Your friends are operating under the wrong assumption, namely that winning this election will be mainly about courting moderate Republican Texans (who’d no more vote for an openly gay man for President than they would a woman or African-American) instead of inspiring Texans who don’t usually vote (especially young people) to come out an election day by giving them a candidate with truly progressive ideas.
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I am with you 100%.
If we were better at organizing and registering voters here in Texas–and I mean the whole dang state–we would have turned Texas blue quite some time ago. The obstacles to voter registration and true representation not gerrymandered bs are many and still in full effect.
I have taken to carrying around voter registration cards with me and when I stand in line at the grocery store, checkout line at the hardware store, feed store, tractor supply, etc., I ask if anyone needs a card. I have tried to register neighbors, many of whom have simply abandoned voting altogether because they don’t see the point. Downballot races in particular, I say, have real consequences and we need everybody.
Treading water, head-desking, and still working to organize in the Texas Hill Country, I will keep working on my piece. We do have a few bright stars locally. I have mentioned one, my state rep for Texas House District 45, before here on this bbs:
We’re fundraising right now, as a matter of fact!
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‘Low bar’ is so god damn low, that’s it’s not even still on the earth’s surface anymore; instead, steadily sinking into the deepest pit of the lowest circle of Hell.
As for Mayor Pete?
That’s two big-ass strikes against him in my books now.
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Is that nausea medication? Because:
On second thought, what I feel like I need is a shower with a lot of soap and scrub brush.
I’ll skip that medicine in that bottle after all.
ETA: grammar 
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Log Cabin Republicans are a thing, too, and I don’t understand that either.
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White supremacy.
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Have another:
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Grrrr…
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I don’t think she was a Hero.
It’s clear to me that WikiLeaks used Chelsea Manning. They cultivated her as an asset and discarded her once they got the goods.
There was a huge failure of military leadership, they should have had consulting available. Hell that might have saved many people who latter took their own lives.
For all that is cherishable upon Earth or in the heavens, please oh please do not anyone with any hope for a new administration court moderate Texans at the expense of a truly progressively electable candidate before and if we manage to abolish or declaw the Electoral College.
Historical ignoramuses, and sometimes also historically ignorant kapos.
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I recently read there was an official investigation that found that actually no lives were endangered. So it is actually not that complicated.
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US can’t connect a single death to Manning’s Leaks:
Leaks did not do any damage to US interests: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/secret-government-report-chelsea-manning-leaks-caused-no
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Periodic reminder that Chelsea Manning is, in fact, rotting in prison. Right now.
With the willing assent of both parties.
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What your friend is missing is that to win, you don’t get moderate Republicans to vote for a Democrat, you convince them to “protest” by staying at home. Sure, flipping them would be even better, but it’s a good half-step to let them know that they can stay at home, or at least just abstain on certain questions on the ballot.
That way, if the Democrat wins they can still proclaim that they didn’t vote for the queer/broad/commie/whatever derogatory term fits their worldview and the winner.
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Pete’s view may seem upsetting to folks, but I assure you its a view held by many who are otherwise considered liberal/progressive within the military and defense community. It’s not shocking at all once you realize only a tiny portion of military veterans believe otherwise. We may sit here and think he’s a tool for stating it, but he’s regurgitating what he’s heard from everyone else around him.
You’re not going to make inroads in any voting block by supporting Chelsea Manning except the voting blocks your candidates already have sewn up. I say that as a person who is strongly in favor of protecting people who out our government’s many abuses. But I would never admit that at work, because I work with people like Pete and other folks who are decidedly more conservative. Sometimes you have to understand the constituency you are dealing with and understand you’re not going to get through to them. Not and keep your job.
Take it as another reason not to vote for him and move on. I already had several, but I add that, should he win the primaries, I’ll still gladly vote for him come next November. I’d vote for a sack of steaming dog shit over the pile of pestulant pimples sitting in the oval office these days.
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One doesn’t have to agree with Manning’s acts to agree with clemency.
“ Still, her thirty-five-year sentence was not just the longest ever handed down for giving classified national-security information to the press but, according to a tally made by Gabe Rottman, a lawyer for the A.C.L.U., which has worked tirelessly on her behalf, it was almost ten times as long as the next harshest, for Donald Sachtleben, a former F.B.I. agent. And it was twenty times as long as the most severe sentence ever given for such actions prior to the Obama Administration, which has been notably tough on leakers and has seen a record number of prosecutions under the Espionage Act. (When it was handed down, my colleague John Cassidy called the sentence “draconian.”) Counting Manning’s pre-sentencing detention, she has already served more time than anyone else has been sentenced to for similar acts.”
“ Manning tried to kill herself last year and her military jailers, at Fort Leavenworth, responded by putting her in solitary confinement, which seems to have torn her further apart. She had already been held for an excessively long period of time in solitary at Quantico immediately after her arrest, in notably bleak conditions. She has at times been deprived of all clothing but a smock and subjected to the kind of petty humiliations that come too easily in a prison. Some of the treatment (although not all of it) was doubtless due to misjudgments about the best way to respond to Manning’s status as a transgender woman in a maximum-security men’s prison, rather than to bad will or hostility, but that simply raises the question of how her treatment might change in a different political climate.”
“ This one seems to have really mattered to Obama. Last week, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, went out of his way to make the point to reporters, while drawing a distinction between Manning and Edward Snowden. “Chelsea Manning is somebody who went through the military criminal-justice process, was exposed to due process, was found guilty, was sentenced for her crimes, and she acknowledged wrongdoing,”
Civil disobedience means taking an illegal act and understanding that you may be punished. The question becomes for the rest of us - was that punishment just?
One of the most important and completely unfettered powers of a Chief Exec is the pardon power. The values, analysis, compassion and bravery one brings to how one would apply that power tells you a good deal about that person and whether they’re ready to have that power.
Peter failed that test.
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And compare, for example, the sentence handed to this fucker:
Chelsea exposed war crimes, motivated by the pursuit of justice.
Petraeus exposed Top Secret operational details, motivated by the pursuit of blowjobs.
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