Comments by "wvu05" (@wvu05) on "I CONVINCED caller not to vote Jill Stein over Israel/Gaza" video.

 @bevtaylor5466 If they were serious about building something instead of chasing matching funds, that's exactly what they'd do.
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@15jamorris How much effort do they really do in comparison to what they do for President and matching funds? They have been at it for over 50 years and never once won a Congressional or statewide election. I hear the Green Party over and over talk about the importance of the matching funds (fun fact: Perot did better without them than with them), and while there is lip service to building at the grassroots level, I never actually see it. The highest-elected Green is, depending on how you look at it, a state legislator or a mayor of a mid-sized city. Running for President should be the last thing that a third party does if its goal is to build for the long term. An example of Greens dropping the ball: in Philadelphia, the minority party is guaranteed two at-large city council seats because there are seven total and each party can only nominate (and voters cab only pick) five candidates. In 2015, a Green Party candidate actually had the good idea of "nothing says that the minority party has to be a Republican, and the lowest Democrat more than doubles the top Republican, so use one of your five for me." It didn't work, but other third-party candidates got the idea in 2019. The Green Party was nowhere to be seen, and the Working Families Party got one of the two seats in 2019, and both in 2023. Even when the rules benefit the Green Party, they frequently drop the ball.
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@weneedcriticalthinking She's so antiwar that she kisses the ring of Putin.
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@15jamorris What "other comment"? I saw one from someone named Bev, and that's who I responded to. Yours isn't showing up.
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@15jamorris What "sources"? I don't know what is so difficult to understand about "your post isn't showing up," but this is the second time that you have referred to something that is not on the thread.
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@15jamorris "Stein's 2012 VP pick went on to start the Poor People's Campaign. So[,] yes [,] the matching funds are important." 1) Last I checked, Bill Barbour wasn't jer running mate in 2012. 2) The Green Party never qualified for matching funds. The closest they came was just over halfway when Nader got 2.74%, well short of 5. 3) What does one have to do with the other? But I have no desire to work for third party movements, because for the most part they care more about purity than governing. And the worst-case scenario, they actively serve as stalking horses to help Republicans win like Nader explicitly did in 2000, breaking his vow to only campaign in swing states and openly state that he was going to target people like Paul Wellstone for not meeting his definition of purity. However, when WFP was running in 2019, I passed out fliers while volunteering for Bernie with DSA.
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@weneedcriticalthinking So, by that logic, if someone was invited to a dinner to celebrate Kim Jong-un and that person came and spouted the party line, that would be a good thing? Seriously, look up the definition of useful idiot.
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@15jamorris As far as broke goes, whatever happened to the millions of dollars that Stein raised for a recount in 2016?
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@15jamorris Sorry it took so long to reply. There were several points and I wanted to look at it on a computer screen rather than a phone so I wouldn't have to make a separate reply to every point. 1) Cheri Honkala wasn't the person who started the revived Poor People's Campaign, Bill Barber was. It's bad enough to work behind the scenes to help people whose stated goals are pretty much the opposite of yours, but to take credit from the people who actually started it is pretty low. 2) Nader was and remains the high-water mark for Green Party Presidential campaigns, so it is perfectly fair to point to him as an exemplar of Green Party thinking. I remember after the 2004 election that a lot of GP people were furious that David Cobb kept his word (unlike Nader) and focused on safe states rather than swing states in an effort to not be a spoiler. But let's just say for the sake of argument that it's really not fair to point to Nader and his plans to sabotage Democratic candidates because it was too long ago. Okay, then, let's look at your most recent party standard bearer. The campaign for Howie Hawkins was so incompetent that it filled out the paperwork wrong and didn't qualify for the Wisconsin ballot, even with the Wisconsin Secretary of State giving them notice to correct the issue. So, what did the Hawkins campaign do? They waited until two weeks after the decision to work with a Republican law firm to sue for ballot access all while claiming that their exclusion was an affront to democracy. Because of their lawsuit, several large counties such as Dane had to pause printing their ballots and nearly missed the deadline to mail overseas absentee ballots, which the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled must be returned by Election Day no ifs, ands, or buts. If they had won their challenge and those ballots would have had to have been scrapped (not very environmentally friendly for a party that labels itself Green), and tens of thousands would have had no time to get their ballots in for the election. Does that sound like a good faith actor or does that sound like a willing stooge for the Republican Party? 3) I have run for office, and I have worked in the field for literally dozens of campaigns (both paid and volunteer, and both electoral and issue) over the space of 20+ years. You might think that condescension is the correct response, but I've probably done way more in grassroots organizing than you have. "ended up helping a third party campaign in the long run" So, you've just admitted that it was a scam. You also contradicted yourself that there weren't any complaints from donors. If the recount was a legitimate effort, and not an excuse to raise money for the Green Party, it should have been in a separate account for those express purposes. Just because something is legal doesn't mean that it is ethical. You think Bad Faith offers a good strategic perspective? BJG is a grifter who refuses to take yes for an answer. She's the one who led the chorus in 2020 making the Sanders campaign insisting that Bernie could win the primary with 30-35% of the vote because the field would never coalesce around an alternative. Anyone who thinks that in a field where you have to get 50% Plus One of pledged delegates to win (because it was very obvious that the superdelegates weren't going to give it to Bernie if he won a plurality but not a majority) doesn't have the first clue about winning. Her goal is to make money by always saying that nothing is ever good enough, not to actually win.
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@15jamorris Sorry for my delay. So I don't lose track of the thread, I'm just going to use a reply for each point so I can stay with it while typing: 1) The instant that I mentioned Bill Barber and the Poor People's Campaign, it should have been obvious what was happening. It wasn't until multiple times mentioning it when I finally pointed out that Bill Barber founded the Poor People's Campaign that you finally issued the correction. Considering that the PPC was clearly an allusion to people working to continue the legacy of Martin Luther King, and you kept saying "Poor People's Campaign," it seemed very intentional rather than an honest mistake.
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@15jamorris 2) Funny how you seem to have all these excuses that keep absolving the party from all these bad actors. Never mind the fact that Republicans literally control the Green Party in several states, or that national campaigns clearly and repeatedly act in an effort to help the Republican Party win and often act in coordination with the Republican Party. Maybe, just maybe, at a certain point, the vast majority of the Green Party is a collection of grifters and marks.
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@15jamorris So, bragging that several million dollars of the money that was supposed to be used for a recount effort got used to build a party instead "isn't evidence of a scam"? I don't know if you've ever worked or volunteered for organizations in a way where you are accountable for the money that is involved, but saying that you're using money for one thing when you try to raise it and then use it for another is fraud. Therefore, if the $7MM that the Stein campaign and the Green Party said was going toward the recount didn't all go toward the recount, that is the scam. The fact that you think that it is brilliant tells me that you are fine with fraud in the name of what you perceive as the greater good.
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@15jamorris "No such thing as spoilers" Okay, let's look at the rules for how a President is elected. In order to win the Presidency, a candidate has to win an absolute majority in the Electoral College. If no candidate does so, the election goes to the House... where it is decided by Democrats and Republicans. Therefore, there is literally zero chance of a third-party candidate winning (Ross Perot initially dropped out in 1992 because he knew he couldn't win if the election was thrown into the House, which was almost certainly the best-case scenario for him). The Green Party not only knows that there is no chance of winning, but they don't even really try to win. Their goal is to get to 5% of the national popular vote and get their hands on that sweet, sweet matching fund cash. Therefore, if they have no chance of winning, the only role that they actually have in the campaign is to make it harder for one of the two candidates who actually do have a chance to win to do so. At the top level, they know this very well, which is why they repeatedly and regularly ally themselves with Republicans for things like petition drives and ballot access lawsuits. The Republican Party gets what they want out of the deal (more power), but the Green Party gets the exact opposite of what it claims to desire in terms of policy. State and local elections are a different story, because the rules are different, but if you live in a close state, any vote for a third party candidate is (and always will be as long as we have the rules that we do) voting for the spoiler effect.
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@15jamorris No, but I can read English, and when someone keeps using the same term, that seems less and less likely to be an honest mistake. (Not sure why my other responses aren't showing up, though.)
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