Mormons believe some pretty crazy stuff, but at least Romney can probably tell you how many states are in the USA... You'd think that anyone running for president would be privy to that kind of knowledge, but Obama apparently thinks there are 57...

Thanks for taking the time to explain that. So from one perspective: a centrum-right government focused on domestic issues, where coalition partners at least outwardly cancel each other out and put the larger EU questions (like aid packages, debt, trade reform and regulation) further away for a while..?

Is that the general sell for the centrum party as well, do you think? That they deliberately avoid at least starting out with the issues that likely encourage categorical opposition, to avoid the deadlocks you described from earlier? I don't know anything about Finnish politics, but heard Sipilä is a Læstadianer.. so you would guess a government with a person like that in the biggest government party wouldn't exactly be thriving on confrontation or extreme populism.

:) but I really don't know anything about Finnish politics, so forgive me for just dumping out my thoughts here, in case they're very wrong, or hilarious, and things like that.

I was talking about world leaders including presidents. Also, it was the Republican-controlled Congress that balanced the budget. Bill Clinton wanted to blow the money on more bureaucracy but the GOP stopped him. Also, Bill Clinton dragged us into the Balkan War which then strained relations with the Russian Federation (Serbia should have won), he supported legislation that enabled the financial and housing crisis of 2008, and he supported questionable and subjective sexual harassment policies like "hostile work environment."

By the way, Clinton also did not go through with the plan to remove Saddam Hussein from power and replace him with a more favorable regime in the early 90s thereby giving us Iraq War of 2003.
Carter got the Egyptian president assassinated. He also allowed the Islamists to rise into power in Iran and claimed we could trust the Ayatollah by calling him a good man with "religious values." He then went through with a botched rescue operation that sounded like he was watching too many action movies which resulted in the helicopters crashing and the soldiers on board all getting killed.

Carter did not make peace or "some peace" in the Middle East. He simply helped make worse things possible. There was good reason to why he got his ass handed to him by Reagan in 1980.
So fucking what? I would rather have Romney than Obama. Hell, I would rather have the rotting corpse of Jerry Falwell in office that Obama and Hillary Clinton despite Falwell having been a major douchebag when he was still alive.

Obama's weakness on ISIS and Putin speaks for itself as well as that idiotic "Cash for Clunkers" program back in 2009, his choice to appoint a Monsanto executive Michael Taylor to food safety in the FDA, his choice to appoint a big telecom lobbyist as FCC chairman, and his two-faced and horribly written health "care" bill.

"If you like your health plan, you can keep it..." Yeah right.

Yeah, right. Except he did.
He did make matters worse in Iran, though.

And making matters worse in Iran is not exactly the creation of "peace." Also, I frown upon anyone that strives for "peace." Peace is a bunch of bullshit and it is anything but natural or sustainable. It is used as an excuse to turn people into serfs and slaves.

Hitler was a failure though, and his entire career was based on high-risk gambling. If his enemies hadn't made astounding mistakes, he would never gotten as far as he did.
He also was fairly lazy as a dictator, regularly sleeping till noon and delegating all manner of tasks to his underlings. Stalin worked much harder and in a sense was much more competent as dictator.
Both were pretty evil though.
Chamberlain's bad reputation isn't wholly deserved though, at least Britain did rearm under his premiership (against the oppostion of the influential pacifist movement) which made possible its national survival in 1940.

Hahahaha... well, maybe he's trying to correct his severe hyperopia :D.

Serbia's conduct at the time wouldn't have agreed with even current day Russia, you know. And while the dissolution of Yugoslavia could conceivably have been largely invisible from the point of view of CNN or something like that -- the amazing amount of backlash as a consequence of softening super-powers on the one hand, and successful peace-talks bringing certain difficult problems into the public spheres on the other, was not invisible. And remember that Vollebæk and OSSE kept negotiations alive in the Serbia/Kosovo split for 10 years before things fell apart. UN security missions after as well were more successful than they really had any right to be. But invisible non-successes that avoid absolute disaster aren't exactly amazing PR material, of course.

So while you could argue that the Kosovo intervention through the NATO articles were a disaster that laid the groundwork for disregarding the non-aggression part of the UN Charter later. And that this in turn soured relations with Russia, and things like that. The idea that Clinton got anyone involved in Kosovo is not correct at all. This was something the US state department wouldn't have approved of. In fact the entire "Nation Building" concept invented to sell these worst case damage control operations around the world that cropped up at the time in insane numbers, that came after Kosovo. So opposition in Congress to Clinton's escapades was actually higher before Kosovo than after, from a.. half-way outside point of view.

Props for remembering Sadat and Begin, btw. But could probably add that other less map-changing talks between Israel and Egypt have happened since, several times. And practically any president since Carter could have focused on a dialogue like that to avoid the inevitable clash that would come from the extremists on either side in the wake of it.

I mean, a jew shot Rabin. A muslim shot Sadat. You wouldn't really have to be a psychic to see it happening then. And this element of having to move extremely fast at a high level (far over everyone's heads) so things are solved before the presidential period is over, that is unfortunately very real with the significant role the US plays in international affairs. The short horizon from the outset is counter-intuitive in.. any kind of actual peace-talk. And it does produce unwanted consequences and too high short-term stakes. Remember Ban Ki-moon's overtures towards North Korea and how they were shot down by people accusing him of encouraging terrorism? Of course not, but that was the US state department ensuring the next 15 years of the "Axis of Evil" being locked out from any peaceful talk of any kind.

And this is one of the main reasons why most relatively successful talks are sorted out without any media-coverage or public focus now, for example. And why talks tend to shift away from US involvement altogether, and on to local figures with no official pull or really public interest around them at all.

BAHAAHAHA OK!
Keep talking, republitard.

I have to admit, I was actually unaware of that. That being said, Britain did allow Germany to constantly violate treaties they had signed which lead up to that point, and I still think that Chamberlain shares a large fraction of the blame for that.

I'd rather be a sympathetic, non-gay-shooting liberal than a gun-toting, red neck conservitard.

Chamberlain certainly made mistakes and his conduct during the Sudetenland crisis in 1938 (basically forcing the Czechs to accede to German demands) was dubious...but it has to be remembered that a very large part of the British public at that time wanted to avoid war if possible, remembering the carnage of the 1st world war. And once Germany's occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 made it clear that Hitler's ambitions weren't limited to lands mostly populated by ethnic Germans, Chamberlain's government did send a guarantee to Poland and eventually declared war on Germany in September 1939.
It also has to be remembered that Britain at that time was an imperial power whose resources were already overstretched and which faced threats in the Mediterranean (Italy) and the far East (Japan), as well as a potentially hostile Soviet Union (which was to become de facto an ally and partner in crime of Germany in 1939-1941).. That was also a factor which made appeasement of Germany seem like a sensible policy.
I know Chamberlain has a very bad reputation in the USA today ("Munich" and all that), and to some extent this is deserved, but the political situation at the time was much more complicated than is often realized today.

That was an Islamist that did that. Nice try.

Nope, says right there in the news story. Guy didn't like gays, targeted them and killed them. He was a conservative. He didn't like the idea of guys kissing other guys. And he was NOT islamist, no matter WHAT the conservitard media wants us to believe.