1. The birther conspiracy theory claims that the first African-American president of the United States is actually ineligible to serve (and also, presumably, actually an illegal immigrant) because he was born in a foreign country. Now, if there were good evidence for this, the racism link would be tenuous at best. But, instead, the conspiracy theory has been shot down over and over and over again. Anyone who bothers looking at the evidence can see that Obama was born in Hawaii.

The only “reality” that the conspiracy rests on, in other words, is that our current, legitimate president “seems” foreign, compared to the other folks who have held his office – he has a funny-sounding name, he’s related to some Muslims, and he’s black. That’s got a pretty blatant, racial (and racist) dimension to it.

2. This one’s pretty simple, actually. Kos’ polls are conducted by a hired, non-partisan firm, Research 2000. R2000′s not some hack, “pay for the results you want”-type company, either – 538′s statistical analysis of various pollsters found that it has a lower “pollster-introduced error” than the average poll-conductor, as well as a lower p.i.e. than CNN, ABC, CBS, Zogby, or Gallup.

Basically, the mainstream media can cite Kos’ polls because the people doing Kos’ polls are as good or better at conducting objective polls than the mainstream media sources themselves.