There has been considerable discussion in the past day or so about the meaning of the margin of error used by polls to estimate support levels for the various candidate.  I have been saddened to see some real innumeracy in this issue, even among a professed social scientist who said that he works with statistics regularly.

A lot of people seem to be saying that even though Obama had a 5-point lead in the CNN poll, and the margin of error was 3 points, you could not say that this result is statistically significant, since 5 points is not greater than twice the margin of error.

These people are wrong.  The same value can be used for the margin of error for the estimate of each support level as for the hypothesis that one candidate is ahead of the other.  I'll show why after the jump.  The basic thinking is that, when considering the difference between two estimated values, you can ignore one of the tails of the distributions.

McJoan diaried about this last week, and now it's coming to fruition.  

I'm nostalgic for those days of the Baker-Hamilton commission, when Dean Broder assured us that the Wise Men of Washington, acting in a bipartisan fashion, would resolve the problems of the Iraq War.  The commission's recommendation was for a phased pull-out.  

Bush has ignored this, and decided instead to follow the McCain play, sending 20,000+ troops in an escalation/"surge".

And here's the latest
"President George Bush has asked Congress for an extra 8,000 troops for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, on top of the 21,500 reinforcements announced two months ago."

Dear Senator Lieberman,

In 1988 I was a college student in Connecticut and I voted for you in your race against Lowell Weicker.  My motivation for voting for you was primarily to keep the Senate in the hands of the Democrats as a check on President Reagan's power.  Although Lowell Weicker struck me as a decent man, I could not see how his ability to represent my interests would jib with the politics that the Republican party had adopted.

In 1994, I again happened to be living in Connecticut, albeit briefly, and again voted for you to represent my interests on Capitol Hill.  The 1994 election was a down year for Democrats, but you managed to keep your seat.

In 2000, I voted for you twice, once for VP and a second time for your position as Connecticut's Senator.

I saw this article at Yahoo today and it seems indistinguishable from a Fox News press release.  The last paragraph in particular is suspicious in the context of an article allegedly written by "Beth Harris" at the AP.  Google identifies her as an "AP Sports writer" and it seems that most of her articles are either about sports or appear to be entertainment industry press releases passed on with little comment.  (Example:  "Amazing Race moves to new night, time" really does not constitute news does it?  It sounds like advertisement.)

I'm posting this diary mostly because the assertion in the article that Olbermann "generally runs third" in his time slot contradicts what I'd read recently here, and I cannot find any source for cable TV ratings.  A little help?

I was pointed to this by Pandagon, and the source is the New Republic.  I came to Kos to see if people were talking about it but I do not see anything.  So I thought I'd highlight Senator Biden's absurd statement today.  

Here's the source:

The Note

And here's the money quote.

The Senator from Delaware also said that he hopes the event improves President Bush's approval ratings. "We get one president at a time. This election in November is not for President of the United States. . . I hope it does improve his standing and emboldens him to take bolder moves in terms of his policy in Iraq. . . His low ratings and his inability to rally support is a difficult position for the United States internationally."