MSNBC into conspiracy over Fox's TV ratings? Not too surprising for MSNBC

So don't NBC and MSNBC have news bureaus?  Can't Phil Griffin get his own news people to come up with the evidence?  From Mediaite:

. . . “Monday we had a really good day in the key demographic, on the night that Fox News debuted their three shows, we either tied or beat them in those hours,” Griffin told a group of MSNBC employees at a briefing to preview the launch of a redesigned MSNBC.com. 

“Tuesday – you guys should be doing some investigations – I have never seen it in all my years of cable, same overnight, same everything, and they doubled their ratings in a day? It is impossible,” Griffin continued inadvisably. “I have never seen it. They did election night numbers in the demo Tuesday.” . . .  

Griffin is correct. After a lackluster debut on Monday night for Megyn Kelly’s The Kelly File, her ratings increased in the key demographic by %116 percent to 635,000. “Kelly also saw a 34% increase in total viewers, rising to 2.768M,” Mediaite reported. “Fox News soundly beat its competition on CNN and MSNBC in both the 25-54 demo and total viewers.” 

Impressive, yes. No one has yet, however, suggested that this ratings increase was… suspicious. . . .

Obama continues blaming speculators

I have tried several times to explain how speculation works, but Democrats can't pass up a chance to bash businesses.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, HOST: Let's talk a little bit more about the economy. Gas prices are starting to come down this week, but the president wanted to show he's on top of it, saying he's prepared to crack down on speculators.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: My administration will take new executive actions to better analyze and investigate trading activities in energy markets and more quickly implement the tough consumer protections under Wall Street reform. None of these steps by themselves will bring gas prices down overnight, but it will prevent market manipulation and make sure we're looking out for American consumers.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: Keith, the president did made a concession there. The problem is they actually hadn't been able to come up with any evidence that speculation was driving up the price. There's a lot of hunches, no hard evidence.

KEITH OLBERMANN: Yeah. One of the -- one of the things I turned to, to try to establish that was to look at the average gas price at various key moments, and the lowest price in the last six years, the nadir of gas prices at the pump, was the day of this president's inauguration in 2009. There has to be some connection between that being the least busy political moment of a president's career, where you're not going to -- you're not going to hurt them, you're not going to harm him that way, and the price of gas. There has to be an almost deliberate or at least a side effect quality to that. There must be.

The rambling here about conspiracy theories is crazy.  Speculators make money my arbitraging away price differences.  To sell gas when you think that it will rise in the future is a sure way to lose money.  The same is true if you buy it up when you think that it will be lower in the future is another way to lose money.  For a massive market like oil where this conspiracy trading increases the profits of other speculators to go in the other direction.

The wacky fringes of politics

I often wonder whether many of the responses are simply by people expressing their political frustrations as opposed to things that they actually believe. For example, if people say that they believe Obama is a Muslim, is it because they just dislike him so much that they will latch on to anything that comes up to show it? However, that doesn't explain why a third of Democrats blame "the Jews" for the financial crisis.

There’s the 32 percent of Democrats who blame “the Jews” for the financial crisis. There’s the 25 percent of African-Americans who believe the AIDS virus was created in a government lab. There’s support for state secession, which may have been higher among liberals in the Bush era than among Republicans in the age of Obama. And there’s the theory that the Bush White House knew about 9/11 in advance, which a third of Democrats endorsed as recently as 2007. . . .

Dem offers conspiracy theory explanation for Arizona Immigration Law

I would obviously been nice if she had read the bill, but her explanation for how pushed for the law is weird enough.

A California congresswoman is pointing the finger at white supremacist groups, who she says have inspired Arizona's new law cracking down on illegal immigrants.

Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., told a Democratic Club on Tuesday that white supremacist groups are influencing lawmakers to adopt laws that will lead to discrimination.

"There's a concerted effort behind promoting these kinds of laws on a state-by-state basis by people who have ties to white supremacy groups," said the lawmaker, who is of Mexican descent. "It's been documented. It's not mainstream politics."

Click here to listen to the audio tape.

Sanchez said front organizations for white supremacist groups are approaching lawmakers to propose the language to the bills and urging them to push them through state legislatures in an effort to legalize discrimination.

"It creates a Jim Crow system where based on the color of your skin you could be treated as a second-class citizen or harassed based on how you look," she said.

The Arizona law, which makes it a state crime to be in the country illegally, requires police enforcing any other law to question people about their immigration status if there is "reasonable suspicion" that they are in the country illegally. . . .