Larry Jaques wrote:

On Fri, 14 Nov 2008 21:38:57 -0500, the infamous "Ed Huntress"
scrawled the following:


"Wes" wrote in message

I hope not. I do wonder why seriously liberal commentary on other than
NPR doesn't seem
to exist though.

There is some entertaining stuff on TV now, on MSNBC. Keith Olbermann
("Countdown") can be pretty brutal, and Rachel Maddow is very good with a
sharp scalpal. g


I heard one Olberman rant on the Shrub which had me rolling.


--snip--

We could get into a discussion about it, based on audience-study data, but
you wouldn't like it. d8-) You may be surprised to know that Limbaugh's
approval rating is very low according to nationwide surveys -- just slightly
higher than that of George Bush (based on a Rasmussen study conducted last
year, and I think there was at least one other recent study that had similar
results). He has a large enough audience to pull something like 13.5 million
listeners/week (that's what they call the "cume" in radio advertising speak:
the number of people who tuned into radio at least once and at least for
five minutes in an average week) , but that's actually a smallish percentage
of voting-age Americans. They're hard core but, by themselves, they can't
win an election.


I know a lot of them. Or did in CA.



As Sam Clemmens said, "Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics"


But it proved to be an interesting article in the Science column of ABC
News today. Check the "Bottom Line"...



How McCain Won (or Could Have)

November 14, 2008 2:40 PM


According to the totals so far, Barack Obama won the election by
something more than 8.4 million votes. But Mike Sheppard says the
margin that really matters was only 445,912.

Sheppard, you may recall from a previous post, is a grad student in
statistics at Michigan State who became interested in the interplay
between the popular and electoral vote in history, and calculated how
many votes it would have taken in each race to change the outcome.

Sheppard has refrained from telling me what his own political leanings
are; his interest is in how well (or not) the electoral process works.

He showed that more than half our presidential elections since 1824
could have come out differently if fewer than two percent of voters --
the right two percent -- had voted differently and swung the electoral
college totals to the losers. In 1976, for instance, Gerald Ford could
have beaten Jimmy Carter if Ohio and Hawaii had gone his way -- and it
would only have taken 9,246 voters to make the difference.

David Chalian, our political director, has supplied the total popular
votes for 2008 as of today:

* Obama: 66,624,447
* McCain: 58,182,368

Take a look at Sheppard's analysis HERE.

https://www.msu.edu/~sheppa28/elections.html#2008

It was not a close election by his standards; John McCain needed at
least seven more states to win the electoral vote. But the most
efficient way, mathematically, for that to have happened would only have
taken 444,121 popular votes (out of 126 million cast), since North
Carolina, Indiana, New Hampshire, etc., were so close.

In other words, Mr. McCain could have become president by winning in the
electoral college, 270-268 -- though still losing by 7.6 million votes.


http://blogs.abcnews.com/scienceands...ccain-won.html