The Exit Poll: Islamic Shock and the Kenyan Communist All-Stars!

[RottingCorpse]

NBC just called it for Obama.

[monkey!]

My site as well.

[monkey!]

275 - 203 is a big win for Obama, right?

[RottingCorpse]

We'll see how it pans out by the AM. Right now Romney is winning the popular vote even hough Obama seems set to handily win the electoral college.

[Reginald McGraw]

And the time for horn tooting is at hand!

I don't see any way Romney can win.

Could he be close in the popular vote? Yes. Could he win the electoral vote? It's not even really close. If Romney wins Florida (he may) and Ohio (he won't), big electoral hauls, he will still likely lose the election.

[nacho]

Thank god.

Hate to see that close popular vote, though...

[nacho]

So the big news is that PR went for statehood.

While 53 percent of reported voters (75,188) chose to not continue their 114-year-old relationship with the U.S., 47 percent (67,304) favored the status quo.

But it was the response to the second question that got everyone's attention: 65 percent of voters favored statehood, followed by 31 percent favoring sovereign free association and only four percent wanting independence.

So now they go to Congress. But the road there looks like it's pretty clear. So, in four years... A new state and a new flag!

http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/us51star.html

[RottingCorpse]

Isn't there a lot of political pushback against a 51st state? My understanding is that both parties are fairly invested in the 100 member Senate with the Veep as a tiebreaker.

[nacho]

Isn't there a lot of political pushback against a 51st state? My understanding is that both parties are fairly invested in the 100 member Senate with the Veep as a tiebreaker.

Both sides support it. Or, at least, they've said that they do. That may change once the petition is real... It took Alaska and Hawaii 10 years of fighting to get in. But Obama and Romney both made a point of saying that they would make it happen in the next 4 years if a majority of Puerto Ricans voted it in.

Now...what is a majority? Obama may hesitate because it wasn't very overwhelming. Even more complicated, the pro-statehood governor got voted out and the anti-statehood guy got voted in. So that may be an excuse.

But, in the past, once we get to this point there's nowhere to go but forward.

Don't get confused by our local statehood woes. DC's problem is much more complicated.

[RottingCorpse]

Yeah, I guess I'm caught up in a "Taxation without Representation" mentality.

[nacho]

DC's largest hurdle is that the Federal government cannot be beholden to a state. Nor should a state be beholden to the feds (they would be DC's #1 employer by a wide margin). So the only real options for DC are to devolve it back to Maryland and keep the federal land as an independent district, or let it be a state with roughly a third of it staying behind as a smaller version of DC. And those aren't real options.

Thanks to the scourge of gentrification, though, it's all rapidly becoming a moot point. The DC natives are becoming Virginians and Marylanders anyway (which helps your state turn blue)!