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OLBERMANN: "The Simpsons" has a new opening sequence. Harry Shearer talks us through it.
Plus, "Family Guy's" answer to the question, what is the most unattractive male name in
the English language. That's next. But first, time for Countdown's number two story, tonight's
worst persons in the world.
The bronze to Betsy McCaughey, the long ago New York lieutenant governor, whose error
riddled, apparently never fact checked op-ed for "Bloomberg News" precipitated the entire
paranoia on the right that the stimulus package was going to some how wind up dictating who,
what and how doctors could treat. McCaughey's piece was picked up by Limbaugh, Drudge and
Fox, not of whom noted her remarkable conflicts of interest, that she was a shill by an outfit
called the Hudson Institute for the pharmaceutical industry, which fears even slight increases
in government oversight.
When we reported this last week, McCaughey used a pay for publicity press release service
to issue a response in which she stated, "I am not paid by the pharmaceutical industry
or the Hudson Institute." Yet, the consumer group Health Care Renewal points out Miss
McCaughey currently sits on the board of directors at Cantell Medical (ph), a medical device
company, and used to sit on the board of Genta, a bio-tech company. And the Securities and
Exchange Commission reports that just days before she summarized her scare tactics in
that piece for "Bloomberg," McCaughey received 750 shares of stock options from Cantell Medical
worth about 11,000. And SEC records also she received more than 55,000 dollars from Cantell
Medical in the fiscal year ending last July 31st.
Miss McCaughey challenged me personally. "If Keith Olbermann has the courage, I invite
him to debate me on his program." Miss McCaughey is welcome on Countdown. Like every other
paid spokesperson trying to shill a product, she is invited to buy commercials on the show.
A tie at runner up to Congressman John Mica and Don Young of Alaska. Mr. Mica put out
a press release trumpeting stimulus money to be spent on railroads. "I applaud President
Obama's recognition that high speed rail should be part of America's future." Mr. Young put
out one too, boasting that in the stimulus he had, quote, "won a victory for the Alaska
Native Contracting Program, and other Alaska small business owners in HR-1, the American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act."
Mr. Mica and Mr. Young both voted against that act, the stimulus, and then promptly
took part credit for it. Honestly, what is better than hypocrisy?
Our winner, in yet another all bash the stimulus edition, comedian Rush Limbaugh, reduced to
inadvertently making a laughing stock of himself to try to make that bill look bad. Complaining
about his computer format. "They reformatted the bill. They've made it a PDF file when
they posted it. Now for those of you that don't use computers, basically, what that
means is that it cannot be key word searched. A PDF file is essentially a picture of a page.
So you can read every page, but you cannot key word search it. They didn't want anybody
knowing what is in this. They want it happening as fast as possible so nobody can know what's
in it."
Rush, did you try the binoculars thing to the left of center of every PDF tool bar?
You touch it with the mouse and then it says search across one or more PDF files. And if
you click it, it gives you a whole second screen on the side with the search bar. You
type in word, it will give you a list of all 900 places the word shows up.
How about Control F, did you try Control F, Rush? The little find tool bar then pops up.
You can type in it the word you want, and it will go right to that word? No. Well could
you try this, before you go accusing the Democrats and the president of the United States of
some conspiracy, can you ask an IT guy to give you a little help with your computer,
or maybe some six-year-old kid in your neighborhood. Failing all that, could just jam the keyboard
in your mouth as fast as possible to save you and us all this embarrassment.
Comedian Rush "what does the on switch do" Limbaugh, today's worst person in the world.