It's official

Hamid Karzai is the duly elected official President of Afghanistan. Congratulations to the Afghans for conducting a successful election for the first time in their history!

Oh, and Bush won re-election, Tom Daschle is out (yeah! another wolf in sheep's clothing is gone!) and the Republicans picked up four seats in the Senate. It looks like Bush wins the popular vote by over 4 million votes. So much for a close election.

On a personal note, my new Congressman is Pete Sessions, a Republican, who won handily against long-time Democratic Congressman, Martin Frost. I'm quite happy about that, because Frost was very partisan, although he aligned himself with George Bush, Kay Bailey Hutchinson and Dennis Hastert in his campaign ads and left "Democrat" off all his campaign signs. (Obviously we Texans weren't fooled.)

Hopefully the Democrats will be sufficiently chastened by these results to at least attempt to move back toward the middle, where most of America is. We desparately need two viable parties (or more), and an impotent opposition party is not in the best interest of the country.

Oh, and my prediction was way off (obviously). Kerry ended up winning Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Hawaii, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire - all states that I thought would go Bush. (Was Hawaii just a tease?) I was surprised at the vote margins in those states. I really thought they'd be much closer. Wisconsin is interesting. One county reported that 125% of the registered voters voted! (Wisconsin allows same-day registration.) Someone really ought to get that state straightened out.

Next item on the agenda. Voting reforms.

UPDATE: I added Pennsylvania to the list of states that I missed. I had forgotten it last night. You might also want to look at this electoral college map that allows you to compare 2000 to 2004. It's amazing how similar they are.