February 1, 2024 • 47 mins
SERIES 2 EPISODE 115: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Election polls are bullshit.
In the morning came the polls showing Trump ahead by 8 in every swing state. Except the margin of error plus the undecided number is 16.
In the afternoon came the polls showing Biden ahead by 6 in nationally. And Trump beating Haley. But Haley beating Biden. Except the margin of error plus the undecided number is 9.
I'll explain the "Keith Number" we should always attach to polling, and why polling was once considered unacceptable for inclusion in American TV newscasts, and how I sat there as an MSNBC executive once ordered Frank Luntz to take two polls or do two focus groups to confirm the predetermined outcome he wanted.
Though there WAS one useful "interior number" in that Swing States poll that could augur a Biden landslide.
PLUS: Judge Engoron hasn't revealed the figure, Alina Habba hasn't been fired but what Trump's done to her is much, much, worse. There was performative theater in the Senate social media hearing yesterday but ONE truth was emitted by Senator Tillis. And a bell rang somewhere and three of the most racist things ever said by Republicans were said without hesitation, by a Wisconsin state legislator ("Race Hustlers"), Senator Tom Cotton ('Are you sure you ain't Chinese?') and Nikki Haley, who, asked why she said she got shivers down her spine about the prospect of President Kamala Harris, immediately answered about how President Obama made everything about race.
Pure cracker racism from Nikki Haley.
B-Block (27:47) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Jesse Watters claims brainwashing, which is impossible if you don't have a brain. More racism from Congressman Troy Nehls. And Congressman Derrick Van Orden is so dumb, he's dumber than he was last year.
C-Block (36:08) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: With news of Netflix possibly dropping Harry and Meghan Markle, I have a Netflix story to tell. I offered them the whole of the video news industry and they demanded Italian Subtitles.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Joe
Biden is getting his ass kicked in the polls, except
(00:25):
in those poles in which he is kicking Trump's ass.
Sixteen years ago, it was that I proposed that a
new number be attached to all political polls, one which
I modestly called the Keith number, which was very simply
the undecideds plus the poll's margin of error. You are
(00:45):
up in this poll by five points, but the margin
of error is three and the undecided is seven. Well,
your Keith number is actually ten, and you do not
want it to be larger than your lead, let alone
twice as big as your lead. This was an attempt
to take a tool out of the pollster's box of
three card Monte tricks and use it against them to
(01:06):
underscore the point that the most important things about poles
are their nearly universal unreliability and instability. We used the
Keith number, at least around our shop. It relaxed pole
fever considerably. Yesterday Morning, Bloomberg and Morning Consult put out
swing state poles, showing Trump up in every one of them.
(01:30):
Yesterday afternoon, Quinnipiac put out a national poll showing that
what had been too close to call in late December
was now Biden by six. Quinnipiac also had Biden adding
five points to his lead among women, uping it to
fifty eight to thirty six. Quinnipiac also did the due
to the convergence of forces beyond his comprehension, Donald Trump
(01:52):
was suddenly squirted out of the universe like a watermelon
seed and never heard from again. MC esher pole and yes,
Trump beats Haley seventy seven to twenty one, and Haley
beats Biden forty seven to forty two. Now the pollsters
have gotten smart in the last sixteen years and have
started making the margin of error more difficult to find,
(02:15):
or they've started to assign different margins of errors to
different parts of their pole and to split undecideds into
someone else or no answer or refuse to answer. Not
as a result of the Keith number, just a coincidence,
because I'm hardly the only person to have existential doubts
about poles, and I certainly was not the first. But
(02:36):
best as I can calculate margin of error in Quinnipiac,
the good one for Biden is just about three percent,
which is pretty damn good. And the undecided is six,
which means sure, Biden is ahead by six. But the
Keith number is nine, which means I'm not wrapping myself
in this poll either. It could be one third wrong.
(03:00):
On the other hand, in those Bloomberg swing state individual
dual polls, they have smooshed them all together and they
have Trump up forty eight to forty an eight point
lead margin of error. Hell, Bloomberg is making this tough
on me. They say it's plus or minus one percent,
which means two percent, and they say each individual state's
(03:22):
margin of error is between three and five percent. I
will give them something of the benefit of the doubt
and say the overall margin of error in this poll
is four, but the undecided is twelve, So four plus
twelve is sixteen. Thus the Keith number in the favorable
Trump swing state pole is nearly twice as much as
(03:46):
Trump's lead, So this poll could be one half wrong.
This is why I hate Poles. I often cite the
movie Network as the most prophetic film ever made, and
it is certainly so about television news, but it really
was about television news about politics. One of the most
(04:06):
shocking things to the audiences of nineteen seventy six that
saw that film. When new was that network predicted a showbiz, slick,
entertainment oriented national newscast that relied on things that the
TV networks of the time would never let their real
life Cronkites and Huntley's and Brinkley's and Reasoner's Touch let
(04:28):
alone depend on. And the most shocking was a regular
segment that movie auteur Patty Tchaievsky called Vach's Populi, which
was clearly a nightly opinion poll, not only treated as news,
but featured as one of the most important and popular
(04:50):
things on the news. In nineteen seventy six, it was
unthinkable in twenty twenty four, it is automatic. There is
no question that there is science to political polling, but
much of the refinement of that science is how to
get people to answer the way the pollster wants them
to answer. I have mentioned this previously. In two thousand
(05:12):
and three, when I was back at MSNBC for what
was literally planned as three days relief for the five
PM anchor who was very sick, and when I had
no interest in returning to work there full time, my
old friends there revealed that they were about to launch
an eight PM newscast called Countdown, and they had already
drawn up the contract for the new host they so
(05:33):
desperately wanted that they were buying him out of his
contract with ABC News. That man's name was Sam Donaldson. Involuntarily,
I laughed out loud at this, literally thinking they were kidding,
don't you know? I asked, I've been working at ABC
Radio for a year now. They're trying to get Sam
to quit. They took him off TV. They put him
(05:56):
on a radio call in show. When that didn't work,
they took him off the radio call in show and
made it an online only call in show. I filled
in from last week. We got like three calls. The
MSNBC executive went cold, and then without even asking me
to leave the room, he made a phone call Frank
Phil Frank, I have to get out of the Donaldson deal, buddy,
(06:20):
How quickly could you get me a poll or maybe
a focus group that shows putting Sam Donaldson on will
be a disaster? Okay, great, fax it to me. Oh oh, Frank,
do me another favor, another one. Get me a focus
group that shows that Keith Olberman would be great for
eight pm. Again, Frank was Frank Luntz. Within forty eight hours,
(06:44):
the Sam Donaldson deal was dead. Within seventy two hours,
the president of MSNBC was calling my agent asking if
there was any chance I might even consider coming back
to MSNBC. That is the science of polling, and now
having trash polls, I will add that what he is
really useful in them is what sports reporters call interior numbers.
(07:08):
Bloomberg asked those Trump voters in those swing states where
he's ahead by eight, but the Keith number of uncertainty
is sixteen, if they'd be very willing or somewhat willing
or somewhat unwilling or very unwilling to still vote for
him if he was actually convicted by a jury. And
forty six percent said very unwilling and the undecided and
(07:32):
that was only seven And the margin of error is four.
So at worst, at least thirty five percent would drop
Trump if he's convicted in the swing states. But what
about Sam Donaldson? How do you feel about Sam? Who's
voting for Sam Donalds? Who out there has got Frank
Luntz's phone number? Hell, who's got Judge Arthur Engern's phone number?
(08:00):
If you spent frustrating moments or hours or longer looking
for anger On's ruling on how much Trump owes how
much he owes the State of New York for business fraud,
not how much she owes e Gene Carroll or how
much he owes Michael Cohen, or how much he owes
Stormy Daniels, or how much he owes the people of
the United States of America. No, you're not nuts. You
(08:21):
did not miss it. After a day of rumors yesterday,
Judge Ngarn did not announce the count and the amount,
And he may not do it today, and he may
not do it tomorrow. And somebody who may hear useful
rumors as opposed to the ordinary kind, Former Assistant New
York Attorney General and prosecutor of Trump University, Tristan Snell,
says he hears aiming for early next week. Of course,
(08:45):
that's fine, except previously and Gern was aiming for January
thirty first at the latest. And it ain't January anymore.
The important part, the cancelation of corporate charters for Trump
in New York State, is already locked in. This is
about how much the fine will be the latest demand
from the attorney General's office was three hundred and seventy
(09:06):
million dollars. But Snell's expectation matches the conventional wisdom, and
you can take the conventional wisdom for what it's worth.
Do we have any pulling on conventional wisdoms? But the
expectation is the low end of the range that Trump's
endless working of the REFS and everybody related to the
REFS and everybody working for the REFS really has left
(09:29):
anger on trying to find a number that hurts but
is unlikely to be overturned. The fine could be as
low as two hundred million dollars, which Trump would position
as him being thrown into a bottomless pit and burnt
at the steak or something, but would actually be a
comparative win for him at a reminder that he does
what he does to the Arthur and Gorons of this world.
(09:51):
Because the sad truth is it works, the appeals process,
And don't lie through this eighteen months of Trump in courtrooms,
you have wondered to yourself, maybe we shouldn't have an
appeals process in this country. Don't lie you thought it.
(10:15):
I know I have. We kind of have to have one.
The appeals process will be State Appellate Division, then the
New York Court of Appeals. Than Trump would try to
get it to the Supreme Court, but there really isn't
anything constitutional in this case. The point of the appeals
would be the delay, because delay is what keeps Trump
alive maybe literally by this point, and what keeps anywhere
(10:38):
from two hundred and eighty three point three million to
four hundred and fifty three point three million in his
pocket till further notice. One important caveat to that. When
there are court judgments against you for four hundred and
fifty three point three million and you have just been
banned from doing business in the fourth most populous state
in the country, I don't care if you're Elmer J.
(10:59):
Fudd billionaire and you own a mansion and a yacht.
Even before you actually have to pay the money, the
banks will be decreasingly willing to loan you money, and
that could be as devastating to Trump as the fines themselves.
Delay keeps him alive oer PM. Other people's money keeps
(11:22):
him solvent. The other defendant, Jay Trump. News today is funnier,
a lot funnier.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Somebody said to me, Elena, would you rather be would
you rather be smart or pretty? And I said, oh, easy, pretty.
I can fake being smart.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
No, no, you can't. Turns out this is going to
be one of the greatest soundbites of all time, because
if Trump has not actually fired Alena Habba, I mean,
why fire her? Why let all that effort to make
her not look like Elis Stephanic's twin sister by whatever
means go to waste. If he has not fired fired her,
(12:07):
he has removed her from the Egen Carroll case. Haba
might have survived looking like a well, the worst thing
we can call her is what she is, a parking
lot lawyer in the trial itself. But then, in an
effort to pull her acorns out of that fire, she
wrote the judge demanding more information to use in Trump's
(12:28):
appeal about when he quote mentored Ejen Carroll's lawyer. Ejen
Carroll's lawyer fired back that there was no mentorship. She
happened to overlap with the judge for less than two years,
and she was an associate and he was a partner,
and they never met, and she wanted sanctions against Haba
(12:48):
for the inference. Habba backed slowly away from the train wreck.
She caused, and then late Tuesday night, Trump posted I
am in the process, along with my team of interviewing
various law firms to represent me in an appeal of
the Carroll case by Felicia. Trump used all his cliches,
(13:12):
but he never as much as mentioned poor little miss
don't hate me because I'm pretty so I guess it's
yabahaba do. Thank you, Nancy Faust. I cannot believe how
(13:45):
much time and space was devoted to that social media
kabuki theater in the Senate yesterday, But I'm glad everybody
had fun booing and applauding and yelling and crying and threatening.
And please rejoin us next year, when after a year
of utter inaction on the subject, they will enact exactly
the same performance, only this time it will be in
the style of Gilbert and Sullivan. There was one useful
(14:11):
sound bite, Senator Tom Tillis of North Carolina. Listen carefully.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
But at the end of the day, I find it
heart to blieve.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
First honest statement by a Republican senator this year.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
But at the end of the day, I find it
heart to blieve.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
The only other thing of true note in that hearing
was the racism. Sure enough, it was from racist Tom Cotton,
from the state of racism. Racist Tom Cotton went to
Harvard Undergrad and Harvard Law and presumably Harvard racism. By
the way, I've never been prouder that they would not
(14:50):
let me in, thank you. Nineteen seventy five. The CEO
of TikTok he is racist ng in this SoundBite, also
went to Harvard to Harvard Business. The CEO's wife went
to Harvard Business. But the CEO is from Singapore and
his name is Shao she Chew, and that means Chinese descent.
(15:12):
And good old racist Tom racist Cotton is racist. Convinced
that mister shoes Chew is lying about being in Singapore
and is actually a Chinese spy. And the real problem
about racist Republican bastard morons like racist Tom racist Cotton
(15:33):
racist is that they actually racist think they are racist? Right?
Speaker 4 (15:39):
You said today, as you often say, that you live
in Singapore of what nation? Are you a citizen Singapore?
Are you a citizen of any other nation? No, Senator,
have you ever applied for Chinese citizenship?
Speaker 5 (15:51):
Senator, I serve my nation in Singapore.
Speaker 4 (15:54):
No, I did not. Do you have a Singapore in passport.
Speaker 5 (15:57):
Yes, and I served my military for two two and
a half years.
Speaker 4 (15:59):
Since you have any other Do you have any other passports?
Any other names?
Speaker 5 (16:03):
Senator?
Speaker 4 (16:03):
Your wife is an American citizen. Your children are American citizens,
that's correct. Have you ever applied for American citizenship? No?
Not yet?
Speaker 5 (16:11):
Okay.
Speaker 4 (16:14):
Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party.
Speaker 5 (16:16):
Senata, I'm singaporeon.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
No.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
Have you ever been associated or affiliated with the Chinese
Communist Party?
Speaker 5 (16:22):
No, Senator again, I'm Singaporeanon.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Appalling. I wish there was something legal I could do
to render Tom Cotton mute for the rest of his life.
And by the way, a bell of some kind must
have gone off yesterday morning in every elected Republicans head.
Not just racism everywhere local, national, state level, but no
(16:47):
longer the slightest effort to conceal it. This next creature
is Eric Wimberger, and he is a Wisconsin state racist
senator representing Green Bay. And the website Heartland Signal found this,
and this racist Wimburger actually said this out loud at
(17:09):
a hearing.
Speaker 6 (17:10):
One of the main effects that this bill will have
is that it will put race hustlers out of business,
and they will stop this graft on people suffering. So
racism is a problem, and it probably is something that
will exist in the ether, and it will never go
(17:30):
away to a degree where we can manage it if
what we do fundamentally in our policies is very consciously
decide that a black man ought to get what a
black man deserves and a white man ought to get
what a white man deserves.
Speaker 4 (17:45):
You just use the term I've never heard. I'm going
to ask your denition hustler.
Speaker 6 (17:50):
Oh. Race hustlers would be all those people who sell
seminars and like Al Sharpton. I see, but what makes
them profiteering off?
Speaker 1 (18:05):
The term quote race hustler is not some new construction
by the gentle racists from Green Bay, mister Wimberger scumbag.
It is a term racists invented not long after slavery ended.
It was designed to remind black people that they might
be free, but they had better not try to act free.
(18:29):
Anybody who advocated for equality not accommodation was called a
race hustler. W. E. B. Du Bois was called a
race hustler. In nineteen oh one, Martin Luther King was
called a race Hustler after his I have a dream
speech in nineteen sixty three. And if you wonder where
the Tom Cottons of this world come from, the answer
(18:51):
is they come from the Eric Wimbergers. And yet, somehow
more terrifying still, there are the racists who clearly are racists,
and clearly say racists things and do racist things, and
yet they think their racism is not racism. Nikki Hayley
(19:14):
on the Breakfast Club with Charlemagne the God and dj Enby,
and she she doesn't even know how irredeemably racist she
really is. When I ask why you said if Kamala
was president, why I would send chills down? You're right.
Speaker 7 (19:28):
So a couple of things. I think with Obama that
was if you go back, that's when we really started
to feel the division. That's when it was the white
supremacist though well, no, I think it was. It was everything.
Everything was exaggerated with the Obama administration. It became more
about gender, it became more about race, It became more
(19:49):
about separating Americans instead of bringing them together.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
It was Helko, the right wing media, though, well, they
were scared enough of a black president.
Speaker 7 (19:56):
Look, I don't think everybody is at fault. I'm not
saying that one person did this, but I'm saying under
that administration, it it really did cause some You just
felt people felt like they were being put in camps
through that administration. The second thing is I saw he
was very much an Iranian sympathizer. He very much kept
(20:18):
wanting to support and do things with Ron. I think
that's incredibly dangerous. This is a culture that says death
to America, and you have to always be careful, Kamala.
It's from an experience standpoint.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Asked about Kamala Harris, she answered about Barack Obama, didn't
even pause, and then she talked about racial division for
two minutes and then said, well, the part about Harris
is about inexperience. The division she referred to in this country.
That probably started with white people owning black people, or
(20:54):
if you don't like that as the starting point, maybe
it started with the Civil War. Dipshit. Oh, and people
were divided and put in camps here during World War
Two when Democrats and Republicans united to put Americans literally
in camps because they were of Japanese descent. And Obama was,
(21:18):
you say, an Iranian sympathizer sympathizer. I mean, like like you, Nikki,
you're a ku klux Klan sympathizer, or did you mean
something less stupid than that? Nicki Haley is a lying,
racist cracker. I don't care what her birth name is
or where her parents are from. Nikki Haley proves my
(21:42):
old theory of the lifeboat. Your ocean liner sinks. You
are re enacting the end of Titanic. Suddenly you're in
the water. You bob to the surface, and miraculously, next
to you is a fully outfitted lifeboat that can seat
eighteen people. One of two things happens. Next one, you
(22:06):
pull yourself into the lifeboat. Your mind races, do I
bring in seventeen women or do I have to pull
in a few men to help me row? And I
can only take fourteen women and the three of four
of us that could we take twenty kids instead of
ten adults? Or something else happens. You look at the
food supply and all the space, and you calculate how
(22:27):
much longer you could survive by yourself if you can
just make sure that nobody else gets into your lifeboat,
And you think, thank god, this thing has oars. Now
I can kill anybody who tries to get into my
lifeboat because you have your lifeboat, and to hell with
everybody else, and that person is nicky, God damn her.
(22:53):
To hell. Haley also of interest here and somehow none
of that might have been the single most racist thing
said by a sitting elected Republican all day yesterday, And
clearly none of that was the most stupid thing said
(23:16):
by a sitting elected Republican yesterday. Congressman Derek Van Orden
in twenty twenty four is so dumb that it turns
out he is even dumber than Congressman Derek Van Orden
in twenty twenty three. That's next. This is countdown.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
This is countdown with Keith.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Olberman still ahead on countdown. If you heard the rumors
(24:03):
that would be rumors with two us that Netflix is
about to follow Spotify and drop Prince Harry and Megan Markle,
I think you might be amused and perhaps informed and
educated by my own experience trying to explain to Netflix
that if it chose to, it could own the entire
(24:25):
political media video market, It could replace television and all
online stuff in political news, and Netflix's response its experience
trying to explain to me, But how could we ever
put the Italian subtitles on all these news programs fast enough?
(24:45):
Seriously Italian subtitles? Things I promised not to tell, including
a Riva dircea Netflix coming up first time for the
daily roundup of the miss Grants, morons and Dunning Kruger
effects specimens who constitute today's worst persons in a the world,
(25:05):
The bronze worse. Jesse Waters, the Bill O'Reilly intern who
was promoted to eight PM host when everybody else at
Fox got fired. MSNBC's Joy Reid swore on the air
the other night, apparently, and Waters, who is so unjustifiably
self confident that he truly owes part or most of
(25:26):
his salary to professors Dunning and Krueger in licensing fees.
Waters decided that it was all part of a plot
of some kind. What kind of plot, he didn't say.
But what does that matter? MSNBC doesn't respect their audience,
he said, Well, he has them there. But he then
blew the thing by adding quote, they're not putting on
(25:48):
a show to inform their viewers. It's a brainwashing op.
Everything to Jesse is an op. Problem here is to
recognize a brainwashing, op Jesse. You'd have to have a brain.
The runner up worser, Congressman Troy Nells, more confirmation in
the flesh that we just don't pay our public service
(26:10):
members enough money to keep the really good candidates in
public service, and instead going to where the big cash
must be running. Seven elevens, Congresswoman Corey Busch married her
security guard who had gone to work for her after
she got a series of death threats against her, racist
death threats. Congressman Nells, who has already revealed he has
(26:32):
no idea what Congress is supposed to be doing and
thinks he's only there to impeach the Director of Homeland
Security or the president, or a statue or a bartender
he doesn't like. Nells has now added to his confessions
by going full on double racist. She doesn't even support
the police, says Nells, but the idea to pay her
(26:54):
thug money to try to help protect her this and
that for what. Maybe if she wouldn't be so loud
all the time, maybe she wouldn't be getting three ets.
Since we're postulating hypotheticals, maybe if Troy Nells and the
other white supremacists of Texas jumped into the Rio Grande,
she wouldn't be getting threats either. It's kind of amazing
(27:15):
how much sub human bilge Nells spit out in that
one paragraph. He basically told an African American woman that
she caused the racist death threats against her. He called
rather her husband a thug. By the way, her husband
is an army veteran. He called army veterans thugs. And
(27:36):
as to Nells is she doesn't even support the police.
Remember this idiot cracker congressman who referred to the law
officers injured on January sixth as the quote sobbing police.
The idiot who said that was Troy Nells. Why do
you hate the police? Troy Nells? But our winner the worst?
(27:57):
Another congressman who needs to go through post concussion protocol
and explore the potential value of shock treatments, professional or amateur. Derek, Hey,
you kids, get out of my capital. Van Orden, the
Wisconsin Rep who looks like somebody just hit him in
the face with a snowshovel. Besides his genuinely disturbing behavior
(28:18):
towards well towards everybody, Van Orden seems to be fighting
something that stands in the way between himself and reality.
Confronting economist Robert Reisch, who spells his name r H
and pronounces it Reisch, Van Orden said that he should
change his first name to third, which Van Orden thought
(28:38):
was clever, but which, unfortunately for the joke Van Orden
was going for, would mean that the ex Labor Secretary
would then be known as Third Reisch. Well, mister Van
Orden has topped himself. Senator Elizabeth Warren has put out
some economic data on wealth in this country and added
quote tax the rich. Van Orden's clever repost. This time
(28:59):
he retweeted her and added a screenshot of her supposed
net worth and wrote a that the words okay you first.
I hope he did that himself rather than delegating that
to some staffer. You're the staffer in charge of three
word tweets. The screenshot is the story. It's from a
(29:20):
website called ca Knowledge, which appears to be run by
somebody who claims to be an accountant in India who
seems to spend most of his time guessing how much
money other people in the world have. CA Knowledge says,
for instance, that I make more than one million seven
hundred thousand dollars a month, and Jesse Waters makes one
(29:41):
hundred thousand dollars a month, and show hey Otani makes
seven hundred thousand dollars a month, meaning shoe hey Otani's
new seven hundred million dollar deal with the Dodgers must
be for eighty three years, and that I somehow make
a million dollars more a month than he does. I'm
just gonna suggest here maybe CA Knowledge is not even
really making any guesses at all. It may just be
(30:04):
putting in random numbers and then hitting send. Now back
to the original point. The financial biography CA Knowledge provides
of Senator Warren that Van Orden screenshotted and posted has
a couple of red flags that Van Orden, unsurprisingly was
too stupid to notice. It says that Liz Warren makes
(30:24):
four hundred thousand dollars a month, but also that she
only makes two hundred and eighty five thousand dollars a year.
More importantly, and so far, there is no evidence that
anybody has broken this fact to Representative Van Orden. CEA
Knowledge includes some non financial data in its profiles, and
in the profile of Elizabeth Warren that he posted. It
(30:45):
says age seventy four years birthplace, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Height,
United States Senator height United States Senator. Republicans long ago
proved it does not matter to them if what they say,
or do or post is not true, largely because their
supporter is long ago go prove that doesn't matter to
(31:06):
them either, and usually they don't notice. But the screenshot
this idiot van Ordon post. It contained only thirty nine
words and one photograph. And if that kind of input
load is too much for Derek van Orden, may I
suggest a medically induced coma. Congressman Derek his height is
(31:28):
pineapple van Orden two days, worst person in the world
and also the dumbest. Finally, to the number one story
(31:48):
on the Countdown and my favorite topic, me and things
I promised not to tell and I don't usually venture
into financial commentary or advice. You will remember the story
of my great grandfather who gave away the name General
Motors for free. But I just read of Netflix finally
staunching the subscriber flow. It had lost around a million,
(32:10):
two hundred thousand households in the first half of this year,
but added about twice that many in the third quarter
thanks to such uplifting programming as the Jeffrey Dahmer story.
So yay corporate cannibalism profits. Anyway, I had an experience
with Netflix which so shook my confidence in them that
it made me fearful of even playing their stuff on
(32:33):
my big TV, because I was wondering if their stuff
would damage my big TV. This is my favorite story
of what happens when media management misunderstands its own business
and wrongly thinks superstitions and coincidences are inviolable rules for success.
This happened on June seventeenth, twenty sixteen, the day I
(32:56):
found out about the vitality, the importance, the absolute necessity
of Netflix's Italian sub I don't want to exaggerate the
importance of the two video series I did for the
GQ magazine site in twenty sixteen in twenty seventeen, The
Closer and The Resistance. I mean, for one thing, The
(33:17):
Closer was so named because each of the handful of
us involved in its production could not really conceive that
there were enough morons and closeted racists in this country
to actually elect Crazy Trump. We grandly called the videos
The Closer because we expected our expositions of Trump's essential
fraudulents and dangerousness would close the deal for Hillary Clinton.
(33:40):
Uh huh, but people watch those videos. I forget the
final count, one hundred and eighty or so episodes, four
hundred million or so views, not plays, but people actually
viewing essentially the whole piece. And CBS News did a
story once with the web analyzing platform social Flow that
showed that the first episode of The Resistance from November sixteenth,
(34:04):
six sixteen was the top story or video on Facebook
through the first six months of the Trump administration. The calculation,
and lord knows what this formula actually looks like, but
the calculation was probably pretty close that it reached fifty
four million people, the equivalent of one out of six
of everybody in the country. That's CBS News reporting this.
(34:27):
Not my ego, and ego is not the reason I
mentioned this, well, it's not the only reason I mentioned this.
MSNBC had offered me a new show in January of
twenty sixteen, but I would have hated it and you
would not have watched it. So it was not supposed
to have any commentaries in it, and a conservative co
host was supposed to be there, and The goal was
(34:50):
she and I would be the wacky couple who would
find middle ground. Plus I would have had to move
to Los Angeles, even though I could see the headquarters
of NBC News out my bedroom window in New York.
And then when it was successful, the producers wanted me
to simply get on a plane from Los Angeles and
show up one morning in the New York office of
(35:11):
the president of NBC News, Andy Lack, and tell him
either we were scrapping the format and relaunching Countdown that night,
or I was quitting. In short, they wanted me to
do this lousy show and then run a palace coup
against the president of NBC News. I passed. I put
my energy and said into finding a new platform for
(35:32):
Countdown or a Countdown like show. I had a deal
in place to become the video anchor of The Huffington Post,
a daily exclusive commentary interviews, features breaking news, funny stuff, whatever.
Two days later. Two days later, Arianna Huffington sold the
Huffington Post no more deal. Before and after this, some
(35:54):
friends from Lionsgate Productions and I were trying to sell
two ideas, pitching to a series of forward looking media companies.
One was that they should be producing and running or
posting or streaming or whatever the series of my commentaries
that became The Closer and then The Resistance. I don't
know what that would have been worth, but I do
know that the tiny slice of the advertising GQ got
(36:16):
just from the commercials that would roll if you watched
one of the episodes on YouTube was well over a
million dollars. The overall profit might have been ten times that.
Production costs were like fifty thousand dollars. But I had
a second, bigger idea to pitch to these other companies.
Who wants to own the future of cable news when
(36:37):
there isn't any cable news anymore? I correctly predicted twenty
twenty two back in twenty sixteen. Who wants to own
the future of cable news when there isn't any cable anymore?
Start with just my commentaries, and as they make money
for you, build out. If they work, you add my
(36:58):
interviews and my debates, and then somebody else's commentaries, and
then some conservative commentaries, and then add all of what
is now cable news and put it on one streaming platform.
We rented a studio, We made a demo commentary. We
made what TV pitchmen call a deck. That's how I
(37:21):
knew the producers were serious. We met with HBO about this,
We met with something called Pop TV, The Daily Beast, Yahoo,
tune In, Sony, EPIX, BBC, Hulu, Conde Nast. Ultimately that
led to the GQ series. But the one I had
the most hoped for was Netflix. The way I saw it,
they could start this tiny little thing in the corner
(37:42):
of their homepage called news Flicks, and you could click
on it, and someday there would be a menu with
Keith Olderman commentaries and I don't know, Glenn Beck commentaries
and Bill Maher commentaries and Jesus H. Christ commentaries and
Keith Olderman newscast and lou Dobbs newscast and and and
(38:04):
all of them partisan but collectively one giant, all encompassing
by partisan because of volume news and commentary site, the
proverbial marketplace of ideas, Dunkin Donuts and Baskin Robbins and
Pizza Hut living together only as newscasters, you know, for kids.
(38:28):
I thought Netflix would see it immediately. They would own news,
all of it. I mean, these were the people who
realized America was too lazy to go down to the
video store anymore, so they began to send America rented
DVDs by mail, and people actually returned the DVDs, And
(38:48):
then they realized that America was too lazy to return
them anymore, and that the optimum date to switch from
DVDs to the then laugh out loud bad concept of
online video was precisely January sixteenth to one thousand and seven.
These guys had the gonads to take a brilliantly successful,
(39:09):
profitable new idea and gradually strangle it and replace it
with a different, brilliantly successful new idea. I could not
wait to meet them. My agent at the time I
would be producer the head of television of Lionsgate like
the chief of chief at Lionsgate. And I went to
the Netflix building in Beverly Hills at ten thirty am
(39:31):
Pacific daylight time on Friday, June seventeenth, twenty sixteen. It
felt perfect. Netflix was still just down from the corner
of Alden and Maple. Twenty five years later, I had
lived two blocks away from Alden and Maple. It was
a four minute walktops. Yeah. The two people there from
Netflix were vice presidents. Wish I remembered their names. I
(39:54):
don't know. Maybe they're still there. I deliberately blocked the
names from my memory after this. One was in charge
of documentaries, one was in charge of non fiction series.
One was a man, one was a woman. I did
most of the talking, and I said, start with these
daily commentaries. You'll never have a better launch window than
the four months before the election. We could have one
(40:15):
ready for you to upload by Monday. This is lowest risk,
highest reward. How would you like to own the news
or if it doesn't work for some reason, you spend
I don't know, one hundred thousand dollars. The man spoke first.
But if you're going to do these daily, how are
(40:35):
people going to binge watch them? I mean, the first
time somebody comes to Netflix to see your commentaries, there's
only going to be one to watch. I took a
quick breath and explained that could be a drawback. On
the other hand, within four weeks there would be twenty
of them to binge. We could even start with five
or ten evergreen commentaries, so that when they come to
(40:58):
see the official premiere they watch that, then ten more
first day, and and and you guys keep telling the
press that your problem is people binge, and then they
don't come back for another five days or a week.
This way, at least some of them would come back
every day to your website. You'd begin to solve your
frequency of visitation problem, wouldn't you. I mean, you're the executives.
(41:20):
I'm just the talent, the meat puppet. But isn't that
then the woman interrupted me, okay, yeah, that would help,
and I like starting with ten, But what about the subtitles?
There was a long pause. Then the head of Lionsgates
said what subtitles? The man said, well, everything we run
(41:42):
is subtitled in the language of each country we run
it in. So your commentary would have to have subtitles
added in like sixteen different languages. That usually takes three months.
Could you do commentaries today that would still work in September?
I said, well no, But why do you need subtitles?
(42:04):
You need, say Italian subtitles or any subtitles. I mean,
it's very unlikely I said that people worldwide who are
interested enough in American politics to watch commentaries about American
politics don't already speak English. The woman looked, aghast, I
mean the coloring of her face changed, but the subtitles.
(42:25):
She said, we always have subtitles. We always do it
that way here, and I said, well, yeah, I understand,
but see this would be for news flicks, not Netflix
per se. See you could adapt your rules to fit
the urgency of timeliness. I mean, MSNBC has a profit
of like five hundred million a year because of timeliness
(42:49):
and their last in profit in cable news. Couldn't you
adjust slightly for five hundred million a year? The man
now looked a gas. No, we couldn't. This is the
Netflix rule. We can't change a rule. I began to
feel not happy. The man spoke again. Plus, what about
(43:09):
the twelve oh one rule? We all looked at each other.
You said, the commentaries would probably work best at eight
or nine pm, But in all of our countries, anything
new gets posted at exactly twelve oh one am local time,
only at twelve oh one am, so anything you did
today could not possibly run until twelve oh one am tomorrow.
(43:30):
I was still reeling from the Italian subtitles. Now there
was also an unbreakable twelve oh one tomorrow rule. I
was thinking of getting up and leaving, but the woman
apparently had one more gut punch to throw at me.
I also wanted to know if we somehow were able
to turn the subtitles around with lightning speed, or skip them,
or do them and say only two or three hours.
(43:52):
The man interrupted, plus the hours until it's twelve oh one,
don't forget them. She nodded, yes, plus the hours until
it's twelve o one. If we could somehow do that.
What would happen if one day something went wrong technically
and we couldn't upload that day and people came to
the site and there wasn't a new one. What if
it doesn't upload? Well? I had an answer to that,
(44:13):
but I did not say it out loud. I said
it a few minutes later to the head of lions Gate,
after we had said goodbye to mister and missus vice
president in the lobby of the Netflix building, I said,
good God. These people are in the uploading business. They
have been uploading for nine years. They aren't sure they
can upload. What equipment have they been uploading with? Are
(44:36):
they uploading from Kevin Spacey's nineteen ninety six don laptop?
As I left to get in the car to go
to lax to Fly home to New York, totally disappointed.
The Lionsgate guy was just shaking his head. I'm sorry,
I had no idea.
Speaker 8 (44:54):
I call you later at exactly twelve oh one am
with Italian subtitles. Haha, what if it an upload? He
said as he walked away from me. Christ I got
to get my broker on the phone. I got to
sell all my Netflix stock. I've done all the damage
(45:25):
I can do here. Thank you for listening. Countdown has
come to you from the world headquarters of the Old
Women Broadcasting Empire in New York Countown. Musical directors Brian
Ray and John Phillip Shanelle arranged, produced, and performed most
of our music. Mister Ray was on guitars, bass, and drums,
and mister Shanelle handled orchestration and keyboards produced by TKO Brothers.
(45:46):
Other music, including some of the Beethoven compositions, were arranged
and performed by the group. No horns allowed, by the way.
That's TKO Brothers and not somebody named TKO Brothers, not
Joyce Brothers brother or something. Joyce Brothers who not only
went to Cornell as did I, but worked at the
Cornell radio station WVBR, not anytime near mind, But we
(46:09):
once discussed this on countdown. You've lost interest, haven't you.
The sports music is the Ullriman theme from ESPN two,
written by Mitch Warren Davis Curtesy of ESPN inc. Our
satirical and pithy musical comments are by Nancy Fauss. The
best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer today was my
friend Dennis Leary. Everything else was pretty much my fault.
So next countdown for this the two hundred and seventy
(46:30):
ninth day until the twenty twenty four US presidential election,
and the twenty second day since dementia J Trump's first
attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
Use the fourteenth Amendment, use the Insurrection Act, use the
justice system, use the mental health system to stop him
from doing it again while we still can. The next
(46:54):
scheduled countdown is tomorrow bulletins as the news warrants, and
if my throat permits till then I'm Keith Olberman. Good morning,
good afternoon, good night, and good luck.
Speaker 3 (47:09):
But at the end of the day I find it
hard to blade.
Speaker 1 (47:11):
Countdown with Keith Olderman 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. Joe
Biden is getting his ass kicked in the polls, except
(00:25):
in those poles in which he is kicking Trump's ass.
Sixteen years ago, it was that I proposed that a
new number be attached to all political polls, one which
I modestly called the Keith number, which was very simply
the undecideds plus the poll's margin of error. You are
(00:45):
up in this poll by five points, but the margin
of error is three and the undecided is seven. Well,
your Keith number is actually ten, and you do not
want it to be larger than your lead, let alone
twice as big as your lead. This was an attempt
to take a tool out of the pollster's box of
three card Monte tricks and use it against them to
(01:06):
underscore the point that the most important things about poles
are their nearly universal unreliability and instability. We used the
Keith number, at least around our shop. It relaxed pole
fever considerably. Yesterday Morning, Bloomberg and Morning Consult put out
swing state poles, showing Trump up in every one of them.
(01:30):
Yesterday afternoon, Quinnipiac put out a national poll showing that
what had been too close to call in late December
was now Biden by six. Quinnipiac also had Biden adding
five points to his lead among women, uping it to
fifty eight to thirty six. Quinnipiac also did the due
to the convergence of forces beyond his comprehension, Donald Trump
(01:52):
was suddenly squirted out of the universe like a watermelon
seed and never heard from again. MC esher pole and yes,
Trump beats Haley seventy seven to twenty one, and Haley
beats Biden forty seven to forty two. Now the pollsters
have gotten smart in the last sixteen years and have
started making the margin of error more difficult to find,
(02:15):
or they've started to assign different margins of errors to
different parts of their pole and to split undecideds into
someone else or no answer or refuse to answer. Not
as a result of the Keith number, just a coincidence,
because I'm hardly the only person to have existential doubts
about poles, and I certainly was not the first. But
(02:36):
best as I can calculate margin of error in Quinnipiac,
the good one for Biden is just about three percent,
which is pretty damn good. And the undecided is six,
which means sure, Biden is ahead by six. But the
Keith number is nine, which means I'm not wrapping myself
in this poll either. It could be one third wrong.
(03:00):
On the other hand, in those Bloomberg swing state individual
dual polls, they have smooshed them all together and they
have Trump up forty eight to forty an eight point
lead margin of error. Hell, Bloomberg is making this tough
on me. They say it's plus or minus one percent,
which means two percent, and they say each individual state's
(03:22):
margin of error is between three and five percent. I
will give them something of the benefit of the doubt
and say the overall margin of error in this poll
is four, but the undecided is twelve, So four plus
twelve is sixteen. Thus the Keith number in the favorable
Trump swing state pole is nearly twice as much as
(03:46):
Trump's lead, So this poll could be one half wrong.
This is why I hate Poles. I often cite the
movie Network as the most prophetic film ever made, and
it is certainly so about television news, but it really
was about television news about politics. One of the most
(04:06):
shocking things to the audiences of nineteen seventy six that
saw that film. When new was that network predicted a showbiz, slick,
entertainment oriented national newscast that relied on things that the
TV networks of the time would never let their real
life Cronkites and Huntley's and Brinkley's and Reasoner's Touch let
(04:28):
alone depend on. And the most shocking was a regular
segment that movie auteur Patty Tchaievsky called Vach's Populi, which
was clearly a nightly opinion poll, not only treated as news,
but featured as one of the most important and popular
(04:50):
things on the news. In nineteen seventy six, it was
unthinkable in twenty twenty four, it is automatic. There is
no question that there is science to political polling, but
much of the refinement of that science is how to
get people to answer the way the pollster wants them
to answer. I have mentioned this previously. In two thousand
(05:12):
and three, when I was back at MSNBC for what
was literally planned as three days relief for the five
PM anchor who was very sick, and when I had
no interest in returning to work there full time, my
old friends there revealed that they were about to launch
an eight PM newscast called Countdown, and they had already
drawn up the contract for the new host they so
(05:33):
desperately wanted that they were buying him out of his
contract with ABC News. That man's name was Sam Donaldson. Involuntarily,
I laughed out loud at this, literally thinking they were kidding,
don't you know? I asked, I've been working at ABC
Radio for a year now. They're trying to get Sam
to quit. They took him off TV. They put him
(05:56):
on a radio call in show. When that didn't work,
they took him off the radio call in show and
made it an online only call in show. I filled
in from last week. We got like three calls. The
MSNBC executive went cold, and then without even asking me
to leave the room, he made a phone call Frank
Phil Frank, I have to get out of the Donaldson deal, buddy,
(06:20):
How quickly could you get me a poll or maybe
a focus group that shows putting Sam Donaldson on will
be a disaster? Okay, great, fax it to me. Oh oh, Frank,
do me another favor, another one. Get me a focus
group that shows that Keith Olberman would be great for
eight pm. Again, Frank was Frank Luntz. Within forty eight hours,
(06:44):
the Sam Donaldson deal was dead. Within seventy two hours,
the president of MSNBC was calling my agent asking if
there was any chance I might even consider coming back
to MSNBC. That is the science of polling, and now
having trash polls, I will add that what he is
really useful in them is what sports reporters call interior numbers.
(07:08):
Bloomberg asked those Trump voters in those swing states where
he's ahead by eight, but the Keith number of uncertainty
is sixteen, if they'd be very willing or somewhat willing
or somewhat unwilling or very unwilling to still vote for
him if he was actually convicted by a jury. And
forty six percent said very unwilling and the undecided and
(07:32):
that was only seven And the margin of error is four.
So at worst, at least thirty five percent would drop
Trump if he's convicted in the swing states. But what
about Sam Donaldson? How do you feel about Sam? Who's
voting for Sam Donalds? Who out there has got Frank
Luntz's phone number? Hell, who's got Judge Arthur Engern's phone number?
(08:00):
If you spent frustrating moments or hours or longer looking
for anger On's ruling on how much Trump owes how
much he owes the State of New York for business fraud,
not how much she owes e Gene Carroll or how
much he owes Michael Cohen, or how much he owes
Stormy Daniels, or how much he owes the people of
the United States of America. No, you're not nuts. You
(08:21):
did not miss it. After a day of rumors yesterday,
Judge Ngarn did not announce the count and the amount,
And he may not do it today, and he may
not do it tomorrow. And somebody who may hear useful
rumors as opposed to the ordinary kind, Former Assistant New
York Attorney General and prosecutor of Trump University, Tristan Snell,
says he hears aiming for early next week. Of course,
(08:45):
that's fine, except previously and Gern was aiming for January
thirty first at the latest. And it ain't January anymore.
The important part, the cancelation of corporate charters for Trump
in New York State, is already locked in. This is
about how much the fine will be the latest demand
from the attorney General's office was three hundred and seventy
(09:06):
million dollars. But Snell's expectation matches the conventional wisdom, and
you can take the conventional wisdom for what it's worth.
Do we have any pulling on conventional wisdoms? But the
expectation is the low end of the range that Trump's
endless working of the REFS and everybody related to the
REFS and everybody working for the REFS really has left
(09:29):
anger on trying to find a number that hurts but
is unlikely to be overturned. The fine could be as
low as two hundred million dollars, which Trump would position
as him being thrown into a bottomless pit and burnt
at the steak or something, but would actually be a
comparative win for him at a reminder that he does
what he does to the Arthur and Gorons of this world.
(09:51):
Because the sad truth is it works, the appeals process,
And don't lie through this eighteen months of Trump in courtrooms,
you have wondered to yourself, maybe we shouldn't have an
appeals process in this country. Don't lie you thought it.
(10:15):
I know I have. We kind of have to have one.
The appeals process will be State Appellate Division, then the
New York Court of Appeals. Than Trump would try to
get it to the Supreme Court, but there really isn't
anything constitutional in this case. The point of the appeals
would be the delay, because delay is what keeps Trump
alive maybe literally by this point, and what keeps anywhere
(10:38):
from two hundred and eighty three point three million to
four hundred and fifty three point three million in his
pocket till further notice. One important caveat to that. When
there are court judgments against you for four hundred and
fifty three point three million and you have just been
banned from doing business in the fourth most populous state
in the country, I don't care if you're Elmer J.
(10:59):
Fudd billionaire and you own a mansion and a yacht.
Even before you actually have to pay the money, the
banks will be decreasingly willing to loan you money, and
that could be as devastating to Trump as the fines themselves.
Delay keeps him alive oer PM. Other people's money keeps
(11:22):
him solvent. The other defendant, Jay Trump. News today is funnier,
a lot funnier.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Somebody said to me, Elena, would you rather be would
you rather be smart or pretty? And I said, oh, easy, pretty.
I can fake being smart.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
No, no, you can't. Turns out this is going to
be one of the greatest soundbites of all time, because
if Trump has not actually fired Alena Habba, I mean,
why fire her? Why let all that effort to make
her not look like Elis Stephanic's twin sister by whatever
means go to waste. If he has not fired fired her,
(12:07):
he has removed her from the Egen Carroll case. Haba
might have survived looking like a well, the worst thing
we can call her is what she is, a parking
lot lawyer in the trial itself. But then, in an
effort to pull her acorns out of that fire, she
wrote the judge demanding more information to use in Trump's
(12:28):
appeal about when he quote mentored Ejen Carroll's lawyer. Ejen
Carroll's lawyer fired back that there was no mentorship. She
happened to overlap with the judge for less than two years,
and she was an associate and he was a partner,
and they never met, and she wanted sanctions against Haba
(12:48):
for the inference. Habba backed slowly away from the train wreck.
She caused, and then late Tuesday night, Trump posted I
am in the process, along with my team of interviewing
various law firms to represent me in an appeal of
the Carroll case by Felicia. Trump used all his cliches,
(13:12):
but he never as much as mentioned poor little miss
don't hate me because I'm pretty so I guess it's
yabahaba do. Thank you, Nancy Faust. I cannot believe how
(13:45):
much time and space was devoted to that social media
kabuki theater in the Senate yesterday, But I'm glad everybody
had fun booing and applauding and yelling and crying and threatening.
And please rejoin us next year, when after a year
of utter inaction on the subject, they will enact exactly
the same performance, only this time it will be in
the style of Gilbert and Sullivan. There was one useful
(14:11):
sound bite, Senator Tom Tillis of North Carolina. Listen carefully.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
But at the end of the day, I find it
heart to blieve.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
First honest statement by a Republican senator this year.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
But at the end of the day, I find it
heart to blieve.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
The only other thing of true note in that hearing
was the racism. Sure enough, it was from racist Tom Cotton,
from the state of racism. Racist Tom Cotton went to
Harvard Undergrad and Harvard Law and presumably Harvard racism. By
the way, I've never been prouder that they would not
(14:50):
let me in, thank you. Nineteen seventy five. The CEO
of TikTok he is racist ng in this SoundBite, also
went to Harvard to Harvard Business. The CEO's wife went
to Harvard Business. But the CEO is from Singapore and
his name is Shao she Chew, and that means Chinese descent.
(15:12):
And good old racist Tom racist Cotton is racist. Convinced
that mister shoes Chew is lying about being in Singapore
and is actually a Chinese spy. And the real problem
about racist Republican bastard morons like racist Tom racist Cotton
(15:33):
racist is that they actually racist think they are racist? Right?
Speaker 4 (15:39):
You said today, as you often say, that you live
in Singapore of what nation? Are you a citizen Singapore?
Are you a citizen of any other nation? No, Senator,
have you ever applied for Chinese citizenship?
Speaker 5 (15:51):
Senator, I serve my nation in Singapore.
Speaker 4 (15:54):
No, I did not. Do you have a Singapore in passport.
Speaker 5 (15:57):
Yes, and I served my military for two two and
a half years.
Speaker 4 (15:59):
Since you have any other Do you have any other passports?
Any other names?
Speaker 5 (16:03):
Senator?
Speaker 4 (16:03):
Your wife is an American citizen. Your children are American citizens,
that's correct. Have you ever applied for American citizenship? No?
Not yet?
Speaker 5 (16:11):
Okay.
Speaker 4 (16:14):
Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party.
Speaker 5 (16:16):
Senata, I'm singaporeon.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
No.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
Have you ever been associated or affiliated with the Chinese
Communist Party?
Speaker 5 (16:22):
No, Senator again, I'm Singaporeanon.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Appalling. I wish there was something legal I could do
to render Tom Cotton mute for the rest of his life.
And by the way, a bell of some kind must
have gone off yesterday morning in every elected Republicans head.
Not just racism everywhere local, national, state level, but no
(16:47):
longer the slightest effort to conceal it. This next creature
is Eric Wimberger, and he is a Wisconsin state racist
senator representing Green Bay. And the website Heartland Signal found this,
and this racist Wimburger actually said this out loud at
(17:09):
a hearing.
Speaker 6 (17:10):
One of the main effects that this bill will have
is that it will put race hustlers out of business,
and they will stop this graft on people suffering. So
racism is a problem, and it probably is something that
will exist in the ether, and it will never go
(17:30):
away to a degree where we can manage it if
what we do fundamentally in our policies is very consciously
decide that a black man ought to get what a
black man deserves and a white man ought to get
what a white man deserves.
Speaker 4 (17:45):
You just use the term I've never heard. I'm going
to ask your denition hustler.
Speaker 6 (17:50):
Oh. Race hustlers would be all those people who sell
seminars and like Al Sharpton. I see, but what makes
them profiteering off?
Speaker 1 (18:05):
The term quote race hustler is not some new construction
by the gentle racists from Green Bay, mister Wimberger scumbag.
It is a term racists invented not long after slavery ended.
It was designed to remind black people that they might
be free, but they had better not try to act free.
(18:29):
Anybody who advocated for equality not accommodation was called a
race hustler. W. E. B. Du Bois was called a
race hustler. In nineteen oh one, Martin Luther King was
called a race Hustler after his I have a dream
speech in nineteen sixty three. And if you wonder where
the Tom Cottons of this world come from, the answer
(18:51):
is they come from the Eric Wimbergers. And yet, somehow
more terrifying still, there are the racists who clearly are racists,
and clearly say racists things and do racist things, and
yet they think their racism is not racism. Nikki Hayley
(19:14):
on the Breakfast Club with Charlemagne the God and dj Enby,
and she she doesn't even know how irredeemably racist she
really is. When I ask why you said if Kamala
was president, why I would send chills down? You're right.
Speaker 7 (19:28):
So a couple of things. I think with Obama that
was if you go back, that's when we really started
to feel the division. That's when it was the white
supremacist though well, no, I think it was. It was everything.
Everything was exaggerated with the Obama administration. It became more
about gender, it became more about race, It became more
(19:49):
about separating Americans instead of bringing them together.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
It was Helko, the right wing media, though, well, they
were scared enough of a black president.
Speaker 7 (19:56):
Look, I don't think everybody is at fault. I'm not
saying that one person did this, but I'm saying under
that administration, it it really did cause some You just
felt people felt like they were being put in camps
through that administration. The second thing is I saw he
was very much an Iranian sympathizer. He very much kept
(20:18):
wanting to support and do things with Ron. I think
that's incredibly dangerous. This is a culture that says death
to America, and you have to always be careful, Kamala.
It's from an experience standpoint.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Asked about Kamala Harris, she answered about Barack Obama, didn't
even pause, and then she talked about racial division for
two minutes and then said, well, the part about Harris
is about inexperience. The division she referred to in this country.
That probably started with white people owning black people, or
(20:54):
if you don't like that as the starting point, maybe
it started with the Civil War. Dipshit. Oh, and people
were divided and put in camps here during World War
Two when Democrats and Republicans united to put Americans literally
in camps because they were of Japanese descent. And Obama was,
(21:18):
you say, an Iranian sympathizer sympathizer. I mean, like like you, Nikki,
you're a ku klux Klan sympathizer, or did you mean
something less stupid than that? Nicki Haley is a lying,
racist cracker. I don't care what her birth name is
or where her parents are from. Nikki Haley proves my
(21:42):
old theory of the lifeboat. Your ocean liner sinks. You
are re enacting the end of Titanic. Suddenly you're in
the water. You bob to the surface, and miraculously, next
to you is a fully outfitted lifeboat that can seat
eighteen people. One of two things happens. Next one, you
(22:06):
pull yourself into the lifeboat. Your mind races, do I
bring in seventeen women or do I have to pull
in a few men to help me row? And I
can only take fourteen women and the three of four
of us that could we take twenty kids instead of
ten adults? Or something else happens. You look at the
food supply and all the space, and you calculate how
(22:27):
much longer you could survive by yourself if you can
just make sure that nobody else gets into your lifeboat,
And you think, thank god, this thing has oars. Now
I can kill anybody who tries to get into my
lifeboat because you have your lifeboat, and to hell with
everybody else, and that person is nicky, God damn her.
(22:53):
To hell. Haley also of interest here and somehow none
of that might have been the single most racist thing
said by a sitting elected Republican all day yesterday, And
clearly none of that was the most stupid thing said
(23:16):
by a sitting elected Republican yesterday. Congressman Derek Van Orden
in twenty twenty four is so dumb that it turns
out he is even dumber than Congressman Derek Van Orden
in twenty twenty three. That's next. This is countdown.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
This is countdown with Keith.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Olberman still ahead on countdown. If you heard the rumors
(24:03):
that would be rumors with two us that Netflix is
about to follow Spotify and drop Prince Harry and Megan Markle,
I think you might be amused and perhaps informed and
educated by my own experience trying to explain to Netflix
that if it chose to, it could own the entire
(24:25):
political media video market, It could replace television and all
online stuff in political news, and Netflix's response its experience
trying to explain to me, But how could we ever
put the Italian subtitles on all these news programs fast enough?
(24:45):
Seriously Italian subtitles? Things I promised not to tell, including
a Riva dircea Netflix coming up first time for the
daily roundup of the miss Grants, morons and Dunning Kruger
effects specimens who constitute today's worst persons in a the world,
(25:05):
The bronze worse. Jesse Waters, the Bill O'Reilly intern who
was promoted to eight PM host when everybody else at
Fox got fired. MSNBC's Joy Reid swore on the air
the other night, apparently, and Waters, who is so unjustifiably
self confident that he truly owes part or most of
(25:26):
his salary to professors Dunning and Krueger in licensing fees.
Waters decided that it was all part of a plot
of some kind. What kind of plot, he didn't say.
But what does that matter? MSNBC doesn't respect their audience,
he said, Well, he has them there. But he then
blew the thing by adding quote, they're not putting on
(25:48):
a show to inform their viewers. It's a brainwashing op.
Everything to Jesse is an op. Problem here is to
recognize a brainwashing, op Jesse. You'd have to have a brain.
The runner up worser, Congressman Troy Nells, more confirmation in
the flesh that we just don't pay our public service
(26:10):
members enough money to keep the really good candidates in
public service, and instead going to where the big cash
must be running. Seven elevens, Congresswoman Corey Busch married her
security guard who had gone to work for her after
she got a series of death threats against her, racist
death threats. Congressman Nells, who has already revealed he has
(26:32):
no idea what Congress is supposed to be doing and
thinks he's only there to impeach the Director of Homeland
Security or the president, or a statue or a bartender
he doesn't like. Nells has now added to his confessions
by going full on double racist. She doesn't even support
the police, says Nells, but the idea to pay her
(26:54):
thug money to try to help protect her this and
that for what. Maybe if she wouldn't be so loud
all the time, maybe she wouldn't be getting three ets.
Since we're postulating hypotheticals, maybe if Troy Nells and the
other white supremacists of Texas jumped into the Rio Grande,
she wouldn't be getting threats either. It's kind of amazing
(27:15):
how much sub human bilge Nells spit out in that
one paragraph. He basically told an African American woman that
she caused the racist death threats against her. He called
rather her husband a thug. By the way, her husband
is an army veteran. He called army veterans thugs. And
(27:36):
as to Nells is she doesn't even support the police.
Remember this idiot cracker congressman who referred to the law
officers injured on January sixth as the quote sobbing police.
The idiot who said that was Troy Nells. Why do
you hate the police? Troy Nells? But our winner the worst?
(27:57):
Another congressman who needs to go through post concussion protocol
and explore the potential value of shock treatments, professional or amateur. Derek, Hey,
you kids, get out of my capital. Van Orden, the
Wisconsin Rep who looks like somebody just hit him in
the face with a snowshovel. Besides his genuinely disturbing behavior
(28:18):
towards well towards everybody, Van Orden seems to be fighting
something that stands in the way between himself and reality.
Confronting economist Robert Reisch, who spells his name r H
and pronounces it Reisch, Van Orden said that he should
change his first name to third, which Van Orden thought
(28:38):
was clever, but which, unfortunately for the joke Van Orden
was going for, would mean that the ex Labor Secretary
would then be known as Third Reisch. Well, mister Van
Orden has topped himself. Senator Elizabeth Warren has put out
some economic data on wealth in this country and added
quote tax the rich. Van Orden's clever repost. This time
(28:59):
he retweeted her and added a screenshot of her supposed
net worth and wrote a that the words okay you first.
I hope he did that himself rather than delegating that
to some staffer. You're the staffer in charge of three
word tweets. The screenshot is the story. It's from a
(29:20):
website called ca Knowledge, which appears to be run by
somebody who claims to be an accountant in India who
seems to spend most of his time guessing how much
money other people in the world have. CA Knowledge says,
for instance, that I make more than one million seven
hundred thousand dollars a month, and Jesse Waters makes one
(29:41):
hundred thousand dollars a month, and show hey Otani makes
seven hundred thousand dollars a month, meaning shoe hey Otani's
new seven hundred million dollar deal with the Dodgers must
be for eighty three years, and that I somehow make
a million dollars more a month than he does. I'm
just gonna suggest here maybe CA Knowledge is not even
really making any guesses at all. It may just be
(30:04):
putting in random numbers and then hitting send. Now back
to the original point. The financial biography CA Knowledge provides
of Senator Warren that Van Orden screenshotted and posted has
a couple of red flags that Van Orden, unsurprisingly was
too stupid to notice. It says that Liz Warren makes
(30:24):
four hundred thousand dollars a month, but also that she
only makes two hundred and eighty five thousand dollars a year.
More importantly, and so far, there is no evidence that
anybody has broken this fact to Representative Van Orden. CEA
Knowledge includes some non financial data in its profiles, and
in the profile of Elizabeth Warren that he posted. It
(30:45):
says age seventy four years birthplace, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Height,
United States Senator height United States Senator. Republicans long ago
proved it does not matter to them if what they say,
or do or post is not true, largely because their
supporter is long ago go prove that doesn't matter to
(31:06):
them either, and usually they don't notice. But the screenshot
this idiot van Ordon post. It contained only thirty nine
words and one photograph. And if that kind of input
load is too much for Derek van Orden, may I
suggest a medically induced coma. Congressman Derek his height is
(31:28):
pineapple van Orden two days, worst person in the world
and also the dumbest. Finally, to the number one story
(31:48):
on the Countdown and my favorite topic, me and things
I promised not to tell and I don't usually venture
into financial commentary or advice. You will remember the story
of my great grandfather who gave away the name General
Motors for free. But I just read of Netflix finally
staunching the subscriber flow. It had lost around a million,
(32:10):
two hundred thousand households in the first half of this year,
but added about twice that many in the third quarter
thanks to such uplifting programming as the Jeffrey Dahmer story.
So yay corporate cannibalism profits. Anyway, I had an experience
with Netflix which so shook my confidence in them that
it made me fearful of even playing their stuff on
(32:33):
my big TV, because I was wondering if their stuff
would damage my big TV. This is my favorite story
of what happens when media management misunderstands its own business
and wrongly thinks superstitions and coincidences are inviolable rules for success.
This happened on June seventeenth, twenty sixteen, the day I
(32:56):
found out about the vitality, the importance, the absolute necessity
of Netflix's Italian sub I don't want to exaggerate the
importance of the two video series I did for the
GQ magazine site in twenty sixteen in twenty seventeen, The
Closer and The Resistance. I mean, for one thing, The
(33:17):
Closer was so named because each of the handful of
us involved in its production could not really conceive that
there were enough morons and closeted racists in this country
to actually elect Crazy Trump. We grandly called the videos
The Closer because we expected our expositions of Trump's essential
fraudulents and dangerousness would close the deal for Hillary Clinton.
(33:40):
Uh huh, but people watch those videos. I forget the
final count, one hundred and eighty or so episodes, four
hundred million or so views, not plays, but people actually
viewing essentially the whole piece. And CBS News did a
story once with the web analyzing platform social Flow that
showed that the first episode of The Resistance from November sixteenth,
(34:04):
six sixteen was the top story or video on Facebook
through the first six months of the Trump administration. The calculation,
and lord knows what this formula actually looks like, but
the calculation was probably pretty close that it reached fifty
four million people, the equivalent of one out of six
of everybody in the country. That's CBS News reporting this.
(34:27):
Not my ego, and ego is not the reason I
mentioned this, well, it's not the only reason I mentioned this.
MSNBC had offered me a new show in January of
twenty sixteen, but I would have hated it and you
would not have watched it. So it was not supposed
to have any commentaries in it, and a conservative co
host was supposed to be there, and The goal was
(34:50):
she and I would be the wacky couple who would
find middle ground. Plus I would have had to move
to Los Angeles, even though I could see the headquarters
of NBC News out my bedroom window in New York.
And then when it was successful, the producers wanted me
to simply get on a plane from Los Angeles and
show up one morning in the New York office of
(35:11):
the president of NBC News, Andy Lack, and tell him
either we were scrapping the format and relaunching Countdown that night,
or I was quitting. In short, they wanted me to
do this lousy show and then run a palace coup
against the president of NBC News. I passed. I put
my energy and said into finding a new platform for
(35:32):
Countdown or a Countdown like show. I had a deal
in place to become the video anchor of The Huffington Post,
a daily exclusive commentary interviews, features breaking news, funny stuff, whatever.
Two days later. Two days later, Arianna Huffington sold the
Huffington Post no more deal. Before and after this, some
(35:54):
friends from Lionsgate Productions and I were trying to sell
two ideas, pitching to a series of forward looking media companies.
One was that they should be producing and running or
posting or streaming or whatever the series of my commentaries
that became The Closer and then The Resistance. I don't
know what that would have been worth, but I do
know that the tiny slice of the advertising GQ got
(36:16):
just from the commercials that would roll if you watched
one of the episodes on YouTube was well over a
million dollars. The overall profit might have been ten times that.
Production costs were like fifty thousand dollars. But I had
a second, bigger idea to pitch to these other companies.
Who wants to own the future of cable news when
(36:37):
there isn't any cable news anymore? I correctly predicted twenty
twenty two back in twenty sixteen. Who wants to own
the future of cable news when there isn't any cable anymore?
Start with just my commentaries, and as they make money
for you, build out. If they work, you add my
(36:58):
interviews and my debates, and then somebody else's commentaries, and
then some conservative commentaries, and then add all of what
is now cable news and put it on one streaming platform.
We rented a studio, We made a demo commentary. We
made what TV pitchmen call a deck. That's how I
(37:21):
knew the producers were serious. We met with HBO about this,
We met with something called Pop TV, The Daily Beast, Yahoo,
tune In, Sony, EPIX, BBC, Hulu, Conde Nast. Ultimately that
led to the GQ series. But the one I had
the most hoped for was Netflix. The way I saw it,
they could start this tiny little thing in the corner
(37:42):
of their homepage called news Flicks, and you could click
on it, and someday there would be a menu with
Keith Olderman commentaries and I don't know, Glenn Beck commentaries
and Bill Maher commentaries and Jesus H. Christ commentaries and
Keith Olderman newscast and lou Dobbs newscast and and and
(38:04):
all of them partisan but collectively one giant, all encompassing
by partisan because of volume news and commentary site, the
proverbial marketplace of ideas, Dunkin Donuts and Baskin Robbins and
Pizza Hut living together only as newscasters, you know, for kids.
(38:28):
I thought Netflix would see it immediately. They would own news,
all of it. I mean, these were the people who
realized America was too lazy to go down to the
video store anymore, so they began to send America rented
DVDs by mail, and people actually returned the DVDs, And
(38:48):
then they realized that America was too lazy to return
them anymore, and that the optimum date to switch from
DVDs to the then laugh out loud bad concept of
online video was precisely January sixteenth to one thousand and seven.
These guys had the gonads to take a brilliantly successful,
(39:09):
profitable new idea and gradually strangle it and replace it
with a different, brilliantly successful new idea. I could not
wait to meet them. My agent at the time I
would be producer the head of television of Lionsgate like
the chief of chief at Lionsgate. And I went to
the Netflix building in Beverly Hills at ten thirty am
(39:31):
Pacific daylight time on Friday, June seventeenth, twenty sixteen. It
felt perfect. Netflix was still just down from the corner
of Alden and Maple. Twenty five years later, I had
lived two blocks away from Alden and Maple. It was
a four minute walktops. Yeah. The two people there from
Netflix were vice presidents. Wish I remembered their names. I
(39:54):
don't know. Maybe they're still there. I deliberately blocked the
names from my memory after this. One was in charge
of documentaries, one was in charge of non fiction series.
One was a man, one was a woman. I did
most of the talking, and I said, start with these
daily commentaries. You'll never have a better launch window than
the four months before the election. We could have one
(40:15):
ready for you to upload by Monday. This is lowest risk,
highest reward. How would you like to own the news
or if it doesn't work for some reason, you spend
I don't know, one hundred thousand dollars. The man spoke first.
But if you're going to do these daily, how are
(40:35):
people going to binge watch them? I mean, the first
time somebody comes to Netflix to see your commentaries, there's
only going to be one to watch. I took a
quick breath and explained that could be a drawback. On
the other hand, within four weeks there would be twenty
of them to binge. We could even start with five
or ten evergreen commentaries, so that when they come to
(40:58):
see the official premiere they watch that, then ten more
first day, and and and you guys keep telling the
press that your problem is people binge, and then they
don't come back for another five days or a week.
This way, at least some of them would come back
every day to your website. You'd begin to solve your
frequency of visitation problem, wouldn't you. I mean, you're the executives.
(41:20):
I'm just the talent, the meat puppet. But isn't that
then the woman interrupted me, okay, yeah, that would help,
and I like starting with ten, But what about the subtitles?
There was a long pause. Then the head of Lionsgates
said what subtitles? The man said, well, everything we run
(41:42):
is subtitled in the language of each country we run
it in. So your commentary would have to have subtitles
added in like sixteen different languages. That usually takes three months.
Could you do commentaries today that would still work in September?
I said, well no, But why do you need subtitles?
(42:04):
You need, say Italian subtitles or any subtitles. I mean,
it's very unlikely I said that people worldwide who are
interested enough in American politics to watch commentaries about American
politics don't already speak English. The woman looked, aghast, I
mean the coloring of her face changed, but the subtitles.
(42:25):
She said, we always have subtitles. We always do it
that way here, and I said, well, yeah, I understand,
but see this would be for news flicks, not Netflix
per se. See you could adapt your rules to fit
the urgency of timeliness. I mean, MSNBC has a profit
of like five hundred million a year because of timeliness
(42:49):
and their last in profit in cable news. Couldn't you
adjust slightly for five hundred million a year? The man
now looked a gas. No, we couldn't. This is the
Netflix rule. We can't change a rule. I began to
feel not happy. The man spoke again. Plus, what about
(43:09):
the twelve oh one rule? We all looked at each other.
You said, the commentaries would probably work best at eight
or nine pm, But in all of our countries, anything
new gets posted at exactly twelve oh one am local time,
only at twelve oh one am, so anything you did
today could not possibly run until twelve oh one am tomorrow.
(43:30):
I was still reeling from the Italian subtitles. Now there
was also an unbreakable twelve oh one tomorrow rule. I
was thinking of getting up and leaving, but the woman
apparently had one more gut punch to throw at me.
I also wanted to know if we somehow were able
to turn the subtitles around with lightning speed, or skip them,
or do them and say only two or three hours.
(43:52):
The man interrupted, plus the hours until it's twelve oh one,
don't forget them. She nodded, yes, plus the hours until
it's twelve o one. If we could somehow do that.
What would happen if one day something went wrong technically
and we couldn't upload that day and people came to
the site and there wasn't a new one. What if
it doesn't upload? Well? I had an answer to that,
(44:13):
but I did not say it out loud. I said
it a few minutes later to the head of lions Gate,
after we had said goodbye to mister and missus vice
president in the lobby of the Netflix building, I said,
good God. These people are in the uploading business. They
have been uploading for nine years. They aren't sure they
can upload. What equipment have they been uploading with? Are
(44:36):
they uploading from Kevin Spacey's nineteen ninety six don laptop?
As I left to get in the car to go
to lax to Fly home to New York, totally disappointed.
The Lionsgate guy was just shaking his head. I'm sorry,
I had no idea.
Speaker 8 (44:54):
I call you later at exactly twelve oh one am
with Italian subtitles. Haha, what if it an upload? He
said as he walked away from me. Christ I got
to get my broker on the phone. I got to
sell all my Netflix stock. I've done all the damage
(45:25):
I can do here. Thank you for listening. Countdown has
come to you from the world headquarters of the Old
Women Broadcasting Empire in New York Countown. Musical directors Brian
Ray and John Phillip Shanelle arranged, produced, and performed most
of our music. Mister Ray was on guitars, bass, and drums,
and mister Shanelle handled orchestration and keyboards produced by TKO Brothers.
(45:46):
Other music, including some of the Beethoven compositions, were arranged
and performed by the group. No horns allowed, by the way.
That's TKO Brothers and not somebody named TKO Brothers, not
Joyce Brothers brother or something. Joyce Brothers who not only
went to Cornell as did I, but worked at the
Cornell radio station WVBR, not anytime near mind, But we
(46:09):
once discussed this on countdown. You've lost interest, haven't you.
The sports music is the Ullriman theme from ESPN two,
written by Mitch Warren Davis Curtesy of ESPN inc. Our
satirical and pithy musical comments are by Nancy Fauss. The
best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer today was my
friend Dennis Leary. Everything else was pretty much my fault.
So next countdown for this the two hundred and seventy
(46:30):
ninth day until the twenty twenty four US presidential election,
and the twenty second day since dementia J Trump's first
attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
Use the fourteenth Amendment, use the Insurrection Act, use the
justice system, use the mental health system to stop him
from doing it again while we still can. The next
(46:54):
scheduled countdown is tomorrow bulletins as the news warrants, and
if my throat permits till then I'm Keith Olberman. Good morning,
good afternoon, good night, and good luck.
Speaker 3 (47:09):
But at the end of the day I find it
hard to blade.
Speaker 1 (47:11):
Countdown with Keith Olderman 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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