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Channel: Voting – Creative Resistance

Tone Down For What

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Tatiana Makovkin

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Donald Trump & Hillary Clinton Are Unacceptable To Most Voters

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Anthony Freda

– Artist’s Website –

I don’t want to see the American people voting for the lesser of two evils,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told viewers of This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. To be clear, he was implying two things: First, that Donald Trump is the greater of two evils and second, Hillary Clinton is evil. To be fair, he has said he’d rather see her in the White House than Trump—but not as much as he’d like to see himself.

Sanders might be overstating it a bit, but most Americans are in a similar state of mind. A new Washington Post/ABC News poll of registered voters finds nearly 60 percent of us view Trump and Clinton unfavorably.

“Never in the history of the Post-ABC poll,” write Dan Balz and Scott Clement, “have the two major party nominees been viewed as harshly as Clinton and Trump.”

Let’s be clear: The problem isn’t with voters, it’s with the candidates. You can debate whether Clinton is not as utterly awful as Trump (as some libertarians hold) but we don’t need to go there, really, do we? It’s enough to say that both presumptive nominees are, in the term of liberal friend of mine, unacceptable. When 57 percent are saying you suck, something has gone wrong with the selection process, hasn’t it? The only thing surprising about the case of Mary Anne Noland, the 68-year-old Virginian who chose to die rather than face a Trump-Clinton choice, is that there aren’t dozens of such cases a day!

David DeebleDavid DeebleThe Wash Post/ABC poll finds 44 percent of voters want a third-party candidate and in a potential three-way contest including 2012 GOP loser Mitt Romney, Clinton gets 37 percent, Trump 35 percent, and Romney 22 percent. This is sound of an electorate deeply dissatisfied with what the Democrats and Republicans are offering. No wonder then, that party identification is at historic lows for Democrats (at 29 percent) and near a historic low for Republicans (26 percent).

Gary Johnson, the best-known candidate vying for the Libertarian Party nomination, has pulled 10 percent and 11 percent in recent polls—and the indications are that he would take support from both Clinton and Trump (recall that in the 2013 Virginia governor’s race, Libertarian Sarvis, who won almost 7 percent of the vote, pulled far more from Democrat Terry McAuliffe than from Republican Ken Cuccinelli).

A strong Libertarian Party ticket is one obvious way to force the major parties to field candidates who can appeal to wider swaths of voters. Socially liberal and fiscally conservative libertarians comprise the single-largest ideological voting bloc according to Gallup. Using questions on the scope of government in the economy and whether government should support traditional morals, Gallup finds 27 percent of voters are libertarian, 26 percent are conservative, 23 percent are liberal, and 15 percent are populist.

If the Democratic Party and the Republican Party lived up to their various feints toward libertarian rhetoric, they would certainly blunt the appeal of most third-party candidates but certainly anybody put up by the LP itself. The refusal to do so will likely be the undoing of one or both of them. Consider the fact that Hillary Clinton is not just an unregenerate hawk on foreign policy. She is an all-in drug warrior and a hater of the sharing economy who, like Donald Trump, has called for Internet censorship. On the either side of the aisle, Trump’s mass-deportation plan implies the creation of a your-papers-please police state and his trade policy is good old American protectionism on steroids. Exactly where he stands on most issues is anybody’s guess (on foreign policy, he’s promised both “bomb the shit out of them” and get other countries to fight their own battles).

The role of third parties isn’t necessarily to win elections. At least in part, third parties represent the views of voters left out or ignored by the major parties. More and more of those being ignored are temperamentally libertarian. That is, more and more of us agree, in the phrase of CNN’s regular survey, that “government was doing too much.”

Neither the Dems or the Reps promise to address that complaint, despite about 60 percent of us feeling that way. To the extent that the LP speaks to that concern—and offers up a compelling way to pare the state back while giving people more ability to live their lives on their own terms—it will shape how the major parties change and adapt as they go hunting for new voters.

New Surgeon General Warning!

How Electronic Voting is Rigged

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Anthony Freda

– Artist’s Website –
It’s about the math.
It’s fraction magic.

Used in precincts all across the country, the software – deemed “the most devastating election theft mechanism yet found” – allows votes to be fractured and rounded up or down to sway the results for any candidate.

According to Bev Harris, a member of the non-partisan Black Box Voting investigative team, this latest discovery constitutes the “missing piece” that blows the lid off of wide-scale voter fraud.

“It can give contract signing authority to whoever the user chooses,” the video’s description states. “All political power can be converted to the hands of a few anonymous subcontractors.”

“It runs silently, invisibly, and can produce plausible results that pass for the real thing.”

To Blaze A Path To Congress 

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Benjamin Thomas Wolf

– Artist’s Website –

By Veronica Stracqualursi, CNN

Updated 9:51 PM ET, Wed February 28, 2018

(CNN)A former FBI employee is running for Congress as the “Cannabis Candidate,” with a campaign ad featuring him smoking marijuana in front of an image of the American flag.

Benjamin Thomas Wolf is one of three challengers to incumbent Rep. Mike Quigley in the Democratic primary for Illinois’ 5th Congressional District, which includes parts of Chicago.

The campaign ad, shot in Wolf’s apartment, was a way to let voters who are in favor of marijuana legalization know that “there are people that hear them and agree with them and will stand up for what they think is important,” Wolf said.

“It was my idea. I knew that we needed to do something with cannabis — to take a little bit of a risk, but at the same time connect with the voters,” he told CNN in a phone interview Wednesday.

Wolf said he believes that legalizing marijuana in Illinois would reform the criminal justice system and bring in billions in tax revenue.

“As a former federal agent and law enforcement officer, I think legalizing cannabis would really free up the criminal justice system in terms of incarceration space, in terms of time and energy of first responders, and it would allow law enforcement officers to focus on what’s really important,” Wolf said.

Cannabis is not something Wolf uses every day, he said — just a few times a week in the evenings to unwind and sometimes to tap into creativity when he’s working on his campaign.

Long before trying cannabis for the first time (accidentally eating pot brownies that were included in a care package sent to him from a friend in California), Wolf worked as a national security investigator with the FBI, including following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“The government trained me to be strong, and suspicious, and just stern. … I’m thankful I have cannabis in my life. I think it has allowed me to be a gentler person, maybe a better father, a better partner,” said Wolf, who is dad to twin boys and a newborn son. “I’m much more empathic. … I’m an evolved person because of it.”

He worked under Robert Mueller, who was FBI director during 9/11, and said Wednesday that Mueller was the “perfect man” for the job of special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Wolf spent about five years with the FBI before transferring to the State Department in 2003 and working as a US diplomat and special agent overseas in Iraq and Africa, according to a bio on his campaign site.

Trained to use an AR-15 and carry the weapon in conflict zones, Wolf also weighed in on the debate over whether they should be banned: “These are true instruments of death. And I think that there’s no place for them in modern American society,” he said.

While his campaign website states that the Second Amendment must be respected, Wolf holds an AR-15 in one of his campaign ads, explaining the weapon’s functions and why he thinks it should be banned “immediately.”

As a former FBI employee, Wolf called the bureau’s admitted failure to follow up on a tip about the confessed shooter in the Parkland, Florida, school massacre “tragic.”

“The people (at the FBI) are just such professionals and so thorough in their investigations, but you simply can’t stop every threat and every attack. I think it’s really unfortunate,” Wolf said.

Wolf left the State Department about five years ago and transplanted to Chicago to finish his doctorate in psychology. Since then, he’s become a professor, opened a restaurant and started a housing nonprofit. He decided to run for Congress after being “constantly disappointed” with Illinois’ elected officials and hoping this election brings a “next generation of Democratic leadership” in Washington.

“Folks like Nancy Pelosi are the age of my grandmother. … I would not want my grandmother or my grandfather speaking for everyone at this point and leading the country. It’s their time to retire and go spend time with their grandchildren,” said Wolf, who’s 42.

Wolf faces off against Quigley, who won re-election in 2016 with over 67% of the vote, former Yale undergraduate director Steve Schwartzberg and Sameena Mustafa.

Should We Lower The Age To Vote?

Americans Who Tell The Truth

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Robert Shetterly

-Artists website-

“Americans Who Tell the Truth” Exhibit of 238 portraits opens at Syracuse University
The portrait series by artist Robert Shetterly highlights citizens who courageously address issues of social, environmental and economic fairness. The artist will participate in a public discussion at the University on November 29.

Shetterly was born in Cincinnati and graduated from Harvard College in 1969 with a degree in English literature. After moving to Maine in 1970, he taught himself drawing, printmaking and painting. While trying to become proficient in printmaking and painting, he illustrated widely. For 12 years he created the editorial page drawings for the Maine Times newspaper and illustrated the National Audubon Society’s children’s newspaper, Audubon Adventures and some 30 books.

His work appears in collections across the United States and Europe. Along with his “Americans Who Tell the Truth” series, he is well known for his series of 70 painted etchings based on William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell,” and for another series of 50 painted etchings reflecting on the metaphor of the Annunciation.

He began “Americans Who Tell the Truth” in the early 2000s in response to U.S. government actions following 9/11. Shetterly undertook the project as a way to deal with his own grief and anger by painting Americans who inspired him. He initially intended to paint only 50 portraits, but by 2013 the series had grown to more than 180 paintings. Today, it numbers 238. Portions of the series have toured widely across the United States, shown in schools, museums, libraries, galleries and other public spaces.

A few of Shetterly’s paintings have previously been featured at Syracuse University. A small portion of the “Americans Who Tell the Truth” series was on display in March and April 2014 at VPA’s 914Works gallery.

An “Americans Who Tell the Truth” book featuring Shetterly’s first 50 portraits was published in 2008. He says the portraits have given him an opportunity to speak with children and adults throughout the United States about “the necessity of dissent in a democracy, the obligations of citizenship, sustainability, U.S. history, and how democracy cannot function if politicians don’t tell the truth, if the media don’t report it, and if the people don’t demand it.”

Shetterly is the subject of a documentary that’s in production, “Our Children’s Future: A Portrait of Robert Shetterly,” sponsored by the Union of Maine Visual Artists and directed by SU alumnus Richard Kane ’72. [View the film’s trailer.] Kane will be in Syracuse this week to record additional interviews for the film.

In connection with the exhibit, he will be engaged in a full schedule of classroom appearances at Syracuse University this week, visiting VPA, the Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics, the School of Education, the Whitman School of Management, and the Renée Crown University Honors Program.

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Muhammad Ali
Boxer : b. 1942 – 2016
“If I thought going to war would bring freedom and equality to twenty-two million of my people, they wouldn’t have to draft me. I’d join tomorrow. But I either have to obey the laws of the land or the laws of Allah. I have nothing to lose by standing up and following my beliefs. We’ve been in jail for four hundred years.”

The ESPN network, choosing its top athletes of the 20th Century, placed Muhammad Ali at number 3. The fighter was born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. in Louisville, Kentucky. Taught to box at age 12, he won 100 of 108 amateur fights and several national titles. At age 18 he added a gold medal from the 1960 Olympics. Back home in Kentucky, however, when a restaurant refused to serve him because of his race, Clay took the Olympic medal from around his neck and threw it into the Ohio River.

Turning professional, the handsome and skillful Clay brought style and verbal wit to boxing. Both quick and powerful, he could “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.” In his 20th match, fighting as the underdog, he became the world heavyweight champion. A surprised nation was further shocked the next morning when Clay announced that he had joined the Nation of Islam and taken a Muslim name, Muhammad Ali.

By March 1967, his record stood at 29-0. One month later, he refused induction into the US Army during the Vietnam War, claiming conscientious objector status. “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong,” he said, adding, “No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.” Condemned as unpatriotic and cowardly, Ali was stripped of his title and his boxing license. He was tried, found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison. Released on appeal, he waited three years for the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the verdict.

Despite these years of inactivity, Ali ended his professional career with a record of 56 wins and 5 losses. Revered instead of hated, he became the first boxer to win—and hold–the heavyweight championship three times (1964-67, 1974-78 and 1978-79). But he stayed too long in the ring and lost three of his last four fights before retiring in 1981. Shortly after that, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

Two decades later, Ali has been slowed by the disease but not defeated. Three decades after America reviled him for his religious and political beliefs, he was asked to light the Olympic Torch at the opening of the 1996 Atlanta games. In October 2003, the editor of Esquire magazine wrote that “he, like only a very few Americans, has existed for nearly his entire life at that rare nexus of celebrity, accomplishment, and infamy that makes one an American icon.”

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Susan B. Anthony
Reformer, Woman-Suffrage Leader: 1820-1906
“Women, we might as well be dogs baying the moon as petitioners without the right to vote!”

Susan Brownell Anthony’s life dedicated to social reform may have been foreordained by her birth, in Adams, Massachusetts, into the large family of a Quaker abolitionist. Tales of her childhood support the image of the forceful personality that was to emerge on lecture platforms in the 1850’s. As a young teacher in western New York, Anthony addressed such thorny issues as equal pay for women teachers and broader educational opportunities for girls. The abolition of slavery was, of course, the dominant concern of mid-19th Century reform, and she became acquainted with eminent leaders of the movement such as Frederick Douglass who visited the family home in Rochester.

The temperance movement attracted her support because she, like other feminists of her time, recognized in alcohol abuse the widespread victimization of innocent women and children who had to suffer the physical dangers and economic hardships of living with hard-drinking men. When the Sons of Temperance barred women from their ranks, Anthony organized the Daughters of Temperance.

Anthony’s celebrated collaboration with Elizabeth Cady Stanton dates from their meeting in 1851. Because Stanton’s duties as a wife and mother limited her travel during the 1850’s, Anthony was often the more visible spokesperson for women’s full legal and social equality and, as such, the more frequently ridiculed. In 1872, Anthony decided to test the protection of the 14th Amendment by attempting to register and vote in Rochester. She was arrested, tried and fined, but she refused to pay.

Today, when activists have the benefit of mass media and electronic communications, it is easy to forget the sheer physical exertion involved in the work of reform in years past: travel, writing and distributing newspapers, starting local groups, petitioning legislative bodies, pamphleteering and public speaking. Anthony, a brilliant organizer, averaged 100 speaking engagements each year during her most active period.

She once remarked that, “It has always been thought perfectly womanly to be a scrubwoman in the Legislature and take care of the spittoons; that is entirely within the charmed circle of woman’s sphere: but for women to occupy any of those official seats would be degrading.” She also said: “I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”

“Hands Off Venezuela” Rally


Put It To The People

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Activists

One Million+ March in UK to Demand Brexit Rethink

“The Prime Minister claims she speaks for Britain. Well, have a look out of the window Prime Minister. Open your curtains. Switch on your TV. Look at this great crowd today. Here are the people.”

With the right-wing U.K. government of Prime Minister Theresa May under fire for the chaos unleashed by failed Brexit negotiations—and a final deadline swiftly approaching—more than a million people took to the streets of London and other cities on Saturday as part of “People’s Vote” demonstrations demanding a new referendum on whether or not the country should leave the European Union.

According to the Independent: the estimate of over one million demonstrators, “provided by the People’s Vote UK, would make it the biggest march to be held in the UK since the Iraq War protest in 2003.”

The Associated Press reports:

The “People’s Vote March” kicked off shortly after noon and snaked from Park Lane and other locations to converge on the U.K. Parliament, where the fate of Brexit will be decided in the coming weeks.

Many marchers carried European Union flags and signs praising the longstanding ties between Britain and continental Europe.

Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable, invited to help lead the march, called the crowd impressive and unified.

“There is a huge turnout of people here from all walks of life, of all ages and from all over the country,” he tweeted. “We are a Remain country now with 60 percent wanting to stop the Brexit mess.”

Tour Launched To Register Young Voters

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Parkland Activists

The March For Our Lives movement is hitting the road this summer to register young people to vote ahead of the November mid-term elections.
Miami Herald/TNS via Getty Images



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