I know this is not an extremely original observation, but the recent Arstechnica piece on his Senate candidacy in Australia annoyed me so much I have to repeat it.
As you may know Assange is currently holed up in Ecuador's London Embassy. He's been accused of multiple sexual crimes in Sweden, which wants to talk to him as part of it's investigation, and the Brits are treaty-bound to turn him over. Assange's American defenders claim this is all a US Plot, but that's fairly hard to believe.
Currently now he's claiming that the US could get him out of that embassy. That if he gets elected to the Senate
the Aussies will have to force the Brits and US to back off, and let him go home to Australia.
The "Assange is screwed solely because of the US" theory is pretty tenuous for a couple reasons.
1) Sweden is one of the only countries in the world that has never been a US Ally. Assange picked Sweden as a refuge largely because he thought it was immune to US pressure.
2) The rape allegations have been linked to both Sweden's main political parties. The right-wing Moderate party are currently in power, so they're the government asking for Assange, and the lawyer advising the victims was a minister in the preceding left-wing Social Democratic government. note the party names. Countries where the right wing is called "Moderate," and the left-wing is called "Social Democratic" tend not to be in America's pocket.
3) A prominent anti-American freedom of information advocate was forced to flee from Democratic Europe to a very new Democracy state which currently faces multiple allegations of suppressing freedom of speech. This is due to multiple rape allegations. The alleged victims from the very people he was planning on living with (both were wikileaks fans, one of whom only refused Asssange in the first place because he refused to wear a condom). The CIA just isn't this good.
Even if the US was so powerful that it could convince a couple of wikileaks' female fans to allege Assange had raped them, how is Obama supposed to put that particular genie back in the bottle? The Swedish police have a case file, and Sweden isn't the kind of country where the police drop investigations because a bunch of bigger countries start bullying them. The UK still has agreements with it's European neighbors, which means they still have to turn Assange over to Sweden. The US can't actually do anything directly because it's not involved.
I suspect this is mostly partisan posturing, hoping to capitalize on an anti-American vote and get Australia to be slightly less rabid in it's opposition to wikileaks,