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Keith takes on a trifecta of idiocracy in his Worst Persons segment from Nov. 26, 2008. First up is LaDonna Hale Curzon from wsRadio.com for offering Sarah Palin radio all the time and instead letting listeners find John McCain radio.

Next up Keith takes on Glenn Beck for his statement that maybe some states should secede from America to protest the bailouts.

And finally Keith takes on the myth of the $70 an hour autoworker and Andrew Ross Sorkin from the New York Times who gave the right wing their talking points on this B.S. Media Matters has more on Andrew Ross Sorkin.

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From Countdown, Nov. 14, 2008 featuring Blackwater-Gate, Bailout-Gate and Siegelman-Gate. Emptywheel has more on the latest in the Don Siegelman case.

Keith sits down with John Cleese to talk about the Presidential race, and John also shares a poem he's written.

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On tonight's post-Obama Nation Wide Address Edition of Countdown, Keith talks to Chris Matthews about what he thought of the production, and Matthews is visibly moved by it and gets a little choked up. Obama certainly knows how to communicate to this country. He's exactly what we need right now to lead us out of the darkness brought on by Conservatism.

Olbermann: If you tuned in maybe grudgingly to this thing, you were told this was the Obama speech, the Obama infomercial purchase, the Obama show, would you have been surprised, would you have been sucked in? How did it work?

Matthews: Well I thought it was Hollywood. It was romance. It was realism. The technical quality of it, the production value was perfect. The way they timed going to live. The biographical material but most important the connection with the average person and the economic turmoil we face right now. I thought it was fabulous. Of course there we see the setting which is very much like an Oval Office setting showing that he's comfortable, and we should be comfortable and will be with him in such a setting.

I thought everything was just right. I thought the most important part of it I thought was the biographical showing him talking about his mom and talking about him taking his chance in history and not wanting to miss it having seen his mother die at a young age and it was very human. I think you'd have to be a tough customer not to be touched by it.

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From Countdown, Monday Oct. 27, 2008. Keith tells John McCain that he needs to speak out against those who would use Friday's racist hoax attack perpetrated by Ashley Todd as a means to re-open the racial divide in America.

Transcript available here:

OLBERMANN: Finally, a "Campaign Comment" about the fraudulent race attack claim since acknowledged and recanted by a John McCain campaign volunteer in Pennsylvania. You know the story well, by now. It's a sad and demoralizing tale of a woman who could be summarized by the awful term B actress. Ashley Todd was not sexually assaulted by a big black man. He did not carve the letter B on her face to punish her for supporting John McCain.

It apparently never dawned on her it resembled less a cut than an abrasion done by a weapon no more sinister than a nail file. She was not even at the ATM where she claimed the attack took place. It apparently never dawned on her that the machine had security video and she would not be on it. And clearly, somewhere in her mind was a calculation that a story like this one with layer upon layer of racial threat could be some kind of game changer for the presidential candidate she worked to get elected in at least two states for at least two months. Her saga is pathetic. She now claims mental illness. If this too is not true, Miss Todd might think she's pulling another fast one over on the rest of us. In fact her claim seems to be accurate, whether she knows it or not.

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From Countdown Oct. 24's Oddball segment:

Keith: To northern Virginia where another frivolous 911 call had been placed. We've played them for you before. I was just kidding about that. Someone called police complaining that their pizza didn't get there in 30 minutes or less, there-by tying up resources that should be used for real emergencies. Tonight's call is a celebrity edition.

Operator: Alexandria 911, state your emergency.

Caller: It's not an emergency but do you know why on one side at the damn drawbridge of 95 traffic is stopped for 15 minutes and yet traffic's coming the other way?

Operator: Sir, are you calling 911 to complain about traffic?

(Pause.)

Caller: (Expletive) you.

(Caller hands up.)

Keith: That voice that sounds so familiar telling the police officer FU, Joe McCain, brother of Presidential candidate John McCain everybody. Who can blame him though he was probably caught up in Obama early voting traffic. Brother McCain has apologized for his rude remark and says he will not be doing any more campaigning, not even about what he previously called the communist part of Virginia.

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Winners for the night...Fixed News, Bill-O, and Diane Fideli.

(Transcripts below the fold.)

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From Countdown, Oct. Oct. 16, 2008:

OLBERMANN: And in the frequency with which he used them on the campaign trail, it should be no surprised that some of John McCain's worse most obvious canards about used things about Barack Obama ended up in the debate last night.

Our fourth story on the Countdown: Tonight, a partial inventory of McCain misspeaks from debate number 49.

(full transcript below the fold)

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Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Joe Biden appeared on Countdown last night for the post-debate wrap up and while remaining gracious to Republican rival John McCain (a characteristic that doesn't appear to be shared on the other side of the aisle. Funny, that), pointed out all of McCain's bluster and bravado is merely to cover up for the fact that he has an indefensible position of sharing the failed George W. Bush policies for the economy and foreign policy.

This is a very difficult ground, in fairness to John, it's really difficult to defend the terrain that he occupies. The terrain he occupies is he's bought on the economic philosophy of George W. Bush and the sort of you know free market, let it run its way, let it be on its own, and now all of the sudden he's talking about greed on Wall Street. The same way with his foreign policy. He went in and thought this was a...you know, he thought we were going to be over in a short time, that we were going to be greeted and so on and so forth. John's judgment - here's the point - John's judgment has been fundamentally wrong on the basic, critical, foreign policy and domestic decisions we've had to make.

It could have been more concise, but what it comes down to is McCain is Bush's third term.   And no one wants to see that repeated.

  Keith does a great job of breaking down Palin's second TV interview.

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Keith was visibly upset after the GOP ran their 9/11 "tribute" ad during last week's convention. Tonight, that outrage manifested itself in yet another scathing Special Comment aimed at John McCain and the rest of the 9/11 exploiting GOPers.

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This is supposed to be a day of remembrance. Remembrance of the attack, remembrance of the national unity which followed it.

Most important of all, remembrance of the dead.

But 9/11 has become…... a brand name. A Republican campaign slogan. Propaganda of the lowest form.

9/11 has become… 9/11, with a trademark logo.

FLASHBACK: Keith's 2006 Special Comment from Ground Zero.

Full transcript below the fold:

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  Senator Obama joined Keith tonight for a major sit down interview and took McCain/Palin's lies head on. Whether it's their claim that Palin was against the "bridge to nowhere" or their promise to change Washington despite being the party in charge for the past eight years, Obama left no stone unturned.

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They're not telling the truth.  You know, I mean, it's -- I think we've all gotten accustomed to being able to spin things in politics.  But when you've got somebody who was for a project being presented as being against it, then that, you know, stretches the bounds of spin into new areas.

And you know, as far as John McCain is concerned, you know, I think that Senator McCain has, on occasion, broken with his party, but this notion that, as he said at his convention, that he would tell the lobbyists that they're not going to be running Washington anymore, who is he going to tell, his campaign chairman, Charlie Black, his campaign manager, Rick Davis, two of the largest corporate lobbyists in Washington with client lists that extend into every major industry?

You know, there is just a sense that they're making these assertions that ignore the facts of their campaigns and their past history.  And I think people should be troubled by that.

Full transcript below the fold:

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Q: What do rightwing blogger John Hawkins and MSNBC's Keith Olbermann have in common?

A: Both have been bumped from covering the Republican convention.

Hawkins didn't get his application for media credentials approved, he says because of critical posts he has written which irritated the McCain campaign, particularly on immigration. AP reports that Olbermann has been re-assigned.

Keith Olbermann was pulled from St. Paul to anchor MSNBC's storm coverage from New York, with his seat beside Chris Matthews filled by David Gregory. Capus said political considerations had nothing to do with that move; Olbermann has been sharply critical of the GOP.

You believe that, right? Sounds to me like the McCain campaign only wants McFournier types in attendance.

Noel Sheppard at the rightwing News Busters site is oh-so disappointed about Olbermann's absence. So just to cheer him up here's some classic Keith from January -

  An open mic caught Keith Olbermann last night telling Joe Scarborough to get a shovel and dig himself out of the horse crap he was dropping all over the airwaves about how confident the McCain campaign must feel right now. And thus a classic moment in live political news coverage was born.

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The only disappointment, as KO pointed out in his DK diary, is that there was no pie.