More From Our New Hero, Keith Olbermann

Keith has some good stuff about Nader's recount efforts in New Hampshire and the Green Party candidate's recount efforts in Ohio:

That Cobb and Nader between them could lead to a resolution of both Democrats’ doubts about the legitimacy of the election, and Republicans’ resentment that there are doubts, contains a delicious irony. To call them “fringe” candidates is to demean their efforts, but they’re hardly favorites at any spot on the political spectrum. Nader, in particular, was trashed on a daily basis by the Democrats who feared he could negatively impact Kerry’s vote totals in swing states, as he clearly did to Al Gore in Florida in 2000. For the rancor, Nader has nobody to blame but himself. Not until late in the campaign did he successfully articulate his reasons for ‘running anyway’— namely, his conviction that breaking the two-party duopoly at lower echelons of government (particularly in the House) will take decades, and had to start at the top and work down.

Plus, Keith's got an update on the Warren County lockdown:

The rationale for the bizarre “lockdown” of the vote-counting venue in Warren County on election night suddenly broke down when it was contradicted by spokespersons from the FBI and Ohio’s primary homeland security official.

County Emergency Services Director Frank Young said last week that in a face-to-face meeting with an FBI agent, he was warned that Warren County, outside Cincinnati, faced a “terrorist threat.” County Commissioners President Pat South amplified, insisting to us at Countdown that her jurisdiction had received a series of memos from Homeland Security about the threat. “These memos were sent out statewide, not just to Warren County, and they included a lot of planning tools and resources to use for election day security.

“In a face to face meeting between the FBI and our director of Emergency Services,” Ms. South continued, “we were informed that on a scale from 1 to 10, the tri-state area of Southwest Ohio was ranked at a high 8 to a low 9 in terms of security risk. Warren County in particular, was rated at 10.”

But the Bureau says it issued no such warning.

So the media was kept two floors away from the vote counting at the Warren County Administration on election night on the basis of a “10” FBI terror threat that the FBI says was never issued.

And, finally, Keith takes fellow Cornell alumni Ann Coulter to task for misquoting him:

Ms. Coulter, living up to her usual standards which many of us in the Alumni Association nightly pray she didn’t learn at the university, took a quote from a transcript of the November 8th show completely out of context, and entirely twisted its meaning...It’s a neat trick — the journalistic equivalent of the dog who learns to balance the biscuit on her nose and then flip it into her mouth on voice command.

Nice shot Keith...