- Fred Newman talks about Tavis Smiley, the Black Agenda, Rev. Al Sharpton, Minister Louis Farrakhan, Jessie Jackson, Cornel West and Karl Marx in Talk Talk with Jackie Salit. You can view Tavis Smiley’s “Black Agenda” summit on C-Span here.
- While campaigns are underway in Louisiana and California for open primaries (Proposition 14 in CA) that would allow independents and decline-to-state voters to vote (right now parties are allowed to exclude these voters), voters in many states are registering into parties in order to vote in primaries.
- Centrist John Avlon’s new book decries political extremes as “wingnuts“.
- NYC Dems don’t want charter revision ballot referendum items this year, while Indies want nonpartisan elections. You can read Dr. Lenora Fulani’s testimony here.
For more news for independent voters, see The Hankster
Provocateur/ pundit/ organizer Nancy Hanks is a long-time activist in the independent political movement who’s done it all: petitioning to put independent candidates on the ballot from New York to Texas and points east, west, north and south; fundraising for the independent think tank, the Committee for a Unified Independent Party (CUIP), and its online counterpart, IndependentVoting.org; running as an independent for New York City Council from Queens, New York City’s most diverse borough; serving as the current Treasurer of the Queens County Committee of the Independence Party of New York (of the IP NYC Organizations); conducting research for the Neo-Independent, a magazine that addresses the concerns of independent voters.