Germany and Canada: If you don't have friends, make them.

The Christian-Democrat wins in Germany and the conservatives may gain control of the Canadian Parliament. Both of these are nations whose governments have been unfriendly to this administration.

Given how much money the GOP paid to arrange the DNC primary to their benefit, it wouldn't surprise me if they are paying for friendly governments in both nations. Paying for friends, essentially.

Where is our money going? Has anyone taken a look at our international contributions? George must feel isolated. George must feel insecure. George must feel he must pay for international friends or else George goes nowhere.

I mean it would be impossible for Schroeder to be unpopular or for Martin to have run a piss-poor campaign. It must have been US greenbacks bribing the electorate and politicians. And here I thought you Americans were broke......

But now Bush might have two more friends in the international community to agree to his actions against Iran in the UN. Good for Bush. He always gets what he wants. It must be his great relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. :eyes:

did you hear last week about Condi trying to get all federal foreign aid disbursements to go exclusively through the state department?

Basically, if you don't do what we say, we'll cut off money to your country; development aid, loans, poverty aid, food donations, medicine, etc., because once the state department controls ALL of it that's what they intend to do.

Blackmail takes on a whole new shade of evil under her.

1) it's very difficult to cheat on national elections (if not impossible) in both Canada and Germany due to the metod of hand counted paper ballots. The local surveillance of politicians make it impossible too.

2) The liberals lost in Canada (or are going to be sanctioned) because they were caught the hand in the cookie jar in a serie of bribe scandals. Besides the probably winning conservatives won't even have a majority due to the parlementary system. In the event of a victory of a conservative minority government life's expectency is a maximum of 18 months...

3) In Germany the "conservative" victory was won to an extreme narrow margin. The reason is mostly that Schroeder payed the price for very unpopular but necessary reforms whick Merkel is going to keep anyway. And Merkel's "conservative" party would be considered as "extreme-left" in the US even by Democrat mainstream standards. One of Merkels firts international actions was to fly to the US to tell Bush to close Gitmo.

Liberals or socialist lose elections because they fuck up, not because the game is cheated.

I appreciate another perspective. Thank you.

If a court convicts someone of committing a crime, then can you say, "it wouldn't surprise me if the person actually did commit the crime"?

Have you ever heard of the Innocence Project?