The Dish

He voted for it before he voted against it.

Cartography was once a very elitist and top-down activity. And yes, even maps have agendas. What they include or leave out or annotate has always reflected the decisions of very few people. But that’s changing fast, with Google Maps and Google Earth. Places once ignored are now quite prominent, and the details and annotations are gettig much more democratic:

John Hanke, the director of Google Earth and Google Maps, zooms in for a closer look at Bangalore. At first, the city appeared in Google Earth as little more than a hi-res satellite photo. "Bangalore wasn’t mapped on Google’s products," he says, "and it really wasn’t very well mapped, period."

Now, however, hundreds of small icons pop up on the screen. Pointing at one brings up a text bubble identifying a location of interest: a university, a racetrack, a library. An icon hovering over the Karnataka High Court calls up a photo of its bright red exterior and a link to an account of its long, distinguished history. Another, atop M. Chinnaswamy Stadium, links to a Wikipedia entry about the legendary cricket matches played there. "As you can see, it’s very well mapped now," Hanke says, pulling up a photo of a Hindu temple.

The annotations weren’t created by Google, nor by some official mapping agency. Instead, they are the products of a volunteer army of amateur cartographers. "It didn’t take sophisticated software," Hanke says. "What it took was a substrate — the satellite imagery of Earth — in an accessible form and a simple authoring language for people to create and share stuff. Once that software existed, the urge to describe and annotate just took off."

(Hat tip: Jesse Walker.)

"Michael Moore has teased and bullied his way to some brilliant highs in his career as a political entertainer, but he scrapes bottom in his new documentary, "Sicko" …

In each country, Moore interviews doctors who speak proudly of how well their country’s system works. But the candor of these doctors is no more impressive than that of the corporate spokesmen Moore has confronted in the past. No one mentions the delays or the instances of less than first-rate care…

Moore winds up treating the audience the same way that, he says, powerful people treat the weak in America — as dopes easily satisfied with fairy tales and bland reassurances," – David Denby in the New Yorker. I’ll force myself to go see it and review shortly.

New York, New York, sunset.

For a newly updated, global gallery of Dish readers’ window views, click here.

"We do expect Senator Obama to significantly outraise us this quarter," – Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s campaign manager. Ambers has the full memo.

The family often got together in the same room at night and turned the lights off:

”It was just a time to totally be yourself,” Tagg says.

Ooookaaay. Was the dog invited?

Outside the extremist, activist base, regular GOP voters turn out to be relatively tolerant when it comes to sexual minorities and private sex lives. They’re not well represented by their party leaders, as far as policy is concerned. This is good news for Fred Thompson. The man has had a colorful and wide-ranging sex life, as I’m sure we will soon find out.

David Boaz gets it right:

In a way, Cheney’s story is the story of the Bush administration: Where they pushed bad policies, policies that dramatically expand the power of the federal government and infringe on our liberties, they have had much success. When Cheney and occasionally Bush backed good policies, policies that would constrain government, they failed miserably. Indeed, if Vice President Cheney is indeed a "small-government conservative" who used his unprecedented power to "hold the line" for "conservative orthodoxy on budget and tax matters," he has been a failure of Carteresque proportions.

At least Carter didn’t pretend to be a conservative. And back then, Americans were smart enough not to re-elect total incompetents.

Why does no one ever mention the heatwave? It made Katrina seem like a model of government effectiveness:

The new estimate comes a day after the French Parliament released a harshly worded report blaming the deaths on a complex health system, widespread failure among agencies and health services to coordinate efforts, and chronically insufficient care for the elderly.

Aaron spotted this Muppet classic this morning. We haven’t laughed as hard in a while. No reason for posting today particularly. But it sure beats reading about beheadings. Apologies to all my Irish relatives: