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From last Monday night's monologue, mostly about Olbermann's sudden departure from MSNBC.

From The Majority Report:

The Majority Report is back after an eventful weekend. Sam starts off the show discussing Keith Olbermann’s abrupt departure from MSNBC. Keith’s progressive legacy at MSNBC includes Rachel Maddow, Ed Shultz, Cenk Uygur – hosts that may have never gotten a chance on television if Keith didn’t blazon the way. For that, we all thank Mr. Olbermann. Sam also finds a correlation with the way that Randi Rhodes left AAR and Keith. Both were suspended for silly reasons for management to agitate. And that suspension pretty much was the last straw in a long line of management headbutts. Listen to Sam discuss Keith’s legacy on MSNBC.

Update: Keith Olbermann said he will issue an official Tweet tonight at 8:00pm EST

With Keith's departure from MSNBC, I thought I'd share another video that a lot of you may not have watched -- his interview with C-SPAN's Brian Lamb back in 2006 on their weekly series Q&A. I wasn't recording video for Crooks and Liars back then, but C-SPAN has it in their archives. I did watch this when it aired live back in the day and really enjoyed the interview. I hope you do as well.

I sincerely hope Keith decides to keep his voice out there with a presence on the Internet even if his contract agreement prevents him from hosting any broadcast television.

You can read the transcript from the interview here. And if you'd like to share the link for the C-SPAN interview with others, here's the link for their video archive.

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Here's Keith back in 2007 being interviewed by another person that I deeply regret is no longer on the air, Bill Moyers. Full transcript available here.

I thought I'd share one portion of the transcript here where Keith talked about leaving MSNBC during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and whether he'd ever do it again.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah, I noticed when you a sportscaster you never took sides between the teams on the field. But a lot of people think you've taken sides now. They think you've taken sides with the progressive or liberal story.

KEITH OLBERMANN: They didn't say that a lot during the Lewinsky thing. I always find that kind of ironic as I've seen some of the criticism from the right. But, what I've done on the air in the last 4 1/2 years, and particularly in the last year and a half since the special comments began, is really journalism. It's saying here's what you're being told. Here's the identifiable objective fact to the situation. This statement from the government may be a lie. And what we all did in this country, those who had voted for this president and those who did not, was to say we're in dire trouble. We've been attacked. Let's rally around him, give him all the support we can, and we will suspend our disbelief. The moment that it began to be obvious that we were being manipulated, used-- that was when my suspicions began to take voice.

BILL MOYERS: I watched you walk off when you were at MSNBC and they were covering the Lewinsky scandal. And I believe you said, "This is ridiculous."

KEITH OLBERMANN: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: This is drip, right?

KEITH OLBERMANN: Right.

BILL MOYERS: You walked away.

KEITH OLBERMANN: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: Would you do it again?

KEITH OLBERMANN: I think probably it won't happen. But I would say that there were circum-- there were circumstances in this show, there was one occasion where I was prepared to go out the door an hour before one of the shows because we had one of those conflicting moments. This is very early on again. This is 2003. When we were all still in that kind of, "Gee, should we suspend our disbelief? What if he's-- what if George Bush is right and this is the kind of threat that he portrays?" He-- it's probably exaggerated because he's a politician, number one. But number two, what if he's right? I think a lot of us were saying, "Well, okay, let's just tread gently." MSNBC hired a guy named Michael Savage. And he came on and did-- not only did he do a show once a week that was basically just spattering invective on people he didn't like and these people change from week to week, but it was terribly produced. I mean, it was an awful show. And he was-- he looked like he was standing in front of a chalkboard somewhere in somebody's basement with a camera. One night I walk in, my boss is out of town. And the guy actually running the show at the point said, at countdown, said-- "We're going to run a Michael Savage commentary. I've got to go now." And he ran away. And I said, "We're not running a Michael Savage commentary. That's in the"-- and he was gone.

I called my agent. Now, I'd just gotten back to MSNBC. I left, as you said, under the Lewinsky circumstances. A lot of bridges were burned. Came back. Everybody hugged. It's three or four months in. I'm enjoying it. I think I'm making a difference. I'm getting that little sort of skeptical thing back. And here we're going to have a Michael Savage commentary in the middle of it. So I finally got a hold of my agent. And I said, "I have to walk out, don't I?" She said, "Yep, you do." And I said, "Yeah, I guess so. Well, it was a nice career." I'm going to try to get a hold of my boss in Washington. And I called him and I said, "I can't"-- he said, "Can you find some reason not to run it that doesn't pertain to the politics?" I said, "Are you saying to me if I go and look at it and it doesn't meet production standards we don't have to run it?" "I might be saying that, yes. Just give me something to work with." And I went in and looked at it and the guy repeated himself nine times. So I called the guy back and said-- "It's very badly produced. He's repeating himself. I don't think you should run it." "Okay, good enough." But those things still happen, and I'm sure they'll still happen.

Here's part two.

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MSNBC's Keith Olbermann didn't hold anything back Wednesday when he announced the news that the "delusional liar" Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) was planning on retiring.

"The end of the line for Joe Lieberman, self-described 'moderate Democrat,'" Olbermann began his show by announcing. "Don`t let the delusional liar door hit you in the delusional liar butt on the delusional liar way out."

"Tonight, goodbye, Joe Lieberman, and good riddance," he later said.

The MSNBC host noted that in comparing himself to President John F. Kennedy, Lieberman had implied that today's Democrats were either anti-civil rights, anti-growth or weak on defense.

"As far as his civil rights record, he was rightly praised for helping to repeal 'don't ask, don't tell' in the Senate," Olbermann said. "Civil rights for Muslims on the other hand? Unlike JFK, Mr. Lieberman supported the American government tossing Muslim suspects into detention, denying them Miranda rights, seeking to strip even US citizens suspected of terrorism of their basic civil rights."

"On tax policies, Mr. Lieberman, like Mr. Bush, supported taxing the rich at the lowest rates they could get, about half of the 65 percent rate favored by President Kennedy," he noted.

"Mr. Lieberman's standard formulation is that he was a Republican on foreign policy and Democrat on domestic, except for the estate tax, the Bush tax cuts, school vouchers, gay marriage, homeland security, the public option, the Medicare buy-in, privatizing Social Security, and tort reform. Did I leave anything off the list?" Olbermann asked Slate's Dave Weigel.

"That was almost complete," Weigel replied. "I think you might have left off in 2006, when Lieberman supported -- opposed a bill in Connecticut that would have forced all hospitals to treat rape victims, even if they were seen to be ovulating. It was the Catholic hospitals were against it. He took the side of them. At the time he famously said, in Connecticut, it's only a short ride to the next hospital, in case you are going to one of these hospitals that doesn`t allow you to get the treatment you need."

"So OK, add that to the list and I think you`ve have got a pretty comprehensive list of reasons why liberals do not like him," he concluded.

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Keith's Special Comment on the nine days since Tuscon:

To date, only one commentator or politician has expressed the slightest introspection, the slightest self-awareness, the slightest remorse, the slightest ownership, of the existence of the fantasy dream cloud of violent language by which we are now nearly blinded.

Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on the nine days since Tucson. That awful night, I said this: We need to put the guns down. Just as importantly we need to put the gun metaphors away and permanently. Left, right, middle - politicians and citizens - sane and insane.

This age in which this country would accept "targeting" of political opponents and putting bullseyes over their faces, and of the dangerous blurring between political rallies and gun shows, ended.

I cited seven examples of violent rhetoric from the right; only one from the left -- my own. Because the point of that Comment and this one was not that the right pulled the trigger in Tucson but that we as citizens must stop the next Loughner, and the only way to do this is to accept personal responsibility and to pledge -- as I said that night -- that "violence, or the threat of violence, have no place in our Democracy, and I apologize for and repudiate any act or any thing in my past that may have even inadvertently encouraged violence."

This afternoon, former President Clinton issued a statement honoring what would have been Dr. King's 82nd birthday:

"...we'd all do well to heed this message. While no one intends their words or actions to incite the violence we saw in Tucson -- and it's wrong for anyone to suggest otherwise - we live in a world where what we say and how we say it can be read, heard, or seen by those who understand exactly what we mean and by those whose inner demons take them to a very different place.

"That's not an argument against free speech, but a reminder that, as with all freedoms, its use carries with it responsibility. Therefore, we should follow the example Dr. King set and exercise our freedom of speech in ways that both clarify our honest differences and nurture the best of us rather than bring out the worst."

Perfect.

Yet the response?

To date, only one commentator or politician has expressed the slightest introspection, the slightest self-awareness, the slightest remorse, the slightest ownership, of the existence of the fantasy dream cloud of violent language by which we are now nearly blinded.

"Our political discourse," John McCain wrote in an otherwise steaming serving of Washington Post Op-Ed partisan flab, "should be more civil than it currently is, and we all, myself included, bear some responsibility for it not being so."

That's it.

One individual assumed any personal responsibility for any of it, besides me: John McCain. Not Palin, not Beck. Not Limbaugh, not West. Not Kanjorski, not Malloy. Not O'Reilly, not Angle. Not Jesse Kelly, not President Obama.

It's me and John McCain.

Read on...

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Keith Olbermann talked to the SPLC's Mark Potok about what the possible motivation behind the assassination attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Griffords may have been.

OLBERMANN: Loughner's Internet trail, does it tell us anything about his politics? Does that specific reference to the 8th District, the Congresswoman's district, does that step out of the incoherence or just part of the incoherence?

POTOK: Well you're right that reading through all of his materials or the materials that are purported to be his he sounds quite mad... out of his mind. But there is a thread through the material that really seems pretty clear and that thread has to do with seeing the government as an enemy. The books you mentioned, there's a theme that runs through all of them, particularly the Ayn Rand book; the idea of the individual against the state, but there are ideas, like the idea of the only legitimate currency being backed by gold instead of silver; that's a core idea of the radical right in this country.

The idea weirdly enough of controlling grammar, of somehow the government using grammar to control the people is an idea that exists on the radical right. There's a particular person, a man named David Wynn Miller who has plugged this idea for years. This man also talked quite a lot in these strange videos of his about what he called conscience dreaming but I think it's almost certainly meant to be conscious dreaming which is an idea that also has been kind of tossed around on the radical right, in particular by a kind of British conspiracy theorist by the name of David Icke. So a lot of these ideas, his burning of the flag, his talking about the government as treasonous and using mind control to control the rest of us and so on, these are all ideas or kind of shards of ideas that exist very much on the radical right.

And then of course as the Pima sheriff said so dramatically and so truly I think, you know you add those kinds of ideas to just the amazing level of vitriol out there on the air waves and also in addition to what the sheriff said, coming from politicians, and it is not entirely surprising, you know, that someone like this acts out.

Keith asked Mark Potok if in fact Jared Loughner is just one extremely disturbed individual, does that “exonerate those that put the cross-hairs on Ms. Giffords” and “those who use language demonizing liberals, or Democrats or just leaving the party out of it, people in office, incumbents, or does it simply underscore why such language, no matter what direction it's pointed in is so ill advised.”

POTOK: I think the latter. I think there's no exoneration for the people who talk about... who make these... who will repeat these kind of falsehoods on the air and in public squares all over this country. You know, the people who say it's not about health care, it's about the president wanting to kill your grandmother. It's not about immigration reform, it's about a secret plot on the part of Mexico to reconquer the Southwestern United States, and on and on and on.

Thank you Mark Potok for that. It's a sad day for Democracy as Keith Olbermann expressed in his special comment when one of our political parties has turned to terrorism as a political tactic, and that's exactly what the right wing and the Republicans have done while being given a free pass from our useless corporate media.

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Keith's Special Comment on the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and domestic terrorism.

Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona. We need to put the guns down. Just as importantly we need to put the gun metaphors away and permanently.

Left, right, middle - politicians and citizens - sane and insane. This morning in Arizona, this age in which this country would accept "targeting" of political opponents and putting bullseyes over their faces and of the dangerous blurring between political rallies and gun shows, ended.

This morning in Arizona, this time of the ever-escalating, borderline-ecstatic invocation of violence in fact or in fantasy in our political discourse, closed. It is essential tonight not to demand revenge, but to demand justice; to insist not upon payback against those politicians and commentators who have so irresponsibly brought us to this time of domestic terrorism, but to work to change the minds of them and their supporters - or if those minds tonight are too closed, or if those minds tonight are too unmoved, or if those minds tonight are too triumphant, to make sure by peaceful means that those politicians and commentators and supporters have no further place in our system of government.

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Politics is making for some strange bedfellows these days. Keith Olbermann talked to Sen. Bernie Sanders about whether he and Senator Jim DeMint might filibuster the deal made by the White House and Republicans to extend the Bush tax cuts.

Sanders, DeMint pledge to filibuster Obama-GOP tax cut deal:

The US Senate's most liberal and most conservative member have both come out strongly against the bipartisan compromise on tax cuts between President Barack Obama and Republicans.

Self-avowed democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on Tuesday evening promised he will "do whatever it takes" to prevent passage of the measure, objecting to its temporary two-year extension of tax cuts for the highest income earners, a centerpiece of the Republican agenda.

A fierce opponent of the high-end tax breaks, Sanders appeared on television Tuesday blasting the deal as a "moral outrage." He depicted it a Republican ploy to hold the middle class "hostage" to the demands of millionaires and billionaires.

Sanders' office confirmed to Raw Story that he will filibuster the measure, becoming the first senator to announce such an intention, and will court others to do the same.

Also on Tuesday, after Obama's prime time pitch depicting the bill as a necessary compromise to move forward, arch-conservative Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) said he'll also filibuster to the bill, but for different reasons than Sanders. Read on...

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Keith's Special Comment Tuesday was in response to President Obama's deal with Republicans for more tax cuts for the rich, followed by his press conference, where he attacked his base for not being appreciative enough of what he's accomplished.

I'll add some transcript later if they post it. All I can say is I don't think Keith will be getting any invitations to the White House any time soon after this one.

UPDATE: Here's the transcript:

Finally tonight as promised, a Special Comment on the tax compromise.

To paraphrase Churchill, again, let me begin by saying the most unpopular and most unwelcome thing: "that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road. We should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of American politics and policy have been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being, been pronounced against this Administration: 'thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting'."

In exchange for selling out a principal campaign pledge, and the people to whom and for whom it was made. In exchange for betraying the truth that the idle and corporate rich of this country have gotten unprecedented and wholly indefensible tax cuts for a decade. In exchange for giving the idle and corporate rich of this country two more years in which to accumulate still more, and more vast piles of personal wealth with which they can buy and sell everybody else.

In exchange for extending what he spent the weeks before the mid-terms calling "tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires" to people who have proven, without a scintilla of doubt, without even a fig leaf of phony effort to make it look like they would do otherwise, that they will keep the money for themselves.

In exchange for injecting new vigor into the infantile, moronic, disproved-for-a-decade three-card monte game of an economic theory purveyed by these treacherous and ultimately traitorous Republicans, that tax cuts for the rich will somehow lead to job creation even though if that had ever been true in the slightest the economy would not be where it is today.

In exchange for giving tax cuts for the rich which the nation cannot afford, and extending their vintage through the next election and thus promising at best a reenactment of this whole sorry, amoral, degrading spectacle in the winter of 2012 and at worst a rubber-stamp from a wholly Republican House and Senate and even White House.

In exchange for this searing and transcendent capitulation, the President got just thirteen months of extended benefits for those unemployed less than 100 weeks. And he got nothing absolutely nothing for those unemployed for longer — the 99ers.

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