I loved the comparison of cold days anecdotes to citing obits to disprove population growth. I'm going to steal that. It's a perfect analogy to bring down how moronic the tactic is.

Also, the subject of Conservatives managing to lap our best efforts to satirize them, I am reminded of the interview Colbert did with the female author of a book advocating a return to traditional gender roles. Colbert plays along as if he agrees with her, and his tact in these situations is to try and exaggerate the guest's point to an obvious level of absurdity. She had mentioned the 1950s norms of housewives as some sort of goal, and he comes back with 1850. She didn't blink, fully in favour. I think he had gone back to some medieval date prior to even victorian times before giving up.

The woman was mad, and there was no standard of repression of women too harsh for her. I bet if colbert had quoted from A Handmaid's Tale, she would have been fine with it.

...The heated debates we had at Unclaimed Territory when some of our friends north of the border, (I love Canada and Canadians, btw. I would love to live in Vancouver, B.C.), tried to convince Glenn, an ardent supporter of the first amendment, that their hate speech laws were superior to our "no holds barred" policy here down in the lower 48. This is a perfect example of why Glenn, as usual, was right.

Those were good debates. Two very high principles competing for prominence, and no accusation of ill will or bad faith for either side.

FWIW, there is absolutely no way Canada's hate speech laws would ever come into play over anything ever said on Unclaimed Territory or here.

Not to reopen that whole debate, but Shooter accusing us of hate speech wouldn't exactly bring the Canadian Feds down on us, even with a Conservative Majority government.

Whatever slippery slope might exist, Canada has not slid down it to that point.

Small point, but I do enjoy this:

The former has a Middle East agenda which outweighs all, while the latter has what it believes to be wisdom far superior to (and more Serious than) the views of the dirty and ignorant masses

It's how Glenn capitalizes words like "Serious" to put that slight bit of scorn to them, a subtle dig at the people who hold themselves in such high esteem (or should I say High Esteem?)

It conveys the slap well, and gives your audience a lot of credit to "get it" - which is I think the mark of great writing. No different than how a Great Simpsons episode has jokes that you only get if you have some kind of background knowledge (usually of some obscure movie they're referencing) - but to others the point is lost.

Glenn doesn't beat you over the head with everything he's saying I wanted to point it out. Of course, if one missed this point, the thesis of the piece would hardly be lost, but by seeing these things, it just becomes richer.

It's so funny their reporting wins two awards, and their editorial page will only get crazier.

So a journalist wins the most presitigious award for his profession for exposing that the Administration has a formalized policy of breaking the law, and it gets buried way down in the article. Now the insanity of the WSJ editorial weirdos will have a new layer of seeming credibility.

I was reading it last night. It's even better news for the Democrats than I had imagined.

Pelosi is a better speaker than I had expected or even hoped.

Also in that poll, 49% of Americans strongly disapprove of the Job George W. Bush is doing as president. We're 1 point from a majority of the nation strongly disapproving of the leader, and yet the pundits cannot fathom how Americans approve the Congressional democrats standing up to this person they detest so much.

It really doesn't need any deep political analysis: They don't all have to love Pelosi and Reid, they simply loathe Bush, and cheer anyone who gives him the finger.

The pundits are stuck analyzing 2002. When resisting the President's wishes would harm a member of congress.

About approval for the Dems vs Republicans in Congress. Hitherto now, all I had seen was general Congressional approval as a whole, which is still quite low. Now that we break it down by party, we see which party is dragging down America's opinion of their Legislative branch.

Hint: It's the republicans.

Say you have a town of 1000 people, 900 whites, 100 blacks.

You do a poll, and you poll 10 whites, and 10 blacks.

The whites say they will vote Democratic 5, Republican 5.

The blacks will vote Democratic 9, Republican 1.

If you're being obtuse like shooter, you will assume the pollster will simply do a big average when reporting the results:

14 Dem

6 GOP

70% Dem, 30% GOP.

But of course, that's not what any reputable pollster would do:

Instead, you weight the results for each demographic based on their representation in the population. Blacks are 10% of our town, whites are 90%, so to get the true poll figures, you do this:

White GOP Results: .9 X 50% = 45%

Black GOP Results: .1 X 10% = 1%

Total GOP Vote: 46%

White Dem Results: .9 X 50% = 45%

Black Dem Results: .1 X 90% = 9%

Total Dem Vote: 54%

Naturally, 20 people is nowhere near a statistically significant sample, so your poll will still have a huge margin of error, but that's the principle.

They oversampled Blacks because they wanted a larger sample to ask their Imus questions about, since they broke that question down by race in the results.

More media foolishness: The ABC News article on this poll is all about the Imus question. Good old "path to 9-11" and "Iraqi Anthrax Ahoy" ABC news, leading the way again on reporting the key findings of the polls.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=3044635&page=1

Likely the Imus question was a tack on at ABC's request so they'd co-fund the poll for WaPo.