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And the winner of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, as reported by the major mainstream media outlets is Donald Trump. It has also been reported that Hillary Clinton called President-elect Donald Trump to concede.
Electoral vote count (so far): 279 for Donald Trump, 218 for Hillary Clinton. 270 electoral votes are needed to win.
Popular vote: 57,227,164 votes (48.0%) for Donald Trump, 56,279,305 votes (47.2%) for Hillary Clinton. Update: Now it is closer to 59,085,795 votes (47.5%) for Donald Trump and 59,236,903 votes (47.6%) for Hillary Clinton.
Yell, scream, gnash teeth... but please keep it civil.
Results at CNN, NYT, FiveThirtyEight, Wikipedia.
takyon: Republicans have retained control of the House and Senate.
Here's some market news:
Dow futures plunge nearly 750 points as investors warily eye electoral map
Asian markets plummet on likelihood of Trump victory
Bitcoin price soars as Trump pulls ahead
Opinion: How to profit from a Donald Trump victory
Ballot measure results will be covered in an upcoming story. Some initial results can be found at Ballotpedia and CNN.
[TMB Note: Stop breaking stuff, cmn32480]
(Score: 2) by Sarasani on Thursday November 10 2016, @12:57AM
But if there is any place in the world that feels forelorn and forgotten, there is still a chance that an American will lay down his or her life to protect them because it is the right thing to do.
Hold on there cowboy. How many sons of the upper crust (politicians, the rich, etc) end up as cannon fodder? More often than not the people who end up as cannon fodder will do so more out of necessity rather than conviction. After all, why is it that army recruiters do so much better in economically depressed areas of the country? I don't think for a minute that any significant percentage of US soldiers signed up to help the oppressed in overseas countries. On the contrary, the vast majority have no clue whatsoever about why they're being sent into those places. Do you really think that the average 19 year old, barely an adult still, and generally having much more interest in drinking beer and getting his dick wet than geo-political issues, is going to willingly put his life on the line because he wants to help some poor sod in a country that he may not even be able to point out on a map? A lot of them end up scratching their collective heads as why they were ever sent there in the first place, and why so many of their friends ended up dead.
I'm not making assumptions about the character of the soldiers (I''m sure there's some fine examples among them), but I'm also not going to romanticize the reasons for people signing up. I think that a lot of them are being tricked into a glorified version of what the army is all about and that politicians particularly will eagerly abuse the bad situations that a lot of these soldiers found themselves before they signed up. Heck, half the time (perhaps even all of the time?) politicians delude the rest of the populace into going to war in the first place. I vividly remember the non stop lies and deceit about the reasons for going to war in Iraq. Where are those WMDs again? And instead of finding WMDs, we created a massive vacuum that gave birth to Islamic State. And so this never ending story of geo-political elitist power grabbing bullshit goes on and on and on.
and no European country will ever send her sons to fight for anything that does not benefit their own particular empire
Even if this were true, do you really think this to be any different for the US? When is the last time that the US went to war for reasons other than to protect, or advance, its own self interest?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday November 10 2016, @04:50PM
The Gulf War? We didn't keep Kuwait for ourselves afterward, nor did we Iraq. We stuck strictly to the UN mandate.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Sarasani on Friday November 11 2016, @02:51AM
But the Gulf War was all about the flow of oil, wasn't it?
(Score: 2) by Sarasani on Friday November 11 2016, @07:42AM
Perhaps a better example would have been the peacekeeping efforts in Somalia (UNITAF/UNOSOM). And while the US played a significant part in that peacekeeping effort, so did other nations (such as Pakistan, which contributed over 7,000 troops).