That didn’t take long.
MSNBC just announced that Keith Olbermann will be back on Tuesday after one more day of suspension on Monday evening.
Olbermann was suspended indefinitely without pay on Friday after a report that he’d contributed to three Democratic House candidates in October, purportedly a violation of MSNBC policy.
Statement from Phil Griffin …
After several days of deliberation and discussion, I have determined that suspending Keith through and including Monday night’s program is an appropriate punishment for his violation of our policy. We look forward to having him back on the air Tuesday night.
First he was a Republican. Then he was an independent. Then he was all but a Democrat. Now Charlie Crist is considering a posthumous pardon of The Doors’ Jim Morrison for charges of indecent exposure stemming from a notorious concert incident in Florida in 1969.
Six months I’m thinking, leading advocate of industrial hemp/pot legalization or building new power base at an ashram in Oregon.
Or maybe something based in South Beach.
Here’s an article in the Times that is both disturbing and oddly comic, if darkly so. The US government is now making a major push to combat obesity. It’s the First Lady’s big cause. But for years Americans have been moving away from full-fat to reduced fat or skim milks. And this has created a surplus of whole milk and milk fat.
So what to do? While trying to get Americans to reduce fat intake and eat better, the USDA has also created a marketing arm called ‘Dairy Management’ which has the job of teaming with companies to find ways to get more cheese into consumers’ diets.
The story in the lede is about how ‘Dairy Management’ helped Dominos overcome sagging pizza sales by introducing pizzas with 40% more cheese. It’s been a rousing success and sales have doubled.
Takeaway factoid: Americans eat 33 pounds of cheese per year — almost three times as much as they ate in 1970.
Mark Blumenthal’s got a very interesting piece up at Huffpo talking specifically about how off the polls were in Nevada but also making a broader point about the quality of public polling. Remember, the Nevada race was heavily polled. And the results showed the two tied and then with Angle opening a consistent lead of 2 or 3 percentage points. Reid didn’t just win. He won by 5 points. Not even close, really.
Most people have assumed that Reid just had such an amazing field operation and shoe-leathered it out, managing to dramatically outperform the polls. In other words, somehow Reid’s folks just managed to grab a bunch of non-likely voters, got them out of bed and hauled them to the polls. And to be clear, I’d include myself among the folks thinking this way.
But apparently that’s not what happened. Read More
Hoyer picks up support from key House progressives, in bid to be Minority Whip.
There’s been a lot of digging in and grinding of teeth over the emerging Democratic leadership battle in the House. Most readers are focused on whether Nancy Pelosi should stay caucus leader in the new Congress. But at this point, that seems to be a given. A handful of Reps. from swing districts have said they won’t support her. But just a sprinkling. And no one with even a remote chance of success has come forward to oppose her. That makes a lot of the left-right drama, or questions about the optics of Pelosi either stepping down or not stepping down, sort of moot since she’s staying. Read More
I find the Keith Olbermann story bizarre, on both sides but mainly on MSNBC’s. First, political contribution records are the most public thing in the world for anyone who is even somewhat in the public eye, certainly for someone who courts controversy. So political giving strikes me as something done entirely in the open for someone of Olbermann’s stature. On the one hand that sounds like MSNBC is flipping out about something that must have been all but an open secret. On the other, if this is MSNBC’s policy, why was Olbermann openly flouting it?
Second, MSNBC’s policy forbids employees from making donations to political candidates, unless they ask for permission to do so, in which it seems usually to be granted. That seems to me to undercut the principle behind the policy.
But of course all of this pales behind the larger point which is that Olbermann’s job at MSNBC is to be an extremely opinionated commentator on politics. And he’s the centerpiece (along with Maddow and more equivocally, Matthews) behind the business strategy of making MSNBC the liberal cable news/chat network. (How they square that with simultaneously having a more traditional and by the books NBC News is something they clearly have yet to work out.) But when you take that all into account, seeing him now all but canned over a handful of individual political contributions because he’s compromised the objectivity he’s supposed to bring to the job sounds like a bit of a joke.
This doesn’t mean I don’t see the point of rules barring people in the news business from giving money to politicians. I do. I think they usually make sense. And whatever the rules, organizations have the right to their rules and if you want to work there you need to follow them. But against the canvass of the media and political world we’re living in and everything that’s happening in it, the scale of MSNBC’s response this seems bizarre, arbitrary and excessive.
(ed.note: I’ve appeared a few times recently on Olbermann’s show.) Read More