I don’t think that there are enough libertarian blogs with the number of visitors as used in his comparison to have been included.

Paul receives support from a combination of libertarians and non-libertarians. While many are non-libertarians, most are right wing, not left wing. There are some left wing opponents of the war supporting him but I doubt they make up a meaningful percentage of his support.

There is probably no way to say for sure how many of each type of person supports Paul. The people posting comments here might not be representative, but the vast majority are right wingers with some libertarians and very rare left wing supporters. I wouldn’t classify any of them as populist but a tremendous number are into various conspiracies. The mind set of many is based upon conspiracy theories. Besides supporting a number of well known conspiracy theories, I also see that mind set as I get a lot of comments asking things like which corporations paid me to write posts critical of Paul.

Who is this guy? I’m going to write him a nasty email.

BTW, on Paul supporters claiming to be “libertarians,” most of them are clearly not. They are some wierdo leftwing populist conspiratorialist posing as libertarians, cause they know “libertarian” sounds cool and sells well.

It was one individual blogger who put this together and I had nothing to do with it. They don’t lump libertarians in with conservatives but look at a handful of big liberal and conservative blogs. There’s probably not a big enough sample of libertarian blogs with comparable traffic to make similar comparisons.

Since I’ve posted this I’ve seen speculation that the difference is discussion of Ron Paul. In general liberals read liberal blogs, conservatives read liberal blogs, and those of us who cross over probably don’t impact the total traffic that much. Paul supporters swarm any blog which discusses Paul, and it is likely that more Republican/Conservative blogs have posts on him. By their logic I could be bucking the trend as I have many posts on Paul, as well as some links here from libertarian blogs.

While traffic to a blog mentioning Paul is probably primarily from Paul supporters, there is also some interest in Paul beyond his supporters. Looking at the search engine hits which bring people here, many are for “Ron Paul” which could indicate support or opposition, with most of these probably coming from Paul supporters. However some of the more detailed search engine strings do suggest that the visitor was anti-Paul. This would include searches such as “Paul opposed to separation of church and state.” There are also searches related to Paul and right wing extremist groups. These could be Paul supporters looking for such posts to defend him, but I suspect a number are from people who object to Paul because of his connections to them.

“We are Pro-Choice.” Talk to all the Paul supporters who have entered comments here claiming that abortion is murder.

Where do they lump us libertarians in, with the conservatives?

While we are cousins to conservatives, and are close friends with them, and allied against the Liberals, WE LIBERTARIANS ARE NOT CONSERVATIVES!!

We are Pro-Choice. They are not. We are anti-Nanny State. They are fine with Seat Belt Laws. We are in favor of decrminilzied marijuana, prostitution and gambling. Most conservatives are clearly not.

Ron, tell you buddies who do this survey to include libertarian blogs next time, please.

I figured that the April numbers would have been more comparable to May’s if not for the link. The trend stopped as traffic dropped back for a while starting in late May. This was probably a combination of my traveling during the summer and overall reduced blog reading during the summer.

Some jumps in traffic also have nothing to do with major political events. For example I got a brief boost after Vanessa Hudgen’s nude photos were on line. I had a post which mentioned this and had a picture of her in a bikini which received a huge boost. In general the biggest jumps come when someone like Crooks and Liars links here.

The Libby verdict was in March; Imus got canned in April and got a lot of blog love (and some hate, too – let’s say, “attention”), but I have a hard time believing that is it.

The V-tech shootings were in April also, as was the first Dem debate.

A quick scroll through the Lib Val archives does not provide much illumination, other than to assure me that I am not alone in wishing that the spell-check macros also applied to post headlines.

Your thoughts?