I have to admit I was surprised a couple of years ago when I found out, after watching and hating V for Vendetta, that the Wachowskis pretty much turned the concept from the written source material on its head in the movie. Alan Moore condemned the film in pretty scathing terms, as it was supposed to be condemning fascism from a distinctly English flavor and not a left wing anti-Bush fantasy. Had they simplt left the original themes in place and just updated the setting to account for where Moore's future history got it wrong (by his own admission) the result would have been much better.

Actually his analysis is more than a little fishy. It makes all the same demographic errors that the pre primary polls that had Murkowski up by 30 or more were making. Juneau and Anchorage are overrepresented and Kenai, Fairbanks and Mat-Su are grossly underrepresented.

Alaska is a weird state for polling because it is so geographically large but not densely populated. The people are not clumped in traditional urban style nor evenly spread over the state. What this means is that polls that do not carefully break the state down by its "sub regions" wind up being useless. Even Rasmussen has missed this factor, although at least they have more honesty than other outfits and maybe will adjust their polling to account for this.

As much as I like Big Government, this is one time they really need to step back a it.

For one thing they are building this whole story off of quoting a blog that is not all that significant. Also the poll cited in the blog entry is from a polling outfit which has had numerous problems in the past with hilariously inaccurate polls (they are like PPP in that they have the in state demographics badly wrong and overstate Anchorage in the results - both errors common to the polls that did not see the primary race getting tight).

Good thoughts.

I tried to post mine as someone who works in the industry but this site kept saying too many words. So I blogged it here.

http://thejoelist.wordpress.com/

Hi,

I tried to reply but the posting system kept saying my post was too long. So instead I made it into a blog here

http://thejoelist.wordpress.com/

It is a view from inside the industry.