More on culture wars. Florida's Bay Harbor Island has been allowed to put its nativity scene back. Previously the town had been ordered to remove the nativity scene although a menorah was allowed to stay.

Over at Media Matters, the left-wing media watchers, they are upset over the coverage. Why? because: "FOX News failed to report that a Christmas tree had also been allowed in the holiday display." I'm not quite sure what their point is. I think that they are saying that a Christmas tree is equivalent to a nativity scene.

I've been writing a lot about Olbermann but that's nothing. There is a whole blog devoted to watching him. A recent entry has an email exchange between Olbermann and an other reporter, Tom Sileo. It is interesting the attiduted that Olbermann lets slip. Sileo quotes his grandfather about how the press treated FDR during WWII. Olbermann's response,

I'm not sure of your grandfather's point in referencing Roosevelt. The narrowest of his four victories came in 1944, by a percentage margin of 53-46, and an electoral margin of 432-99. Is he comparing World War II with the fighting in Iraq? Given that the country was virtually unanimous in support of that war, and is still pretty evenly split about this conflict, the comparison seems like apples and oranges

Later in the exchange Olbermann says,

But it's a political judgement to compare these wars -- and to buy into the concept that Iraq is even part of a war on terrorism. If you've made your mind up about that, and start with an assumption that that's just TRUE -- a starting point -- then you've already made a political judgement about the incumbent president.

If you assume that it's just FALSE then you have also made a political judgement.

Granted Saddam's tied with al Qaeda are murky but his ties with other terrorist groups are well-documented. To me, that made him part of the war on terror (plus we had been in a continual state of hostilities since the end of the Gulf War).

Anyway...

I've been hammering Olbermann over his election coverage. He knows that a significant portion of the population was not going to accept that Bush won. That should make him careful about his sources. You don't start crying election fraud until you have some actual proof.

This didn't stop Olbermann. He quoted left-wing message boards about counties where people registered Democrat but vote Republican. He quoted grad students who came up with impressive-sounding statistics. He seized onto the story of the Triad who "patched" the computer without bothering to get the facts and as recently as yesterday he was still confusing the technician having access to the vote counting machine (Triad was contracted to do this) with having access to the ballots. He accepts Jesse Jackson at face value. Along the way he showed his absolute contempt for Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell and anyone else who suggests that the election was above board.

The complaint about bloggers is that some guy sitting around in his pajamas can say just anything while the major news organizations have layers of researchers and fact-checkers. I don't see any of that here. The Daily Kos and the Democratic Underground do not count as a fact-checkers.

Olbermann is on a prime-time cable news show yet he is allowed to persue a personal vendetta, often breaking a story before he knows the facts.

He also makes the same error as Eric Alterman in assuming that, just because the MSM is not as far to the left as he is, that they must be conservative.

Good thing that his ratings are dismal or he could be dangerous.