NP: John Cage, 4'33"

I might have to give up on Olbermann. Last night, in trumpeting the results of a new NBC poll, the cable news rock star du jour made an exceptionally loud point that Barack Obama's national lead over John McCain was outside the margin of error. Of course, during the primaries, Countdown made a point of concocting a larger effective margin of error by combining MOE with the percent of undecideds in the poll.

Now that it's down to Democrats vs. Republicans, though, it appears they threw that out the window. Why was it appropriate to use the larger number in one case but the smaller number in the other? Could it be because using the smaller number supports a point they're trying to score? Support, oh, I don't know, an agenda?

Then there was the lead story -- John McCain's "not too important" comment. There is certainly an angle from which to approach this story as insensitive, just in terms of the proximity of the words "not too important" and "troops come home." But to not even consider that McCain might have meant that it's not too important to set a firm date for withdrawal versus being not important when troops actually come home is the kind of willful misinterpretation that pisses me off whenever its used in a presumptive "news" environment. The ferocity with which Olbermann went after McCain on this was downright ugly, and it's only going to get worse with tonight's "special comment."

I've often defended Keith as less ideological than his detractors -- and some of his supporters -- would care to admit, but that's getting less and less defensible. And while some on the left might decry that it's about time they got a biased voice on cable TV, I'm not on the left, and that's not what I want to watch. BBC World News is beginning to look like the better option.