medium. "Pwnage" is often in the eye of the beholder, but this beholder believes that Stein pwned Tanden big-time. For confirmation, I noticed that the replies from Team Tanden diminished in quantity and causticity after Stein's "Girl, do you even Google?" burn, and Team Stein's replies smelled like victory. Oh look, Jill just posted another one 20 minutes after the last:
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.
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. David Cobb and I agree on a lot. That's partly because, over the years, he has educated me on many topics and preached intersectionality before most of us even had a word for it. We were in agreement before we even met: In the 1990s, we were both independently working to organize a Green Party in Harris County.
One thing on which Cobb and I have recently agreed is that Caity Johnstone rocks our respective worlds. Ms. Johnstone, who has been contributing to Inquisitr almost daily of late, is a converted Sandernista. As a progressive voter, she jumped on the Bernie bandwagon early, rejected Hillary Clinton's candidacy for a host of reasons, and switched her allegiance to Jill Stein and the Greens when it became clear that Sen. Sanders would not get the Democrats' nod. Here's her piece from Thursday on the revelation that Jill Stein has her money in some not-100%-green funds. ZOMG. Hide your kids, hide your wife. It's been a Texas-size weekend for the Stein/Baraka campaign. Dr. Jill Stein and her mini-entourage appeared in El Paso Friday for a crowd of about 300, nearly as many in Houston Saturday, moved on to San Antonio yesterday, and will scoot up I-35 into Austin today. (I extend my sympathies to my comrades in Greater Dallas–Fort Worth, who will not get a visit from Jill this time around. Laredo and the Valley got to see her last year.)
In addition, Sunday night, John Oliver actually deigned not only to mention Jill Stein and the Greens, but to take Stein's candidacy seriously—as seriously as a comedy news analysis program should, anyway. He also took Gary Johnson's Libertarian candidacy seriously for a few seconds...and then totally didn't. The crowd at Last Concert Café Saturday (pictures here and here and on Brains & Eggs) was large and enthusiastic. However, not everyone in attendance came in as Stein supporters, and not everyone left as Stein supporters. Some came just out of curiosity, to find out whether Jill would be a better choice than the abhorrent major-party nominees. A couple of friends, progressive but not hardcore Greens like me, accepted my invitation to the campaign event at LCC. They reported afterward on Facebook that the event gave them a bitter taste, partly from what Jill or the other speakers said from the stage, but more due to what they heard from the crowd. Somebody busted out with a cry to put Hillary Clinton in prison, a line more befitting a Trump rally, and another referred to Secretary Clinton as "Shitlary." I had to assure my friends that longtime Greens try to eschew that kind of talk, especially in public, not that we're always successful in that effort. Trash talk of that sort comes mostly, though not exclusively, from people who are new to the movement and don't understand the importance we place on civil discourse. Another friend commented that you see and hear a lot worse at rallies for major-party candidates.  These are the venues and times for Jill Stein's actual appearances in Texas over the next few days. The events may start earlier than the times indicated: For example, the Houston event begins at 2 pm and ends at 7, with Jill expected to arrive about 4 after flying in from El Paso.
Last night I watched most of Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka's one-hour appearance on C-SPAN with Steve Scully. As I mentioned in the preceding post, I am 100% behind the Green Party's presidential ticket, and not just because I find the other parties and candidates abhorrent. Stein's Power to the People Plan, and the Green Party's national platform, are the blueprints for the world I want for my extended family, friends, and descendants.
This does not mean that I refrain from criticizing my preferred candidates' performance in the rare media opportunities they receive. Jill does not do media as well as a presidential candidate ought to. She has improved with practice, but she's not where she needs to be. In the way she educates interviewers with hardball questions, she's literally awesome, as a recent video demonstrates. But she has some habits that are irritating to someone like me who watches her regularly and has a background in public speaking. |
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