Balta1701

The Royals don't expect Greinke to be with them to start the season.

The Nats signed Pedro Astacio to a 1 year deal, contingent on Astacio passing an MRI exam, which they're now supposedly going to start doing now that they feel like they got screwed in acquiring Lawrence. This should, if it goes through, remove the immediate need to trade for Arroyo, IMO.

According to This SI piece the Bears are likely to have less than $10 million in cap room available this year, depending on if anyone gets cut or not. Given their needs at other positions and how close they wound up last year, this just doesn't seem like the time to waste cap room on a QB. You're just not going to find one who's going to be worth not filling gaps at other positions (Or did you enjoy Tillman on Steve Smith?).

Please, let us just make an intelligent choice if options like that are available.

Unless those couple of people were named Ozzie Guillen, I don't buy it at all. If he gets out of jail with a not guilty verdict and doesn't get picked up by someone else, he'll be in our camp the next spring.

Yet another way for Borchard to get $100 off of A.J....

"Nowhere man".

Well, this poll appears to have been conducted using a different method: face to face sampling in Iraq. They certainly appear to have had no connection to being found over a computer. Which is probably why "Le Moyne college" was involved. Probably gave him manpower and access to the bases that he might not have had if it were just 1 person doing the sampling.

From the Truth is stranger than fiction file: Scooter Libby's defense? I forgot. And here's the guys who prove it's possible to forget. Yowza.

QUOTE(samclemens @ Feb 28, 2006 -> 11:13 AM) i believe that zogby polls were discounted on this site for having "suspect methods" by posters on both sides of the eisle here at soxtalk. i dont remember what thread it was, but i think i remember bigsqwert going into a bit more detail about zogby. (correct me if i'm wrong, i dont have the time or effort to go back through old posts and find it) Zogby and Gallup are 2 opposite ends of a spectrum in the general elections. In the General, Zogby assumes that the party registration of whatever sample he gets may be biased, and he takes the step of normalizing his results by the party affiliation of the previous election. In other words, if his sample records 33% Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, but the last election was 40-30-30, he'll assume he missed some Republicans and recalculate. Gallup doesn't do that...Gallup assumes that Party ID is a variable...that people can leave and enter parties depending on how they feel at the time. While this is true, it leaves the possibility that Gallup's sample may be biased by something like having a larger portion of Democratic voters either at work when Gallup calls or using only cell phones, which cannot be polled. Which method works? Well, in the last election, Gallup was closer to correct; there was a shift towards the Republicans due to additional votes for Bush among the elderly and among those who are in the top 10% of wage earners. Zogby missed this, because he assumed that party affiliation was holding constant. However, it's also possible that next election, Gallup could easily be the one who is off, because they could miss some bias in their sample due to things like people not being home or choosing to not respond when called (If more Republicans choose not to answer the poll than Democrats, suddenly they have a biased sample.) In this poll, it looks like none of that is any concern at all. This Zogby poll appears to have taken several steps to appear random, they have demographic information which can be cross-checked and compared to army statistics (which I don't have but i'm betting others do), and there's no adjustment based on any standard as far as I can tell. So in this case, the only reason to disbelieve Zogby's method is if he didn't get a representative sample...which as I said above, could be checked by comparing his demographic information to the makeup of the army as a whole.

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Feb 28, 2006 -> 11:33 AM) And that really bears out when you read the section about what the percentages were by branch. The everyday people had much hirer levels than did the weekend warriors. Keep in mind that since you're talking about select branches...you're talking about a subset of the poll, and therefore, you're talking about groups with much higher margins of error. Probably on the order of plus or minus ten to fifteen percent over each group.

QUOTE(juddling @ Feb 28, 2006 -> 11:03 AM) Sample size: 944 Troop level: 140,000 (about that) percentage of soilders asked : .006 i guess that 680 soliders in the sample size speaks for the rest. Yet another worthless poll. Yes, it actually does give you valuable information about the opinions/attitudes over there. Because once you get to a certain sample size, if you've truly done random sampling, then it's almost impossible for the overall survey results to be off by a significant percentage. In this case, how you should read this poll is thus: "If I were to take all 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, break them into groups of 944 at random, and ask each of these groups the same question, 95% of those groups would have responses within plus or minus 3.3% of the overall result of this poll." That does, however, assume that you have gotten a truly random sample. That's sometimes the one problem. For example, the CBS poll we saw last night has a major problem in that they don't have enough Republicans being sampled for whatever reason, so they're normalizing their poll results by assuming that a higher portion of the population are Republicans than they're actually seeing. Interestingly, unlike the CBS poll, this poll actually has data which can be used to check whether or not their sample is truly random. From the poll: Because this poll took demographic information, it actually has something you can compare it to. If those numbers are plus or minus about 3% away from the actual numbers that the DOD has in Iraq, then it strongly suggests that they did manage to get a random sample. If, on the other hand, like 60% of the soldiers in Iraq were actually over 30, or 50% were female or something like that, and the sample set was made up as described, then the sample would almost certainly not be random. Unless those numbers are inaccurate, there's no reason to believe that this poll is not representative of the entire army in Iraq within a couple of percentage points.

QUOTE(mr_genius @ Feb 27, 2006 -> 10:33 PM) i must be reading that wrong. it looks like you're saying CBS is skewing polls to favor a Republican president. That wasn't my intention. I'm saying that CBS is somehow polling a sample that contains more Democrats than it should if it was a totally random sample (their raw numbers seemed to confirm this to my eyes). This just means that for whatever reason, they're calling more Democrats than Republicans. Maybe it's a state thing, maybe it's a race thing, who knows, but for some reason the're calling more Democrats than they should. So what they wind up having to do is come up with a rational estimate of how biased their sample is, and then normalize those responses to that estimate. This is a trick that is used in a lot of polls...you try to come up with an estimate of how wrong you are in order to correct in a rational way. But the other feature is that in any statistical operation, there is going to be random variation. That's why polls are usually given as plus or minus 3 percent...if you did the poll 100 times with a truly random sample, and the true approval rating was 40%, 95 times it would come up as somewhere between 37-43 just entirely based on random variation. The other 5 would be even farhter away. Now, the other thing to note is that as your sample size gets smaller, the chance for errors increases. So, if we suddenly start talking about "all republicans" instead of all respondents, we have a much smaller group with a much higher margin of error. Say 10%. So if Bush's approval among Republicans was 70%, then 95 times out of 100 in a truly random sample of Republicans, it would come out between 60% and 80% entirely by random chance. Now, the last thing is the bias adjustment. So we have a sample which is already varying on a much larger range than the overall sample...now we're multiplying that by some factor in order to make up for the projected defiency in Republicans in our total sample. So what that winds up doing is causing much more variation in the poll than their should be...we've taken a random variation across 20% and multiplied it by something like 1.5, so suddenly we've got a range of 30% in what number the polled Republicans are giving him. So, the net result of this is that the poll swings quite wildly based on the fact that the sample of Republicans is too small, and small variations in either the sample set of Republicans polled or in Bush's approval among Republicans are magnified in the final poll, causing the poll to skew much more wildly than it should. Bottom line, I think that the poll in January showing a 42% approval from this same group was probably a little too high, and this one is probably a little bit too low. Their sample sizes back that conclusion up, and a consequence of it is Bush's numbers swinging by 8% in a month. He's probably dropped a little bit this month, but until I see 3-4 different polls all saying he dropped by 8%, this one should be treated as an outlier.

Did Frank actually have a second surgery on his foot? I was under the impression they didn't operate the 2nd time (mainly because they couldn't.)

QUOTE(Jordan4life_2006 @ Feb 27, 2006 -> 09:51 PM) Knicks lose by 30 tonight. Make that 15-41? With the Raptors and Hawks playing a little better of late, it seems only the Bobcats could possibly have a worse record. Even if they do wind up with a worse record...I think it's ok if their draft ball comes up ahead of ours. Just looking at their lineup, I'm not sure they have a place for Aldridge. They would be much better fit with that guy from Uconn. And then of course, there's the fact that it's actually fairly rare that the worst team comes up at the top. Hopefully one of ours will wind up top 2.

QUOTE(KipWellsFan @ Feb 27, 2006 -> 09:17 PM) Isn't the deficit supposed to shrink? They've actually found a statistical trick to make that happen (Hi Addisonst!). Instead of using any actual deficit that they ran, they've lately been talking in terms of the predicted deficit as a percentage of GDP in 2004 (the election year). Bush said that he would cut the deficit in half by 09. Their plan to do that is to use that number, which is higher than any other deficit we ran, and because of the fact that the total deficit could remain constant at the same time as the percentage deficit decreases if the economy grows.

Already threw this one into the Dems only thread. It's a CBS news poll. Here's the link to someone other than Drudge. Here are my comments:

Well this should be a fun night, I'm about to bike out in this:

I don't know if it's even still there, but J&J's Pizza Shack in Portage always made one hell of a meal.

My God...more than 1300 people died in the violence in Iraq Last week.

QUOTE(kapkomet @ Feb 27, 2006 -> 07:06 PM) YEEE f***ING HAW!!! LOW POLL NUMBERS! OUR PRESIDENT SUCKS!!! WOOO HOOOO!!! And then you wonder why the perception is from a conservative standpoint all you want to do is attack and wish bad things for this president. Edit: Oh, crap, my fault. This is the Bush bashing thread that no one dare speak anything good about the president in here. My fault, I just realized where I was. But I think this is a good enough point to leave it here. Or...could it be that I'm hoping for a win in this little election at the end of the year, and the lower Bush's poll numbers, the easier it will be to defeat Bush's party?

QUOTE(mr_genius @ Feb 27, 2006 -> 05:10 PM) i don't like his ideas, i don't like is speaking style, he has never been challenged by anyone in the media (aka, he could crumble when he gets asked hard questions), he has hasn't done anything out of the ordinary to deserve to be ordained the best young politician in the country.... ect. oh, but if i don't like him it's just because i hate all democrats... See, I actually was very impressed with his speaking style. I thought it was a tossup between him and Bill as to who gave the best speech @ the Dem convention in 2004, for example (Clearly better than either Kerry or Edwards).

I think this is clearly an outlier on the negative side, but it's nice to see the Port deal doing some dragging in this number. And the approval rating for Iraq has dropped hugely from their poll in January. The internals of this poll seem really skewed. They veer from Bush being at 35 in October up to 42 in January and back down to 34 in February. That's a lot of movement. I bet there's something funny in the way they're adjusting their sample which gives extra weight to Republicans polled...where a few ticks upwards in Republican approval gives a larger tick upwards in overall approval because they're a minority in the sample. Anywho...always nice to see a new low. The lower the outliers get, the lower the mean gets.

QUOTE(nitetrain8601 @ Feb 27, 2006 -> 04:41 PM) I don't think that place is an ideal situation for a rookie. Half the players on that team take everything as a joke. Are the Knicks right now the ideal situation for ANYTHING? (Except of course, for the Bulls, who have their picks)

QUOTE(NorthSideSox72 @ Feb 27, 2006 -> 04:35 PM) Oh man. I was hoping JG would lose the patch. It looks even longer and more ridiculous now. :rolly Hitters can't help but stare. Then they strike out. See: the Angels in the ALCS. That's the source of all his power.