Barack Obama Retains US Presidency 1576
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.
Re:Kill the Electoral College please... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Kill the Electoral College please... (Score:5, Informative)
nope, it doesn't require a constitutional amendment. All it needs is this:
National Popular Vote Interstate Compact [wikipedia.org]
California has already enacted it into law. All it needs is more states to ratify it until enough states are on aboard to total 270 electoral votes.
Re:GWB 2.0 (Score:2, Informative)
No they did not. Water boarding was listed as activities supporting torture but none of them were convicted for water boarding anyone. You will not find one charge of water boarding against any of the japs or germans convicted of post facto laws
Re:Tweedledee won ! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Look at who they appoint to the SCOTUS. (Score:5, Informative)
The original intent of the founding fathers...
The founding fathers.. bla bla bla... Maybe you should read some history about the Whiskey Rebellion and the original Aliens and Seditions act. It took a lot of yelling and screaming to get the bill of rights into the constitution. And it took another 75 years to abolish slavery. There was no absence of aristocracy amongst the founding fathers. Not a poor man in the bunch. The government still maintains sovereign immunity, amongst other perks none of us are permitted. I would wager that they would think we have far too much freedom.
Re:Kill the Electoral College please... (Score:5, Informative)
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) [wikipedia.org].) 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.
Re:Look at who they appoint to the SCOTUS. (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. It occurred to me the other day: Did the Founding Fathers intend for there to be so many exceptions to the plainly written rules in the Constitution? I mean, take the 4th amendment. It says right there, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." I don't see the part where it says, "Except when we're crossing the border or getting on an airplane." So why is it that the DHS can treat us any old way they want to, just because we're crossing back into this country or traveling somewhere?
This is just one example among many.
Unfortunately, they stuck that word "unreasonable" in there. All you have to do is assert reasonableness, and the whole thing goes away.
Re:Tweedledee won ! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Other interesting election results: (Score:5, Informative)
Here in CA we also had a referendum to reform the three strikes law so that people with minor third offenses don't face life in prison. That has passed by a wide margin.
Re:Tweedledee won ! (Score:2, Informative)
Really?
I have not heard Obama saying that he wants to legislate women's vaginas and the choices they want to make with them because of some popular mythology.
It's something I take seriously, so please enlighten me. Explain one policy that was motivated purely by religious views. Socialism is not generally a purely religious platform either. You can be atheist and still be a socialist.
Re:Look at who they appoint to the SCOTUS. (Score:5, Informative)
If Benjamin Franklin knew about the state of the world today there would've no second amendment and healthcare for all.
It has nothing to do with the state of the world, it's America we are talking about.
It's the current state of America that sux to the max.
Even the tiny Singapore fairs much better, in comparison.
Caning, death penalties, CCTV trained at peoples homes to catch them dropping litter?
Don't you mean the Senate? (Score:5, Informative)
The electoral college is necessary to balance power between large and small states. Civics education in this country is going down the pooper.
I think you're confusing the Senate with the Electoral College. The distribution of electors by state within the electoral college is determined by each state's population. So no, it does not keep any kind of "balance" between large and small states. What it does is keep control of the federal government directly at the State level. The States get to choose who is President of the US, and thus they get to decide what method to use to represent the popular vote of their citizens. A couple states (Maine and Nebraska) are more "democratic" than others, in that they split their electoral votes by district, thus it is possible for some of the state's votes to go to one candidate, and some to go to another.
But the spirit of the electoral college is simply that of the union of separate States into a federal government. When is the last time you, personally, got to vote on ANYTHING to do with the federal government? Never. However, the representatives you elected for your state and congressional district do get to vote. The electoral college is in this same spirit, in that we "elect" individuals to represent us at the federal level.
So why is the electoral college separate from, say, the House of Representatives (IE why doesn't the house decide the president since we chose them to represent us already, and they are even allocated by population just like the electors)? To maintain proper separation of the 3 parts of our government. The electoral college is unique and independent of the legislative and judicial branches, as it should be to maintain balance of power.
Not that I'm an advocate of the electoral system as it stands, but I can see how the concept applies to a union of individual states. Personally, I'm tired of feeling that my vote doesn't count, because it was trumped by urban voters in a few areas of dense population 400 miles from where I live. They have different needs, concerns, demographics, etc, and are not representative of those who live in my region of the state, yet only their voice is heard when it comes to electing a president.
Re:.... and the US deficit continues to balloon (Score:5, Informative)
Can you put two and two together looking at this graph [cbpp.org]?
(Numbers and graph Courtesy of the non-partisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities).
Re:Tweedledee won ! (Score:4, Informative)
What do you call it when more than one bad person cooperates on an agenda that they both find mutually beneficial? Hint, it starts with a 'c'.
Whether or not there was a true false flag operation is highly debatable. No seriously, it is.
What is not debatable is that there are clear and ever present "grand" conspiracies by those in power. Government contracts, copyright protections, intelligence community tools, military industrial complex profits, bail out corruption, LIBOR manipulation, quasi-gerrymandering via voter suppression, red light camera manipulation, mortgage fraud, rubber-stamped-evictions-via-deeds-of-trust-abuse, and on and on, and on, and on.
If there was more than one person in the government that knew of an imminent attack and deliberately obfuscated, delayed, or otherwise covered up the facts to allow it, since it would benefit certain interested parties financially, or with increased power over people, it was a conspiracy.
Considering how massively successful the last 10 years has been in eliminating civil rights, increasing and strengthening Constitution Free Zones, "educating and training" the public to accept violent intrusions into the privacy and restrictions on their freedom of movement, and the siphoning off of ludicrous amounts of wealth to the hands of the few elite.......... ... ummm..... yeah.... I am going to stick with conspiracy.
Either that, or we are just really some unlucky bastards that kicked puppies and drowned kittens in past lives.
Re:Kill the Electoral College please... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Tweedledee won ! (Score:4, Informative)
You can only disprove an absolute statement that way. I am aware of exceptions so I deliberately chose the weaker statement with the word tend for that reason.
Re:Tweedledee won ! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Tweedledee won ! (Score:5, Informative)
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 [schneier.com] points out on a regular basis).
Re:Tweedledee won ! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Romney COULD have won it. (Score:2, Informative)
Re sig: "Government "economic stimulus" programs destroy more jobs than they create." Can you present concrete evidence of this?
Depends on what you would accept as "proof".
Consider this article: "Obama's Economists: 'Stimulus' Has Cost $278,000 per Job." [weeklystandard.com] No doubt that's an underestimate, too, but let's take it as accurate.
As I read it, that means: For each job "created or saved" about five were destroyed. That's because the median income for the period was about a fifth of that number, and the value of the money spent "creating or saving" those jobs was sucked out of the private sector, thus destroying about that number of jobs.
The value was sucked in one of about three ways: Direct taxation, currency inflation (diluting the existing money in private hands), or borrowing from those with money to invest - in competition with other borrowers who would have used it to create actual productive economic activity. That third one costs several times, by the way: Once when the investment money is pulled out of the economy initially, again when it must be paid off out of tax money, along with years of interest.
A Keynsian would prattle about the "multiplier effect" of the created jobs creating more. But the destroyed jobs also have the same multiplier effect, so the created/destroyed ratio remains the same if multiplier effect jobs are included (and the total job loss is far higher than the direct job loss minus the direct job creation.)
For a classic explanation of how this happens see the broken window falacy [wikipedia.org].
Re:Look at who they appoint to the SCOTUS. (Score:2, Informative)
No single Party should have the majority of the House/Senate. I think every Party should not be able to legislate "on their own", there should ALWAYS be a debate about laws and regulations, especially between opposing views. I believe that in that proverbial middle ground lies the best chance for a country to move forward. Any country that considers itself democratic.
Re:Tweedledee won ! (Score:4, Informative)
You caught that didn't you?
It was deliberate. There are no citizens anymore. Just resource units they like to refer to as "consumers".
Re:Excellent (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Tweedledee won ! (Score:5, Informative)
1- Because the majority of the current deficits of the last 4 years were due to the wars and the Bush tax cut. Thus, he is not responsible for their effects. He tried to stop both, but met with limited success. Further, another good portion of the deficits were due to reduced tax revenue and increased mandatory spending because of the recession that appeared before he took office. Gonna have deficits during a recession.
2- Federal discretionary spending, which is spending that isn't forced by some law requiring it, is flat or down for Obama's term.
3- He will continue the hard work of helping the country build growth and jobs, and no doubt continue reducing any spending he can while trying to get the Bush tax cuts cancelled.
You talk about facts, but you don't seem to actually know any.
Re:Look at who they appoint to the SCOTUS. (Score:4, Informative)
If you leave the US you won't have to pay US taxes.
Nope, the US is about the only country in the world that taxes non-residents the same as residents.
Not exactly. If you are a non-resident US citizen and you earn your income from a foreign company, then you get an exemption on this foreign-earned income up to $95K a year. So, you only pay US taxes if you make more than that amount.
http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/Foreign-Earned-Income-Exclusion [irs.gov]
Re:Look at who they appoint to the SCOTUS. (Score:3, Informative)
I hardly think that Corporal punishment, Death penalty, Surveillance or even being held without a fair trial are things any US citizen can comment on at this junction in time. As long as y'all have 12.000+ deaths due to handgun violence per annum, still execute more prisoners per year than any other country on the planet, run camps like Guantanamo and invade the odd nation for spurious reasons, y'all can't really bitch about Singapore, now can you?
Having said that, I am a citizen of the Netherlands. We've been known to be a wee more liberal and less violent than the US for a while now.