Beck and Hannity def called him a Nazi. Most popular name now

More liberals I know than conservatives appear to watch Glenn Beck by a large margin

That's pretty slick marketing (NO, YOU ARE!)

jerseyhoya wrote:More liberals I know than conservatives appear to watch Glenn Beck by a large margin

It's the Howard Stern thing - "people who love you listen an average of 30 minutes a day, people who hate you listen for 3 hours"

But really, it's just re-blogging.

yeah, i just watch once in a while b/c it is entertainment. it's fun to watch after work with a glass of whiskey

jerseyhoya wrote:More liberals I know than conservatives appear to watch Glenn Beck by a large margin

That's probably selection bias, since FOX News tends to appeal to older white people. The people in our age bracket who would watch Beck's show are people like me: Marxists who enjoy chuckling at every logical fallacy he uses.

His ratings have been diving though, so hopefully he's off the air soon.

CrashburnAlley wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:More liberals I know than conservatives appear to watch Glenn Beck by a large margin

That's probably selection bias, since FOX News tends to appeal to older white people. The people in our age bracket who would watch Beck's show are people like me: Marxists who enjoy chuckling at every logical fallacy he uses.

His ratings have been diving though, so hopefully he's off the air soon.

It's not selection bias. Most of the people I know who watch Glenn Beck are liberal. The universe I'm interested in here is people I know.

Okay, I read too much into that then. I thought you were using that to make a statement about Beck's general audience.

I don't watch Glenn Beck. I read blogs that do it for me.


Iceland passed marriage equality today, with no down votes. Nice.

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IT'S ALL REAL!!!

jerseyhoya wrote:It's not selection bias. Most of the people I know who watch Glenn Beck are liberal.

I'm guessing they like to yell and/or shake their fists at the TV?

Seriously, I thinks it's probably more along the lines of how we can't resist checking Teh Fugies or the Mets thread here.

Phan In Phlorida wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:It's not selection bias. Most of the people I know who watch Glenn Beck are liberal.

I'm guessing they like to yell and/or shake their fists at the TV?

Seriously, I thinks it's probably more along the lines of how we can't resist checking Teh Fugies or the Mets thread here.

That's why I watch the Phillies.

there is a fraud going on in South Carolina. This guy did not legitimately win the Democratic nomination for Senate

hahaha that video is so awkward. i agree there is not legitimate way he actually won. i dont know who or how they did it but something happened.

What's the non-moonbat jist of the Alvin Greene thing? That Republicans flooded the open Democrat primary and got the guy picked? I mean, this guy is unreal, it can't just be a paranoid thing, right?

I guess the question is, can the party undo it's rules and hold another primary that isn't open to fix this?

VoxOrion wrote:What's the non-moonbat jist of the Alvin Greene thing? That Republicans flooded the open Democrat primary and got the guy picked? I mean, this guy is unreal, it can't just be a paranoid thing, right?

I guess the question is, can the party undo it's rules and hold another primary that isn't open to fix this?

I haven't followed it very closely, but some smart people have been trying to figure it out, to no avail. See here. (I don't think Schaller is smart in the slightest, but he seems really just to be compiling others' work here.)

He does dismiss the mischief scenario, or rather a 538 reader does:

5. The Republican crossover theory debunked. In addition to many smart comments from 538 readers to the previous post on the SC race, I received an email from one particularly astute reader named Harrison Brown. Complete with an excel spreadsheet to back up his conclusions, Brown basically argues that there's neither any logic to, nor statistical evidence to support, the idea of Republicans crossing over to infiltrate the Democratic primary. Here are the key sections from his email to me, verbatim:

1. Suppose people were being brought into the Democratic-primary voting pool (from unregistered voters, the Republican faithful, or wherever) for the sole purpose of voting for Greene. Imagine a variable encapsulating the proportion of primary voters in each county who are Greene partisans; this (hidden) variable ought to be strongly positively correlated with both Greene's final results and with the participation rate in each county. In particular, this implies that Greene's vote share and the participation rate, both of which we can measure, would be correlated. But this is not the case -- under either linear or rank correlation! The R-squared and rho-squared are both effectively 0.

2. Even if that effect didn't show up, there should still be other signs. For instance, we can see if there are any counties where turnout for the Democratic primary exceeded the number of votes Barack Obama received in 2008; those would be prime suspects for Republican influence. And, in fact, there are three such counties: Hampton, Lee, and Union. But these are all fairly small counties where McCain/Palin received under 30% of the vote -- hardly Republican-dominated...

A more robust analysis of turnout levels reveals similar patterns. Although I didn't collect data for Republican voters (except for the McCain vote share), I came up with a rough estimate of GOP voters in 2008 by assuming the two-party share was 100% in each county. Running a linear regression to predict the number of Democratic primary voters from the number of votes Obama and McCain received, we find that the McCain raw vote total is statistically significant--but it has a negative coefficient. If anything, this points to voter suppression (no real surprises) rather than ballot box stuffing.

3. Finally, there's the simple question of where the Republican voters would have come from! From eyeballing the GOP primary totals, it seems like turnout in that elections was almost ludicrously high, which seems more-or-less corroborated by what Google's told me. But barring widespread voter fraud and/or corruption by local election officials, high turnout in the GOP primary should be incompatible with infiltration into the Democratic primary.

In conclusion, while the voting patterns in the D-Senate primary are strange and may not be totally legitimate, they don't bear the expected hallmarks that would arise in the case of a Republican plant.

So like I said, no idea. Either somebody is really, really smart and meticulous, or it's just a weird fluke outcome of low-information, low-motivation (because in all likelihood they're not going to beat DeMint anyway) voting.

Basically this its either a) legit, and just weird, or b) someone tampered with the voting machines.

I have so much trouble with the latter, the risk/reward is just not worth it. At the same time, I think Occam's Razor only barely favors a).

Trillion dollar mineral reserves discovered in Afghanistan

Wow...How the hell does one go about setting something up with this with them having such a weak central government?

jerseyhoya wrote:Trillion dollar mineral reserves discovered in Afghanistan

Wow...How the hell does one go about setting something up with this with them having such a weak central government?

send in a multinational corporation. Easier to do with weak central govt.

Or just do what the chinese did and bribe someone for 30 mill. Again, startlingly easy to do with a weak central govt.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iQ7ZDUutU4[/youtube]

Alabama political ads

I think this one is more embarrassing than the one about not believing in evolution