Poll of the day

Poltico.com completely whiffs by missing the point and misreading the mood of the country in their daily poll today.



Are you worried about air travel security this holiday season?

- Yes. I'm not sure all is being done to keep me safe.

- No. I feel our security measures in place are effective.

- I'm not sure.

- I'm not traveling via air this week.

What should've been in there instead of the last question is:

- I have doubts that the current TSA screening techniques are effective in deterring terror plots.

and/or

- The new and improved TSA security measures are unnecessarily invasive and violate my 4th amendment rights.

"I'm not traveling this week" is completely irrelevant. It precludes one from having an opinion merely because one is not flying.


And with respect to the first answer, that box could be checked by both those who have no problems with/favor the crotch grab as well as those totally opposed to it reasoning that we are not employing effective behavioral profiling to sniff out the terrorists as the reasonable alternative.


Bad poll, Politico. Bad poll.

Programming Alert

Still a little bit more time to vote in our NYC Ground Zero Mosque poll.

Check it out on the right-hand margin at the top.

It's Official...

America is racist.

Graphic of the Day

Check out this graph on public perception of news networks.



Mike Flynn opines that by this, one can estimate that a full quarter of our nation is comprised of complete loons. How else would one describe a situation whereby 14% of people think that Fox News is "mostly liberal" and conversely, 11% of people think that MSNBC is "mostly conservative"?

We think he may be on to something.

H/T: Truth before dishonor

Critical Mass?

Bold predictions sure to go wrong: Whatever and however things shake-out this next week in Denver, the Democratic candidate’s prospects will be much dimmer coming out of the convention than they are at this moment.

With Obama’s fall in the polls, Hillary’s supporters are ramping-up efforts to derail Obama’s campaign with an email campaign of their own. Things are rapidly approaching critical mass to where Hillary’s supporters, thinking they are that tantalizingly close to claiming the nomination and believing that she and not Obama can beat McCain, will revolt and sit out the election, or worse, vote for McCain should Obama retain the nomination.

On the other hand, think of the meltdown that will occur among the netroots, blacks and your standard party-line Democrats who just want some pax familia, if by some still-remote-yet-not-beyond-the-realm-of-possibility chance, Suit gets bumped as the nominee?

Either way, the nominee will emerge from the convention with party support that is less than unified if not fractured altogether. With things as tight as they are, it is highly doubtful that any nominee can win the general election if found in this particular circumstance.

We will be watching to see the events unfold next week (actually, we may not be able to but that’s a whole ‘nother matter) and monitor the fall-out particularly with respect to how the Republicans play it at their own convention early next month.

"So, about that VP pick..."

"...that would be my VP pick, pal."


McCain 46%
Obama 41%

But what should, perhaps, worry Suit’s camp even more is that same poll from Reuters found that McCain is seen as a stronger manager of the economy. We can’t remember the last time we saw a Republican candidate enjoy an advantage over the Democratic candidate in the “who will better manage the economy" question.

Denver and good times await.

Not Happening...

Chris Dufresne, the college football writer for the L.A. Times gives his important dates on the college football calendar here.

He reminds us of why there is a very strong possibility we will, again, be in a foul mood in just a little over 4 months:

· Dec. 7: Final BCS standings release.

Aftermath: National sports columnist from hometown team left out of title game discovers the sport is controversial.

Aftermath II: President of school that finished No. 3 in standings calls news conference to unveil his eight-team playoff plan.

… but misreads the biggest non-conference match-up of the season when USC takes on Ohio State at the Coliseum:

· Sept. 13: Ohio State at USC.

As big as it gets, but the loser is not out of the title chase. Ohio State lost at home last year to Illinois in November and still got back to the title game. USC could have overcome the Stanford stinker and played for the title had the Trojans not lost to Oregon.

The “you’re not done just because you lost one game” is now the conventional wisdom in our brave new BCS-world, especially since LSU won it last year with two losses but... Ohio St. is a different case. Yes, a one-loss USC team can play for the BCS championship but a one-loss Ohio State will not play for the same and you can take that to the bank. Voters will not be willing to give the benefit of the doubt to a one-loss Ohio State team precisely because of the fact they’ve been rolled in the last two championships games. Unless they arrive in December undefeated, they ain’t gettin' a 3rd chance.

Everyone has seen enough. Just say “no” to plodding Midwest teams against speed teams from the South and the West. Rich Rodriguez could not have come soon enough to Michigan and to the Big 10.

For those of you scoring at home.

Old white guy at the head of a disorganized, dispirited, no-momentum campaign vs. young, hip, smooth-talkin’ black dude fronting a disciplined campaign team that hi-lites (all) his strength(s) without exposing his weaknesses. Bad election year for Republicans in Congress predicted and people can’t stand the President who happens to be a member of the old white guy’s party.

And even with all this including a shameless media in M.T. Suit’s back pocket, old white guy sits just outside the statistical error range in polls heading into the fall when the Republican candidates have traditionally gained momentum to close the gap if not overtake the Democratic candidate entirely with whom the public has had a summer fling.

If McCain pulls this off, it will have to go down as one of the great upsets in Presidential election history.

Story here.

So, What's a Few Points Between Friends?

Gallup’s daily running poll has Obama and McCain neck and neck. L.A. Times/Rasmussen poll has Obama with a 12 point edge.

We don’t have enough information to draw any airtight conclusions, however, using the standards that are applied to the current state of journalism these days and knowing what we know about the players involved, we will conject that one of these polls is “projecting” just a tad, dontcha think?

Susan Estrich is optimistic about our pessimism.

No, no… we’re not going to beat-up on her. Though, politically disagreeable we’ve seen her enough on the telly to sense that she is a pretty rational and sane observer of the body politic. Her article, (misplaced the link - will try to track down and post later), points to the “right direction/wrong direction” poll that was done recently as being good news for the eventual Democrat nominee. Said poll claims that 81% of us think the country is headed in the wrong direction.

Not ones to ever be accused of overthinking things, this poll question never seemed to make a whole lot of sense to us, though, as it appears much more nuanced and subjective to interpretation than what the pollsters intended, perhaps. As such, we don’t know how we’d answer that question were it ever posed to us. Our reasoning would be a rather complicated algorithm to which generating a binary answer might prove impossible.

But back to Susan: Estrich hangs her hat on the CW that with an overwhelming majority of the American public being in a funk over the national “direction”, this spells trouble for the incumbent party in power….in the Oval Office. While this may be true, one’s got to think that the extraordinary job Congress has been doing as evidenced by their approval ratings has to be factored into this equation as well. It would seem to us that both Clinton and Obama as Democratic members of a Democratically-controlled Congress should be perceived as part and parcel reasons for our country-wide bummer. While this logic may hold for Clinton, Obama’s awesomeness lifts him above the fray.

B-Daddy, a while back, strongly urged the Republican primary candidates to run against Congress rather than their prospective Democratic opponent precisely because of this reason. Unfortunately for John McCain though, because of his track record in the Senate, we are skeptical that that he will be able to decouple himself from the overall unpopularity of the Senate and House.

Afterall, our disgust with Congress may equal that of a liberal’s, though for very different reasons which makes divining the effects of these polls somewhat sketchy.

Its a Non-Issue Because We Said Its a Non-Issue. Capiche?

The latest tact for the Amnesty crowd is to purport that you don’t really care about the issue of illegal immigration. To wit, Timothy Rutten, the L.A. Times media critic and not really one to be mistaken for a conservative, rips CNN for their conduct of the Republican debates last week (read article here).

He starts off O.K. by questioning the legitimacy of debate topics revolving around the factual validity of the Bible and the Confederate flag (btw, Mitt Romney is apparently going to be giving a speech Thursday regarding his Mormonism. The official editorial position regarding Mitt’s Mormonism here at BwD is: We don’t care. In fact, of all people, the late Reverend Jerry Falwell put it best when he said after meeting with Romney earlier this year, “We’re voting for the the Commander-in-Chief not the Sunday School Teacher-in-Chief”. Well put, Rev, well put) but then he veers wildly off-course by taking CNN to task for spending what he felt was too much time on illegal immigration. He contends illegal immigration being a hot button issue for CNN’s Lou Dobbs as the reason for all the time wasted on something, in his opinion, you don’t care about.

He then cites a Pew Center poll which supposedly reveals immigration being way down the list of things that Americans are concerned with currently, trailing the War in Iraq, the economy and health care.

Firstly, in this context, a polling to gage the concerns of “Americans” is not the same as a polling of “Republicans” and particularly not the same as “Republicans willing to watch these excruciatingly painful CNN-YouTube debates”. One cannot take the alleged concerns of “Americans” as the equivalent to “likely Republican primary voters.”

Secondly, would it be kosher to dare question these poll results? Afterall, because you didn’t care, the Rube Goldberg Amnesty Bill was dragged kicking and screaming into the light from behind the closed doors of the Amnesty cabal and bludgeoned to death by a listless, disinterested electorate.

And two of the leading Presidential contenders from both parties have, for the time being, changed their tune on illegal immigration because you really are not interested in the subject. Hillary Clinton finally came out against driver’s licenses for illegals because New York voters gave a collective shrug regarding this issue and John McCain has now come out against the very Amnesty Bill he helped write because you were just too busy to be bothered reading some of the fine print.

Is that how it really works? Is that what these polls actually reveal about us?

Political strategists and politicians have always relied on polls but something about all this does not add up. Whether it’s the exit polls in the ’04 Presidential elections that indicated Kerry was comfortably ahead of Bush or this poll referenced above, we can’t help but feel that because of perhaps unreliable sampling or skewed questioning, the strategists aren’t able to pull their heads out of the numbers long enough to see what is glaringly obvious to the rest of us.

Combine the above with strategists and politicians shoe-horning “public opinion” into their own template or narrative and you have a system where the politicians become increasingly distant, imperious and unaccountable. Kind of sounds like we're there now, huh?