Fine, We Can Go There

From Jesse Taylor we learn that the McCainiacs are resorting to cheap imagery to mock Barack Obama's simple suggestion that we check our tires is the entirety of his energy plan, handing out tire gages (at $25 a pop) nicely inscribed with the words "Obama Energy Plan."

It's a specialty of the GOP hatchet squad, planting a simple misleading visual out there that acts like a brain-bomb on the body politic. No doubt you remember this "honorable" gem with the cute purple heart band aids from four years ago, mocking John Kerry's service while "Ace" McCain's stays strictly off limits, some how elevating the ability to crash five jets as a qualification for high office.

So, in answer to the shameless goofballery, I propose we pull out the stops and win this little game, even if it's under their rules and on their turf.

JOHN McCAIN'S PLAN FOR FUEL EFFICIENT TRANSPORTATION


JOHN McCAIN'S LOW-COST PRESCRIPTION DRUG PLAN





JOHN McCAIN'S OUTREACH PROGRAM FOR YOUNGER VOTERS




JOHN McCAIN'S ANSWER TO THE SOCIAL SECURITY "CRISIS"




JOHN McCAIN'S VISION FOR FIXING THE HOUSING PROBLEM




JOHN McCAIN'S VIEW ON "WOMEN'S ISSUES"




JOHN McCAIN'S ANSWER ON COMPREHENSIVE HEALTH CARE




JOHN McCAIN'S JOBS PROGRAM




JOHN McCAIN'S DIPLOMATIC INITIATIVES

Go ahead, throw some more up against this wall and let's see if it sticks.

Givin’ It Away

Bob Somerby thinks that liberals are blowing the presidential election (as usual) because of our too high-minded reaction to John McCain’s dogwhistles. Obviously, white people are still living in a bit of denial about American racism and the doubt went to the white guy over last week’s kafuffle, even as Obama’s charge about McCain trying to scare people by using Obama's face on our currency was revealed to be absolutely true. So let’s go with a different tack, shall we?

Dear Barack:

We’ve had our “issues” as of late but I still have no doubt that you’re a world better than the other guy, so here it is:

John McCain doesn’t seem to think you’re very smart. He thinks you can’t tell the difference between a campaign about the issues we all want to work on and one based on empty personal attacks. He thinks you want this campaign to be about Britney Spears and Charlton Heston and The Matrix.

I think that the American people are smarter than that. They don’t want to be fooled again into making a bad choice because of baseless attacks on someone’s character. They want a campaign based on the important issues and policies that are at stake in this election. So when you hear me compared with some celebrity, or super hero, or Moses, or that I’m too presumptuous, just remember that my opponent is playing you for a sucker.

That’s how you do jujitsu. I’m charging you for the next one.

[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]

This Is Bad

But when's the last time Bonddad reported any good news on the economy?

So -- with the effect of the stimulus checks consumer spending decreased .2% thanks to the largest price increase since 1981. This is very bad news because it indicates consumer spending will drop hard when the rebate check effect wears off.

There Are No Electoral Votes in Germany

Republican presidential candidate John McCain hopes to enhance his appeal to blue-collar voters and those in the Northern Plains with a visit to a giant motorcycle rally in South Dakota.

The Arizona senator will be stumping for votes Monday at what amounts to an annual motorcyclists' Woodstock in Sturgis, S.D. The event, billed as the largest rally of its kind in the world, is known as the "Buffalo Chip." It features nine nights of entertainment, with bands including Def Leppard, Lynyrd Skynyrd and REO Speedwagon. McCain will speak about dinnertime.

Dinnertime at Sturgis?

[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]

What Steve Benen Said Digby Said

Carpetbagger:

As Digby put it, “I am really starting to hate this unctuous, double-talking creep.”

I mean, really. It’s tough to keep up, but just try to count the lies:

I know a lot of otherwise good lefty folks out there are still:

• a.) pissed off about how Hillary was treated,
  
• b.) mad about Obama's cave on FISA,
  
• c.) worried Obama might not follow through on his health care program that is already watered down since it doesn't have mandates,
  
• d.) disgusted that Obama might not arrest Bush and Cheney and their co-conspirators and throw them in Gitmo by midnight January 20th,
• e.) upset that Obama catered to the Christianist fanatics by promising not to eliminate Bush's faith-base initiatives entirely,
• f.) indignant that anyone should suggest that they "get over it."
  

However, John McSame, his Rovian handlers, and corporate lobbyist campaign machine have proven to be so dishonest and utterly without shame, so callous in their disregard for offering solutions that work as opposed to slogans that deceive and can only be designed to perpetuate the lawlessness of the current regime they must never be allowed the levers of power.

Indeed, it will take a Herculean effort to dislodge the destructive influence of all the Loyal Bushies who have infiltrated every level of government, especially since a new Democratic administration will be honor-bound not to fire people merely due to their political affiliations even though they were hired exclusively on that criteria regardless of their qualifications. No Republican administration will even attempt to fix what is really broken in our system of graft, cronyism and influence peddling.

More Benen on Digby:

It’s mildly interesting that McCain gave his word to the nation that he would run a substantive, honest campaign, and then completely abandoned his promise when he saw some poll results he didn’t like. But it’s far more interesting that McCain’s campaign strategy is based on little more than a massive con job. I care that McCain is relentlessly negative, but I really care that he’s relentlessly dishonest.

Digby concluded, “At this point I don’t care if Obama flips on every single issue, I will do everything I can to see this jackass defeated.”

I think that’s precisely the right attitude.

Ditto!

More On Those Maps

Resurrecting the the electoral maps I used in 2004 to measure what the state of the race is now got me wondering if any new work had been done along these lines. The first place to start, naturally was my archives at my old Blogdrive blog to trace back this "cartogram" to its creator, Geography Professor Dr. Sara Fabrikant at UC Santa Barbara, who looked at the maps of the US colored red and blue on her television (mostly red) the day after the 2000 election and couldn't understand how the pundits could call the race close, even though it was oh, so damn close. Yet the map was a sea of red.

The problem of course was that every news outlet took maps designed to show relative geographical data and used those very familiar metaphors for reality and tried to use them for a completely different purpose, counting up electoral votes. As I indicated in my post below, although the pundits are again calling this a close race, if you map people and potential electoral college votes rather than the geography of the USA, the picture becomes clearer that John McCain is in a world of hurt.

Dr. Fabrikant and a colleague were interviewed by the Santa Barbara Press right after the 2004 election, and explained their vision of the political landscape.

"It's actually communicating information about acres, not voters," said Daniel Montello, a UCSB geography professor.

All maps are distortions of reality, said Mr. Montello, who studies how people perceive space and geography. The earth is round and land masses are difficult to accurately draw on a two-dimensional plane. But different maps serve different purposes.

For Mr. Montello, who has a doctorate in psychology and serves as the chairman of the university's Cognitive Science Program, the meaning a map conveys is important.

The red of giant western states like Wyoming, with its population of less than 500,000, dominates the electoral map used by most newspapers.

But try and find the blue dot of the District of Columbia, which has close to 600,000 people. There are more people in a few blocks of New York City than the whole state of North Dakota, but you would probably have an easier time finding Bismarck than the Bronx in most of the national maps used to chart the election.

There are some notable exceptions to that rule. Both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times this week have included different maps to chart such things as the depth of support for each candidate in each county across the nation. And both papers have included maps that distort the shape of states, enlarging and shrinking them based on their electoral votes.

It is ironic that distorted maps can actually convey more meaning than the standard representations of the United States, said Sara Fabrikant, a geography professor at UCSB.

Ms. Fabrikant created her first election map the day after the 2000 presidential election. The Swiss native wanted to understand the close race. She was perplexed by the message that the election was too close to call, yet the election maps used on television and in the newspapers showed a nation colored mostly Republican red.

"I'm not an American citizen and I didn't understand the electoral vote system until I put it on a map," she said.

The traditional political map made it appear that President Bush was winning hands down.

"In essence they are using the wrong visual form," Ms. Fabrikant said.

Using cartograms, maps that include statistical data to add color shading or distortions in shape, she created a map based on electoral votes that showed a more even split in votes between candidate Al Gore and Mr. Bush in the 2000 race.

She did it again this year, posting her maps online the day after the race.

The distorted maps range in color from a light blue to light pink, showing both the intensity of support for each candidate and the relative number of votes each got. (One of her colleagues said the distorted national map looks slightly like an upsidedown donkey, but Ms. Fabrikant said it was pure coincidence and that she has no party affiliation.)

"What you can really see is the urban and rural contrast in voting," Ms. Fabrikant said.

The cartogram contracts the empty land and expands the populated cities.

Over the summer she delivered a paper on the 2000 race, "Blue & Red America," to a group of German academics. She's also added other variables to her maps and included a breakdown by county. What's striking is that displaying the data in different ways begs new questions. On one map she included major rivers and highways and found a line of blue snaking up the Mississippi. In another she saw an arching band of blue extending through several southern states.

The apparent patterns prompted her to wonder if the lines followed the same migration routes of blacks who moved north for jobs, or whether they simply follow urban development along the river front. Ms. Fabrikant said she would like to work more with a political scientist to investigate those patterns.

Making these maps isn't about politics, she said, but communicating information.

"Basically what has been driving cartography for 5,000 years is the acknowledgement that a picture really is worth a thousand words."

The best representation of what kind of a nation we really are, contrary to the simplistically divided red vs. blue, selling Tide and Superglue country the corporate media will perpetuate for as long as they have breath, is Dr. Fabrick's county-by-county cartogram that not only distorts the geography to show population more accurately, but also shades each county varying degrees of purple based on their support for Bush or Kerry last time around.

Nothing proves Barack Obama's point better than this map. There are no red States and there are no blue States. We are one big purple nation, a country of fabulous color.

Maps? I Got Yer Maps

We all just love those neat maps that color the states all red and blue, especially when they turn bluer and bluer, don't we? At the end of the last presidential election, the map looked (sadly) like this (source, Wikipedia):

Candidate: Bush Kerry

Electoral vote: 286 251

States carried: 31 19+DC

Popular vote: 62,040,610 59,028,444

Percentage: 50.7% 48.3%





Presidential election results map. Red denotes states won by Bush/Cheney (31), Blue denotes those won by Kerry/Edwards (19+DC). The split vote in Minnesota denotes a faithless elector's vote counted for John Edwards. Each number represents the electoral votes a state gave to one candidate.


That's an awful lot of red. But it doesn't look like quite the blowout when you look at a map that truly reflects the the relative electoral college strength of each State as a function of it's size on the map, like this:

Not exactly a "mandate," is it? I started doing these in August of '04 and now is as good a time as any to put them back out there. Paul Rosenberg (who regular readers know I think is sheer genius) posted a current map of the electorate based on polling data from Polster.com that separates "strong" from "leaner" states and paints toss-up states yellow (fittingly).

By no means do I intend to duplicate Rosenberg's work here, where he makes the case that there is a "potential" for a "map changing" Obama Tsunami here based on his analysis of Swing State Clusters. But to get a feel of what he's talking about, one look at my map below should dispell the corporate media myth that this race is anywhere near close right now.


(Oooh, The Colors!)

All the usual caveats apply of course, but if the McCain camp is looking at anything close to what this map represents, it certainly explains why they suddenly look like they're desperate, trying absolutely anything they can to move the numbers.

They're acting desperate because they are desperate.

All 10 Toss-up States (yellow) were Bush States in '04, three of the "lean Obama" States (Ohio, Iowa and New Mexico) were in Bush's column too. Meanwhile, Obama is not losing a single State to the Toss-up category that John Kerry won or any leaners to McCain.

Remember, if only one or two States had flipped in either 2000 or 2004, the Democrats would have won. McCain must hold his base States and solidify his lead in all his Leaners, turn ALL the Toss-ups red and pick off either Ohio or a combination of Michigan and one of the other States Obama counts as leaning his way. To call that a tall order is the understatement of the year.

So Simple

The very same people, infused with an all-consuming lust for power and money used every conceivable lie they could imagine a trusting yet detached public would buy to green-light their invasion of Iraq are now engaged in a frenzy of dishonesty aimed at electing John McCain -- to continue their rape of the nation's treasure and cover their tracks of course.

After You Win The War About The War

As we enjoy the first Hot August Night of this election year, the aroma of this last week's festival of defecation that masquerades as political theater still lingers.

The smell of his own fecal material hitting the fan may (or may not) trouble PrezNitWit Shrub and his henchmen (and women), but it smells sweet to me, like pony poo.

We came to appreciate that John McRove has opted for the tactic of throwing anything against the wall to see if it sticks -- no matter how absurd -- so the mendacious media as well as the vast wasteland of Teh Stoopid out there will be too distracted to remind everyone that Obama won the war about the war, that John Kerry was right (so was Jimmy Carter), and what a shallow opportunist McCain has always been. Unless of course the fan flings the crap back into McCain's lap.

Meanwhile the Congressional Republicans have simply lost their hold on reality. Unfortunately, understanding that much like treating a terminal patient with dementia and delusions of grandeur, Dr. Obama elected to humor them, giving in to their screams for another fix of the black crude they're addicted to, knowing that the real cure will take a bit over five months to take effect.

This weekend is as good a time as any to sit back and reflect on the idiocy, no doubt we'll be seeing a lot more of these dog-n-pony shows as November approaches.

Wal*Mart Uber Alles

The prospect of the Demon-crats taking over Washington has WalMart execs in a tizzy. The Murdoch Street Journal reports "thousands of Wal-Mart store managers and department heads have been summoned to mandatory meetings at which the retailer stresses the downside for workers if stores were to be unionized."

The Wal-Mart human-resources managers who run the meetings don't specifically tell attendees how to vote in November's election, but make it clear that voting for Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama would be tantamount to inviting unions in, according to Wal-Mart employees who attended gatherings in Maryland, Missouri and other states.

"The meeting leader said, 'I am not telling you how to vote, but if the Democrats win, this bill will pass and you won't have a vote on whether you want a union,'" said a Wal-Mart customer-service supervisor from Missouri. "I am not a stupid person. They were telling me how to vote," she said.

THIS WILL NOT STAND! We simply cannot allow WalMart employees to unionize, making all the cheap crap they import from China more expensive just so the peasants working there can have the same rights to collectively bargain for better working conditions, more affordable health care and competitive wages -- just like all the unionized WalMart workers in (wait for it) China. [/snark]

How much of a raise did some unionized Wal-Mart China workers collectively bargain for this year? 8% over last years wages and another 8% in 2009 over the already increased 2008 wages.

According to a Xinhua News article,
the trade union for Wal-Mart workers in Jinjiang, Fujian also
successfully negotiated issues of hours worked, general rest and
vacation time, insurance, and worker safety. Full time staff will
enjoy rights to vacation days, marital leave, maternity leave, and
parental leave.

How’s that compare to Wal-Mart’s U.S. workers? I seem to recall reading something about Wal-Mart wanting more part time labor and wage caps. And as another cost saving measure didn’t Wal-Mart violate labor laws over 2 million times in just six years - in Minnesota alone!?

This isn't just a case of China putting on it's best face for the Olympics, like they did today in bowing to pressure and agreeing to live by their agreement with the IOC when it comes to internet access for international journalists -- so the guys from the BBC can now access their own website. This is a concerted effort by China to improve it's society, and unions are considered an integral part of their advancement into the 21st century.

It is just another step in China’s efforts to move away from being a
destination for foreign companies seeking super low paid workers. Just
as with so much else in China, we are seeing foreign companies getting
out in front in terms of going along with what China wants to do with
its economy. Domestic companies are and will continue to follow in
terms of having to deal with unionized and higher paid employees…
anybody who still thinks China will do anything for foreign investment
is living in the past. Times have changed and China is getting more and
more selective in terms of the foreign (and even domestic) companies it
wants.

This is not window dressing, and Walmart executives knew going in that China would insist the company deal fairly with unions before they started investing in China -- where the company now has 90 supercenters, three Sam’s Clubs and holds a 35% share of the Taiwanese Trust-Mart brand. But interestingly enough, the union movement among Chinese WalMart employees was not an edict from Beijing, but a grass-roots movement that has been struggling for recognition for ten years before their first store went union in 2006 (pdf).

Ten Years. It took ten years of fighting, and two more years of negotiations before the first real collectively bargained agreement between WalMart and some of it's Chinese employees could be signed. And that's in Communist freaking China? The worker's paradise? And here in the Land of the Free, they're afraid of a centrist Democratic Party, barely tolerant of progressive causes?

Ugh!

Union membership in the US has been cut from 25% to 7% since the Reagan years, and the legacy of Reaganomics is continuing to devastate this nation as our Department of Labor has been morphed into the Department of Union-Busting. Meanwhile, union friendly China is indisputably moving in the right direction for it's economy and the standard of living of it's citizens.

Human rights? After Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, legalizing torture and creating a surveillance state, Americans are hardly in a position to get snooty about China's history of rights violations -- and they're kicking our ass economically, even with unions at their WalMart stores.