1) Hooray! Chi's back!
2) One credit I'll give to the US media this election cycle is how they've pointed out how insignificant Iowa really is in the grand scheme of things. It's a state with a population of less than the county I live in. In fact, there are 5 times more people in the city I live in than voted last night. Also, the population is 94.6% white...not exactly a snapshot of modern America.
The reason why western states like California and Nevada moved their primaries up is because they were tired of having the midwest and south choosing who the remaining candidates would be once their late primaries rolled around. If California's primary had been first, the pundits would be debating this morning whether or not a gay-friendly, pro-choice candidate with no foriegn policy experience like Rudy Giuliani
can win any midwestern or southern Republican primaries other than Florida. And whether or not he could, he'd still have won more primary votes in one state than Huckabee could win in 10.
3) A win in Iowa might give a candidate some momentum, but it's certainly not a guarantee at the party nomination...Pat Robertson, Richard Gephardt, & George HW Bush in 1980 to name a few won Iowa and collapsed after that.
Yeah! Kooky Christian Fundamentalist TV Preacher Pat Robertson won there--it shouldn't be a surprise the Iowans voted for Huckabee.
This is one of the many reasons I won't be going back to the state of my birth...yeah, I was born in Iowa.
4) Finally, while I'm intrigued by the thought of Huckabee being the GOP nominee just to see how much he'd get trounced, the thought of him winning scares the fuck out of me, so I hope he runs out of money and fades into obscurity after New Hampshire.