Pots and Kettles come to mind.

Which might explain why they have almost identical policies.

Right -- does anyone playing this game not recognize the Bush/Cheney oil riches?

This game strikes me as a relatively successful interactive political cartoon. Successful in representation at least (I'm not sure if the rhetoric is politically useful for the GOP). Monopoly is perhaps a good metaphor for Kerry + his wife's extensive real estate holdings. But Kerryopoly doesn't actually let you play Monopoly with the properties, it just frames them in the property-lust-fantasy of the board game. Of course, the question for political critique is what kind of "monopoly" Kerry actually holds. In Kerryopoly, the properties aren't framed as monopolies; they are scattered around a smaller gameboard. And interestingly, the Gas Tax space is also framed as a property, rather than a tax space (as one would expect in a version of the board game). There's also a kind of unexplored critique of Kerry's appeal to the everyman, in the form of the $40,000 average salary juxtaposed with the high property values on the board. As the player moves around the board, he goes into debt based on the value of the properties he lands on. Of course, in the real game, the player pays rent on properties owned by other players, not the full value of the property. I'm not sure how this "rule change" in Kerryopoly increases its rhetorical register.

Anyway, there are so many versions of Monopoly around, one for every city, and one for every university, and many more. I think the reason people enjoy playing these is because they turn the tables on the market; they "own" these unaffordable, unownable properties, and they leverage them against their competitors. Does one get the same impression of disconnected ideals with Kerryopoly, the same realization that the Kerry-Heinz world is so massively uncoupled from the average citizen's that the citizen would become repelled from the Kerry ticket? I'm not sure, but the fact that the player can't really play -- that is, he can't buy, sell, mortgage, leverage the properties -- doesn't help.

I'm sure I'm overanalyzing this. It reminds me to post some comments on the GOP games in general, which I'll do after the holiday.

I had a hard time not wondering about Bush's assets when rolling the dice, too.

I was pleasantly surprised to know that Kerrys bike *could* actually have cost the same as my old one, $1000. The game sets it at $1000-$6000. Does that make him a spendthrift in my eyes? Well, no.

Hence the political context around the game marrs its success as a cartoon to me. Any Joe or Jane that follows the American election with half an eye open knows that Bush and his cabinet are among the richest people in the States. Thus making Kerry out to be a huge capitalist swine misses the mark. But then again the GOP games are not exactly known for caring about the people who play their games, are they?

Right. I think the point Josh is making, however, is that Kerry is damn rich himself: A lot of this comes from his wife, who inherited a $500 million estate from her late husband, also a Senator, John Heinz III. So, nobody's exactly on the ground floor here, from a financial perspective.

So true. The other night my girlfriend and I were eating a home-made hamburgers and started to chuckle at the fact that we were supporting John Kerry's campaign all the way from Denmark just by eating dinner.

Long live globalisation.

No kidding! Heck, I bet you're even supporting Kerry out at your local pse stand...

seeing comments about Bush's and Chaney's assets as compared to Kerry's I realize that Bush and Chaney earned their wealth, Kerry married into it. And while Bush and Chaney may have used connections and the family name to help them along the way, that is totally legal and is nothing that thousands of Americans do each and every day. Kerry divorced his first wife while she was ill, and took half of HER wealth.

"Earned it?"

GWB "earned" being born into the Bush clan?

And as for the way in which the Bush/Cheney's administration's cronies have "earned" their wealth, check out -

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/06/01/eveningnews/main620626.shtml

And, in general, the stuff that the Republicans come up with against Kerry - "flip-flopping?" This little bit - essentially sexist, since if Mrs. Kerry were running for office and had married a millionaire, there'd be no peep - does any of it compare to things like:

The biggest deficit ever, after one of the biggest surpluses ever?

The greatest job loss rate since the great depression?

The Bush hypocrisy of sending hundreds of poor non-violent drug users to prisons for things that he and his own family have done?

The shifting rationales for the Iraq war?

Eh, back on course: nothing in the Kerryopoly game illuminates any real issues about Kerry the way that the anti-Bush game at http://www.emogame.com/bushgame.html clearly and succinctly shows just how screwed up the Bush administration has been.

The point isn't necessarily about Kerry himself, but rather how his policies reflect his own habits. You hear him tell everyone he would do better with the economy, but you never hear him tell HOW, and that is basically the problem. I can tell you I would have done better with the economy all I want and call Bush an idiot all I want, but that doesn't mean I actually have any basis for that or had any plans that would have been more successfull at the time.

And Lemmy Caution: I would like to note that you have just given criticizm to items which have already been debunked, primarily the job loss situation. The president has, in fact, almost no influence on jobless rates. Rather the economy does, and the economy itself is also effected, but not controlled by the political administration. The current trend you now see follows the sharp fall of the empty e-business sectors which made the economy soar during the Clinton administration. Clintion could have done whatever he wanted and would have had basically no effect on the econmy, he was lucky enough to have been in a trend he had no actuall influence on and spun it successfully. Bush happened to be on the downward end of that trend, and the lack of newer revolutionary trends have created the economy you see now. Take an economics course.

There are plenty of reasons to hold the Republican administration responsible for this massive job loss, and the biggest one is the change in tax policy, which has impoverished schools, distorted the income curve betweeen rich and poor further, moved capital overseas, wiped out job-training programs that would make displaced US workers competitive for jobs, and created the greatest deficit this country has ever known.

You'll have to go to someone other than Sean Hannity for a "debunking" of the description of the economic failures of the Republican administration. Only in one of Reagan's 2 terms did we actually see a stronger economy as a result of Republican management - while Clinton's presidency was the single greatest period of economic expansion in US history. I not only recommend that you take an economics course (I seriously doubt that you have), I also recommend you take an economic history course.

The record shows that Democratic economic policy is consistently correlated with better economic performance, better employment rates, healthier schools, and a more able workforce that isn't being driven into the ground in the name of "higher productivity". Trickle-down economics is a clear failure. Even Bush's own treasurer, Paul O'Neill, describes the current administration's policies as wrong-headed. It may will take a decade to recover from the damage this administration has done to the economy.

>> Only in one of Reagan's 2 terms did we actually see a stronger economy as a result of Republican management - while Clinton's presidency was the single greatest period of economic expansion in US history.

And who was in office before Reagan? Carter?? The Democrat's miserable policies during the Carter years even required the infamous "misery index" to describe. Reagan came along and inherited this mess. You've actually admitted that in one of his terms that we had a stronger economy due to the Republican management. This upturn continued unabated throughout the 90's, meaning that Clinton inherited an economic boom that was deflating by the time he got thru with it.

A president's economic success is not defined by what happens while he is in office, but what happens while his successor is in office. On that scale, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Clinton fail miserably while Reagan worked an absolute miracle. W's legacy has yet to be written, but he's moving in the right direction.

And Yes, I DO know that Nixon and Ford were not Democrats. It's not the label on the politican, it's their actions that count!

Best site for Poker