Free Republic

Newsbusters.org: Contrasting Olbermann’s struggles, Fox News is dominating more than ever. FNC has ranked fifth or higher for 24 straight weeks among all cable channels in prime time, while MSNBC ranks seven spots below the Food Channel. A typical ratings score looks something like this one from June 22: O’Reilly – 2.9 million, Olbermann – 1.2 million. It must be hard for Olbermann now that he doesn’t have George Bush to call a fascist or to compare to the Nazis. Crediting Obama with defeating Hezbollah in Lebanon’s elections just isn’t cutting it… Olbermann’s uncritical coverage of Obama is one reason...

Should be interesting next time Joe Scarborough runs into the likes of Ed Schultz . . . The Morning Joe host today slammed the hypocrisy of cable news hosts, specifically including some at MSNBC, for taking "unbridled glee" in Mark Sanford's disgrace. Scarborough didn't name names, but he almost surely had Schultz, among others, in mind. As I reported here, on his show last evening Schultz absolutely reveled in Sanford's distress, boasting "I have no mercy here" and using the most mocking of tones to describe the circumstances. Was Joe also alluding to Keith Olbermann, who had considerable fun at...

No doubt noticing the pub Letterman got for his vulgar comments about Sarah Palin’s teenage daughter, Keith Olbermann apparently decided to outdo the Late Show house when it comes to making vile comments about a woman. From this evening’s Countdown, addressing himself to Ann Coulter in the course of naming her his “Worser Person.” KEITH OLBERMANN: Ann, to use the vulgarities of the gutter, you are a worthless . . . Coulter. View video here.

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- MSNBC talking head Keith Olbermann has named pro-life nurse and blogger Jill Stanek the "Worst Person in the World" during that segment of his Thursday night broadcast. Stanek is the pro-life nurse who uncovered live birth abortions at a hospital in Chicago that led to a national law prohibiting the practice.On her blog, Stanek has noted how late-term abortion practitioner LeRoy Carhart of Nebraska is one of the few remaining people to do abortions so late in pregnancy now that George Tiller has been killed.As LifeNews.com has noted, Stanek posted pictures of Carhart's Belleview-based abortion...

If you can’t beat ‘em, quarantine ‘em . . . Unable to compete with Bill O’Reilly, who consistently thrashes him in the ratings, Keith Olbermann has come up with a better idea: accuse his nemesis of “incitement to murder” and propose the “quarantine” of Fox News. Olbermann used O’Reilly’s comments about George Tiller as his pretext to attempt to drive off television the man who drives him insane. View video here.

Erich "Mancow" Muller has gotten a lot of publicity for himself over the last few days by subjecting himself to a supposed waterboarding and then immediately declaring it to be torture. As a result, he has been hailed in the leftwing Blogosphere and appeared on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann to report on his experience. Well, now it appears that his "experience" was probably faked and did not encompass what a real waterboarding is like according to the Gawker blog. A series of e-mails between Mancow publicist, Linda Shafran, and David Kupcinet who has contacts with many veterans through his...

I remember exactly what I was doing the morning of September 11, 2001. I was a grad student at the time, getting ready for my first class with the television running in the background. Just before the first large passenger plane crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center something caught my attention just in time to see it happen live. And the day froze into shock, numbness, dismay, terror, and a rising anger. The broadcasters were talking to themselves about whether this was an accident, or an intentional attack. I didn't need them to tell me...

Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment about Mr. Cheney's speech. Neurotic. Paranoid. False to fact and false to reason. Forever self-rationalizing. His inner rage at his own impotence and failure dripping from every word and as irrational, as separated from the real world, as dishonest, as insane, as any terrorist.

Like an obsessed stalker, Keith Olbermann has declared he won’t stop talking about Rush Limbaugh, even though Rush has challenged MSNBC to do so for a month. Oh, and for good measure, the classy MSNBC host screamed at Rush—who was surely not watching—”F.U.!” Olbermann copped to his Rush fixation in response to the challenge to MSNBC that Limbaugh laid down on his show today not to mention him for a month–and see what happened to their ratings. View video here.

On his show last night, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann responded to a story on CityFile.com, about his previously unexplained absence for several nights in late April. CityFile's story, picked up on a variety of other blogs, quoted insiders who described a booking battle, which Olbermann lost, between Rachel Maddow's staff and Countdown's over Ben Affleck, who was promoting his movie, "State of Play. But Olbermann said his absence was not due to the Affleck booking but because he hit "an emotional wall about my mother's passing," and took a long weekend off, before hitting "another kind of wall over the weekend...

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann attacks blogger from Cityfile for reporting rumors about him and his mother's death. And also a fight between him and Rachel Maddow over who got to interview actor Ben Affleck. With all due sympathy to Olbermann over his mother's recent death, he has unintentionally legitimized Cityfile. If it were me, I would take the high road and settle my grievance with the website in private. But that would by un-Alinsky of Olbermann to do. When it doubt, pick the target, personalize it, polarize it. Finally, for Olbermann to question anyone's journalistic integrity is like Barack Obama or...

As he was working himself into a lather on the set at Fox News Channel last week, Glenn Beck picked up a gasoline can. He pretended he was President Barack Obama pouring gasoline on the American people, as he emptied the can (filled with water) on a shivering actor and lit a match. It was one of Beck's "crank up the crazy and rip off the knob" moments, to borrow the words of Stephen Colbert. Depending on your politics, the monologue was either absurd or astute. Either way, it was undeniably entertaining television — the kind of jaw-dropper you rarely...

The "tolerant" proponents of homosexual marriage, following the hateful lead of homosexual, Perez Hilton and the likes of anti-Christian bigot Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, have had their fun bashing Miss California, Carrie Prejean. For simply stating the obvious truth that marriage ought to be between a man and a woman, Carrie has been unjustly slandered, insulted and ridiculed. "By courageously shining the light of God's truth on the marriage issue, now homosexuals and their allies irrationally seek to defame and destroy Carrie Prejean," said Dr. Gary Cass, Chairman and CEO of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission. "Perez Hilton, 'queen of all...

Once upon a time, there was Dylan Ratigan, host of CNBC's "Fast Money," and co-host of that network's "Closing Bell." He was never partisan and willing to criticize both political parties in Washington, D.C. Now he seems to think Bristol Palin has taken Karl Rove's job as the sinister mastermind of Republican politics. --more with video--

On Thursday’s Countdown show, Michael Musto of the Village Voice appeared to help MSNBC host Keith Olbermann lambast Miss California, Carrie Prejean, because of her expression of opposition to same-sex marriage. After Olbermann set up the segment by revealing that Prejean had received breast implants paid for by the Miss California organization, Musto made a number of crude sexual jokes, and even cracked that she was like a "Klaus Barbie Doll," presumably a reference to Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, who was a Gestapo officer responsible for thousands of deaths during World War II. Referring to the Miss California organization,...

People at both ends of this argument make me want to barf, and all parties involved are harming the cause of gay rights. Miss California's attack on thousands of marriages is now available for all to see, and instead of stupid gay thunderstorm imagery, it makes handy use of Carrie Prejean's victimization: The ad cleverly accuses advocates of gay marriage of distraction, while using distraction. Lost to the viewer is the fact that neither Perez Hilton nor the Miss California organization really has any skin in this game, as far as activism goes. So, what does Countdown with Keith Olbermann...

Keith Olbermann wants to torture Sean Hannity. Or is it enhanced-interrogate him? Last week, Charles Grodin was on Hannity, and the conversation turned, as so many do, to simulated drowning. Grodin says waterboarding is torture; Hannity says it's not, and then Grodin asked, "We can waterboard you?" Hannity replied, "Sure...I'll do it for charity. I'll let you do it." And then Keith Olbermann became obsessed with the statement, offering to give $1,000 to military families for every second of waterboarding Hannity could withstand. "And I'll double it, when you admit you feared for your life," he said on the air....

Just saw this on U.S. News & World Report.  There's a new petition asking Keith Olbermann to give back his extra $3.5 million in compensation, in light of the fact that GE is taking bailout funds: While General Electric, the parent-company of your MSNBC network, was negotiating a $126 billion taxpayer-funded bailout, you signed a new contract raising your salary from $4 million to $7.5 million annually. You have used your show as a platform to call for the resignation of corporate executives accepting excessive bonuses on the backs of taxpayers who are picking up the tab for these atrocious...

So that’s how he gets his kicks . . . On this evening’s Countdown, Keith Olbermann offered $1,000 a second if Sean Hannity would agree to let Olbermann waterboard him. View video here.

"Let's be very honest about what this is about. It's not about bashing democrats, it's not about taxes, they have no idea what the Boston Tea Party was about. They don't know their history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of tea-bagging rednecks. And there is no way around that... They are now dependent upon immigrant bashing, and hating the black guy in the White House. Will people act on that? It's not new, but Fox doesn't mind fomenting it. Michelle Bachman...