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Stories tagged with “Eliot Spitzer”

Alyssa

Current TV Fires Keith Olbermann, Replaces Him With Spitzer Immediately, Olbermann to Sue

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Mar 30, 2012 at 4:49 pm

The New York Times’ Brian Stelter breaks the news that Current TV has let go Keith Olbermann, and will replace him starting tonight with Eliot Spitzer, denying Olbermann to give a send-off or special comment to his viewers. Spitzer, like Olbermann, also had experience at MSNBC, where he appeared as a guest anchor. Olbermann had been suspended by MSNBC for violating its rules on campaign contributions, an event that soured his relationship with the network, before his departure from MSNBC opened the door to his deal with Current. He was at one point a high-profile acquisition for the network, founded by former Vice President Al Gore to provide a more progressive take on the news. But his ratings fell and his relationship with Current quickly foundered.

In an open letter to Current viewers, Gore and co-founder Joel Hyatt wrote “We created Current to give voice to those Americans who refuse to rely on corporate-controlled media and are seeking an authentic progressive outlet. We are more committed to those goals today than ever before. Current was also founded on the values of respect, openness, collegiality, and loyalty to our viewers. Unfortunately these values are no longer reflected in our relationship with Keith Olbermann and we have ended it.” Olbermann had complained about technical issues on his set and squabbled with the network over his role in its coverage of the Republican primary, though he ultimately agreed to anchor those segments.

A source familiar with the decision-making process at Current said the choice to terminate Olbermann was based on what the network felt were violations of three tenets of his contract: a series of unathorized absences, a failure to promote the network, and disparagement both of Current as a network and of its executives individually. The source said that Olbermann missed 19 of his 41 working days in the months of January and February, and that Olbermann was told that if he took a vacation day he had requested for the night of March 5, it would be considered a breach of his contract. Olbermann took the day off, and former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm ran a two-hour edition of her show, the War Room, in his place. The charges that he disparaged the network likely stem from the disputes over election coverage, when Olbermann said in a public statement: ““I was not given a legitimate opportunity to host under acceptable conditions. They know it and we know it. Telling half the story is wrong.”

In a series of Tweets after that letter was released, Olbermann sharply criticized Current’s leadership and said that he would sue the network, writing:

I’d like to apologize to my viewers and my staff for the failure of Current TV. Editorially, Countdown had never been better. But for more than a year I have been imploring Al Gore and Joel Hyatt to resolve our issues internally, while I’ve been not publicizing my complaints, and keeping the show alive for the sake of its loyal viewers and even more loyal staff. Nevertheless, Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt, instead of abiding by their promises and obligations and investing in a quality news program, finally thought it was more economical to try to get out of my contract.

It goes almost without saying that the claims against me implied in Current’s statement are untrue and will be proved so in the legal actions I will be filing against them presently. To understand Mr. Hyatt’s “values of respect, openness, collegiality and loyalty,” I encourage you to read of a previous occasion Mr. Hyatt found himself in court for having unjustly fired an employee. That employee’s name was Clarence B. Cain. http://nyti.ms/HueZsa

In due course, the truth of the ethics of Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt will come out. For now, it is important only to again acknowledge that joining them was a sincere and well-intentioned gesture on my part, but in retrospect a foolish one. That lack of judgment is mine and mine alone, and I apologize again for it.

Olbermann’s longtime attorney Patty Glaser has vowed a tough fight with the network after negotiations over a severance payment for Olbermann failed. And Current has hired a team of crisis public relations experts to help guide their response.

Health

In Tense Interview, Rand Paul Folds On SGR, Can’t Name Specific Cut To Balance Budget

By Igor Volsky on Nov 10, 2010 at 9:57 am

Back in May, Senator-elect Rand Paul (R-KY) raised more than a few eyebrows when he backed Democratic efforts to prevent cuts to physician payments under a program called the sustained growth rate, or SGR. At one campaign event Paul, an ophthalmologist who generated 50 percent of his practice from government reimbursements, said, “Physicians should be allowed to make a comfortable living,” conveniently disregarding his pledge to institute “across the board cuts” on government spending.

Well, last night, CNN’s Eliot Spitzer took Paul to task on this apparent contradiction, asking the newly minted lawmaker about why he was excluding his former colleagues from the gruesome cuts — particularly since Medicare spending was primarily responsible for the growing deficit. Remarkably, Paul immediately backed away from his broad-brush indictment of government spending and argued that cutting reimbursements would reduce access to physicians:

SPITZER: You’ve said that the one place you don’t want to cut is doctor reimbursement rates?

PAUL: You’ve been reading too many liberal bloggers. Let me set you straight…What I have said is that look, if we want to cut physician fees automatically without a vote, let’s lump all federal employees in there, senators, congressmen and all two million federal employees and let’s all automatically cut their pay every year without a vote and I’m all for it. But right now, let’s not single out one set of people and say that somehow we’re going to balance the health care budget on one set of people. The problem is that ultimately if you keep reducing. For example, if physician fees go down in Medicare by 30 percent as they’re designated to do in December, you won’t find a doctor. I think we need to think about do we want to have doctors available to see patients and I think that’s a major problem.

SPITZER: But Senator, I’m correct in saying you’ve opposed cutting Medicare reimbursement rates even though the Medicare system is the single largest deficit hole we’re facing as we look at our budget and reimbursing doctors is the largest piece of that.

PAUL: You do have to figure out how to balance the Medicare budget and it’s going to take a lot of different things to do it, but you can’t balance it simply on one facet.

Watch it:

From there, the interview deteriorated into a painfully uncomfortable and at times personal exchange. Spitzer pressed Paul on his “peak income over the past decade,” to which the Senator dryly shot back, “do I want to go back to your personal past and talk about your past on this program? I don’t think so.”

Spitzer proceeded to ask Paul to name specific programs he would cut from health care, Social Security or defense. But Paul, demurred, explaining that he would offer a balanced budget in the next Congress — over 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 year increments, but was still unsure of what to cut to get there. At one point, Paul even suggested that rather than pressing him for specifics, Spitzer should invite liberals and ask “how do you continue to have these programs?”

Paul went on to chastise lawmakers for breaking certain budget and spending rules. “The main thing you have to have is you have to have rules [to balance the budget],” and make “difficult decisions” he said, unaware that by reversing the physician cuts under SGR he would be, in fact, breaking a spending rule. “Nothing is off limits,” he said. “We will look at each individual program and we will do a stepwise process to this. We will say, can it be downsized, can it be privatized, can it be eliminated or can we not look at this program at all because it’s too important and it can’t be cut.” He offered no specifics last night, however.

Pushed to the edge by Spitzer, Paul did rattle off ideas like repealing the health care law and sending back TARP dollars, before telling Spitzer that his “personal agenda is getting in the way of making you a very good broadcaster” and claiming he had to leave for another interview. Spitzer responded curtly. “Sir, the tenor of the campaign in which you say you’re going to balance the budget and cannot name a single cut suggests to me that that debases politics,” he said and ended the segment.

Incidentally, Paul is in complete agreement with the administration and the doctor’s lobby on the reimbursement issue. In a speech to the Association of American Medical Colleges, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius “pushed for an extension to the so-called doc fix to stop an expected 23% cut to Medicare payments for physicians,” saying “I hope that Congress will act quickly to pass it, so that our doctors and seniors can have some peace of mind while we work on a long-term fix.”

Yglesias

Never Resign

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 19, 2010 at 10:29 am

Reviewing Client 9, Felix Salmon speculates that “[m]aybe Spitzer’s problem was that he was never very good at cultivating powerful friends who could protect and support him — a skill that another executive horndog, Bill Clinton, has in spades.”

I think the contrasting fates of Spitzer and guys like Clinton or Senator David Vitter (R-LA) shows that Spitzer’s problem was much simpler than that—he resigned. When a reasonably popular public official is hit with a scandal of a personal nature, the natural immediate first reaction of his same-party colleagues is to want to get rid of him. After all, no reason this guy should be a millstone around all of our necks. That leads to an initial torrent of criticism from friendly-ish sources and a wave of pressure to resign. But if you resist that first wave, apologizing for your conduct but refusing to apologize for your years of public service and highlighting the pernicious special interests who’d love to see you brought low, you basically flip the dynamic. Now you’re definitely going to be a millstone around everyone’s necks so the question becomes how heavy a stone?

Suddenly all your same-party colleagues have an incentive to defend you and to attack your enemies. Suddenly an incumbent Republican in Louisiana is just another guy with a safe seat. An incumbent President presiding over an economic boom is super-popular. And I bet an incumbent Democratic governor in New York could have cruised to re-election.

After all, at this point Spitzer is basically rehabilitated in all the ways that count. His new primetime TV show may or may not succeed, but that will turn on his merits as a TV commentator. It’s not going to fail because people can’t “forgive” him or whatever. And by the same token, were he still governor he’d be struggling with the economic problems afflicting incumbent politicians everywhere but fundamentally he’d be getting judged on the same basic criteria as everyone else. It’s different for a mere candidate (like John Edwards, say) but my advice to any incumbent with a reasonably strong political position who’s suddenly wracked by a sex scandal is simple—don’t quit. And make it clear to all your political allies that you’re not going to quit, so they’d better all start thinking about how to rally around you.

Yglesias

Why Does Adultury Only Matter For Democrats?

By Matthew Yglesias on May 12, 2009 at 4:01 pm

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Mike Tomasky says he’s finally figured out what it takes to be banished from public life in the United States:

I’ve spent the last 14 years thinking well, we’ve finally learned in America what you have to do to be utterly banished — you have to literally get away with murder, or two of them (oops, I forgot this is Britain; I mean allegedly! Allegedly! And did I mention that he was acquitted by a jury of his peers?).

And now we add to the category a second condition: if you cheat on your cancer-stricken wife with another woman and still decide you can run for president, and you get busted, you’re pretty much finished. Yes or no?

He’s talking about John Edwards. But I have a question about this theory: what about Newt Gingrich? It’s true that Gingrich hasn’t launched a presidential campaign, but cheating on his cancer-stricken wife he’s done. Then he divorced her and married a second woman on whom he also cheated. And now he’s on his third marriage. And he converted to Catholicism! And he’s a defender of traditional marriage! And he’s still a high-profile public figure.

Consider also the starkly contrasting treatment of Elliot Spitzer, forced into resignation and disgrace for seeing a prostitute, and David Vitter, sitting pretty in the United States Senate.

Logically speaking, since there’s only one of the two parties that puts a very high premium on the idea that state regulation of individual sexual behavior should be the main role of government, these allegations should be more damaging to Republicans. Hypocrisy on the part of the media is part of the story. But part of the issue, I think, is just partisan and ideological solidarity. A politician can survive a great deal if his co-partisans are willing to stand by him, and conservatives are much more inclined to stand by their man than are progressives.

Yglesias

Missing: Eliot Spitzer

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 20, 2009 at 12:25 pm

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Michael Hill writes for the AP about Elliot Spitzer’s long struggle with AIG, his return to the spotlight, and the dim prospects for a Spitzer comeback: “It would be a long shot. The trail for a married politician caught soliciting high-priced prostitutes would likely be prohibitively steep.”

I have to say that I don’t really understand this. If soliciting prostitutes doesn’t ruin your career in Louisiana politics, why should it ruin your career in New York politics? Spitzer’s decision to resign has always struck me as basically just a case of blinking. I remember when the Monica Lewinsky story broke, and a lot of pundits immediately assumed that Bill Clinton would “have to” resign. And I think that was a real possibility. But he didn’t. So even though people weren’t thrilled with this aspect of his conduct, it quickly shifted from a public debate about his conduct to a public debate about the desirability of booting a popular, effective president from office and he won. I can see why Spitzer may have decided he didn’t want to fight the fight; but that’s ultimately what he did. A politician who’s well-liked by his constituents pre-scandal, hit by a scandal that has no real bearing on his job performance, can usually hang on if he wants to.

And by the same token, I don’t think there would be any real barrier to Spitzer coming back in some form. I’ve heard some people say that they never liked Spitzer’s Wall Street work and therefore they’re glad he’s not around anymore. And I’ve heard more people say that they did like Spitzer’s Wall Street work and therefore it’s too bad that he’s not around. But the concern about the sex scandal is almost entirely a “meta” thing, people think it’s too bad that other people see Spitzer as too tainted.

Media

My Assigment Desk

By Matthew Yglesias on Jan 24, 2009 at 10:14 am

Elliot Spitzer uses his most recent Slate column to call for a renewed spirit of competition and innovation in American business. Yawn. You know what issue I’d like to see Spizter address? Prostitution. It’s illegal. But the laws against it are pretty sporadically enforced. And I think there’s a lot of sentiment that punishing people for consensual acts is wrong, and also that criminalizing prosecution leaves women exposed to violence, abuse, and rape at the hands of pimps and cops alike. At the same time, prostitution legalization hasn’t, where it’s been tried, exactly ushered in a utopia.

So what’s former prospector and former state attorney general Elliot Spitzer think about this? Does he think he deserves to be thrown in jail? The hooker he used to see? And if not, does that call for broader reform of the laws regulating prostitution? Or is there some principled reason why the laws should be on the books but not enforced in this particular case? Seems to me that if Slate‘s editors got him to address these issues they’d get a lot of traffic.

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