Nearly Half of You Loves the Rich Enough...

Seriously, I haven't been blogging for awhile but it doesn't mean I haven't been enjoying the ride.

Obama seems poised to finally say all those things we wanted him to say at the very beginning of his presidency, finally remembering that he wasn't  elected to play nice with the Good Old Boy's Club (now with spunky hostesses!) but to protect the interests of his base, the middle-class.

The Republicans have found more callous and twisted than them and are a bit surprise. And annoyed. 

Yahoo has erected itself as the Fox News of the internet, doctoring main stories distribution and choosing elements of coverage that only reflect Tea party/GOP allegiance. The comments section itself is nothing more but a gathering of strident bullies, a motley crew of GOP zombies repeating that they want nothing more than to let the Tea Party loose on the world and let the theocracy that the Saintly Anointed Founding Fathers OBVIOUSLY wanted for this country  triumph at long last! This victory will usher a new dawn of God fearing prosperity, where women are women and paid less, men are tools and paid less and children that have the money get educated and the rest are paid less or sent to war! Imagine! They'll get a gun!  EACH! For free!… la-la-la la-la-la!!

Damn! Where's Poland when you need it?!

Well, yes, all that would be tempting and enticingly suicidal but I prefer my Democracy lunatic-free and anti-totalitarian. I know, old habits die hard… So I still go back to Yahoo to get my GOP sponsored news page and I sill read the AP news wire everyday. And everyday I wish I could laugh it all off as an elaborate punk hoax by George Orwell  but, no, doublespeak is the new official language of the United States. For exemple:

AP-GfK Poll: Nearly Half Oppose Tax Hikes for Rich.

Pasted from <http://www.fair.org/index.php>

Isn't that pretty? Nearly half! Well that couldn't mean that (counting on my fingers)... let's say, more than half?... So.. the majority?  By Jove, my man, the majority are for tax hikes for the Rich (with a capital R)! 

I would have given a bloody Pulitzer to any decent journalist that would have wrote a simple, reality based headline: Majority of Americans are for the Repeal of Bush tax cut for the Wealthy.

Less sexy to the lunatic fringe, I guess…

How AP Can Make a Poll Say Whatever It Wants It To

Posted by Julie Hollar on 09/16/10 at 11:36 am

An AP piece published across the Web today (9/16/10) carries this headline: AP-GfK Poll: Nearly Half Oppose Tax Hikes for Rich.

Well, that's one way of looking at it--just like you could report the results of the 1988 election by saying that Michael Dukakis got "nearly half" of the popular vote. The more logical way of putting it would be that more than half support letting tax cuts expire for the rich: 54 percent to 44 percent. But framing it instead around the minority position lets them focus on how Democrats might worry about "provoking the 44 percent who say the reductions should include the wealthy," as opposed to worrying about provoking the majority who don't feel that way.

And that majority is particularly strong among Democratic voters (three quarters), who are presumably the ones Democratic lawmakers need to be most worried about, particularly given the sharp drop in enthusiasm among those voters.

Pasted from <http://www.fair.org/index.php>