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."

Should be interesting next time Joe Scarborough runs into the likes of Ed Schultz . . .

The Morning Joe host today slammed the hypocrisy of cable news hosts, specifically including some at MSNBC, for taking "unbridled glee" in Mark Sanford's disgrace.

Scarborough didn't name names, but he almost surely had Schultz, among others, in mind.  As I reported here, on his show last evening Schultz absolutely revelled in Sanford's distress, boasting "I have no mercy here" and using the most mocking of tones to describe the circumstances.  Was Joe also alluding to Keith Olbermann, who had considerable fun at Sanford's expense last night?

Here was Joe's statement of this morning . . .

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:

When four members of the media, only one of them decidely right-leaning, agree on something, viewers should pay heed: blaming conservative talk show hosts whenever someone goes on an unprovoked shooting spree is wrong.

Such was the unanimous conclusion reached on Sunday's "Reliable Sources" when host Howard Kurtz and his guests -- Mark Halperin of Time magazine, Ana Marie Cox of Air America Radio, and Jim Geraghty of National Review -- got together to discuss the predictable reaction to Wednesday's killings at the Holocaust Museum Memorial.

Most surprisingly, even the uber-liberal Cox concurred:

I do think it is irresponsible to make that a very like hard connection. I have to totally disagree with Rachel [Maddow] and Keith [Olbermann] on this. I think that that was going a little bit too far to compare him to Rush Limbaugh.

Imagine that. What follows is an embedded video of this surprising segment (relevant section at 12:00) along with a partial transcript:

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:

If your liberal friends are brazen enough to declare that not only do Fox News and Limbaugh and Hannity and Ingraham and Levin encourage "domestic terrorism" with their "militia-style" rants, but they also claim "media liberals don't traffic in irresponsible talk of murder and violence and terrorism," here's just a fraction from our Notable Quotables archives that ought to put a stop to it:

-- As a final crash of self-indulgent nonsense, when the incontrovertible truth of your panoramic and murderous deceit has even begun to cost your political party seemingly perpetual congressional seats....this advice, Mr. Bush: Shut the hell up! Good night and good luck." — MSNBC's Keith Olbermann in a "Special Comment" on Countdown, May 14, 2008.

-- "Good evening. A President who lied us into a war and, in so doing, needlessly killed 3,584 of our family and friends and neighbors." – Keith Olbermann on Countdown, July 2, 2007.

-- "I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact." – Host Bill Maher on his HBO show Real Time, March 2, 2007, discussing how a few commenters at a left-wing blog were upset that an attempt to kill Vice President Cheney in Afghanistan had failed.

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.”

It takes a big man to admit when he’s been bested. I have to say however, that after this one I had to walk away with my head hanging in shame.  You win this round, Mr Olbermann… You win this round. [video below page break]

In my defense however, I will say that Maddow came way out of left field with the double-teaming.  I personally found it to be distasteful… But well played on Maddow’s part.

On Thursday morning, NewsBusters' Tim Graham asked, "Mark Levin Says Damaging New Sotomayor Texts Emerging: Will Media Notice?"

Given the small amount of attention yesterday's revelation that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor made extremely similar derogatory comments about men back in 1994 as she did in 2001, the answer appears to be "No."

As most readers are aware, Sotomayor uttered the following roughly eight years ago during a lecture at Boalt Hall, the University of California, Berkeley's, law school:

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?

On Monday’s Countdown show, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann placed blame on FNC host Bill O’Reilly for inciting the recent murder of Dr. George Tiller, widely known for performing late-term abortions in Kansas. After showing a number of clips of O’Reilly and other FNC personalities attacking Tiller, Olbermann encouraged his viewers to request that businesses like restaurants that run FNC on their televisions change the channel because "Fox News Channel will never restrain itself from incitement to murder and terrorism – not until its profits begin to decline, when its growth stops." Referring to O’Reilly, he also declared that "the goal here, to get this blindly irresponsible man and his ilk off the air," and that "we must again make the world safe for people condemned by the Fox News Channel."

Below is a transcript of relevant portions of the Monday, June 1, Countdown show on MSNBC:

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.

Monday's Chicago Tribune featured the article "Powell 'still a Republican': Rebutting critics, he criticizes party's far right voices."  The article starts:

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell warned Sunday that ideological conservatives, particularly radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, have gained a hold over the Republican Party that risks driving the GOP into an extended exile from power.

Powell cast his warnings in unusually personal terms as he answered recent charges from two champions of the Republican right -- Limbaugh and former Vice President Dick Cheney -- that he was no longer a Republican.

"Rush will not get his wish, and Mr. Cheney was misinformed," said Powell, whose resume includes work as military adviser to President Ronald Reagan, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George H.W. Bush and President George W. Bush's Cabinet. "I am still a Republican."

Obviously, the "far right voices" referenced in the piece's headline are those of Limbaugh and Cheney.

If Rush Limbaugh is on the far right, surely MSNBC's Rachel Maddow qualifies to be characterized as far left.  Yet only last month, the Tribune carried an article from the Los Angeles Times (another Tribune newspaper) that asked this burning question about Maddow:

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):

For many years a common media meme has been that black people have to be Democrats and that African-Americans whose political views are even slightly right of center must either be addle-minded or crazy.

Janeane Garofalo in her disgusting interview with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann last month said anybody at April's Tea Parties that wasn't white had to be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. 

On Friday, Barbara Howard, a black, Republican media and government relations consultant from Florida, took on this absurd stereotype -- "I dare say that Miss Garofalo knows little or nothing about black folk and definitely not black Republicans" -- while claiming President Obama "thinks he knows more than everybody, including all 43 presidents before him."

In a South Florida Times op-ed marvelously titled "The Politics of Blackness: A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing," Howard discussed how Obama's healthcare proposal would have negatively impacted her recent stay in the hospital:

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.

On Monday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith and weatherman Dave Price described attending Saturday’s White House Correspondents Dinner and Smith commented on the controversial joke about Rush Limbaugh made by comedian Wanda Sykes: "She told a joke about Rush Limbaugh as being one of the -- one of the hijackers and the reason he didn't make the flight was because he was, you know, on drugs or whatever...And the whole place -- yeah -- so the whole place groaned, and I ran into Keith Olbermann afterwards...And he said 'I'm not sure, I think that was probably -- probably in bad taste.' I said 'what do you think her job is?’"

In one of many jokes attacking conservatives, Sykes remarked: "I think maybe Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker, but he was just so strung out on oxycontin he missed his flight." Apparently, while even left-wing bomber thrower Keith Olbermann thought that was over the line, Smith defended Sykes: "Well, you know what, any comedian, anybody who does that job, their job is to push the envelope...You can't go home -- you can't go home to the community of comedians unless you've gone too far."

Co-host Julie Chen later wondered: "But how did the room react, you guys, who was there?" Smith replied: "They groaned, serious groan...And Michelle Obama, in particular, was very uncomfortable with some of Wanda Sykes." Dave Price explained: "It was pretty much the only groan. I mean, there were a couple of other small ones. But she was -- she was pretty much en fuego [on fire]."

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?