Jill Stein For President

With the nominees of the two supposedly major parties now all but set, I am set to announce whom I am supporting in November.  This blog is endorsing Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party for President of the United States.

Dr. Stein is a physician from Massachusetts and a lifelong activist on progressive issues, particularly on the environment, She has been an advocate for environmental protection, having successfully helped get coal plants cleaned up and also having helped close a toxic medical waste incinerator in the poor, minority-dominated town of Lawrence, Massachusetts.   She supports having the country convert entirely to clean renewable energy by 2030, supports living-wage jobs and a single-payer public medical insurance program, and advocates for the right to vote being constitutionally guaranteed to avoid voter suppression by the states. She supports investments in public transit and sustainable agriculture, and she also supports labeling foods with GMOs and a treaty, rather than a mere protocol, to do something about climate change.  In essence, Dr. Stein wants to do what the Democratic Party has merely talked about doing for twenty-four years and what the Republican Party has spent the same time working to make sure will never actually happen.

Oh yeah, here's something else you might want to consider: She currently holds the record for the most general-election votes ever received by a female U.S. presidential candidate.  

Admittedly, Dr. Stein's candidacy is a long shot, and not because she's a Jewish woman; after all, Hillary Clinton is a woman, and Bernie Sanders is Jewish.  No, Dr. Stein is a long shot - a longer shot than Martin O'Malley - because she's the candidate of the Green Party, a party not known for broad support or electoral success, and because she is currently on the ballot in only 21 states, New Jersey not being one of them.  If she does not make the New Jersey ballot by the August deadline, however, I can still cast a write-in vote for her in November.  And that's what I'm going to do.  Even if she doesn't win, I will still have voted for the best candidate and not the lesser of two evils.  Because when you make such a choice, you're still choosing evil.  Hillary is asking us to preserve a status quo that is in dire need of being shaken up, and while Donald Trump says he wants to make America great again - and no, Hillary, America in fact did stop being great! - Trump is an ignorant, bigoted vulgarian, and I don't want him in the White House either. 

Except for when I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, I haven't voted in a Democratic primary, presidential or otherwise, since 1994.  I left the party because it moved too far from the left.  Bill Clinton, like his wife, proved to be a squishy moderate, and as such he left no lasting change behind, and Barack Obama has talked a good game but has, for the most part, failed to deliver.  He has been a good President but hasn't achieved much that could be considered monumental, and some of his grandest ambitions were sacrificed for short-term gain that was barely worth the trouble.  The Democratic Party needs to move in a progressive direction, by someone who is a party regular who recognizes the need to overturn the centrist establishment that rules the party with an iron fist.  I maintain that Martin O'Malley - who, like Obama, has now endorsed Hillary for President, because what else can he do? - was that person, and I was ready to rejoin the party because of him.  Instead of being taken seriously, he was ridiculed, dismissed outright, handicapped by the party bosses, and laughed out of the race.  Meanwhile, a plurality of rank-and-file Republican primary voters were all too happy to embrace, quite possibly, the least qualified person for the Presidency in all of American history. The Republican Party has long hidden its intolerance and its hostility to social change under numerous code phrases - "small government," "traditional values," "states' rights" - and now they have a candidate who has exposed the GOP for what it really is.   Both parties deserve to and will disappear.  Neither party deserves our votes.  Even if a third party can't win, I no longer care.  I have had enough of voting my head and not my conscience.

Trump, you're dumped. Sorry, Hill, Jill will fill the bill.  I'm with Dr. Jill Stein all the way.

Learn more about Dr. Stein here.