August 4, 2025 • 53 mins
SEASON 4 EPISODE 1: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: The Jobs Report will now be handled by the same guy who keeps score when Trump plays golf.
But first, the unexplained move of Ghislaine Maxwell from near Alligator Alcatraz to Club Fed was just beginning to calm down when Trump detonated on Lenard McKelvey (political commentary name Charlamagne Tha God). All Charlamagne had done was to go on Fox News and claim to Lara Trump “I think that traditional conservatives are going to take the Republican Party back. I think there’s a political coup going on right now in the Republican Party that people aren’t paying attention to… we have the opportunity to have, like, a huge reset.” Trump has never known when to leave bad enough alone, but this time he just hit the side of the hornets’ nest with his tie. Called him “racist sleazebag… low IQ individual… has no idea what words are coming out of his mouth… knows nothing about me… this dope.”
So now millions of people who DIDN’T know an often conservative, Trump-accepting-if-not-supporting African American was describing a Republican Palace Coup AGAINST TRUMP OVER EPSTEIN… have THAT new Trumpsteen tendril to ponder.
Let’s sort this out. Somebody had to change Maxwell’s status as a registered sex offender to get her transferred to an all-women, all-white collar criminals, minimum security facility. She might no longer BE a registered sex offender; that could be a free sample offered by Trump if she’ll lie for him. The move to the cushier camp could be ANOTHER free sample. Or to make it easier for her to suffer rapid unscheduled disassembly.
Also there’s a Trump cover-up OF The Epstein Files, and a Trump cover-up OF HIS OWN NAME IN the Epstein Files, and a Conservative Coup Against Trump OVER The Epsteen files, and the unexplained cushy new home for Epstein’s co-rapist.
Oh and the true Orwellian shooting of the statistical messenger. But - you'd forgotten, hadn't you - he's always done this. He did this most infamously as Covid started.
B-Block (30:17) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: There's little left for Andrew Cuomo. Apparently that includes flat out making up a story that mayor-to-be-Zamdani has never had a job before. Ryan "Who Put That Porn On The TV Monitor In My Office During The State Education Department Executive Meeting" Walters of Oklahoma doubles down. And the Republicans sure know how to sell American cars: with a picture of a car made in Soviet Russia in 1970 being sold by a Trump that looks like he was made in 1870.
C-Block (40:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: The teachers of Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York are legendary. Nineteen of them there I graduated fifty years ago were still there the day I gave the Commencement Address thirty years ago. But now we may have lost the last of the greats, at least of that era. Gerry Murphy was the math teacher with empathy. He once recognized he had hit "the math wall" - he recognized I had. If he hadn't, I'd still be there failing that class for the 51st straight year. Gerald Murphy, R.I.P.
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. The
(00:25):
jobs report will now be handled by the same guy
who keeps score when Trump plays golf. But first, sure
the firing shows Trump as a psychopath, and sure it
shows he's a fascist, and sure he's already tried shooting
the messenger when he didn't like his numbers. You just
forgot about it because it was ten thousand corruptions ago. First,
(00:50):
there is the small matter of what is today being
described as the traditional conservative coup to take back the
Republican Party from Trump because of Epstein. Bless him. Every
time the fire trump stein is begins to die down,
Trump throws another can of gasoline on it. I mean,
(01:13):
I told you last week he had already made a
deal with Kallaine Maxwell, already figuratively gotten into bed with her,
just by sending the Deputy Attorney General to meet with
her and give her two days worth of proffer immunity.
Now he's made some other kind of second deal with
her that ends with her being relocated from that same
state as Alligator Alcatraz, to Club Fed in Texas. And
(01:38):
just as that was beginning to settle down, Trump re
reignited Trumpstein by picking a fight with Leonard McKelvey political
commentary name Charlemagne the God and going full racist on
him because Charlemagne had the audacity to suggest that traditional
conservatives are mounting a coup to take back the GOP
(02:00):
from Trump over Trump's cover up of Jeffrey Epstein. Trumpstein now, Trumpstein, tomorrow,
Trumpstein forever. Nice work, Don, Let's sort this out if
we can. You may want to take notes. Somebody had
(02:20):
to change Maxwell's status as a registered sex offender to
get her transferred to an all women, all white collar
criminal minimum security facility in Texas. She might no longer
be a registered sex offender. That could be a free
sample offered by Trump if she will lie for him.
The move to the Cushier camp could be another free sample.
(02:43):
Or they may have simply broken the rules for her,
or she may have blackmailed Trump into it, or they
figure inmate number zero two eight seven nine five zero
nine will be punished enough by having to share her
new digs with Elizabeth Holmes, who presumably keeps everybody there
(03:03):
up all night while she's practicing various new voices to
use when she gets out, or in Magaworld, where the
phrase of the moment is hey, wait a minute. They
hear minimum security and conclude Trump moved Glaine Maxwell to
(03:24):
a place with minimum security in order to make it
easier for her to, you know, suffer rapid unscheduled disassembly,
to which Charlemagne, who has come a long long way
from needing to ask me to be a guest on
his partially political show like a decade ago, and then
looking at me oddly when I said you should drop
(03:46):
this breakfast club stuff and just do politics, went on
with Trump's daughter in law on Fox, and Charlemagne said, quote,
I think that traditional conservatives are going to take the
Republican Party back. I think there's a political coup going
on right now in the Republican Party that people aren't
paying attention to. We have the opportunity to have like
(04:09):
a huge reset. Trump has never known when to leave
bad enough alone. This time he just hit the side
of the hornet's nest with his tie. He called Charlemagne
quote racist sleesbag low iq. Individual has no idea what
words are coming out of his mouth, knows nothing about me,
(04:31):
this dope. So now millions of people who didn't know
an often conservative leaning Trump accepting, if not supporting. African
American commentator has been describing a Republican palace coup against
Trump over Epstein. Now they all have that new Trumpstein
(04:52):
tendril to ponder the coup against Trump as promoted by Trump.
But wait, there's more getting less attention in the background
Trumpstein and it back at its point of origin. Bloomberg's
freedom of information guru Jason Leopold reports that the FBI
didn't just spend thousands of agent hours searching for Trump's
(05:16):
name in the Epstein files and lists it, and thus
Trump really has it redacted Trump's name god knows how
many times on the thinnest of pretexts, including the idea
that many of the references to Trump and the Epstein
files are from when Trump was just a private citizen.
(05:36):
So there's a Trump cover up of the Epstein files,
and a Trump cover up of his own name in
the Epstein files, and a conservative coup against Trump over
the Epstein files, and the unexplained cushy new home for
Epstein's co rapist. And just in case you forgot about
the rhetorical question that reignited all this last week at Marrilago,
(05:59):
what did you think Epstein was stealing those women. For
the question, he didn't answer and just walked out of
a room. During well, he was asked that question again
and he answered it this time. And guess what, walking
out of the room was a way better idea. Family
of Virginia Juffrey released a statement overnight and response to
(06:19):
some of the comments that it made this week. You
said that Jeffrey Epstein sole people from mar A Lago
at the time, did you know why he was taking
those young women, including Virginia. No, I didn't know.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
I mean, I would figure it was ABC fake news.
I would ask that question one of the worst, But no,
I don't know really why. But I said, if he's
taken anybody from mar A Lago, he's hiring or whatever
he's doing. I didn't like it, and we threw him out.
We said we don't want him, you know, at the place.
This is the story that's been known for many years,
(06:51):
as you know, but it's I didn't like it that
he was doing.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
That perfect answer if you want to make sure the
story never goes away. A social media user with the
handle I am Hero summed it up quote, I don't
know if I can think of a worse defense against
being called a pedophile than to say you stopped being
friends with another pedophile because he stole a teenager from
(07:17):
you unquote. Oh but wait, Trump wasn't done yet. Remember
Alex Acosta. Greg Kelly, the fired Fox host, the son
of the former New York City Police commissioner, is now
on Newsmax pushing the most novel original of all of
(07:37):
the bullshit explanations for this ever expanding trump Stein bottomless pit.
His explanation is that the real victim here may be
Gallaine Maxwell, and that she may be innocent, and of
course our inference has to then be that that will
be the excuse when Trump pardons her. They're testing it
(08:02):
out on Newsmax. Now, Gregg Kelly is a moron. It
may not be a test. It may just be the
fact that Greg Kelly is a moron, But the people
who put him on Newsmax are not morons. And now
it has been revealed that one of the newest members
of Newsmax's board of directors, appointed this summer is Alex Acosta.
(08:23):
And if the name alex Acosta sounds familiar, alex Acosta
was Trump's first Secretary of Labor who before that as
the Bush US attorney in Miami, gave a thirteen months
sweetheart plea deal in two thousand and eight two Jeffrey Epstein,
(08:47):
the man who did not prosecute Epstein, board of directors
Newsmax now claiming Gallaine Maxwell maybe anocent just in case
it is not clear that the single individual on this
planet who has done the most, who has done the
most heroic work to keep trump Stein alive, is Trump.
(09:11):
He also made a big deal about a revivified President's
Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition, and he named to
that council football Hall of Famer Lawrence Taylor. Lawrence Taylor,
the guy who was arrested for the statutory rape of
(09:31):
a sixteen year old girl, then pleaded guilty to sexual
misconduct and to patronizing a prostitute, and then had to
register as a sex offender. Because what you want, in
the middle of a presidential existential scandal in which you
are clearly trying to cover up the entire twenty thirty
(09:52):
forty year long case involving a pedophile and his death
and his partner and your connection to them, the one
thing you want to do is to name a register
stard sex offender who was arrested for raping a sixteen
year old and bring him into the White House to
have him stand next to you. Well, at least that's
(10:17):
the end of it. Oh no, it's not. Just in
case you needed Trump to remind you once more about
Trumpstein and about his perversions and about his own creepiness
towards young blondes that transcends Trumpstein. There's his press secretary,
the one he seems to have hired off the bottle
(10:38):
of Saint Pauly Girl beer, Caroline Levitt, just fifty two
years younger than him, dumb as two hundred pounds of rocks,
and in the room. As he said this, don't make
people think about Epstein. Don't make people think about Epstein.
Don't make people think about Epstein. I didn't realize she'd
(10:59):
be in the room, but she's on my list.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Caroline Levitt's I'm a star. It's that face, it's a brain.
It's those lips, the where they move, they move like
she's a machine gun. Is she in the roof, She's
in the room. She's a star.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
I better use some tic TACs just in case I
start kissing her. You know, I'm automatically attracted to beautiful
I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just
kiss I don't even wait. And when you're a star,
they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab
them by the presumably you remember the rest of that
quote from Donald. Of course, Trump watches Caroline Levitt's lips
(11:39):
move rather than listening to what comes out of them.
He doesn't know she's a buffoon. This is the woman
who infamously at the White House podium called Trump President Tump,
who wants in an interview called Hitler Hilter, and who
(12:01):
has now added to her own personal haul of dumb
ladies and gentlemen, the Nobel Peace Prize. It's well past
time that President Trump was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Oh my god, oh my god, Oh my god, oh
my god, oh my god. The Nobel Peace Prize presumably
the Nobel Peace Prize as opposed to the Nobel Peace Prize.
(12:24):
The Nobel Peace Prize was presumably established by the late
James Noble, the actor who played Governor Gatling on the
old sitcom Benson Knitwit. But she's keeping trump steam alive,
just like everybody else in the White house, so good
(12:45):
work knit wit. So if the Bureau of Labor Statistics
(13:14):
is not going to be run by Erica mcintarfer, they
got fired. But he's going to be run and said
by Bryson Deshambeau or another one of Trump's jag off
golf buddies, or it'll be run by Ronnie Jackson. The
quote doctor unquote who said Trump was six foot three,
two hundred and thirty nine pounds, which could be true
(13:38):
if you take it in the sense of I didn't
say just six y three two hundred and thirty nine pounds.
I mean anybody who weighs three hundred pounds is in
a sense two hundred and thirty nine pounds. That part
of him is two hundred and thirty nine pounds. Too bad.
The first doctor, the guy with the hair who basically
pronounced that Trump was immortal, and then a couple of
(14:00):
years later confessed that Trump had dictated the entire letter
Harold Bornstein sadly he's dead. Actually, I don't see that
as being a significant impediment to getting a statement out
of him that says Trump is going to be immortal
or that the labor stats are really good. I am
(14:20):
not disputing nor minimizing the significance of the memory holding
of bad job growth data and the statistician who compiled it.
This is directly from Orwell's nineteen eighty four. It is
absolutely a sign of Trump's evil and his growing desperation,
and especially his growing rage when his confabulation is being contradicted.
(14:43):
Chris true Acts, the conservative writer, introduced that word into
the dialogue in the Hill Confabulation, saying that Trump has
entered that stage of dementia, the one in which quote
the person doing it genuinely believes what he's saying, even
if it is obviously and patently false. True Axe brought
(15:06):
up this facocta Trump unibomber story from last month in
which Trump claimed his uncle who taught at MIT and
had three degrees nuclear, chemical, and math, and that's why
he Trump is a genius because his uncle had genes,
and now he Trump has those genes. How uncle John
taught Ted Kazinski, the unibomber, at MIT, and told Donald
(15:28):
how smart Kazinsky was, except uncle John was a professor
of electrical engineering at MIT, and none of the other things.
And the unibomber went to Harvard, not MIT, and uncle John.
He died in nineteen eighty five, and the unibomber wasn't
identified as the unibomber until nineteen ninety six. I'm not
(15:53):
discounting any of the seriousness of this. I'm just saying
that Trump didn't start cooking the books and shooting the
messengers last Friday. He began by doing that. He began
his career by doing that. Never mind the business stuff
where he cooked the books for forty years. Every pole
he didn't like from day one was fake. Every primary
(16:16):
result he didn't agree with, crooked, every election he lost, fixed,
all numbers fixed, crooked, fake. And it is now five
years and five months. It was late February twenty twenty
when dementia J. Trump demanded that some of the earliest
American victims of COVID must be kept on board the
Grand Princess Cruz ship where the virus was raging, rather
(16:40):
than brought ashore because quote, I like the numbers being
where they are. I don't need to have the numbers
double because of one ship in private that the very
start of the COVID pandemic, in which Trump was personally
responsible for the deaths and illnesses of untold hundreds of thousands,
(17:03):
if not millions. In private, the numbers became quote my numbers,
and Trump's fury that the CDC and FAUCI and the
Chinese and the virus were all plotting against him to
ruin his numbers, because that's all those people were to him, numbers.
(17:26):
His numbers, just like the unemployed are just numbers, just
like you are just a number, and you are his number.
It is the same baseline mental reality I've been hammering
home since twenty fifteen, in public, since nineteen eighty three
in private. Donald Trump's brain does not work right now.
(17:49):
Throw in this confabulation element. He may truly believe the
economy has never been better. He may truly believe gasoline
is a dollar ninety eight a gallon in some mythical
state that he dreamt of. He may truly believe he
can force the price of eggs to drop eleventy billion percent.
Of course, he truly believes it. His uncle had degrees
(18:10):
in nuclear chemical and math, and eleveny billion dollars math,
and his uncle gave him his brain before he died.
There is a practical problem here, of course, besides making
more people doubt more reality even more Often these aren't
(18:33):
Fatso's golf scores or his correct weight estimated to the
nearest ton. These are the statistics upon which the economy rests.
I mean, economic numbers are corrupted enough as it is
without the Bureau of Labor Statistics simply running the numbers
past Trump first to see if he likes them enough
or they have to be many more thousand percent gooder
(18:59):
per Those parts of the Washington posts that still have
power companies and Wall Street and and other countries now
worry quote that Trump's volatile temperament could cause additional economic
harm by undermining market confidence in the government data that investors,
business executives, and policymakers require to make decisions. Quote It's
(19:24):
like trying to drive a car blindfolded, says the former
chief economist from the Labor Department. Don't worry Trump can
do that. He can. He can drive a car blindfolded.
Ask Uncle John, Get him on the phone. Get Uncle
John on the phone right now. What do you mean
(19:45):
he died in nineteen eighty five. That's ridiculous. Died in
nineteen eighty five, That's unpossible. I mean, today's is nineteen
sixty five. So our team Hitler is completely bonkers and
(20:07):
is making up his own numbers and his own words.
Remember he said Obama was sedacious. Making up your own
words is a primary symptom of bipolar disorder. In case,
we want to throw that into the salad bowl that
is his head. Ah so what, he can always fall
back on the military. Your attention is directed to Greg's
(20:29):
sergeant's piece in The New Republic over the weekend, based
on a leaked Homeland Security memo from that corner of
the White House where the Drunks meet the dog murdering sadists,
Christy nomes liaison to Pete Hegseth, who just happens to
be the liaison heg Seth's kid brother, Skippy. The memo
(20:53):
outlines the DHS needs to convince the Pentagon to authorize
way more troops to disappear way more brown people, and
not just at the border, things like Trump's terrorist attack
on Los Angeles. More of this, please only in New
York and San Francisco and Chicago and who knows where else.
(21:15):
Rationalization for it cook the books call any immigrant committing
a crime the equivalent of al Qaeda or isis. Well,
you can't call them isis ICE is the equivalent of ices.
But they're cooking these books now, they're calling them the
equivalent of al Qaeda as it is. And your historical
(21:35):
role models for doing this for rounding people up. The
people who put the internment camps were Japanese Americans together
during the Second World War, and the political excuse the
Democrats did that, So shrug emoji. Last point on this.
You would think that in the Senate, the vote for
(21:56):
the dumbest smart guy or the smartest dumb guy would
be unanimous for Senator John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana, who
acts and talks like my late friend Pat Buttram, only
he doesn't wear that bowler hat, but went to UVA, Vanderbilt,
and Oxford, and only eighteen years ago decided he wasn't
(22:18):
going to get anywhere in Louisiana as a smart Democrat,
so he instead became a rube Republican. But I don't know,
Senator Kennedy might lose that election in an upset to
Tom Cotton of Harvard and Harvard Law, who does not
act dumb, but does do dumb things in order to
manipulate dumb people and gets extraordinary yields. It was Tom
(22:41):
Cotton who floated prosecuting Jack Smith for violating the Hatch Act.
This got huge play in Maga fantasy land here, Oh,
they're going to execute Jack Smith for violating the Hatch Act.
It got some play here in real news, surprisingly a lot.
But internationally this was the second or third biggest story
(23:04):
coming from the US over the weekend. The BBC ran
it on its World TV newscasts every hour for a day.
Oh my god, the special prosecutor is being prosecuted. Not
once was it mentioned, just as not once was it
mentioned in Maga media that if this mystery man Jack Smith,
(23:24):
who basically never spoke, is actually guilty of violating the
Hatch Act of campaigning while you shouldn't be campaigning, Jack
Smith faces possible fines, jail terms, and other punishments of
up to nothing. If they throw the book at him,
He'll get no fine, no jail term, no punishment. They
(23:52):
warned or reprimanded Jen Saki on the Hatch Act, and
Kaylee Mcananey and Karine, Jean Pierre and Kelly and Cohnjob,
Mike Pump, Nikki Hayley, not James Comy. He was not
guilty and I spent way too much time over the
(24:13):
weekend looking to find the last person actually find under
the Hatch Act. Couldn't not any amount, let alone the
maximum fine of one thousand dollars, doctor evil. There was
somebody suspended for four months from their job at Thers,
and somebody else who's actually fired from the Bureau of
(24:34):
Engraving fifteen years ago. But you would think that someone
somewhere on the news would have noted that unless Trump
takes the great dangerous presidentially fatal leap of just announcing
he is making a new retroactive law, the most they
can possibly do to Jack Smith with the Hatch Act
is fire him from his job as special counsel, the
(24:59):
job of special counsel from which he resigned last January eleventh.
That's if he's guilty of anything, you can fire him
from a job he doesn't have anymore if he's guilty
of anything. Guilty of anything besides taking Merrick Garland's words
of caution seriously also of interest here, Thank god they're morons.
(25:30):
The Republicans put out a meme for the newest mutation
of Maga Maga with two a's in the middle, make
American automobiles great again. The meme has a picture of
Trump and a The automobile in the meme that he's
celebrating is actually a car made in the Soviet Union
(25:51):
in the seventies. And b you know how old Trump
looks in the meme, He looks two hundred and six.
That's next. This is countdown. This is countdown with Keith
Olberman still ahead on this all new edition of Countdown. Next.
(26:29):
In Things I promised not to tell, I think I
mentioned this once. I went back to my high school,
the school that produced Chris Berman and Will Bunch and
gave Obama his first political speech venue and I gave
the commencement address nineteen years after I had graduated, and
in the crowd were twenty of my teachers. Twenty teachers
(26:54):
who had been there when I graduated. That's how long
they lasted there. They were great teachers, but greater people,
and one of them, the math department head, who literally
saved me from not graduating on time and possibly still
being the student theired. Today, the last of the greats
(27:16):
of the Hackley School, Tarrytown, New York, Jerry Murphy, has died.
A Tribute to mister Murphy. Next first. Believe it or not,
there's still more new idiots to talk about. The roundup
of the miss Grants, morons and Dunn Krueger effects specimens
who constitute today's other worst persons in the world, the
(27:37):
Bronze and Drew Cuomo slouching towards getting blown out in
the election for mayor of New York City twice in
one year. He is now stone cold lying about the
mayor to be, As was tweeted on CNBC, Cuomo says
of Zoran Mamdani, quote, thirty three years old, never had
(28:00):
a job, and now the first job is going to
be the mayor of New York. Mom Donnie has been
a State Assembly member since twenty twenty one. And if
quality of jobs and performance on them is the real
test here, Cromo is gonna lose by more than he thinks.
(28:20):
Just unbelievable. Andrew Cuomo Trumpian narcissist, lying scumbag and possibly
only the second biggest Trumpian narcissist lying scumbag among his
own siblings. Runner up worser Ryan Naked women on my
(28:42):
office TV during the State Education Board meeting executive session
and they yell at me and I shout what's that?
And now everybody is lying but me, Walters. This is
the construction of the classic hidden porn addict story. I
told you about this. Why they behave this way? Ryan
is the superintendent of education in the state of Oklahoma.
(29:04):
I'm sorry, not the state of Oklahoma, the theocratic kingdom
of Oklahoma. And he is frankly dying hard there. He
is not going gently into that good night that will
envelop him soon or late. He is doubling down on me.
I can't be evil. Look at all these attacks on woke.
(29:24):
I'm doing bullshit. Don't look at the porn. He is
again posted if you are a teacher coming to Oklahoma
from woke states, First of all, your premise is flawed.
Who the f is going to do that? If you
are a teacher coming to Oklahoma from woke states, you
(29:45):
will not be indoctrinating our kids with a liberal agenda,
you know, like porn in Oklahoma. He didn't say that.
I did. In Oklahoma. We are proud to have America
First values again my interpretation like porn, and he attaches
(30:05):
a Fox News story also porn Oklahoma requires America First
certification test for and it has more. But I didn't
click through, So all I know is that the title
is Oklahoma requires America first certification test for now, Ryan,
This certification test that they have to do for you.
Is this in addition to teach your applicants from woke
(30:29):
states bringing you a gift of porn with naked women
appearing on chiropractic tables? Or is this instead of bringing
you a gift of porn with naked women appearing on
chiropractic tables? Ryan, Ryan, mister Walters, buddy, if I can
get your attention away from that one monitor in your
(30:53):
office for a moment, please come on, Ryan. This is
so obvious. Mike Johnson would have confessed to it by now.
Holy crap. But the winner the social media director of
the Republican Party. Well, I guess by now, given the
way Trump fires people for inadvertently or advertently telling the truth.
(31:20):
The ex social media director of the Republican Party over
the gop Twitter x account. The one Big Beautiful Bill
will drive the return of the Great American Car. Not
one American flag, emog follows this, but two American flags
double the America, and there's a giant white on blue sky,
(31:43):
making automobiles great again. See this, They've found another thing
to call MAGA after only nine years. Huh what other
words start with g Uh? What other words start with A?
America starts with an M. That's what the M and
(32:03):
magas for America is great again. I can't get over
Ryan Walters thinking people are deliberately moving to Oklahoma to
teach there. But back to this one. So there's this
picture of Trump at a car behind him and making
America making automobiles great again. The one big, beautiful Bill
(32:26):
will drive the return of the great American car. That's all,
it says the car shown behind Trump as he makes
that gesture with his hands in the air. You know,
the eye can no longer move my body sufficiently to
actually dance, so you'll all have to pretend that I'm dancing.
The car shown behind him is a small, boxy, bright
(32:48):
yellow car with motorcycle hub caps that looks like a
like a Paris taxi in a Peter Seller's pink Panther
Inspector Cluseau picture from the sixties or seventies. You got
the image. I mean, anybody putting this meme together looks
at this and says, the new Ram pickup looks like crap. Wait,
(33:08):
that's not a ram, that's a turns out. That's a
nineteen seventy Vaz twenty one oh one Ziguli c Hi
g u l i jiguli, also called a Kopeika, also
called in international automobile circles a loda. All those names
(33:29):
play on house. It's so small it looks like the
smallest coin in Russia. Because the goddamned little tiny yellow
car that the Republicans think promotes American cars, the goddamn
car sitting there behind Trump, that these Republican losers picked
a show behind him, is not just Russian, it's Soviet.
(33:50):
It was a Soviet produced car, the nineteen seventy Vaz
twenty one oh one. As late as nineteen seventy four,
this car was put on sale in England for nine
hundred and seventy nine pounds even then. That wasn't a lot.
It's a pos Soviet car. And that's how his own
(34:13):
cult thinks. Trump is making American automobiles great again by
making Russian automobiles great again by making Soviet Russian automobiles
great again. The Republican Party, whatever you do, don't do
anything that underscores the connection between Trump and Russia, that
(34:40):
Republican Party, the Republican Party social media account, clown today's
person in the world, to the number one story on
the Countdown, and my favorite topic, me and things I
promised not to tell, and in this case it is
(35:02):
something I wish I did not have to tell. There
is another world somewhere, another universe, another timeline in which
I am preparing right now for not the fiftieth anniversary
of my graduation from my high school, but I am
in fact preparing to return to my high school for
(35:26):
my fifty first year as a senior there because I
am still trying to pass senior math. Because in this
parallel world, my math teacher in the school year nineteen
seventy four to seventy five is not Jerry Murphy, but
(35:46):
somebody else. Anybody else, somebody who wasn't quite the math
teacher that he was, somebody who wasn't quite the empathetic
figure that he was, and most importantly, somebody who was
just not as much of a decent, caring, proactively kind
human being as Jerry Murphy was. You can probably guess
(36:12):
that Gerald C. Murphy of Brooklyn, New York, died in
Albuquerque on June eighteenth of this year. Those of us
who went to the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York
were informed by email at the end of last week.
He had a degree from Fordham in math and an
(36:34):
MS in mathematics from Polytechnic Institute of New York. And
it reads oddly in his obituary in the Albuquerque newspaper
where he completed all course work towards a PhD. And
I saw that, and I smiled, because he told me
that story in nineteen seventy four or early nineteen seventy five.
(36:55):
It doesn't say it here. And I'm very unhappy that
the biography, which recounts the great events of his life,
and the fact that he taught at my alma mater, Hackley,
home of many many teachers who weren't paid well and
yet stayed twenty years, that he stayed twenty years, became
chairman of the math department, then moved to New Mexico
(37:15):
and taught at the Albuquerque Academy until the year twenty eleven.
So he spent twenty one years there and they were
fortunate to have him. And it goes on about his wife,
who I knew very briefly at Hackley, and how he
loved to ski and play tennis, and travel and reading
and taking photographs and was a member of the Zen
(37:38):
Buddhist community in New York, which I did not know,
but doesn't surprise me in the least. But it doesn't
say here what it should have said. At the first
Jerry Murphy, one of the great human beings died, the
world is a little smaller and worse for this fact.
(37:59):
It was better for him being here. And I know
so many of my classmates it's reached out to me
about this to see if I had seen it, including
my friend Will Bunch, who I've mentioned many times was
on the school newspaper with me and for whom mister
Murphy was one of his favorites, as mister Murphy was
one of mine. Because there is one story about Jerry Murphy,
(38:23):
and what I said, I guess is kind of an
exaggeration at the beginning of this reminiscence about him. But
I suppose there is a world in which when the
subject of this last year of math changed to something
so mystifying to me that I have blotted out the
(38:44):
name of the kind of math it was. Might have
been trigonometry, might have been pterodactyl. I don't know what
it was, that's how little sense it made to me.
I remember raising my hand at one point and saying,
mister Murphy, the thing on the left is that the answer?
(39:05):
Or is that the question? And he looked at me
and a wry smile snapped across his thin mouth, and
he said, stay after, we need to talk about that,
and keep quiet the rest of the class, will you.
I had been, as I think I've mentioned several times,
(39:25):
mistaken for a math prodigy. When I was a child.
I used to like to play with numbers, and I
mean that literally. I had a small container full of
plastic numbers, and I like to array them in forty
and fifty digit numbers and add and subtract and then
later on multiply them. And for this they thought I
(39:46):
was a math prodigy, that I would someday be doing
differential calculus. In fact, I just like doing addition, subtraction,
and multiplication. No division. My limit was division. So I
guess by the time I was a senior in school,
it was pretty well established that I was not a
(40:06):
math prodigy anymore. But there was no reason for me
not to take math classes because There was no particular
reason for me to think that I would not be
able to process this stuff, which was fairly logical, and
which I continued to consume and process pretty well until
I guess it was trigonometry. In the middle of the
year we went to this and at one point I
(40:29):
remember turning my head upside down and looking at the
board that way to see if maybe it made more
sense looking at it upside down. Jerry Murphy, who was
a wonderful man, and treated us all as if we
were just junior members in some sort of partnership in
(40:50):
his classroom, who would be upbraided when they did not
behave as junior partners should be. But who were not
some you know, ragmuffin crowd of over rich or overfed
or deserving of resentment, none of that. We were his
(41:13):
partners in this experience called teaching math in Tarrytown, New
York in nineteen seventy four. And so in this little
meeting afterwards, he said, you don't see it, do you,
And I went, I don't see it at all. You
could write anything up there, and I would have a
better chance of solving anything else you wrote up there.
(41:35):
I don't know what it means I don't know where
to start. It's literally liking when like somebody turned the
gravity off. Yes, exactly, He goes, don't worry about it.
I said, don't worry about it. I don't when you're
going to test us on this, aren't you. It's like
everything else. And I've done BS and maybe an occasional C,
(41:55):
but maybe an occasional A for the whole of my
five years here at the various levels of math. I
did okay in algebra, I didn't like it. I did
okay Calculus I didn't like that. And now this, whatever
this is, I don't know what this is, let alone
how to solve it. And he said, just relax. It's
called the mathwall. And I said, that's what it's called.
(42:17):
He said, no, no, no, what's happened to you is called
the mathwall. He said. If you didn't notice, there's three
or four others of you in this class. You've all
hit this at the same time. Don't worry about it.
We all hit the mathwall. And I said, who's this we?
He said, I hit the mathwall. This is why I
am not doctor Murphy. This goes back to completing all
(42:41):
coursework towards a PhD at Polytechnic Institute of New York.
He said that one day he came home with one
of those problems that they give would be people with
doctorates in mathematics, the ones that take three days to solve,
the ones you have to work on and work on
for twelve or fourteen hours and then risk going to
(43:04):
sleep and losing your place and having to go back
to the beginning again. And he described the agony of
doing this, and on the third day, when he realized
he'd made a fundamental mistake in solving whatever this problem was,
which I hope was at least something to do with
time travel, it sounded so complex, he said, I started
to cry. Now, imagine just at any point in your life,
(43:29):
a teacher, especially a high school teacher, a man and
a very rugged Brooklyn kind of guy, no matter what
his education might have been, explaining to you that some
point something in the educational process had made him cry.
(43:49):
This was human in a way that so few teachers,
so few adults are. Then and now to kids, Jerry
Murphy said, yeah, I began to cry, and I went
back to the beginning, and my wife said, maybe it's
time for you to give this up and take what
(44:10):
you have in the way of an education and make
a career as a teacher rather than as a professional
mathematician or a collegiate instructor in math. And he went,
you know, you're right, and that's when he left. So
when it says he completed all the coursework, what it
doesn't say is there was this one three day problem
that caused him to cry and to give up on
(44:34):
that aspect of his career. And as he said, I
gave that up, but I regained my sanity. And here
we are today. So you've hit your math wall a
little earlier than I did, but realistically only about five years,
I guess, he said. You've done well. You're relatively well
behaved in this class, he said, and you're funny, and
(44:57):
we all enjoy your work, and everybody thinks you're a
good guy. And here's what we're going to do. You
go down to the registrar's off and here's my note
approving it. You change your course grading system on this
class whatever it was, Senior Math Math five, whatever the
calling of the name of this thing was, and you
change from grades letter grades to pass fail. He said,
(45:22):
I will pass you your work so far has been
a B plus. I will pass you. I'm not going
to grade you, and you can take the exams. I
suppose here's your requirement. Though, you and the other three
or four who have also hit this same math wall.
It's a real one. It's a tough one. You're not
the first I've ever seen do this. All of you
(45:45):
had damn well better be quiet in my classroom. I
don't hunt a single bit of trouble from any of
you for the rest of the year. And this may
have been November, December, January, I can't remember how early
it was. But he said, you go and take it,
pass fail and shut the hell up. And you and
(46:05):
that guy over there he brings in the papers anyway,
read the papers quietly to yourselves. Don't get in the
way of the students who still understand this stuff. And
certainly don't tell anybody that if they pretend that they've
hit the math wall, that they don't have to do
the work. You have to do everything except the work,
and you have to do more of it here in
(46:25):
the classroom. And there's another thing. Every Monday, when I
come in here at nine o'clock in the morning, we
were his first class. You guys are reciting some thing
from this what's it called Monty Something's Flying Something? And
I said Monty Python's Flying Circus, the British TV comedy
series on Channel thirteen exactly. He said, I saw it
(46:49):
once when we had the week off. I stayed up
that late. I don't normally stay up that late, ten
thirty at night and I said yeah. He said, you
seem to think it's pretty funny, and from what I've
heard you describe it, it sounds like it's really really way
off the wall. I said, it's like nothing I've ever
seen before. You get a good sense of humor. Overman,
(47:12):
here's what I want you to do. You get to
the other guys together they watch too, right, And he
listed the guys who are also at the math wall
with me. He said, I want you guys to come
in a little early and decide which of the sketches
from the previous night's episode of Monny Bithen's Flying Circus.
Did you say which of them you can remember the best?
(47:32):
And I want you to reenact it for me before
class starts. I said, yes, sir, And for this you're
going to pass me yep and be quiet in my classroom,
no laughing, and certainly don't make any noise during the
exams when the students who haven't gone math brain dead
(47:55):
yet are still trying to get a's and get into
colleges of their choice. And I said, well that's I said,
that's that's terrific of you. Thank you, and he went,
I don't want anybody crying over math in my classroom.
I've already been through that enough with me. And that's
how it went the rest of the year. Three of us,
(48:19):
I think eventually there were four would assemble about ten
minutes before mister Murphy walked in and go through whatever
the best Monty Python sketch had been the night before,
and remember what we could, and each assumed some roles
and reenacted as best we could. I often filled in
the detail and did some of the voices. We did
(48:41):
a passable job. And each time, as our remember, Jerry
Murphy actually laughed. And came graduation time, and before that
the final exams, and he handed the final exam, put
it down on the desk, on my desk and the
other guy's desks, and everybody else in the class just
laughed because they knew we were essentially morons who had
(49:04):
hit the math. It was not like he was protecting
us and saying, don't laugh at them. They've hit the
math wall. You may too soon hit the math wall.
He didn't say that. He went, look at these idiots, Well,
we're just going to let them sit there and sit
on their math accomplishments and whatever else they have to
sit on for the rest of this class, and then
(49:26):
we do another Monty Python sketch and that would be
the end of it. Now, the end of it for
me was, as I think I have recounted a couple
of times. Because I took the class pass fail rather
than what would have happened, which would have been an F.
Number one, my grade point average soared. I did not
get a C or a B in math. I got
(49:47):
a pass, which did not count towards your grade point average.
Thus my grade point average probably went up. I don't
know point two something. I made the list of the
kum Laude Society top ten percent of the graduates of
the class had no business being in it. I hit
the math wall. In another world, I would have failed,
(50:09):
and they would have made me come back for another
senior year just for the math class. With a different teacher,
and then I would have failed again and again and again,
and so far we're up to nineteen eighty one, and
again and again and again. Now it's nineteen ninety seven.
I'm still a senior at Hackley School in Terrytown, New York,
and I am preparing now to go back for year
(50:31):
fifty one, the twenty twenty five twenty six academic year.
But for Jerry Murphy, he did much more than that.
I don't want to reduce his life to an active
kindness towards students in a time when that wasn't necessarily
(50:52):
approved of, even at a good school like Hackley. But
it occurs to me as I now look back at
these teachers, almost all of whom I think are gone now.
Jerry was one of the youngest, but all the others
who taught me, including the fierce ones and the ones
who had reputations as dictators in their classrooms, and Arthur
(51:13):
Nathing and Walter Schneller and Randy McNaughton and Rusty McMullen
and LM. A. Miller and all of them, and I
realized that they shared one fundamental element in common when
Jerry Murphy had it in spades. They were human beings
with empathy. They were good human beings. And the first
(51:35):
line of Jerry Murphy's obituary should say Gerald C. Murphy,
who was a great human being who thought about others
and the plights that they faced, and whose empathy lighted
up his corner of the world has left us. Let
(51:58):
us be where we can as empathetic as he was.
Remember that there is always a math wall awaiting each
of us eventually, and if we're lucky, the person at
the math wall says, just go downstairs and switch it
(52:19):
to pass fail and do a Monty Python sketch too.
By the way, this isn't part of my plan, but
you'll get to learn how to perform other people's comedy.
Hadn't thought of that? Had you? See? You thought you
were just sort of filling time in my classroom. In fact,
you were learning a different skill, to say nothing of
(52:41):
the empathy. Thank you, Jerry Murphy. Countdown with Keith Olderman
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(53:04):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. The
(00:25):
jobs report will now be handled by the same guy
who keeps score when Trump plays golf. But first, sure
the firing shows Trump as a psychopath, and sure it
shows he's a fascist, and sure he's already tried shooting
the messenger when he didn't like his numbers. You just
forgot about it because it was ten thousand corruptions ago. First,
(00:50):
there is the small matter of what is today being
described as the traditional conservative coup to take back the
Republican Party from Trump because of Epstein. Bless him. Every
time the fire trump stein is begins to die down,
Trump throws another can of gasoline on it. I mean,
(01:13):
I told you last week he had already made a
deal with Kallaine Maxwell, already figuratively gotten into bed with her,
just by sending the Deputy Attorney General to meet with
her and give her two days worth of proffer immunity.
Now he's made some other kind of second deal with
her that ends with her being relocated from that same
state as Alligator Alcatraz, to Club Fed in Texas. And
(01:38):
just as that was beginning to settle down, Trump re
reignited Trumpstein by picking a fight with Leonard McKelvey political
commentary name Charlemagne the God and going full racist on
him because Charlemagne had the audacity to suggest that traditional
conservatives are mounting a coup to take back the GOP
(02:00):
from Trump over Trump's cover up of Jeffrey Epstein. Trumpstein now, Trumpstein, tomorrow,
Trumpstein forever. Nice work, Don, Let's sort this out if
we can. You may want to take notes. Somebody had
(02:20):
to change Maxwell's status as a registered sex offender to
get her transferred to an all women, all white collar
criminal minimum security facility in Texas. She might no longer
be a registered sex offender. That could be a free
sample offered by Trump if she will lie for him.
The move to the Cushier camp could be another free sample.
(02:43):
Or they may have simply broken the rules for her,
or she may have blackmailed Trump into it, or they
figure inmate number zero two eight seven nine five zero
nine will be punished enough by having to share her
new digs with Elizabeth Holmes, who presumably keeps everybody there
(03:03):
up all night while she's practicing various new voices to
use when she gets out, or in Magaworld, where the
phrase of the moment is hey, wait a minute. They
hear minimum security and conclude Trump moved Glaine Maxwell to
(03:24):
a place with minimum security in order to make it
easier for her to, you know, suffer rapid unscheduled disassembly,
to which Charlemagne, who has come a long long way
from needing to ask me to be a guest on
his partially political show like a decade ago, and then
looking at me oddly when I said you should drop
(03:46):
this breakfast club stuff and just do politics, went on
with Trump's daughter in law on Fox, and Charlemagne said, quote,
I think that traditional conservatives are going to take the
Republican Party back. I think there's a political coup going
on right now in the Republican Party that people aren't
paying attention to. We have the opportunity to have like
(04:09):
a huge reset. Trump has never known when to leave
bad enough alone. This time he just hit the side
of the hornet's nest with his tie. He called Charlemagne
quote racist sleesbag low iq. Individual has no idea what
words are coming out of his mouth, knows nothing about me,
(04:31):
this dope. So now millions of people who didn't know
an often conservative leaning Trump accepting, if not supporting. African
American commentator has been describing a Republican palace coup against
Trump over Epstein. Now they all have that new Trumpstein
(04:52):
tendril to ponder the coup against Trump as promoted by Trump.
But wait, there's more getting less attention in the background
Trumpstein and it back at its point of origin. Bloomberg's
freedom of information guru Jason Leopold reports that the FBI
didn't just spend thousands of agent hours searching for Trump's
(05:16):
name in the Epstein files and lists it, and thus
Trump really has it redacted Trump's name god knows how
many times on the thinnest of pretexts, including the idea
that many of the references to Trump and the Epstein
files are from when Trump was just a private citizen.
(05:36):
So there's a Trump cover up of the Epstein files,
and a Trump cover up of his own name in
the Epstein files, and a conservative coup against Trump over
the Epstein files, and the unexplained cushy new home for
Epstein's co rapist. And just in case you forgot about
the rhetorical question that reignited all this last week at Marrilago,
(05:59):
what did you think Epstein was stealing those women. For
the question, he didn't answer and just walked out of
a room. During well, he was asked that question again
and he answered it this time. And guess what, walking
out of the room was a way better idea. Family
of Virginia Juffrey released a statement overnight and response to
(06:19):
some of the comments that it made this week. You
said that Jeffrey Epstein sole people from mar A Lago
at the time, did you know why he was taking
those young women, including Virginia. No, I didn't know.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
I mean, I would figure it was ABC fake news.
I would ask that question one of the worst, But no,
I don't know really why. But I said, if he's
taken anybody from mar A Lago, he's hiring or whatever
he's doing. I didn't like it, and we threw him out.
We said we don't want him, you know, at the place.
This is the story that's been known for many years,
(06:51):
as you know, but it's I didn't like it that
he was doing.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
That perfect answer if you want to make sure the
story never goes away. A social media user with the
handle I am Hero summed it up quote, I don't
know if I can think of a worse defense against
being called a pedophile than to say you stopped being
friends with another pedophile because he stole a teenager from
(07:17):
you unquote. Oh but wait, Trump wasn't done yet. Remember
Alex Acosta. Greg Kelly, the fired Fox host, the son
of the former New York City Police commissioner, is now
on Newsmax pushing the most novel original of all of
(07:37):
the bullshit explanations for this ever expanding trump Stein bottomless pit.
His explanation is that the real victim here may be
Gallaine Maxwell, and that she may be innocent, and of
course our inference has to then be that that will
be the excuse when Trump pardons her. They're testing it
(08:02):
out on Newsmax. Now, Gregg Kelly is a moron. It
may not be a test. It may just be the
fact that Greg Kelly is a moron, But the people
who put him on Newsmax are not morons. And now
it has been revealed that one of the newest members
of Newsmax's board of directors, appointed this summer is Alex Acosta.
(08:23):
And if the name alex Acosta sounds familiar, alex Acosta
was Trump's first Secretary of Labor who before that as
the Bush US attorney in Miami, gave a thirteen months
sweetheart plea deal in two thousand and eight two Jeffrey Epstein,
(08:47):
the man who did not prosecute Epstein, board of directors
Newsmax now claiming Gallaine Maxwell maybe anocent just in case
it is not clear that the single individual on this
planet who has done the most, who has done the
most heroic work to keep trump Stein alive, is Trump.
(09:11):
He also made a big deal about a revivified President's
Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition, and he named to
that council football Hall of Famer Lawrence Taylor. Lawrence Taylor,
the guy who was arrested for the statutory rape of
(09:31):
a sixteen year old girl, then pleaded guilty to sexual
misconduct and to patronizing a prostitute, and then had to
register as a sex offender. Because what you want, in
the middle of a presidential existential scandal in which you
are clearly trying to cover up the entire twenty thirty
(09:52):
forty year long case involving a pedophile and his death
and his partner and your connection to them, the one
thing you want to do is to name a register
stard sex offender who was arrested for raping a sixteen
year old and bring him into the White House to
have him stand next to you. Well, at least that's
(10:17):
the end of it. Oh no, it's not. Just in
case you needed Trump to remind you once more about
Trumpstein and about his perversions and about his own creepiness
towards young blondes that transcends Trumpstein. There's his press secretary,
the one he seems to have hired off the bottle
(10:38):
of Saint Pauly Girl beer, Caroline Levitt, just fifty two
years younger than him, dumb as two hundred pounds of rocks,
and in the room. As he said this, don't make
people think about Epstein. Don't make people think about Epstein.
Don't make people think about Epstein. I didn't realize she'd
(10:59):
be in the room, but she's on my list.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Caroline Levitt's I'm a star. It's that face, it's a brain.
It's those lips, the where they move, they move like
she's a machine gun. Is she in the roof, She's
in the room. She's a star.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
I better use some tic TACs just in case I
start kissing her. You know, I'm automatically attracted to beautiful
I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just
kiss I don't even wait. And when you're a star,
they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab
them by the presumably you remember the rest of that
quote from Donald. Of course, Trump watches Caroline Levitt's lips
(11:39):
move rather than listening to what comes out of them.
He doesn't know she's a buffoon. This is the woman
who infamously at the White House podium called Trump President Tump,
who wants in an interview called Hitler Hilter, and who
(12:01):
has now added to her own personal haul of dumb
ladies and gentlemen, the Nobel Peace Prize. It's well past
time that President Trump was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Oh my god, oh my god, Oh my god, oh
my god, oh my god. The Nobel Peace Prize presumably
the Nobel Peace Prize as opposed to the Nobel Peace Prize.
(12:24):
The Nobel Peace Prize was presumably established by the late
James Noble, the actor who played Governor Gatling on the
old sitcom Benson Knitwit. But she's keeping trump steam alive,
just like everybody else in the White house, so good
(12:45):
work knit wit. So if the Bureau of Labor Statistics
(13:14):
is not going to be run by Erica mcintarfer, they
got fired. But he's going to be run and said
by Bryson Deshambeau or another one of Trump's jag off
golf buddies, or it'll be run by Ronnie Jackson. The
quote doctor unquote who said Trump was six foot three,
two hundred and thirty nine pounds, which could be true
(13:38):
if you take it in the sense of I didn't
say just six y three two hundred and thirty nine pounds.
I mean anybody who weighs three hundred pounds is in
a sense two hundred and thirty nine pounds. That part
of him is two hundred and thirty nine pounds. Too bad.
The first doctor, the guy with the hair who basically
pronounced that Trump was immortal, and then a couple of
(14:00):
years later confessed that Trump had dictated the entire letter
Harold Bornstein sadly he's dead. Actually, I don't see that
as being a significant impediment to getting a statement out
of him that says Trump is going to be immortal
or that the labor stats are really good. I am
(14:20):
not disputing nor minimizing the significance of the memory holding
of bad job growth data and the statistician who compiled it.
This is directly from Orwell's nineteen eighty four. It is
absolutely a sign of Trump's evil and his growing desperation,
and especially his growing rage when his confabulation is being contradicted.
(14:43):
Chris true Acts, the conservative writer, introduced that word into
the dialogue in the Hill Confabulation, saying that Trump has
entered that stage of dementia, the one in which quote
the person doing it genuinely believes what he's saying, even
if it is obviously and patently false. True Axe brought
(15:06):
up this facocta Trump unibomber story from last month in
which Trump claimed his uncle who taught at MIT and
had three degrees nuclear, chemical, and math, and that's why
he Trump is a genius because his uncle had genes,
and now he Trump has those genes. How uncle John
taught Ted Kazinski, the unibomber, at MIT, and told Donald
(15:28):
how smart Kazinsky was, except uncle John was a professor
of electrical engineering at MIT, and none of the other things.
And the unibomber went to Harvard, not MIT, and uncle John.
He died in nineteen eighty five, and the unibomber wasn't
identified as the unibomber until nineteen ninety six. I'm not
(15:53):
discounting any of the seriousness of this. I'm just saying
that Trump didn't start cooking the books and shooting the
messengers last Friday. He began by doing that. He began
his career by doing that. Never mind the business stuff
where he cooked the books for forty years. Every pole
he didn't like from day one was fake. Every primary
(16:16):
result he didn't agree with, crooked, every election he lost, fixed,
all numbers fixed, crooked, fake. And it is now five
years and five months. It was late February twenty twenty
when dementia J. Trump demanded that some of the earliest
American victims of COVID must be kept on board the
Grand Princess Cruz ship where the virus was raging, rather
(16:40):
than brought ashore because quote, I like the numbers being
where they are. I don't need to have the numbers
double because of one ship in private that the very
start of the COVID pandemic, in which Trump was personally
responsible for the deaths and illnesses of untold hundreds of thousands,
(17:03):
if not millions. In private, the numbers became quote my numbers,
and Trump's fury that the CDC and FAUCI and the
Chinese and the virus were all plotting against him to
ruin his numbers, because that's all those people were to him, numbers.
(17:26):
His numbers, just like the unemployed are just numbers, just
like you are just a number, and you are his number.
It is the same baseline mental reality I've been hammering
home since twenty fifteen, in public, since nineteen eighty three
in private. Donald Trump's brain does not work right now.
(17:49):
Throw in this confabulation element. He may truly believe the
economy has never been better. He may truly believe gasoline
is a dollar ninety eight a gallon in some mythical
state that he dreamt of. He may truly believe he
can force the price of eggs to drop eleventy billion percent.
Of course, he truly believes it. His uncle had degrees
(18:10):
in nuclear chemical and math, and eleveny billion dollars math,
and his uncle gave him his brain before he died.
There is a practical problem here, of course, besides making
more people doubt more reality even more Often these aren't
(18:33):
Fatso's golf scores or his correct weight estimated to the
nearest ton. These are the statistics upon which the economy rests.
I mean, economic numbers are corrupted enough as it is
without the Bureau of Labor Statistics simply running the numbers
past Trump first to see if he likes them enough
or they have to be many more thousand percent gooder
(18:59):
per Those parts of the Washington posts that still have
power companies and Wall Street and and other countries now
worry quote that Trump's volatile temperament could cause additional economic
harm by undermining market confidence in the government data that investors,
business executives, and policymakers require to make decisions. Quote It's
(19:24):
like trying to drive a car blindfolded, says the former
chief economist from the Labor Department. Don't worry Trump can
do that. He can. He can drive a car blindfolded.
Ask Uncle John, Get him on the phone. Get Uncle
John on the phone right now. What do you mean
(19:45):
he died in nineteen eighty five. That's ridiculous. Died in
nineteen eighty five, That's unpossible. I mean, today's is nineteen
sixty five. So our team Hitler is completely bonkers and
(20:07):
is making up his own numbers and his own words.
Remember he said Obama was sedacious. Making up your own
words is a primary symptom of bipolar disorder. In case,
we want to throw that into the salad bowl that
is his head. Ah so what, he can always fall
back on the military. Your attention is directed to Greg's
(20:29):
sergeant's piece in The New Republic over the weekend, based
on a leaked Homeland Security memo from that corner of
the White House where the Drunks meet the dog murdering sadists,
Christy nomes liaison to Pete Hegseth, who just happens to
be the liaison heg Seth's kid brother, Skippy. The memo
(20:53):
outlines the DHS needs to convince the Pentagon to authorize
way more troops to disappear way more brown people, and
not just at the border, things like Trump's terrorist attack
on Los Angeles. More of this, please only in New
York and San Francisco and Chicago and who knows where else.
(21:15):
Rationalization for it cook the books call any immigrant committing
a crime the equivalent of al Qaeda or isis. Well,
you can't call them isis ICE is the equivalent of ices.
But they're cooking these books now, they're calling them the
equivalent of al Qaeda as it is. And your historical
(21:35):
role models for doing this for rounding people up. The
people who put the internment camps were Japanese Americans together
during the Second World War, and the political excuse the
Democrats did that, So shrug emoji. Last point on this.
You would think that in the Senate, the vote for
(21:56):
the dumbest smart guy or the smartest dumb guy would
be unanimous for Senator John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana, who
acts and talks like my late friend Pat Buttram, only
he doesn't wear that bowler hat, but went to UVA, Vanderbilt,
and Oxford, and only eighteen years ago decided he wasn't
(22:18):
going to get anywhere in Louisiana as a smart Democrat,
so he instead became a rube Republican. But I don't know,
Senator Kennedy might lose that election in an upset to
Tom Cotton of Harvard and Harvard Law, who does not
act dumb, but does do dumb things in order to
manipulate dumb people and gets extraordinary yields. It was Tom
(22:41):
Cotton who floated prosecuting Jack Smith for violating the Hatch Act.
This got huge play in Maga fantasy land here, Oh,
they're going to execute Jack Smith for violating the Hatch Act.
It got some play here in real news, surprisingly a lot.
But internationally this was the second or third biggest story
(23:04):
coming from the US over the weekend. The BBC ran
it on its World TV newscasts every hour for a day.
Oh my god, the special prosecutor is being prosecuted. Not
once was it mentioned, just as not once was it
mentioned in Maga media that if this mystery man Jack Smith,
(23:24):
who basically never spoke, is actually guilty of violating the
Hatch Act of campaigning while you shouldn't be campaigning, Jack
Smith faces possible fines, jail terms, and other punishments of
up to nothing. If they throw the book at him,
He'll get no fine, no jail term, no punishment. They
(23:52):
warned or reprimanded Jen Saki on the Hatch Act, and
Kaylee Mcananey and Karine, Jean Pierre and Kelly and Cohnjob,
Mike Pump, Nikki Hayley, not James Comy. He was not
guilty and I spent way too much time over the
(24:13):
weekend looking to find the last person actually find under
the Hatch Act. Couldn't not any amount, let alone the
maximum fine of one thousand dollars, doctor evil. There was
somebody suspended for four months from their job at Thers,
and somebody else who's actually fired from the Bureau of
(24:34):
Engraving fifteen years ago. But you would think that someone
somewhere on the news would have noted that unless Trump
takes the great dangerous presidentially fatal leap of just announcing
he is making a new retroactive law, the most they
can possibly do to Jack Smith with the Hatch Act
is fire him from his job as special counsel, the
(24:59):
job of special counsel from which he resigned last January eleventh.
That's if he's guilty of anything, you can fire him
from a job he doesn't have anymore if he's guilty
of anything. Guilty of anything besides taking Merrick Garland's words
of caution seriously also of interest here, Thank god they're morons.
(25:30):
The Republicans put out a meme for the newest mutation
of Maga Maga with two a's in the middle, make
American automobiles great again. The meme has a picture of
Trump and a The automobile in the meme that he's
celebrating is actually a car made in the Soviet Union
(25:51):
in the seventies. And b you know how old Trump
looks in the meme, He looks two hundred and six.
That's next. This is countdown. This is countdown with Keith
Olberman still ahead on this all new edition of Countdown. Next.
(26:29):
In Things I promised not to tell, I think I
mentioned this once. I went back to my high school,
the school that produced Chris Berman and Will Bunch and
gave Obama his first political speech venue and I gave
the commencement address nineteen years after I had graduated, and
in the crowd were twenty of my teachers. Twenty teachers
(26:54):
who had been there when I graduated. That's how long
they lasted there. They were great teachers, but greater people,
and one of them, the math department head, who literally
saved me from not graduating on time and possibly still
being the student theired. Today, the last of the greats
(27:16):
of the Hackley School, Tarrytown, New York, Jerry Murphy, has died.
A Tribute to mister Murphy. Next first. Believe it or not,
there's still more new idiots to talk about. The roundup
of the miss Grants, morons and Dunn Krueger effects specimens
who constitute today's other worst persons in the world, the
(27:37):
Bronze and Drew Cuomo slouching towards getting blown out in
the election for mayor of New York City twice in
one year. He is now stone cold lying about the
mayor to be, As was tweeted on CNBC, Cuomo says
of Zoran Mamdani, quote, thirty three years old, never had
(28:00):
a job, and now the first job is going to
be the mayor of New York. Mom Donnie has been
a State Assembly member since twenty twenty one. And if
quality of jobs and performance on them is the real
test here, Cromo is gonna lose by more than he thinks.
(28:20):
Just unbelievable. Andrew Cuomo Trumpian narcissist, lying scumbag and possibly
only the second biggest Trumpian narcissist lying scumbag among his
own siblings. Runner up worser Ryan Naked women on my
(28:42):
office TV during the State Education Board meeting executive session
and they yell at me and I shout what's that?
And now everybody is lying but me, Walters. This is
the construction of the classic hidden porn addict story. I
told you about this. Why they behave this way? Ryan
is the superintendent of education in the state of Oklahoma.
(29:04):
I'm sorry, not the state of Oklahoma, the theocratic kingdom
of Oklahoma. And he is frankly dying hard there. He
is not going gently into that good night that will
envelop him soon or late. He is doubling down on me.
I can't be evil. Look at all these attacks on woke.
(29:24):
I'm doing bullshit. Don't look at the porn. He is
again posted if you are a teacher coming to Oklahoma
from woke states, First of all, your premise is flawed.
Who the f is going to do that? If you
are a teacher coming to Oklahoma from woke states, you
(29:45):
will not be indoctrinating our kids with a liberal agenda,
you know, like porn in Oklahoma. He didn't say that.
I did. In Oklahoma. We are proud to have America
First values again my interpretation like porn, and he attaches
(30:05):
a Fox News story also porn Oklahoma requires America First
certification test for and it has more. But I didn't
click through, So all I know is that the title
is Oklahoma requires America first certification test for now, Ryan,
This certification test that they have to do for you.
Is this in addition to teach your applicants from woke
(30:29):
states bringing you a gift of porn with naked women
appearing on chiropractic tables? Or is this instead of bringing
you a gift of porn with naked women appearing on
chiropractic tables? Ryan, Ryan, mister Walters, buddy, if I can
get your attention away from that one monitor in your
(30:53):
office for a moment, please come on, Ryan. This is
so obvious. Mike Johnson would have confessed to it by now.
Holy crap. But the winner the social media director of
the Republican Party. Well, I guess by now, given the
way Trump fires people for inadvertently or advertently telling the truth.
(31:20):
The ex social media director of the Republican Party over
the gop Twitter x account. The one Big Beautiful Bill
will drive the return of the Great American Car. Not
one American flag, emog follows this, but two American flags
double the America, and there's a giant white on blue sky,
(31:43):
making automobiles great again. See this, They've found another thing
to call MAGA after only nine years. Huh what other
words start with g Uh? What other words start with A?
America starts with an M. That's what the M and
(32:03):
magas for America is great again. I can't get over
Ryan Walters thinking people are deliberately moving to Oklahoma to
teach there. But back to this one. So there's this
picture of Trump at a car behind him and making
America making automobiles great again. The one big, beautiful Bill
(32:26):
will drive the return of the great American car. That's all,
it says the car shown behind Trump as he makes
that gesture with his hands in the air. You know,
the eye can no longer move my body sufficiently to
actually dance, so you'll all have to pretend that I'm dancing.
The car shown behind him is a small, boxy, bright
(32:48):
yellow car with motorcycle hub caps that looks like a
like a Paris taxi in a Peter Seller's pink Panther
Inspector Cluseau picture from the sixties or seventies. You got
the image. I mean, anybody putting this meme together looks
at this and says, the new Ram pickup looks like crap. Wait,
(33:08):
that's not a ram, that's a turns out. That's a
nineteen seventy Vaz twenty one oh one Ziguli c Hi
g u l i jiguli, also called a Kopeika, also
called in international automobile circles a loda. All those names
(33:29):
play on house. It's so small it looks like the
smallest coin in Russia. Because the goddamned little tiny yellow
car that the Republicans think promotes American cars, the goddamn
car sitting there behind Trump, that these Republican losers picked
a show behind him, is not just Russian, it's Soviet.
(33:50):
It was a Soviet produced car, the nineteen seventy Vaz
twenty one oh one. As late as nineteen seventy four,
this car was put on sale in England for nine
hundred and seventy nine pounds even then. That wasn't a lot.
It's a pos Soviet car. And that's how his own
(34:13):
cult thinks. Trump is making American automobiles great again by
making Russian automobiles great again by making Soviet Russian automobiles
great again. The Republican Party, whatever you do, don't do
anything that underscores the connection between Trump and Russia, that
(34:40):
Republican Party, the Republican Party social media account, clown today's
person in the world, to the number one story on
the Countdown, and my favorite topic, me and things I
promised not to tell, and in this case it is
(35:02):
something I wish I did not have to tell. There
is another world somewhere, another universe, another timeline in which
I am preparing right now for not the fiftieth anniversary
of my graduation from my high school, but I am
in fact preparing to return to my high school for
(35:26):
my fifty first year as a senior there because I
am still trying to pass senior math. Because in this
parallel world, my math teacher in the school year nineteen
seventy four to seventy five is not Jerry Murphy, but
(35:46):
somebody else. Anybody else, somebody who wasn't quite the math
teacher that he was, somebody who wasn't quite the empathetic
figure that he was, and most importantly, somebody who was
just not as much of a decent, caring, proactively kind
human being as Jerry Murphy was. You can probably guess
(36:12):
that Gerald C. Murphy of Brooklyn, New York, died in
Albuquerque on June eighteenth of this year. Those of us
who went to the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York
were informed by email at the end of last week.
He had a degree from Fordham in math and an
(36:34):
MS in mathematics from Polytechnic Institute of New York. And
it reads oddly in his obituary in the Albuquerque newspaper
where he completed all course work towards a PhD. And
I saw that, and I smiled, because he told me
that story in nineteen seventy four or early nineteen seventy five.
(36:55):
It doesn't say it here. And I'm very unhappy that
the biography, which recounts the great events of his life,
and the fact that he taught at my alma mater, Hackley,
home of many many teachers who weren't paid well and
yet stayed twenty years, that he stayed twenty years, became
chairman of the math department, then moved to New Mexico
(37:15):
and taught at the Albuquerque Academy until the year twenty eleven.
So he spent twenty one years there and they were
fortunate to have him. And it goes on about his wife,
who I knew very briefly at Hackley, and how he
loved to ski and play tennis, and travel and reading
and taking photographs and was a member of the Zen
(37:38):
Buddhist community in New York, which I did not know,
but doesn't surprise me in the least. But it doesn't
say here what it should have said. At the first
Jerry Murphy, one of the great human beings died, the
world is a little smaller and worse for this fact.
(37:59):
It was better for him being here. And I know
so many of my classmates it's reached out to me
about this to see if I had seen it, including
my friend Will Bunch, who I've mentioned many times was
on the school newspaper with me and for whom mister
Murphy was one of his favorites, as mister Murphy was
one of mine. Because there is one story about Jerry Murphy,
(38:23):
and what I said, I guess is kind of an
exaggeration at the beginning of this reminiscence about him. But
I suppose there is a world in which when the
subject of this last year of math changed to something
so mystifying to me that I have blotted out the
(38:44):
name of the kind of math it was. Might have
been trigonometry, might have been pterodactyl. I don't know what
it was, that's how little sense it made to me.
I remember raising my hand at one point and saying,
mister Murphy, the thing on the left is that the answer?
(39:05):
Or is that the question? And he looked at me
and a wry smile snapped across his thin mouth, and
he said, stay after, we need to talk about that,
and keep quiet the rest of the class, will you.
I had been, as I think I've mentioned several times,
(39:25):
mistaken for a math prodigy. When I was a child.
I used to like to play with numbers, and I
mean that literally. I had a small container full of
plastic numbers, and I like to array them in forty
and fifty digit numbers and add and subtract and then
later on multiply them. And for this they thought I
(39:46):
was a math prodigy, that I would someday be doing
differential calculus. In fact, I just like doing addition, subtraction,
and multiplication. No division. My limit was division. So I
guess by the time I was a senior in school,
it was pretty well established that I was not a
(40:06):
math prodigy anymore. But there was no reason for me
not to take math classes because There was no particular
reason for me to think that I would not be
able to process this stuff, which was fairly logical, and
which I continued to consume and process pretty well until
I guess it was trigonometry. In the middle of the
year we went to this and at one point I
(40:29):
remember turning my head upside down and looking at the
board that way to see if maybe it made more
sense looking at it upside down. Jerry Murphy, who was
a wonderful man, and treated us all as if we
were just junior members in some sort of partnership in
(40:50):
his classroom, who would be upbraided when they did not
behave as junior partners should be. But who were not
some you know, ragmuffin crowd of over rich or overfed
or deserving of resentment, none of that. We were his
(41:13):
partners in this experience called teaching math in Tarrytown, New
York in nineteen seventy four. And so in this little
meeting afterwards, he said, you don't see it, do you,
And I went, I don't see it at all. You
could write anything up there, and I would have a
better chance of solving anything else you wrote up there.
(41:35):
I don't know what it means I don't know where
to start. It's literally liking when like somebody turned the
gravity off. Yes, exactly, He goes, don't worry about it.
I said, don't worry about it. I don't when you're
going to test us on this, aren't you. It's like
everything else. And I've done BS and maybe an occasional C,
(41:55):
but maybe an occasional A for the whole of my
five years here at the various levels of math. I
did okay in algebra, I didn't like it. I did
okay Calculus I didn't like that. And now this, whatever
this is, I don't know what this is, let alone
how to solve it. And he said, just relax. It's
called the mathwall. And I said, that's what it's called.
(42:17):
He said, no, no, no, what's happened to you is called
the mathwall. He said. If you didn't notice, there's three
or four others of you in this class. You've all
hit this at the same time. Don't worry about it.
We all hit the mathwall. And I said, who's this we?
He said, I hit the mathwall. This is why I
am not doctor Murphy. This goes back to completing all
(42:41):
coursework towards a PhD at Polytechnic Institute of New York.
He said that one day he came home with one
of those problems that they give would be people with
doctorates in mathematics, the ones that take three days to solve,
the ones you have to work on and work on
for twelve or fourteen hours and then risk going to
(43:04):
sleep and losing your place and having to go back
to the beginning again. And he described the agony of
doing this, and on the third day, when he realized
he'd made a fundamental mistake in solving whatever this problem was,
which I hope was at least something to do with
time travel, it sounded so complex, he said, I started
to cry. Now, imagine just at any point in your life,
(43:29):
a teacher, especially a high school teacher, a man and
a very rugged Brooklyn kind of guy, no matter what
his education might have been, explaining to you that some
point something in the educational process had made him cry.
(43:49):
This was human in a way that so few teachers,
so few adults are. Then and now to kids, Jerry
Murphy said, yeah, I began to cry, and I went
back to the beginning, and my wife said, maybe it's
time for you to give this up and take what
(44:10):
you have in the way of an education and make
a career as a teacher rather than as a professional
mathematician or a collegiate instructor in math. And he went,
you know, you're right, and that's when he left. So
when it says he completed all the coursework, what it
doesn't say is there was this one three day problem
that caused him to cry and to give up on
(44:34):
that aspect of his career. And as he said, I
gave that up, but I regained my sanity. And here
we are today. So you've hit your math wall a
little earlier than I did, but realistically only about five years,
I guess, he said. You've done well. You're relatively well
behaved in this class, he said, and you're funny, and
(44:57):
we all enjoy your work, and everybody thinks you're a
good guy. And here's what we're going to do. You
go down to the registrar's off and here's my note
approving it. You change your course grading system on this
class whatever it was, Senior Math Math five, whatever the
calling of the name of this thing was, and you
change from grades letter grades to pass fail. He said,
(45:22):
I will pass you your work so far has been
a B plus. I will pass you. I'm not going
to grade you, and you can take the exams. I
suppose here's your requirement. Though, you and the other three
or four who have also hit this same math wall.
It's a real one. It's a tough one. You're not
the first I've ever seen do this. All of you
(45:45):
had damn well better be quiet in my classroom. I
don't hunt a single bit of trouble from any of
you for the rest of the year. And this may
have been November, December, January, I can't remember how early
it was. But he said, you go and take it,
pass fail and shut the hell up. And you and
(46:05):
that guy over there he brings in the papers anyway,
read the papers quietly to yourselves. Don't get in the
way of the students who still understand this stuff. And
certainly don't tell anybody that if they pretend that they've
hit the math wall, that they don't have to do
the work. You have to do everything except the work,
and you have to do more of it here in
(46:25):
the classroom. And there's another thing. Every Monday, when I
come in here at nine o'clock in the morning, we
were his first class. You guys are reciting some thing
from this what's it called Monty Something's Flying Something? And
I said Monty Python's Flying Circus, the British TV comedy
series on Channel thirteen exactly. He said, I saw it
(46:49):
once when we had the week off. I stayed up
that late. I don't normally stay up that late, ten
thirty at night and I said yeah. He said, you
seem to think it's pretty funny, and from what I've
heard you describe it, it sounds like it's really really way
off the wall. I said, it's like nothing I've ever
seen before. You get a good sense of humor. Overman,
(47:12):
here's what I want you to do. You get to
the other guys together they watch too, right, And he
listed the guys who are also at the math wall
with me. He said, I want you guys to come
in a little early and decide which of the sketches
from the previous night's episode of Monny Bithen's Flying Circus.
Did you say which of them you can remember the best?
(47:32):
And I want you to reenact it for me before
class starts. I said, yes, sir, And for this you're
going to pass me yep and be quiet in my classroom,
no laughing, and certainly don't make any noise during the
exams when the students who haven't gone math brain dead
(47:55):
yet are still trying to get a's and get into
colleges of their choice. And I said, well that's I said,
that's that's terrific of you. Thank you, and he went,
I don't want anybody crying over math in my classroom.
I've already been through that enough with me. And that's
how it went the rest of the year. Three of us,
(48:19):
I think eventually there were four would assemble about ten
minutes before mister Murphy walked in and go through whatever
the best Monty Python sketch had been the night before,
and remember what we could, and each assumed some roles
and reenacted as best we could. I often filled in
the detail and did some of the voices. We did
(48:41):
a passable job. And each time, as our remember, Jerry
Murphy actually laughed. And came graduation time, and before that
the final exams, and he handed the final exam, put
it down on the desk, on my desk and the
other guy's desks, and everybody else in the class just
laughed because they knew we were essentially morons who had
(49:04):
hit the math. It was not like he was protecting
us and saying, don't laugh at them. They've hit the
math wall. You may too soon hit the math wall.
He didn't say that. He went, look at these idiots, Well,
we're just going to let them sit there and sit
on their math accomplishments and whatever else they have to
sit on for the rest of this class, and then
(49:26):
we do another Monty Python sketch and that would be
the end of it. Now, the end of it for
me was, as I think I have recounted a couple
of times. Because I took the class pass fail rather
than what would have happened, which would have been an F.
Number one, my grade point average soared. I did not
get a C or a B in math. I got
(49:47):
a pass, which did not count towards your grade point average.
Thus my grade point average probably went up. I don't
know point two something. I made the list of the
kum Laude Society top ten percent of the graduates of
the class had no business being in it. I hit
the math wall. In another world, I would have failed,
(50:09):
and they would have made me come back for another
senior year just for the math class. With a different teacher,
and then I would have failed again and again and again,
and so far we're up to nineteen eighty one, and
again and again and again. Now it's nineteen ninety seven.
I'm still a senior at Hackley School in Terrytown, New York,
and I am preparing now to go back for year
(50:31):
fifty one, the twenty twenty five twenty six academic year.
But for Jerry Murphy, he did much more than that.
I don't want to reduce his life to an active
kindness towards students in a time when that wasn't necessarily
(50:52):
approved of, even at a good school like Hackley. But
it occurs to me as I now look back at
these teachers, almost all of whom I think are gone now.
Jerry was one of the youngest, but all the others
who taught me, including the fierce ones and the ones
who had reputations as dictators in their classrooms, and Arthur
(51:13):
Nathing and Walter Schneller and Randy McNaughton and Rusty McMullen
and LM. A. Miller and all of them, and I
realized that they shared one fundamental element in common when
Jerry Murphy had it in spades. They were human beings
with empathy. They were good human beings. And the first
(51:35):
line of Jerry Murphy's obituary should say Gerald C. Murphy,
who was a great human being who thought about others
and the plights that they faced, and whose empathy lighted
up his corner of the world has left us. Let
(51:58):
us be where we can as empathetic as he was.
Remember that there is always a math wall awaiting each
of us eventually, and if we're lucky, the person at
the math wall says, just go downstairs and switch it
(52:19):
to pass fail and do a Monty Python sketch too.
By the way, this isn't part of my plan, but
you'll get to learn how to perform other people's comedy.
Hadn't thought of that? Had you? See? You thought you
were just sort of filling time in my classroom. In fact,
you were learning a different skill, to say nothing of
(52:41):
the empathy. Thank you, Jerry Murphy. Countdown with Keith Olderman
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(53:04):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and current events with intelligence and humor. From the border crisis, to the madness of cancel culture and far-left missteps, Clay and Buck guide listeners through the latest headlines and hot topics with fun and entertaining conversations and opinions.