March 13, 2023 • 53 mins
EPISODE 152: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:41) SPECIAL COMMENT: New government document in a separate January 6 case filed yesterday, sworn under oath and under penalty of perjury, confirms that by September 2021 Jacob Chansley and his attorneys were given all but 10 seconds of the J6 video Carlson showed last week. Carlson's claim that Chansley and his lawyers had never seen the video, is a lie. Carlson's claim that it was "withheld" from Chansley and America, is a lie. Carlson's claim that they were sightseers, is a lie. Carlson's claim that it's a false flag, is a lie.
Tucker Carlson is a liar. What's worse: he could be guilty of Obstruction of Justice.
Because what has this all been about? This was Kevin McCarthy providing Tucker Carlson access to the materials with which to lie, gaslight, and whitewash. He did all three things. This is a conspiracy to turn guilty perpetrators of insurrection, coup, and violent attack on the Capitol during the official transfer of power, into victims - and the victims into defendants. And THAT is called "Obstruction Of Justice."
B-Block (20:47) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Yay Capitalism until its speculative bank fails then it's Yay Socialism. At least it shuts up Junior Trump. Mike Pence talks tough against Trump but still won't lift a finger to stop him. And Tom Hanks broke my Cummerbund at the Oscars. (24:23) IN SPORTS: DeSantis's brilliant idea to get a hated tennis player arrested, MSG's Jim Dolan vows to win alcohol fight (it'd be his first win) and what sportscaster solidarity can do: BBC's Gary Lineker has brought the UK's fascist government to its knees. (30:50) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: On the other hand, the UK mailed in its uniforms for the World Baseball Classic. The House Freedom Caucus's debt limit demand includes...Defunding the police? And why DeSantis needs to read every snowflake first.
C-Block (35:20) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: My Dad died, 13 years ago today. But instead of telling you some somber remembrance let me tell you about something he did that, 47 years later, still strikes me as the epitome of selfless parenting and still leaves me speechless. Oh and it features me meeting Howard Stern when he was 20 and I was 15.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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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 Free
the Q Shaman Jacob Chansley, no arrest Tucker Carlson. Tucker
(00:29):
Carlson is lying about the January sixth video, and a
new government document, sworn under oath and under penalty of
perjury and submitted yesterday to a district court in Washington,
confirms that Tucker Carlson could be prosecuted as part of
a conspiracy to obstruct justice, or even prosecuted on much
more serious and ominous charges under eighteen Usc. Two three
(00:53):
eight three rebellion or insurrection. All that footage that Carlson
said had been quote withheld from the Q Shaman Chansley,
All that footage that Carlson said showed Chansley being escorted
by Capitol police. All that footage that Carlson said proved
a government conspiracy to frame Chansley. All that footage that
(01:14):
Carlson said proved January sixth was just sightseers framed by
Pelosi and Cheney and Biden and the media. All that
footage that Kevin McCarthy sold his soul, over all that
footage that Elon Musk was dumb enough to fall for
and promulgate all that footage that every Trump apologist and
(01:34):
every proseditionist congressman is pushing like his life depended on it.
Because maybe it is all that footage at the center
of the international Communist liberal democratic woke crt LGBTQ George
Sorrow's conspiracy that Tucker Carlson and Tucker Carlson alone valiantly
(01:58):
outed and will avenge all that footage. Jacob Chansley's lawyer
was given all but ten seconds of that footage on
or before September twenty fourth, two twenty one, five hundred
and thirty five days ago, and Chanslly's lawyer was given
(02:20):
the remaining missing ten seconds forty nine days ago. Tucker
Carlson is lying. Kevin McCarthy is lying. Jacob Chansley's first
lawyer is lying. Jacob Chansly's second lawyer is lying. Fox
Quote news unquote is lying. One of the members of
(02:44):
the terrorist group the Proud Boys himself on trial for
January sixth, Dominic Pizzola moved to dismiss his case or
have a mistrial called quote due to recent revelations on
the Tucker Carlson Show unquote, there are no revelations. There
is no new footage. There was no truth a single
(03:05):
word out of Tucker Carlson's fascist, racist, anti democracy whoremouth.
Yesterday afternoon, the Government responded to the Pozzola motion to
dismiss by issuing Memorandum number six eight nine and giving
it to the Court Memorandum six eight nine in the
(03:27):
United States of America versus ethan Nordion at all. And
while the memorandum is ostensibly about that case and this
gang member Pezzola, it is in fact directed at the
lies of the lawyers of the Q Shaman, and more
importantly and absolutely lowers the boom on Tucker Carlson and
Fox quote news unquote and this entire enraging, embarrassing, illegal
(03:53):
scam that Carlson and Kevin McCarthy are running. And it
is thus now utterly essential to the future of this
nation for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to convene a
Senate investigation of Carlson and Fox and whatever is behind
Rupert Murdoch's effort to destabilize the elected government of the
(04:14):
United States and imperil our country. Let me read from
Document six eighty nine Case one twenty one CR. Zero
zero one seven five t j K quote. The CCTV
footage is core evidence in nearly every January sixth case,
(04:35):
and it was produced on moss labeled by camera number
and by time to all defense counsel in all cases,
with the exception of one CCTV camera, where said footage
totaled approximately ten seconds and implicated an evacuation route. All
of the footage played on television was disclosed to defend
(04:59):
it Pezzola and defended Chansley. By September twenty fourth, two
twenty one, the final ten seconds of footage was produced
in global discovery to all defense counsel on January twenty three,
twenty twenty three. End quote. Knowing already what he did
(05:21):
and what he did not do. On January sixth, Jacob
Chansley and his attorney at the time, Albert Watkins, agreed
to a plea deal on September third, twenty twenty one
one charge of felony obstruction of a proceeding of Congress,
and Chansley signed a seven page document giving a minute
by minute timeline of his crime, and not once in
(05:43):
it did he claim he had been escorted, but in
the document he confessed to repeatedly refusing to do what
those officers shown on that video told him to do,
which was leave his attorney Watkins got any video from
the insurrection he had not already been given except the
ten seconds that showed a secret escape route by September
(06:05):
twenty four, twenty twenty one. Chancey was sentenced on November seventeenth,
twenty twenty one, meaning his attorney had at least fifty
four days to review the video that the liar Tucker
Carlson showed last week and claimed was new. If any
of it actually did anything like the liar Tucker Carlson claimed,
(06:29):
the attorney would have showed it to the judge at sentencing,
and he and Chancey could have backed out of the
plea deal, or the judge would have thrown out the
plea deal. But it didn't show anything. Because Tucker Carlson
is lying, he is obstructing justice. And when the attorney
Watkins told the liar Tucker Carlson that he had never
(06:51):
seen the video before, if Watkins himself was not lying,
it means Watkins was too lazy or too incompetent or
both to review the video. He had had access to
five hundred and thirty five days ago. The Q Shaman
Chansley officially changed attorneys on November twenty ninth, twenty twenty one,
(07:13):
meaning his new lawyer, John Pierce, has had four hundred
and seventy days to look at that video that the liar,
Tucker Carlson lied had been withheld from the lawyers and
from the nation. And when the attorney Pierce told the
liar Tucker Carlson that he'd never seen that video before,
if Pierce wasn't lying, it meant Pierce was too lazy
(07:35):
or too incompetent, or both to review the video he
had access to four hundred and seventy days ago and
every day since. But wait, what about that last ten
seconds that the government didn't turn over until just under
two months ago? What about that? Well from the same
(07:57):
memo in this puzzola case filed yesterday, quote, the final
ten seconds of footage similarly, as with other CCTV depicts
defendant Chansley outside of the Senate Chamber with law enforcement
after his initial breach of the chamber unquote. And remember,
(08:19):
anything the government puts into the record in its prosecution
of anybody must be utterly verifiable to the letter. If
there is not a signed receipt from every attorney, including
Chansley's apparently useless mouthpiece, Albert Watkins, the one who said
Chandsley and the others were from quote the short bus.
If there isn't an impeccable sworn under oath record of
(08:43):
everything the government asserts in something like this Memorandum six
eighty nine, not only does the prosecution go out the window,
but the prosecutors can go to jail. This isn't the
Tucker Carlson liar show. You can't just lie and get
away with it like you're Tucker Carlson. If Fox quote
News were held to the same standard, to one tenth
(09:04):
of the same standard as federal prosecutors, Tucker Carlson would
not only be in jail right now, he would have
already lost his appeal to get out on bail. But wait,
there's more later in government Memorandum six eighty nine quote
the televised footage shows Chansley's movements only from approximately two
(09:28):
fifty six pm to three pm. Prior to that time,
Chansley had, amongst other acts, breached a police line at
two o nine pm, with the mob entered the capital
less than one minute behind Dominic Pizzola during the initial
breach of the building, and faced off with members of
the US Capitol Police for more than thirty minutes in
(09:49):
front of the Senate Chamber doors, while elected officials, including
the Vice President of the United States, were fleeing from
the chamber. Chansly then entered the Senate Gallery, where he
proceeded to scream obscenities while other rioters rifled through the
debt eskus of US senators on the floor below. All
these actions were captured by Senate floor and or CCTV cameras.
(10:12):
In some Chansley was not some passive, chaperoned observer of events.
For the roughly hour that he was unlawfully inside the Capitol,
he was part of the initial breach of the building.
He confronted law enforcement for roughly thirty minutes just outside
the Senate chamber he gained access to and later left
(10:32):
the Senate floor only after law enforcement was able to
arrive on Moss to remove him. It is at this
point that the authors of Memorandum six eighty nine nail
the liar Tucker Carlson to the metaphorical wall quote. It
is true that a sole officer who was trying to
(10:54):
de escalate the situation was with Chansley as he made
his way to the Senate floor after initially breaching the chamber,
as the televised footage reflect But the televised footage fails
to show that Chansley subsequently refused to be escorted out
by this loan officer and instead left the Capitol only
(11:17):
after additional officers arrived and forcibly escorted him out free
Jacob Chansley arrest Tucker Carlson. What the liar Tucker Carlson
and the liar Maria barter Romo as recently as yesterday,
still pushing Fox's January sixth video lie, still trying to
(11:41):
spit out the words watching them walk and being escorted
by police. What they are doing is obstructing justice, and
for that matter, so is what Speaker of the House
Kevin McCarthy is doing. He, without any consultation, arbitrarily released
all this video to the liar Tucker Carlson for the
(12:03):
express purpose of producing sing the kind of gas lighting, obstructionist,
false narrative that Carlson and his producers and his employers
and Rupert Murdoch promptly and efficiently did produce, McCarthy handed
Carlson access to materials with which to lie. Carlson then
lied night after night and yesterday. Interviewed by the liar
(12:27):
bartar Romo, Kevin McCarthy completed the self fulfilling prophecy. Quote,
what have we learned from these tapes that have been
on Tucker Carlson tonight? Said bartar Romo, who is the
liar who has promised support for a Senate run by
Steve Bannon. In answering her, McCarthy as evil but not
nearly as interesting as his nineteen fifties namesake, answered quote,
(12:50):
The first thing I found is that the January sixth
committee was not honest with us. He then strung together
his standard cliches about transparency and how many hours of
tape there was and burning cities and everybody can make
their own judgment and equal justice, well justice, equally equal justice.
Arrest Kevin McCarthy for obstruction of justice. What, after all
(13:12):
has this all been about. This has been to try
to whitewash and to gaslight, not just in the arena
of public opinion, not just to fool the marks who
watch Fox, but in the courts. This is to try
to whitewash and gaslight, an insurrection, a coup, a bloody
(13:35):
attack on the Capitol during the official transfer of power.
It is a conspiracy to turn the guilty perpetrators into
victims and the victims into defendants. And that is called
obstruction of justice. And you go to jail for that,
And Kevin McCarthy and Tucker Carlson should go to jail
(13:57):
for that. On Saturday, the former White House Communications director
under Trump, Stephanie Grisham, underscored what we've all known all
along that Fox quote news unquote served as the main
propaganda outlet for Trump, with specific hands on direction by Trump.
(14:20):
In an interview with CNN, Grisham emphasized that people like
Sean Hannity and Janine Piro and Laura Ingram and Fox
quote News unquote CEO Suzanne Scott all called her office constantly,
and if she did not get back to them fast enough,
they would call Trump and whine about that. Quoting her,
(14:41):
we did work hand in hand with them, and that
came at the President's direction. If he didn't like something,
we were to immediately, you know, call Fox and have
them fix it or try to make a new story
out of it. Etc. Unquote. So the question must now
be raised, is this exact construction happening again? We heard
(15:05):
Kevin McCarthy humiliate himself the night he was finally elected
speaker fulsomely thanking Trump. Is this whole conspiracy to obstruct
justice originating with Trump? Did he tell McCarthy to give
the January sixth video access to Tucker Carlson? We need
(15:28):
not only the full resources of the Department of Justice
directed towards these evil men and the people who enabled them,
like Rupert Murdoch, We need a Senate Select committee and
hearings into what is more than just Fox's typical lying
to and manipulation of its moronic audience, but which is
a conspiracy to obstruct justice in the prosecution of the
(15:49):
January sixth insurrection. Free the Q Shaman, Arrest Tucker Carlson,
Arrest Kevin McCarthy, and arrest the ringleader of this conspiracy
to rocked Donald Trump still ahead of us. In this
(16:22):
edition of Countdown, Mike Pence says he and his family
and everybody at the Capitol on January sixth were endangered
by Donald Trump, and of course no, he will not
help anybody investigating Trump nor prosecuting Trump. He'll just continue
to say mean, meaningless things about Trump. The collapse of
Silicon Valley bank conservatives like the aforementioned Kevin McCarthy are
(16:45):
blaming woke banking. Excuse me, does free check income with
your woke banking? Turns out the real culprits in the
collapse include two former Kevin McCarthy staffers. In sports, a
tweet by the lead football commentator for the BBC may
bring down the British government. What happens when sportscasters say
(17:09):
enough is enough? Whereas persons, Hey, Ron de Santis never
accept us snowflake from a stranger and thirteen years ago
today my dad died. I will spare you anything sad
and instead tell you of one of the most remarkable
pieces of parenting self restraint I have ever encountered about
(17:30):
my education. I found out about it forty six years
ago and I am still speechless metaphorically. That's next. This
is countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Olberman. Both scripts
(17:56):
to the news. Some headlines, some updates, some snarks, some predictions.
Dateline Santa Clara, the government insisted is not bailing out
the imploded Silicon Valley bank, but all depositors will be
able to get their money at no cost to you
taxpayers at home, because yea capitalism until it turns out
one bunch of capitalists have no idea what they're doing,
(18:17):
which case it becomes yeay corporate socialism. The move will
at Lee's quiet, if not end two right wing talking points.
Donald Trump Junior tweeted yesterday quote, I don't remember banks
collapsing under Trump. A Junior also doesn't remember last night.
More importantly, b sixteen banks collapsed under Trump. This is
(18:39):
the first since he left office. The other fascist bleat
over the weekend was that because it promoted responsible investing,
SVB was quote woke and therefore it went broke. In fact,
as Ken Clippenstein reported at the Intercept, key parts of
the Dodd Frank banking regulations were not only rolled back
in two and eighteen under the guidance of Trump and
(19:01):
the then House Majority leader Kevin McCarthy, but two SVB
lobbyists are former McCarthy staffery's McCarthy's former Coalitions director Brian Worth,
and McCarthy's ex senior policy adviser Wes McClelland. And McCarthy
is not woke. In fact, there's not even much evidence
he's awake. Dateline Washington the usually lighthearted translation It's boring.
(19:25):
Gridiron Charity Dinner Saturday featured former Vice President Mike Pence
attacking everybody trying to minimize January sixth. He even name
checked Trump. Quote, President Trump was wrong. I had no
right to overturn the election, and his reckless words endangered
my family and everyone at the Capitol that day. And
(19:47):
I know history will hold Donald Trump accountable on quote. Well,
maybe history will, but Pence won't. He is still fighting
the subpoena to testify to Special Counsel Jack Smith. So basically,
he's full of crap and a bad Christian. Thank you,
(20:20):
Nancy Faust. As a PostScript, Treasury Secretary Tony Blincoln also
spoke at the Gridiron Dinner quote. According to the guest list,
there are six hundred to tends here tonight. CNN would
kill for an audience like that, and Dateline Hollywood at
the Oscars, nice that Navalne won for Best Documentary. Waiting
(20:41):
for Trump to ask where is Putin's oscar? Otherwise I
don't care. I covered the Oscars for the La Times
once nineteen ninety nine and Tom Hanks, Ben Affleck and
Matt Damon grabbed me and pulled me over the security
hedge onto the red carpet and they broke my comer bund.
I still haven't gotten a check from Hanks for that.
(21:01):
Maybe we can't get a slap every year. But if
there's no broke Cummerbund, sorry, I'm watching hockey instead. This
(21:22):
is Sports Center. Wait, check that in not anymore. This
is Countdown with Keith Alberman in sports. Florida Governor Ron
De Santis says that if the federal government continues to
keep tennis star Novak Djokovic out of this country because
he is not vaccinated, DeSantis is open to breaking the
(21:43):
law and bringing Djokovic in by the back door to
play in the Miami Tennis Open or whatever. Quote. I
would run a boat from the Bahamas here for him.
I would do that. Actually, I like this idea because
then the Coastguard could stop the boat, arrest everybody on board,
prosecute De Santis, and if the boat wouldn't stop, they
could just sink it. Cool plan Ron. Here in New York,
(22:07):
the war continues between the owner of Madison Square Garden
Radio City Music Hall, The Knicks and the Rangers, Jim
Dolan and Reality. The State Liquor Authority has begun proceedings
to revoke all of Dolan's licenses to sell booze in
response to him using facial recognition technology to keep out
customers he personally does not like. Dolan promptly sued the
(22:29):
liquor authority, calling it gangster like, and he promised victory
over it, which would be the first ever victory by anything.
Jim Dolan owns Dateline London Day for the British government
and its iconic broadcaster, the BBC, trying to figure out
how to get control of the country back from football
announcer and former UK playing star Gary Lineker. Last Tuesday,
(22:54):
the repulsive British Home Secretary Suella Braberman made the stark
announcement about people trying to cross the Channel into England
without documentation. Quote enough is enough, we must stop the boats.
Leneker retweeted her, adding this is awful, and then added
this is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed to the
most vulnerable people. In language that is not dissimilar to
(23:17):
that used by Germany in the thirties. The BBC, which
has been lurching to the right for several years, has
a new right wing chairman who has been accused of
helping to arrange alone for the former Prime Minister barsh Johnson.
The chairman is still in his chair. The BBC, though,
lives in mortal terror of the Conservative Party and it
immediately it said Gary Lineker would be quote stepping back
(23:40):
from his duties as the host of Match of the Day,
the soccer slash football broadcast that has been at the
center of BBC sports since it started. This is TV
management speak stepping back for we suspended him. Lenaker is
not only the highest paid sports broadcaster at the BBC,
he is the highest paid broadcaster period at the BBC.
(24:02):
Yet the government somehow thought and then the BBC went
with them, that they could attack him, claiming he made
remarks insensitive to Jewish people and how dare you call
us Nazis and blah blah blah, and he would just fold.
It is hard to find a comparison to Linaker in
this country. He's not just a popular commentator, we have
lots of those. He is the host who used to
(24:24):
be a star player for the national team and by
the way, he's right, and when the BBC suspended him,
it expected he would cave or at worst they'd fire
him in the government would throw them a fish or something. Instead,
all of linakers on air colleagues, all the other sportscasters
on BBC television Match of the Day, none of whom
(24:47):
make even a quarter of what he does, refused to
go on television without him. There were no commentators on
Saturday's BBC Match of the Day broadcasting. By yesterday, the
walkoffs had spread to the various BBC radio networks and
all of its women football commentators as well in the
women's coverage. Newspaper reports from London early Monday morning indicated
(25:09):
that negotiations to get Linaker back on the air were
moving in the right direction, and that meant that there
were hints that the BBC was trying to massage its
own social media rules to be able to say Linaker
didn't violate them because he's not backing down. I'll mention again,
Linaker is right. I'll point out that thirty years ago
at ESPN, I tried to just get a vote taken
(25:31):
as to whether or not those of us on the
air there should affiliate with the after a television union
which all our ABC sports colleagues were in. I needed
one other sportscaster to sign the request. Anybody who did
that their job and my job would have immediately been
protected by the National Labor Relations Board, basically for life.
(25:53):
Nobody else would sign. In England, something like thirty sportscasters
walked out in solidarity with Gary Lineker. And there's still
a larger issue here. The BBC continues to self delude
on the central issue here. It supposed neutrality. A couple
of years ago, the BBC ran a promo for its
BBC World News service in which its main anchor of
(26:16):
that marched through the streets of Washington as the giant
words like fairness and honesty and neutrality popped up around her.
She actually said in the narration that the BBC was
so neutral that it quote had never taken sides in
any war, which made me laugh out loud, even though
I was born in nineteen fifty nine and I've never
(26:37):
been to London. But I did seem to know something
about the BBC that the BBC evidently did not. In
the Second World War, not only did the Nazis bomb
BBC headquarters in London, but later evidence proved they did
so at the direct demand of Hitler. What I've heard
on records of the BBC news broadcasts of the time
is that the BBC was not exactly neutral in that war,
(27:00):
the war where the fascists were trying to kill them
all inside their own BBC studios. You don't have to
be neutral against evil. As fascism returns to Europe by
various means, including these weighted violent threats like we must
stopped the boats, by creatures like this odious Home Secretary,
the BBC should not be punishing Linaker. It should instead
(27:24):
make him it's lead newscaster. Ahead. It is thirteen years
to the day since my father died, and rather than
(27:46):
do a somber memorial about him, have I got a
story to tell you about an act that showed how
much he learned from and improved upon the way he
had been raised. The beneficiary of that was me first
time for the daily round of the miscreens, morons and
Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's persons of the
World le Bronze Sorry, Gary Lineker. The British team at
(28:11):
the World Baseball Classic. Look the World Baseball classic is
bad enough. Yet another marketing scheme to get you to
buy yet another fact similar uniform, only this time it's
based on where your favorite player's grandmother lived. It interrupts
Major league's training, and it often injures Major League players,
and it hurts Major League teams. But on top of that,
(28:32):
team Great Britain, which has thirty seven players, exactly six
of whom were actually born in Great Britain, showed up
to its first game in generic gray uniforms with no
logos or designs or patches or anything, just the words
Great and then underneath it Britain stuck on the front
of their uniforms and letters that look to be about
(28:53):
two inches high. They looked like T shirts issued to
Little League teams in nineteen seventy four. If they were
just stuck on there with velcro, I wouldn't have been
a bit surprised way to sell the conceit. The runners
up the House Freedom Caucus. This is insurrectionist Scott Perry's
little Cabal. It is promising it will refuse to vote
to raise the debt ceiling under any circumstances unless Biden's
(29:16):
student debt relief program is eliminated discretionary spending his cap
for a decade, funding for climate change and added IRS
employees are cut, and many other measures are taken. Several
critics note the Freedom Caucus's proposal will also cut Medicare,
defund border protections, and wait a minute, defund the police.
(29:38):
Scott Perry. No, but the winner Florida Governor Ron DeSantis again,
who is quickly learning that Florida is not actually the
entire year world de fascist was in Iowa over the weekend,
not running for anything, mind you, of course not, when
someone posed as an admirer and approached him and said
she liked to make large souvenirs snowflakes for her favorite
(30:02):
politicians when they visited Iowa, and she handed one to
him and they posed together with him holding it, and
he looks like a grinning idiot. We don't know if
he ever found out that the glitter forming the prongs
of the snowflake actually spell out one word twelve different times,
and that one word is fascist. Run Wait, even if
(30:25):
it didn't spell fascist, why on earth did you accept
just a snowflake snowflake? Descantis today's worst person in no
worse to the number one story on the countdown and
(30:51):
my favorite topic, me and things I promised not to tell.
And my dad died thirteen years ago today, March thirteenth,
twenty ten. If you are an orphan like me, young
or old, you know that processing the death of a
parent is not just unlike anything else you experience in life,
(31:12):
but it's also utterly nonlinear. It is tougher for me
to deal with today than it was the day it happened,
but not as tough as five years ago in but
tougher than at seven years and less tough that you
get the idea, and the idea that my dad has
gone thirteen years, that the span is now identical to
(31:33):
the length of time it took me between the day
I graduated from college and the day I started on
Sports Center is way more difficult to get my head
around than is the fact that he is gone. As
I'm sure is also true for you. I could tell
you six months uninterrupted stories about my dad, but I
(31:55):
happened recently to be thinking of two of them, connected
not in time but in topic, and I thought you
might be as amazed by them as I continue to
be amazed by them and by him. I understand my
dad was born basically two months and change before the
stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine. His dad was
(32:18):
a pretty mercurial guy, and that's a polite way of
describing him. He had a city job in the pits
of the depression. He got a promotion. He showed up
to work in a sports shirt that first day because
he liked my dad like me, had a weird neck
and throat things and collars and ties hurt. And when
they said, Harry, you got to wear a shirt and
(32:38):
a tie you got a promotion, he said, the hell
with that, and he asked to have his old job back,
and they said, Harry, the moment you got promoted, we
had eight hundred and thirty seven applications, it's the depression.
So he said, I quit. And so my dad, at
the age of seven, maybe eight, and his two brothers,
one older one younger, saw the family income drop from
(32:58):
like four thousand dollars a year to, as dad put it,
the two hundred bucks or so we made collecting and
cycling old comic books. The next year. So a decade
after that, when my father graduated as the valedictorian of
the New York High School of Industrial Arts and he
was offered a full scholarship to a major architecture college.
(33:21):
His dad, who never understood that his own son was
not just Doodlin, said flat out that if my father
went to college, that would mean his younger brother, Bill
would have to quit high school and go to work,
because otherwise the family would starve. My dad had to
turn the architectural college scholarship down. He went to work,
(33:45):
went to work in a department store, and then he
became a draftsman, and he finally got his architectural license
twenty years after that. Twenty years never went to college,
just some night school and just finding out about a
key law that said, if you could pass the architecture exam,
the state of New York had to give it to you.
(34:06):
He wrote them, they had to give it to him.
They gave it to him, he passed. Then they changed
the law, which apparently had been written in eighteen fifty six.
Soon my father was licensed in forty of the fifty states,
and basically every Mask and Robin's ice cream parlor in
this country was something he had designed. And I don't
know how many more stores he built for his other clients,
(34:29):
but it must have been in the thousands and five
years after he finally got his license. He had a
Cadillac and got a new one through the lease every
other year. I was in a private school, and he
was turning down architectural assignments because he just didn't have
the time. So when it came time for me to
go to college, my dad said, apply anywhere you think
(34:50):
you can get in. Pick the thing that's best for you.
We'll pay for it. I narrowed it down to Boston University, Cornell,
and Harvard. I had lined up an internship through a
friend with the Boston Celtics. Boston University had the top
communications program in the nation. Harvard was Harvard, and Cordelle
was there in case something went wrong at be You
(35:12):
and Harvard wouldn't let me in. Frankly, now, in those days,
high school kids did not strategize, beginning at age two,
as to how to get into a good college. So
when I sent in my applications, and I noted I
had not only been the sports editor of a high
school newspaper and yearbook and radio station, but I also
had been the associate editor of the first baseball Memorabiliar
(35:34):
reference book, and I was the paid editor of a
professionally produced Memorabiliam magazine. This was the kind of extracurricular
activity these schools would not see on every other application.
They would see it about once a decade. My dad
and I go to be you for the visit, and
we are greeted not by some guy from the admissions office,
(35:54):
by the dean of the School of Public Communications, and
all three of us talked for maybe half an hour,
and at the end of it, the dean asks my
dad about the financial and he says, look, mister all Ryman,
we don't do this a lot, but we really would
like Keith to be here. We don't have a lot
of latitude on these things, but I've gotten approval. We
(36:15):
can occasionally do this. We can offer you a merit scholarship.
My dad didn't really register this, but I did immediately
because I've been reading about all the application processes around
the country. And I gasped, and I say a free ride,
and the dean says, yeah, everything but food. Food you
have to pay for yourself. And my father knits his
(36:36):
eyebrows and he looks at me, and then he knits
his eyebrows again, and he looks at the dean and
then he bursts out laughing that's what he had been
offered twenty seven years earlier at the Architectural College, and
he could not take it. So the Dean now takes
us on the tour of the Boston University School of
Public Communications, heart of the city, trolley trains clanging past
(36:57):
every ninety seconds, busy, bustling, clean enough trees to make
it look like a college. The Celtic Internship is a
short ride on the tee away and free. Now we
see the ultra modern dorm for freshmen, and it's great,
and the professional radio station which was NPR and played
classical music, and all the guys are wearing ties, and
(37:19):
the dean says, this is mostly grad students, but I
have no doubt that you can find a place here.
And then he takes us to the undergrad radio station
and it's a little seedier, but it's still first class equipment,
lots of different studios, and there's a kid in the
on air studio playing rock and he's like six four
and forty pounds, greasy, stringy, curly hair hanging to his
(37:41):
forty pound waist, and a little granny glasses. And the
dean waits until the disc jockey turns off the on
air light. He opens the door to the studio and
he says, well, well, well, if it isn't my favorite student,
great timing, believe it or not, I'm gonna leave you
this very qualified applicant in your hands for a couple
(38:03):
of minutes because I got a class I have to
go teach. You tell them whatever you want to tell him, Keith,
mister Olderman. Whenever you decide, as we hope you will,
to join us, call me directly, call collect and mister Olderman,
if you would walk me out to the front door
here and just let's talk a little bittle logistics. And
now they leave, and when it's just the jock and me,
(38:25):
the jock says to me in a deep voice, New
York accent, good to see you, Dean. And the door
closes and he adds, you fraud kid. He says, don't
make my mistake. Don't come here. And I'm shocked, and
I explain it's going to be free. Well, what's that?
They say, You get what you pay for, right, Listen,
the grad students were in the real station. They won't
(38:47):
even let you wash the toilets of the real station.
Took me two years just to get in here, to
this lousy midday show twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Tuesdays and Thursdays. I'm gonna be the best dish jockey
of all time. You don't even get to take any
communications classics here until you're a junior, just general studies.
And the dean, let me just put it this way,
(39:08):
I'm not his favorite student. I don't know if you
could tell kid any questions. I was speechless. Then I
see my dad reappear outside the studio and he comes
in and shakes this kid's hand, and the kid says,
don't worry, Dad, I told your boy everything he really
needs to know. And we leave. We go back to
(39:29):
Logan Airport, we get on the shuttle, we go home.
That night, I read the Boston University catalog from front
to last page and everything that the world's next greatest
disc jockey has told me. Damn it, he's right. Two
years of general studies. You can't even get into a
communications class, let alone the radio station, let alone the
(39:52):
undergrad radio station until you are our junior. Also, they
will not even give me college credit, not one for
the Celtics. Internship. Then comes the news story. A couple
of days later. Then in that brand new, ultra modern
freshman dorm, they found a dead student in the hallway.
And I don't know what it was. But between what
the world's next greatest disc jockey ever has told me
(40:14):
and the dead body in the hallway, I'm thinking it's
gonna be Harvard or Cornell, meaning it's almost certainly Cornell,
because I don't think Harvard's gonna let me in. And
my dad says, you know, I think they've probably removed
that body by now, And then he says, I can't
argue with the restrictions. I'm not being able to be
on the radio station until you're a junior. What's the
point of that. I will remind you just once though,
(40:36):
of one other detail. It is free. A couple of
weeks later, we go to Harvard for the interview. That
goes well. They like me. They don't have a communications major,
but I could go in under English or history or
general studies. And the admission guy says, your extracurriculars are
extraordinary and the internship is great, but you have a
numbers problem here. There's seventy kids in your senior class.
(40:58):
Four of you guys have applied, and how are your
grades compared to theirs? And I gulp, and I say, well,
there are the two guys who've had the four point
zero since they were in the womb, and then there's
the other guy who's had one since the third grade,
and then there's me. And I'm only National Honor Society
and like, you know, three point eight five or something,
but I am a fifteen year old senior. And the
(41:18):
admission guy says, ordinary year that would get you in.
If you're the only applicant from your school that would
get you in, you're number four out of four. It's
gonna be tough. So Dad and I go to Cornell
and the campus is like my high school, only it's
a thousand times larger, and everything is uphill. There is
(41:39):
no downhill at Cornell. It's only uphill from here. And
the communications department is a joke. We go see the
facilities in the fall of nineteen seventy four and they
are in a converted barn with broken windows in the
barn and rusty razor blades for editing audiotape, and there
(41:59):
are no students in there, just broken windows and rusty
razor Blades. Any TV, I ask, and the guy says, well,
we have TV on campus and I say no, I
mean any TV station or classes or the students in
communication arts and he laughs. He says, I think you
can rent one of those new video cameras and tape
decks for like fifty dollars an hour. But there is
(42:21):
a really good radio station. He says, we don't own
it or anything. We don't even run it. The students
own it, and it's commercial. They sell commercials. You should
go see it before you leave town. Now, I'm just
shaking my head and praying that the guy at Harvard
will get me in. And my dad offers to take
me over to the radio station, and I say, why bother?
And we start the five hour drive home, and I say,
(42:42):
the good thing here is the communications program is inside
the Agriculture College. And the Agriculture College, although it's first
rate might be actually a little tougher than some of
the arts school, it's a state school. So if you're
a New Yorker, the tuition is a tenth of what
should pay in the Arts college, and you can take
all the history in the English classes you want. And
(43:02):
if that radio station is any good. I can spend
most of my time over there, and it's not free,
but it's a lot less than my high school currently costs.
But it ain't Harvard. And my father says, I told
you before, I want you to do what you decide
is best. If it's Harvard and it costs us Harvard money,
(43:25):
don't think twice. I get it about be you, I
get it about Cornell. None of us have graduated college
in a hundred years. You figure out what's best, I'll
figure out how to pay for it. So Harvard turned
me down. The two four point oh since the womb
guys got in. The four point zero guy who had
(43:47):
only been there since the third grade, he got waitlisted.
I got the reno It's our loss letter, which was
day to April ninth, nineteen seventy five, in which I
received April eleventh, nineteen seventy five, after the folks and
my sister and I all got back from the Yankees
home opener at Chase Stadium, a five to three lost
to the Detroit Tigers. Not that I remember everything, or
not that I'm still bitter, or not that I wrote
(44:08):
them back and said, you bet, it's your loss, that's
just a rumor. No comment, no comment. Cornell accepted me.
I went to Cornell. There are a couple of postscripts,
the kid with the long, stringy hair who was six
four and forty pounds, and the New York accent who
was going to be the greatest disc jockey of all time.
(44:29):
The kid who talked me out of going to Boston
University was, of course, Howard Stern. When I first saw
him on TV in nineteen eighty eight or so, I said,
that guy looks exactly like the kid who talked me
out of going to Boston University. Years later, I was
at Howard's show and we had a conversation about this. No,
it wasn't me. I don't remember meeting you. I said, well,
(44:52):
we hadn't even exchanged names. Then, I don't remember any
of it. And I said, did you and the dean
there not get along? Oh? Man? The dean hated me
like one day. Came into the studios one time with
some high school kid and his father. Oh boy, we
gave each other a hard time After that, he says,
I talked him out of it, and I said, that
was my dad and me. Not a chance I would
(45:14):
have remembered meeting you. I said, we didn't mention names. Howard. Also,
I was like five inches shorter and I was fifteen. No,
it wasn't you. It wasn't me, I promise you. And
I said, Howard, your shift was Tuesdays and Thursdays mid
days and you didn't like it. Yeah, And I said,
how many other kids at the radio station who were
(45:34):
dish jockeys looked like you? He said, none, Nobody looks
like me. And I said, how would you know if
you were me about the dean and you if you
hadn't seen it or heard it. I don't know. I
don't remember meeting you. The guy was Howard Stern So
at Cornell. The PostScript is this, It turned out the
(45:56):
radio station was the greatest training ground in the radio business.
It turned out ten to twenty professional broadcasters per year.
We sold about a quarter million dollars in advertising every year.
And this is in the three hundred and fifty first
largest market in the country. And when you're three hundred
and fifty first the world largest is inappropriate. There was
(46:20):
an organized training program at WVBRFM that was better than
any college course anywhere. By the time of my sophomore year,
I was the sports director. By my junior year, I
was running the training program for the whole station. After
my senior year, I was well enough trained and had
been on the air so many times, like fifteen hundred times,
(46:40):
that I went directly from WVBR to a one thousand
station radio network, and I took every history in English
class I could, and Dad paid one tenth with all
the other dads of all the other kids in the
English and history classes paid. And when I went back
for a visit in two eleven, the three history professors
I had took me out to lunch because they were fanboys.
(47:03):
Very little to this point would suggest that this is
really a story about my father and not about me,
But it is. It is entirely about him. My freshman year,
when it started, the whole family took me up, and
I believe this was strategical. It was better that way.
With three of them, they were able to bar the
(47:24):
doors and force me to stay, which was not my inclination.
My sophomore year, which was a little easier on me,
it was just my dad and me. We drove up
there in a borrowed pickup truck with all my stuff
in the back and somehow we get onto the campus
via a back route and he's lost, and I say, wait, wait,
don't worry, I know where we are. I know it
from here. Besides which, it works out. He look, if
(47:46):
you make the last next left, we can see something
you'd probably like to see. It's the Architecture College. It's
called and I'm about to name it. I'm about to
say rand Hall, which was the name of the architecture college.
And he interrupts me, and my dad says, matter of factly,
rand Hall. Yeah, I know, right at the bend of
the avenue here. Yeah, I remember I told you about
(48:06):
the architectural scholarship that I couldn't take. And I still
don't realize what's coming. I say yeah. He goes, yeah,
well it was here. It was Cornell. This place offered
me the scholarship I couldn't take. Are you hungry? I'm
damned hungry. I couldn't speak. I can barely speak. Now.
(48:27):
This is nineteen seventy six, and I still haven't gotten
over this. Through all of this back and forth about
college that consumed a year, Cornell b you, Harvard, Merit scholarships,
free rides, the dead student in the hallway, the Celtics internship,
the New York State discount, go to Harvard if you
(48:49):
get in, Howard Stern, his own father, his brother, the depression.
Through all of that, my dad never once mentioned that
Cornell had been his dream, his escape, his free ticket
that he had to give up, that he had to
replace with working as a draftsman and going to night
school for nearly twenty years. Never mentioned it. Finally I spoke.
(49:14):
Could have been hours later, could have been days later.
You didn't tell me. How did you resist? He pulled
into a parking spot in front of a diner. Do
you think, after what my father did to me, that
(49:37):
I was going to try to influence your decision about college,
even put that thought in your mind about going here
because I couldn't go here. Never. Never, in twenty lifetimes,
he's gone thirteen years. Around year three, me and a
(50:02):
bunch of the other alums from the Radio STA decided
that our successors, who had kind of fallen on hard
times and w VBRFM was now operating out of the
basement of something called the National Heifers Association, we decided
that we needed to get them out from under the
cows that they needed an entirely new radio station to
(50:25):
learn in as we were privileged to, as I was
privileged to. Thanks to my dad, I'm proud to say
I paid for nearly the whole thing, and therefore I
got to name it. And I named it for two people,
one of whom was my friend Glenn Cornelius, who was
the program director who died very young. You can guess
(50:46):
the name of the other person I named it after.
So if you're ever in Ithaca, New York, go to
six hundred and four East Buffalo Street and you will
see it w VBRFM, w VBR Cornell Media Guild, the
Olderman Cornelius Studios. My dad would say two things about that.
I believe clever the way you named it after me,
(51:11):
but it also just happens half your name in it, too.
And then he'd say, also, good ordering of the names.
You wouldn't want anybody actually thinking there was ever somebody
named Cornelius Ulderman. I've done all the damage I can
(51:41):
do here. Thank you for listening. Countdown has come to
you from the studios of the Theodore C. Olverman Broadcasting Empire,
high atop its headquarters in the Sports Capsule building here
in New York. Here are the credits. Most of the
music was arranged, produced and performed by Brian Ray and
John Philip Channel, who are the Countdown musical directors. Produced
by t Ko Brothers. All orchestration and keyboards by John
(52:03):
Philip Channel, Guitars, bass and drums by Brian Ray. Other
Beethoven selections have been arranged and performed by No Horns Allowed.
The sports music is the Olderman theme from ESPN two
and it was written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of
ESPN Inc. Musical comments from Nancy Fauss, the best baseball
stadium organist ever, and belated happy birthday to her. Our
(52:24):
announcer today was Larry David and everything else was pretty
much my fault. So that's countdown for this, the seven
hundred and ninety seventh 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 Alderman. Good Morning,
good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman
(52:59):
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
Visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio Free
the Q Shaman Jacob Chansley, no arrest Tucker Carlson. Tucker
(00:29):
Carlson is lying about the January sixth video, and a
new government document, sworn under oath and under penalty of
perjury and submitted yesterday to a district court in Washington,
confirms that Tucker Carlson could be prosecuted as part of
a conspiracy to obstruct justice, or even prosecuted on much
more serious and ominous charges under eighteen Usc. Two three
(00:53):
eight three rebellion or insurrection. All that footage that Carlson
said had been quote withheld from the Q Shaman Chansley,
All that footage that Carlson said showed Chansley being escorted
by Capitol police. All that footage that Carlson said proved
a government conspiracy to frame Chansley. All that footage that
(01:14):
Carlson said proved January sixth was just sightseers framed by
Pelosi and Cheney and Biden and the media. All that
footage that Kevin McCarthy sold his soul, over all that
footage that Elon Musk was dumb enough to fall for
and promulgate all that footage that every Trump apologist and
(01:34):
every proseditionist congressman is pushing like his life depended on it.
Because maybe it is all that footage at the center
of the international Communist liberal democratic woke crt LGBTQ George
Sorrow's conspiracy that Tucker Carlson and Tucker Carlson alone valiantly
(01:58):
outed and will avenge all that footage. Jacob Chansley's lawyer
was given all but ten seconds of that footage on
or before September twenty fourth, two twenty one, five hundred
and thirty five days ago, and Chanslly's lawyer was given
(02:20):
the remaining missing ten seconds forty nine days ago. Tucker
Carlson is lying. Kevin McCarthy is lying. Jacob Chansley's first
lawyer is lying. Jacob Chansly's second lawyer is lying. Fox
Quote news unquote is lying. One of the members of
(02:44):
the terrorist group the Proud Boys himself on trial for
January sixth, Dominic Pizzola moved to dismiss his case or
have a mistrial called quote due to recent revelations on
the Tucker Carlson Show unquote, there are no revelations. There
is no new footage. There was no truth a single
(03:05):
word out of Tucker Carlson's fascist, racist, anti democracy whoremouth.
Yesterday afternoon, the Government responded to the Pozzola motion to
dismiss by issuing Memorandum number six eight nine and giving
it to the Court Memorandum six eight nine in the
(03:27):
United States of America versus ethan Nordion at all. And
while the memorandum is ostensibly about that case and this
gang member Pezzola, it is in fact directed at the
lies of the lawyers of the Q Shaman, and more
importantly and absolutely lowers the boom on Tucker Carlson and
Fox quote news unquote and this entire enraging, embarrassing, illegal
(03:53):
scam that Carlson and Kevin McCarthy are running. And it
is thus now utterly essential to the future of this
nation for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to convene a
Senate investigation of Carlson and Fox and whatever is behind
Rupert Murdoch's effort to destabilize the elected government of the
(04:14):
United States and imperil our country. Let me read from
Document six eighty nine Case one twenty one CR. Zero
zero one seven five t j K quote. The CCTV
footage is core evidence in nearly every January sixth case,
(04:35):
and it was produced on moss labeled by camera number
and by time to all defense counsel in all cases,
with the exception of one CCTV camera, where said footage
totaled approximately ten seconds and implicated an evacuation route. All
of the footage played on television was disclosed to defend
(04:59):
it Pezzola and defended Chansley. By September twenty fourth, two
twenty one, the final ten seconds of footage was produced
in global discovery to all defense counsel on January twenty three,
twenty twenty three. End quote. Knowing already what he did
(05:21):
and what he did not do. On January sixth, Jacob
Chansley and his attorney at the time, Albert Watkins, agreed
to a plea deal on September third, twenty twenty one
one charge of felony obstruction of a proceeding of Congress,
and Chansley signed a seven page document giving a minute
by minute timeline of his crime, and not once in
(05:43):
it did he claim he had been escorted, but in
the document he confessed to repeatedly refusing to do what
those officers shown on that video told him to do,
which was leave his attorney Watkins got any video from
the insurrection he had not already been given except the
ten seconds that showed a secret escape route by September
(06:05):
twenty four, twenty twenty one. Chancey was sentenced on November seventeenth,
twenty twenty one, meaning his attorney had at least fifty
four days to review the video that the liar Tucker
Carlson showed last week and claimed was new. If any
of it actually did anything like the liar Tucker Carlson claimed,
(06:29):
the attorney would have showed it to the judge at sentencing,
and he and Chancey could have backed out of the
plea deal, or the judge would have thrown out the
plea deal. But it didn't show anything. Because Tucker Carlson
is lying, he is obstructing justice. And when the attorney
Watkins told the liar Tucker Carlson that he had never
(06:51):
seen the video before, if Watkins himself was not lying,
it means Watkins was too lazy or too incompetent or
both to review the video. He had had access to
five hundred and thirty five days ago. The Q Shaman
Chansley officially changed attorneys on November twenty ninth, twenty twenty one,
(07:13):
meaning his new lawyer, John Pierce, has had four hundred
and seventy days to look at that video that the liar,
Tucker Carlson lied had been withheld from the lawyers and
from the nation. And when the attorney Pierce told the
liar Tucker Carlson that he'd never seen that video before,
if Pierce wasn't lying, it meant Pierce was too lazy
(07:35):
or too incompetent, or both to review the video he
had access to four hundred and seventy days ago and
every day since. But wait, what about that last ten
seconds that the government didn't turn over until just under
two months ago? What about that? Well from the same
(07:57):
memo in this puzzola case filed yesterday, quote, the final
ten seconds of footage similarly, as with other CCTV depicts
defendant Chansley outside of the Senate Chamber with law enforcement
after his initial breach of the chamber unquote. And remember,
(08:19):
anything the government puts into the record in its prosecution
of anybody must be utterly verifiable to the letter. If
there is not a signed receipt from every attorney, including
Chansley's apparently useless mouthpiece, Albert Watkins, the one who said
Chandsley and the others were from quote the short bus.
If there isn't an impeccable sworn under oath record of
(08:43):
everything the government asserts in something like this Memorandum six
eighty nine, not only does the prosecution go out the window,
but the prosecutors can go to jail. This isn't the
Tucker Carlson liar show. You can't just lie and get
away with it like you're Tucker Carlson. If Fox quote
News were held to the same standard, to one tenth
(09:04):
of the same standard as federal prosecutors, Tucker Carlson would
not only be in jail right now, he would have
already lost his appeal to get out on bail. But wait,
there's more later in government Memorandum six eighty nine quote
the televised footage shows Chansley's movements only from approximately two
(09:28):
fifty six pm to three pm. Prior to that time,
Chansley had, amongst other acts, breached a police line at
two o nine pm, with the mob entered the capital
less than one minute behind Dominic Pizzola during the initial
breach of the building, and faced off with members of
the US Capitol Police for more than thirty minutes in
(09:49):
front of the Senate Chamber doors, while elected officials, including
the Vice President of the United States, were fleeing from
the chamber. Chansly then entered the Senate Gallery, where he
proceeded to scream obscenities while other rioters rifled through the
debt eskus of US senators on the floor below. All
these actions were captured by Senate floor and or CCTV cameras.
(10:12):
In some Chansley was not some passive, chaperoned observer of events.
For the roughly hour that he was unlawfully inside the Capitol,
he was part of the initial breach of the building.
He confronted law enforcement for roughly thirty minutes just outside
the Senate chamber he gained access to and later left
(10:32):
the Senate floor only after law enforcement was able to
arrive on Moss to remove him. It is at this
point that the authors of Memorandum six eighty nine nail
the liar Tucker Carlson to the metaphorical wall quote. It
is true that a sole officer who was trying to
(10:54):
de escalate the situation was with Chansley as he made
his way to the Senate floor after initially breaching the chamber,
as the televised footage reflect But the televised footage fails
to show that Chansley subsequently refused to be escorted out
by this loan officer and instead left the Capitol only
(11:17):
after additional officers arrived and forcibly escorted him out free
Jacob Chansley arrest Tucker Carlson. What the liar Tucker Carlson
and the liar Maria barter Romo as recently as yesterday,
still pushing Fox's January sixth video lie, still trying to
(11:41):
spit out the words watching them walk and being escorted
by police. What they are doing is obstructing justice, and
for that matter, so is what Speaker of the House
Kevin McCarthy is doing. He, without any consultation, arbitrarily released
all this video to the liar Tucker Carlson for the
(12:03):
express purpose of producing sing the kind of gas lighting, obstructionist,
false narrative that Carlson and his producers and his employers
and Rupert Murdoch promptly and efficiently did produce, McCarthy handed
Carlson access to materials with which to lie. Carlson then
lied night after night and yesterday. Interviewed by the liar
(12:27):
bartar Romo, Kevin McCarthy completed the self fulfilling prophecy. Quote,
what have we learned from these tapes that have been
on Tucker Carlson tonight? Said bartar Romo, who is the
liar who has promised support for a Senate run by
Steve Bannon. In answering her, McCarthy as evil but not
nearly as interesting as his nineteen fifties namesake, answered quote,
(12:50):
The first thing I found is that the January sixth
committee was not honest with us. He then strung together
his standard cliches about transparency and how many hours of
tape there was and burning cities and everybody can make
their own judgment and equal justice, well justice, equally equal justice.
Arrest Kevin McCarthy for obstruction of justice. What, after all
(13:12):
has this all been about. This has been to try
to whitewash and to gaslight, not just in the arena
of public opinion, not just to fool the marks who
watch Fox, but in the courts. This is to try
to whitewash and gaslight, an insurrection, a coup, a bloody
(13:35):
attack on the Capitol during the official transfer of power.
It is a conspiracy to turn the guilty perpetrators into
victims and the victims into defendants. And that is called
obstruction of justice. And you go to jail for that,
And Kevin McCarthy and Tucker Carlson should go to jail
(13:57):
for that. On Saturday, the former White House Communications director
under Trump, Stephanie Grisham, underscored what we've all known all
along that Fox quote news unquote served as the main
propaganda outlet for Trump, with specific hands on direction by Trump.
(14:20):
In an interview with CNN, Grisham emphasized that people like
Sean Hannity and Janine Piro and Laura Ingram and Fox
quote News unquote CEO Suzanne Scott all called her office constantly,
and if she did not get back to them fast enough,
they would call Trump and whine about that. Quoting her,
(14:41):
we did work hand in hand with them, and that
came at the President's direction. If he didn't like something,
we were to immediately, you know, call Fox and have
them fix it or try to make a new story
out of it. Etc. Unquote. So the question must now
be raised, is this exact construction happening again? We heard
(15:05):
Kevin McCarthy humiliate himself the night he was finally elected
speaker fulsomely thanking Trump. Is this whole conspiracy to obstruct
justice originating with Trump? Did he tell McCarthy to give
the January sixth video access to Tucker Carlson? We need
(15:28):
not only the full resources of the Department of Justice
directed towards these evil men and the people who enabled them,
like Rupert Murdoch, We need a Senate Select committee and
hearings into what is more than just Fox's typical lying
to and manipulation of its moronic audience, but which is
a conspiracy to obstruct justice in the prosecution of the
(15:49):
January sixth insurrection. Free the Q Shaman, Arrest Tucker Carlson,
Arrest Kevin McCarthy, and arrest the ringleader of this conspiracy
to rocked Donald Trump still ahead of us. In this
(16:22):
edition of Countdown, Mike Pence says he and his family
and everybody at the Capitol on January sixth were endangered
by Donald Trump, and of course no, he will not
help anybody investigating Trump nor prosecuting Trump. He'll just continue
to say mean, meaningless things about Trump. The collapse of
Silicon Valley bank conservatives like the aforementioned Kevin McCarthy are
(16:45):
blaming woke banking. Excuse me, does free check income with
your woke banking? Turns out the real culprits in the
collapse include two former Kevin McCarthy staffers. In sports, a
tweet by the lead football commentator for the BBC may
bring down the British government. What happens when sportscasters say
(17:09):
enough is enough? Whereas persons, Hey, Ron de Santis never
accept us snowflake from a stranger and thirteen years ago
today my dad died. I will spare you anything sad
and instead tell you of one of the most remarkable
pieces of parenting self restraint I have ever encountered about
(17:30):
my education. I found out about it forty six years
ago and I am still speechless metaphorically. That's next. This
is countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Olberman. Both scripts
(17:56):
to the news. Some headlines, some updates, some snarks, some predictions.
Dateline Santa Clara, the government insisted is not bailing out
the imploded Silicon Valley bank, but all depositors will be
able to get their money at no cost to you
taxpayers at home, because yea capitalism until it turns out
one bunch of capitalists have no idea what they're doing,
(18:17):
which case it becomes yeay corporate socialism. The move will
at Lee's quiet, if not end two right wing talking points.
Donald Trump Junior tweeted yesterday quote, I don't remember banks
collapsing under Trump. A Junior also doesn't remember last night.
More importantly, b sixteen banks collapsed under Trump. This is
(18:39):
the first since he left office. The other fascist bleat
over the weekend was that because it promoted responsible investing,
SVB was quote woke and therefore it went broke. In fact,
as Ken Clippenstein reported at the Intercept, key parts of
the Dodd Frank banking regulations were not only rolled back
in two and eighteen under the guidance of Trump and
(19:01):
the then House Majority leader Kevin McCarthy, but two SVB
lobbyists are former McCarthy staffery's McCarthy's former Coalitions director Brian Worth,
and McCarthy's ex senior policy adviser Wes McClelland. And McCarthy
is not woke. In fact, there's not even much evidence
he's awake. Dateline Washington the usually lighthearted translation It's boring.
(19:25):
Gridiron Charity Dinner Saturday featured former Vice President Mike Pence
attacking everybody trying to minimize January sixth. He even name
checked Trump. Quote, President Trump was wrong. I had no
right to overturn the election, and his reckless words endangered
my family and everyone at the Capitol that day. And
(19:47):
I know history will hold Donald Trump accountable on quote. Well,
maybe history will, but Pence won't. He is still fighting
the subpoena to testify to Special Counsel Jack Smith. So basically,
he's full of crap and a bad Christian. Thank you,
(20:20):
Nancy Faust. As a PostScript, Treasury Secretary Tony Blincoln also
spoke at the Gridiron Dinner quote. According to the guest list,
there are six hundred to tends here tonight. CNN would
kill for an audience like that, and Dateline Hollywood at
the Oscars, nice that Navalne won for Best Documentary. Waiting
(20:41):
for Trump to ask where is Putin's oscar? Otherwise I
don't care. I covered the Oscars for the La Times
once nineteen ninety nine and Tom Hanks, Ben Affleck and
Matt Damon grabbed me and pulled me over the security
hedge onto the red carpet and they broke my comer bund.
I still haven't gotten a check from Hanks for that.
(21:01):
Maybe we can't get a slap every year. But if
there's no broke Cummerbund, sorry, I'm watching hockey instead. This
(21:22):
is Sports Center. Wait, check that in not anymore. This
is Countdown with Keith Alberman in sports. Florida Governor Ron
De Santis says that if the federal government continues to
keep tennis star Novak Djokovic out of this country because
he is not vaccinated, DeSantis is open to breaking the
(21:43):
law and bringing Djokovic in by the back door to
play in the Miami Tennis Open or whatever. Quote. I
would run a boat from the Bahamas here for him.
I would do that. Actually, I like this idea because
then the Coastguard could stop the boat, arrest everybody on board,
prosecute De Santis, and if the boat wouldn't stop, they
could just sink it. Cool plan Ron. Here in New York,
(22:07):
the war continues between the owner of Madison Square Garden
Radio City Music Hall, The Knicks and the Rangers, Jim
Dolan and Reality. The State Liquor Authority has begun proceedings
to revoke all of Dolan's licenses to sell booze in
response to him using facial recognition technology to keep out
customers he personally does not like. Dolan promptly sued the
(22:29):
liquor authority, calling it gangster like, and he promised victory
over it, which would be the first ever victory by anything.
Jim Dolan owns Dateline London Day for the British government
and its iconic broadcaster, the BBC, trying to figure out
how to get control of the country back from football
announcer and former UK playing star Gary Lineker. Last Tuesday,
(22:54):
the repulsive British Home Secretary Suella Braberman made the stark
announcement about people trying to cross the Channel into England
without documentation. Quote enough is enough, we must stop the boats.
Leneker retweeted her, adding this is awful, and then added
this is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed to the
most vulnerable people. In language that is not dissimilar to
(23:17):
that used by Germany in the thirties. The BBC, which
has been lurching to the right for several years, has
a new right wing chairman who has been accused of
helping to arrange alone for the former Prime Minister barsh Johnson.
The chairman is still in his chair. The BBC, though,
lives in mortal terror of the Conservative Party and it
immediately it said Gary Lineker would be quote stepping back
(23:40):
from his duties as the host of Match of the Day,
the soccer slash football broadcast that has been at the
center of BBC sports since it started. This is TV
management speak stepping back for we suspended him. Lenaker is
not only the highest paid sports broadcaster at the BBC,
he is the highest paid broadcaster period at the BBC.
(24:02):
Yet the government somehow thought and then the BBC went
with them, that they could attack him, claiming he made
remarks insensitive to Jewish people and how dare you call
us Nazis and blah blah blah, and he would just fold.
It is hard to find a comparison to Linaker in
this country. He's not just a popular commentator, we have
lots of those. He is the host who used to
(24:24):
be a star player for the national team and by
the way, he's right, and when the BBC suspended him,
it expected he would cave or at worst they'd fire
him in the government would throw them a fish or something. Instead,
all of linakers on air colleagues, all the other sportscasters
on BBC television Match of the Day, none of whom
(24:47):
make even a quarter of what he does, refused to
go on television without him. There were no commentators on
Saturday's BBC Match of the Day broadcasting. By yesterday, the
walkoffs had spread to the various BBC radio networks and
all of its women football commentators as well in the
women's coverage. Newspaper reports from London early Monday morning indicated
(25:09):
that negotiations to get Linaker back on the air were
moving in the right direction, and that meant that there
were hints that the BBC was trying to massage its
own social media rules to be able to say Linaker
didn't violate them because he's not backing down. I'll mention again,
Linaker is right. I'll point out that thirty years ago
at ESPN, I tried to just get a vote taken
(25:31):
as to whether or not those of us on the
air there should affiliate with the after a television union
which all our ABC sports colleagues were in. I needed
one other sportscaster to sign the request. Anybody who did
that their job and my job would have immediately been
protected by the National Labor Relations Board, basically for life.
(25:53):
Nobody else would sign. In England, something like thirty sportscasters
walked out in solidarity with Gary Lineker. And there's still
a larger issue here. The BBC continues to self delude
on the central issue here. It supposed neutrality. A couple
of years ago, the BBC ran a promo for its
BBC World News service in which its main anchor of
(26:16):
that marched through the streets of Washington as the giant
words like fairness and honesty and neutrality popped up around her.
She actually said in the narration that the BBC was
so neutral that it quote had never taken sides in
any war, which made me laugh out loud, even though
I was born in nineteen fifty nine and I've never
(26:37):
been to London. But I did seem to know something
about the BBC that the BBC evidently did not. In
the Second World War, not only did the Nazis bomb
BBC headquarters in London, but later evidence proved they did
so at the direct demand of Hitler. What I've heard
on records of the BBC news broadcasts of the time
is that the BBC was not exactly neutral in that war,
(27:00):
the war where the fascists were trying to kill them
all inside their own BBC studios. You don't have to
be neutral against evil. As fascism returns to Europe by
various means, including these weighted violent threats like we must
stopped the boats, by creatures like this odious Home Secretary,
the BBC should not be punishing Linaker. It should instead
(27:24):
make him it's lead newscaster. Ahead. It is thirteen years
to the day since my father died, and rather than
(27:46):
do a somber memorial about him, have I got a
story to tell you about an act that showed how
much he learned from and improved upon the way he
had been raised. The beneficiary of that was me first
time for the daily round of the miscreens, morons and
Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's persons of the
World le Bronze Sorry, Gary Lineker. The British team at
(28:11):
the World Baseball Classic. Look the World Baseball classic is
bad enough. Yet another marketing scheme to get you to
buy yet another fact similar uniform, only this time it's
based on where your favorite player's grandmother lived. It interrupts
Major league's training, and it often injures Major League players,
and it hurts Major League teams. But on top of that,
(28:32):
team Great Britain, which has thirty seven players, exactly six
of whom were actually born in Great Britain, showed up
to its first game in generic gray uniforms with no
logos or designs or patches or anything, just the words
Great and then underneath it Britain stuck on the front
of their uniforms and letters that look to be about
(28:53):
two inches high. They looked like T shirts issued to
Little League teams in nineteen seventy four. If they were
just stuck on there with velcro, I wouldn't have been
a bit surprised way to sell the conceit. The runners
up the House Freedom Caucus. This is insurrectionist Scott Perry's
little Cabal. It is promising it will refuse to vote
to raise the debt ceiling under any circumstances unless Biden's
(29:16):
student debt relief program is eliminated discretionary spending his cap
for a decade, funding for climate change and added IRS
employees are cut, and many other measures are taken. Several
critics note the Freedom Caucus's proposal will also cut Medicare,
defund border protections, and wait a minute, defund the police.
(29:38):
Scott Perry. No, but the winner Florida Governor Ron DeSantis again,
who is quickly learning that Florida is not actually the
entire year world de fascist was in Iowa over the weekend,
not running for anything, mind you, of course not, when
someone posed as an admirer and approached him and said
she liked to make large souvenirs snowflakes for her favorite
(30:02):
politicians when they visited Iowa, and she handed one to
him and they posed together with him holding it, and
he looks like a grinning idiot. We don't know if
he ever found out that the glitter forming the prongs
of the snowflake actually spell out one word twelve different times,
and that one word is fascist. Run Wait, even if
(30:25):
it didn't spell fascist, why on earth did you accept
just a snowflake snowflake? Descantis today's worst person in no
worse to the number one story on the countdown and
(30:51):
my favorite topic, me and things I promised not to tell.
And my dad died thirteen years ago today, March thirteenth,
twenty ten. If you are an orphan like me, young
or old, you know that processing the death of a
parent is not just unlike anything else you experience in life,
(31:12):
but it's also utterly nonlinear. It is tougher for me
to deal with today than it was the day it happened,
but not as tough as five years ago in but
tougher than at seven years and less tough that you
get the idea, and the idea that my dad has
gone thirteen years, that the span is now identical to
(31:33):
the length of time it took me between the day
I graduated from college and the day I started on
Sports Center is way more difficult to get my head
around than is the fact that he is gone. As
I'm sure is also true for you. I could tell
you six months uninterrupted stories about my dad, but I
(31:55):
happened recently to be thinking of two of them, connected
not in time but in topic, and I thought you
might be as amazed by them as I continue to
be amazed by them and by him. I understand my
dad was born basically two months and change before the
stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine. His dad was
(32:18):
a pretty mercurial guy, and that's a polite way of
describing him. He had a city job in the pits
of the depression. He got a promotion. He showed up
to work in a sports shirt that first day because
he liked my dad like me, had a weird neck
and throat things and collars and ties hurt. And when
they said, Harry, you got to wear a shirt and
(32:38):
a tie you got a promotion, he said, the hell
with that, and he asked to have his old job back,
and they said, Harry, the moment you got promoted, we
had eight hundred and thirty seven applications, it's the depression.
So he said, I quit. And so my dad, at
the age of seven, maybe eight, and his two brothers,
one older one younger, saw the family income drop from
(32:58):
like four thousand dollars a year to, as dad put it,
the two hundred bucks or so we made collecting and
cycling old comic books. The next year. So a decade
after that, when my father graduated as the valedictorian of
the New York High School of Industrial Arts and he
was offered a full scholarship to a major architecture college.
(33:21):
His dad, who never understood that his own son was
not just Doodlin, said flat out that if my father
went to college, that would mean his younger brother, Bill
would have to quit high school and go to work,
because otherwise the family would starve. My dad had to
turn the architectural college scholarship down. He went to work,
(33:45):
went to work in a department store, and then he
became a draftsman, and he finally got his architectural license
twenty years after that. Twenty years never went to college,
just some night school and just finding out about a
key law that said, if you could pass the architecture exam,
the state of New York had to give it to you.
(34:06):
He wrote them, they had to give it to him.
They gave it to him, he passed. Then they changed
the law, which apparently had been written in eighteen fifty six.
Soon my father was licensed in forty of the fifty states,
and basically every Mask and Robin's ice cream parlor in
this country was something he had designed. And I don't
know how many more stores he built for his other clients,
(34:29):
but it must have been in the thousands and five
years after he finally got his license. He had a
Cadillac and got a new one through the lease every
other year. I was in a private school, and he
was turning down architectural assignments because he just didn't have
the time. So when it came time for me to
go to college, my dad said, apply anywhere you think
(34:50):
you can get in. Pick the thing that's best for you.
We'll pay for it. I narrowed it down to Boston University, Cornell,
and Harvard. I had lined up an internship through a
friend with the Boston Celtics. Boston University had the top
communications program in the nation. Harvard was Harvard, and Cordelle
was there in case something went wrong at be You
(35:12):
and Harvard wouldn't let me in. Frankly, now, in those days,
high school kids did not strategize, beginning at age two,
as to how to get into a good college. So
when I sent in my applications, and I noted I
had not only been the sports editor of a high
school newspaper and yearbook and radio station, but I also
had been the associate editor of the first baseball Memorabiliar
(35:34):
reference book, and I was the paid editor of a
professionally produced Memorabiliam magazine. This was the kind of extracurricular
activity these schools would not see on every other application.
They would see it about once a decade. My dad
and I go to be you for the visit, and
we are greeted not by some guy from the admissions office,
(35:54):
by the dean of the School of Public Communications, and
all three of us talked for maybe half an hour,
and at the end of it, the dean asks my
dad about the financial and he says, look, mister all Ryman,
we don't do this a lot, but we really would
like Keith to be here. We don't have a lot
of latitude on these things, but I've gotten approval. We
(36:15):
can occasionally do this. We can offer you a merit scholarship.
My dad didn't really register this, but I did immediately
because I've been reading about all the application processes around
the country. And I gasped, and I say a free ride,
and the dean says, yeah, everything but food. Food you
have to pay for yourself. And my father knits his
(36:36):
eyebrows and he looks at me, and then he knits
his eyebrows again, and he looks at the dean and
then he bursts out laughing that's what he had been
offered twenty seven years earlier at the Architectural College, and
he could not take it. So the Dean now takes
us on the tour of the Boston University School of
Public Communications, heart of the city, trolley trains clanging past
(36:57):
every ninety seconds, busy, bustling, clean enough trees to make
it look like a college. The Celtic Internship is a
short ride on the tee away and free. Now we
see the ultra modern dorm for freshmen, and it's great,
and the professional radio station which was NPR and played
classical music, and all the guys are wearing ties, and
(37:19):
the dean says, this is mostly grad students, but I
have no doubt that you can find a place here.
And then he takes us to the undergrad radio station
and it's a little seedier, but it's still first class equipment,
lots of different studios, and there's a kid in the
on air studio playing rock and he's like six four
and forty pounds, greasy, stringy, curly hair hanging to his
(37:41):
forty pound waist, and a little granny glasses. And the
dean waits until the disc jockey turns off the on
air light. He opens the door to the studio and
he says, well, well, well, if it isn't my favorite student,
great timing, believe it or not, I'm gonna leave you
this very qualified applicant in your hands for a couple
(38:03):
of minutes because I got a class I have to
go teach. You tell them whatever you want to tell him, Keith,
mister Olderman. Whenever you decide, as we hope you will,
to join us, call me directly, call collect and mister Olderman,
if you would walk me out to the front door
here and just let's talk a little bittle logistics. And
now they leave, and when it's just the jock and me,
(38:25):
the jock says to me in a deep voice, New
York accent, good to see you, Dean. And the door
closes and he adds, you fraud kid. He says, don't
make my mistake. Don't come here. And I'm shocked, and
I explain it's going to be free. Well, what's that?
They say, You get what you pay for, right, Listen,
the grad students were in the real station. They won't
(38:47):
even let you wash the toilets of the real station.
Took me two years just to get in here, to
this lousy midday show twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Tuesdays and Thursdays. I'm gonna be the best dish jockey
of all time. You don't even get to take any
communications classics here until you're a junior, just general studies.
And the dean, let me just put it this way,
(39:08):
I'm not his favorite student. I don't know if you
could tell kid any questions. I was speechless. Then I
see my dad reappear outside the studio and he comes
in and shakes this kid's hand, and the kid says,
don't worry, Dad, I told your boy everything he really
needs to know. And we leave. We go back to
(39:29):
Logan Airport, we get on the shuttle, we go home.
That night, I read the Boston University catalog from front
to last page and everything that the world's next greatest
disc jockey has told me. Damn it, he's right. Two
years of general studies. You can't even get into a
communications class, let alone the radio station, let alone the
(39:52):
undergrad radio station until you are our junior. Also, they
will not even give me college credit, not one for
the Celtics. Internship. Then comes the news story. A couple
of days later. Then in that brand new, ultra modern
freshman dorm, they found a dead student in the hallway.
And I don't know what it was. But between what
the world's next greatest disc jockey ever has told me
(40:14):
and the dead body in the hallway, I'm thinking it's
gonna be Harvard or Cornell, meaning it's almost certainly Cornell,
because I don't think Harvard's gonna let me in. And
my dad says, you know, I think they've probably removed
that body by now, And then he says, I can't
argue with the restrictions. I'm not being able to be
on the radio station until you're a junior. What's the
point of that. I will remind you just once though,
(40:36):
of one other detail. It is free. A couple of
weeks later, we go to Harvard for the interview. That
goes well. They like me. They don't have a communications major,
but I could go in under English or history or
general studies. And the admission guy says, your extracurriculars are
extraordinary and the internship is great, but you have a
numbers problem here. There's seventy kids in your senior class.
(40:58):
Four of you guys have applied, and how are your
grades compared to theirs? And I gulp, and I say, well,
there are the two guys who've had the four point
zero since they were in the womb, and then there's
the other guy who's had one since the third grade,
and then there's me. And I'm only National Honor Society
and like, you know, three point eight five or something,
but I am a fifteen year old senior. And the
(41:18):
admission guy says, ordinary year that would get you in.
If you're the only applicant from your school that would
get you in, you're number four out of four. It's
gonna be tough. So Dad and I go to Cornell
and the campus is like my high school, only it's
a thousand times larger, and everything is uphill. There is
(41:39):
no downhill at Cornell. It's only uphill from here. And
the communications department is a joke. We go see the
facilities in the fall of nineteen seventy four and they
are in a converted barn with broken windows in the
barn and rusty razor blades for editing audiotape, and there
(41:59):
are no students in there, just broken windows and rusty
razor Blades. Any TV, I ask, and the guy says, well,
we have TV on campus and I say no, I
mean any TV station or classes or the students in
communication arts and he laughs. He says, I think you
can rent one of those new video cameras and tape
decks for like fifty dollars an hour. But there is
(42:21):
a really good radio station. He says, we don't own
it or anything. We don't even run it. The students
own it, and it's commercial. They sell commercials. You should
go see it before you leave town. Now, I'm just
shaking my head and praying that the guy at Harvard
will get me in. And my dad offers to take
me over to the radio station, and I say, why bother?
And we start the five hour drive home, and I say,
(42:42):
the good thing here is the communications program is inside
the Agriculture College. And the Agriculture College, although it's first
rate might be actually a little tougher than some of
the arts school, it's a state school. So if you're
a New Yorker, the tuition is a tenth of what
should pay in the Arts college, and you can take
all the history in the English classes you want. And
(43:02):
if that radio station is any good. I can spend
most of my time over there, and it's not free,
but it's a lot less than my high school currently costs.
But it ain't Harvard. And my father says, I told
you before, I want you to do what you decide
is best. If it's Harvard and it costs us Harvard money,
(43:25):
don't think twice. I get it about be you, I
get it about Cornell. None of us have graduated college
in a hundred years. You figure out what's best, I'll
figure out how to pay for it. So Harvard turned
me down. The two four point oh since the womb
guys got in. The four point zero guy who had
(43:47):
only been there since the third grade, he got waitlisted.
I got the reno It's our loss letter, which was
day to April ninth, nineteen seventy five, in which I
received April eleventh, nineteen seventy five, after the folks and
my sister and I all got back from the Yankees
home opener at Chase Stadium, a five to three lost
to the Detroit Tigers. Not that I remember everything, or
not that I'm still bitter, or not that I wrote
(44:08):
them back and said, you bet, it's your loss, that's
just a rumor. No comment, no comment. Cornell accepted me.
I went to Cornell. There are a couple of postscripts,
the kid with the long, stringy hair who was six
four and forty pounds, and the New York accent who
was going to be the greatest disc jockey of all time.
(44:29):
The kid who talked me out of going to Boston
University was, of course, Howard Stern. When I first saw
him on TV in nineteen eighty eight or so, I said,
that guy looks exactly like the kid who talked me
out of going to Boston University. Years later, I was
at Howard's show and we had a conversation about this. No,
it wasn't me. I don't remember meeting you. I said, well,
(44:52):
we hadn't even exchanged names. Then, I don't remember any
of it. And I said, did you and the dean
there not get along? Oh? Man? The dean hated me
like one day. Came into the studios one time with
some high school kid and his father. Oh boy, we
gave each other a hard time After that, he says,
I talked him out of it, and I said, that
was my dad and me. Not a chance I would
(45:14):
have remembered meeting you. I said, we didn't mention names. Howard. Also,
I was like five inches shorter and I was fifteen. No,
it wasn't you. It wasn't me, I promise you. And
I said, Howard, your shift was Tuesdays and Thursdays mid
days and you didn't like it. Yeah, And I said,
how many other kids at the radio station who were
(45:34):
dish jockeys looked like you? He said, none, Nobody looks
like me. And I said, how would you know if
you were me about the dean and you if you
hadn't seen it or heard it. I don't know. I
don't remember meeting you. The guy was Howard Stern So
at Cornell. The PostScript is this, It turned out the
(45:56):
radio station was the greatest training ground in the radio business.
It turned out ten to twenty professional broadcasters per year.
We sold about a quarter million dollars in advertising every year.
And this is in the three hundred and fifty first
largest market in the country. And when you're three hundred
and fifty first the world largest is inappropriate. There was
(46:20):
an organized training program at WVBRFM that was better than
any college course anywhere. By the time of my sophomore year,
I was the sports director. By my junior year, I
was running the training program for the whole station. After
my senior year, I was well enough trained and had
been on the air so many times, like fifteen hundred times,
(46:40):
that I went directly from WVBR to a one thousand
station radio network, and I took every history in English
class I could, and Dad paid one tenth with all
the other dads of all the other kids in the
English and history classes paid. And when I went back
for a visit in two eleven, the three history professors
I had took me out to lunch because they were fanboys.
(47:03):
Very little to this point would suggest that this is
really a story about my father and not about me,
But it is. It is entirely about him. My freshman year,
when it started, the whole family took me up, and
I believe this was strategical. It was better that way.
With three of them, they were able to bar the
(47:24):
doors and force me to stay, which was not my inclination.
My sophomore year, which was a little easier on me,
it was just my dad and me. We drove up
there in a borrowed pickup truck with all my stuff
in the back and somehow we get onto the campus
via a back route and he's lost, and I say, wait, wait,
don't worry, I know where we are. I know it
from here. Besides which, it works out. He look, if
(47:46):
you make the last next left, we can see something
you'd probably like to see. It's the Architecture College. It's
called and I'm about to name it. I'm about to
say rand Hall, which was the name of the architecture college.
And he interrupts me, and my dad says, matter of factly,
rand Hall. Yeah, I know, right at the bend of
the avenue here. Yeah, I remember I told you about
(48:06):
the architectural scholarship that I couldn't take. And I still
don't realize what's coming. I say yeah. He goes, yeah,
well it was here. It was Cornell. This place offered
me the scholarship I couldn't take. Are you hungry? I'm
damned hungry. I couldn't speak. I can barely speak. Now.
(48:27):
This is nineteen seventy six, and I still haven't gotten
over this. Through all of this back and forth about
college that consumed a year, Cornell b you, Harvard, Merit scholarships,
free rides, the dead student in the hallway, the Celtics internship,
the New York State discount, go to Harvard if you
(48:49):
get in, Howard Stern, his own father, his brother, the depression.
Through all of that, my dad never once mentioned that
Cornell had been his dream, his escape, his free ticket
that he had to give up, that he had to
replace with working as a draftsman and going to night
school for nearly twenty years. Never mentioned it. Finally I spoke.
(49:14):
Could have been hours later, could have been days later.
You didn't tell me. How did you resist? He pulled
into a parking spot in front of a diner. Do
you think, after what my father did to me, that
(49:37):
I was going to try to influence your decision about college,
even put that thought in your mind about going here
because I couldn't go here. Never. Never, in twenty lifetimes,
he's gone thirteen years. Around year three, me and a
(50:02):
bunch of the other alums from the Radio STA decided
that our successors, who had kind of fallen on hard
times and w VBRFM was now operating out of the
basement of something called the National Heifers Association, we decided
that we needed to get them out from under the
cows that they needed an entirely new radio station to
(50:25):
learn in as we were privileged to, as I was
privileged to. Thanks to my dad, I'm proud to say
I paid for nearly the whole thing, and therefore I
got to name it. And I named it for two people,
one of whom was my friend Glenn Cornelius, who was
the program director who died very young. You can guess
(50:46):
the name of the other person I named it after.
So if you're ever in Ithaca, New York, go to
six hundred and four East Buffalo Street and you will
see it w VBRFM, w VBR Cornell Media Guild, the
Olderman Cornelius Studios. My dad would say two things about that.
I believe clever the way you named it after me,
(51:11):
but it also just happens half your name in it, too.
And then he'd say, also, good ordering of the names.
You wouldn't want anybody actually thinking there was ever somebody
named Cornelius Ulderman. I've done all the damage I can
(51:41):
do here. Thank you for listening. Countdown has come to
you from the studios of the Theodore C. Olverman Broadcasting Empire,
high atop its headquarters in the Sports Capsule building here
in New York. Here are the credits. Most of the
music was arranged, produced and performed by Brian Ray and
John Philip Channel, who are the Countdown musical directors. Produced
by t Ko Brothers. All orchestration and keyboards by John
(52:03):
Philip Channel, Guitars, bass and drums by Brian Ray. Other
Beethoven selections have been arranged and performed by No Horns Allowed.
The sports music is the Olderman theme from ESPN two
and it was written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of
ESPN Inc. Musical comments from Nancy Fauss, the best baseball
stadium organist ever, and belated happy birthday to her. Our
(52:24):
announcer today was Larry David and everything else was pretty
much my fault. So that's countdown for this, the seven
hundred and ninety seventh 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 Alderman. Good Morning,
good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman
(52:59):
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
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