You Got Your Disease Into My Addiction

Be warned: this is an Inside Baseball blog moment. If you skip, I won't cry.

FTT's ads are provided by YardBarker, who act as a network placement service for many of us in Blogfrica. They ask that we refrain from the potty mouth, and in return, they supply us with the ads that you see on the site.

Yardbarker ad revenue keeps me in gum, and motivates me to keep filling the bloghole like a real live professional, because I am a greedy little black duck. But since FTT is more like a persistent hobby instead of an occupation, I feel pretty independent of the advertisers, if you catch my drift.

Yardbarker also produces a daily newsletter to their subscribers, highlighting some of the more notable pieces that they've seen in the network. FTT has gotten the occasional link from it, and we're always appreciative. It's also a nice little tool to keep an eye on what other sites are doing.

In yesterday's issue, there was a link for a fellow blogger and friend of the site. I won't name him, for fear of Getting Into A Pissing Match. Anyway, he (mostly) went off the sports reservation with a gleeful spew targeted at Keith Olbermann.

Olbermann is, of course, the ex-SportsCenter anchor who now irritates the right wing on a highly rated MSNBC show, "Countdown." He also appears on NBC's "Sunday Night Football", which I guess makes him fair game for a sports site. It's a reach, but so be it.

As Olbermann's show is the highest rated thing in MSNBC's history, Olbermann has gotten more and more to do, including the SNF gig and a prominent position at the Democratic National Convention. He's also become the target for claims of media bias, in the eternal right-wing narrative of how the media is so very, very unfair to them. Mean, even. (I'm leaving the whole Faux News Experience, and a lifetime of grievances, alone right now, in a doomed attempt to stay on point.)

Olbermann made news himself by missing the Republican National Convention (the reasons why were the subject of my friend's rant), and then getting taken off MSNBC's election night coverage, along with fellow network personality Chris Matthews.

Now, it's fine if my friend from the other side wants to go off into a non-sports tangent. I probably do it a half dozen times a month at least without y'all seeming to be too offended; at least I'm not making you suffer with a creepy love for femme-y soap operas that show me to be a borderline statutory rape candidate.

(Seriously, Lemur Boys... please, for the love of God, stop talking about the new 90210 or whatever Real World is happening right now. I desperately do not care about what you masturbate to.)

If you like a certain writer, you give them a little leeway; you give them the trust to take you the long way from time to time.

But I am curious as all get out as to why the Yard decided to link to it... especially as my Friend From the Other Side's day job is to, well, work as a political operative.

Getting his anti-Olbermann dig into the populace counts as a point for His Side, and a relatively effective one as well, since it got publicity in a key demographic that has a large number of undecided voters.

Now, if a blogger wants to go off topic into politics, so be it. We all fill our hole some way or the other. If they want to drag their day job into their work, that's their right as well.

But when a publisher wants to give air to that, it's advocating one side over the other... and making me wonder all kinds of unkind things as to their motivation for doing so.

Which isn't good, whether I agree with them or not. And it's especially not good with so many of us having raw feelings over the outcome of the next election, no matter how it goes down, and with said election less than two months away.

So, um, YB? Please don't give me any further reason to lump you into my Compromised Media pile, OK?

And as a side note... the Lemur decided this week that it's also sports to tell you how Cindy McCain enjoys racing cars.

This election can't come fast enough, folks...