And now for something completely stupid…
Right now on CNN, “The Situation Room” is conducting a program Wolf Blitzer is calling The National Report Card. People are being asked to go to the CNN website and provide “grades” on a series of questions related to the first 100 days of the Obama administration.
The first question? Give a grade to Vice President Joe Biden. And what exactly has he done so far that would earn him more than an incomplete? Huh, what?
The second question (and the reason I started to pay attention to this) asks people to grade their state’s senators. As presented on television, Blitzer gave the impression that people were weighing in individually on each senator. It might have been somewhat interesting to hear what CNN viewers think of Sens. John McCain and Jon Kyl. But the Web site actually asked a visitor for a single grade for “your state’s two senators,” without a reminder about who might represent your state in Congress. So it would have been quite easy to “grade” senators when you didn’t know their names, their party or their voting record.
After the CNN voting was finished, the “grade” shown for McCain and Kyl (presumably) is a C-plus. That might be OK in Arizona, where the two senators are from the same party and vote relatively close together. But such a grade must be completely meaningless for people living in, say, Nebraska or New Hampshire, where the senators are from different parties and have different governing philosophies.
If you want to waste a few minutes, the current question is grading Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
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