Keith Olbermann Countdown Promo - Current TV

Keith Olbermann Premieres on June 20th
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The First Guess: Lotto Nation by Keith Olbermann - FOK News Channel

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Keith Olbermann's latest at The FOK News Channel -- The First Guess: Lotto Nation:

Three-time Murrow-Award Winner Keith Olbermann is the "K" in "Friends Of Keith" and "Friends Of Keith" is the FOK in the not-for-profit FOKNewsChannel.

Olbermann out at MSNBC - Keith Olbermann - Salon.com

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"Countdown" star who revived cable network abruptly announces he is stepping down

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MSNBC host Keith Olbermann announced Friday that he is leaving the network and has taped his last "Countdown" show. (Watch his full announcement below.)

MSNBC issued a statement that it had ended its contract with the controversial host, with no further explanation. Olbermann hosted the network's most popular show, but his combative liberal opinions often made him a target of critics.

Olbermann did not explain why he was leaving.

"MSNBC thanks Keith for his integral role in MSNBC's success and we wish him well in his future endeavors," the network said.

A spokesman said Phil Griffin, MSNBC's president, would not comment on Olbermann's exit. Spokesman Jeremy Gaines would say only that the acquistion of NBC Universal by Comcast, which received regulatory approval this week, had nothing to do with the decision.

Olbermann was suspended without pay from the network for two days in November for donating to three Democratic candidates, which violated NBC News' policy on political donations. Olbermann complained that he was being punished for mistakenly violating an inconsistently applied rule that he had known nothing about.

The host apologized to fans -- but not to the network.

Olbermann, before leaving the show with a final signature toss of his script toward the camera, thanked his audience for sticking with him and read a James Thurber poem.

"This may be the only television program where the host was much more in awe of the audience than vice versa," he said.

He thanked a series of people, including the late Tim Russert, but pointedly not Griffin or NBC News President Steve Capus.

Olbermann's prime-time show is the network's top-rated. His evolution from a humorous look at the day's headlines into a pointedly liberal show in the last half of George W. Bush's administration led MSNBC to largely shift the tone of the network in his direction, with the hirings or Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell in primetime.

But Olbermann was known for a mercurial personality behind the scenes and he was almost fired last year for the political donations. He quit a prime-time show on MSNBC in the late 1990s, complaining that management was making him report too much on President Bill Clinton's impeachment scandal.

He was particularly critical of Fox News Channel and his direct competitor, Bill O'Reilly, frequently naming him his "Worst Person in the World" in a segment popular with his fans. Bosses at NBC had discussed trying to keep the tone of the vitriol down.

MSNBC announced that O'Donnell, who had frequently filled in for Olbermann before starting his own 10 p.m. show, will take over Olbermann's time slot starting Monday. "The Ed Show," with Ed Schultz, would move to 10 p.m. Cenk Uygur of the Web show "The Young Turks," will fill Schultz's vacated 6 p.m. time slot.

Olbermann had signed a new four-year contract with MSNBC two years ago. It's unclear what his plans are now.

He could give a boost to struggling CNN's prime-time lineup, but Olbermann would mean CNN would make an abrupt shift in its nonpartisan policy. It was not immediately known how quickly Olbermann could switch to another job if he wanted to.

Elizabeth Warren Helped Shoot Down Bill That Would Have Sped Foreclosures, Calendar Shows by Shahien Nasiripour - The Huffington Post

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Elizabeth Warren was the first senior Obama administration official to recognize the potentially incendiary impact of a bill that would have made it significantly easier for mortgage companies to foreclose on homes, and her subsequent warnings played a crucial role in persuading the President to veto the measure, according to freshly released documents and people familiar with the deliberations.

The disclosure that Warren was instrumental in halting a bill that would have streamlined the foreclosure process comes as she confrontsfierce criticism from Republicans on Capitol Hill for the way she was appointed to construct a new consumer financial protection bureau, and characterizations that she is inclined to take an overly punitive tack with Wall Street.

A long-time advocate for greater regulation of the financial system and a prominent critic of predatory lending, Warren now finds herself at the center of an intensifying debate over the relationship between the Obama administration and the business world.

For consumer advocates, who have long decried what they portray as Wall Street's outsized influence in Washington, Warren represents their greatest hope that big banks will be more tightly supervised following the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. For a vocal group of business leaders and their Republican allies, Warren has become Exhibit A in their case that the Obama administration is anti-business.

The decisive way in which she labored behind the scenes to stymie a bill that would have eased requirements for documentation in the foreclosure process underscores how her arrival has altered the administration's relationship with major banks.

The bill, which passed both houses of Congress and awaited President Obama's signature to become law, essentially would have compelled notaries to accept out-of-state notarizations, regardless of the rules in those states.

State officials across the country--who have been pursuing probes looking into wrongdoing within the foreclosure process-- feared that those jurisdictions with lax standards could have become hotbeds for foreclosure documentation fraud. Lenders and mortgage companies could have used those states as central clearing houses to produce bogus foreclosure paperwork, and then export those documents to other states with more stringent regulations--an expedient bypass around the strictures.

Obama ultimately declined to sign the law, and the House of Representatives failed to override the veto.

Officials said Warren was among the first federal officials to recognize the significance of the notary bill, titled the Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act of 2010. She met with authorities from several states and then relayed their concerns to influential administration officials.

During the morning of Oct. 6, Warren's team at the Treasury Department wrote the first memos on the bill, raising questions about the possible consequences if it became law, these people said.

That evening, Warren met for 30 minutes with Peter Rouse, Obama's interim chief of staff, her calendar shows. She later spent an hour on the phone with Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, who once sued Countrywide Financial and exacted an $8.4 billion multi-state settlement.

The next day, Warren participated in an afternoon meeting on the bill, her calendar shows. During that meeting one of Obama's top spokesmen, Dan Pfeiffer, posted an entry on the White House Blog explaining why Obama would not sign the bill.

On Oct. 8, Obama declined to sign the bill into law, citing the need for "further deliberations about the possible unintended impact" of the bill on "consumer protections, including those for mortgages."

Documents released Wednesday show that Warren met or spoke with at least eight state officials leading a 50-state investigation into possibly-fraudulent mortgage documentation practices.

The state attorneys general, secretaries of state and bank supervisors are probing the way in which major mortgage companies have pushed through thousands of foreclosure cases at a time, as if on a factory assembly line, by short-cutting the required documentation process.

Recent weeks have featured a host of unsavory disclosures about how mortgage companies employed so-called robo-signers-- people whose sole job was to sign foreclosure documents without reading them or confirming basic facts, as required by law. The volume of cases and shoddy handling of paperwork is reflective of the messy and indiscriminate lending practices that characterized the nation's housing boom, as Wall Street eagerly handed mortgages to seemingly anyone willing to sign off.

The states' investigation and a parallel multi-agency federal probe are now roiling the mortgage industry, heightening the possibility that major lenders could face potentially huge fresh losses as bad loans continue to emerge. With legal and regulatory uncertainty now enshrouding the industry and public outrage trained on foreclosures, the banks could have trouble limiting those losses by selling off the homes pledged against bad mortgages.

The nation's biggest lender, Bank of America, has seen its share price drop 18 percent through yesterday's market close since the day before the states announced their joint inquiry.

Warren serves as an assistant to Obama and a special adviser to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as she leads the effort to create the new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, a watchdog designed to protect borrowers from abusive lenders. Her calendar from Sept. 20 to Nov. 2 was released per a Freedom of Information Act request.

The longtime Harvard Law School professor and consumer advocate met or spoke with the state attorneys general from Iowa, Illinois, Texas, North Carolina, Massachusetts and Ohio, her calendar shows. She also met with Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, and spoke with New York's top banking regulator, Richard H. Neiman. They are among the leaders of the combined state probe.

Warren has long chided federal regulators for their lax oversight of the financial industry and slipshod protection of consumers. She's championed state regulators, however, who have often been ahead of their federal counterparts when it comes to consumer finance issues.

Warren's calendar also shows numerous meetings with bankers and their representatives. Financial executives and lobbyists have noted that Warren was reaching out to them more than they initially expected. The calendar confirms her outreach.

On Sept. 20, the same day she took a photo for her Treasury Department badge, Warren spent an hour and a half meeting with bankers from Oklahoma, her calendar shows. She spent an hour having lunch with Geithner that day as well.

Since then she's met with the chief executives of the nation's largest banks, including Vikram Pandit of Citigroup; Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase; John Stumpf of Wells Fargo; James Gorman of Morgan Stanley; Richard Davis of U.S. Bancorp; W. Edmund Clark of TD Bank Financial Group; David Nelms of Discover Financial Services; Niall Booker of HSBC North America Holdings; and Kenneth Chenault of American Express.

The calendar entry for Chenault's one-hour meeting on Oct. 13 notes that "He's flying here for us."

Warren also met with officials from Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, Germany's biggest lender and one of the world's biggest financial institutions.

Notably absent from Warren's calendar are officials from Bank of America, the biggest bank in the U.S. by assets and branches, including its chief executive, Brian Moynihan.

Warren's calendar includes meetings with investors and trade groups, like the Consumer Bankers Association, the Independent Community Bankers of America, the Financial Services Roundtable and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.

Though Warren is known for her vigorous advocacy on behalf of consumers, she's spent more time with bankers and their lobbyists than with consumer groups and advocates during her roughly two months on the job.

Warren's 2007 journal article calling for the creation of a dedicated consumer agency inspired policymakers to enact it into law. Big banks opposed it.

Warren has also met with nearly two dozen members of Congress from both sides of the aisle, including the likely incoming chair of the House Financial Services Committee, Rep. Spencer Bachus, and the top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, Richard Shelby. The Alabama Republicans have been particularly critical of Warren and her new agency.

Warren's calendar features numerous White House meetings, like a two-hour dinner on Sept. 23 with top Obama adviser David Axelrod and breakfasts and lunches with another top Obama counselor, Valerie Jarrett. She's also met with the heads of all the major federal financial regulatory agencies, including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

Among Warren's early initiatives are efforts to make credit card disclosure forms shorter and easier to read, and simplifying mortgage documents. Her first major speech since joining the administration was a Sept. 29 address to the Financial Services Roundtable, a Washington trade group representing firms like JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock and State Farm. She asked the assembled executives to work with her to create a new system of consumer regulation focused on core principles rather than a mountain of specific rules.

Rudy Giuliani Still: A Noun, a Verb and 9-11 at Cyclones Game...

The Brooklyn Paper mentioned on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann...


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Brooklyn Paper reporter Stephen Brown asked Rudy Giuliani the tough question at a Cyclones game last week — was he rooting for the hometown Cyclones or the visiting Staten Island Yankees? Well, Rudy’s answer earned Brown a mention on a subsequent telecast of “Countdown with Keith Olbermann.”

Rep Weiner: “Obama Makes the Pivot” and Interview with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann after the State of the Union Address

Sounds Rallying Cry to Focus on Jobs, Middle-Class, Equality, Security and Yes, Health Care Reform

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Rep Anthony Weiner (D-NY-9th) speaks to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann after President Obama's State of the Union speech...

Representative Anthony Weiner (D - Brooklyn and Queens) released the following statement in response to President Obama’s State of the Union address:

“Tonight, President Obama managed to hold fast to his principles on his issue agenda and his call for change. He put Republicans back on defense; either to do what is right or to be seen as the obstructionists they have been too often.”

“Obama made the pivot. He sounded the rallying cry to focus on jobs, middle-class, equality, security, and yes, health care reform.”

“The President is right that we need to pass health care reform. There are a lot of ideas that people supported: the public option, the Medicare buy-in, coverage for preexisting conditions, and closing the “donut hole.” I think there’s time to put together an approach that can reduce health care costs and cover more Americans. I’m committed to fighting for it.”

CrooksandLiars.com - Bush is a Fascist..Olbermann Special Comment on FISA

Countdown’s Keith Olbermann and guest Rachel Maddow look at the derailment of the straight talkin’ Maverick John McCain into the craven torture-endorsing flip-flopper that appears to have sold his integrity for the endorsement of the Republican leadership.

MADDOW: The White House admits, as of this month, to authorizing waterboarding. And they say that they authorized it because the way they looked at the law, they’re allowed to do that. It’s legal. Yeah right, but that’s what the White House said. They said, ‘The way we interpreted the law, we thought it was legal and we’re happy that we did it, and it was very useful.’ So Congress has therefore passed something that says, ‘actually, clearly, plainly, obviously this is illegal, if you didn’t think it was illegal before, let us make it more obvious for you.’ And that’s what John McCain voted against. So, in context, and logically, it is a vote for waterboarding because the White House has used this legal explanation, this legal cutthroat explanation, in order to…in order to justify what they admit to having already done. [..]

This decision is so plainly a political decision. This is John McCain reversing himself, not only in terms of being for waterboarding now, but the grounds on which he is for waterboarding. I mean, he’s the guy who made the argument that the Army Field Manual was sufficient. The only thing we need to understand about this is that John McCain made a sudden and otherwise inexplicable change of heart since November. A change of heart that brings him in line with what appears to be the Republican strategy for the general election this year, which is to pick deliberately provocative, deliberately controversial fights on the issues that they want this election to be about. They want the election to be about war, and torture and Guantanamo. So they’re picking fights on those issues, even though they know a lot of Americans disagree with them on these issues. They’re picking fights on those issues so those will be the things we’re talking about around the election because they think that will help Republicans.

Given McCain’s own signed “confession” after four days of continued torture during his own POW days, he knows only too well how false information and confessions can be coerced by torture. And yet, even though it happened to him, he’s unwilling to take a stand against torturing detainees. And why? To fall in line with the Republican party strategy for framing the debate this election season. Yup, there’s a maverick for you. (h/t Crooksandliars)

Keith Olbermann on Bill Moyers Journal - December 15th 2007

Keith Olbermann's interview on Bill Moyers Journal Dec. 15, 2007...

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Countdown Special Comment: Torture Part 1 and 2...

Keith at his best...Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein are sell-outs and enablers for the criminal enterprise known as the Bush Administration...