Cynthia McKinney is now the official presidential candidate of the Green Party. Her vice presidential running mate is Rosa Clemente.
About a week ago, I wrote an article reporting that none of the Green Party presidential candidates appeared to have said anything about the FISA Amendments Act. It turns out that Cynthia McKinney did make a short statement, though that short statement received almost no coverage, and the one article, by San Francisco Bay Indymedia, that did provide coverage only recently was indexed by the search engines.
The statement was made on June 24th, at a protest organized by peace activist Cindy Sheehan, who is challenging Nancy Pelosi for her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Pelosi led the Democratic leadership’s effort to pass the FISA Amendments Act, and Sheehan, in response, led a burial for the 4th Amendment, a part of the Bill of Rights that the FISA Amendments Act blatantly violates.
McKinney said,
“Last week, Nancy Pelosi helped deal a double blow to Democratic Party grassroots supporters and to the U.S. Constitution itself. On Thursday, June 19, George Bush got another $162 billion from the Congress for war and occupation. On Friday, June 20, Nancy helped Bush give immunity to telecommunications companies that helped him spy on us!
Fannie Lou Hamer of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party remarked that she was sick and tired of being sick and tired. And she did something about it by standing up at the Democratic Party Convention that routinely had accepted all-white, non-representative state delegations from the South.
Well, I’m sick and tired and outraged, too. And I’m doing something about it.
Cindy Sheehan is my choice for Congress.
Nancy thinks that by November you will have forgotten about all of this.
Don’t forget! Remember–in November!Vote Cindy! Vote Cynthia!”
It’s good to know that there is at least one presidential candidate who is against the FISA Amendments Act. However, Cynthia McKinney needs to do a much better job at publicizing her positions on the issues, though, especially on issues like the FISA Amendments Act which have large numbers of Democrats disenchanted with Barack Obama. If McKinney won’t provide information on these policy differences, it’s going to be very difficult even for well-intentioned independent progressive media sources to report on them.
