LMAO at MSNBC (Non-poker)

[Lost Wages]

From a story about the presidential race. ( link to story (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4482401/) )

[ QUOTE ]
In a bit of good news for Bush, Nader is drawing essentially all of his support from Kerry, who leads Bush by 9 percentage points in a two-way matchup with the president -- an indication Nader could play the spoiler for Democrats in 2004 as he did four years ago. Underscoring that potential, nearly two-thirds of Democrats opposed Nader's decision to run, while nearly half of all Republicans supported his move.


[/ QUOTE ]

Nearly 2/3 of Democrats oppose while nearly 1/2 of Republicans support. In other words, they support his decision to run about equally.

Lost Wages

[Franchise (TTT)]

The ~17% different between 2/3 and 1/2 is quite significant (especially in a political poll), even after factoring the +/- however-many-percentage-points-"nearly"-is.

Purposely misleading? Doubtful.
Somewhat ambiguous? Maybe.
Should have printed the actual polled percentages? Definitely.

[Steven Punk]

Are you the "TT" charachter that some have called me? If so please clear this up as it would reduce the amount of degenerates PMing me asking me who I really am.

[pudley4]

I already told you who TT was.

[Lost Wages]

The two nearly's are not +/-. When they say "nearly 2/3 of Democrats oppose", what they mean is "less than 2/3 of Democrats oppose" otherwise they would have said "more than 2/3 of Democrats oppose". The same for the Republicans, "nearly 1/2 support" means that "less than 1/2 support".

So they are implying a difference of about 17% while in reality it could be as close as a few percent. I definately think they were trying to misrepresent the numbers to support the article.

Lost Wages

[Duke]

Thanks for putting non-poker in the title, though.

~D