CBS did a poll saying that 65% of Americans believe that Sarah Palin is not prepared to be president.
So how do we determine who is right?
There are several tricks that can be used to skew a poll to the left side of exit polls and other actual results. The most common way to make a poll result move further to the left is to poll “registered voters” instead of “likely voters”. Almost anyone who gets a license is registered to vote. Most of them do not vote and don’t pay attention to politics and just parrot the far left views of the elite media.
Another common way to skew a poll to the left is to conduct the poll on a weekend. Another way to skew a poll to the left is to include cell phone numbers in the poll. People who have a cell phone as opposed to a land line are people who are highly mobile. Those who are highly mobile and have no land line are less likely to vote and less likely to pay attention to politics; thus are more likely to simply parrot the view of the elite media.
The final way to rig a poll is in the way that you ask the question. For example “Do taxpayers spend too much money on the medical bills of illegal aliens” vs. “should the children of immigrants be denied all access to hospitals and schools”.
So I examined the PDF with the weakly detailed “internals” of the poll (LINK):
This poll was conducted among a random sample of 944 adults nationwide, interviewed by telephone July 9-12, 2009. Phone numbers were dialed from samples of both standard land-line and cell phones.
Upon examining the polls, both used “registered voters instead of likely voters, so both are skewed to the left. Both include cell phone numbers. But the Gallup poll was taken on a Monday and the CBS poll is a weekend poll; hence the CBS poll will be more skewed to the left than the Gallup poll and the numbers reflect that.
Statements from White House reporter and AOL Daily reporter Carl Cannon via the MRC:
In the 2008 election, we took sides, straight and simple, particularly with regard to the vice presidential race. I don’t know that we played a decisive role in that campaign, and I’m not saying the better side lost. What I am saying is that we simply didn’t hold Joe Biden to the same standard as Sarah Palin, and for me, the real loser in this sordid tale is my chosen profession.
From the beginning, and for the ensuing 10 months, the coverage of this governor consisted of a steamy stew of cultural elitism and partisanship. The overt sexism of some male commentators wasn’t countered, as one might have expected, by their female counterparts. Women columnists turned on Sarah Palin rather quickly. A plain-speaking, moose-hunting, Bible-thumping, pro-life, self-described “hockey mom” with five children and movie star looks with only a passing interest in foreign policy — that wasn’t the woman journalism’s reigning feminists had envisioned for the glass ceiling-breaking role of First Female President (or Vice President). Hillary Rodham Clinton was more like what they had in mind – and Sarah, well, she was the un-Hillary.
Cannon went on to catalogue just some of Biden’s mistakes:
Sen. Biden, however, was in a place by himself when it came to bogus claims, absurd contentions, and flights of rhetorical fancy. He threw out several assertions that were so preposterous that – had Palin made them – they would have prompted immediate calls for McCain to dump her from the ticket.
The good senator from Delaware warmed up slowly, erroneously claiming that McCain voted with Obama on a budget resolution, and asserting wrongly that Obama wanted to return to the Reagan-era marginal income tax rates. He also embarked on an appallingly wrongheaded monologue about the constitutional history of the vice presidency. But when the talk turned to national security, presumably Biden’s purported area of expertise, he went completely off the grid.
• “John McCain voted against a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that every Republican has supported,” Biden stated. (Actually, in a 1999 vote in Congress, McCain sided with 50 other Republicans to kill the treaty. Only four joined the Democrats.)
• “Pakistan already has deployed nuclear weapons,” Biden said. “Pakistan’s weapons can already hit Israel and the Mediterranean.” (Pakistan has no known intercontinental missiles. The range of its weapons is thought to be 1,000 miles – halfway to Israel.)
• “When we kicked — along with France — we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, ‘Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t…Hezbollah will control it.'” Biden recalled. “Now what’s happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel.” (Except that the U.S. never kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon or anywhere else. They’ve been entrenched in Lebanon since 1982. Actually, Hezbollah, insofar as it was responsible for the 1983 suicide bombing at the Marine barracks that killed 241 U.S. servicemen, kicked America out of Lebanon, not the other way around.)
• “The president…insisted on elections on the West Bank, when I said, and others said, and Barack Obama said, ‘Big mistake. Hamas will win. You’ll legitimize them.’ What happened? Hamas won,” Biden said. (Only the last two words of Biden’s strange soliloquy are true. The rest are false. For one thing, Fatah controls the West Bank. Biden was thinking of Gaza. Secondly, neither Biden nor Obama predicted the 2006 victory for Hamas in Gaza’s legislative elections. Third, McCain and Obama – but not Biden — signed a letter urging the president to pressure Palestinians to require that candidates adhere to democratic principles before being allowed to run for office. Fourth, Biden served as an election observer and later wrote an article expressing high praise for Bush’s actions. To sum up: One factual error and three fibs in only 31 words. Pretty impressive, in its way.)
• “With Afghanistan, facts matter…we spend more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spend on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan. Let me say that again…” (He did say it again, but that didn’t make it true. It’s wildly and weirdly off the mark. Yes, facts matter. The facts here were that at the time Biden was speaking, the U.S. had spent $172 billion in Afghanistan. The Iraq War consumes between $7 billion and $8 billion every three weeks. Biden’s math was off by 2,000 percent.)
• “Can I clarify this? This is simply not true about Barack Obama. He did not say (he’d) sit down with Ahmadinejad.” (He most certainly did. And among those who criticized him at the time for it was Joe Biden, who told Byron York of National Review that the idea of a president meeting with the likes of the Iranian president or Hugo Chavez was “naVve.”)
PITTSBURGH – A former executive for a defense contractor with ties to Democratic U.S. Rep. John Murtha has been charged by federal prosecutors with taking about $200,000 in kickbacks from a subcontractor.
Richard Ianieri, of Doylestown, Pa., served as president and CEO of Coherent Systems International Corp., the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.
The government alleges Ianieri received checks which were “provided for the purpose of improperly obtaining and rewarding favorable treatment … relating to a government prime contract.”
He is accused of accepting two kickbacks of about $100,000 each from a subcontractor — identified only as “K” — while he was an officer of Coherent Systems International Corp.
In an April 2006 news release, Murtha announced that Coherent and Kuchera Defense Systems were working “virtually as one company” on 14 contracts worth $30 million to develop high-tech military gear. At the time, both companies had offices in Windber, near Murtha’s home base of Johnstown.
Kuchera has given thousands of dollars to Murtha’s campaign and political action committee. He has given the company millions of dollars in earmarks.
The company, owned by brothers William and Ronald Kuchera, has received $14.7 million in Murtha earmarks in the past two years. It and another company, Kuchera Industries Inc., have received $53 million in federal contracts in this decade alone.
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