GE Bailout Piles Rocks Outside Keith Olbermann's Glass House

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Keith Olbermann, the host of an eponymous news and entertainment program on MSNBC, makes great sport of tossing angry rocks in the direction of conservatives and Republicans. He comes across as very tough when he dishes out his scorn. But, thanks to a new site on the Internet, we may soon be able to find out whether or not he can take it.

The Worst Bailout in the World has just gone live on the Internet with a petition asking Olbermann, who works for a company owned by General Electric, to return the $3.5 million in additional compensation awarded him in his new contract to the U.S. Treasury.

Says the site:

While General Electric, the parent-company of your MSNBC network, was negotiating a $126 billion taxpayer-funded bailout, you signed a new contract raising your salary from $4 million to $7.5 million annually. You have used your show as a platform to call for the resignation of corporate executives accepting excessive bonuses on the backs of taxpayers who are picking up the tab for these atrocious bailouts, yet you yourself have no problem engaging in the same "class economic rape" that you access them of.

Please heed you own advice and stop accepting taxpayer money to subsidize your nightly diatribes. Resign or return the balance of your excessive raise to the U.S. Treasury.

Says one of the people involved in putting up the site, "It is just outrageous that Olbermann, night after night, goes after executives at so-called bailout firms when he himself works for one. He likes to call other people on their inconsistencies—he calls them the worst person in the world. Well, he needs to take a look in the mirror."

Among his more inflammatory comments, Olbermann once, after attacking Fox News host Sean Hannity for his position on "waterboarding," said he would donate $1,000 to charity for every second that Hannity was himself waterboarded, reported Newsmax.com.

And, in a segment that aired earlier this week, Olbermann did an interview with comedian Janeane Garofalo "in which they wrote off the tea parties that were held this week and the protestors who attended them as being motivated only by a racist hatred of Obama and stating that the protestors somehow lacked intelligence because they questioned the president's policies," according to the Internet site Op-Ed news.

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