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Credit: voterocky.org As Romney and Obama march toward November, all eyes are focused on the two parties and their battle for the White House. Many Americans are unaware of the struggle of third-party candidates such as Justice Party candidate Rocky Anderson to gain media attention and ballot access. Rocky Anderson's fight for ballot access depends on a web of laws governing elections. Although ballot access laws vary from state-to-state, naturally most of them favor candidates who can obtain

Credit: Tom Smart / Deseret News Presidential candidate Rocky Anderson has gained support across party lines in several states across the country. He is currently on the November ballot in several states. As a new political party, the Justice Party does not have as many followers as other third parties. This puts them at a disadvantage in terms of ballot access. According to the chairman of the Connecticut Independent Party, Mike Telesca, it is an uphill battle to be seen nationally as a third

Photo: sfcitizen.com The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, expected to be an important swing state in 2012, has made headlines all week for a controversial voter ID law backed by the state's Republicans. Critics are calling it a partisan ploy to restrict ballot access and fix the results of November's general election in favor of Republican candidates, including presumptive presidential nominee, Governor Mitt Romney. But on the same day that a judge ruled in favor of Pennsylvania's voter ID law, a

Photo: Houston Chronicle Social justice has been a perennial topic of discussion in the United States from the progressive reforms of the Gilded Age to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Today, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community has defined the social justice dialogue that reaches the popular airwaves. From the passage of Proposition 8 in California in 2008 to the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York in June of 2011, the social dialogue of gay marriage a

, which is a government sponsored enterprise created by an act of Congress. The Fed even returns any profits from its activities to the US Treasury anyways. Its assets are assets of the federal government. This is money the government essentially owes to itself. Last year, Ron Paul suggested that Congress knock all that money off the national debt (and thereby create some breathing room between Congress and the debt ceiling) by instructing the Federal Reserve to forgive all those debts by destr

While the War on Women and Chick-fil-A might be getting all the juicy headlines lately, there's another issue quietly smoldering in the background noise of this election season. It's buried under all the campaign rhetoric and doom-and-gloom forecasts about the economy.Our public libraries are not just threatened this election season. They're fighting for their lives -- and with them, the livelihoods and well-being of hard-hit communities all over the country. Library districts in California, Il

Credit: dailybeast.com Election Update: And The Tax Return Saga Continues... Despite pleas from Democrats and even some Republicans, Mitt Romney continues to keep his tax returns under covers, arguing that his critics will "distort the information and use it against him." Romney, who is estimated to be worth at least $250 million, paid a federal tax rate of 13.9% on his $20+ million income in 2010. As most of this income came from investments, his tax rate was lower than an earned rate, drawin

Angus King, former independent governor of Maine in 1994 and 1998 is running for senate as an independent in November. King has gotten a lot of media atention so far, what other independent governors are we overlooking? Illinois Maine Minnesota Oregon Rhode Island and Texas have all had formally elected independent governors. In 1974, Illinois elected its first two governors, Shadrach Bond and Edward Coles, both independents. Besides Angus King, Maine elected independent James B Longley in 19

Credit: wikimedia.org On Saturday, I was shocked to learn that Alexander Cockburn, founder of the influential hard left political website Counterpunch,  had died of cancer. Despite my disagreement with him on subjects like global warming and Occupy, I respected his intellectual independence. Cockburn rightly pilliored the emphasis that some on the left place upon hostility towards religion, correctly observing that the US is one of the most Christian countries in the world. You aren't going to

As a constitutional republic, the US system of government is designed on the principles of federalism. In our federalist system the federal government is one of enumerated powers and those powers not explicitly granted to the federal government are reserved to the states. The framers of the Constitution established this system through the Tenth Amendment, which reads: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the stat