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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alighieri who wrote (553719)	3/8/2010 3:59:04 PM
From: Jim McMannis	4 Recommendations Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574679

She was 6 years old? Wow, hold her feet to the fire. Personally I'd like to see at least basic health care at the national level through clinics with a minimal copay. Unfortunatly the 'bama plan seems illconcieved. All things for all concerned doesn't fly.

To: Alighieri who wrote (553719)	3/8/2010 4:06:02 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1574679

Rasmussen vs. Everybody Else by Jed Lewison Mon Mar 08, 2010 at 09:10:03 AM PST In his post last Friday on how the 2010 tide is turning in favor of Democratic Party, Markos pointed out that polling numbers generated by Rasmussen Reports are single-handedly propping up Republicans in national composite tracking indexes. In pollster.com's generic ballot composite index, for example, Republicans narrowly lead Democrats 42.7% to 41.3%. But when you exclude Rasmussen and YouGov (a Democratic leaning internet poll), Democrats lead by a slightly larger 44.5% to 42.0% margin. Including YouGov would have given Democrats a larger 47.3% to 41.4% margin, meaning that the inclusion of Rasmussen alone results in a huge 7.3% swing towards the GOP. Obviously, tracking polls don't actually count for anything when it comes to tabulating ballots, but they do have a big impact on narrative, and the impact of Rasmussen's numbers on the overall composite was shocking to me, to put it mildly. Of course, Rasmussen's "Republican house effect" doesn't mean we're looking at another Strategic Vision here and I want to stress that the only point I'm making in this post is that at least in national tracking polls, in any given timeframe, a Rasmussen poll is overwhelmingly likely to show better news for the GOP than any other poll. To illustrate this point, I generated a series of scatter plot charts using pollster.com's index of polls. Every poll in pollster.com's index is represented on each chart by a dot, plotted horizontally by the date of the poll, and vertically by the results of the poll. Rasmussen polls are in red; every other poll is in green. Shaded red areas on the charts represent areas where results would favor the GOP. I think you'll see that Rasmussen polls literally stand out from all the others and they almost always deliver good news for the GOP. Let's start with a simple chart of President Obama's approval rating starting from Inauguration Day: A key point here is not just that Rasmussen's numbers show lower approval ratings for President Obama than other pollsters, it's that the sheer volume of Rasmussen's polls allow them to steer the narrative away from the numbers being shown by everybody else. The Rasmussen effect is even more obvious with Obama disapproval ratings. There's a huge gap between Rasmussen's numbers and those of everybody else. Rasmussen has shown Obama's disapproval in the "red zone" since July of last year, with only a smattering of other pollsters yielding similar results: What does it look like when you factor in both the approval and disapproval numbers and look at the net approval rating? Again, same story -- Rasmussen vs. everybody else: The Rasmussen effect is not confined to Obama's approval ratings. It is arguably even greater on the generic ballot, where Rasmussen continues to deliver the most pro-Republican results -- and continues to flood the "red zone". On the generic ballot question, in any given timeframe, Rasmussen always has the most pro-Republican results. Every. Single. Time. Without fail. Just because a poll has good news for Republicans doesn't mean that the poll is worthless, And certainly, there must be a methodological explanation for Rasmussen's pro-Republican results, and I'm Rasmussen would defend its methodology with great sincerity. But whatever that explanation is, it's also clear that although we tend to focus on the composite index of polls to evaluate narratives, what we've actually got going on is two distinct narratives coming from the polling community. The narratives share a common trend-line, but they've arrived in different places. In Rasmussen's narrative, Obama is now an unpopular president with majority disapproval and Republicans are enjoying a wide lead in their bid to retake the majority in Congress. In everybody else's narrative, Democrats have fallen back to earth from their stratospheric post-2008 levels, but they still enjoy a narrow-to-moderate edge over Republicans, and President Obama still enjoys a positive net approval rating. As 2010 plays out, we're going to find which story is right. To that end, a bit of history might be instructive. In 22 polls conducted in the first four months of 2008, Rasmussen showed John McCain with an average lead of 2.6%. In 80 polls conducted by everybody else, Barack Obama had an average lead of 1.8%. To be fair, Rasmussen's polling eventually caught up with reality and showed an Obama win. At least for the first third of 2008, however, it was telling a different story -- a story that didn't come to pass. dailykos.com

To: Alighieri who wrote (553719)	3/8/2010 5:01:34 PM
From: Brumar89	2 Recommendations Respond to of 1574679

She's a hypocrite for where her parents took her brother after an accident when she was under 6? How pathetic you guys are dragging this up. BTW today Skagway has 862 people (not counting summer tourist visitors), while Whitehorse has 20,000+. I'm sure both numbers were lower in the early 1960's. I doubt Skagway had a doctor then and I'm guessing Whitehorse was the closest place to take a kid with a burned foot.