On a Sunday afternoon in April, fans arrived at an Addison Street stadium, parked for free, shuffled through the gates for $10 and chanted “GOOOOOOSE” in throngs.
They were treated to many of the Wrigley Field-type charms – a crackling public address system, bleacher seating and a decaying scoreboard – but were two miles west of that iconic stadium.
The team they came to see is professional, boasts a reigning MVP, a YouTube sensation turned record-holder that commutes from Florida for games and an owner who just over a year ago learned of the sport he’s now a part of.
At the end of the game, the fans came down to the field and met the players that they came to watch: Jonathan “Goose” Helton, Brodie Smith, Geoff Serednesky and others.
The Windy City Wildfire, a professional ultimate frisbee team and a 2013 expansion member of the American Ultimate Disc League, satisfied its growing fan base with a win over the Cincinnati Revolution, 23-16, on that day. But majority owner Steve Gordon is more excited about gaining the support of Chicago’s thriving ultimate community and of local sports fans as he sets out to pioneer Chicago’s first season of professional ultimate. Continue reading →
Behind a seven-inning two-hitter from starter Travis Wood (4-2) the Cubs (16-22) defeated Colorado (20-18) at home on Monday, 9-1, on 14 Cubs hits to match a season-best three-game win streak.
Collected reaction, tweets and coverage have been collected in a Storify post here.
CRYSTAL LAKE – Todd Post knew his Kankakee Community College baseball team would win on Thursday if it could accomplish one thing.
“We just needed to get to the last inning with a lead,” he said. “[Casey Fletcher] has been our closer all year, and he was great today.”
Fletcher took the mound at McHenry County College in the bottom of the ninth inning with a one-run lead and retired the three batters he faced for a save and an 11-10 nonconference win for KCC. Continue reading →
More sports storytellers than ever have access to ever-larger audiences as internet access spreads. But they’re not all great. Here are four stories that are. Continue reading →
When Michael Jordan turned 50 this past February, all the major outlets were on the scene. The basketball icon adorned the cover of a special edition of Sports Illustrated for the 50th time. The Chicago Tribune devoted five full pages of its Sunday sports section to Jordan, which included high points from his career, 50 memories of Jordan from those that know and a barrage of photos, illustrations and stories.
Third-party candidates for president, Rocky Anderson, Virgil Goode, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein debate Oct. 23 at the Hilton in Chicago. (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The course of the electoral system was the first order of business last month when four presidential candidates convened at the Hilton in Chicago for the third-party debate.
Although they represent fundamentally different points on the political spectrum, Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party, Virgil Goode of the Constitution Party, Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Jill Stein of the Green Party, agreed that the U.S. electoral system has some major flaws.
“Our electoral system has been so constricted; Our democracy so degraded by [the Republican and Democratic parties] from the very beginning in terms of ballot access,” Anderson said in his opening remarks.
In Colorado, for example, prospective candidates for president need only submit $500 and an affidavit of intent, according to USA Today. As a result, Colorado voters will be able to choose from 16 different candidates for president.
But in Illinois, as in many states, prospective local and national candidates must fulfill much more strenuous requirements. That includes getting 25,000 signatures for candidates for national office. Additionally, any Illinois citizen can challenge the legitimacy of a candidate’s filing.
Illinois citizens filed 57 challenges this election season, resulting in the removal of 35 candidates from Illinois ballots. Another 22 candidates have withdrawn their candidacy.
As a result, only five third-part candidates for state and local offices officially remain as choices for Illinois voters.
Here are those candidates, the officially-recognized write-in candidates on Illinois ballots, what they stand for and their struggles to gain ballot access in Illinois.
Green Party
Candidates on Illinois ballots: Jill Stein/Cheri Honkala (President/Vice President), Nancy Wade (5th U.S. Congressional District, Paula Bradshaw (12th U.S. Congressional District), Frank Wedig (McHenry County Board), Karen Roothaan and Dave Ehrlich (Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Chicago)
Presidential candidate and Massachusetts physician Jill Stein grabbed headlines on Oct. 16 when she was arrested along with her running mate for stepping onto the grounds of the presidential debate at Hofstra University.
Her left-leaning party managed to secure ballot access for two U.S. congressional candidates in Illinois, and party chairman Phil Huckelberry says the Green Party has a hard-line stance on social issues that the mainstream candidates have ignored.
“We are strict down the line pro social justice, civil rights, gay marriage, all of that,” Huckelberry said. ” The Republicans absolutely aren’t. The Democrats waffle, but if you actually look at the way it’s played out in a lot of places, they’re not on board with all of that either.”
Huckelberry said that pension reform and education policy are major priorities for his party in Illinois, but that sound environmental policy can drive positive change.
“If we take money from nuclear, and take money away from coal, and take money away from oil that government is actually pumping into those things, we can better the environment,” Huckelberry said. “We can lower energy costs. We can put a lot of people back to work, and by putting people back to work we can build the tax base back up.”
Candidates on Illinois ballots: Gary Johnson/Jim Gray (President/Vice President)
Illinois Campaign Director Noah Pokorny said he has distributed nearly 600 yard signs like this one in Elgin, Ill. in support of Libertarian Gary Johnson’s campaign for president. (Photo by Chris Burrows)
The Libertarian party fielded a full cast of state-level candidates to support Lex Luther’s bid for Illinois governor in 2010, but in 2012 both of their state-level candidates were removed from the ballot after challenges. Only former New Mexico governor and failed Republican party candidate Gary Johnson remains. He is on the ballot in every U.S. state except Michigan and Oklahoma.
“We ended up submitting 43,000 signatures, and we didn’t get challenged, so we were able to secure ballot access,” Illinois Campaign Director Noah Pokorny said. “We weren’t as lucky in some of our local races.”
The Libertarians combine parts of liberal and conservative philosophy that advocates for limited government, decreased spending and greater freedoms.
“On fiscal issues, we’re to the right of the Republicans, and on social issues we’re to the left of the Democrats,” Pokorny said. ”[Johnson] is currently the only candidate that’s proposing to submit a balanced budget to congress in his year in office, and he’s also advocating putting an end to the war on drugs and repealing the Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act.”
In fact, all four third-party candidates said at the third-party debate that they would support repealing NDAA. And on social issues?
“The Libertarian Party is actually advocating full-on marriage equality across the board on a federal level,” Pokorny said.
Justice Party
Candidates on Illinois ballots: Rocky Anderson/Luis Rodriguez (President/Vice President)*
A new face in the third-party crowd, the Justice Party was started just nine months ago in Utah. Their name says it all—this left-leaning party is all about bringing justice where justice is denied.
“The justice party is about social, environmental and economic justice,” Anderson’s press secretary, Sally Soriano said. “Anderson talks about what’s not being brought up in the mainstream debates. They don’t talk about climate change, shrinking the war budget and transferring that to jobs, and the erosion of civil liberties in Illinois.”
A sticking point for the party is the justice system. According to Soriano, the U.S. spends $64 billion per year on its overwhelming prison population.
“Just think if we gave that money to a community college for scholarships,” Soriano said. “What a difference that would be.”
But like the other third parties, the Justice Party had trouble getting on the ballot in Illinois. This year they didn’t even attempt gaining ballot access in Illinois because they simply could not afford to pay volunteers the cut-rate fee of $1 per signature in a state where $2 is the norm, Soriano said. The party is content with earning attention for their cause.
“This is the only way that people are going to start hearing about third parties,” Soriano said. “It’s hugely important for friends and families to talk about this option because it’s not out there as much. If we can get this discussion going, that is what we need.”
The Constitution Party has had real problems getting on the ballot in Illinois.
“The toughest obstacle that any third party faces is ballot access,” Illinois State Chairman Tim Pearcy said. “And Illinois is one of the tougher ballot access states.”
In 2010, the party turned in 33,000 signatures for their slate of state-level candidates, but around 8,000 of those were tossed out, leaving them with 24,965 —35 short of the minimum.
This year, the Constitution Party simply couldn’t raise enough signatures to get Goode, their party’s presidential nominee onto the ballot in Illinois, even though he is on the ballot in 26 other states. However, Dale Dorch will represent the party with a bid for the seat representing the 117th district in the Illinois House of Representatives.
“Everyone knows you need to get 50,000 signatures so that they will not be challenged,” Pearcy said. “To get 25,000 signatures, you have to turn in almost double that. That means you have to spend $100,000 just to get on the ballot. We’re not really spending any money here on our presidential race. We had to jump through hoops to even become a viable candidate.”
The Constitution Party stands firmly on the conservative end of the spectrum, and Goode has shown a great deal of political range throughout the years. He started out as a Democrat in the House of Representatives representing Virginia in 1997 and later switched to the Republican Party in 2000. After losing his seat in 2008, he decided to go back to his roots and join the Constitution Party.
“In a lot of ways we could be viewed as more to the right of Republicans,” Pearcy said. “We are very socially conservative and fiscally conservative. Some of our views are so conservative and constitutional because we go back to the founders of the nation.”
On Oct. 7, Venezuelan voters flocked en masse to polling stations to vote in the country’s presidential election and re-elect controversial President Hugo Chavez.
According to the Washington Post, voters started forming lines hours before polling places opened. Some waited in line for up to four hours, and some polling places remained opened beyond the official closing time, according to Time Magazine.
Approximately 80 percent of eligible voters turned out in Venezuela, according to Der Spiegel, a rate that flies in the face of the 56.8 percent of American voters that cast ballots in the 2008 presidential election. Critics have expressed concern over low turnout rates in recent election history.
DePaul University Professor H. Peter Steeves thinks there is a better way.
Steeves, whose work has included communitarianism theory and Latin American politics, witnessed the rise of Chavez firsthand.
“There is a media blackout before the elections happen [in Venezuela], so you can’t run campaign ads a few days before,” Steeves said. “And there is a media blackout during the day of the election so [media] can’t be predicting what is happening, which could discourage certain groups of people from voting.”
Steeves was in Venezuela in 1992 to teach at the University of Zulia when Chavez mounted an unsuccessful coup. He said the contentious atmosphere of the time “freaked” him out, but over the years Steeves began to believe in the methods of the controversial leader.
“My initial reaction … was almost a sort of privileged, almost bourgeois response to the problems, because there were real people dying of hunger right there a few yards from the apartment where I was living,” Steeves said. “You had a country that was rich in oil with more than 80 percent of the people living far below the poverty line, and they had the oldest democracy in Latin America. … So what purpose was that serving?”
According to a 2011 report from the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, Venezuela now has the third-lowest poverty rate in Latin America, after 12 years under the rule of Chavez.
Steeves has worked to apply Chavez’s approach to politics to American democracy.
“On a larger scale, one of the things that I think Chavez is trying to do is trying to find a non-liberal approach to running a nation-state, and I’ve tried to use the model of communitarianism to make sense of what he’s doing,” Steeves said. “A lot of the stuff that I’ve published and worked on has been on communitarianism theory, which is sort of everything that weren’t not doing these days in politics.”
Communitarianism is an affront to classical liberalism, which forms the basis for American democracy. It proposes that the individual’s connection to his community is chief, and that values and beliefs are formed in public space.
Steeves said he doesn’t vote in American elections, because he doesn’t exist within the abbreviated, cramped spectrum of Republicans and Democrats.
“The spectrum itself, where you’re either going to be far left or far right and liberal and conservative fall somewhere in there … is a Liberal spectrum,” Steeves said. “I wouldn’t put myself anywhere on that spectrum. I would put myself outside of it.”
Steeves said he thinks the system itself is the problem, and that changes are coming.
“There’s a part of me that thinks revolution on some level – that revolution is necessary,” Steeves said. “I tend to think that this is on a collision course with itself. This is not sustainable the way that we’re living today.”
