Huffington Post: OMG SURROGATEZ!!1!1

At the increasingly worthless Huffington Post today:

Two great writers (Tom Edsall is a Pulitzer finalist, and Jason Linkins is the genius behind DCeiver), two stupid-ass stories. This fussing about surrogates has been the leitmotif of the 2008 race: Austan "NAFTAGate" Goolsbee, Sam Power, Ferraro, Wright, the stupid Obama dude, apparently now this lady, the list goes on. Yet does anyone outside the elite media and the fanatic bloggers actually care whose surrogates did or said what? I love me some horse-race politics, but come on. It just isn't news. You might as well make a big deal out of that hissy fit the Clinton diarists had at Daily Kos this weekend... wait, what?

(sound of soft, gentle weeping)

I want this campaign to be over.

A quick object lesson in poll analysis

Red flag #1 ought to have been that this was in the Washington Times, a paper that's not exactly known for its journalistic rigor. But no, I soldiered on, reading a fairly bland writeup about a Harris poll that shows -- Surprise! -- not everybody reads political blogs. Whatever. Until this:

The Harris poll, meanwhile, found that political blog readership was lowest among those younger than 40 — and highest among people 63 and older.

Buh? Since when are seniors the biggest readers of political blogs? I mean, I know I do my best to court that demographic, but I'm fairly sure I'm in the minority there. One does not imagine Grampa gettin' up in the morning and checking out, for example, TBogg, especially not more frequently than the average young person. So -- all you amateur statisticians out there, can you think of a reason this finding might be flawed? How about we read the next sentence?

The online Harris survey of 2,302 adults was conducted Jan. 15-22.

Aha! The only people who could respond to this survey -- in polling terminology, its "sample frame" -- were people who were already using the Internet. Now, we can assume that it's a fairly small and non-representative portion of seniors who are online regularly, whereas a larger and more diverse (though still non-representative) portion of younger people use the Internet. (See Gallup, among many other sources.) So you cannot generalize from these findings out to the population at large, only to Internet users, and hence saying that blog readership is "higher" among one group or another is simply wrong. In fact, it's likely that in raw numbers, more young and middle-aged people read political blogs than older people, simply because there's more of them online. This is very very simple stuff, and it's sad that no editor at the Washington Times (assuming they have editors) caught it.

(This is also why Internet polls -- like the Harris and Zogby Interactive -- are completely worthless for political purposes. The Internet just cannot provide a representative sample. Or at least not yet; if current trends continue, Internet use may be as standard as phone use within a decade or so, at which point it'll be kosher for polling.)

...Still, maybe I'm wrong, and the chief demographic of a political blog really is the over-65 set. In which case, what the hell, give 'em what they want has always been my motto...

----SHAMELESS CROSS-PROMOTION ALERT: Grab the Indy today (or, if you're over 65, read it online) for a bunch of insightful pieces on the 5th anniversary of Iraq, including a brilliant analysis of media's role in war and public discourse by our own Sam Jack.

Mini-Roundup: I'm Going To Die

No full-length roundup today, because it's the hottest week of the summer down here in North Carolina and my skin is slowly melting off my face. However, read:

--TEACHERS' UNIONS: THREAT, OR MENACE? Kevin Carey and our boy Ezra Klein look at the peculiar tendency of liberal elites to blame teachers' unions for everything, including the weather. In rebuttal, Tim Lee at the newly redesigned American Scene thinks Kevin and Ezra are peculiar.

--NOT ACTUALLY A SQUARE-DANCE CALL: Open Left, Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers' new project (as well as some guy named Mike I've never heard of), kicks off with a bang. Read Chris with a long, possibly definitive study of the condition of the netroots.

--I PREFER THE FRENCH "EUH": Language Log, which is always worth your time, looks at differences in pausing between gender and age groups. Check this out:

Turns out "um" and "uh" are pretty reliable identifiers of gender. ...There is a moment in "Clue" that has bothered me for years, where Wadsworth the butler (played by Tim Curry) is talking very quickly and says "the uh, um, uh, library." I had wondered why that phrase stuck in my brain. Now I know: it was essentially androgynous! (Of course for Tim Curry that's hardly a stretch.)

--SENTENCE OF THE DAY: Roy Edroso channels Dylan:

How long can a man scream epithets in a cemetery before he loses the status of outrage and devolves into a figure of fun?

--AND: You may know that "musician" Avril Lavigne has been accused of plagiarism by 70s bubblegum-rockers The Rubinoos. But you probably do not know that The Rubinoos also recorded the seminal theme to 1984's "Revenge of the Nerds." Yes! In honor of their reappearance, I present the wonderful first ten minutes of that godawful movie:

A tip to our incoming freshmen: that is exactly what's in store for you this fall.

That's all I got. Stay indoors, everyone.

Telling It Like It Is

Gary Trudeau, author of the satirical comic strip Doonesbury, recently biting in its criticism of the Iraq war, has launched a new forum for reflection on the war. Last week he opened a blog on his website (www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose) for soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the site, entitled The Sandbox, it will serve as "a clean, lightly edited debriefing environment" where "the focus is not on policy and partisanship...but on the unlassified details of deployment." And he's gotten some interesting responses.

Posts vary from in topic from the stress of long distance relationships:
"Spouses and significant others don't relate to what the Soldier is going through. They want the text message, phone calls, digital pictures, letters, and hell some probably even want sky writing" -Sgt. Allen

to poetic meditations on their surroundings:
"I think Alfred Hitchcock would have loved this place at night" -Captain Lee Kelly

The posters are conflicted idealogically, but they agree that they deserve to be heard. "Combat Doc" sums it up in his post:
"In the end Joe isn't being heard by the pro [war]s or the anti [war]s. There's good and bad going on there, but the only one who will tell you the truth is the shooter who handed out bread to the children and lead to the Hajj."

The interesting thing about this war is that even with all the tehnology available, especially through the internet, despite the imbedded reporters and soldiers' YouTube videos-- the public still isn't hearing the voice of the soldiers. It's not unified, but it sure seems far better qualified than that of TV's punditocracy. These are our peers, and they're fighting for us, whether we like it or not. Let's listen to them.