Imagine this: It’s worse than 1984.  Now Big Brother is in your computer. It’s 2013, and the U.S. Treasury, National Security Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security are monitoring and recording all your emails, Internet searches, and Facebook posts. Everything you read, write, and think about can be tracked by the government, without the permission of any court of law.

Let me be clear, this nightmare scenario has not yet actually come true. But the bill that would allow it to happen passed the House on April 18 and Mike Quigley, my opponent, voted for it. 

The debate over the Keystone XL pipeline may seem distant. As it turns out, the threat is very immediate for us – if Canadian company Enbridge gets its way toxic tar sands oil could be spilled into Lake Michigan, from which we draw our drinking water.

We did it! We got close to 6% of the vote. This is a huge step forward for the Green Party in the 5^th district. It means that instead of having to get 5,000 plus signatures of registered voters to get our candidate on the ballot we’ll only need a few hundred next election cycle. Piece of cake.

 IL-5 Green Party Congressional candidate Nancy Wade addresses PDA Chicago's membership, October 9, 2012

Click to watch the video...

I pledge that when elected I will not vote for laws that infringe on and erode our constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure afforded to American citizens. That is not a claim my opponent, Mike Quigley, can make.

Quigley just voted to extend warrantless spying on you and me for the next five years. He joined Republicans in voting to deny our civil liberties and further weaken our democracy and freedoms.

Todd Akin, Republican Senate candidate in Missouri, holds the view that when women are “legitimately” raped we are able to block conception by an implied magical ability of the female body. He’s not just conservative; he wants to take us back in time to the early seventies, when there were passionate public debates over what rape “really” is.

The national spotlight right now is on the disturbed young man who opened fire in a Colorado theater, killing and injuring 70 people. Our nation’s latest shooting tragedy.  Rather than reacting to the “latest” tragedy we should be engaged in an effort to get the weapons of mass destruction – guns intended to kill people – out of our society.  

The media is engaged in an orgy of questions about why this particular shooting happened. It happened for the same reason every other shooting happens. Gun tragedies always have one thing in common. Guns.

We've got to get Big Money out of our government. This January I organized a rally in support of Move to Amend in Chicago, a citizen's group working to overturn the Citizen's United Supreme Court decision giving corporations all the rights of individuals.

Now, due to the hard work of the Move to Amend group in Chicago Alderman Joe Moore has introduced a resolution into the Chicago City Council. This resolution calls on the US Congress to propose a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. The full text is below.

Let’s support Ald. Moore and the Move to Amend. http://movetoamend.org/

Join Nancy at the public hearing on this resolution on: Monday, July 23rd, 10AM-Noon, City Hall, 121 N LaSalle, Room 201A

It is time that our government takes its collective head out of the sand and recognizes the dangers of global warming. As your representative I would call immediately for a national plan of defense addressing the climate crisis based on the Green Party platform.

The Green Party platform comprehensively addresses ecological sustainability and climate change. It states, “Climate change is the gravest environmental, social and economic peril that humanity has ever met…It is a tragedy unfolding in slow motion.” We must take the steps and make the hard choices to prevent that tragedy from continuing to unfold.