Wipe Your Butt With Our New Poll

If you know me, you know how much I love polls/surveys. Not taking polls, but dissecting them. This one isn't even worth dissecting. It's idiotic on its face.

Polls are supposed to be information-gathering devices. This information can be used for marketing, customer service evaluation, testing political winds, etc. Sometimes a poll that's taken for a legitimate purpose is still illegitimate. Check these out if you want to know what I think about polls/surveys that do this.

But Charmin's poll is clearly not intended to gather useful information. It's only purpose is to get people who just love to have their opinions heard to click on an advertisement. It's so transparent that I can't imagine anyone clicking on it. I'd be curious to see the numbers on how many who saw the ad just couldn't resist pulling the trigger. And what they clicked. "Ooh, is Charmin extremely new and different or just very new and different? It wipes my butt in such new and different ways. But just how new and different? I'm torn."

Now Fewer Americans Than Ever Believe in Facts

Just when I think we can't get any dumber.

I had always thought that polls were supposed to be about people's opinions. I mean, they used to call them, more descriptively, opinion polls. "Who do you think should be president?" "What do you think about the bottle bill?" "Who's hotter, Megan Fox or Newt Gingrich?"

Apparently, we've added a new subsection of polling...fact polling. We ask people if they believe if something factual is actually factual. No, I'm not talking about asking whether people believe in God. I'm talking about this poll.

Holy crap.

We have reduced facts to nothing more than one more thing we can have opinions about. "Is the president a muslim? What's your opinion?"

The only value a poll like this has is to show just how fucking stupid we are. What's possibly worse than the 18% of people who believe (based on what?) that Obama is a muslim is the 43% of people who "don't know", more than the number who think he's a christian. This could just be chalked up to inattention. I mean, I don't know what religion some people are. (But we're usually not talking about the president of a religion-obsessed nation here.) But the same poll last year showed only 34% who didn't know. Huh? Did they forget? Or did they get stupider?

Let's have some more polls, shall we?

"Is Dick Cheney bald? What's your opinion?"

"Do the New York Yankees play in Yankee Stadium? What's your opinion?"

"Is the moon orbiting the earth? What's your opinion?"

"What's the name of that thing pumping blood through your body right now? What's your opinion?"

"Does the F train stop at Broadway-Lafayette? What's your opinion?"

Next week, only 53% of Americans think that the "heart" is what pumps their blood, down from 57% last year.

A Big Fat Chunk of Dishonesty

Bill O'Reilly may be the most clueless (or dishonest; it has to be at least one) person ever to have a television show that human beings watch. And I'm only assuming that they're human. Here's Bill's expert breakdown of the current electoral landscape.


Crikey! Obama's behind! How could such a thing happen?

Wait. Here's a map from Slate based on data taken from Pollster, which aggregates data from several polling sources.


Hmm, bit of a discrepancy there. Here are some numbers from some of Bill's "tossup" states.

• Pennsylvania: Obama 52%, McCain 41.3%
• Oregon: Obama 54%, McCain 39.4%
• Iowa: Obama 53%, McCain 41.3%
• Michigan: Obama 54%, McCain 38.1%

Wow, only 16 points. That one's a tossup, all right.

And here are some numbers from some of McCain's "safe" states in O'Reilly World.

• North Carolina: Obama 48.8%, McCain 46.9%
• North Dakota: Obama 44.9%, McCain 41.3%

Georgia, Montana and Indiana are all in play but McCain is ahead so those are really only a mild stretch for Bill. But Obama is actually leading in two other states that O'Reilly has already awarded to McCain. They're not even tossups for Bill! From where is Bill getting his numbers? From the same place his head is.

[Wait for it.]

His ass!