Lying with numbers

Mark Twain once said "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" He considered statistics as a worse kind of lie because they were more easily accepted as true. I have to believe that if Samuel Clemens were alive today he'd consider polls to be on par with statistics.

From Ann Coulter's column this morning comes this nugget which sums up my views on these polls the media trots out daily saying the presidents approval rating is at another all time low.

Like callers to talk radio claiming to be Republicans angry with Republicans, liberals love to pretend public opinion is always in the process of shifting in their direction. They can't win elections – Democrats have gotten a majority vote in a national election only two times since FDR was president (Lyndon Johnson in '64 and Jimmy Carter in '76). But they're always experiencing an upswing in the polls. Clinton could never get a majority of Americans to vote for him but, according to the polls, as soon as the public found out about his sex romps with Monica, his support shot up to above 80 percent. Bush did get a majority of the country to vote for him less than two years ago. Now we're told 70 percent of Americans hate the man.

Read the rest. She may be over the top occasionally, but she cuts through the bs better than most.