Bookworm Room

Things have changed little since Mark Twain:  “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” The Times is trumpeting a poll showing a huge number of Americans support Obama’s health care plan.  As Bruce Kesler explains, though, the devil is in the details, and quite the little devil it is.

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Iowahawk explains it all (as Mike Devx already pointed out in a comment).  Read his post, and you will get a formula for statistical probability and you’ll get a little primer on why statistical probability, which is a static count, doesn’t work well in a dynamic field — especially one as dynamic as this year’s [...]

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DJ Drummond, who blogs at Wizbang, has two spectacular articles explaining in simple terms why we shouldn’t blindly trust the polls this year.  You should read them, here and here.  Bottom line:  no matter what the polls seem to be saying, make sure to vote.

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I have no idea if this email, which I got from the local Republican grapevine, is true, so I offer it for whatever you think it’s worth: Good morning, I wanted to pass along something heard Saturday at a community event. As most of you may know, Zogby International is headquartered in our neck of [...]

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Before you let the polls spook you, Ann Coulter has some useful history: Reviewing the polls printed in the New York Times and the Washington Post in the last month of every presidential election since 1976, I found the polls were never wrong in a friendly way to Republicans. When the polls were wrong, which [...]

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I’m going to take you back a few days to my post asking if American’s are really racist.  That was the one in which I questioned a poll that was struggling to figure out why the Messiah isn’t doing better and that concluded that it’s because Democrats are racists.  (Republicans are racists too, but they [...]

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This sounds dreadful — until you read this, and discover that it’s not dreadful, it’s profoundly dishonest.  And it’s the dishonesty that’s the true horror. Have past elections been characterized by such terrible dishonesty?  I wonder if these lies, damn lies and statistics were always out there tainting the flow of information, and we simply [...]

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As they do every election year about this time, the polls strongly favor the Democrats, which is very disheartening.  Right around now I find it especially worrisome, because I think that Obama, emboldened by media adulation, is being more and more forthright about his political agenda, and it’s one that ordinarily would should have the [...]

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The moment I saw the boastful headline yesterday announcing that, if the election were held today, either Obama or Hillary would beat McCain by a mile, I suspected that something was wrong. The numbers just didn’t sound right. And of course, they’re not: However, a closer look at the poll’s internals reveals that the poll’s [...]

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