Want to know how to take a bad situation and make it significantly worse? Check this out. We were just discussing how the website DailyKos was going to sue its former pollster after an investigation turned up fairly compelling evidence that the data it presented was either faked or manipulated. Pretty quickly, a few folks sent over the news that Nate Silver, at the always fascinating FiveThirtyEight, (though, frankly, I miss his Baseball Prospectus work…) had received a cease & desist from R2K’s law firm:

As Silver notes in his post, the letter, in part, credits statements made on the Kos website to Silver, which is just really bad lawyering. On top of that, it takes issue with some of Nate’s Twitter messages, such as one where he clearly opines that R2K’s results have “maginal quality.” That’s a clear opinion statement, and not defamatory at all. The whole thing is bizarre and clearly makes R2K look even worse — especially considering the claims on Kos that it was given weeks to defend its research and chose not to for whatever reasons. But as soon as the reports come out demonstrating the likely problems with the research, R2K rushes out the cease-and-desist letter… and to a third party site that was just reporting on what folks on Kos had found? Yikes.

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