Shameless, and proud of it

Slate made me laugh out loud this afternoon from its sheer shamelessness. They're launching "SurveyMonkey," a monthly poll between now and November that will survey "people’s attitudes toward the presidential candidates—and how they are shifting." You know, in real time. Slate admits that this is not a scientific poll. "We are capturing a snapshot, not running a lab experiment," the editors said. So if the polling results are essentially meaningless, what is the point of SurveyMonkey? Well, there isn't any -- aside from its brazen role as pageview bait. When Alexis de Tocqueville observed that "the power of the periodical press is second only to that of the people," SurveyMonkey was not what he had in mind.