American Election News - Chump Wins Over Stump Over in the God blessed US of A, a man with the brains of limpet and the morals of whichever energy company happens to be bribing him at the time has won the election over the man with all the charm and personality of a tree stump. Bush or Kerry, it's a bit like asking would you like a smack in the nose or a knee in the balls. This one or that one, that's all the choice we've got. The two candidate/party system doesn't allow the voters any choice. If you went to the butchers and they said 'We have pork sausage or beef sausage' but what you actually wanted was a couple of nice lamb chops, well, you'd go and shop somewhere else, but you are rather stuck with your country. I posted a couple of weeks ago about the lack of choice in British politics, I always feel that whoever you vote for, you have to betray some of you own moral choices. I can't in all honesty vote Conservative any more because I believe we should be in with Europe, not piddling about on the sidelines, well, that and the fact that the entire Westminster section of the party have been behaving like rowdy schoolchildren for the last decade. I have never been a Labour man, I don't ever want to be part of a Union, but the current Labour party has become so right wing that the Conservatives are having to consider becoming the Nazi Party to stay right of them. I don't suppose all those tens of thousands being sacked from the Civil Service thought they were voting for the dole when they made their mark. I've voted Green and Liberal in elections recently, people might say it's a vote wasted, but sometimes you have to vote for what you believe rather than who might win and push forward a small selection of your policies. Perhaps with the rise of electronic media and communications we could do away with the politicians altogether. We could log on to our PC's and be presented with the vote of the week, given a multi choice box to tick and bingo, back to real democracy. If you don't like wealthy folk telling less well off folk what they should do with their lives, remember that your Labour MP, and Cons, and Libs, earn a minimum £57,000 , and most of them are helping themselves to around £118,000 in expenses a year. The MP for the area I used to live in, Chris Leslie, has never held a job outside of politics, he came strait from university into the House of Commons, he receives a junior ministers salary of around £86,000. So Chris Leslie (work experience - paper round and part time bar work at Uni), gets to rake in well in excess of £200,000 per year to tell the decent, hard working people of Shipley how to live their lives. How much did the US election cost ? I bet it ran into tens of millions of dollars. Money squandered and wasted, money that could have been spent better elsewhere. More than anywhere else in the world, money talks in American politics, unless the two parties in charge vote to change the political system (and turkeys don't vote for Thanksgiving), America will always be saddled with some rich chump with mega wealthy 'friends' running the show. Aaargh, bloody politicians, I'm off to lie down in a dark room for a while to calm down. Do you know which current politician I admire most ? Dennis 'The Beast Of Bolsover' Skinner! And me a right winger and all.