Check out this new XPLANATiON that XPLANE put together:

“Barack Obama is the first major candidate to decline participation in the public financing system for presidential campaigns. He’s found a more effective way to raise money — by leveraging the power of the American people through online Social Networks.”

This work is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

“Pacifists and war protesters all over the world wear peace signs on shoulder bags and jeans jackets. But only few know what the symbol really means, and where it came from.

Exactly fifty years ago British designer Gerald Holtom created what would become the international peace symbol. On February 21, 1958 the Royal College of Art trained artist designed a logo for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the start of the British peace movement.”

“Late last year, a slide show in The New York Times, ‘Reading Tea Leaves and Campaign Logos’ took to the blogwaves like wildfire. In it, illustrator Ward Sutton passed mocking judgment (to great effect) on all of the 2008 presidential candidate logos, commenting on anything from the type choice to the relative size of the R in Rudy Giuliani’s logo (”Extra large ‘R’ to remind you just how Republican he is”). But in his zeal to mock equally, he certainly got one critique wrong: Obama ‘08.”

“On mission along the border of Chad and Darfur, Human Rights Watch researchers gave children notebooks and crayons to keep them occupied while they spoke with the children’s parents. Without any instruction or guidance, the children drew scenes from their experiences of the war in Darfur: the attacks by the Janjaweed, the bombings by Sudanese government forces, the shootings, the burning of entire villages, and the flight to Chad.”

The Bookslut review: “Norman Rockwell’s best painting may very well be Blood Brothers, a grim depiction of two dead soldiers, one white and one black, laid out beside each other with their blood intermixing on a Vietnamese battlefield. The white soldier’s eyes are closed, but the black one’s are wide open in a perpetual expression of shock. Unfortunately, it was killed by Look magazine in 1968.”

The White House broke with tradition Wednesday night and refused to let photojournalists shoot still pictures of the president at the podium after his prime-time address on the Iraq war. As a result, newspapers and wire services had little choice but to run low-quality frame grabs from the video of the speech. An official handout photo from the White House, which most news outlets rejected, was the only other option.”

“Juan Enriquez had a nice idea for rebalancing the priorities in the voting booth: proxy votes for parents of children under 18. That is, if my wife and I have two kids, the family gets four votes, not two. Juan’s rationale for this plan is that the voting public is currently made up of a lot of baby boomers, who are going to begin to vote for things that benefit their age group…”

“The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum began the National Design Awards in 2000 to honor the best in American design… If design has an Oscar, the National Design Award is it. The honor is taken seriously… Because the Awards program was originally conceived as an official project of the White House Millennium Council, the First Lady serves as the honorary chair of the gala at which the winners are celebrated. She also traditionally hosts a breakfast at the White House to which all the nominees and winners are invited. That breakfast was today. This year, however, five Communication Design honorees decided to decline the invitation. They wrote a letter to Laura Bush explaining why.”

“There’s something to be said for working smarter, and not harder, and humans have been looking for–and finding–loopholes to enable it for centuries. A look at some of our most celebrated loophole practitioners, and their tales.”

“In the January 30th [2004] issue of the The Wall Street Journal, a paper I frequently work for, the editor of its op-ed page with the evocative name of Tunku Varadarajan wrote an article called ‘Just Where Does an Illustrator Draw the Line?’ for the Friday ‘Taste’ section. In it he describes his difficulty in getting a certain illustrator (who he refers to in the opening paragraph as a ‘pompous little artichoke’) to accept an assignment without first reading it to see if he agreed with its political proposition. The illustrator, who is left-leaning, was evidently not comfortable with blindly accepting the assignment from an editorial page that generally leans towards the right.”

“Poland’s two largest newspapers, Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita, joined an Amnesty International protest against repression in neighboring Belarus on Wednesday and blacked out much of their front pages. An Amnesty ad on the bottom read ‘This is what freedom of speech looks like in Belarus.’”

“The results of the U.S. presidential election have been mapped in a number of ways. For some, there are two Americas, and one of them is, um, Canada ó instead of running away to Canada, some think Canada should come to them. Fun.” More, more and more.

Thank you. Here’s some extra info, courtesy of a.wholelottanothing.org: Find your polling place, What to do if you run into trouble voting. States where your employer legally must give you time off to vote.

“David Brooks, cultural observer and author of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, proposed an alternative analysis of the American political scene in his New York Times column recently. ‘There are two sorts of people in the information-age elite, spreadsheet people and paragraph people,” wrote Brooks. ‘Spreadsheet people work with numbers, wear loafers and support Republicans. Paragraph people work with prose, don’t shine their shoes as often as they should and back Democrats.’ He went on to point out that ‘C.E.O.’s are classic spreadsheet people,’ five times more likely to donate to Bush than Kerry, and ‘Professors, on the other hand, are classic paragraph people,’ with Kerry donors outnumbering Bush donors eleven to one.”

“Good-looking printed documents can complement protests, lobbying, and media work. This Saturday, Anne Rolfes and Iris Carter Brown from the Louisiana Bucket Brigade spoke about their campaign against Shell to stop polluting their neighborhood. They talked about a few of the ways reports and Web sites made a difference to people campaigning on the ground.”