$1.539

Wow. Kerry. Edwards. And then — distantly — Dean?

I’m amazed.

Kerry is a bolt out of the blue. I’m just flat shocked that he came out so strongly on top. I really saw Dean and Edwards duking it out for first and second place, and Kerry and Gephardt fighting for the crumbs of third and fourth place.

Wow.

(And, from a techie perspective, all the candidates’ sites were working… except John Edwards — I kept getting “Server too busy” messages from their IIS server. Kerry had a “we won” banner up before he spoke to his supporters, and Gephardt already had notes on his site that led you to believe that he would drop out because of the results in Iowa. Ain’t technology grand?)

Now, Kerry has indicated that he is in favor of making it more difficult for US companies to ship their jobs overseas. Others — namely the Computer Systems Policy Project (Dell, HP, Intel, IBM) — have indicated that allowing jobs to go overseas is the only way for American business to survive. They favor the government investing in tech research, rather than protectionist policies, like Kerry’s. They even go so far as to indicate that there will be many good jobs out there for high school grads with basic reading, writing and arithmetic.

Hope those kids are rehearsing….. “Do you want fries with that?”

So, once those companies have all their e-commerce jobs overseas, we could be held hostage to their interests, and would probably find that our quality of life here is lessened, with a smaller personal tax base, and fewer dollars to purchase those goods and services that the Computer Systems Policy Project are fighting so hard to serve from elsewhere.

Good luck guys — I think you’re wrong. I know it’s not politically correct to toot the American horn. In fact, some might say that I’m somehow close-minded, or anti-foreigner. Both are wrong. Perhaps I would be labelled “pro-American”.

That would be true.