Wait, didn’t Rachel Maddow assure us on Friday that, unlike those mercenary wingnuts at Fox News who let Republican guests pitch donation URLs on the air, MSNBC is “not a political operation”? Six full minutes of fact-checkin’ fun here via Johnny Dollar, who not only spent hours piecing this lowlight reel together but has an accompanying post delving further into the hypocrisy. Somehow, Hannity and Palin raising money for conservatives is qualitatively different from Ed Schultz and Harold Ford doing the same for liberals. Which, I guess, is true: When Hannity and Palin push their side, they’re playing politics, whereas when Schultz and Ford push theirs, they’re making news. Please do take time to read his post and watch the clip; I promise, you’ll enjoy every minute.

As for the return of the modern-day Murrow to his perch atop Serious Newsman Mountain, this is simply too good not to be true:

“Keith is furious about the way this has all been handled and insisted that MSNBC bosses apologize to him before he would agree to return,” a network insider tells me. “Keith sees himself as the star of MSNBC, the person who put them on the map and discovered fellow network anchors Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell. To be treated like this by the network he helped shape, he considers disgusting.”…

“Keith clearly won this battle. Not only has he got the bosses to say sorry, but he’s also got the company to review its ethic rules,” a friend of Keith’s tells me. “You watch — his rating on Tuesday when he returns will be bigger than ever, giving him even more power at MSNBC.”

Jeff Bercovici at Forbes declares that this cements Olby’s status as the most powerful man at MSNBC, the thought of which seems to have Ace feeling depressed but which makes me perfectly happy. Remember, this is a guy whose buffoonery is such that even some JournoListers are left cringing at it. MSNBC’s hyperpartisan election night coverage was straight out of the Olby playbook, and predictably so alienating to everyone except far-left liberals that more than one TV critic acknowledged with teeth gnashed that Fox’s coverage was more balanced. Why wouldn’t you want him in charge? They should make him program director and give him extra airtime so that he doesn’t have to pare down his lists of who’s worse than Al Qaeda due to time constraints. And besides, as I said on Friday, his suspension was stupid to begin with. All’s well that ends well!