They ask whoever they need to get the results they want.

The information from public polls is useless except when the question is understood the same way by everybody, which eliminates almost everything except a poll about who the pollee will vote for. For an election, interpretation of that question is minimal. (of course, those polls can still be manipulated by the “adjustments” dishonest pollsters make, purportedly to adjust for demographics, but in reality, more often to adjust to get an answer closer to the pollster’s bias.)

Once a “question” is formulated, the poll is open season for manipulation by the pollster, the media and the consumer. That’s why they are useless.

But to be clear, I’m not criticizing the theory behind polls. I believe the theory is solid. And I think private polls can be very useful. The reason is that with a private poll, the party that conducts the poll has no reason to distort the results. In fact, they have every reason to insure the poll is accurate.

But to think the Slimes poll is accurate would be the height of stupidity. It’s exactly as accurate as the “reporting’ the Slimes did about Iraq.

http://www.reuters.com/article.....407?rpc=33

http://abcnews.go.com/Business.....amp;page=1

PR: great news about your Mom’s poll – and good luck with Angelina. Keep me posted…

It is now PC brainwashing to drop “toxic assets” and replace it with “legacy assets”. Another fine indication of the manipulation that occurred from Bambi and the MSM.

I tend to agree, me and the wife are holding steady – namely in money market accounts and have bought a few CD’s. Luckily – we are USAA members and get an amazing rate, compared to to others – across the board. Since my broker/asset management days – I tend to only put no more than 10% in growth equity. I am just fine with a net 3-4% yearly rate of return after taxes and write downs.

The intentional complexity of forecasting is best summed up with the baffon Harry S Dent who wrote “Roaring 2000’s DOW 35,000″ back in the 90’s. He has now penned the opposite book, 10+ years later and a few trillion gone “The Great Depression Ahead”. SunAmerica used to send this to potential clients (financial planners) and of course would state “this is not an indication of future performance” in .06 font…

I’m going to start calling him DOTUS, Deceiver of the Untied States. He may not be the full blown antichrist, but deceiver is apt.

Spot-on about driving it down to take credit for the recovery. Totally planned. Of course, the masses, and sadly lots of well-educated folks can’t (or don’t want to) grasp economics – GHWB was right – it’s mainly voodoo!

From what I hear, there is going to be some very bad news, re: the toxic asset valuations, on the street in the next few weeks that will put a major damper on the party for a few weeks or a little longer, i.e., a great time to get into (or back into) the market. After that, the waters will calm and people will see that while the recession was real, it was mild, money will flow and we’ll gently make our way back to a 3-5% annual GDP.

How we pay back the Trillions, social security, et cetera is above my pay grade…

The failure of his recent Euro-Islam tour (unless you count fashion, food tasting and America bashing) did not go well and the Der Speigal and AFP are reporting Sarkozy, Merkle, Brown, etc are not happy he thrust his “arrogant American opinion” as to Turkey and the EU.

http://www.spiegel.de/internat.....ml#ref=rss

You know how bad this moron is doing, based on the speed of an opinion poll released through their friendly , complicate CBS/NYT outlets…

Our past “dust ups” require fancy math and Latin… wth am I to do now??? lol.

Serious question (I have my serious look on now) – do you think the TARP 1/2 and massive defecit/budget numbers will skew the Q3 09 rebound? I barely got through the latest Newsweek and couldn’t make heads or tales from 5 contributors, ranging from Wharton – Harvard – Carnegie Mellon, economic experts as to when they believe, with said Trillions adding in – as to the recovery.

I have felt all along the hysteria was overblown to jam the agenda down our throats through fear, and then take claim for the “recovery”. I polled over 45 retail stores in the Atlanta and Destin markets (face to face with managers who were willing to talk – I am in consumer marketing) with most (39) saying sales were the same or better than last year and 6 saying worse. Some of the best – Macy’s, Bloomingdales, Target… and in an article 3 or 4 weeks ago that SG posted – Q1 earnings estimates were all better for 12 companies, than analysts expected, sans 1…

What say you?

Most good track records are easily explainable by normal probability. if 1,000,000 monkeys flip coins 10 times, 1 will flip heads 10 times in a row.

But Lynch’s returns were so much better than what probability would predict that he clearly wasn’t playing by a playbook that anybody else had…..and absolutely could not be explained as a Random Walk. (even taking into consideration that non-Fortune 500 stocks had fantasitc returns during Lynch’s career.

Buffet is a different story. He clearly has been very successful, but he was 1/20th as diversified as Lynch, and frequently took a management role in his investments. I think his success is probably due to a mixture of very good luck intensified by lack of diversification, a very good underlying strategy, and good management instincts. Curiously, Buffet has taken huge losses during the Droolers financial meltdown. His eyes must have been glazed over with liberal fervor for deadbeat lending, since he surely knew the probably end-game with all that.

Lynch beats Buffet by a mile, imho.

But I’m with you, how could anyone be surprised at the manipulation of the masses? Remember the meme during the last year or so – worst since the great depression – is now ’signs of economic recovery’.

I do believe we will be out of the recession by the end of the third quarter of ‘09, for what that’s worth and have been preaching that for some time. And it’s based solely on the historic length of these retractions – no fancy mathematics or Latin involved. ;-)

There is an inverse reaction , you know like when 3.5% GDP growth and 4M new jobs were perceived as “bad”. He goes to show that it really doesnt mean anything to a true economy, due to the manipulation of outlets telling people what they should believe. Sales, mall traffic, tourism, credit/debt ratio, etc. let you know whats going on.

Peter Lynch – the famed asset manager (Fidelity) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Lynch used to track Disney gate sales and mall shopping bags as a hard indicator of what the country’s economic pulse was. Not a perfect man (note the SEC fine from 2002-2004), but truly believed in simplicity over confusion in economics. 29.2% rate of return for the Magellan Fund – from 1977-1990.

This chart is nothing more than a bogus manipulation of the masses of asses, over sampled to the left.