your vote?

(  )  Anaconda

(  )  Quicksand

(  )  Meat Grinder

(  )  Mud Stuck Elephant

mine

( x 1) Meat Grinder - I found this one the most painful. The person I interviewed was having health and health care financial problems and was speaking from personal painful experience.

(x 2 ) Mud Stuck Elephant - has a optimistic  quality in that it proposes a solution to the problem.. every needs to love each other.

 from James.

"quicksand

really hits home for me, but the anaconda is a good runner up. The mappings for me are like this: The conservatives tell poor people that they are sinking because they are aren't working hard enough and they don't have discipline. The truth is, the harder they work, the further they sink, because the conservatives are standing on the solid ground of wealth and the poor have no means to climb onto that ground. The more they struggle, the worse the situation gets. The conservatives view this as an opportunity to make use of the struggle, and they view the struggling, sinking person as a resource. So they promise the sinking person a solution if they do more work, like pulling on ropes that run a fan which cools the conservatives. When the poor get close to getting a grasp on solid ground, the conservatives just loosen the ropes and start over again, until the person eventually sinks. Then they move to another victim.

The solid ground can also be seen as infrastructure on which much of the conservative power is based. But the conservative thinks the ground is his, and the sinking person has to "earn" it. The sinking person was once on solid ground, but the conservative claimed that ground and forced the sinking people into the quicksand (by selling their labor for more than they paid for it)."
http://65.181.144.29/content/how-should-obama-frame-mccain 

My vote is for "quicksand"

Conservatves often present their "values" and plans so slickly, playing to people's fears, ignorance and greed, that many are willing to walk across the sands of "security", "tax cuts" or "pre-emptive war" to their doom. When the quicksand of those deceptions begins to suck them down, they cry out for help, only to find the cons and neocons, under the guise of "deregulation" or "executive privilege", busily shredding the rescue ropes.

Practicing progressive values is like restoring those "rescue ropes" such as our civil liberties, honest vote counts and the Constitution and charting a clear way out of the desert of failed conservative values.

Edwin, thank you for all your hard work!

Arin Stevens