April 23, 2024 • 51 mins
SERIES 2 EPISODE 162: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Stochastic threat number one million. Trump returns to his propaganda channel to insist that his thugs should be, quoting his online post, “allowed to protest at the front steps of Courthouses, all over the country” rather than be “rudely and systematically shut down and ushered off to far away ‘holding areas’ essentially denying them their constitutional rights.” He tells them “Rally behind MAGA. Save our country. The only thing you have to fear is fear itself.”
When THAT stochastic call to lay siege to federal buildings didn’t work (why does that sound SO familiar?) Trump tried what he thinks is smooth and subtle. “The Palestinian Protests at Columbia University have closed the college down. But the area surrounding the Courthouse in Downtown Manhattan, is closed up like a drum, with New York City’s Finest (Police) all over the place. Why not send some to Columbia… Republicans want the right to protest in front of the courthouse like everyone else.”
Again. Seems oddly familiar. Reduce law enforcement around an area Trump wants to see sacked by gangs and militias and morons ready to spring him or hang a Vice President or, who knows, kill a judge. He forgot to note “will be wild.”
Justice Juan Merchan
There is little for Justice Juan Merchan to DO about this latest threat other than to encourage the city and the state of New York to have tanks ready because frankly if Trump terrorist gangs again rise up against the government as he had them do on January 6th the only way the point is going to be made clear is if it ends with the New York Department of Sanitation having to clean them up with brooms and hoses and garbage trucks. But with Trump following yesterday's half-day in court ending with more violations of the gag order, Merchan can at least regain control of this mess by - if not jailing Trump at today's gag order hearing - at least saying: if you do it again I will revoke your jail and send you to Rikers Island. We have to grasp this nettle eventually, let's do it now.
In the long term, the ACTUAL Trump Legal headline may have come not from New York but Florida where witness exhibits in the Trump Espionage case reveal that the feds have a small coterie of witnesses close to Trump including an unidentified Person 16, clearly a senior Trump aide but not in the innermost circle, who revealed nothing less than the fact that Trump’s “people” told his valet and co-defendant Walt Nauta not to worry about the stolen documents case, that it’s not going anywhere, yet even if he were to, say, get charged with lying to the FBI, Trump will pardon him after he regains power.
B-Block (26:33) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The man Nate Silver once thought was a top-five candidate to be the next Democratic presidential nominee, Eric Adams, is down to 16% support for re-election as mayor of New York. Kevin McCarthy is surprised to learn his claim Hillary Clinton never conceded is a lie. And ESPN's policy - no, you can't be a sportscaster on one station and an advocate for a presidential candidate on another - was right. I know: I helped to author it because the day when you (or I) could is long gone. So why is today's ESPN letting Stephen A. Smith do it? Why is he campaigning for Trump on Fox News? ESPN must silence him - or fire him.
C-Block (37:32) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: So I once had an agent named Art Kaminsky who at the same time he was negotiating to extend my deal at KCBS in Los Angeles was also sending his other clients in for the job. And he ordered his partner Lou Oppenheim to NOT tell me as he literally walked out of the meeting at which KCBS told him whether or not I was staying. This all ends with them serving me with papers hours before my first SportsCenter, 32 years ago this month!
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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. Trump
is now demanding that his mobs be able to block
(00:24):
the entrances to all courthouses, all courthouses, including the one
he is in. His thug should be quoting his online post,
allowed to protest at the front steps of courthouses all
over the country, rather than be quote rudely and systematically
shut down and ushered off the far away holding areas,
(00:46):
essentially denying them their constitutional rights. He tells them rally
behind MAGA, save our country. The only thing you have
to fear is fear itself. When that stochastic call to
lay siege to federal buildings did not work, this sounds
so familiar. Trump again did what he thinks is smooth
(01:11):
and subtle. Quote the Palestinian protests at Columbia University have
closed the college down, but the area surrounding the courthouse
in downtown Manhattan is closed up like a drum with
New York City's finest parentheses police all over the place.
Why not send some to Columbia. Republicans want the right
(01:34):
to protest in front of the courthouse like everyone else. Again,
this seems oddly January sixth is familiar reduce law enforcement
around an area Trump wants to see sacked by his
gangs and his militias and his morons ready to spring him,
or to hang a vice president, or who knows, kill
(01:57):
a judge he only forgot to note, will be wild
to turn the temperature down a little bit on this.
To be fair, there is much in that of Trump
needing to delude himself that New York City is rising
in his defense, coming to his aid, defending his freedom
to break all the laws. He just can't see them
(02:19):
because the police have cordoned them off and put them
in far away holding areas, perhaps a little farm upstate.
And in his pathetic version of the Nathan Fielder gag,
he is out on the town having the time of
his life with a bunch of friends. They're all just
out of frame protesting too. There is little for Justice
(02:41):
Juan Merchon to do about this latest threat, and whether
or not it's realistic, it's another threat. It's a threat
to besiege the courthouse. There's little for Merchon to do
about it other than to encourage the city and the
state of New York to have tanks ready, because, frankly,
if Trump terrorist gangs again rise up against this government
(03:02):
as he had them do on January sixth. The only
way the point is going to be made clear this
time is if it ends with the New York Department
of Sanitation having to clean them up with brooms and
hoses and garbage trucks. But Mayor Seawan can do something
about the part of this fish that stinks literally if
(03:23):
the flatulence reports from last week are correct. Few experts
expect the judge to do this, and I know that
the judge did not shut down the first day of
defendant Jay Trump's Stormy Daniel's election interference trial with just
a little David Pecker merely to give Trump more time
to violate the gag order ahead of today's gag order
(03:44):
hearing into how many times Trump could violate the gag
order what with his busy schedule of farting and napping
and fart napping. But guess what, it has worked out
that way, hasn't it. What are they going to a
did in the last trial so he got caught line
(04:07):
pure line, and what are they going to look at
that ordered that defendant is directed to refrain from the
following making or directing others to make public statements about
known or reasonably foreseeable witnesses concerning their potential participation in
the investigation or in this criminal proceeding. So that clip
(04:27):
in which he does that against Michael Cohen is proof
of one Trump violation of the Mershan gag order at
twelve forty eight Eastern Dementia Time yesterday. Then there was
the second Trump violation yesterday, three minutes earlier, twelve forty
five Eastern Defended Time yesterday, in which Trump said Michael
Cohen was guilty of these charges, not him. The things
(04:48):
he got in trouble for were things that had nothing
to do with me. Got in trouble, he went to jail.
This had nothing to do with me. So that's two
plus in a list of supposed trial facts, a bunch
more on his campaign website, including comments about witnesses, quote
testimony of some of the most disreputable and fame thirsty
(05:10):
characters on the planet, that's three violations. There's a Trump
quote posted attributed to The New York Post. I have
a Trump hating judge with a Trump hating wife and
family whose daughter worked for Kamala Harrison now receives money
from the Biden Harris campaign. That quote links to a
photo of the judge's daughter. That's four violations of the
gag order, plus the seven that prosecutors submitted last week,
(05:34):
and two more after they submitted it last week that
occurred on Friday. At least thirteen violations of Justice Mershon's
gag order just since jury selection began in this trial.
And yet lawyers think the worst that Mershan will do
is admonish Trump. Now we can all agree on ranges
(05:56):
here and that the extremes are wrong. Death penalty, no
too much, admonishments, no too little. Trump is not just
violating the gag order. He is doing so compulsively, and
he is doing so because, as I suggested last Friday,
he is viewing this trial as he views every other trial,
(06:17):
as he views every other confrontation in his world, life
or death, him or me, them or me, the government
or me, America or me. He said as much last Friday.
The criticisms of Justice Merschan that you will hear next
are not technical. They're not about resolving things. They're not
even about the judge recusing from the case. He says,
(06:41):
the conflict has to end with the judge. It has
to end with the judge. These are deliberately chosen phrases
end the judge, and the conflict has to end with
the judge. The judge has a conflict the worst I've
ever seen, and it has to end with the judge,
(07:04):
the conflict with the judges, because that's something that he
can I know anything about. It's wrong, it's wrong. Judge
Merschan can do nothing himself about Trump having now escalated
this to ending him and to coupling that with demanding
that police be moved away from the courthouse at one
hundred Center Street so that his mobs can end him.
(07:25):
But he could right now order Trump to jail for
violating the gag order. It's not like he just started
doing it. It's not like he hasn't been warned we
will reach this point. Trump to jail sooner rather than later.
And the reluctance of any authority figure in this country
(07:45):
to cut to the chase and to do it mystifies me,
except when I again quote Jean Renlar in Rules of
the Game, as he foretells French society collapsing in self
interest even before the Nazis attacked in nineteen forty. You
see in this world. There is one awful thing, and
that is that everyone has his reasons. But Mershan can
(08:12):
regain control of this trial, and in fact, regain control
of the entire legal system's effort to put Trump behind bars,
where he should be and where he should live out
his appalling life, without sending Trump to jail. Now he
can say, you have sworn that you understood that this
gag order meant what it means, and yet you have
(08:33):
violated it thirteen dimes in the last nine days, and
if you violated a fourteenth time at any point in
the future, I will revoke your bail, and I will
put you in Riker's Island, and I will keep you
there one full week for every violation. You may now
(08:54):
return to your seat. We're going to have to grasp
this nettle, or grasp this bull by the horns, or
maybe most perfectly, grasped this bullshit by the diaper. Trump
will have to go to jail at some point. He
has to be stopped. If you want to try to
(09:16):
slow him first by all means. I don't know what
we've been doing the last three and a half years.
Seems to me we've been trying to slow him down,
But jan mere Sean and the other judges and the
other prosecutors are the ones entitled to and they are
the ones charged with the responsibility to act in defense
(09:39):
of the nation. Trump has accelerated this to where we
were in the weeks and months before January sixth. He
has wanted two judges attacked. He has wanted three prosecutors attacked.
He has made these wants public, and now he wants
and again I am quoting him, courthouses all over the
(10:02):
country unquote attacked. Trump is already attacking, metaphorically, attacking our courthouses,
and he has been attacking us for a decade. It
is time to stop him now. Parenthetically, the opening day
(10:31):
at that trial itself ended early due to religious holidays
and due to a juror's dental emergency. And he thinks
his teeth dirt. Now just wait. What little transpired, including
just perfunctory initial questioning of the perfectly named David Pecker,
did have one tangible effect. It made Trump squirm. It
(10:52):
has been years, it has been decades since he has
not been surrounded by yes men, since he's had any
idea how much he has hated and more importantly, how
much he is in danger. Breaking his carefully built bubble
may in fact be all we get out of this,
because if you didn't notice, there is a member of
the jury who somehow slipped in past prosecution objections and strikes,
(11:14):
who says he reads everything and he's on Twitter x,
but he couldn't cite one news source except for truth Social.
So ultimately this trial could wind up being hung, and
it could wind up being just about making sure Trump
spends week upon week hearing this two word message from
(11:37):
America quote you suck. For the truncated day one, it
was limited to opening statements in which the defense called
Trump a person just like you and just like me,
and a family man, even though no member of his
many families has been at the trial at all, and
(11:59):
the original event that precipitated all this was him banging
a porn star right while wife three was still nursing
child five. He's a family man. He hates his family,
just like you and I do. The prosecution emphasized Trump
is on trial for election interference, not hush money, and
(12:21):
the American media largely continues to be unable to comprehend
the distinction. CNN still yesterday last night. I presume this
morning running banners in which they title this hush money trial.
Then again, that is a network that on Friday showed
a live suicide outside the Trump courtroom and boasted about
(12:42):
it and boasted about its own superior coverage, even though
you are not supposed to show live suicides on the
air because that might encourage suicide, and also because the
viewers at home might be horrified by it. But they
did it really well, even though their anchor on the
scene first called it an active shooter situation, and then,
(13:03):
during her breathless and gore or play by play faster
than somebody calling a horse race, she twice insisted the
man who went there to get exactly the kind of
coverage CNN gleefully provided for his death had quote emblazoned himself.
He's emblazoned himself, she said, even though the word emblazoned
(13:24):
means to put a logo or insignia on something. So
I don't know why I'm expecting CNN to understand what's
actually going on at the Trump trial. I guess I'm
just grateful that CNN did not make a your fired
joke incredibly long term anyway, the actual Trump legal headline
from yesterday may have not come from New York, but
(13:44):
rather Florida, where witness exhibits in the Trump espionage case
reveal that the FEDS have a small coterie of witnesses
close to Trump, including an unidentified Person sixteen, clearly a
senior Trump aide but not necessarily in the innermost circle,
who revealed nothing less than the fact that Trump's people
(14:04):
told his valet and now co defendant Walt Naude, not
to worry about the stolen documents case, that it was
not going anywhere yet, just in case, even if he
were to say, get charged with lying to the FBI,
Trump will pardon him after he regains power. Person sixteen,
the guy who identified this information, was so spooked by
(14:27):
what he knows and the prospect of retribution, and the
sheer number of non disclosure agreements he had signed, that
while he fulsomely revealed what he knows, he would not
let the FBI record the interview. He also revealed that
Trump routinely took documents from the Oval office to his
White House residence, and yes, he had heard Trump declassify
(14:48):
one set of them, the ones pertaining to the FBI
investigation of Trump's links to Russia as to the universal
standing order to declassify anything Trump ever touched or just
looked at or blinked about twice. Nope, says Person sixteen.
Never happened. But Nowada stuff is critical. If Trump ever
(15:11):
goes to trial in Florida, he's meat because on top
of everything else, they can easily break this nauda and
then they can get Trump for a little bit of
witness tampering. Let's run some of the other headlines. I
got Biden's next campaign ad for him courtesy of this
(15:33):
Jesse Waters ass from Fox. At least I think he's
still with Fox. He might not be now. He used
to be Bill O'Reilly's henchman. Not as smart as O'Reilly,
not nearly, but he may be unemployed once the furor
here's that little Jesse Waters said this about Trump. The
guy needs exercise. He's usually golfing, and so you're gonna
(15:56):
put a man who's almost steady sitting in a room
like this on his butt for all that time. It's
not healthy. You know how big of a health nut
I am. He needs sunlight, and he needs activity, he
needs to be walking around, he needs action. It's really
cruel and unusual punishment to make a man do that.
I'm Joe Biden and I approved this message. Also coming
in the future. Good evening. I'm Tucker Carlson. This is
(16:17):
Tucker Carlson Tonight. Jesse Waters. Jesse Waters who one point
again to emphasize among people who think they are both
too old, it is Biden sixty one, Trump thirteen in
the polling. All you have to do is drag up
the Trump is too old number. Apparently it's already worked
(16:40):
with Jesse Waters. He may be as dumb as the
average Trump Republican. Also, Politico lost without video to steal
and show, has resorted to demonstrating key events of the
Trump trial in New York by using bobblehead dolls. I
have bad news for Politico on this. I used bobblehead
(17:06):
dolls to demonstrate because we could not get video, We
could not put our cameras in the meetings to demonstrate
the activities of the National Football League Players Association and
its ownership its management council during the NFL player strike
of nineteen eighty two. I don't want to say using
bobbleheads when you can't get video is an old bit,
(17:28):
but I did it when I was twenty three years old,
and more importantly, when CNN was two years old, back
when we didn't show live suicides and say, oh, this
will win us an emmy, bring his ashes with us.
Bennie Thompson has offered legislation, introduced it in the House.
(17:51):
Anybody convicted of a felony with a term of at
least one year, guess what happens to their secret Service
protection all they forfeited. Oh, Benny, it's not going to pass. Obviously,
although we said that about Ukraine, didn't we It's not
going to pass. And anyway, even if it did pass, somehow,
(18:12):
I'm sure Trump's secret Service agents would volunteer to go
to prison with him anyway. Late polling from NBC Trump
forty six, Biden forty four, but Biden thirty nine, Trump
thirty seven, Kennedy thirteen, Stein three, West two. In other words,
(18:34):
some kind of shift has taken place, and the third parties,
or in this case, the third, fourth, and fifth parties
are now taking votes away more from Trump than from Biden,
which we saw coming, if you will remember, long before
it was evidenced, than any of the polling. Trump attacked
Kennedy so expect much more of that, and somebody needs
(19:00):
to get ahold of Cornell West and explain to him
how badly history will judge him for this, and call
Jill Stein in Moscow. The other thing from the NBC
News poll that is fascinating. It turns out that only
NBC has asked this question in a two form fashion,
(19:21):
what's most important? What's the most important issue? And the
same answers keep coming back. Inflation twenty three percent, cost
of living and then immigration slash the border at twenty
two percent, So it's what's the most important issue? Inflation
and the cost of living twenty three percent, then immigration
(19:42):
and the border twenty two percent. And then they asked
the question in a different way, what's the most important
issue in determining your vote? Twenty eight percent said high number.
Twenty eight percent said protecting democracy or constitutional rights, Immigration
(20:02):
and the border second at twenty f percent, abortion third
at nineteen percent. So, in other words, not asking what
do you think generically is the most important issue of
the day, but what are you going to base your
vote on? Forty seven percent said protecting democracy or constitutional
rights or abortion rights. That's the key, not who's leading
(20:26):
in the polls. Here is, though, a story that would
lead the news in any other timeline, in any other
moment in American history. The Republican Congressman Tony Gonzalez quote
Matt Gates, he paid miners to have sex with them
at drunk parties. There's a second version of this quote,
he paid miners to have sex with him at drug parties.
(20:49):
Oh well, that's much better. Speaker of the House, Mike
Johnson will campaign today alongside Congressman Tony Gonzalez. I am
beginning to I think Mike Johnson sometime last week was
hit by lightning, but in a good way. Keep them
(21:20):
in office, hell make him a Democrat. Also of interest here,
once upon a time you could be on one network
and talk politics and advocate even for one party on
that one network, while on your sixth day of work
you were also on another network talking sports utterly a politically.
And let me tell you from personal experience, that time
(21:41):
when you could do that. That ended in the year
twenty ten, and it especially ended at a place called ESPN.
And I know because I helped write the rules saying
you could not do politics in one place while you
were on ESPN in the other place. So why is
(22:01):
ESPN now letting its most prominent on air personality openly
campaign for Trump? This will end in tears for everybody.
Why ESPN has two choices? Silence Stephen a Smith or
fire Stephen a Smith. That's next. This is countdown. This
(22:24):
is countdown with Keith Olberman still ahead of us on
(22:50):
this all new editiontive countdown. So somebody asked me the
other day if I knew a sportscasting agent named Lou Oppenheim,
And it was like the old joke about the guy
saying Niagara falls and the second guy turns around and
loses his mind. Niagro falls slowly. I turned, step by step,
(23:10):
not that Lou Oppenheim was the worst party of the
story in which his business partner was supposedly negotiating a
new deal for me at my employers at CBS in
nineteen ninety one, while he was also sending CBS tapes
of other clients in hopes of getting them my job
that he was still negotiating for. But Lou was part
(23:31):
of it. You gotta hear this story. It involves me
also getting served with court papers the night of my
first ever sports center. Next on things, I promised not
to tell first. Still more new idiots to talk about
the daily roundup of the miscrants, morons, and Donning Kruger
effects specimens, including two sports guys who have not succeeded
(23:52):
in transforming into news guys who constitute two days worst
persons in the world Crinklitus Days the bronze worse Nate Silver,
who started in sports metrics and moved into political metrics
in large part because I put him on TV talking
about political metrics oops to say oops and get out.
(24:14):
I really thought he would be satisfied as the master
of the numbers. But I guess no one is satisfied
as the master of the numbers. On January third, twenty
twenty two, Nate Silver tweeted, quote, It's probably foolish to
think a New York City mayor will successfully translate into
being a national political figure. But I still think Eric
Adams would be in my top five for who will
(24:36):
be the next Democratic presidential nominee after Joe Biden. My man,
you left off a couple of zeros after that five,
your top five hundred, your top five thousand, new polling
from the Manhattan Institute, Who you vote for in the
next New York City mayor's election, Mayor Eric Adams sixteen percent.
Sixteen sixteen percent said yes to Merk Adams. Somebody else
(25:01):
sixty five percent. AHw I heard that phrase, ie watering numbers.
Well here they are. I can't see the page. Sixty
five somebody else, anybody else, for God's sakes, one of
the horses in Central Park. I don't care, a manhole
cover whatever, Maybe a Republican Not sure, so it still
could be somebody other than Adams nineteen more percent. So
(25:25):
right now it's Adams sixteen not Adams eighty four. Wait,
it gets worse. How far underwater are his favorable unfavorable
impression numbers? His favorable minus his unfavorable with Democrats. With Democrats,
he's at minus thirty five, and that is his best
party demographic. Among New Yorkers in their thirties, he's minus
(25:49):
seventy four eighteen to twenty nine year olds minus sixty eight,
forty to forty nine year olds minus sixty eight, among
black voters minus eleven, people more than two hundred and
six years old, minus twenty two. How's that possible? I
made that one up, and it all may be worse
than that because those are just disapprove or approved. The
(26:10):
percentage that strongly disapproves of Eric Adams is forty six percent.
The percentage that strongly approves of Eric Adams, great job,
mayor great job four percent? Fool good call Nate Silver
the runner up worse Kevin McCarthy, especially in the context
(26:30):
of Mike Johnson, likely to be X speaker at least
ex Republican because he actually stood up for something on
principle at last, we can fully see what a human
jellyfish Kevin McCarthy is. Goes on Fox, calls the Democrats
the dangers to American democracy, and his evidence quote, I
mean Hillary Clinton ever said she lost the twenty sixteen election.
(26:52):
The surprised host says, yeah, she called Trump and conceded.
McCarthy makes a dismissive sound like and says, but she
never said it to the press. She called the night
of his election. She made the public concession speech the
next day, November ninth, twenty sixteen. It was in all
of the papers. Kevin McCarthy, Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot.
(27:14):
You don't know how to freaking read. But our winners
the worst Stephen A. Smith and ESPN We had a
hard and fast rule. There you're on ESPN, no party politics,
no endorsements of candidates, no electioneering. You know who wrote
that rule. I wrote that rule. You know why, because
(27:37):
I actually believe in the separation of politics and sportscasting,
not politics and sports. If athletes are going to go political,
you can cover them doing it. You kind of have
to sometimes, but don't you do it. Aaron Rodgers gets
strung out on something and starts spewing conspiracy theories on ESPN. No,
you probably should not have given him that platform to
(27:57):
do it, but regardless, you then have to cover it.
You have to explain he's gone nuts. But sportscasters campaigning,
not reporting on Colin Kaepernick, not recording and reporting on
transgender athletes, but reporting and making a choice of Biden
or Trump. Nobody wants that mix, least of all the
(28:22):
ESPN talent who would do it. They don't really want it.
The ESPN management who would permit it, they don't want it.
And yet they are letting Steven A. Smith, who makes
millions of dollars as the man in television most gifted
in saying the least amount of stuff taking up the
most amount of time, who kills off hours a day
between ESPN gambling advice without ever advancing the story or
(28:47):
explaining a team dynamic or improving anybody's knowledge about anything
in sports. Who thus deserves every penny he makes. They
are letting him go on Fox News and campaign for
Donald Trump campaign on Sean Hannity's show On with Sean Hannity.
One of the people who has most damaged the United
(29:08):
States of America could not have done more damage if
he were Vladimir Putin. Stephen A. Smith goes on with
Hannity and tells him about Trump. Quote. Black folks find
him relatable because of when he said, what he is
going through is similar to what black Americans have gone through.
He wasn't lying. Spoiler alert, Stephen A. Trump is lying.
(29:31):
He's always lying. Quote. He was telling the truth. When
you see the law, law enforcement, the court system, and
everything else being exercised against him, it is something that
black folks throughout this nation can relate to. With some
of our historic iconic figures. Steven, you just insulted all
of your historic iconic figures and all of mine and
(29:52):
all of Americas and you're a useful idiot. The law
is being exercised against Trump, whatever the f that means,
it's being exercised against him because he keeps breaking the law.
He has broken the law to try and stall in
the dictatorship in this country. One I might add that
if he succeeds in the fall, we'll repress minority groups
(30:14):
and the media way more than everybody else. You and
me are going to the camps under Dictator Trump, Stephen,
and it got worse. Quote. We've seen that happen throughout society.
So no matter what race, what ethnicity you may emanate from,
we relate to you when you're suffering like that because
we know we have ESPN in the last decade has reprimanded, suspended, demoted,
(30:40):
and dismissed on air people who said far less propagandistic things,
who didn't do one percent of the damage Stephen A.
Smith just did to ESPN, who hit far fewer political
party talking points and who didn't come anywhere as close
to what Steven A. Smith just did there, go on
national television on a propaganda network from hell like Fox
(31:00):
and come up with excuses for a criminal like Donald
Trump and his crime times and figuratively hug Donald Trump
and Sean haddity f you, Steven A. Smith. Bluntly, I
have been associated with ESPN longer than anybody now running
it or Smith. I also think my credentials on trying
to balance sports and politics are better than anybody in
(31:22):
the business, including management and Stephen A. Smith. This is
not two thousand and eight. I just barely got away
with it in two thousand and eight. By twenty ten,
the National Football League said I couldn't do it anymore.
They forced me off NBC's Football Night at America. To
the executives at ESPN letting Smith do this, you are
going to inherit the wind, Bob Iger. I have known
(31:45):
you since nineteen seventy nine. They will fire you over
this someday. Just because many of you agree with him
and want to suck up to Trump. Just in case,
does not mean your predecessors were wrong. Embrace party politics
as opposed to cultural issues or sports issues with political impact.
(32:05):
Embrace Trump versus Biden, and I'd say this if you
were embracing Biden and ESPN will die and Stephen you
and I have always gotten along well personally, so I
am saying this and hopes you will take it this way.
Drop the politics. Do it now. You cannot be on
ESPN and do Trump commercials simultaneously. Do it or kiss
(32:29):
your sports career goodbye? And more importantly, all that money
you have to go to the bank to count every
once in a while, you can kiss that goodbye too.
It doesn't work anymore. If it worked anymore, I'd still
be at ESPN doing it. Stephen A. Smith campaigning for
Trump and ESPN letting him campaign for Trump two days.
(32:50):
Worse persons in the world to the number one story
on the Countdown and my favorite topic, me and things
I promised not to tell. And somebody invoked his name
(33:13):
the other day asked me about a television agent named
Lou Oppenheim. I only met I think Lou Oppenheim once.
It was not a particularly memorable meeting. But Lou Oppenheim
is in the middle of one of the great stories
of my career, at least in terms of agents who
(33:35):
have represented me. I had one agent for pretty much
all of the nineteen eighty three to two thousand and
ten era of my broadcasting career, and I've had several
of them since then. But in the middle of nineteen
ninety one, my then colleague Jim Lampley at KCBS in
(33:56):
Los Angeles said I don't think your agent is big
time enough to advance you further in your career. Well,
Lampley had worked for years at ABE Television, he was
at the network, and I at the age of thirty
two and doing pretty well at KCBS in Los Angeles,
certainly financially and in the ratings compared to the ratings
that the rest of the station had, but not doing
(34:17):
well in terms of establishing any kind of national presence
in sportscasting. I wanted to do as well nationally as
Lampley had, so Lampley said, I should fire my agent
and hire this guy, Arthur Kaminsky. He was the head
of a company called Athletes and Artists, or as I
later referred to them, Athletes and con Artists. I'll explain
(34:41):
to you right now that it turned out. I found
out the following year that Art Kaminsky had sought me
as a client, not because he wanted to represent me,
not because Lampley had suggested it, but because Art Kominsky
was like me, a sports memorabilia collector, and he assumed
I could get him a good price on a set
of nineteen fifty five Tops Football cards. The high end
(35:06):
of this set of nineteen fifty five Tops Football cards
in the year nineteen ninety one was maybe two thousand dollars.
He thought I could get it for him for about
fifteen hundred. That's why he wanted to represent me, and
that was apparently the only reason he wanted to represent me.
Needless to say, this did not go well, and this
is how not well it went. Although they were paying
(35:28):
me half a million dollars when I was thirty two
years old, and particularly in nineteen ninety one, that went
a long way. I was not particularly happy at KCBS
Channel two in Los Angeles because the station was a graveyard.
It had been in last place in the ratings since
about nineteen oh seventy five or so, and would be
(35:49):
well into the late nineties if I remember correctly. They
had hundreds, perhaps of broadcasters, all of whom succeeded elsewhere,
who did not succeed there. If you remember the morning
newsreader on the Today Show and Curry, she was with
me at KCBS, all kinds of anchors. Jim Forbes behind
(36:10):
the music. Jim Forbes was a reporter for US, the
guy from whichever one of those tabloid shows. Harvey Levin,
he was one of our reporters. It was a great
staff and lousy management. I wanted to get out of
there anyway, but there didn't seem to be the right
job anywhere. I wanted to work in my hometown of
New York, and I thought Kaminsky could help me there,
(36:30):
or at least I wanted Kaminsky to talk the management
of Channel two in LA into picking up my option
for the rest of my contract. I'd been there for
three years in about three months, and I had two
years to go, and it was their option, and it
was another half a million dollars a year. And even
then I realized that being paid half a million dollars
(36:50):
a year to do like three sports casts a day
and maybe an hour over the weekend was pretty damn
good money for not a lot of work. So Kaminsky's
job became to try to get me a job in
New York, or to get me my job in LA,
to get them to pick up the option. I'll spare
you what he did and did not do in terms
(37:12):
of getting me the job in New York. Ultimately, I
suggested something to him, and he said, I would never
do that. It would reflect badly on me, and I
was like, what are you talking about. I had volunteered
to work at union scale in a new job in
New York for a period of time, and if the
station didn't like me, they could get rid of me,
or they could pay me competitively. That would be just
(37:35):
beneath my dignity. So as the months went on, it
became evident that there really were only three possibilities for
my employment for the year nineteen ninety two. The possibility
of a job in San Diego, which would have cost
almost as much as Los Angeles in terms of cost
of living and paid about one third something like that,
(37:56):
or staying at Channel two in Los Angeles, or going
to ESPN, which I didn't really want to do because
I was living in Beverly Hills and there was no
humidity and no winter. And guess what. ESPN was not
anywhere near Beverly Hills, and it didn't pay that well.
(38:16):
It only paid about thirty five or forty percent of
what the job in Los Angeles paid in any event,
So now Kaminski worked on getting me to retain my
job somehow, some redirection or promise or to make the
shows more appealing to eighty year old women who watched
Channel two in Los Angeles at four o'clock in the
(38:36):
afternoon and then our newscast at five, or whatever it
is they had in mind. One day he told me
that his partner at Athletes and con Artists, a man
named Lou Oppenheim, was going to be in Los Angeles
when he normally was in New York, and was going
to meet with the general manager and the news director
of KCBS to find out and to convince them about
(38:59):
my option. That he would come out of that meeting
and be able to tell me whether or not I
was going to stay there and not have to sell
my condo and take a significant salary loss and possibly
not have to move to Bristol, Connecticut. The day came,
I saw Oppenheim on the way in. I greeted him
at the door. I walked him down the hallway and
(39:20):
I said, make sure you stop by before you leave.
And as the hours went on, I saw the general
manager of the television station in the hallway somewhere, meaning
the meaning had been concluded. And then as I was
walking to my office there I saw in the distance
coming down the hallway. Who else but Lou Oppenheim, And
I said, Lou, what happened? And he began to run
(39:43):
towards me and passed me. I can't talk right now.
I'm late for the airport. I said, what do you mean?
I just need to know. Am I give me a
head start on putting my house up on the market.
Am I staying or going? I can't go. I can't
talk to you now. I have to go back to
and he was gone. He had the answer. He had
been told by the general manager whether my contract option
(40:04):
was going to be picked up or not, and he
wouldn't tell me now. I later found out that he
wouldn't tell me because this was on the instructions of
his partner, Kominski. Kaminsky is now dead, so he can't
really defend himself in this story. But when he was alive,
he couldn't defend himself either, because he was a schmuck.
What Art Kaminsky was doing was keeping this information to himself,
(40:26):
namely that my option was not being picked up at
KCBS in Los Angeles, and thus there was a number
one sportscasting job open in Los Angeles. And he saw
this now as one thing and one thing only, not
representing me and my next job or letting me know
about what was now going to be my soon to
be ex job. He saw this as an opportunity for
(40:49):
him Art Kaminsky, to put another one of his clients
in my job while I still had it, and he
was still arguing theoretically for me to stay there, and
we're talking about, I believe maybe September or October of
nineteen ninety one, and I still had a contract through
January first of nineteen ninety two. I was going to
(41:10):
be a lame duck and did not even know it.
One day, during the Baseball Playoffs, which were on CBS
at the time, I was in the news director's office,
it was given to us as the viewing room for
the pre and postgame shows that we were producing four
Channel two in Los Angeles for the Baseball playoffs in
the World Series. Unlike most sporting events in Los Angeles,
(41:35):
the problem with TV broadcasts of the NFL or Major
League Baseball, NBA, NHL anything at all. The games don't
end too late. In Los Angeles and the rest of
the West Coast. They end too early. A World Series
game that does not shut down till eleven thirty or midnight.
Eastern time is over at nine o'clock. That's two hours
(41:56):
to kill until you can go to the eleven o'clock news.
So we would fill it with a postgame show, a
locally produced postgame show with me and a then active
baseball player. We had Wally Joyner from the California Angels,
my longtime friend. He did it one year. Danny Tartable
who had been with the Kansas City Royals and the
Seattle Mariners. We had Rick Dempsey who was then with
(42:19):
the Los Angeles Dodgers. We had all kinds of people,
and we did this for all sports. We did this
for the NFL and the NBA and Major League Baseball.
And one day, as we're sitting there watching the baseball
playoff games in the news director's office with the biggest
TV we could find to watch this, my partner, my
analyst for the postgame shows, was a guy who was
(42:41):
pitching for the Saint Louis Cardinals and had aspirations to
become a broadcaster and became one named Joe McGrain. And
Joe McGrain suddenly began to look around the news director's
office and I saw his head tilt over at about
ninety degrees, which is a very unusual position to see
another human being keep his head in. And Joe and
(43:02):
I had gotten along pretty well at that point. I
didn't know each other that well, but we were friends
for a very long time thereafter. And Joe was now
looking at a series of tapes. This is during the
commercials between innings of the World Series game, and he's
looking at the tapes, the boxes of tapes on the
news director's desk, and he's looking at them sideways because
(43:22):
they're labeled vertically rather than horizontally. And he says, huh,
Hanna a Storm. And I said, Hannah Storm. There's a
tape of Hannah Storm on my news director's desk. He said, yeah,
what do you know about her? And I said, she's
one of Art Komensky's other clients. And he said, well,
(43:45):
over here, there's that's this Jimmy Cephalo And I said,
Jimmy Cephalo is another one of Art Kaminsky's clients. Well,
this went on for quite a while. It turned out
there were about a dozen tapes on the news director's
desk of other Art Kaminsky clients. For my job while
I was represented by Art Comment and his partner Lou Oppenheim,
(44:09):
had literally pushed me aside, so he did not have
to tell me that my contract was not being renewed.
Needless to say, even though mister Kominsky had been negotiating
my job with ESPN my next job with ESPN, I
shortly thereafter fired him, but not before I called him
up and screamed at him, which was the least he
deserved from me. Other people have had exceptional experiences with
(44:32):
Art Kominsky and made a lot of money thanks to
his involvement. I was not one of those people. In
any event, At some point Kaminsky said he didn't want
to talk to me anymore, and the discussion of what
was going to happen to me at KCBS should be
handled by the third sports agent in his stable of agents,
(44:55):
Alan Sanders. This is nineteen ninety one. In nineteen eighty three,
eight years previously, Alan Sanders had been my int at
CNN Sports in New York. He had just gone into
the agentine game, and he had, in fact, a few
weeks previously, actually driven me up from my folks house
(45:15):
outside of New York City up to ESPN and Bristol, Connecticut,
the first time I'd ever been there to have an
interview and look around, and he drove me back and
he was a great guy. And I always got along
well with Alan, and we have crossed paths several times
since then. I had nothing at all bad to say
about Alan Sanders. On the other hand, I did point
(45:36):
out that this was really kind of rubbing it in
that Kaminsky here not only did not permit his partner
lou Oppenheim to tell me the truth in real time
and actually avoid me and push me out of wait,
don't push me out of the way, just say yes
or no or thumbs up or thumbs down. I gotta go.
(45:58):
But then on top of that, Kaminsky would not talk
to me about this subject. He said Alan would, And
I said, I don't think that's appropriate, Arthur, I think
you should do it, whereupon Arthur Kaminsky turned around and
holding the phone away from his own mouth, shouted, Hey,
Alan Alderman doesn't think you're important enough to tell him
(46:19):
he's been fired by CBS. So when I then finalized
my deal to go to ESPN, and you know what
happened there for the year nineteen ninety two. I called
up several people there who were the ones who hired me,
and I said, listen, I'm no longer represented by Art Kaminsky.
(46:39):
I'm represented again by Gene Sage, who was the woman
who had represented me before I made the mistake of
dismissing her and hiring Arthur Kaminsky. And these people said, oh,
thank god. Here. I know we told you we couldn't
pay him more than whatever it was, one hundred and
ninety thousand dollars. I know we told you that, but
here's another twenty thousand dollars, just because we're all so
(47:02):
grateful that we don't have to deal with that dick Kaminski.
And I actually said, no, his name is Arthur. So
I was a little honked off about Komensky. And I
figured that if anybody ever heard this story, his stature
as a business agent in hockey, which was his other thing,
or broadcasting, would be diminished somewhat. And so I figured
(47:26):
we'd just let this go and Gene Sage would be
my agent at ESPN. And I, by the way, was
not going to pay Arthur Kaminsky a dime of my
ESPN contract. Sure enough, I go to work at SportsCenter
and in fact start earlier than planned. I was supposed
to take three months off and go to Hawaii. In fact,
they needed me to go back there and launch the
(47:47):
radio network early at ESPN, and so I did not
get my time off, and I moved there earlier than planned,
and I started on Sports Center maybe a week earlier
than originally planned, which was about the opening day of
the two thousand, or rather the nineteen hundred and ninety two.
It's a long time ago base all season, so I
started a little early. And as I'm sitting there writing
(48:09):
my first script and going, well, it's not the first
place I'd choose to live. But as Lampley himself once said,
look at it this way, you will be married to
your audience. There's very little you can do to screw
it up. I thought it was an interesting analogy, but anyway,
we'll let that one pass. As I was doing that,
(48:29):
there was a call from the front desk saying that
there was somebody downstairs to see me. Well, I was
naive enough to go downstairs to see who it was,
and a man I'd never met stood there at the
main desk at ESPN and said, are you Keith Olderman,
and I said yes, and he said you've been served,
(48:51):
and he handed me a lawsuit from Arthur Kaminski seeking
the something like ten thousand dollars that I would have
owed him if he had actually been my agent at ESPN.
That was Lou Oppenheim's partner. I am led to believe
(49:12):
Lou was forced to do everything he did. Nevertheless, I
did just want to put this one on the record
because as I told the story to the person who
asked about Lou Oppenheim, they went into hysterics at every
little stage of this story. So there it is. The
Lou Oppenheim. I can't tell you the truth because my boss,
(49:34):
Arthur Kaminsky told me not to story. If you're looking
for an agent in the field of sports broadcasting, I
can only give you this advice. I have no advice whatsoever.
(50:02):
I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank
you for listening. Countdown musical directors Brian Ray and John
Phillip Schanel arranged, produced and performed most of our music.
Mister Ray was on guitars, bass and drums. Mister Chanelle
handled orchestration and keyboards. It was produced by TKO Brothers.
Other music, including some of the Beethoven compositions, were arranged
and performed by the group Noah Horns Elude. Suddenly I
(50:23):
became Scandinavian perfumed. The sports music is the Olberman theme
from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis curtisyvespn inc.
Our satirical and fifty musical comments are by Nancy Faust,
the best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer today was
my friend Larry David, and everything else was pretty much
my fault. So that's countdown for this the one hundred
(50:44):
and ninety seventh day until the twenty twenty four presidential election,
and the two hundred and fourth day since Diaper j
Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of
the United States. Use the fourteenth Amendment and the not
regularly given elector objection option. Use the Insurrection Act, You
use the justice system, use the mental health system, use
(51:08):
the recyclable diaper system to stop him from doing it
again while we still can. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow.
Bulletins as the news warrants till then, I'm Keith Oulreman.
Good morning, Good Afternoon, good Night, and good Luck. Countdown
(51:38):
with Keith Olreman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Trump
is now demanding that his mobs be able to block
(00:24):
the entrances to all courthouses, all courthouses, including the one
he is in. His thug should be quoting his online post,
allowed to protest at the front steps of courthouses all
over the country, rather than be quote rudely and systematically
shut down and ushered off the far away holding areas,
(00:46):
essentially denying them their constitutional rights. He tells them rally
behind MAGA, save our country. The only thing you have
to fear is fear itself. When that stochastic call to
lay siege to federal buildings did not work, this sounds
so familiar. Trump again did what he thinks is smooth
(01:11):
and subtle. Quote the Palestinian protests at Columbia University have
closed the college down, but the area surrounding the courthouse
in downtown Manhattan is closed up like a drum with
New York City's finest parentheses police all over the place.
Why not send some to Columbia. Republicans want the right
(01:34):
to protest in front of the courthouse like everyone else. Again,
this seems oddly January sixth is familiar reduce law enforcement
around an area Trump wants to see sacked by his
gangs and his militias and his morons ready to spring him,
or to hang a vice president, or who knows, kill
(01:57):
a judge he only forgot to note, will be wild
to turn the temperature down a little bit on this.
To be fair, there is much in that of Trump
needing to delude himself that New York City is rising
in his defense, coming to his aid, defending his freedom
to break all the laws. He just can't see them
(02:19):
because the police have cordoned them off and put them
in far away holding areas, perhaps a little farm upstate.
And in his pathetic version of the Nathan Fielder gag,
he is out on the town having the time of
his life with a bunch of friends. They're all just
out of frame protesting too. There is little for Justice
(02:41):
Juan Merchon to do about this latest threat, and whether
or not it's realistic, it's another threat. It's a threat
to besiege the courthouse. There's little for Merchon to do
about it other than to encourage the city and the
state of New York to have tanks ready, because, frankly,
if Trump terrorist gangs again rise up against this government
(03:02):
as he had them do on January sixth. The only
way the point is going to be made clear this
time is if it ends with the New York Department
of Sanitation having to clean them up with brooms and
hoses and garbage trucks. But Mayor Seawan can do something
about the part of this fish that stinks literally if
(03:23):
the flatulence reports from last week are correct. Few experts
expect the judge to do this, and I know that
the judge did not shut down the first day of
defendant Jay Trump's Stormy Daniel's election interference trial with just
a little David Pecker merely to give Trump more time
to violate the gag order ahead of today's gag order
(03:44):
hearing into how many times Trump could violate the gag
order what with his busy schedule of farting and napping
and fart napping. But guess what, it has worked out
that way, hasn't it. What are they going to a
did in the last trial so he got caught line
(04:07):
pure line, and what are they going to look at
that ordered that defendant is directed to refrain from the
following making or directing others to make public statements about
known or reasonably foreseeable witnesses concerning their potential participation in
the investigation or in this criminal proceeding. So that clip
(04:27):
in which he does that against Michael Cohen is proof
of one Trump violation of the Mershan gag order at
twelve forty eight Eastern Dementia Time yesterday. Then there was
the second Trump violation yesterday, three minutes earlier, twelve forty
five Eastern Defended Time yesterday, in which Trump said Michael
Cohen was guilty of these charges, not him. The things
(04:48):
he got in trouble for were things that had nothing
to do with me. Got in trouble, he went to jail.
This had nothing to do with me. So that's two
plus in a list of supposed trial facts, a bunch
more on his campaign website, including comments about witnesses, quote
testimony of some of the most disreputable and fame thirsty
(05:10):
characters on the planet, that's three violations. There's a Trump
quote posted attributed to The New York Post. I have
a Trump hating judge with a Trump hating wife and
family whose daughter worked for Kamala Harrison now receives money
from the Biden Harris campaign. That quote links to a
photo of the judge's daughter. That's four violations of the
gag order, plus the seven that prosecutors submitted last week,
(05:34):
and two more after they submitted it last week that
occurred on Friday. At least thirteen violations of Justice Mershon's
gag order just since jury selection began in this trial.
And yet lawyers think the worst that Mershan will do
is admonish Trump. Now we can all agree on ranges
(05:56):
here and that the extremes are wrong. Death penalty, no
too much, admonishments, no too little. Trump is not just
violating the gag order. He is doing so compulsively, and
he is doing so because, as I suggested last Friday,
he is viewing this trial as he views every other trial,
(06:17):
as he views every other confrontation in his world, life
or death, him or me, them or me, the government
or me, America or me. He said as much last Friday.
The criticisms of Justice Merschan that you will hear next
are not technical. They're not about resolving things. They're not
even about the judge recusing from the case. He says,
(06:41):
the conflict has to end with the judge. It has
to end with the judge. These are deliberately chosen phrases
end the judge, and the conflict has to end with
the judge. The judge has a conflict the worst I've
ever seen, and it has to end with the judge,
(07:04):
the conflict with the judges, because that's something that he
can I know anything about. It's wrong, it's wrong. Judge
Merschan can do nothing himself about Trump having now escalated
this to ending him and to coupling that with demanding
that police be moved away from the courthouse at one
hundred Center Street so that his mobs can end him.
(07:25):
But he could right now order Trump to jail for
violating the gag order. It's not like he just started
doing it. It's not like he hasn't been warned we
will reach this point. Trump to jail sooner rather than later.
And the reluctance of any authority figure in this country
(07:45):
to cut to the chase and to do it mystifies me,
except when I again quote Jean Renlar in Rules of
the Game, as he foretells French society collapsing in self
interest even before the Nazis attacked in nineteen forty. You
see in this world. There is one awful thing, and
that is that everyone has his reasons. But Mershan can
(08:12):
regain control of this trial, and in fact, regain control
of the entire legal system's effort to put Trump behind bars,
where he should be and where he should live out
his appalling life, without sending Trump to jail. Now he
can say, you have sworn that you understood that this
gag order meant what it means, and yet you have
(08:33):
violated it thirteen dimes in the last nine days, and
if you violated a fourteenth time at any point in
the future, I will revoke your bail, and I will
put you in Riker's Island, and I will keep you
there one full week for every violation. You may now
(08:54):
return to your seat. We're going to have to grasp
this nettle, or grasp this bull by the horns, or
maybe most perfectly, grasped this bullshit by the diaper. Trump
will have to go to jail at some point. He
has to be stopped. If you want to try to
(09:16):
slow him first by all means. I don't know what
we've been doing the last three and a half years.
Seems to me we've been trying to slow him down,
But jan mere Sean and the other judges and the
other prosecutors are the ones entitled to and they are
the ones charged with the responsibility to act in defense
(09:39):
of the nation. Trump has accelerated this to where we
were in the weeks and months before January sixth. He
has wanted two judges attacked. He has wanted three prosecutors attacked.
He has made these wants public, and now he wants
and again I am quoting him, courthouses all over the
(10:02):
country unquote attacked. Trump is already attacking, metaphorically, attacking our courthouses,
and he has been attacking us for a decade. It
is time to stop him now. Parenthetically, the opening day
(10:31):
at that trial itself ended early due to religious holidays
and due to a juror's dental emergency. And he thinks
his teeth dirt. Now just wait. What little transpired, including
just perfunctory initial questioning of the perfectly named David Pecker,
did have one tangible effect. It made Trump squirm. It
(10:52):
has been years, it has been decades since he has
not been surrounded by yes men, since he's had any
idea how much he has hated and more importantly, how
much he is in danger. Breaking his carefully built bubble
may in fact be all we get out of this,
because if you didn't notice, there is a member of
the jury who somehow slipped in past prosecution objections and strikes,
(11:14):
who says he reads everything and he's on Twitter x,
but he couldn't cite one news source except for truth Social.
So ultimately this trial could wind up being hung, and
it could wind up being just about making sure Trump
spends week upon week hearing this two word message from
(11:37):
America quote you suck. For the truncated day one, it
was limited to opening statements in which the defense called
Trump a person just like you and just like me,
and a family man, even though no member of his
many families has been at the trial at all, and
(11:59):
the original event that precipitated all this was him banging
a porn star right while wife three was still nursing
child five. He's a family man. He hates his family,
just like you and I do. The prosecution emphasized Trump
is on trial for election interference, not hush money, and
(12:21):
the American media largely continues to be unable to comprehend
the distinction. CNN still yesterday last night. I presume this
morning running banners in which they title this hush money trial.
Then again, that is a network that on Friday showed
a live suicide outside the Trump courtroom and boasted about
(12:42):
it and boasted about its own superior coverage, even though
you are not supposed to show live suicides on the
air because that might encourage suicide, and also because the
viewers at home might be horrified by it. But they
did it really well, even though their anchor on the
scene first called it an active shooter situation, and then,
(13:03):
during her breathless and gore or play by play faster
than somebody calling a horse race, she twice insisted the
man who went there to get exactly the kind of
coverage CNN gleefully provided for his death had quote emblazoned himself.
He's emblazoned himself, she said, even though the word emblazoned
(13:24):
means to put a logo or insignia on something. So
I don't know why I'm expecting CNN to understand what's
actually going on at the Trump trial. I guess I'm
just grateful that CNN did not make a your fired
joke incredibly long term anyway, the actual Trump legal headline
from yesterday may have not come from New York, but
(13:44):
rather Florida, where witness exhibits in the Trump espionage case
reveal that the FEDS have a small coterie of witnesses
close to Trump, including an unidentified Person sixteen, clearly a
senior Trump aide but not necessarily in the innermost circle,
who revealed nothing less than the fact that Trump's people
(14:04):
told his valet and now co defendant Walt Naude, not
to worry about the stolen documents case, that it was
not going anywhere yet, just in case, even if he
were to say, get charged with lying to the FBI,
Trump will pardon him after he regains power. Person sixteen,
the guy who identified this information, was so spooked by
(14:27):
what he knows and the prospect of retribution, and the
sheer number of non disclosure agreements he had signed, that
while he fulsomely revealed what he knows, he would not
let the FBI record the interview. He also revealed that
Trump routinely took documents from the Oval office to his
White House residence, and yes, he had heard Trump declassify
(14:48):
one set of them, the ones pertaining to the FBI
investigation of Trump's links to Russia as to the universal
standing order to declassify anything Trump ever touched or just
looked at or blinked about twice. Nope, says Person sixteen.
Never happened. But Nowada stuff is critical. If Trump ever
(15:11):
goes to trial in Florida, he's meat because on top
of everything else, they can easily break this nauda and
then they can get Trump for a little bit of
witness tampering. Let's run some of the other headlines. I
got Biden's next campaign ad for him courtesy of this
(15:33):
Jesse Waters ass from Fox. At least I think he's
still with Fox. He might not be now. He used
to be Bill O'Reilly's henchman. Not as smart as O'Reilly,
not nearly, but he may be unemployed once the furor
here's that little Jesse Waters said this about Trump. The
guy needs exercise. He's usually golfing, and so you're gonna
(15:56):
put a man who's almost steady sitting in a room
like this on his butt for all that time. It's
not healthy. You know how big of a health nut
I am. He needs sunlight, and he needs activity, he
needs to be walking around, he needs action. It's really
cruel and unusual punishment to make a man do that.
I'm Joe Biden and I approved this message. Also coming
in the future. Good evening. I'm Tucker Carlson. This is
(16:17):
Tucker Carlson Tonight. Jesse Waters. Jesse Waters who one point
again to emphasize among people who think they are both
too old, it is Biden sixty one, Trump thirteen in
the polling. All you have to do is drag up
the Trump is too old number. Apparently it's already worked
(16:40):
with Jesse Waters. He may be as dumb as the
average Trump Republican. Also, Politico lost without video to steal
and show, has resorted to demonstrating key events of the
Trump trial in New York by using bobblehead dolls. I
have bad news for Politico on this. I used bobblehead
(17:06):
dolls to demonstrate because we could not get video, We
could not put our cameras in the meetings to demonstrate
the activities of the National Football League Players Association and
its ownership its management council during the NFL player strike
of nineteen eighty two. I don't want to say using
bobbleheads when you can't get video is an old bit,
(17:28):
but I did it when I was twenty three years old,
and more importantly, when CNN was two years old, back
when we didn't show live suicides and say, oh, this
will win us an emmy, bring his ashes with us.
Bennie Thompson has offered legislation, introduced it in the House.
(17:51):
Anybody convicted of a felony with a term of at
least one year, guess what happens to their secret Service
protection all they forfeited. Oh, Benny, it's not going to pass. Obviously,
although we said that about Ukraine, didn't we It's not
going to pass. And anyway, even if it did pass, somehow,
(18:12):
I'm sure Trump's secret Service agents would volunteer to go
to prison with him anyway. Late polling from NBC Trump
forty six, Biden forty four, but Biden thirty nine, Trump
thirty seven, Kennedy thirteen, Stein three, West two. In other words,
(18:34):
some kind of shift has taken place, and the third parties,
or in this case, the third, fourth, and fifth parties
are now taking votes away more from Trump than from Biden,
which we saw coming, if you will remember, long before
it was evidenced, than any of the polling. Trump attacked
Kennedy so expect much more of that, and somebody needs
(19:00):
to get ahold of Cornell West and explain to him
how badly history will judge him for this, and call
Jill Stein in Moscow. The other thing from the NBC
News poll that is fascinating. It turns out that only
NBC has asked this question in a two form fashion,
(19:21):
what's most important? What's the most important issue? And the
same answers keep coming back. Inflation twenty three percent, cost
of living and then immigration slash the border at twenty
two percent, So it's what's the most important issue? Inflation
and the cost of living twenty three percent, then immigration
(19:42):
and the border twenty two percent. And then they asked
the question in a different way, what's the most important
issue in determining your vote? Twenty eight percent said high number.
Twenty eight percent said protecting democracy or constitutional rights, Immigration
(20:02):
and the border second at twenty f percent, abortion third
at nineteen percent. So, in other words, not asking what
do you think generically is the most important issue of
the day, but what are you going to base your
vote on? Forty seven percent said protecting democracy or constitutional
rights or abortion rights. That's the key, not who's leading
(20:26):
in the polls. Here is, though, a story that would
lead the news in any other timeline, in any other
moment in American history. The Republican Congressman Tony Gonzalez quote
Matt Gates, he paid miners to have sex with them
at drunk parties. There's a second version of this quote,
he paid miners to have sex with him at drug parties.
(20:49):
Oh well, that's much better. Speaker of the House, Mike
Johnson will campaign today alongside Congressman Tony Gonzalez. I am
beginning to I think Mike Johnson sometime last week was
hit by lightning, but in a good way. Keep them
(21:20):
in office, hell make him a Democrat. Also of interest here,
once upon a time you could be on one network
and talk politics and advocate even for one party on
that one network, while on your sixth day of work
you were also on another network talking sports utterly a politically.
And let me tell you from personal experience, that time
(21:41):
when you could do that. That ended in the year
twenty ten, and it especially ended at a place called ESPN.
And I know because I helped write the rules saying
you could not do politics in one place while you
were on ESPN in the other place. So why is
(22:01):
ESPN now letting its most prominent on air personality openly
campaign for Trump? This will end in tears for everybody.
Why ESPN has two choices? Silence Stephen a Smith or
fire Stephen a Smith. That's next. This is countdown. This
(22:24):
is countdown with Keith Olberman still ahead of us on
(22:50):
this all new editiontive countdown. So somebody asked me the
other day if I knew a sportscasting agent named Lou Oppenheim,
And it was like the old joke about the guy
saying Niagara falls and the second guy turns around and
loses his mind. Niagro falls slowly. I turned, step by step,
(23:10):
not that Lou Oppenheim was the worst party of the
story in which his business partner was supposedly negotiating a
new deal for me at my employers at CBS in
nineteen ninety one, while he was also sending CBS tapes
of other clients in hopes of getting them my job
that he was still negotiating for. But Lou was part
(23:31):
of it. You gotta hear this story. It involves me
also getting served with court papers the night of my
first ever sports center. Next on things, I promised not
to tell first. Still more new idiots to talk about
the daily roundup of the miscrants, morons, and Donning Kruger
effects specimens, including two sports guys who have not succeeded
(23:52):
in transforming into news guys who constitute two days worst
persons in the world Crinklitus Days the bronze worse Nate Silver,
who started in sports metrics and moved into political metrics
in large part because I put him on TV talking
about political metrics oops to say oops and get out.
(24:14):
I really thought he would be satisfied as the master
of the numbers. But I guess no one is satisfied
as the master of the numbers. On January third, twenty
twenty two, Nate Silver tweeted, quote, It's probably foolish to
think a New York City mayor will successfully translate into
being a national political figure. But I still think Eric
Adams would be in my top five for who will
(24:36):
be the next Democratic presidential nominee after Joe Biden. My man,
you left off a couple of zeros after that five,
your top five hundred, your top five thousand, new polling
from the Manhattan Institute, Who you vote for in the
next New York City mayor's election, Mayor Eric Adams sixteen percent.
Sixteen sixteen percent said yes to Merk Adams. Somebody else
(25:01):
sixty five percent. AHw I heard that phrase, ie watering numbers.
Well here they are. I can't see the page. Sixty
five somebody else, anybody else, for God's sakes, one of
the horses in Central Park. I don't care, a manhole
cover whatever, Maybe a Republican Not sure, so it still
could be somebody other than Adams nineteen more percent. So
(25:25):
right now it's Adams sixteen not Adams eighty four. Wait,
it gets worse. How far underwater are his favorable unfavorable
impression numbers? His favorable minus his unfavorable with Democrats. With Democrats,
he's at minus thirty five, and that is his best
party demographic. Among New Yorkers in their thirties, he's minus
(25:49):
seventy four eighteen to twenty nine year olds minus sixty eight,
forty to forty nine year olds minus sixty eight, among
black voters minus eleven, people more than two hundred and
six years old, minus twenty two. How's that possible? I
made that one up, and it all may be worse
than that because those are just disapprove or approved. The
(26:10):
percentage that strongly disapproves of Eric Adams is forty six percent.
The percentage that strongly approves of Eric Adams, great job,
mayor great job four percent? Fool good call Nate Silver
the runner up worse Kevin McCarthy, especially in the context
(26:30):
of Mike Johnson, likely to be X speaker at least
ex Republican because he actually stood up for something on
principle at last, we can fully see what a human
jellyfish Kevin McCarthy is. Goes on Fox, calls the Democrats
the dangers to American democracy, and his evidence quote, I
mean Hillary Clinton ever said she lost the twenty sixteen election.
(26:52):
The surprised host says, yeah, she called Trump and conceded.
McCarthy makes a dismissive sound like and says, but she
never said it to the press. She called the night
of his election. She made the public concession speech the
next day, November ninth, twenty sixteen. It was in all
of the papers. Kevin McCarthy, Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot.
(27:14):
You don't know how to freaking read. But our winners
the worst Stephen A. Smith and ESPN We had a
hard and fast rule. There you're on ESPN, no party politics,
no endorsements of candidates, no electioneering. You know who wrote
that rule. I wrote that rule. You know why, because
(27:37):
I actually believe in the separation of politics and sportscasting,
not politics and sports. If athletes are going to go political,
you can cover them doing it. You kind of have
to sometimes, but don't you do it. Aaron Rodgers gets
strung out on something and starts spewing conspiracy theories on ESPN. No,
you probably should not have given him that platform to
(27:57):
do it, but regardless, you then have to cover it.
You have to explain he's gone nuts. But sportscasters campaigning,
not reporting on Colin Kaepernick, not recording and reporting on
transgender athletes, but reporting and making a choice of Biden
or Trump. Nobody wants that mix, least of all the
(28:22):
ESPN talent who would do it. They don't really want it.
The ESPN management who would permit it, they don't want it.
And yet they are letting Steven A. Smith, who makes
millions of dollars as the man in television most gifted
in saying the least amount of stuff taking up the
most amount of time, who kills off hours a day
between ESPN gambling advice without ever advancing the story or
(28:47):
explaining a team dynamic or improving anybody's knowledge about anything
in sports. Who thus deserves every penny he makes. They
are letting him go on Fox News and campaign for
Donald Trump campaign on Sean Hannity's show On with Sean Hannity.
One of the people who has most damaged the United
(29:08):
States of America could not have done more damage if
he were Vladimir Putin. Stephen A. Smith goes on with
Hannity and tells him about Trump. Quote. Black folks find
him relatable because of when he said, what he is
going through is similar to what black Americans have gone through.
He wasn't lying. Spoiler alert, Stephen A. Trump is lying.
(29:31):
He's always lying. Quote. He was telling the truth. When
you see the law, law enforcement, the court system, and
everything else being exercised against him, it is something that
black folks throughout this nation can relate to. With some
of our historic iconic figures. Steven, you just insulted all
of your historic iconic figures and all of mine and
(29:52):
all of Americas and you're a useful idiot. The law
is being exercised against Trump, whatever the f that means,
it's being exercised against him because he keeps breaking the law.
He has broken the law to try and stall in
the dictatorship in this country. One I might add that
if he succeeds in the fall, we'll repress minority groups
(30:14):
and the media way more than everybody else. You and
me are going to the camps under Dictator Trump, Stephen,
and it got worse. Quote. We've seen that happen throughout society.
So no matter what race, what ethnicity you may emanate from,
we relate to you when you're suffering like that because
we know we have ESPN in the last decade has reprimanded, suspended, demoted,
(30:40):
and dismissed on air people who said far less propagandistic things,
who didn't do one percent of the damage Stephen A.
Smith just did to ESPN, who hit far fewer political
party talking points and who didn't come anywhere as close
to what Steven A. Smith just did there, go on
national television on a propaganda network from hell like Fox
(31:00):
and come up with excuses for a criminal like Donald
Trump and his crime times and figuratively hug Donald Trump
and Sean haddity f you, Steven A. Smith. Bluntly, I
have been associated with ESPN longer than anybody now running
it or Smith. I also think my credentials on trying
to balance sports and politics are better than anybody in
(31:22):
the business, including management and Stephen A. Smith. This is
not two thousand and eight. I just barely got away
with it in two thousand and eight. By twenty ten,
the National Football League said I couldn't do it anymore.
They forced me off NBC's Football Night at America. To
the executives at ESPN letting Smith do this, you are
going to inherit the wind, Bob Iger. I have known
(31:45):
you since nineteen seventy nine. They will fire you over
this someday. Just because many of you agree with him
and want to suck up to Trump. Just in case,
does not mean your predecessors were wrong. Embrace party politics
as opposed to cultural issues or sports issues with political impact.
(32:05):
Embrace Trump versus Biden, and I'd say this if you
were embracing Biden and ESPN will die and Stephen you
and I have always gotten along well personally, so I
am saying this and hopes you will take it this way.
Drop the politics. Do it now. You cannot be on
ESPN and do Trump commercials simultaneously. Do it or kiss
(32:29):
your sports career goodbye? And more importantly, all that money
you have to go to the bank to count every
once in a while, you can kiss that goodbye too.
It doesn't work anymore. If it worked anymore, I'd still
be at ESPN doing it. Stephen A. Smith campaigning for
Trump and ESPN letting him campaign for Trump two days.
(32:50):
Worse persons in the world to the number one story
on the Countdown and my favorite topic, me and things
I promised not to tell. And somebody invoked his name
(33:13):
the other day asked me about a television agent named
Lou Oppenheim. I only met I think Lou Oppenheim once.
It was not a particularly memorable meeting. But Lou Oppenheim
is in the middle of one of the great stories
of my career, at least in terms of agents who
(33:35):
have represented me. I had one agent for pretty much
all of the nineteen eighty three to two thousand and
ten era of my broadcasting career, and I've had several
of them since then. But in the middle of nineteen
ninety one, my then colleague Jim Lampley at KCBS in
(33:56):
Los Angeles said I don't think your agent is big
time enough to advance you further in your career. Well,
Lampley had worked for years at ABE Television, he was
at the network, and I at the age of thirty
two and doing pretty well at KCBS in Los Angeles,
certainly financially and in the ratings compared to the ratings
that the rest of the station had, but not doing
(34:17):
well in terms of establishing any kind of national presence
in sportscasting. I wanted to do as well nationally as
Lampley had, so Lampley said, I should fire my agent
and hire this guy, Arthur Kaminsky. He was the head
of a company called Athletes and Artists, or as I
later referred to them, Athletes and con Artists. I'll explain
(34:41):
to you right now that it turned out. I found
out the following year that Art Kaminsky had sought me
as a client, not because he wanted to represent me,
not because Lampley had suggested it, but because Art Kominsky
was like me, a sports memorabilia collector, and he assumed
I could get him a good price on a set
of nineteen fifty five Tops Football cards. The high end
(35:06):
of this set of nineteen fifty five Tops Football cards
in the year nineteen ninety one was maybe two thousand dollars.
He thought I could get it for him for about
fifteen hundred. That's why he wanted to represent me, and
that was apparently the only reason he wanted to represent me.
Needless to say, this did not go well, and this
is how not well it went. Although they were paying
(35:28):
me half a million dollars when I was thirty two
years old, and particularly in nineteen ninety one, that went
a long way. I was not particularly happy at KCBS
Channel two in Los Angeles because the station was a graveyard.
It had been in last place in the ratings since
about nineteen oh seventy five or so, and would be
(35:49):
well into the late nineties if I remember correctly. They
had hundreds, perhaps of broadcasters, all of whom succeeded elsewhere,
who did not succeed there. If you remember the morning
newsreader on the Today Show and Curry, she was with
me at KCBS, all kinds of anchors. Jim Forbes behind
(36:10):
the music. Jim Forbes was a reporter for US, the
guy from whichever one of those tabloid shows. Harvey Levin,
he was one of our reporters. It was a great
staff and lousy management. I wanted to get out of
there anyway, but there didn't seem to be the right
job anywhere. I wanted to work in my hometown of
New York, and I thought Kaminsky could help me there,
(36:30):
or at least I wanted Kaminsky to talk the management
of Channel two in LA into picking up my option
for the rest of my contract. I'd been there for
three years in about three months, and I had two
years to go, and it was their option, and it
was another half a million dollars a year. And even
then I realized that being paid half a million dollars
(36:50):
a year to do like three sports casts a day
and maybe an hour over the weekend was pretty damn
good money for not a lot of work. So Kaminsky's
job became to try to get me a job in
New York, or to get me my job in LA,
to get them to pick up the option. I'll spare
you what he did and did not do in terms
(37:12):
of getting me the job in New York. Ultimately, I
suggested something to him, and he said, I would never
do that. It would reflect badly on me, and I
was like, what are you talking about. I had volunteered
to work at union scale in a new job in
New York for a period of time, and if the
station didn't like me, they could get rid of me,
or they could pay me competitively. That would be just
(37:35):
beneath my dignity. So as the months went on, it
became evident that there really were only three possibilities for
my employment for the year nineteen ninety two. The possibility
of a job in San Diego, which would have cost
almost as much as Los Angeles in terms of cost
of living and paid about one third something like that,
(37:56):
or staying at Channel two in Los Angeles, or going
to ESPN, which I didn't really want to do because
I was living in Beverly Hills and there was no
humidity and no winter. And guess what. ESPN was not
anywhere near Beverly Hills, and it didn't pay that well.
(38:16):
It only paid about thirty five or forty percent of
what the job in Los Angeles paid in any event,
So now Kaminski worked on getting me to retain my
job somehow, some redirection or promise or to make the
shows more appealing to eighty year old women who watched
Channel two in Los Angeles at four o'clock in the
(38:36):
afternoon and then our newscast at five, or whatever it
is they had in mind. One day he told me
that his partner at Athletes and con Artists, a man
named Lou Oppenheim, was going to be in Los Angeles
when he normally was in New York, and was going
to meet with the general manager and the news director
of KCBS to find out and to convince them about
(38:59):
my option. That he would come out of that meeting
and be able to tell me whether or not I
was going to stay there and not have to sell
my condo and take a significant salary loss and possibly
not have to move to Bristol, Connecticut. The day came,
I saw Oppenheim on the way in. I greeted him
at the door. I walked him down the hallway and
(39:20):
I said, make sure you stop by before you leave.
And as the hours went on, I saw the general
manager of the television station in the hallway somewhere, meaning
the meaning had been concluded. And then as I was
walking to my office there I saw in the distance
coming down the hallway. Who else but Lou Oppenheim, And
I said, Lou, what happened? And he began to run
(39:43):
towards me and passed me. I can't talk right now.
I'm late for the airport. I said, what do you mean?
I just need to know. Am I give me a
head start on putting my house up on the market.
Am I staying or going? I can't go. I can't
talk to you now. I have to go back to
and he was gone. He had the answer. He had
been told by the general manager whether my contract option
(40:04):
was going to be picked up or not, and he
wouldn't tell me now. I later found out that he
wouldn't tell me because this was on the instructions of
his partner, Kominski. Kaminsky is now dead, so he can't
really defend himself in this story. But when he was alive,
he couldn't defend himself either, because he was a schmuck.
What Art Kaminsky was doing was keeping this information to himself,
(40:26):
namely that my option was not being picked up at
KCBS in Los Angeles, and thus there was a number
one sportscasting job open in Los Angeles. And he saw
this now as one thing and one thing only, not
representing me and my next job or letting me know
about what was now going to be my soon to
be ex job. He saw this as an opportunity for
(40:49):
him Art Kaminsky, to put another one of his clients
in my job while I still had it, and he
was still arguing theoretically for me to stay there, and
we're talking about, I believe maybe September or October of
nineteen ninety one, and I still had a contract through
January first of nineteen ninety two. I was going to
(41:10):
be a lame duck and did not even know it.
One day, during the Baseball Playoffs, which were on CBS
at the time, I was in the news director's office,
it was given to us as the viewing room for
the pre and postgame shows that we were producing four
Channel two in Los Angeles for the Baseball playoffs in
the World Series. Unlike most sporting events in Los Angeles,
(41:35):
the problem with TV broadcasts of the NFL or Major
League Baseball, NBA, NHL anything at all. The games don't
end too late. In Los Angeles and the rest of
the West Coast. They end too early. A World Series
game that does not shut down till eleven thirty or midnight.
Eastern time is over at nine o'clock. That's two hours
(41:56):
to kill until you can go to the eleven o'clock news.
So we would fill it with a postgame show, a
locally produced postgame show with me and a then active
baseball player. We had Wally Joyner from the California Angels,
my longtime friend. He did it one year. Danny Tartable
who had been with the Kansas City Royals and the
Seattle Mariners. We had Rick Dempsey who was then with
(42:19):
the Los Angeles Dodgers. We had all kinds of people,
and we did this for all sports. We did this
for the NFL and the NBA and Major League Baseball.
And one day, as we're sitting there watching the baseball
playoff games in the news director's office with the biggest
TV we could find to watch this, my partner, my
analyst for the postgame shows, was a guy who was
(42:41):
pitching for the Saint Louis Cardinals and had aspirations to
become a broadcaster and became one named Joe McGrain. And
Joe McGrain suddenly began to look around the news director's
office and I saw his head tilt over at about
ninety degrees, which is a very unusual position to see
another human being keep his head in. And Joe and
(43:02):
I had gotten along pretty well at that point. I
didn't know each other that well, but we were friends
for a very long time thereafter. And Joe was now
looking at a series of tapes. This is during the
commercials between innings of the World Series game, and he's
looking at the tapes, the boxes of tapes on the
news director's desk, and he's looking at them sideways because
(43:22):
they're labeled vertically rather than horizontally. And he says, huh,
Hanna a Storm. And I said, Hannah Storm. There's a
tape of Hannah Storm on my news director's desk. He said, yeah,
what do you know about her? And I said, she's
one of Art Komensky's other clients. And he said, well,
(43:45):
over here, there's that's this Jimmy Cephalo And I said,
Jimmy Cephalo is another one of Art Kaminsky's clients. Well,
this went on for quite a while. It turned out
there were about a dozen tapes on the news director's
desk of other Art Kaminsky clients. For my job while
I was represented by Art Comment and his partner Lou Oppenheim,
(44:09):
had literally pushed me aside, so he did not have
to tell me that my contract was not being renewed.
Needless to say, even though mister Kominsky had been negotiating
my job with ESPN my next job with ESPN, I
shortly thereafter fired him, but not before I called him
up and screamed at him, which was the least he
deserved from me. Other people have had exceptional experiences with
(44:32):
Art Kominsky and made a lot of money thanks to
his involvement. I was not one of those people. In
any event, At some point Kaminsky said he didn't want
to talk to me anymore, and the discussion of what
was going to happen to me at KCBS should be
handled by the third sports agent in his stable of agents,
(44:55):
Alan Sanders. This is nineteen ninety one. In nineteen eighty three,
eight years previously, Alan Sanders had been my int at
CNN Sports in New York. He had just gone into
the agentine game, and he had, in fact, a few
weeks previously, actually driven me up from my folks house
(45:15):
outside of New York City up to ESPN and Bristol, Connecticut,
the first time I'd ever been there to have an
interview and look around, and he drove me back and
he was a great guy. And I always got along
well with Alan, and we have crossed paths several times
since then. I had nothing at all bad to say
about Alan Sanders. On the other hand, I did point
(45:36):
out that this was really kind of rubbing it in
that Kaminsky here not only did not permit his partner
lou Oppenheim to tell me the truth in real time
and actually avoid me and push me out of wait,
don't push me out of the way, just say yes
or no or thumbs up or thumbs down. I gotta go.
(45:58):
But then on top of that, Kaminsky would not talk
to me about this subject. He said Alan would, And
I said, I don't think that's appropriate, Arthur, I think
you should do it, whereupon Arthur Kaminsky turned around and
holding the phone away from his own mouth, shouted, Hey,
Alan Alderman doesn't think you're important enough to tell him
(46:19):
he's been fired by CBS. So when I then finalized
my deal to go to ESPN, and you know what
happened there for the year nineteen ninety two. I called
up several people there who were the ones who hired me,
and I said, listen, I'm no longer represented by Art Kaminsky.
(46:39):
I'm represented again by Gene Sage, who was the woman
who had represented me before I made the mistake of
dismissing her and hiring Arthur Kaminsky. And these people said, oh,
thank god. Here. I know we told you we couldn't
pay him more than whatever it was, one hundred and
ninety thousand dollars. I know we told you that, but
here's another twenty thousand dollars, just because we're all so
(47:02):
grateful that we don't have to deal with that dick Kaminski.
And I actually said, no, his name is Arthur. So
I was a little honked off about Komensky. And I
figured that if anybody ever heard this story, his stature
as a business agent in hockey, which was his other thing,
or broadcasting, would be diminished somewhat. And so I figured
(47:26):
we'd just let this go and Gene Sage would be
my agent at ESPN. And I, by the way, was
not going to pay Arthur Kaminsky a dime of my
ESPN contract. Sure enough, I go to work at SportsCenter
and in fact start earlier than planned. I was supposed
to take three months off and go to Hawaii. In fact,
they needed me to go back there and launch the
(47:47):
radio network early at ESPN, and so I did not
get my time off, and I moved there earlier than planned,
and I started on Sports Center maybe a week earlier
than originally planned, which was about the opening day of
the two thousand, or rather the nineteen hundred and ninety two.
It's a long time ago base all season, so I
started a little early. And as I'm sitting there writing
(48:09):
my first script and going, well, it's not the first
place I'd choose to live. But as Lampley himself once said,
look at it this way, you will be married to
your audience. There's very little you can do to screw
it up. I thought it was an interesting analogy, but anyway,
we'll let that one pass. As I was doing that,
(48:29):
there was a call from the front desk saying that
there was somebody downstairs to see me. Well, I was
naive enough to go downstairs to see who it was,
and a man I'd never met stood there at the
main desk at ESPN and said, are you Keith Olderman,
and I said yes, and he said you've been served,
(48:51):
and he handed me a lawsuit from Arthur Kaminski seeking
the something like ten thousand dollars that I would have
owed him if he had actually been my agent at ESPN.
That was Lou Oppenheim's partner. I am led to believe
(49:12):
Lou was forced to do everything he did. Nevertheless, I
did just want to put this one on the record
because as I told the story to the person who
asked about Lou Oppenheim, they went into hysterics at every
little stage of this story. So there it is. The
Lou Oppenheim. I can't tell you the truth because my boss,
(49:34):
Arthur Kaminsky told me not to story. If you're looking
for an agent in the field of sports broadcasting, I
can only give you this advice. I have no advice whatsoever.
(50:02):
I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank
you for listening. Countdown musical directors Brian Ray and John
Phillip Schanel arranged, produced and performed most of our music.
Mister Ray was on guitars, bass and drums. Mister Chanelle
handled orchestration and keyboards. It was produced by TKO Brothers.
Other music, including some of the Beethoven compositions, were arranged
and performed by the group Noah Horns Elude. Suddenly I
(50:23):
became Scandinavian perfumed. The sports music is the Olberman theme
from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis curtisyvespn inc.
Our satirical and fifty musical comments are by Nancy Faust,
the best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer today was
my friend Larry David, and everything else was pretty much
my fault. So that's countdown for this the one hundred
(50:44):
and ninety seventh day until the twenty twenty four presidential election,
and the two hundred and fourth day since Diaper j
Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of
the United States. Use the fourteenth Amendment and the not
regularly given elector objection option. Use the Insurrection Act, You
use the justice system, use the mental health system, use
(51:08):
the recyclable diaper system to stop him from doing it
again while we still can. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow.
Bulletins as the news warrants till then, I'm Keith Oulreman.
Good morning, Good Afternoon, good Night, and good Luck. Countdown
(51:38):
with Keith Olreman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
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