In today's "This Is One of the Scariest Things I've Ever Read" segment, a Kos Kid thinks MSNBC's Keith Olbermann is trustworthy, fair, and unbiased.

Feels like Halloween, doesn't it?

Unfortunately, in this love letter to the "Countdown" host that amazingly made Daily Kos's recommended diaries list, that was just the tip of the iceberg:

In today's "Does His Ego Know No Bounds?" segment, Keith Olbermann warned Daily Kos readers on Friday that they should not post diaries or comments critical of him for it strengthens the Right.

As NewsBusters Mitchell Blatt reported Friday, a diary was posted at Daily Kos on July 18 that bashed the "Countdown" host for just attacking Republicans and not doing any real news.

Olbermann clearly was displeased, and posted a response that was two parts Narcissus and one part Norman Bates (h/t Hot Air):

Just about a year ago, Keith Olbermann recorded his first major victory over Bill O’Reilly.

Over the first week of June, 2008, Olbermann beat O’Reilly in the 25- to 54-year-old demographic for the first time.

“We’re growing, and he’s regressed,” Olbermann said to the New York Times in an email.

Like most of what he says, that turned out being wildly inaccurate.

One year later, Olbermann is posting his lowest ratings of the year, down 26% from last year, and even liberals at the Huffington Post and Daily Kos are starting to disparage him.

On Wednesday’s Countdown show, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann crossed a line that political commentators and other partisan public figures normally do not traverse as they criticize political figures with whom they disagree -- he engaged in name-calling against the average voters who elected his political targets. During the show's regular "Worst Person in the World" segment, Olbermann referred to voters as "idiots" and "buffoons" who voted into office two Republican legislators – Congressman Randy Neugebauer of Texas and State Representative Cynthia Davis of Missouri, whom he also called an "inhuman monster" for expressing her views in opposition to government welfare.

Because Neugebauer -- who is co-sponsoring a bill requiring future Presidents to present a birth certificate to prove legal U.S. citizenship -- answered with uncertainty when he was asked whether he believes President Obama is a U.S. citizen, Olbermann recounted the Congressman's response and snapped: "The people who elected you are obviously idiots. That does not mean everybody else is."

On Monday’s Countdown show on MSNBC, as host Keith Olbermann and NBC News correspondent Richard Engel discussed the apparent murder of 27-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan by Iranian government forces as part of the crackdown against pro-democracy protesters, and the possibility that she will become the visual symbol for her country’s pro-democracy movement because her death was recorded, Engel brought up the infamous Mohammed al-Dura video clip from September 2000 and claimed that the Palestinian boy was shot and killed by Israeli troops – as if this story were not in dispute – even though many who have examined the case closely over the years believe not only that the boy was not hit by Israeli bullets, but that the video purporting to document his shooting and death was likely a hoax.

The exchange from Monday's Countdown show, in which both Engel and Olbermann assumed the al-Dura story to be undisputed:

KEITH OLBERMANN: To the point of Neda Soltan, I don’t know that there’s ever been a revolution, or even a near revolution, that did not have an identifiable face, a martyr, you think of everything from Tiananmen Square to Lexington and Concord-

RICHARD ENGEL: I was thinking more, remember Mohammed al-Dura, the boy who was shot in Gaza-

OLBERMANN: Yes, yes.

ENGEL: -in his father’s arms-

OLBERMANN: Yes.

ENGEL: -and who became a symbol of injustice? I think this is a similar moment.

On Monday’s Countdown show, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann slammed Jonah Goldberg of the National Review during the show’s "Worst Person in the World" segment because Goldberg complained about the treatment of neoconservatives by liberals, as the National Review Online editor recently charged that "mainstream liberalism and other outposts of paranoid Bush hatred have portrayed neoconservatives – usually code for conservative Jews and other supporters of Israel – as an alien, pernicious cabal."

Olbermann, who has a history of blaming conservatives like Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly for violent acts by extremists, accused the "far right" of "enabling" recent murders, and then claimed not to have ever heard the term "neocons" associated with a particular "religious or ethnic group." He went on to suggest that the word "neocon" may really be code for "belligerence, pig headedness, stupidity, wasteful, indifference to human life," and "paranoid."

Olbermann:

If you've ever wondered why the mainstream media didn't show much curiosity about how 20 years of attending Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church shaped President Barack Obama, there is a perfectly logical explanation. Obama wasn't really there.

According to Richard Wolffe, an MSNBC contributor and former Newsweek columnist that covered the Obama presidential campaign for the weekly magazine, people don't have to worry about the rantings and ravings of Obama's controversial preacher having any impact on his world view because he wasn't there.

Wolffe, in an appearance at the Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. on June 15 promoting his book about Obama, "Renegade," told the audience the president wasn't naïve about Wright - he was ignorant.

On Tuesday’s Countdown show, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann suggested that President Obama’s speech in Cairo may have been responsible for the defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon’s parliamentary elections which occurred a few days after the speech. But as Olbermann discussed the possibility that Obama had a hand in the results, he neglected to inform viewers that the apparent 71 out of 128 seats won by pro-Western candidates in 2009 is nearly identical to the 72 won in the last such round of elections in 2005.

During the show’s opening teaser, Olbermann brought up Obama’s speech: "The Cairo effect: Did this already pay off practically?"

After a clip of Obama’s speech, the MSNBC host continued: "Three days later, voters in Lebanon elected an American-backed coalition instead of a Hezbollah-backed coalition."

"Countdown" host Keith Olbermann Friday evening accused Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin of using her daughters, as well as the brouhaha surrounding jokes made about them by "Late Show" host David Letterman, to further her political career.

In a twelve minute segment about the former vice presidential candidate, Olbermann called her, "Sanctimonious, holier than thou, exploitative, undignified, pedantic, childish, self-inflicting, insipid, backwards, embarrassing, over-reactive, overreaching" as well as a "delusional lunatic."

Potentially even more disgraceful, in Olbermann's almost unimaginably perverted view, Letterman is actually "the victim" who has "continued to take the high road" in this sordid affair.

The video of this disgusting attack is embedded below the fold with a full transcript:

As both Noel Sheppard and I reported recently, General Electric boss Jeffrey Immelt faced a tough crowd at GE's annual stockholder's meeting in April.

First, Project 21 Fellow Deneen Borelli asked if media reports that Immelt had tried to silence anti-Obama reporting on GE-owned networks are true. During her dialogue with Immelt, her microphone was cut off (it was restored after she continued talking anyway).

MSNBC’s Tamron Hall attempted to justify multiple stories on Rush Limbaugh supposedly comparing Barack Obama to Al Qaeda: "We have a right to cover people who are speaking out...Many people listen to this man, and we have a responsibility to report all sides and you can't try to duck and hide, throw the rock and then hide in the bush."

Hall was responding to criticism by Republican strategist Alex Conant, who, in the 4PM hour on Thursday, pointed out MSNBC’s excessive coverage of Rush: "Well, let me just make an observation. Two weeks ago, Rush Limbaugh challenged this network, MSNBC, to go a whole month without repeating his name, and this is like the fifth segment you guys have had this afternoon talking about Rush-" Hall immediately interrupted: "Oh, you know – okay, that's ridiculous, absolutely. You know, I don't know if you've ever, ever watched Keith Olbermann, who just obliterated Rush Limbaugh on this topic."

The segment with Conant, opposite liberal talk radio host Bill Press, was the third story MSNBC had done on Rush’s comments on Thursday. Hall herself had covered the story only an hour earlier, with liberal blogger Peter Slutsky and conservative Brian Faughnan from Redstate.com. During that segment in the 3PM hour, Hall asked Slutsky: "...do the Republican leadership, conservatives out there, need to speak out against this kind of language? I cannot imagine, you know, if there was a liberal blogger who had compared George W. Bush directly to Al Qaeda or some of the other language that’s coming out recently."

MSNBC’s partisan-in-chief Keith Olbermann used his “Worst Person in the World” segment on Thursday evening to falsely accuse pro-life blogger Jill Stanek of posting the “addresses of the only two remaining physicians who will provide late-term abortions when the woman’s life is in danger,” thus enabling “a bunch of crazy people, like your readers, where they can find somebody and abuse, threaten, or kill them.”

Stanek actually did not post addresses of the two abortionsts, LeRoy Carhart and Warren Hern, in the two items in which she included pictures of Cahart’s drab-looking center. The former nurse, who achieved notoriety for her testimony about the exposure deaths of infants who survived their late-term abortions at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois, pointed out in her retort to Olbermann that the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press had done the something similar- posting pictures of both physicians’ centers. She also snarked back that “Keith had best make Google the ‘Worst Search Engine in the World!’ for posting a map and directions to Carhart’s Abortion & Contraception Clinic of Nebraska and Hern’s Boulder Abortion Clinic.”

Keith Olbermann’s Fox News-hating frenzy on Monday night might have obscured the nasty accusations against pro-lifers Olbermann drew out of Richard Wolffe, who recently left his job as a political reporter at Newsweek to be a full-time MSNBC pundit.

Wolffe said Tiller’s killing had a "direct link" to people yelling "Kill him" at McCain-Palin rallies and insisted pro-lifers need to look themselves hard in the mirror and ask themselves "Have I played a part" in Tiller’s death by charging that Tiller "committed horrendous acts"?

Wolffe also insisted Republicans were hypocrites for objecting to "Muslim terrorism" while encouraging terrorism against abortion doctors, since that's a natural "result" of abortion protests:

OLBERMANN: The homeland security secretary, Ms. Napolitano, bowed to Republican outrage in April, apologizing for that DHS assessment that warned of violent acts by right-wing extremists - are the Republicans in Congress still of the belief that the threat of right-wing extremist violence is some sort of fantasy out of the Obama administration?

In the very heart of the pro-life community, there is nothing they wanted less than another shooting of an abortionist. An unhinged vigilante's shooting of notorious Kansas late-term abortion "provider" George Tiller prompted an avalanche of press releases from pro-life groups denouncing the killing.

Why bother? Let's face it. The national media had zero interest in spotlighting a pro-life spokesman expressing horror, because let's face it, they don't believe it. Instead, as with ABC, they found anonymous citizens on the website Twitter saying "Oh, happy, day. Tiller the baby killer is dead." Another wrote, "God bless the gunman."

It was time for a barrage of liberal mudslinging. Keith Olbermann started his MSNBC program with these words: "A religious jihad by fundamentalist crusaders who believe that murder is justified, their acts of violence having the intended effect of changing behavior. Our fifth story on the Countdown: Not the Taliban, not Hamas, not al Qaeda."

Although not at all surprising, the far-left in America are pointing fingers at Fox News personalities – in particular, Bill O’Reilly – for the murder of abortion Dr. George Tiller.

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Monday night’s “Countdown” even went so far as to place the blame squarely on FNC’s shoulders stating, “Fox News Channel will never restrain itself from incitement to murder and terrorism…the goal here is to get this blindly irresponsible man [O’Reilly] and his ilk off the air.”

The seemingly untenable position being espoused is since O’Reilly and other FNCers spoke critically of Tiller’s abortionist practices, they were complicit in encouraging alleged assailant Scott Roeder to perform this heinous act.

This raises an important question: as Olbermann and his ilk on MSNBC and throughout the liberal blogosphere routinely referred to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as murderers, would they have been responsible if someone had assassinated either of these former White House members?

While the far left is blaming Bill O’Reilly and the pro-life movement for the death of George Tiller, another shooting has left military recruiter William Long dead at the hands of an anti-military Muslim convert.

Mainstream liberals like Keith Olbermann and news sources like NBC have already blamed O'Reilly for Tiller's death, as have websites like Salon, the Huffington Post, and the Daily Kos.

Markos Moulitsas may have celebrated the deaths of Blackwater fighters and wished for a similar fate for Michelle Malkin, but nevermind that.

Last Wednesday, Keith Olbermann falsely compared statements Samuel Alito made during his 2006 Supreme Court confirmation hearings to the now controversial and seemingly racist remark Sonia Sotomayor uttered during a 2001 speech.

In her lecture to the Boalt School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, Barack Obama's nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter said, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

By contrast, Alito in 2006 talked about his background indeed impacting his decisions, but never said that would make him "more often than not reach a better conclusion than" women of a different race.

Olbermann, as he so often does with his agenda-driven drivel, missed this obvious distinction (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript):

Michael Calderone over at Politico has the scoop on CNN's fall from grace these days with cable news viewers. Reporting that "since Obama took office, CNN's prime-time audience had dropped sharply," Calderone gives us the grim details of CNN's struggle to keep it's audience.

The upshot of the story seems to be that CNN is being out liberaled by MSNBC. The hard-left programing of MSNBC seems to be drawing viewers away from CNN with CNN finding itself lately in the unfamiliar role of being considered the "centrist" network. This only shows how far left MSNBC truly is.

CNN is also alarmed that its top anchors, Anderson Cooper and Campbell Brown, are floundering in the ratings.

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 Purple Heart Association was obtained by the Gawker. Shafran was trying to get a veteran to conduct the waterboarding and when Kupcinet agreed to find one, she sent him the following e-mail:

You are a ROCK STAR!!!

It is going to have to look "real" but of course would be simulated with Mancow acting like he is drowning. It will be a hoax but have to look real. Would be great if they could dress in fatigues and bring whatever is needed. We will supply the water.

Are the Fox News Channel and MSNBC bad for America?

Such was implied on CNN's "Reliable Sources" Sunday when host Howard Kurtz invited the Baltimore Sun's David Zurawik, "USA Today Live's" Lauren Ashburn, and the BBC's Matt Frei on his program to discuss the "increasingly partisan nature of cable news."

By the end of the conversation, Ashburn said "[T]he bottom line is this is not good for society," and Zurawik agreed: "That's absolutely right...The effect on society and on this democracy of this angry, polarizing, bitter kind of putdown conversation is dangerous."

Not surprisingly, Kurtz and his guests didn't include CNN amongst the partisans, with the host making sure to regularly inform his audience that "CNN, by and large, tries to play things down the middle, with liberal and conservative guests taking each other on." 

Despite the obvious bashing of competitors while falsely holding his employer up as the model of impartial journalism on cable, the discussion was actually quite interesting (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript, relevant section begins at 11:44 with commentary to follow):

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann has said a lot of disgraceful things in his tenure as "Countdown" host, but on Thursday evening, he attacked former Vice President Dick Cheney in a fashion that should make all of America's enemies both here and abroad proud.

To give you an idea of the level of hatred and invective on display, this was the opening sentence of Olbermann's "Special Comment" concerning Cheney's speech to the American Enterprise Institute Thursday:

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; the former vice president has today humiliated himself beyond redemption.

But that was just the beginning, for moments later, Olbermann said Cheney was "culpable, morally, ethically" for 9/11:  "At best, you are guilty of malfeasance and eternally lasting stupidity. At worst, sir, in the deaths of 9/11, you are negligent."

What follows is a video of this abomination along with a full transcript, some lowlights, and videos of Cheney's actual speech:

The L.A. Times is reporting that CNN's star talker Anderson Cooper has seen his ratings in a steady decline all year. It's so bad that MSNBC's Keith Olbermann is starting to gain on Cooper's numbers for the first time ever.

MSNBC is still at the bottom of the Cable barrel, but with Cooper's plummeting ratings, MSNBC is suddenly looking competitive.

As he appeared as a guest on Thursday’s Countdown show on MSNBC to discuss Joe the Plumber’s recent criticism of the Republican party, Newsweek’s Richard Wolffe started off by suggesting that Republicans had "lost their heart" in the 1980s and had "lost their mind" in the 1990s. Wolffe: "You know, if they lost their heart in the 1980s, and they lost their mind in the 1990s, what we've seen in the 2000s is Republicans losing their image, and they lost it on national security."

Wolffe later demeaned the intelligence of participants in the recent Tax Day Tea Parties, whom he referred to as "tea baggers," and charged that they want to "have their cake and eat it." Wolffe:

Keith Olbermann, who in March scolded Fox News's Brit Hume for admitting that he often used information provided by the Media Research Center in his "Special Report" program, has once again channeled material taken directly from the far-left, George Soros funded, Clinton front-group Media Matters for America.

Even better, the story was actually precipitated by an article read on the air Friday afternoon during -- wait for it!!! -- Rush Limbaugh's radio show.

But before we get there, embedded below the fold is the video and partial transcript from Friday evening's "Countdown" on MSNBC:

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.

In late March 2009, Ratigan left CNBC for destinations unknown, but on May 6 it was announced he would begin hosting a show CNBC's sister network, MSNBC. Ratigan appeared on MSNBC's May 6 "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," not only to preview his new show, but comment on Bristol Palin, daughter of former GOP Vice Presidential candidate and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, and her campaign promoting abstinence.

"The thing that really stands out to me with this, because the hypocrisy is obvious - it's as obvious as a closeted gay senator voting against gay marriage," Ratigan said. "There's a prevalence in politics of this type of behavior, unfortunately. That's why the conversations like the one we're now having exist."

On Thursday’s Countdown show, Michael Musto of the Village Voice made an appearance 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, Musto cracked: "They also paid for Carrie to cut off her penis, and sand her Adam`s Apple and get a head to toe waxing. I know for a fact that Carrie Prejean was Harry Prejean, a homophobic man, who liked marriage so much, he did it three times. Now he`s a babe who needs a brain implant. Maybe they could inject some fat from her butt. Oh, they have?

Has General Electric's news division at MSNBC officially announced its unequivocal support for the far-left in this nation while abandoning what little remains of its journalistic integrity?

Before answering, consider that during Monday's "Countdown," a new GOP logo, created for the perilously liberal website Daily Kos, was used  in a hit piece thoroughly disparaging the Republican Party.

Is this really what the good folks at GE think qualifies as journalism (video embedded below the fold, h/t Johnny Dollar):

It appears the love MSNBC feels towards Barack Obama is not unrequited, for last Wednesday, a member of the Administration actually declared in public, "At the White House, as we always like to say, we love MSNBC."

Such occurred at the Atlantic Council Awards Dinner hosted by "Morning Joe"'s Joe Scarborough and Mike Brzezinski.

After they introduced special assistant to President Obama for the arts and culture Kareem Dale, he began (video embedded below the fold, relevant section at 1:50, h/t Hot Air):

On Wednesday’s Countdown show, which aired at 9:00 p.m. after President Obama's news conference, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann viciously slammed Republican Congresswoman Virginia Foxx for claiming that murder victim Matthew Shepard – whom the current hate crimes bill is named after – was targeted out of a desire to commit robbery rather than because of anti-gay sentiment by his attacker, contradicting the conventional wisdom that the grisly murder was a hate crime. The MSNBC host was so outraged at the North Carolina congresswoman that he named her as the night’s "Worst Person in the World" and showed particular venom toward her, even suggesting she should resign. Olbermann: "She is at best callous, insensitive, criminally misinformed. At worst she is a bald-faced liar. And if there is a spark of a human being in there somewhere, she should either immediately retract and apologize for her stupid and hurtful words or she should resign her seat in the House."

On the 11:00 p.m. special edition of Hardball, Chris Matthews and guests Joan Walsh of Salon and MSNBC political analyst Michelle Bernard also lambasted Foxx for her claim, with Walsh contending that she was either "lying" or "ignorant," and Matthews calling Foxx’s words "rough stuff." Walsh: "She's a hoax, Chris. She disgraced herself today. That was inaccurate. And what I really don't know is whether she’s lying – she knows the facts and she’s lying – or whether she’s so ignorant and arrogant that she didn’t need to delve into the facts."

But, on the November 26, 2004, 20/20, ABC host Elizabeth Vargas ran a report in which a number of figures tied to the case, including the prosecutor, were interviewed, and made a credible case that Shepard was targeted by Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson not because of anti-gay sentiment, but because McKinney was high on methamphetamines, giving him unusual violent tendencies as well as a desire for cash to buy more drugs. Vargas not only found that a meth high can lead to the kind of extreme violence perpetrated against Shepard, but that McKinney had gone on to similarly attack another man, causing a skull fracture, very soon after his attack on Shepard. Additionally, McKinney’s girlfriend and another friend of McKinney’s even claimed that McKinney himself has bisexual tendencies, although McKinney himself denied it.

Vargas appeared on the November 19, 2004, The O’Reilly Factor on FNC and summarized her findings:

Playing off Keith Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World" shtick, some clever fellow started a petition recently at WorstBailoutIntheWorld.com calling on the "Countdown" host to return his recent pay raise to "Turbo Tax" Tim Geithner's Treasury Department. (h/t NewsBusters contributor Amy Menefee; see related story here)

The petition's full wording:

Dear Mr. Olbermann,

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 bailouts, yet you yourself have no problem engaging in the same “class economic rape” that you accuse them of.