Slashdot Mirror
Barack Obama Retains US Presidency
Fox News, NBC, and CNN have called the U.S. election for incumbent Barack Obama. Of the so-called 'battleground states,' Obama carried Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire, which, along with all of the solidly Democrat-leaning states, was enough to push him beyond the 270 required for victory. You can check this chart to see the full list of states that have currently been called, and by which news networks. The NY Times has an excellent interactive map showing all election results updated in real time, as does CNN. It's currently projected that the Republicans will retain control of the House of Representatives, and the Democrats will retain control of the Senate.
No more
Don't worry, Republican friends, Mitt will just claim he wasn't actually running for President anyway.
Not really. Two sources of data I user are electionprojection.com and electoral-vote.com. One is run by a liberal, the other by a conservative, but both are data driven based on several polling services. Both has Obama winning 303 electoral votes, Both sources have predicted correctly each state, and I see the possibility of two states going against their prediction (Florida, they predicted for Romney, Va they predicted for Obama). Based on the polls, this election has really been over for a couple months. So, only a media wanting a major even was predicting a long, drawn out affair.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
God bless America. Or flying Spaghetti monster. Or random evolutionary processes. At least it wasn't that mutant.
Now, we have to:
1. Declare a national holiday so all can vote on a day off to eliminate the lines.
2. Get rid of the electoral college.
3. Get Congress to override Citizen United.
4. Take the money out of the electoral system.
But is there any difference ?
Yes.
Now my turn for a question: do you pay the slightest attention to what our politicians do?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Romney could probably have gotten the Republican nomination fair-and-square, and if he had done it that way a bunch of people wouldn't have been alienated and abandoned the Republican party. Instead his people cheated blatantly and publicly and drove away, not just a few hundred thousand hardcore Ron Paul supporters, but a bunch of non-Paulite Rs. He lost FAR more than the margin by which he lost some key states in the general election.
The behavior of his people in the primary/caucus period proved they couldn't be trusted with government power. So they got what they deserved. And I'm proud to have been a part of it.
Take that, Neocons!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The electoral college is fine. The problem is the Winner Takes All system. The founding fathers never intended that.
And both seem to want to increase government surveillance and trade freedom for safety.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Then you'll see a huge difference.
In your opinion, do you think an Al Gore administration would have led us into war with Iraq?
Oh well. I guess I'll go watch Fox News slip into a channel-wide suicidal depression.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If they can't beat Obama in this economy, with his results, they really need to stare at their navels and figure out why people hate them so much. They can start with GWB, one of the worst presidents in history, move on to what they think of rape, and then figure how much they need the religious nutjobs that forms their so called base. Their anti-science, anti-women BS is driving the country away from them.
I'll admit I voted for Rmoney. Not because I like that finger in the wind flip flopper, but I think Obama's policies are disastrous.
Please, let's stop pretending that Bush started anything.
1) He started the invasion of Iraq.
2) He started torture as official US policy.
His predecessors were hardly any better.
After World War 2, the USA convicted several Japanese soldiers of water boarding American and Allied prisoners of war. The US government hanged them for that crime.
George W. Bush will forever be known as the President who first sanctioned torture in the USA.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Also, to repeat it, for no apparent reason, 11 weeks from now.
This person does not speak for us. Harper is... uncomfortably far right for many Canadians. And yet still sits to the left of Obama on many issues. He only appears deranged and extreme compared to our regular variety of center-left or outright left politician.
Well, no, he is a little deranged all on his own. But still, we'll take him over damn near anyone you could send us in return. Should only be another election or two before his party collapses on itself and we can move on.
Mitts strategy was to rely on moderate Republicans (who vote for the party and what it ideally stands for, even if it falls short) and appease the far right, in an effort to push him over the line. Essentially playing the numbers game (Hey, it made him rich!).
The Republicans didn't bother trying to engage broader America. This is now proven to be a loser move (and demographics are against this). So: Is the Republican party going to move towards the centre or go further right? A reagan-esque war is about to happen in the GOP.
...Thankyou American voting public.
Yeah, Clinton with his 3.5% unemployment, 3 years of balanced budgets and 8 years averaging 3.7% GDP growth really sucked. I'm glad those days are gone.
[/sarcasm]
At lest we wouldn't still be stuck there a decade later. When Democrats go to war, they tend to strike surgically based on the advice of expert strategists who actually went to school to learn how to do these things. They don't tend to crow about mission accomplished before we've even gotten started.
The electoral college is necessary to balance power between large and small states.
No it's not. That was never the purpose. The electoral college was needed for southern states to get some credit for slaves that they wouldn't get if there was a direct election of president. (See, for instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States).) Besides that, the effect of the electoral college is to put the focus on a few swing states. No one cares about CA and TX and numerous other states because those states will reliably go for a particular side.
Fuck man, I would have campaigned for him....
Maine and Washington (and possibly Maryland) legalized gay marriage. Minnesota had a referendum to ban it, results still inconclusive.
Massachusetts, Washington and Arkansas (and probably Colorado) legalized marijuana. Montana "reformed medical marijuana". Oregon had a referendum to legalize, which failed.
The Massachusetts assisted-suicide referendum is still undecided, but seems to have failed from early numbers
Florida rejected a referendum to limit "Obamacare" ("prevents penalties for not purchasing health care coverage in order to comply with federal health care reforms"), but Alabama approved a similar referendum. That will probably lead to the Supreme Court as a states-rights conflict.
California had a referendum to ban the death penalty, which failed.
Finally, Puerto Rico had a referendum to decide whether to pursue statehood, leave the union, or to remain a non-state commonwealth. While this could be one of the biggest actual changes of the election, I can't find any results as of yet.
Can you say Telecom explosion? Clinton prospered because our ability communicate went supernova.
Good-bye
You seem to be mixing up Afghanistan with Iraq. It is understandable, because they speak foreign languages in both countries.
Iraq had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden and 9/11. It was all about the imaginary weapons of mass destruction.
but not to make Obama look bad. They should obstruct his "agenda" because it is the wrong direction for the country.
Yes, it would be bad form for the country to help veterans find jobs. I am sure every single one of the republicans that voted against this bill had also opposed the unfunded wars that created these veterans in the first place
Oh, wait...
You had a choice: http://www.jillstein.org/issues
"FINANCIAL REFORM
* Break up the oversized banks that are "too big to fail," starting with Bank of America.
* Create a Corporation for Economic Democracy, a new federal corporation (like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) to provide publicity, training, education, and direct financing for cooperative development and for democratic reforms to make government agencies, private associations, and business enterprises more participatory.
* End bailouts for the financial elite and use the FDIC resolution process for failed banks to reopen them as public banks where possible after failed loans and underlying assets are auctioned off.
* Bring monetary policy under democratic control by prohibiting private banks from creating money, thus restoring government's Constitutional authority.
* Let pension funds be managed by boards controlled by workers, not corporate managers.
* Regulate all financial derivatives and require them to be traded on open exchanges.
* Require banks to use honest bookkeeping so that toxic assets cannot be hidden or sold to unsuspecting persons.
* Restore the Glass-Steagall separation of depository commercial banks from speculative investment banks.
* Democratize monetary policy to bring about public control of the money supply and credit creation. This means nationalizing the private bank-dominated Federal Reserve Banks and placing them under a Federal Monetary Authority within the Treasury Department.
* Establish federal, state, and municipal publicly-owned banks that function as non-profit utilities and focus on helping people, not enriching themselves."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
After World War 2, the USA convicted several Japanese soldiers of water boarding American and Allied prisoners of war. The US government hanged them for that crime.
US justice consistently ruled waterboarding a crime from the time of the Spanish-American War until this century. We have convicted foreign troops for doing it to ours, our own troops for doing it to foreigners, and even civilian law enforcement agents for doing it to criminals or suspected criminals.
But no one has the political courage to slap a President and Vice President in prison for it. We'll impeach a president for lying about an illicit blowjob, but not for authorizing war crimes.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's a shame we learned so little from Vietnam. Yes, I was there in '68.
How do you calculate that? In CA it's about 630,000 people per electoral vote and in WI it's 570,000 people per electoral vote. That's a 1.1 ratio, not a 3.8 ratio.
No fair, my post used actual numbers and yours are complete baloney.
... that would be the appearance of safety. I don't think anything that has been done has actually added any significant safety.
LBJ made a grave mistake in Vietnam. Now look at who seems to have learned from that mistake and who still wants to blunder in against the best advice available.
And both seem to want to increase government surveillance and trade freedom for safety.
They're trading our freedom for something, but it's not safety (as Bruce Schneier points out on a regular basis).
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
LBJ just escalated a policy that had been set in place long before by Truman in '49. The presumption by Truman, then supported by Eisenhower, was that a domino effect of communist revolutions across Indochina could lead to a Trotskyite victory for communism over the long run (the so-called 'domino theory'). Going back to all the way '49 the United States sent 'advisors' and significant funds and weapons to French controlled Vietnam to sustain operations against communist guerrillas.
Thus, the foreign policy of the United States was to prevent a communist win by engaging in proxy wars rather than direct conflict. But the French lost control and pulled out, ultimately losing Algeria as well. The French gave up on colonialism as a result, but this left the United States to sustain cold war operations in Indochina. Eisenhower increased the 'advisor count' (special operations troops) as a result and Kennedy continued the policy until his assassination.
LBJ just escalated a longstanding policy supported by both Democrats and Republicans back when the country had a unified foreign policy across the parties. And you'll notice that contrary to his campaign pledge to 'end the Vietnam war', Nixon escalated as well. Who just happened to have been Eisenhower's Vice President.
Opposition to the Vietnam war in the Democratic Party in the late sixties and early seventies was only seen in a minority wing of the party that had little policy control at the top. By the time popular majorities opposed the war, Democrats then just rode the populist wave with anti-vietnam war rhetoric. But they had been staunch supporters of the policy from the start of the cold war. Just as had been Republicans.
You know why they took over, right? When Obama won, the *only* fired up element in the Republican party was the extreme Right and we all know why that was. They called themselves the Tea Party under the guise that they wanted lower taxes, even though taxes are already historically low. When someone finally told them that, they decided they were the low debt party (ominously silent while the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were charged on Uncle Sam's card and ignoring the fact that the Bush tax cuts were creating trillions more in debt).
But, since they were the only ones fired up and everyone else in the Republican party was depressed (even mainstream guys like Tucker Carlson were starting to call themselves Libertarian to wash the stink of the Bush years off them). So, even though the Republicans treated their far right wing like the racist, slightly imbalanced uncle who came over once a year for Thanksgivings (polite nods and half-hearted chuckles at his jokes), they decided to give him the reigns.
And, when that happened, they got even MORE fired up. No more being forced to sit on the porch and watch the party from the outside. Now, they had access! And, the more access they got, the more fired up they got. They started winning elections, getting seats on committees, and soon built up enough power to start making demands! They weren't just coming over for Thanksgiving, now they had a room upstairs and their buddies were coming over every night to get wasted and talk about how much the hated that Mexican family across the street.
Now, the Republican party is stuck. They've given the extreme Right so much power and access that they're entrenched. You can't ask them to leave and they've been legitimized for so long you can't call them wrong. Nothing to do but ride it out and hope their rowdy parties don't burn your house down, before they get bored and decide to leave for good.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Either party is deeply toxic towards America with their own unique blend of anti-freedom, anti-citizen agendas.
FTFY. Replacing the word citizen with consumer in public discourse is one of the toxic things they have done.
one that wants to make the country beholden to christian interests (pretty much above all, other than the almight dollar).
the other is nearly neutral (as neutral as you can get these days) on the subject.
in obama's speech, he talked a lot about inclusion.
in romney's speech, he said he'd 'pray' for the other side.
if you don't get that they are *worlds* apart, you have your head hidden somewhere dark.
we got the right guy. luckily, we avoided giving mandate to the american taliban party.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Police/TSA officers are more of a threat to US citizens compared to Osama ever was.
Bush wasn't afraid of a quagmire. He respected the UN. The UN mandate only authorized us to eject Iraq from Kuwait, nothing more. So that's all he felt we could do. That was the reason he did not come to the defense of Iraqis rebelling against Saddam after the war. He didn't protect them until the UN authorized the no-fly zones over Northern and Southern Iraq.
Bush Jr. OTOH decided the UN was unimportant and invaded Iraq on his own.
I saw that too. McCain did multiple appearances on The Daily Show over the years. Before his nomination, he sounded sane and thinking and even justified some of the "maverick" label he had acquired. After he "won" the nomination, the money people of the RNC completely hosed him. They told him what to say, what to wear, what to eat, what to think, and none of it was him. It was some neocon wetdream that is such a tiny minority it continues to astonish me how much power they've acquired over the Republican party, at all levels.
We know where that power comes from, too: money. There are a few completely insane exceedingly rich people who basically control the Republican party lock, stock, and barrel, because of their money. They "donate", they call the shots. And they're NOT conservative. They're ridiculously regressive. Conservatives like to keep things more or less the way they are. That's the definition of the word. Don't rock the boat if the boat is floating and making progress. The people that control the Republican party are anything but conservative. They want to change everything, starting with Roe vs. Wade and working their way down a very long list that would push us back to as close to pre-Civil War society as makes no difference. Even further, in some cases, to pre-Revolutionary War. I swear their ultimate goal is to engender a literal American aristocracy, with themselves as the aristocrats. It's sick, and it's un-American, and they should be stopped.
It isn't the terrorists that will bring down the US...it will be our mismanagement of the economy, and I'm afraid we as a country put a few nails in the coffin with the re-election of this guy. Sad day for the US....
I don't see it. It took Bush's economic policies (tax cuts for the rich, getting our country attacked by not listening to the previous adminiatration or his own FBI agents), and starting two very expensive wars to nearly bankrupt us. Bush went into office with a balanced budget and a booming economy, and left it with the largest defecit in US history and the economy in ruins. You expected Obama to fix in four years what Bush took eight to destroy? Are you mad?
When your wife leaves you broke and in debt, what do you do? You cut spending as much as you can, get a second job if you have to (increased revenues), and guess what? You're going to go even deeper in dept before you can get out of it. You gotta eat. That's where the country is now.
Unemployment is lower than when Obama took office, there are far more jobs available than when he took office (Bush is still history's only President to leave office with fewer jobs than when he was elected), the Iraq war is over and Afghanistan winding down. Things are getting better, fool. But Romney's plan is to go back to the Bush policies. All I can say is WTF?!?
Free Martian Whores!
I don't think anything that has been done has actually added any significant safety.
How about ending our presence in Iraq? Do you think that has anything to do with your safety? It does. Allow me to explain.
Check out this wiki page. Give it a good once-over, then let's talk about the contents.
You'll find that a good base number for civilian deaths in Iraq is a little over 100,000. That seems to be the average agreed upon number. We'll go with the AP number, 110,600 deaths. AP is reliable, and it's a decent average for the most conservative estimates for loss of life. Now note the time period. "March 2003 to April 2009." That's 6 years and one month. Are you with me so far?
On 9/11, the terrorist attacks accounted for the loss of 2,977 lives. Now let's look at those numbers and see what they mean.
110600 / 2977 is 37.15. So what that means is that we have killed 37 times more civilians than the 9/11 attackers did. The 9/11 victims and the civilians in Iraq are alike - all innocent people that did not deserve to die.
March 2003 to April 2009 is a period spanning 6 years and 1 month. That's 73 months. And 73 / 37.15 is 1.96. That's almost exactly two months. That means that what we've done to Iraq is like a 9/11 style attack every two months for over six years. Remember how pissed off we were after 9/11? Imagine that every two months for six years running.
110,000 families missing a loved one. A child they raised, a mother they loved, a father that will never come home. 110,000 families that have a good solid reason to absolutely poisonously passionately hate our guts.
Still feel safe? It took only 19 guys to carry out the 9/11 attacks.
My point is that it absolutely matters who is President. Decisions will be made that will affect your safety directly. You need someone at the helm that makes good decisions.
It matters. A lot.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.