Is Keith O running out of kids willing to play with him? Plus: Right-wingers turn their attention from "teh gay" to the economy

by Ken

It appears that finally the remaining shoe has dropped. From the NYT "Media Decoder" blog:

Current TV Dismisses Keith Olbermann

By BRIAN STELTER

6:10 p.m. | Updated Current TV said Friday afternoon that it had terminated the contract of its lead anchor, Keith Olbermann, scarcely a year after he was hired to reboot the fledgling channel in his progressive political image.

The cable channel indicated that he had failed to honor the terms of his five-year, $50 million contract, giving the channel the right to terminate it. Starting Friday night, the former New York Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer will take over Mr. Olbermann’s 8 p.m. time slot.

In a stream of Twitter messages, Mr. Olbermann responded to Current’s announcement by stating that “the claims against me in Current’s statement are untrue and will be proved so in the legal actions I will be filing against them presently.”

Current executives declined interview requests about the termination, apparently due to the expected legal action. But in a letter to viewers, the channel’s founders, Al Gore and Joel Hyatt, wrote: “We created Current to give voice to those Americans who refuse to rely on corporate-controlled media and are seeking an authentic progressive outlet. We are more committed to those goals today than ever before. Current was also founded on the values of respect, openness, collegiality, and loyalty to our viewers. Unfortunately these values are no longer reflected in our relationship with Keith Olbermann and we have ended it.” . . .

There's more detail in the report, and clearly there are legal issues that have to be thrashed out, possibly in courrt. Meanwhile:

(1) Is anyone surprised? I didn't think so. Given the mounting acrimony since . . . well, almost since Keith started the Current gig, it seemed just a matter of time.

(2) I love Keith to death (perhaps because I don't have to deal with him?), but even in the event that he prevails on the legal issues, he clearly has no future at Current, leaving the question whether he's going to be able to find anyone else -- in the TV world or elsewhere -- interested in working with him. He's not that hot a talent, is he?


MEANWHILE, GOP CONGRESSIONAL LOONS LOSE INTEREST
IN SAME-SEX MARRIAGE -- BUT WATCH OUT FOR THOSE EELS!

"[Moray eels] will attack humans - but only when disturbed or provoked and they can be quite vicious. (Although, they actually can be quite friendly once they are used to you - and you are used to them. Careful when you feed them as their teeth are indeed razor sharp and they might lurch at offered food, and offering fingers, very rapidly.)"

-- from the website sharktoothgifts.com

To be clear, although Georgia Rep. Jack Kingston is a celebrated nincompoop, it's not clear whether he spoke or wrote to the reporters, so we can't tell who imagined the "sexual morays" that appeared in the original posting of this piece:

"In one decade, what's shocking on TV is accepted as commonplace in the other. It's the same with sexual morays all over that if you look at campuses and universities, they have a lot of gay pride clubs and so there has been a deliberate and effective outreach to the younger generation about being more accepting of same-sex relationships."

-- Rep. "Crazy Jack" Kingston (R-GA), in the original posting
of Politico's "Republicans retreat on gay marriage"

In the Politico article, by Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer, these, er, thoughts are introduced following this paragraph:

It’s not like the GOP has become a bastion of progressiveness on gay rights, but there has been an evolution in the political approach - and an acknowledgment of a cultural shift in the country. Same-sex relationships are more prominent and accepted. There are more gay public figures -- including politicians -- and it’s likely that many Washington Republicans have gay friends and coworkers. Just as important -- there’s also a libertarian streak of acceptance on people’s sexuality coursing through the House Republican Conference.

This context makes it even tough to puzzle out what Crazy Jack is saying, but I for one don't hear "acceptance" so much as the suggestion that those satanic gay pride clubs are now the leading edge of the long-storied gay recruitment operation, the mission now expanded beyond the recruitment of, you know, new recruits to the brainwashing of nongay civilians -- lurking there among the sexual morays -- into becoming more "accepting."

That said, the piece is worth checking out, even now that the sexual morays have been exiled.

The economy has displaced moral issues in today’s politics. Ask most House Republicans today if they have deep convictions about gay relationships, and it hardly registers.

And some of the great minds of the House GOP majority, DWT faves all, are quoted (wait for it!):

* Allen West of Florida: "I personally have deep convictions about my children having a financially stable country that they can live in,” Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) said in an interview. “I want my daughters to have the opportunities that I had, and that’s what concerns me. That’s what keeps me up awake at night, not worrying about who’s sleeping with who."

* Hal Rogers of Kentucky, chairman of the Appropriations Committee: "I don’t hear it discussed much."

* Louie Gohmert of Texas, described by the Politico scribes conservatively as a "die-hard social conservative": "I don't hear it discussed much."

The Senate, Sherman and Palmer note, "also has undergone a shift. When Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) held the first hearing on the Defense of Marriage Act since it became law, few Republicans showed up and those who were there didn't use it as an opportunity for fire-and-brimstone speeches on same-sex unions."

You have to guess that many of these exceedingly dim bulbs have gradually figured out that their orgy of ideological crackpottery isn't what got them elected -- and there's another election coming up. Of course they haven't exactly been neglecting the economy; after all, they've spent these two years do everything in their power to make sure that any sensible ideas President Obama may have thrown out would die a painful death.


IT'S NOT ENOUGH TO BE STUPID AND CRAZY; YOU
HAVE TO BE THE RIGHT KIND OF STUPID AND CRAZY

Meanwhile, the economic predators who were salivating over the inroads into economic sanity that could be championed by the new Republican House majority seem to be discovering that it's not necessarily a piece of cake dealing with a pack of mental defectives -- see Jonathan Weisman's NYT report "Business Bets on the G.O.P. May Be Backfiring." Here's a sample:

Big business groups like the Chamber of Commerce spent millions of dollars in 2010 to elect Republican candidates running for the House. The return on investment has not always met expectations.

Even though money for major road and bridge projects is set to run out this weekend, House Republican leaders have struggled all week to round up the votes from recalcitrant conservatives simply to extend it for 90 or even 60 days. A longer-term transportation bill that contractors and the chamber say is vital to the recovery of the construction industry appears hopelessly stalled over costs.

At the same time, House conservatives are pressing to allow the U.S. Export-Import Bank, which has financed exports since the Depression, to run out of lending authority within weeks. The bank faces the possibility of shutting its doors completely by the end of May, when its legal authorization expires.

And a host of routine business tax breaks — from wind energy subsidies to research and development tax credits — cannot be passed because of Republican insistence that they be paid for with spending cuts.

Business groups that worked hard to install a Republican majority in the House equated Republican control with a business-friendly environment. But the majority is first and foremost a conservative political force, and on key issues, its ideology is not always aligned with commercial interests that helped finance election victories.

“Free market is not always the same as pro-business,” said Barney Keller, spokesman for the conservative political action committee Club for Growth.

There could be real-world consequences to the conservative rebellion. The 90-day extension of the highway trust fund that House Republican leaders say they will pass this week in lieu of a broad highway bill would keep existing projects moving for now. But business groups say few new government-funded infrastructure projects can get under way without longer-range certainty about federal backing. . . .

The moral: Just 'cause the peeps are stupid and crazy doesn't mean they're the right kind of stupid and crazy. In politics as in other matters, let the buyer beware.

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