Reading Investor's Business Daily editorials can have something of a cathartic effect. After doggedly researching and fact-checking the dubiously nuanced claims of more sophisticated misinformers, it can be sometimes fun to take a (brief) dip into their troubled fantasy land where even the most fevered conspiracy theories can leap from the pages of FreeRepublic and get their brief, shining moment in the sun. Consider that IBD has implausibly claimed that the House health care bill would outlaw private insurance, absurdly claimed that Colombian terrorists had an inside line to President Obama's campaign, and outright racistly claimed that Obama would put the interests of his “tribe” ahead of national interests.

But, it turns out that IBD has a polling outfit that complements the partisan hackery on display in their editorials. According to the latest IBD/TIPP survey, "[t]wo of every three practicing physicians oppose the medical overhaul plan under consideration in Washington, and hundreds of thousands would think about shutting down their practices or retiring early if it were adopted." This finding fits neatly with the conservative argument against health care reform, and runs contrary to just about every other poll of doctors, which show overwhelming support among physicians for health care reform.

As polling guru Nate Silver explains, the IBD poll is garbage:

[T]he Investors' Business Daily poll purporting to show widespread opposition to health care reform among doctors is simply not credible. There are five reasons why:

1. The survey was conducted by mail, which is unusual. The only other mail-based poll that I'm aware of is that conducted by the Columbus Dispatch, which was associated with an average error of about 7 percentage points -- the highest of any pollster that we tested.

2. At least one of the questions is blatantly biased: “Do you believe the government can cover 47 million more people and it will cost less money and th quality of care will be better?”. Holy run-on-sentence, Batman? A pollster who asks a question like this one is not intending to be objective.

3. As we learned during the Presidntial campaign -- when, among other things, they had John McCain winning the youth vote 74-22 -- the IBD/TIPP polling operation has literally no idea what they're doing. I mean, literally none. For example, I don't trust IBD/TIPP to have competently selected anything resembling a random panel, which is harder to do than you'd think.

4. They say, somewhat ambiguously: “Responses are still coming in.” This is also highly unorthodox. Professional pollsters generally do not report results before the survey period is compete.

5. There is virtually no disclosure about methodology. For example, IBD doesn't bother to define the term “practicing physician”, which could mean almost anything. Nor do they explain how their randomization procedure worked, provide the entire question battery, or anything like that.

Silver concludes: “There are pollsters out there that have an agenda but are highly competent, and there are pollsters that are nonpartisan but not particularly skilled. Rarely, however, do you find the whole package: that special pollster which is both biased and inept. IBD/TIPP is one of the few exceptions.”

As you'd expect, biased incompetence of this sort can only mean one thing -- wild popularity in the conservative blogosphere.