PensivePenny wrote:

Willie71 wrote:Now you have people who believe that there were WMDs, that the world's climate scientists are conspiring to screw the true American patriots, and even a good swath of people who believe the world is 6000 years old and the center of the universe.

Center of the universe? I'd settle for them just learning that Earth isn't the center of the SOLAR SYSTEM!

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/02/14/277058739/1-in-4-americans-think-the-sun-goes-around-the-earth-survey-says

I dont think they know the difference.

Acetone wrote:

Teague wrote:Oh let me add - what peer review findings did they report on with WMD's in Iraq? They seemed pretty good at dispensining exactly what your government wanted.

Rofl, what the president and his administration all say does not require peer-review to be put into the news.

You're just purposely being obtuse now.

No, you missed the pouint entirely and you've done that plenty of times before.

PensivePenny wrote:

Acetone wrote:

Teague wrote:Oh let me add - what peer review findings did they report on with WMD's in Iraq? They seemed pretty good at dispensining exactly what your government wanted.

Rofl, what the president and his administration all say does not require peer-review to be put into the news.

I beg to differ with one caveat. If our government says CIA intelligence indicates Canada has WMD and intends to attack the US with them, it's the responsibility of the media to verify it. Blindly accepting the governments statements as fact, not requiring verification is PRECISELY why the first amendment exists.

The caveat, reporting what an official says doesn't require verification if the reporter heard if first hand. But, the content of what is said, DOES require verification, if that content is some assertion.

Somebody got it

Trump advisors aim to privatize oil-rich Indian reservations

Native American reservations cover just 2 percent of the United States, but they may contain about a fifth of the nation’s oil and gas, along with vast coal reserves.

Now, a group of advisors to President-elect Donald Trump on Native American issues wants to free those resources from what they call a suffocating federal bureaucracy that holds title to 56 million acres of tribal lands, two chairmen of the coalition told Reuters in exclusive interviews.

The group proposes to put those lands into private ownership - a politically explosive idea that could upend more than century of policy designed to preserve Indian tribes on U.S.-owned reservations, which are governed by tribal leaders as sovereign nations.

The tribes have rights to use the land, but they do not own it. They can drill it and reap the profits, but only under regulations that are far more burdensome than those applied to private property.

"We should take tribal land away from public treatment," said Markwayne Mullin, a Republican U.S. Representative from Oklahoma and a Cherokee tribe member who is co-chairing Trump’s Native American Affairs Coalition. "As long as we can do it without unintended consequences, I think we will have broad support around Indian country."

Trump’s transition team did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The plan dovetails with Trump’s larger aim of slashing regulation to boost energy production. It could deeply divide Native American leaders, who hold a range of opinions on the proper balance between development and conservation.

The proposed path to deregulated drilling - privatizing reservations - could prove even more divisive. Many Native Americans view such efforts as a violation of tribal self-determination and culture.

"Our spiritual leaders are opposed to the privatization of our lands, which means the commoditization of the nature, water, air we hold sacred," said Tom Goldtooth, a member of both the Navajo and the Dakota tribes who runs the Indigenous Environmental Network. "Privatization has been the goal since colonization – to strip Native Nations of their sovereignty."

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-t ... SKBN13U1B1

Aaaahhhhh more brown people with oil....

Teague wrote:Oh let me add - what peer review findings did they report on with WMD's in Iraq? They seemed pretty good at dispensining exactly what your government wanted.

Perhaps you're unaware of the fact that there were reports in the mainstream press that questioned the claims of the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war. For instance, from September 2002:

"Lack of hard evidence of Iraqi weapons worries top U.S. officials"

"Iraq has been unable to get materials needed for nuclear bomb, experts say"

From October 2002:

"CIA report reveals analysts' split over extent of Iraqi nuclear threat"

There are others that can be found as well. If you want to get a better understanding of how the mainstream press covered the push to war, one good book is HUBRIS, by Isikoff and Corn. Yes, many mainstream outlets didn't seriously question the claims. However it would be inaccurate to imply that it completely failed to call them into question. I remember reading stories like the above before the invasion, which is why I participated in the anti-war demonstrations, along with thousands of others in the US, and across the world.

SkyMutt wrote:

Teague wrote:Oh let me add - what peer review findings did they report on with WMD's in Iraq? They seemed pretty good at dispensining exactly what your government wanted.

Perhaps you're unaware of the fact that there were reports in the mainstream press that questioned the claims of the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war. For instance, from September 2002:

"Lack of hard evidence of Iraqi weapons worries top U.S. officials"

"Iraq has been unable to get materials needed for nuclear bomb, experts say"

From October 2002:

"CIA report reveals analysts' split over extent of Iraqi nuclear threat"

There are others that can be found as well. If you want to get a better understanding of how the mainstream press covered the push to war, one good book is HUBRIS, by Isikoff and Corn. Yes, many mainstream outlets didn't seriously question the claims. However it would be inaccurate to imply that it completely failed to call them into question. I remember reading stories like the above before the invasion, which is why I participated in the anti-war demonstrations, along with thousands of others in the US, and across the world.

They were pathetic. I noticed though they couldn't get enough of "embedding" their reporters into it and spared no expense doing that. To think the MSM played a critical role in questioning the war is a little OTT. I rather think they couldn't wait for it to kick off tbh.

Why did I bother? I should know better.

SkyMutt wrote:

Teague wrote:Oh let me add - what peer review findings did they report on with WMD's in Iraq? They seemed pretty good at dispensining exactly what your government wanted.

Perhaps you're unaware of the fact that there were reports in the mainstream press that questioned the claims of the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war. For instance, from September 2002:

"Lack of hard evidence of Iraqi weapons worries top U.S. officials"

"Iraq has been unable to get materials needed for nuclear bomb, experts say"

From October 2002:

"CIA report reveals analysts' split over extent of Iraqi nuclear threat"

There are others that can be found as well. If you want to get a better understanding of how the mainstream press covered the push to war, one good book is HUBRIS, by Isikoff and Corn. Yes, many mainstream outlets didn't seriously question the claims. However it would be inaccurate to imply that it completely failed to call them into question. I remember reading stories like the above before the invasion, which is why I participated in the anti-war demonstrations, along with thousands of others in the US, and across the world.

Somehow this gets woven into an all or nothing debate. The occasional proper report does not dismiss the regular malpractice. People have no problem pointing out TYTs errors, which happen about as often as the MSM gets it right.

SkyMutt wrote::roll: Why did I bother? I should know better.

I have stopped bothering. This is the second thread he has ruined. He is like an old man that will never accept anything that is against any of his dogma's.

PensivePenny wrote:

Willie71 wrote:Now you have people who believe that there were WMDs, that the world's climate scientists are conspiring to screw the true American patriots, and even a good swath of people who believe the world is 6000 years old and the center of the universe.

Center of the universe? I'd settle for them just learning that Earth isn't the center of the SOLAR SYSTEM!

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/02/14/277058739/1-in-4-americans-think-the-sun-goes-around-the-earth-survey-says

From the same article:

As alarming as some of those deficits in science knowledge might appear, Americans fared better on several of the questions than similar, but older surveys of their Chinese and European counterparts.

Only 66 percent of people in a 2005 European Union poll answered the basic astronomy question correctly. However, both China and the EU fared significantly better (66 percent and 70 percent, respectively) on the question about human evolution.

Scot Dutchy wrote:

SkyMutt wrote::roll: Why did I bother? I should know better.

I have stopped bothering. This is the second thread he has ruined. He is like an old man that will never accept anything that is against any of his dogma's.

<lost for words>

crank wrote:Have evidence? I've documented dozens of examples, you just refuse to see it obviously. The media turned on the Vietnam around 67/68, the war had been going on for quite a while by then.

"The War", the part of the war we are talking about began in April of 1965 when Johnson changed the rules of engagement for US forces from defensive to offensive combined with an escalation of US combat troops from 3500 in March to ~200,000 at the end of the year. By mid August Morley Safer had filed a report for CBS News with Walter Cronkite of villages and homes being burned in retaliation for "a burst of gun fire."

Interesting though that you equate coverage by the media with the media turning on something. Sounds like no one is covering a subject until they take a position that you agree with.

crank wrote:How well did it cover what we did to Laos, and how well has this been mentioned since? There are still people dying there every year from unexploded cluster bombs we dropped there over 50 years ago. How widely is this known?

Well, no one covered the secret war until someone covered it and that would be the New York Times on May 9th, 1969. Until then it was a secret.

crank wrote:

Oldskeptic wrote:

Willie71 wrote:The "liberal media" is a fiction created by the republicans to create distrust in reality.

And your idea of the Main Stream Media being an organ of the "establishment" is the same, a fiction created to instill distrust in the same reality, only in a different direction.

The reality is that the press is what it is, not controlled by the far right or the far left. What we do have is a far left press and a far right press, neither of which describes the Main Stream Press. Something I find it laughable is, the news outlets that do tend to tell different sides of a story, when there are more than one being told, being called biased by people on the left and right that only tell their side of the story.

What I find is that I can read a story like the DAPL protests in the liberal press and a story on the same event in the conservative press and they are nothing alike, and there is always some political or ideological and or emotional message being delivered by whoever is supposedly delivering the news. In my opinion the Main Stream Media are the only news sources that have not descended into near total ideological sermonizing.

Information when it is completely one sided is not information, and it certainly isn't news. Fox News is not news, it's carefully selected bits of information combined with self-righteous sermonizing, and The Young Turks are no different.

No one paying attention should have trouble noticing that the more extreme in their liberal or conservative views the more the telling to the viewer what to think goes on. That, my friend, is not to be admired as a standard of journalism; whether it's on the part of the right or the left.

Information that is one sided, as in 'on the side of facts' is actually a good source of information.

A fact from the left press: A concussion grenade thrown by police nearly blew an arm off a young woman protestor.

A fact from the right press: A propane bottle bomb intended to be thrown at police by demonstrators exploded prematurely and injured a young woman protestor.

A fact from Main Stream Media: Protestors say that a concussion grenade thrown by police nearly blew an arm off a young woman protestor, while police spokespersons say that protestors may have been building propane bottles to explode. Investigations have so far been inconclusive.

crank wrote:

felltoearth wrote:The problem with the Vietnam War is that media didn't wake up until it bacame blatantly obvious that they were being lied to.

If only they remembered that lesson in the lead up to both Iraq wars.

The thing is, there is no grand conspiracy. It's the system itself, the way it's built that's the problem. The need for revenue, the need to scopp, and the need for political access that in endemic to western journalism.

The apology from the New York Times in 2004.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world ... -iraq.html

Some critics of our coverage during that time have focused blame on individual reporters. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated. Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.

The time they turned on the war was also the time when they realized we couldn't win.

And of course, we never say there's a conspiracy, those who fail to grasp the enormity of the problem want to tar anyone who points it out as conspiracy-mongers, but it clearly isn't. Manufacturing Consent--The Political Economy Of The Mass Media documents this beautifully, but then it's from Chomsky, so it will be dismissed out of hand, with zero justification. I just found you can see the whole book in this pdf

It doesn't need to be dismissed out of hand, but dismissed nonetheless it should be. Simply on very simple arguments against the core propaganda model:

1) Size, Ownership, and Profit Orientation: The dominant mass-media outlets are large companies operated for profit, and therefore they must cater to the financial interests of the owners, who are usually corporations and controlling investors."

Quite right, and much less than dominant media outlets are operated for profit also, and indeed they cater to the financial interests of the owners. Those interests mainly being making a profit. Yes, the owners are usually corporations, media corporations: CNN is owned by Time-Warner.

The largest share holder of CBS is National Amusements.

ABC is owned by Disney.

NBC is owned by NBC Universal.

The New York Times is owned by the New York Times Company.

The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Orlando Sentinel, Sun-Sentinel, The Baltimore Sun, and the San Diego Union-Tribune are owned by Tronc inc.

The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos.

The non-profit Associated Press is owned by all contributing newspapers and radio and television stations.

2) "The Advertising License to Do Business: Since the majority of the revenue of major media outlets derives from advertising (not from sales or subscriptions), advertisers have acquired a "de facto licensing authority".[4] Media outlets are not commercially viable without the support of advertisers. News media must therefore cater to the political prejudices and economic desires of their advertisers."

Laughable even on the surface. Advertisers go towards the outlets that attract the demographics they are wanting to sell their product to, not the other way around.

3) "[T]he large bureaucracies of the powerful subsidize the mass media, and gain special access [to the news], by their contribution to reducing the media’s costs of acquiring [...] and producing, news. The large entities that provide this subsidy become 'routine' news sources and have privileged access to the gates. Non-routine sources must struggle for access, and may be ignored by the arbitrary decision of the gatekeepers.

What is being talked about here seems to be the Associated Press and other news sharing organizations that are made up of over seven thousand independent news outlets/sources.

5) "Flak and the Enforcers: "Flak" refers to negative responses to a media statement or program (e.g. letters, complaints, lawsuits, or legislative actions). Flak can be expensive to the media, either due to loss of advertising revenue, or due to the costs of legal defense or defense of the media outlet's public image. Flak can be organized by powerful, private influence groups (e.g. think tanks). The prospect of eliciting flak can be a deterrent to the reporting of certain kinds of facts or opinions

This flack, if and when it does happen, is usually concerned with accuracy in reporting not opinions expressed. Legal actions for libel and or slander, and defense of image or reputation if the reporting turns out to be wrong and or biased.

The image Chomsky conjurers is of a monolithic Main Stream Media united in biased cause and effort in support of some mythic all powerful establishment, and despite Chomsky's false statements, assumptions, and anecdotes this solid edifice of united intent is not in evidence.

Of course if you slip comfortably into anti-establishment conspiracy mode while reading Manufacturing Consent it all makes sense because the whole book will be just a large exercise in confirmation bias.

The left screams their message and the right screams their message, each claiming to be the absolute truth holders and trying to sway the middle to their separate points of view. And when the middle doesn't trip over its own feet trooping over to go for either of their extremist views it's the middle's fault for not paying attention to the screams of the left or right, and instead listening, reading, and watching Main Stream Media.

It may astonish some of those on the far left and the far right but at least 47% of us are moderates and at most you guys are somewhere around 25% each, and as such do not want our news leaning too far to right or left. We want it straight up. When so and so on the left says this or that we want to know what so and so on the right had to say about it and vice versa.

Sources like Breitbart or Fox News and what they have to say don't really mean anything to moderates because they're pretty much news free sermonizing/commentary about what to think, and the same goes for sources like TYT, RoF, and RT.

It's actually somewhat amusing that the people wanting unbiased accurate information are the middle, the moderates so that they can make up their minds, and that it's the right and the left that have already made up their minds that are complaining about the news sources that are actually the most unbiased.

Oldskeptic wrote:

crank wrote:Have evidence? I've documented dozens of examples, you just refuse to see it obviously. The media turned on the Vietnam around 67/68, the war had been going on for quite a while by then.

"The War", the part of the war we are talking about began in April of 1965 when Johnson changed the rules of engagement for US forces from defensive to offensive combined with an escalation of US combat troops from 3500 in March to ~200,000 at the end of the year. By mid August Morley Safer had filed a report for CBS News with Walter Cronkite of villages and homes being burned in retaliation for "a burst of gun fire."

Interesting though that you equate coverage by the media with the media turning on something. Sounds like no one is covering a subject until they take a position that you agree with.

crank wrote:How well did it cover what we did to Laos, and how well has this been mentioned since? There are still people dying there every year from unexploded cluster bombs we dropped there over 50 years ago. How widely is this known?

Well, no one covered the secret war until someone covered it and that would be the New York Times on May 9th, 1969. Until then it was a secret.

You're missing the point. But oh well, good to see you're consistent. The MSM still hasn't discussed the Laos bombing. Saying we bombed them is one thing, what the video I posted earlier demonstrates is a profoundly vicious act, and it was done for no substantial reason. They dropped far more on Laos that all the bombs by all sides in WWII. That you 'cover' something doesn't mean it's been covered. Are you going to try to defend Korea, the Philippines, Mexico, virtually all of C and S America, and on and on and on....? Are you going to defend the history taught in the schools? You want to rationalize how corporate profits are unquestionably valued over the welfare of millions? Go ahead and wallow in the MSM, that's where everyone who prefer their deaf and blind, but comfortable, 'reality' over hearing ugly truths like to hang out.

Oldskeptic wrote:

crank wrote:

Oldskeptic wrote:

Willie71 wrote:The "liberal media" is a fiction created by the republicans to create distrust in reality.

And your idea of the Main Stream Media being an organ of the "establishment" is the same, a fiction created to instill distrust in the same reality, only in a different direction.

The reality is that the press is what it is, not controlled by the far right or the far left. What we do have is a far left press and a far right press, neither of which describes the Main Stream Press. Something I find it laughable is, the news outlets that do tend to tell different sides of a story, when there are more than one being told, being called biased by people on the left and right that only tell their side of the story.

What I find is that I can read a story like the DAPL protests in the liberal press and a story on the same event in the conservative press and they are nothing alike, and there is always some political or ideological and or emotional message being delivered by whoever is supposedly delivering the news. In my opinion the Main Stream Media are the only news sources that have not descended into near total ideological sermonizing.

Information when it is completely one sided is not information, and it certainly isn't news. Fox News is not news, it's carefully selected bits of information combined with self-righteous sermonizing, and The Young Turks are no different.

No one paying attention should have trouble noticing that the more extreme in their liberal or conservative views the more the telling to the viewer what to think goes on. That, my friend, is not to be admired as a standard of journalism; whether it's on the part of the right or the left.

Information that is one sided, as in 'on the side of facts' is actually a good source of information.

A fact from the left press: A concussion grenade thrown by police nearly blew an arm off a young woman protestor.

A fact from the right press: A propane bottle bomb intended to be thrown at police by demonstrators exploded prematurely and injured a young woman protestor.

A fact from Main Stream Media: Protestors say that a concussion grenade thrown by police nearly blew an arm off a young woman protestor, while police spokespersons say that protestors may have been building propane bottles to explode. Investigations have so far been inconclusive.

Fact: been over this shit, the smart folk don't believe the police, because they know the percentages, and if it was thems that did it, you ain't gonna get a real investigation.

Oldskeptic wrote:

crank wrote:

felltoearth wrote:The problem with the Vietnam War is that media didn't wake up until it bacame blatantly obvious that they were being lied to.

If only they remembered that lesson in the lead up to both Iraq wars.

The thing is, there is no grand conspiracy. It's the system itself, the way it's built that's the problem. The need for revenue, the need to scopp, and the need for political access that in endemic to western journalism.

The apology from the New York Times in 2004.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world ... -iraq.html

Some critics of our coverage during that time have focused blame on individual reporters. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated. Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.

The time they turned on the war was also the time when they realized we couldn't win.

And of course, we never say there's a conspiracy, those who fail to grasp the enormity of the problem want to tar anyone who points it out as conspiracy-mongers, but it clearly isn't. Manufacturing Consent--The Political Economy Of The Mass Media documents this beautifully, but then it's from Chomsky, so it will be dismissed out of hand, with zero justification. I just found you can see the whole book in this pdf

It doesn't need to be dismissed out of hand, but dismissed nonetheless it should be. Simply on very simple arguments against the core propaganda model:

1) Size, Ownership, and Profit Orientation: The dominant mass-media outlets are large companies operated for profit, and therefore they must cater to the financial interests of the owners, who are usually corporations and controlling investors."

Quite right, and much less than dominant media outlets are operated for profit also, and indeed they cater to the financial interests of the owners. Those interests mainly being making a profit. Yes, the owners are usually corporations, media corporations: CNN is owned by Time-Warner.

The largest share holder of CBS is National Amusements.

ABC is owned by Disney.

NBC is owned by NBC Universal.

The New York Times is owned by the New York Times Company.

The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Orlando Sentinel, Sun-Sentinel, The Baltimore Sun, and the San Diego Union-Tribune are owned by Tronc inc.

The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos.

The non-profit Associated Press is owned by all contributing newspapers and radio and television stations.

2) "The Advertising License to Do Business: Since the majority of the revenue of major media outlets derives from advertising (not from sales or subscriptions), advertisers have acquired a "de facto licensing authority".[4] Media outlets are not commercially viable without the support of advertisers. News media must therefore cater to the political prejudices and economic desires of their advertisers."

Laughable even on the surface. Advertisers go towards the outlets that attract the demographics they are wanting to sell their product to, not the other way around.

3) "[T]he large bureaucracies of the powerful subsidize the mass media, and gain special access [to the news], by their contribution to reducing the media’s costs of acquiring [...] and producing, news. The large entities that provide this subsidy become 'routine' news sources and have privileged access to the gates. Non-routine sources must struggle for access, and may be ignored by the arbitrary decision of the gatekeepers.

What is being talked about here seems to be the Associated Press and other news sharing organizations that are made up of over seven thousand independent news outlets/sources.

5) "Flak and the Enforcers: "Flak" refers to negative responses to a media statement or program (e.g. letters, complaints, lawsuits, or legislative actions). Flak can be expensive to the media, either due to loss of advertising revenue, or due to the costs of legal defense or defense of the media outlet's public image. Flak can be organized by powerful, private influence groups (e.g. think tanks). The prospect of eliciting flak can be a deterrent to the reporting of certain kinds of facts or opinions

This flack, if and when it does happen, is usually concerned with accuracy in reporting not opinions expressed. Legal actions for libel and or slander, and defense of image or reputation if the reporting turns out to be wrong and or biased.

The image Chomsky conjurers is of a monolithic Main Stream Media united in biased cause and effort in support of some mythic all powerful establishment, and despite Chomsky's false statements, assumptions, and anecdotes this solid edifice of united intent is not in evidence.

Of course if you slip comfortably into anti-establishment conspiracy mode while reading Manufacturing Consent it all makes sense because the whole book will be just a large exercise in confirmation bias.

The left screams their message and the right screams their message, each claiming to be the absolute truth holders and trying to sway the middle to their separate points of view. And when the middle doesn't trip over its own feet trooping over to go for either of their extremist views it's the middle's fault for not paying attention to the screams of the left or right, and instead listening, reading, and watching Main Stream Media.

It may astonish some of those on the far left and the far right but at least 47% of us are moderates and at most you guys are somewhere around 25% each, and as such do not want our news leaning too far to right or left. We want it straight up. When so and so on the left says this or that we want to know what so and so on the right had to say about it and vice versa.

Sources like Breitbart or Fox News and what they have to say don't really mean anything to moderates because they're pretty much news free sermonizing/commentary about what to think, and the same goes for sources like TYT, RoF, and RT.

It's actually somewhat amusing that the people wanting unbiased accurate information are the middle, the moderates so that they can make up their minds, and that it's the right and the left that have already made up their minds that are complaining about the news sources that are actually the most unbiased.

I read through this inane crap twice, trying to find something that wasn't utterly muddleheaded, and failed. If you think this empty verbiage somehow refutes Manufacturing Consent, you are woefully mistaken. You actually said "Laughable even on the surface. Advertisers go towards the outlets that attract the demographics they are wanting to sell their product to, not the other way around." Essentially saying it's laughable to say the news is influenced by who their advertisers are. Laughable? Really? That pretty much sums up your abilities of reasoning and observation all right. This is too oblivious, too delusional, to even address, I don't have the strength. But then you think Hillary would have been a good president, and again, there's that pattern.

OlivierK wrote:

Scot Dutchy wrote:

SkyMutt wrote::roll: Why did I bother? I should know better.

I have stopped bothering. This is the second thread he has ruined. He is like an old man that will never accept anything that is against any of his dogma's.

<lost for words>

Except I'm not an old man, unlike Scot who I refuse to participate with because alomst every post he makes is full of absolute horse manure. It does surprise me that some people here still view the MSM as credible though.

Hillary Clinton gets 2.7 million lead in the popular vote

The Democrat could end up with more votes than Obama in 2012

Hillary Clinton has 2.7 million more votes than Donald Trump, despite losing the presidential election, and the number is expected to rise.

Ms Clinton is on track to get more votes than president Barack Obama did in 2012. He won 65.9 million, and she is only about 400,000 votes behind him.

The votes are being tallied by David Wasserman for the Cook Political Report. Votes are still streaming in from states like California, New York and Washington due to late counting of mail-in and absentee ballots.

Mr Trump swept to victory thanks to the centuries-old electoral college system, which distributes electoral votes around states and the candidate who wins in each state gets all of those votes.

Larger states - like Pennsylvania with 20 electoral college votes and Michigan with 16 votes - went to Mr Trump.

More...

What a great system of democracy.

The election is not yet over.

Hillary Clinton could have legal right to challenge electoral college system and be next US president, says law professor

Legal expert says Ms Clinton could have grounds to challenge 'unconstitutional' electoral college system and claim win, as she takes 2.6 million lead in popular vote

Hillary Clinton may be able to challenge the election result in the Supreme Court and become the next President of the United States, a law professor has said.

Ms Clinton currently has 2.6 million more votes than Donald Trump in the popular count, but lost the election in November because of the idiosyncratic workings of the United States' Electoral College system — a result which academic Lawrence Lessig has said could be ruled unconstitutional.

The process by which the United States elects a president is complicated — rather than US citizens voting for their head of state directly, representatives in the Electoral College choose the winner on behalf of their state.

Almost all states operate a "winner-takes-all" system, which ignores voter margins. So for instance, Ms Clinton got 44 per cent of the vote in Georgia, but because Mr Trump got a larger percentage, none of the state's six representatives in the Electoral College are set to vote for her.

More...