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Recently, at least on the Seminal, there’s been a lot of talk about supporting third parties. There are many in this country, although here the conversation tends to return to the Green Party, the only national progressive party. If Firedoglake is willing to support Green (and other third party or independent) candidates, we could end up changing politics all over the nation.

(Image from Greenpeace)

Hello all – hopefully I can make this into some kind of a short series or get someone to help me with this, but if not you’ll probably see at least one more diary on the subject from me. Basically, here’s a post where I’m trying to assemble all the information for protests that you need to know in order to take action against BP and for some kind of a clean energy future.

Go below the fold for a list of events/websites/facebook pages/etc.

(Just because of my own time constraints, I’ve only listed events in the US)

On June 8, Californians will vote on several referendums, in addition to primary races. One of those referendums, Proposition 14 (aka the Top Two Primaries Act), could hugely change how those primary races are conducted, and it would definitely not be for the better. As if to add insult to injury, but it could take down a public campaign financing measure along with it.

Prop 14 was put on the ballot through the backroom dealings of State Senator (not Lt. Gov.) Abel Moldonado, the very last holdout on the budget this year. He used the budget crisis for his own profit and one of his demands was to put this measure on the ballot. Now, his reckless action is being opposed by every political party in California and numerous electoral reform groups, groups ranging from the NAACP to the Southern California Tax Revolt Coalition.

But big business wants this to pass because of the control it could give them over elections (explanation below the fold). So your help is needed – $5, $10, $100 – whatever you can chip in to prevent California from descending further into a mess of broken government.

Although the political ramifications remain to be seen from this shocking revelation, in an interview with Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks, former Senator Mike Gravel (D-AK) admitted to both smoking marijuana and eating brownies “laced” with it. “Those were pretty good,” said Senator Gravel.

More information, including videos, below the fold.

Once again, the states are leading the way on health care reform. This past week, the Vermont House and Senate passed two versions of a bill that would essentially get a consultant to design three systems for health care in Vermont: something similar to Canadian single payer, something similar to a private system with a public option, and something similar to the recently passed federal health insurance bill.

This Earth Day, while an oil rig was burning and sinking and spilling out into the Gulf of Mexico, I joined a small band of protesters during my lunch break to tell the government to stop a similar crime against nature, one that is taking place in my home state of Pennsylvania. There are no offshore oil rigs here, of course, but the new and dangerous method of extracting natural gas through fracking is becoming a larger and larger threat to our water, our land, and our climate. And Pennsylvania is ground zero.

So I took to the streets at a Green Party-organized protest. We stood outside the regional Department of Environmental Protection and made our voices heard.

(Go below the fold for more info on the protest, fracking, and what you can do, including upcoming actions.)

If you were mad at all about Bush’s violations of civil liberties when he was president, this will get you fuming:

In a rare legal action against a government employee accused of leaking secrets, a grand jury has indicted a former senior National Security Agency official on charges of providing classified information to a newspaper reporter in hundreds of e-mail messages in 2006 and 2007.

The official, Thomas A. Drake, 52, was also accused of obstructing justice by shredding documents, deleting computer records and lying to investigators who were looking into the reporter’s sources.

“Our national security demands that the sort of conduct alleged here — violating the government’s trust by illegally retaining and disclosing classified information — be prosecuted and prosecuted vigorously,” Lanny A. Breuer, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s criminal division, said in a statement.

This is not just a single instance of outrage. It is a microcosm of the Obama presidency, the political success of corporate America, and the failure of its opposition.

The health “care” – really insurance – bill that passed is far from a perfect bill, in large part because it leaves a system intact that is the source of a ton of the problems that were used to create support for it, and it is not actually universal health care.

To get any kind of actually universal coverage we’re going to need to turn to the states. Clearly those thousands of lobbyists are too powerful in DC to really challenge the powers that be in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. So the good news is that there are state-level campaigns for single payer, and they’re gaining a lot of momentum in states like California and Pennsylvania.

Apparently inspired by certain Democrats voting against the health insurance reform, the Service Employees International Union – a union representing over 2 million workers – is surprisingly planning to work against Democrats this election season.

Perhaps the strongest challenge to Democrats, if not the Democratic establishment itself, will be in North Carolina. The national SEIU is working with the State Employees Association of North Carolina, its state affiliate, to form the North Carolina First Party.

I had an idea the other day, and I’m going to put it together. Basically, I’m creating a map of people all over the nation who are willing to donate something – their home, some food, some time, etc – to resistance to war, big business’ greed, and other injustices. Google Maps makes this surprisingly easy.