In the beginning we had Sugging and shortly thereafter came Frugging. (The correct capitalization on these terms has always eluded me.) Mercifully we strayed from this convention when we discovered push polls. The question before us: what should we call what newsmax.com is up to?
Here is the deal. They send out survey invitations to email lists of unknown origin ostensibly to get opinions about some current issue. If you click their link you actually get a choice of four or five surveys. Each one is five or six innocuous questions about Obama, Palin, Healthcare reform, etc. They have a standard intro that tells you that newsmax.com is a leading online news organization whose results are reported on all of the big media outlets, and the survey topic is always Urgent. (My favorite was that this was the first ever online poll conducted about Barack Obama.) At the bottom they ask for your email address, otherwise your "vote" is not counted. Give them your email address and the conservative propaganda starts flowing to your inbox.
But it doesn't stop there. As it turns out, they will accept a blank survey as long as you give them your email address. Then you get an offer for a free Dynamo World Band Emergency Radio if you will just subscribe to their magazine which they say features "exclusive stories the major media won't report." Doubling down on the paranoia they tell us that the Department of Homeland Security's advises that we all have a radio.
So it turns out that it's just Sugging after all.