Schadenfreude

Calling an economic downturn "the Obama recession", does not in turn actually make it Obama's fault.

Repeatedly describing your propensity for "supporting the troops" to every microphone within shouting distance does not mean that you actually do.

Naming yourself "Fox News" does not make you a news station.

I get all giddy when people stop ignoring the elephant in the room and point this out, be it expressed or implicit. Per Fishbowl DC, with five press conferences as president-elect, Obama has yet to call on Faux News for questions.

Right now I have a warm and fuzzy all through my belly.

Stats don't lie

Data can be misinterpreted, but it never lies. Quality interpretation usually leads to plenty of "I told you so's" while poor interpretation be it intentionally, ignorantly, or just through bias, either gets ignored, qualified (there was no way to foresee that happening), or posthumously changed.

Faux News usually provides great examples of poor performance. Remember all the calls from them that McCain was "closing the gap" from 7 points behind Obama in the days preceding the election? The final results left Obama 53%-46%, dead on the 7 points predicted by most reputable sources.

On the other side, two of my favorite sources through the election were Electoral-Vote.com and FiveThirtyEight.com, both of which only missed Indiana and the Omaha district of Nebraska (FiveThirtyEight did not make a prediction for Missouri) in their pre-election predictions.

Maps from Electoral-Vote.com and FiveThirtyEight.com (respectively):


And the final map (from CNN.com):



Regardless of what the naysayers conclude about the illegitimacy of polls, a quality interpretation of the data will yield a correct result, as demonstrated by E-V.com and 538.com.