On the other hand, Jill Stein isn't directly responsible for at least a half-dozen wars, she's not BFFs with Goldman Sachs and Henry Kissinger, she's never leaked state secrets due to sheer incompetence, and she isn't about to be publicly eviscerated by the Trump-Bernie Combined People's Front.

I guess you gotta take the bad with the good. Sometimes, you have to play politics and overlook the small details, like when your candidate is somwhat vaguely against Big Pharma-controlled vaccinations.

Sometimes, Bort, you just gotta be willing to get your hands dirty, and vote for the lesser of two evils!

It's like the song said, you gotta serve somebody.

"A Monsanto lobbyists and CEO like Michael Taylor, former high-ranking DEA official, should not decide what food is safe for you to eat. Same goes for vaccines and pharmaceuticals. We need to take the corporate influence out of government so people will trust our health authorities, and the rest of the government for that matter."

WHAT CORPORATE INFLUENCE IN VACCINES??? Vaccines aren't money-makers; corporations are rarely interested in them, except as a public service.

What the....

Why don't public officials educate the dumb motherfuckers that live in this country, rather than pandering to them? I'm sorry if you don't like getting "lectured at", prissy white lady. But we wouldn't have to lecture you if you listened to the experts that have been talking at you for the past 10-15 years.

Ana -
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-smith/youre-appointing-w ho-plea_b_243810.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/vaccines-a re-profitable-so-what/385214/

One can try and *re-interpret* the data and its overall significance, but it is impossible to deny that such data exists. There are, quite openly, direct and admitted links between government policy-making and multinational corporations like Monsanto. It is also an indisputable fact that vaccines now turn profits, and that both the price and profitability of vaccines has shot up dramatically in the past two decades (oddly coinciding with the contemporary crusade for more vaccines, less regulatory control, and fewer legal safeguards for patients' rights and informed consent)

As with any issue that deals in the intersection of science and corporate profitability (Big Pharma and vaccines, Big Oil and the environment, Big Tobacco and public health), what you do with the information, and whether you feel the questions raised are compelling enough to sway you away from the pro-corporate side of the argument, is ultimately up to you. We are intelligent people, and each of us can make up our own minds about the relative merits of either side of the debate.

What we *cannot* do, however, is deny the facts or ignore that a debate even exists.

The Green Party in America is and always has been a complete embarrassment and I am terrified that this woman will steal enough votes to put Donald Trump in the White House.

Fuck you Jill Stein.

EH - Well I'll be damned. Looks like my information was out of date. I had no idea that vaccinations had become profitable. Thanks for the links.

Unfortunately, Hillary is going to steal more votes than this nice cat lady.

ok first of all, Hillary looks like a cat lady WAY more than Jill Stein. Jill looks like your grandma that goes to the gym and does pilates.

Second, she is not an anti vaxxer.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/danthropology/2016/07/sorry-clint on-supporters-but-jill-stein-is-not-an-anti-vaccine-presidential-c andidate/

Essentially, her concerns boil down to being worried that new vaccines could be rushed through the FDA without proper testing and research.

She responds directly here:

https://youtu.be/WiQWhJj-3yQ

Oh, for God's sake. The push for universal, or near-universal vaccination, is not new. It's been the goal of health workers for decades, if not generations. The change is that only lately has it become remotely controversial. I don't care a whit if someone makes a buck of something that is ultimately beneficial for society at large. I'm sure Waste Management doesn't mind if you recycle that can, and neither do I.

Homer gets closer to exhibit status every single day.

Jill Stein is a tool that panders to stupid and selfish people with destructive policies, just like Clinton, just of a slightly different configuration.

Still a massive tool, nonetheless.

Of course, the biggest difference between them is that Hillary can actually theoretically become president, thereby preventing a Trump presidency.

That's a pretty big one.

Thanks, Void and ROUS for giving me a mental image of Hillary and Jill in catsuits.

Miss Henson, I do not see why merely providing proper context for the discussion should trigger you like it does, but, as this seems to be an issue that interests you, please let me ask you the following questions:

1) When you say "near-universal vaccinations", to *which* vaccinations, specifically, are you referring? Every possible vaccination that has been, can, or will be marketed? Or to only a select number of vaccinations that you yourself deem to be trustworthy, and if so which are they?
2) What is your position vis a vis medical ethics and informed consent?
3) RoUS provides a pair of great sources, further elaborating the position of Jill Stein (who is herself a Harvard-trained medical professional). How would you respond to Dr Stein's concerns about rushed research, given that we KNOW -a- there is a financial incentive to rush research, and -b- there is now an enormous conflict of interest between the industry and the FDA?

You know what really unites people across ideological, class and party lines toward the common goal of incrementally realigning the goals of government toward improving the quality of life for the majority of its citizens?

Calling them "dumb motherfuckers."



You know what's a really good way to help people develop a more openminded, rational, nuanced, fact based view of the world?

Calling them "dumb motherfuckers."



You know what's a really good way to improve your own relationship with the society you live in, and recognize that underneath the sometimes large but more often superficial differences between individuals' experiences of the world based on cultural background, class, education and so on?

Calling them "dumb motherfuckers."

Also, for the record, I don't have a strong opinion on Jill Stein one way or the other, because I haven't really educated myself much about her.

On the other hand, the Green Party got Cicciolina elected so they're probably OK.

"baleen
The Green Party in America is and always has been a complete embarrassment and I am terrified that this woman will steal enough votes to put Donald Trump in the White House."


If anyone is going to put Trump in the White House it's the DNC.

It's hard to get educated on Jill Stein, because whenever she shows up for presidential debates, the establishment goon squad handcuffs her and detains her in a warehouse.

(and no, I'm not joking about that)
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/17/green_partys_jill_stein _cheri_honkala

"Second, she is not an anti vaxxer."

I never said she was. But if you have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to defend her by saying "Dr. Stein MD is not an anti-vaxxer", you're defending someone who doesn't deserve it. By virtue of her training alone she should be morally obligated to say clearly and unambiguously: "Vaccinations work, get your goddamn kids vaccinated". The fact that she cannot shows what a weak, craven creature she is.

Again, Bort, if you're going to talk about "scraping the bottom of the barrel", literally the only favourable argument I have heard so far for supporting Hillary Clinton is "she's not a Republican". And even the truth value of THAT statement is up for debate.

Jill Stein is not an anti-vaxxer. She is also not a bankster crony, a war monger, or a person proven to be guilty of leaking classified documents. In fact, I can't really think of ANYTHING bad to say about her. Can you?

The *worst* thing you could think to say about Dr Stein is that she is an anti-vaxxer. But that is not true, and you now admit that is not true, so... what else have you got?

>If anyone is going to put Trump in the White House it's the DNC.

Yup. If they were really that afraid of Trump they would have chosen someone that polls better against him.

"The *worst* thing you could think to say about Dr Stein is that she is an anti-vaxxer. But that is not true, and you now admit that is not true, so... what else have you got?"

I never said she was an anti-vaxxer; I said she is a cowardly worm who is too afraid of her unhinged fan base to speak direct truths to them. What you consider a virtue in Jill Stein -- her lack of any negative record -- I consider a vice, in that she has been completely inconsequential all this time and has never been important enough to generate a negative record.

... I wasn't about to even try to sell you on Hillary because you've already decided on the worst possible interpretation of her. But then I just happened to bump into this article on Wonkette and I'll call it fate:

http://wonkette.com/604731/gay-rights-are-human-rights-wasnt-o n-hillarys-teleprompter-she-just-said-it-with-her-mouth

---

Did you know that when Hillary Clinton spoke in 2011 at the UN in Geneva and famously declared that “gay rights are human rights,” that part wasn’t even in her originally prepared speech? In fact, Hillz was ad libbing like a common Donald Trump, except for instead of catapulting mouth poops about banning all the Muslims like Trump does, she said a REALLY GOOD THING. Patel said at the Equality Forum panel that Hillary had gone “off script,” and then added that it wasn’t something one of her speechwriters would have written for her to say.

...

What many people do not know is that Secretary Clinton had said that famous phrase before. A year and a half prior to Geneva, U.S. diplomats gathered for the State Department Pride celebration in a stuffy, windowless auditorium. At this small and unglamorous event, the secretary ran through most of her prepared speech, but then paused and looked up, catching the crowd by surprise. Going off script, she emphatically stated:

“These dangers are not ‘gay’ issues. This is a human rights issue. Just as I was very proud to say the obvious more than 15 years ago in Beijing that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, well, let me say today that, Human rights are gay rights and gay rights are human rights, once and for all.”

Prior to that moment, those words were not in any U.S. government policy papers or mentioned in a speech. They came directly from Hillary Clinton, whose leadership and commitment to championing equality was crystal clear. The echoes of this declaration became public December 6, 2011.

---

That's what Hillary was up to while Jill Stein was cowering in fear of her support base and Bernie was letting the NRA cornhole him in Vermont.

Wow. So, you're saying that in 2011, long after gay rights was already a trendy issue here in the West, Madame "RtoP" Hillary made a speech before the UN in favour of gay rights? And she DIDN'T use a teleprompter?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBk-NbMFFsw

Oh. So what else have you got?

Because right off the top of my head, I can tell you a few OTHER things that Hillary was doing in 2011, things that were *a lot worse* than Jill Stein standing up to Monsanto's (Hillary-endorsed) takeover of the very government regulatory body that was meant to keep Monsanto on the straight-and-narrow. Hillary was doing things like this, for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yn6yktWU5qA


But yeah, I guess the real problem here is that Jill Stein doesn't want Monsanto running its own regulations. She's a downright monster, that Dr Stein!

I feel so privileged to witness this completely unique dialogue. A dialogue in which facts are wielded with the empathy and wisdom required to emphatically change minds and educate.

Oh, I wouldn't be so cynical, Mr Tux! Mr Bort and I have been friends for a long time. He'll come around to reason eventually.

And when he does, I shall have to convince him not to vote for Dr Stein, either - in large part, because the Green Party is deeply committed to centralized regulatory policies, and yet has thus far never been able to provide (even in theory) an adequate safeguard against precisely the sort of regulatory capture which Dr Stein was opposing, in both the vax links (regarding the FDA) and in the actual video itself (regarding the failure of Obamacare). The centralization of power LEADS TO the centralization of power; that is inevitable, it is part of the core logic of their system and cannot be avoided.

Every time I hear this dumb shit about third parties "costing" the Democrats an election, I rage inside.

You don't hear this shit on the right. All the Ron Paul / Gary Johnston / Ross Perot supporters vote for what they want, not for the second-worst option. And guess what? The GOP has been moving to the right ever since, and dragging the DNC along with it.

The DNC didn't oppose Sanders because they didn't believe in what he stood for. They opposed him because they already had your vote no matter what.

I'm not American, so believe me when I say that America is too important a country for its liberals to be such cowards.

OZ, as a Sanders supporter, of course I'm angry at the DNC. I've contributed to the DCCC and even attended Democratic fundraisers.

I also understand their concern. Sanders could not have beaten Trump, in the same way that Howard Dean, another spirited leftist from Vermont, had a snowballs chance of beating a beefy charismatic fratboy from Texas.

Maybe that's not true. Maybe, during the presidential debates, whenever Sanders brought up a brilliant, cogent point about poverty, Trump just laughing at him wouldn't have given him a boost in the same way it boosted Bush and Reagan when leftists brought up cogent points about poverty, the economy, and social justice.

There is nobody it pains more than me to actually have to vote for Clinton.
I hate Clinton. I think she's everything everybody on the left says she is, but I'm voting for Clinton, because I'm a grownup.

And it's not the end of the world for Sanders. He's going to be the most powerful builder of a leftist movement in this country ever. He'll tour the country and get leftists in at the local level, where they belong. That will in turn create a generation of politicians that can get elected on the national level. We now have a chance of having a social democratic movement equal to the rest of the developed world, finally, 35 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and all it represented.

That will not be built by the Green Party, on the party of Cynthia McKinney, who was completely out of her fucking mind. It will not be built by the party of a certain portion of San Francisco. These people don't build things, they snipe from the sideshow.

Tux - I dunno... because of this discussion, I learned more about the current economics of vaccinations. So... yeah.... it has had some positive effect.

"On the other hand, Jill Stein isn't directly responsible for at least a half-dozen wars,"

That's because you don't get many opportunities to start wars as a member of the Lexington MA town meeting.

"half a dozen wars?" Really?

Christ, every time you Trump enablers mention Hillary's name the number of atrocities you accuse her of doubles. At this rate, by this time tomorrow you'll be saying she caused the Armenian genocide and the Star Wars Holiday Special.


If the Green Party gave a shit about the things they claim to stand for, they'd run some candidates for state and local office in races they could actually win, instead of putting on this sideshow every four years. They know damn well their candidates won't accomplish anything, but so long as it brings in donations and press, they don't give a shit. Fuck them, they do more to discredit the idea of third parties than the big two have done in years.

"Fuck them, they do more to discredit the idea of third parties than the big two have done in years." This times a thousand.

And when I said American Green Party, I meant AMERICAN Green Party. They actually have some relevance in local elections in other countries. Here, they are the alpha and omega of why the left can't have nice things.

This was a great debate. I loved reading it.

Al Gore didn't lose Florida because of Ralph Nader, he lost because of Dieboldt, Jeb Bush and a partisan Supreme Court. Likewise, the Democratic Party didn't shift way to the right because they had a mandate from the voters; They had a mandate from Wallstreet and Fox News.

You're blaming the powerless for the mistakes of the powerful. That's pretty rightwing thinking right there. THAT'S the kind of mindset holding us back.

Do people still run the narrative of Ralph Nader 'spoiling' the 2000 election?

All the time, Spaceman.

Hilary bends the truth as much as the average politician. That's not exactly a point in her favor, but I've been thinking that the only reason that Trump can criticize her for being a hypocrite is that he has no integrity at all and everyone knows it.

Let these stars console you in your hour of need.

A man chooses. A slave obeys.

... And a Spartan fucks children.

Everyone obeys. Rules are useful.

So where in the rules does it say you have to vote for a major-party candidate?

For that matter, where in the rules does it say you have to vote at all?

I don't care about the specifics, only the application of the videogame quote which was written specifically to echo libertarian pseudo-intellectual memes. The sort where freedom is cut & pasted over kittens or guns or scrapbooking as the wubbie of choice. Something held dear as a protective talisman against an uncontrolled world.

It's obviously well done, since quite a lot of libertarian-minded people have adopted it. And yet, it's still meaningless. Like Deepak Chopra talking about quantum physics.

Hillary is a war-mongering, plutocrat-pandering Goldwater Girl who's policies represent a continuation of the Bush II-era.

NOTE: I live in California, I vote as I wish.

As discussed above, Dr Stein's problem with vaccinations is not that she is "a homeopath". Her problem lies with the conflict of interest between government regulators and the very corporations they are supposed to be regulating; a problem which is both admitted and out in the open, though almost completely ignored by politicians in more comfortable, establishment positions.

It should not be a controversial statement to say that the FDA should NEVER be controlled by Monsanto executives, and it certainly shouldn't be controversial to demand that clinical tests for major new drugs (most of which, historically, turn out to be costly failures) be conducted carefully, thoroughly, and independently, before they are approved for use on the public.

Here's how a less craven Green Party candidate might have gone about it:

"First, let me say what should be obvious in this day and age. Get your kids vaccinated. Vaccines work; vaccines have saved millions or billions of lives. We are lucky to have grown up in an era where epidemics are an abstract concept because we vaccinate our children against diseases. You have a responsibility to your children and your neighbor's children to not listen to so-called 'alternative' science, and instead do what works. Get your kids vaccinated. Also, homeopathy is a sham and you should know better. ALL OF THAT SAID, I have concerns about the FDA ..."

You know the only think keeping Jill Stein MD from saying that? A complete absence of a backbone. She does just fine railing against figures of authority, but when called upon to BE a figure of authority on a matter as uncontroversial as vaccinations, she's not up to the challenge. (Yes, vaccinations are uncontroversial, if you're any sort of doctor.)

You say this stuff like you think Hillary doesn't equivalent or worse baggage.

I think Hillary ahs been consequential enough to have a record with both good and bad aspects. Jill Stein is a nobody who has never done anything of any consequence, and still she can't defend vaccinations like any reputable doctor would.