Earlier tonight, now-former Countdown host Keith Olbermann sent his first tweet since his departure from MSNBC’s airwaves Friday. The subject? To announce that he would be sending his first post-Countdown tweet at 8pm Eastern time. The strange announcement is probably a humorous tweak at the speculation that ensued following an innocuous update to his Twitter profile on Saturday.

Find out what Olbermann had to say in his (technically second) post-Countdown tweet after the jump.

Since joining Twitter early last year, now-former Countdown host Keith Olbermann has become one of the platform’s most loquacious users, tweeting more frequently than a meth-tweaked canary. All of that came to an abrupt end in the hour before his Friday announcement that he, and his show, were leaving MSNBC.

Saturday night, though, Olbermann-watchers saw the first sign of post-Countdown life from his Twitter feed: an update to his profile which read “WATCHTHISSPACE MLB.com Baseball Nerd blog returns 2/14.”

In his own effort to ratchet down the temperature of political rhetoric, Countdown host Keith Olbermann seems to be putting his money where his mouth is. For months, he has been satirizing Sarah Palin by referring to Arizona Governor Jan Brewer‘s cuts to organ transplant funding as the “Arizona Death Panel.” However, in the first [...]

Not content with cliché year-end wrap pieces, the voracious political media machine has resorted to reanimating the rotting corpses of memes past. Now, not only do we now have to avoid the stumbling, vacant groans of “Brains!” from Birther queen Orly Taitz, MSNBC’s The Dylan Ratigan Show has also thrust open the cemetery gates for “Death Panels.”

Using a report from Newsmax (Newsmax!) as its impetus, a panel that includes Jonathan Alter, Jane Hamsher, and Matt Lewis kicks the Death Panels around for awhile, but fails to deliver the requisite double-tap.

On last night’s Countdown, Keith Olbermann made a special appearance to update his viewers on his father’s medical condition, and to respond to critics of his “Life Panels” Special Comment from last week, singling out Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. As is often the case, much of the criticism has been focused on how the message was delivered, rather than the substance of it. Keith gave his critics more credit than they deserved, and took on what little substance they offered.

In the same show in which he attacked Mediaite by taking a shot at this site’s founder, and the day after an even cheaper shot at Sarah Palin, Countdown’s Keith Olbermann also displayed a return to form with a Special Comment that was about as riveting a 13 minutes of television as you are likely to see. “Last Friday night, my father asked me to kill him,” he began

This is going to be good. One of the biggest disappointments of last year’s historic election was Oprah opting out out of any political interviews because she was a self-declared Barack Obama supporter, the lack of her clout was particularly felt when it came to a public vetting of Sarah Palin. No more!

Like adept professors, Newsweek‘s Jon Meacham and Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times covered the historical context for the current state of conservatism, and solicited opinions and observations from the engaged crowd. As they discussed the future directions of politics, it felt as though the pair was running an advanced level political science class.

Better late than never. Someone is finally taking the death panel debate back to its source: Facebook. Americans United For Change, a liberal advocacy group, has just launched its own stop Sarah Palin’s lies Facebook ad targeting Palin’s supporters. It’s something the Obama admin should probably have considered a while back.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs seems like a nice enough guy. He has a sense of humor about his work, he maintains a friendly banter with reporters, and he was even the goalie of the North Carolina State Wolfpack soccer team. But Gibbs largely gets a free pass from the media for his many blunders. How does he do it?

On Friday, the former Alaska Governor posted some grade-A crazy talk on her Facebook page, alleging that the Obama health care plan promoting “Death Panels” — where “his bureaucrats” would decide the fate of babies like her son Trig, born with Down Syndrome. The echoes of the accompanying cuckoo-clock noises had barely died down when Newt Gingrich rushed in to agree with Palin that Death Panels were, indeed, cause for concern. Exactly the health care issue Obama wanted!