The hilarious thing is that Cahuzac seems to take roughly the same amount of votes from each other candidate.

Looks like the most right-wing of the three major candidates will pull this off. Shameful.

I'm OK. Sad about leaving SF, though.

McCain is less bad than the other two.

Cuomo is pulling off!

Write-in: The US campaign system is a complete, unbelievable disaster and should be completely overhauled, including a constitutional Amendment and all.

Yeah, this forum is disheartening some days...

2008 Democratic primary!

Greece's 2012 election clusterf**k!

^^^^^ Excellent ideas!

Depends, really.

How did Christians who believe men/women are equal get over Paul's positions on women?


What Paul writes is sometimes contradicted by others in the Bible... sometimes even by himself, sometimes by Jesus himself.

This is an excellent point. I don't know why people expect religious texts to be consistent. Those are all full of contradictions, and I'd argue it's a very good thing.

I oppose all months, but we have white history month 11 months out of the year anyway.

You oppose all months? That must make it hard to read your calendar.

Snowstalker should be banned from making jokes.

Carter.

Nixon easily

One of the great minds of our time.

I don't think there are any examples of a parliament with more than 500 members actually working properly

Define "working properly".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundestag

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembl%C3%A9e_Nationale

Ideally 1000, realistically the cube root rule (600some).

The attachment of many white Americans to the concept is... er... well...

Well, I'd say it's Americans in general. And yes, this is stupid.

Race does not exist. Period.

(obviously, I was a cleggmaniac... )

And he's [Fälldin] still alive. I met two of his grandkids at the Centre Youth Congress. ^^

Have Fälldin made any statements on what he thinks of the Centre Party of today (certainly much more right-wing than in his time)? And what is the feeling amongst older Centre members in general about the current direction of the party?

Nope, he's not made any statements about the party for a decade as far as I'm aware off. But he's very old and frail. Older Centre Party members have not been happy about the party's direction, but that's a given.

BTW, do the constituencies correspond to counties? Or portions of counties? Or groups of counties? Or is there no relationship at all?

They correspond to the counties, but the three most populus counties (Stockholm, Västra Götaland, and Skåne) are split into smaller constituencies.

Ah, I see. Makes sense.

Yes (non-racist)

If you think the 22nd Amendment is a serious problem in the US constitution, you're completely missing the point.

Cathcon.

What Gully and Pit said.

Surprised Denmark is this low. Things are definitely getting worse, especially in Copenhagen.

The high end countries are the ones you would expect, apart from Italy which I thought would be on the same level as France.

Yeah, Italy is a major sh*thole in terms of homophobia (and other forms of socon-inspired hatefulness).

So with your double Franco-Italian background what would you say are the reasons for this? Given that strong elements of unreformed macho-culture is not reserved for Italy alone.

Compared to France and Spain I would say that at least two things are worse in Italy: the political class and the media. So a couple of hypothesis.

- The way the media portrays gays? 
- No political action against homophobia? (but have there been any in France?)
- The Vatican influence.

Catholic influence certainly bears a great deal of responsibility, both directly (because people are ready to justify their homophobia based on the Church's position) and in a more pernicious way (there are many Italian PDers from DC background, and these people will make sure the left never does anything serious about that). Generally speaking, the political class doesn't give a sh*t about homophobia, between Berlusconi's bigoted jokes and the left's silence on every serious issue.

On the other hand, you have people like Vendola or Sicily's new President Rosario Crocetta, both gay and to the left of PD, who are successful and charismatic politicians very popular among their southern and conservative electorate. Hopefully this might help a bit in the long term.