Fox and MSNBC have been attacking each other with more frequency (but probably less violently) than the Black Spy and the White Spy, and one of their main forms of ammunition have been their respective ratings.

So naturally 'Countdown', hosted by the rather large (both in stature and physical size) talking head Keith Olbermann, had to respond to a report that appeared in the New York Post's "Page Six" column claiming that his show is one baboon hair away from cancellation hell.

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Remember last week when Jon Stewart turned his eye on pundit mimicry against MSNBC's rather large talking head Keith Olbermann?

It seems that Mr. Olbermann saw Stewart's glasses-removing "special comment" on The Daily Show, so Olbermann dedicated the end of Monday's show to a little "special comment" of his own. Get ready to hear something you may never hear again on a cable news pundit show for a rambling, incoherent and baseless attack on a public figure on either side of the political aisle: an apology!

Someone want to turn to The Weather Channel and check on Hell's wind chill? Because it may have just dropped to -2 Celsius.

The Democrats are getting desperate to retain the baboon hair thin majority they have in the Senate.

How desperate are they? They actually asked political TV shouter Ed Schultz to run for a vacant seat.

The pundit and host of MSNBC's The Ed Show got a call from Democratic Rep. Merle Boucher asking him to run for retiring North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan's vacated seat.

Schultz hasn't said whether he'll run one way or the other but when he does, expect his booming voice to knock out a few car windows and the occasional fragile wine glass. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Morning Meeting, a horrid hour long morning news and shout show featuring former CNBC talking head Dylan Ratigan, invited Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz on a recent show and conducted the kind of interview that would cause the Bill O'Reilly from that infamous Inside Edition clip to calm down. Although it would probably sound more like "calm the f*$& down."

Ratigan tried to take Schultz to the mat over the recent health care bill, but the only thing he accomplished is turning his own show into the kind of wall of incoherent noise that has dominated the cable news clusterf&$%. He has since issued an apology.

If you're wondering who actually flicked the switch for the always impressive Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, you might be surprised or violently angry depending on your personal opinions.

MSNBC's professional right-wing pundit impressionist Keith Olbermann lit the tree during last night's episode of Countdown while dishing on Tiger Woods' series of trysts with gossip monger Michael Musto like a couple of housewives in a beauty parlor with baritone voice. Olbermann officially ushered in Christmas with a switch that looks like he raided the trash bin after NBC dismantled the Family Feud set. Then without missing a beat, the two jump right back into the Tiger trashing.

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Who doesn't love Thanksgiving? I'll be enjoying mine with all the usual staples: turkey, cranberries, cornbread stuffing, some weird brown thing my father attempted to make and my Mom's mind-numbingly good meliton dressing. I'm literally chomping at the bit to take that first of 227 bites of homemade turkey. I've gone through three remotes in the last hour.

But I have to come up with something to do after all the food has been ravenously devoured by that wolf pack I call my family. And rather than list 100 reasons for regretting life (because 99 of them would be "Why did I eat that?"), here some things I have to be thankful for instead.

If you're playing a TV news drinking game wherein you and your dumb little buddies have to do a shot every time someone posts fake footage or film for a story, you might want to think about switching to Tang.

Now MSNBC's Morning Meeting has been caught dipping their hand in the Photoshopping jar when they aired rather obvious fake photos of Sarah Palin while doing a diss-session on the former VP candidate and her never ending book tour. Seriously, why is there this much coverage over one book? Even The Never Ending Story has an ending.



Dylan Ratigan issued an official apology to the viewers, Palin and her family for "mistakenly" using the doctored images. He also said he and the network took the weekend to ensure this would not happen again. I guess that means there's one less email forwarding fratboy on MSNBC's research payroll now.

The Los Angeles Times made a rather humorous error in their TV listings and some, depending on what they personally think of MSNBC talking head Keith Olbermann, may not have noticed the difference.

Their TV listings for Thursday listed Jackass in the time slot where Countdown with Keith Olbermann should have been. The paper issued a correction the following day, disappointing thousands of easily hammered frat boys (including me) who thought MTV's nightly cavalcade of nut shots and poo fights had returned to television on another network.

Olbermann was OK with the mistake until one of the paper's bloggers used it as a political parry against him and his network. That launched the MSNBC host into a personal tirade against the blogger and anything else that happened to saunter into the path of Olbermann's angry spittle cannon.

Walter Cronkite's passing didn't mark the end of an era in the TV news business. The era he helped produce and prolong died long before he did.

It's hard for me to ever imagine a time when people considered a major network news anchor as America's most trusted source for anything. Claims of bias and political persuasion being injected into every story with a meat syringe created a thick fog that made it very hard to cover anything with a modicum of honesty.

Cronkite, however, was the man people turned to when something blew up, exploded, imploded, launched, landed or any other number of descriptive verbs, because his goal wasn't to make news every time he stepped in front of a camera. His goal was just to report it.

A while back I called Anderson Cooper "The Four Million Dollar Man." Looks like we're going to have to call him something else.

CNN has just given the anchor of Anderson Cooper 360 a big increase in pay. Cooper will be paid $50 million over the next five years. Yes, that's 5-0. That comes out to be $10 million a year, but it's up to you whether you want to call Coop "The 50 Million Dollar Man" or "The 10 Million Dollar Man."

So readers, is he worth it? It's really hard to judge whether one person is "worth" the amount of money they are given, whether it's Michael Jordan, Julia Roberts, or Anderson Cooper. But Cooper does indeed seem to be the future of CNN, the "face" of the network, if you will, and it looks like they want to lock him in for a long time to come.

Cooper hosts his nightly show at 10pm and also contributes to 60 Minutes over on CBS.

Is this one of the improvements they're making to the cable network now that it's under new leadership? Not sure if you watch it during the day, but they have this really annoying new feature where you see and hear the producer in the control room telling the technicians what to do, telling the anchor what story is coming up next, telling viewers they're going to commercial. Why are they doing this? Doing it once or twice was a quirky and interesting, but now it's a regular thing? Who cares what the producers say and how the show runs? When I watch a 24 hour news channel (or many types of shows, actually), I don't want to see the inner workings of the machine. Do they think it's hip or revealing or innovative? It's not.

If they want to start putting cameras in the dressing rooms of the anchorwomen, then I might be interested. New slogan: "MSNB-See the hot anchorbabes like you've never seen them before!"