Normally I would firmly eschew the hand carved wooden flute and from time to time run screaming from the mandolin, but to kick us off, Mariee Sioux (playing in Niort in the Charente in November). Her only connection to this election special being that she is from….er….America.

Less than three weeks to go to possibly the most important election in modern times and things are getting nasty across the pond. I’ve never been a big believer in conspiracy theories, (actually that’s bollocks, I think we all know that no-one has ever landed on the moon and that Chesney “I am the one and only” Hawkes was actually an animatronic ) however this seems to be an unlikely accident

For those who can’t be arsed to click on the link or read the article (everyone, I imagine), the gist is that some absentee ballots have gone out in a few counties in upstate NY with Barack Obama’s name spelled Barack Osama….as the piece points out - just how close are the B and S keys on a keyboard ? …..hmmmm….I shall say no more.

There is a long tradition in the land of the free and home of the cheats for vote rigging. I think everyone is by now aware that Al Gore actually won the 2000 election but was sucker punched out of it by a combination of George Bush’s brother and an acquiescent supreme court.

The thinking for the 2004 election, however, seems to be that once Bush and his assorted denizens of darkness had successfully portrayed John Kerry as a “wind surfing Frenchman” (I’m not making this up) Dubya won at a canter. Actually nothing could be further from the truth. If you look a the graphic below you will see that the whole thing boiled down to Ohio (circled)

Had those 20 elecotral votes gone the other way then the current president of the USA would have been John Kerry. “So what” I hear almost none of you cry, “it didn’t happen” – think again and read this. A litany of systematic manipulation of the electoral roll, voter registration and counting procedures. What is interesting is to compare the current map showing Obama / McCain based on up to date poll numbers.

Even without winning Ohio and Florida (both states in which he is ahead in the polls) Obama would still creep past the 270 electoral votes needed. The difference between the two maps isn’t huge and although Obama is campaigning heavily in Republican states (and may conceivably pick off one or two, although the main purpose is to force McCain to spend what’s left of his dwindling war chest on defending votes he would usually expect as god given) as usual the election of the President of America is actually decided by a relatively small number of people in a relatively small number of states.

Given the numbers it is unsurprising that McCain and Palin are attempting to whip up their supporters into a frenzy of righteous indignation, intimating that Obama somehow isn’t ‘American’ enough. The real obfuscator ( a word insufficiently used in my opinion) is McCain himself. Read here for the real story of the McCain rise to prominence….a couple of quotes from the piece for those who really, truly cannot be arsed (it is ten pages long)

“This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.”

“The reckless, womanizing hotshot who leaned on family connections for advancement before his capture in Vietnam emerged a reckless, womanizing celebrity who continued to pull strings. The real difference between the McCain of 1967 and the McCain of 1973 was that the latter’s ambition was now on overdrive.”

Finally 6.7 million people have now viewed this YouTube clip, which is about 20 more than watched my dog running round the garden with the Pixies in the background – I think we all know which one will affect the future of the world more.