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Electoral College Elects Donald Trump As President (nbcnews.com)
mi writes: The drama is over, Donald J. Trump passed the 270 electoral votes necessary to become President. A few electors dissented, resulting in their prompt dismissal and replacement per their state's laws. Ironically, more dissenters turned on Clinton than on Trump... The sky may not be falling yet, but the Earth is already in peril.
Yet the media will spin like a top to call trump the next hitler and announce the apocalypse because he was elected. Dems lost because hillary sucks, period!
I fear the drama is just beginning.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
This story was submitted by mi, who is pretty much a partisan hack. It's written with little substance and is very misleading about the faithless electors. Although a couple of Democratic electors attempted to switch their vote to Sanders, that's not the main reason for faithless electors from that party. And two faithless Republican electors from Texas cast a single vote each for Kasich and Ron Paul. One of the faithless Democratic electors cast a protest vote because of the North Dakota pipeline. The others were actually casting votes for Republican candidates other than Trump to try to entice Republican electors to join them and send the election to the House of Representatives. That's why three Democratic faithless electors cast votes for Colin Powell. The story is so misleading and lacks so much substance that it's an embarrassment, even for Slashdot.
Yep, Trump is definitely going to be relying on the Anonymous Cowards of the nation to do his dirty work for him. This checks out.
She did win the popular vote though.
The popular vote is trivia. Neither side was trying to win the popular vote. They spent their time and money to maximize the electoral. If the popular was the goal then they would have spent their time and money very different and we would have a very different popular vote as a result. Focusing on the popular vote is like focusing on the fact that the losing team in a football game moved the ball more yards. Interesting but neither team was trying for that.
I voted for Johnson in a state where it didn't matter, but I wish I and most of the other Johnson voters had swallowed our pride and voted for Trump so he'd have his majority. Every passing day with every passing bit of left-wing craziness over Trump's win makes me that much more glad that Hillary lost. If her supporters are so bad-shit insane over a loss, I dread how they'd've behaved with a win.
She did win the popular vote though.
Yes, only in America can you win by 3 million votes and still somehow lose. Thanks, Electoral College!
Somehow? There is no mystery. She was not trying for the popular vote, both Hillary and Trump were allocating time and money for the electoral vote. If the popular vote were the goal they both would have allocated time and money very differently and that popular vote would have been very different. The current popular vote is a side effect, trivia.
Also its not the electoral college that is the problem. The Electoral College only has a small effect itself, a small bump due to the two electors every state gets that correspond to their Senators, the remaining number of electors corresponding to their House representation which is proportional to population. The real huge bump is due to the states going winner take all. That is a state problem, not a federal problem. Some states do proportional rather than winner take all. Two states?
My only hope is that he will do something that can get him impeached relatively quickly, before too much damage can be done.
Trump has already put a fail-safe in place for that. Unless someone really wants to see Mike Pence as president, they would do their very best to make sure that doesn't happen.
The mountains of madness have many little plateaus of sanity - Terry Pratchett.
I can only imagine the outcry, if HRC had won and the republicans were asking to ignore the votes of Americans, because they voted incorrectly. Seriously, the people who were honestly hoping that the electoral college voters would ignore the votes of the people of their states, and simply disenfranchise however many million voters it would take, just so they can get their way?
I personally think Trump will be a horrible, horrible president. I cannot imagine any good coming from his presidency. The world climate alone may never recover. My only hope is that he will do something that can get him impeached relatively quickly, before too much damage can be done. Having said that, I still cannot understand the thought process behind attempting to tell 50% of the country, "your vote doesn't count, unless you vote the way you are supposed to". If that actually happened, the utter and complete demise of any semblance of democracy in the USA would have happened, and there would either be a) a revolt, or b) a new, non-democratic country.
Can you imagine the outcry if China had hacked the RNC and tipped the election so that HCR won? Do you really think that all we'd have at this point would be a bipartisan call by the handful of remaining still rational Rep. and Dem. senators for action, a call that will come to nothing, and a few media personalities expressing 'concern'? We'd have a full scale armed uprising on our hans complete with convoys of camo coloured pickup trucks full of tacticool 2nd amendment people carrying tricked out M4s and AK-47s cruising through the streets and sweeping house to house looking for 'librul China lovin traitors'.
You are equally at fault. You should have elected literally any other candidate in the Democratic primary.
Somehow, viable Democrats (Bernie is really an Independent) seem to have stayed out of the primary this year. Its really strange, there was no Democratic incumbent running for re-election. There should have been a wide selection of viable candidates like in 2008, as happens all the time in non-incumbent years. But somehow, no big names but Hillary showed up. Yes there was the token opponent who mostly agreed with Hillary and said she would be a good President; and there was the Independent Bernie who re-registered to run as a Democrat. How was there not a contested field like in 2008?
Except that the whole point of the electoral college is that electors can block the winner if they don't like the result. If you take faithless electors out of the equation, then there's no longer any point to having an electoral college.
Obama weaponized the IRS against his foes, he expanded all the spying regimes, started killing US citizens with drones in deliberately targeted attacks, and prosecuted more leakers than ever. Inasmuch as this is the most transparent administration ever, we have Wikileaks to thank for that.
What kind of fake news have you been watching, CNN?
Also, Democrats seem to like the idea of a limited federal government again.
"His name was James Damore."
Um, who do you think won the popular vote?
Nobody, because there is no "popular vote" for President of the US.
"Popular vote" is a fiction invented by those who are unhappy that their candidate lost the election, or by those who won and want to claim some "huge mandate from the public" to do something. The rest of us know what it takes to win.
It is ridiculous to assume that the "popular vote" would be the same were it the actual system in use to elect the President, and that's why it is ridiculous to assume it means anything when it is not. If the voters (and candidates) operated under a "popular vote" system, the results could be, and probably would be, very much different. There are too many instances of people who don't bother voting because they know their state will go to the "other person". For example, if you live in California why bother voting for a Republican president when you know that the Democrat is going to win anyway? Many of those non-votes would have voted had "popular vote" been the rule of the day, and it is unlikely that the California statewide vote total would have been as lopsided as it was. Or maybe it would be. That's the point -- you can't know until it happens, and it didn't happen.
When I think about this election. I can not help but think of Issac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy.. And the various eras of leadership and government the foundation went through.
;)
Maybe we are transitioning from the era of the modern profession elite career politician (which I think may have started with Kennedy). And now it has ended with poor corrupt incompetent status quo leadership. Ending with presidents, Clinton, Bush and Obama. They were not bad presidents, they just were not very good at the job.
To the new era of Corporate Business Tycoons (no elite political background). But (I hope) strong leadership and competence. Maybe the next 50 years will be a succession of Business Tycoons from both political parties. And in 50+ years Business Tycoons will be the corrupt incompetent status quo. And something new will arise.
But that will be for future generations
We can not force the rest of the world to not emit CO2. The best way to stop them is to make renewable/less polluting power less expensive than coal. In California, we have drought - which is famous for lots of sun and few clouds. Think we can find a better use of land than growing almond trees?
Once we perfect solar, we can bankrupt Texas dirty manufacturing with power that literally falls on us for free from the sky. In the process, we are going to bring lots of jobs and revenue into the state and build up technology export industry for the rest of the world.
Wallowing in self pity over Trump is not solving any problems. Even with Hillary, we would have hard time convincing China, India and Russia to do much about greenhouse gases. Anyone who claims want to save the Earth needs to actually get their hands dirty.
a. Bullshit. The IRS went after a few Right wing 'nonprofits' because they were so obviously political they were easy pickings for lazy auditors. The left doesn't do that because there's a multi-billion dollar media machine that savages them (fox news, briebart, etc, etc)
b. So what? Every president expands the spying regimes. I don't like it, and fuck if I'll defend it, but if you want to get away from that crap then your only way out is to take away the _reason_ people are spying: money. We need this spy network to keep tabs on terrorists. We have terrorists because we have to meddle in other countries affairs so we can all have personal automobiles that guzzle gas. Build a real public transit system. Start up a UBI program so we're not at each other's throats all the time. Get some God Damned Worker Solidarity for Christ's sake and stop letting the mega corps pick you apart like that snake picture of the old colonies.
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