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Fri May 11, 2012 at 01:20 PM PDT

Sorry About That, Chief

by Keith Olbermann

I regret to tell you that I'm going to have to miss Netroots Nation.

I need to have surgery - fortunately, minor surgery - and the best guy in the world on this says we shouldn't wait beyond next week. Between his gentle insistence and the facts that I will not be missing any work (duh) and that it should result in a significant improvement in one area of my health, I'm going to go ahead and do it now. The problem is that while I'll (hopefully) be out of the hospital quickly, the process demands that one reserve at least two weeks of not really moving very far from a bed, let alone travel even by car or train.

I apologize to the organizers and of course all of you who are attending, and want to thank Nolan Treadway in particular for his understanding and assistance. I hope you have a great event and I'm sorry I can't be there.

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You saw the video of his mad rant against Occupy, then you saw the "list"cobbled together in far too much of a hurry to rationalize the rant, then the new video from World Net Daily of all people, showing Andy Breitbart drinking before the rant (and breaking, in cartoon fashion, his wine glass).

What you have not seen are the facts behind the transparently dishonest "list" with which Breitbart is trying to smear Occupy as rapists. Sadly, it appears his people's efforts consisted of finding stories in which both the word "Occupy" and some report of sexual misconduct.

It doesn't look like anybody bothered to read the links. Nearly every one of the stories shows Occupy participants were the victims and not the alleged perpetrators, or the incidents had nothing to do with Occupy.

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You heard me.

In any other context, I'd be calling on Michael Bloomberg to resign as Mayor of New York. The ham-handed handling of Occupy Wall Street by Bloomberg and his minions, from its first week to last night, reflects the kind of short-sightedness and ignorance of this country's laws, history, and principles, that can truly only be offered by a man with an obscenely large amount of money and an obscenely small amount of conscience.

But history tells us that the dumber The Establishment gets, the more obvious its repression becomes, and the more popular it makes the movements it seeks to crush. In short:

Democracy has been protected, not merely by the strenuous efforts of those of us who cherish it. But mostly, and most profoundly, by the limitless stupidity of those who would ration it, keep it for themselves and themselves alone -- or destroy it.
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I'm glad this is the compromise. I would have hated to have seen the capitulation.

UPDATE: Here's the link to the video (I tried to embed; things bloweded up).

President Obama's greatest vulnerability in this tragic debt deal is not that he might appear to have failed, or appear to have abandoned the principles demanded of any humane president (let alone of a Democrat). His true risk is that he and the form of government he heads have suddenly begun to appear utterly, irredeemably, irrelevant.

Tonight, after my guests, including Congressman Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), the head of The Congressional Black Caucus and the coiner of the memorable 'Satan sandwich' phrase, Kos his ownself, and Al Gore, have had their say, I will have mine.

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I'm cross-posting this from our Current website because, well, because.

And because the Murdoch Phone-Hacking Scandal may have just metastasized.

The so-called "Climate-Gate" controversy - in which e-mails about Global Warming were stolen from researchers at Britain's University of East Anglia in November, 2009 - now turns out to bear the stamp of Neil Wallis, one of the key figures in Murdoch's hacking of the phones, voicemails, and other electronic communications of thousands of people.

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Long time no diary.

And sorry about that: it may have seemed like time off, but it was all rather like launching a Moon Mission on four months' notice, including building the space center and putting your own heinie in the capsule. My apologies.

I rejoin you here today to propose that the Debt Ceiling "talks" have been viewed almost entirely through the wrong end of the telescope. We - this President included - have nuanced ourselves to death about Chained Colas and 14th Amendment remedies, while burying the macro viewpoint: What is the purpose of this or any other nation if not to defend its people?

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During my suspension weekend before last I got an email from the delightfully and improbably named Autumn Brewington, inviting me to contribute an Op-Ed piece to The Washington Post on the topic of journalistic objectivity (and, I’m assuming, how political contributions or mere identification fit into that sphere). Discretion being the better part of valor, I had to turn down all requests for comment at that point. Vanity being the better part of me, I have to assume she then turned to the former ABC anchor Ted Koppel.

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The full list through which I waded -- all the while remembering Michael Palin’s warning to his fellow insurrectionaries from the movie Life Of Brian that they’d be traveling through Pilate’s sewer (“so don’t wear your good sandals”) – was twice, perhaps three times as long as the 32 finalists I selected for the latest Special Comment.

They left me with a headache and a dim view of the future, and a reminder that some of them will become elected officials of our government on Tuesday, not because Democrats and Liberals acted too boldly nor too emphatically nor too loudly, but because they compromised with those who see compromise only as weakness and opportunity. Last year many of us hoped we had an entered a time when the rhetoric could be tamped down and the edges softened. And the Right’s response was to move further to the Right than the rest of us moved towards the middle. You do not have to extrapolate very far from what John Boehner and other GOP leaders have said about compromise, to the Swiftian conclusion (I am being consciously hyperbolic here) that the goal of the Right and the Corporations is not to compromise any more than is necessary to offer us a choice of sauces to be served in after they figuratively kill us and eat us.

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Not long after the National Review fluffed him, the Republican Tea Party candidate for the House in the Texas 30th went where one of these playground bullies inevitably had to go. Per the Dallas Morning News, Stephen Broden told WFAA-TV in Dallas that if his side doesn't get what it wants, it's time for violence:

“We have a constitutional remedy. And the framers say if that don’t work, revolution.”

Did Broden - laughably described as a 'pastor' - really mean to imply that the violent overthrow of the United States government was something to be considered?

“The option is on the table. I don’t think that we should remove anything from the table as it relates to our liberties and our freedoms. However, it is not the first option.”

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Of all the Orwellian inside-out euphemisms of the Conservatives, Tea Partiers, and Republicans, perhaps none of them can match -- for sheer audacity or sheer perversion of meaning -- the GOP’s flag-waving crusade to protect those little people, those hard-fighting diminutive economic engines, those “Small Businesses.” They portray this battle as David versus Goliath, the weak versus the powerful, small business versus big government.

“Small Business” is, in short, a brand name.

What American voters hear when the phrase is used, could not be further from reality. I don’t know if any of you saw the twenty or so minutes we gave to this topic last night on Countdown, but before I adapt liberally from the script, let me sum it up thusly:

The Tribune Company is a “Small Business.” So is the company that makes Tabasco Sauce. So are most of the companies controlled by the guy who owns the L.A. Lakers.

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...and I don't pretend to be Emile Zola.

But sitting on vacation, paying half-attention to the unfolding story of Shirley Sherrod, it slowly dawned on me that this saga of deep and soul-less deceit on the part of the Right Wing Media bore more than passing resemblance to the persecution of the innocent French Army Captain in 1894. The false conviction of Alfred Dreyfus so rent asunder that nation that some French historians believe it set in motions the events that led to France's political futility in the face of the German onslaught in the late 1930's and especially 1940.

So guess who started paying full attention, and is not on vacation tonight, for about twelve minutes, around 8:48 Eastern Daylight Time? Ordinarily I like to excerpt some parts of these Special Comments here but a) I'm pressed for commuting time, and b) the final script has yet to be vetted and I don't want to print anything that might not get read verbatim on the air. You know, living up to the ideal journalistic standards of Andrew Breitbart.

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Wed Jul 14, 2010 at 02:15 PM PDT

Deconstructing Rush Limbaugh

by Keith Olbermann

The universal condemnation of the windbag's grievously timed exploitation of the death of the New York Yankees baseball team owner George Steinbrenner, has evidently found its way through and struck a nerve.

The classless hatemonger has respondedto the inquiries of an actual journalist, Michael Calderone of Yahoo! News, as to why he would say such a thing just hours after Steinbrenner's death from an unanticipated heart attack.

To refresh you, here's what Limbaugh said yesterday:

George Steinbrenner has passed away at age 80. That cracker made a lot of African-American millionaires. He -- George Steinbrenner, the classic capitalist, everybody around him became wealthy. Like most successful capitalists, he made the people around him wealthy, and a lot of African-American millionaires along the way, and at the same time he fired a bunch of white guys as managers, left and right.

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