Wow, you are from Miss. ? I didn't think that Miss had any democrats left down there. Perhaps
you took my comment out of context, I said you look at your liberal political views from a left coast point of view. And that still applies wherever you are from. Although you may be from Miss. you still don't think and act like you know a thing about the central part of the country, Being from Miss, you are from the South and while it may be central, it is still South. And while Miss is a Red State, it makes me wonder where you went wrong.

Oh well, I guess there some are dinosauers that still remain in the red states in contrast to the herds of them in the Blue States. While you are surrounded in Red, I guess there may still be some hope for you to see the light and not to look at everything through dark sunglasses.

If a poll is "on-line" you have no idea who filled in the answers.

I can think of only one research company that recruits for on-line polls in an expensive but trustworthy way to ensure the people on-line are exactly who they say they are. No one else goes to any substantial effort.

It is the easiest thing in the world to bias the results. Wording of a question. Wording of the answers. Choice of answers. The way the questions are offered, ie. what's asked first, second and so on.

It is very, very hard to do good quantitative research and eyewateringly expensive.

Just saying.

You have confirmed that your comments and Bush hatred is tainted by you “personal” loss of the 2000 and 2004 elections. You were led to falsly think that Kerry was actually going to win while we in the red states mid west knew all along that it would be a Bush Victory

Backwards, Herb; my Bush hatred led me to take the loss of the elections personally. 2000 not so much, since how bad Bush would be was not yet evident.

Your problem Anderson is that you look at your Liberal political views from a left coast point of view and don’t know a thing about the thinking of people from the center of our country.

Pretty funny, since my part of the left coast is called "Mississippi." Not the center, you're right.

As I admitted, I only kidded myself into seeing a Kerry victory in the last few days of the campaign, based not least on Zogby. As it was, a few more votes (or fewer Diebold machines?) in Ohio, and we'd have had our second pop-vote loser in the White House.

(Don't mistake me for a Kerry fan, btw; I hope he doesn't run again.)

He's been releasing polls in the Texas gubernatorial race, which flavor the coverage. Polls are now news items in themselves, which help influence how journalists and voters see races. I'm not impressed that he doesn't more clearly label his online polls.

"I believe that Wal-Mart is bad for America. It may provide low prices, but these prices come with a high moral and economic cost for consumers."

vs.

"Wal-Mart is good for America. It provides low prices and saves consumers money every day."

Compare that with the results elsewhere in the survey which seem to indicate a much less clear picture:

The Zogby poll also questioned consumers on whether they thought that Wal-Mart was becoming too powerful an economic force in America. Some 33 percent were very concerned, while 20 percent said they were not at all concerned.

Thirty-three percent strongly agreed that Wal-Mart was a retail monopoly that threatened the future health of the U.S. economy, but 35 percent did not agree at all.

It seems that the number actually concerned about Wal-Mart is closer to 33 percent than 56.

You have confirmed that your comments and Bush hatred is tainted by you "personal" loss of the 2000 and 2004 elections. You were led to falsly think that Kerry was actually going to win while we in the red states mid west knew all along that it would be a Bush Victory

Your problem Anderson is that you look at your Liberal political views from a left coast point of view and don't know a thing about the thinking of people from the center of our country.

So it's not surprising he's associated with the latest liberal fetish, Wal-Mart whipping. Ya know, I have yet to see anyone forced against their will to go Wal-Mart.

The whole purpose of the science of statistics is to tell us that ... as long as you can take a random sample of your population, you can find out an enormous amount about the population from a relatively small number of observations. You can find out what proportion of rich people had poor paretns, or what proportion of twenty year olds think they will graduate from college, or pretty much any other average proportion that you want.

Now the "random sample" part of this is very important. But if your sample is random--if the fact that the yes-no pattern of observations so far makes it no more (or less) likely that you next observation will be a "yes"--then the law of large numbers tells us that the sample average you compute will converge to the true population average at a frighteningly rapid speed.

We are so through.