Independent & Third Party Issues

[Demented]

Karine Jean-Pierre has left the Democratic Party and wrote a book called Independent.  In this CBS Morning interview, she defends Joe Biden and talks about the disconnect between what the public perceived in June of 2024, and what she perceived behind the scenes.  Regardless of what you believe about Joe Biden or his former press secretary, it's not difficult to agree with Karine about one simple thing:  The Two Party system is broken.  This is a recurring theme in public consciousness.  She talks briefly about the No Kings protests from this past weekend where 7 million Americans took to the streets to show dissatisfaction with the current White House administration, but it begs a question.  Are Democrats a lock to regain a House majority in the 2026 midterms?  As unhappy as people are with the GOP (Guardians Of Pedos is what I've been calling them at Never Trump Blog) today, the Democrats have serious issues.  Personally, I don't like their super delegate system, and I think it shuttles corrupt, Establishment-types to the top of the ticket, and this system has miffed Bernie Sanders, RFK Jr, and Tulsi Gabbard.  These are weird times, and NOBODY wants the political system to be exclusively about pick your poison.

This thread is dedicated to the disenfranchised people.  I know GREAT third party people, and I respect independent minds.  There are Republicans and Democrats who remain in their parties, and they're hopeful the System can be restored to be something the the public can respect.  I love to hear their plans, but with each passing year, it serms that Corruption is beating everyone.  As the operator of Maniac Nebula, the people that irk me the most are the shameless shills.  They ruin politics.  This is the start of a discussion that needs to be had, though ...

[homercocktail]

I posted this to Maniac Nebula in June of 2015.  My rocky history with traditional politics led me to becoming independent.  I am currently registered as a Libertarian.
— Homer Cocktail

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6/9/2015
In the summer of 1996, I read "Earth In Balance" by Al Gore.  I had picked ecology as my major at one of the Claremont Colleges.  When I was young, I used to get shortness of breath after playing outside in filthy Southern California air.  I figured, "Why not go into environmentalism? Who doesn't want clean air and water?"

If there were never con artists going town to town selling miracle cures such as snake oil, there would be no reason for government regulation.  What we have found is that corporations pollute our air and water and desire to pay zero taxes which would fund clean up.

I was pretty mainstream when I started studying ecology but I had pals that were involved in radical groups such as Greenpeace, Earth First!, and later Earth Liberation Front.  "The Monkey Wrench Gang" by Edward Abbey was a popular book that went around.  We used to go to Bioneers conferences in San Francisco during the autumn.  I watched a great one-person play dipicting the life of Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring.  I watched Ralph Nader speak at our campus.  I studied methyl bromide, the pesticide used in strawberry fields.  A group of us spent time at the United Farm Workers headquarters near Bakersfield.  Many people here talk about Saul Alisky.  He was a personal mentor of Cesar Chavez.  Crop dusters dropped pesticides on farm workers while they were still in the fields.  There was a black and white photo exibit from David Wells at out school showing the gruesome methods and effects of the agribusiness.  It affected my life.

In the spring of 1998, I was part of a group project called "Save Ward Valley".  Nuclear waste can be high-level (stuff coming from reactors) or low-level (stuff coming from biotech).  Yucca Mountain was being prepared for high-level stuff.  Ward Valley was meant for low-level waste.  There were many issues.  US Ecology was to run the place and they had a history of leakages.  Ward Valley was on Native American land, the land of the Aha Macav, about thirty miles west of the Colorado River.  There were issues with ground water, a rare tortoise, and treaty issues.

I spent the night at Ward Valley for part of my research.  It was a beautiful thing.  There were Native Americans and anti-nuke people sharing company around a campfire. I brought my guitar and let one of the guys play.  Excellent ecclectic music.  It changed me.

I never meant to "go radical" and I wonder if I did.  We filmed the Ward Valley area.  At the entrance to camp, there was a large inverted American flag.  Some people believe that means you hate America but what it really stands for is a distress signal.  My job as a student is to have candor and integrity and to report things as they are.  How can saving ground water from nuclear contaminants be radical?  I remember showing the video of Ward Valley to my dad, an Air Force veteran.  Usually, he was overly supportive of anything I did at school.  When he saw the inverted flag, he walked away and didn't say a word.  Our relationship became rocky after that point and hasn't quite been the same ever since.

My godparents are millionaires and staunch Republicans.  They have had mansions in Lake Tahoe, Ventura, Oxnard, Encino and Laguna.  I used to spend my summers at their beach houses.  They offered their Tahoe home for a Pete Wilson fund raiser and they were members of the Lincoln Club.  Politics are a strange thing and I always tried to put family first.  In the Autumn of 1998, there was a family funeral and my rich cousin wouldn't look in the direction of me or my dad.  Besides being an Air Force veteran, he was a union electrician and it no longer felt like my cousins wanted to treat us as equals.

I had done an internship for the AFL-CIO in Seattle 1997.  I worked with the same people that organized the world famous ruckus against G7 practices in the summer of 1998.  Like I said, I never wanted to be radical.  When I was a kid, you throw a plastic wrapper in the garbage and it disappears.  Where does it go?  Who cares?  It's someone else's job!  When you grow up, you realize, "Oh!  I'm that 'someone else' to someone out there!"  It was difficult, though.  I'm convinced that those on the far right perceive those on the left as crazy.  My family sure the heck treated me like I was crazy when I got involved in ecology and labor movements.  The point I want to make is that none of this would happen if the people in leadership were sensitive and responsible.  Why do you need to earn four hundred times the amount of your average employee as CEO?  Why are you dumping toxic waste in rivers?  Why are you moving every single industrial job to China where there is absolute slave labor?  And then... having the gall to call everyone lazy when MBAs can't find work!

I've waited a long time to get some of these things off my chest.  I write fiction because it's therapeutic.  I'm not necessarily trying to "name names" but I feel cheated.  I wonder what the crux of our problems are.  Our world population doubles roughly every generation but we're moving further and further away from the coast to drill for oil.  Our topsoil us disappearing.  It's DOOOOOM!!!

Good luck, guys.  It sounds like you're trying to get to the bottom of it.  My experience with ecologists is quite mixed.  I'm all for clean air and water.  Who isn't?  I had a hardcore falling out with my ecology advisor in Claremont.  The radical people have serious issues.  I don't want nuclear sludge in our rivers, but I shouldn't feel like I'm in a crack-pot cult.  It was peculiar.  There would be shame if you weren't out there chaining yourself to an old-forest tree.  Here come the lumberjacks and bulldozers!  Time to die like Rachel Corrie!!!! !

[Necro Bot]

I posted this a month later in 2015.  I backed Gary Johnson, a Libertarian, and I eventually voted for him in November of 2016. Trump at the time was an outsider and turned out to be a total loser and fraud, but people had hope at the beginning.  The Establishment was full of a lot of bullshit, and nobody wanted another Bush or Clinton  That was for sure ...
– Homer Cocktail
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7/12/2015
I'm  registed Libertarian.  I have a big problem with both parties and haven't voted for a Democrat or Republican presidential candidate in the past few elections.  One of the problems I have with Republicans is that the upper echelon use people like tools, minorities included.  In 2000, Bush and Cheney campaigned on...
• Inclusion
• Being strict Constitutionalists
•  Being Washington outsiders

Their inclusion is a joke.  Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice are given lofty positions and paraded around for photo ops to mask what many really believe is white supremacy.  My issue has nothing to do with race.  It has to do with lying and deception.  I worked for a couple of staunch Republicans and I used to believe in the supposed ideals they talked about.  I've passed calculus, I got great work reviews, and these people are jerks.  There's something about the way things are talked about and the way they're practiced.  These people are human, and too many of them have severe faults.  The Republicans realized that Mitt Romney might have won in 2012 if he won a bigger slice of the Hispanic vote.  I live in California and know many conservative Hispanics.  There are business owners, church-going people, veterans and military wonks.  They don't like being toyed with.  Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are in the race to make sure Hispanics feel included.  I would be surprised if either one became president.  Carly Fiorina was fired by the company she worked for and, if she was a man, she would be nowhere near a GOP debate stage.  Once again, the Republicans are trying to make sure women in the electorate don't feel left out.  And Ben Carson?  A heart surgeon with no political office experience?

The issue here is that Americans get toyed with like three-year-old children.  The mass media has picked Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton as your two choices.  I'm pretty sure of it.  My mom used to pick out my clothes when I started kindergarten.  No big deal.  The MSM is doing the equivalent of picking out clothes for an eleventh grader.

I'm sick of the dichotomies, too.  Coke or Pepsi.  Ford or Chevy.  Democrat or Republican.  I'm happy that Trump is in the race ruffling feathers.  I'm a white person like the seventy percent you mentioned but that doesn't mean I have to like the system of using people like rags.

I'd like to be proven wrong but that can only happen during the course of the next few months.  My dream election is Trump versus Sanders versus Johnson.  Who's Johnson?  Gary Johnson is the Libertarian candidate, former governor of New Mexico.  If the nightmare happens and it's Bush versus Clinton, I hope Donald Trump opts out and runs as an independent.  We should not have less options for president than types of bottled water at a grocery store.  This is not democracy.  I think it would be neat if Jesse Ventura was allowed into the debates.  What's the worst that could happen?  Ralph Nader called our system a "duopoly". The two major parties make the rules for the debates... and they receive our tax dollars.  About a third of Americans, even if registered with a major party, identifies as independent.  How can these people shut a third of us out of the process?  Ralph Nader was cut out of a Gore/ Bush debate in 2000.  Who cares, right?  Well, he was given a ticket to attend the debate by a student at the university where it was held.  They wouldn't let him in the building as a spectator!  What kind of crap system has evolved here???

CAMPAIGN 2000
Bush, Cheney Kick Off Their Convention Tour in Arkansas
July 29, 2000

Scott McClellan, a spokesman for Bush and Cheney, said Gore was "trying to do everything he can to divert attention away from the fact that this administration has failed to adopt a national energy policy."

As Gore vacations with his family in North Carolina, the Republican tour will decant the themes that the Philadelphia convention is supposed to showcase: education, a strong defense, compassion, inclusion.

http://articles.latimes.com/2000/jul/29/news/mn-61097