Last Thursday, Contrarian got into a bit of a Twitter dustup with Alice Funke, whose blog, Pundits' Guide, features statistical analysis of Canadian election results. In a post titled, "Mommy, They Split My Vote," Funke purported to show that few if any of the 27 Liberal seats lost to Stephen Harper's Conservatives in the May 2 election had been lost due to vote-splitting. Her complicated argument defies succinct exegesis, but you can read it here. In response, I tweeted: This unleashed a torrent of counter-tweets that, for the time being at least, you can find here and here (by scrolling back to May 12). Funke followed...

16 May, 2011

I wrote yesterday that only one Canadian news source had taken note of a Robert Kennedy Jr. column on HuffingtonPost slamming Stephen Harper. In fact, the CBC's Kady O'Malley took note in a tweeet (which is what @kady does): So did Jane Tabor in the Globe and Mail. Neither piece turned up in a Google search at the time of my post. O'Malley took umbrage at my post, arguing that RFK's "entire piece was pure crap" and "a kennedy being staggeringly wrong on facts isn't news." This is a strange standard for news selection, especially coming from Canada's Parliamentary press gallery, where...

03 March, 2011