SLEAZE: ALITO, TRUMP TALK, BEFORE ALITO RULES ON TRUMP CASES - 1.9.25 - Countdown with Keith Olbermann

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. This
is not difficult. Justice Samuel Alito must be off the

(00:29):
Supreme Court of the United States immediately today. He is
a man without any morals, ethics, judicial standards, and if
he is aware of the concept of the appearance of
the conflict of interest, he no longer gives a damn
about the appearance of a conflict of interest. He is
one of the people destroying this nation. He should not

(00:50):
be allowed to park near the Supreme Court, let alone
serve on it. ABC News reports, and Alito actually has
confirmed that on Tuesday he spoke to Trump the day
before Trump's lawyers filed an emergency request demanding that Alito

(01:10):
and the other justices block a state judge, New York
State Judge jan mere Shan from sentencing Trump tomorrow for
his thirty four convictions in the election interference Stormy Daniel's case. Here,
even though there is zero percent chance of jail time
and probably not much more of chances of probation or fine,

(01:35):
the convicted felon and constitutionally ineligible president elect who is
running because Alito in the Supreme Court made up a
new interpretation of an amendment that has never before been made,
and then made up something called presidential immunity. He still
has the TikTok case in front of the Supreme Court.

(01:57):
Now he will probably take the release of either or
both of the halves of the Jack Smith report on
Trump espionage the coup attempt to the Supreme Court in
the next few days to try to keep those reports
from ever seeing the light of day. And this human
embodiment of sleas Sam effing Alito talked to him by

(02:18):
phone less than forty eight hours ago. And what is
Alito's excuse for this complete breach of judicial etiquette? Alito
told ABC the conversation was not about that case, was
not about that case that was not filed till the
next morning. It was about a job reference. I'll quote

(02:43):
what he told ABC. Quote William Levi, one of my
former law clerks, asked me to take a call from
President elect Trump regarding his qualifications to serve in a
government position. I agreed to discuss this matter with President
elect Trump, and he called me yesterday Tuesday afternoon. We
did not discuss the emergency application filed today Wednesday, And

(03:06):
indeed I was not even aware at that time of
our conversation that such an application would be filed as
an aside. That makes Aledo stupid. On top of everything else,
we also did not discuss any other matter that is
pending or might in the future come before the Supreme Court,
or any past Supreme Court decisions involving the President elect.
Sam Alito to ABC News unquote bullshit. Sam Alito has

(03:33):
lied in the case of the political flags flown over
his homes and his conflict with his neighbors. He has
publicly complained that the American public has had the nerve
to disagree with him. He has imposed his religious nut
job cult views on cases before the court. There is
an argument that he has long since passed the Chief
Justice at the time of the Court's affirmation of slavery,

(03:54):
Roger B. Tawney as the worst human ever to sit
on that court a job reference a job for one
of his former clerks in Trump's administration, while Trump has
business before the Court and more to come. Even if

(04:14):
this far fetched excuse is somehow true, how could you
talk directly to Trump with cases coming before the court
centering on Trump to say nothing of cases to come
in the years ahead, where you have essentially asked Trump

(04:35):
to hire your former law clerk. It looks like the
first half of a bribe. If you did it, that's
what they'd say about you. How could he be so dense,
so unaware of the hatred he has personally brought down
upon this once most respected of American governmental institutions. As

(04:57):
to conduct that call now thirteen days before the inaugural
I mean, this would be cheap and petty and obvious
and horrish, and a conflict of interest, or at least,
at best, the appearance of a conflict of interest, even

(05:18):
judged against Trump's conduct. That's how bad this is. This
is not difficult. Recusing is insufficient here he must be
off the court. In point of fact, Alito should in
this order recuse, resign, and go to hell. And this

(05:43):
also is not difficult. Eileen Cannon, Trump's other concier's judge
ruled the DOJ can't release Smith's report on the espionage
and Stolen Secret Documents report in the case, which she
herself threw out corruptly. That report is still nominally vaguely
in her purview, but probably not. But she also wanted

(06:07):
and still wants to throw out the Smith investigation report
of Trump's involvement in the attempted revolution January sixth. The
solution here is far easier than in the case of
sam Alito. Oh, He's only talking to him about a job.
The solution here is far easier. Ignore Eileen Cannon, to

(06:30):
his very small credit. Merrick Garland is going to release
the January sixth part of Smith's final report on Trump,
but withhold the document's part until a final court ruling. Doubtless,
Trump and his legal whores will go to the Supreme
Court and try to at least run out the clock
on the January sixth stuff, just as they have gone
to the Supreme Court to try to run out the
clock on the sentencing in the Trump election interference Stormy

(06:53):
Daniels case. Here in New York, an internal Department of
Justice report has nothing to god damned do with a
case that no longer exists because the judge threw it
out corruptly. If her superior judges at the Eleventh Circuit
Court of Appeals do not immediately overturn her transparent payback

(07:16):
to the man to whom she owes her job, President
Biden himself must release all of Smith's report on the
stolen documents on national security grounds, and if somebody in
the Trump regime doesn't like it, they can prosecute Biden.
All right, It's an official presidential act, and thus Biden
is immune. By the way, Biden, who yesterday said he

(07:38):
is considering preemptive pardons for people like Liz Cheney and
Tony Fauci, and I still think there should be a
million more on the list, should hit Trump with one final, short,
sharp shock. He should take the whole Smith report on
the insurrection and the documents and release it a week

(08:00):
from Sunday, the night before the inauguration, or crack of
dawn on Inauguration Day itself. The Attorney General, who can
snatch some small part of his dignity from the jaws
of humiliation, was not planning to release the two volume
report before tomorrow morning at the earliest. Hold on to it, Bigfoot.

(08:23):
It overshadow the inauguration with it every humiliation of Trump
and these idiots, I mean, besides the humiliations he keeps
making out of himself every goddamn day. No matter how
temporary one of these humiliations is, it is a victory. Hell.
I still think Biden should retire before the twentieth for
the sole reason of making just for a few hours

(08:46):
or a few days, Kamala Harris the forty seventh president anyway,
and to do, if nothing else, screw up Trump's forty
seven merchandise. Meanwhile, the Eleventh Circuit Court should not only
reprimand Eileen Cannon, but they should attempt to suspend her, and,
however fruitless it may ultimately be, they must try to

(09:08):
remove her from her ill gotten position. She is the
personification of the Trump Maga Republican Party, prostitution of the bench.
And to the degree it is still possible, those few
left in the justice system, all committed to the law
and the Constitution and the idea of truth, should go
to the mats to get rid of Eileen Cannon. Ignore

(09:34):
her ruling, release the damn report, print a million copies
of it, and drop them from helicopters over every Trump
property in this country, especially over his home at Muscalago.
And as to the courts still hearing these cases, this
is it for your entire profession, kids, for possibly centuries

(09:58):
to come. It is now or never. Stand up for
the law and for what you have supposedly don detiquete
to your lives too, or the entire structure and all
of you will have to be replaced if this nation
is ever to again function as what it claims to be,
a system in which no man, even a fat, stupid,

(10:19):
crazy one, is above the law. And now to your

(10:50):
obeying in advanced scorecard. And it is hard to believe
that we could see somebody hore themselves out. And I
know I'm pushing my show limit for the word horror,
but it is amazing to see somebody hore themselves out
worse than Elon or Jeff Bezos. Mark Zuckerberg in a
expensive watch and a bad rug on top of his

(11:13):
head bands, fact checking on Facebook threads whatever else. He
owns Meta Matza what I don't even know what it's
called anymore, to enable conservative lying, which is what it's for,
eliminate fact checks that allows conservatives to lie and to

(11:34):
groom young people into believing their lies. He puts the
UFC slimeball Dana White on the board of Mega Maga Zuka.
He appoints a Trump flunky to a position from which
he has just fired an actual journalist as a top executive.

(11:56):
He has the Trump flunky go on Fox News to
announce this change in the elimination of Facebook, essentially to
fellate Trump on Fox. Then, just in case you thought
somebody was freelancing inside Meta Muda mita, Hello Mudda, Hello fada,
he Zuckerberg puts out a pathetic string of tweets on

(12:18):
threads or or whatever it's called threats. An A makes
it sound like he is in a BDSM relationship with Trump,
and by the way, not in the ass part, and
b makes elon musk sound subtle. Let me read this
and translate it, and it's basically already a transcription of

(12:40):
a video Zuckerberg did in which he's wearing some sort
of religious pendant or something and a nine hundred thousand
dollars watch and a bad rug from zuck It's time
to get back to our roots around free expression and
giving people voice on our platforms. Yes, yes, that was

(13:04):
free expression. That was the thing that got you hauled
in front of Congress several times because people were printing
damaging lies and getting away with it. Because the major
failure in online communication is you let people use anonymity
to smear other people and to tell lies. Nearly every

(13:24):
problem on the Internet would disappear tomorrow. If everything written
on it had to be signed, as we say, had
to have your name on it. Would this increase some problems? Yes?
Would it decrease whistleblowing? I guess when was the last
time a whistleblower went to Facebook or Thrills or whatever

(13:49):
it's called. When was the last time that happened? Would
there be some more risk of people trying to jump
from the Internet world to real life and cause problems
for people? They're doing that now. People are docksed every hour,
And basically what Zucker saying is sure, you can dox them,
you can slander them. We're going back to our roots.

(14:10):
Here's what we're going to do. One replace fact checkers
with community notes. Starting in the US. He just fired
the pros and let the average user of Facebook and
the other meta products decide what is reality and what
is not reality. And George Carlin's joke comes back into

(14:31):
the fore here. Consider the average intelligence of the absolute
average person in America who has the average intelligence, and
remember that that means that all nearly fifty percent of
the public is dumber than that guy. So we're going
to let those people decide what is real and what
is a fact and what is not. Two, simplify our

(14:53):
content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and
gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse. So
get out all of your jokes about transgenders and your
threats against them, mar Zuckerberg and immigration. You can start
using terms that were dropped from polite conversation in this
country in the nineteen seventies about people from Mexico, for instance,

(15:15):
or Jewish people. If you want, go right ahead, immigration, gender,
open warfare is now permitted on Facebook, threads, Instagram, instacrap,
whatever it is. Three change how we enforce our policies
to remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing

(15:37):
our filters on tackling illegal and high severity violations and
requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action. Yes,
because there were so many censorship mistakes banning Trump from
the Internet basically from social media actor he tried to
use social media to cause an armed insurrection in which

(15:58):
police officers and other law enforcement officers were killed as
a result of a mob filled with all kinds of
weapons and militias with organized game plans to potentially hang
the vice president of the United states. That's right removing
that policy because that was a censorship mistake. Four, bring

(16:18):
back civic content. We're getting feedback that people want to
see this content again, so we'll phase it back into Facebook, Instagram,
and threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.
I thought you said you were going to stop fact
checking the conservatives. How is it ever going to be
friendly and positive again? I mean I got into an

(16:41):
argument once on Twitter about the fact that I was
not a big fan of rap music. I think every
time other than that that there have been harsh words,
it's been with a conservative. Five. Move our trust and
safety and content moderation teams out of California and our
US content review to Texas. This will help remove the

(17:03):
concern that bias employees are overly censoring content. People in
Texas are less biased than people in California. Zuckerberg, you
know you're talking about Texas. If they find out that

(17:24):
you think that the people in Texas are more fair
and honest to immigrants and Hispanics and gay people, they're
going to run you right out of Texas. That's not
what they do in Texas. Work with President Trump to okay,
just give it up. Right here. Just stop pretending in

(17:46):
your nine hundred thousand dollars watch and your bad rug
work with President Trump. You do not work with the
government to do things like this on an ordinary basis
to push back against foreign governments going after American companies
to censor more as the strongest constitutional protections for free

(18:07):
expression in the world, and the best way to defend
against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with
the support of the US government. There is nothing at
all in the Constitution or in any law that says
that there cannot be consequences for bad free speech. You

(18:27):
still cannot shout fire in a crowded theater, according to
the Supreme Court. And no matter what you say, if
it's wrong, if it inspires bad conduct, there are results.
Your company can fire you. But this idea that constitutional

(18:47):
protections for free expression means everything goes is something that
someone who is living an abject terror of being blackmailed
would say. It'll take time to get this all right,
and these are complex systems, so they'll never be perfect.
But this is an important step forward, and I'm looking
forward to this next chapter. What is this mark Chapter

(19:07):
eight hundred. You've been doing this how long thirty years
and you still aren't even close to fulfilling the responsibilities
you should have started with Delete your company. Dictatorship requires
the sublimation and perversion of media. The Nazis cut to
the chase and simply eliminated private broadcasting in the thirties

(19:31):
and controlled the newspapers directly. Other authoritarians managed to control
news and communication forums by intimidation or influence, but bribing
or rewarding amoral whorees like Zuckerberg and bus Musk with
billions is just a new streamlining of the Hitler Stalin
Mao playbook, now the Hitler Stalin Mao Trump playbook. What

(19:58):
a dispiriting and self destructive, self disemboweling, pathetic excuse for
a human being. Mark Zuckerberg is not to be outdone
Jeff Bezos, who is also all of those things. Plus

(20:20):
I tried this not in a social setting, but in
a work setting. I tried to spend part of every
day with Laurence Sanchez. I don't know if he had
told me he was not. I wasn't gonna say it.
I can't say it. All I know is that it
would eventually disturb your brain. Jeff Bezos se is signaling

(20:43):
he will pay to play in this space. Oh no,
Zuckerberg's gonna turn Facebook and Meta and threads over to
Trump and eliminate all fact checking. Ah, hold my beer.
Bezos is signaling he will pay to play to so
to speak, pay to play with Milania Trump. He didn't

(21:07):
just buy a documentary about Trump's quote wife unquote for
forty million dollars, he leased it. He didn't even get
ownership of it. Fuck's Matthew Boloney scooped. I've also learned
that Amazon is paying a cool forty million to license
the film, per three sources familiar with the deal. The

(21:27):
price includes the Ratner documentary, which will get a small
theatrical release and then appear on Prime Video, plus a
previously undisclosed two to three episode follow up docuseries on
the First Lady. Milania will participate in both projects. As
an aside, I believe the title of this series will
be who cares? But seriously, dude, forty million dollars to

(21:51):
Milania Trump and you don't even own it. Of course,
come to think of it, that sounds exactly like Trump's
deal with her. As to Trump himself, if you had
any doubt it's true that every Republican accusation is a confession.

(22:14):
Politico reporter Alex Eisenstadt has a new book coming out,
and in it he says that Trump could not even
get through a town hall just him, no Common, no Biden,
no NICKI Haley, just him, just a foxtown hall without
being given the questions in advance. This Fox hall on
town hall was a weird A year ago Friday, year
ago tomorrow. Quoting CNN, Eisenstadt describes a deep relationship between

(22:39):
Trump and those within Fox News. Eisenstadt reports that in
January twenty twenty four, then candidate Trump was sent to
hold a town hall with Iowa voters, moderated by Fox
News anchors Brett Baher and Martha McCallum. They're not anchors,
they're opinion people pretending to be anchors. Though not all
of Trump's advisors wanted him to attend, they quote were
still peeved at Fox, whose coverage they continued to find antagonistic,

(23:05):
and did not want the former president to do the
primetime event. Eisenstadt writes, but Trump had a good relationship
with Bear. They were golf buddies and wanted to do
a sit down. About thirty minutes before the town hall
was due to start, a senior aide started getting text
messages from a person on the inside at Fox. Holy

(23:28):
s hyphen t. The team thought they were images of
all the questions Trump would be asked and the planned
follow ups, down to the exact wording Jackpot. This was
like a student getting a peek at the test before
the exam started, Eisenstadt writes. In other words, Fox was
giving Trump help to finish first in his class, and

(23:52):
his class consisted of only one student. Now you know
how Trump got through Wharton. The amazing part about this
is that Fox responded by saying it would invest to Gate.
It didn't like the fact that there were sources, even
though every minute of Fox is sourced to some anonymous source.

(24:12):
But the most important part I thought was they complained
about that description of Brett Behar as a golf buddy
of Trump's because the implication is that these text messages were,
or these pictures of the questions were gotten to Trump's
people by or under the influence of, or at the
direction of Brett Behar. That's the implication of this. That

(24:35):
is the way this is phrased from a person on
the inside at Fox right after the reference to a
good relationship with Bear, they were golf buddies. Fox has
denied their golf buddies. Of course, since this happened, whatever
actually happened, he needed help finishing first in a one

(24:56):
man race. Of course, since then, a year ago tomorrow,
Trump has gotten far crazier. And the nice thing about
being in insane and constitutionally ineligible president is that you
never have to say you're sorry, or take any more
crazy pills or anything that might be true. You don't
have to say that, or you don't have to make
sense when you talk, or you don't have to say

(25:18):
something that just holds together as bullshit. I mean, I
thought he couldn't have sounded nor looked crazier in his
brain damaged Grant on Tuesday if his eyes had suddenly
done a Marty Feldman and began pointing in different directions.
I can't begin to tell you how much was wrong
with that news conference. We are founding signatories to two

(25:45):
important treaties, not just to NATO but to the Rio
Pact which preceded NATO. These both require us, in writing
to come to the defense if any of our allies
and co signatories in NATO or in the Rio Pact
are attacked. We have to defend allies like Canada, Greenland

(26:08):
and Panama. So after his latest dose of the crazy pills,
he no longer needs. Trump wants to rename the Gulf
of Mexico as the Gulf of America as a compromise,
I recommend the Gulf. Between Trump's insanity and reality. He
wants to coerce Canada into merging with us. Actually that's cool.

(26:30):
I like that we get their land, they get to
run the government. Seems like the optimum outcome for the
possibility of freedom on the continent. And he wants to
buy or try out his beloved Hitler style an shlush
on Greenland at its protector Denmark. And he wants to

(26:52):
just go seize the Panama Canal and will not rule
out using troops against countries we are sworn to defend.
So this could legally put us in this position. And
I know Trump doesn't believe any rule applies to him,
and therefore no treaty applies to him, and no reality
applies to him. And he's not going to die, And
if he wanted to, he could turn off the gravity.

(27:12):
He's crazy as f but we could legally be in
this position internationally. Trump sends troops to Canada, Greenland, and Panama,
and we also simultaneously send different troops to Canada, Greenland,
and Panama to help them defend themselves against US. Even

(27:38):
Trump's media sycophants, We're not ready for all of this?
How not ready? This is fill in Fox News nitwit.
Rosanna Scatto on the idea of buying Greenland.

Speaker 2 (27:53):
By the way, this is not the first time that
America has tried to buy Greenland. Back in eighteen sixty seven,
Democratic President Harry Truman to bry Greenland for one hundred
million dollars.

Speaker 1 (28:07):
Cool. Cool, so Harry Truman was president from eighteen sixty
seven through nineteen fifty three. By the way, this Rosanna
Scotto used to co anchor the news here on Channel
five with Greg Kelly, now of Newsmax. In fact, she
is still an actual newscaster on the Fox station in

(28:30):
New York Rosanna Scotto back then, though when she co
anchored with Greg Kelly, the joke was Greg Kelly was
on Channel five with her because he could not count
as high as six. More recently, Greg Kelly told his
Newsmax idiot viewers that idolizing Taylor Swift was a sin
and it's in the Bible. And then he went back

(28:51):
idolizing Trump. And just remember miss Scotto was considered the
smart one to be fair in the year twenty ten. Scotto,
who was a member of the family that runs some
Okay restaurants here, showed off her food sophistication by on
the air calling soy milk quote cow jism on the

(29:15):
news on the Morning News at quarter to eight, cow
good Kennedy. Then there is immigration and the purge of minorities,

(29:46):
and the growing indications that the guy Trump put in
charge of all that, Stephen Miller, may not be right
in the head, and the guy Stephen Miller put in
charge of pulling it off maybe even less right in
the head than Stephen Miller. A week after the Vegas
and Nola attacks, and Tom Homan and boy is that
a perfect name, home Man still insists immigrants had something

(30:08):
to do with both of those attacks. Something something borders something, something,
terrorsts crossing something something. Let their clown voters make up
their own nonsense connection I Tom Hoeman have run out
of them. But the madness is not contained to the
Department of Ethnic Cleansing, Norm Eisen and Thomas Joscelyn in

(30:30):
the Bulwark quote what was the FBI doing planning January
sixth for a year? Cash Patel, Trump's dominie to serve
as FBI director, asked that question during a November twenty fifth,
twenty twenty two episode of Cash's Corner podcast for The
Epoch Times. It was no slip of the tongue, As
the title of that episode suggested, what did the FBI

(30:52):
know before January sixth? Patel spent considerable time trying to
cast the FBI as a villain responsible for January sixth.
Patel noted that FBI Director Christopher Ray had quote testified
that the FBI never instigated or helped the January sixth
protesters commit crimes, but citing a report that the FBI
had confidential human sources in the crowd, Pttel asserted, Okay, well,

(31:15):
that was in planning for at least a year. It's
the FBI. It's a major political event taking place in
Washington hours before the certification of the election, which Trump
has been spending months trying to prevent, and you are
surprised that the FBI was there. The FBI is supposed

(31:38):
to be there. Somebody is supposed to be there. Everybody
else blew it. Every other aspect of that Trump administration
controlled Justice Department and law enforcement officials, they blew it.
But the FBI confidential program had a couple of people
in the crowd good. During the September thirtieth, twenty twenty

(32:02):
two episode of Cash's Corner, by the way, that was
the best name you could come up for a podcast,
Cash's Corner, Patel said, the question that has to be
answered is when did the FBI put those goes in
and where and did those confidential human sources engage people
who are not going to conduct criminal activity and convince

(32:23):
them to do so. Come on, everybody, let's stage a revolution.
Battel claimed that it is the definition of entrapment, which
is illegal, and you can't charge someone who's been entrapped,
and he wondered who was running this confidential human source
network and reporting it to FBI Director Chris Ray. Petel
added he would venture a guess that once we see
the documentation from January sixth, you will see the FBI's

(32:45):
confidential human source corruption cover up network on blast and
he accused the FBI of inserting these human sources into
these matters. Petel asked rhetorically, why why would you say
January sixth? Because they wanted a political target, a political prosecution,
not one based on law. In fact, it's an interesting

(33:07):
article the Bulwark, Thomas Joscelyn and Norm Eisen. The problem,
of course, is that as a corrupt head of the
FBI with a screw loose cash, Patel could easily fabricate
documents or order equally maniacal subordinates to do it for
him and pass them off as evidence of whatever it

(33:28):
is he thinks happened here. And then we have jumped
immediately into the Stalin Purge trials of the nineteen thirties
with fabricated evidence against Chris Ray. No, Biden's got a
powerdon Chris Ray, who's not that cleaner record. But now
I's got to everybody else. Is all going to come
back to. Liz Cheney was in the crowd dressed as

(33:52):
I don't know, Abraham Lincoln, like in the Manchurian Candidate.
She was wearing a Lincoln beard and a hat. That
these people are not very bright is established fact that
I cite often It does not change the fact though,
that they can still be very dangerous. But sometimes there

(34:13):
is comic relief in the stupidity of the Greenland thing.
The Midas Network quotes Danish media on truth social Trump
posted a video of a man from Greenland asking him
to purchase the Danish colony. As it turns out, the man,
Timmy Zeb tim eh Zeb Zeeb, is a convicted drug dealer,

(34:34):
according to dr News quote. But Timmy Zeb, who on
Trump's profile has been made the face of Greenlander's desire
to become part of the United States, has a long
list of convictions behind him, most striking as a verdict
from twenty nineteen, where Timmy Zeb was sentenced to four
years in prison in one of Greenland's largest cannabis cases.
Back in two thousand and nine, Greenlandic police described how

(34:58):
Timmy Zeb was known for crimes that were dangerous to people.
This happened in connection with Timmy Zebe's escape from prison. Well,
I mean, he not only fits right in with Trump,
he should be in the cabinet or at least ambassador
to Greenland. Mister Zeb also apparently said Americans were too fat,

(35:19):
which I guess means that how fat he appears in
his video, which I would roughly describe as ten pounds
and a five pound bag would be just fat enough.
Yet through all this, Trump of course reserved the ultimate
crazy about January sixth to himself. He has now dropped
the hint of a new plot line coming up, suggesting

(35:42):
maybe January sixth was done by I can barely say
it has Belah, you might as well Trump have said
January sixth was a conspiracy led by the Visiting Nurse
Association and the Los Angeles Fires. As a former resident,

(36:16):
I'm a mess. You may have heard it. I'll go
into this at length later. The fatal, arrogant, and worse
mistake of Trump and the cult is that the only
force on earth that matters is money. When say, Florida
is rendered unlivable at some point in the next fifty years,

(36:36):
five years, five months, whatever it is, by winds, by fires,
by storms, by nature, by God, whatever, all the money
will mean nothing that moment when you discover that Trump
is wrong, that money is not the only force in
the universe that matters, was on public display in the
last few days at the height of the disaster, as

(36:58):
others perished and fire after fire broke out a celebrity
house flipping guy or a real estate jackass or something.
A week ago was touting the great investments in Pacific Palisades,
where much of the destruction occurred posts this. His name
is Keith Watserman and on behalf of all the Keiths
in the world. I'd like to apologize for this. Does

(37:20):
anyone have access to private firefighters to protect our home
in Pacific Palisades? Need to act fast here all neighbors'
houses burning. Will pay any amount, thank you, Please save
my luxury home firemen. I can pay more than those
people who will pay you to save their children. I'm

(37:44):
even in this America, even in this America that has
been building since I was a child, in which people
believe that money can get them anything. And remember there
is an eternal life cult around the idea that if
they spend enough money, they can live or be frozen
and resuscitated in a thousand years. They really believe this.
They can extend their own life last to one hundred

(38:05):
and twenty five years and then get frozen and resuscitated.
Ted Williams was right seeing the condition his head is in. No,
I haven't well look around the room later. It's got
to be here somewhere. Does anyone have access to private
firefighters to protect our home? And Pacific Palisades need to

(38:25):
act fast here all neighbors' houses burning will pay any amount,
thank you. So just picture this. Somebody says yes to
this and sends private firefighters weaving through everybody being evacuated
from Pacific Palisades to go in and just save this
one guy's house, as if that was physically possible. When

(38:47):
winds of up to one hundred miles an hour, we're
blowing the fire dozens, perhaps one hundred miles across southern
California in a forty eight hour period. This idiot believes
that his home and his home alone can be saved
by private firefighters because there must be private firefighters. There

(39:10):
must be for him. He just didn't know about it beforehand,
or he would have signed a contract and probably left
a five dollars tip. Wait, it gets worse. This is
this same guy, Keith Wasserman. Also on ex Twitter in September,

(39:31):
Trump reposts, your automobile insurance is up seventy three percent.
Vote for Trump. I'll cut that number in half. He
retweets this and adds property taxes too. Please, you know
what property taxes go to. Yeah, trying to stop your
goddamn house from burning down, and your neighbor's house and

(39:52):
everybody else's house, because it's cheaper that way and more efficient,
because you can't just go into a burning neighborhood and
go thirty two seventy one will save that one. The
rest of you can go to hell. I never dreamed
the cut taxes so your house burns down party would
let my house burn down. Thousands of buildings destroyed by

(40:18):
the mill of yesterday afternoon, at least seventy thousand evacuated,
more than one million people without power in Los Angeles.
The total number in Southern California in the Greater Area
was approaching a million and a half. Wind gusts up
to one hundred miles an hour to the point where
they could not fly those planes dropping the water and

(40:40):
the fire retardant. But only when you discover a piece
of trivia like the following does it become personal and
help you clarify your mind about why we continue to
tempt climatic disaster and the local tragedies that will precede
it like this in Los Angeles, when we imagine something

(41:02):
like this every day, every day, a little worse than
the last one. The denial of disasters from my own
time living in Santa Monica, where I found out yesterday
that my old house is literally the last time I
looked three blocks south of the mandatory evacuation. All right,

(41:35):
I know I've taken up a lot of your time,
but there's much more to come. Also of interest here
in an all new edition, the guy in charge of
the Washington Post actually is quoted by a staffer who
resigned as having asked a reporter for the Washington Post quote,
what can we do to attract Trump supporters? Well, he's

(41:57):
doing what you could do. Go out of business. That's next.
This is countdown. This is countdown with Keith Albumen still

(42:28):
ahead of us on countdown. To paraphrase the old radio joke,
No it's not leaving here. Fine, I hope it sounds fine.
The episode has been a little ragged. I want to
go into length and distance about why it has been
so ragged. The short answer to that is two words,

(42:50):
three words. Really, Southern California fires. I used to live there,
and I mean there at the intersections. Believe it or not,
there's still first more new idiots to talk about. The
daily roundup of the miscrants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects
specimens who constitute today's other worst persons in the world,

(43:11):
the bronze worse. Jen Saki. Jen Saki is not terrible
on MSNBC, although if they had wanted to hire somebody
to do a Rachel Matdow impression, they should have gotten
somebody to commit to the bit like Abby Elliott used
to on SNL. She does, however, have that little I'm
going to explain this to you like you were a

(43:32):
child tone to her voice. She's gotten that now very nicely.
But boy, oh boy, oh boys, can she not shake
the propagandist part. That was not the idea of MSNBC.
When the Democrats aligned with our positions as we thought
them out, and our guests believed that was great. When

(43:54):
they didn't, we slammed Democrats. When we made mistakes, we
apologized for them, even in past lives, in past careers. Nope,
Jensaki has now descended into rationalizing fatal mistakes made by
Jensaki and the presidential administration for which she worked four
years ago. Talking on MSNBC about Merrick Garland, who right

(44:18):
now will go down into history as one of the
great and perhaps final villains of American democracy. This is
a man, Jensaki said, who has an unassailable resume. I
believe you have the tense wrong there and views the
job as it should be viewed through the prism of
the law and history. No, clearly that's not true. But

(44:43):
I do wonder if that at that moment in history,
he was the right choice for the job. She went
on a long monologue about her internal wonderings. She wondered
if she should have helped support Garland from the White
House press podium or gone along with not addressing the
second Trump impeachment, or much of January sixth from the

(45:04):
White Ho press podium. A lot of wondering and that
sort of meanderingly went to her excusing herself for not
being more aggressive towards Trump. We can't predict the future,
she said, Funny, Jen, everybody else did, everybody else, pretty
much in the Democratic Party, everybody else in America told

(45:24):
you lock him up, send him to ELBA, put him
and everybody who was involved in this, and put him
away for good forever, and most importantly, do it before
he regains strength. You are talking about the Godzilla of politicians. Oh,

(45:46):
you can't predict the future now. Of course, Jensaki is
still doing the job she quit in twenty twenty two.
Stop giving these ponderous, overwrought commentaries that somehow always end
up with you distancing yourself from the disaster you participated in,
and then end with you forgive yourself. You failed, you

(46:07):
all failed. You may have cost America representative government, but no,
write a long commentary about how you wonder now if
Merrick Garland at that moment in history was the right
choice for the job he wasn't, or at any other
point in history right now, If you want to do

(46:30):
a commentary about Merrick Garland having vaguely worked for him,
with him or with the people who chose him, I
think you should devote it to wondering whether or not
he's actually a Democrat, a liberal, or a believer in
representative government. How about that for a commentary. On the
other hand, your disgrace, your failure, has been rewarded with
the high paying TV job that you don't do very

(46:51):
well and you clearly don't understand the purpose of So
you got that going for you? Runner up worser. We'll
let Eric Erickson represent all the fascists who now have trumpsomnia.
But also playing back to what Jensaki said, you can't
predict the future. Eric Erickson is one of I don't
know how many ten million Republican commentators, all of whom,

(47:15):
all of whom have somehow memory hold January sixth and
changed its meeting, altogether, changed it utterly beyond all recognition,
as if the Civil War was in fact the war
of Northern aggression to destroy Confederate property rights, you know,

(47:36):
the slaves. On January sixth, twenty twenty one, at three
o'clock in the afternoon Eastern Standard time, Eric Erickson, a
Conservative who came from such humble beginning beginnings that his
family could only afford the one name. Eric Erickson tweeted,

(47:57):
shoot the protesters, wave the rules, impeach, wave the rules, convict,
waive the rules, deny the ability to run for election again.
Possibly the only time and certainly the last time. Eric
Erickson was right, and today he and all the rest
of them have rationalized putting the man he wanted to impeach,

(48:22):
convict and deny the ability to run for election again.
Back in the White House to run the world again
and rename it the Gulf of America or the gulf
between Trump's insanity and reality. Eric Erickson representing that group,

(48:43):
and that group is now pushing, if you have not
heard this, for an investigation into the death of the
terrorist Ashley Babbitt, the one he said should have been
shot along with all the other protesters. I'm not a
big fan of shooting people. I'm certainly not a big
fan of shooting people who are expressing political opinions, even
if they are completely wrong. And they want to shoot me,

(49:07):
but shoot the protesters. That was a pretty good idea,
and we didn't do it. Instead we got Merrick Garland
shoot the protesters. And now they want to investigate the
death of Ashley Babbitt. And you know already where this ends.
This ends with indicting people who were involved in protecting
the capital for the simple reason that not only does

(49:29):
Trump have to be cleared and made the actual victim
of all this, but they want to lay the groundwork
for when they do it again. And they'll do it again,
I mean, if there's another election. Instead of an investigation
into the death of Ashley Babbitt, may I suggest this instead,
which will go over really big, I think in conservative circles.

(49:51):
How instead about doing this, you fascists, bring Ashley Babbitt
back to life again. The way you convinced your dim
bulb occultists that you could bring JFK Junior and JFK
back to life again, and you can vince them that
you could bring RFK Junior back to life again. That
didn't go so well. Hey, Robert, are you over? Oh

(50:12):
you're on, You're on, You're on FaceTime. Okay, take that
in the other room, please, AnyWho. I think they should
bring Ashley Babbitt back to life so she can go
and do the same insane, stupid, self destructive, anti freedom,
anti American conspiracy theory crap again and the officers can
shoot her again now again. I will be happy if

(50:36):
they bring her back to life and they shoot her
and they just wound her and she recovers. The point
will have been made by that. And with all of this,
this winner is very brief and very much to the point.
The CEO Will Lewis of The Washington Post also known
as The Washington Post going out of business sale, the
Washington Post, what's left of it? The Washington Post no

(50:57):
longer at this address. The Washington Post now printing three
times a month. This is from Semaphore News. The Post's
former deputy Democracy editor, Mary Joe Murphy, quietly quit in
response to owner Jeff Bezos killing its presidential endorsement. She
wrote about it on a Facebook page for New York

(51:19):
Times alumni Quizzlings. She wrote, are inside the house that
Graham's and Bradley's, Woodwards and Bernstein's built. She recalled here's
the fun part that CEO will Lewis had asked a
reporter she managed quote what the Post could do to
attract Trump supporters parenthesis, I don't know, she wrote, lie

(51:45):
to them. Will Lewis Jeff Bezos, proprietors of after the
upcoming doubtless inevitable merger will Lewis, CEO of The Washington Post,
Penny Saver and Hot Singles News two days Whisson in

(52:09):
the world. Finally to the number one story on the
countdown and things I promised not to tell. And if
this episode has seemed a little ragged, a little more

(52:32):
ragged than usual, I have an explanation, if not an excuse.
I spent much of Tuesday night not sleeping, but watching
and listening to local television and radio coverage of the
disaster in southern California, specifically in Los Angeles, specifically in
the area basically north of Santa Monica along the Pacific

(52:54):
Coast Highway. Other fires, aided by wind gusts approaching one
hundred miles an hour, afflicted the other parts of the area,
and it is not fire season. I used to live there,
and as I said, I was almost an honorary native

(53:16):
in the news business in Southern California, in TV, particularly
if you get to seven years on the air there
in local news, you can be there forever. There were
people with whom I broke in in Los Angeles television
in nineteen eighty five who are still on the air,
and I'm not being critical of them, nor the fact
that I got to like six and a half years

(53:36):
and that was it. So I didn't quite make my
permanent honorary native status. But I enjoyed my time there.
It was my second favorite place to live in the
world and was always an option that I considered moving
back to as recently as twenty and sixteen. In any event,
I have affection for la and I have affection particularly

(53:57):
for that part of LA that was so immediately affected,
with so many homes lost and so many people evacuated
overnight Tuesday that I could not stop listening to what was,
of course a radio station, an all news station that
I used to work for for the better part of
my first trip in La KNX. Then they did a

(54:20):
marvelous job, not surprising. People who are working there are
people I worked with there. In any event, I went
back to LA for a second time to work for
Fox in nineteen ninety nine, two thousand and two thousand
and one, and I lived in Santa Monica, and in
fact I lived on Pacific Coast Highway in the area

(54:42):
in which Santa Monica slowly evolves into Malibu. There were
a couple of country clubs and tennis establishments just north
of me. It was a beautiful house. It was a
house that would I believe was built in nineteen twenty
seven by a Hollywood producer. It was a house there

(55:03):
that had the inter section of Pacific Coast Highway and
the California Incline, a key visual from the movie from
the sixties, It's a Mad, Mad Mad Mad World. The
California Incline is this hill that goes up from the
Pacific Coast Highway to Santa Monica proper. And so this house,

(55:25):
four stories tall, seven bedrooms and priced ridiculously low, had
at one end past the little spare guesthouse and the pool.
Beyond that there was a gate, There was the beach,
there was the ocean, and there was off in the

(55:45):
distance somewhere Hawaii, which no, you could not see from
my house. It was great. There was one problem and
one fear, and it's why I'm bringing all this up now,
other than simply to say this is part of me
that was in spirit there as this has unfolded, as

(56:06):
it is for all calamities in that community. There was
one problem with the place. When it was built. It
was on the beach. Santa Monica was not necessarily unpopulated,
but it was difficult to get to. There wasn't a
Pacific Coast Highway per se, and in any event, traffic
was not like it was in nineteen twenty seven. By
the time I lived there in nineteen ninety nine, there

(56:27):
was a red light at the California incline that you
could sort of reach out of my house and touch,
which meant that at peak driving hours, which are in
California daylight. The rush hour starts at daylight and ends
at the sunset, except in winter, when it's about four
hours longer. At that light, whenever it would turn red

(56:49):
on Pacific Coast Highway, there would be sixty seventy cars
idling going in each direction, So a constant rumble was
in the background there, and when there wasn't a red light,
you were treated to this sound from Pacific Coast Highway
echoing through the house, except at night when it was

(57:18):
motorcycles making that sound. Soon after about the third or
fourth day that I lived there, I began to find
myself involuntarily making those sounds myself while I was on
the phone with people who said are you okay, and
I would say I'm fine, even when I was seated

(57:42):
in the back of the backyard visiting with my neighbor
the beach and the Pacific Ocean. So that was the problem,
and I didn't stay there that long. But there was
also something else that worked on my mind then, and
I didn't really fully understand it and why it was
such a problem until I watched the fire in Santa

(58:05):
Monica on the same street on which I lived. Consume
most of the area and the structures on each floor
of this magnificent nineteen twenty seven underpriced four story building
built by the way like a British castle. There weren't

(58:26):
even cracks in the masonry, and it had been there
through countless earthquakes. On each floor there was a small door,
and inside it there was on a wheel on a
big roof, sometimes rusty and repaired wheel, a fire hose.
I don't know. I never took one of them out.
I wasn't there long enough, and I didn't need to.

(58:46):
I think they might have been fifty feet long. I
don't know. I'm not good at estimating these things. Let's
put it this way. These were not seven foot long hoses,
and these were not garden hoses. These were big, flat,
leather bound firefighters hoses like I used to see in
my grandfather, the New York City Fireman's pictures of himself

(59:07):
driving the hook and ladder in nineteen thirty one, big
hoses for home use. And obviously I rationalize this by saying, well,
you know, when they built this in nineteen twenty seven,
Santa Monica was not out in the middle of nowhere necessarily,
But the idea that there would be conceivably a fire
in the house, and you'd need to deal with it,
and you should have something like this, And it was

(59:28):
instead of sprinklers, it instead of rapid response. Now I
know better. The fear has always been there in southern
California all and I read this when I lived there
and was worried about the earthquakes. All of the prophecies
of the doom of Los Angeles have been about not
earthquakes but fires. Nathaniel West the day of the Locust,

(59:50):
los Angeles burns to the ground, painting after painting is
Los Angeles burning. The real story always from the scientists
who studied earthquakes was because, of course, an earthquake, no
matter how damaging it is, is over in a minute,

(01:00:12):
or if it's a disastrous, world shaking earthquake, two three minutes.
A fire, as we see can be two three days.
And so now they have one hundred mile an hour gusts,
and I understand why I can still see those little

(01:00:35):
doors and the little rusty wheels and the fire hoses.
I sold the place because somebody else fell in love
with it, got my money back, and moved out and
moved back into where I live for most of my
time in southern California, second time around in a hotel
or one of two hotels, which, by the way, is
the reverse of living in a troublesome house or a

(01:00:58):
discounted house. It is, as Warren Batty said about moving
into a hotel, it takes you a long time to
adjust to living into a hotel room or hotel suite
several hours. Other than occasional noise from neighbors, there's really

(01:01:19):
very little wrong with it, and of course the cost,
but what the hell, There's something else about the southern
California aspires that strikes me. And this might be interpreted,
especially by my friends from that time, with whom I
am still in touch with many of them, as criticism

(01:01:41):
or tisking or you see, you got what you paid for,
and it's not meant to be that way. But as
I just expressed, to live in that house in Pacific
Coast Highway, just north of the California Incline, like the

(01:02:04):
westernmost building at home on the continental United States, I
guess to live in that required a certain amount of denial.
I didn't recognize that those fire hoses were kept in
working order because you might need them because something like

(01:02:27):
this could happen someday, because fires burning towards the coast
from the wooded areas, if hit by the winds just right,
would jump Pacific Coast Highway and burn everything till it
got to the ocean, as we have seen. But the
other part of denial and physical calamity in southern California

(01:02:49):
has always stayed with me, And it also came back
to my mind as I heard the announcers on kN
X again and again try to place the disaster they
were seeing and the damage they were seeing in historical
context for native southern California, and they kept referring back
to nineteen ninety three and the Northridge earthquake and what

(01:03:09):
that did to the entirety of the community, and fires
the same year and what that did to the entire community.
So thirty two years ago nearly was the first historical comparison,
and they were all saying, it's dark, we can't really
see how much damage there's been. It may be nineteen
sixty one on the Malibu fires, but nineteen ninety three

(01:03:32):
and Northridge was the first time that I ever heard
my friends who had been born and raised in southern California,
and by the time I knew them, when we were
all in our twenties and thirties, shook off earthquakes and
it was like, yeah, that was a bad one. I
had forgotten about it in the three hours since it happened.
But the Northridge one was not that at all. Nobody

(01:03:55):
that I talked to who was from southern California when
I talked to them by phone in my new haunts
of Bristol, Connecticut in nineteen ninety three, not one of
them made a joke, not one of them seemed anything
but still shaken. Days, weeks, months, years later. I had
friends who lived in the apartment building that pancaked. In fact,

(01:04:19):
some of them occupied one of the apartments that was
totally crushed, and a couple of them, one of them
in particular, had moved out at my slight help from
Southern California to ESPN months earlier, and the first thing
he did was get his roommates jobs at ESPN, and
they all moved out and the apartment building was empty.
If you'd like to think about the consequences of your

(01:04:41):
job choices and your career pursuits in any event, when
I got to southern California and experienced my first minor
earthquake and went, oh, I get it. That thunking sound
in the chugga chugga chugga for a minute is like
an old train, a subway train pulling out a Times
Square station or Grand Central and everything rattling and you

(01:05:03):
get all the noises, only it's everything that's shaking, not
just the train that you're in, but you can pretend
it's a train. So the first couple of earthquakes in
the first couple of years, I was okay. And then
in nineteen eighty seven we had a big one on
October first, that was I believe five point eight, and
the pictures on my wall moved, and a star player

(01:05:25):
for the Los Angeles Dodgers injured his back and was
never the same because he tried to catch his big
screen TV as it fell off the wall. Oops. And
later on all the crazy earthquakes with people being hit
by arm wairs in their bedrooms, and of course the
number one injury requiring hospital at least doctor attention after

(01:05:49):
earthquakes of all sizes, it's people stepping on broken glass
in their home. It was evident to me from the
day that I moved in. If you want anything in
your particularly your bedroom, and you're living in southern you
put up a poster. Put up a cat. The cat
poster that says, hang in there and use nothing sharper

(01:06:13):
or more potentially damaging than thumbtacks. Tape is recommended. The
other thing was I once saw a special about what
you needed in an earthquake and how you could fit
it in a box and store it in your closet.
You needed a device a wrench that could actually shut
off the gas meters again fire not earthquakes. You needed

(01:06:34):
some form of water supply that could leave you alive
at the end of a couple of days when they
could not get to you through the rubble. You needed
a radio and batteries. You needed a small shovel, You
needed a medical kit. Just a few things, and they
sold these things for two hundred dollars. And then there

(01:06:55):
were little household things that you could do to make
things easier to survive an earthquake and not be hit
in your neck with an armoire as you got out
of bed and stepped on broken glass. Drill a little
drill and put in a couple of screws and tie

(01:07:17):
things like bookcases to your walls with piano wire, a
very simple process, so simple that I was able to
do it with everything in all of my apartments, and
even I was starting to do it when I moved
into Pacific Coast Highway, just not screwing them into the wall,
but just attaching them to the wall, with the premise

(01:07:38):
being that if there's a major earthquake enough to knock
one of them over, it probably will not come over.
All you'll have to deal with is all of your
books flying off and hitting you in the head. And
anybody can say you got a choice of a bookcase
full of books fawing on you or a bunch of
books flying off the wall and hitting you in your forehead.
You'll take the books hitting you in the forehead. But

(01:08:02):
at some point, I think around nineteen eighty eight, I
had an idea, because I wanted to go into some
sort of advanced prepper stuff about earthquakes. What else could
you do besides tying your bookcase to the wall. What
else could you do besides having that one box in
your closet. And I looked and looked for stores in

(01:08:26):
the malls, and there were very healthy malls in those
days in nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties in southern California,
healthy malls with stores of all kinds, and never was
there a earthquake preparedness store. And finally the bright idea
came to me, I would open an earthquake preparedness store.
Clearly somebody had missed this entire market. I mean, I

(01:08:50):
was already at the stage where whenever I went into
a building, and since you didn't really have to deal
with too many high rises, you're talking about the buildings
of four to twelve stories tall, I guess would be
probably the main rage in southern California. I would take
the elevator up and take the stairs down, having thus
decreased by fifty percent my chances of getting stuck in

(01:09:12):
an elevator during an earthquake. A minor thing like that,
just improve your numbers. You cannot earthquake proof yourself in
earthquake country. Well what else could you do? What else
could I be selling people? What else could I? And
I got this far of seeing the logo for this

(01:09:32):
place called be Prepared with me in a boy Scout
uniform with my fingers up in the boy Scout salute
or you know, maybe go a little edgy and do
the other finger salute. And I thought this was the
greatest idea of all time. And my friends from Southern
California looked at me not only like I was crazy

(01:09:54):
and going to lose every dollar I had, but they
looked at me as if I were insulting them. This confirmed,
after years of things that I had noticed vaguely that
the main defense against earthquakes and other disasters in Southern
California is denial. And again I'm trying not to be
critical here because I did it myself. But if you

(01:10:18):
go into a building and your first thought is how
the hell would I get out of here? If this
hallway is blocked, that can quickly turn into the government
is causing the earthquakes. It's a straight line from one
to the other. You have to call it off somewhere
and have some sort of reasonable idea. Attach your bookshelves

(01:10:41):
to your walls with string or with wire or with
chewing gum. Take the elevator up but not down. Don't
accept the office at the radio station in Los Angeles
that's seven doors away from the nearest window. Yeah, at

(01:11:06):
that point, like keeping a box full of emergency equipment
and food stuffs in your closet, and you begin to
have to acknowledge that you are in denial because you
are making preparations for a thing that you are convinced
cannot happen. No matter how many previews you have gotten.

(01:11:26):
It was denial, and it was capped by this one winter.
The company that had sold and they delivered them by ups.
I think these boxes full of water in some kind
of plastic pouch, impermeable plastic pouch, water that would last

(01:11:48):
you several days, and that God bless America gigantic wrench
to shut off the gas. Yeah, I want to be
playing with the gas during an earthquake and aftershocks. What
do hell do I know about turning off the gas.
We're not talking about turning off the gas on your stove.
Worry about it, going in, finding in your building or

(01:12:09):
the building which you live, or your home, going in
finding the main artery to the gas and making sure
you turned this. And by the way, you and sixteen
neighbors probably could not turn it if you all turned
it at the same time. But it had everything else
that you needed, particularly the medical supplies and the radio
and the batteries and the little little alerts that told

(01:12:31):
you when you needed to throw in more batteries into
your box in your closet. And for Christmas one year,
I chose my twenty dearest friends and sent them all
one of these boxes. Four or five of them not
born in southern California called me on Christmas to say thanks.

(01:12:54):
From four or five, I received no response whatsoever. The
other ten or twelve either returned the box to me
or called me up and yelled at me for having
had the nerve to disturb them with something like this
on Christmas. I swear denial is a hell of a

(01:13:15):
drug in some respects. As I have indicated from my
own behavior, it is necessary to live in a place
like southern California, or I imagine in hurricane country, in cyclone country,
in those areas of the Midwest with twisters. In fact,

(01:13:36):
in all of human life, we have to have some
denial or you will never ever go outside again, and
while you're inside, you'll be worried about the roof falling in.
You can't live that way. You do have to proceed,
But in some areas where it's much more dangerous and
the dangers are much more lethal. You then resort to
denying everything and thinking, well, those four giant industrial grade

(01:14:04):
fire hoses, they were just here for the problems they
had in the twenties. It's not like that anymore. Unfortunately,
as the climate continues to deteriorate, and we now know
that the process by which we make the planet uninhabitable

(01:14:24):
has just been advanced by fifty years. Because that's the
real story of the Trump election. The key decisions that
will mitigate or worsen the immediate effect of climate change
and let's call it for what it is, atmospheric disaster,
those decisions will now be in the hands of a

(01:14:45):
madman who doesn't believe in any of it and can't
make money off of it. As I said earlier, the
fatal element of the Trump madness is the idea that
the only force in the world that matters is money.
Money did nothing other than hasten a vaccine when a
pandemic hit, and it will do nothing to stop fire

(01:15:10):
like we have seen in southern California, and it will
do nothing for whatever else is next. So when we
are in denial, and we are now dealing with the
scenario in which the time off in southern California from wildfires.
Was the midwinter Rose Bowl Rose Bowl Parade, no fires.

(01:15:36):
It's a great time of year, fifty sixty degrees every day,
sometimes into the eighties. It's great being here. What do
you mean Santa Monica is on fire? These are the
changes we will see. It doesn't get warmer, it doesn't
get colder. It just gets more extreme, more often. And
now we have a man who thinks somehow that is

(01:15:57):
caused by Hezbollah, So we will all have to make
contain a little denial going forward. I don't know how
much time the planet has left. The scenes I saw
from southern California that kept me up all night Tuesday
night and led this to being a ragged broadcast make

(01:16:19):
me thinks, as always that it's sooner rather than later.
My heart goes out to my former home. I don't
know what happened to the brick spit house at the
California Inc Line in pch, but I know I heard
addresses mentioned Montana Lincoln Boulevard taking people off the freeway

(01:16:43):
at Lincoln Boulevard. He used to get my mail on
Lincoln Boulevard. The distance between Lincoln Boulevard and where I
lived throughout My last stay in southern California was walking
distance and that's where I got my mail. And there
were fires, and there were blockades, and there were refugees.

(01:17:04):
So the question that I raised earlier, which is, what
the hell does all this wasted energy that this country
is putting into blocking people from coming here who have
nowhere else to live? What the hell does that mean
when we are rendering parts of the planet uninhabitable, the
areas around the equator, that within a few years it

(01:17:26):
won't be oh, ten thousand migrants are at the border,
or there's imaginary caravans on Fox News, there will be
millions of people trying to get here because guess what,
They're not going to stay and live in a place
that's one hundred and fifty degrees. They're going to do
something else. And the people, the number of people at
the border may exceed the number of people inside the country.

(01:17:47):
So the solution to immigration is not building walls which
will not hold out a million people a day, which
would be three hundred and sixty five million people in
a year, which will be the size of our population. Anyway,
that's not the solution. The solution is to do our
best to mitigate all of this and to arrange in

(01:18:08):
advance areas for which these people can go. And I
don't care if you have to bend some rules and say, well,
you refugees from climate crises, you have to live in
the unpopulated areas, which will be a little bit colder,
because there are going to be more climate problems here too,
but not like we're dealing with in the equatorial part

(01:18:31):
of the country of the planet. I think there would
be ways we can handle this, But we live in
the land of stupid people, led by Trump, who is
crazier than ever and there's something wrong with his eyes.
And even if he does succumb to whatever is wrong

(01:18:52):
with him, and he looks like he's on the verge,
but often he's looked like that's imminent, he'll be replaced
by a bunch of other people who get their news
from YouTube conspiracy videos, to believe that the only force
that matters in the world is money, and who do
not know how to process nor act upon situations in
which nature, the universe, the climate, the atmosphere, God, whatever

(01:19:21):
you want to call the forces of reality tell you
to shove your money up your ass and take what
you can with you because we're burning down your house
in your neighborhood. We should have some denial, We should
try to outlive our lives. But we can't have that

(01:19:41):
much denial. And so back to the memo or the
mantra I was going to use and trying to sell
my stores that so offended Southern California with earthquake preparedness,
it is be prepared. I've done all the damage I

(01:20:09):
can do here raggedly, but I've been prepared. Thanks for listening.
Brian Ray and John Phillip Shaneil the musical directors have Countdown, arranged, produced,
and performed most of our music. Mister Chanelle handled orchestration
and keyboards, Mister Ray was on guitars, bass and drums,
and it was produced by Tko Brothers. Our satirical and
fifthy musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever,

(01:20:32):
Nancy Faust. The sports music is the Olderman theme from
ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc.
Other music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed.
My announcer today was my friend Larry David, who I'm
sure long ago screwed his cabinets, into his walls. Everything

(01:20:52):
else was, as ever, my fault. You can't believe. Even
thirty five years later, one of my friends from southern
California brought up that gift of the earthquake preparedness box,
like I had sent her a box of manure. Now
I'm going to be thinking about earthquakes for the whole year. Yeah. Yeah,

(01:21:17):
that's countdown for today, week and a half until we
inaugurate a constitutionally ineligible president who does not believe in
any of this and has no connection to reality anymore
and thinks that there is money and him and nothing
else in the world that matters. But it's just four
hundred and seventy three days until the scheduled end of

(01:21:37):
his lame duck term. The next scheduled countdown is Monday.
I hope to announce a new schedule for this series
by then. Maybe in the interim has always bulletins as
the news warrants till the next one. I'm Keith Olderuman.
Good Morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown

(01:22:10):
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.

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SLEAZE: ALITO, TRUMP TALK, BEFORE ALITO RULES ON TRUMP CASES - 1.9.25

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