America's Choice

We know now, after a couple of weeks of uncertainty, that President Obama has been re-elected by what passes for a comfortable margin (about 2% of the vote) in deeply divided America. Although in many respects the lesser of two evils and still unlikely in the extreme to herald any genuine change, it is worth reflecting a little on the people who might have been elected in his place.

Mitt Romney, whose election victory website went live yesterday by accident, is clearly a consummate chameleon, twisting and changing his position on everything from healthcare and abortion to fiscal policy. To this end, he was content to embrace some pretty unpleasant people with unpleasant views in his pursuit of power. There were the pro-war agitators, keen to assault Iran and Syria at the earliest opportunity; the people who wanted to strip away even the minimal health protection provided to tens of millions of poor Americans by "Obamacare", and worst of all the men (and they all were) who made repeated and ever more extreme comments about female rape victims as alternately asking for it or being the subject of Divinely-ordained sexual assault. They were not even medieval in their outlook, but positively Old Testament. Even Romney's running mate for Vice President, Paul Ryan, had been involved in sponsoring unsuccessful legislation which distinguished between "forcible" and apparently "non-forcible" rape.

It is to the credit of American voters that all of these men went down in flames at the polls - and Obama led Romney by a huge margin among women voters. This led to chilling comments from a number of rightwing commentators that Obama is not the choice of white Americans, or that alternatives to voting need to be found to force through their Christian fundamentalist agenda.

Outside the mainstream, the Green candidate for President Jill Stein polled over 397,000 votes in spite of the two-party squeeze, more than doubling the Green vote since 2008, and some local gains were made with Greens elected in Maine, including one representative to the state assembly.

But among the non-major party candidates, it was former Republican Governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson, who polled best, taking 1.1 million votes as the Libertarian Party candidate running on a platform characterised by one commentator as being "founded on the concern that Americans are not yet greedy enough."

Republican Rape

In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the Presidential election has been temporarily relegated from the headlines, although through the tour of disaster sites by President Obama and the charity drives of his challenger Mitt Romney, it is in truth never far from the surface. Only a very temporary outbreak of faux decorum has stopped the arguments between the two major rivals.

Yet we should not forget that by this time next week, the USA may have a new President-elect, as well as a new Congress. And the polls for the three major contest all show advances by the Republicans: Realclear Politics has Romney and Obama in a dead heat, one which could be disrupted if voters in predominantly Democrat-leaning states in the storm zone end up with a rather understandably low turnout next Tuesday. In the Senate, where a third of places are up, Republicans may end up short of a majority but are tipped to make gains, while they are 40 seats ahead in the forecast for the House of Representatives.

So what sort of men -as nearly all of them are - might these new legislators be? Aside from fiscal conservatives and defence hawks, one remarkably consistent strain throughout many of their pronouncements has been not merely an anti-abortion stance, but a rather warped view of rape as the quotes below show. These men are not some lonesome idiot sitting on a bar stool sounding off offensively (though who knows what some of them may get up to?). These are men already in prominent political positions in the most powerful nation in the world. These are men selected by the Republicans and endorsed by Mitt Romney, the man who may be the next President.

Judge for yourself - are people with these views fit to hold office anywhere in the world?

Watch the Flag: Putin Comes to the American Elections

The media has been full of commentary on President Obama and Governor Romney's "aggressive" debate last night at Hofstra University. But as these two mouthpieces of corporate America squared up in their pseudo-boxing contest, the real aggression was taking place outside the gates of the University.

There, Green Party Presidential nominee Dr Jill Stein and her running mate Cheri Honkala, wrapped in the US flag, attempted to gain entry to the debate. Dr Stein pointed out that as she is on the ballot in 85% of states (local nomination rules in the remaining 15% make it virtually impossible for non-Democrat/Republican candidates to gain ballot access) she has satisfied the rules set by the League of Women Voters, which originally ran these debates. At least in theory she could win enough electoral college votes to become President and so, like John Anderson in 1980, and Ross Perot in 1992, she should be allowed to take part in the televised debates. But of course Anderson was a Republican Senator and Perot a multi-millionaire businessman.

Multimillionaire Perot made the 1992 debate

However, as the video below shows, the response of the authorities was not to open up the debate to the Greens, or any of the other "third party" candidates running. Instead, while Obama and Romney posed in their testosterone-fuelled debate as candidates for the alleged "leader of the free world", their Green rivals were arrested and handcuffed, driven to a special facility prepared to hold debate protesters, tied to chairs for eight hours and only finally released in the dead of night. 

This then is American democracy in the 21st century.

Last year, when the Russians staged-managed democracy led to protests on the streets of Moscow, Obama criticised President Putin's handling of the parliamentary elections. After last night's blatant suppression of free speech and democratic protest, America has finally been exposed for its utter hypocrisy in ever castigating other countries (and most especially Venezuela's exemplary elections) for the conduct of ballots and for daring to refer to itself as the Land of the Free.

Watch the video and as the two women are led away by police, one officer hurries to pick up the Stars and Stripes they were draped in when it falls on the ground. "Watch the flag!" he intones urgently.

Yes, indeed, Watch the flag.

Jesus For President?

As would-be Republican party Presidential nominees fall over each other to out-Christian their rivals (never mind Nazi-Communist Obama), American TV host Bill Maher speculates on a last minute entry to the race by the Big Man Himself...