TODAY'S NEWS HEADLINES for INDEPENDENT VOTERS

INDEPENDENT VOTERS

• How the Independent Movement Went Left by Going Right (by Jacqueline Salit, Executive Editor of The Neo-Independent magazine, Huffington Post) This article was also posted on The Moderate Voice and Independent Political Report
  
• Lisa Guerriero: Let's see what you can do, Obama (By Lisa Guerriero/ Off Deadline, Salem Gazette) No matter how committed he is to change, Obama's not going to fix the economy, end poverty and solve the conflicts in the Middle East in his first year in office — if at all. It's just not that simple.
  
• Moderate Republicans may be in big demand in Senate (By Janet Hook, LA Times) "The power of moderates is declining in the country: They are fewer in number and the country has polarized," said Thomas F. Schaller; Swing voters have been alienated by President Bush's policies and perceptions that the Republican Party is dominated by extremists.
  

LOCAL INDEPENDENT NEWS

• OK: New sheriff in town (Ada Evening News, Talina Turner Managing Editor) A bill which would allow Independents to vote in primary elections at a specific party's invitation is up for introduction in the 2009 Oklahoma Legislative session.
  
• MN: A conclusion draws near in the Minnesota Senate race (Independent Political Report) That "other" category is mostly Dean Barkley, the Minnesota Independence Party candidate for US Senate this November.  He got more than 15% of the vote.
  

BOOK REVIEW

Review: 'Sweet Land of Liberty' by Thomas J. Sugrue (BY DAVID L. CHAPPELL, Special to Newsday) The election of Barack Obama - whose biography unifies Third World immigrant and hardscrabble prairie pioneer, black and white - calls into question the rigid dichotomies that have defined the American conflict over inequality. Thomas Sugrue's evocative and richly documented new book, "Sweet Land of Liberty," is well timed because it addresses the most blinding and fundamental of these dichotomies, that between the southern land of slavery and Jim Crow and the ill-defined rest of the country (the part Obama comes from).