Forums: Purgatory:

Keep them coming. Email him at: KOlbermann@msnbc.com

SECAUCUS -- A quick and haplessly generic answer now to the 6,000 emails and the hundreds of phone calls.

Firstly, thank you.

Secondly, we will indeed be resuming our coverage of the voting irregularities in Ohio and Florida -- and elsewhere -- on this evening's edition of Countdown

read the page at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/

Having said all that— for crying out loud, all the data we used tonight on Countdown was on official government websites in Cleveland and Florida. We confirmed all of it— moved it right out of the Reynolds Wrap Hat zone in about ten minutes.

Which offers one way bloggers can help guide the mainstream at times like this: source your stuff like crazy, and the stuffier the source the better.

Enough from the soapbox. We have heard the message on the Voting Angst and will continue to cover it with all prudent speed.

Thanks for your support.

I sent this yesterday:

Subject: We love you! Now tell everyone who owns the voting machines.

Is there any way you could convince the rest of the MSNBC staff that we care more about honest elections than we do about the Peterson trial? I'm beginning to think the station owners are somehow involved in the murder; I can't see any other reason they would be so obsessed with it.

p.s. Can you talk a bit about who owns the voting machines? And the certification *cough* process.

Originally posted by audrey
I sent this yesterday:

mine went like this:



Dear Mr Olbermann,

Regarding your coverage of voting irregularity tonight:
My thanks to you and your staff for being the only folks on television with balls!

I've been asking myself for some time now "where have all the journalists gone?"
Apparently, they are all either working the comedy side of the action at the Daily Show...
or with you and your great Countdown team at MSNBC.

I had thought it was time to give up watching your network when I heard Pat Buchanan kissing John O'Neill's ass last week—apologising for not having stood up to defend his heroism in standing by his lies to the bitter end. I had sincerely thought that revisionist history of the election had begun fiull-swing.

It would seem that all the news networks simply stopped reporting news and investigating stories sometime this past year—opting to simply read press releases—no matter their lack of any shred of fact or substance.


Some of us have been following the stories about the so-called 'black-box' voting and suspect numbers from last week's election for the better part of the week... amid news on the int0rweb of a complete clamp-down on this story—your coverage has emerged. Thank you!



Thank You All~



Walt Dietrich
Roseville, CA

Mine from yesterday:

Dear Mr. Olbermann,

Damn you, sir. Damn you to hell. Your blog entries of the past two days have caused me to bookmark yet another blog for daily reading! Where am I going to find the time to keep up with everything that's important?

Keep up the good work.

Having said all that— for crying out loud, all the data we used tonight on Countdown was on official government websites in Cleveland and Florida. We confirmed all of it— moved it right out of the Reynolds Wrap Hat zone in about ten minutes.

Flashback to a recent Keith quote on WFG...

The only reason I differentiate between the blogs and the newspapers is that in the latter, a certain bar of ascertainable, reasonably neutral, fact has to be passed, and has to be approved by a consensus of reporters and editors. The process isn’t flawless (ask Dan Rather) but the next time you read a blog where bald-faced lies are accepted as fact, ask yourself whether we here in cyberspace have yet achieved the reliability of even the mainstream media. In short, a lot gets left out of newspapers, radio, and tv - but what’s left in tends to be, in the words of my old CNN Sports colleague NickCharles, a lead-pipe cinch.

*rolls with laughter again.

I too find it amusing how a story can move from being questioned in blogs to being checked and reported-on by a cable-news program.... oh how funny!

it is even more amusing that only a pseudo-news/entertainment show would have the balls to follow-up on the story... maybe change their first perception, after getting thousands of emails encouraging them to look into the matter further...


changing one's view—after getting more facts and information—is so incredibly funny




I simply chose to ignore that post the first time... it completely misrepresented the page from which it was taken and posted—and does so again...

despite first appearances, the 'Countdown' staff stuck with the story—and the majority of their viewers who wrote them—checked the story out... and "...confirmed all of it— moved it right out of the Reynolds Wrap Hat zone in about ten minutes."




oh, I find it so incredibly funny, someone would seek to look into a story from the int0rweb blogs and confirm it... oh, ha ha ha ha

it's true, i saw the graphs!

A bunch of cats across the parking lot (Keith Olbermann)

A bunch of cats across the parking lot (Keith Olbermann)

NEW YORK - The election vote mess is like one of those inflatable clown dolls. You knock it down with your hardest punch, it goes supine, and then bounces back up, in the meantime having moved an inch or two laterally.

The punch, of course, is the explanation that the 29 more-votes-than-voters precincts in greater Cleveland appear to have been caused by the addition of Absentee Ballots. The total difference between registered voters and votes (93,000) might be explained by that process, but it does little for one’s confidence in the whole result from Ohio.

The problem is, the rubber clown immediately bounces back with the report that officials in Youngstown managed to catch a slight glitch in their voting there: a total drawn from all the precincts that initially showed negative 25,000,000 million votes cast. It evokes a Monty Python sketch (“Mr. Kevin Phillips Bong - Sensible Party - 14,352. Mr. Harquin Fim Tim Lim Bim Bus Stop Fatang Fatang Ole Biscuit Barrel - Silly Party -- minus 25,000,0000).

No reason to worry about the integrity of the outcome in Ohio, is there?

The most pleasing thing of the last three days of blogs and newscasts is the reassurance from political professionals that all of you (all of us) who have wondered about what went on a week ago yesterday are not necessarily nuts. We might not necessarily be right, but there are some very stodgy, very by-the-book folks who think we’re damned right to be asking.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/

NEW YORK— With news this morning that the computerized balloting in North Carolina is so thoroughly messed up that all state-wide voting may be thrown out and a second election day scheduled, the story continues.

Tonight on 'Countdown,' we'll examine the N.C. mess (which would not include a second presidential vote), new fuzzy math in Nevada, allegations against the Democrats in Pennsylvania, Ralph Nader's news conference, and the other voting developments as they occur. A Stanford computer expert will address the vulnerability of the Optical Scanning system (and answer the question: which is easier to hack, electronic voting or exit polls?), and Newsweek's Jonathan Alter will join me to report on the reporting.

In the interim, for the North Carolina situation, we refer you to the Website of the excellent newspaper The Charlotte Observer.

cnn sort of acknowledged the existence of a controversy on Judy Woodruff's show this afternoon.

they aired about a 3 minute bit that didn't have much to say.

Originally posted by Walt
Relax about Ohio, Relax about the guy tailing me.

NEW YORK - Anybody else notice that when you politely refer to the Secretary of State of Ohio, you have to call him “Mr. Blackwell,” just like that guy who compiles the goofy worst-dressed list?
...


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240

The blog just keeps getting better and better. Actually the entry before this most recent one is my favorite, about the emailed Kerry video.

... But the video is just plain weird. The phrasing of the start of the relevant passage—“Regardless of the outcome of this election”— is open to the same kind of parsing and confusion usually reserved for the latest release from Osama Bin Laden. ...

It is noteworthy that the announcement of a legal challenge made it into weekend editions of The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Columbus Dispatch, the Associated Press wires, and other publications. The Columbus paper even mentioned something curious. “Earlier this week, the Ohio Democratic party announced it would join a lawsuit arguing that the state lacks clear rules for evaluating provisional ballots, a move the party said will keep its options open if problems with the ballots surface.”

The Ohio newspaper coverage suggests that even the mainstream media is beginning to sit up and take notice that, whatever its merits, the investigation into the voting irregularities of November 2nd has moved from the Reynolds Wrap Hat stage into legal and governmental action.

Today's email:

Dear Keith,

Please oh please cover Hurricane Bev, as she blows through Volusia County Florida, wrestling election officials over bags of garbage that burst open, revealing certified voting tapes destined for the dumpster. Better than the basketbrawl, it has not only the fighting, but also corruption and coverups. Ask her for a snippet of film. If it doesn't look lively enough, maybe you could intersperse it with shots of people wrestling alligators in the Everglades.

(This is the part where I poke you with something sharp, but nonthreatening. Maybe a spork.)

Go on, do it.

*waits anxiously*

Audrey

you two have a good rapport going. maybe you could get him to do a special on those graphs and charts?

Olbermann destroys Coulter.

<a href="http://www.edwardsdavid.com/BushVideos/olbermann_050107-01.rm">The Friday night news quiz</a>.

It would almost be worth the price of the doll to do that.