The GOP Wants to Help the Green Party

The GOP is a principled, high road party

Bipolar for president

In its burning desire to keep the White House in GOP hands, the party is working hard to help the Green Party get on the ballot in battleground states. The idea is to drain democratic votes away from Biden. Maybe the democrats should be helping the libertarians get on the ballot in battleground states. It is not clear who should be helping Kanye West get on the ballot anywhere. The New York Times writes:

“Four years ago, the Green Party candidate played a significant role in several crucial battleground states, drawing a vote total in three of them — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — that exceeded the margin between Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton.

This year, the Republican Party has been trying to use the Green Party to its advantage again, if not always successfully.

In Wisconsin, a G.O.P. elections commissioner and lawyers with ties to Republicans tried to aid attempts by Howie Hawkins, the current Green Party presidential candidate, to get on the ballot there, which were ultimately unsuccessful. In Montana, state regulators found that the Republican Party violated campaign finance laws as part of an effort to boost the Greens in five down-ballot races, including for senator and governor. 

And in Western Pennsylvania, petitioners from Florida and California were brought in to gather signatures for Mr. Hawkins by an outside firm whose actions Mr. Hawkins and the party said they could not account for. Mr. Hawkins also did not make the ballot there. 

Supporters of the president have also been trying to advance the candidacy of Kanye West, the billionaire hip-hop artist, confident that he can cut into Mr. Biden’s vote total. Democrats have portrayed the effort as a “dirty trick” and exploitative of Mr. West, who has bipolar disorder.”

It is good to see the GOP finally showing some concern for the environment. Their support, legal or not, for the Green Party is encouraging. 

A part of the environment

Speaking of the environment, the NYT writes separately:

“America is now under siege by climate change in ways that scientists have warned about for years. But there is a second part to their admonition: Decades of growing crisis are already locked into the global ecosystem and cannot be reversed.

This means the kinds of cascading disasters occurring today — drought in the West fueling historic wildfires that send smoke all the way to the East Coast, or parades of tropical storms lining up across the Atlantic to march destructively toward North America — are no longer features of some dystopian future. They are the here and now, worsening for the next generation and perhaps longer, depending on humanity’s willingness to take action. 

‘I’ve been labeled an alarmist,’ said Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist in Los Angeles, where he and millions of others have inhaled dangerously high levels of smoke for weeks. ‘And I think it’s a lot harder for people to say that I’m being alarmist now.’”

I’m not dead yet!

That poor lost soul Dr. Kalmus. There, there, doctor, here’s a nice cup of hot tea. We heated the water up by putting it outside in the sun for a couple of minutes.

Obviously, climate science deniers and crackpots will still call him, and anyone who warns about climate change, an alarmist or something(s) worse. That would be the case even if all the ice melts, sea level rises 220 feet and the gulf coast migrates to about 20 miles south of Philadelphia. We need to alert the border patrol about this possible intrusion to insure that the Gulf of Mexico migrates into Pennsylvania legally. Its papers need to be in order. Darned illegal oceans sneaking around the coasts.

On the bright side, one climate scientist was quite hopeful. The NYT quoted Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University as saying: “It’s as if we’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for decades [and the world is now feeling the effects]. But we’re not dead yet.”

I’m happeeee!!