Newsweek interviewed MSNBC morning host Joe Scarborough last week, and prominently mentioned when Scarborough defended the murderer of an abortion doctor. That didn't go over well in Scarborough country, so Newsweek editor— and frequent Scarborough guest—Jon Meacham changed it.

Dr. George Tiller wasn't the first abortion doctor to be murdered by a pro-life jihadist. In 1993, Dr. David Gunn was shot and killed in Florida by Michael Griffin. Who was Griffin's attorney? MSNBC morning host (and Starbucks lover) Joe Scarborough!

On Morning Joe this morning, NBC News' Chuck Todd offered his analysis of the Osama bin Laden audiotape released this morning: It's a standard political "prebuttal." Does that mean we've won the war on terror?

• Stephen Colbert will be Newsweek's guest editor next week. [NYO]
• Conan O'Brien's second Tonight Show dropped 30 percent from Monday's record-setting premiere, although that was probably to be expected. [THR]
• For the third straight month, MSNBC bested CNN in the cable news ratings. Fox News remained in first place, as usual. [Daily Finance]
• More bad news for CNN: Campbell Brown returned from maternity leave this week and immediately returned to fourth-place in the ratings. [THR]
• A new Harvard Business Review study reveals that 10 percent of Twitter users account for more than 90 percent of Twitter messages sent. [AdAge]
• Jon & Kate Plus 8 is still generating obscene ratings, sadly. [AP]

• Conan O'Brien makes his debut this evening as Tonight Show host. [BN, EW]
• Bravo is ditching its tagline "Watch what happens" and replacing it with "By Bravo." We'll just have to watch and see what happens with that. [AdAge]
• More on the recent ratings meltdown at CNN. [Politico]
• The Times Magazine will be 9 percent smaller starting in two weeks. [E&P]
• DirectTV chief Chase Carey is in talks to join News Corp. as Rupert Murdoch's second-in command, taking over for Peter Chernin. [THR, BN]
• Disney's animated pic Up was No. 1 at the box office this weekend. [THR]
• New York's cover story on Condé Nast, in case you missed it. [NYM]

Keith Olbermann devoted a good deal of time on his show tonight to our reporting on Erich "Mancow" Muller's fake waterboarding escapade. He says we're conspiracy theorists. We never said anybody conspired with anybody to do anything, but his puzzling, false, and hysterically paranoid response makes us wonder.

Pat Buchanan, valiant defender of the White Man and his interests, knows that there is hostility and bigotry toward white men who voted for Pat Buchanan. And it's all because of that woman, Sonia Sotomayor.

Rush Limbaugh recently accused MSNBC of "trying to build its ratings on [his] back"—they could build a 747 on your back, Rush!—and TVNewser points out that Rush's name came up 39 times on the network yesterday. But they still can't spell it.

• It's not just TLC that is happy about the Jon & Kate nonsense. Putting them on the cover of Us six times in a row has been a "windfall" for Janice Min. [NYP]
• Get ready to pay for People.com: Time Warner chief Jeff Bewkes says the company may begin charging for access to online magazine content. [AP]
• With book sales plunging and attendance down at BookExpo America, the mood in the publishing industry is kinda gloomy at the moment. [NYT]
• Keith Olbermann is in hot water again. The waterboarding video on his show last week was staged, it turns out, and MSNBC was made aware of that fact before the show, but they went ahead with it anyway. [Gawker]

We always figured it took something really special for Rachel Maddow to be able to put up with Keith Olbermann every evening. Now we have the answer, courtesy of author/Mac pitchman John Hodgman: A bit of La Fée absinthe mixed with Red Bull, apparently. [Twitpic via BYOT]

• Portfolio isn't over and done with, after all: An affiliate of Condé Nast—based in Charlotte, weirdly—plans to revive the magazine's website. [NYO]
• Josh Marshall has accepted Maureen Dowd's apology for swiping some of his copy; and Dowd's new column today is Marshall-free, thankfully. [TPM, NYT]
• Upfronts 2009: What the CW and CBS have in store for the fall. [THR, THR]
• Is Jann Wenner looking to poach Condé Nast honcho David Carey? [NYM]
• Times executive editor Bill Keller says Google is the paper's "frenemy." [NYO]
• CNBC's Jeff Macke had a meltdown on the air yesterday. [Gawker]

Rachel Maddow is gay, a fact that she's rendered uninteresting, unremarkable, and normal by casually dropping details about her private life on her show, as she did again last night.

Today Michael Steele laid out his vision for a teabaggy Republican future. MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell covered the speech and either found something extremely funny about Steele's words, or someone on the set, ugh, broke wind.

If there's anyone who'd want to take Steve Rattner—the media-savvy financier-cum-auto-czar who is embroiled in a pay-to-play pension scandal—down a notch, it would be fearless Wall Street bulldog Eliot Spitzer, right? Wrong.

Keith Olbermann's Ego Trumps the Truth [Gawker]

Oh man, Keith Olbermann took to his nightly airwaves to try and shame CityFile, Wonkette and us for raising questions about his unexplained vacation last April. We're not sorry.

Did Keith Olbermann create a monster when he got Rachel Maddow her own show on MSNBC?

Keith Olbermann is denying a report from CityFile that he threw a hissyfit last month and called in sick for three days because Rachel Maddow booked Ben Affleck, and Olbermann wanted him all to himself.

Keith Olbermann has responded to our story about his three-day absence late last month:

If you regularly tune in to Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, you may remember that Olbermann was mysteriously absent from the show for three days at the end of April. But Olbermann didn't just "have the night off," as David Shuster, his fill-in, said on the air three evenings in a row. According to a source inside MSNBC, it was a bizarre temper tantrum on Olbermann's part that led him to storm off the set in protest. Even stranger: The drama was all Ben Affleck's fault.