So I Signed Up for the Atlantic's Twitter Feed...
And now I am signing off of it, as this was the first thing that appeared:
Molly Ball: Obama Is Ahead, but Is He Winning?: Three months remain until election day, and President Obama narrowly leads in nearly every national poll. Gallup's most recent tracking has him up 47-45 over Mitt Romney, for example, and just about every reputable poll for the last two months has shown a similar result. Nate Silver's weighted polling model puts Obama's current share of the popular vote at 50.2 percent to Romney's 48.4 percent, a figure that has scarcely changed since early June….
Yet Republicans seem bullish on their chances. Take Karl Rove: His column in Thursday's Wall Street Journal was headlined "For Romney, Even Means Ahead."…
Rove isn't being contrarian here -- this is a widely shared sentiment on both sides, for a number of reasons. Here's why many Republicans think they're in good shape -- and many Democrats agree…
If you are going to cite Nate Silver, you should say that Silver believes that Obama would have an 80% chance of winning if the election were held today--and, because things could break either in Obama's or Romney's direction over the next three months, a somewhat smaller 73% chance of winning in November.
If you are not going to cite Nate Silver's bottom line, you have no business claiming him as a validator of your "It's a horse race! It's really close! Obama is likely to lose!" blogging.
And if you are going to take Karl Rove's judgment of the situation as superior to Nate Silver's, you need to explain why Silver is wrong. And if you won't spend the time to understand why Silver reaches the conclusions he does--well, you should not be writing about this.
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
Moral responsibility, people. Those you cite deserve to have their arguments and conclusions presented.
