“

The Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, who said he had been “banned” from MSNBC for a year, will also be a contributor to the new “Countdown.” (Mr. Griffin sidelined Mr. Moulitsas for spreading innuendo about Joe Scarborough.) While MSNBC “has pretended to be the progressive network,” Mr. Moulitsas said, “they are conservative in terms of who they have on and what they can say.” Referring to Mr. Olbermann’s new show, he said, “I think that Current recognizes that there is a real opportunity here for a network that has a real diversity of opinions and voices.”

Mr. Olbermann, always pleased to pick a fight, clearly wants to foster competition. To Rolling Stone this month, he said “we’re going to take MSNBC’s business away from them,” a comment that Mr. Griffin chalked up to strategic posturing.

“Look,” he said in an interview on Friday, “everybody has a strategy, and that is purely a strategy. I’m talking about reality, and the reality is that we’ve never been stronger.”

”

At New Network, Olbermann Sets Sights on MSNBC - NYTimes.com
  • The New York Times

“It was sort of a perfect storm. Democrats don’t support their own in these situations. Republicans love to be on the right side of a scandal like this, because it doesn’t happen that often. And you get the media, and particularly the political media, most of whom are morons. So you give them something that they can actually understand — a penis.” - Keith Olbermann on the Anthony Weiner scandal.

RawStory

“

Several supposed Liberals have demanded that Weiner resign immediately because of the difficult position in which he has placed the minority leader, as if Weiner’s contributions to Progressive causes in this country were insignificant and irrelevant.

Even public opinion polls have, well – what else? – an opinion. Only 30% of New Yorkers in a Marist Poll said he should resign, while nearly two thirds of them said he apologized only because he got caught.

And, of course, odious blackmailers like Andrew Breitbart have said Weiner and other liberals are hypocrites. He in particular added he was holding back additional photographs out of decency. And then he showed those photographs the next day. But Weiner is the hypocrite. This is to be remembered when Breitbart’s fall finally comes – prediction: it will involve handcuffs, and not in the way he might enjoy them.

Now, Minority Leader Pelosi and other leading House Democrats have done what their Republican colleagues would never do: they too have urged Weiner to resign, for what appears to be about the 45th worst sex scandal among politicians in the last five or six years. Senators Jon Ensign and David Vitter make Weiner look like a celibate, and we have yet to hear a Republican demand either of them go.

(…)

But if there is nothing further to the Weiner story, if what we know is all there is, I have actually done what so many fear to do these days, and sat around and thought about something for a week. And now I think I know what I think — not demand, not insist, not preach — Anthony Weiner should do.

For it, I turn improbably back to the man who put the “cant” back in “Cantor,” the House Majority Leader: Let the people decide.

”

Keith Olbermann, Advice To Anthony Weiner: Resign, Then Run Again

mohandasgandhi:

Keith Olbermann defended Michael Moore’s comments about the killing of Osama bin Laden—and criticized former MSNBC colleague Ed Schultz—in an online “Special Comment” posted to Olbermann’s website on Thursday.

Moore has received a boatload of criticism for his comments on CNN’s “Piers Morgan Tonight” about bin Laden’s death. He said that the killing showed that “we’ve lost something of our soul here in this country…something that separates us from other parts, other countries where we say everybody has their day in court.”

One of Moore’s critics was MSNBC’s Ed Schultz, who earlier this week devoted a segment to the filmmaker’s comments, and said, “the intellectual liberal hand-wringing needs to stop in this country.”

In his “Special Comment,” Olbermann said that he also disagreed with Moore (who was just named as a contributor to his upcoming Current TV show), and supported the killing.

“What I object to is those who want to silence those who disagree with me,” he said. “Michael’s points are right-on…I believe, with great regret, that the pragmatic circumstances of keeping bin Laden alive outweighed, very narrowly, what Michael is addressing. But for him to then be accused of ‘intellectual liberal hand-wringing’ by a supposedly liberal commentator on a supposedly liberal television network, is outrageous.”

Olbermann compared the reaction to Moore’s bin Laden comments to the atmosphere in the wake of 9/11 and in the run-up to the Iraq War.

“Do we want to go back to the way the media was in this country eight years and four days ago?” he said. “That to question the honesty of those in power is to find oneself painted as unpatriotically questioning the troops? Because that is where Michael Moore’s critics would lead us. I want hand-wringing over exactly who a President gets to kill. I want liberals to question other liberals. If the official story deviates at all from the facts, I want the official story questioned.”

Well said, sir.