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Here is the best analysis of the best data I've seen...

http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...

If only someone with more official access could study this in detail ( http://www.pri.org/stories/201... ) maybe we wouldn't have to guess

medicine has been able to extend life on average by reducing death from causes other than aging

The one thing you have to consider is that "death due to aging" is somewhat of a moving goalpost, due in part to medical advances.

Several hundred years ago, having an seventy-year-old clutch his chest and fall over dead or an eighty-year-old becoming incoherent and then dying shortly afterwards would be considered to be "dying of old age". Today we'd lump those in the "heart attack" and "stroke" categories, respectively. It isn't like there's some kind of expiration date written on humans' heels, where when you reach that age you body says "X years? Okay, I'm shutting down now."

There are certainly elderly people who die of unknown causes, and whose listed cause of death is "old age", but one can argue that's due to lack of knowledge about the true underlying cause. There's every likelihood that with further study will discover something like "oh, the elderly are susceptible to Wilson-Cuddy syndrome, which causes sudden organ failure when untreated, but can be managed with X, Y, and Z" pushing up the age of death.

life span has not improved incrementally, despite numerous medical advances

Baloney. See the graph in this article. Notice the trend in the ages of the oldest person on earth (ignore Jeanne Calment). Since 1960 it's increased from around 110 to around 116. The maximum lifespan *is* increasing, but it's doing it slowly.

I prefer FiveThirtyEight to Real Clear Politics. As they point out frequently, national polls mean little or nothing in the primary race because primary elections don't work the way polls do. The rules are also malleable right up to the moment before the actual selection takes place at the convention.

FiveThirtyEight places a great deal of weight on what it calls the Endorsement Primary. This is a points system where each endorsement of a candidate by a member of the House of Representatives is worth one point, each Senator's endorsement is worth five points, and each governor's is worth 10 points. By this scale, there are theoretically up to 1435 points to award, though members of one party are unlikely to endorse someone from another party. In any case, Clinton leads the Endorsement Primary for Democrats by 447 to Sanders's mere 2 points (and O'Malley has one point). Republicans are a much more mixed bag with Bush at 41, Rubio at 29, Christie at 25, and Huckabee at 24. Everyone else is at 15 or fewer points (Trump and Carson have zero), and only 168 points worth of endorsements have even been made among candidates still in the race, so there's still a lot of wait-and-see going on.

I expect the party will push for some of the others to drop out to make the Iowa slate a little cleaner, but Iowa and New Hampshire are worthless as predictors of the nation, doing little better than chance at predicting the actual nominee. They act as filters: if you can't make a halfway decent showing there, you're probably not going to do it elsewhere. But ultimately, the party has a great deal of control by pushing superdelegates to vote in a certain way, and even a seemingly close match-up going into the convention could turn out to be a nearly runaway victory for whomever the Establishment prefers.

I prefer FiveThirtyEight to Real Clear Politics. As they point out frequently, national polls mean little or nothing in the primary race because primary elections don't work the way polls do. The rules are also malleable right up to the moment before the actual selection takes place at the convention.

FiveThirtyEight places a great deal of weight on what it calls the Endorsement Primary. This is a points system where each endorsement of a candidate by a member of the House of Representatives is worth one point, each Senator's endorsement is worth five points, and each governor's is worth 10 points. By this scale, there are theoretically up to 1435 points to award, though members of one party are unlikely to endorse someone from another party. In any case, Clinton leads the Endorsement Primary for Democrats by 447 to Sanders's mere 2 points (and O'Malley has one point). Republicans are a much more mixed bag with Bush at 41, Rubio at 29, Christie at 25, and Huckabee at 24. Everyone else is at 15 or fewer points (Trump and Carson have zero), and only 168 points worth of endorsements have even been made among candidates still in the race, so there's still a lot of wait-and-see going on.

I expect the party will push for some of the others to drop out to make the Iowa slate a little cleaner, but Iowa and New Hampshire are worthless as predictors of the nation, doing little better than chance at predicting the actual nominee. They act as filters: if you can't make a halfway decent showing there, you're probably not going to do it elsewhere. But ultimately, the party has a great deal of control by pushing superdelegates to vote in a certain way, and even a seemingly close match-up going into the convention could turn out to be a nearly runaway victory for whomever the Establishment prefers.

538 recently ran a piece on this misguided and largely misleading storyline police are touting. It's worth a read if you like facts. But this is /. http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...

You raise an interesting point.
Check out graphs 3&4
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/...
and here
http://fivethirtyeight.com/dat...

So it sucks to be black and under 30. but what really surprised me was the white suicide rate and how it keeps climbing with age. So it also sucks to be old and white!

Yes there is a problem, and yes there needs to be a solution.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/dat...

If this is actually a credible report, then the U.S. government needs to stop funding the rebuilding/construction of areas that are CURRENTLY under sea level like New Orleans and the dikes and berms around it.

That turns out to be harder than you would think.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...

Unfortunately, despite some predictions to the contrary, it looks like it will be Hillary or Trump.

I'd be worried except I realize there's nothing I can do about it.

“If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it.” Mark Twain

0.02% of articles are retracted according to 538: http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...

Agreed on the calm down message. Here is a recent article with a good perspective on this fraud: http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...

I'm not a particularly big fan of Obama, but he is definitely not the biggest user of executive orders:

The list*, as an average by number of executive orders per year:
1) Franklin D. Roosevelt (D) - 290.6
2) Herbert Hoover (R) - 242
3) Woodrow Wilson (D) - 225.4
4) Warren G Harding (R) - 216.6
5) Calvin Coolidge (R) - 215.2
.
.
.
20) George W. Bush (R) - 36.4
20) Benjamin Harrison (R) - 35.8
21) Grover Cleveland (D) - 35
22) Barack Obama (D) - 33.6

(Source: http://fivethirtyeight.com/dat...)

*The numbers for Barack Obama are probably skewed a bit since during the first few years for his presidency his party controlled the house and senate limiting the need for him to issue executive orders.

One could possibly argue that Barack Obama has used executive orders more aggressively/pushing the boundary of the power, but that would be a completely separate issue.

The MLB rule book expressly prohibits arguing balls and strikes, partly because it's so hard for the home plate umpire to make those calls. For the most part, MLB umpires do a really good job of getting calls right. It's really hard to determine accurately whether the ball crossed within a certain rectangle at any point as it crosses home plate. The strike zone is a three dimensional construct that varies from one hitter to another depending on their height. There's nothing easy about what the umpires are asked to do. For the most part, MLB players tolerate a strike zone that's not perfect provided it's not unreasonably large or small and that it's consistent for both teams throughout the game. That said, it's not perfect, and there are situations where this really could make a difference.

Yadier Molina is one of the best catchers in baseball, known primarily for his defense, especially picking runners off base, and for being a good hitter as catchers go. He also does a good job of calling the game for his pitcher, that is what pitch he asks the pitcher to throw, and where he sets up and tries to get the pitcher to locate the pitch. He's probably the best catcher in MLB right now at this. But he's also really good at fooling the umpire in what's known as framing the pitch. That is, how he moves the glove after catching the baseball can fool the home plate umpire into calling borderline balls as strikes and effectively expanding the strike zone for his pitchers. Long considered a myth, there's actually real evidence now with new data that shows catchers like Molina can have large impacts on a game by framing pitches. Not directly related to Molina, but a similar issue, is when a pitcher badly misses the catcher's target, but the pitch is still a strike. An example would be the catcher setting up on the outside corner but the actual pitch being on the insider corner. The pitch may well be a strike, but because the pitcher missed the target so badly, it will almost always be called a ball.

Greg Maddux was a really great pitcher who was successful in fooling hitters and getting a lot of strikeouts with a fastball around 90 mph. He's a Hall of Fame pitcher and deservedly so. He fooled hitters for about two decades and his stats in the shortened seasons of 1994 and 1995 rank among the very best stats for a season in the history of baseball, right up with Bob Gibson's 1968 season and Pedro Martinez's ridiculously good 2000 season. However, in addition to pinpoint control of his pitches and good movement, he also seemed to get a lot of pitches called strikes that were off the plate. That is, he got some strikes "on the corner" that were really about six inches off the plate. His teammate and fellow Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Glavine, was also frequently associated with getting a wide strike zone.

While the umpires generally do a really good job, I can see ways where this really can help standardize the strike zone and solve some problems. I don't think this will ever replace human umpires altogether, but it frees them up to focus on other things like managing the pace of play (a huge problem for baseball), looking for balks, and determining whether a hitter went around on a checked swing. And I suspect that in college and lower levels of baseball, human umpires will always call balls and strikes.

Nobody in a full-time job

A lot of U.S. companies have started to cut their employee's hours in order to avoid having to pay certain government-mandated fringe benefits to their employees. (Source)

considerably above minimum wage

My reply to this part of your post would depend on how much you mean by "considerably" and how close the wage offers are in a particular local market. In an area of the Midwestern United States with low cost of living, $600 per year for Internet during breaks is a larger percentage of the wage than in, say, the Bay Area.

$50/month, or about thirty cents per workday

By "per workday" did you mean "per hour"?

If one of your employees is downloading stuff without permission from copyright owners

Does this include updates to the firmware of company-issued Android devices? Because a U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that Android infringes Oracle's copyright on the Java Standard Edition APIs. My point is that it's next to impossible for anyone who uses the Internet to avoid all infringement.

It's a fact that wages have been declining for 40 years.

Citation?

A quick google disagreed with this "fact", showing a slight increase in median household income over the last half century....

It's the last 15 years that have done the most damage. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-american-middle-class-hasnt-gotten-a-raise-in-15-years/.

Here is what I found on Wikipedia:

"White Americans are the racial majority, with a 77.7% share of the U.S. population. Hispanic and Latino Americans amount to 17.1% of the population, making up the largest minority. African Americans are the largest racial minority, amounting to 13.2% of the population."

So, African-americans are 13.2% of the population.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...

Roughly 39% that go to college, graduate (and this is out of the percentage that actually go in the first place). So it makes sense that Tech companies, no matter how racially diverse, are hiring less African-Americans. Even if 100% went to college, they would still be only a fraction of the workforce, if completely represented.

We need to get to the root of the problem instead of focus on the symptoms. Symptoms have been focused on for many years (affirmative action, etc) and it doesn't seem to be working. What needs to happen is in the home and I don't think the government can really do anything about it.

http://www.politifact.com/trut...

72% of African-american children are born out of wedlock.

"Estimates for the percentage of African-American children growing up in single-parent households are slightly lower, at 67 percent"

Nate Silver doesn't poll, he takes other people's polls and combines them.
Which upsets the real poll takers, Silver gets a lot of attention using other peoples' work.
If the real poll takers fail, so will the Nate's of the world.

From my understading, the "combines" part involves generating ratings for each polling service and quantifying the "bias" of each polling company. I'd imagine he makes use of that quantified bias for his aggregated predictions.

It's also not too hard to imagine that Nate Silver's job will become harder as the polls before more inaccurate.

However, if the effects causing the problems turns out to have a bias that is consistent...this will be just more set of factors to adjust for...

Nate Silver did very poorly in the UK election just this spring. His trend was better than most pollsters, but he was still way off.

Who wants to be Nate Silver will be able to make sense of the polls?

Maybe Nate Silver?

He has a site fivethirtyeight.com/ that interprets poll results, and other numbers in the news

It is seemingly paradoxical, but in New York it now snows less often and they get more snowfall: http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...

I can't comment on the cases that you take issue with because you haven't provided sources, but it is possible that an area could expect more floods and more droughts as the climate changes.

Easy fix. Coke, McDonalds, VISA, Budweiser and every other US corporation can pull sponsorship, then see how it works out for them. I've also heard UEFA (European Football) is discussing separation from FIFA, so it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to get the Japs and Koreans on-board, ask if Uncle Rupert wants to buy in, and start a whole new organisation. Screw the Russian and Arabs, we don't need their filthy money.

This is actually not too far off from what I've heard talked about. Nearly all the sponsors are US-based, and probably don't want their brands associated with corruption. "Have a Coke, and a dead Qatari migrant worker" doesn't quite have the right ring to it.

Also, Nate Silver did an analysis on UEFA's threat to leave FIFA. While the "western" rule-of-law countries have almost no voting power in FIFA, they have nearly all of the paying viewers. If they left together, UEFA (- Russia) and a few other countries (USA, Japan, S. Korea, Australia, Mexico, and Brazil and Argentina for bonus points), could easily break FIFA. That group there would take about 70% of FIFA's income with them, and 70% of its last round of 16 teams as well.

I know that Slashdot in general loves to follow the stereotypical nerd rage against sports and jocks, but there are some of us who love it all. I love technology and I love athletics--especially when you combine the two. This story actually had the potential for geeking out. They did this over at 538: http://fivethirtyeight.com/dat...

That's the angle that Slashdot should have taken, but not everybody here is an obese, cheetos-loving, basement dweller.

Britain has better dental health than the USA. But keep peddling that century old myth if it makes you feel better.

My wife is American and finds this particularly funny. When she came to the UK she had a lot of treatment that she could not have afforded in the USA, and our daughter has orthodontic treatment without charge - and some of her relatives who have had teeth removed because they could not afford treatment still make jokes about British teeth

For children up to the age of 6, Quebec Canada children have free treatment, and correctional orthodontics, if not really for cosmetic purposes.
Normally orthodontics is done around age 12-14.

Britain has better dental health than the USA. But keep peddling that century old myth if it makes you feel better.

My wife is American and finds this particularly funny. When she came to the UK she had a lot of treatment that she could not have afforded in the USA, and our daughter has orthodontic treatment without charge - and some of her relatives who have had teeth removed because they could not afford treatment still make jokes about British teeth

Britain has better dental health than the USA. But keep peddling that century old myth if it makes you feel better.

Hmm, a few minutes of google-fu shows the number of "civilians" killed by police in 2013 (to pick a year as close as possible to today, and far enough back to be sure the statistics have all been gathered together) to be 320.

...but the problem is that number, like most numbers about this, is complete BS. Nate Silver's website has several articles up about how hard it is to get legit numbers about police shootings.

Your numbers sound pretty made up, especially anything that's 99% and 100%, or "in no cases." Let me guess, they were "not intended as a factual statement"?

If you get married the only usual out is divorce, which means that men in 99% of cases are on the hook for support for the rest of their lives.

According to the US Census, as cited in this excellent article analyzing child support, only 53.4% of custodial mothers are awarded child support (and only a fraction actually receive all the support they are awarded). Key chart here: https://espnfivethirtyeight.fi...

children in more than nine out of 10 cases living with their mothers

From the same article above, "18.3 percent of custodial parents in 2011 were fathers."

- In seven out of ten cases the judge ordered a transfer of the property into the wife's name
- During 160 contested cases when an order was made to sell the home the wife received more than half of the proceeds in 25 percent of the cases, during the other 75 percent the proceeds were split

In the same article, they make the point that the wife is usually poorer and has a worse employment situation, a correlation that explains most or all of this imbalance. Judges are going to award more financial support to the poorer party, and if you don't correct for that, you're presenting very misleading stats. Though given the totally made-up numbers you scattered throughout your entire post, I guess you don't care.

Do we have any indication that Martin would allow the books to be finished if he died? The only way I could see him allowing that in his will would be if A: it was a sticking point for a contract with HBO or B: if he trusted a writer enough.

As you said, obviously the TV show wouldn't be as detailed,. But the TV show is good enough that I wouldn't throw myself off of a rope bridge if Martin died.

In central mass north of Worcester I have gotten 3 feet and it is continuing to fall. There is so much snow I have no where to put it.

The inaccuracy in the prediction seems to be not about the magnitude of the storm, but about how far south it would hit (and, in particular, whether it would hit New York City).

Nice discussion of the various models' predictions here: http://fivethirtyeight.com/dat...

Increasing the minimum wage rather than the EITC has the benefit that more money is paid in taxes

Except that you are taxing the creation of low wage jobs. That is probably not smart policy. People are poor, not because of low pay, but because of NO pay. Most poor households have no earned income at all.

those who do have a minimum wage job ... typically are poor, and it's ridiculous to assert otherwise

Claiming that something is "ridiculous" does not make it untrue. Most minimum wage earners are not rich, but they are not poor either. Their average family income is $53k. Citations:

Very few minimum wage earners are the sole providers for a family
Typical Minimum-Wage Earners Aren’t Poor
most minimum-wage earners are young, part-time workers and relatively few of them live below the poverty line
Minimum wage myths

I believe you're referring to fivethirtyeight.com not "528.com". And this article in particular:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/dat...

So, just to be fair, the combined population of the three nations you mentioned is ~119 million, and the U.S. is at 316 million.

And relevant to the discussion, here's a nice article on 538 today, talking about the current California drought, and saying (with detailed discussion) that even though climate warming may exacerbate drought, it's nearly impossible to attribute this particular drought to climate warming:
The complex, dynamic nature of our atmosphere and oceans makes it extremely difficult to link any particular weather event to climate change. That’s because of the intermingling of natural variations with human-caused ones.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...

And a link to a (2 year old) Nature editorial saying the same thing about extreme weather: http://www.nature.com/news/ext...

I'm not going to rant about how guilty Darren Wilson was. To tell the truth, I don't know if he was guilty. But I just don't understand how there wasn't enough evidence to at least take this to trial. There were multiple witnesses saying that Mike Brown had his hands up and was not attacking Darren Wilson when he was shot. This alone to me is enough to at least take it to trial and see all the evidence to try and figure out exactly what happened.

It's Incredibly Rare For A Grand Jury To Do What Ferguson's Just Did, as in it basically never happens. So how "lucky" is Darren Wilson?!

The National Bar association doesn't seem to impressed with the decision either!

Interesting reads here (How Darren Wilson avoided criminal charges for killing Michael Brown) and here (New photos of Darren Wilson released as 'secret' letter written by police officer is revealed).

Nate Silver is still calling it for the Republcans, though it's getting tighter. Here's hoping he's right and the polls are skewed.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...

Several years before 9/11, pilots were asking that the cockpits be made more secure by installing a $200 lock on the pilot's side of the door giving access to the cockpit.

Do you have a reference for that? I find it hard to believe because when the FAA implemented the sterile cockpit rule after recurring accidents where crew distraction was a contributing cause, the pilot's union fought it tooth and nail. You're now saying the pilots suddenly want to be isolated from the cabin?

Also, the predominant cost of adding equipment to an aircraft isn't the purchase price. It's the fuel burn cost. An airliner flying 1750 miles burns about 5 cents worth of fuel for every additional pound it carries. If that beefier lock weighed 1 pound, at 3 flights a day, 330 operational days per year, and 20 years in service, the fuel cost to carry that lock is $990.

If you factor in the cost of a (say) 20 pound $1000 steel-reinforced door to go along with the lock (after all what good is a $200 lock if the door has 35 cent hinges), you're now talking about ~$22,000 in additional fuel per aircraft. This is the reason why aircraft manufacturers and airlines are willing to spend thousands of dollars extra on materials which shave just a few pounds from an aircraft's weight.

I believe it is a disingenuous statement to mislead. It is technically true. However, there is an important but subtle distention between the value of a company and market capitalization.

Sony is a much larger company. However, from accounting 101, Assets – Liabilities = Equity. If we use assets as a proxy for company size (which is not quite true but good enough for this post), as one increases liabilities, equity gets smaller. Sony has lots of liabilities, so its market capitalization is much smaller than it size.

In addition, market capitalization does not care about the companies' current profitability (which is actually a better term than size) but its future profitability. Sony is a big average company. Because of its size it would need multiple home runs to really change its probability. Uber offers the prospect of large growth and large future profits. It is that tempting hope that makes Uber more valuable than Sony. That being said, maybe Uber is not worth 17b. For some hard numbers, see

http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...

...and this particular pollster is known to be worse than most. For example, in the 2012 election they had Romney winning two states by more than 5 points which he actually lost.

538 did an analysis of this. However, the swing was so huge that you really can't put all the blame on the pollster. Being wrong by 10 points (as they often are) is a whole different kettle of fish from being wrong by 44. Other non-internals recently showed Cantor winning by 10. So clearly something happened.

You probably should read this book.

Or this: http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...

"I never know if you are lying or just confused. But what you say is not correct. Neither that there is any dispute, nor that you've ever pointed me to any page that says otherwise.

Confused or lying? Lying or confused? All in a single post."

Okay. On the outrageously infinitesimal probability that you have argued with me so frequently but missed the hundreds of links I have posted, here are just a few of them. First, about the physics. (If you are unfamiliar with how this relates to AGW, I suggest you look up some of the discussions of the physics of CO2-based AGW according to climate scientists, including the Stefan-Boltzmann law.)

No, Virginia, Cooler Objects Cannot Make Warmer Objects Warmer Still.

Then, let's see... there are so many to choose from. I have 120 bookmarks of these from just the last couple of years... most of which I've linked to here. And more written down from years prior. Hey, here's one. About that "97% consensus". (Note here: this information did not come from Christopher Monckton, but he did write about it. The same points are available in more painstaking detail elsewhere. I linked to this same information from a different source a few days ago. The point being: don't try shooting the messenger. I'll just laugh at you. If you can refute the message, go ahead.)

"That's a 0.3% consensus, not 97%"

Because, you see, according to an actual survey of AMS members, it turns out that their opinion of AGW is actually based more on their "perception of consensus" (rather than science) and their "political ideology" (rather than science). Wow. I would never would have guessed that latter. Just kidding. I most certainly would have. But isn't that what you accused ME of? What a coincidence!

If you don't like reading about it on WUWT, here is a link so you can download the paper directly from the American Meteorological Society's own website.

How about some information regarding the actual CO2-based-warming climate models?

Hmm. How about: how IPCC has deliberately mislead the public.

And more of that: "IPCC Scientists Knew Data and Science Inadequacies Contradicted..."

Yet another reason bogus claims about expensive storms have been bogus...

How 114 out of 117 climate models studied exaggerated warming by a mean of over 100% (pdf). That one is from Nature.

No dispute? Hahahaha.

Wait... this wouldn't be complete (it isn't anyway, not by a long shot) without just a hint of the boatload of evidence that Steve Goddard has been compiling about dishonest temperature information being fed to us by our erstwhile "authorities" on the matter.

Well, hell. I could do this all day. So here's a list of more references you can read for yourself, all peer-reviewed. I'm not going to count them.

Like the one entitled, How to Eat at McDonald’s When You’re Monumentally Broke. Of course, this requires that you have an Internet connection and browser-capable system to read it, while being "monumentally broke"...

This is a myth that's repeatedly been debunked. US industrial output has grown steadily since the 1960's, it's only industrial employment that has been dropping:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/02/us-manufacturing-is-not-dead.html

Manufacturing jobs are not going over sees, they're disappearing completely. Much like we once went from a society where most people were involved in agriculture to one where a few percent can produce more food than the rest of society can consume, we're now in similar process in manufacturing.

but for instance, we had no way of knowing if a "Bradley Effect" would have been in play

Sure we do. Nate Silver has looked at this effect a number of times. If it exists at all, it's tiny.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/search/label/bradley%20effect

I'm not saying that the probability of systematic error is large, just unknowable.

It is knowable, and that's exactly why Nate Silvers forecasts are so much more accurate than anyone else's. He does the donkey work to minimise these systematic errors.

It was a perfectly reasonable and scientific position for a Republican to say "Romney's chances are equal to the probability of error in the polls, and I hope that probability is large."

No, it was really, really dumb. Not only can systematic errors be minimised, but margin of error is not going to go in the same direction on all polls.

Bearing in mind that airplanes really, truly, absolutely, in fact, are popular targets for terrorists, and a successful attack paralyses mass air transit, which already needs to be propped up financially in most cases.

If the TSA had any security-related purpose or effect, you might have some basis for argument here. Although I read it twice and I still don't see "unless we're scared" anywhere in the 4th amendment. And by "popular target" you mean "once every few years", right? As in "less dangerous than driving to the airport"? And surely you're not arguing that our fundamental freedoms are somewhat less important that the financial success of the airlines?

In fact, I can't seem to find a single rational or coherent point anywhere in what you just said.

In fact, you're more likely to be struck by lightning than to be the victim of a terrorist attack. And god forbid you should take a shower! You are several times more likely to die in a bathroom accident than you are to be the victim of a terrorist attack. And don't even get me started on automobile transportation....geez!

Oh and for you Missourians out there, check out This and This

Except for this http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/07/is-poll-scientific-if-it-excludes-more.html

You should read what Nate Silver had to say about that survey:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/06/are-you-smarter-than-george-mason.html

538's feed:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/feeds/posts/default

-- despite not being explicitly hosted at the NYT, it's still current.

WARNING: actual numbers ahead, Zogby International employees must put on their Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Fact Sensitive Sunglasses.

Why people even pretend these mouthwhores are any more than a you-pays-your-money-we-confirm-your-meme outfit is beyond me. I guess it makes for good press.

And here is the poll to back it up.

Apparently the general populace and tea party supporters are polar opposites in support/opposition to Bush. 57% favorable vs 27% unfavorable for Teabaggers. and 27% favorable and 58% unfavorable for the general populace.

I don't usually reply to ACs, but...

I know Holland went for the defendant, and said as much, but two justices supported him being executed because he filed his paperwork late. Charming.

And I didn't suggest that statutory limits were the reason the justice system is broken...I KNOW it's broken because I just came through it. We have the largest prison population in the world and the highest per capita incarcerated population. So, what...we're a nation of criminals?

Lastly, there is no "massive opposition" to RvW. Only the fringe loonies want to criminalize abortion. Google away but here's one example:

http://www.pollingnumbers.com/poll-of-polls/roe-versus-wade.html

or

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/05/cnn-poll-record-support-for-roe-v-wade.html

The issue is dead, stare decisis after almost 40 years is a no brainer.

Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com did this right prior to the last presidential elections. While the rest of the sheep-reporters were elbowing for room on the campaign bus or plane, listening to the candidates bla bla bla the same stump speech in town after town, Nate and "BrettMarty" were going on their their self-titled 'Kerouac' tour, going from state to state across the US, visiting campaign HQs they could find . These guys reported stuff that the mainstream-sheep weren't. My sense was they were driving around - and sleeping - in an old chevy van. Clearly younger, they could sacrifice their bodies and lives for the story. Worth a look at the series. This is one example. http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008_09_14_archive.html