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ralph nader
Jill Stein's Dangerous Game Could Put Fascist Trump Back in the White House
Running for president and keeping an iron grip on the once-noble Green Party has become Stein’s singular mission. And she’s killing the Party — and its once-sterling reputation — in the process.
Oct 10, 2024
Jill Stein doesn’t give, as the old saying goes, a flying f*ck about democracy. Instead, she’s all about how famous she can become and how much money she can grift off her repeated presidential campaigns. It’s a damn dangerous game.
Fresh off her 2016 political quacksalvery, in which she handed that year’s election to Donald Trump, this professional grifter — who’s been doing real damage to the Green Party for over a decade — is trying to get Trump back into the White House.
As her Wisconsin campaign manager, Pete Karas, told Politico:
“We need to teach Democrats a lesson.”
Arguably, Democrats have already learned that lesson.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost Wisconsin to Trump by 22,748 votes; Stein carried 31,072 votes. In Michigan the story was similar: Clinton lost to Trump by 10,704 votes while Stein carried 51,463. Ditto for Pennsylvania, where Trump won by 44,292 votes and Stein pulled in 49,941 votes.
Had Clinton carried those three states she would have become president.
The Green Party — that I safely voted for in 2000 when I lived in non-swing-state Vermont — deserves a candidate who’ll work to produce real change rather than simply run repeated vanity campaigns that cripple our admittedly flawed electoral system.
Those slim margins may be a distant memory, however, given how hard Stein is pounding on Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania Democrats against President Biden’s unfortunate support of Israel’s brutal bombing campaign in Gaza. As Newsweek reported last week:
“In Michigan, a battleground state where the Greens are campaigning hard, and which has a large Arab American community, 40 percent of Muslim voters backed Stein versus just 12 percent for Harris and 18 percent for Trump, according to a late August poll by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
“Michigan has more than 200,000 Muslim voters and 300,000 with Middle Eastern or North African ancestry. Biden won there in 2020 by 154,000 votes, while Trump carried the state with a victory margin of just 10,700—or 0.23 percent—in 2016.
“In Wisconsin, the CAIR poll showed Stein on 44 percent and Harris on 29 percent, while she also leads the Democrat candidate among Muslims voters in Arizona.”
I moderated the 2012 presidential debate between Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson; she and Johnson both had the smell of cheap political hustlers to me then, a feeling that’s only been reinforced in the years since.
Stein certainly hasn’t done much to advance the stated goals of the Green Party. Back in the day, it was the Greens leading the charge against climate change and in favor of instant runoff voting, having considerable success with the latter.
David Cobb, a Texas environmental attorney, ran on the Green ticket in 2004 and was a regular on my radio program that year. He explicitly told people listening to my show in swing states to vote for John Kerry instead of him, calling it his “safe states” strategy.
He refused to campaign or even appear in battleground states, a statement of both high integrity and real patriotism.
Stein has neither. This is her third run for president (Howie Hawkins was the Green candidate in 2020 and was not on the ballot in most swing states.)
Instead, she’s bragging about how she’s going to hand the 2024 election to Donald Trump. Presumably she’ll be spared the imprisonment that Trump says he’s preparing for the rest of us in politics and the media. As Stein boasted to Newsweek:
“Third Way found that, based on polling averages in battleground states, the 2020 margin of victory for Democrats would be lost in four states — Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin — because of third party support.
“So they can’t win. There’s a fair amount of data now that suggests the Democrats have lost. Unless they give up their genocide.
“We’re doing outreach all the time to a lot of different groups, but it’s really been the Muslim Americans and Arab Americans who have really taken this campaign on like it’s theirs — like they have enormous ownership over this.”
Running for president and keeping an iron grip on the once-noble Green Party has become Stein’s singular mission. And she’s killing the Party — and its once-sterling reputation — in the process. As Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said:
“If you run for years in a row, and your party has not grown, has not added city council seats, down ballot seats and state electives, that’s bad leadership. And that to me is what’s upsetting.”
As Peter Rothpletz wrote for The New Republic in an article titled Jill Stein Is Killing the Green Party:
“As of July 2024, a mere 143 officeholders in the United States are affiliated with the Green Party. None of them are in statewide or federal offices. In fact, no Green Party candidate has ever won federal office. And Stein’s reign has been a period of indisputable decline, during which time the party’s membership—which peaked in 2004 at 319,000 registered members—has fallen to 234,000 today.”
Stein brought along a Fox “News” film crew when she crashed the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, cementing her reputation as a hustler who’ll hook up with anybody who’ll provide her with fame or fortune.
There are, apparently, no Democrats in America clean or pure or virginal enough for Stein; as Rothpletz reports, she even attacked Bernie Sanders for being a “DC insider” and “corrupted” by corporate money.
Meanwhile, her campaign, theoretically opposed to giant monopolies and defense contractors, has taken money from Google, Lockheed Martin, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and McKinsey.
Stein is working hard to win the votes of disaffected Muslims in Michigan and Wisconsin, among other swing states, and could well deny Harris the White House this year just like she so proudly did to Clinton in 2016.
The unfortunate reality is that our system of democracy — created way back in 1789 — essentially requires a two-party system because we have first-past-the-post, winner-take-all elections. The result is that third parties always tear votes away from the major party with which they are most closely philosophically aligned.
And the Electoral College, by creating swing states, amplifies the problem.
Until America adopts proportional representation nationwide (which would require a constitutional amendment) or instant runoff voting (which could be done by law), a vote for a third-party candidate will always damage the party most closely aligned with it. Jill Stein understands this well, but chooses to ignore (or to intentionally exploit) its consequences.
Most other advanced democracies use a parliamentary or proportional representation system where the party that gets, for example, 12 percent of the votes gets 12 percent of the seats in Parliament. This allows for multiple parties and a more vibrant democracy.
However, it wasn’t until the year the Civil War started, 1861, that British philosopher John Stuart Mill published a how-to manual for multi-party parliamentary democracies in his book Considerations On Representative Government.
It was so widely distributed and read that nearly all of the world’s democracies today — all of them countries that became democracies after the late 1860s — use variations on Mill’s proportional representation parliamentary system.
The result for those nations is a plethora of parties representing a broad range of perspectives and priorities, all able to participate in the daily governance of their nation. Nobody gets shut out.
Governing becomes an exercise in coalition building, and nobody is excluded. If you want to get something done politically, you have to pull together a coalition of parties to agree with your policy.
Most European countries, for example, have political parties represented in their parliaments that range from the far left to the extreme right, with many across the spectrum of the middle. There’s even room for single issue parties; for example, several in Europe focus almost exclusively on the environment or immigration.
The result is typically an honest and wide-ranging discussion across society about the topics of the day, rather than a stilted debate among only two parties.
It’s how the Greens became part of today’s governing coalition in Germany, for example, and are able to influence the energy future of that nation. And because of that political diversity in the debates, the decisions made tend to be reasonably progressive: look at the politics and lifestyles in most European nations.
But until America adopts proportional representation nationwide (which would require a constitutional amendment) or instant runoff voting (which could be done by law), a vote for a third-party candidate will always damage the party most closely aligned with it. Jill Stein understands this well, but chooses to ignore (or to intentionally exploit) its consequences.
The Green Party — that I safely voted for in 2000 when I lived in non-swing-state Vermont — deserves a candidate who’ll work to produce real change rather than simply run repeated vanity campaigns that cripple our admittedly flawed electoral system.
It’s time to say “good bye” to Jill Stein and rescue — and then improve — our democratic republic.
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'Loser Donald' and 40 Other Nicknames 'Trump the Grifter' May Not Like
The old saying that you have to give a bully his own medicine is an “evergreen” because it works.
Aug 31, 2024
No matter what his advisers caution, Donald Trump cannot resist giving negative, insulting nicknames to his opponents and critics. Nor can the mass media resist reprinting them in CAPITAL LETTERS, without giving the named persons a right of reply. He gets a free ride day after day, month after month, year after year.
Trump and his pollsters think the nicknames stick in enough people’s minds to make this an effective rhetorical tactic. Trump’s favorites include “crooked Joe Biden,” or “Lying Ted Cruz,” or “Crazy Nancy Pelosi.”
The targeted politicians have chosen not to respond with their own nicknames for the mega-slanderer-in-chief, not wanting to lower themselves into his mud pile. Nor do they ask their allies to hurl similar invectives that would be compelling because they would be so accurate.
The old saying that you have to give a bully his own medicine is an “evergreen” because it works. Would the New York Times continue to repeat Trump’s slurs if he immediately got slurred back in kind? Would the television networks keep conveying Trump’s insulting nicknames were he to become enmeshed by others mocking him and hurling insults with similar frequency?
It is astonishing how lacking in introspection the mainstream media has been about being so used, so frequently by this failed gambling tsar who took them for such a ride in 2016.
Not likely. Pretty soon Trump would realize that his foul-mouth utterances are buying a torrent of nickname backlashes. He is, you may recall, notoriously sensitive to personal criticism. Thin-skinned, he is.
One episode illustrates what can happen with a tit-for-tat response. When Trump was president, he went to a Washington Nationals baseball game, and a crowd started chanting “Lock him up.” This was after he would exhort his mass rallies to chant “Lock her up” Interestingly, the crooked Hillary chants ceased during his following rallies. Trump got a dose of his own medicine.
Without such neutralizing reciprocity, Trump will intensify his personal epithets against Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz in the remaining weeks before the November 5th election. Such a demeaning repetitive tactic is also an insult to most voters, who want candidates to focus on ways and means to improve their livelihoods, further their aspirations, and be more honest.
It is astonishing how lacking in introspection the mainstream media has been about being so used, so frequently by this failed gambling tsar who took them for such a ride in 2016. (See, NationalPopularVote.com).
Maybe some suggested nicknames will stimulate the media to stop playing his game, as it reports his regular contempt, just to get more ratings or readers. Think of our Founding Fathers and their wishes for elevated discourse.
Accurate nicknames Donald Trump will Dislike:
1. Dumb Donald
2. Convicted Crook Donald Trump
3. Lying Donald
4. Delusional Donald
5. Dangerous Donald
6. Disgusting Donald
7. Serial Law-breaker Donald
8. Deceiver Donald
9. Loser Donald
10. Trump-serial abuser of women
11. Lazy Donald
12. Violence Inciter Donald
13. Trump-obstructor of Justice
14. Dictator Donald
15. Dictator-lover Donald
16. Weak Donald
17. Dishonest Donald
18. Deadly Donald – Early Covid Denier
19. Fake Donald
20. Tax Escapee Donald
21. Unstable Donald
22. The Lyin’ King
23. Cheating Donald
24. Low IQ DONALD
25. Racist Trump
26. Know-Nothing Donald
27. Know It All Trump
28. Insecure Donald
29. Don the Con
30. The Incompetent Trump
31. Trump the Grifter
32. Betrayer Trump
33. Greedy Trump
34. Pardon Myself Donald
35. “I am the Law” says Lawless Donald
36. Corrupt Don
37. Ignorant Don
38. Bragging Trump
39. Trump Fantasy Land
40. Daily Lawbreaking Donald
41. Egomaniacal Donald
42. The Trump Dump
There is an important utility to such nicknames. They start reminding people of what Trump did to America in his four nightmarish years at the White House. The Democratic Party still has not reminded a voting bloc with short memories about Trump’s daily lies and sugarcoating of his record – from deadly early Covid denial to corruption and self-enrichment to promoting Wall Street over Main Street to Big Business runaway controls over Americans, to climate-violence-denial, to bashing the rights of consumers and workers, to giant tax cuts to the super-rich like him, to thumbing his nose at the Constitution and the rule of law, to obstruction of justice “as a way of life” in the White House, in the words of his former aide John Bolton.
Replaying that record is a must to dissolve the fantasies Trump weaves about his glorious four-year service.
The motivating, readable, relevant book for this critical voter education is “WRECKING AMERICA: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All” (2020) – the most usable book on Trump’s nightmarish term in office. Mark Green and I also wrote this paperback for any return engagement. “Lest we forget.”
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RFK Jr Running Mate Floats Joining 'Forces With Trump' to Thwart Harris-Walz
"From the beginning of this race, we've said that RFK Jr. is nothing more than a spoiler for Donald Trump, and we're glad that his running mate is finally admitting it," said one Democratic strategist.
Aug 20, 2024
Nicole Shanahan—the billionaire who poured millions of dollars of her own money into Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s presidential campaign before the conspiracy theorist chose her as his running mate—on Tuesday raised the possibility that Kennedy could drop his independent White House bid and throw his support behind former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee.
"There's two options and one is staying in, forming that new party, but we run the risk of a Kamala Harris and [Minnesota Gov. Tim] Walz presidency, because we draw votes from Trump," Shanahan told Tom Bilyeu during the latest episode of his "Impact Theory" podcast. "Or we walk away right now and join forces with Donald Trump and... we explain to our base why we're making this decision."
"I will say that Trump has taken genuine, sincere interest in our policiesaround chronic disease," Shanahan added. "He takes it seriously. For that reason, I think it behooves us to sit and see if we can actually make some real change."
During his first term, Trump repeatedly proposed massive cuts in federal funding for medical and scientific research and other programs.
Shanahan said she envisions a situation in which Kennedy "does an incredible job" as Trump's Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary.
Responding to Shanahan's remarks, Democratic National Committee (DNC) communications adviser Lis Smith said in a statement that "Nicole Shanahan isn't even pretending to be a serious VP candidate anymore."
"In one interview alone, she floated RFK Jr. for HHS secretary in a Trump administration, discussed her interest in running for governor of California in 2026, admitted that the Kennedy-Shanahan campaign has no path to victory, and raised the possibility of joining forces with Trump to defeat Vice President Harris," Smith continued.
"From the beginning of this race, we've said that RFK Jr. is nothing more than a spoiler for Donald Trump, and we're glad that his running mate is finally admitting it," she added.
The Washington Postreported last week that Kennedy sought a meeting with the Harris-Walz campaign to discuss a possible job in their administration should they defeat Trump and Republican U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio in November. According to sources, the Harris campaign has so far ignored Kennedy.
While Kennedy called that reporting "fake news," hesaid on social media Tuesday that "as always, I am willing to talk with leaders of any political party to further the goals I have served for 40 years in my career and in this campaign."
Shanahan's interview isn't the first time someone in Kennedy's campaign has given up the game. In April, Rita Palma was fired from her job as Kennedy's New York campaign director after she admitted behind closed doors that her "No. 1 priority" was to take electoral votes away from President Joe Biden, then the presumptive Democratic nominee and the "mutual enemy" of Trump and Kennedy voters.
Earlier this year, More Perfect Unionrevealed that ultrawealthy Trump donors were also bankrolling Kennedy's campaign.
Kennedy chose Shanahan as his running mate after she contributed heavily to his campaign, which has been derided as a potential "spoiler."
"I did not put in tens of millions of dollars to be a spoiler candidate," she said in the interview Tuesday. "They have, unfortunately, turned us into a spoiler. And we don't want to be a spoiler. We wanted to win. We wanted a fair shot."
Shanahan added that the DNC "made that impossible for us."
"They have banned us, shadowbanned us, kept us off stages, manipulated polls, used lawfare against us, sued us in every possible state," she explained.
In 2004, Ralph Nader, who ran an independent campaign for president, was sued in 18 states by the DNC in a bid to keep him off the ballot after he was falsely blamed for spoiling the 2000 election for Republican President George W. Bush.
Some Kennedy supporters recoiled at the thought of him joining forces with Trump. Kennedy campaigner Kyle Kemper toldNBC News he would be "heartbroken" if Kennedy were to "sell his soul" to Trump.
"Don't make a deal with the devil," he pleaded.
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