{"id":1000,"date":"2016-11-25T10:05:18","date_gmt":"2016-11-25T14:05:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/?p=1000"},"modified":"2016-11-29T10:32:39","modified_gmt":"2016-11-29T14:32:39","slug":"it-pains-me-to-say-this-but-you-should-probably-give-jill-stein-money-right-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/2016\/11\/it-pains-me-to-say-this-but-you-should-probably-give-jill-stein-money-right-now\/","title":{"rendered":"It pains me to say this, but you should probably give Jill Stein money RIGHT NOW"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jill Stein and the goddamned Green Party are collecting money to perform recounts in three states<\/a>.\u00a0 <\/span>She already has the money to trigger a re-County Wisconsin<\/del>\u00a0[<\/i>ed.: <\/i><\/b>in the 24-hours since I wrote that, Stein collected ~$3 million more to support this work] <\/i>cover recount-request paperwork filing fees in all three states, but she still need another ~$3mil to cover the costs of an actual hand recount.<\/span><\/p>\n

This almost certainly isn’t going to change the election<\/b>, but anything worth knowing is worth knowing True and Sure\u2014and facts are always worth repeating:\u00a0 <\/span>If you backed him or not, it’s important to reiterate that the President-Elect is the Second-Place Winner.\u00a0 <\/span>He doesn’t have a “mandate,” he doesn’t represent a beleaguered “silent majority.”\u00a0 <\/span>He isn’t the voice of the “Real America.”\u00a0 <\/span>He won on a technicality\u2014which is very much like him\u2014and anyone continuing to put a thorn in his side (and the sides of those who need to strut around spouting his bullshit) is most definitely doing God’s Work<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Just to give you a sense of how truly, absurdly close this election was, and how imprecise election-night numbers are:\u00a0 <\/span>Michigan has been counted as a Trump win since Election Night, but we didn’t actually officially declare a winner here until the night before Thanksgiving<\/i>.\u00a0 <\/span>In the day-after-the-election estimate, Trump had won by ~13,000 votes<\/a> out of ~4.5 million cast\u2014absurdly close.\u00a0 <\/span>By the time the true, official tabulation was released two nights ago, that lead had been reduced by about one-quarter, to 10,704 votes<\/a>; for context roughly 10,000 people buy a dog at any given time Tigers game\u2014and the tigers are sucky unpopular team.\u00a0 <\/span>This is the closest election in Michigan history, and the first time the state has gone red for PotUS since 1988.\u00a0 <\/span>Also, this is a state where Trump handily lost<\/i> the Republican primary, and where he sank<\/i> in the polls immediately after visiting (although, again, I’m not saying there was a fix in Michigan<\/a>: This is also a state where black turnout was significantly depressed without apparent outside jiggery-pokery, and which had no new obstructions to voting put in place since 2012).<\/span><\/p>\n

I kicked Stein a few bucks, even though I’m moderately furious with her and the Green Party and how they ran their campaign here in Michigan (short version<\/strong>: They ran against HRC\u2014not against War, or the the Establishment, or Trump, just against HRC.\u00a0 <\/span>Like, their goddamned lawn signs said “NO HRC” on them.\u00a0 <\/span>Clinton lost Michigan by ~10k votes; Stein got ~50k votes.\u00a0 <\/span>i.e., it isn’t hard to imagine that if Stein had maybe–I dunno, run against the Status Quo instead of the Other Woman–maybe Clinton would have scraped out a win here, to the tune of 16 EC votes\u2014still a Clinton loss nationally, but you’d have 4 million fewer broken hearts here in the Mitten.\u00a0 <\/span>So, yeah: Fuck Jill Stein and the Green party.\u00a0 <\/span>Having lived through this shit twice now, to the tune of two wars and countless tens of thousands of dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, I feel pretty confident when I say that I would sooner vote to have both my hands burned off with molten lead than I’d vote for a Green Party candidate.<\/em>)\u00a0 <\/span>Every last penny you donate via this form goes to recount efforts<\/a>; none to Jill, none to the Greens, just toward making a colossal fuck-up a touch less wrong.\u00a0 <\/span>Excess funds go toward their work on election integrity and voting system reform.\u00a0 <\/span>I may think the Greens are a sack of dicks, but I 100% agree with them about election integrity and voting reform, and trust them to do the Good Work on those issues.\u00a0 <\/span>’cause, at the very least, the Greens are ass-hats, but they aren’t crooks.<\/span><\/p>\n

This election has, quite literally, been a Tragedy:\u00a0 <\/span>It was won on suppression and lost on discouragement. On that alone it is an abomination and complete failure of our Democratic System, callously used in a fashion opportunistic and anti-democratic ON ALL SIDES AND BY ALL PARTIES<\/i><\/b>.\u00a0 <\/span>This is a small step toward restoring it.\u00a0 <\/span>Let’s hold hands, hold our noses, and take that step together.\u00a0\"usa-american-flag-waving-animated-gif-26\"<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jill Stein and the goddamned Green Party are collecting money to perform recounts in three states.\u00a0 She already has the money to trigger a re-County Wisconsin\u00a0[ed.: in the 24-hours since I wrote that, Stein collected ~$3 million more to support this work] cover recount-request paperwork filing fees in all three states, but she still need … Continue reading “It pains me to say this, but you should probably give Jill Stein money RIGHT NOW”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_share_on_mastodon":"1"},"categories":[11],"tags":[53,56],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1000"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1001,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000\/revisions\/1001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}