These people are the official representatives of one of America's great parties

Before we begin, an historical footnote: the Republican Party was founded in 1864 and soon joined by Abraham Lincoln to unite the disparate anti-Confederate, anti-Slavery forces in American politics.

Today, delegates to the Republican Party's National Convention behave like this:

An attendee to the US Republican party convention was removed from the conference after allegedly throwing nuts at a black camerawoman from CNN, saying "this is how we feed animals".

and like this - towards members of their own party, apparently for being, well, Latina:



Not to worry you, but the gap between the candidates is currently 1%. I'm not that bothered that Mitt Romney wears special religious underpants and believes that Jesus visited America. I am bothered that his party hates women, believes weird things about their biology, promotes the most vicious forms of capitalism, thinks it's OK that a Presidential candidate keeps his millions in the Cayman Islands, Switzerland etc - he wants to run the government, not contribute to its maintenance - and believes that electing representatives whose faces contort with racial hatred is apparently fine.

(Puerto Rico was seized by the US at the end of the Spanish-American war. It's a dependent territory, essentially an offshore possession in which citizens can't vote for the Presidency but do have an elected governor).