Party Politics: Beneath the Latest Fox News Poll

The headline on the most recent Fox News poll is that 79% of those surveyed say that "it's possible the economy could collapse".

I haven't been able to locate the underlying data, which Fox has published for other polls in the past, but I have to say that the potential wordings and the misleading manner in which responses could be grouped makes the headline more than a little suspect.

Yes, in theory the economy could collapse, but right now, we have no idea how many people think this to be a likely scenario or a probable outcome and how many just agree that it's possible.

So, once you discount the top line, you're presented with some other data and though it's purely political, one thing that jumped out is that only 16% of those surveyed by Opinion Dynamics think the Republicans in Congress have a plan to "fix the economy" and only 25% of Republicans believe that their party has a solution.

QuickLink: Unprecedented

In a post calling President Obama out for using "unprecedented" 129 times since taking office, Politico uses the term 44 times, plus two for the title and one in a caption.

Barack Obama's Mama was Smart

The American Anthropological Association and Duke University Press are going to publish the doctoral dissertation of S. Ann Dunham, President Obama's mother.

Publisher's Weekly gave the following preview of Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, which will have an initial printing of 10,000 for what was a 1000 page work, before it was edited by her academic advisor;

Wissoker said that Duke University Press’s anthropology list was focused on books about "how conventional foreign aid has not worked and how it should be rethought," and Dunham's book is a perfect fit for its program. He hailed the importance of Dunham’s scholarly work in Indonesia—she spent nearly 15 years in the field—and called the book, "a forerunner of much of today’s work on using direct micro-credits and small loans. The book is about what small villagers can do entrepreneurially to help themselves. Her message is very accessible: trust people in small villages to be able to do good things if they have resources."

(via Jezebel)