Keith Olbermann is sort of longwinded

other funny moments:

"seared still into my soul"

pyre

"a grasping, opportunistic dilletante"

thwart

jostle

elaborate self-congratulations (i sort of like this one)

"the urgent oath reduced to lazy execution" (ugh)

"unaminous humanity" (sounds like a kool keith lp title)

vacillating

impotent

transmuting

fradulent

monstrously

ok i like "portable public chorus"

also his tortured grammar: "look into this empty space behind, and the bipartisanship upon which the bush administration also did not build." uh?

...also wtf with the extended "twilight zone" reference?

sort of reminds me of that damon wayans prison guy on "in living color"

lol

(it took me a sporto-girl-crush to get me waking up to sportscenter, but i gave it back up in short order)

what? he's sort of the opposite of that stereotype. or at least something apart from it.

having said that, calling gw a fascist is a total emperor no clothes moment - except everyone is too cynical to care - still nice to hear though.

"After graduating from Pascack Hills High School in Montvale, New Jersey, which he attended with fellow commentator Bill Maher......"

oy, somehow that makes sense.

but he had a great run on night court...

http://www.tvland.com/shows/nightcourt/images/shows/4.jpg

I dig the puppet theater on his show. stupid celebrity trials finally get the coverage they deserve

olberman is great. always has been. he's a complete asshole, which i appreciate, and the way he handled the lewinsky scandal on 'the big show' was wonderful. still, his career has largely been a disappointment. definitely one of those anchorman's anchorman/smartest-guy-i-know kinda dudes who can always kill at cocktail parties but you can tell doesn't quite have their shit together. i dig that about him.

He should be a high school English teacher or something.
"dilettante" implies a dabbler, which i don't think was really what he wanted to imply.
it's kind of cute that he's sort of decided that having this public moment means he should strive to be cicero or something.

I know several people who worked with Olberman back in the old days at ESPN, and they kind of hated him because he was a dickhead with a love affair for himself. And as much as I find his sanctimonious attitude annoying, the guy appears to be fairly smart and basically, unwavering. I don't watch his show but catch him on ESPN radio from time to time, and he's enjoyably tame.

the NY Post, being the cockmongers they are, made fun of him for it

i use ghostbusters slime, of course

actually i learned this week about the vast difference between brands of soy milk.

one was basically just soy and natural sweetener. the other had sugar and all manner of artificial flavors and preservatives. i was surprised by the vast difference because the packaging was very similar. you'd think the healthier one would advertise "pure" or something like that.

i don't see him as being self-righteous, or maybe that's because i agree with him.

btw i don't even know who you are (that's a little self-parody) squirrel police but your posts make you seem like a twat.

love,

amateurist

(solo)

VERSE 2:
I don’t want you, to act afraid
You got a lot to do, you got to be brave
I’ve been misled before, I know how it feels,
But I don’t love you, it wasn’t real

CHORUS:
Don’t be foolish, don’t shed no tears,
If we don’t do this now, we’ll be trapped for years
And for a home to be a jail just isn’t right
I won’t apologize,
For rescuing my life

(solo)

MIDDLE 8
It was so wonderful, a perfect time
When you were quiet, and gentle and fine
But then you asked me to walk on your line
And I will not become a man with no spine

VERSE 3:
And though in time I might feel lonely again
And if it’s nice I might not have to pretend
To listen to her, the things that she shared
Cause with you girl, I never cared

CHORUS

About jackyazoo
Jack Yazoo surfaced in a trailer in remote East Wickida county, Alaskansas. He quickly took stock of the situation and smuggled himself out of town in a oversized laundry bag, by land sea and air. Unfortunately, this escape turned out to be one more case of "out of the frying man, into the pyre." You see, Yazoo ended up somewhere in the system, trying to deal with several unwanted guests that had taken up residence in his most personal living space--his head. After being saved by a pair of robot missionaries on their way to a Metal Object Convention, Yazoo said a binary prayer and hitchhiked to Boise, Idaho, later volunteering for the marines (the few, the proud, the employable), forcibly. After valiantly serving his country in ethniklashistan, yazoo returned to Idaho amid cheers/jeers for his true grit and patriotism. Jack Yazoo was last seen living in a guitar somewhere near the Taco Bell Arena, and would gladly share a burrito with anyone who asks.

maybe i'd be nicer if i imagined that we were sitting at a large table and i was physically uttering everything i type here. i just don't know if i'm ruder than any of a number of regulars, i just usually take the minority position and so i get that mob reaction.

> >What the hell does "Hip-Hop" mean?

> I thought it was collective term for a whole range of, erm, "cultural
> practices", emanating from American black urban youth.

Well, yeah. I hope you're just being facetious.
I'm a bit of a fan of certain styles of Hip-Hop myself.
What does the term "Hip-Hop" literally mean though?

maybe i'd be nicer if i imagined that we were sitting at a large table and i was physically uttering everything i type here. i just don't know if i'm ruder than any of a number of regulars, i just usually take the minority position and so i get that mob reaction.

ps. yes i was mormon when i posted that SEVEN years ago. i was fifteen at the time and living in a very strict home. things have changed.

"This year will go down in history. For the first
time a civilized nation has full gun registration.
Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient,
and the world will follow our lead into the future."
Adolph Hitler, 1935

As a "believer" in the BOM, I have to speak hypothetically when I say, jeez, this book is a masterpiece. I mean, to me, that's one of the _proofs_ of the Book of Mormon...how else could such a book exist? Not only does it have suspense, action, adventure, maybe even a little humor (Shiz flopping around like a headless chicken *hyuck hyuck* ... Erm, maybe not)...it also has allegory (just read Jacob chapter five...amazing) and deep religious thought (obviously with it's origins in christianity, but divergent and revolutionary in subtle ways). Not only that, much of it in first person. It's like Gene Wolfe's dream come true.

So what do you think people? Was Joseph Smith Jr. a genius or what? And don't just say "he copied the bible" ... if that is so easy, why hasn't anyone else done it (or convincingly, I should say. Maybe someone else has done it, but I doubt they have converted millions of people who consider their novel scripture)?

(p.s what do you think of my sig, *grin*)

"Atheistic Humanism is the opiate of the
self-described intellectuals."

>Coyle asked

>Would the
>>"true church" embrace the likes of Adolf Hitler?

As far as I can tell, about all of the LDS on this NG have been unable to
address with this "Hitler" issue, therefore, for the benefit of the non-LDS on this NG (friends of the church, enemies, or otherwise) I would like to put forth my viewpoint on this matter:

Jesus taught in the New Testament (accepted by all, LDS or protestant)
that it is neccesary to love the sinners, turn the other cheek to our
aggressors, and pray for our enemies (my bible isn't near at hand,
so this is paraphrised)

So I don't quite understand your reasoning here...shouldn't we hope
and pray for Hitler even _more_ since his soul is apparently in
even more peril, judging from his heinous actions in this life.

I don't think you quite understand the true meaning of a Baptism
For The Dead. When a Baptism takes place, that does _not_
automatically mean that the deceased becomes a member
of the church...he still has to be worthy, wherever he is.
And if you are a sinner in this world, you are a sinner in
the next.

However, it is our responsibility to give the dead that _opportunity_ ...
Countless numbers of people have passed from this world
without ever hearing Christ's message.

No man can judge another man's heart. This holds true for
anybody...even Hitler. How can we judge him? I have always
speculated that perhaps he suffered such emotional damage
in his youth that his moral sense was stunted. Or, even more
likely, perhaps he was mentally ill.

but you've made your point. i'm a whacko. squirrel police in speculating that hitler was nutso shocker.

"Atheistic Humanism is the opiate of the
self-described intellectuals."

ORLY LOL WTF !

hmm. hadn't thought of that one, but yeah.

http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/1559/693571250liy4.gif

George S. Kaufman

http://www.dramadept.org/who/bios/images/kaufmang.jpg

from here

Ecko, the folks who brought us the Flava Flav and Biz Markie alarm clocks, are set to introduce the 3rd character in their Legends alarm clock line. The latest talking alarm clock is of former 3rd Bass member - MC Serch. The clock is available in 2 versions - the red version has 8 alarm phases, while the more limited (500 piece) black version has two extra phases. And when I say "phase", I mean different lines that the alarm wakes you up with.

http://www.kidrobot.com/images/specimages/s-flavawg-1.jpg

and

http://www.weblogsinc.com/common/images/3115770578156435.JPG?0.5713889277100119

Did anyone see this when it was on TV Monday?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15004160

xpost

"So, donate the $100,000 to his charity, FATASS."

is it worth it?

And, surprise surprise, dude's a freeper.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miXAZj-tcGI

It's ironica that the Senator from Vegas is such a dim bulb...

GET IT? DIM BULB. VEGAS. THERE ARE LOTS OF BRIGHT LIGHTS IN VEGAS.

srsly, Miller was funny for a little while there on SNL, right?

Nope.

Keith Olberman is the sexy.

I like how the biggest laugh he got was a Fight Club reference.

"Hey... I understood that!"

Dennis Miller was never funny.

Nah, there was a time when Miller was funny. Right around the end of the Reagan administration, his barbs from behind the Weekend Update desk were as sharp as could be. Once he left SNL, though, someone started whispering in his ear (perhaps himself) about how brilliant and clever and intelligent he was and then he was wrecked forever.

I don't even care that much that he's turned into a conservative shill. Whatever. He's just so unfunny now.

From: Jack Redelfs - view profile
Date: Tues, Jul 21 1998 12:00 am
Email: jrede...@hotm✧✧✧.c✧✧ (Jack Redelfs)
Groups: alt.religion.mormon

As a "believer" in the BOM, I have to speak hypothetically when I say, jeez, this book is a masterpiece. I mean, to me, that's one of the _proofs_ of the Book of Mormon...how else could such a book exist? Not only does it have suspense, action, adventure, maybe even a little humor (Shiz flopping around like a headless chicken *hyuck hyuck* ... Erm, maybe not)...it also has allegory (just read Jacob chapter five...amazing) and deep religious thought (obviously with it's origins in christianity, but divergent and revolutionary in subtle ways). Not only that, much of it in first person. It's like Gene Wolfe's dream come true.

So what do you think people? Was Joseph Smith Jr. a genius or what? And don't just say "he copied the bible" ... if that is so easy, why hasn't anyone else done it (or convincingly, I should say. Maybe someone else has done it, but I doubt they have converted millions of people who consider their novel scripture)?

(p.s what do you think of my sig, *grin*)

"Atheistic Humanism is the opiate of the
self-described intellectuals."

Whoa. J'accuse!

What happened?

Keith's special comment on the Libby stuff. He called for Cheney and Bush to resign. I'm sure it'll be on Youtube / Crooks & Liars in a few minutes. He wasn't even that long-winded! His language was actually pretty straight and powerful.

Here's the link to Crooks and Liars, with video.

holy christ

"RESIGN"

I don't usually go in for "sacred freedoms" language from anybody, but most of this was pretty good.

Nah, there was a time when Miller was funny. Right around the end of the Reagan administration, his barbs from behind the Weekend Update desk were as sharp as could be. Once he left SNL, though, someone started whispering in his ear (perhaps himself) about how brilliant and clever and intelligent he was and then he was wrecked forever.

otm, it's really around the Clinton years he became unbearable

X. Eddy used to say the same thing about Paul Westerberg. He was right.

Rugged

Here's the link to Crooks and Liars, with video

Just saw the clip of that on First Look. Bad. Ass.

President Bush has resorted anew to the sleaziest fear-mongering and mass manipulation of an administration and public life dedicated to realizing the lowest of our expectations. And he has now applied these poisons to the 2008 presidential election, on behalf of the party at whose center he and John McCain lurk.

Mr. Bush has predicted that the election of a Democratic president could "eventually lead to another attack on the United States." This ludicrous, infuriating, holier-than-thou and most importantly bone-headedly wrong statement came during a May 13 interview with Politico.com and online users of Yahoo.

The question was phrased as follows: "If we were to pull out of Iraq next year, what's the worst that could happen, what's the doomsday scenario?"

The president replied: "Doomsday scenario of course is that extremists throughout the Middle East would be emboldened, which would eventually lead to another attack on the United States. The biggest issue we face is, it's bigger than Iraq, it's this ideological struggle against cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives."

Mr. Bush, at long last, has it not dawned on you that the America you have now created, includes "cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives?" They are those in -- or formerly in -- your employ, who may yet be charged some day with war crimes.

Through your haze of self-congratulation and self-pity, do you still have no earthly clue that this nation has laid waste to Iraq to achieve your political objectives? "This ideological struggle," Mr. Bush, is taking place within this country.

It is a struggle between Americans who cherish freedom, ours and everybody else's, and Americans like you, sir, to whom freedom is just a brand name, just like "Patriot Act" is a brand name or "Protect America" is a brand name.

But wait, there's more: You also said "Iraq is the place where al-Qaida and other extremists have made their stand and they will be defeated." They made no "stand" in Iraq, sir, you allowed them to assemble there!

As certainly as if that were the plan, the borders were left wide open by your government's farcical post-invasion strategy of "they'll greet us as liberators." And as certainly as if that were the plan, the inspiration for another generation of terrorists in another country was provided by your government's farcical post-invasion strategy of letting the societal infra-structure of Iraq dissolve, to be replaced by an American viceroy, enforced by merciless mercenaries who shoot unarmed Iraqis and then evade prosecution in any country by hiding behind your skirts, sir.

Terrorism inside Iraq is your creation, Mr. Bush!

***

It was a Yahoo user who brought up the second topic upon whose introduction Mr. Bush should have passed, or punted, or gotten up and left the room claiming he heard Dick Cheney calling him.

"Do you feel," asked an ordinary American, "that you were misled on Iraq?"

"I feel like -- I felt like, there were weapons of mass destruction," the president said. "You know, 'mislead' is a strong word, it almost connotes some kind of intentional -- I don't think so, I think there was a -- not only our intelligence community, but intelligence communities all across the world shared the same assessment. And so I was disappointed to see how flawed our intelligence was."

Flawed.

You, Mr. Bush, and your tragically know-it-all minions, threw out every piece of intelligence that suggested there were no such weapons.

You, Mr. Bush, threw out every person who suggested that the sober, contradictory, reality-based intelligence needed to be listened to, fast.

You, Mr. Bush, are responsible for how "intelligence communities all across the world shared the same assessment."

You and the sycophants you dredged up and put behind the most important steering wheel in the world propagated palpable nonsense and shoved it down the throat of every intelligence community across the world and punished anybody who didn't agree it was really chicken salad.

And you, Mr. Bush, threw under the bus, all of the subsequent critics who bravely stepped forward later to point out just how much of a self-fulfilling prophecy you had embraced, and adopted as this country's policy in lieu of, say, common sense.

The fiasco of pre-war intelligence, sir, is your fiasco.

You should build a great statue of yourself turning a deaf ear to the warnings of realists, while you are shown embracing the three-card monte dealers like Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

That would be a far more fitting tribute to your legacy, Mr. Bush, than this presidential library you are constructing as a giant fable about your presidency, an edifice you might as claim was built from "Iraqi weapons of mass destruction" because there will be just as many of those inside your presidential library as there were inside Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

***

Of course if there is one overriding theme to this president's administration it is the utter, always-failing, inability to know when to quit when it is behind. And so Mr. Bush answered yet another question about this layered, nuanced, wheels-within-wheels garbage heap that constituted his excuse for war.

"And so you feel that you didn't have all the information you should have or the right spin on that information?"

"No, no," replied the President. "I was told by people, that they had weapons of mass destruction ..."

People? What people? The insane informant "Curveball?" The Iraqi snake-oil salesman Ahmed Chalabi? The American snake-oil salesman Dick Cheney?

"I was told by people that they had weapons of mass destruction, as were members of Congress, who voted for the resolution to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

"And of course, the political heat gets on and they start to run and try to hide from their votes."

Mr. Bush, you destroyed the evidence that contradicted the resolution you jammed down the Congress's throat, the way you jammed it down the nation's throat. When required by law to verify that your evidence was accurate, you simply resubmitted it, with phrases amounting to "See, I done proved it," virtually written in the margins in crayon.

You defied patriotic Americans to say "The Emperor Has No Clothes," only with the stakes -- as you and the mental dwarves in your employ put it -- being a "mushroom cloud over an American city."

And as a final crash of self-indulgent nonsense, when the incontrovertible truth of your panoramic and murderous deceit has even begun to cost your political party seemingly perpetual congressional seats in places like North Carolina and Mississippi, you can actually say with a straight face, sir, that for members of Congress "the political heat gets on and they start to run and try to hide from their votes" -- while you greet the political heat and try to run and hide from your presidency, and your legacy -- 4,000 of the Americans you were supposed to protect -- dead in Iraq, with your only feeble, pathetic answer being, "I was told by people that they had weapons of mass destruction."

***

Then came Mr. Bush's final blow to our nation's solar plexus, his last reopening of our common wounds, his last remark that makes the rest of us question not merely his leadership or his judgment but his very suitably to remain in office.

"Mr. President," he was asked, "you haven't been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?

"Yes," began perhaps the most startling reply of this nightmarish blight on our lives as Americans on our history. "It really is. I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died, to see the Commander in Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as -- to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."

Golf, sir? Golf sends the wrong signal to the grieving families of our men and women butchered in Iraq? Do you think these families, Mr. Bush, their lives blighted forever, care about you playing golf? Do you think, sir, they care about you?

You, Mr. Bush, let their sons and daughters be killed. Sir, to show your solidarity with them you gave up golf? Sir, to show your solidarity with them you didn't give up your pursuit of this insurance-scam, profiteering, morally and financially bankrupting war.

Sir, to show your solidarity with them you didn't even give up talking about Iraq a subject about which you have incessantly proved without pause or backwards glance, that you may literally be the least informed person in the world?

Sir, to show your solidarity with them, you didn't give up your presidency? In your own words "solidarity as best as I can" is to stop a game? That is the "best" you can do?

Four thousand Americans give up their lives and your sacrifice was to give up golf! Golf. Not "Gulf" -- golf.

And still it gets worse. Because it proves that the president's unendurable sacrifice, his unbearable pain, the suspension of getting to hit a stick with a ball, was not even his own damned idea.

"Mr. President, was there a particular moment or incident that brought you to that decision, or how did you come to that?"

"I remember when [diplomat Sergio Vieira] de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man's life. And I was playing golf, I think I was in central Texas, and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, it's just not worth it any more to do."

Your one, tone-deaf, arrogant, pathetic, embarrassing gesture, and you didn't even think of it yourself? The great Bushian sacrifice -- an Army private loses a leg, a Marine loses half his skull, 4,000 of their brothers and sisters lose their lives -- and you lose golf, and they have to pull you off the golf course to get you to just do that?

If it's even true.

Apart from your medical files, which dutifully record your torn calf muscle and the knee pain which forced you to give up running at the same time -- coincidence, no doubt -- the bombing in Baghdad which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello of the U.N. and interrupted your round of golf was on Aug. 19, 2003.

Yet CBS News has records of you playing golf as late as Oct. 13 of that year, nearly two months later.

Mr. Bush, I hate to break it to you 6 1/2 years after you yoked this nation and your place in history to the wrong war, in the wrong place, against the wrong people, but the war in Iraq is not about you.

It is not, Mr. Bush, about your grief when American after American comes home in a box.

It is not, Mr. Bush, about what your addled brain has produced in the way of paranoid delusions of risks that do not exist, ready to be activated if some Democrat, and not your twin Mr. McCain, succeeds you.

The war in Iraq, your war, Mr. Bush, is about how you accomplished the derangement of two nations, and how you helped funnel billions of taxpayer dollars to lascivious and perennially thirsty corporations like Halliburton and Blackwater, and how you sent 4,000 Americans to their deaths for nothing.

It is not, Mr. Bush, about your golf game! And, sir, if you have any hopes that next Jan. 20 will not be celebrated as a day of soul-wrenching, heart-felt thanksgiving, because your faithless stewardship of this presidency will have finally come to a merciful end, this last piece of advice:

When somebody asks you, sir, about Democrats who must now pull this country back from the abyss you have placed us at ...

When somebody asks you, sir, about the cooked books and faked threats you foisted on a sincere and frightened nation ...

When somebody asks you, sir, about your gallant, noble, self-abdicating sacrifice of your golf game so as to soothe the families of the war dead.

This advice, Mr. Bush: Shut the hell up!

Is that Keitho?

Yep - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24632990/

(there's a very subtle but very telling tiny pause between "the" and "hell" when he says it)

I hate this guy's style of speech so much!

still

dude is not unattractive.

Abbott otm

Keefer is ok but dude plays the anger = ratings card a bit much.

Yeah, but he's pretty much the best "personality" that the cable news networks have going at the moment, no?

I don't care about the style, as long as SOMEONE has the balls to tell it like it is.

God, that was the most cloying over-the-top thing ever. I like Olbermann's show but his "SPECIAL COMMENTS" are ridiculous.. faux-outrage.. and all of this because the guy said he gave up golf.

i like watching msnbc's election coverage with olbermann and chris matthews co-hosting, because you can tell how much they don't like each other. it's entertaining.

Does anyone like Chris Matthews?

(also it's funny how when the other reporters/pundits use all their stupid sports metaphors they always make a point to say, "as someone with your sports background might say, keith ..." which can sound like sucking up to him or putting him down, depending on who says it.)

Chris Matthews : Name Your Reasons Why He Is So Bad & Hated.

After that NYT magazine story I feel a little bit sorry for Chris Matthews.

I think Matthews is annoying and never watch him voluntarily, but he's better, political-junkie-ism-wise, than any of the other cable news talking heads because he knows more about politics, and occasionally might come up with an original thought or elicit something mildly interesting or newsworthy.

yeah, me too. he seems compulsive.

xpost

I ahrdly ever really disagree with the content of his rants, but ugh... either he's putting on a big song and dance every show, or he has a superhuman capacity to maintain white-hot outrage. I, for one, grow weary of being that angry. Don't most people?

I, for one, grow weary of being that angry.

i can imagine keith olbermann saying this

I like Chris Matthews.

faux-outrage

What's faux about it?

The way he delivers those special comments seems really fake and forced SIRRRRRRR

it's an homage to Edward R. Murrow by a Sportscenter dude

kinda like a cable news version of the Strokes

I, for one, grow weary of being that angry. Don't most people?

Hi dere Alex in NYC.

I'm just not punk rock enough, I don't guess.

Olberman: Speakin' truth to power!

I identify a lot with his anger.

i dont remember him doing a special comment about lunagate

So I just read that Chris Matthews NYTimes thing.

Wow he is really weird. But in a cool way.

Sorry for being a Tuomas, but what are people supposed to dislike about Chris Matthews?

Hee hee, ethan.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200512230005

Thanks for posting that, 'cause even his stentorian roar aside, he alwys seems like a kind of smug trimmer to me, always on the 'right' side of an issue even if it takes him some time to figure out what that is.

yeah i dont think hes some kind of committed right wing idealogue he just, like most of the news media, wants to go along with popular opinion right or wrong

Also, he's either slightly deaf (and a dick) or just a dick, 'cause he seems to try to out-decibel people way more than I'm comfortable with.

omg was anyone just watching hardball?

yeah that was amazing.

HE'S AN APPEASER! HE APPEASED!! rofl

this is why I like chris matthews

Incredible smackdown.

vid for those who haven't seen it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1wSZBTAXRs

oh thank you, I needed to relive that

awesome

"energized, legitimized, and energized legitimized"

and the other guy getting in on it "can I answer the question?" "Kevin, when you're in a hole, stop digging"

<3 olbemann

maybe he does it over the top but he makes up for everyone else on these shitty networks who don't do it at all

ethan did you post that cuz you think its otm or did you post it cuz you're a hater? i can't tell anymore

oh god he's at it again... another special comment.

Man's heart is in the right place but OMG cannot write.

like the man sez, it's not the writing, it's the editing. he needs somebody with a big red pen. he could make all his points in a third of the time, and they'd sound better.

u guys do not understand cable news at all - no offense

mr. jhøshea, have you no shame, sir.

No, I totally understand the requirements of cable news networks and their regardless-of-stance shouty man syndrome but KO also posted a rant on Kos about HRC/RFK, which spurred my challenging opinion.

Also from a professional angle, journalists who need that much big red pen are usually too much hassle for a working editor and find redeployment in some other aspect of journalism or the media.

I mean, dude comes off as Paul Harvey of the centre-left when fulminating. Not that I don't agree with KO about the issue at hand...

http://www.freewebtown.com/supperadmin/images/streetfighter/dhalsim/dhalsimyogafire1.gifYOGA FLAMEhttp://www.freewebtown.com/supperadmin/images/streetfighter/dhalsim/dhalsimyogafire1.gif

suzy otm

The way he delivers those special comments seems really fake and forced SIRRRRRRR

-- The Brainwasher, Thursday, 15 May 2008 20:48 (1 week ago) Link

actual lol

u guys do not understand cable news at all - no offense

i kinda think his special comments are against the grain of cable news. so long, so involved, not accompanied by onscreen graphics. they're deliberately retro, or his idea of retro, a la murrow. and i'm fine with going against that grain. but he do drone on.

So, uh, what do we think about what Hillary said?

Sorry, found the other thread.

I don't know what we think, but she was pointing out that a moment everyone knows from past Democratic primaries happened in California, in June. She's said this before. However, apparently a lot of people who already despise her are currently having a shit fit because they now think she's hoping that happens to Obama. I blame Hillary for not realizing that, years ago, Rush Limbaugh convinced much of the "liberal" media and many progressives that she'd do anything for power and probably had Vince Foster killed too.

Olbermann's special comment is hilarious, though, completely over the top.. I can't watch more than a few seconds without cracking up.

it's pretty ottt. I like the laundry list of forgivenesses tho.

daria, do you think she was saying anything other than "I'm hanging in there in case he gets taken out by a nut?"

KO has a similar look to British critic Mark Kermode, in that he appears to have been licked by a Great Dane seconds before showtime.

I dunno. I'm a registered Democrat and although I love the Obama approach at no point have I said I would not support Clinton were she to become the nominee, because for me it boils down to 12 straight years of GOP chipping away at civil liberties/abortion via court appointments. That said, the way she has run her campaign does not augur well for the way she would run the country, regardless of her actual policies, but she would still run it better than John McCain and yes that is faint praise. But I cannot help but feel that the choice between her and McCain is a choice between one dynasty and another and it's a big fat Hobson apart from the Supreme Court issue.

Hillary Clinton had a big, fat opportunity to directly apologise to the Obama family for a poorly-timed remark at a time when the party has to come together for its own good and she failed to do so, which is disappointing. Also very tone-deaf in a week of v. bad news for the Kennedys.

daria, do you think she was saying anything other than "I'm hanging in there in case he gets taken out by a nut?"

-- Rock Hardy, Saturday, May 24, 2008 4:22 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

For the record, as an O supporter and longtime Clinton loathateer, I think it was an unfortunately loaded point of comparison. Nothing more. I suspect she would have used it no matter who else might have been in O's position.

That having been said, I understand the logic of those who think that she might have been insinuating something more sinister. The "Obama in funny clothes" leak, he's not a Muslim "as far as (she) knows," and her math-be-damned persistence all suggest that she's willing to go low.

While it might be disingenuous to suggest that she was saying "he gon' die and that's why I'm in," it's equally so to say "god why are you people so ready to attribute the worst to her you must be swallowing Rush's myths."

she's willing to go low.

ie she's not above "dirty tricks" & loaded insinuations

Despite KO's hysterical delivery last night, his best point was that if even if she dropped out now, if something awful were to happen to Obama, she'd be back in as the nominee. She didn't have to raise the ugly spectre! There was absolutely nothing to gain by it, and it just makes her look lowdown.

daria, do you think she was saying anything other than "I'm hanging in there in case he gets taken out by a nut?"

She was saying that previous primary seasons went on into June and beyond. She's said the same thing before. It's unprecedented for a constant drumbeat to be coming from the news media insisting that a candidate should drop out of the race. That's not the media's job and they've been doing it since Iowa. It's ridiculous.

I know this is unpleasant to bring up, but given the firestorm when the Rev. Wright tapes showed up out of the blue, there certainly could be other stories about Obama that could show up out of the blue, and there are doubts about electability already given that.. after being essentially declared the nominee by the news media, he was blown out by 40 and 35 points in two very recent high turnout primaries.

Come on, though, do you guys think she's THAT horrible a person that she's just wasting the time and money of her supporters and donors in the hopes her opponent will get taken out? Really?

well she is definitely wasting the time and money of her supporters regardless of her motivation

but srsly you dont find the invocation of assassination in this context a bit strange

The "Obama in funny clothes" leak, he's not a Muslim "as far as (she) knows," and her math-be-damned persistence all suggest that she's willing to go low.

the Clinton campaign didn't have anything to do with that photo. Straight from rightwing blogs to Matt Drudge. Did you watch the CBS interview? The "as far as I know" was her being baffled as to why the reporter kept pressing her on this question after she'd said "no" quite a few times. I feel like this is one of those points of.. impasse because if you assume everything she says is calculated for political impact, sure it reads differently, but if you watch the interview, that's not what it was at all.

AFAIK this is the first primary season when the media was all about the math, the math, the math. It's not about the math, in fact. It's about the Democratic Party nominating the candidate with the best chances of winning the general election in November. The primary process is all kinds of complicated, but it's actually about nominating a candidate who can win the White House, not about using The Math to carefully navigate this clusterfuck of a process.

and just for the record rev wright did not show up out of the blue - id heard of that guy as a possible road block for obama since before he declared

wright didnt "come out of the blue" unless you know basically only the most superficial shit about obama.... at this point hes a known quantity and the only upcoming scandals are gonna be muslim-email smear type falsehoods

xp

No, of course I don't think she's actively hoping some nut takes out Obama. However, as someone mentioned upthread, using the term "assassination" in any context during a political campaign is a loaded and provocative thing to do. She's got 35 years of experience as she so often likes to tell us, so she really should know better no matter how exhausted or fatigued she is.

Also, primaries used to start in March. Then February. Now they start in January. The BEGINNING of January. I'd wager that no Democratic primary in the modern era has gone on as long as this one has, with one candidate already having had a virtual lock on the nomination for about half the race. If it weren't Hillary Clinton as the underdog, news coverage of "candidate x" wouldn't take up half the time it does.

I find it strange that the media's going batshit over a comment she has made before including in a Time interview in March, where the point of the comment and the emphasis in it was that primaries continued into June.

Keith Olbermann himself observed on-air that a superdelegate should take her into a room and only he comes out, Slate runs a Hillary Death Watch for months, there are routinely media references to having her taken out or put down or kneecapped, and there's zero outcry over that. Why? Because it's beyond the pale to believe anyone actually advocates political violence?

May I ask a candid question?

Would you support any female candidate over a male candidate with this enthusiasm, or do you actually just think Hillary Clinton is the bees knees?

the Clinton campaign didn't have anything to do with that photo. Straight from rightwing blogs to Matt Drudge.

-- daria-g, Saturday, May 24, 2008 1:43 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

uh the linage of that photo is still murky - but here you have the v next morning before the clinton camp had renounced and rejected the photo one of their prime surrogates a person who would not go off message or say something like this w/o campaign approval repeatedly calling those clothes obamas native garb - sounds like attempted meme creation to me

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnLSkWulPVE

now any hearty clinton supporters response is sure to be - omg do you really think shes so calculating so evil! to which everyone will say plz stop accusing us of thinking hillary is evil and yes to the calculating part YES OMG FOR THE LAST TIME HAVE YOU EVER PAID ANY ATTENTION TO POLITICS BEFORE IN YR LIFE WTF FFS

she really should know better no matter how exhausted or fatigued she is.

Also, primaries used to start in March. Then February. Now they start in January. The BEGINNING of January. I'd wager that no Democratic primary in the modern era has gone on as long as this one has

I have paid attention to politics! That's why I don't believe the Clintons would do something that stupid to bring down a firestorm of accusations against them, especially on a day she was giving a major foreign policy speech!

Is it basically that much of the Democratic base is, at heart, xenophobic, racist, and ignorant and the Clinton strategists got together and decided that the best way to win those votes was through clumsy character assassination attacks that are 99% likely to backfire?

ALSO YELL MORE

Is it basically that much of the Democratic base is, at heart, xenophobic, racist, and ignorant and the Clinton strategists got together and decided that the best way to win those votes was through clumsy character assassination attacks that are 99% likely to backfire? half-truths and insinuations that play to the fears of low-info voters

-- daria-g, Saturday, May 24, 2008 6:03 PM (39 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

I mean

much of the Democratic base is, at heart, xenophobic, racist, and ignorant

is this really that challenging of an opinion given lol 20th century?

Would you support any female candidate over a male candidate with this enthusiasm, or do you actually just think Hillary Clinton is the bees knees?

I decided last summer she knew her shit and was the best candidate. There has been an unbelievable amount of biased, vitriolic, sexist media commentary on this race and yeah, I do think she's the bees knees for not giving up or even getting angry in the face of that. Couple paragraphs down, here, are a ton of examples plus links on that.

half-truths and insinuations that play to the fears of low-info voters
is this really that challenging of an opinion given lol 20th century?

I think it's a matter of what one chooses to believe and I prefer the liberal POV on this, so no, I don't believe that about people.

Has anyone around here denied there's been a lot of misogyny catapulted at Hillary Clinton in this campaign, much less the last 17 years (at least on a nationwide level)? I don't think so. She doesn't deserve any ridicule or dismissive language based on the fact she was born with two x chromosomes. She does, however, because of the slimy triangulation and positioning and for the pretty awful people with whom she chooses to associate herself and her campaign. Any good political idea she has is already compromised because of favors she's got to return for someone somewhere.

Daria, I wish you had addressed my points upthread. Most of the vitriol directed against HRC has to do with her words and actions. I'm sorry the freepers think she's a closet dyke etc. but she shouldn't take it personally unless she wants to make a larger point for other women about gynophobia in conservative life. I'd actually welcome that; she could also call the people slagging Michelle O out but unfortunately she appropriates female solidarity only when it suits her. That is not a feminist.

I've never suggested that the 2008 version of the Clintons were stupid at all. Disingenuity and calculation are hardly stupid, although the end result can totally parse that way.

much of the Democratic base is, at heart, xenophobic, racist, and ignorant

Seriously, I refuse to believe this. It is a matter of values and a choice to not believe the worst about people. However I do see this assumption as a persistent undercurrent to the media coverage of this campaign.. and, I mean, I don't get it. How high-info can you be if you're into pointing the finger at a huge number of people you don't even know?

I think it's a matter of what one chooses to believe and I prefer the liberal POV on this, so no, I don't believe that about people.

-- daria-g, Saturday, May 24, 2008 6:18 PM (4 minutes ago)

Sure, likewise I believe anyone and everyone is able to get informed and get past prejudice. Given the history of the Democratic party and various realignments, though, it's no stretch to imagine that a number of yellow-dog Democrats are in fact prejudiced and too busy working for grocery money to spend time reading up on the particularities of primaries or politicians.

Suzy, not sure which part, but as far as apologizing, she wasn't making the comment in reference to Obama, but in reference to primaries going into June. If I thought she was actually giving a commentary on the odds of Obama being taken out, sure I'd want her to apologize.

she could also call the people slagging Michelle O out but unfortunately she appropriates female solidarity only when it suits her. That is not a feminist.

http://xs.to/xs.php?h=xs127&d=08216&f=t-bomb759.png

HOOS, I see we just disagree.. if I'm going to indulge my cynical side I'd say from personal experience I saw just as much closed-mindedness and racist assumptions in play at a very very liberal university and in a liberal white-collar workplace. "High info" but only hire and promote certain people who fit a certain culture which somehow translates into mostly upper class and white. I'm not about to point the finger at fellow Dems who make less money and assume they're any better or worse than that.

http://xs127.xs.to/xs127/08216/t-bomb759.png xp

I'm not sure what she should say about Michelle O? I'm sure if asked about something in particular she'd stick up for her, but AFAIK she's never been asked about anything in particular and else, it seems a little patronizing to step in as if Michelle and Barack weren't able to defend themselves?

it seems a little patronizing to step in as if Michelle and Barack weren't able to defend themselves?

Yeah, I agree with this. Likewise, it would be weird if Barack stepped up and said "y'all stop picking on Bill."

it's actually about nominating a candidate who can win the White House, not about using The Math to carefully navigate this clusterfuck of a process.

-- daria-g, Saturday, May 24, 2008 12:43 PM (54 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

this is hilariously RONG

besides the fact that trying to predict who is going to win an election leads to things like giuliani as a front runner and hillary as the unflappable, ubeatable candidate, the math suggests exactly what you are proposing-- that the democrats believe barack obama is the best candidate for winning the white house. so yeah, sorry, it is about The Math, and i hope you're not insinuating that anyone should defy the will of the voters

Primaries always went into June when the contest began in March. If HRC wishes to draw that analogy, we'd have to be finished with this by now for it to be correct.

Like I said before, I think the tenor and timing of her remarks were tone-deaf in the extreme and the heavy volume of people asking her to apologise to the Obamas as well as the Kennedys has not been cooked up by a hostile media, but an angry public.

otm

I am a little bent out of shape more than usual about the notion that "low info" Dem voters are just ignorant and racist because.. I have certainly seen in the past couple years how race and gender assumptions figure into the "high info" workplace, how much people are paid, what projects they're given, opportunities to advance, who gets past HR gatekeepers in the first place, who fits the "culture" of the office, who gets talked down to and who's allowed to speak up about real problems and who's "frustrated" or "angry" or "emotional." (And I'm not just being self-referential here.) It pisses me off, big time, and I probably shouldn't post this but I'm currently wondering why.. um.. where I am right now, they don't step back and say how come the office is 95% white people? Isn't that detrimental to the organization and what kind of assumptions are made during the process that this is happening?

And the media, well.. MSNBC's team is upper class middle age white dudes and two or three white women. CNN isn't much better. I just see this smugness from the media about their own enlightened status and this comfortable assumption that a lot of regular folks are low info and ignorant and racist, so clearly that's how politicians must be appealing to them. bunch of hypocrites IMHO.

Suzy I know we just disagree on this.. it's a comment she's made before to emphasize June, and sure she wanted to emphasize June for the purpose of making a political argument that the race should continue. The interview was streamed live & I expect a couple bloggers picked up that one answer instantly out of context and sent it to Drudge for the purposes of creating a firestorm. It's not as if she were delivering a speech with a key point about assassination, that wasn't her point at all.

It's almost a crapshoot trying to figure out what's going to drive the next outrage, I don't see how the candidates could know - I certainly can't predict it. I'm pretty well dismayed about the process in general, in which campaign coverage is all about nothing but a long, wearisome serious of "gotchas" and trying to start the next firestorm faster than the next blogger or the next pundit.

You keep mentioning Drudge like that's the only place people go to with bad news for the Dems. I don't look at it because the man's a schmuck, BTW.

I like that Barack Obama seems to be aware of all the classism you are addressing, which is totally 100 percent real and bang OTM, and has actual ideas about how to deal with it. A lot of what people characterize as racism or sexism is in fact classism but anyone who points this out is a Communist in the eyes of those they are criticizing in America. My mom and others like her are hardly lo-info but she is responding to a number of conflicting cultural signals typical of someone of her age and background in determining her vote. Non-white people don't freak her out but she holds their behaviour to a higher standard than that of white people she knows, and it is wrong to do this.

Please show me an MSM team where the management does not come from an upper middle class position in deciding how much of its bounty it shares out with those who do not come from traditional power networks. In most cases you have to have access to those connections to even know what kind of opportunities are there. HR people often do not come from this class but the snobbery of a certain kind of arriviste ensures that they watch the gates a lot harder than their supposed betters.

I agree with you completely that the whole construction of "low info voter" as a category is problematic. Who's in it? Who decides who "low info voters" are (ie white people, people with money, men)? Yes. Agreed.

Again, though, I'm not suggesting that any and all working class people who vote Democratic are backwater hood-wearing xenophobes. I'm saying that older whites & southern whites, many of whom were raised with prejudice, make up a portion of the party's base. I'd wager that since Reagan lots of these people vote Red now! But some, especially the elderly, are yellow dog.

Is that unfair?

xxp

daria's ability to smudge the issues by trying to make it seem like we're arguing from some elitist position about 'low info voters' is simply clintonian

cant 'lo info' just mean folks who aint paying attention but vote dem anyway? thats where so much of hillary's support came from in the first place just because of name recognition. its not about race, class or gender

(lo info isnt per se about those things i mean)

Daria is right in that the clip is hilarious. I laughed my ass off. Classic Olbermann, just a total shameless ham. But like I said somewhere upthread, he's not funny because he's wrong. He's a character (and a frickin' half). If Olbermann knew that I cracked the hell up in the first five seconds of his rant, half because his delivery is so vein-busting and half because it's so rote, I doubt he'd be offended. That's his job. He's that guy.

I just see this smugness from the media about their own enlightened status and this comfortable assumption that a lot of regular folks are low info and ignorant and racist, so clearly that's how politicians must be appealing to them.

The hypocrisy of their hiring practices notwithstanding, and I don't doubt that for a second, the media (sigh) is not a unified front with any kind of agenda that goes beyond telling us what we want to hear. That's troubling in itself, but The Media just doesn't have agendas like that. They are simply not in the business of ideology, they are in the business of business. It's a capitalist institution. A hegemony-maintainer. A status-quo machine. Taken as one giant whole, as The Media, they're about as politically biased as a car dealership.

Ok, so, I'm off to kill myself. Take care!

It's almost a crapshoot trying to figure out what's going to drive the next outrage, I don't see how the candidates could know - I certainly can't predict it.

This seems disingenuous. Clinton said that she's not dropping out because who knows what will happen in June---I mean, RFK was assassinated in June! She's saying that there would be a lot of time after such an assassination to still run a campaign, were it to happen in June.

If she had left out the comment about assassination, this would not be outrageous.

If that doesn't outrage you, I can't help, but I don't believe you can't see what's outrageous about what she said.

deej, you're trying to insult the wrong person by calling them Clintonian, I like the Clintons.

HOOS, you're not wrong in that some proportion of people have prejudices, of course not. I'm concerned with it in the sense that.. part of what's happened in the primary is accusing HRC of running a Southern strategy/race baiting type of campaign, which makes no sense politically unless you assume there is a significant proportion of voters for whom this is a smart strategy (since you'd also be losing many others), and given that she's winning more voters without college education & at lower income levels.. that must be them. And I see this latest flap the same way.. either she'd do the most horrific, poisonous, offensive things possible to win the nomination, or she's deliberately been taken out of context and interpreted in the worst possible light.

I'm sure she was stunned that anyone would take that comment and believe it was in reference to Obama. Her staff should've told her that, yes, we're through the looking glass now.. people really will believe you're hoping/waiting for your opponent to be assassinated.

Neither I nor you can read the mind of HRC (so no more of 'I'm sure' etc plz) but I think that the truth is somewhere in the middle of the two poles you suggest in your first para. Toss out extremes on each side, apply law of averages.

I think their badly-run campaign has run a different strategy every two weeks and none of them seem to be working, and if you need staff to tell you not to say the word 'assassination' during any part of that campaign, for any reason, that's fucked-up. She would not yell 'fire' in a theatre.

Despite KO's hysterical delivery last night, his best point was that if even if she dropped out now, if something awful were to happen to Obama, she'd be back in as the nominee.

I thought his best point was a bit unintentional -- this assassination reference has been one of her talking points (for lack of a more Demmy word) for a while now? Whoa. She's mentioned RFK getting domed in June five, six, seven times now, and there's not a lot of ways to interpret the statement -- at *best* she's saying, "Anything could happen; hell, it might even be a national tragedy, who knows?!" and I don't see how you can say that with a "What a wacky world!" shrug at the end.

And repeatedly. Nobody noticed this before? Olbermann goes through several examples and then switches oddly to the *word* assassination as being the offensive part instead of sticking with the fact that this is a very, very, VERY strange and sinister thing to go around saying to crowds of people over and over. I guess Olbermann's trying to be a company man -- he runs through the numerous times that her wild shit has been ignored, and says "no more," but the better way to end the rant would have been, "You know why we have given you a pass for so long, Senator? Because" -- red faced, of course -- "WE. DON'T. DO. OUR. JOBS. Have a good evening."

Nah, she's saying, this is a historical moment everyone remembers (how many are there in Democratic primary seasons past that people can remember?) and the point is, the primaries were running til June. AFAIK Kennedy was NOT the frontrunner and was still in the contest trying to catch up in delegates, so maybe she was saying, what a wacky world - I could go all the way to June and then get taken out!

I dunno, though - here I am on the other side of the impasse thinking, wow, how can you believe she's that sinister?! An unremarkable point about history was an unremarkable point about history up until the Drudge siren - there was no theatre.

Oh right, you mean like how Rev Wright's fiery-but-nothing-new rants were just waved off.

That was cheap, and I take it back.

how can you believe she's that sinister

I can't believe she's that stupid! I mean, you can't go around saying that you're still in the race because anything could happen, remember that guy that some nut gunned down? You can't do that. It's not done. This is her baby dangling over the balcony moment.

I wonder that, actually -- does she have friends, or just Michael-Jackson-style friends? Friends are supposed to tell you when you're coming off like a nut.

"What a wacky world!"

http://www.geocities.com/verisimus101/rfk/Sirhan_in_custody.jpg

except that people have been saying for months now "why is she sticking around? is she hoping he'll be assassinated?" (theres posts on the primary thread from like march asking this) and whether she's hoping it or not it's a really dumb thing to say, especially since everybody says obama gives hardcore bobby kennedy vibez??

"Can you be a misanthrope and still love or enjoy some individuals? How about a compassionate misanthrope?"
...
And at one point she demands of herself: "Define 'happiness' Hillary Rodham, acknowledged agnostic intellectual liberal, emotional conservative."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/hillary-clinton-the-tortured-teen-459533.html

whether she's hoping it or not it's a really dumb thing to say

and the less generous reading is that it's off-the-fucking-map evil. Good god, I HOPE she's just dumb.

But again, she wasn't saying anything could happen. She was just trying to emphasize that historically the contests were not over by June (she mentioned Bill's run in 1992 as well), so there's no reason for the media to try and push for it to be over this time.

It was an unremarkable comment prior to this, including when published in Time magazine, the newspaper editors paid no attention, some folks liveblogging her interview (Clintonista blogs, Talking Points Memo cafe) paid no attention, and then.. Drudge/the NY Post go apeshit. So yeah, I am not surprised her friends didn't tell her she seemed like a nut given that she'd made the same historical point 4-5 times previously in front of audiences and to reporters and in major news media and nobody said she seemed like a nut.

But she wasn't saying that historically the contests were not over by June. That might be what her comment about Bill implied. But she didn't mention that RFK was still running in June, she mentioned that he was assassinated in June. If her argument is that people are still running even in June - what does that have to do with RFK's assassination? Unless she's assuming that by mentioning the assassination, we'll all recall that it happened in the heat of the nomination process. But why not just say that directly?

people have been saying for months now "why is she sticking around? is she hoping he'll be assassinated?"

Wow, am I glad I quit the primaries threads before that happened (I'm pretty sure I had by that point). Yes, guys, you win. I will say this with sarcasm so you can understand it - she is evil and stupid and hopes he'll get taken out, that is clearly the answer.

Daria, I don't think the point of that comment was to suggest that people believe she wants Obama to be assassinated. I think the point is that there's a context for this conversation that she's speaking into. She's in a race long after most people think she's lost. People have been worried about an assassination from the get-go. Etc. For her to make the comment and then pretend like she doesn't understand the outrage is pretty disingenuous.

xpost no no, let's be reasonable. Obviously the answer is that the world is against her. OBVIOUSLY.

And I'm speaking as someone who when the primaries were in NYC, I didn't vote because I couldn't decide between Obama and Clinton. Their positions were close enough, and I didn't have a personal preference between them. If anything, I liked Clinton a bit more. That said, it's been this kind of thing that's turned me off to her campaign; numerous remarks that could be explained away as innocent, but have obvious meanings in them that require willful disregard to not parse.

Since Xmas vacation, I've gone through three-and-a-half metamorphoses and am beginning to feel as though there is a smorgasbord of personalities spread before me. So far, I've used alienated academic, involved pseudo-hippie, educational and social reformer and one-half of withdrawn simplicity.

"'I don't know whether she was seeing a doctor or not" - she wasn't, so far as is known - "but she was depressed," said David Gergen, who was counsel to the president. "Deeply depressed. I just felt she went into a downward spiral." This was a near-universal view in the White House."

oh yes, this is an excellent candidate, completely immune from the freakshow. you can see this by the great success of her campaign, almost equaling a complete unknown who is a minority with a funny name.

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-me-poll24-2008may24,0,6353526.story

hey, she's leading McCain by a big 3 points in California!

To be fair, that poll is probably an outlier.

From 538.com:
"Although ordinarily Clinton's relatively small margin would be newsworthy, there have been three other California polls released within the past week and none of them show the race this close. We still have each Democrat at about 95 percent to win the Golden State."

is it? http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/ indicates three polls (including the Field poll, generally acknowledged as the best in the state) in which Hillary has been within 3 points in CA, and none in which Obama has been within less than 7. the fact that Hillary won among Democrats there does not mean that she would do better in the general.

it's also been suggested that there's no such thing as an outlier, only variations in methodology

That's who I was quoting!

i know, i xposted you. the difference here is clearly in how hard the pollster pushes leaners, as the 17% that are undecided in the Clinton-McCain matchup is much larger than that in any other poll, while the 13% in the Obama-McCain matchup is comparable only to the Field poll.

yes, there were three other polls in CA since 5/15, but only two of them measured Hillary against McCain - Rasmussen and PPIC - and while both showed CA moving solidly in the Dems' direction, it was the first iteration of either poll during the primary season in which Hillary broke 47%, a number Obama has never been below in any poll in that time.

my god this thread we should just post clinton talking points and argue against them

http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2007-12/34202595.jpg

lol at the guy right above Bill

Kitten heels. So '90s.

Things that are easy to say when your opponent "Dean screams":

"I have learned that when you are campaigning for as many months as Senator Clinton and I have been campaigning, sometimes you get careless in terms of the statements that you make and I think that is what happened here. Senator Clinton says that she did not intend any offense by it and I will take her at her word on that," Obama told Radio Isla Puerto Rico.

i want to know what gabbneb et al think of this
http://blogs.usatoday.com/onpolitics/2008/05/a-blowout-victo.html

I think psyops because there are a gazillion more articles about how fucked McCain's campaign is.

wow, man, the politico reporting that republicans think their candidate is going to win by a landslide.

also, karl rove has the math.

pure FUD.

Is that the same Karl Rove with two subpoenas?

in 2006 there were special republicans knowing abt holding onto congress through incredible election maths

http://www.nypost.com/seven/05252008/news/nationalnews/kennedys_feel_bobby_socked_112469.htm?page=0

also in that politico thing they decide to give to mccain any states where he is "competitive" right off the bat. nice! i foresee a 50-0 electoral college sweep! he's on the ballot in Every Single State!!!!!

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0508/Roves_maps.html

Did we know that Bill Clinton had seen Karl Rove's maps before they were public?

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2008/05/26/when_was_the_1992_presidential_race_over.html

My finger's not always on the pulse of America (to say the least), but this guy is bigger than I thought. MSNBC becoming the FOX of the left?

http://www.onthemedia.org/episodes/2008/06/06/segments/100726

def

Another special comment today :|

also:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/12/keith-olbermann-backlash_n_106775.html

Olbermann gets on my nerves more and more every day, yet I continue to watch. I think I'll skip the special comment tonight, though. Those have just become absolutely intolerable.

(for the record, I think he was justified in rating Couric last night)

Yeah. Just a couple of weeks after Scott McClellan's pokes at the press for rolling over for Bush's war claims, this "backlash" talk seems like so much bullshit. Olbermann, unlike O'Reilly, gets to the truth of things, which I thought was the point of all this. Also, the accusations that he tried to drive Clinton out of the race are really unfounded.

I mean, we can talk about/laugh at his style, but the other stuff seems pretty unquestionable.

I still think the special comment should be shot with a dolly on a circular track with Olbermann's chair at the center, timed + with a gradual zoom so that by the end of his rant we're back at 0 degrees on maximum closeup for the GN&GL.

olbermann 4 life

im strong in the camp of thinking his oration style is lol but when it comes down to it he's still going at people that no one on cable television goes at. i guess he's probably unconsciously upping his histrionics as things move along here but i don't find it insufferable at all.

OTMFM

he looks wrecked right now

im a big fan but imo he's approaching msnbc's coverage with a measured mix of distance and love and perspective right now

I still think the special comment should be shot with a dolly on a circular track with Olbermann's chair at the center, timed + with a gradual zoom so that by the end of his rant we're back at 0 degrees on maximum closeup for the GN&GL.

lol

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53Ef739Vlkg

snap

lol @ the last thing he says and how he says it. ok that was pretty good.

awesome

haaaa

:D :D :D :D :D :D

LOL at Rush clip, especially coming a month after the N.Y. Times Magazine praised him as a great communicator.

"jesus, why don't you get a shovel, joe?"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jk41FmnrX6o

hahaha.

what the fuck is the rachel maddow show?

i like her as a talking head but this show is mad pointless its like her doing straight newscasting and the set looks like they had some big plans but then stopped after 20 mins and just left it

aw i like her. i'd rather watch her than any of the other msnbc blowhards. granted, "favorite cable news talking head" is on a par with "favorite lime-flavored lite beer."

I like her too, but her show is mad boring

I'll probably check back in a few weeks to see if they've worked the kinks out. I just have to remind myself how much better she is than Abrams in the meantime.

^^^

it's kind of weird, too, she did a decent job subbing for olbermann. maybe her show needs more of that countdown style format and... crap.

Maddow show has gotten better, or maybe I'm just happy about her poking fun at Rossi's "'Grand Old Party' Party" bullshit today.

it's definitely getting better. i especially like it when she does a minute or so at the end just to nail her point home, which she managed to do in a way that is tons less heavy-handed than olbermann.

granted, "favorite cable news talking head" is on a par with "favorite lime-flavored lite beer."

― tipsy mothra, Friday, September 12, 2008 9:46 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark

^this is p. choice

btw:
y'know, i really don't have a problem with keith olbermann

Needs to go back to needling Dan Patrick.

this is like a 6.5 on the Olbermann scale but still good

http://lakesidedistrict.com/images/07WrapItUp1.jpg

^ sounds like fun btw

^^yoga

okay seriously fuck john mccain for this shit. i just don't even have words.

by "this shit" i mean pretending he has been victimized by john lewis.

yesterday:

[NOTE: Only the last few seconds are cut off... Olbermann says "Is it not your responsibility, Senator, to insist that, win or lose, you will not be party to a campaign that devolves into hatred and prejudice and divisiveness? And Senator McCain, if it is not your responsibility... whose is it?"

lol @

"i have frequently insisted insisted i would never turn the platform of the special comment into a regular feature but as these last two weeks of this extraordinary and extraordinarily disturbing presidential campaign project out in front of us i fear i may have to temporarily amend that presumption. i hope it will be otherwise but i suspect this will be the first nightly pieces, most shorter than this one, until further notice... and thus a special comment..."

i'm so glad this fucking guy is on our team-- can you imagine if rush limbaugh took himself this fucking seriously?

my duuude

tonight:

"i suggested last night that until the election we could very easily wind up doing a 'special comment' here every show. it was in turn suggested to me that, while events may warrant them, this would certainly render that word 'special'-- for two weeks anyway-- inoperative. good point."

that was great. jon stewart's treatment of this stuff last night was on point as well, even going so far as to answer the small town values = real america obligato by invoking 9/11, and more or less saying "fuck you, witches." whoah xposts

I like Keith Olbermann because I feel like he's the only TV talking head that a time-traveler from the 1920s would be able to understand.

i love him @ 5:42 in the 2nd one there

lots of times when i watch a special comment i think "i wonder if grady saw this special comment"

lots of times when i post a special comment to Keith Olberman is sort of longwinded i think "i wonder if j0rdan will be the first person to post after this special comment"

keith olbermann is the only person I have ever heard say "pwned!!" on tv

OTM, but the time traveler from the 20's thing is kind of true as well.

xpost I guess a time-traveler from the 1920s probably wouldn't get that part

it comes across even more when you see his stuff in print, and your brain doesn't automatically add that uniquely modern obnoxiousness that he has when he speaks:

The President revealed this last Friday, as he fairly spat through his teeth, words of unrestrained fury directed at the man who was once the very symbol of his administration, who was once an ambassador from this administration to its critics, as he had once been an ambassador from the military to its critics.

The former Secretary of State, Mr. Powell, had written, simply and candidly and without anger, that "the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism."

This President's response included not merely what is apparently the Presidential equivalent of threatening to hold one's breath, but within it contained one particularly chilling phrase.

(sorry, this was just the first thing I found on google)

yeah he's a writes in an environment of talkers. he overwrites too, but there's no doubting he's reaching for old timey muck raker outrage with his language.

oh god bless him. i thought i was losing my mind during that vp debate when she said the constitution affords the vice president "flexibility" to exercise authority over the Senate. like, maybe she actually can't read.

olberman theme always makes me wanna listen to army of the pharaohs - time to rock

drums in the olbermann theme are so awesome

keith olbermann is the only person I have ever heard say "pwned!!" on tv

i would love to see a clip of that

i saw him doing an NFL recap on Sunday and forgot what a good sports guy he is.

this is kind of weak sauce but i saw the re-broadcast a few minutes ago and they edited out the technical difficulties and it worked better:

lol @ "election comment" turning into "campaign comment"

the central point about them doing everything worse or first is a pretty important one but it probably didn't warrant a comment

still liked it though

gr8080 and j0rdan's super spesh jackoff sesh

if i wasn't using a library computer i would just IM you but ¯\(°_o)/¯

Needs to go back to needling Dan Patrick.

― Dr Morbius, Friday, September 26, 2008 6:25 AM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Haven't they been back together on a radio show or something the last few months?

when DP was on ESPN Radio, Olbermann would stop by for an hour -- dunno if that's still going on since DP left for satellite radio. But I think DP & KO are reliving their glory days every Sunday during NBC's clusterfuck of a football pre-game / halftime show.

big up that clusterfuck

Yeah, I guess that's what I heard about. Patrick was a guest on Countdown in mid-/late summer.

My mom's been watching Olbermann more the past month or so. She approvingly used the phrase "10-minute tirade" re one of the special comments.

i should really hate it when olbermann gets smug on the air over beating O'Rielley in the ratings but i don't.

yesterday:

Today's is pretty awesome:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXqB-1H7fv0

lolsimpsons

i should really hate it when olbermann gets smug on the air over beating O'Rielley in the ratings but i
don't.

― ♪☺♫☻ (gr8080), Wednesday, October 29, 2008 7:49 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

im cool with this because every time he brings up ratings he brings up o' reilly's sexual harassment case

faroffle

lmaoofah

sexualol harrasslmaont

?

irlol

sexualol harrasslmaont

― joe 40oz (deej), Thursday, October 30, 2008 1:14 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

can't take this one seriously bcuz it's one letter away from "harass lamont"

http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/countdown-with-keith-olbermann/805561/
^^pretty good but doesnt do enough with how Olbermann slips into lol mode/oddball shit

tonight's "campaign comment" was meh but this is classic K.O.:

tonight's special comment was heavy

HELL YES

it was good. for all his olbermanness, i like how unafraid he is of totally embarrassing himself. "that tiny spark of happiness"...

he was on the view today

v. good comment today, although after the SNL parody, I can't watch him do the thing where he turns to face different cameras without cracking up

i cant believe he doesnt vote. waht a dummy

yeah that was weird. i didn't get his explanation either.

i thought journalists werent supposed to register with a party but most journalists vote, right? i mean whats the point if youre as biased as olbermann?

I believe Jim Lehrer claims to not vote.

he looked gigantic on the view. it looked like bigfoot was their special guest. are those women just tiny?

His 'tirade' was good last night, I thought.

i should use my punditry as a nonvoting rationale.

In the age of the secret ballot?

I would watch a Morbs pundit show, if only for the use of phrases like "Obamanic Street Preachers". He should have Ethan as a cohost, kind of like Hannity and Colmes.

I think that very combination was proposed for the Nabisco News Network.

show me the money.

Have Blount on for 'Special Comments'

morbzfire / the o'andtwat factor

i can't decide about last night's comment. i thought it was great and righteous but can't help feeling that making it above love sort of misses the point, even though it's a pretty big part of it. asking people to philanthropically nurture the growing seeds of romance and engage with humanity is like appointing societal arbiters, when really - as i guess he dealt with in the first half - it's more about quitting denying equal rights to people for no reason. i don't feel like it's a tender romance issue, it's a prejudice issue that people should get over.

about love/dammit

I dunno, calling people on being anti-love esp when they claim to be all about it is pretty germane, imho.

morbzfire morbzfire morbzfire morbzfire morbzfire morbzfire morbzfire morbzfire morbzfire MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE MORBZFIRE

i want a morbs and ethan show about politics

on tonight's show: cynthia mckinney -- would blap y/n?

mmmmmmmmmm no.

I really can't follow politics (y'know, the tactics and all that stuff) enough for even a Nabisco Network-caliber shoutfest.

I don't think O'Reilly does either -- you just need to read the pol headlines of the day and get shouty about them.

I dunno, calling people on being anti-love esp when they claim to be all about it is pretty germane, imho.

i don't know. i think it feeds into it being treated as too personal an issue, a culture war referendum on homosexuality. this might be skewed, but i think presenting gay marriage as romantic, and considering forbidden love, contrasts with the more rounded, stately, nuclear and not-explicitly romantic (ie more in the realm of family and niceness and breakfast table hair ruffling) picture of hetero marriage. sexual preference, of all things, impacting on someone's rights, on someone's fucking taxes, is absurd, and i think it's by concentrating on the social realities of prohibiting freedom in this area - ie, emphasising that people are being disallowed from basic rights afforded to others - that it's difficult to argue against. i've just started reading and the band played on, and there's the bit of one of harvey milk's cohorts speaking at the democratic conference, and asking them to acknowledge that gays are human. olberman saying 'imagine if someone said you couldn't be married' sums it up i guess (and probably negates my original criticism of his speech).

Nabisco News Network

WANT

the nabisco news network

i want a morbs and ethan show about politics

― ♪☺♫☻ USA (gr8080), Tuesday, November 11, 2008 6:26 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this would possibly the most entertaining show in the history of entertaining shows

possibly *be*

I can't take the dude who fills in on MSNBC seriously because he looks like Jimmy Kimmel.

haha OTM

David Schuster is a toad.

http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2009/02/vaccines-didnt-cause-autism.html

This morning, Orac called Keith Olbermann out on his ridiculous “worst person in the world” slot yesterday, where he (Olbermann) named Brian Deer as one of his ”worsts”. Olbermann called Deer’s reporting of the Wakefield MMR/autism fraud “journalistic malfeasance”, apparently because The Times didn’t mention that the investigation into Wakefield was the result of a complaint by Brian Deer. Leaving aside for now the fact that that Deer is not the complainant in this case anyway, my reaction was “so what?” How would Deer being the complainant change the facts so that Wakefield suddenly magically didn’t commit fraud any more? Obviously, it wouldn’t.

Of course, we know that Wakefield's work was flawed at best, and paid for by those seeking to sue vaccine manufacturers. Deer (as anyone knows) has been covering this story for years. As Orac writes:

Olbermann apparently doesn't know that the reason Deer made the complaint to the British GMC was because of what he found in his original report in 2004 and then again in 2006. In other words, Deer discovered that Wakefield had been in the pocket of a trial lawyers seeking to sue vaccine manufacturers, having accepted £435,643 in fees, plus £3,910 expenses for his "research." Who wouldn't have reported him to the GMC for that?

Talk about a conflict of interest. We now know that Olbermann’s piece was essentially written for him by anti-vaccine crank David Kirby, who is crowing about it today on the Huff Post. Several people including Brian Deer himself have written to Olbermann today to inform him of his mistake(s), but since there was no retraction from Olbermann tonight we have to conclude that Olbermann is happy with his hatchet job on a respected journalist. Pretty ironic for someone who criticizes Fox News presenters for reading talking points given to them without checking the facts.

damn olbermann special comment on cheney is on some old school shit

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/01/business/media/01feud.html?_r=2&hp

Not to take the side of Money too much, but it's about time that bullshit walked.

Nice rant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JO2_-nQitQ

Yeah, the guy can say a lot of words about a thing. His healthcare special was magnificent.

he is a bit like glenn beck

when he's doing the world's worst persons bit, and he dictates a quote by one of his adversaries, and he really, really gets into doing the voice, so much so that it becomes this barely-recognizable cartoonish impersonation that is pretty obviously counter to "traditional" (non-goofy-voiced) journalistic integrity, i personally get a little crêped out. he was doing a lou dobbs impression earlier and apparently lou dobbs sounds like hannibal lecter, which i didn't know. it's totally loldad humor, which he shouldn't be getting away with cause afaik he ain't no dad

plus MSNBC is selling olbermann bobblehead dolls now, which i guess is something that a certain type of person is going to buy, using actual money?

Tea Parties:Keith O::ACORN:Glenn Beck

He is getting way silly about how much power and cachet he lends this idea. You'd seriously think they were like the real Illuminati the way he talks about them.

I go out of my way to NOT watch Olbermann now.

it's like he is going out of his way to emulate ben affleck's snl impersonation of him

http://yfrog.com/86gfzzj

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#38747706

more FUNdit than pundit!

Keith Oberman. Hmm, that's interesting. At first I thought you were talking about my farts because that's the name I give to my farts.

― Butt Dickass (Dick Butkus), Monday, September 18, 2006

This guy drops a lot of Hypnotoad refs.

Keith olberman is sort of suspended without pay

wow, that is some stupid shit

on the part of MSNBC

not that i think very much of KO

what did he do

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2010/11/msnbc-suspends-keith-olbermann-for-donating-to-3-democratic-candidates/1

I don't see how this is particularly stupid if there was a code of ethics required as terms of his position and he violated it.

It does some discredit to their desire to become the Fox News of the Left. Not that I want them to do that, and MSNBC annoys me generally. Still kind of nice to know they have some degree of ethical standards. Rough week for Keith all around though.

I don't really see how this is a conflict of interest

it's not like Keith Olbermann is an OBJECTIVE REPORTER

It is a conflict with the rules of your job.

really don't like that "our" "answer" to the fox crew is this guy, but i guess that's the game.

I always thought of this guy as being the face of MSNBC, for better or for worse.

not that I watch MSNBC but I prefer Maddow to him by a longshot

hopefully now they'll extend Hardball to 2 hours so we can get even more of Chris Matthews pontificating about how to 'win back the Rust Belt'.

Isn't Countdown their biggest show, ratings wise? Way to whack yourselves in the kneecaps, msncbc...

Olbermann is usually a bore even when he's right, but watching some election-night coverage made me realize how many different ways I would like to harm that mouthbreathing clown Matthews

harm that mouthbreathing clown!

Wondering how quickly the Fox "news" shills will pick up on the theme that this proves how hypocritical all liberals are, because "they" criticized Fox News Corp for contributing multiple millions to Republican candidates. Makes no difference that no one at Fox News was fired for this, but Olbermann lost his job over ~$7000 out of his own pocket.

really don't like that "our" "answer" to the fox crew is this guy, but i guess that's the game.

― Mannsplain Steamroller (goole), Friday, November 5, 2010 6:24 PM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark

i always thought of him as the answer in particular to o'reilly. maddow is our hannity, only where he's angry and serious she's annoyed and jokey.

he's just suspended as of now
xp

but i mean 'suspended without pay' surely means "we are try to appear to take this seriously but will have our biggest ratings draw back asap"

tough week for the dude. getting all butthurt over stewart and suspending "World's Worst" because of it, midterms, and now this.

they should replace him with ben affleck

hell yes

best possible idea

So is Lawrence O'Donnell going to sub for him and then do his own show later?

But a search of OpenSecrets.org reveals that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough and MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan have also made contributions to political campaigns. Here's what we found...

In March 2006, Scarborough, who hosts the show Morning Joe, gave $4200 to Derrick Kitts (R-OR). And, as the Daily Kos points out, a month later Kitts was a guest on Scarborough's show.

Between 2005-2008, Pat Buchanan made five contributions to Republican candidates, totaling $2250.

A bunch of my Mormon/Repub relatives are posting this on Facebook.

This = Keith O. fired, not Pat Buchanan's contributions.

keith olbermann is biased??? what???

Well, since Fox obviously has no problem with political contributions, surely KO will find a soft landing spot there?

He worked for FOx before! FOx Sports.

FOx

I always forget fox sports still exists

He hasn't mentioned it on his Twitter yet, btw.

3 hours ago: http://twitter.com/KeithOlbermann/status/572632130916352 (is a reply to http://twitter.com/thejosha/status/566543612116994 )

CONSPIRACY!

Fine given to Olbermann when not given out to others, a little over a month after a Republican-supporter takes over MSNBC!

Wondering how quickly the Fox "news" shills will pick up on the theme that this proves how hypocritical all liberals are, because "they" criticized Fox News Corp for contributing multiple millions to Republican candidates. Makes no difference that no one at Fox News was fired for this, but Olbermann lost his job over ~$7000 out of his own pocket.

Olbermann
November 5, 2010 5:57 P.M.
By Andy McCarthy

I’m with K-Lo, Jonah, Bill, and other lovers of free speech. If this hadn’t happened, and we didn’t know about NBC’s cockamamie policy, wouldn’t you have assumed that Keith Olbermann donated money to left-wing candidates? I certainly would have — if I had cared enough to give it a second of thought.

NBC took Olbermann off its Sunday night NFL telecasts this year. That made sense. If you’re into politics but you can’t abide Olbermann, you can simply join the 300 million Americans who choose not to watch MSNBC. But if you like football, your choice was to endure Olbermann, not watch, or watch with the sound down. That was a stupid position for NBC to put its audience and sponsors in, so they stopped doing it. Why, though, should MSNBC’s sparse viewership, which tunes in because it adores Olbermann and lefty pols, be deprived of their Keith-fix just because, besides promoting lefty pols, he supports them financially?

One of two things must be going on. Possibility no. 1: NBC News really is clueless: i.e., they actually believe, when they put Olbermann on “news” shows with other “objective, non-partisan journalists” like Chris Matthews, that we don’t realize opinion is being masqueraded as news — and thus they’re worried that Olbermann’s political contributions risk revealing the charade. Since it is a charade anyone who cares is already on to, consider the more likely possibility no. 2: as usual, there’s more to the story than we’re hearing.

again he has not been fired

lol, massive PR fuckup ahoy

it's pretty unbelievable, keith olbermann being literally fired over this.

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can't believe they fired olbermann missu.youtube

i had no use for him, but RIP

thinkprogress article seems to make it pretty clear that this suspension is bullshit and just a cover story.

Soon enough all media will be owned by News Corp or Comcast... and then the two companies will merge.

theyll never own my podcast!!

Maddow first has four minutes of examples of Fox News hosts contributing to Republican campaigns before she addresses Olbermann's firi thingy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nZnMumCKXU

Olbermann to Fox in 5, 4 ... oh, wait.

Not completely un-funny, imho: http://www.mediaite.com/tv/fox-news-red-eye-gives-keith-olbermann-giddiest-goodbye-yet/

It was as simple as Keith running it by his boss: "Hey, are we cool with me donating money to some campaigns? Oh, that's against the policy of NBC News? Cool, then...I won't do it." But that didn't happen. As much as I hate Fox News getting to have a laugh at this, and as much as I think MSNBC is overreacting, it's probably fair that Keith is off the air for a short while.

If you're gonna be a newsman with those kind of a poor instincts, maybe it's time for self-reflection.

Interesting post from Josh Marshall.

Cliffs:
- Is KO doing a brinksmanship thing with his employers like he's done in the past?
- What the hell kind of policy is "no donations without clearing it with us first"?
- Commenter: KO can't legitimately say "we're different from and better than Fox News" if he's going to give $$$ to candidates.
- Marshall: Hmm, fair point that I kind of wish I could sweep under the rug.

what a disaster for msnbc

keith olbermann is sort of longwanged

^this took 54 posts?

xp

taibbi coming completely correct here: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/matt-taibbi/blogs/TaibbiData_May2010/231499/83512

He should pay the price? Is Bob Steele kidding? What the hell is wrong with people?

We had a whole generation of journalists who sat by and did nothing while, for instance, George Bush led us into an idiotic war on a lie, plus thousands more who spent day after day collecting checks by covering Britney's hair and Tiger's text messages and other stupidities while the economy blew up and two bloody wars went on mostly unexamined... and it's Keith Olbermann who should "pay the price" for being unethical? Because, and let me get this straight, he donated money, privately, to politicians?

...

These periodic spaz attacks the people in our business have over obscure and usually completely made-up ethical controversies -- often over this whole "objectivity" issue, which provides a seemingly endless source of false piety for some of the more obnoxious journo-ethicists -- are really irritating.

Phew!

at ease, gentlemen.

Keith Burns Koppel

uh so today was the last edition of Countdown. Olbermann just said goodbye on air. Totally didn't see that coming!

?!

He didn't give an explanation at all, was sort of elusive even.

whoa wtf

i mean i had no use for him

but u know

RIP homie, you were right most of the time

He'd grown almost completely insufferable over the past 3 years, but I still tuned in when there wasn't anything else on. Maybe Jon Stewart finally shamed him into retirement.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/vp/41201922#41201922

video of the goodbye, if anyone's interested.

"According to a source at MSNBC, “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell” will move to 8 PM, with Ed Schultz moving to 10 PM. Rachel Maddow will remain at 9."

http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/keith-olbermann-out-at-msnbc_b49553

man i hate ed schultz

like i understand why he needs to exist

but i cant watch that guy

Maybe he's moving to Oprah's network, she's supposed to be revealing something HUGE Monday.

But MSNBC probably had a non-compete clause on him.

Ed Schultz is just the liberal Sean Hannity. If you could force the two together at a high enough velocity, you could create a wormhole and make them disappear forever.

Also, Lawrence O'Donnell at 8? They should just save the money and air a blue screen.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

wtf happen

josh marshall was on and had no idea it was the final show http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2011/01/what_the_hell_was_that_about.php

OH CHRIST! This is just wild conjecture, okay? But what if Keith is going to take over for Robert Gibbs as the White House Press Secretary?

I would say the odds for that are roughly the same as the odds that sarah palin becomes white house press secretary

Maybe, but the White House knows he's kind of an immovable object in some situations.

Also, Lawrence O'Donnell at 8? They should just save the money and air a blue screen.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

― Johnny Fever, Friday, January 21, 2011 9:18 PM (44 minutes ago)

yeah odonnell kinda sucks, give it to ratigan imo

i like odonnell. wtf, i just heard about this and thought it was a joke. but KO is kind of.. known for burning bridges everywhere he's been on the air

That's what I was thinking. Dylan Ratigan could do well at 8pm.

I've heard that Comca--er, Kabletown hated KO.

no one on the whole internet seems to know wtf went down

lol - anderson cooper is reporting on this at cnn and interviewing shuster, who also effectively got shitcanned from msnbc about a year ago

meanwhile fox has MICHELLE BACHMANN if u are interested in why obamacare is SOCIALISM

I was gonna say this is what happens when the dude goes without his plushy chair weekly Thurber fix, but then at the end he announced he was going to read a Thurber story still.

Oh, I guess they finally let Shuster out of his spiderhole.

L O'D is awesome, wtf? way better than Ratigan, at least...

shuster is free now afaik but they kept him off the air for like 10 months? and he didn't even really do anything wrong

CNN is all ZOMG BREAKING NEWS. i think fox must have some unwritten policy of NEVER MENTION THAT GUY

Lawrence is a sleeping pill on two legs. Smart guy, insightful (sometimes), but BOOOOORING.

Olbermann has always been desperately in need of a punch in the neck. Have always hated having him on my side of any issue.

i like odonnell actually. he really believes his own bullshit, it's kind of amazing. no irony involved.

god, fucking ed -- everything that ppl criticized keith for, i.e. calling him msnbc's version of a fox host -- is actually completely otm for ed

yeah seriously

should reunite w/dan patrick on sports center imo

HIRE CHRIS HAYES imo

Hire Dr. Morbius.

YES

Olberman as new press secretary would be pretty epic lulz. i'm rooting for that outcome

the whole show would just be called SPECIAL COMMENT with DR. MORBIUS

http://i30.tinypic.com/1zyhpj5.jpg

should reunite w/dan patrick on sports center imo

― ice cr?m, Friday, January 21, 2011 10:29 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

came here 2 post this very thing

its settled then

dan patrick's radio show is pretty great -- wouldn't be surprised to see keith go that route tbh, be able to talk about baseball & shit when he wants while still keeping his foot in politics

"friend's" comment on facebook:

Olbermann gone. Now we just need to get after Rush, Beck, and any other idiotic ideologue who does little to further the dialogue.

everyone thinks theyre the reasonable one

"The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell” will move to 8 PM

why o'donnell? they could air a show hosted by crispin glover. i'd watch a show hosted by crispin glover.

maybe olberman's going back to SportsCenter.

good times.

larry od's show must be doing pretty well

they didn't give him his own show for nothing

not on purpose

i've only ever seen o'donnell's show once and i think i was high but it just looked like a public-access version of countdown.

olbermann really bugged me and his colossal sanctimonious ego bugged me and his "good night and good luck" bugged me and his ninth symphony hunter-brinkley bite bugged me and his invocation and as far as i'm concerned total misinterpretation of network in his final sign-off bugged me but for some reason i'm still sad he has to leave his show, good luck to him.

*huntley-brinkley

Used to love listening to the KO hour when Patrick was still on ESPN radio. Maybe the last time sports talk radio didn't suck.

Given the guy's past history, no doubt Comcast tried to renegotiate the terms of his contract, take it or leave it, and Olbermann told them to dangle.

Hey, maybe he'll end up at Fox!

Hmm.

Anderson Cooper said Olbermann's departure was so sudden that MSNBC was still running Olbermann promotions on air, an hour after his final sign off.

he's going undercover to win the Repub nominee in 2012, then withdraw from the presidential race last minute to assure Obama of 2nd term

Anderson Cooper said Olbermann's departure was so sudden that MSNBC was still running Olbermann promotions on air, an hour after his final sign off.

― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, January 22, 2011 8:57 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yah seems to have been a total surprise to everyone - still the internet has no idea wtf happened - p awesome

reasonable take, lol at sports center anecdote http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2011/01/keith_olbermanns_ouster.html

Ed Schultz is just the liberal Sean Hannity.

My theory (just formed this second) is that liberals cannot play the game by these rules. All liberal commentators need to be avuncular and twinkle-eyed, giving off a strong puppylike vibe, as if all they really want to do is get down on the floor with you for a fun wiggly romp. The angry, spit-spraying, outraged attack-monkey shtick is inherently a property of conservatives.

You've seen Ed Schultz in action, though, right? He's just as big a gasbag as Hannity's ever been (or Limbaugh, for that matter, what with all the stupid nicknames he gives people and his "Psycho Talk" segments).

maddow seems to be the ideal disposition for the liberal take no prisoners talk person - unflappable and matter of fact where the conservatives are histrionic and convoluted

i think tho the assumption that there needs to be liberal corollaries to oreilly et al is a bit off base - particularly in the tv realm where these shows are just not that popular - on the radio which does have an actually large audience theres npr which is instructive as to what yr average liberal actually wants for their newspinion dollar

disclaimer: i dont engage in any of this shit tbh im strictly blogz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyZNyQQs1ok
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GisL-VBXQ2g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vH_jlM_TWhQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7po9cuzE-7I

no one sings like olbermann

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LnkCuIjJZk&feature=related

^^^ I like the Groucho Marx look Keith was sporting in the clip above.

he looks younger today than he did in 1988

awzom

lol @ eyebrow grooming btw

jim lampley's the main news guy at the end, too!

Guess NYTimes is reporting this was in the works for weeks, and they only finalized a Conan-like agreement on Friday.

yea one of my facebook friends posted that thsi was happening a few hours before it aired. contract ended

such a lot of fuss over one partisan gasbag.

dont be so hard on yrself!

lol, what party do I belong to? (I am getting emails from prog groups trying to have "Coffee Parties" btw)

sure that's not nursing home daily activity newsletter

wa-wa-waaaaaaaa

We old guys have such shriveled 'nads that a we can take a direct punch to them and just smile back at you. You young guys would crumple.

This really isn't a discussion about partisanship (for me, anyway). It's about tv.

which means K.O. will pretty much be forgotten in 4-6 weeks, til he's back somewhere

likely hell be picked up by someone who wants and encourages him to do his thing ala bill maher, should be interesting, to read abt

2ND UPDATE, SATURDAY AM: An MSNBC insider told this to Deadline today about Keith Olbermann's departure Friday:

"This was all Keith's choice. He has several times over the years said that he wants out of his contract. He never meant it until this year. He started lawyers negotiating twice this year. He stopped them in the spring. Then, about a month ago with the guidance of his new ICM team and a new LA manager (who were making zero $ on his current deal), he once again said he wanted to leave and this time they negotiated the full package.

"Because of all the false threats in the past, it was impossible for the network to know if he was really going to sign the final document yesterday. That's why promos for his show were still running after he quit on the air. The network couldn't really believe it or act on it until he said it on TV. They couldn't tell the promo people to pull Keith's show out of the cycle until they were sure. His staff learned he was quitting when they heard him say it on TV.

"Comcast has had no impact at all on MSNBC [yet]. Phil Griffin has complete authority. He makes deals without having to consult with anyone. He has made proposals over the years on the fly and in high-speed contexts where he is acting alone and with full authority. MSNBC is Phil Griffin's network and no one at NBC thinks they have a better idea than Phil about what to do next."

http://www.deadline.com/2011/01/nbcu-statement-msnbc-and-keith-olberman-have-ended-their-contract-last-show-tonight

wow!

"His staff learned he was quitting when they heard him say it on TV."

What a huge dick.

lol 'btw you should all start looking for new jobs now, goodnight and good luck'

compare-and-contrast with conan o'brien, who fought tooth-and-nail for his staff with nbc as he exited the tonight-show.

Exactly.

Cue up Ben E. King's "Stand By Me".

it should be noted this is coming form an 'msnbc insider' and could be total bullshit

all anonymous MSNBC insiders are trustworthy

oh n/m then

no way an msnbc insider would feed nikki finke bullshit to make olbermann look dumb

pfff yeah I took that whole article with a grain of salt.

whoa, yeah, olberman is way sexier now than in 1989

"His staff learned he was quitting when they heard him say it on TV."

how very larry sanders

If he's been unhappy for years, it'd take a really non-perceptive staffer not to pick up on that and keep a CV and letter of recommendation handy. And given Olbermann's well-documented past, the savvy staffer should have expected this could happen at any moment.

Anyway, I would imagine the Conan show was a much greater degree of creative collaboration than Countdown. I assume, egomaniac that he is, that Olbermann did most of the non-technical stuff himself - writing, etc. It's not like he had a band, announcer, side-kick, folks that shared camera time, etc.

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/olbermann-said-to-be-going-to-current-tv/?hp

I know Current is somewhere on my extended digital cable dial, but I have no idea where (and that it's only accessible on the tv where the dvr box is). Great move, Olbermann!

whatta weirdo

haha is he going to produce his own show

jus chillin w/a flip cam in central park

now that i think abt it im actually v curious to see what crazy shit hell come up w/given total control

if current went whole hog for the unfulfilled liberal fox news promise of msnbc they could do p well

maybe they'll send him to n korea

he'll prob just talk abt baseball more

welcome back keith

he can be annoying but it's kind of nice to see him back on the air

“In due course, the truth of the ethics of Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt will come out. For now, it is important only to again acknowledge that joining them was a sincere and well-intentioned gesture on my part, but in retrospect a foolish one. That lack of judgment is mine and mine alone, and I apologize again for it.”

is Olberman a douche

kinda trying to wrap my head around the fact that keith olbermann is suing al gore

who is left to air him now? and why would anyone bother? jeez

oh this is why i couldn't find this thread today

who is left to air him now? and why would anyone bother? jeez

― mookieproof, Friday, March 30, 2012 11:03 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

yeah he seems as hell bent as anyone in recent memory on utter self destruction that doesn't involve drugs or alcohol

i suppose he'll soon be a huffpost/dailybeast thing

Dude doesn't burn bridges, he napalms them.

I'm just like... they were paying you 10m a year dude.

Well, yeah, that's why he's saying the firing was a cost-cutting measure.

What the eff was the reason given this time? Was he hitting on interns or some shit?

he didn't show up for work!

That's just cause pretty much anywhere for getting fired, right?

in the future everyone will get to fire keith olbermann

http://ll-media.tmz.com/2012/03/30/0330-keith-olbermann-al-gore-getty-ex-1.jpg

this guy must be the most awful person to work with

not worth it IMO

http://deadspin.com/espn-suspends-keith-olbermann-for-penn-state-tweets-1687751753

I'm generally eager to bash PSU at the first hint of controversy, but wtf is Keith so mad about here? idgi and it's probably good he's being suspended (for the millionth time).