This is really confusing me. Glenn Beck is on the Idiot List of right-wing commentators, most recently for letting out a doozy of a request to the first Muslim Congressman: “Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.” This also drew the ire of Crooks and Liars. So to put it mildly, the left does not like this guy.

Which begs the question: why is CNN buying ads for him on liberal blogs? This is ridiculous.

AMERICAblog:

Crooks & Liars

Daily Kos

Eschaton

Firedoglake

MyDD

This just baffles me. And for the curious, that isn’t a special about how Glenn Beck has an extremist agenda, take a look for yourself.

So here’s the question, again: why on EARTH is CNN buying ad space on all of the major liberal blogs for someone those blogs would never actually support? What’s the motivation? Seems like wasted money to me.

UPDATE BELOW:

I got this one via another blog, but the post has been deleted for some reason. Anyway, here’s something to take a look at: the 2006 Connecticut Senate election results.

And now let’s take a look at the numbers from 2000:

A little fishy, no? Now, the blog I snipped this from seems to have been a fiercely “liberals suck” kind of thing, and that this situation isn’t evidence of a democrat conspiracy may have precipitated the deletion.

And that is the peculiar part. In 2000 it would have been the democrats handing Lieberman his victory, but in 2006 it would have been the democrats handing it to Lamont. Does Holy Joe have personal connections to the vote counters? Very strange indeed that his main challenger would stop at the same number each time.

UPDATE: Got a hold of John over at AmericaBlog who pointed me in the direction of CT’s own numbers (PDF on the page), which differ slightly from CNN. According to them, Lamont got 450,837 votes.

So now I have to figure out what’s going on with CNN and why the numbers differ. I shot an email their way, hopefully I’ll get the results sometime soon so I can get to the bottom of this. It strikes me as doubly peculiar that CNN would magically get a wrong vote count that was exactly the same as Giordano’s 2000 count.

I’ll refrain from personal theories on the issue until I get an answer, so stay tuned.

I do not understand why having a paper trail for electronic voting could possibly be a point of contention, but then I’m also slowly learning to stop underestimating how ridiculous this country has gotten.

Rep. Rush Holt [D-NJ], sponsor of the bill, said the inaccuracy of electronic touch-screen voting machines “poses a direct threat to the integrity of our electoral system.” The New Jersey congressman argued the Florida district, in which more than 18,000 votes have gone uncounted, has exposed the system’s flaws.

…

The bill would require that all voting systems produce a voter-verified paper record for use in manual audits; ban the use of undisclosed software and all wireless and concealed communications devises in voting systems; and establish procedures to be followed if there is a discrepancy between reported results and audit results.

So let me get this straight. Electronic voting has been around for years, and yet there is still no paper trail, there is no system to verify votes (how did the recount happen, anyway?), and there is no regulation on what software is used.

Is it just me, or does it often seem like the people in charge really don’t take anything seriously? It feels like they’re all acting as though they’re playing a big game of Risk.