Profiles In Scourging: Blarghosphere Awards Special

"I'm sacrificing [...] every hour of my waking day to put this country on a new path."

In these middle years of the information age the newspapers are slowly opening up to the potential of the Internet in much the same way dinosaurs opened up to the potential of crude oil. They are dying, slowly and painfully, but their decaying apparatus is nourishing a new breed of tech-savvy reporters and editorial writers. The Internet reporters and commentators are coming into their own in this election cycle and as often as not they are the ones shaping the conventional wisdom in an incestuous feedback loop with cable news networks. Blogs cite TV news, TV news cites the blogs, and the newspapers bellow their last breath as they crash down among the trees of the Cambrian jungle. All of that is a really dumb way of saying the blogs are here to say, so let's give them some awards. Thus, the Blarghies were born, offering you the world's most important awards for un-excellence and im-meritoriousness in political journalism and commentary on the Internet.

Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos

There are a lot of full-time bloggers making inaccurate predictions about upcoming votes, so you have to make some really shitty voting projections to get called out on it by a pollster. That's just what happened to Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, who ran afoul of Public Policy Polling after dismissing their April 2nd Pennsylvania poll as "just ridiculous".

Most pollsters ignore such criticism or have no way of really responding short of a press release. Not so with PPP, who maintain a blog and apparently read Daily Kos. Tom Jensen from PPP wrote a response later the same day entitled "Kos is full of it" and pointed to PPP's record in this election versus Markos's record. They particularly singled out his wildly incorrect prediction for the Texas Democratic primary. PPP correctly picked Clinton as the winner, but was off by two points. Markos incorrectly picked Obama as the winner and he was off by sixteen points.

"I think the only thing 'ridiculous' here is Kos so flippantly writing off our poll, when our recent track record is a heck of a lot better than this."

- Tom Jensen
Public Policy Ownage

Markos is not a polling analyst and does not portray himself as any particular expert when it comes to interpreting polling data. However, he chose his unfortunate Texas prediction to brag about his accuracy and then in short order dismissed a poll from a professional pollster with a respectable track record. Kudos to Tom Jensen at PPP for justifiably owning his dumb face.