Originally posted at The Moderate Voice

The contrast in quality between the news and opinion divisions of The Wall St. Journal never ceases to amaze me.

While the news reporting has won award after award, and has become the definitive source of news for the American business and financial communities, the opinion pages are characterized by what some would consider mendacity and methodological sloppiness or a genuine lack of understanding of the subject matter. Indeed:

The 13 March, 2009, op-ed by Doug Schoen and Scott Rasmussen is just another indication of why one should beware of anything written in those sections. Both authors are pollsters, and should therefore know better, but they didn’t provide full cross-tabs, sampling information, fielding dates or questionnaires for the polls they cite, and their analysis meanders back and forth between different polls. It is impossible to take any of the claims in this article completely seriously on their own merits.

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Originally posted at The Moderate Voice.

A CBS News poll fielded over the weekend shows a surprising finding: while a majority of Americans disapprove of AIG handing out bonuses, believe that the government should do more to recover them and specifically give Obama low marks for handling this issue, there is no appreciable change in his overall job performance and there is an increase in overall confidence in his ability to handle the economy. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, has slightly lower numbers.

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