MARGINS OF ERROR: OK, the pollsters all got New Hampshire wrong. The reporters--claiming they were punctilious stenographers, accurately reporting what the pollsters said--got it wrong. The pundits, extrapolating, based on the polls, got it wrong. The candidates' staffs--both of them--got it wrong. And the next day, what happened? Well, there was, of course, a tsunami of speculation on why the pollsters got it wrong. Was it Hillary Clinton's incipient tear? Or the independents who, assuming Barack Obama had it in the bag, went for John McCain? Was it older women? Or was it New Hampshire's contrarian electoral DNA? Or was it all of the above? Whatever.

But simultaneously the press started citing new polls! By week's end, Tim Russert was asking Clinton on Meet the Press what she thought about polls showing that most Democrats thought Obama was more electable than she. The following Monday, the subhead on the New York Times's lead story was "Poll Finds Economic Worries Now Top Issue." Never has a reputation so universally besmirched been so quickly rehabilitated. Had the pollsters improved their methodology? Had they recalibrated (or at least restated) their "margin of error" (their original New Hampshire projections, off by 8 percent or more, were said to have a margin of error of 3 percent)? Or was somebody (everybody?) not paying attention? Beats me. Maybe we can take a poll and find out.   VICTOR NAVASKY

THE WHISTLEBLOWER: We mourn the passing of Philip Agee, the courageous former CIA officer who, in his 1975 book Inside the Company: CIA Diary, exposed the agency's subversion of democracy and its practices of torture and murder, naming hundreds of officers, agents and companies involved with the crimes. Agee was motivated, he said, by the CIA's support for "the worst imaginable horrors" in Latin America.

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