"Hollywood for ugly people."

It is not a phrase coined by Michigan independent congressional candidate Cooper Nye. However, Nye says he can see why some people have come to view Washington, DC this way after working in the nation's capital.

And the phrase -- from Nye's point of view -- is not a personal attack against individual policymakers on Capitol Hill, but rather a statement on how DC is run and the ugly, partisan, sometimes corrupt culture that has taken hold in Washington.

Welcome to our weekly post, Independent Action, where we let you know the important moves independent candidates and organizations made over the past week.

Nathan Altman, a 30-year old “scrappy entrepreneur who’s built a career on being a maker and builder of things,” has entered the race for U.S. Senate for Indiana. He’s been featured quite a bit this past week through organizations and publications such as Unite America and the Indianapolis Business Journal.

The DNC must have been high when it filed a lawsuit on April 20th against the "Russian government, the Trump campaign and the WikiLeaks organization alleging a far-reaching conspiracy to disrupt the 2016 campaign and tilt the election to Donald Trump."

What do you think about the state of our country today? And what is your opinion about our society?  These are things I think about every day.

I think our country is at risk—slipping out of our representative democracy that is formally called a republic and informally called a democracy. And my opinion about our society is that we blame problems on “those people” too much and don't have enough collaborative problem solving.

If 2016 taught me anything, it is how disastrous political polls have become. And as we head into the 2018 midterms, we should take a hard look how we are conducting them, crunching the numbers and using the results. Voters deserve it.

This week, Attorney Michael Attanasio and those representing the SoccerCity initiative filed a lawsuit to toss out the SDSU West initiative on the grounds it violates state law. Attanasio said, "Public university names are the property of the state and its citizens, and this law was specifically intended to prevent their exploitation by private business interests."

The Facebook scandal involving personal data mishandled by Cambridge Analytica has raised concerns over the privacy of the information we share on our social media accounts.

Some countries have gone as far as to legislate Internet data privacy with laws granting the “right to be forgotten.”

Yet Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says we don’t need such regulations here in the states. Is he right?

This is a Reality Check you won’t get anywhere else.

2018 may see the first "bitcoin candidate" elected to Congress.

Many political candidates are jumping on the opportunity to raise campaign funds by accepting donations in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which are free market, private currencies competing against the U.S. dollar and all other sovereign national currencies.

Candidates like Andrew Hemingway who in 2014 became the youngest gubernatorial candidate in New Hampshire history, are making U.S. political, financial, and tech history by accepting digital crypto coins.

As independent voters, we’re all about ensuring that power resides with “the people,” but what does that mean?  Can “the people” have too much power in a representative, constitutional democracy?

Recent developments in Maine and Utah this week (discussed below) have me thinking about this.