Yep - in your case, soaking your brain in alcohol might help!!

I'm not fond of Olbermann and Maddow's backing of Dems, but Olbermann's Special Comments on a number of issues have been brilliant. I will never forget his summation of the Bush President in 8 minutes. I am sure he would do equally well with Obama. He is clearly a single-payer advocate and made a special comment on this at the beginning of the whole sordid mess that was HCR. He talked about the separation of health care (insurance) from the workplace, people staying at jobs just for the benefits, a situation that could be crushing their creativity or an ambition to start a new business. I don't know if anyone remembers this. And although he backed Dems they were definitely progressive Dems. I'm sure if they had been Blue Dogs there would have no problem. Maybe at the moment he lacks the imagination of a third party or truly doesn't believe it's possible and therefore ... I don't know, but I do know that he has been an important voice.

I haven't listened to Maddow and Olbermann in many months, so I'm not saying this as a major fan, just someone who believes that an important voice is being silenced here. There are no more progressive viewpoints at PBS that I know of, with the ending of Bill Moyers and NOW (thrilled that Brancaccio is doing special reporting for Marketplace), and NPR's flagship shows, what a joke.

Moonpie,
Bravo!

Some of your comment was true. But I don't think he was in favor of the illegal invasions or of the dums continuing to fund them. However, I did quit watching him and Rachel because they are like soap operas. Tattletelling on the naughty thugs and their affairs. His fixaction with the the Fox loonies was stupid. Not sure what he said about Wililesks but you never heard much of Haiti or all the other counties national disasters and the abandonment of the people. Not much NEWS was delivered. He was better on the US atrocities when Bush was in office but did seem to give Obama a pass on torture and detentions.
Amy Goodman is the best since Moyers retired.
Rachel used to but sold out.

Fair enough - I should have said semi-sane. Or, sane compared to the other talking heads (some comparison that is).

The point remains - the firing is political. It is another move to the right for the corporate media.

Cheers.

moonpie - you have an anger problem. I suggest you stay away from the blogs for a couple of weeks. The rest will probably do you a world of good.

Brilliant, albeit sad, comment.

Do GE washers get out bloodstains? Not any more. They're now made in China and as we know, "The East is Red." (And you have to be an oldster to know that!)

"MSNBC claimed they let Donahue go due to low ratings-- but I never bought that."

His was, in fact, the top-rated show on MSNBC at the time. They replaced him with Joe Scarborough, who drew half his audience, but who told the story NBC wanted people to hear.

Donahue had been subjected to extensive editorial interference by MSNBC--by the end, they were insisting that conservatives, on the show, had to outnumber liberals 3-to-1. Then Donahue was fired, and a leaked internal memo basically gave away that it was because of his criticism of Bush and the coming Iraq war.

---
Left Hook!
http://lefthooktheblog.blogspot.com/

Ray Duray,
THANK YOU!

Hey Ray - the subject is Olbermann's shafting, not Obama's spinelessness and political expedience. If you want to criticize Olbermann, do it and leave the harping for another more appropriate blog. This constant wanking by CD's is getting annoying. Do something constructive - go out and start a new political party.

I did a lookup in Google of "O'Donnell too liberal Obama" for your remark "Lawrence O'Donnell just reported the other day that Obama and the Dems took a hard hit because Obama is too liberal" comment. I came up with your comment here on CD and an O'Donnell Last Word line "Or did the democrats lose because they were too liberal."

http://www.livedash.com/transcript/the_last_word_with_lawrence_o'donnell/52/MSNBC/Wednesday
_November_3_2010/328299/

That looks like a question to me. Your remark has the look and feel of a Breitbart exegesis.

With all due respect, Chelsey, your denunciation of MSNBC for its alleged hypocrisy is an almost perfect example of the conceptually perfect functioning as the enemy of the functional better-than-awful.

And to denounce Lawrence O'Donnell and Ed Schultz as "phony corporate liberals paid hacks" is not only to misunderstand the huge value of their contributions; it is also to implicitly tar Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann with the same inappropriate brush.

Indeed such denunciation is rather like damning the White Rose society as hypocritical because it "merely" opposed Hitler rather than opposing all things German.

By way of explanation, my generation of U.S. journalists (those of us born c. 1900-1945) mostly came from Working Class backgrounds. Typically we went into newspaper reporting and/or broadcast news because we recognized it was the one sure way somebody who was not part of the already all-powerful (and already mostly hereditary) capitalist aristocracy might actually be able to improve the quality of Working Class life in general.

The possibility of comforting the afflicted (and thus afflicting the comfortable) was very real.

Such pivotal moments were not every-day occurrences, but they did happen, and they occurred often enough that work on a major metro daily was (as a colleague of mine put it), "a helluva lot more productive than slaving away in an insurance office."

In my own career, which spanned slightly more than half a century, there were at least a dozen such episodes.

Beyond the aforementioned expose' of the heroin-addiction epidemic and its cover-up, the most memorable of the associated stories include:

My career-destroying refusal to cooperate with a carefully pre-planned, potentially ruinous slandering of civil rights workers by The Knoxville Journal (the incident that resulted in my arrest in The Journal's newsroom on 2 June 1963 and my termination notice on Page One of the next day's paper but helped save "forty Negroes and whites" from conviction on trumped-up "sex orgy" charges);

Disclosure in 1977 via a small, now-defunct community newspaper that Washington state's Democratic Governor Dixy Lee Ray was so defiantly contemptuous of the environment and environmentalists, she was buying luxury limousines for her department heads – including a chauffeur-driven limo for her welfare honcho (the original “welfare Cadillac?”) plus an equally ostentatious gas guzzler, the "ecology limo," for the head of the Department of Ecology; (my story – another of my investigative reports that was eventually picked up by The New York Times – halted the limousine-buying policy and earned me a permanent place on Governor Ray's enemies list);

Revelation via the same newspaper in 1978 that the authors of a Washington state "anti-pornography" initiative had secretly written the measure as a tool for closing gay and singles bars; (my reporting not only defeated the initiative, which had been well ahead in the polls when the story broke, but earned me a much-cherished letter of commendation from the American Civil Liberties Union);

Exposure the same year via the same paper of how Christian misogyny prompted a major church-owned hospital in the Seattle suburbs to refuse to treat rape victims for fear accommodating them would damage the hospital's reputation as a “good Christian institution”; (my story forced the hospital to reverse its policy and compelled cooperation with the local rape-relief organization in training emergency room personnel);

Revelation via the Internet in 1995 – this after six months of research – that the real U.S. “welfare queens” are the welfare bureaucrats themselves, who from 1970 through 1990 increased welfare administrative costs by 5,390 percent (not a typo) even as they slashed stipends and services to the poor by 66 percent.

My point Chelsey is that you could no doubt call me or anyone else employed by Ruling Class Media “phony corporate liberals paid hacks” but some of us nevertheless do the best we can.

Meanwhile Ruling Class Media is (A) the only show in town and (B) is demonstrably far more effective (by its lingering power to expose and embarrass oppressors) than all the legions of demonstrators combined: note for example the impact of the Pentagon Papers (huge) versus that of years of anti-Vietnam War demonstrations (negligible).

The biggest difference between journalism when I entered it – I got my first newspaper job in 1956 at age 16, as a copy boy and sports stringer for The Grand Rapids Herald – and journalism today is that it is no longer open to Working Class kids like I was.

In 1956 you could go directly from copy boy to reporter and eventually even to editor without having to pass through the socioeconomic-exclusion process of a four-year college degree. Today to get where I did – even on the smaller (and thus relatively insignificant) publications to which I was limited after the Knoxville incident – would be impossible without a degree, which I didn't get until 1976 (and then only because of the G.I. Bill).

Indeed this methodical exclusion of Working Class men and women in favor of the academic bourgeoisie elite is precisely why people like Mr. Olbermann are so rare in both print and broadcast journalism.

When I entered journalism, 95 percent of the nation's news outlets were independently owned. Now the same percentage is divided amongst six capitalist monopolies.

And when the monopolies took over, they imposed Big Business hiring practices – personnel screening carefully designed to eliminate anyone who is not a slavishly obedient, abjectly conformist rat-minded back-stabber.

That's why we should be damn thankful there's even a handful of people like Mr. Olbermann or Ms. Maddow or Messrs. O'Donnell and Schultz anywhere in journalism at all. It's also why the ouster of Mr. Olbermann is such a monumental tragedy.

From what I gather, KO signed a contract with MSNBC that he would not participate in political donations.
Evidently, he broke his contract.

MSNBC are hypocrites as they own GE who funds wars.
I have no sympathy for KO or MSNBC--or for the whole M$M for that matter.