Election Reality Map

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Wednesday November 05, 2008 · 5:21 PM PST

2008/11/05 · 17:21

Standard red-blue maps lie to the eye about size of our win -- they show the area of a state, but what matters isn't area, it's people. The maps show a vast red tide across the middle of America, with a huge red Montana and a tiny blue New Jersey. In human terms, that's backward. On all those maps, our hard-won mandate looks like a close election. Not good.

Here's a map that shows states scaled by population, which cuts the red states down to their real size:

Poll

400 votes Show Results

Do maps matter?

400 votes Vote Now!

Do maps matter?

I like the look of a red-filled America

37 votes

How a map looks has no effect on anyone

35 votes

Let's get this in front of more eyeballs

328 votes

Attack the Root: Systematic Lying (Updated)

technopolitical

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Thursday September 04, 2008 · 4:40 PM PDT

2008/09/04 · 16:40

I think we can win big with a direct attack on the systematic lying by the McCain campaign. A successful attack would change the game in this election and begin to make lying shameful and unacceptable again. This would be a greater transformation in American politics than any other I can imagine.

Being blunt about lying is on the table. Obama has already used the dread L word, saying that "they know they're lying about what my energy plan is." How could the campaign take this further?

technopolitical

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday April 02, 2005 · 4:54 PM PST

2005/04/02 · 16:54

We've seen the rot in political and economic reporting. But science and technology are also key to public policy, and not everyone can see that they screw this up, too.

The NYT online today tells us about nuclear weapons -- or tries to, but not very hard.

(Disclosure: A contributer to this article recently misrepresented me in the NYT, so I'm pissed.) Read More

Now that Google News features dKos diaries... A modest proposal

technopolitical

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday September 23, 2004 · 6:06 PM PDT

2004/09/23 · 18:06

I've heard that dKos has more unique visitors per month than the Fox News site. I've seen a screen shot of a dKos diary on the Google News front page. We're a source of news and analysis, but we're also a community that talks to itself. This creates a conflict which may have a partial socio-technological fix.

A problem: In the standard, "nested" view, the recent diary on electronic voting fraud had 12 screens of reminiscence about antique text editors before any substantive discussion of current -- possibly urgent -- fraud scenarios. This illustrates a familiar problem, but trying to get people to rate enjoyable off-topic comments as "2: marginal" isn't a solution. Chat, jokes, even personal messages in diary threads, are all part of what makes dKos a community.

A suggestion: Because diary comments are not created equal, we might benefit from having a better way to say what we're creating. What if we had two buttons for posting comments: "post" and "post side remark"? These might work like this....

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Election Reality Map

Attack the Root: Systematic Lying (Updated)

The NYT goes nukular

Now that Google News features dKos diaries... A modest proposal