Liberals, Right?

I've noticed something annoying, right, and I think only liberals do it. I think it's just liberals because the egregious use of it is on MSNBC, right? The most famous example is Rachel Maddow, right, but the guy who does it the most, to an insane degree, right, is Chris Hayes, who sometimes fills in for her and has a show on Saturdays. 

These rights? are not questions. They're not asking you if they're actually right about anything. It's just a way for them to keep talking, right, so it's a very annoying tic that they think makes them sound smarter or something. 

I was wondering how I was going to demonstrate this annoying thing to you. For you to see it in action. And then luckily for me, Nate Silver came along.

Nate runs a great blog called fivethirtyeight.com, which almost exactly predicted the outcome of the last presidential race. I don't think there's much doubt that he's a liberal, though his numbers are neutral. Anyway, he did an interview with salon.com, and they posted the transcript of what he said, word for word. Thus, we all get to see how right? is used in this way.

Here's just a portion of the transcript, where he answers the question "why are we so fascinated with predictions?":

I have two answers to this, and maybe they’re complimentary in part, contradictory in part. I think, on the one hand, you can go to a site like FiveThirtyEight and it has that one number, right? So Obama today has a 79-point-whatever-it-is [chance of winning] — 79.6 or 79.7 — and that might save you a lot of effort; it’s like, here’s the gist, right? 

And so, getting into that data allows us to feel less alienated from the random course the world might be on, or the inability to influence it. People don’t necessarily trust the news media to mediate information for them anymore — and maybe they shouldn’t, right? So if you show the raw numbers and are actually willing — at least in my case — to set a betting line, basically … And it’s based on a formula you’re not just making up a number everyday. In the end, it does boil down to the numbers.

Right now, you can say Obama’s the favorite, but Romney is not out of it, right? I think everyone can agree with that. But what’s “not out of it”? Does that mean he has a 3 percent chance? A 5 percent chance? It’s that margin between the 5 percent and the 45 percent chance where I’m trying to make my trade.

Am I only one noticing this? It's sorta white people's version of "know what I'm sayin'?