February 15, 2023 • 39 mins
EPISODE 134: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:42) SPECIAL COMMENT: We are owned by guns, and our only way out is Economic Civil War.
Why does this supposedly sophisticated nation abide the ritual sacrifice of our children to insane gun owners? Because it makes other people millions of dollars. And when we cross a milestone where one of the Michigan State student-survivors is also a Sandy Hook survivor and at least three of them are also Oxford High student-survivors, we must attack the Gun Lobby, the Death Lobby, the Republican Death Party, and the Red States that harbor these terrorists with the only weapon they fear: Money. The Blue States keep the Red Ones from going bankrupt tomorrow and starving by next week. Let's use it. We must force our Blue State governments to stop contributing money to the Federal Government unless the Red States meet our demands about guns, the disproportionate House and Senate that codifies it, and the bought-and-sold Supreme Court that protects it. The Red States survive on State-to-State Socialism and you know how they hate Socialism. And the constitutional basis for an Economic Civil War? Why, the 2nd Amendment. After all, we are trying to protect "the security of a free State," aren't we?
B-Block (18:40) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Special Counsel squeezes a Trump lawyer, Feinstein to retire, Nikki Haley is the next contestant, and Flaco the Eagle-Owl is not really a "zoo escapee" any longer. (22:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Why lookee here! It's Elon Musk, Elon Musk, and then Elon Musk! He really fixed Twitter so his tweets would "win"? What a twerp!
C-Block (28:00) EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY: Joy and Easy, sisters in New York (29:10) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Many have dreamed of it, but only one of my 438 past bosses actually threatened to kill me, and chased me around the studio to prove he was sincere. The saga of the premiere of "Rita Cosby Tonight" and the man who actually thought I was sabotaging it (as if anybody needed to), MSNBC president Rick Kaplan.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of I Heart Radio.
One of the student survivors at Michigan State was a
(00:25):
student survivor of Sandy Hook, and at least three of
the student survivors of Michigan State where student survivors at
Michigan Oxford High School fifteen months earlier, and we can
say with all too much certainty that some of them
will also become survivors of Toledo, Dallas, your city, my city,
(00:53):
because mass gun murders are profit centers. Why does this
supposedly sophisticated nation abide the ritual sacrifice of our children
dron and our brothers and sisters and parents to the
moloch of insane gun owners like Lauren Bobert or Thomas
(01:13):
Massey or whoever, the ones who get some kind of
sexual gratification from owning and displaying and stroking and firing
weapons because it makes other people millions of dollars. That's
why we are owned by guns. And so we go
(01:36):
on calculating the averages and deciding if by age five
it is already too late to teach kids how to
play dead in their classrooms, And we go on listening
to fascist asshole madmen like Ron de Santist talk about
fortifying schools and fortifying movie theaters and fortifying churches, and
(01:57):
we go on listening to messianic button heads like Eric
Adams talk about giving more guns to more police, when
lease often turn out either to be the murderers or
the cowards who idle in the hallways as the children
of Uvalde are executed one by one, And we go
on listening to the fatuous idiots like the Missouri House
(02:18):
where the police said we need laws to stop fourteen
year olds from walking down the streets of St. Louis
carrying a R fifteens and the House voted a hundred
and four to thirty nine to keep open carry legal
in Missouri for kids, and we go on listening to
a moral monsters like Donald Trump talk about arming teachers
(02:38):
and bringing back firing squads, and we listened to these
paid scumb Republicans bribed by the gun manufacturers and the
gun organizations, recite what they have been paid to say
about responsible gun owners, when after half a million gun
deaths in this country in the last ten or twelve years,
it is no longer in doubt, there are no longer
(02:59):
any responsible gun owners on this nightmare so familiar, so routine,
and so constant that we no longer remember the details,
or the location, or the motive were the sequence of them,
And now we are no longer even remembering that there
(03:20):
was a nightmare last night or the night before, and
we're now marbling them into other things in American life,
as if they were snowstorms or flight delays. And a
hockey podcaster begins by saying, well, it's tough to do
this after the Michigan State news, but let's talk about
the Carolina hurricanes needs at the deadline, and the New
(03:42):
York Times can run a sidebar that the shooting, well,
it up ended the lives of thousands, but it also
put the school back in an uncomfortable spotlight, what with
the sexual assault scandal. There we go on in an
unacceptable world in which we are owned by guns. We
(04:03):
go on to borrow from Churchill in strange paradox, decided
only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift,
solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent. The dead
(04:26):
of Michigan State, the dead of Las Vegas, the dead
at the Pulse, the dead at well, why do we
bother with individual place names anymore. The dead of the
killing field, the dead of the transcendent national shooting range,
(04:47):
that is the United States of America. They are dead
because somebody is making money off them, and because Ted
Cruz is making money off them, and Marjorie Taylor Green
is making money off them, and every horror politician is
making money off them, and rarely even bothering anymore to
(05:10):
wash the money through sepack or save America this, or
shoot America, that the donations come straight and unhidden, and
whether it's Trump or de Santis or Poor soon to
be very very surprised, Nicki Haley, or just some other
idiot free from morality or conscience, whom the moneyed interests select.
(05:33):
It is fair to say that the Republican nominee for
president in whoever that is, will be underwritten by the
gun manufacturers and the gun lobby and their masters, the
death lobby, who pay good money to bad people to
maintain not just our culture of guns and shooting and
dead children and thoughts and prayers, but also maintain the
(05:57):
world's culture of continuing to poison the atmosphere and kill
off the species one by one because the one billion,
nine hundred and sixty three million dollars in profit made
last year by big Oil just isn't enough, because they
stay up at night anguished by the thought that there
remains somewhere one dollar not yet stolen from a child
(06:22):
dying next to the earthquake rubble in Syria or Turkey,
one dollar yet to be pocketed by Darren Woods, the
CEO of Exxon Mobile. Away God intended it, it is economics,
and thus the only solution can also be economics, because
(06:47):
we will not defeat them in the states that are
already lost to the control of the death lobby. And
even if President Biden said tomorrow we are not owned
by guns, and I don't give a damn. If I'm
re elected or even renominated, I'm going to issue four
hundred and fifty executive order and take every damn gun
I can get off the streets. And if the House
(07:09):
and Senate won't reinstate the assault weapons man, I will
do so unilaterally and come and get me in the courts.
Even if Biden did that, we the anti death people,
we would lose in the Supreme Court because Clarence Thomas,
the whore, is on the Supreme Court, because of and
(07:32):
bought and paid for by the death lobby, and Samuel
Alito the whore is, and John Roberts the whore is,
and Neil Gorsch and Drunken Brett Kavanaugh and Bible paralegal
Amy Coney Barrett. And so we must ask ourselves, what
economically can we do to the gun lobby, to the
(07:55):
oil lobby, to the death lobby, and to their minions
in the Senate and the House, and all the Senates
and all the houses in all the states in America
and in this country. There are only a couple of
measures that might possibly work, and might possibly work fast
enough so that enough of us won't be killed in
(08:18):
next year's three hundred gun massacres or the next decades
three hundred climate crises. And that one thing is to
spare you the kind words, the soft words. That one
thing is economic civil war. It can start simply, buy
nothing from Texas, do not go to Florida, do not
(08:43):
patronize Missouri. We can start there, and then we can
get serious. It is a simple mathematical fact that, with
some exceptions, and a little more nuanced than time permits
me here. It is a simple mathematical fact that the
Blue states of this country keep the Red states of
(09:03):
this country from going bankrupt. It is a simple mathematical
fact that the Blue states pay in more to the
federal government than they ever get back in services or infrastructure,
or certainly in per capita representation. New York pays in
net twenty four billion a year, California pays inter at
(09:24):
fourteen billion, and most of that goes to keeping Florida
and Texas from starving. Florida gets thirty six billion a
year more than it pays in Texas nearly that much.
It is state to state socialism, and we all know
(09:45):
that we can't have socialism. And it is a simple
fact that the Blue states restrict and regulate guns, and
the Red states sell guns and sell guns and sell
guns and profit off dead children. And when the political
whore's like Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson and Rupert Murdoch
(10:12):
point to the gun carnage of Chicago, they are actually
pointing to the gun carnage of weapons smuggled in from
Indiana to Chicago. And it is also a simple fact
that we can dance around for decades yet to come
about how to stop the gun massacres of February and
(10:33):
the chemical disasters of June two thousand sixty one so
bad they reminded old timers of where was that East Palestine, Ohio?
Or we can cut to the chase and put it
this way. If the Red States do not agree to
strict and enforced gun regulation and the removal and the
outlawing of gun manufacture, and a revision of the Second
(10:57):
Amendment so that the vagueness that isn't actually there, but
that the death lobby has spent a century convincing millions
is there, that all doubt about the Second Amendment be
erased and replaced by the simple statement that private gun
ownership is illegal without a series of licenses and mental
health tests, and that the owner is liable for whatever
is done with his gun, and if that includes murder,
(11:18):
then the owner is liable for life imprisonment, whether he
fired the gun or not. If the Red States do
not agree to that, and by the way, to reapportioned
representation in the House and the Senate, so that Idaho
does not have as many senators as a real state
and not a welfare state like Idaho, And if they
do not agree to the resignations of Chief Justice Roberts
(11:40):
and Justices Alito, Barrett, gorstch Kavanaugh, and Thomas. If the
Red States do not agree to that, then the Blue
States will simply stop paying money into the federal government,
and the Blue States will simply spend that money directly
on their own citizens. And if the leaders of our
(12:00):
Blue states who will not comply with this, then the
only solution we have since the murders at Michigan State
Monday night and the murders at your town name here
next week, our profit streams for many people, the only
solution we have is to then stop paying our federal
taxes until our state leaders recognize that the only way
(12:22):
out of this nightmare is to threaten the Red States
and thus threatened the gun lobby, and thus threatened the
oil lobby, and thus threatened the death lobby with economic strangulation,
economic civil war, to save the country, to save the
(12:43):
next six hundred thousand Americans who will die by gun
violence almost certainly by the year five, if it does
not get worse before then six hundred thousand, the same
number who were killed in the actual Civil War. And
if you ask your sell or, you are asked by
(13:06):
what right we could threaten economic civil war just say
this is constitutional under the Second Amendment quote a well
regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state,
the right of the people to keep and bare arms
shall not be infringed. Our rights to the security of
(13:30):
a free state have been infringed upon by the gun
lobby and the death lobby, which has convinced generations of
gun fetishists that an amendment that does not contain the
word own nor any synonym for own, does contain it.
The Constitution is a property document. It mentions rights only
fifteen times. It mentions voting only thirty seven times. This
(13:53):
is out of nearly eight thousand words. But it mentions
money and ownership a hundred and three times. The Second
Amendment is about making sure nothing interferes with a well
regulated militia. Well regulated militia, that is, they're protecting our
rights as citizens to have, as it says in the
(14:13):
Second Amendment, the security of a free state. Our Second
Amendment rights have been trampled on by Donald Trump and
the Republicans, the anti Second Amendment Republicans. We need to
start enforcing the Second Amendment. We need an economic civil
(14:35):
war against the gun lobby and the death lobby, and
those corrupted and financially insolvent red states that stand in
the way of peace and security in this country because
we are owned by guns. But god damn it, we
are not going to be owned by guns any longer.
(15:11):
Still ahead, Diane Feinstein is out of the California Senate race,
so we can all exhale and throw her a party.
Elon Musk makes a fool of himself on Twitter again,
and yes it actually happened. A former boss of mine,
a president of MSNBC, really did do it. He really
did chase me around the studios one night and threatened
(15:31):
to kill me. And they made him apologize for that.
Things I promised not to tell. Coming up, that's next.
This cis Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Olberman post
scripts to the news, some headlines, some updates, some snarks,
(15:52):
some prediction. State line, Washington. Another shoe has dropped from
the Special Counsel's office. Jack Smith's staff has asked to
judge to erase the attorney client privilege of the Trump lawyer,
Evan Corkeran This is about that June document that Corker
and wrote and the other Attorney Christina bob signed the
one that said that Trump was voluntarily turning over every
(16:16):
classified document he'd taken and stashed at Marilago. Obviously, Smith
wants to know whether Trump ordered Corkran to write that
and knew it wasn't true when he did, and to
get that they need Corkran to be at risk of
an obstruction of justice charge if it somehow was not
Trump's idea. Gonna make a wild guess on whose idea
(16:37):
this was. Dateline. San Francisco Senator Diane Feinstein has relieved
California Democrats of the Odium of throwing her off the cart.
Eighty nine years old and in the Senate since she
had widely been abandoned by her party, with retired Speaker
Nancy Pelosi saying she would be endorsing Congress and Adam
(16:58):
Shift for the nomination presuming Feinstein retired. Well, now she
has retired. Katie Porter is already also running. Barbara Lee
is a probable. Feinstein has taken a lot of justifiable
crap lately, but she has been an extraordinary public servant
who survived two terrorist assassination attempts. Was president of San
Francisco Board of supervisors and kept the city together as
(17:21):
acting mayor when George Mosconi and Harvey Milk were murdered
in She was then elected to the mayor's post shortly
thereafter and served ten years on that job. Dateline, South Carolina.
After sucking up to Trump for seven years and saying
she would never run for the Republican nomination if he did,
NICKI Haley is running for the Republican nomination. I would
(17:43):
never root for Trump for anything, but his reaction to
this over the next few weeks is gonna be hi
hilarious and Dateline Central Park, New York. Flat go of
the Eagle owl was now smarted near Bethesda Fountain in
Central Park. That's about ten blocks north of his former
home in the Zoo. He also brief we went out
(18:05):
onto East seventy st. Flacco has been free for one
day shy of two weeks now. He's obviously surviving very
well on his own. He seems to really like going
around the park, and he is feeding himself on rats,
as we true New Yorkers do. In fact, he is
(18:25):
so voracious Flacco has actually reduced the rat population, and
in fact that makes him a front runner for New
Yorker of the Year Award. Thank you Nancy Faust time
(19:09):
for the daily roundup of the miscrants, morons and done
in Krueger effects specimens who constitute today's worst persons in
the world. The bronze Elon Musk. He has tweeted the
world's only century old meme, the one that tries to
connect Stonehenge, Easter Island and the Washington Monument by drawing
(19:32):
a stone man inside the Earth whose head is at
one end at Easter Island, and then his toes are
at the exact opposite point of the earth in Stonehenge,
and well in Washington that would be his monument as
the Washington Monument. There are no coincidences, Musk, wrote Sage Lee,
except the exact opposite point on the earth to Stonehenge
(19:55):
is not anywhere near Easter Island. It's three thousand, eight
hundred and seventy nine miles east northeast of Easter Island.
Nice meme, el Oh, the runner up, Well, this is
a coincidence. The runner up is Elon Musk. You may
have seen this earlier, but it was new to me
at six eight pm Eastern on Sunday night, not long
(20:15):
after the Super Bowl started, Musk tweeted, quote go Eagles,
and since sports ball is obviously a mystery to him,
he put three American flags in front of Go Eagles,
and then another three after it, and then after the game,
which the Eagles lost, he deleted the tweet. And he
also deleted a tweet congratulating the victorious Casey Chiefs and
(20:38):
halftime performer Rihanna. But our winner is oh work at
this selon Musk again. Well, now we know why he
deleted the go Eagles tweet and why is knitwitted conspiracy
theory tweets keep showing up on your feed, in some
cases five or ten of them in a row. I'll
just read from the website platform er quote at two
(21:01):
thirty six on Monday morning, James Musk's and an urgent
message to Twitter engineers. Quote, we are debugging an issue
with engagement across the platform, wrote James Muska, cousin of
the Twitter CEO, quoting any people who can make dashboards
and write software, please can you help solve this problem?
This is high urgency. If you're willing to help out,
(21:24):
please thumbs up this post. What do you think the
high urgency problem was? Yes, Musk's Eagles tweet generated nine
point one million impressions, and that made him furious because
another tweet about the Eagles generated nearly twenty nine million impressions,
the tweet by President Biden. Back to the platformer account quote,
(21:47):
Twitter CEO flew his private jet back to the Bay
Area on Sunday night to demand answers from his team.
Within a day, the consequences of that meeting would reverberate
around the world as Twitter users opened the app to
find that Musk's posts overwhelmed their ranked timeline. This was
no accident. Platform Or can confirm. After Musk threatened to
(22:09):
fire his remaining engineers, they built a system designed to
ensure that Musk and Musk alone benefits from previously unheard
of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base.
Unquote all right, Look, everybody likes their tweets to be
read and retweeted, and some scientists said seeing the like
and retweet counts grow creates the same effect in the
(22:32):
brain as eating chocolate. But we have to address the
possibility here that Elon Musk's brain is chocolate. What is
wrong with this dude? Fixing the algorithm so that you
always win. Trump doesn't even do that in his little
Nazi social media site. I mean, can't somebody who cares
(22:52):
about Elon Musk, you know, get him committed somewhere, all right?
This assumes somebody actually does care about him. Ellen, my dear,
you never assume, you see, when you assume, you make
an ass of you and me Musk. Two days larst
(23:13):
Musk and still ahead on countdown. Many of my bosses
have thought about trying to kill me. One and one
alone has actually tried it, the saga of Rick Kaplan
(23:37):
coming up first. In each edition of Countdown, we feature
a dog in need you can't help. Every dog has
its day to New York and two sisters, Joy and Easy.
They are Rottweiler's but they are socialized, mellow, shy, affectionate,
good with dogs and cats and kids and strangers, and
(23:58):
they're human. Was evicted and took them both to the
kill pound. And Joy is on the kill list tomorrow
at the New York Pound because she caught pneumonia in
the pound and is on a feeding tube. The law
of self fulfilling prophecies. Again. They're scared, they get sick,
they get killed because they're scared and they're sick. We're
trying to get Joy and Easy adopted together. So what
(24:19):
we can do is pledge donations to defray the costs
of a rescue saving them. You can find Joy and
Easy on my Twitter feeds. I thank you and Joy
and Easy thank you. Finally our number one story in
(24:49):
the Countdown things. I promised not to tell them Back
to my favorite topic, me, How exactly was I supposed
to tell the police that the man threatened to kill
me was the president of MSNBC. He was chasing me
through the studios. He was too overweight to run. But
even though he inexplicably lied and said he was six
(25:10):
ft seven, at six ft five, this guy his name
was Rick Caplan, and he was the soon to be
ex president of MSNBC, just as he was already the
ex president of CNN. He still had strides as long
as my own. Plus On that night of August eighth,
two thousand five, I was multitasking. I was trying to
mentally record everything he was shouting, while also drawing him
(25:33):
away from the live microphones of the live studio in
which he had started shouting, while also fishing for my
office key. So I could lock myself in there if
need be, while also figuring out how I would hit
him if it came to that, while also trying to
register the superb double takes from my colleagues past to
(25:53):
whom he was stomping like an out of shape Frankenstein,
while also trying to suppress an overwhelming and seemingly inappropriate
desire to burst into laughter, while still game planning the
soon to be inevitable call to the cops of beautiful
downtown Secaucus, New Jersey. Uh yeah, yeah, he's he's trying
(26:16):
to kill me, my boss, the president of MSNBC. Yeah,
the Yeah, the cable television network. Yeah, exactly down the
street from the London fog outlet story. Yeah one MSNBC Plaza.
I know it's a dumb address. Uh. He's about sixty
uh to seventy pounds. By the way, he says he's
(26:40):
six ft seven, but he's only six ft five. Why
Why does he lie about his height or why is
he trying to kill Right? Well, I did a commentary
urging the viewers to stop smoking, and he's afraid of
the mention of blood. Hello. Hello, As all of this
played out in my head, President Kaplan was huffing and
puffing his way through our giant studio, weaving through the
(27:02):
news assignment area, past the make up room, down the hallways,
nearing the offices of my show Countdown, and past the
bank of a couple of hundred television monitors with a
different face on every one of them, each seemingly staring
slack jawed at the executive, screaming threats at the only
guy on his own network who got any ratings. I'll
pay you back, I'll get your world, I'll fetish your call.
(27:30):
This had all begun roughly ten days earlier, in late
July two tho five, an oral surgeon who had intended
to examine a growth on the roof of my mouth
that instead, with one pale look, silently betrayed his suspicion
that it was cancerous. Then he cut the whole thing out.
I was on my way to work anyway, It was
(27:52):
too late to get a replacement, and I was bleeding
so much that our technical director and I decided to
pre record all of my on camera segments for that
night show, thus reducing the chances of viewers hearing me
say President Bush today while blood used out of my
mouth over my teeth and lips and onto the desk
(28:13):
like I was drectul anchor. When the following Wednesday I
got the unexpected all clear from the surgeon's office, I
decided to devote some of each night's newscast to a
campaign to help viewers and myself quit smoking. My premise
was a simple one that I had never heard argued
before and have rarely heard argued since, that it would
(28:35):
be a lot easier to quit if you didn't have
cancer than if you did have cancer. I pitched my
producers on the series. I went into Rick Kaplan's office
to get his seal of approval. He was enthusiastic and supportive,
and most rare of all, he was paying attention. And
then I said, I was also going to point out
that if you got the good outcome like I had,
(28:57):
they would merely stick a laser in your mouth, and
you'd smell your own flesh burning for like forty eight hours,
and you'd have to keep spitting out your own blood.
Would say that he can't suddenly threw his meaty hands
out towards me in a strangling gesture, and then just
as quickly clamped them over his own ears and closed
his eyes and began actually screaming. No no no no
(29:17):
no no no no no no no no no. I
thought he had gone crazy, as it proved he was
just practicing foregoing crazy. Later, I'm sorry, I'm squeamish. I
got the point. I just can't handle references to, you know, uh,
the red stuff. Go ahead with the series. Just just
toned down the red stuff. I toned down the red stuff.
(29:43):
And my executive producer, as He Povich, sent him the
scripts and he told her to tone down the red
stuff a little more, and I went and I did
that too. We all decided to start the anti smoking
series the following Monday, August eight, two thousand five. By
nauseating coincidence, that was the day after the ABC anchorman
(30:04):
Peter Jennings had died of lung cancer. The MSNBC president
had been a producer on jennings newscast. I had long
since written and recorded jennings obituary, and now the somewhat cold,
but still journalistically valid segue would have to be made.
We would have to go directly from the twelve minute
long Jennings Oh bit to the start of our anti
(30:24):
tobacco campaign eight or nine minutes into that prerecorded Jennings obituary,
Rick Kaplan came out of his office and walked the
fifty ft or so through the vast open newsroom to
where my anchor desk was. His eyes were full of tears.
This is wonderful, he said quietly. Peter would have liked this.
He gave me a thumbs up. Then he walked to
(30:45):
a second desk another fifty feet away, where his first
big hire, a woman named Rita Cosby, was about to
premier his first big gamble, her new show immediately following mine.
I was actually moved by Rick Kaplan's comment. I did
not once think of phoning the Secaucus police, but end
(31:05):
I began the anti smoking segment, and as I focused
on the camera and the teleprompter in front of me
and detailed the blood and the gore and the spitting
and how that was the good outcome, out of the
corner of my eye I saw this weird site. The
President again left his office and waddled out along the
wall thirty feet ahead of me in the general direction
of the control rooms. Within moments, as I continued to
(31:28):
read my script, he was back in the studio and
standing right next to my camera, gesticulating wildly. I said,
they never say it, but wouldn't it be really easier
to quit smoking when you didn't have cancer than when
you did? And Kaplan responded with the same two handed
choking gesture he had made briefly in his office much earlier.
(31:48):
I presumed there was some simple problem, like that the
building was on fire, but I calculated that I could
still make it to the show's scheduled finished time E
d T and still survive even if others perished. That's
countdown for this the days since the declaration of mission
accomplished in Iraq. I'm Keith, all remain goodnight and good
(32:08):
luck your Sliva. Rick Kaplan suddenly screamed from the other
anchor desk. I could hear, and this is my impression
of her. Good evening. I'm Rida Cosby. This is Rida Cosby,
Live and Direct with Rida Cosby, and I'm Rida Cosby.
She was not a big woman, but she had a
voice on her like the horn on the Staten Island
(32:29):
ferry if it had a cold. You are over the top.
You aren't disgusting. My first thought was that Camplin had
forgotten that microphones fifty ft away were live during the
premiere of his pet project, Rina is On. I actually
whispered to him, silly me, I don't get a half
for three days on you were told by as He
(32:49):
poviche At the piece was over the top and you
needed to cut it, and you didn't. I still couldn't
bring myself to yell back. We're in a live studio.
I did cut it, and easy read it and approved it,
and she said you had too, and and and read
his premiers going on over there in that sort of direction.
Maybe you should yell at me closer to the assignment desk.
Maybe I don't give a crap. If as He approved it,
(33:12):
then she's an ass and I can't trust you. I
can't trust you. You're all idiots. I can't believe you
did this to me. I'm trying to get Rita show
off the ground. Do you start talking about spitting blood
into a garbage can? Well, now I was getting angry.
I couldn't resist. Yes, Rita is in fact live and
direct from that desk right over there. And if you'll notice,
she keeps looking over here at us, wondering why you
(33:35):
are yelling. During the first minutes of her first show,
So why don't we move over here? Rick began to
move away from him, and we're walking away from the
live MOA mix, and and we're walking and we're walking
and Rick and Keith are walking because the noise isn't
really professional. Well, we're not talking professionals, are we We're
talking idiots. We were walking and he was still screaming,
(33:58):
you're idiots. I will never trust you again. He had
begun to trot or stumble or whatever he was doing.
This is not over. I will pay you back, self
serving garbage. I will get you and I'll get that
a hole is he for not staying here and reading
that script? How many times did you intend to say
spit blood into a garbage can before I stopped you.
(34:19):
I now realized what he thought had happened, as he
had gestured spasmodically at me while he stood next to
my camera. I briefly let my focus shift to amazement
at the fact that this guy, who had been in
TV news for twenty five years, knew almost nothing about
how TV worked. I explained to him that is he
and one of her assistants and I had gone over
(34:40):
the script several times and taken out half of the
gorrier references. Then they suck at television. And since I
can't trust anybody here, since they won't stand up to
you and edit the script, since you obviously bullied them,
he bawled up his fist and stomped his foot on
the floor as he called me a bully. I'm now
going to have to approve every piece of your copy.
(35:05):
By this point, I was backing into the countdown work
area with its array of desks, and all the producers
Caplan had just insulted, and I knew one of them
would dial the phone when I said, call the cops
and call this lunatics boss, Did you hear me? And
if you don't like it and you don't want to
come into work tomorrow, that's fine too. I never did
get that part, but now I had him. I crossed
(35:28):
my arms in front of my chest slowly, like you
have seen every news anchor do and every television news
promo ever shown in the history of the world. I
flashed as evil a slowmost smile as I could, Oh,
I'll be here tomorrow, and then I made a sweeping
gesture back towards my staff, who were both of course
(35:49):
literally and figuratively behind me, and so will all of them. Suddenly,
at that point, for no apparent reason, Rick Caplan's hysterics
were replaced by mere confusion. He even stopped huffing at
almost normal volume. He asked me, yeah, all of who.
Only at this point did I turn around to discover
(36:10):
that my entire staff had already left the building. There
was nobody there behind me. Of course, there was nobody there,
As he Povich told me later, he went into the
control room and threatened all of them first. So we
got on the phone back to the office and tell
everybody to get the hell out of the building. She
paused and laughed. I mean, we love you, but we're
(36:30):
not crazy. Rick Kaplan's exorcism was a brief one. He
began screaming again, I'm gonna end your career tomorrow. I'm
gonna completely f you up. He turned and stumbled away
from my office. Good luck sleeping tonight. I slept like
a stone. And not because Kaplan had previously threatened to
(36:51):
fire me for not leaving my father's bedside after what
they thought was a heart attack to fly to l
A to appear on the Tonight Show, and not because
he'd once threatened to fire me because he didn't like
my tie, and not because he had previously threatened to
fire me for not doing something during live coverage that
I had already done but he thought we hadn't done
because he was watching us, not live but on delay
(37:13):
on his DVR president of a network. And I slept beautifully.
Not because I correctly guessed this would be it for
Rick Kaplan and it was the next day human resources
forced him to apologize to me, and ten months later
his bosses fired him. Nor did I snooze blessedly because
(37:35):
of any bravery or stoicism or fatalism on my part.
But I slept well simply because of the realization that,
even after all of this, Rick Caplan was still only
the second or third craziest MSNBC executive I had ever
worked for. Countdown has come to you from the studio's
(38:09):
Elbowler and Broadcasting Empire World headquarters in the Sports Capsule
Building in New York. Thanks for listening here. The credits
moost to the music, including our theme from Beethoven's Ninth arranged,
produced and performed by Brian Ray and John Philip Channello,
who are the Countdown musical directors, guitarist based and drums
by Brian ray All, orchestration and keyboards by John Philip.
(38:31):
Channel produced by t k O Brothers. Other Beethoven selections
have been arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed.
The sports music is the Alderman theme from ESPN two,
and it was written by Mitch Warren Davis and appears
courtesy of ESPN, Inc. Musical comm answered Nancy Faust, the
best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer today was Larry
(38:51):
David and everything else was pretty much my fault. So
that's countdown for this, the seven hundred and seventy first
day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically
elected government of the United States. Arrest him now while
we still can. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Until then,
I'm Keith all Reman. Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and
(39:12):
good luck. Countdown with Keith al Reman is a production
of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of I Heart Radio.
One of the student survivors at Michigan State was a
(00:25):
student survivor of Sandy Hook, and at least three of
the student survivors of Michigan State where student survivors at
Michigan Oxford High School fifteen months earlier, and we can
say with all too much certainty that some of them
will also become survivors of Toledo, Dallas, your city, my city,
(00:53):
because mass gun murders are profit centers. Why does this
supposedly sophisticated nation abide the ritual sacrifice of our children
dron and our brothers and sisters and parents to the
moloch of insane gun owners like Lauren Bobert or Thomas
(01:13):
Massey or whoever, the ones who get some kind of
sexual gratification from owning and displaying and stroking and firing
weapons because it makes other people millions of dollars. That's
why we are owned by guns. And so we go
(01:36):
on calculating the averages and deciding if by age five
it is already too late to teach kids how to
play dead in their classrooms, And we go on listening
to fascist asshole madmen like Ron de Santist talk about
fortifying schools and fortifying movie theaters and fortifying churches, and
(01:57):
we go on listening to messianic button heads like Eric
Adams talk about giving more guns to more police, when
lease often turn out either to be the murderers or
the cowards who idle in the hallways as the children
of Uvalde are executed one by one, And we go
on listening to the fatuous idiots like the Missouri House
(02:18):
where the police said we need laws to stop fourteen
year olds from walking down the streets of St. Louis
carrying a R fifteens and the House voted a hundred
and four to thirty nine to keep open carry legal
in Missouri for kids, and we go on listening to
a moral monsters like Donald Trump talk about arming teachers
(02:38):
and bringing back firing squads, and we listened to these
paid scumb Republicans bribed by the gun manufacturers and the
gun organizations, recite what they have been paid to say
about responsible gun owners, when after half a million gun
deaths in this country in the last ten or twelve years,
it is no longer in doubt, there are no longer
(02:59):
any responsible gun owners on this nightmare so familiar, so routine,
and so constant that we no longer remember the details,
or the location, or the motive were the sequence of them,
And now we are no longer even remembering that there
(03:20):
was a nightmare last night or the night before, and
we're now marbling them into other things in American life,
as if they were snowstorms or flight delays. And a
hockey podcaster begins by saying, well, it's tough to do
this after the Michigan State news, but let's talk about
the Carolina hurricanes needs at the deadline, and the New
(03:42):
York Times can run a sidebar that the shooting, well,
it up ended the lives of thousands, but it also
put the school back in an uncomfortable spotlight, what with
the sexual assault scandal. There we go on in an
unacceptable world in which we are owned by guns. We
(04:03):
go on to borrow from Churchill in strange paradox, decided
only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift,
solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent. The dead
(04:26):
of Michigan State, the dead of Las Vegas, the dead
at the Pulse, the dead at well, why do we
bother with individual place names anymore. The dead of the
killing field, the dead of the transcendent national shooting range,
(04:47):
that is the United States of America. They are dead
because somebody is making money off them, and because Ted
Cruz is making money off them, and Marjorie Taylor Green
is making money off them, and every horror politician is
making money off them, and rarely even bothering anymore to
(05:10):
wash the money through sepack or save America this, or
shoot America, that the donations come straight and unhidden, and
whether it's Trump or de Santis or Poor soon to
be very very surprised, Nicki Haley, or just some other
idiot free from morality or conscience, whom the moneyed interests select.
(05:33):
It is fair to say that the Republican nominee for
president in whoever that is, will be underwritten by the
gun manufacturers and the gun lobby and their masters, the
death lobby, who pay good money to bad people to
maintain not just our culture of guns and shooting and
dead children and thoughts and prayers, but also maintain the
(05:57):
world's culture of continuing to poison the atmosphere and kill
off the species one by one because the one billion,
nine hundred and sixty three million dollars in profit made
last year by big Oil just isn't enough, because they
stay up at night anguished by the thought that there
remains somewhere one dollar not yet stolen from a child
(06:22):
dying next to the earthquake rubble in Syria or Turkey,
one dollar yet to be pocketed by Darren Woods, the
CEO of Exxon Mobile. Away God intended it, it is economics,
and thus the only solution can also be economics, because
(06:47):
we will not defeat them in the states that are
already lost to the control of the death lobby. And
even if President Biden said tomorrow we are not owned
by guns, and I don't give a damn. If I'm
re elected or even renominated, I'm going to issue four
hundred and fifty executive order and take every damn gun
I can get off the streets. And if the House
(07:09):
and Senate won't reinstate the assault weapons man, I will
do so unilaterally and come and get me in the courts.
Even if Biden did that, we the anti death people,
we would lose in the Supreme Court because Clarence Thomas,
the whore, is on the Supreme Court, because of and
(07:32):
bought and paid for by the death lobby, and Samuel
Alito the whore is, and John Roberts the whore is,
and Neil Gorsch and Drunken Brett Kavanaugh and Bible paralegal
Amy Coney Barrett. And so we must ask ourselves, what
economically can we do to the gun lobby, to the
(07:55):
oil lobby, to the death lobby, and to their minions
in the Senate and the House, and all the Senates
and all the houses in all the states in America
and in this country. There are only a couple of
measures that might possibly work, and might possibly work fast
enough so that enough of us won't be killed in
(08:18):
next year's three hundred gun massacres or the next decades
three hundred climate crises. And that one thing is to
spare you the kind words, the soft words. That one
thing is economic civil war. It can start simply, buy
nothing from Texas, do not go to Florida, do not
(08:43):
patronize Missouri. We can start there, and then we can
get serious. It is a simple mathematical fact that, with
some exceptions, and a little more nuanced than time permits
me here. It is a simple mathematical fact that the
Blue states of this country keep the Red states of
(09:03):
this country from going bankrupt. It is a simple mathematical
fact that the Blue states pay in more to the
federal government than they ever get back in services or infrastructure,
or certainly in per capita representation. New York pays in
net twenty four billion a year, California pays inter at
(09:24):
fourteen billion, and most of that goes to keeping Florida
and Texas from starving. Florida gets thirty six billion a
year more than it pays in Texas nearly that much.
It is state to state socialism, and we all know
(09:45):
that we can't have socialism. And it is a simple
fact that the Blue states restrict and regulate guns, and
the Red states sell guns and sell guns and sell
guns and profit off dead children. And when the political
whore's like Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson and Rupert Murdoch
(10:12):
point to the gun carnage of Chicago, they are actually
pointing to the gun carnage of weapons smuggled in from
Indiana to Chicago. And it is also a simple fact
that we can dance around for decades yet to come
about how to stop the gun massacres of February and
(10:33):
the chemical disasters of June two thousand sixty one so
bad they reminded old timers of where was that East Palestine, Ohio?
Or we can cut to the chase and put it
this way. If the Red States do not agree to
strict and enforced gun regulation and the removal and the
outlawing of gun manufacture, and a revision of the Second
(10:57):
Amendment so that the vagueness that isn't actually there, but
that the death lobby has spent a century convincing millions
is there, that all doubt about the Second Amendment be
erased and replaced by the simple statement that private gun
ownership is illegal without a series of licenses and mental
health tests, and that the owner is liable for whatever
is done with his gun, and if that includes murder,
(11:18):
then the owner is liable for life imprisonment, whether he
fired the gun or not. If the Red States do
not agree to that, and by the way, to reapportioned
representation in the House and the Senate, so that Idaho
does not have as many senators as a real state
and not a welfare state like Idaho, And if they
do not agree to the resignations of Chief Justice Roberts
(11:40):
and Justices Alito, Barrett, gorstch Kavanaugh, and Thomas. If the
Red States do not agree to that, then the Blue
States will simply stop paying money into the federal government,
and the Blue States will simply spend that money directly
on their own citizens. And if the leaders of our
(12:00):
Blue states who will not comply with this, then the
only solution we have since the murders at Michigan State
Monday night and the murders at your town name here
next week, our profit streams for many people, the only
solution we have is to then stop paying our federal
taxes until our state leaders recognize that the only way
(12:22):
out of this nightmare is to threaten the Red States
and thus threatened the gun lobby, and thus threatened the
oil lobby, and thus threatened the death lobby with economic strangulation,
economic civil war, to save the country, to save the
(12:43):
next six hundred thousand Americans who will die by gun
violence almost certainly by the year five, if it does
not get worse before then six hundred thousand, the same
number who were killed in the actual Civil War. And
if you ask your sell or, you are asked by
(13:06):
what right we could threaten economic civil war just say
this is constitutional under the Second Amendment quote a well
regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state,
the right of the people to keep and bare arms
shall not be infringed. Our rights to the security of
(13:30):
a free state have been infringed upon by the gun
lobby and the death lobby, which has convinced generations of
gun fetishists that an amendment that does not contain the
word own nor any synonym for own, does contain it.
The Constitution is a property document. It mentions rights only
fifteen times. It mentions voting only thirty seven times. This
(13:53):
is out of nearly eight thousand words. But it mentions
money and ownership a hundred and three times. The Second
Amendment is about making sure nothing interferes with a well
regulated militia. Well regulated militia, that is, they're protecting our
rights as citizens to have, as it says in the
(14:13):
Second Amendment, the security of a free state. Our Second
Amendment rights have been trampled on by Donald Trump and
the Republicans, the anti Second Amendment Republicans. We need to
start enforcing the Second Amendment. We need an economic civil
(14:35):
war against the gun lobby and the death lobby, and
those corrupted and financially insolvent red states that stand in
the way of peace and security in this country because
we are owned by guns. But god damn it, we
are not going to be owned by guns any longer.
(15:11):
Still ahead, Diane Feinstein is out of the California Senate race,
so we can all exhale and throw her a party.
Elon Musk makes a fool of himself on Twitter again,
and yes it actually happened. A former boss of mine,
a president of MSNBC, really did do it. He really
did chase me around the studios one night and threatened
(15:31):
to kill me. And they made him apologize for that.
Things I promised not to tell. Coming up, that's next.
This cis Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Olberman post
scripts to the news, some headlines, some updates, some snarks,
(15:52):
some prediction. State line, Washington. Another shoe has dropped from
the Special Counsel's office. Jack Smith's staff has asked to
judge to erase the attorney client privilege of the Trump lawyer,
Evan Corkeran This is about that June document that Corker
and wrote and the other Attorney Christina bob signed the
one that said that Trump was voluntarily turning over every
(16:16):
classified document he'd taken and stashed at Marilago. Obviously, Smith
wants to know whether Trump ordered Corkran to write that
and knew it wasn't true when he did, and to
get that they need Corkran to be at risk of
an obstruction of justice charge if it somehow was not
Trump's idea. Gonna make a wild guess on whose idea
(16:37):
this was. Dateline. San Francisco Senator Diane Feinstein has relieved
California Democrats of the Odium of throwing her off the cart.
Eighty nine years old and in the Senate since she
had widely been abandoned by her party, with retired Speaker
Nancy Pelosi saying she would be endorsing Congress and Adam
(16:58):
Shift for the nomination presuming Feinstein retired. Well, now she
has retired. Katie Porter is already also running. Barbara Lee
is a probable. Feinstein has taken a lot of justifiable
crap lately, but she has been an extraordinary public servant
who survived two terrorist assassination attempts. Was president of San
Francisco Board of supervisors and kept the city together as
(17:21):
acting mayor when George Mosconi and Harvey Milk were murdered
in She was then elected to the mayor's post shortly
thereafter and served ten years on that job. Dateline, South Carolina.
After sucking up to Trump for seven years and saying
she would never run for the Republican nomination if he did,
NICKI Haley is running for the Republican nomination. I would
(17:43):
never root for Trump for anything, but his reaction to
this over the next few weeks is gonna be hi
hilarious and Dateline Central Park, New York. Flat go of
the Eagle owl was now smarted near Bethesda Fountain in
Central Park. That's about ten blocks north of his former
home in the Zoo. He also brief we went out
(18:05):
onto East seventy st. Flacco has been free for one
day shy of two weeks now. He's obviously surviving very
well on his own. He seems to really like going
around the park, and he is feeding himself on rats,
as we true New Yorkers do. In fact, he is
(18:25):
so voracious Flacco has actually reduced the rat population, and
in fact that makes him a front runner for New
Yorker of the Year Award. Thank you Nancy Faust time
(19:09):
for the daily roundup of the miscrants, morons and done
in Krueger effects specimens who constitute today's worst persons in
the world. The bronze Elon Musk. He has tweeted the
world's only century old meme, the one that tries to
connect Stonehenge, Easter Island and the Washington Monument by drawing
(19:32):
a stone man inside the Earth whose head is at
one end at Easter Island, and then his toes are
at the exact opposite point of the earth in Stonehenge,
and well in Washington that would be his monument as
the Washington Monument. There are no coincidences, Musk, wrote Sage Lee,
except the exact opposite point on the earth to Stonehenge
(19:55):
is not anywhere near Easter Island. It's three thousand, eight
hundred and seventy nine miles east northeast of Easter Island.
Nice meme, el Oh, the runner up, Well, this is
a coincidence. The runner up is Elon Musk. You may
have seen this earlier, but it was new to me
at six eight pm Eastern on Sunday night, not long
(20:15):
after the Super Bowl started, Musk tweeted, quote go Eagles,
and since sports ball is obviously a mystery to him,
he put three American flags in front of Go Eagles,
and then another three after it, and then after the game,
which the Eagles lost, he deleted the tweet. And he
also deleted a tweet congratulating the victorious Casey Chiefs and
(20:38):
halftime performer Rihanna. But our winner is oh work at
this selon Musk again. Well, now we know why he
deleted the go Eagles tweet and why is knitwitted conspiracy
theory tweets keep showing up on your feed, in some
cases five or ten of them in a row. I'll
just read from the website platform er quote at two
(21:01):
thirty six on Monday morning, James Musk's and an urgent
message to Twitter engineers. Quote, we are debugging an issue
with engagement across the platform, wrote James Muska, cousin of
the Twitter CEO, quoting any people who can make dashboards
and write software, please can you help solve this problem?
This is high urgency. If you're willing to help out,
(21:24):
please thumbs up this post. What do you think the
high urgency problem was? Yes, Musk's Eagles tweet generated nine
point one million impressions, and that made him furious because
another tweet about the Eagles generated nearly twenty nine million impressions,
the tweet by President Biden. Back to the platformer account quote,
(21:47):
Twitter CEO flew his private jet back to the Bay
Area on Sunday night to demand answers from his team.
Within a day, the consequences of that meeting would reverberate
around the world as Twitter users opened the app to
find that Musk's posts overwhelmed their ranked timeline. This was
no accident. Platform Or can confirm. After Musk threatened to
(22:09):
fire his remaining engineers, they built a system designed to
ensure that Musk and Musk alone benefits from previously unheard
of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base.
Unquote all right, Look, everybody likes their tweets to be
read and retweeted, and some scientists said seeing the like
and retweet counts grow creates the same effect in the
(22:32):
brain as eating chocolate. But we have to address the
possibility here that Elon Musk's brain is chocolate. What is
wrong with this dude? Fixing the algorithm so that you
always win. Trump doesn't even do that in his little
Nazi social media site. I mean, can't somebody who cares
(22:52):
about Elon Musk, you know, get him committed somewhere, all right?
This assumes somebody actually does care about him. Ellen, my dear,
you never assume, you see, when you assume, you make
an ass of you and me Musk. Two days larst
(23:13):
Musk and still ahead on countdown. Many of my bosses
have thought about trying to kill me. One and one
alone has actually tried it, the saga of Rick Kaplan
(23:37):
coming up first. In each edition of Countdown, we feature
a dog in need you can't help. Every dog has
its day to New York and two sisters, Joy and Easy.
They are Rottweiler's but they are socialized, mellow, shy, affectionate,
good with dogs and cats and kids and strangers, and
(23:58):
they're human. Was evicted and took them both to the
kill pound. And Joy is on the kill list tomorrow
at the New York Pound because she caught pneumonia in
the pound and is on a feeding tube. The law
of self fulfilling prophecies. Again. They're scared, they get sick,
they get killed because they're scared and they're sick. We're
trying to get Joy and Easy adopted together. So what
(24:19):
we can do is pledge donations to defray the costs
of a rescue saving them. You can find Joy and
Easy on my Twitter feeds. I thank you and Joy
and Easy thank you. Finally our number one story in
(24:49):
the Countdown things. I promised not to tell them Back
to my favorite topic, me, How exactly was I supposed
to tell the police that the man threatened to kill
me was the president of MSNBC. He was chasing me
through the studios. He was too overweight to run. But
even though he inexplicably lied and said he was six
(25:10):
ft seven, at six ft five, this guy his name
was Rick Caplan, and he was the soon to be
ex president of MSNBC, just as he was already the
ex president of CNN. He still had strides as long
as my own. Plus On that night of August eighth,
two thousand five, I was multitasking. I was trying to
mentally record everything he was shouting, while also drawing him
(25:33):
away from the live microphones of the live studio in
which he had started shouting, while also fishing for my
office key. So I could lock myself in there if
need be, while also figuring out how I would hit
him if it came to that, while also trying to
register the superb double takes from my colleagues past to
(25:53):
whom he was stomping like an out of shape Frankenstein,
while also trying to suppress an overwhelming and seemingly inappropriate
desire to burst into laughter, while still game planning the
soon to be inevitable call to the cops of beautiful
downtown Secaucus, New Jersey. Uh yeah, yeah, he's he's trying
(26:16):
to kill me, my boss, the president of MSNBC. Yeah,
the Yeah, the cable television network. Yeah, exactly down the
street from the London fog outlet story. Yeah one MSNBC Plaza.
I know it's a dumb address. Uh. He's about sixty
uh to seventy pounds. By the way, he says he's
(26:40):
six ft seven, but he's only six ft five. Why
Why does he lie about his height or why is
he trying to kill Right? Well, I did a commentary
urging the viewers to stop smoking, and he's afraid of
the mention of blood. Hello. Hello, As all of this
played out in my head, President Kaplan was huffing and
puffing his way through our giant studio, weaving through the
(27:02):
news assignment area, past the make up room, down the hallways,
nearing the offices of my show Countdown, and past the
bank of a couple of hundred television monitors with a
different face on every one of them, each seemingly staring
slack jawed at the executive, screaming threats at the only
guy on his own network who got any ratings. I'll
pay you back, I'll get your world, I'll fetish your call.
(27:30):
This had all begun roughly ten days earlier, in late
July two tho five, an oral surgeon who had intended
to examine a growth on the roof of my mouth
that instead, with one pale look, silently betrayed his suspicion
that it was cancerous. Then he cut the whole thing out.
I was on my way to work anyway, It was
(27:52):
too late to get a replacement, and I was bleeding
so much that our technical director and I decided to
pre record all of my on camera segments for that
night show, thus reducing the chances of viewers hearing me
say President Bush today while blood used out of my
mouth over my teeth and lips and onto the desk
(28:13):
like I was drectul anchor. When the following Wednesday I
got the unexpected all clear from the surgeon's office, I
decided to devote some of each night's newscast to a
campaign to help viewers and myself quit smoking. My premise
was a simple one that I had never heard argued
before and have rarely heard argued since, that it would
(28:35):
be a lot easier to quit if you didn't have
cancer than if you did have cancer. I pitched my
producers on the series. I went into Rick Kaplan's office
to get his seal of approval. He was enthusiastic and supportive,
and most rare of all, he was paying attention. And
then I said, I was also going to point out
that if you got the good outcome like I had,
(28:57):
they would merely stick a laser in your mouth, and
you'd smell your own flesh burning for like forty eight hours,
and you'd have to keep spitting out your own blood.
Would say that he can't suddenly threw his meaty hands
out towards me in a strangling gesture, and then just
as quickly clamped them over his own ears and closed
his eyes and began actually screaming. No no no no
(29:17):
no no no no no no no no no. I
thought he had gone crazy, as it proved he was
just practicing foregoing crazy. Later, I'm sorry, I'm squeamish. I
got the point. I just can't handle references to, you know, uh,
the red stuff. Go ahead with the series. Just just
toned down the red stuff. I toned down the red stuff.
(29:43):
And my executive producer, as He Povich, sent him the
scripts and he told her to tone down the red
stuff a little more, and I went and I did
that too. We all decided to start the anti smoking
series the following Monday, August eight, two thousand five. By
nauseating coincidence, that was the day after the ABC anchorman
(30:04):
Peter Jennings had died of lung cancer. The MSNBC president
had been a producer on jennings newscast. I had long
since written and recorded jennings obituary, and now the somewhat cold,
but still journalistically valid segue would have to be made.
We would have to go directly from the twelve minute
long Jennings Oh bit to the start of our anti
(30:24):
tobacco campaign eight or nine minutes into that prerecorded Jennings obituary,
Rick Kaplan came out of his office and walked the
fifty ft or so through the vast open newsroom to
where my anchor desk was. His eyes were full of tears.
This is wonderful, he said quietly. Peter would have liked this.
He gave me a thumbs up. Then he walked to
(30:45):
a second desk another fifty feet away, where his first
big hire, a woman named Rita Cosby, was about to
premier his first big gamble, her new show immediately following mine.
I was actually moved by Rick Kaplan's comment. I did
not once think of phoning the Secaucus police, but end
(31:05):
I began the anti smoking segment, and as I focused
on the camera and the teleprompter in front of me
and detailed the blood and the gore and the spitting
and how that was the good outcome, out of the
corner of my eye I saw this weird site. The
President again left his office and waddled out along the
wall thirty feet ahead of me in the general direction
of the control rooms. Within moments, as I continued to
(31:28):
read my script, he was back in the studio and
standing right next to my camera, gesticulating wildly. I said,
they never say it, but wouldn't it be really easier
to quit smoking when you didn't have cancer than when
you did? And Kaplan responded with the same two handed
choking gesture he had made briefly in his office much earlier.
(31:48):
I presumed there was some simple problem, like that the
building was on fire, but I calculated that I could
still make it to the show's scheduled finished time E
d T and still survive even if others perished. That's
countdown for this the days since the declaration of mission
accomplished in Iraq. I'm Keith, all remain goodnight and good
(32:08):
luck your Sliva. Rick Kaplan suddenly screamed from the other
anchor desk. I could hear, and this is my impression
of her. Good evening. I'm Rida Cosby. This is Rida Cosby,
Live and Direct with Rida Cosby, and I'm Rida Cosby.
She was not a big woman, but she had a
voice on her like the horn on the Staten Island
(32:29):
ferry if it had a cold. You are over the top.
You aren't disgusting. My first thought was that Camplin had
forgotten that microphones fifty ft away were live during the
premiere of his pet project, Rina is On. I actually
whispered to him, silly me, I don't get a half
for three days on you were told by as He
(32:49):
poviche At the piece was over the top and you
needed to cut it, and you didn't. I still couldn't
bring myself to yell back. We're in a live studio.
I did cut it, and easy read it and approved it,
and she said you had too, and and and read
his premiers going on over there in that sort of direction.
Maybe you should yell at me closer to the assignment desk.
Maybe I don't give a crap. If as He approved it,
(33:12):
then she's an ass and I can't trust you. I
can't trust you. You're all idiots. I can't believe you
did this to me. I'm trying to get Rita show
off the ground. Do you start talking about spitting blood
into a garbage can? Well, now I was getting angry.
I couldn't resist. Yes, Rita is in fact live and
direct from that desk right over there. And if you'll notice,
she keeps looking over here at us, wondering why you
(33:35):
are yelling. During the first minutes of her first show,
So why don't we move over here? Rick began to
move away from him, and we're walking away from the
live MOA mix, and and we're walking and we're walking
and Rick and Keith are walking because the noise isn't
really professional. Well, we're not talking professionals, are we We're
talking idiots. We were walking and he was still screaming,
(33:58):
you're idiots. I will never trust you again. He had
begun to trot or stumble or whatever he was doing.
This is not over. I will pay you back, self
serving garbage. I will get you and I'll get that
a hole is he for not staying here and reading
that script? How many times did you intend to say
spit blood into a garbage can before I stopped you.
(34:19):
I now realized what he thought had happened, as he
had gestured spasmodically at me while he stood next to
my camera. I briefly let my focus shift to amazement
at the fact that this guy, who had been in
TV news for twenty five years, knew almost nothing about
how TV worked. I explained to him that is he
and one of her assistants and I had gone over
(34:40):
the script several times and taken out half of the
gorrier references. Then they suck at television. And since I
can't trust anybody here, since they won't stand up to
you and edit the script, since you obviously bullied them,
he bawled up his fist and stomped his foot on
the floor as he called me a bully. I'm now
going to have to approve every piece of your copy.
(35:05):
By this point, I was backing into the countdown work
area with its array of desks, and all the producers
Caplan had just insulted, and I knew one of them
would dial the phone when I said, call the cops
and call this lunatics boss, Did you hear me? And
if you don't like it and you don't want to
come into work tomorrow, that's fine too. I never did
get that part, but now I had him. I crossed
(35:28):
my arms in front of my chest slowly, like you
have seen every news anchor do and every television news
promo ever shown in the history of the world. I
flashed as evil a slowmost smile as I could, Oh,
I'll be here tomorrow, and then I made a sweeping
gesture back towards my staff, who were both of course
(35:49):
literally and figuratively behind me, and so will all of them. Suddenly,
at that point, for no apparent reason, Rick Caplan's hysterics
were replaced by mere confusion. He even stopped huffing at
almost normal volume. He asked me, yeah, all of who.
Only at this point did I turn around to discover
(36:10):
that my entire staff had already left the building. There
was nobody there behind me. Of course, there was nobody there,
As he Povich told me later, he went into the
control room and threatened all of them first. So we
got on the phone back to the office and tell
everybody to get the hell out of the building. She
paused and laughed. I mean, we love you, but we're
(36:30):
not crazy. Rick Kaplan's exorcism was a brief one. He
began screaming again, I'm gonna end your career tomorrow. I'm
gonna completely f you up. He turned and stumbled away
from my office. Good luck sleeping tonight. I slept like
a stone. And not because Kaplan had previously threatened to
(36:51):
fire me for not leaving my father's bedside after what
they thought was a heart attack to fly to l
A to appear on the Tonight Show, and not because
he'd once threatened to fire me because he didn't like
my tie, and not because he had previously threatened to
fire me for not doing something during live coverage that
I had already done but he thought we hadn't done
because he was watching us, not live but on delay
(37:13):
on his DVR president of a network. And I slept beautifully.
Not because I correctly guessed this would be it for
Rick Kaplan and it was the next day human resources
forced him to apologize to me, and ten months later
his bosses fired him. Nor did I snooze blessedly because
(37:35):
of any bravery or stoicism or fatalism on my part.
But I slept well simply because of the realization that,
even after all of this, Rick Caplan was still only
the second or third craziest MSNBC executive I had ever
worked for. Countdown has come to you from the studio's
(38:09):
Elbowler and Broadcasting Empire World headquarters in the Sports Capsule
Building in New York. Thanks for listening here. The credits
moost to the music, including our theme from Beethoven's Ninth arranged,
produced and performed by Brian Ray and John Philip Channello,
who are the Countdown musical directors, guitarist based and drums
by Brian ray All, orchestration and keyboards by John Philip.
(38:31):
Channel produced by t k O Brothers. Other Beethoven selections
have been arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed.
The sports music is the Alderman theme from ESPN two,
and it was written by Mitch Warren Davis and appears
courtesy of ESPN, Inc. Musical comm answered Nancy Faust, the
best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer today was Larry
(38:51):
David and everything else was pretty much my fault. So
that's countdown for this, the seven hundred and seventy first
day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically
elected government of the United States. Arrest him now while
we still can. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Until then,
I'm Keith all Reman. Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and
(39:12):
good luck. Countdown with Keith al Reman is a production
of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
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