Is it really worth discussing?

Thousands of scientific papers are published every year (and I may be off by a few orders of magnitude.) But the media filter as to what makes its way into popular culture is always about the sexiness of the results, as opposed to the quality of the research. Let's face it - John Tierney is not really the best person to judge.

And Catherine is basically parroting Tierney.

As to the content of this article:

At some point, perhaps people will remember that the nuclear family is a modern invention. The fact that people are pursuing gender roles even more today than in previous centuries would support the thesis that gender roles are learned, not instinctive. The genetic makeup of the human species has not changed in any meaningful way in millenia, so any major differences detected must be artifacts of culture.

Walter Shapiro, and indeed anybody who wants to comment intelligently on the Presidential race, should look very carefully at how Gallup constructed their most recent poll. In a nation where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by a 4:3 margin, Gallup somehow sampled just as many Republicans as Democrats. Worse, this ratio was new to this week's poll, and was not consistent with previous Gallup polls on this question. (Except another Gallup outlier a few months back, where they did the same thing.)

As a result of the improper sampling, Gallup has grossly inflated McCain's support level. John McCain's 10 point bounce is derived half from a normal post-convention bounce and half from bad polling by Gallup.

This will become clearer later this week as other, better polls become available.

A tip for future poll-reading: when any of these polling organizations proclaims their top numbers without disclosing their internals, wait for the internals. Otherwise you are only getting half the picture

The latest polls show Obama with a comfortable lead in enough states to give him 260 of the 270 EVs he needs, and favored in enough other states that he need not win either Ohio or Florida.

A lot of you hyper-panicking blamethrowers should read up a bit more on state-by-state polling.

And hoot-owl should have a bit of waterboarding at 3 a.m. I hear it's fun!

Obama doesn't let the media nonsense rule the day like Gore did, and he doesn't simply ignore it like Kerry did. He confronts it like Bill Clinton did, and he does so quickly and efficiently.

I don't know how we dismantle the noise machine, but it must be done, since it is a constant blight on our system. But one thing that should help people feeling discouraged by the latest polls is the fact that many of them are utterly fabricated by improper party sampling.

The fact that Gallup and other polling organizations are willing to play along with the Republican agenda, just as the media are, is itself very troubling. But we should keep in mind that the population is not as stupid as the pollsters and the media would have you believe.

"I know it sounds stupid," he says taking a long drag from his Maverick cigarette, "but Barack Hussein Obama?"

Yup. It sounds stupid all right.

How does a story like this get written. Somebody sits back and says to himself "Gosh, Obama's so wonderful, how can it possibly be that people are not deciding to vote for him?" And then, with the narrative in mind, the reporter goes out and fills up his story with the people he's looking for.

Why are stories like this always written about Democratic candidates, and why do they always take place in rural America? Is rural America some kind of fantasy destination for reporters? It seems to me, from a demographic perspective, that far fewer people live in rural America than in towns and cities, and that is true even in "red states".

I hope at some point, we'll have reporters go around cities and ask the hard questions. "Why is it that McCain cannot get any 'traction' among black, urban voters?"

Why do these narratives always come down to identifying rural, white Americans as "typical" Americans? They really aren't.

And yeah, somebody who thinks a Semitic middle name is a good reason to vote against somebody is a good argument for cancelling this democratic experiment altogether.

Shanahan decided to go for 2 before the drive started, since his defense was getting torched in the second half. He has said as much. He wanted to end the game then and there.

The "joke" is clearly aimed at the notion that Latinos are domestic servants.

Right?

Is it offensive? It doesn't offend me, but I'm not Latino. Why do questions like these always seem to come down to some objective notion of what is offensive? Aside from: if a lot of people were offended, then the joke was offensive.

Because that's the only objective definition of "offensive" we have.

This 'case' against Ivins should be a primary issue in the media right now. Sadly, the media simply passes along uncritically whatever they are told by the FBI. It is clear to anybody with even a cursory familiarity with the science involved that the FBI literally has no case whatsoever against Ivins.

The scandal here is the net effect of the FBI's actions. By intentionally blaming the wrong person, the FBI is giving up any serious effort to determine the actual culprits.

With that in mind, I have to ask the question: why does anyone think that the Republicans are better at dealing with terrorism?

I'm looking forward to explaining to any potential grandchildren exactly when it became accepted in polite society to view subpoenas as optional.

This thing that Salon seems to be doing, namely presenting selected polls at random, without providing internals or context with respect to other polls that have been recently taken, is not terribly valuable.