Guus Bosman

The first elections results of the elections for the Dutch parliament have been coming in from 3 pm EST today.

1. A sad day for the PvdA: they were unable to leverage the failure of the VVD/CDA government to gain more seats and lost some 9 seats. Should Wouter Bos resign?
2. The biggest surprise is the very strong result for the Socialist Party. I disagree with their ideology but they are a true grass-roots party and have worked hard for their success.
3. The SP now probably has more seats that Lijst Pim Fortuyn ever had.
4. Balkenende will get a 4th chance to come up with a stable government. He will likely continue to represent the government of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
5. There is now a party in Dutch parliament that has animal rights as its main priority.
6. It is now a good time for Mr. Marijnissen to start thinking about his successor, to prevent the SP from becoming a one-man party and prove that they are a strong organization
7. Mark Rutte has failed as the first man for the VVD. His party lost significantly, and only 36% of the VVD voters voted for Mr. Rutte. He should resign his partijleider position or will otherwise be moved aside by his party anyway.
8. It's sad that Mr. Wilders did quite well with a projected 6 to 9 seats. Unfortunately it shows that there is a consistent base of anti-immigrant voters.
9. The LPF likely no longer has any seats in parliament, nor does Mr. Nawijn get a seat.
10. "EenNL", a LPF follow-up party, did get a seat. Comment of its first man: "I would feel horrible sitting in parliament alone".
11. D'66 virtually disappeared (finally) from national politics after withdrawing support for Balkenende III.
12. The election results of Dutch citizens abroad will be published on Friday.

Wednesday are the elections for the Lower Chamber in the Netherlands.

Mieke sent me my voter's card a few weeks ago which I signed and returned. This way she can vote for me tomorrow.

Let's see if Mr. Balkenende (CDA) will get a 4th chance to come up with a strong and stable government. He has had plenty of time to practice.

The VVD left Minister Verdonk on the candidate list and even placed her on number 2. This is the minister who tried to strip Hirsi Ali of her Dutch passport and thereby made a fool of Dutch politics worldwide.

I've never really trusted the VVD too well and I guess this reinforces my thoughts. Given Ms. Verdonk's bad judgment calls in the past and her incompentent behavior in the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali she should never have been placed on the candidate list.

It will be no surprise to regular readers that my vote won't go to VVD or CDA.

Sunday afternoon I went to see Ultimate Fighting Competition episode 65 at Mike's place.

Mike and Maya had recorded the pay-per-view show which was broadcast the Saturday night before and they organized a nice BBQ to watch the show with a group of 10 people.

I had never seen this type of show before -- I saw some WWF wrestling games but those are scripted (fake) games and really not that exciting. I really enjoyed the UFC games which were relatively short (between 3 and 15 minutes per game) but full of action.

The most interesting game was between Sylvia and Monson. Sylvia is a very tall guy (6"8) and Monson is only 5"8 although they're the same weight. So it was the big, long-armed boxer against the short fujitsu wrestler. Sylvia was defending his title and after 4 round Monson could not capture the title, but it was an entertaining game.

I was supporting Hughes when he fought against St. Pierre, but St. Pierre dealt some severe kicks and basically knocked out Hughes with 1 feet kick to the head followed by a kick. George St. Pierre, the Canadian, is now the UFC Welterweight Champion. Later a Dutch guy played also, and I was happy to see him win. The food was good too - I tried pickled onions from Winston Salem, NC, and devilled eggs.

It was a very entertaining evening.

A week ago I celebrated my 28th birthday.

In the morning we had cake for breakfast (with birthday flowers in the background) and Sasha gave me a beautiful jacket as a present. It was a very nice morning and I enjoyed to look at my website early in the morning and see so many comments there already.

At work we had cake also and in the evening I invited my colleagues for drinks in the Flying Saucer in Raleigh. The weather was great so we were sitting outside. Sasha met my colleagues for the first time and we met a lot of their 'significant others' also which was very nice.

Thanks everybody for the congratulations, presents, cards, comments and everything!