Randi Rhodes:Olby's New Gig & Mubarak's Exit Plan

Keith Olbermann announced his plans today. If you’ve ever heard any of Keith Olbermann’s announcements, you know you may want to wait for the Cliff Notes version. Keith is going to Current TV. Wow. A lot of people aren’t even sure Current TV is still currently on TV. Current TV doesn’t have a lot of current viewers, even by cable TV standards. I think its ratings are somewhere between MTV 9 and the Farsi language business channel.

As part of the deal, Olbermann will have an executive roll at and an equity stake in Current TV. Well, I guess one way to keep him from fighting with his bosses is to make him one of them. Incidentally, Comcast owns 10 percent of Current TV. But then I think Comcast owns at least 10 percent of everything. Olbermann fled NBC as they were being taken over by Comcast, but he evidently couldn’t find any media outlet that was totally free of Comcast. Ten percent Comcast was the best he could do. Still, it might be a brilliant move by Current TV. At MSNBC, Keith Olbermann drew a million viewers per night. I don’t know if Current TV has drawn a million viewers total yet.

There are rumors that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak may travel to a clinic in Germany as part of a graceful exit strategy. What exactly is graceful about telling a dictator to go to Germany? Mubarak may go to a clinic near Baden-Baden for a “prolonged health check.” Perfect, reform in Egypt goes forward while Dr. House and his team take a look at Hosni.

Also in Egypt, an executive from Google who helped organize the protests has been released from jail. Google exec Wael Ghonim had disappeared last month. Did anyone think of conducting a Google search? There were rumors that Ghonim had been taken into custody, but they were all marked “citation needed.”

Finally, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is out pushing his new book. Where? In the areas north, east, south, and west of Barnes & Noble. Now Rummy says that claiming that there were weapons of mass destruction in sites round Baghdad and Tikrit before the invasion was a “misstatement.” Call me skeptical, but when a misstatement perfectly serves your agenda, it’s usually a lie.

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