Barack Obama Is One Step Closer To Being President

At 3:00 Eastern time on Monday Dec. 15, 538 electors in state capitols across the US cast the votes that actually elected Barack Obama the 44th President. Obama received, unofficially, 365 electoral votes (with 270 needed to win). The exact total will not be official — or Obama officially elected — until Congress certifies the count of electoral votes in a joint session on Jan. 6, 2009. The Electoral College was established in its present form in 1804 by the Twelfth Amendment to the US Constitution. Electors are not required to vote for the candidate who won their state — in fact, 24 states make it a criminal offense to vote otherwise, but no "faithless elector" has ever been charged with a crime. "On 158 occasions, electors have cast their votes for President or Vice President in a manner different from that prescribed by the legislature of the state they represented. Of those, 71 votes were changed because the original candidate died before the elector was able to cast a vote. Two votes were not cast at all when electors chose to abstain from casting their electoral vote for any candidate. The remaining 85 were changed by the elector's personal interest, or perhaps by accident. Usually, the faithless electors act alone. An exception was in 1836 when 23 Virginia electors changed their vote together. ... To date, faithless electors have never changed the otherwise expected outcome of the election."

Comments

And?

[Anonymous Coward]

And the point of this story is...?

Re:And?

[Uberbah]

Understatement of the year. Pudge is the hero of dumb fat fucks everywhere - in one of his journals he talks about how Obama has the least amount of experience of any candidate in 70 years, obviously forgetting who's in the White House right now. And his candidate in the primaries was Fred Thompson, who's public service consists of 12 years of legislative experience...exactly what Obama has.

Judging by some red-neck rants on Christian blogs

[Chrisq]

What your saying is that McCain has an outside shot?

Judging by some red-neck rants on Christian blogs he is not the only person who might have a shot at the president elect.

Re:Judging by some red-neck rants on Christian blo

[drunkenoafoffofb3ta]

Ah, rednecks. All of those Sunday sermons they attended, for all of those years. "Turn the other cheek", "love thy neighbour" etc. And yet they want to shoot a black president. How Christian of them. If, of course, by "Christian", you mean "moron-tastic". Actually, try that substitution in other situations too. IT works well.

the popular vote went to al gore

[circletimessquare]

i'm glad you can spin scenarios where this is not true. and? supposition is not fact

the official record is al gore won the popular vote. please, show us contingencies and if-then conditions where this is not true. it doesn't mean anything

meanwhile, we also have the factual record of the abyssmal gw bush administration. can you tell me with a straight face al gore would have invaded iraq?

we need to remove the electoral college, to prevent another a gw bush: gw bush was not the democratic will of the american people, according to factual record (not your suppositions). yet he took the white house, and we paid dearly for this idiotic anachronistic tweak on our popular will called the ec

"The popular vote doesn't matter."

[circletimessquare]

the popular vote is all that should matter

everything you said is 100% correct, in a bogus system. which renders your points pointless

i don't know why you think its important to lecture me on the facts of the status quo, when the whole issue here is the status quo is wrong

i get it. i get everything you said. i got it before you said it

do you get it that the way things work is wrong? or at least that that is the fucking subject matter?

there are pluses and minuses to everything

[circletimessquare]

i'll grant you all of your pluses, and a few more conjectures if you like. now listen to my one big fat negative, and understand that your pluses are outweighed by an order of magnitude:

it weakens faith in democracy. if my vote doesn't matter, because i'm a democrat in texas or a republican in new york, why vote? why consider my government to be a representative of my will?

a democracy is strong because it manufactures legitimacy. if the people believe the government acts in their interests, then there is social stability, and therefore happiness and prosperity.

to the extent that people dislike what their government does, if they believe that there is some "medicine" in the system which warps their will, meaning their will has not been adequately and fully expressed, they ar eunhappy, there is social instability, we all suffer for that

all of your "pluses" of the ec are aristocratic instincts of your own. you don't trust the popular will. which means you yourself have anti-democratic impulses. which means you are part of the problem

other strong-arm governments depend upon force to impose the will of an aristocracy, a "special" class, onto the will of the majority. this of course creates injustice and unhappiness

you need to reexamine your instincts. you are flawed, because you don't trust the will of the people. the will of the people is infallible, because there is no way you can morally or intellectually stand apart from the people and judge them, because there is no morally or intellectually valid point of view that stands apart from the people

close

[circletimessquare]

i actually favor a county-by-county approach. in new york state, guns should be illegal in manhattan, but should be legal in herkimer county in the adirondacks

of course, it would be impossible to enforce, so it doesn't matter

either rural folks have to suffer for the sake of urban folks, or urban folks have to suffer for the sake of rural folks. there are a lot more urban folks, and more and more every day. therefore, rural folks need to suffer for the sake of urban folks. currently, the opposite is true, and there are hundreds of deaths every year due to that injustice

freedom IS more important than life

[circletimessquare]

which is why i fight gun ownership, as the curtailment on our freedom that it is

i am motivated by the same principles as you. the difference between you and me is that gun ownership in your mind is joined at the hip with freedom. this is an absurdity

not all limits to your freedom are imposed by the state. drug addiction is a form of slavery. fear in urban communities by gun toting thugs is a form of slavery

the gun is a tool of slavery much more than it is a tool of freedom

that in your mind, gun ownership is so tightly wound up with the notion of freedom, is outright wrong, and sad

Re:News?

[Chris Tucker]

Hal, hate to be the one to tell you...

We Won. You Lost. Get Over It.

Because in a little over 30 days from now...

January 20, 2009, shortly after noon, upon the steps of Congress, in Washington, D.C.:

"I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. So help me God!"

Re:So all that is left.

[lwsimon]

Coward.

That last step's a doozy....

[argStyopa]

"Barack Obama Is One Step Closer To Being President"

Now if he can just clear that pesky 'American Citizenship' requirement.

AFAIK, McCain's citizenship was initially also questioned, but was resolved within a week when the McCain campaign released all relevant documents. Sadly, the Obama campaign has refused to do so, I genuinely don't know why. They don't want to credit the wingnuts with a response? True, I could understand that, but when there remain a number of valid questions about Obama's claimed citizenship, I'd hope that everyone would want to put these questions to rest ASAP:

- According to Obama's Kenyan Grandmother, and the Kenyan government, he was born in Kenya. Multiple other sources point to two different Hawaiian hospitals, and the campaign-supplied certificate has serious questions as to its provenance.
- The circumstances of his mother's precise status (wherever he happened to be born) and her ability to legally transfer citizenship to her son based on the law at the time of his birth, are certainly muddled.
- Subsequent questions of his claimed citizenship also shadow the discussion: what was his own claimed citizenship while he attended Harvard? When he traveled to Pakistan in 1981, he is recorded as having an Indonesian passport...a country which didn't allow dual citizenship.

And for those who'll aggressively mod me down 'troll' because they disagree, censorship != winning a debate. As Harvey Krumpet might point out: "fakt 48: fakts still exist even if they are ignored "

Re:That last step's a doozy....

[DragonWriter]

AFAIK, McCain's citizenship was initially also questioned, but was resolved within a week when the McCain campaign released all relevant documents.

This is false. Like Obama, McCain was challenged (since he wasn't actually born in the US, does not have Constitutional birthright citizenship, and is only arguably a citizen-by-right-of-birth due to retroactive legislation passed after he was born) in court, and the challenge thrown out by a federal trial court for lack of standing for those bringing the case. I believe the dismissal was appealed, but the issue is now moot.

The difference between McCain and Obama is that in Obama's case the law is not in dispute, the facts are in dispute and all of the official documents produced are on Obama's side. In McCain's case the facts were not in dispute, the law was in dispute, and what little precedent there is not particularly favorable to McCain.

According to Obama's Kenyan Grandmother, and the Kenyan government, he was born in Kenya. Multiple other sources point to two different Hawaiian hospitals, and the campaign-supplied certificate has serious questions as to its provenance.

The campaign-supplied certificate has been confirmed by the state government that issued it, and has even been confirmed as genuine by a number of right-wing websites. There is no serious dispute about its provenance.

The circumstances of his mother's precise status (wherever he happened to be born) and her ability to legally transfer citizenship to her son based on the law at the time of his birth, are certainly muddled.

Since he is documented as born in the US and there is no credible challenge to that, and the US Constitution makes any person born in the US a citizen, his mother's "ability to legally transfer citizenship" is a non-issue; it would only be an issue if he was born outside of the US.

Subsequent questions of his claimed citizenship also shadow the discussion

Subsequent questions of his claimed citizenship would be irrelevant to the question of whether or not he is a natural born citizen of the United States, even if they had any validity.

Re: Whose Suffering?

[znerk]

either rural folks have to suffer for the sake of urban folks, or urban folks have to suffer for the sake of rural folks. there are a lot more urban folks, and more and more every day. therefore, rural folks need to suffer for the sake of urban folks.

So, what you're saying, then, is that you support the tyranny of the majority?

So much for your "Low Budget HDV Filipino Horror Movie". The majority of us don't want to see it, so stop production. Immediately. You Filipinos will just have to suffer for the sake of the rest of us, so that we don't have to suffer through your crappy movie.

Oh, touched a nerve, did I? Good. Tyranny of the majority is never a good thing. Learn to live with, nay, even *love* your freedom.

In short, being *more free* is worth a little bloodshed. If the truth be told, I'd spill a little myself, to keep my freedoms, and the freedoms of my loved ones. Would you?