Wow, apparently Basescu asks for election cancelling and starting the process all over accusing a fraud of at least 2.5%. According to him all the cancelled votes were accounted as good for Nastase/PSD. [links in Romanian] So there may something rotten in Denmark after all.
UPDATE: More coverage in English.
Silviu made a very good comment of the present situation in Romania as a result of the elections and also I got several emails with comments - thank you for that, I was actually surprised that so many people cared to share their thoughts on this.
Of course it is not that bad - I mean it could definitely be worse. :)
It's not that I had high expectations but still I would have thought that it would be a head-to-head race. The partials as of 5 o'clock indicate a 36%/31% ratio PSD/DA and 40.2%/33.9% for Nastase/Basescu counted from 68% of the voting sections.
Moreover, I knew and read from several sources about muddy moves from the PSD for getting a false start since they were handling the bread and butter. I even mentioned about it on this blog. I just didnot expect that the percentage accounting for that would be that high - and that is my big disappointment - this means the perpetuation of a mediocre environment that forces you to create innovative solutions for staying on top of the game (or of the system) rather than being preoccupied with the (theoretical) purpose of the whole exercise - the best possible choice for value creation in the strict law-obeying and economical sense. While making a better system of course.
On a related note I was reading somewhere (I think it was a BBC source) that Basescu actually declared that the frauds (or should I rather call them anomalies?) would count for 5-7%, and that morally the D.A. won. That's just a pale figure of speech - at the end of the day the numbers are the only things counting, and besides I doubt that they would be as high as claimed. Also, I didnot expect that the undecided number was that high - for various reasons 4 people out of 10 said that it's not worth getting involved, and that saddens me, I think it is a big number.
Basically now either PSD or DA will have to ally with either PRM or UDMR for getting the majority and this means inconsistency and compromise - I doubt it'd last for more than a year. Also, word in town is that DA is going to get consolidated by a merger between its constituents PD and PNL - this certainly will have big impact a la long and needs to be followed closely.*
I certainly agree with Silviu on the corruption thing - there is not a magic wand that anybody coming in place would be able to use for erradicating it in less that 3-5 years. And here it is what I am mostly concerned of - exactly the change and its pace. By having this Parliament structure IMO we have the premises for the slowest rate of changing things and that would mainly come from an external source - being pushed from behind by EU. Btw, I am not sure you are aware about the way the EU chapters were negotiated - the Romanian part basically had no objections and signed everything as it had the time pressure of the upcoming elections - and that would heavily impact the economy in 2007 or whenever we would be formally accepted. And at that time any party that would be in power will be taxed as a consequence - perhaps that would be DA's bright side for not getting the majority yesterday. :)
Also the flat tax would have been perfectly welcome in this economic boom context as it would be a great incentive for more entrepreneurial ventures in a country with not so much experience in this sense.
Finally a legit concern would be - is the Romanian society as whole ready for a big & fast change? The demographics show us that probably not - and again I agree with Silviu that the older generation was the most dilligent part exercising their pro-PSD vote and implicitly their risk aversion and fear of big and radical change. Sadly enough we still need to wait for younger generations to emerge for a counterweight.
*For people not familiar with the Romanian political scene DA is an alliance between the liberals (PNL) and the democrats (PD). UDMR is the party of the Hungarian minorities which counted for about 8% of the votes and PRM is the extremist party of a former Ceausescu's poet having become a politician at the 1989 system swing. PRM got about 11% of the votes. PSD+PUR (which for simplicity I simply called it PSD) is an alliance between the governmental party and a small other one whose president owns an influential Romanian media empire (hence the alliance interest from PSD :))
UPDATE: Via Daniel here is a good international roundup of what others think on the whole thing.
Also Doug has a good coverage explaining in detail the potential choices that the main political players from the Parliament would have to consider as next steps.
Well, it's kind of cloudy in both senses in Bucharest these moments. Yesterday there were about 60% of the Romanians with the right to vote exercising it. The exit polls are favorable to the PSD & Nastase, and the intermediary results are not encouraging either. My only surprise was that the difference is high - at least 5% on all the levels (president/parliament). I was expecting somewhat even results and I guess that the balance was decided by the "undecided" - people who were too dissapointed with what is going on in Romania or non believers in that their vote would matter. Or non believers in the whole democratic process per se. It doesn't matter now anyways, the problem is more complex that that.
If you sit down and judge it objectively, the results shouldnot be a surprise. They would appear as a normal choice in a society driven by huge manipulation by all means - most frequently via media channels or blackmails of all sorts (I have a friend working for a TV station who was threaten to be fired in case of voting for the "wrong" person.) And signs are everywhere -- look at the tv, read the newspapers, look at ordinary people in the streets (and I don't mean downtown Bucharest), talk to them, learn about the system(s), who makes it, who runs it, what the drivers behind it are. Those signs show little evidence of efforts for creating a better living or a better environment and I guess that those signs only indicate an aggresive ego fight combined with self-driven interests. No preocuppation for the community whatsoever - not even signs of respect for the others. This ultimately means mediocrity and this is exactly how these elections results should be interpreted. Cynically enough, while I am writing this a friend of mine asked me if I know what is the worst joke he has ever heard - yesterday's elections.
However, besides that, it looks like the Romanian society still has a heavy burden making it almost impossible to judge and choose decently in a situation otherwise obvious in a civilised world. Even though the old people grinning last night on tv don't represent me or the path to a better living whatsoever I will still accept the results. The reason: despite my anger and disappointment I think I should have a clear mind - the true value of a character stands in being there in bad moments, and now we will have to get involved more than ever even though we just shoot ourselves in the foot. In spite of that actually.
The paycheck is huge unfortunately and wounds are deep. And while I believe that the result of the elections will constitute a brake to reaching rapidly a healthy and pragmatical way of thinking at the societal level I will still mind my own business and will not surrender in believing in us and in our potential. Nor will I quit getting involved as much as I can.
Btw, read also this - unfortunately only for people understanding Romanian.
Today's the day -- by 11 o'clock there were more than 10% voters of the 18 million Romanians with a right to vote. Even though it is a tough call, I am optimistic and think that Basescu is going to make it - Doug's money is on Nastase since he has more resources. We shall see.
Somewhat updated info about how the elections are going can be found here.
...is about $9 trillion for a country with 4.6 million people. Not bad, eh, the oil reserves are valued at $300 billions, a value which is 6 times higher that the Romanian GDP. :) (source)
Here's a business idea - a recruting agency for Westerners willing to work in Romania at Romanian salary levels. Here's the inspiration - a similar thing for India, according to BBC entry and mid-level employees are recruited from European countries on Indian salaries to service their native markets from India. They're in the early or mid 20s and besides an exotic place where they get to live and work the experience would certainly look good on their resumes. Evidently we have a win/win situation here since the locals would get accustomed to Western working practices.
So Romania needs a good differentiator I think - and there's plenty to capitalize on. Actually I am almost sure that there are already companies doing that - I also know people who came here through students' AIESEC.
On a related note - check out Vivid. Very pertinent opinions about what is going on in Romania.
Some of you may be familiar with the recent story of the Romanian government party (PSD) having the stenograms from their internal meetings made available to the large audience. Of course not by them but by an insider who was probably dis-satisfied with what was going on. Those scripts certainly don't put a good light on PSD, on the contrary, and for this obvious reason they were published only by a part of the Romanian media - namely by Evenimentul Zilei. The stenograms were also published on the internet but I am told the websites were taken down. Actually Evz (daily) and Catavencu (weekly) are the only Romanian papers that publicly criticized PSD and the government.
Now, apparently today's printed editions from both media vehicles contained their share of criticism to PSD and it looks like somebody made all the possible things to make them dissapear by buying the respective editions in bulks this morning. (Catavencu also acknowledges it on its website) My take is that this doesn't make much difference in the elections but for what it's worth if you care enough for knowing exactly what they contained here is the pdf version of the latest Catavencu edition and this is a website that made all the stenograms available both for reading or download (zip).
This goes to all my readers who are celebrating Thanksgiving tonight - a time for family, good thoughts and food. Have a happy one everyone!
The elections in Romania are so close - this Sunday - and so I will link to two good arguments: one of a journalist (en & ro) and one of a Romanian studying in the US (unfortunately only in Romanian).
For people not following up the comment sections I put for download two more clips on reasons to vote that dismantle the "misoginism theory" the one from a previous post was accused of.
UPDATE: And another argument via Lulu. Also in Romanian only.
I am using Skype quite frequently these days for talking with both my friends and my business partners. Now via Morten I just learnt that Skype closed a deal with Kazaa - apparently a good fit between the two companies offering complementing services via p2p. They could leverage a strong user base (Kazaa claims it has 300 mil. users and Skype has 30 mill. dowloads and growing) and besides Skype's CEO (Niklas Zennstrom) was one of the Kazaa's founders.
While I like Skype very much, I must say that this move raises a question mark upon the privacy and all the SPIT (spam over internet telephony) issues, especially since Kazaa is famous for the spyware and adware (including the lite version).
Anyways - for a story background read these two older posts about Skype's model and also read Rodrigo's thoughts and suggestions for improving the technology.
Via Viewropa where people are getting into the X-mas mood here's a new cool website (ok, technically it's an online social networking tool :)) -- Elfster. Basically Elfster provides the online logistics for groups of friends to arrange for Secret Santa gifts. This goes like this:"
"Rather than eveyone buying everyone else a gift, the group "draws names from a hat". Each person in the exchange is reponsible for buying only one gift. When you only have to buy one gift, you can find a thoughtful gift while experiencing less stress and saving money."
Neat.
Actually not stuff but valuable thoughts and pieces of wisdom encompassed in a ebook or a white paper. And why is that - people are interested in talking to cool ideas generators, opinion makers, or simply guys who know their stuff. And not only talk, rather make $$, as everybody wants to team up with smart guys.
But what do I say - here's the example, Seth had his book for sale for more than 2 years now and apparently after making it available for free different opportunities have arisen mainly from inteacting with people who had read the book - he calls those the currency of the future. If you haven't done so, don't forget to download the book while it's free (by December 1st).
Today was the first day - a full half a day with interesting people and presentations. I also made one - a bit nonconventional though - about the role of social software and weblogs in particular for gathering competitive intelligence. I was arguing that in the decision making process besides the business intelligence output (which is scientifically fundamented) one needs to take into consideration the market context and all the related facts. (which I call competitive intelligence) And how do you do that? Get informed as much as possible about what is going on in the market - and weblogs are certainly part of the market conversations permitting getting relevant data on relevant aspects of your business/industry. And to a larger extent the same stands for the social software applications. And as this process improves dramatically the quality of the decision making process (or reduces the probability of failure) sooner or later the social software apps are becoming a strategic extension of the business intelligence.
Is it a wide shot or it makes sense? Apparently the audience took it into two ways: a part that considered that this is included per se in a business intelligence app. (which I kindly disagree since competitive intelligence is not ALWAYS scientifically fundamented) and a part which agreed that it is something becoming increasingly important and it should be accounted for. Somebody even asked if by setting up a weblog one can perfectly dis-inform a target audience - I disagree, since the interactive nature will tend to clear the truth out. On a funny note the moderrator mentioned that this is a way of "economic espionage" - again not quite relevant given the public nature of the social software apps. All in all there were several people interested in the professional role weblogs play and their outcomes thereof.
Here is the presentation [pdf], and the special thanks go to Gabriela who was very helpful and resourceful with several tips, links and materials.
The rest of the conference was informative, a bit boring at parts due to some techincal details that I was not particularly interested in. Apart from the usual schmooze, I learnt relevant info about the BI products coming from Oracle, Microsoft, SAP and Cognos, information governance from Provision, some industry trends from MetaGroup Romania (in 2006 30% of a company's employees will proactively use BI products for making relevant decisions from 15% last year --- hey, keeping a weblog is a proactive thing :)) and a corporate presentation from Exact Software. Also, a very good comment from mr. Teohari of MetaGroup - having the reports from from a BI app doesn't stop your problems - they rather start them.
It was about time for Romania to finally play a role in a crowded space - the company operates with two 737s and wants to fly locally to Timisoara as well as to Spain, France and Italy. It doesn't look as simple as it sounds though - Blue Air didn't get the licenses yet, looks like Italy and Timisoara are not easy shots. Moreover, the pricing model is not as simple as one would expect (though some of the prices are lower) plus that I read the entrepreneur behind is tied to the present government and some related red tape. All discussions aside it is a good step towards normality, read more details here or here and here (last two in Romanian)
The final of the Top Coder competition was held last weekend in USA. Three Romanians made it to 2 out of the 3 finals. Adrian Carca and Mihai Pasca (both from and presently living in Bistrita, Romania) were on the 4th and respectively 6th place on the designers contest while Bogdan Stanescu (from Romania but currently living in Rockville, MD) was the 11th on the algorithm final. Congrats! The algorithms final was won a Polish guy residing in US, the designers one by an American and the developers by a Chinese.
Btw, is anybody willing to make a bet on how long it will take until Adi and Mihai will not be living in Romania any longer? :)
CIO magazine is hosting an article with advice for improving soft skills at the managerial level -- it is equally applicable for people from all the layers of an organization. [link]
It looks like mall projects keep coming to Bucharest, with the already classic recipe of shops & food courts & movie theaters. They capitalize on the social experience - actually Bucharest Mall was successful as it was the first mover in a virgin market. Frankly the shops from there are quite expensive for the average Romanian BUT the Multiplex is quite a decent experience (of course that is if you can ignore people talking on the phone during the movies). And this social experience offered by going to the mall per se permitted charging a premium. And it still does.
And what will it happen when more and bigger malls are to be launched? Firstly the coolness factor will play a role but then I see a decline in the number of visitors and in this context the strategy will have to be focused on neighborhoods and playing the loyalty card on people living closeby. Definitely the premiums will not be as high as Bucharest Mall and the newly open Plaza Romania are charging nowadays (as far I heard). I guess it will be something similar to what had happened with the supermarkets a while back - it was a big rush as the only options Romanians had were the local shops from the street corner (hence a higher margin charged).
But today the increased competition makes the price assymetries not be as high. Definitely the social experience will make a difference but how many people living in Baneasa (which is in the North part of the city) will cross Bucharest to go to Buch Mall (10 min. ride from downtown) or to Plaza (in Militari - 30 minute ride when it's not crowded)? I remember my parents planning to go to Metro every month, as it was cheaper and among the few options they'd got. It still is cheaper but they're not as excited since they live close to Bucharest Mall and Gima offers them a similar price range (perhaps slightly more pricy).
A good point may be reflected by the emergence of some good qualitative cinema halls and there is decent demand for such places, hopefully also reflected on the quality of the movies released. With the current movies supply we have nowadays in Bucharest I think we're lucky with the film festivals, but frankly their time of play prohibit my watching them as I am mostly available only after 9-10 pm. The Buch Mall and Glendale moved fast with this - I guess that the multiplexes are the needed infrastructure for creating a healthy competition in this industry.
I guess Microsoft launching a search engine in beta version was the headline of this week. If you missed it Scoble has a roundup about what has been commented on it (don't miss this funny aspect).
Leaving from this context BBC is having a very interesting overview of the main players in the search engine arena: Google, MSN, A9, Yahoo and AskJeeves.
Speaking of budget airlines, do you have any idea how many airports are in Romania? 17 - 4 owned by the government (through the ministry of transportation) and the rest 13 owned by the local authorities. As such all of them have limited access to investment funding - that is a two-edged sword - not attractive for many operators but a public-private partnership type of deal could be explored. I guess, probably there's a lot of red tape involved as well.
[link]
It's just now that I read about this even though it looks like it's been a last-week piece of news: last July TIW made on offer for Cosmorom - Romtelecom's mobile arm owned by the Greek OTE. (Romtelecom is the main Romanian telco, in case you didnot know) It looks like TIW strategy is rather a scale than a scope enlargement since the offer included also the purchasing OTE's operations from Albania and Serbia. Cosmorom is still in an uncertain mode anyways that is why I haven't followed up on it in a while. The funny thing is that the Greeks rejected the offer and made a counter-offer for acquiring Mobifon - TIW characterized it as "unconvincing".
Starting with next year Romania will have a National Export Strategy. Go figure - what have they been doing for the last 14 years? And why now, all of a sudden? Very simple - fresh funds available from an international body and a good reason for some state institutions to justify their payroll. -- made in Romania ? --
It's not strategies that we lack, but people making them happen.
Oh well, apparently UPC has as a target becoming the cable industry leader in Romania. Then it makes sense. An updated profile of UPC's operations in Romania here.
Brad is saying that RSS/blogs are the natural continuation of the HTTP/web and SMTP/email. He also claims that the business model in the weblog space is quite clear -- selling software either on a stand-alone license or on a hosted basis, BUT excludes the emergence of new ones. Besides the actual models I personally believe in blogs being incorporated into other business models. Also I see wikis having an impact as well, btw, I hope you didnot miss Espen's take on corporate wikis.
On a related note, read Business Week's take on the blog-related models and ventures. Nothing new here though.
WOW - the hour's most important 100 words and images from the top news stories automatically captured and grouped into a picture postcard. Incredibly cool...
More money invested in Romania coming from American BV Murray&Co and directed to fields such as agriculture or food. This after Comtim was acquired by Smithfield for $33 mil.
In a broader context, P&G's chairman recently endorsed Romania claiming that it can play a base for the future investors in the region. We need this, it brings credibility to a still muddy environment.
Is Astral looking for exit? Or is Romania an attractive place for expansion? Or perhaps both - either way it looks like a win-win situation as Romania is a fairly big market and whoever buys will not have been able to start form scratch otherwise (more expensive). And Astral has built an infrastructure worth almost 25% of the market. It remains to be seen if the EUR 230 mil is the right price (3.5 x revenues in a 300 mil market). Except for UPC (which played a lower profile as compared to RDS), the interested parties are institutional investors.
I think that one of the two dominant mobile operators around (Connex or Orange) should give it a shot and try to get a strategic position here, even though it may imply a bit of a financial stretch. But a la long it may pay off as nowadays the telecom industry is facing a continuing death spiral. Besides, my guess is that data transmission and internet services are going to be one of the booming segment in the next 3-4 years in Romania. The reason is fairly simple - in Romania the internet is the most underdeveloped driver in the triple play convergence: voice, TV and internet. And paradoxically - the most disruptive.
I watched on TV a part of the Tariceanu versus Geoana debate last night. Nothing new, except perhaps that Geoana (representing the new PM if the actual governmental party is to win the elections) was more preoccupied for attacking his opponent for events that occured before 2000, while Tariceanu (the PM designed by opposition to lead the governement) focused on the present and on what needs to be done. Geoana was nervous and superficial while Tariceanu was calm and detailed. It was obvious that Tariceanu was expecting all his opponent moves while Geoana was taken by surprise at least by some questions.
While I am not a big fan of Tariceanu my impression is that if Geoana is to be the new PM the next government will have a problem. And implicitly all of us. My vote is decided regardless all the debates anyways.
UPDATE: By the way, if you're interested in a website about the upcoming elections and subsequent political news and info, check out this one. Unfortunately it is in Romanian. Should you be aware of any English based please let me know. Thanks.
I have been mentioning on this blog several entrepreneurial thoughts, guidance and success stories and I know that at some time they tend to overlap or repeat themselves. I take this risk once again now as I believe that it is better to restate or rehearse some useful things from time to time. So here it goes - I pointed yesterday to Rob saying that people who make it furthest in life are the ones who look at everything as a new learning experience. Here is the followup from VC MBA after meeting a successful serial entrepreneur:
1. Take action. Don't put it off till tomorrow. Too many good ideas are lost because no one implements, no one takes action
2. Ignore "that's a bad idea." When you start a company, lots of people will tell you it's a bad idea. Ignore them!
3. Never give up. Failure is good -- it's a great teacher. Better to try 10 times and only to succeed once than not to try at all.
My corollary to this, somehow #2 rephrased, is know yourself and your limitations very well, always believe stubornly in yourself and your ideas while being open to adapt to whatever makes a positive impact in your belief system.
Nothing much will change in the short run and the president's most direct impact on business and the economy is likely to be in the area of fiscal policy - the budget deficit will balloon well above the current estimate of $2.3 trillion over the next decade. Also the Bush victory makes it more likely that the war in Iraq will continue. All these and more here.
[Via Michael] Very nice initiative from the MeFi people with an European focus: Viewropa. Mike's one of the contributors.
Somewhat similar initiatives: European Weblog Review and Living in Europe.
I found it mentioned in my readings and linked it a while ago for blogging it, I just can't rememeber the source right now, I am quite behind with updating my readings and links. Anyways, long story short - if you want to test your site or weblog on usability, design and accesibility here is your chance. @rgumente is doing reasonably well with speed and features rated as excellent. It's normal, I think quality content easy to read is what a blog is worth for.
Very good paper about the online knowledge communities (OKC) and some future trends:
"Based on developments in internet technologies, we see three interrelated trends in the
development of OKC?s. The first one is integration of services. An online meeting place will become more and more a portal that gives access to a wide number of continuous learning services from different organisations. The current development in internet technologies enables developers to integrate services more and more. The second one is practicality of use. The online meeting place is expected to fit more and more in the common practice of professionals. It will become the networked desktop of professionals at home, at the workplace, at seminars, etcetera. The last trend is personalisation. The OKC as a networked professional portal is expected to adapt to the preferences and competences of the professional. The personal interface to an OKC is expected to develop based on the development of the professional." [pdf]
THIS is the convergence of weblogs, wikis and social software tools such as Ecademy, LinkedIn et all - the publish, collaborate, network circle. The trick is finding a niche and serving it best - innomediation is fairly similar with just a different name.
...as compared to the VCs? Here's the equation and its reasoning. Errr, consider also some inflated egos on both sides. The difference is simply that VCs are more pragmatic AND they have the dough.
Fred on the newly released posting interface from Typepad, which is quite cool and powerful (have you seen the drag and drop stuff?):
"Web-based software and services is a superior way to deliver technology. TypePad built something new and all I need to get the benefit of it is to log in the way I always do and there it is. No downloading, no installing, no configuration, no migration. That's powerful."
That is basically called competitive advantage -- to be remembered!
In the last period of time I have noticed the appearance of several newbies in the Romanian blogging environment. That is good news but since I don't have the time to mention all of them there are at least two good sites which are comprehensive in this respect: this and this.
As I know that at least in the beginning newbies are very eager to increase their blog traffic, here is an useful article with tips for generating awareness. These tips are structured in application settings (mainly related to Blogger software), blogging techniques and marketing action items.
I was reading yesterday about this restaurant in London that has no prices in the menu and where the customers are paying just as much as they think it's worth it. Read the context and implications of this strategy, I think it is a hard case to make with a difficult business model, especially in Romania.
And now I just read about a similar pay-what-you-think-it's-worth case with a totally different background: Canada's Bell Mobility messed up with the billing system and now they tell clients to pay as much as they think they owe and they will figure it out after having the system fixed. More from Canadian customers directly involved.
Rodrigo's got a story about how a good advertising campaign can be spoiled by a lousy sale channel. That reminds me of a discussion we had over at Brandient's seminar yesterday about how campaigns such as price reductions or bundled sales ("buy one get one for free") can affect the brand value and so you're better off if you put the money in training the junior people at the front end with your customers. I think Europeans have several lessons to learn from Americans in this respect, I mentioned a related story a while ago. And btw the Brandient seminars are one of the most professional and knowledgeable I have seen lately - those guys are among the best in town in what they do.
The latest Nastase's trick (the Romanian PM involved in the presidential elections) is making public a bet with Tiriac (the former tennis player) about having built some allegedly 400 sport halls across the country. Everybody with common sense around knows that it is just like in the Radio Erevan jokes whereas the truth is twisted - it's true that there are 400 sport halls, it's just that some are not finished, some have just the foundations laid and some are not usable or in locations difficult to get to. Exactly like during Ceausescu's times when people would hurry to report the 5-year production plans fulfilled in 4 years.
BBC did get the story right.
I was invited to make a presentation at ROCS later at the end of this month. The topic is rather large - business intelligence. As I think weblogs could play such a role and as also lately I have become interested about the weblogs' impact on business and social aspects, I started reading several related topics. I am not looking for introduction to blogs rather for papers/discussions analysing the effect such a tool could play. So far the most informative and documented I read are written by the BROG people from Indiana University:
- weblogs as a bridging genre (pdf)
- conversations in the blogosphere: a bottom line analysis (pdf)
- common visual designs of weblogs (doc)
- the past, present and future of weblogs (ppt)
If you are aware of any other good resources pointers will be appreciated - please drop me a line.
UPDATE: Also very interesting after a thorough google search:
- RSS and the future of internet-based content syndication (pdf)
- understanding blogs - a communicative perspective (pdf)
- implementing weblogs in organizations (pdf)
- nodes of participation in a global context (pdf)
I just found out that Gabriela also did some interesting work - i.e. weblogs as learning and experience packages. (pdf)
Mike, our new business partner from UK, sent me this link about implications of outsourcing to India. Quite funny. :)
GWB is the American president for the next 4 years - Kerry just called him to concede presidential election. This morning on TV Magdalena Boiangiu said that Bush may be better for Romania as he had been here. I have my doubts that either GWB or Kerry would make a major difference to what it will happen in Romania in the following four years.
Via Jeff, this is the US elections scorecard:
- President: Republican by first popular vote majority since 1988 and most votes in election history
- House of Representatives: Republican majority by 29 seats
- Senate: Republican majority by 7 seats
- Governorships: Republican by 6 states
