Georgraphy is Destiny: The Polish Election

Here's one I stumbled on by accident:
...but it's pretty good proof that old habits are slow to change. The black line is the 19th Century Bismarkian (Wilhemian) Germany Empire. The colored splotches are modern Poland. The brown splotches are the "Civic Platform," roughly the successor to the Christian Democrats, "market conservatives," favoring privatization and the flat tax, opposing gay marriage and abortion . The blues are the populist-conservative "Law and Justice" party, descendant, in part of the Solidarity movement, also conservative on social issues but without the free-market heresy. Be interesting, if you could do it, to try to chart out the parallel split in the United States, where free-market and populist conservatives for many years have shared the same (Republican) party political space--although this year, quite a good many of the natual "market liberal" voters voted for Obama.

Source:Wikia, via Strange Maps and Andrew Cusack.

Cool Map: Geography of the Mortgage Mess

Carpe Diem trolls for cool charts and maps so you and I don't have to. Here is some good stuff from the NY Fed on the mortgage mess. I'm not sure they've got the color thing nailed just yet, but you do see information that you might miss in a spreadsheet. Example: if I read the colors right, California and Florida are indeed the capital of the looneytunes loan market--but some other states in the old Confederacy may actually be doing worse on some measures of loan trouble.

Cool Maps

One: Hillary's Travels (as first lady) (link). She's traveled to more places than I have, but she hasn't been to Kashgar. H/T: Talking Points Memo.

Two: news coverage maps (link). I want to look at these more carefully on a bigger screen. H/T Carpe Diem.