Imagine if Romney had won, he's a Mormon.

He believes in magic underwear and baptising the dead, almost makes Scientology look tame by comparison.

i saw this at work earlier and got a good chuckle out of it :)

Potatoe

Pretty much like Hitler then, I guess.

Sipilä.

Tony Blair would be one on my list , spent most of his time in office attached to Bush's asshole .... like some kind of ....... dunno how would you describe that ? ,

Still, he's the only American president that has managed to make (some) peace in the Middle East, being the mediator of the lasting peace treaty between former arch enemies Egypt and Israel in 1979.
Most other American presidents after the Vietnam War have just created more strife and discord in the world, especially Bush jr.

Things sure have gone to the dogs recently :( And any moment now, despite living in the age of Snowden's revelations about mass surveillance, Norway will effectively turn into a police state (light?), giving the police and surveillance agency(ies) the right to hack into people's computers, phones, etc, without them having committed a crime. It's truly jaw-dropping stuff. The kind of stuff I would shake my head and laugh at if it happened in the US or China or whatever. But now we'll (soon) have it in Norway, with practically the whole political spectrum voting for it (the main parties at least).

^yeah. I've always thought of this very calmly before, even when very radical legislation would be submitted to parliament. Because I knew that most of these suggestions would be stopped long before they would ever be enacted. SV (Socialist Left) in government the last time, for example, was like that. We did have some extremely hard discussions, and a lot of very .. insane.. suggestions never actually were made public. I wasn't a huge fan of that, because other less insane suggestions were also never actually submitted on the record. So instead SV ended up with this mush of streamlined compromise that in the end, as I said back then, we would be killed for in the election. Which.. happened, of course. But in any case, most of us already knew that we wouldn't .. be able to get Norway out of NATO, for example. It might be something that could be discussed, and the level of participation, etc., should not be a dead issue. But even the craziest person in SV wouldn't actually believe that we could somehow smuggle in legislation that technically expelled us from NATO, for example. That's.. insane, right? Can't do that. Has to go through parliament, has to be enacted, has to be diplomacy, and there's a process. Everyone understands that.

So whenever we get crazy people into government, I sort of... weell, you know, there's not a huge deal of damage they can do anyway. We agree on 80% of the budget, we're basically on the same page, and nothing changes anyway.

And this period, the government parties, with the silent blessing of labour and the other small parties, have started creating ways to enact their interpretations of the law outside parliament. Whether it is on oversight duty of Telenor, DnB, investment of the oil fund, and back to the anti-terror legislation and mobilisation of guns in the streets for 8 million a month, and so on. Then it's done by assumption of legality through the justice-department. Example: asylum seekers arrested on the border - clearly not acceptable, and in no way legal. And the justice department did it anyway under the assumption that the intention behind the government's intended policy according to the suggested changes to immigration law from December, would /allow/ them to arrest asylum seekers and detain them on the border.

So whatever you think of immigration, what we're actually facing here is that we're missing the buffer-function of the parliament, that has saved us in the past from quite a lot of insanity from all of the parties. And I don't know how we're going to deal with that, when we have so many representatives who simply do not understand how serious of a problem this is.

..no, Hitler was a figurehead, and in debt to a vision guided by very strict ideology. Stalin was a ruthless and very practical tyrant, extremely capable of assembling groups to carry out some plan or other, with very little belief in principles as anything of use except for appearances.

(By the way, keep in mind that since Stalin and his brand of revolution eventually failed, it's a.. common thing to see people criticizing Stalin for what they may very well have supported themselves at the time. So that it's likely the whole "cared nothing for the actual revolution" criticism of Stalin is misguided. He was not a fool, even if he was utterly ruthless. But this shifting criticism is a kind of trait for a particular brand of elites, not just in Russia, where the leader is only seen to have actually done something wrong if they end up on the wrong side of history. Because what everyone is committed to is an ideal, which people may or may not be able to fulfill along the way. And until the pursuit of that ideal fails, you were on the right side. Variants of that one are there all the way up to current leaders and supporters. I mean, some of us did choke pretty damned hard when little Bush manages to practically say: "History will judge me!" on national television after declaring global and eternal war on Lothlorien.)

What about former (and now deceased) Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Charlie Haughey?

Known for arms smuggling for the IRA and taking ridiculous amounts of bribes, some of which he used to buy a private island...


Though I suppose he did get away with it, which probably means he isn't the dumbest leader per se...

Mm. Seems like he got the right idea, frankly.

...Maybe the dumbest leaders price might go to the assembly of representatives from the UK, Northern Ireland and Ireland who failed to even talk to Gerry Adams before the signing of the Belfast Agreement. That was one hell of a golden opportunity to disarm the tension and actually solve things in the long term. And they didn't take it.

What's wrong with him? At last a Finnish politician who gets (and at least tries to) get something done, instead of just "oh well we are in a difficult situation, we are doomed, oh well", ie. doing absolutely nothing. His main problem actually is that the real power in Finland is not with the politicians/government, but the labor unions. That's where the real decisions that really affect the economy are made, if any.

He is not perfect though, cutting from education could have been handled differently I guess (albeit I do support the idea of cutting expenses from useless studies like humanistic arts, feminist gender research and such stuff, lets get back to them on better times), and since he is from the "countryside party", it is obvious he has tried to steer clear of anything that would hurt the farmers, forest owners etc. But those alone are not enough to make his "the dumbest PM/president" we have ever had. Heck, even Tarja Halonen was far worse as a president.

How did the Sipilä government happen, anyway? Is it some sort of coalition over a specific and narrow platform? Or is it another "centrum-right" populist coalition that got elected on "bringing everyone together to do stuff! And things!" thing?

How do governments usually happen? By votes.

If I get you right, to you it is unthinkable that such a government could be formed, or why do you ask? The only thing that might raise some eyebrows is that "Perussuomalaiset" (True Finns), a populistic party, also made it to the government, but when you think about the ongoing EU-crisis and the starting refugee crisis, I don't find that so unbelievable. That's how democracy works.

The center (countryside) party got the most votes (it is one of the three biggest parties in Finland anyway), and they chose the "right-wing" party Kokoomus, and the populistic Perussuomalaiset ("True Finns") as their partners to the government, leaving the socialists and environmentalists out this time. I put quotation marks to the "right-wing" for Kokoomus as depending what you are comparing it to, they are not necessarily that right-wing. Probably comparable to e.g. Democrats in the US.

The socialists etc. got less votes this time, apparently people didn't feel they didn't do very good job in the previous government, e.g. they led Finland to support the "aid packages" to Greece etc., as the finance minister in the previous government was from the socialist party.

Also what was different this time around from the earlier government was that in the earlier one they got this bright idea to add people from lots of parties to the government, ie. there you had the "right-wing" Kokoomus and the left-wing Vasemmistoliitto in the same government, and various others. What this meant in practise was that the government was very inept in making any decisions because it would always be against the ideology of someone in the government. We also got these completely ridiculous situations where a party was forming some new decision/proposal in the government, but then they later made pleas that the parliament wouldn't accept it. For instance when the government was making a proposal to grant a permission for a new nuclear power plant, and the Green Party (who was in the government) is very much against nuclear power.

And towards the end of the former fragmentated government, some of the (leftist) parties left the government, as an obvious attempt to gather more votes in the incoming elections, and trying to wash their hands from any past decisions they had been making too and which had made the left-wing people unhappy.

That's one reason I feel this government has at least some more leverage and power to make decisions because there is less friction between the government parties. Some still, as Kokoomus tends to be very pro-EU, while Perussuomalaiset are traditionally critical towards EU.