RTFA: http://rtfa.net/2008/11/03/obama-wins-karl-rove-ex…

As of 12:32 AM, just 30 minutes after Obama’s acceptance speech, I have to revisit Karl Rove’s eerily prescient estimation of the way this country was going to vote.

Assuming every uncalled state goes to McCain, Rove will have hit it DEAD ON. +/- 0.

We can only conclude that this outcome is not a surprise to certain groups.

Four more years! Four more years!

RTFA: http://news.aol.com/elections/2008/president

…if you’re looking to catch the presidential election results live, AOL has one aggregator that you can watch.

RTFA: http://www.economist.com/vote2008/?mode=descriptio…

The Economist has redrawn the electoral map to give all 195 of the world’s countries (including the United States) a say in the election’s outcome. As in America, each country has been allocated a minimum of three electoral-college votes with extra votes allocated in proportion to population size. With over 6.5 billion people enfranchised, the result is a much larger electoral college of 9,875 votes. But rally your countrymen-a nation must have at least ten individual votes in order to have its electoral-college votes counted.

There are few countries whose votes in the Global Electoral College are a foregone conclusion. So the winner is unlikely to be decided by a small number of “swing countries”. Rather, they will have to cobble together a coalition of small, medium and large nations. (A campaign stop in Beijing is recommended, as well as a tour of Africa.) Voting in the Global Electoral College will close at midnight London time on November 1st, when the candidate with most electoral-college votes will be declared the winner.

Great concept! …but the results are absolutely shocking:

Listen: I’m a registered Republican. I voted for Ron Paul in the primaries, and as we all know, he’s advocated a very isolationist approach. I donated to the McCain campaign, and if you’ve been following RTFA recently, you have probably noticed an endless stream of articles that are critical of McCain. This is because I’m totally angry, disenfranchised, and betrayed by the GOP. I will be infuriated if the GOP manages to steal this election, because they don’t represent Republicans, they don’t represent Americans, and they don’t represent Humanity, at large.

Demonstrations like this map from The Economist give me a moment’s pause. In spite of my Ron Paul endorsement, the rest of the world DOES factor into my calculations, and I advocate for a realistic, gradual shift in focus. There must be a transition from the hard-line, idealistic orthodoxy that has caused the US to exert itself (rather, over-exert) in the affairs of too many foreign nations. Paradoxically, it would appear that I agree with the global consensus, and I conclude that the rest of the world doesn’t want the US in their business.

The essence of the paradox is this: I will listen to the world; it tells me that we should ignore the world. Of course, this is a dramatic over-simplification, but the US must concentrate on its own problems for a few years. I think we can accomplish this through diplomacy: the US can still exert a positive influence by cooperating, through global forums, with other countries that are willing to put forth their own resources towards certain global problems. It is cheaper, and the risks will be shared among more countries.

Here it is… I have delayed as long as possible, but I have reached my breaking point. As a McCain donor, as a registered Republican, as a hard-line fiscal conservative, as a strict constitutionalist:

I am hereby endorsing Obama. I stand with the majority of Americans and the majority of Humans.