Comcast is still in negotiations with the government over its proposed takeover of NBC Universal, but that did not stop the cable company from announcing a new management slate for the entertainment giant last week.
That announcement displeased regulators, according to two government officials with knowledge of the negotiations. In September, the companies said in a statement that they would make no further personnel announcements “until the deal-closing process and timing is certain.”
“For a deal this large, and one that hasn’t been approved, Comcast’s behavior is presumptuous and arrogant,” one of the officials said.
Hmmm. “Presumptuous and arrogant.” Let’s see if Keith Olbermann names Comcast “Worst Person in the World.”
Of course, he buys into — and foments on his own — some fairly predictable liberal propaganda (e.g., Republicans were pro-Nazi circa 1940), but insofar as he seeks to point out the differences between factual reporting, opinionated analysis and the “the false god of objectivity,” he’s onto something here:
If only Keith Olbermann could be persuaded to examine the question of whether the neo-Keynesian economics of the Pelosi/Reid/Obama Democrats was doomed to failure from the beginning, so that he might have a Cronkite-in-Vietnam epiphany: “It’s a hopeless quagmire!”
The commercial success of both MSNBC and Fox News is a source of nonpartisan sadness for me. While I can appreciate the financial logic of drowning television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their own biases, the trend is not good for the republic. It is, though, the natural outcome of a growing sense of national entitlement. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s oft-quoted observation that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” seems almost quaint in an environment that flaunts opinions as though they were facts.
But it isn’t as if Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly never report facts. They report facts every night. Rather, each selects the facts he reports or emphasizes, according to the (presumed) interests of his audience. Olbermann reports facts that makes Republicans look bad, and his liberal viewers appreciate that. O’Reilly reports facts that make Democrats look bad, and his conservative viewers appreciate that.
Sometimes I watch MSNBC, just to see what they’re up to. As a conservative, this can be a painful experience, and not just because of the dreadful liberal bias, but because some of the facts reported on MSNBC genuinely do make Republicans look bad.
However, being a conservative isn’t the same thing as believing that Republicans are 100% wonderful. In fact, I’d love it if Olbermann and Rachel Maddow would devote themselves to destroying the reputations of certain Republicans that I hate even more than they do. For example, John Cornyn.
C’mon, Keith: Assign your researchers to dig up the vilest things possible about John Cornyn. Surely there must be some nasty skeletons in his closet — a hushed-up DUI, a mistress, bribery, kickbacks, transvestitism, something. Take him out.
When it was revealed that Keith Olbermann had donated to Democratic candidates he had interviewed, I was not outraged:
Being strictly a neutral, objective journalist myself — “Ethics, shmethics!” — I don’t think Olbermann should be fired from NBC, which is as about as neutral and objective as Pravda or the Daily Worker.
No one paying attention to NBC’s recent operations — e.g., the elevation of Bush-hater David Gregory to Meet the Press host, Chris Matthews’s tingly gushing about Obama, MSNBC’s hiring of Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz — could miss their tilt toward Democrats.
If NBC News has made a programming decision to appeal to Democratic viewers, this is their own business and my libertarian impulse is to let them do as they pleased. Looking at the situation as a journalist, all that “ethics” required was some honesty about what they were doing. Objectivity is not the same thing as neutrality.
From the moment Olbermann was found to have donated money to three Democratic candidates, there has been a deepening sense of anger and frustration among his colleagues . . . [S]everal of NBC’s front-line stars, including Tom Brokaw, have expressed concern to management that Olbermann has badly damaged MSNBC’s reputation for independence. . . .
Network staffers use phrases like “scorched-earth policy” and “totally narcissistic response” to describe how Olbermann has dealt with criticism of his political donations. A recurring theme is that he has made it impossible for MSNBC to argue that it is journalistically different from Fox News, which has no prohibition against political donations by such commentators and talk-show hosts as Sean Hannity and Karl Rove. The word hypocrisy has frequently been aimed at Olbermann.
War or peace, it’s all the same to me.
I’ll be killed in the war or hung during peace.
Or, as that same dauntless spirit was once expressed on a famous battlefield: “Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer!”
It happened that, earlier today, I received a tersely mystifying e-mail from another warrior, my friend Allen West:
It is with deep regret that this Congressional office and the people of CD 22 will not have Joyce Kaufman as my Chief of Staff. Joyce is a good friend, and will remain loyal to South Floridians and to me. I will always seek Joyce’s counsel for being a good Representative of this Congressional District.
What was this about? Who is Joyce Kaufman? Why was this staffing decision being announced via an e-mail from the West campaign office? A bit of research revealed that her hiring had been announced Tuesday:
A proud Puerto Rican Jew, Kaufman became a de facto spokeswoman for South Florida’s anti-illegal immigration movement in 2007. . . .
“Her 20 years of experience on the political scene in South Florida (always as a radio host) will give me helpful insights and perspective,” Tea Party fave West told Page2Live Monday night. “As chief of staff, she’ll be my right-hand person. “
A screaming liberal Democrat turned independent, Kaufman also gave West plenty airtime as he ran against Democrat Ron Klein in 2008 and this year. West is believed to have been on Kaufman’s show more than 100 times.
That was Tuesday. On Wednesday, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow did a hit job on Kaufman:
A media dogpile ensued and today Kaufman announced she would resign as chief of staff rather than be used as a weapon against West. But watch that video and ask yourself, what’s wrong with what Joyce Kaufman said?
“I am convinced that the most important thing the Founding Fathers did to ensure me my First Amendment rights was they gave me a Second Amendment. And if ballots don’t work, bullets will. . . . [S]ome things are worth fighting for, and some things are worth dying for.”
Does anyone disagree? Or is there nothing worth fighting and dying for?
And isn’t it true that the Founding Fathers specifically intended the Second Amendment as the ultimate guarantor of our liberty?
A friend of mind down home is a ranking police officer. He once told me that Americans have three means of redressing our grievances: The soap box, the ballot box and the cartridge box. So long as we have the first two — free speech and free elections — there is no need to resort to the third.
Christian fundamentalists, the millennial end-of-theworlders obsessed with the Left Behind series about the End Times, neo-Nazi racists, rural black-helicopter Michigan Militia types cut from the same inbred cloth as Timothy McVeigh, allied with “mainstream” gun nuts and right-wing Republicans, have been planning, preparing, and praying for the destruction of the “Godless,” “secular” United States for decades. In the past, they formed groups like the John Birch Society and the Aryan Nations. Now the hard Right has a postmodern, decentralized non-organization organization called the Tea Party. . . .
The government, the corporations, and the extreme right are prepared to coalesce into an Axis of Evil. . . .
The millions of partisans who follow Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and right-wing televangelists . . . will act to stop teenage sluts from getting abortions, teach n—–s a lesson, and slaughter those spics, dots, and everyone else who doesn’t fit into their vision of what and who is right.
See? That’s who the Left thinks you are, and how they think of their “thoughtful” selves. Only they are “hard-working.” Only they are “underpaid.” You? You’re stupid, overpaid and greedy. (Elsewhere, he calls you “parasites, vampires, hideous monsters.”) And who is promoting Ted Rall’s insightful analysis? Who else, but MSNBC?
MSNBC — where Keith Olbermann is paid $7 million a year.
Yes, MSNBC — the network that gives voice to the “thoughtful, freedom-loving, disenfranchised, ordinary people” like Ivy League-educated Ted Rall, who matriculated at Columbia University, alma mater of the President of the United States and other members of the downtrodden toiling masses.
Ted Rall: He’s being kept down by The Man.
UPDATE: Watching that video of Ted Rall being interviewed by Dylan Ratigan, I’m wondering why Columbia University (where the tuition is $40,000 a year) can’t teach basic economics. Rall speaks of “1% of the country owning 24% of the income” and “people getting thrown out of their homes, over 10 million of them.”
Ted, they’re not getting thrown out of their homes. They’re getting thrown out of the mortgage company’s homes. It’s not your home until you pay for it. If you’re living in a $300,000 house and you don’t make the payments, that $300,000 house isn’t yours anymore. And it never really was.
Ted Rall and Barack Obama: Columbia University graduates who can’t grasp basic concepts like property ownership.
The other day I talked to Vince Kreul, who worked on the winning VA-9 race. (I reported on Morgan Griffith’s campaign for The American Spectator and blogged about it here.) Before Vince got to VA-9 — he was doing “Victory Fund” work for the RNC and VAGOP — he worked on three different losing Republican primary campaigns: Rick Barber in AL-2, Les Phillip in AL-5 and Kerry Roberts in TN-6.
Vince’s candidates lost those three primaries, but the candidates who got the nominations won all three seats, previously held by Democrats — a wave so freaking huge that this one 26-year-old GOP operative worked in four districts that flipped D-to-R.
Maybe later on we can get all into the spilled milk and bitter recriminations over missed opportunities, but not now. The kind of mood I’m in right now, baby, you can find me in the back of a jacked-up tailgate . . .
According to this report, not only did Olbermann refuse to apologize for violating NBC’s rules forbidding political contributions by news personnel, but he demanded that the network apologize to him.
By the way, this is the kind of fun we can enjoy again, now that we whupped the Democrats to the tune of 60-plus House seats Nov. 2. Mocking liberals when they lose is much more fun and easy than fighting them tooth and nail when they win.
