Gun Fun in the Good Ole USA!

FL Man Kills Two Police Officers

A routine arrest turned tragic Monday:

A Florida man shot two police officers during a shootout after he barricaded himself in the attic of a house Monday morning.
Officers arrived to arrest the man, "someone we wanted to get off the streets," they said, for aggravated battery.
But he had locked himself in the attic. When the officers entered, he started shooting, and 100 rounds were fired before he was in custody.

"Who expects to walk into a house and get gunfire from the attic?" the St. Petersburg police chief said.
Later Monday, police found the shooter's slain body in the home. The two fallen officers were the latest lives lost in a string of police shootings the past few days, including the fatal shooting of four officers in a Detroit police precinct office on Sunday.

Oprah's Big Secret: She Has a Half-Sister!

Forty-seven years ago, when Oprah Winfrey was 9 years old and living with her father in Tennessee, her mother became pregnant with a daughter who was given up for adoption. Winfrey had known nothing about it.

On The Oprah Winfrey Show on Monday, the talk show host revealed the family secret she had been hyping since last week, introducing her half-sister, Patricia, from Milwaukee.

"It was one of the greatest surprises of my life," said Winfrey, who found out the news last October. "It left me speechless."

Patricia was born in 1963 in Milwaukee and lived in a series of foster homes until the age of 7. She was then adopted, but said her childhood was "difficult" and she longed to be reunited with her birth mother, Winfrey says.

When Patricia was 17, she had a daughter, Aquarius, and then six years later son, Andre. She was unwed and as a single mom worked two jobs to care for her kids.

When Patricia, whose last name was not revealed, turned 20, she first tried to find out who her birth mother was but quickly gave up the search. Then a few years ago, she resumed the search and got her adoption records.

Through the adoption agency, Patricia reached out to her birth mother, whose name she still didn't know, but her mother did not want to meet her.

The very day, she happened to catch a TV news story about a woman named Vernita Lee, who was talking about a son, Jeffrey, who died in 1989, and a daughter, Pat, who had died in 2003. The information matched details in her adoption records.

"The hair on the back of my neck stood up," Patricia said. "I said, 'No, that can't be.'"

Her son Andre researched Winfrey's background and quickly realized that dates and locations lined up. Patricia tried to reach Lee numerous times, once even having her church pastor contact Lee's pastor, but Lee was not ready for a meeting, Winfrey said.

So Patricia went to a Wisconsin restaurant owned by Winfrey's niece, showed her the adoption documents and revealed her suspicion that they were related. Patricia and the niece underwent DNA testing, which proved a positive match.

After that, there were a flurry of emails back and forth between various Winfrey relatives and Winfrey, but none would reveal the secret, saying it was Lee's place. Winfrey asked her mother about giving a child up for adoption, but Lee said it wasn't true.

Then one day in October, 10 minutes before she was walking out to do a show, Winfrey asked her assistant what the truth was and she replied, "You have a sister."

Winfrey confronted her mother with the information and Lee finally admitted the truth. Lee and Patricia met on Oct. 25 for the first time since her birth.

On Thanksgiving Day, Winfrey drove to her mother's home in Milwaukee, where her half-sister sister Patricia was waiting.

"It was a Beloved moment," Winfrey says, referring to the movie in which a daughter comes back from the dead. Home video shows the two embracing for a long moment.

During an interview taped last week with Patricia and their mother, Lee said she had denied the truth for so long because she was ashamed that she had given up a child for adoption.

"I thought it was a terrible thing that I had done," Lee said, adding that she felt she wouldn't be able to take care of another child and get off welfare if she had kept her. Still, she said, "I did think about the baby. I went back looking for her and they told me she had left."

Postal Service Eyes Closing Thousands of Post Offices

The U.S. Postal Service plays two roles in America: an agency that keeps rural areas linked to the rest of the nation, and one that loses a lot of money.

Now, with the red ink showing no sign of stopping, the postal service is hoping to ramp up a cost-cutting program that is already eliciting yelps of pain around the country. Beginning in March, the agency will start the process of closing as many as 2,000 post offices, on top of the 491 it said it would close starting at the end of last year.

In addition, it is reviewing another 16,000—half of the nation's existing post offices—that are operating at a deficit, and lobbying Congress to allow it to change the law so it can close the most unprofitable among them. The law currently allows the postal service to close post offices only for maintenance problems, lease expirations or other reasons that don't include profitability.

Calififornia 2nd Grader Says Kids Had Sex in Class - R U KIDDIN' department!

Calif. 2nd Grader Says Kids Had Sex in Class
Teacher on Leave While School, Police Investigate Claims of Children Stripping, Engaging in Sex Acts in Class

OAKLAND - A second-grade teacher in Northern California was placed on leave while a school and police investigate accounts by students that classmates engaged in oral sex and stripped off some of their clothes during class, officials said Friday.

The investigation was under way at Markham Elementary School in Oakland, where the principal notified parents of the situation in a letter Thursday.

"We believe if the reports are true, there was a serious lapse of judgment or lack of supervision in the classroom," said Troy Flint, a spokesman for the Oakland Unified School District. "We're investigating how could this have happened. It seems unthinkable to us, just the same way it does to the public."

The male teacher, whose name has not been released, told investigators he did not see any of the acts that authorities suspect occurred last week. The teacher is barred from campus at least until the investigation is completed.

The principal learned of the allegations Wednesday after a student gave an account to a teacher's assistant, Flint said.

"Upon hearing these reports, we immediately launched an investigation which, to date, suggests that the reports have merit," Principal Pam Booker wrote in the letter to parents. "We have interviewed all the student participants who were implicated, as well as their teacher, and we continue to investigate the matter aggressively."

One incident involved several students who partially undressed and acted disruptively during class, while the other involved students who engaged in oral sex, district officials said.

"I apologize for this and assure you that we are collaborating with counselors and parents to provide support to those involved, address any concerns and take whatever actions are necessary to ensure that a similar act does not occur again," Booker told parents in the letter.

Counselors were at the school Friday to speak with students.

District officials emphasized the students were not accused of any wrongdoing.

"It's an incident of kids expressing their natural curiosity that went too far because an adult didn't step in," Flint said.

Some parents said they were outraged when they received the letter and saw the story on the news.

"It kind of scares me to know that the teachers aren't really watching them," said Ane Musuva, who has two children at Markham. "I don't want my kids growing up in this type of environment."

Olbermann Split Came After Years of Tension (I promise last post on this topic)

MSNBC never had any doubt about what it was getting when it made Keith Olbermann the face of the network in 2003: a highly talented broadcaster, a distinctive and outspoken voice and a mercurial personality with a track record of attacking his superiors and making early exits.

Even his own boss, Phil Griffin, offered this assessment in 2008, when Mr. Olbermann was being heavily criticized by supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton because he was urging her to drop out of the race to become the Democratic presidential candidate.

For Mrs. Clinton’s supporters, Mr. Griffin said in an interview with The New Yorker magazine, “It was, like, you meet a guy and fall in love with him.” But, he said, “then you commit yourself to him, and he turns out to be a jerk and difficult and brutal.”

Still, the news of his abrupt departure from “Countdown” — delivered by Mr. Olbermann on Friday night — came as a shock to his many fans, some of whom accused Comcast, the incoming owner of MSNBC’s parent, NBC Universal, of forcing out the host for political reasons.

Many people inside the television industry are astonished that a cable network’s highest-rated host, whose forceful personality and liberal advocacy had lifted MSNBC from irrelevance to competitiveness and profitability, would be ushered out the door with no fanfare, no promoted farewell show and only a perfunctory thanks for his efforts.

But underlying the decision, which one executive involved said was not a termination but a “negotiated separation,” were years of behind-the-scenes tension, conflicts and near terminations.

Mr. Griffin, along with Jeff Zucker, the head of NBC Universal, and Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, had long protected and defended Mr. Olbermann, even when insiders like the NBC anchor emeritus Tom Brokaw publicly took Mr. Olbermann to task. Mr. Brokaw said Mr. Olbermann had “gone too far” in campaign coverage that openly took Democratic positions.

Inside the offices of MSNBC, staff members grew more restive about Mr. Olbermann’s temperament. Some days Mr. Olbermann threatened not to come to work at all and a substitute anchor had to be notified to be on standby.

Mr. Olbermann was within one move of being fired in November after he was suspended for making donations to Democratic Congressional candidates. He threatened to make an appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America” to protest the suspension; Mr. Zucker was prepared to fire him on the spot if he did, according to a senior NBC Universal executive who declined to be identified in discussing confidential deliberations.

The pattern of great promise followed by eventual disaffection was established early in Mr. Olbermann’s career. As a young sports reporter for UPI Television, he was fired for telling his boss “this is the minor leagues here.” In the early 1980s, he had a short, stormy tenure at CNN.

He achieved national prominence on ESPN’s “SportsCenter” in the early 1990s, but left after a difficult time that included a reprimand for making an appearance on “The Daily Show” without permission. He labeled his departure from ESPN in 1997 a “nuclear war.”

Mr. Olbermann popped up on MSNBC for the first time in 1998, hosting a news show that evolved, against his wishes, into a nightly examination of the Clinton sex scandal. He left and joined the Fox Sports Network. That stint ended in acrimony as well. Rupert Murdoch, head of the News Corporation, which ran the sports network, later said, “I fired him; he’s crazy.”

He joined MSNBC in 2003 as a fill-in host. Less than two months later, Mr. Olbermann won the job full time. He transformed the show into “Countdown,” and he — and MSNBC — were off and running.

He managed to expand his audience steadily. Starting from a base of a couple hundred thousand viewers, he jumped more than 50 percent from 2006 to 2007, reaching 726,000. From there he built the show until it surpassed one million viewers a night, still well behind Fox News but ahead of CNN.

In a New Yorker interview, Mr. Griffin of MSNBC recalled those early appearances: “First day he was in TV, I knew right away that Keith had something that I’d never seen. He was made for this. I mean, the guy is crazy, but he is made for this.”

(In the same interview, Mr. Olbermann could not help commenting: “Phil thinks he’s my boss.”)

Even some of those at MSNBC who acknowledged being spurned or insulted by Mr. Olbermann said they remained in awe of his productivity and the effect he had on the network. Several considered him in essence a five-day-a-week editorial writer, who had to perform his editorial live on television.

It was an “incredible energy expenditure,” one longtime acquaintance of his said, suggesting that there was no reason to think Mr. Olbermann would stay in his chair indefinitely.

Mr. Olbermann himself alluded to the stresses of the job when he said on Friday night, “There were many occasions, particularly in the last two and a half years, where all that surrounded the show, but never the show itself, was just too much for me.”

In an interview, Mr. Griffin acknowledged that Mr. Olbermann was a “brand definer” for MSNBC — not just because of the success of “Countdown” but because his show was used to develop other hosts for the network as well.

Rachel Maddow started as a frequent “Countdown” guest, as did Lawrence O’Donnell, who began as a fill-in host for Mr. Olbermann and will inherit his 8 p.m. time slot on Monday. Mr. Griffin called Mr. Olbermann “the tent pole at the center” of the network’s sensibility.

At the same time, stories about Mr. Olbermann’s thin skin circulated widely in the newsroom. One such story, which was recalled independently by two hosts, dates to early December, when Mr. O’Donnell, then carving out some success as the 10 p.m. host on MSNBC, collegially proposed via e-mail that Mr. Olbermann come on his show to talk about President Obama’s tax-cut compromise.

Mr. O’Donnell had written this post on Twitter: “Liberal critics of the Obama deal say exactly what Pat Buchanan said of George H. W. Bush: he’s weak.” The message speculated that Mr. Obama’s critics would do to him what Mr. Buchanan “did to H.W. Bush: destroy him and help elect a president from the other party.”

Mr. Olbermann apparently interpreted the message as a personal attack; he declined to appear on Mr. O’Donnell’s show. “I saw what you wrote on Twitter,” he snapped at Mr. O’Donnell.

In the last several months, the relationship began moving toward its denouement: Mr. Olbermann hired new agents from the big firm ICM in September, parting from Jean Sage, the agent who had steered his career through all its previous rocky shoals. Several NBC executives said the move was made to facilitate an eventual settlement of the two years left on Mr. Olbermann’s contract.

Mr. Olbermann’s future is up in the air, mainly because he agreed to a deal that would keep him off television for six to nine months, according to several executives involved in his exit. He is also apparently forbidden to discuss his departure.

One NBC executive involved in the decision to settle Mr. Olbermann’s contract said that he was allowed to work in radio or on the Internet and would presumably be free to return to television in time for the 2012 election cycle.

As for MSNBC, Mr. Griffin expressed confidence in the network’s new lineup: Mr. O’Donnell at 8, Ms. Maddow at 9 and Ed Schultz at 10. It was not clear exactly how long that plan had been in place, however. The anchors did not find out that their shows were shifting until the public announcement on Friday night.

Mr. Griffin said: “I believe the changes that have been made fit who we are. We’re going to be as creative as ever. We’ll be there.”

But they will be there without Mr. Olbermann, the tent pole that the network built itself around.

One NBC News executive said on Sunday: “Give us a bit of credit for getting eight years out of him. That’s the longest he’s been anywhere.”

MSNBC never had any doubt about what it was getting when it made Keith Olbermann the face of the network in 2003: a highly talented broadcaster, a distinctive and outspoken voice and a mercurial personality with a track record of attacking his superiors and making early exits.

Even his own boss, Phil Griffin, offered this assessment in 2008, when Mr. Olbermann was being heavily criticized by supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton because he was urging her to drop out of the race to become the Democratic presidential candidate.

For Mrs. Clinton’s supporters, Mr. Griffin said in an interview with The New Yorker magazine, “It was, like, you meet a guy and fall in love with him.” But, he said, “then you commit yourself to him, and he turns out to be a jerk and difficult and brutal.”

Still, the news of his abrupt departure from “Countdown” — delivered by Mr. Olbermann on Friday night — came as a shock to his many fans, some of whom accused Comcast, the incoming owner of MSNBC’s parent, NBC Universal, of forcing out the host for political reasons.

Many people inside the television industry are astonished that a cable network’s highest-rated host, whose forceful personality and liberal advocacy had lifted MSNBC from irrelevance to competitiveness and profitability, would be ushered out the door with no fanfare, no promoted farewell show and only a perfunctory thanks for his efforts.

But underlying the decision, which one executive involved said was not a termination but a “negotiated separation,” were years of behind-the-scenes tension, conflicts and near terminations.

Mr. Griffin, along with Jeff Zucker, the head of NBC Universal, and Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, had long protected and defended Mr. Olbermann, even when insiders like the NBC anchor emeritus Tom Brokaw publicly took Mr. Olbermann to task. Mr. Brokaw said Mr. Olbermann had “gone too far” in campaign coverage that openly took Democratic positions.

Inside the offices of MSNBC, staff members grew more restive about Mr. Olbermann’s temperament. Some days Mr. Olbermann threatened not to come to work at all and a substitute anchor had to be notified to be on standby.

Mr. Olbermann was within one move of being fired in November after he was suspended for making donations to Democratic Congressional candidates. He threatened to make an appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America” to protest the suspension; Mr. Zucker was prepared to fire him on the spot if he did, according to a senior NBC Universal executive who declined to be identified in discussing confidential deliberations.

The pattern of great promise followed by eventual disaffection was established early in Mr. Olbermann’s career. As a young sports reporter for UPI Television, he was fired for telling his boss “this is the minor leagues here.” In the early 1980s, he had a short, stormy tenure at CNN.

He achieved national prominence on ESPN’s “SportsCenter” in the early 1990s, but left after a difficult time that included a reprimand for making an appearance on “The Daily Show” without permission. He labeled his departure from ESPN in 1997 a “nuclear war.”

Mr. Olbermann popped up on MSNBC for the first time in 1998, hosting a news show that evolved, against his wishes, into a nightly examination of the Clinton sex scandal. He left and joined the Fox Sports Network. That stint ended in acrimony as well. Rupert Murdoch, head of the News Corporation, which ran the sports network, later said, “I fired him; he’s crazy.”

He joined MSNBC in 2003 as a fill-in host. Less than two months later, Mr. Olbermann won the job full time. He transformed the show into “Countdown,” and he — and MSNBC — were off and running.

He managed to expand his audience steadily. Starting from a base of a couple hundred thousand viewers, he jumped more than 50 percent from 2006 to 2007, reaching 726,000. From there he built the show until it surpassed one million viewers a night, still well behind Fox News but ahead of CNN.

In a New Yorker interview, Mr. Griffin of MSNBC recalled those early appearances: “First day he was in TV, I knew right away that Keith had something that I’d never seen. He was made for this. I mean, the guy is crazy, but he is made for this.”

(In the same interview, Mr. Olbermann could not help commenting: “Phil thinks he’s my boss.”)

Even some of those at MSNBC who acknowledged being spurned or insulted by Mr. Olbermann said they remained in awe of his productivity and the effect he had on the network. Several considered him in essence a five-day-a-week editorial writer, who had to perform his editorial live on television.

It was an “incredible energy expenditure,” one longtime acquaintance of his said, suggesting that there was no reason to think Mr. Olbermann would stay in his chair indefinitely.

Mr. Olbermann himself alluded to the stresses of the job when he said on Friday night, “There were many occasions, particularly in the last two and a half years, where all that surrounded the show, but never the show itself, was just too much for me.”

In an interview, Mr. Griffin acknowledged that Mr. Olbermann was a “brand definer” for MSNBC — not just because of the success of “Countdown” but because his show was used to develop other hosts for the network as well.

Rachel Maddow started as a frequent “Countdown” guest, as did Lawrence O’Donnell, who began as a fill-in host for Mr. Olbermann and will inherit his 8 p.m. time slot on Monday. Mr. Griffin called Mr. Olbermann “the tent pole at the center” of the network’s sensibility.

At the same time, stories about Mr. Olbermann’s thin skin circulated widely in the newsroom. One such story, which was recalled independently by two hosts, dates to early December, when Mr. O’Donnell, then carving out some success as the 10 p.m. host on MSNBC, collegially proposed via e-mail that Mr. Olbermann come on his show to talk about President Obama’s tax-cut compromise.

Mr. O’Donnell had written this post on Twitter: “Liberal critics of the Obama deal say exactly what Pat Buchanan said of George H. W. Bush: he’s weak.” The message speculated that Mr. Obama’s critics would do to him what Mr. Buchanan “did to H.W. Bush: destroy him and help elect a president from the other party.”

Mr. Olbermann apparently interpreted the message as a personal attack; he declined to appear on Mr. O’Donnell’s show. “I saw what you wrote on Twitter,” he snapped at Mr. O’Donnell.

In the last several months, the relationship began moving toward its denouement: Mr. Olbermann hired new agents from the big firm ICM in September, parting from Jean Sage, the agent who had steered his career through all its previous rocky shoals. Several NBC executives said the move was made to facilitate an eventual settlement of the two years left on Mr. Olbermann’s contract.

Mr. Olbermann’s future is up in the air, mainly because he agreed to a deal that would keep him off television for six to nine months, according to several executives involved in his exit. He is also apparently forbidden to discuss his departure.

One NBC executive involved in the decision to settle Mr. Olbermann’s contract said that he was allowed to work in radio or on the Internet and would presumably be free to return to television in time for the 2012 election cycle.

As for MSNBC, Mr. Griffin expressed confidence in the network’s new lineup: Mr. O’Donnell at 8, Ms. Maddow at 9 and Ed Schultz at 10. It was not clear exactly how long that plan had been in place, however. The anchors did not find out that their shows were shifting until the public announcement on Friday night.

Mr. Griffin said: “I believe the changes that have been made fit who we are. We’re going to be as creative as ever. We’ll be there.”

But they will be there without Mr. Olbermann, the tent pole that the network built itself around.

One NBC News executive said on Sunday: “Give us a bit of credit for getting eight years out of him. That’s the longest he’s been anywhere.”

Olbermann Split Came After Years of TensionBy BILL CARTER and BRIAN STELTER
MSNBC never had any doubt about what it was getting when it made Keith Olbermann the face of the network in 2003: a highly talented broadcaster, a distinctive and outspoken voice and a mercurial personality with a track record of attacking his superiors and making early exits.

Even his own boss, Phil Griffin, offered this assessment in 2008, when Mr. Olbermann was being heavily criticized by supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton because he was urging her to drop out of the race to become the Democratic presidential candidate.

For Mrs. Clinton’s supporters, Mr. Griffin said in an interview with The New Yorker magazine, “It was, like, you meet a guy and fall in love with him.” But, he said, “then you commit yourself to him, and he turns out to be a jerk and difficult and brutal.”

Still, the news of his abrupt departure from “Countdown” — delivered by Mr. Olbermann on Friday night — came as a shock to his many fans, some of whom accused Comcast, the incoming owner of MSNBC’s parent, NBC Universal, of forcing out the host for political reasons.

Many people inside the television industry are astonished that a cable network’s highest-rated host, whose forceful personality and liberal advocacy had lifted MSNBC from irrelevance to competitiveness and profitability, would be ushered out the door with no fanfare, no promoted farewell show and only a perfunctory thanks for his efforts.

But underlying the decision, which one executive involved said was not a termination but a “negotiated separation,” were years of behind-the-scenes tension, conflicts and near terminations.

Mr. Griffin, along with Jeff Zucker, the head of NBC Universal, and Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, had long protected and defended Mr. Olbermann, even when insiders like the NBC anchor emeritus Tom Brokaw publicly took Mr. Olbermann to task. Mr. Brokaw said Mr. Olbermann had “gone too far” in campaign coverage that openly took Democratic positions.

Inside the offices of MSNBC, staff members grew more restive about Mr. Olbermann’s temperament. Some days Mr. Olbermann threatened not to come to work at all and a substitute anchor had to be notified to be on standby.

Mr. Olbermann was within one move of being fired in November after he was suspended for making donations to Democratic Congressional candidates. He threatened to make an appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America” to protest the suspension; Mr. Zucker was prepared to fire him on the spot if he did, according to a senior NBC Universal executive who declined to be identified in discussing confidential deliberations.

The pattern of great promise followed by eventual disaffection was established early in Mr. Olbermann’s career. As a young sports reporter for UPI Television, he was fired for telling his boss “this is the minor leagues here.” In the early 1980s, he had a short, stormy tenure at CNN.

He achieved national prominence on ESPN’s “SportsCenter” in the early 1990s, but left after a difficult time that included a reprimand for making an appearance on “The Daily Show” without permission. He labeled his departure from ESPN in 1997 a “nuclear war.”

Mr. Olbermann popped up on MSNBC for the first time in 1998, hosting a news show that evolved, against his wishes, into a nightly examination of the Clinton sex scandal. He left and joined the Fox Sports Network. That stint ended in acrimony as well. Rupert Murdoch, head of the News Corporation, which ran the sports network, later said, “I fired him; he’s crazy.”

He joined MSNBC in 2003 as a fill-in host. Less than two months later, Mr. Olbermann won the job full time. He transformed the show into “Countdown,” and he — and MSNBC — were off and running.

He managed to expand his audience steadily. Starting from a base of a couple hundred thousand viewers, he jumped more than 50 percent from 2006 to 2007, reaching 726,000. From there he built the show until it surpassed one million viewers a night, still well behind Fox News but ahead of CNN.

In a New Yorker interview, Mr. Griffin of MSNBC recalled those early appearances: “First day he was in TV, I knew right away that Keith had something that I’d never seen. He was made for this. I mean, the guy is crazy, but he is made for this.”

(In the same interview, Mr. Olbermann could not help commenting: “Phil thinks he’s my boss.”)

Even some of those at MSNBC who acknowledged being spurned or insulted by Mr. Olbermann said they remained in awe of his productivity and the effect he had on the network. Several considered him in essence a five-day-a-week editorial writer, who had to perform his editorial live on television.

It was an “incredible energy expenditure,” one longtime acquaintance of his said, suggesting that there was no reason to think Mr. Olbermann would stay in his chair indefinitely.

Mr. Olbermann himself alluded to the stresses of the job when he said on Friday night, “There were many occasions, particularly in the last two and a half years, where all that surrounded the show, but never the show itself, was just too much for me.”

In an interview, Mr. Griffin acknowledged that Mr. Olbermann was a “brand definer” for MSNBC — not just because of the success of “Countdown” but because his show was used to develop other hosts for the network as well.

Rachel Maddow started as a frequent “Countdown” guest, as did Lawrence O’Donnell, who began as a fill-in host for Mr. Olbermann and will inherit his 8 p.m. time slot on Monday. Mr. Griffin called Mr. Olbermann “the tent pole at the center” of the network’s sensibility.

At the same time, stories about Mr. Olbermann’s thin skin circulated widely in the newsroom. One such story, which was recalled independently by two hosts, dates to early December, when Mr. O’Donnell, then carving out some success as the 10 p.m. host on MSNBC, collegially proposed via e-mail that Mr. Olbermann come on his show to talk about President Obama’s tax-cut compromise.

Mr. O’Donnell had written this post on Twitter: “Liberal critics of the Obama deal say exactly what Pat Buchanan said of George H. W. Bush: he’s weak.” The message speculated that Mr. Obama’s critics would do to him what Mr. Buchanan “did to H.W. Bush: destroy him and help elect a president from the other party.”

Mr. Olbermann apparently interpreted the message as a personal attack; he declined to appear on Mr. O’Donnell’s show. “I saw what you wrote on Twitter,” he snapped at Mr. O’Donnell.

In the last several months, the relationship began moving toward its denouement: Mr. Olbermann hired new agents from the big firm ICM in September, parting from Jean Sage, the agent who had steered his career through all its previous rocky shoals. Several NBC executives said the move was made to facilitate an eventual settlement of the two years left on Mr. Olbermann’s contract.

Mr. Olbermann’s future is up in the air, mainly because he agreed to a deal that would keep him off television for six to nine months, according to several executives involved in his exit. He is also apparently forbidden to discuss his departure.

One NBC executive involved in the decision to settle Mr. Olbermann’s contract said that he was allowed to work in radio or on the Internet and would presumably be free to return to television in time for the 2012 election cycle.

As for MSNBC, Mr. Griffin expressed confidence in the network’s new lineup: Mr. O’Donnell at 8, Ms. Maddow at 9 and Ed Schultz at 10. It was not clear exactly how long that plan had been in place, however. The anchors did not find out that their shows were shifting until the public announcement on Friday night.

Mr. Griffin said: “I believe the changes that have been made fit who we are. We’re going to be as creative as ever. We’ll be there.”

But they will be there without Mr. Olbermann, the tent pole that the network built itself around.

One NBC News executive said on Sunday: “Give us a bit of credit for getting eight years out of him. That’s the longest he’s been anywhere.”

Olbermann Split Came After Years of TensionBy BILL CARTER and BRIAN STELTER
MSNBC never had any doubt about what it was getting when it made Keith Olbermann the face of the network in 2003: a highly talented broadcaster, a distinctive and outspoken voice and a mercurial personality with a track record of attacking his superiors and making early exits.

Even his own boss, Phil Griffin, offered this assessment in 2008, when Mr. Olbermann was being heavily criticized by supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton because he was urging her to drop out of the race to become the Democratic presidential candidate.

For Mrs. Clinton’s supporters, Mr. Griffin said in an interview with The New Yorker magazine, “It was, like, you meet a guy and fall in love with him.” But, he said, “then you commit yourself to him, and he turns out to be a jerk and difficult and brutal.”

Still, the news of his abrupt departure from “Countdown” — delivered by Mr. Olbermann on Friday night — came as a shock to his many fans, some of whom accused Comcast, the incoming owner of MSNBC’s parent, NBC Universal, of forcing out the host for political reasons.

Many people inside the television industry are astonished that a cable network’s highest-rated host, whose forceful personality and liberal advocacy had lifted MSNBC from irrelevance to competitiveness and profitability, would be ushered out the door with no fanfare, no promoted farewell show and only a perfunctory thanks for his efforts.

But underlying the decision, which one executive involved said was not a termination but a “negotiated separation,” were years of behind-the-scenes tension, conflicts and near terminations.

Mr. Griffin, along with Jeff Zucker, the head of NBC Universal, and Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, had long protected and defended Mr. Olbermann, even when insiders like the NBC anchor emeritus Tom Brokaw publicly took Mr. Olbermann to task. Mr. Brokaw said Mr. Olbermann had “gone too far” in campaign coverage that openly took Democratic positions.

Inside the offices of MSNBC, staff members grew more restive about Mr. Olbermann’s temperament. Some days Mr. Olbermann threatened not to come to work at all and a substitute anchor had to be notified to be on standby.

Mr. Olbermann was within one move of being fired in November after he was suspended for making donations to Democratic Congressional candidates. He threatened to make an appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America” to protest the suspension; Mr. Zucker was prepared to fire him on the spot if he did, according to a senior NBC Universal executive who declined to be identified in discussing confidential deliberations.

The pattern of great promise followed by eventual disaffection was established early in Mr. Olbermann’s career. As a young sports reporter for UPI Television, he was fired for telling his boss “this is the minor leagues here.” In the early 1980s, he had a short, stormy tenure at CNN.

He achieved national prominence on ESPN’s “SportsCenter” in the early 1990s, but left after a difficult time that included a reprimand for making an appearance on “The Daily Show” without permission. He labeled his departure from ESPN in 1997 a “nuclear war.”

Mr. Olbermann popped up on MSNBC for the first time in 1998, hosting a news show that evolved, against his wishes, into a nightly examination of the Clinton sex scandal. He left and joined the Fox Sports Network. That stint ended in acrimony as well. Rupert Murdoch, head of the News Corporation, which ran the sports network, later said, “I fired him; he’s crazy.”

He joined MSNBC in 2003 as a fill-in host. Less than two months later, Mr. Olbermann won the job full time. He transformed the show into “Countdown,” and he — and MSNBC — were off and running.

He managed to expand his audience steadily. Starting from a base of a couple hundred thousand viewers, he jumped more than 50 percent from 2006 to 2007, reaching 726,000. From there he built the show until it surpassed one million viewers a night, still well behind Fox News but ahead of CNN.

In a New Yorker interview, Mr. Griffin of MSNBC recalled those early appearances: “First day he was in TV, I knew right away that Keith had something that I’d never seen. He was made for this. I mean, the guy is crazy, but he is made for this.”

(In the same interview, Mr. Olbermann could not help commenting: “Phil thinks he’s my boss.”)

Even some of those at MSNBC who acknowledged being spurned or insulted by Mr. Olbermann said they remained in awe of his productivity and the effect he had on the network. Several considered him in essence a five-day-a-week editorial writer, who had to perform his editorial live on television.

It was an “incredible energy expenditure,” one longtime acquaintance of his said, suggesting that there was no reason to think Mr. Olbermann would stay in his chair indefinitely.

Mr. Olbermann himself alluded to the stresses of the job when he said on Friday night, “There were many occasions, particularly in the last two and a half years, where all that surrounded the show, but never the show itself, was just too much for me.”

In an interview, Mr. Griffin acknowledged that Mr. Olbermann was a “brand definer” for MSNBC — not just because of the success of “Countdown” but because his show was used to develop other hosts for the network as well.

Rachel Maddow started as a frequent “Countdown” guest, as did Lawrence O’Donnell, who began as a fill-in host for Mr. Olbermann and will inherit his 8 p.m. time slot on Monday. Mr. Griffin called Mr. Olbermann “the tent pole at the center” of the network’s sensibility.

At the same time, stories about Mr. Olbermann’s thin skin circulated widely in the newsroom. One such story, which was recalled independently by two hosts, dates to early December, when Mr. O’Donnell, then carving out some success as the 10 p.m. host on MSNBC, collegially proposed via e-mail that Mr. Olbermann come on his show to talk about President Obama’s tax-cut compromise.

Mr. O’Donnell had written this post on Twitter: “Liberal critics of the Obama deal say exactly what Pat Buchanan said of George H. W. Bush: he’s weak.” The message speculated that Mr. Obama’s critics would do to him what Mr. Buchanan “did to H.W. Bush: destroy him and help elect a president from the other party.”

Mr. Olbermann apparently interpreted the message as a personal attack; he declined to appear on Mr. O’Donnell’s show. “I saw what you wrote on Twitter,” he snapped at Mr. O’Donnell.

In the last several months, the relationship began moving toward its denouement: Mr. Olbermann hired new agents from the big firm ICM in September, parting from Jean Sage, the agent who had steered his career through all its previous rocky shoals. Several NBC executives said the move was made to facilitate an eventual settlement of the two years left on Mr. Olbermann’s contract.

Mr. Olbermann’s future is up in the air, mainly because he agreed to a deal that would keep him off television for six to nine months, according to several executives involved in his exit. He is also apparently forbidden to discuss his departure.

One NBC executive involved in the decision to settle Mr. Olbermann’s contract said that he was allowed to work in radio or on the Internet and would presumably be free to return to television in time for the 2012 election cycle.

As for MSNBC, Mr. Griffin expressed confidence in the network’s new lineup: Mr. O’Donnell at 8, Ms. Maddow at 9 and Ed Schultz at 10. It was not clear exactly how long that plan had been in place, however. The anchors did not find out that their shows were shifting until the public announcement on Friday night.

Mr. Griffin said: “I believe the changes that have been made fit who we are. We’re going to be as creative as ever. We’ll be there.”

But they will be there without Mr. Olbermann, the tent pole that the network built itself around.

One NBC News executive said on Sunday: “Give us a bit of credit for getting eight years out of him. That’s the longest he’s been anywhere.”

Reform and the Teachers’ Unions

Education officials across the country are increasingly focused on the two critical reform tasks: developing more effective teacher evaluation systems and speeding up the glacial pace of disciplinary hearings for teachers charged with misconduct.
The American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers’ union, has wisely chosen to work with state legislatures and local school districts to help shape these new systems rather than try to block them.

Last week the union’s president, Randi Weingarten, released a plan for speeding up disciplinary hearings that is a good starting point for more discussion. Developed by Kenneth Feinberg, the arbitration specialist, the plan calls for strictly limiting the process — from complaint to resolution — to 100 days. Right now a hearing can drag on for months or years, with the attendant stiff legal fees.

In many districts, teachers can now be investigated for vaguely worded charges like “moral turpitude” or “conduct unbecoming” that are often difficult to define and difficult to prosecute or defend against.
The plan would give teachers and school systems more protection by establishing a clear set of charges — such as improper use of force, sexual abuse or refusal to obey rules — along with a strict set of deadlines for submissions of evidence and arguments.

The unions and state legislatures also need to press forward on developing evaluation systems that take student performance into account and that allow school systems to reward excellent teaching while steering ineffective teachers out of the field.

Ms. Weingarten has shown strong leadership in this area, and is well ahead of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union. But many members of her union are resistant to the idea of accountability systems, which they say can be far too easily manipulated.

The states are already charging ahead in this area. If the unions want to have input, they need to quickly come up with a legitimate proposal of their own.

OPRAH’S FAMILY SECRET

CHICAGO, IL – Oprah reveals her big family secret on Monday.
She has an identical twin!

Earlier this week, Oprah Winfrey announced that she will have an out of the ordinary show this Monday. Winfrey explained to her audience that she will be reunited with a special family member from her past. Harpo Inc. declined to give any further information regarding the reunion, shedding little light on the details beyond a few quotes from Winfrey herself.

“I was given some news that literally shook me to my core. This time, I’m the one being reunited,” she said. “I was keeping a family secret for months, and on Monday you’re going to hear it straight from me.”

The Weekly World News will not wait for the Big O to divulge her little secret. We put our crack investigative team on the case to uncover the Oprah family dirt. After hours and hours of searching and sleuthing, up and down, in and out, tapping all of our sources, WWN finally discovered who the mystery guest will be for this Monday’s show.

Oprah has an identical twin!

The thought of the queen of media having a twin should not be that much of a surprise. Winfrey was born a bastard child to unmarried teenage parents – Vernon Winfrey and Vernita Lee. Being that her parents were children themselves, when Vernita Lee gave birth, alone, to twin girls she immediately knew that she could only care for one.

Vernita Lee left Oprah’s sister, Orpah, in a picnic basket at the steps of the French Camp Academy, a 900-acre Christian boarding school and community, some 30 odd miles from Kosciusko, Mississippi, where the girls were born. Oprah has always said that her name on her birth certificate was Orpah – but now we know that there were two names on two birth certificates.

The young, single mother was heartbroken to leave Orpah, but she knew that it was the right thing to do.

It is unclear what happened to the Orpah after she was abandoned. Did she flourish in the Christian community and devote a life to the ministry? Did she run away and succumb to an unsavory lifestyle on the streets of Jackson, MS? Did she garner the same level of success as her superstar sister?

To find out the answers to these questions and many more, all of us will have to watch this Monday’s episode. The Oprah Winfrey Show airs Monday through Friday at 4pm on ABC.

Don’t miss this episode; it is a show that you will never forget!

For clues to the economy, look to gun sales and other offbeat data

Lots of routine economic statistics are released each month –- unemployment rates, home sales, etc.

But hoping to get beyond the numbers that everyone else chews on, one Wall Street prognosticator delved into a more eclectic sampling of data, such as gun sales and demand for silver coins.

Such “off the grid” indicators support the widely held notion that the U.S. economy is mending slowly, Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at ConvergEx Group in New York, wrote in a report to clients. But they also point to some potentially troublesome undercurrents.

On the positive side, sales of pickup trucks have risen at a 20% annual rate for the last few months. Pickups are often bought by small businesses, which bodes well for that critically important sector.

Likewise, a growing number of workers who leave companies these days are quitting rather than being fired, indicating that they’re either finding other jobs or are confident of being able to in the future.

But the data also suggest potential danger over what Colas refers to as “consumer security” –- basically, underlying economic and societal concerns that could serve as long-terms drags on the recovery.

For example, gun sales have risen from a long-term rate of about 8 million a year to the current 14 million, according to Colas. Analysts initially attributed the rise to fear of tougher gun-control laws after the election of President Obama. But the continuing climb two years into his term points to a “deeper sense of unease,” be it over government regulations, crime or some something else, Colas wrote.

In the same vein, a jump in demand for silver coins suggests a “fundamental lack of confidence among enough people in the population as to the long-term soundness of the dollar.”

And a rise in the number of people on food stamps –- currently about 43 million people, or 14% of the U.S. population –- points to the deep strains on lower-income people.

“A consumer base -– even one at the lower end of the economic ladder -– with fundamental
concerns over food security and affordability or personal safety is not the ‘dry tinder’ of a strong economic bounce back,” Colas wrote.

Saner Gun Laws NYTimes Editorial

It is widely believed in Washington that there is no chance the gun lobby and the new Republican majority in the House would ever permit passage of the modest ideas for tightening America’s absurdly lax gun laws that have surfaced since the massacre in Tucson.

That may be true, but it is no reason for supporters of reasonable gun regulation not to put up a fight. Nor is it an excuse for the lack of principled presidential leadership on this issue. We are still waiting for President Obama to fulfill his promises on gun safety.

Mr. Obama ran for the White House calling for the restoration of the ban on assault weapons that Congress irresponsibly let expire in 2004. He has not pursued that goal, and so far, his voice is missing even from the call for less ambitious but necessary changes in gun laws. The country needs Mr. Obama to put his support behind a two-pronged approach that is directly relevant to the dynamics of gun violence we all saw at play in Tucson.

It begins with a proposed ban on the big volume ammunition magazines that added to the carnage not just in Arizona but also a long line of other mass shootings, including at Columbine High School and Virginia Tech. Even former Vice President Dick Cheney, a staunch gun rights advocate, said last week that it might be time to reinstate the magazine-size rule, which was part of the discarded assault weapons ban. That would save lives without interfering with hunters or violating any constitutional right.

Mr. Obama ought to tell that to Congress and the public in his State of the Union address this week. The National Rifle Association will counter that Americans need high-capacity clips for self-defense. We’d like to hear how many times in the real world the life of an American, other than a police officer or a combat soldier, was endangered because of an inability to fire 30 shots in rapid succession without reloading. What we do know about is the grim, repetitive reality of mass shootings.

The pending gun agenda also includes plugging dangerous holes in the background check system to make it harder for people with emotional and drug abuse problems, like the Tucson shooter, to obtain weapons. Despite eroding public support for more strict rules, like a handgun ban, there is broad agreement on the need to keep guns from getting into the wrong hands.

Although facing a likely primary challenge from the right when he runs for re-election next year, Senator Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, voiced his continued support for banning assault weapons in a recent interview with Bloomberg News.

Another Republican, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, opposes banning the enlarged magazines. But on “Meet the Press” last Sunday, Mr. Coburn expressed an interest in a bipartisan effort to create a new legal standard to “make sure people who are mentally ill cannot get and use a gun.” His interest in finding common ground is encouraging even though for the moment, at least, the fix is unclear.

One thing that could be usefully addressed is that many state records on disqualifying involuntary commitments and adjudicated mental instability are not being submitted to the federal background check system. Records of drug abuse or addiction also rarely make it into the system, according to Mayors Against Illegal Guns, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s gun policy group.

Asked last week about the administration’s positions on these matters, Mr. Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said the White House was focused on “the important healing process.” That is part of the president’s duties. So is protecting public safety.

Is Pink Necessary? CINDERELLA ATE MY DAUGHTER

Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture

The “princess phase.”
So inevitable is this period in the maturation of girls today that it should qualify as an official developmental stage, worthy of an entry in Leach or Brazelton: first crawling, then walking, then the urgent desire to wear something pink and spark­ly. Whether we smile indulgently or roll our eyes at the drifts of tulle and chiffon that begin accumulating in our daughters’ rooms around age 4, participation in these royal rituals has come to seem necessary, even natural.

Yet the princess phase, at least in its current hyper-feminine and highly commercial form, is anything but natural, or so Peggy Orenstein argues in “Cinderella Ate My Daughter.” As she tells the story, in 2000 a Disney executive named Andy Mooney went to check out a “Disney on Ice” show and found himself “surrounded by little girls in princess costumes. Princess costumes that were — horrors! — homemade.
How had such a massive branding opportunity been overlooked? The very next day he called together his team and they began working on what would become known in-house as ‘Princess.’ ” Mooney’s revelation yielded a bonanza for the company. There are now more than 26,000 Disney Princess items on the market; in 2009, Princess products generated sales of $4 billion.

Disney didn’t have the tiara market to itself for long. Orenstein takes us on a tour of the princess industrial complex, its practices as coolly calculating as its products are soft and fluffy. She describes a toy fair, held at the Javits Center in New York, at which the merchandise for girls seems to come in only one color: pink jewelry boxes, pink vanity mirrors, pink telephones, pink hair dryers, pink fur stoles. “Is all this pink really necessary?” Orenstein finally asks a sales rep.

“Only if you want to make money,” he replies.

The toy fair is one of many field trips undertaken by Orenstein in her effort to stem the frothy pink tide of princess products threatening to engulf her young daughter. The author of “Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap,” among other books, Orenstein is flummoxed by the intensity of the marketing blitz aimed at girls barely old enough to read the label on their Bonne Bell Lip Smackers.
“I had read stacks of books devoted to girls’ adolescence,” she writes, “but where was I to turn to under­stand the new culture of little girls, from toddler to ‘tween,’ to help decipher the potential impact — if any — of the images and ideas they were absorbing about who they should be, what they should buy, what made them girls?”

She turns, like many a journalist before her, to the child pageant circuit, the world of sequined “cupcake dresses” and custom-made “flippers” (dental prosthetics that disguise a gap-toothed smile) that has proved irresistible to reporters since the killing of the 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey in 1996. To her credit, Orenstein recognizes this as well-trodden ground.
“It would be easy pickin’s for me to attack parents who tart up their daughters in hopes of winning a few hundred bucks and a gilded plastic trophy; who train them to shake their tail feathers on command, to blow kisses at the judges and coyly twirl their index fingers into their dimpled cheeks,” she writes. “But really, what would be the point? That story has been told, to great success and profit.”

Such meta-observations, which appear throughout the book, are part of Orenstein’s method: she argues with herself, questions her own assumptions, ventures an assertion and then has second thoughts — all in full view of the reader.
At times, her assiduously cultivated ambivalence seems to paralyze her; she gets stuck between competing concerns, unable to say anything definitive about what she believes. By and large, however, Orenstein’s reflexive self-interrogation is a good match for her material. It allows her to coax fresh insights from the exhaustively analyzed subject of gender and its discontents.

In the case of child beauty pageants, Orenstein offers a shrewd critique of why media exposés of the phenomenon are so perennially popular. They “give viewers license, under the pretext of disapproval, to be titillated by the spectacle, to indulge in guilty-pleasure voyeurism,” she observes.
“They also reassure parents of their own comparative superiority by smugly ignoring the harder questions: even if you agree that pageant moms are over the line in their sexualization of little girls — way over the line — where, exactly, is that line, and who draws it and how?” Orenstein allows us to watch her struggle with these questions, and when she arrives at a few answers, they feel well earned.

Orenstein finds one such enlightening explanation in developmental psychology research showing that until as late as age 7, children are convinced that external signs — clothing, hairstyle, favorite color, choice of toys — determine one’s sex. “It makes sense, then, that to ensure you will stay the sex you were born you’d adhere rigidly to the rules as you see them and hope for the best,” she writes. “That’s why 4-year-olds, who are in what is called ‘the inflexible stage,’ become the self-­appointed chiefs of the gender police.
Suddenly the magnetic lure of the Disney Princesses became more clear to me: developmentally speaking, they were genius, dovetailing with the precise moment that girls need to prove they are girls, when they will latch on to the most exaggerated images their culture offers in order to stridently shore up their femininity.” For a preschool girl, a Cinderella dress is nothing less than an existential insurance policy, a crinolined bulwark to fortify a still-shaky sense of identity.

Orenstein is especially sharp-eyed on the subject of what comes after the princess phase, for in the micro-segmented world of marketing to children, there is of course a whole new array of products aimed at girls who begin to tire of their magic wands. These include lines of dolls with names like Moxie Girlz and Bratz: “With their sultry expressions, thickly shadowed eyes and collagen-puffed moues, Bratz were tailor-made for the girl itching to distance herself from all things rose petal pink, Princess-y, or Barbie-ish,” Orenstein notes.
“Their hottie-pink ‘passion for fashion’ conveyed ‘attitude’ and ‘sassiness,’ which, anyone will tell you, is little-girl marketing-speak for ‘sexy.’ ”

As Orenstein forges on, braving Toys “R” Us, the American Girl doll store and a Miley Cyrus concert, the reader may occasionally wonder: Is she reading too much into this? After all, it’s just pretend; it’s just play. “To a point I agree,” Orenstein half-concedes, equivocal as ever. “Just because little girls wear the tulle does not mean they’ve drunk the Kool-Aid.
Plenty of them shoot baskets in ball gowns or cast themselves as the powerful evil stepsister bossing around the sniveling Cinderella.” By this point the reader knows what’s coming. “Yet even if girls stray from the prescribed script, doesn’t it exert its influence? Don’t our possessions reflect who we are; shape, even define, our experience?”

The author’s process of restless self-examination continues, all the way to the book’s open-ended conclusion. Orenstein has done parents the great favor of having this important debate with herself on paper and in public; she has fashioned an argument with its seams showing and its pockets turned inside out, and this makes her book far more interesting, and more useful.
Because the thing about a phase is: kids grow out of it. (The marketers are counting on that.) But parents’ internal deliberations about what’s best for their children are here to stay.

Annie Murphy Paul is the author of “Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives.”