50th Congress winners and losers, remembering "Hurricane" Carter

The real winner in Patria's election is true democracy. Unlike in Canada's nearly useless first-past-the-post, where so many votes are wasted and elect no one, Patria's proportional representation ensures that virtually every party on the ballot will obtain representation in Congress, even if only a single seat.

Although they lost 10 seats from 2010, the Amrita Party can claim victory in Campaign 2014. There will be four more years of "love and serve", four more years of Amma as the Honorable Member from the Precinct of Arboria. The Social Democrats, an old-school liberal-progressive and social justice party that was virtually untouched by the Dharmic Revolution in 1989-90, is arguably the biggest winner of Campaign 2014. With 49 seats in the 50th Congress-elect, up 16 seats from 2010, they are no longer a "mid-major". The SD will be a key ally of the Amrita and Chakra parties, giving the so-called Positive Possibilities coalition the simple 51% majority needed to pass most legislation. Note that Patria's annual budgets and special bills designated as requiring a "super majority" for ratification require a two-thirds majority; consequently the Amrita-Chakra-SD coalition will require support of the some of the smaller parties such as the Greens and Lilith, as well as any SRM or Jungle Party votes they can pry away.

The SRM is back in force, its "Patria first" and "take back the economy" messages resonating well with voters who are still trying to recover from the GED (global economic downturn) of the last decade. The SRM's commitment to traditional Hinduism also got out the votes in Campaign 2014, and will help the more moderate SRMers find common ground with Amrita, and support the PosPos coalition on key legislation. Bipartisan in the US Congress is more like "quadripartisan" or "pentapartisan" in Patria!

The Jungle Party (28 seats, up 7 from 2010) stepped its game up. Jim Rome and the Clones are no longer a niche party. Jim Rome attracts more than unemployed (or unemployable), overweight, socially inept 20 or 30-something men living in their parents' basements or couch-surfing with fellow nerds and getting little pleasure or intellectual stimulation out of life beyond what they hear on the radio for three hours every working day. Rome attracts Patriens from all walks of life who crave a mature, sober voice of in-depth sports talk and hard-hitting social commentary.

The macho he-men of the National Union came up losers in 2014. They have sunk further into irrelevance - from 70 seats in 2006, to only 35 in 2010, and now down to 26, and trailing the Jungle Party, who likely siphoned off some NU voters. National Unionists have only themselves to blame. The image of NU men owning big dogs and portraying cat owners as pussies in every sense of the word did not go over well. Unlike previous campaigns, the NU did not even mention the death penalty or public flogging for petty lawbreakers. Indeed, the NU's traditional law and order "lock 'em up and throw away key" platform took a back seat to the image of the NU man as a pitbull-owning, Marlboro-smoking, Harley-riding alpha male.

The biggest losers are arguably Patria's social conservatives and the tiny evangelical Christian fringe that has been fighting an incredibly losing battle to take Patria back to the 1950s. On the Campaign 2014 trail, support for such social conservative hobby horses as banning public displays of affection by boyfriend-girlfriend couples and advocating "modest" dress for women dwindled to an all-time low. Patria's apparent shift to the left - if the resurgence of the Social Democrats is any evidence of a leftward or liberal trend - also helped put the nails into this particular right-wing coffin. Even the most orthodox SRM Hindus recognize that Patria's streets and public squares are not ashrams and temples, where of course they would frown on couples' kissing and women in short skirts. And of course, two days before election day the Supreme Court bitch-slapped the Bible-toters by overturning Patria's ban on same-sex marriage.

The day after the election, Patria paused to remember Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, the former boxer and advocate for the wrongfully imprisoned, who died at age 76. Carter's boxing career was cut short when he was sentenced to life in prison for a murder he didn't commit. Following his release in 1985 after almost 20 years in the New Jersey State Prison, he took up residence in Canada and established the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted. In the 1970s a song by Bob Dylan drew attention to Carter's case and may have helped expedite his release from prison.

Hurricane - Bob Dylan from LA REVOLUCION ES AHORA! on Vimeo.