It’s not quite “Demon Sheep,” but it is certainly the eeriest ad of the 2012 election cycle so far. In anticipation of tonight’s CNN debate, Mitt Romney has released an online spot attacking President Obama for his handling of the economy. It’s a trim ad– there are no concrete facts or technocratic details– just the pathos of watching Americans line up to tell their economic tales of woe after being metaphorically run over by the Obama Economic Recovery Wagon.

Rachel Maddow‘s patience with Fox News appears to have finally fully waned. Having spent a good amount of time on her program calmly arguing her side of the story in an attempt to debunk the loudest voices of her rival network, Maddow has now begun an all-out counter-campaign of concern for the “stupidifying effect” of having Fox News broadcast and watched on American airwaves, beginning with the “death panels” and arriving at the “leftist caliphate.”

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.

Well, the Democrats and Republicans in the House are arguing again and you know what that means: somebody is coming to kill your grandparents. In a lovely echo of last year’s death panel rumors, Republican Rep. Paul Brown of Georgia used his time to debate the proposed energy reform legislation by positing that it would lead to many of our country’s old people dying of hypothermia. Clearly they need to stop holding the bi-weekly Congressional screenings of Logan’s Run.

I think that a far more productive use of everyone’s time would be for the President to conduct one briefing a month, unannounced and on a day chosen at random, from Gibb’s podium in the Brady Briefing Room. This would result in a much freer exchange, a more diverse roster of questioners, and more relevant, spontaneous questions.

Remember, folks, you heard it here first. With the historic passage of health care reform last night, the Democrats’ fate in the midterms is in their own hands. If you take Republicans at their word, they stand ready to help the Democrats maintain or increase their Congressional majorities.

Last night Rachel Maddow devoted her entire show to the seemingly never-ending health care debate in an attempt to put the “importance of this end game in perspective by documenting the lengths and the depths which the opponents of health reform have gone to stop it this year.” Is Maddow taking a page from ye olde book of Beck?

It seems that when Sarah Palin criticized the current socialized Canadian health care system last fall, she knew what she was talking about. Palin, who during her attack on the similar system proposed in the United States coined the term “death panels,” admitted to a crowd of supporters in Calgary, Alberta that in her youth she and her family would sneak into Canada from their remote Alaskan town for health care.

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.

While certain conservative media figures of late have been using the health of Keith Olbermann‘s father as a way to further their talking points on these supposed liberal “death panels,” you have to admit that it works both ways. As in Keith Olbermann using an entire 9-minute segment tonight to talk about the decisions he made with his father’s doctor, and the myth of these “death panels.”

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

President Obama and the media is getting the New Yorker treatment this week. Obama is about to celebrate his first year as President. And boy has it been a year. That intensity that has surrounded his first year, while partly the result of events that followed Obama to the Oval Office, is also the result of media coverage under “pressure to entertain or perish.” Sometimes things get missed.

Well if you thought Rush Limbaugh could not get any more disgusting, or heartless, or offensive you would be wrong. There is, apparently, plenty more where that came from.

Today, in the face of the increasing desperation of Haitians, Limbaugh wanted to know whether Haitian patients will also have to appear before ‘death panels’ in order to receive aid.

“Bunny from Kansas” called in to C-SPAN yesterday morning, angered by the passage of Health Care through the Senate — and she did something about it. “I am so disappointed. I have taken my Christmas tree down, I have taken my Christmas wreath off my house. I have taken all the lights down,” she told [...]

Now that 2009 is slowly, finally coming to an end, Sarah Palin is getting her comeuppance in the inevitable end-of-year lists. Sort of. Yesterday Politifact.com, a fact-checking website, selected “death panels” as its number one lie of the year: “Of all the falsehoods and distortions in the political discourse this year, one stood out from the rest.” Last night Lawrence O’Donnell tried his best to create and entirely new catchphrase for Palin: Palinocchio.

Saturday night was the Gridiron Dinner in Washington, D.C., where journalists and politicos gather for some light-hearted ribbing, roasting and making jokes about false, damaging rumors about the health care bill meant to frighten and alienate elderly citizens. At least for Sarah Palin. She also joked about life after the McCain campaign and poked a little fun at herself.

Newsweek, move over. The current issue of Mad Magazine contains images of Sarah Palin that make the “controversial” running shorts cover seem tame by comparison, illustrating the Going Rogue author as “Blunder Woman.” As part of their “20 Dumbest of 2009″ list, they’ve illustrated Palin as a sexy stupor-heroine who does battle with an imaginary Death Panel. Plus, more Palin “art” inside.

We reported last week that a government panel issued controversial new breast cancer screening guidelines, and predicted that the very real concerns they present would be twisted to raise concerns about the House health care reform bill. Our prediction played out on Sunday’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, as GOP Rep. Marsha Blackburn and Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz sparred about the new guidelines. Neither got it quite right, and George ran out of time.

On Thursday, former President Bill Clinton was asked if he would attend the Little Rock C.A.R.E. free clinic today. Rather than simply begging off of the event with the usual non-answer boilerplate about scheduling conflicts, he decided to slam Keith Olbermann for “politicizing” the event, saying Olbermann was “not helpful.” While it’s tempting to applaud President Clinton’s courage in standing up to Olbermann, I’m going to pass.

The Federal Task Force on Clinical Preventive Services has issued new guidelines that drastically scale back the use of routine mammography and breast self-examination. Others in the medical community have condemned the change, but the Task Force’s recommendation carries extra weight, as its guidelines are the basis for minimum benefits standards in the recently-passed House health care bill.

Well, that was a snooze fest. After weeks of anticipation about what Sarah Palin might reveal on Oprah Winfrey, or what Oprah might take Palin to account for — death panels come to mind — the answer in the end was: very little. What we got instead was what felt like a long infomercial for Palin’s memoir Going Rogue.

Congressman Earl Blumenauer‘s timeline detailing how the end-of-life provisions he added to the health care bill became — with the powerful helping hand of Sarah Palin– is fascinating in a number of regards, but specifically because Palin is once again about to be handed a very large microphone. Is the MSM prepared to vet the next vicious news cycle?