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A topic that inevitably receives a lot of focus during election season is the partisan spread of the major media polls. Conservatives regularly complain that the polls are tilted against their side, and thus favor the Democrats. They have a point. To be sure, we can conclude that without accusing any pollster of malfeasance. In this essay, Mark Blumenthal of the Huffington Post correctly notes that the problem gets down to using registered voter polls. These tend to oversample Democrats. The argument in support of them is that, while a likely voter screen would draw a larger Republican sample, it...

Joining the ranks of drug pushers are what I would call polling-place pushers. These are people who run get-out-the-vote drives or at least agitate in that regard, and they are more to be feared than any corner dope peddler. As an example, pollster John Zogby recently lamented how the young people who catapulted Barack Obama to the presidency are now losing interest in voting. He said to the League of Women Voters (LWV), “I truly am worried about today’s twenty-somethings.” I have seen them move from hope and grand expectations for themselves and their world to anxiety and disillusionment.” That’s...

Nearly four years after enthusiastic younger voters poured into polling booths to help push Barack Obama over the finish line and into the Oval Office, their hope has turned to fear and pollster John Zogby says that they are ready to give up on politics. “I truly am worried about today's twenty-somethings,” he frets. “They are our global generation and I have seen them move from hope and grand expectations for themselves and their world to anxiety and disillusionment. We can't afford to lose them,” he adds.

Kermit the Frog established his legacy convincing millions of impressionable youth that "it's not easy being green." Unfortunately for the once famous frog, the Obama Administration has made poor Kermit look like a liar and burst the generational myth – apparently, it is a whole lot easier to be green than Kermit would have had us all believe. In a June 6 hearing to delve into exactly how the Administration comes up with all those green jobs they claim to have saved-or-created, Rep. Darrell Issa, Chairman of the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee probed the essential question, "Just what...

Many of us oldsters remember the Bradley Effect. Back in ye olde 1982, Tom Bradley, the longtime popular mayor of Los Angeles, a nice affable fellow in my recollection, ran for California governor against a fairly faceless guy named George Deukmejian. Most of the polls — including exit polls — showed Bradley with a significant lead. But Deukmejian won, narrowly. This was all put down to a form of covert racism. People didn’t want to admit they wouldn’t vote for a black man. As an ex-civil rights worker, I remember being hugely depressed by Bradley’s defeat. Times have changed. These...

Obama Voters Losing Jobless Benefits Due to the Manipulation of Workforce Numbers May 11, 2012 BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Michael in Momence, Illinois. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello. CALLER: Thanks a lot, Rush, first-time caller. I'm calling because I was at the unemployment office just yesterday, and they have tables there where people fill out the paperwork that they have -- RUSH: Wait, wait, wait whoa, whoa, whoa, just a second. I need you to go slow here. CALLER: Okay. RUSH: Why were you at the unemployment office? It may seem like an obvious question, but...

Obama tells young reporters: Climate change a top challenge for young people By Andrew Restuccia - 08/30/11 01:21 PM ET Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing young people, President Obama said in a recent interview with young reporters from Scholastic News. “Another big challenge that your generation is going to face is the environmental challenge,” Obama said in an interview with Scholastic News Press Corp. that was conducted in July but posted online this month. “Although we’ve made big improvements over the last 20 or 30 years in making our air clean and our water clean, there...

Zogby Interactive: Obama Falls to 39%, As Support from Democrats Continues to Slide; He Trails Romney, J. Bush & Gingrich in '12 Those Saying U.S. on Wrong Track Hits High Under Obama of 69% UTICA, New York - President Barack Obama's job approval rating has dropped to the lowest point of his Presidency at 39%, and in potential match-ups with Republicans in 2012, he trails Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush and Newt Gingrich and is just one point ahead of Sarah Palin. The percentage of likely voters saying the U.S. is on the wrong track is now the highest since Obama...

Americans aren't crazy about the new airport pat-downs. But according to a new poll, nearly half still back them, with even more supporting full body scanning. Forty-eight percent of Americans said the pat-downs are justified, while 50% said they are against the new measures, a new Washington Post/ABC News poll revealed. Meanwhile, the majority – 64% – said they supported the use of full-body scanners while 32% said they were against it. The 385 full-body scanners being used at 68 airports across the country have sparked an outcry from flyers, who argue they're virtual strip searches because they produce invasive,...

Just because the motives of many climate change advocates are questionable, even evil, does that mean the entire global warming proposition is a fraud? It is an article of faith among many conservatives that climate change is sham science. Even worse, it is the nexus of a vast conspiracy involving governments, the UN, and climate scientists that is seeking to destroy the industrial economies of the West, create a one world government, and enrich people like Al Gore who have bet a bundle on a reduced carbon emissions future. They believe that either the earth is not warming at all,...

[Snip] THE JOBS REPORT FOR OCTOBER was released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday, and at first blush was surprisingly strong, much stronger, indeed, than expected. Payrolls expanded by 151,000 and the two previous months' were revised upward. But hold the hurrahs. The unemployment rate was stuck at 9.6%, and, toss in the underemployed and the rate remains at an elevated 17%. Moreover, the household version of the employment picture was a real bummer, showing an employment drop of 330,000. That especially weird disparity between the household and the payroll reports made us do a double-take. Happily, the...

Of course, the timing for the revelation on the day of the elections is a total coincidence. As per the revised tables, average incomes of top earners did not quintuple as had been released on October 15 to $519 million, but instead declined by 7.7% to $84 million.

Review provides plenty of evidence that climate science has been and remains an uncertain shambles The last of three British investigations into the notorious Climategate emails, the Independent Climate Change Email Review, landed yesterday and left behind enough cherry-pickable material to give all sides an opportunity to claim modest vindication. Defenders of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, the source of the emails, will be able to spin the 168-page review as proof that the CRU did little wrong. For climate skeptics and others, the review provides plenty of evidence that climate science has been...

Signing a deal that makes anyone a net profit participant in a Hollywood movie deal has always been a sucker’s bet. In an era where studios have all but eliminated first dollar gross and invited talent to share the risk and potential rewards, guess what? Net profit deals are still a sucker's bet. I was slipped a net profit statement (below) for Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix, the 2007 Warner Bros sequel. Though the film grossed $938.2 million worldwide, the accounting statement below conveys that the film is still over $167 million in the red.

In the final weeks leading up to the June 8 Democratic Senate runoff in Arkansas, no data proved more pivotal in shaping conventional wisdom than a pair of Research 2000 polls showing challenger Bill Halter holding a lead. And those surveys—which fueled the narrative that Sen.Blanche Lincoln was a goner—may have been bogus, according to the blog that commissioned them. The prospect that polling data in a Senate contest of national consequence may have been faked has sent shockwaves across the campaign world, raising disturbing questions not only about the reliability of suddenly ubiquitous public polls, but about a new...

More on the drop in unemployment: The number of unemployed reentrants to the labor force actually fell by 286K in May, offsetting an increase in April. The drop to 9.7% was largely fueled by 322K people exiting the labor force. (BLS)

I cannot condone some things that colleagues of mine wrote or requested in the e-mails recently stolen from a climate research unit at a British university. But the messages do not undermine the scientific case that human-caused climate change is real. The hacked e-mails have been mined for words and phrases that can be distorted to misrepresent what the scientists were discussing. In a Dec. 9 op-ed, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin argued that "The e-mails reveal that leading climate 'experts' . . . manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures." Yet the e-mail she cites was written...

What is the phrase? Oh yea: “Denial isn’t a river in Egypt” They say it to alcoholics in an intervention and to abducted kids suffering from Stockholm syndrome. Its cliché, but now is a point of massive irony. To start, allow me to recall the tale of the esteemed immunologist, David Baltimore. Dr. Baltimore is a Nobel laureate, chairman of the board of director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and holds a professorship at CalTech. However in spite of his current position his reputation has been permanently scared by a scandal in the early 1990’s at...

<p>LONDON — Britain's University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.</p> <p>The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.</p>

Satyam Computer Services, a leading Indian outsourcing company that serves more than a third of the Fortune 500 companies, significantly inflated its earnings and assets for years, the chairman and co-founder said Wednesday, roiling Indian stock markets and throwing the industry into turmoil. The chairman, Ramalinga Raju, resigned after revealing that he had systematically falsified accounts as the company expanded from a handful of employees into a back-office giant with a work force of 53,000 and operations in 66 countries. Mr. Raju said Wednesday that 50.4 billion rupees, or $1.04 billion, of the 53.6 billion rupees in cash and bank...