Britt Iowa is THE PLACE TO BE this weekend.

I'm hoping Iowa Hawk will be onsite to do live interviews with attendees.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 06:47 PM | Comments (1)
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Item #1: From ABC News (Australia), how 'bout some Crocs on a Plane? Well, A croc anyway...

A baby crocodile triggered panic among passengers on an EgyptAir flight from Abu Dhabi to Cairo when it took a leisurely stroll on board the aircraft, airport officials have said. Terrified passengers screamed at the sight of the 30 centimetre reptile as it made its way under seats and down the aisle. Crew members managed to corner and capture the croc and handed it over to authorities when the plane landed in Cairo, where it was to be housed at the Giza zoo.

Item #2: Here's a 2-fer from Cracked to keep you busy and out of trouble: 15 more images you won't believe aren't P-Shopped and The 35 most insane Halloween cosumes from around the world. And finally:

Item #3: Gizmodo has a brief vid of a Giant Waterslide Jump. The jump I can maybe believe. The landing...not so much, as the poster of the vid at Gizmodo says:

"This video shows a crazy man launching himself off an epically-large water slide and landing perfectly in a kiddie pool very far away from it. Is it fake? I suspect so, but I really want it to be real."

Posted by: Open Blog at 06:45 PM | Add Comment
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Wow.

Now I do feel old.

I think this clip expresses my anger about his death. Strong Language Warning.

A bit of Google has led to some trivia: Hughes' Vacation originally ended with Clark W. Griswold heading off to jail. Test audiences didn't like it, so the happy ending was written and shot.

I was trying to find one of his not-cute-and-sweet articles from National Lampoon, but can't find them. nationallampoon.com doesn't even mention his death yet.

I suppose when they get around to it, they'll repost one of Hughes' early written pieces.

Posted by: Ace at 12:59 PM | Add Comment
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Oh, this is bad.

PARKER: I don`t think -- I certainly don`t think she, Sarah Palin, knows anything about Harper Lee or this deep history in the South, where you don`t position a white woman and a black male and pretend like there`s nothing happening there. There`s a deep, deep history. That`s why I mentioned, dropped the Harper Lee in there.

Sarah Palin's very existence as a white woman was a racist dog-whistle. See, we're not allowed to run this white woman against this black guy "and pretend like there's nothing happening there."

Posted by: Ace at 12:56 PM | Add Comment
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I heard she claimed BabyMama Privilege.

Edwards, a former U.S. senator from North Carolina and two-time Democratic presidential candidate, is under investigation to see if campaign funds were illegally paid to Hunter, who served as a videographer on Edwards' 2008 presidential campaign.

"When you bring someone before the grand jury, you want to lock in their testimony. I think this is a pretty significant step in the investigation," said Kieran Shanahan, a former federal prosecutor. "Clearly, they are moving along with their investigation if they feel like they need live testimony."

"Some of the questions they'll be asking are how much did you get paid, who did she get that money from and the purposes for any money she received," said Joe Sinsheimer, a Democratic political consultant. "They may well be looking at bank statements and the kind of money she received."

Clarifying: I was really riffing on the networks being unable to determine what party Cold Cash Jefferson belonged to when I wrote of Edwards, "Party Affiliation: Shut Up."

In this particular article, they ID him, as you can see.

Thanks to AHFF Geoff.

Posted by: Ace at 12:01 PM | Comments (1)
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68-31.

Nine Republicans voted for her; all 31 no's were from Republicans.

Hall of Shame: DrewM puts me some f'n' information:

Alexander, Bond, Collins, Graham, Gregg, Lugar, Martinez, Snowe and Voinivich were the 'R's who voted yes.

I thought she'd also get Merkowski (Girl Power!) and Hutcinson (Girl Power/Tx Hispanic vote), McCain (Maverick!) Bunning (spite) and Ensign (tough reelection campaign in a state with a lot of Hispanics)

Now that Voinvich isn't running, I bet he's going to spend the next year and a half trying to replace Arlen Specter as the most annoying male member of the Republican caucus.

Voinovich... I see him as more of the "urban" Heath Ledger Joker and less the "urbane" Jack Nicholson Joker too, now that you mention it.

Posted by: Ace at 11:24 AM | Add Comment
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Even if you don't like Glen Beck, trust me, this is worth watching.

Thanks to "ruh-roh."

Posted by: Ace at 11:11 AM | Add Comment
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Networks don't have the resources for that kind of painstaking investigatory journalism; CNN would have mentioned it, but ran short on time, because they were too busy running a graphic displaying Michael Jackson's one-month period of bodily decomposition.

Not really on that last one. They just didn't report it. I have to say "not really" because even as I wrote it I realized, "You know, this is not entirely far-fetched."

Hah! AmishDude tips a joke:

Q: What is DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDR?

A: A bipartisan corruption scandal in New Jersey.

Posted by: Ace at 11:02 AM | Add Comment
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CNN's poll has Obama dropping 10 points in 100 days.

Ed criticizes the poll, which still puts Obama at an unexpectedly-high 56% support, but he's off-base in this specific criticism, I'm pretty sure:

Interviews with 1,136 adult Americans, including an oversample of African-Americans, conducted by telephone by Opinion Research Corporation on July 31-August 3, 2009. The margin of sampling error for results based on the total sample is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Did they correct for that oversample? Did they weight the responses? CNNÂ’s polling data doesnÂ’t explain at all, which leads one to the conclusion that they kept the oversample in the final data.

Oversampling does not mean overweighting.

If you want to, say, conduct a broad national poll but also make specific conclusions about what a minority might think, you have to oversample them. I think the minimum -- minimum -- number of respondents you need to put out numbers for any question is around 400. The academic/business organization that sets standards for this sort of thing is the AAPOR, sets 400 as the minimum number for meaningful results for any poll question -- and that includes a sub-segment of the poll's total universe of respondents, too.

So, to get meaningful results from black respondents specifically, you need 400 of them. At a minimum.

Now, blacks are like 12% of the population so if you are polling 1000 Americans you're likely to only get 120 blacks. That's fine, if you don't want to report specific responses from the black population.

But if you want to report those responses, and want them to actually be statistically meaningful, you need to get that sub-cohort up around 400.

Does that mean they didn't weight black responses back down? No, of course they did. Any polling company which didn't would be setting itself up for not only ridicule but loss of business, as its competitors pointed out the gross error of postulating a 37% black US population.

They weighted them back down to 12%, or 13%, or whatever the current Census figures indicate.

As for polling adults rather than voters: Well, it's true that adults are the least predictive sample... if you're predicting election results. If you don't care about who wins an election, but rather only what adults think, whether they vote or not, it's the appropriate sample.

In this case, their decision was likely made not according to what they really wanted to measure -- adult mood or likely future election results -- but according to cost. Anytime you screen out respondents, it costs you money. You spend more on your callers' salaries (paid by the hour, mostly) because they're making many more phone calls than they're actually generating responses (i.e., stuff you can use in your poll).

In this case, CNN had already made one costly decision -- calling lots of people to try to get those 400 black respondents -- and cheaped out on making it more costly by screening for voters (or, even more costly, likely voters).

At any rate, there are a lot of ways that a pollster can manipulate results -- the biggest assumption being about current party identification figures, those being kinda anyone's guess and therefore pretty variable between pollsters -- but grossly overweighting a well-known and easily-checked stat like "percentage of blacks in the US" isn't one of them.

I mention this not to call Ed out, but because it's, well, true, and I've been seeing stray references to an "oversampled CNN poll" in the comments.

By the Way: The minimum 400 rule gets violated all the time.

The media violates it all the time when they report statistically-insignificant stuff like "unmarried Asian females," a group their poll sampled like, what, three of? You asked three unmarried Asian females a question and now you're gonna get all conclude-y about them?

But polling companies themselves aren't supposed to. They too will write lots of analysis about tiny sample-size questions and pass those to clients, to demonstrate they're "getting their money's worth," but they're not supposed to. A lot of those micro-sized break-out questions are absolutely meaningless and the AAPOR says not to report them at all.

One Other Way the Media Biases Polls: They bury polls they don't like and trash their own polls.

I forget which poll it was, but one of the big networks found a lot of support for McCain/Palin, and simply didn't report the poll. When they eventually did have to report it (embarrassed into it), they trashed it.

Now that poll was probably a bad poll.

But when a network finds support for Obama and the Democrats at a suspiciously-high level, they don't bury or trash their poll. They vigorously promote it, claiming it heralds a major come-back or blah blah blah.

If they were being honest and consistent, they'd either report all polls equally enthusiastically, or equally bury/trash polls that were out of kilter with other polls.

They don't. They don't mind when their polls come in overly-optimistically for the Democrats. To them it's win-lose -- hey, it's a garbage poll, but we win, because we inject a little optimism into our Democratic friends.

A poll coming in too high for the GOP is lose-lose, and they trash it.

Heh: Ed's right about this:

One of the questions asked, “How do you personally feel about Barack Obama being president?”, has the following options for response: Thrilled, Happy, Don’t Care, Unhappy, Depressed, No Opinion. Depressed? CNN offers two kinds of responses for happy, one for unhappy, and one that asks people to diagnose themselves with a clinical disease.

Not just a disease, but a sin, isn't it? Don't Catholics teach that allowing yourself to stew in depression is self-indulgent and sinful?

Biased. Why not "very displeased"?

Or maybe CNN can really cook the books and ask,

"How do you personally feel about the President?"

Happy, plus I'm really good-looking

Unhappy, and I've gone all pear-shaped and I smell like funky cheese

Angry, crazed, and racist, and also my dick is the size of watch-battery and/or I've got chronic swamp-ass

Posted by: Ace at 09:30 AM | Add Comment
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So far, this wins:

The Earth-scorching August firefight over health care has given rise to questions about the point at which stifling civil discussion damages the democratic process.

All across the country, conservative opponents are clamoring to disrupt town-hall meetings about the proposed overhaul of the nationÂ’s health care system, using GOP-generated talking points to shout down Democratic congressmen who attempt to explain the plan.

The Constitution protects their right to speak freely, but Democrats say that they are limiting rather than promoting an open exchange of ideas.

Some experts on political organization say that despite the disruption of Democratic-run events — and divided public feelings on the health care overhaul — the shout-down strategy betrays an essential weakness on the Republican side, not a strength.

...

“Organized mobs across the country are intimidating lawmakers, disrupting events, and silencing discussions about the change our country needs,” one Obama campaign aide wrote in an e-mail to supporters in Michigan.

Hari Sevugan, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, says there is a difference between expressing a point of view and browbeating others — in this case congressmen and their constituents — who seek to express theirs.
...

But the nature of the protests suggest the GOP has run out of options for fighting on substance, said David S. Meyer, a sociology professor at the University of California-Irvine who wrote The Politics of Protest: Social Movements in America.

“In historical context, it’s a tool of the weak,” Meyer said. He said it is noteworthy “that conservatives have to throw this kind of Hail Mary pass to stop health care reform” in a political system that favors that status quo.

Etc.

Apparently this sucker of cock thinks there's a special government email address where you can report people for commendable morale-building party activity, too.

Thanks to Slublog, including for the photoshop.

Posted by: Ace at 08:57 AM | Add Comment
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