August 28, 2023 • 48 mins
SEASON 2 EPISODE 23: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Two major developments today warranting a bulletin edition: Judge Tonya Chutkan has set the start of jury selection in the Trump Subversion of the Election trial in Washington for March 4. Trump is, as I predicted this morning, EFFED. He's SO effed he's already insisting he will appeal her decision, proving he doesn't even know there is no legal means FOR him to appeal it.
He is SO effed.
Meanwhile in Atlanta, his former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows seems hell bent on confessing to everything - including crimes he hasn't been charged with - just to get the trial moved from state to federal court. He actually took the stand this morning and admitted to everything on the Raffensberger call (and I think I called him Ken in here. Ken pitched for the Phillies in 1954).
Note: the rest of this edition is repeated from Monday's regular edition. If you've heard it, feel free to hit STOP right about here.
Also: the first signs of life are appearing in the attempt to actually DO something about disqualifying Trump from the ballot under the Disqualification Clause of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
After another mass shooting - one predicated on distinct and undeniable racism - shock and grief and rage can account for almost any reaction. But as Governor Ron DeSantis, who trades in distinct and undeniable racism and who had the gall to insist HBCUs in Florida would not be targeted when one was targeted Saturday, attended a vigil last night for the victims in Jacksonville, the crowd rightly booed and heckled him and his inanely smiling wife. And the local Democratic councilwoman made an unbelievable mistake. She told the crowd to "put parties aside. A bullet don't know a party."
She could not be more wrong.
A bullet not only knows a party but the bullets are there BECAUSE of a party and we damn well better say so.
We have mass shootings and we have nearly unfettered civilian access to weapons of war and we have an orgy of gun worship BECAUSE of Republicans. Period. Our gun crisis may not be 100% Republican but it’s 95%. Our awareness that at any moment, anywhere, anyone in this country could be murdered by sentient fecal matter and the only variables are which minority group THIS one murdered because of which Republican THIS one listened to, waxes and wanes. But there are four unswerving constants and they played out in Jacksonville over the weekend: they had the guns because of Republicans; if they didn’t have the HATE already they got IT because of Republicans; nearly all of our news media will refuse to say that mass shootings in this country are the unquestioned FAULT of Republicans, and no matter what the circumstances of this particular one were, Republicans will insist it’s too soon to – you know – try to STOP them from happening and to propose – you know – SOLUTIONS – is trying to exploit a tragedy for political gain. As opposed to trying to exploit a tragedy for donations from the National Rifle Association and making sure that nothing is ever, ever, done, to stop the next one.
Trump's other spawn, Vivek Ramaswamy, spent Sunday morning insisting that Mike Pence he should’ve refused to certify Biden’s election until the Senate agreed to instantly instituted new laws to mandate the most draconian Republican talking points about voting suppression: single-day elections, paper ballots, government-issued ID’s, and quote “led through that level reform and then under that condition certified the election” – as if every moment of the political day is a hostage situation and every law is optional because Vivek Ramaswamy sees a loophole to exploit.
Happily that performance on "Meet The Press" earned Ramaswamy the coveted endorsement of one viewer: O.J. Simpson.
B-Block (27:52) IN SPORTS: Spain's Soccer Kiss scandal continues to cascade. The Chicago White Sox still don't know how two fans got shot in the bleachers during a game. And the Oakland A's forgot they'll have to find a place to play four lame duck seasons before moving to Las Vegas (32:44) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Zillow mistakenly reports Trump sold Mar-a-Lago to Junior for 10 times its value ("Oops!"), Tucker and Musk are lying about the audience for Carlson's interview with Trump by a factor of at least 300:1, and Jonathan Turley 2023's biggest enemy right now is: Jonathan Turley 2021.
C-Block (38:30) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: The odometer has turned over again. Now it's 43 years since I started in television at CNN. So let me tell you how Ted Turner inadvertently invented SportsCenter AND nearly wound up owning ALL THE TEAMS in the National Football League.
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 iHeartRadio. Trump
is so aft, He's so aft. He says he's going
(00:27):
to appeal the judge's decision that he's aft, and that
means he does not even know you can't appeal the
judge's decision. That means he's aft. He's so aft. Today
the DC trial was scheduled to start March fourth, one
hundred and ninety days from now. Forgive me, let me
quote myself from this morning's regular edition. I don't have
(00:49):
a clue where she Judge Chutkin, will end up, but
if she goes where any date in January or February,
Trump is aft unquote March fourth, within four days of February.
Close enough. Trump is aft. Not only aft, but he
he's being rushed to the front of the line to
get ft. Not only f't but so aft that they'll
(01:11):
be rescheduling his getting locally f't here in New York
from March twenty fifth to maybe April or May. And
they may also be rescheduling the Florida tour stop of
the United States of America versus Donald JA get ft Trump,
which is supposed to start May twentieth, but his getting
ft may also have to be postponed. There this man's
(01:31):
liberty and life is at stake, said Trump's subversion of
the election lawyer John Loro today, and they're gonna have
to start numbering these lawyers for God's sake, give me
a break here. He's no different than any American, and
this morning Judge Tanya Tchutkin took that to heart and
treated the scheduling as she would have for any other American,
(01:52):
noting that Trump's personal and professional schedule means nothing to
her and the scheduling of the trial. The judge compared
it to a pro athlete facing trial, which would be
laugh out loud funny given Trump's amazing failure at sports
and lying about sports. But it will probably please him
enough that he might even make some begrudging, grunting noises,
(02:13):
and he may even try to bother to learn how
to spell Judge Chutkin's name correctly. I mean he misspelled
fascist this morning, John Laurow, and let's call him Attorney
number one sixty seven B. John Laurel won sixty seven
B was good enough to raise his voice in court
during the hearing, to the point that Judge Chutkin told
(02:36):
him to lower the temperature. So maybe we want to
find out who the candidates are for attorney one sixty
seven C. You may recall that instead of slapping Trump's
as if he were a pro athlete ass in jail,
when earlier this month he began to Harris and obliquely
threaten her and Jack Smith and Biden and Mankind online,
(02:58):
she warned his attorneys that her response to him doing
that would be to give him an even speedier trial.
And that's why I keep saying he's soft. She just
did that. She just did that today, just today. She
gave the prosecution a start date that's only two months
behind their request. She gave the defense a start date
that's twenty five months ahead of their request. That's ft,
(03:22):
He's ft, and she is apparently only going to get stricter.
She says she is quote watching carefully for anything that
might impact or poison her word, poison the jury pool. Nominally,
she means this report that there's going to be a
Trump poll of DC residents or their attitudes towards him,
designed to support their lunatic motion for a change of
(03:44):
venue by supporting the idea that they could not get
a fair trial for him in the district of Columbia.
But that statement watching carefully for poison will also apply
to Trump's inability to control himself online, which he displayed
within hours of the decision. Message from Tanya to don
you don't like March fourth, how about February twe twenty sixth,
(04:05):
February twelfth. Also, here's your full trial schedule. Remember your
Christmas vacation, boys, cancel it. Disclosure of exhibits December eighteenth,
motions December twenty seventh. Your guy is f't hearing January fourth.
I made the last one up. Also, John Lauro one
(04:26):
hundred and sixty seven b hinted that they will be
introducing motions supporting their idea that when it came to
questioning the election, Trump had something they have made up
called presidential immunity, which apparently also covers coup's blackmail, bribery, conspiracy, subversion,
overthrowing the Constitution of the United States treason. Judge Chutkin
(04:49):
did not bust out laughing, but witnesses in the courtroom
said when she heard this, she seemed cool to the
premise Trump is so ft. At two thirty seven today,
he posted he will appeal when you can't appeal that
judge's decis. On the start of the trial at three
zero three pm, he demanded Special Counsel Jack Smith indict
(05:10):
the January sixth committee. He's so ft and he'll be
FT in Atlanta to arraignment at the Fulton County Courthouse,
now scheduled as of today for next Wednesday at nine
thirty am and televised. But defendants don't necessarily have to
be there, so we will see. But speaking of Atlanta
(05:31):
and FT, there's the Mark Meadows hearing, which, in a
harbinger of things to come for Trump, began at the
exact same hour in Atlanta today that Trump's lawyers were
facing Judge Trutkin in DC. They both started at ten
am at the airports. They used to call this gate saturation,
and what Meadows seems to have is lousy lawyers saturation.
(05:52):
Just Sunday, he added to his team one of the
flunkies from the Ken Star investigation of Bill Clinton. And
I don't know if Meadows is trying to get himself
sent to prison or he has decided that he should
scare the hell out of Trump by essentially confessing under
oath to everything they said he did for Trump, just
so he can get his part of the Georgia election
(06:13):
plot trial transferred to federal court. But there's no getting
around it. That's exactly what this stupid sum beach is doing.
He took the stand this morning in a procedural hearing
for three hours before the lunch break. Holy crap. Not
only did he take the stand, but in this desperate
(06:34):
bid to prove that everything he did he did under
color of his office, he basically confessed to everything. I
would get invited to almost every meeting the president had,
Meadows testified. People would often meet with him Meadows testify
and so he could quote get in the President's ear
and pass along their message dandy, good for you. Yet,
(06:57):
also today, per the Washington Post quote, Meadows claim to
have no knowledge of the Trump campaign's efforts to contest
the election results. He said, sure, he went to the
meeting with Trump and the Michigan lawmakers that Trump was
trying to entice to sabotage the election results there, but
he had no clue the campaign was trying to overturn Michigan,
and Meadows said, sure he went to Georgia, and sure
(07:20):
he arranged the infamous call with Ken Raffinsburger, but he
didn't know that three of the lawyers who were on
the call had sued Ken Raffinsburger on behalf of the
Trump campaign. And when they asked him if you arranged it,
how did you arrange for Cleta Mitchell and the other
Trump ambulance chasers to get on the call with you?
He said, I can't remember, and he keeps digging anyway,
(07:44):
Meadows tells the court the Raffensburger call was just Trump
hoping to find a quote less litigious way of resolving
everything in Georgia, which the Georgia prosecutors rightly responded to
by noting that this made it a campaign litigation phone call,
and asking your chief of staff at the White House,
your government, why are you on a campaign litigation phone call.
(08:09):
I don't have the court record in front of me,
but I believe Meadows answered, yamanahammanahamanahammahamana. Which is it? Bub
You were Trump's eyes and ears, and you were at
all the meetings, but you had no idea what was
happening at all those meetings. Seems like you shouldn't be
pleading not guilty. You should be pleading insanity. Bluntly, Mark
(08:32):
Meadows implicated himself today so many different ways. He was
lucky he got to go home at the end of
the day. And the conundrum facing the judge there, Federal
District Court Judge Steve Jones, is this the bar to
get a case like this one against Meadows moved to
federal court. That's not a high bar, particularly so when
(08:52):
the facts are not in dispute. Mark Meadows was a
federal official at the time the events he's charged over
took place. This color of his office thing, it's pretty
clear it's true. But Meadows seems determined to infest to
the crimes and to confess to others he hadn't even
charged with. His motion has two pages about how the
charges infringe on his First Amendment rights. Quote. All the
(09:15):
alleged conduct as to mister Meadows relates to protected political
activity that lies in the heartland of the First Amendment.
The First Amendment quote has its fullest and most urgent
application precisely to the conduct of campaigns for political office. Unquote. Cool, cool.
There's a small problem in there. Though it's called the
Hatch Act. You are not allowed to conduct conduct relating
(09:40):
to protected political activity and campaigns for political office while
you are covered by the color of your office. In short,
Meadows is asking the judge to protect him from being
charged with one crime by boasting that he committed a
whole bunch of other crimes. Judges don't like that particularly.
(10:04):
We'll see a note here. The rest of this bulletin
podcast is repeated from the regular edition from Monday morning.
Why the crowd in Jacksonville was right to boo Roan
DeSantis at the shooting vigil Sunday night, OJ Simpson endorsing
a lucky presidential candidate, etc. So if you've heard it
already and you want to hit stop, I'm not going
to take it personally. Full coverage of everything as usual
in Tuesday's regular edition. Of course, Trump's trial status would be,
(10:29):
if not academic, then less important if Trump is not
on the ballot next year. You will also remember why
that might be the disqualification clause of Section three of
the fourteenth Amendment. And we are finally seeing some early
stirrings of people who want to make that constitutional theory sing.
Four years ago, Corky Messner ran for the Senate seat
(10:49):
from New Hampshire and Trump endorsed him, and yet he's
loyal to the Constitution. I've taken an oath to this country,
he says. My sons are serving right now, and I
believe someone's got to step up to defend the constitution. Corky,
did you say that? What a guy? Messner says, he's
not precisely sure how he's going to do it, but
(11:11):
he's going to try to get Trump barred from the
New Hampshire ballot based on fourteen three. ABC News reports
the New Hampshire Secretary of State met with Mesner on
Friday and will now confer with the state attorney general.
But he does think this needs to be tested in court.
And yes, the New Hampshire Republicans are just ornery enough,
an old school enough that they can be rapidly pro Trump,
(11:32):
but angrily more pro constitution. And now in Florida, a
tax attorney named Lawrence Kaplan has sued in federal court
there to keep Trump off the primary ballot next March nineteenth,
based on the Fourteenth Amendment fourteen three next Crew Citizens
for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, it keeps saying it
(11:53):
is going to be acting shortly on Trump and fourteen three. Meanwhile,
another ethics group, Free Speech for People, is launching a
campaign that starts with letters to all fifty state secretaries
of state going through the fourteen three argument and urging
them to just bar Trump from their state ballots and
then see what happens. That's phase one where Doris gets
(12:14):
her oats. Phase two from the FSFP people legal challenges
state by state, using state laws where they exist. These
are not huge developments, but they are a damn site
better than commentaries about how conservative scholars are convinced that
fourteen to three disqualifies Trump, even commentaries by me. They
(12:45):
heckled Ron DeSantis last night at a vigil for the
victims of the latest mass shooting in Jacksonville, and the
local district councilwoman told the crowd to be quiet because quote,
a bullet don't know a party, unquote, and unfortunately she
was utterly mistaken. Utterly. I understand about grief, and I
(13:09):
understand about rage. And when a psychopath with Nazi symbols
on his guns goes to an HBCU and then to
a dollar store to specifically shoot people because they are
African American, I think I can just begin to have
a vague, genuine empathy about why somebody like Councilwoman Jacoby
(13:30):
Pittman would make such a mistake, defending, even for just
the moment, slime like Ron DeSantis, who has spent much
of this year spewing the kind of racist hate that
the Jacksonville shooter felt somehow entitled to put into murderous form.
Siding with DeSantis as he strode to the mic and
(13:51):
boasted he wouldn't let black colleges be targeted by racists
who already targeted them Saturday, while his idiot wife stands
there smiling doing her very dime store knockoff him pression
of Jackie Kennedy. I get why she would make a
mistake under the circumstances, but it was a mistake. In
(14:13):
our America of twenty twenty three, a bullet not only
knows a party, but the bullets are there because of
a party.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Lord of Governor Ron DeSantis is here. We're going to
ask the governor if he would come now and bring remarks.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
Well, thank you for doing this. I want to just
say to the councilwoman, counsel woman, counsel woman, I got you.
Don't worry about it. We've already been looking to identify
funds to be able to help one make sure there's
adequate security for Edward Waters College. We are not going
to allow these institutions to be targeted by people.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
We let me let me.
Speaker 4 (15:10):
Okay, let's send y'all. Let me let me tell you
we finna put parties aside, because it ain't and about
parties today. A bullet don't know a party, So don't
get me started. Okay, Jacoby is nice, but Anne is not. Now,
if the if the if the governor wanted to come
here and he bringing gifts to my community, y'all know,
(15:33):
I'm taking the gifts because we've been through enough already
and I don't want to go through no more. Now, y'all,
y'all just be quiet just a minute and let the
let the governor say what he gonna say, and we're
gonna get this party started. You hear me, Okay, let's
do it.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
We have mass shootings, and we have nearly unfettered civilian
access to these weapons of war, and we have this
decade's old orgy of gun worship because of Republicans period,
our gun crisis may not be one hundred percent Republican,
(16:11):
but it's ninety five percent. As our democracy crisis may
not be one hundred percent Republican, but it's ninety five percent,
as our climate crisis may not be one hundred percent republican,
but it's well seventy five percent. Our awareness that at
any moment, anywhere, anyone in this country could be murdered
(16:31):
by sentient fecal matter, And the only variables from tragedy
to tragedy are which minority group this one murdered because?
If which Republican this one listened to? That waxes and wanes.
But there are four unswerving constants, and they played out
in Jacksonville over the weekend. They had the guns because
(16:53):
of Republicans. If they didn't have the hate already, they
got it because of Republicans. Nearly all of our news
media will refuse to say that mass shootings in this
country are the question fault of Republicans, and no matter
what the circumstances of this particular one or any gun
tragedy are, Republicans will insist it is always too soon
(17:16):
to you know, try to stop them from happening and
to propose, you know, solutions, And they will say that
that's trying to exploit a tragedy for political gain, I
as opposed to trying to exploit a tragedy for donations
from the National Rifle Association and making sure that nothing
(17:37):
is ever ever done to stop the next mass murderer. So,
Councilwoman Pittman, don't get me started. You were wrong. A
bullet knows a party, A bullet in this country knows
who its friends are Republicans, and if you don't know that,
(17:59):
get out. Maybe you've been a great councilwoman in your
two months in office. I don't know, I hope so.
But if your response is to kiss the ass of
the governor who is running for president on a platform
of slavery had a silver lining of giving its victims
blacksmithing skills, maybe you want to reconsider which party you
belonged to. Now, if this was just about the tragedy
(18:21):
of this weekend and the shock, forgive me for saying
what I have said. Yes, I think you would deserve
a pass. But if it isn't and you meant that,
get out. And to those in that crowd who booed
this fascist DeSantis, God bless you, and please if words
like this still have any meaning in our paralyzed, irresponsible, racist,
(18:47):
failed society. Please accept not just my condolences, but my
thanks because you all knew which political party killed your
friends and neighbors Saturday, and you showed the courage the
rest of us, including the Democratic politicians, including us in
the media, the kind of courage we have not shown
(19:14):
before we get to Trump. Let's pivot to Vivek Ramaswami.
And it is hard to believe that in a timeline
that has brought us Trump and DeSantis, this Ramaswami guy
may be the biggest idiot of them all. The primary
danger of the Trump era is the release of hatred
and violence and racism and brutality. But the secondary danger
(19:36):
is this ongoing release of this stupidity. This I will
again go to Howard Feineman's Pittsburgh term. It fits Ramaswami
like spandex painted on him. This jag Off goes on
NBC yesterday and says, no, Mike Fence shouldn't have done
what Trump wanted him to do on January sixth, but
he should have refused to certify Biden's election until the
(19:58):
Senate agreed to instantly institute new laws to mandate the
most draconian Republican talking points about voting suppression, single day elections,
paper ballots, government issued IDs, and he said, quote Pence
should have quote led through that level of reform and
then under that condition, certify the election, as if every
(20:20):
moment of the political day is designed to be a
hostage situation and every law must be optional. Because VIVK.
Ramaswami sees a loophole to exploit, let's leverage it, let's bargain.
This jag off had the audacity to get up in
(20:41):
front of a national television audience and insist that anybody
under twenty five who wants to vote should have to
pass a civics test first. And since then he has
spent his entire week revealing he could not possibly pass
any civics test. And he has explained that the Constitution,
which was not written until seventeen eighty seven, won the
revolution for us in seventeen eighty three, and now he thinks,
(21:04):
so as long as you can get away with it,
you should be able to suspend the Constitution and the
laws a civics test before you can vote. Hell, give
this Ramaswami a breathalyzer test. But look out. The Ramaswami
machine may now be unstoppable. Last night, Vivk Ramaswami got
(21:26):
the most coveted endorsement in the political calendar. This morning, I.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
Got up and I found myself watching Meet the Press.
They had the babik Lwamaswami on now, just like the debates,
the Republican debates. I said, Hey, this guy is onto something.
But I love what he was saying in this book.
I was saying, it's fresh, it's new. I got a
little problem with his foreign affairs take and if he
(21:53):
got himself an experienced person to run with him, an
experienced person, I would say, like Nikki Haley, somebody that
knows foreign affairs, this guy would have a chance. I
think this guy really would have a chance.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Oh J. Simpson endorses Vivek Ramaswami oh J for the
Ramaswami Haley ticket. I'd say it's the kiss of death.
But you know, I mean, how can somebody not just
(22:29):
this stupid, this stupid, as stupid as Vivic Ramaswami. How
can somebody not just this stupid, but this stupid he
thinks he's the smartest man alive run for president? Well,
how is somebody this stupid. A sitting senator from Tennessee,
Marsha Blackburn tweeted, the Left is able to release Donald
(22:52):
Trump's mugshot, but they still can't tell us who brought
cocaine into the White House. And you wonder is she
really so imbecilic as to not understand that those two
things have nothing to do with each other. Oh, and
that she doesn't know that virtually all mugshots everywhere in
(23:14):
this country are released, and she hadn't noticed that the
leading distributor of Trump's mugshot, the one where he tried
to look like big brother and tried to hide his double, triple,
quadruple and quintuple chins. She doesn't know that the leading
distributor of the mugshot was Trump himself. Marsha Blackburn Ramaswami,
(23:38):
dozens more Republicans. I mean, they can't be naturally this
stupid and have survived to the ages they have reached.
They would have walked into open manhole covers by now,
all of them. There's only one other explanation. They they
must be high as a kite all the time. One
(24:03):
more thing. The Russian Investigative Committee now says it's official quote,
molecular genetic testing has been completed. Unquote, it says and
yes that one particular pile of ashes from the private
jet crash northwest of Moscow last Thursday is was the
Wagner Group leader of Genny Progosion. So it thus becomes
(24:26):
irresistible to Saturday Night Live fans of a certain vintage
Good Evening General Lissimo ev Genny Pregosion is still dead.
Also of interest here, the murmuring is beginning to get louder.
There is a push starting to get Jonathan Turley fired
(24:47):
by George Washington University Law School. Can I help? And
you know whose comments are most directly helping this along?
Jonathan Turley's. That's next. This is countdown. This is countdown
with Keith old Woman. This is Sports Center. Wait, check
(25:21):
that not anymore. This is countdown with Keith Alberman. In sports,
The Spanish soccer kiss crisis continues to cascade. The world
governing body for the sport, FIFA, has now suspended the
president of the Spanish Football Federation for ninety days. He
(25:42):
has vowed to fight any punishment. Every one of Spain's
eleven assistant managers and coaches has quit in protest. Each
Spanish player has refused to play again for their country.
Other nations are vowing to refuse to play Spain ever
again because the FIFA suspension is insufficient. The federation chief
Luis Rubiatis celebrated spain World Cup victory first by grabbing
(26:07):
his crotch and then by grabbing the back of the
head of the Spanish player Jenny Hermoso with both hands
and kissing her on the lips. She said it was
not consensual. He issued a statement that translates from Spanish
to English as some sort of gibberish about consent via
the circumstances, and apparently it's even worse in Spanish. It
(26:28):
loses something in the original, something about her lifting him
by the hips. His conclusion, he's not resigning, and if
you keep trying to make him, he'll just keep saying
he's not resigning. No medri, no no.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
Bojamid novoya le meidiri, novoya lemidiri.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Okay, fine, you're not resigning. They'll fire you instead. The
Spanish government says it is now trying to remove Rubillies
by legal means. The Spanish Football Federation says it has
activated its sexual violence protocol and is investigating its own
federation president in Chicago. We might be able to use
the Spanish football federation to look into this. Three days
(27:15):
later and the White Sox are still not clear how
two fans got shot as they watched Friday's game from
the bleachers. They don't even know if the shots came
from inside or outside the stadium. A forty two year
old woman took a bullet in the leg and was
hospitalized in fair condition. A twenty six year old woman
suffered a graze to the abdomen and did not need
(27:35):
medical attention. Hope this doesn't offend anybody connected to this podcast.
Do we have anybody with any connections to the White
Sox on this pod? On this podcast, almost no story, though,
is without a silver lining, and this one is no different.
After the shooting, the White Sox canceled that night's Vanilla
Ice concert. Thank you, Nancy Faust from Oakland back to Cascating.
(28:16):
As you know, Oakland A's team owner John Fisher starved
that franchise until it was unwatchable and attendance flat lined,
and this was his excuse to make a deal to
move it to Las Vegas. Fisher has just found out
he has a big problem. No way there is a
place to play in Las Vegas before twenty twenty eight
at the earliest, maybe even twenty twenty nine, and he's
(28:37):
leased in Oakland runs out after next season. He's had
the gall to ask Oakland for an extension. The Mayor
of Oakland has replied by telling Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred,
who is complicit in this staggering betrayal of one of
its most long suffering markets, that Fisher can have the
extension provided that when the A's move, they leave the
(28:59):
name A's in Oakland, and that Baseball promises in writing
to put an expansion for m ties to replace the
A's in Oakland, which they'll then call the A's the
current A's and we know what A stands for here.
Think they have an alternative, renting out the home of
the San Francisco Giants for thirty or forty games a year.
(29:20):
If that doesn't work, plan C is to play in
the A's Triple A Minor League stadium, which is in Summerland, Nevada,
and that seats eighty two hundred people and doesn't have
a roof. Stell ahead on an all new edition of countdown. Oh,
(29:49):
it's anniversary month. I mean, I've been around so long
it's always anniversary month for something. This time it's the
anniversary of the start of my television career. And thus
previously untold tales of Ted Turner first time for the
Day round up with the mis grants, morons undone in
Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's worse persons in the
(30:10):
world should have done that with a Southern accent. Worst
person in the world my Ted Turner impression the bronze
to Zillo, the online home selling site. It posted that
ten days before Trump was indicted in Georgia, he had
sold Meri Lago for four hundred and twenty two million
dollars to his son Junior. You know, even though Zilo
(30:35):
estimated the value of the place at twenty four million,
that was the price four hundred and twenty two million.
Needless to say, this was interesting, sounded like something you know,
drug lord would do before faking his own death. Five
hours later, Zillo finally answered a lot of inquiries by saying,
without further explanation, that this was a thing that was
(30:56):
posted in error and they took it down an error.
You bet the runners up, Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk
continuing to lie about how many people saw the Carlson
flatulent lap sitting interview with Trump. The number they're now
claiming who saw it as like a three four hundred,
I don't know, eleventy billion, whatever it is. In fact,
(31:17):
that number that they are putting out is how many
people saw the tweet of the interview in their timelines.
The old video view number that Musk has now hidden
from Twitter only required that people watched something for two
seconds to count as a viewer, so it was bad
enough measurable reports that the number of people who watched
(31:37):
the Trump Tucker Carlson interview for at least two seconds
was only fourteen point eight million two seconds who watched
it for even a minute way less. The debate, for
which it was supposedly counterprogramming, got twelve point eight million
on Fox. The goped debate, for whatever this is worth,
crushed Tucker Carlson with Trump in terms of actual audience.
(32:00):
In short, under Musk, Twitter has a new metric which
includes people who watch something and people who don't watch it. Genius,
I tell you genius, but the winner Jonathan Turley, people
keep asking me about Jonathan Turley, who used to be
a regular on Countdown, and what happened to him. My
answer is, I assume it's blackmail. The real question is
(32:24):
what's going to happen to him next. There is mounting
pressure on George Washington University Law School to get rid
of him. The latest atrocity from John Turley described online
by somebody as Mike Lindell with tenure. He is whoring
out his reputation by telling his new pimps at Fox
that he can't understand the Trump charges because when Trump
(32:44):
called Secretary of State Ken Rafsenberger of Georgia and asked
him to find eleven five hundred and seventy votes, he
was just demanding a recount. A recount, that's all. It
was the recount which had already taken place before the
phone call a month earlier, a month after the audit were.
(33:05):
Turley is in direct disagreement with somebody very well respected
in the legal game who tweeted on January third, twenty
twenty one quote telling Raffensburger to quote find the votes
on the Saturday before the inauguration is a breathtaking I
am as mystified by the request, as I am by
the logic, such an opportunistic move to secure the sixteen
(33:27):
electoral votes would not work to change the outcome. Who
tweeted that position, completely contradicting and out arguing John Turley.
John Turley. John Turley said that the request that Raffensburger
made no sense. Couldn't figure it out. Now he says, oh,
it's just a recount. He's being blackmailed. John. Remember when
(33:50):
they tried to blackmail Jeff Bezos to give Trump good coverage?
You really think Bezos was the only one looking at you? Turley, Turley,
Today's worse person.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Annoy.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Now to the number one story on this all new
edition of Countdown. And it's that time of year again.
It's August when the odometer turns over and my TV
debut becomes forty three years ago. This holy crap, and
it all owes to Ted Turner and Lou Dobbs. Part
(34:35):
of this I've told before. I actually interviewed with Cable
News Network twice, once in April nineteen eighty when they
were not yet on the air, and after that interview
I saw no reason they ever would be. I wrote
in my diary, there's no chance they're ever going to
get it on the air in time. They were supposed
to go on in September because the New York Bureau
(34:56):
of CNN consisted of one coffee table, a couple of chairs,
one coffee machine, a stairway well, one unisex bathroom, and
one staffer New York Bureau chief Mary Alice Williams. Plus
the day I went there, CNN Sports president Bill McPhail
made it two staffers. He was up from Atlanta after
(35:18):
a long year. My phone rang one day and McPhail
asked me to fill in for two weeks. In two
weeks for their New York sports reporter. I had no
television experience at all. Well, I'd watched it. She was
going on vacation on August third, sooner, McPhail added if
the baseball strike ended before then. Her name was Debbie Segur,
(35:38):
and all I knew was vacation me okay. Turned out
it was part vacation, part get out of town quickly,
very quickly. See CNN started as not just news news
or just news and politics and interviews and guests. There
was a half an hour business show every night and
(35:59):
a half an hour show business show every night. And
a half an hour sportscast at seven and the other
half an hour sports cast at eleven and then one
in the middle of the night. There was a fashion program,
and there were hourly stock reports, and they had a
staff of meteorologists, and they had short sports cast almost
every hour of the day. And the business anchor based
in that New York bureau, which had expanded from the
(36:20):
one unisex bathroom was Lou Dobbs, and as the producer
they had sent up to work with me when I
filled in for this Debbie Sigura Phil Griffin, later the
president of MSNBC. As he explained to me when we
got in the car to go out to Shaye Stadium
to interview all those New York Mets guys, Lou Dobbs
was rumored to be stepping out on his wife with
(36:42):
the CNN New York sports reporter, and missus Dobbs had
found out, so there was even a rumor there was
somebody else who also worked in the CNN New York
bureau who found out. So Bill McPhail's hurried call asking
me to fill in for the reporter for two weeks.
In two weeks was because she was going on quote vacation.
(37:05):
Not long after all this, Dobbs thought it would be
smarter to leave New York for a while, like a
decade or so, and Debbie went with him. They got married.
This left New York without a sports reporter, and CNN
tried another one of their Atlanta anchors for a while,
but they kept giving him extra vacation time, so they
would have to bring me in freelance every month, and
(37:25):
finally the following March they offered me the job full time.
And I have not earned an honest pay check since.
And I mean that in two ways. CNN was paying
me five hundred dollars a week, that's one hundred dollars
a day to go on national television. Even then, this
seemed a little low, and it was about forty percent
less than what I was making for like three days
(37:46):
a week in network radio. I pointed this out acceptingly
because I was learning how to do TV while on
TV and getting paid for it. It was a vocational school.
And that's when they told me that the five hundred
dollars a week was already more than they had been
paying Debbie Segura, and more than the guy they were
paying as their reporter in Los Angeles, and then Bill McPhail,
(38:10):
the head of Sports, called and offered me a contract
for twenty five thousand dollars and I said, wait, twenty
five thousands, five hundred dollars a week is twenty six
that Wait a minute, you're offering me less for the contract.
Why would I take less? Is there health insurance or something?
And he said no, there's just the security of having
the contract. And I said, well, I'd rather have the
thousand dollars that you're docking me for signing, and they
(38:33):
found it somewhere, but they always reminded me how generous
they had been with that extra thousand dollars, and I
kept saying, that's not extra. You are already paying me that. Anyway,
none of that would have happened, though, without Ted Turner,
because CNN was his idea, and in fact, most of
what you saw from me on ESPN later that was
(38:56):
also mostly his idea too, sort of. Anyway, the basic
idea of Sports Center sports news on national television on
more or less a daily basis, Ted did that. Not
ESPN and the daily Sports News studio show on at
the same time every day or night, with the same
anchors treated as seriously as a half an hour of news.
(39:19):
Ted did that, and buying sports teams to have something
to put on your television station. Ted did that too.
WTCG Channel seventeen Atlanta was the fringiest of FRINGETV stations
when Ted Turner bought it in nineteen seventy, But then
six years later he bought first the Atlanta Braves and
then the basketball Atlanta Hawks, and he bought a couple
(39:39):
of satellite dishes, and the FCC made the fateful decision
to let him put Channel seventeen up on the satellite
so it could be shown on those fledgling cable systems
around the country. And the next thing you knew, the
Atlanta Braves were America's team, and Ted, who was shameless,
promptly signed the first baseball player ever to take advantage
(40:01):
of what we now know as free agency, Andy Messersmith.
Andy messer Smith got what looked like all the money
in the world, more money than any baseball player had
ever gotten or or we were certain would ever get,
one million dollars over three years. With one catch, Andy
(40:26):
Messersmith had to wear uniform number seventeen WTCG Channel seventeen.
You see where this was going. He had to wear
uniform number seventeen, and instead of having Messersmith written on
the back of the shirt over the seventeen, he had
to have the word Channel. So Andy Messersmith's uniform when
(40:46):
he broke in with the Atlanta Braves in nineteen seventy
six as the highest paid player in baseball history, the
back of the uniform read Channel seventeen. Baseball stopped that
right quick, It's not ted. The day he decided that
he should see what it was like to manage the
Braves and if it really was his difficult as his
managers had made it seem. His lifetime record was zero
(41:09):
to one, and he said, yes, this is very difficult.
But the cable sports genie that one was out of
the bottle and nobody was stopping it, and he aspn
ran with it. But next came news. Even then his
crazy idea cable news network rested squarely on the first
regularly scheduled nightly sports newscast in national television history, CNN
(41:29):
Sports Tonight at seven at eleven and two am Eastern,
while SportsCenter was on in those days for fifteen minutes
one night at seven and then an hour the next
night at ten and sports Tonight. Was there Come News
or high Water? Seven nights a week. Of course, Ted
Turner was not just shameless, he was also technically penniless,
(41:50):
so he hired a couple of real veterans to run
and anchor the thing. Bill McPhail, who helped invent the
NFL on CBS and Monday Night Football, was also his idea,
and his former CBS colleague Bob Wessler, and he hired
Nick Charles, who was a star of sports casting on
the Washington and Baltimore newscasts, but everybody else the cheapest
(42:10):
hires they could find. In nineteen eighty one, Turner sent
McPhail to hire me. That was our second interview. When
I told Bill I had made forty two thousand dollars
the year before working for Charlie Steiner in radio. Bill
spit his drink halfway across the room. We were planning
on hiring six guys to start with, for a total
(42:30):
of ninety five thousand. This is when they were staffing
up what became CNN Headline News. I answered that I
hoped that the other five guys he was going to
hire were prepared to make it on seven grand each,
because there was no way I was moving to Atlanta
for less than sixty thousand dollars. Well, they got me anyway,
and for less than sixty thousand dollars, but I did
not move to Atlanta, Thank you, Lou Dobbs. And they
(42:53):
got Dan Patrick and Hannah Storm and Fred Hickman and
Dan Hicks and Gary Miller and dozens of others and
reporters and cameramen and producers and executive and editors, and
one sports production assistant from the original crew of CNN
Sports wound up becoming the president of CNN Worldwide, and
(43:14):
another wound up becoming the president of MSNBC. ESPN reshaped
television sports news anyway, CNN created it, and early on
CNN staffed ESPN and much of the industry, And I'm
skipping how Turner mainstreamed World Cup yachting at least for
a while, and Ted and TNT and TED and the
(43:36):
Goodwill Games and TED and World Championship Wrestling, whose matches
were actually held right above the CNN newsroom, so that
often you could hear the wrestlers slamming each other on
our ceiling. And by the way, the Braves winning fourteen
straight division titles and the repopulation of Bison in the country.
It was also Ted Turner, but my favorite Ted Turner
(43:57):
story comes from something he did not pull off, not
that he did not try. When the football owners forced
the players out on stroke in nineteen eighty two, Ted
sent me to cover it every day for eight months,
and one day he showed up at the Football strike
talks to meet with the players, and when he came out,
he announced that he would be bankrolling and televising two
(44:20):
football games in the middle of a football strike, one
at RFK Stadium in Washington and the other at the
Rose Bowl in southern California. And basically these two games
would pit pickup teams of striking players the American Conference
versus the National Conference. And he called his two games
the All Star Season. I've mentioned this elsewhere and before.
(44:42):
When I asked him about the acronym for the All
Star Season, he winked at me and shushed me, and
then he took me aside and he asked me what
I thought. I told him, nobody's gonna watch and he's
going to lose money. And he looked at me and
he said, nobody watches you. I lose money on you,
so what we'll make money eventually. He then explained that
(45:04):
that was really just designed to set up the owners.
If he could put the games together and get them
on TV with no more than one month's lead time,
the players' union was willing to partner up with him.
Ted's real motive for the ass the All Star season
was nothing less than creating his own football league, twenty
(45:28):
four teams, which would begin play in nineteen eighty three
or sooner if necessary, and would be televised exclusively on TBS.
All he needed was the players going along with him,
and one little labor court ruling that the owners had
forced the players union to go out on strike and
that would allow the union to negotiate with other employers. Well, obviously,
(45:52):
you don't have to be a football expert to know
that he did not get that court ruling, but they
went for it. Ted Turner was shooting for nothing less
than killing off the National Football League and replacing it
with a new National Football League owned by Ted Turner,
and he was going to give the players fifty percent
of the whole league. And don't forget, nearly all of
(46:14):
this was done on a shoe string budget with borrowed money,
with all of his employees convinced that he was crazy
and it wouldn't last until next Tuesday. And when we
would get our paychecks at CNN in New York, we
would race each other to the bank to cash them,
just in case there wasn't going to be enough for everybody.
So whenever something causes me to get nostalgic about my
(46:37):
start in TV, I inevitably find myself going back to
tales of Ted Turner, Owen Lou and Missus Dobbs and
the Other Missus Dobbs, Missus Dobbs one and Missus Dobbs two.
(47:08):
I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank
you for listening. Countdown has come to you from our
studios high on top the Sports Capsule Building in New York.
Here are the credits. Most of the music was arranged,
produced and performed by Brian Ray and John Phillip Schanel.
They are the Countdown musical directors. All orchestration and keyboards
by John Phillip Shanel, guitars, bass and drums by Brian Ray,
(47:28):
produced by Tko Brothers. Other Beethoven selections have been arranged
and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. The sports
music is the Olderman theme for ESPN two, and it
was written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of esp and
e musical comments by Nancy Fauss. The best baseball stadium
organist ever. Our announcer today was my friend Jonathan Banks.
Everything else is pretty much my fault. That's countdown for
(47:50):
this the nine hundred and sixty fourth day since Donald
Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of
the United States. Arrest him again while we still can.
The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow, Boltons as the news
warrant still then, I'm Keith Alreman. Good morning, good afternoon,
good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olreman is
(48:23):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Trump
is so aft, He's so aft. He says he's going
(00:27):
to appeal the judge's decision that he's aft, and that
means he does not even know you can't appeal the
judge's decision. That means he's aft. He's so aft. Today
the DC trial was scheduled to start March fourth, one
hundred and ninety days from now. Forgive me, let me
quote myself from this morning's regular edition. I don't have
(00:49):
a clue where she Judge Chutkin, will end up, but
if she goes where any date in January or February,
Trump is aft unquote March fourth, within four days of February.
Close enough. Trump is aft. Not only aft, but he
he's being rushed to the front of the line to
get ft. Not only f't but so aft that they'll
(01:11):
be rescheduling his getting locally f't here in New York
from March twenty fifth to maybe April or May. And
they may also be rescheduling the Florida tour stop of
the United States of America versus Donald JA get ft Trump,
which is supposed to start May twentieth, but his getting
ft may also have to be postponed. There this man's
(01:31):
liberty and life is at stake, said Trump's subversion of
the election lawyer John Loro today, and they're gonna have
to start numbering these lawyers for God's sake, give me
a break here. He's no different than any American, and
this morning Judge Tanya Tchutkin took that to heart and
treated the scheduling as she would have for any other American,
(01:52):
noting that Trump's personal and professional schedule means nothing to
her and the scheduling of the trial. The judge compared
it to a pro athlete facing trial, which would be
laugh out loud funny given Trump's amazing failure at sports
and lying about sports. But it will probably please him
enough that he might even make some begrudging, grunting noises,
(02:13):
and he may even try to bother to learn how
to spell Judge Chutkin's name correctly. I mean he misspelled
fascist this morning, John Laurow, and let's call him Attorney
number one sixty seven B. John Laurel won sixty seven
B was good enough to raise his voice in court
during the hearing, to the point that Judge Chutkin told
(02:36):
him to lower the temperature. So maybe we want to
find out who the candidates are for attorney one sixty
seven C. You may recall that instead of slapping Trump's
as if he were a pro athlete ass in jail,
when earlier this month he began to Harris and obliquely
threaten her and Jack Smith and Biden and Mankind online,
(02:58):
she warned his attorneys that her response to him doing
that would be to give him an even speedier trial.
And that's why I keep saying he's soft. She just
did that. She just did that today, just today. She
gave the prosecution a start date that's only two months
behind their request. She gave the defense a start date
that's twenty five months ahead of their request. That's ft,
(03:22):
He's ft, and she is apparently only going to get stricter.
She says she is quote watching carefully for anything that
might impact or poison her word, poison the jury pool. Nominally,
she means this report that there's going to be a
Trump poll of DC residents or their attitudes towards him,
designed to support their lunatic motion for a change of
(03:44):
venue by supporting the idea that they could not get
a fair trial for him in the district of Columbia.
But that statement watching carefully for poison will also apply
to Trump's inability to control himself online, which he displayed
within hours of the decision. Message from Tanya to don
you don't like March fourth, how about February twe twenty sixth,
(04:05):
February twelfth. Also, here's your full trial schedule. Remember your
Christmas vacation, boys, cancel it. Disclosure of exhibits December eighteenth,
motions December twenty seventh. Your guy is f't hearing January fourth.
I made the last one up. Also, John Lauro one
(04:26):
hundred and sixty seven b hinted that they will be
introducing motions supporting their idea that when it came to
questioning the election, Trump had something they have made up
called presidential immunity, which apparently also covers coup's blackmail, bribery, conspiracy, subversion,
overthrowing the Constitution of the United States treason. Judge Chutkin
(04:49):
did not bust out laughing, but witnesses in the courtroom
said when she heard this, she seemed cool to the
premise Trump is so ft. At two thirty seven today,
he posted he will appeal when you can't appeal that
judge's decis. On the start of the trial at three
zero three pm, he demanded Special Counsel Jack Smith indict
(05:10):
the January sixth committee. He's so ft and he'll be
FT in Atlanta to arraignment at the Fulton County Courthouse,
now scheduled as of today for next Wednesday at nine
thirty am and televised. But defendants don't necessarily have to
be there, so we will see. But speaking of Atlanta
(05:31):
and FT, there's the Mark Meadows hearing, which, in a
harbinger of things to come for Trump, began at the
exact same hour in Atlanta today that Trump's lawyers were
facing Judge Trutkin in DC. They both started at ten
am at the airports. They used to call this gate saturation,
and what Meadows seems to have is lousy lawyers saturation.
(05:52):
Just Sunday, he added to his team one of the
flunkies from the Ken Star investigation of Bill Clinton. And
I don't know if Meadows is trying to get himself
sent to prison or he has decided that he should
scare the hell out of Trump by essentially confessing under
oath to everything they said he did for Trump, just
so he can get his part of the Georgia election
(06:13):
plot trial transferred to federal court. But there's no getting
around it. That's exactly what this stupid sum beach is doing.
He took the stand this morning in a procedural hearing
for three hours before the lunch break. Holy crap. Not
only did he take the stand, but in this desperate
(06:34):
bid to prove that everything he did he did under
color of his office, he basically confessed to everything. I
would get invited to almost every meeting the president had,
Meadows testified. People would often meet with him Meadows testify
and so he could quote get in the President's ear
and pass along their message dandy, good for you. Yet,
(06:57):
also today, per the Washington Post quote, Meadows claim to
have no knowledge of the Trump campaign's efforts to contest
the election results. He said, sure, he went to the
meeting with Trump and the Michigan lawmakers that Trump was
trying to entice to sabotage the election results there, but
he had no clue the campaign was trying to overturn Michigan,
and Meadows said, sure he went to Georgia, and sure
(07:20):
he arranged the infamous call with Ken Raffinsburger, but he
didn't know that three of the lawyers who were on
the call had sued Ken Raffinsburger on behalf of the
Trump campaign. And when they asked him if you arranged it,
how did you arrange for Cleta Mitchell and the other
Trump ambulance chasers to get on the call with you?
He said, I can't remember, and he keeps digging anyway,
(07:44):
Meadows tells the court the Raffensburger call was just Trump
hoping to find a quote less litigious way of resolving
everything in Georgia, which the Georgia prosecutors rightly responded to
by noting that this made it a campaign litigation phone call,
and asking your chief of staff at the White House,
your government, why are you on a campaign litigation phone call.
(08:09):
I don't have the court record in front of me,
but I believe Meadows answered, yamanahammanahamanahammahamana. Which is it? Bub
You were Trump's eyes and ears, and you were at
all the meetings, but you had no idea what was
happening at all those meetings. Seems like you shouldn't be
pleading not guilty. You should be pleading insanity. Bluntly, Mark
(08:32):
Meadows implicated himself today so many different ways. He was
lucky he got to go home at the end of
the day. And the conundrum facing the judge there, Federal
District Court Judge Steve Jones, is this the bar to
get a case like this one against Meadows moved to
federal court. That's not a high bar, particularly so when
(08:52):
the facts are not in dispute. Mark Meadows was a
federal official at the time the events he's charged over
took place. This color of his office thing, it's pretty
clear it's true. But Meadows seems determined to infest to
the crimes and to confess to others he hadn't even
charged with. His motion has two pages about how the
charges infringe on his First Amendment rights. Quote. All the
(09:15):
alleged conduct as to mister Meadows relates to protected political
activity that lies in the heartland of the First Amendment.
The First Amendment quote has its fullest and most urgent
application precisely to the conduct of campaigns for political office. Unquote. Cool, cool.
There's a small problem in there. Though it's called the
Hatch Act. You are not allowed to conduct conduct relating
(09:40):
to protected political activity and campaigns for political office while
you are covered by the color of your office. In short,
Meadows is asking the judge to protect him from being
charged with one crime by boasting that he committed a
whole bunch of other crimes. Judges don't like that particularly.
(10:04):
We'll see a note here. The rest of this bulletin
podcast is repeated from the regular edition from Monday morning.
Why the crowd in Jacksonville was right to boo Roan
DeSantis at the shooting vigil Sunday night, OJ Simpson endorsing
a lucky presidential candidate, etc. So if you've heard it
already and you want to hit stop, I'm not going
to take it personally. Full coverage of everything as usual
in Tuesday's regular edition. Of course, Trump's trial status would be,
(10:29):
if not academic, then less important if Trump is not
on the ballot next year. You will also remember why
that might be the disqualification clause of Section three of
the fourteenth Amendment. And we are finally seeing some early
stirrings of people who want to make that constitutional theory sing.
Four years ago, Corky Messner ran for the Senate seat
(10:49):
from New Hampshire and Trump endorsed him, and yet he's
loyal to the Constitution. I've taken an oath to this country,
he says. My sons are serving right now, and I
believe someone's got to step up to defend the constitution. Corky,
did you say that? What a guy? Messner says, he's
not precisely sure how he's going to do it, but
(11:11):
he's going to try to get Trump barred from the
New Hampshire ballot based on fourteen three. ABC News reports
the New Hampshire Secretary of State met with Mesner on
Friday and will now confer with the state attorney general.
But he does think this needs to be tested in court.
And yes, the New Hampshire Republicans are just ornery enough,
an old school enough that they can be rapidly pro Trump,
(11:32):
but angrily more pro constitution. And now in Florida, a
tax attorney named Lawrence Kaplan has sued in federal court
there to keep Trump off the primary ballot next March nineteenth,
based on the Fourteenth Amendment fourteen three next Crew Citizens
for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, it keeps saying it
(11:53):
is going to be acting shortly on Trump and fourteen three. Meanwhile,
another ethics group, Free Speech for People, is launching a
campaign that starts with letters to all fifty state secretaries
of state going through the fourteen three argument and urging
them to just bar Trump from their state ballots and
then see what happens. That's phase one where Doris gets
(12:14):
her oats. Phase two from the FSFP people legal challenges
state by state, using state laws where they exist. These
are not huge developments, but they are a damn site
better than commentaries about how conservative scholars are convinced that
fourteen to three disqualifies Trump, even commentaries by me. They
(12:45):
heckled Ron DeSantis last night at a vigil for the
victims of the latest mass shooting in Jacksonville, and the
local district councilwoman told the crowd to be quiet because quote,
a bullet don't know a party, unquote, and unfortunately she
was utterly mistaken. Utterly. I understand about grief, and I
(13:09):
understand about rage. And when a psychopath with Nazi symbols
on his guns goes to an HBCU and then to
a dollar store to specifically shoot people because they are
African American, I think I can just begin to have
a vague, genuine empathy about why somebody like Councilwoman Jacoby
(13:30):
Pittman would make such a mistake, defending, even for just
the moment, slime like Ron DeSantis, who has spent much
of this year spewing the kind of racist hate that
the Jacksonville shooter felt somehow entitled to put into murderous form.
Siding with DeSantis as he strode to the mic and
(13:51):
boasted he wouldn't let black colleges be targeted by racists
who already targeted them Saturday, while his idiot wife stands
there smiling doing her very dime store knockoff him pression
of Jackie Kennedy. I get why she would make a
mistake under the circumstances, but it was a mistake. In
(14:13):
our America of twenty twenty three, a bullet not only
knows a party, but the bullets are there because of
a party.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Lord of Governor Ron DeSantis is here. We're going to
ask the governor if he would come now and bring remarks.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
Well, thank you for doing this. I want to just
say to the councilwoman, counsel woman, counsel woman, I got you.
Don't worry about it. We've already been looking to identify
funds to be able to help one make sure there's
adequate security for Edward Waters College. We are not going
to allow these institutions to be targeted by people.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
We let me let me.
Speaker 4 (15:10):
Okay, let's send y'all. Let me let me tell you
we finna put parties aside, because it ain't and about
parties today. A bullet don't know a party, So don't
get me started. Okay, Jacoby is nice, but Anne is not. Now,
if the if the if the governor wanted to come
here and he bringing gifts to my community, y'all know,
(15:33):
I'm taking the gifts because we've been through enough already
and I don't want to go through no more. Now, y'all,
y'all just be quiet just a minute and let the
let the governor say what he gonna say, and we're
gonna get this party started. You hear me, Okay, let's
do it.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
We have mass shootings, and we have nearly unfettered civilian
access to these weapons of war, and we have this
decade's old orgy of gun worship because of Republicans period,
our gun crisis may not be one hundred percent Republican,
(16:11):
but it's ninety five percent. As our democracy crisis may
not be one hundred percent Republican, but it's ninety five percent,
as our climate crisis may not be one hundred percent republican,
but it's well seventy five percent. Our awareness that at
any moment, anywhere, anyone in this country could be murdered
(16:31):
by sentient fecal matter, And the only variables from tragedy
to tragedy are which minority group this one murdered because?
If which Republican this one listened to? That waxes and wanes.
But there are four unswerving constants, and they played out
in Jacksonville over the weekend. They had the guns because
(16:53):
of Republicans. If they didn't have the hate already, they
got it because of Republicans. Nearly all of our news
media will refuse to say that mass shootings in this
country are the question fault of Republicans, and no matter
what the circumstances of this particular one or any gun
tragedy are, Republicans will insist it is always too soon
(17:16):
to you know, try to stop them from happening and
to propose, you know, solutions, And they will say that
that's trying to exploit a tragedy for political gain, I
as opposed to trying to exploit a tragedy for donations
from the National Rifle Association and making sure that nothing
(17:37):
is ever ever done to stop the next mass murderer. So,
Councilwoman Pittman, don't get me started. You were wrong. A
bullet knows a party, A bullet in this country knows
who its friends are Republicans, and if you don't know that,
(17:59):
get out. Maybe you've been a great councilwoman in your
two months in office. I don't know, I hope so.
But if your response is to kiss the ass of
the governor who is running for president on a platform
of slavery had a silver lining of giving its victims
blacksmithing skills, maybe you want to reconsider which party you
belonged to. Now, if this was just about the tragedy
(18:21):
of this weekend and the shock, forgive me for saying
what I have said. Yes, I think you would deserve
a pass. But if it isn't and you meant that,
get out. And to those in that crowd who booed
this fascist DeSantis, God bless you, and please if words
like this still have any meaning in our paralyzed, irresponsible, racist,
(18:47):
failed society. Please accept not just my condolences, but my
thanks because you all knew which political party killed your
friends and neighbors Saturday, and you showed the courage the
rest of us, including the Democratic politicians, including us in
the media, the kind of courage we have not shown
(19:14):
before we get to Trump. Let's pivot to Vivek Ramaswami.
And it is hard to believe that in a timeline
that has brought us Trump and DeSantis, this Ramaswami guy
may be the biggest idiot of them all. The primary
danger of the Trump era is the release of hatred
and violence and racism and brutality. But the secondary danger
(19:36):
is this ongoing release of this stupidity. This I will
again go to Howard Feineman's Pittsburgh term. It fits Ramaswami
like spandex painted on him. This jag Off goes on
NBC yesterday and says, no, Mike Fence shouldn't have done
what Trump wanted him to do on January sixth, but
he should have refused to certify Biden's election until the
(19:58):
Senate agreed to instantly institute new laws to mandate the
most draconian Republican talking points about voting suppression, single day elections,
paper ballots, government issued IDs, and he said, quote Pence
should have quote led through that level of reform and
then under that condition, certify the election, as if every
(20:20):
moment of the political day is designed to be a
hostage situation and every law must be optional. Because VIVK.
Ramaswami sees a loophole to exploit, let's leverage it, let's bargain.
This jag off had the audacity to get up in
(20:41):
front of a national television audience and insist that anybody
under twenty five who wants to vote should have to
pass a civics test first. And since then he has
spent his entire week revealing he could not possibly pass
any civics test. And he has explained that the Constitution,
which was not written until seventeen eighty seven, won the
revolution for us in seventeen eighty three, and now he thinks,
(21:04):
so as long as you can get away with it,
you should be able to suspend the Constitution and the
laws a civics test before you can vote. Hell, give
this Ramaswami a breathalyzer test. But look out. The Ramaswami
machine may now be unstoppable. Last night, Vivk Ramaswami got
(21:26):
the most coveted endorsement in the political calendar. This morning, I.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
Got up and I found myself watching Meet the Press.
They had the babik Lwamaswami on now, just like the debates,
the Republican debates. I said, Hey, this guy is onto something.
But I love what he was saying in this book.
I was saying, it's fresh, it's new. I got a
little problem with his foreign affairs take and if he
(21:53):
got himself an experienced person to run with him, an
experienced person, I would say, like Nikki Haley, somebody that
knows foreign affairs, this guy would have a chance. I
think this guy really would have a chance.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Oh J. Simpson endorses Vivek Ramaswami oh J for the
Ramaswami Haley ticket. I'd say it's the kiss of death.
But you know, I mean, how can somebody not just
(22:29):
this stupid, this stupid, as stupid as Vivic Ramaswami. How
can somebody not just this stupid, but this stupid he
thinks he's the smartest man alive run for president? Well,
how is somebody this stupid. A sitting senator from Tennessee,
Marsha Blackburn tweeted, the Left is able to release Donald
(22:52):
Trump's mugshot, but they still can't tell us who brought
cocaine into the White House. And you wonder is she
really so imbecilic as to not understand that those two
things have nothing to do with each other. Oh, and
that she doesn't know that virtually all mugshots everywhere in
(23:14):
this country are released, and she hadn't noticed that the
leading distributor of Trump's mugshot, the one where he tried
to look like big brother and tried to hide his double, triple,
quadruple and quintuple chins. She doesn't know that the leading
distributor of the mugshot was Trump himself. Marsha Blackburn Ramaswami,
(23:38):
dozens more Republicans. I mean, they can't be naturally this
stupid and have survived to the ages they have reached.
They would have walked into open manhole covers by now,
all of them. There's only one other explanation. They they
must be high as a kite all the time. One
(24:03):
more thing. The Russian Investigative Committee now says it's official quote,
molecular genetic testing has been completed. Unquote, it says and
yes that one particular pile of ashes from the private
jet crash northwest of Moscow last Thursday is was the
Wagner Group leader of Genny Progosion. So it thus becomes
(24:26):
irresistible to Saturday Night Live fans of a certain vintage
Good Evening General Lissimo ev Genny Pregosion is still dead.
Also of interest here, the murmuring is beginning to get louder.
There is a push starting to get Jonathan Turley fired
(24:47):
by George Washington University Law School. Can I help? And
you know whose comments are most directly helping this along?
Jonathan Turley's. That's next. This is countdown. This is countdown
with Keith old Woman. This is Sports Center. Wait, check
(25:21):
that not anymore. This is countdown with Keith Alberman. In sports,
The Spanish soccer kiss crisis continues to cascade. The world
governing body for the sport, FIFA, has now suspended the
president of the Spanish Football Federation for ninety days. He
(25:42):
has vowed to fight any punishment. Every one of Spain's
eleven assistant managers and coaches has quit in protest. Each
Spanish player has refused to play again for their country.
Other nations are vowing to refuse to play Spain ever
again because the FIFA suspension is insufficient. The federation chief
Luis Rubiatis celebrated spain World Cup victory first by grabbing
(26:07):
his crotch and then by grabbing the back of the
head of the Spanish player Jenny Hermoso with both hands
and kissing her on the lips. She said it was
not consensual. He issued a statement that translates from Spanish
to English as some sort of gibberish about consent via
the circumstances, and apparently it's even worse in Spanish. It
(26:28):
loses something in the original, something about her lifting him
by the hips. His conclusion, he's not resigning, and if
you keep trying to make him, he'll just keep saying
he's not resigning. No medri, no no.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
Bojamid novoya le meidiri, novoya lemidiri.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Okay, fine, you're not resigning. They'll fire you instead. The
Spanish government says it is now trying to remove Rubillies
by legal means. The Spanish Football Federation says it has
activated its sexual violence protocol and is investigating its own
federation president in Chicago. We might be able to use
the Spanish football federation to look into this. Three days
(27:15):
later and the White Sox are still not clear how
two fans got shot as they watched Friday's game from
the bleachers. They don't even know if the shots came
from inside or outside the stadium. A forty two year
old woman took a bullet in the leg and was
hospitalized in fair condition. A twenty six year old woman
suffered a graze to the abdomen and did not need
(27:35):
medical attention. Hope this doesn't offend anybody connected to this podcast.
Do we have anybody with any connections to the White
Sox on this pod? On this podcast, almost no story, though,
is without a silver lining, and this one is no different.
After the shooting, the White Sox canceled that night's Vanilla
Ice concert. Thank you, Nancy Faust from Oakland back to Cascating.
(28:16):
As you know, Oakland A's team owner John Fisher starved
that franchise until it was unwatchable and attendance flat lined,
and this was his excuse to make a deal to
move it to Las Vegas. Fisher has just found out
he has a big problem. No way there is a
place to play in Las Vegas before twenty twenty eight
at the earliest, maybe even twenty twenty nine, and he's
(28:37):
leased in Oakland runs out after next season. He's had
the gall to ask Oakland for an extension. The Mayor
of Oakland has replied by telling Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred,
who is complicit in this staggering betrayal of one of
its most long suffering markets, that Fisher can have the
extension provided that when the A's move, they leave the
(28:59):
name A's in Oakland, and that Baseball promises in writing
to put an expansion for m ties to replace the
A's in Oakland, which they'll then call the A's the
current A's and we know what A stands for here.
Think they have an alternative, renting out the home of
the San Francisco Giants for thirty or forty games a year.
(29:20):
If that doesn't work, plan C is to play in
the A's Triple A Minor League stadium, which is in Summerland, Nevada,
and that seats eighty two hundred people and doesn't have
a roof. Stell ahead on an all new edition of countdown. Oh,
(29:49):
it's anniversary month. I mean, I've been around so long
it's always anniversary month for something. This time it's the
anniversary of the start of my television career. And thus
previously untold tales of Ted Turner first time for the
Day round up with the mis grants, morons undone in
Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's worse persons in the
(30:10):
world should have done that with a Southern accent. Worst
person in the world my Ted Turner impression the bronze
to Zillo, the online home selling site. It posted that
ten days before Trump was indicted in Georgia, he had
sold Meri Lago for four hundred and twenty two million
dollars to his son Junior. You know, even though Zilo
(30:35):
estimated the value of the place at twenty four million,
that was the price four hundred and twenty two million.
Needless to say, this was interesting, sounded like something you know,
drug lord would do before faking his own death. Five
hours later, Zillo finally answered a lot of inquiries by saying,
without further explanation, that this was a thing that was
(30:56):
posted in error and they took it down an error.
You bet the runners up, Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk
continuing to lie about how many people saw the Carlson
flatulent lap sitting interview with Trump. The number they're now
claiming who saw it as like a three four hundred,
I don't know, eleventy billion, whatever it is. In fact,
(31:17):
that number that they are putting out is how many
people saw the tweet of the interview in their timelines.
The old video view number that Musk has now hidden
from Twitter only required that people watched something for two
seconds to count as a viewer, so it was bad
enough measurable reports that the number of people who watched
(31:37):
the Trump Tucker Carlson interview for at least two seconds
was only fourteen point eight million two seconds who watched
it for even a minute way less. The debate, for
which it was supposedly counterprogramming, got twelve point eight million
on Fox. The goped debate, for whatever this is worth,
crushed Tucker Carlson with Trump in terms of actual audience.
(32:00):
In short, under Musk, Twitter has a new metric which
includes people who watch something and people who don't watch it. Genius,
I tell you genius, but the winner Jonathan Turley, people
keep asking me about Jonathan Turley, who used to be
a regular on Countdown, and what happened to him. My
answer is, I assume it's blackmail. The real question is
(32:24):
what's going to happen to him next. There is mounting
pressure on George Washington University Law School to get rid
of him. The latest atrocity from John Turley described online
by somebody as Mike Lindell with tenure. He is whoring
out his reputation by telling his new pimps at Fox
that he can't understand the Trump charges because when Trump
(32:44):
called Secretary of State Ken Rafsenberger of Georgia and asked
him to find eleven five hundred and seventy votes, he
was just demanding a recount. A recount, that's all. It
was the recount which had already taken place before the
phone call a month earlier, a month after the audit were.
(33:05):
Turley is in direct disagreement with somebody very well respected
in the legal game who tweeted on January third, twenty
twenty one quote telling Raffensburger to quote find the votes
on the Saturday before the inauguration is a breathtaking I
am as mystified by the request, as I am by
the logic, such an opportunistic move to secure the sixteen
(33:27):
electoral votes would not work to change the outcome. Who
tweeted that position, completely contradicting and out arguing John Turley.
John Turley. John Turley said that the request that Raffensburger
made no sense. Couldn't figure it out. Now he says, oh,
it's just a recount. He's being blackmailed. John. Remember when
(33:50):
they tried to blackmail Jeff Bezos to give Trump good coverage?
You really think Bezos was the only one looking at you? Turley, Turley,
Today's worse person.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Annoy.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Now to the number one story on this all new
edition of Countdown. And it's that time of year again.
It's August when the odometer turns over and my TV
debut becomes forty three years ago. This holy crap, and
it all owes to Ted Turner and Lou Dobbs. Part
(34:35):
of this I've told before. I actually interviewed with Cable
News Network twice, once in April nineteen eighty when they
were not yet on the air, and after that interview
I saw no reason they ever would be. I wrote
in my diary, there's no chance they're ever going to
get it on the air in time. They were supposed
to go on in September because the New York Bureau
(34:56):
of CNN consisted of one coffee table, a couple of chairs,
one coffee machine, a stairway well, one unisex bathroom, and
one staffer New York Bureau chief Mary Alice Williams. Plus
the day I went there, CNN Sports president Bill McPhail
made it two staffers. He was up from Atlanta after
(35:18):
a long year. My phone rang one day and McPhail
asked me to fill in for two weeks. In two
weeks for their New York sports reporter. I had no
television experience at all. Well, I'd watched it. She was
going on vacation on August third, sooner, McPhail added if
the baseball strike ended before then. Her name was Debbie Segur,
(35:38):
and all I knew was vacation me okay. Turned out
it was part vacation, part get out of town quickly,
very quickly. See CNN started as not just news news
or just news and politics and interviews and guests. There
was a half an hour business show every night and
(35:59):
a half an hour show business show every night. And
a half an hour sportscast at seven and the other
half an hour sports cast at eleven and then one
in the middle of the night. There was a fashion program,
and there were hourly stock reports, and they had a
staff of meteorologists, and they had short sports cast almost
every hour of the day. And the business anchor based
in that New York bureau, which had expanded from the
(36:20):
one unisex bathroom was Lou Dobbs, and as the producer
they had sent up to work with me when I
filled in for this Debbie Sigura Phil Griffin, later the
president of MSNBC. As he explained to me when we
got in the car to go out to Shaye Stadium
to interview all those New York Mets guys, Lou Dobbs
was rumored to be stepping out on his wife with
(36:42):
the CNN New York sports reporter, and missus Dobbs had
found out, so there was even a rumor there was
somebody else who also worked in the CNN New York
bureau who found out. So Bill McPhail's hurried call asking
me to fill in for the reporter for two weeks.
In two weeks was because she was going on quote vacation.
(37:05):
Not long after all this, Dobbs thought it would be
smarter to leave New York for a while, like a
decade or so, and Debbie went with him. They got married.
This left New York without a sports reporter, and CNN
tried another one of their Atlanta anchors for a while,
but they kept giving him extra vacation time, so they
would have to bring me in freelance every month, and
(37:25):
finally the following March they offered me the job full time.
And I have not earned an honest pay check since.
And I mean that in two ways. CNN was paying
me five hundred dollars a week, that's one hundred dollars
a day to go on national television. Even then, this
seemed a little low, and it was about forty percent
less than what I was making for like three days
(37:46):
a week in network radio. I pointed this out acceptingly
because I was learning how to do TV while on
TV and getting paid for it. It was a vocational school.
And that's when they told me that the five hundred
dollars a week was already more than they had been
paying Debbie Segura, and more than the guy they were
paying as their reporter in Los Angeles, and then Bill McPhail,
(38:10):
the head of Sports, called and offered me a contract
for twenty five thousand dollars and I said, wait, twenty
five thousands, five hundred dollars a week is twenty six
that Wait a minute, you're offering me less for the contract.
Why would I take less? Is there health insurance or something?
And he said no, there's just the security of having
the contract. And I said, well, I'd rather have the
thousand dollars that you're docking me for signing, and they
(38:33):
found it somewhere, but they always reminded me how generous
they had been with that extra thousand dollars, and I
kept saying, that's not extra. You are already paying me that. Anyway,
none of that would have happened, though, without Ted Turner,
because CNN was his idea, and in fact, most of
what you saw from me on ESPN later that was
(38:56):
also mostly his idea too, sort of. Anyway, the basic
idea of Sports Center sports news on national television on
more or less a daily basis, Ted did that. Not
ESPN and the daily Sports News studio show on at
the same time every day or night, with the same
anchors treated as seriously as a half an hour of news.
(39:19):
Ted did that, and buying sports teams to have something
to put on your television station. Ted did that too.
WTCG Channel seventeen Atlanta was the fringiest of FRINGETV stations
when Ted Turner bought it in nineteen seventy, But then
six years later he bought first the Atlanta Braves and
then the basketball Atlanta Hawks, and he bought a couple
(39:39):
of satellite dishes, and the FCC made the fateful decision
to let him put Channel seventeen up on the satellite
so it could be shown on those fledgling cable systems
around the country. And the next thing you knew, the
Atlanta Braves were America's team, and Ted, who was shameless,
promptly signed the first baseball player ever to take advantage
(40:01):
of what we now know as free agency, Andy Messersmith.
Andy messer Smith got what looked like all the money
in the world, more money than any baseball player had
ever gotten or or we were certain would ever get,
one million dollars over three years. With one catch, Andy
(40:26):
Messersmith had to wear uniform number seventeen WTCG Channel seventeen.
You see where this was going. He had to wear
uniform number seventeen, and instead of having Messersmith written on
the back of the shirt over the seventeen, he had
to have the word Channel. So Andy Messersmith's uniform when
(40:46):
he broke in with the Atlanta Braves in nineteen seventy
six as the highest paid player in baseball history, the
back of the uniform read Channel seventeen. Baseball stopped that
right quick, It's not ted. The day he decided that
he should see what it was like to manage the
Braves and if it really was his difficult as his
managers had made it seem. His lifetime record was zero
(41:09):
to one, and he said, yes, this is very difficult.
But the cable sports genie that one was out of
the bottle and nobody was stopping it, and he aspn
ran with it. But next came news. Even then his
crazy idea cable news network rested squarely on the first
regularly scheduled nightly sports newscast in national television history, CNN
(41:29):
Sports Tonight at seven at eleven and two am Eastern,
while SportsCenter was on in those days for fifteen minutes
one night at seven and then an hour the next
night at ten and sports Tonight. Was there Come News
or high Water? Seven nights a week. Of course, Ted
Turner was not just shameless, he was also technically penniless,
(41:50):
so he hired a couple of real veterans to run
and anchor the thing. Bill McPhail, who helped invent the
NFL on CBS and Monday Night Football, was also his idea,
and his former CBS colleague Bob Wessler, and he hired
Nick Charles, who was a star of sports casting on
the Washington and Baltimore newscasts, but everybody else the cheapest
(42:10):
hires they could find. In nineteen eighty one, Turner sent
McPhail to hire me. That was our second interview. When
I told Bill I had made forty two thousand dollars
the year before working for Charlie Steiner in radio. Bill
spit his drink halfway across the room. We were planning
on hiring six guys to start with, for a total
(42:30):
of ninety five thousand. This is when they were staffing
up what became CNN Headline News. I answered that I
hoped that the other five guys he was going to
hire were prepared to make it on seven grand each,
because there was no way I was moving to Atlanta
for less than sixty thousand dollars. Well, they got me anyway,
and for less than sixty thousand dollars, but I did
not move to Atlanta, Thank you, Lou Dobbs. And they
(42:53):
got Dan Patrick and Hannah Storm and Fred Hickman and
Dan Hicks and Gary Miller and dozens of others and
reporters and cameramen and producers and executive and editors, and
one sports production assistant from the original crew of CNN
Sports wound up becoming the president of CNN Worldwide, and
(43:14):
another wound up becoming the president of MSNBC. ESPN reshaped
television sports news anyway, CNN created it, and early on
CNN staffed ESPN and much of the industry, And I'm
skipping how Turner mainstreamed World Cup yachting at least for
a while, and Ted and TNT and TED and the
(43:36):
Goodwill Games and TED and World Championship Wrestling, whose matches
were actually held right above the CNN newsroom, so that
often you could hear the wrestlers slamming each other on
our ceiling. And by the way, the Braves winning fourteen
straight division titles and the repopulation of Bison in the country.
It was also Ted Turner, but my favorite Ted Turner
(43:57):
story comes from something he did not pull off, not
that he did not try. When the football owners forced
the players out on stroke in nineteen eighty two, Ted
sent me to cover it every day for eight months,
and one day he showed up at the Football strike
talks to meet with the players, and when he came out,
he announced that he would be bankrolling and televising two
(44:20):
football games in the middle of a football strike, one
at RFK Stadium in Washington and the other at the
Rose Bowl in southern California. And basically these two games
would pit pickup teams of striking players the American Conference
versus the National Conference. And he called his two games
the All Star Season. I've mentioned this elsewhere and before.
(44:42):
When I asked him about the acronym for the All
Star Season, he winked at me and shushed me, and
then he took me aside and he asked me what
I thought. I told him, nobody's gonna watch and he's
going to lose money. And he looked at me and
he said, nobody watches you. I lose money on you,
so what we'll make money eventually. He then explained that
(45:04):
that was really just designed to set up the owners.
If he could put the games together and get them
on TV with no more than one month's lead time,
the players' union was willing to partner up with him.
Ted's real motive for the ass the All Star season
was nothing less than creating his own football league, twenty
(45:28):
four teams, which would begin play in nineteen eighty three
or sooner if necessary, and would be televised exclusively on TBS.
All he needed was the players going along with him,
and one little labor court ruling that the owners had
forced the players union to go out on strike and
that would allow the union to negotiate with other employers. Well, obviously,
(45:52):
you don't have to be a football expert to know
that he did not get that court ruling, but they
went for it. Ted Turner was shooting for nothing less
than killing off the National Football League and replacing it
with a new National Football League owned by Ted Turner,
and he was going to give the players fifty percent
of the whole league. And don't forget, nearly all of
(46:14):
this was done on a shoe string budget with borrowed money,
with all of his employees convinced that he was crazy
and it wouldn't last until next Tuesday. And when we
would get our paychecks at CNN in New York, we
would race each other to the bank to cash them,
just in case there wasn't going to be enough for everybody.
So whenever something causes me to get nostalgic about my
(46:37):
start in TV, I inevitably find myself going back to
tales of Ted Turner, Owen Lou and Missus Dobbs and
the Other Missus Dobbs, Missus Dobbs one and Missus Dobbs two.
(47:08):
I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank
you for listening. Countdown has come to you from our
studios high on top the Sports Capsule Building in New York.
Here are the credits. Most of the music was arranged,
produced and performed by Brian Ray and John Phillip Schanel.
They are the Countdown musical directors. All orchestration and keyboards
by John Phillip Shanel, guitars, bass and drums by Brian Ray,
(47:28):
produced by Tko Brothers. Other Beethoven selections have been arranged
and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. The sports
music is the Olderman theme for ESPN two, and it
was written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of esp and
e musical comments by Nancy Fauss. The best baseball stadium
organist ever. Our announcer today was my friend Jonathan Banks.
Everything else is pretty much my fault. That's countdown for
(47:50):
this the nine hundred and sixty fourth day since Donald
Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of
the United States. Arrest him again while we still can.
The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow, Boltons as the news
warrant still then, I'm Keith Alreman. Good morning, good afternoon,
good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olreman is
(48:23):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.