Very good article about Keith Olbermann, the Immoral Minority's favorite newsman.

Olbermann, who looks more like a high school teacher than a glitzy TV anchor, is the one who cuts and dices the news of the day into five segments, what he and his staff consider the day's top stories, illustrated with news reports from NBC News correspondents, interviews with newsmakers, whom he treats courteously, interspersed with signature witty interjections (calling 9/11 Rudolph "Giuliani's red badge of courage"), further interrupted by new ways to look at the news.

Olbermann does news quizzes and a puppet theater. Beginning with the Michael Jackson trial, he created comedic puppet "re-enactments" of news stories, using printed photographs glued to popsicle sticks, hand-held in front of a blue screen. Olbermann did the voiceovers himself. My favorites were the "Karl Rove Puppet Theatre" and the "Anna Nicole Smith Supreme Court Puppet Theatre," although the Mel Gibson and Paris Hilton puppets were not too shabby.

A segment called "Oddball" regularly assays the day's collection of weird videos, goofy stories with goofy clips of people behaving like idiots, announced with the clarion "Let's play Oddball!"

Each night he picks the Worst Person in the World, awarding a bronze medal (worse), a silver (worser) and a gold (worst). Bill O'Reilly has the distinction of winning all three top spots on a single broadcast (the night of November 30, 2005); as of June he had gone gold fifty-seven times.

Most of us on the left think of Keith as our knight in tweedy armor. He wades into battle with his indignation in one hand and his incredible elocution in the other. Keith uses his great speaking voice to slice his targets with precision like strokes of his verbal scalpel, to leave them exposed for the world to see.

In my deepest fantasies I would love to see Bill O'Reilly come on Countdown (much like he did with the Colbert Report) and attempt to control the exchange with KO(I love this nickname), like he tries to do on his show. I would suggest that KO go on the "O'Reilly factor" except we all know that Bill would cut his mike as soon and KO offered him a "falafel of peace".

If MSNBC had any brains at all they would allow KO to produce a number of new programs that would help the cable network to squash FOX like a bug on a windshield.