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Blogging Olbermann - complete with a tie color/style tracking feature.

And even if the tie was the ONLY thing this site evaluated, it would STILL be a thousand times more relevant than anything Chris Matthews (of MSNBC's Lardass.. NoBalls... um, Hamhocks.. eh, Hardball) opines either on his own show or when paired with Keith Olbermann's Countdown for political commentary.

Chris Matthews, Hardball, Mea Culpas, And An Embarrassment of Rich (and Neverending) Embarrassments

Salon starts of this piece about how MSNBC's Hardball host, Chris Matthews, has caused the Internets (all of them!) to be agog about his terribly treatment of Hillary Clinton and goes on to say he's offering his mea culpas, which may or may not be because he could lose his job otherwise.

But let's be honest here: almost everything that comes out of Matthews unchecked and mealy mouth, usually about Democrats in particular, has been damned embarrassing.

Matthews started his very erratic slide - and this tool was never the most sharply calibrated instrument to begin with - when he went totally gaga about how MANLY Bush looked in May 2003 with his stunt landing on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln to announce "Mission Accomplished" and "all combat pretty much over in Iraq". Matthews literally noted Bush's (quite obviously) padded crotch and opined that every woman in America had fallen in love with the brainless wonder and every man was proud that, if they had to have a president who had a bigger codpiece than they did, at least it was "this MAN's MAN". (Geez, I want to retch just thinking about this.)

Thus, Matthews simple-minded diarrhea of the brain isn't something that started with this election cycle. It's just that he's getting exponentially worse. In addition to the Hillary remarks, he's said Obama was inspiring because he did so well in Iowa considering he's a true candidate of the third world. Uh, I know Chicago has problems, but when did Illinois join the third world? And it gets worse from there.

Sadly, the only thing MSNBC is doing in having Matthews plastered on EVERY presidential campaign focused broadcast is to render useless the little bit of better analysis they DO have (and considering their team, we're pretty much down to Keith Olbermann who shouldn't have to be paired with a fellow host so incompetent he could be named a major Bush appointee).

Of Disasters And Playing The Fear Card: Did You Notice?

Wednesday night, as the tragedy of the bridge collapse in Minneapolis played out in prime time, gave what (at least for me) seemed a potent example of how badly the media, especially hopelessly partisan and misleading venues such as virtually anything and everything Rupert Murdoch owns like Fox News, the Department of Homeland Security, AND the Bush Administration serve us in times of tragedy.

I've addressed my complete disgust with the Bushies on this subject in earlier posts today, so let me turn to the rest, starting with the Department of Homeland (Incompetence and In)Security, which took rather long Wednesday night to say they doubted terrorism was at fault for the devastation.

From what I could tell, more than 90 minutes elapsed before the DHS managed to say that probably Osama bin Laden - or a liberal blogger, for that matter - was responsible. Now that might not sound too bad, but this message came SIGNIFICANTLY AFTER one cable TV news source, notably Keith Olbermann doing live coverage on MSNBC, bothered to check the Minnesota DOT's Web site and learned important details like the fact significant pile-driving, which can cause fierce vibration and therefore could be a major contributing factor to such a structural failure, was to take place that very night. I flipped between MSNBC, CNN, and Fox for the better part of three hours, and I have to say Olbermann's crew was almost always not just ahead of the game, but putting out important and verifiable details that put the disaster in much better perspective. For example, they seemed the first to report that this bridge had been considered at only 50% of its structural best several years ago and was on a list with tens of thousands of other bridges throughout the country in dire need of repair or replacement. In Bush's America especially, little things like basic safety take a huge backseat to getting Halliburton ever greater unprecedented profits thanks to no bid contracts awarded by the Bushies. Was this information magically available globally to the World Wide Web somehow not available to the idiot DHS director Michael Chertoff and his band of corrupt incompetents calling themselves by a department name they aren't fit to wear? So yes, I wonder if the slowness by them wasn't convenient to the fear campaign.

Fox, on the other hand, at best behaved almost hysterically and at worst... well, I have to say that I seriously wondered whether they were deliberately playing into the fear card as part of the great leadup to the nonstop terror scare fest we must expect as we edge closer to the 2008 presidential election. It seems to be part of the Republican playbook to scare the bejesus out of everyone with the silliest of potential terror events (exploding cheese and grandmas with bombs in their Reeboks, for example) while completely ignoring the gravest of present dangers like the Bushies and Fox News. At one point, Shep Smith filling in for O'Reilly was as breathless as a scared schoolgirl talking about explosions and all but suggesting that Osama bin Laden had decided that the way to hurt America most was to make it tough to get to Minnesota's Mall of America. They had a terror alert banner running that seemed suspiciously like something to be used to scare the not-so-bright into thinking al Qaeda wants to win its war one structurally unsound American bridge at a time.

Folks, we're being played and for far worse than mere fools. Fox plays us, the Bushies play us, and our own desire to not worry about all this "pesky political stuff" also plays us directly into the hands of those who want to peddle fear while reaping huge profits for doing nothing more than none too talented sleight-of-hand, hoping you're too busy watching American Idol or the latest ball game to notice.

Frank Rich: "Everybody Hates Don Imus"

While I actually can't care about Imus enough to bother to hate him, I think Rich makes some excellent points in Sunday April 15th's Times' OpEd piece:

Familiar as I am with the warp speed of media, I was still taken aback by the velocity of Don Imus’s fall after he uttered an indefensible racist and sexist slur about the Rutgers women’s basketball team. Even in that short span, there’s been an astounding display of hypocrisy, sanctimony and self-congratulation from nearly every side of the debate, starting with Al Sharpton, who has yet to apologize for his leading role in the Tawana Brawley case, the 1980s racial melee prompted by unproven charges much like those that soiled the Duke lacrosse players.

It’s possible that the only people in this whole sorry story who are not hypocrites are the Rutgers teammates and their coach, C. Vivian Stringer. And perhaps even Don Imus himself, who, while talking way too much about black people he has known and ill children he has helped, took full responsibility for his own catastrophic remarks and didn’t try to blame the ensuing media lynching on the press, bloggers or YouTube. Unlike Mel Gibson, Michael Richards and Isaiah Washington, to take just three entertainers who have recently delivered loud religious, racial or sexual slurs, Imus didn’t hire a P.R. crisis manager and ostentatiously enter rehab or undergo psychiatric counseling. “I dished it out for a long time,” he said on his show last week, “and now it’s my time to take it.”

Among the hypocrites surrounding Imus, I’ll include myself. I’ve been a guest on his show many times since he first invited me in the early 1990s, when I was a theater critic. I’ve almost always considered him among the smarter and more authentic conversationalists I’ve encountered as an interviewee. As a book author, I could always use the publicity.

Of course I was aware of many of his obnoxious comments about minority groups, including my own, Jews. Sometimes he aimed invective at me personally. I wasn’t seriously bothered by much of it, even when it was unfunny or made me wince, because I saw him as equally offensive to everyone. The show’s crudest interludes struck me as burlesque.

I do not know Imus off the air and have no idea whether he is a good person, any more than I know whether Jerry Lewis, another entertainer who raises millions for sick children, is a good person. But as a listener and sometime guest, I didn’t judge Imus to be a bigot. Perhaps I felt this way in part because Imus vehemently inveighed against racism in real life, most recently in decrying the political ads in last year’s Senate campaign linking a black Tennessee congressman, Harold Ford, to white women. Perhaps I gave Imus a pass because the insults were almost always aimed at people in the public eye, whether politicians, celebrities or journalists — targets with the forums to defend themselves.

And perhaps I was kidding myself. What Imus said about the Rutgers team landed differently, not least because his slur was aimed at young women who had no standing in the world of celebrity, and who had done nothing in public except behave as exemplary student athletes. The spectacle of a media star verbally assaulting them, and with a creepy, dismissive laugh, as if the whole thing were merely a disposable joke, was ugly. You couldn’t watch it without feeling that some kind of crime had been committed. That was true even before the world met his victims. So while I still don’t know whether Imus is a bigot, there was an inhuman contempt in the moment that sounded like hate to me. You can see it and hear it in the video clip in a way that isn’t conveyed by his words alone.

Does that mean he should be silenced? The Rutgers team pointedly never asked for that, and I don’t think the punishment fits the crime. First, as a longtime Imus listener rather than someone who tuned in for the first time last week, I heard not only hate in his wisecrack but also honesty in his repeated vows to learn from it. Second, as a free-speech near-absolutist, I don’t believe that even Mel Gibson, to me an unambiguous anti-Semite, should be deprived of his right to say whatever the hell he wants to say. The answer to his free speech is more free speech — mine and yours. Let Bill O’Reilly talk about “wetbacks” or Rush Limbaugh accuse Michael J. Fox of exaggerating his Parkinson’s symptoms, and let the rest of us answer back.

Liberals are kidding themselves if they think the Imus firing won’t have a potentially chilling effect on comics who push the line. Let’s not forget that Bill Maher, an Imus defender last week, was dropped by FedEx, Sears, ABC affiliates and eventually ABC itself after he broke the P.C. code of 9/11. Conservatives are kidding themselves if they think the Imus execution won’t impede Ann Coulter’s nasty invective on the public airwaves. As Al Franken pointed out to Larry King on Wednesday night, CNN harbors Glenn Beck, who has insinuated that the first Muslim congressman, Keith Ellison of Minnesota, is a terrorist (and who has also declared that “faggot” is nothing more than “a naughty name”). Will Time Warner and its advertisers be called to account? Already in the Imus aftermath, the born-again blogger Tom DeLay has called for the firing of Rosie O’Donnell because of her “hateful” views on Chinese-Americans, conservative Christians and President Bush.

Read the rest at Rozius.

Don Imus (AKA The Big Brass Ass)

You may want to read this piece on the Don Imus/Rutgers University debacle from The Times.

What really pisses me off are those who go after the woman athletes and others for "ruining" poor, dear, good-hearted, already-had-2097-other-chances-and-blew-them-too Imus.

For all the decency he claimed this week, I can't think of a single time that Donny Boy offered even the faintest apology without, in the same breath, making it clear he thinks it's someone else's problem for taking it badly.

Perhaps it speaks of Imus' fan base to learn that the Rutgers women team has received death threats and a host of other pure nastiness.

Hey, Don, don't let the door hit you in the ass where you carry the coke stash on your way out.