Obladi, Obrador, Life Goes On

aBloggers smell a rat in the Mexican election results. Our British cousins mark the first anniversary of 7/7, and video blog aficiandos try to carry on after the departure of Rocketboom star Amanda Congdon.

Obladi, Obrador, life goes on. Felipe Calderón, the handpicked successor to outgoing president Vicente Fox, has won the viciously contested Mexican presidential election by less than 1 percent of the vote. Citing widespread shadiness at the polls, leftist rival Andrés Manuel López Obrador demands a recount.

Canadian conservative Shameer Ravji at Sham The Tory Man wants Obrador's concession: "The leftist should just accept defeat, he's not winning any sympathy for his bully tactics."

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But Tara at lefty blog Prairie Weather thinks the election was fraudulent and deserves to be challenged: "There is a chance that a total recount will be ordered…Whether Mexican election officials -- and the country at large -- do the right thing depends on how much they've learned not only from past troubles and threats of uprising, but from observing the disgrace their neighbor to the north visited upon itself in 2000." Ditto, says Tina at Fuzzy and Blue: "Calderon's 'win' can only mean 2 things to America: The continuation of more masses of exploited illegal slave labor to the US, and the continued purchase of Mexican oil, perhaps w/ a bit of help from privatization via private contractors (and BushCo just may know a few of those)."

Priest-in-training "Moneybags" at The Dignity of Human Life is happy the Catholic stays in the picture: "Reuters previously reported some people were trying to get citizens to openly reject candidates that agree with the Church on abortion and contraception. I'm so pleased to read that Felipe Calderon, a man of values, is going to be the President and the anti-Catholic agenda lost again! Mexcio has about 100 million people and 85 percent are Catholic."

Righty Chris Lawrence at Outside the Beltway is fine with whatever candidate ultimately becomes el presidente: "Even if [Obrador] were to somehow overturn the results, the impact on US-Mexican relations would probably be minimal–both candidates staked out similar positions (which mirrored those of the Fox administration) on the issues of immigration and border security, and while AMLO is something of a populist, there is little concern that he would turn out to be another Hugo Chávez in office."

Read more about the Mexican election.