And yet Neilsen decides the fate of billions of $$$ based on a sampling of less than 1% of the viewing public.

Yet no one seems bothered by that. Bring politics into a sampling and suddenly polls mean nothing.

When's a Consipiracy Theory not a theory?

Here's an excerpt from the Guardian's Ed
Vulliamy:
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It is incumbent upon journalists, I think, to distrust conspiracy theories. But the problem with the conspiracy theory of the machine that lifted George 'Dubya' Bush to high office is that it never lets you down; you wait for the trip wire, but walk on. This is hardly the place to recount my inspections of that mechanism but I did spend many weeks listening in Texas and days at the Securities and Exchange Commission sifting through box files, to become acquainted with its workings.

I wanted, just for instance, to find out which company bought Dresser Industries, once the world's biggest oil services company, of which Prescott Bush (Dubya's grandfather) was director and for which George Bush senior opened up the West Texas oil basin. It was Halliburton, recent beneficiary of a contract in Iraq, where Vice President Dick Cheney made his fortune after being Bush senior's Defence Secretary. And on it goes. President Bush broke all records in the history of campaign finance to get 'elected'. One of his biggest donors was 'Kenny Boy' Lay, CEO of the Enron Corporation, operator of one of the biggest company frauds ever. And among Enron's lav ishly paid consultants was, inevitably, Ralph Reed, former head of the right-wing Christian Coalition, recommended to the board by Karl Rove, the Svengali figure who managed all Bush's campaigns in Texas, and is now the most powerful man in the White House.

The entwinement of politics around the corporate boardroom had been rehearsed during Bush's governorship of Texas - once a nation, and most Texans would love it to be so again. But the Union prohibits that. So: if Texas cannot be a nation, make the nation into Texas.

For nearly a decade a group of people exiled from power during the Clinton years had been making plans. Their names are now more or less well known: Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Douglas Feith. In a series of papers they devised a blueprint for unchallenged and unchallengeable American power, military and political, across the globe, with the Middle East and Iraq as fulcrum. All that was needed to realise that dream - said a document produced by one of their many think-tanks, the Project for the New American Century - was 'a new Pearl Harbour'.
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source:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1028186,00.html

HILARIOUS CHICKENHAWK ANIMATION