Political Statistics Blogs 

 With the 2006 election coming up soon, here are a couple of blogs that might appeal to both the political junkie and the methods geek in all of us.    Political Arithmetik  , a blog by Charles Franklin from Wisconsin, is full of cool graphs that illustrate the power of simple visualization and non-parametric techniques, something that we spend a lot of time talking about in the introductory methods courses in the Gov Department.  (On a side note, I think that the plots like  this  of presidential approval poll results that you find on his site and others have to be one of the best tools for illustrating sampling variability to students who are new to statistics.)  Professor Franklin also contributes to another good polling blog,  Mystery Pollster , run by pollster Mark Blumenthal.  It just moved to a new site, which now has lots of state-level polling data for upcoming races.   All in all, plenty of good stuff to distract you from the "serious" work of arguing about causal inference, etc.