Help Skew Phony Poll Results in Favor of Freedom
by David M. Brown
Today I founded a new organization called Phony-Poll Skewers of America. Would you rather become a member by filling out some tedious form or just by reading this sentence? If the latter, welcome aboard, thou art hereby dubbed, certified and otherwise sword-clapped. (And guess what. We've doubled the organization's membership in the last minute alone! This kind of gyrating-out-of-control growth shows the crying need for what we're doing here.)
The idea for this organization first occurred to me, if only as a pre-natal glimmer, when I saw the poll results about legislative term limits at an anti-term-limits web site called the National Conference of State Legislatures. I guess the point of NCSL is to help state legislators legislate and also safeguard or restore de facto legislative oligarchies--NCSL has even handed out a phony "award" to Idaho political monopolist Bruce Newcomb for leading the charge to unilaterally overturn voter-enacted term limits in Idaho. The NCSL site also features the results of a pompous survey of the legislators and legislative aides who frequent the site, which sought to determine whether such persons are for, or maybe against, state legislative term limit laws that kick them out of power. Some 134 people answered the poll. Vast majority: opposed. Shocker.
These polls are not scientific and nobody believes they are. They are especially uninformative when they invite the specialized audience visting a specialized site to indicate whether they agree, or disagree, with the very presuppositions that brought them to the site in the first place. Of course, if taken with a grain of salt, such polls are a good way to give visitors a little fun and get them to interact with your site. But if the plurality of those responding to a WorldNetDaily poll agree, prior to the commencement of Operation Freedom, that, "Yes, Jesse Jackson should be allowed to go to Baghdad as a peace envoy; just make sure that when the first bomb falls, he's standing on the spot where it's going to fall," that doesn't tell you much except that many visitors to WND are not fond of Jesse Jackson. Which is not new information.
Yet some sites imply that the surveys they conduct do convey more than the obvious. The National Conference of State Legislatures argues that its now-closed survey of a whopping 134 visitors shows, among other things, that "few of term limits proponents' rosy predictions about the effects of term limits have become reality, but neither have some of the opponents' predictions of doom. Proponents claimed that term limits would help to increase diversity in legislatures and provide more public access. NCSL's survey shows that most people [ahem; most legislators and legislative aides]--51 percent--say there has been no change in diversity thanks to term limits, and 22 percent actually say their legislature is less diverse than before."
So the sheer fact that 51 percent of 134 surfing-in opponents of term limits say term limits aren't working is just exactly the data you need to "prove" term limits aren't working. Except that...the actual evidence actually gathered so far about sex, race, and business background of term-limited legislatures, reported by such outfits as U.S. Term Limits and the Cato Institute, contradicts the casual opinions of these opponents of term limits (which respondents, by the way, hardly had to live in a state with a term-limited legislature in order to answer the survey). The evidence on how many incumbent state legislators get ejected from office by term limits is even more clear-cut; within several years after a term limits law starts ejecting legislators, the success rate is 100 percent. But NCSL must think that its phony poll is just very extremely indicative of timeless truths, because three years after conducting it, their self-deluded analysis of the results is still enshrined on its own permanent page at NCSL's web site.
NCSL's phony survey has ended, so there is no way to skew it now. Instead, I am directing all members of Phony-Poll Skewers of America to an on-line poll currently in progress at a page of Floridians For All, a web site dedicated to destroying the lives of Floridians. This particular page of the site is all about the glorious cause of making it harder for employers to hire workers by forcing employers to pay employees more than the employees are worth to the employers. I'm going to assume that you, the educated reader of Crunch Report, and, moreover, a dedicated charter member in good standing of Phony-Poll Skewers of America, oppose destroying the lives of Floridians on principle, and therefore also oppose destroying the livelihoods of Floridian employers and employees; in acknowledgement of which I hereby instruct you to click into the FFA page and vote No to the following survey question: "Do you think Florida should raise the minimum wage to $6.15?"
It's cute, by the way, that the only choices the chaps who run the site can condescend to provide are "Yes," "No," and "It should actually be more than $6.15." Geez, how "scientific" can you get? The option of "I oppose immoral assaults on the livelihoods of employers and employees and thus believe that all minimum wage laws should be rescinded immediately" is not even listed.
But let's at least vote No to the latest incursion.
[Reprinted with permission of The Crunch Report.]
Discuss this Article (3 messages)
|
