Countdown Supplemental
Countown Supplemental is a new feature on The News Hole offering links to source material for some of the stories on Countdown.
Here's the article in Contingencies Magazine containing McCain's line, "Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation."
(Here's the corresponding Obama piece in the same publication.)
Progressive Accountability tallies McCain's pork.
Keith introduced Oddball on Friday with the note that it was the anniversary of the first Mary Tyler Moore show. Watch Episode 1, Season 1 on Hulu for free.
Panda Land at Adventure World, home of the two new panda cubs.
Here's the 1999 Christian Science Monitor article describing Thomas Muthee's "Mama Jane" witch hunting incident.
The Web site devoted to transparency in government as a result of the efforts Senators Coburn and Obama and with the support of Senator McCain is USASpending.gov.
And here's the "singing road" in Lancaster, California that is grooved to vibrate car tires to the tune of The William Tell Overture.
Related, mostly primary source links to recent stories covered on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann:
A lot of people, including NY Times columnist Paul Krugman on Monday night's Countdown, are comparing John McCain's insistence that the economy is fundamentally strong with Herbert Hoover's insistence that the economy under his administration was fundamentally sound on the eve of the Great Depression. The actual Hoover quote is, "The fundamental business of the country, that is, the production and distribution of commodities, is on a very sound and prosperous basis." This remark came in a press conference on Friday, October 25th, following Black Thursday, and in advance of the big crash of "Tragic Tuesday," October 29th.
Talking Points Memo has assembled an efficient clip for those who need a reminder of McCain economic advisor Phil Gramm's July statements about a "mental recession" and America being a "nation of whiners."
National Constitution Center and Associated Press poll reveals American oppose giving the president more power.
The complete list of Shea Stadium items up for auction is here and if you plan on buying something you might consider joining the Shea Stadium "Premiere Club."
The place to find NBC's electoral map projections and make your own is on the msnbc.com Politics page.
Politico.com's reporting on McCain's odd answer to the house
question is here
(with the original audio).
Architectural
Digest Visits Senator and Mrs. John McCain - Southwestern Style for their
Phoenix Family Home
Here's a ranked
list of the greatest exporters in the world. This list includes the E.U.
even though Germany alone ranks higher than the E.U. but Keith's point on
Thursday's show holds. China already leads the U.S. in exports.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development country
productivity rankings are in this chart. The GDP per hour worked stat that
Keith described last night is the second column from the right. So again, where
John McCain specifically lists productivity as one of the strong fundamentals
of the U.S. economy, calling us "the most productive" we see that in
fact the U.S. ranks sixth.
Jon Soltz of VoteVets.org mentioned a couple of times to Keith on Thursday's
show that the plan John McCain has on his Web site "equals the
draft." On the
"National Security" issues page of McCain's campaign site, that
does seem to be a reasonable interpretation of the "Increasing the Size of
the American Military" section.
Here
are two
letters to the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration opposing the
appointment of Hans von Spakovsky to the Federal Election Commission. As Keith
pointed out on in Thursday's show, despite his rejection from the F.E.C.,
"the Civil Rights Commission reportedly wants him to oversee its report on
how well the Justice Department is monitoring the 2008 Presidential
Election."
Senators
raise concerns over attorney general guidelines for FBI investigations
The back cover of Chaplain Bill McCoy's book bearing the endorsement of General
Petreaus (See Thursday's Worsts) can
be seen on the Barnes & Noble site. The author does have a blog entry from a
few days ago on Amazon.com in which he says that a new back cover is being
redesigned.
Major polls referenced in recent shows:
Judging by the MySpace page of the
East Coast Avengers they are at least aware of Keith's message to them that even in the case of people like Bill O'Reilly, "Nobody's life should be threatened." Wired has
a stream of the song.
NOTE: Headphone alert. The song probably has curses but they're not very distinct from the overall rap. However, the end of the song has the unedited audio of O'Reilly's "We'll do it live" rant which, as you know, contains distinct F-bombs.
News Corp stock chart YTD as guided by the market omnipotence of Bill-O the Clown.
Among Jerome Corsi's other great hits:
I didn't think I understood this story when it aired. Turns out it's as literal as it was reported by Keith:
Confused sea turtles march into Italian restaurant
These items follow Friday's stories reported by guest host Rachel Maddow.
McCain: Audacity WatchPresident McCain Sends Secretary of State Lieberman and Defense Secretary Graham to TbilisiThe stat Rachel quoted Friday night about Obama doing better among all faith groups other than Evangelicals comes from
a recent Barna poll.
For the most part, the various faith communities of the U.S. currently support Sen. Obama for the presidency. Among the 19 faith segments that The Barna Group tracks, evangelicals were the only segment to throw its support to Sen. McCain. Among the larger faith niches to support Sen. Obama are non-evangelical born again Christians (43% to 31%); notional Christians (44% to 28%); people aligned with faiths other than Christianity (56% to 24%); atheists and agnostics (55% to 17%); Catholics (39% vs. 29%); and Protestants (43% to 34%). In fact, if the current preferences stand pat, this would mark the first time in more than two decades that the born again vote has swung toward the Democratic candidate.
Legislation has been introduced in Congress that would require the Department of Defense to grant the press access to ceremonies honoring fallen military personnel. The bill was introduced by
Congressman Walter Jones, a Republican from North Carolina, and a member of the House Armed Services committee. It's called the
Fallen Hero Commemoration Act, HR 6662 IH.
Ed McMahon's house - now Donald Trump's house. (Same photos,
more snark.)
So what happened with the Bigfoot DNA test?
Fail.One of the two samples of DNA said to prove the existence of the Bigfoot came from a human and the other was 96 percent from an opossum, according to Curt Nelson, a scientist at the University of Minnesota who performed the DNA analysis.
The Obama campaign's corrections of Jerome Corsi's ridiculous book of lies
are linked here.
The Georgetown University journalism program investigating the murder of Daniel Pearl is called
The Pearl Project.
There's no free online version of the newly released Office of Strategic Services personnel records from the National Archives, which is just as well because
according to the press release it's 750,000 pages.
On Thursday's show, guest host Rachel Maddow suggested viewers Google the phrase "
Truman Commission." Go ahead.
This was in response to the Cooking-the-books-gate scandal in Bushed in which it was revealed that the shockingly large amount of money spent of private contractors in Iraq (as calculated by the Congressional Budget Office) is actually not shockingly high enough because it only accounts for private contractors working inside Iraq and ignored the tens of billions spent on private contractors in the U.S. on tasks related to the war in Iraq.
How Bush spent his days in office - This isn't exactly the source of the "2.5 years on vacation" stat but it's a nice clear breakdown of how the days and events tally up for the Bush years.
The details of the man who died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody are even more outrageous than Keith described in Wednesday night's Bushed segment.
The New York Times has the full story, short version
at Gothamist.
The article suggesting McCain's speech on the Georgia crisis was partly
plagiarized from Wikipedia is here.
From Monday's Oddball, the emotion-enabled
Heart Robot.
Source documents for some recent Countdown stories:
Stabilizing and Rebuilding Iraq: Iraqi Revenues, Expenditures, and Surplus - This is just the summary, the significant bit you heard about on Countdown is:
As of December 31, 2007, the Iraqi government had accumulated financial deposits of $29.4 billion, held in the Development Fund for Iraq and central government deposits at the Central Bank of Iraq and Iraq's commercial banks. This balance is the result, in part, of an estimated cumulative budget surplus of about $29 billion from 2005 to 2007. For 2008, GAO estimates a budget surplus of between $38.2 billion to $50.3 billion.
The full (41 page) pdf is here.
KFC In Fallujah? Too Finger-Licking Good To Be TrueThe Smoking Gun has
the arrest report of the jerk who called 911 with complaints about his sandwich.
Keith noted on the show, "Under a 1991 amendment to statutes that in 1947 created the C.I.A. and that govern its actions, there is a passage that reads, 'No covert action may be conducted which is intended to influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies, or media.'" You can
find that amendment here (see item f).
U.S. Army hopes to keep native Arabic speakers - Incentives likely to include large payments to soldiers now working as translators. Completing the picture is this from
an earlier C.S. Monitor story:
Nearly 11,000 military personnel have been discharged under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, according to a Government Accountability Office report in 2005, including about 750 personnel in jobs critical to the war on terrorism, like translators.
Here's the official Web site of the
Sturgis Motorcycle Rally though more appropriate to the news is
The Buffalo Chip campground, host to the annual Miss Buffalo Chip competition.
Chuck Todd’s Latest Electoral Map: Obama 217, McCain 189
Transcript of Amerithrax Investigation Press Conference - And for those truly devoted to digging through the anthrax case,
here are the hundreds of pages of documents released by the DoJ in connection with the case.
FBI was told to blame Anthrax scare on Al Qaeda by White House officials - The portion highlighted by Keith:
After the Oct. 5, 2001, death from anthrax exposure of Sun photo editor Robert Stevens, Mueller was "beaten up" during President Bush's morning intelligence briefings for not producing proof the killer spores were the handiwork of terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden, according to a former aide.
"They really wanted to blame somebody in the Middle East," the retired senior FBI official told The News.
In case, for some reason, you thought Keith was making it up, yes, the Wall Street Journal really did publish an article about
whether Barack Obama is "too fit." An interesting note is the "correction and amplification" at the bottom. That's likely a response to
the "online story research" uncovered by bloggers.
From NASCAR.com:Tires are the Rodney Dangerfield of the automotive world. Even though they're the only component of the car that actually touches the pavement, tires "get no respect."
Apparently they're also the Rodney Dangerfield of the Republican world.
Here's the
Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard University Survey of Low-Wage Workers wherein it is revealed that in spite of the media hype it is in fact John McCain who has a "working class whites problem."
This was going to be in tomorrow's Countdown Supplemental but since
Gerald Posner brought it up on tonight's show, here it is. If you're interested in following up on his recommendation of looking at the Maryland records of Bruce Ivins' therapist, Jean C. Duley, you have to
start here and then put her name in the subsequent search (don't worry about the other fields).
