February 27, 2023 • 42 mins
EPISODE 142: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:42) SPECIAL COMMENT: Merrick Garland is going to appear in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday morning. And it looks like there'll be yet another new and big and shiny thing to ask him about, about the arrested ex-FBI man Charles McGonigal and the Russian linked via Paul Manafort to Trump, Oleg Deripaska. Once, McGonigal was in charge of investigating Deripaska. The next thing you knew, he was WORKING FOR Deripaska. Exactly WHEN that happened keeps changing. 2020? 2019? Now it's 2018? Could it have been 2016? Judiciary Chair Dick Durban and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse want to know, and they want to know if Garland knows if McGonigal was aware of his FBI New York Field Office and how it was already trying to fix the 2016 election for Trump by forcing James Comey to re-smear Hillary Clinton eleven days before the election.
Meanwhile Trump CAN get the GOP nomination because the GOP hierarchy is moronic: it actually believes it has "cornered" him by demanding a pledge of all would-be nominees to support whoever gets the nomination because OF COURSE he always lives up to his promises. And Tucker Carlson doubles down on the January 6th video scam.
B-Block (18:08) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: First you could say "Dilbert" isn't funny. Then you could say it isn't appropriate. Now, after Scott Adams' racist rant, you can say it just...isn't. Happily Elon Musk is there to defend him. And the Department of Energy says Covid-19 was a lab leak? Oh they say it with "low confidence" that they're right? And it's the Department of ENERGY? (21:43) In sports: baseball's pitch clock seems to work (I'll be DAMNED), but where is it going to come up with the money to pay Manny Machado? Four more Regional Sports Networks pumping baseball (and the NBA and NHL) full of cash say they will likely go bankrupt within a month. (25:20) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Did the anti-Drag governor of Tennessee dress up IN drag in High School? Why does one writer keep calling CNN's Chris "Maybe Ate Paste" Licht a genius when he's never finished higher than last in the ratings? And how do you spell "NINTH" and "TWELFTH"? Don't ask the Florida Department of Education - the folks there have no clue.
C-Block (32:00) EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY: Peanut, in North Carolina, who weighs 20 pounds when she should weigh 60, needs your help. (33:15) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: On one day I was supposed to have coffee - at her invitation, as a prelude to a date, with Uma Thurman, AND the president of Current TV was taking me to dinner to explain how we could get rid of the idiot co-owner who didn't know what "DVR" was and so bought ratings showing only "Live" viewers, not "Live + DVR" viewers. If I tell you I had coffee and dinner alone, can you guess what happened?
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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. Merrick
Garland is going to appear before the Senate Judiciary day
(00:25):
after tomorrow, and it looks like there will be something
big and new and shiny to ask him about Charlie
McGonagall and Oleg Derik Posca. And when two Democratic members
of that committee pull on this McGonagall threat on Wednesday,
they hope Garland will say something that confirms that this
is a story not just about McGonagall and Derek Pasca,
(00:46):
but about McGonagall and Derek Pasca and Trump. Business Insider,
which has been running rings around the rest of the
news media combined on this story for months now now
reports that in twenty eighteen, McGonagall, either before his retirement
from the FBI or just his retirement from the FBI,
and way before his arrest, went to London to meet
(01:10):
a Russian unnamed who was under so much suspicion that
the British authorities had that Russian under surveillance. Every time
you turn around, this pile of smelly stuff involving this
guy McGonagall seems to have grown in size while you
weren't looking at it. At the end of last month,
McGonagall was arrested on charges that he was working illegally
(01:33):
for Derik Pasca in twenty twenty one and that he
traveled to London to meet with Derik Pasca. Read the
indictment and the first version of the Derrick Posca saga,
and it looks like that meeting definitely took place in
twenty twenty, maybe two nineteen, but definitely not in two eighteen,
when Derrick Fosca was still an active executive in the FBI.
(01:55):
Now he is placed in London meeting some Russian in
two eighteen, And you do not have to be a
conspiracy theorist to stay full together the different parts of
the Charlie McGonagall oleg Deripaska story to quickly ask, you
know if that Russian the British allegedly caught McGonagall meeting
with in two eighteen was Derrik Pasca, and you're still
(02:19):
in the normal behavior range. If you wonder exactly when
McGonagall started working for Derrik Pasca, and if it could
have been two eighteen, could it have actually been in
two thou sixteen, because that is clearly what the FBI
and the Department of Justice are still asking, and what
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse wants to ask Garland about on Wednesday.
(02:40):
Back to this New Business Insiders story. When the surveillance
showed their Russian whoever he was meeting with the FBI's
McGonagall in two eighteen, the British alerted the FBI legal attache,
who operated out of the American Embassy in London, whoever
the meeting was with, Whatever the meeting was for, it
(03:00):
was bad enough that it was one of the reasons
the FBI in fact began its investigation of its own
man McGonagall. If you're fuzzy on this labyrinthine story because
it has been out of the headlines for a few weeks,
the FBI investigation of Buggonagal climaxed a month than four
days ago when McGonagall was arrested on two seemingly separate
(03:22):
accusations taking money from Albanian interest while he was still
active before he retired from the FBI, and more relevant
to what they will ask the Attorney General on Wednesday
morning for allegedly illicitly working for a Russian oligarch. He
had once been in charge of investigating Derri Pasca the
same prutent friendly money man whom Paul Manafort was also
(03:45):
working for. Manafort, who was the same Manafort who was
Trump's second campaign chief in twenty sixteen, for free, while
Manafort owed Derri Pasca money. And of course Trump is
the same Trump on whose behalf mcgonagall's FBI Field office
in New York went rogue in twenty sixteen. The New
York FBI office agents who are threatening to leak insinuations
(04:08):
about the Anthony Weener laptop and Bureau director James Comey
decided to re smear Hillary Clinton eleven days before the election,
before his agents could anonymously do it for him. As
this story has evolved over the months since the arrest
of McGonagall, it has been clear that the FBI and
(04:29):
the Justice Department are not clear exactly when McGonagall started
working for Derrick Pasca, or they know, and they are
waiting for the rest of us to ask so loudly
that they just have to find out. At the start
of this month, The New York Times wrote quote prosecutors
suggested that mister McGonagall began wooing mister Derrick Pasca shortly
(04:52):
before his retirement in twenty eighteen, he helped the daughter
of an employee of mister Derrick Plasca get an internship
with the New York Police Department. According to the New
York indictment, mister McGonagall explained to another FBI official that
the girl's father was a Russian intelligence officer he wanted
to recruit, Prosecutors said. The indictment of Charlie McGonagall specifically
(05:16):
accuses him of traveling to Vienna and London to meet
this Derrick Posca, but it gives no timeframe on those
meetings and now comes the story that the meeting could
have taken place while McGonagall was still active in the
FBI and still active in the corrupted New York Field
office that actually influenced the outcome of the twenty sixteen
presidential election. Three weeks ago, tomorrow, Senator white House of
(05:39):
the Judiciary Committee wrote to Merrick Garland for details on
McGonagall and Derrick Pasca, and specifically what was being done
to investigate whether McGonagall knew about the FBI New York
Office's pro Trump dirty tricks from twenty sixteen. White House's
office says he has not heard back. At the same time,
the Judiciary chair Dick Durban also wrote Merrick Garland asking
(06:03):
for a briefing about McGonagall, and he hasn't heard back now.
Garland's appearance at the ten am Wednesday morning hearing is
per a Durban aid not in response to the letter.
He just happens to be stopping by to take general
questions as one does. Obviously, there is the small chance, underscore,
(06:25):
small underscore chance that Garland will help Durban and white
House dig up the body of the Muller investigation, which
Trump and Bill Barr so skillfully buried alive in twenty nineteen.
Because no matter how tepid Trump's bid to regain power
may seem, the ground underneath Trump within the Republican Party
(06:45):
continues to prove still fertile and welcoming and dumb. The
chair of the National Committee, Rona McDaniel, went on CNN
yesterday and said, yes, she expects that everyone seeking a
place on the Republican presidential debate stage later this year
will agree to sign a play edge supporting the eventual
(07:06):
Republican presidential nominee. That means all of them not named Trump,
including never Trumpers like Asa Hutchinson, and trying to put
space between me and Trumpers like Nicky Haley and Mike
Pompeo would have to pledge to support Trump if he's
the nominee, and McDaniel and the hapless CNN interviewer Dana
(07:27):
Bash both seemed to believe that Trump would also pledge
to support the nominee if that nominee is not Trump.
The reason Trump could still be the nominee of the
Republican Party is simple. It is as simple as Rona
McDaniel is. Who on earth would be stupid enough to
(07:50):
look at Trump and say, oh, He's going to pledge
to support the nominee even if it isn't him. And
as we know, Trump's word is as good as gold.
Who would be that stupid to believe that? Well, Dana Bash,
Rona McDaniel, and Politico. Politico headlined it's version of this story,
GOP Coroner's Trump with Debate pledge. Trump's word, especially about
(08:16):
something as vegua as a pledge, is actually only as
good as the gold coloring in his can of spray
on hair, which might be Lemon pledge. They are really
willing to believe that this time Trump will do what
he has promised. This is the whiney creature whom Rolling
Stone now reports tried to pressure at least three Disney
(08:38):
executives because he didn't like a joke Jimmy Kimmel had
made about him, while his FCC was at least nominally
investigating Stephen Colbert at the same time, and while he
wanted the Department of Justice to try to prosecute Saturday
Night Live. So you can count on Trump A, he'll
live up to a pledge and be no. Of course,
(08:59):
he would never have taken help from the Russians or
the FBI compromised by the Russians. And see he would
never ever try to bury evidence confirming he'd taken help
from the Russians. Oh, and d he would never ever
forgive Kevin McCarthy for turning on him. However, briefly, even
if McCarthy agreed to break several laws and give forty
(09:20):
four thousand hours of January sixth security video to Tucker
Carlson so Carlson could massage it into more gas lighting fuel.
There are two developments on that story. They are not major.
The freshman congressman from Wisconsin whom McCarthy apparently had live
for him, Brian's Style has shockingly defended both himself and McCarthy. Reportedly,
(09:43):
it was Style, as chairman of the House Administration Committee,
who went to the Capitol Hill Police and demanded that
a viewing station be set up for his committee. Mind you,
so is committee and its staff could review the unreleased
January sixth video, And then, oh, what do you know?
Suddenly it was not his committee, but K Carlson's producer
(10:06):
is sitting there at the viewing station viewing. Style issued
a statement to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, quote, I support
Speaker McCarthy's decision to increase transparency for the American people.
This majority is focused on accountability, transparency, and restoring the
people's trust. Didn't say the people of which country. The
(10:30):
paper then asked specifically if Style consulted the Capitol Police
about possibly releasing the video to any member of the public.
Style answered by not answering, quote, I strongly believe we
can maintain security while increasing openness and transparency for the
American people. I gotta say that is some pretty good
(10:51):
boilerplate Republican bullshit from a freshman. He's one to keep
an eye on the other January sixth video development. If
you thought Carlson might have been chastened by the rage
over his access to the video, or by the release
of the Dominion texts that showed he not only may
or may not believe any of this crap he spouts
(11:12):
every night, but there is the distinct possibility that he
no longer knows whether he does or does not believe
any of this crap. Forget it. Carlson has in fact
doubled down and removed a few of the guardrails that
had seemed to keep him away from at least selling
his brainwashing victims on election denialism quote, it is galling
(11:33):
to be lectured about democracy by a man who took
power in an election so sketchy that some Americans don't
believe it was real. He's talking about twenty twenty and Biden.
Carlson then decided to echo one of Trump's oldest pieces
of bullshit, quote, Biden is far less popular in the
US than Putin is in Russia. How that argument works
(11:57):
even with the most moronic Fox viewer, I'll never know.
And then Howard Kurtz comes back into the Fox picture,
and I know, it is slightly comforting to know that
some people at Fox actually believe they still work in journalism.
(12:17):
Howard Kurtz, who was once with the Washington Post and
CNN and was the Washington bureau chief for The Daily Beast,
went on his little Fox News media show yesterday where
he usually complains about just the liberals, and said, quote,
some of you have been asking why I'm not covering
the dominion voting machines lawsuit against Fox involving the unproven
(12:39):
claims of election fraud in twenty twenty. It's absolutely a
fair question. I believe I should be covering it. It's
a major media story given my role here at Fox,
but the company has decided that as part of the
organization being sued, I can't talk about it or write
about it, at least for no I strongly disagree with
that decision, but as an employee, I have to abide
(13:00):
by it. One suspects Howard Kurtz will soon be talking
of his role there at Fox in the past tense,
as in I have been told I no longer have
a role here at Fox. I strongly disagree with that decision.
While Kurtz long ago forfeited the sympathies and empathies of
actual reporters or actual consumers of actual news by going
(13:21):
to work at the whorehouse. It is kind of sad
that he may soon be yet another reason that it
is absolutely past time to d platform Fox News and
put that company out of business. Stell ahead in this
(13:51):
edition of Countdown. Speaking of out of business, one major
newspaper was still publishing Dilbert by Scott Adams yesterday after
he had gone on that full white supremacist rant that
was yesterday. Today, it too has canceled his alleged comic strip,
Bye Felicia. Can you spell the words ninth and twelfth
(14:15):
as in numbering Things ninth and twelfth? If so, you
are smarter than the Florida State Department of Education. I
wish I were making this up Baseball's new pitch and
hit Clock's work surprisingly well and in an all new
and painful edition of Things I promised not to tell.
(14:36):
On one day in twenty eleven, the guy who was
going to save Current TV and the last television version
of Countdown was going to tell me how he planned
to do it, and actor she was the one who
invited me. I was going to go have coffee with
Uma Thurman. Needless to say, things came a Cropper in
(15:00):
both of those meetings things I promised not to tell.
That's next discountdown. This is countdown with Keith Olberman. Low
scripts to the news, some headlines, some updates, some snarks,
some predictions. Dateline Washington Screaming headlines. Yesterday, the Department of
(15:23):
Energy says it believes COVID nineteen originated from a laboratory leak.
Let the pearl clutching begin, and please do not read
the details of the story in which the Department adds
it believes this with quote low confidence that it's right,
while other parts of the American intelligence structure don't believe
(15:45):
this at all. Plus COVID nineteen as sleuthed out by
the Department of Energy, all those birologists and scientists and
spies from the Department of Energy. I don't know about you,
but I'm reserving judgment on just where COVID nineteen originated
until I hear it personally from the Undersecretary of Lumber
(16:09):
and floor Wax. Dateline Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. Some good
news as Friday's podcast and My Little Story of my
childhood correspondence with the far less than perfect author Royal
Dolls just beginning to circulate, his publishers decided no, we
were all right, and they were wrong. Puffin will still
(16:29):
publish its bodlerized versions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
and James and the Giant Peach and all the other
Doll novels with fringe offensive words like bald and fat
removed and other portions rewritten and clumsily, but it will
simultaneously now keep the original Royal Doll Techs in print.
Dateline Minnesota. Oh well, that's not going to happen for
(16:52):
Scott Adams. Dilbert gets his tie caught in the office shredder.
The services will be Thursday. The Minneapolis Star Tribune appears
to have been the only major American newspaper yesterday to
not drop the quote comic strip unquote after creator Scott
Adams is racist rant on YouTube in which he called
(17:12):
for quote white people to get the hell away from
black people. You know, the one in which he advocated
for resegregation. Scott can now choose a new career of
some kind. Thank you. Nancy Faust. USA Today and Gannett's
(17:47):
other three hundred papers dropped the strip, which was never
particularly funny, but it did once present an anti boss,
anti corporation point of view, and that was a kind
of daring thing to see in American newspapers. Coming to
the defense of Adams, the last man standing here, the
increasingly obvious reactionary and or fascist Elon Musk. Musk declared
(18:10):
in response to an Adam's tweet that it's the media
that's racist against whites and Asians, and so are the
elite colleges and high schools. He says, because you can
take the boy out of apartheid South Africa, but you
can't take apartheid South Africa out of the boy. This
(18:42):
is Sports Center. Wait, check that not anymore. This is
Countdown with Keith Olberman in sports. I am never pleasantly surprised.
I don't know if you know that about me, and
yet here I am having to tell you that I
am pleasantly surprised. Hats off to the picture and the hitters.
(19:05):
In the first weekend of baseball's new clock and its
anti shift rules, Yes there was one disaster about the
batter's clock, but out of a couple of dozen spring
training games, there was only one disaster the first weekend
of the thing. Almost all the other hitters were in
place with eight seconds to go on the clock, and
almost all the pitchers were in place with seven seconds
(19:27):
to go on the clock. The fielders were where they
were supposed to be in the new rule, though it
is still a dumb rule, and the games were running
about twenty five or twenty six minutes shorter than they
were a year ago, and with all the dead spaces
cut out, the disaster was the thing that made the headlines.
Of course, the Boston Red Sox and Atlanta Braves were
tied at Northport, Florida, six six in the bottom of
(19:49):
the ninth, Braves up two out bases loaded three two
count to minor league prospect Cal Conley of the Braves.
Boston's Robert Kuwayatkowski through an apparent ball four, which would
have met a game winning walk for Conley and the Braves. Instead,
the umpire leaped out from behind the plate to say
Conley did not beat the clock. It was an eight
second violation and therefore an automatic strike strike three in fact,
(20:14):
so instead of game winning ball four, it was game
ending strike three. The first weekend of this end of
spring training twenty twenty three was about Manny Machado of
the San Diego Padres. He was the first player ever
called for not being ready, and then yesterday he turned
out to be very ready, signing a new eleven years,
three hundred and fifty million dollar deal with the Padres.
(20:36):
Machado becomes the third Padre on a deal worth two
hundred and eighty million or more. He was already the
fifth on the team who will make at least twenty
million this season. Now where's that money coming from? As
we told you, the Bally Sports Regional Networks missed one
hundred and fifty million in interest payments and are expected
to go bankrupt in a month. They carry the Padres games,
(20:57):
among many others in baseball, and they carry all told
forty two MLB, NBA and NHL teams. But while the
leagues were trying to process that Warner Brothers Discovery that's
the John Malone company that is running CNN to the ground,
they told the teams that their regionals carry that it
(21:17):
is exiting the regional sports business in the next few weeks.
By Felicia. It operates the AT and T Sports networks
in Denver, Houston, and Pittsburgh and owns part of Roots
Sports in Seattle, and it has given the teams it
carries until March thirty first to reach agreement to take
their TV rights back. You know what, I got an
(21:38):
idea of baseball and the other sports that are going
to lose these deals with Warner Brothers, Discovery and Valleys,
they should go where the growth is. They should all
start podcasts ahead. He was Al Gore's business partner and
(22:06):
one of his top political advisors. He was running our
new cable news network, and he did not know what
the letters DVR stood for. And he thought he had
outsmarted the Nielsen ratings people when he bought the ratings
that only had live viewers and none of this diver
nonsense in them. Coming up on the worst day of
(22:28):
my life so far, first time for the daily route
up of the miss Grants morons undone in Kruger Effect
specimens who constitute today's worst persons in the world. The
Bronze Will Statehouse Bill HB zero zero zero nine has
now passed in Tennessee. It will make it a criminal
offense to have a drag show on public property in
(22:48):
that state. First defense is a misdemeanor. Subsequent offenses will
be a felony. Since the state Senate had already passed
its version of this monstrosity. The combined bill will now
go to the desk of Tennessee Governor Bill Lee for signature.
And it turns out that if a Governor Lee does
want to sign it, he may want to dress up
for the occasion, maybe in a cocktail dress, pearls and
(23:10):
a nice hat. That's what he appears to be wearing
in a photo on page one sixty five of the
nineteen seventy seven Franklin High School yearbook, unless that's another
Bill Lee who went to bill Lees High School in
Bill Lee's hometown in bill Lees graduating year. This was
as discovered by somebody on Reddit and tweeted out by
(23:30):
the Tennessee Holler. So is there a statute of limitations
on this hateful Republican crap? Can Governor Lee get himself
arrested for participating in a drag show in nineteen seventy seven?
The runner up Dylan Buyers, the media writer at the
website Puck. He's out with another column about CNN Worldwide
(23:50):
President and chief guy at MSNBC. We used to think
eight paced Chris licked And once again a Buyer's column
is full of excuses for these series of self defenistrations
that Lickt has overseen and accomplished at CNN. I think
this is column number thirty eight's newest quote from a
New York Times article about the Vanilla centrist Boring CNN
(24:12):
he has created. Quote. This is not Vanilla's centrist or
Boring's newest idea a newscast co hosted by Gail King
and Charles Barkley, Buyer's latest nonsense quote? Can lit capture
the lightning of a Barkley or a Don Lemon without
getting burned? Doing so requires incredibly deft, hands on management,
(24:35):
exactly the kind of management Lickt has historically excelled at
as an executive producer. Mister Byers, when was that Licht
produced Morning Joe, which was in third place on MSNBC
when he produced it, sometimes in fourth place in the
three cable network cable morning news ratings. Then Licht went
(24:56):
to CBS and produced its morning news show, which was
in third place in the three network broadcast morning news ratings.
Then he went on to produce Even Colbert's Show, which
by last year had lost twenty seven percent of its
audience and was being beaten out in the ratings by
a show from Fox News. Now, CNN is not only
in last place, but its ratings have tanked again and
(25:17):
they are now about half that of MSNBC's and MSNBC
is in full fledged panic over how it's tanking. So
this is a double tank. So let me note which
one of these failures Licked has displayed quote incredibly deft
hands on management. He got his hands on something. But
it's not management, but our winners. The Florida Department of Education.
(25:39):
That's the headquarters for the book banners. But if you're
a glass half full kind of guy, like I've always been,
you'll say, wait, what about all the books they haven't
banned in Florida? What about a list of the approved books? Well,
that list is out. It has more than three hundred
and fifty titles on it, including, ironically enough, Fahrenheit four
fifty one. Curious George is okay for high school students
(26:01):
in Florida, nineteen eighty four, hop On, pop Romeo, and Juliet,
and each is carefully listed alongside the class year for
which it's been approved. Animal Farm, for instance, is okay
for the ninth grade, or as it is spelled on
the official Florida Department of Education list at least three
dozen times nineth nineth grade ni n et. The Florida
(26:26):
State Department of Education misspelled the word ninth thirty six
times ninth. Then there's pride and prejudice in Utopia and
the twelve seasons. All of them have been approved for
seniors who are in the twelfth grade. Twelfth twe lt
(26:47):
leave off the last F for Florida the Florida Department
of Education. Well, why do we need to spell ninth
or twelfth correctly since we're trying to get all these
kids to drop out in the seventh grade or the
eighth grade. Anyway, two days worst persons and the misspelled
(27:13):
still ahead on Countdown. It was a long bad day.
It was the day I didn't have coffee with Uma Thurman. First,
in each initiation of Countdown, we feature a dog in need.
You can help. Every dog has its day. To zebulon
North Carolina, and the little tan thing that was dropped
off at the town dump was still moving as the
(27:34):
humans pulled away. It was a dog, skin and bones,
unable to walk to lift her head. Special Needs Animal
Rescue there named her Peanut. She's twenty pounds, maybe a
Retriever mixed golden lab maybe, and they were clearly starving her.
She should be about a seventy pound dog, maybe sixty pounds.
(27:56):
And yet as the rescuers came for her, she wagged
her tail. She can barely move, she wagged her tail.
They think they can her. She'll need fluids and a
lot of er care, and they need our donations. Peanut
is on giving grid com. You can find her there
or on my Twitter feeds. I thank you, and Peanut
(28:16):
thanks you. And now to the number one story on
(28:37):
the Countdown and my favorite topic, me and I saw
her on TV recently, so I flashed back and shuddered
all over again. Yes, it's things I've promised not to tell.
I suspect that until the day I actually die. No
day will have started so well with such promise, yet
ended so badly with such a clanging thud, as Wednesday,
(29:00):
July twenty seventh, two thousand and eleven did. Near midnight
two nights earlier, I had just entered my New York
apartment back from a New York Yankees game, when the
last landline telephone I ever owned began to ring. Hi
Keith it's Umah. Yeah, how many UMAs could there be?
(29:20):
It was the actress Uma Thurman. We had texted briefly,
we had never met, we had never spoken. We spoke
for ninety minutes, and she was self deprecating and vulnerable
and razors sharp and warm, and she invited me to coffee.
On the afternoon of D Day, Wednesday, July twenty seventh,
two eleven, one of the producers I had hired to
do the new version of Countdown on Al Gore's network,
(29:43):
Current TV, happened to know Uma Thurman from the gym.
Erica Ferrari was her name, and she was great, and
she and Uma Thurman had become close enough that Uma
had unloaded all her relationship issues on Erica. And the
next thing I knew, Erica was in my office explaining
to me that when she explained to Uma where she
worked and with whom, Uma said, the Keith Olberman, and
(30:05):
I was being set up for drinks or dinner or
coffee or something with Uma Thurman. So this seemed like
a good day. Then two nights earlier, we had finally
had had this marvelous, warm conversation, and Uma Thurman had
suggested coffee and Wednesday in two thirty or so in
one of the two or three places in Midtown near
(30:25):
my studio, and she text me with details and she
couldn't wait. Simultaneously with this, the CEO of the Current
TV network, Mark Rosenthal called me up and invited me
to dinner on Wednesday, July twenty seventh, twenty eleven. Not
gonna be a busy day. Al Gore and Current had
hired me even before I left MSNBC. That was what
(30:45):
that was all about. And I had met and gotten
to know everybody in the organization over the following six
months before we finally got the show on the air
in June. We got off to a good start, even
though Current TV was available only in low deaf digital cable.
On its first night, Countdown on Current beat both MSNBC's
Lawrence O'Donnell's Show and CNN's Elliot Spitzer Show, and the
(31:06):
so called demo ratings measuring viewers eighteen to fifty four.
But by July twenty seventh, twenty eleven, so like two
months later, it was evident to me that the network
was run by four kinds of people. One this CEO Rosenthal,
who used to be at MTV and knew what he
was doing. Two some dilettants who did not know how
(31:27):
to plug in a television, let alone put stuff on one.
Three co owner Al Gore, who meant well but who
had absolutely no judgment when it came to business partners.
And four in a class by himself, Gore's business partner
Joel Hyatt, who had made one superb business decision in
nineteen seventy seven that earned him billions of dollars and
(31:50):
he sold everything and then had earned him billions of
dollars again. But he had literally never gotten anything right
since nineteen seventy seven, while at the same time thinking
he had never gotten anything wrong since nineteen seven seven.
He was a liberal. Unfortunately he was a liberal Donald Trump.
What was worse was that of all these people, only
(32:12):
Mark Rosenthal understood how ruinously incompetent Joel Hyatt really was.
Rosenthal had been president of MTV from nineteen ninety six
through two thousand and four, and whatever you thought of
all those reality shows and the Real World and stuff
like that, they were successes. He knew what he was doing,
and he knew Joel Hyatt didn't. And Mark Rosenthal had
(32:36):
invited me to dinner as soon as my show was
over on Wednesday night, July twenty seven, twenty eleven, about
seven hours after I was scheduled to have coffee with
Uma Thurman as a dry run for a date, and
Rosenthal told me he had figured out how we could
in effect take control of the Current TV network away
from this Joel Hyatt and not only exploit the good
(32:58):
start Countdown had made, but build on it and make
Current TV into the liberal news network we had been
in tending to create, and new would be a success.
Dinner would be our chance for him to explain it
to me, to hatch our plan. It was a big,
big day. I think, without me going into detail, you
(33:19):
intuitively get the Uma Thurman part of what July twenty seventh,
twenty eleven was supposed to be. But I need to
put a little bit more meat on the bones of
why it was so important at Current TV. This is
who this guy Hyatt was, that same producer who was
doing her best to set up Uma Thurman and me Erica.
She walked in one day, white as the sheet of
(33:40):
paper she was carrying at arm's length, as if it
had been printed in bubonic plague she had found while
surfing around internet archives. A New York Times article about
this Joel Hyatt an article from April thirteen, nineteen ninety.
Do you remember the movie Philadelphia where the evil head
of law firm portrayed by the actor Jason Robards had
(34:02):
fired the head of his Philadelphia office play by Tom
Hanks because the Hanks character had AIDS and Hank's character
got as his lawyer, a character played by Denzel Washington. Well,
this guy who co owned Current TV with Al Gore,
he was the Jason Robard's character he had fired from
his law firm Hyatt Legal Services the head of his
(34:24):
Philadelphia office, Clarence B. Kane, after finding out Clarence B.
Kane had AIDS. In fact, reality was actually worse than
the Philadelphia movie. In real life, Clarence B. Kane was
also African American. The Time story that Erica Ferra handed
Me like it was printed on razor Blades recounted how
a federal judge had not only ordered Highatt Legal Services
(34:45):
to pay mister Kane one hundred and fifty seven thousand
dollars plus costs, but how it had ordered them to
pay him immediately, like in the next couple days. This
was harrowing enough, but the final paragraph made my head swim.
Quote what pained him most, mister Hyatt said the notion
that his firm discriminated. He noted how it had, after all,
(35:09):
named a gay black man to run one of its
major offices, something no law firm its size has ever
knowingly done. Quote what's totally lost in the shuffle is
that this is an organization in which anyone can succeed,
he said. No one has written about that. That was
this guy Hyatt in a nutshell. He fired a gay
(35:30):
black man who was dying of AIDS, but he knew
who the real victim here was himself. And it's not
like Hyatt had improved over the years. As I mentioned,
The Night Countdown premiered on Current TV June twentieth, twenty eleven.
We beat MSNBC and CNN in the ratings, but we
didn't know it. The next day, our ratings showed that
(35:50):
we had beaten CNN and just missed beating O'Donnell on MSNBC.
A few weeks later, one of those networks got a
friendly reporter to write a story about how since the debut,
our ratings on Current had sunk, which was to be
expected and which is a totally legitimate competitive thing for
the MSNBC guys to do. But the numbers were all wrong.
(36:10):
The ratings for Countdown that were included in the PROCNN
pro MSNBC story were somehow higher than the ratings we
saw every day at Current. If I'm not clear about this,
the story said that, say, on Monday July eleventh, we
had had one hundred thousand demo viewers, but our ratings,
the ratings we got from the Nielsen company, they said
(36:33):
that on Monday July seventh, we didn't have a one
hundred thousand demo viewers. We had seventy five thousand demo viewers. Well,
something was really really wrong here. So when Hyatt called
me for our weekly phone chat, I said, look, there's
something wrong with the ratings. And I explained the article
to him and he said, oh, I knew they were
going to do that, show how your ratings had dropped.
And I said, no, no, you're missing my point. They
(36:55):
say we had higher ratings than we actually did. Oh,
I knew they were going to do that too, he said,
with even more condescension. And I said, why would they
do that, why would they try to make us look better? Oh,
I knew they were going to do that too, just too.
Then there was a long pause while Joel Hyatt made
something up just to mess with us. I asked him,
(37:16):
since he had personally purchased the ratings package from the
Nielsen Company, the first ratings in the history of current TV,
if he could just review for me what he remembered
of the process. Well, I went in and made an
excellent deal. I saved two thousand dollars on their initial
price point. This man was worth a couple billion dollars.
They wanted us to buy not just the live ratings,
(37:38):
but something called live plus DIVER. I thought for a moment, Diver,
I said, you mean live plus DVR. He laughed, Yes,
that's it, Diver. What the hell is divverer? You just
use the live ratings in TV. Everybody knows that. I
(37:58):
explained to him that diver ratings were comparatively new, about
three to four years old at that point. They added
to the live rating people who would watch the show
on their DVR within twenty four hours of having recorded it.
He had bought the ratings that did not include all
of those people, so that when we got what we
thought were our ratings for our premier night, when we
(38:21):
beat CNN and almost beat MSNBC but just missed. We
didn't just miss. The ratings package this idiot Hiatt had
bought did not include anybody who watched the show on
their DVRs, and that cost us the chance to come
out and say we beat CNN and MSNBC the first
night with this crappy low death picture down on channel
one hundred and three. But more importantly, it saved this
(38:43):
billionaire idiot Hyatt two thousand dollars. So Mark Rosenthal was
taking me to dinner hours after I was to have
coffee with Uma Thurman to explain how we could get
rid of this idiot who thought DVR meant diver. Thus
(39:05):
was July twenty seventh, two eleven going to be one
of the turning points in my life. And then about
one forty five, just when Uma said she was going
to text me to tell me where to meet her
for coffee, she texted me. All right, She texted me
to explain her rehearsal was running along and she had
to postpone. And while I was reading between those lines
(39:27):
and knowing that that actually meant she was going back
with her boyfriend or her husband, or whoever he was.
A company email came into all of our inboxes, and
even before I opened it, I could hear mass groaning
coming from my newsroom, Mark Rosenthal seven hours before our
dinner to plot how to root around Joel Diver slash
(39:47):
Jason Robards in Philadelphia. Slash, I saved two thousand dollars Hyatt.
Mark Rosenthal had been fired and he had been replaced
as CEO of Current TV, effective immediately by co owner
Joel Hyatt. Well, Holy Diver. It'd be a better story
(40:10):
if I never saw Mark Rosenthal or Uma Thurman again
in my life, but it wouldn't be true. I saw
Mark many times. And then four years later, I was
at a New York recording studio doing the voice of
the newsman character Tom Jumbo Grumbo on the Great animated
series BoJack Horseman. When one of the other studio doors
opened an outstepped Uma Thurman, radiant, elegant. I introduced myself.
(40:34):
She smiled, She said she was a fan. She laughed,
and she said, you know, we must have coffee sometime.
(40:58):
Not a good day. Thank you for listening. If you're
not subscribed to the podcast already, please do so it
matters and tell somebody else about this, get them to listen.
We really haven't publicized the series at all other than
those forty three tweets a day that I put out
in the YouTube videos and all that Here the credits.
Most of the music was arranged, produced and performed by
(41:19):
Brian Ray and John Philip Channel, who are the Countdown
musical directors. Produced by Tko Brothers. All orchestration and keyboards
by John Philip Channel. Guitars based on drums by Brian Ray.
Other Beethoven selections have been arranged and performed by No
Horns Allowed. Sports music is the Oulderman theme for me
ESPN two and it was written by Mitch Warren Davis
courtesy of ESPN, Inc. Musical comments by Nancy Faust. The
(41:43):
best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer today was Kenny Maine,
and everything else is pretty much my fault. So that's
countdown for this, the seven hundred and eighty third 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,
(42:03):
I'm Keith over. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and
good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
(42:25):
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Merrick
Garland is going to appear before the Senate Judiciary day
(00:25):
after tomorrow, and it looks like there will be something
big and new and shiny to ask him about Charlie
McGonagall and Oleg Derik Posca. And when two Democratic members
of that committee pull on this McGonagall threat on Wednesday,
they hope Garland will say something that confirms that this
is a story not just about McGonagall and Derek Pasca,
(00:46):
but about McGonagall and Derek Pasca and Trump. Business Insider,
which has been running rings around the rest of the
news media combined on this story for months now now
reports that in twenty eighteen, McGonagall, either before his retirement
from the FBI or just his retirement from the FBI,
and way before his arrest, went to London to meet
(01:10):
a Russian unnamed who was under so much suspicion that
the British authorities had that Russian under surveillance. Every time
you turn around, this pile of smelly stuff involving this
guy McGonagall seems to have grown in size while you
weren't looking at it. At the end of last month,
McGonagall was arrested on charges that he was working illegally
(01:33):
for Derik Pasca in twenty twenty one and that he
traveled to London to meet with Derik Pasca. Read the
indictment and the first version of the Derrick Posca saga,
and it looks like that meeting definitely took place in
twenty twenty, maybe two nineteen, but definitely not in two eighteen,
when Derrick Fosca was still an active executive in the FBI.
(01:55):
Now he is placed in London meeting some Russian in
two eighteen, And you do not have to be a
conspiracy theorist to stay full together the different parts of
the Charlie McGonagall oleg Deripaska story to quickly ask, you
know if that Russian the British allegedly caught McGonagall meeting
with in two eighteen was Derrik Pasca, and you're still
(02:19):
in the normal behavior range. If you wonder exactly when
McGonagall started working for Derrik Pasca, and if it could
have been two eighteen, could it have actually been in
two thou sixteen, because that is clearly what the FBI
and the Department of Justice are still asking, and what
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse wants to ask Garland about on Wednesday.
(02:40):
Back to this New Business Insiders story. When the surveillance
showed their Russian whoever he was meeting with the FBI's
McGonagall in two eighteen, the British alerted the FBI legal attache,
who operated out of the American Embassy in London, whoever
the meeting was with, Whatever the meeting was for, it
(03:00):
was bad enough that it was one of the reasons
the FBI in fact began its investigation of its own
man McGonagall. If you're fuzzy on this labyrinthine story because
it has been out of the headlines for a few weeks,
the FBI investigation of Buggonagal climaxed a month than four
days ago when McGonagall was arrested on two seemingly separate
(03:22):
accusations taking money from Albanian interest while he was still
active before he retired from the FBI, and more relevant
to what they will ask the Attorney General on Wednesday
morning for allegedly illicitly working for a Russian oligarch. He
had once been in charge of investigating Derri Pasca the
same prutent friendly money man whom Paul Manafort was also
(03:45):
working for. Manafort, who was the same Manafort who was
Trump's second campaign chief in twenty sixteen, for free, while
Manafort owed Derri Pasca money. And of course Trump is
the same Trump on whose behalf mcgonagall's FBI Field office
in New York went rogue in twenty sixteen. The New
York FBI office agents who are threatening to leak insinuations
(04:08):
about the Anthony Weener laptop and Bureau director James Comey
decided to re smear Hillary Clinton eleven days before the election,
before his agents could anonymously do it for him. As
this story has evolved over the months since the arrest
of McGonagall, it has been clear that the FBI and
(04:29):
the Justice Department are not clear exactly when McGonagall started
working for Derrick Pasca, or they know, and they are
waiting for the rest of us to ask so loudly
that they just have to find out. At the start
of this month, The New York Times wrote quote prosecutors
suggested that mister McGonagall began wooing mister Derrick Pasca shortly
(04:52):
before his retirement in twenty eighteen, he helped the daughter
of an employee of mister Derrick Plasca get an internship
with the New York Police Department. According to the New
York indictment, mister McGonagall explained to another FBI official that
the girl's father was a Russian intelligence officer he wanted
to recruit, Prosecutors said. The indictment of Charlie McGonagall specifically
(05:16):
accuses him of traveling to Vienna and London to meet
this Derrick Posca, but it gives no timeframe on those
meetings and now comes the story that the meeting could
have taken place while McGonagall was still active in the
FBI and still active in the corrupted New York Field
office that actually influenced the outcome of the twenty sixteen
presidential election. Three weeks ago, tomorrow, Senator white House of
(05:39):
the Judiciary Committee wrote to Merrick Garland for details on
McGonagall and Derrick Pasca, and specifically what was being done
to investigate whether McGonagall knew about the FBI New York
Office's pro Trump dirty tricks from twenty sixteen. White House's
office says he has not heard back. At the same time,
the Judiciary chair Dick Durban also wrote Merrick Garland asking
(06:03):
for a briefing about McGonagall, and he hasn't heard back now.
Garland's appearance at the ten am Wednesday morning hearing is
per a Durban aid not in response to the letter.
He just happens to be stopping by to take general
questions as one does. Obviously, there is the small chance, underscore,
(06:25):
small underscore chance that Garland will help Durban and white
House dig up the body of the Muller investigation, which
Trump and Bill Barr so skillfully buried alive in twenty nineteen.
Because no matter how tepid Trump's bid to regain power
may seem, the ground underneath Trump within the Republican Party
(06:45):
continues to prove still fertile and welcoming and dumb. The
chair of the National Committee, Rona McDaniel, went on CNN
yesterday and said, yes, she expects that everyone seeking a
place on the Republican presidential debate stage later this year
will agree to sign a play edge supporting the eventual
(07:06):
Republican presidential nominee. That means all of them not named Trump,
including never Trumpers like Asa Hutchinson, and trying to put
space between me and Trumpers like Nicky Haley and Mike
Pompeo would have to pledge to support Trump if he's
the nominee, and McDaniel and the hapless CNN interviewer Dana
(07:27):
Bash both seemed to believe that Trump would also pledge
to support the nominee if that nominee is not Trump.
The reason Trump could still be the nominee of the
Republican Party is simple. It is as simple as Rona
McDaniel is. Who on earth would be stupid enough to
(07:50):
look at Trump and say, oh, He's going to pledge
to support the nominee even if it isn't him. And
as we know, Trump's word is as good as gold.
Who would be that stupid to believe that? Well, Dana Bash,
Rona McDaniel, and Politico. Politico headlined it's version of this story,
GOP Coroner's Trump with Debate pledge. Trump's word, especially about
(08:16):
something as vegua as a pledge, is actually only as
good as the gold coloring in his can of spray
on hair, which might be Lemon pledge. They are really
willing to believe that this time Trump will do what
he has promised. This is the whiney creature whom Rolling
Stone now reports tried to pressure at least three Disney
(08:38):
executives because he didn't like a joke Jimmy Kimmel had
made about him, while his FCC was at least nominally
investigating Stephen Colbert at the same time, and while he
wanted the Department of Justice to try to prosecute Saturday
Night Live. So you can count on Trump A, he'll
live up to a pledge and be no. Of course,
(08:59):
he would never have taken help from the Russians or
the FBI compromised by the Russians. And see he would
never ever try to bury evidence confirming he'd taken help
from the Russians. Oh, and d he would never ever
forgive Kevin McCarthy for turning on him. However, briefly, even
if McCarthy agreed to break several laws and give forty
(09:20):
four thousand hours of January sixth security video to Tucker
Carlson so Carlson could massage it into more gas lighting fuel.
There are two developments on that story. They are not major.
The freshman congressman from Wisconsin whom McCarthy apparently had live
for him, Brian's Style has shockingly defended both himself and McCarthy. Reportedly,
(09:43):
it was Style, as chairman of the House Administration Committee,
who went to the Capitol Hill Police and demanded that
a viewing station be set up for his committee. Mind you,
so is committee and its staff could review the unreleased
January sixth video, And then, oh, what do you know?
Suddenly it was not his committee, but K Carlson's producer
(10:06):
is sitting there at the viewing station viewing. Style issued
a statement to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, quote, I support
Speaker McCarthy's decision to increase transparency for the American people.
This majority is focused on accountability, transparency, and restoring the
people's trust. Didn't say the people of which country. The
(10:30):
paper then asked specifically if Style consulted the Capitol Police
about possibly releasing the video to any member of the public.
Style answered by not answering, quote, I strongly believe we
can maintain security while increasing openness and transparency for the
American people. I gotta say that is some pretty good
(10:51):
boilerplate Republican bullshit from a freshman. He's one to keep
an eye on the other January sixth video development. If
you thought Carlson might have been chastened by the rage
over his access to the video, or by the release
of the Dominion texts that showed he not only may
or may not believe any of this crap he spouts
(11:12):
every night, but there is the distinct possibility that he
no longer knows whether he does or does not believe
any of this crap. Forget it. Carlson has in fact
doubled down and removed a few of the guardrails that
had seemed to keep him away from at least selling
his brainwashing victims on election denialism quote, it is galling
(11:33):
to be lectured about democracy by a man who took
power in an election so sketchy that some Americans don't
believe it was real. He's talking about twenty twenty and Biden.
Carlson then decided to echo one of Trump's oldest pieces
of bullshit, quote, Biden is far less popular in the
US than Putin is in Russia. How that argument works
(11:57):
even with the most moronic Fox viewer, I'll never know.
And then Howard Kurtz comes back into the Fox picture,
and I know, it is slightly comforting to know that
some people at Fox actually believe they still work in journalism.
(12:17):
Howard Kurtz, who was once with the Washington Post and
CNN and was the Washington bureau chief for The Daily Beast,
went on his little Fox News media show yesterday where
he usually complains about just the liberals, and said, quote,
some of you have been asking why I'm not covering
the dominion voting machines lawsuit against Fox involving the unproven
(12:39):
claims of election fraud in twenty twenty. It's absolutely a
fair question. I believe I should be covering it. It's
a major media story given my role here at Fox,
but the company has decided that as part of the
organization being sued, I can't talk about it or write
about it, at least for no I strongly disagree with
that decision, but as an employee, I have to abide
(13:00):
by it. One suspects Howard Kurtz will soon be talking
of his role there at Fox in the past tense,
as in I have been told I no longer have
a role here at Fox. I strongly disagree with that decision.
While Kurtz long ago forfeited the sympathies and empathies of
actual reporters or actual consumers of actual news by going
(13:21):
to work at the whorehouse. It is kind of sad
that he may soon be yet another reason that it
is absolutely past time to d platform Fox News and
put that company out of business. Stell ahead in this
(13:51):
edition of Countdown. Speaking of out of business, one major
newspaper was still publishing Dilbert by Scott Adams yesterday after
he had gone on that full white supremacist rant that
was yesterday. Today, it too has canceled his alleged comic strip,
Bye Felicia. Can you spell the words ninth and twelfth
(14:15):
as in numbering Things ninth and twelfth? If so, you
are smarter than the Florida State Department of Education. I
wish I were making this up Baseball's new pitch and
hit Clock's work surprisingly well and in an all new
and painful edition of Things I promised not to tell.
(14:36):
On one day in twenty eleven, the guy who was
going to save Current TV and the last television version
of Countdown was going to tell me how he planned
to do it, and actor she was the one who
invited me. I was going to go have coffee with
Uma Thurman. Needless to say, things came a Cropper in
(15:00):
both of those meetings things I promised not to tell.
That's next discountdown. This is countdown with Keith Olberman. Low
scripts to the news, some headlines, some updates, some snarks,
some predictions. Dateline Washington Screaming headlines. Yesterday, the Department of
(15:23):
Energy says it believes COVID nineteen originated from a laboratory leak.
Let the pearl clutching begin, and please do not read
the details of the story in which the Department adds
it believes this with quote low confidence that it's right,
while other parts of the American intelligence structure don't believe
(15:45):
this at all. Plus COVID nineteen as sleuthed out by
the Department of Energy, all those birologists and scientists and
spies from the Department of Energy. I don't know about you,
but I'm reserving judgment on just where COVID nineteen originated
until I hear it personally from the Undersecretary of Lumber
(16:09):
and floor Wax. Dateline Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. Some good
news as Friday's podcast and My Little Story of my
childhood correspondence with the far less than perfect author Royal
Dolls just beginning to circulate, his publishers decided no, we
were all right, and they were wrong. Puffin will still
(16:29):
publish its bodlerized versions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
and James and the Giant Peach and all the other
Doll novels with fringe offensive words like bald and fat
removed and other portions rewritten and clumsily, but it will
simultaneously now keep the original Royal Doll Techs in print.
Dateline Minnesota. Oh well, that's not going to happen for
(16:52):
Scott Adams. Dilbert gets his tie caught in the office shredder.
The services will be Thursday. The Minneapolis Star Tribune appears
to have been the only major American newspaper yesterday to
not drop the quote comic strip unquote after creator Scott
Adams is racist rant on YouTube in which he called
(17:12):
for quote white people to get the hell away from
black people. You know, the one in which he advocated
for resegregation. Scott can now choose a new career of
some kind. Thank you. Nancy Faust. USA Today and Gannett's
(17:47):
other three hundred papers dropped the strip, which was never
particularly funny, but it did once present an anti boss,
anti corporation point of view, and that was a kind
of daring thing to see in American newspapers. Coming to
the defense of Adams, the last man standing here, the
increasingly obvious reactionary and or fascist Elon Musk. Musk declared
(18:10):
in response to an Adam's tweet that it's the media
that's racist against whites and Asians, and so are the
elite colleges and high schools. He says, because you can
take the boy out of apartheid South Africa, but you
can't take apartheid South Africa out of the boy. This
(18:42):
is Sports Center. Wait, check that not anymore. This is
Countdown with Keith Olberman in sports. I am never pleasantly surprised.
I don't know if you know that about me, and
yet here I am having to tell you that I
am pleasantly surprised. Hats off to the picture and the hitters.
(19:05):
In the first weekend of baseball's new clock and its
anti shift rules, Yes there was one disaster about the
batter's clock, but out of a couple of dozen spring
training games, there was only one disaster the first weekend
of the thing. Almost all the other hitters were in
place with eight seconds to go on the clock, and
almost all the pitchers were in place with seven seconds
(19:27):
to go on the clock. The fielders were where they
were supposed to be in the new rule, though it
is still a dumb rule, and the games were running
about twenty five or twenty six minutes shorter than they
were a year ago, and with all the dead spaces
cut out, the disaster was the thing that made the headlines.
Of course, the Boston Red Sox and Atlanta Braves were
tied at Northport, Florida, six six in the bottom of
(19:49):
the ninth, Braves up two out bases loaded three two
count to minor league prospect Cal Conley of the Braves.
Boston's Robert Kuwayatkowski through an apparent ball four, which would
have met a game winning walk for Conley and the Braves. Instead,
the umpire leaped out from behind the plate to say
Conley did not beat the clock. It was an eight
second violation and therefore an automatic strike strike three in fact,
(20:14):
so instead of game winning ball four, it was game
ending strike three. The first weekend of this end of
spring training twenty twenty three was about Manny Machado of
the San Diego Padres. He was the first player ever
called for not being ready, and then yesterday he turned
out to be very ready, signing a new eleven years,
three hundred and fifty million dollar deal with the Padres.
(20:36):
Machado becomes the third Padre on a deal worth two
hundred and eighty million or more. He was already the
fifth on the team who will make at least twenty
million this season. Now where's that money coming from? As
we told you, the Bally Sports Regional Networks missed one
hundred and fifty million in interest payments and are expected
to go bankrupt in a month. They carry the Padres games,
(20:57):
among many others in baseball, and they carry all told
forty two MLB, NBA and NHL teams. But while the
leagues were trying to process that Warner Brothers Discovery that's
the John Malone company that is running CNN to the ground,
they told the teams that their regionals carry that it
(21:17):
is exiting the regional sports business in the next few weeks.
By Felicia. It operates the AT and T Sports networks
in Denver, Houston, and Pittsburgh and owns part of Roots
Sports in Seattle, and it has given the teams it
carries until March thirty first to reach agreement to take
their TV rights back. You know what, I got an
(21:38):
idea of baseball and the other sports that are going
to lose these deals with Warner Brothers, Discovery and Valleys,
they should go where the growth is. They should all
start podcasts ahead. He was Al Gore's business partner and
(22:06):
one of his top political advisors. He was running our
new cable news network, and he did not know what
the letters DVR stood for. And he thought he had
outsmarted the Nielsen ratings people when he bought the ratings
that only had live viewers and none of this diver
nonsense in them. Coming up on the worst day of
(22:28):
my life so far, first time for the daily route
up of the miss Grants morons undone in Kruger Effect
specimens who constitute today's worst persons in the world. The
Bronze Will Statehouse Bill HB zero zero zero nine has
now passed in Tennessee. It will make it a criminal
offense to have a drag show on public property in
(22:48):
that state. First defense is a misdemeanor. Subsequent offenses will
be a felony. Since the state Senate had already passed
its version of this monstrosity. The combined bill will now
go to the desk of Tennessee Governor Bill Lee for signature.
And it turns out that if a Governor Lee does
want to sign it, he may want to dress up
for the occasion, maybe in a cocktail dress, pearls and
(23:10):
a nice hat. That's what he appears to be wearing
in a photo on page one sixty five of the
nineteen seventy seven Franklin High School yearbook, unless that's another
Bill Lee who went to bill Lees High School in
Bill Lee's hometown in bill Lees graduating year. This was
as discovered by somebody on Reddit and tweeted out by
(23:30):
the Tennessee Holler. So is there a statute of limitations
on this hateful Republican crap? Can Governor Lee get himself
arrested for participating in a drag show in nineteen seventy seven?
The runner up Dylan Buyers, the media writer at the
website Puck. He's out with another column about CNN Worldwide
(23:50):
President and chief guy at MSNBC. We used to think
eight paced Chris licked And once again a Buyer's column
is full of excuses for these series of self defenistrations
that Lickt has overseen and accomplished at CNN. I think
this is column number thirty eight's newest quote from a
New York Times article about the Vanilla centrist Boring CNN
(24:12):
he has created. Quote. This is not Vanilla's centrist or
Boring's newest idea a newscast co hosted by Gail King
and Charles Barkley, Buyer's latest nonsense quote? Can lit capture
the lightning of a Barkley or a Don Lemon without
getting burned? Doing so requires incredibly deft, hands on management,
(24:35):
exactly the kind of management Lickt has historically excelled at
as an executive producer. Mister Byers, when was that Licht
produced Morning Joe, which was in third place on MSNBC
when he produced it, sometimes in fourth place in the
three cable network cable morning news ratings. Then Licht went
(24:56):
to CBS and produced its morning news show, which was
in third place in the three network broadcast morning news ratings.
Then he went on to produce Even Colbert's Show, which
by last year had lost twenty seven percent of its
audience and was being beaten out in the ratings by
a show from Fox News. Now, CNN is not only
in last place, but its ratings have tanked again and
(25:17):
they are now about half that of MSNBC's and MSNBC
is in full fledged panic over how it's tanking. So
this is a double tank. So let me note which
one of these failures Licked has displayed quote incredibly deft
hands on management. He got his hands on something. But
it's not management, but our winners. The Florida Department of Education.
(25:39):
That's the headquarters for the book banners. But if you're
a glass half full kind of guy, like I've always been,
you'll say, wait, what about all the books they haven't
banned in Florida? What about a list of the approved books? Well,
that list is out. It has more than three hundred
and fifty titles on it, including, ironically enough, Fahrenheit four
fifty one. Curious George is okay for high school students
(26:01):
in Florida, nineteen eighty four, hop On, pop Romeo, and Juliet,
and each is carefully listed alongside the class year for
which it's been approved. Animal Farm, for instance, is okay
for the ninth grade, or as it is spelled on
the official Florida Department of Education list at least three
dozen times nineth nineth grade ni n et. The Florida
(26:26):
State Department of Education misspelled the word ninth thirty six
times ninth. Then there's pride and prejudice in Utopia and
the twelve seasons. All of them have been approved for
seniors who are in the twelfth grade. Twelfth twe lt
(26:47):
leave off the last F for Florida the Florida Department
of Education. Well, why do we need to spell ninth
or twelfth correctly since we're trying to get all these
kids to drop out in the seventh grade or the
eighth grade. Anyway, two days worst persons and the misspelled
(27:13):
still ahead on Countdown. It was a long bad day.
It was the day I didn't have coffee with Uma Thurman. First,
in each initiation of Countdown, we feature a dog in need.
You can help. Every dog has its day. To zebulon
North Carolina, and the little tan thing that was dropped
off at the town dump was still moving as the
(27:34):
humans pulled away. It was a dog, skin and bones,
unable to walk to lift her head. Special Needs Animal
Rescue there named her Peanut. She's twenty pounds, maybe a
Retriever mixed golden lab maybe, and they were clearly starving her.
She should be about a seventy pound dog, maybe sixty pounds.
(27:56):
And yet as the rescuers came for her, she wagged
her tail. She can barely move, she wagged her tail.
They think they can her. She'll need fluids and a
lot of er care, and they need our donations. Peanut
is on giving grid com. You can find her there
or on my Twitter feeds. I thank you, and Peanut
(28:16):
thanks you. And now to the number one story on
(28:37):
the Countdown and my favorite topic, me and I saw
her on TV recently, so I flashed back and shuddered
all over again. Yes, it's things I've promised not to tell.
I suspect that until the day I actually die. No
day will have started so well with such promise, yet
ended so badly with such a clanging thud, as Wednesday,
(29:00):
July twenty seventh, two thousand and eleven did. Near midnight
two nights earlier, I had just entered my New York
apartment back from a New York Yankees game, when the
last landline telephone I ever owned began to ring. Hi
Keith it's Umah. Yeah, how many UMAs could there be?
(29:20):
It was the actress Uma Thurman. We had texted briefly,
we had never met, we had never spoken. We spoke
for ninety minutes, and she was self deprecating and vulnerable
and razors sharp and warm, and she invited me to coffee.
On the afternoon of D Day, Wednesday, July twenty seventh,
two eleven, one of the producers I had hired to
do the new version of Countdown on Al Gore's network,
(29:43):
Current TV, happened to know Uma Thurman from the gym.
Erica Ferrari was her name, and she was great, and
she and Uma Thurman had become close enough that Uma
had unloaded all her relationship issues on Erica. And the
next thing I knew, Erica was in my office explaining
to me that when she explained to Uma where she
worked and with whom, Uma said, the Keith Olberman, and
(30:05):
I was being set up for drinks or dinner or
coffee or something with Uma Thurman. So this seemed like
a good day. Then two nights earlier, we had finally
had had this marvelous, warm conversation, and Uma Thurman had
suggested coffee and Wednesday in two thirty or so in
one of the two or three places in Midtown near
(30:25):
my studio, and she text me with details and she
couldn't wait. Simultaneously with this, the CEO of the Current
TV network, Mark Rosenthal called me up and invited me
to dinner on Wednesday, July twenty seventh, twenty eleven. Not
gonna be a busy day. Al Gore and Current had
hired me even before I left MSNBC. That was what
(30:45):
that was all about. And I had met and gotten
to know everybody in the organization over the following six
months before we finally got the show on the air
in June. We got off to a good start, even
though Current TV was available only in low deaf digital cable.
On its first night, Countdown on Current beat both MSNBC's
Lawrence O'Donnell's Show and CNN's Elliot Spitzer Show, and the
(31:06):
so called demo ratings measuring viewers eighteen to fifty four.
But by July twenty seventh, twenty eleven, so like two
months later, it was evident to me that the network
was run by four kinds of people. One this CEO Rosenthal,
who used to be at MTV and knew what he
was doing. Two some dilettants who did not know how
(31:27):
to plug in a television, let alone put stuff on one.
Three co owner Al Gore, who meant well but who
had absolutely no judgment when it came to business partners.
And four in a class by himself, Gore's business partner
Joel Hyatt, who had made one superb business decision in
nineteen seventy seven that earned him billions of dollars and
(31:50):
he sold everything and then had earned him billions of
dollars again. But he had literally never gotten anything right
since nineteen seventy seven, while at the same time thinking
he had never gotten anything wrong since nineteen seven seven.
He was a liberal. Unfortunately he was a liberal Donald Trump.
What was worse was that of all these people, only
(32:12):
Mark Rosenthal understood how ruinously incompetent Joel Hyatt really was.
Rosenthal had been president of MTV from nineteen ninety six
through two thousand and four, and whatever you thought of
all those reality shows and the Real World and stuff
like that, they were successes. He knew what he was doing,
and he knew Joel Hyatt didn't. And Mark Rosenthal had
(32:36):
invited me to dinner as soon as my show was
over on Wednesday night, July twenty seven, twenty eleven, about
seven hours after I was scheduled to have coffee with
Uma Thurman as a dry run for a date, and
Rosenthal told me he had figured out how we could
in effect take control of the Current TV network away
from this Joel Hyatt and not only exploit the good
(32:58):
start Countdown had made, but build on it and make
Current TV into the liberal news network we had been
in tending to create, and new would be a success.
Dinner would be our chance for him to explain it
to me, to hatch our plan. It was a big,
big day. I think, without me going into detail, you
(33:19):
intuitively get the Uma Thurman part of what July twenty seventh,
twenty eleven was supposed to be. But I need to
put a little bit more meat on the bones of
why it was so important at Current TV. This is
who this guy Hyatt was, that same producer who was
doing her best to set up Uma Thurman and me Erica.
She walked in one day, white as the sheet of
(33:40):
paper she was carrying at arm's length, as if it
had been printed in bubonic plague she had found while
surfing around internet archives. A New York Times article about
this Joel Hyatt an article from April thirteen, nineteen ninety.
Do you remember the movie Philadelphia where the evil head
of law firm portrayed by the actor Jason Robards had
(34:02):
fired the head of his Philadelphia office play by Tom
Hanks because the Hanks character had AIDS and Hank's character
got as his lawyer, a character played by Denzel Washington. Well,
this guy who co owned Current TV with Al Gore,
he was the Jason Robard's character he had fired from
his law firm Hyatt Legal Services the head of his
(34:24):
Philadelphia office, Clarence B. Kane, after finding out Clarence B.
Kane had AIDS. In fact, reality was actually worse than
the Philadelphia movie. In real life, Clarence B. Kane was
also African American. The Time story that Erica Ferra handed
Me like it was printed on razor Blades recounted how
a federal judge had not only ordered Highatt Legal Services
(34:45):
to pay mister Kane one hundred and fifty seven thousand
dollars plus costs, but how it had ordered them to
pay him immediately, like in the next couple days. This
was harrowing enough, but the final paragraph made my head swim.
Quote what pained him most, mister Hyatt said the notion
that his firm discriminated. He noted how it had, after all,
(35:09):
named a gay black man to run one of its
major offices, something no law firm its size has ever
knowingly done. Quote what's totally lost in the shuffle is
that this is an organization in which anyone can succeed,
he said. No one has written about that. That was
this guy Hyatt in a nutshell. He fired a gay
(35:30):
black man who was dying of AIDS, but he knew
who the real victim here was himself. And it's not
like Hyatt had improved over the years. As I mentioned,
The Night Countdown premiered on Current TV June twentieth, twenty eleven.
We beat MSNBC and CNN in the ratings, but we
didn't know it. The next day, our ratings showed that
(35:50):
we had beaten CNN and just missed beating O'Donnell on MSNBC.
A few weeks later, one of those networks got a
friendly reporter to write a story about how since the debut,
our ratings on Current had sunk, which was to be
expected and which is a totally legitimate competitive thing for
the MSNBC guys to do. But the numbers were all wrong.
(36:10):
The ratings for Countdown that were included in the PROCNN
pro MSNBC story were somehow higher than the ratings we
saw every day at Current. If I'm not clear about this,
the story said that, say, on Monday July eleventh, we
had had one hundred thousand demo viewers, but our ratings,
the ratings we got from the Nielsen company, they said
(36:33):
that on Monday July seventh, we didn't have a one
hundred thousand demo viewers. We had seventy five thousand demo viewers. Well,
something was really really wrong here. So when Hyatt called
me for our weekly phone chat, I said, look, there's
something wrong with the ratings. And I explained the article
to him and he said, oh, I knew they were
going to do that, show how your ratings had dropped.
And I said, no, no, you're missing my point. They
(36:55):
say we had higher ratings than we actually did. Oh,
I knew they were going to do that too, he said,
with even more condescension. And I said, why would they
do that, why would they try to make us look better? Oh,
I knew they were going to do that too, just too.
Then there was a long pause while Joel Hyatt made
something up just to mess with us. I asked him,
(37:16):
since he had personally purchased the ratings package from the
Nielsen Company, the first ratings in the history of current TV,
if he could just review for me what he remembered
of the process. Well, I went in and made an
excellent deal. I saved two thousand dollars on their initial
price point. This man was worth a couple billion dollars.
They wanted us to buy not just the live ratings,
(37:38):
but something called live plus DIVER. I thought for a moment, Diver,
I said, you mean live plus DVR. He laughed, Yes,
that's it, Diver. What the hell is divverer? You just
use the live ratings in TV. Everybody knows that. I
(37:58):
explained to him that diver ratings were comparatively new, about
three to four years old at that point. They added
to the live rating people who would watch the show
on their DVR within twenty four hours of having recorded it.
He had bought the ratings that did not include all
of those people, so that when we got what we
thought were our ratings for our premier night, when we
(38:21):
beat CNN and almost beat MSNBC but just missed. We
didn't just miss. The ratings package this idiot Hiatt had
bought did not include anybody who watched the show on
their DVRs, and that cost us the chance to come
out and say we beat CNN and MSNBC the first
night with this crappy low death picture down on channel
one hundred and three. But more importantly, it saved this
(38:43):
billionaire idiot Hyatt two thousand dollars. So Mark Rosenthal was
taking me to dinner hours after I was to have
coffee with Uma Thurman to explain how we could get
rid of this idiot who thought DVR meant diver. Thus
(39:05):
was July twenty seventh, two eleven going to be one
of the turning points in my life. And then about
one forty five, just when Uma said she was going
to text me to tell me where to meet her
for coffee, she texted me. All right, She texted me
to explain her rehearsal was running along and she had
to postpone. And while I was reading between those lines
(39:27):
and knowing that that actually meant she was going back
with her boyfriend or her husband, or whoever he was.
A company email came into all of our inboxes, and
even before I opened it, I could hear mass groaning
coming from my newsroom, Mark Rosenthal seven hours before our
dinner to plot how to root around Joel Diver slash
(39:47):
Jason Robards in Philadelphia. Slash, I saved two thousand dollars Hyatt.
Mark Rosenthal had been fired and he had been replaced
as CEO of Current TV, effective immediately by co owner
Joel Hyatt. Well, Holy Diver. It'd be a better story
(40:10):
if I never saw Mark Rosenthal or Uma Thurman again
in my life, but it wouldn't be true. I saw
Mark many times. And then four years later, I was
at a New York recording studio doing the voice of
the newsman character Tom Jumbo Grumbo on the Great animated
series BoJack Horseman. When one of the other studio doors
opened an outstepped Uma Thurman, radiant, elegant. I introduced myself.
(40:34):
She smiled, She said she was a fan. She laughed,
and she said, you know, we must have coffee sometime.
(40:58):
Not a good day. Thank you for listening. If you're
not subscribed to the podcast already, please do so it
matters and tell somebody else about this, get them to listen.
We really haven't publicized the series at all other than
those forty three tweets a day that I put out
in the YouTube videos and all that Here the credits.
Most of the music was arranged, produced and performed by
(41:19):
Brian Ray and John Philip Channel, who are the Countdown
musical directors. Produced by Tko Brothers. All orchestration and keyboards
by John Philip Channel. Guitars based on drums by Brian Ray.
Other Beethoven selections have been arranged and performed by No
Horns Allowed. Sports music is the Oulderman theme for me
ESPN two and it was written by Mitch Warren Davis
courtesy of ESPN, Inc. Musical comments by Nancy Faust. The
(41:43):
best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer today was Kenny Maine,
and everything else is pretty much my fault. So that's
countdown for this, the seven hundred and eighty third 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,
(42:03):
I'm Keith over. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and
good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
(42:25):
or wherever you get your podcasts.
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