They put the Whitehouse into the hands of GWB, which led to eight years of deficits and immoral war.
Don’t forget, Nader tried the same shit in 2004, with Republican money. He didn’t even try to hide that he’s running as a spoiler and to be a boil on the ass of the Democratic Party.
That’s one reason why I don’t worry about Stein. No one, outside of hardcore politicos, knows who this woman is. Outside of some coverage on C-Span 3, she’ll be completely ignored by the media.
Excellent, excellent response. Bravo.
I never would have predicted that response. (/smirk)
Misleading characterization of Johnson’s plan. Here it is. I add emphasis:
http://www.ontheissues.org/2016/Gary_Johnson_Tax_Reform.htm
[INDENT] I advocate removing all income taxes, all capital-gains taxes, and replacing them with a consumption tax, kind of a national sales tax called the Fair-tax. [/INDENT] Now replacing the income tax with a national sales tax is pretty stupid: it’s an invitation to tax evasion. If you really wanted to do something like that, a VAT would be the way to go. Also, there’s pretty sound basis for giving higher income groups higher tax rates.
But while stupid, this isn’t build a magic wall and make Mexico pay for it crazy. Johnson and Weld have substantial legislative and executive experience, while Trump and Stein do not. Stein’s thoughts on quantitative easing are Trump level ignorant while her proposal to ban all pesticides until we figure things out is irresponsible to the point of being loony tunes. Still, I’m not surprised a Republican sympathizer would say such a thing. When Romney hired Iraq War dead-enders to advise him on foreign policy, Stein argued that Romney and Obama were basically the same. And she’s right, if you don’t think the Iraq War was a big deal, like most Republicans. Don’t get me wrong. She has a right to her opinion. And I have a right to oppose right wing lunatics and those that are nearly identical to them.
Jill Stein says she would pardon Edward Snowden and appoint him to her Cabinet.
She has also said she would pardon Chelsea Manning.
Appoint him to fix her cabinets maybe. I’d like to see the Senate composition that confirms THAT nomination.
Asswipe Cornel West has now endorsed Jill Stein. Yes, the same idiot that St. Bernie Sanders appointed to the Democratic Platform Committee. This is why the Democrats should never try to appease the far left, you’ll never meet their purity tests.
I know this means absolutely nothing but she looks like an intelligent, reasonable person. With Trump you can tell he’s a buffoon (it’s the hair) and Sanders looks undisciplined but Stein would have me fooled if she didn’t open her mouth.
What is the highest office a Green has ever reached? I live in Portland, Maine, where John Eder of the Green Party has been a political fixture for at least 15 years. He served two terms in the state legislature, and has held many municipal positions. His name is invoked a lot in arguments about the electability of Greens.
State legislative rep. Three times – Maine, Arkansas & California – although, in two of those instances, the person pretty quickly changed party affiliation to Democratic. Maine seems to be the only time one held on.
Brutal takedown of Stein by Daily Kos. Kos certainly is biased, but it looks like they’re not going to be a fertile home for disaffected Berners.
http://m.dailykos.com/stories/2016/7/20/1550081/-The-Dictator-In-Waiting-Jill-Stein-s-Creepy-Look-At-The-Future?detail=facebook
That’s the problem with not actually knowing anything about the Constitution. The Libertarian Party, for all its faults, at least has at the very center of its philosophy the proper methods and procedures by which the government is supposed to work. The Greens just figure they’ll do things by magic. And if not, they’ll just break the law and rely on their supporters to pressure the courts.
The Libertarians also have the well funded Cato Foundation in their corner. While Cato is somewhat fringe, they are mostly neuro-typical (unlike, say, Ron Paul). The center-left and just to the left of that have a number of think tanks that do solid work. I don’t believe the Green Party has any identifiable intellectual apparatus, though I’d be happy to be corrected.
There are plenty of environmentalist organizations of course. But that’s something different.
Incidentally, do the Libertarians support FairVote? Or are they as dim-witted as the Greens are insofar as electoral reform is concerned?
I would imagine the LP would see no issues with the system as it is other than ballot access.
As for Greens and think tanks, there is no Green think tank, but given that they are pretty much just the far left wing of the Democratic Party they just piggyback off of lefty institutes. The LP only needs their own think tanks because they are not the right(or the left) wing of the GOP. They are their own thing, agreeing with the Republicans on some issues but as far left as the Greens on others.
It’s very hard for a third party to prevail with winner-take-all voting. A year ago I would have said, “Impossible in a practical sense”, but I’ve been corrected on this message board with Canadian and UK counterexamples. Still. The LP very much should care about these sorts of rules. Because otherwise they will go nowhere.
Recall that the Republican Party was basically the Northern Whigs. Third parties in the US have never been successful, at least to date.
But they don’t really. They don’t piggy back off of Urban Institute or the Economic Policy Institute, both of which would think they are nuts.
Cato is an independent organization (just in case I wasn’t clear). But it’s something they can piggy back off of.
I suppose the Greens can work off of the Nation magazine, In These Times or other rags, though I suspect those mags mostly oppose the Greens.
“Oppose” only in the sense that the Greens take votes from Democrats. If the Democrats and Greens were the only two parties, a lot of these sites would be overtly pro-Green.
Good for Savage.
A town about 20 miles from me has been undergoing a demographic shift lately–an increasing growth of the 3W population (well off, well educated, and white). They elected a Green Party council member a few years back, just in time for a controversy in which a supermarket chain announced plans to build a store in the town.
The Green council member took the lead in fighting against the proposal: the profits from the store would leave town, the store would not be responsive to community needs, the supermarket wouldn’t support kids’ sports teams and local charities. Reasonable concerns, though she had a hard time listening to arguments that this particular chain was more community minded than most.
She began to lose me, though, when she talked about how the store would bring in “the wrong element”–by which she meant people from surrounding, less gentrified towns.
And she REALLY lost me a little later on. She pointed out that the town already had a perfectly good locally owned grocery store. Others said, well yes, but they have a limited selection and the price is high, and so a lot of town residents have to drive twenty miles to some other supermarket anyway. To which she responded, “okay, but why does anybody need to save ten cents on a loaf of bread?”
The damnedest thing was, it was a genuine question.
It doesn’t sound from the Savage article and the Huffington piece that the party has moved much beyond that rather myopic view of the world.