mondrian’s neon fantod

It’s the thing you’ve been waiting for! Well, maybe ,em>you haven’t. But I have.

Mark Newman, from the Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan has posted the yummy cartograms of the 2008 US Presidential Election results. I could bore you with discussions, but instead, I suggest you go check out his work.

It’s awfully nice, as a Texan, not to have Travis County as a remote little island of blue in a sea of red. This time around the central counties of our major metropolitan areas all went blue, too. So here’s to you, Harris, Dallas, Bexar, El Paso and Jefferson counties. And three cheers for all you folks in the Valley and out West, too. Especially my dear friends in Maverick County!

And he’s not alone. Here’s what that notorious commie General Colin Powell had to say on the matter:

Taxes are always a redistribution of money. Most of the taxes that are redistributed go back to those who pay them — in roads and airports and hospitals and schools. And taxes are necessary for the common good, and there’s nothing wrong with examining what our tax structure is or who should be paying more, who should be paying less. For us to say that makes you a socialist, I think, is an unfortunate characterization that isn’t accurate.

source: CNN

O, Canada. We on the left like to hold up your healthcare system as an example. Those on the right attempt to do the same. But they get it wrong.

Mythbusting Canadian Healthcare, pt 1

Mythbusting Canadian Healthcare, pt 2

Good reads, both. Especially if you want the ground-level view from someone who lives there to use against people who speak loudly about it even though they don’t have first hand knowledge of it.

It’s just a depressing day. But you should read this, too:

The military adventurers of the Bush administration have much in common with the corporate leaders of the defunct energy company Enron. Both groups of men thought that they were the “smartest guys in the room,” the title of Alex Gibney’s prize-winning film on what went wrong at Enron. The neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon outsmarted themselves. They failed even to address the problem of how to finance their schemes of imperialist wars and global domination.

As a result, going into 2008, the United States finds itself in the anomalous position of being unable to pay for its own elevated living standards or its wasteful, overly large military establishment. Its government no longer even attempts to reduce the ruinous expenses of maintaining huge standing armies, replacing the equipment that seven years of wars have destroyed or worn out, or preparing for a war in outer space against unknown adversaries. Instead, the Bush administration puts off these costs for future generations to pay — or repudiate. This utter fiscal irresponsibility has been disguised through many manipulative financial schemes (such as causing poorer countries to lend us unprecedented sums of money), but the time of reckoning is fast approaching.

From: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174884/chalmers_johnson_how_to_sink_america

Lou Dobbs says things you don’t want to hear:

We all have to acknowledge that our problems were in part brought on by the failure of our government to regulate the institutions and markets that are now in crisis. The irresponsible fiscal policies of the past decade have led to a national debt that amounts to $9 trillion. The irresponsible so-called free trade policies of Democratic and Republican administrations over the past three decades have produced a trade debt that now amounts to more than $6 trillion, and that debt is rising faster than our national debt. All of which is contributing to the plunge in the value of the U.S. dollar.

At precisely the point in our history in which this nation has become ever more dependent on foreign producers for everything from clothing to computers to technology to energy, our weakened dollar is making the price of an ever-increasing number of imported goods even more expensive.

Open your ears a little wider.

In An Administration’s Epic Collapse, Joe Klein takes a quick look at the three defining sins of the Bush Administration - arrogance, incompetence, cynicism. It’s short and worth a read. So hop to it.

In The Myth of the Permanent Majority Kevin Drum breaks down the results of the most recent Pew Survey. Both the article and the survey itself are worth reading. Maybe we’re not totally screwed after all.