August 1, 2023 • 60 mins
IT'S THE COUNTDOWN 1ST ANNIVERSARY PODCAST
A-Block (1:43) SPECIAL COMMENT: Indictment foreshadowing. “This is really bad news for Biden,” Trump wrote last night, though – not really, no, “which means I will probably be indicted again, soon.” Do you like THAT foreshadowing? Or how about this one? Fani Willis sends an e-mail to county commissioners asking them to make sure they keep themselves and their staff safe. And orange security barriers have gone up around the Fulton County Courthouse. And yesterday was the first of ten days before August 18th when she ordered 70 percent of her staff to work remotely. Willis also gave a TV interview: “The work is accomplished. We’ve been working for two and a half years. We’re ready to go,” unquote.
Meanwhile back at the DC Ranch: there is still that January 6th Target Letter from Jack Smith hanging like the sword of Damacles over Trump’s head and the fact that if Smith sticks to a timeline that matches the document case, he’s indicting today or Thursday at the latest and the fact that his Trump January 6th Grand Jury was expected to convene today and while Trump’s latest self-pitying post – that would be number Three Million, 447 thousand 237, collect the whole set – is not necessarily time-sensitive it sure is funny if he already knew from his attorneys that the indictments are coming this week and instead of just revealing it like he did last time, he’s milking it this way, in order to feed the fascists’ story line that the entire prosecution of Trump is being made up as they go along, and in a matter of hours, for one reason only. Namely – as Trump also posted last night – “in order to kill the news cycle!!!"
Also: why does Trump treat his cultists like idiots? Because they're idiots. New polling: 91 percent of Republicans who trust Fox News don't believe he has committed any real crime and 85 percent of them say Republicans have to support him regardless. And there is a guess or a theory or a thesis beginning to form that Trump is cash-poor, has been drained by the failure of Trump Social, and his ability to pay for those lawyers AND this campaign may be severely constrained - and it's all because of Elon Musk!
B-Block (19:05) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Whatever actually happened with Congressman Ronny Jackson and the 15-year old girl and the cops at the rodeo, his office felt compelled to issue a press release insisting he WASN'T drinking. The X-sign is gone. Tommy Tuberville is all ears after he loses Space Command for Alabama. RFK Jr's PAC is literally half-funded by an 81-year old Republican. (22:10) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Musk. Again. Threatening to sue to prevent free speech and protect hate speech. DeSantis fanboy Pedro Gonzalez and MORE antisemitic texts including one against Nancy Pelosi whom he doesn't know isn't Jewish. And the U.S. Congressman who believes that a soldier is buried under the floor of the Capitol rotunda.
C-Block (28:45) FIRST ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATIONS of the start of Year 2 of this here pod. Thank you kindly for listening.
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. Foreshadowing
indictment foreshadowing quote, this is really bad news for Biden,
(00:31):
Trump wrote last night, though not really no quote, which
means I will probably be indicted again soon unquote. Do
you like that foreshadowing or how about this foreshadowing? Fannie
Willis sends an email to county commissioners asking them to
make sure they keep themselves and their staff safe and
(00:56):
orange security barriers have gone up around the Fulton County courthouse,
and yesterday was the first of ten days before August eighteenth,
when she ordered seventy percent of her staff to work remotely.
I don't know what could all that possibly mean. Willis
gave a TV interview quote, the work is accomplished. We've
(01:17):
been working for two and a half years. We're ready
to go. Unquote. I wish the district attorney would not
be so bloody evasive. The judge, the same judge, Robert McBurney,
like they only have the one in all of Georgia.
McBurney tossed the last Trump attempt to toss the evidence
yesterday and to disqualify the DA yesterday, and the untossed
(01:41):
DA also says her schedule is her schedule two grand juries.
Neither meets on Wednesday, and in the same interview quote,
I don't know what Jack Smith is doing, and Jack
Smith doesn't know what I'm doing. In all honesty, if
Jack Smith was standing next to me, I'm not sure
I would know who he was. My guess is he
(02:02):
probably can't pronounce my name correctly. Unquote. We can skip
for a moment the reality that it is essential that
the two of them do know what the other is doing,
if only after they announce what they are doing, because
simultaneous trials not only have their own perils and pitfalls,
but twin trials carry the danger that Georgia might assert
(02:25):
one fact or one date or one timeline and be
contradicted by what the Department of Justice is asserting, which
could be fatal for both cases. We now go back
to the DOJ, and there is still that January sixth
target letter from Jack Smith hanging like the sword of
Damocles over Trump's head. And the fact that if Smith
(02:47):
sticks to a timeline that matches the document's case, he
is indicting today or Thursday at the latest. And the
fact that his Trump January sixth Grand Jury was expected
to convene today, and while Trump's latest self pitying post,
which would be number three million, four, one hundred and
forty seven, two hundred and thirty seven collect the whole series,
(03:09):
this latest post is not necessarily time sensitive. It sure
is funny if he already knew from his attorneys that
the indictments are coming tomorrow or Thursday, and instead of
just revealing it like he did last time, he's milking
it this way in order to further feed the fascist
storyline that the entire prosecution of Trump is being made
(03:31):
up as they go along, and being made up in
just a matter of hours for one reason only, namely,
as Trump also posted last night in order to kill
the news cycle. Exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point. I mean,
(03:53):
what does Trump think his supporters are idiots? Yes, he
thinks they're idiots, and that's largely because they're idiots. You
doubtless saw the interior numbers on the latest New York
Times GOP poll, which were far more important than the
exterior ones about how much he's leading DeSantis by because
(04:14):
the interior numbers shows ninety one percent of Republicans who
rely on Fox do not think Trump committed any serious crimes.
Ninety one percent and eighty five percent say Republicans must
(04:34):
stand behind Trump regardless, and eighty three percent say Trump
was merely exercising his right to contest his twenty twenty loss.
And it's just too bad nobody was ever out there
twenty twenty five years ago saying Fox News and Rupert
Murdoch would end democracy and kill us all, and the
uninfected portions of American media and the public had to
(04:56):
do everything we could to kill Fox News first. Oh yeah, right,
I did all that and got dismissed as the O'Reilly
of the left. And I was only doing it for ratings.
And my tendency to say I told you so only
in many, many, many more words is perhaps my least
attractive personality. Trait especially went up to half the nation
has literally succumbed to this mass hysteria in which no
(05:19):
fact or reality can interrupt their loyalty to an authoritarian,
anti democracy movement. And they believe that those of us
who will not simply get out of their imposition of
their own hallucination, we must somehow be removed from the equation.
And this is unfolding on the eve of the election
that will decide who is president during what is probably
(05:42):
mankind's last window to regain the rains of the uncontrolled
climate catastrophe, and the fascists literally have a thoroughly vetted
and organized plan to roll back all environmental controls and
actually burn more fossil fuels as part of their Project
twenty twenty five. Under the circumstances, I'll try to keep
(06:06):
the eye told you so as to a minimum. Also,
I will try not to either try to solve nor
to utterly succumb to the climate emergency during a podcast,
and instead he Marcus Aurelius and his wise words and
concentrate on doing that which is in front of us,
(06:28):
and that would be right now. This guy di Olivierira
and the postponement of his actual indictment yesterday because he
doesn't have a Florida lawyer just like the last guy,
add another week's delay to the Trump documents trial schedule.
Aileen the Olivera does have a Trump pack attorney named
(06:48):
John Irving, and thus Carlos the Boss wants the server deleted.
The Olivera lives in as my childhood friend Will Bunch
of the Philly Inquirer noted he lives in the world
according to Trump, This latest of Trump's countless victims. You
ft up, you trusted, U might scare the hell out
(07:09):
of Trump because if he flips the way the IT
manager you Seal Taveres flipped. Trump can't beat the obstruction
of justice rap cannot. But legal minds think the fact
that he's already been indicted makes him a less likely flippy,
because how does that look when he testifies for the
prosecution and the defense says, aren't you simply saying what
the special counsel told you to say? Because he indicted you,
(07:32):
then he dropped the charges, so you're not going to jail.
There was one other minor news blip last night. CNN
reported that a new court filing from Jack Smith's office
confirms that it has obtained new security video that pertains
to the effort to destroy evidence, and that is all
it reveals. We don't know what it is, just that
(07:54):
they got it after the last set of indictments. It'd
be video of di Olivera and Walt Nauda carrying bankers
boxes on their backs, would be video of the Evanna burial.
We don't know of much more interest. The federal election
campaign filings were due yesterday, and the Ethics Outfit Crew
(08:18):
analyzed the one submitted by the Trump Leadership Pack, which
is sarcastically named Save America. It finds the pack made
three payments to political allies, which is what a leadership
pack of any stripe is supposed to do. Three. It
made just a few more payments to Trump's lawyers, one
hundred and sixty nine of them. The money figure is unclear,
(08:41):
could be twenty million, could be forty million, as originally reported.
The fact that Save America is now Save Trump's ass
with lawyers that is not unclear. Three payments to political allies,
one hundred and sixty nine of them to Trump's lawyers.
When news broke that Trump's campaign is actually short enough
(09:03):
on cash that that pack asked for sixty million dollars
back from another pro Trump pack. I have joked here
that if we can't put Trump in jail before the
twenty twenty four election, maybe Jack Smith and Fannie Willis
and Alvin Bragg can bill him into the ground. Those
lawyer hours can mount up quickly, even if other people
(09:28):
are paying for twenty million forty million eight hundred and
seventy five eleventy billion. It does hurt you because it
means that those same other people are not paying that
amount of money into your campaign. What if Trump or
his campaign or both really, really, really had money troubles.
(09:51):
This was posited seriously on Twitter yesterday, And as I
say that, I am thinking you have become everything you hate,
you are this close to saying that you read something
on Facebook from Trump's cousins, nephew's next door neighbor, entamer
But there is no mistaking than as devoted as Trump
has been to never letting a dollar go unspent as
(10:14):
long as it is your dollar, the legal bills are
mounting exponentially now and having your pack ask for your
money back from the other packs cannot be an ordinary
day at the campaign. God knows Trump has gone bankrupt before,
and his life has been structured exactly to project wealth,
(10:36):
whether or not he actually has any, and everybody I
actually have known in forty years of knowing Trump who
knows him better, has always insisted that he guarded the
tax returns so jealously because they would prove he was
nowhere close to being a billionaire, and perhaps only barely
into nine figures. This on Twitter was the thesis that
(11:02):
what Trump is is poor, that he could be telling
the truth about his net worth without revealing that. As
the writer put it, his businesses are worth a lot
of money, but they don't make a lot of money.
Some don't make any money at all. And that is
one hundred percent provably true. The writer was a man
(11:25):
named Brian Jacobson, a self announced veteran of twenty five
years in the tech sector and the cloud expert, and
also a second Amendment advocate. So I ain't just echoing
an opinion from our side of the cognitive gap here.
It is this Jacobson's contention that quote truth social is
killing Donald Trump's finances and may sink his presidential bid.
(11:50):
I'm not sure about the second part of that, but
the first part may really be true. The idea he
posits was to launch that social media site, grab all
the Twitter users angry at Jack Dorsey's successors, and then
take it public and let stockholders fund it via the
merger with the Digital World acquisition company, the merger that
(12:11):
just fell through, the merger which government agencies are now querying. Instead.
Elon Musk bought Twitter turned it into what it has become,
the playpen of the clouds. Truth Social got half the
users it expected or less, the merger collapsed, and instead
of getting a check for up to half a billion dollars,
(12:33):
Trump winds up still owning ninety percent of truth Social
himself and paying all of its operating expenses. And what
are they fifty million, thirty million? Who knows how much
it is mister Jacobson's conclusion that this means Trump suddenly
has a little less than the five hundred million Trump
owned dollars with which to self finance his campaign, or
(12:54):
his legal defense or di Olivera's legal defense, or all
of the above. No cash flow, just bills, bills, bills
from lawyer about Jack Smith and lawyers about Fannie Willis,
and lawyer is about Alvin Bragg and lawyers about truth
Social and this merger that went belly up. Jacobson then
(13:16):
jumps to the rather startling conclusion, which is where I
seem to be getting off the train here, that Trump
will either have to get a huge amount of money
from this legal defense fund he is just starting, or
he will be faced with folding truth Social or bowing
out of the presidential race, and I think that's farcical.
Trump is not smart enough to do either, and he's
(13:38):
congenitally incapable of admitting defeat either in social media business
or in a presidential candidacy that, oh, by the way,
is literally necessary to keep his own ass out of jail.
But what is absolutely logical and legit is that the
truth social gambit may seriously hamstring Trump's ability to keep
(14:01):
money flowing into his legal defenses and into his campaign simultaneously.
And then my guest would be, no, he's not going
to drop out. He would simply try to campaign with
less money than this extraordinary attempt to extricate himself from
jail and put all the rest of us in it
in his place. We'll need plus ultimately. Even if the
(14:25):
theory is crap, the bottom line is Jacobson's theory is
absolutely delightful, and it's worth wallowing in for a moment because, yeah,
this is true. And I hadn't thought about this before.
(14:46):
Donald Trump's social media ambitions and his personal finances and
to some degree fatal or trivial, have been seriously damaged
by Elon Musk Let them fight. Also, of interest, here
(15:12):
did I mention this is the anniversary of the podcast
a year ago today, and I said it would never last.
We will do minimal celebrations meantime, if you are a
Republican member of Congress and something messy involving you unfolds
(15:32):
at a public event, and your office then finds it
unavoidably necessary several days later to issue a statement that
refers to the police getting involved, and in that statement,
your office also finds it unavoidably necessary to insist that
the congressman quote was not drinking. Guess what literally or metaphorically, you, sir,
(15:58):
have a drinking problem. That's next? This is countdown? Is countdown?
Keith Alboman postscripts to the news, some headlines, some updates,
some snark, some predictions, date line, White Deer, Texas. His
(16:21):
office now admits that Congressman Ronnie Jackson, the disgraced former
White House physician and withdrawn Trump candidate to run the VA,
was quote briefly detained by law enforcement at a rodeo
outside Amarillo, Texas, Saturday night. The office insists Jackson had
been summoned to help a fifteen year old girl having
(16:43):
some sort of medical emergency, and somehow it was so
noisy that the cops grabbed him. Then comes this remarkable statement.
Jackson was sitting the office says quote, in the stands
during the entire rodeo, in full view of the assembled crowd,
and was not drinking unquote. All you need to know
(17:05):
about Ronnie Jackson is contained in the reality that his
office needed to put out a statement saying he was
not drinking as the police detained him as he put
his hands on a fifteen year old girl at a rodeo. Also,
if Ronnie Jackson has not been drinking, watch out the
Texas economy is about to collapse. Thank you, Nancy Faust.
(17:46):
Dateline San Francisco. The giant glowing X sign has been
taken off the roof of Twitter headquarters. Looks like it
was an inside job rather than the city stepping in.
If only Musk himself could be removed so easily. Dateline
Colorado Springs Space Command will remain in Colorado. The Biden
administration overturning a January twenty twenty one Trump decision to
(18:10):
move it to Alabama. The good news is this really
pisses off Senator Tommy Tuberville. The bad news is this
lets Lauren Bobert claim she made it happen and Dateline Washington,
this will stun you. After the FEC filings yesterday, it
turns out Robert F. Kennedy Junior's presidential superpack raised nine million,
(18:31):
eight hundred thousand dollars through the end of June, five
million of which more than fifty percent was from one donor,
Timothy Mellon, eighty one year old heir to the banking
fortune and longtime Trump donor. So RFK Junior is running
as a Democrat financed by a Republican when in fact
(18:53):
he is actually an asshole. Still ahead on the first
anniversary edition countdown, we will go back to episode one
because you can't do that yourself. It's not like episode
one is still online anywhere. Oh right, it is what
(19:17):
the hell? First time for the daily roundup of misgrants,
morons and the Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's
worst persons in the world. The Bronze Musk again he
is threatening the Bill O'Reilly record, which has stood since
two thousand and five. Musk is a free speech absolutist,
as you know, and what that means is he's a
(19:39):
free hate speech absolutist. Musk is now threatening to sue
the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the nonprofit that tracks
hate speech online, for quote a series of troubling and
baseless claims that appear calculated to harm Twitter generally and
its digital advertising business specifically. Unquote. First of all, please
(20:03):
it's x. It's not called Twitter. You think Musk would
know that. Secondly, Musk has spent the entirety of his
time owning that site trying to find out who is
destroying its reputation. We need to start a gofund me
to buy elon amirror. I think you'll show up in
a mirror. The runner up, Ron DeSantis, remember him, mister
(20:26):
Woki Finocchi Swamp Remember his fanboy magazine editor and Tucker
Carlson Darling Pedro Gonzalez and then Breitbart produced a series
of anti semitic text messages by Pedro Gonzalez and other
DeSantis supporters, including his unofficial magazine, The Florida Standard, rallied
to support Gonzales. Turned out, there were even more Gonzales
(20:51):
anti semitic text messages published by the right wing Washington
Free Beacon, in which Gonzales laments that Nancy Pelosi quote
can't be criticized because she is Jewish. Yeah, this is
one of those not that's smart anti Semites, waiting for
reaction from DeSantis if he can find his mouth with
(21:12):
both hands. But our winner, Congressman Derek van Orden of Wisconsin,
you heard about this right last week. A group of
sixteen and seventeen year old Senate pages, on their last
night in the Capitol, took photos of the place, and
some apparently got down on the floor to grab images
of the magnificent ceiling with their iPhones, which is when
(21:32):
Van Orden, in whose office the same night, passers by
photographed a significant amount of alcohol in bottles. Van Orden
approached the group and started swearing at the sixteen and
seventeen year old kids, what the f are you all doing?
Get the f out of here. You are defiling the space,
you pieces of s Who the f are you? They
(21:54):
told him, I don't give an f who you are.
Get out. Condemned by Democratic leaders and Republican leaders and
Senate leaders and House leaders, this Van Orden schmuck down.
He not only insisted the pages were treating the Capitol
quote like a fratthouse common room, he told a Milwaukee
paper that they were quote terribly disrespectful to lay on
(22:18):
the grave of a soldier that died fighting for freedom. Yeah, Congressman,
and I use the term loosely. Even in this day
and age. There are no graves in the US Capital.
You're thinking of the tomb of the unknown soldier Van Orden,
or you're thinking of Jack Daniels, or they taught it
(22:40):
at Excelsior College where you got your degree online. But this,
of course gets worse. Turns out that while Van Orden
was running for that house seat, he went into a
Wisconsin library and he went nuts over a display of
books on LGBTQ topics during Pride month. He started shoving
the books and he lit into what he assumed, I
(23:00):
guess was a library stafford, but was, guess what, a
seventy old girl, another teenager who was a library page
another page. So this Van Orden is not only a
historical ignoramus who thinks somebody is buried under the floor
of the Capitol, but he's a fifty three year old
(23:21):
man who has a habit of picking on teenage girls.
And there's an even bigger issue. Van Orden continues to
believe he is in the right here because the pages
were quote unquote defiling the capitol. Van Orden was in
Washington on January sixth, attended the Trump rally and then
went to the Capitol and he thinks somebody else defiled it, Derek.
(23:44):
The only thing buried at the Capitol is your empties,
Van Orden. Two Day's worse Parsonden.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
And did I mention it was the anniversary of the podcast?
Speaker 1 (24:29):
I can't remember. Have I brought that up at all?
I've always thought anniversaries were overdone things, but they do
provide excuses for assessment and calculation and milestones. And the
month we started, I think we were shy of six
hundred thousand downloads, which was still a pretty good start,
but not really near the threshold for success in one
of these podcasts, which is a million a month. Well
(24:51):
we hit that mark in January. Now with the addition
of the YouTube option, which is itself getting between one
hundred and twenty and one hundred and fifty thousand plays
a week. I mean, you guys listening to all or
most of the show, even though the the video on
YouTube is just a cartoon of me. I know, cartoon
of me. That phrase sometimes seems a little redundant. That
(25:12):
is pretty remarkable all things considered. Well, anyway, between YouTube
and all the podcast options for the month just passed,
we exceeded two million downloads and plays in one month,
and there were only eighteen new shows. I actually took
four days off for a change. Okay, enough boasting for
the moment. One of the many odd things about podcasts,
(25:35):
maybe the oddest is the reality that people do best
of podcasts even though all the originals are, as I
alluded to a segment ago, still online somewhere. I did
a few of these early on, and I may still
do some more, but at least when I do them,
I try to give you a little added value. I
stitched together thematically three segments, so you get three pieces
(25:57):
about that Trump is national security risk, or Biden confronting
MAGA or whatever the Supreme Court, and there is some
value in being able to hear shorter versions of the
commentaries as they happened in real time and trace a
story as it develops. Well, rather than do that for
this anniversary, I thought the simplest thing was to take
the first episode from a year ago, when the same
(26:18):
day audience was like forty percent of what it is
now and at least there's a chance people had not
heard this before, and replay the opening commentary, which was
a takeoff on the mad as Hell speech from Network,
and the closing commentary, which explained where the hell I
had been for the preceding two years. As always, if
you hit stop now, I'm not going to take it personally.
(26:39):
So those bastards who hit stop earlier, they're the ones
who frost my beer Stein. Where were you and what
were you doing on August one, twenty twenty two when
you first heard this? This is countdown with Keith Olberman.
(27:11):
I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody
knows things are bad. It's a recession. Everybody goes to work,
but they're still scared of losing their job. The corporations
make sure the dollar buys in Nicholsworth Banks are making
record profits. Teachers are told to keep a gun under
the desk. Punks are running wild in Congress, and there's
nobody anywhere seems to know what to do, and there's
no end to it. We know the air is unfit
(27:34):
to breathe and our planet will be unfit for life,
and we sit watching our TVs while some Fox newscaster
tells us that today Trump is the real victim and
minorities are the real problem. As if that's the way
it's supposed to be. We all know things are bad.
Worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is
going crazy. So we don't go out anymore. We have
(27:55):
the Senate in the house, but slowly the democracy we're
living and is getting smaller. And all we say is, please,
at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let
me have my president, my RBG shrine and my January
sixth hearings, and I won't say anything, Just leave us alone. Well,
I'm not going to leave you alone. I want you
to get mad. I want you to protest. I want
(28:15):
you to strike. I want you to write to your congressman,
because you don't need me to tell you what to write.
You know what to do about the recession and the
inflation and the Russians and the Nazis in the street.
All I know is first you've got to get mad.
You've got to say I'm a human being, God damage,
my life has value. So I want you to get
(28:38):
up now. I want all of you to get up
and out of your chairs. I want you to get
up right now and go to the window, open it
and stick your head out and yell, I'm as mad
as hell and I'm not gonna take Trump anymore. I
want you to get up right now, Get up, go
to your windows, open them, and stick your head out
and yell, I'm as mad as hell and I'm not
(28:58):
gonna take Trump anymore. Things have got to change. But
first you've got to get mad. You've got to say
I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take
Trump anymore. Then we'll figure out what to do about
the recession and the inflation and the oil cartels. But first,
get up out of your chairs, open your windows, stick
your head out, and yell and say it. I am
as mad as Helen, I'm not gonna take Trump anymore.
(29:21):
The lot as hell, we're gonna take Trump anymore. I
am mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take Trump anymore.
Who but sorry, couldn't resist. And for the first time
in my life, even through the brutal years of Reagan
and even through the psychotic years of Bush, that famous
Howard Beal speech from the nineteen seventy six movie Network
(29:42):
seems to fit this moment. With some revisions. Of course,
the Beal character as portrayed by Peter Finch, and especially
that speech, and especially that catchphrase I'm as mad as
hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore, spoke to
long before it became a cliche. This weird overlap between
somebody who is so enraged that he is angry mad
(30:05):
as hell, and somebody who may be so insane that
he is crazy mad as hell. But there's also a
third subtext to it, which only occasionally gets mentioned and
only occasionally gets appreciated, And it is why beal and
mad as hell means something today. It's that line towards
the start. We all know things are bad. Worse than bad,
(30:26):
they're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy. In short,
it's like Howard Beale, representing all of us, is going
crazy because nobody else is when they should be. If
in school you had read that one hundred years ago,
or one hundred and fifty years ago, or whenever a
president of the United States fraudulently denied he lost the
(30:48):
election and tried to overturn it in the courts and
in the Congress, and it didn't work because it was
one big lie. So he invited gangs of thugs and
racists and guns suckers and militias to come to the
Capitol during the most boasted about part of democracy, the
peaceful transfer of power, And having invited them, he then
(31:09):
incited them to try to overthrow the government by violence.
You would have expected to then have read about the
police and the military and the laws that stopped him,
and the arrests and the indictments and the lifetimes in
prison and the vengeance that followed. Hell, what precipitated the
Civil War? If not eleven states trying to stop the
(31:33):
peaceful transfer of power because they didn't like who got elected.
We are supposed to do something about this. When a
large minority of Americans stood up and said only whites
are real people, and when they said we will use
the police to lynch black people, and when they said
guns settle everything, and when they said women are here
(31:54):
only to breed, and when they said we own the
Supreme Court now, and when they said we will not
teach history because we don't want children to know there's
a more righteous way, and when they said this is
our world, and you the majority, your votes do not
count here, your cities do not count here. Your lives
do not count here. Your president does not count here.
(32:15):
When all that happened within thirty nine days, our anger
and our vengeance, democracies anger and vengeance began. It was
eighteen sixty one. But first you've got to get mad.
Today they have Trump and Schedule F and a plan
to impeach Biden for whatever. And they've already turned the
(32:40):
Supreme Court into the theocratic Republican Supreme Religious Court, and
they've overturned abortion, and next will be marriage equality. And
they intend to investigate the January sixth committee members and
pardon everybody who actually attacked the capital, even though you
and I grew up presuming you know, if I attacked
the capital during the peaceful transfer of power, I'm gonna
(33:02):
guess they'll give me about five seconds to stop before
they start shooting at me. And they want to put
Fauci in prison, and their passing laws prosecuting doctors and
prosecuting women who leave a state to go to another
state for an abortion. In other words, they want to
prosecute women who leave a slave state to go to
(33:23):
a free state and bring them back to the slave state.
And they have a Fox News and another worse Fox News,
and another worser even than that Fox News. And what
do we have? We have once a week somebody who
says we must find a compromise with them. We must
(33:46):
be bi partisan, We must be Democrats and liberals who
act like Republicans and fascists and Nazis. We have Joe Mansion,
And for eighteen months, Joe Mansion has obstructed all the
good Joe Biden has tried to do and prevented all
the emergency measures we must have to keep the last
(34:08):
words by the last humans surviving the climate catastrophe on
this planet. From being a chairman of Excellent Mobile, I
want to report record profits for the year e twenty
fifty two. And when the bribe for Joe Manchin, the
Senator from fossil fuel gulch West Virginia, is finally sufficient
(34:32):
to his liking and he finally agrees with Chuck Schumer
on the seven hundred and forty billion dollar Climate and
Deficit Reduction Bill, what does he get? He gets to
go on all five network Sunday political television Nitwit shows
the proverbial full Ginsburg Glory, Glory, Hallelujah. It's Joe Manchin,
(34:53):
our lawgiver, the true Democrat. And yet Kirsten Cinema could
still kill the thing today and Joe Manchin would then
still look reasonable. By contrast, tomorrow, he'd still be the
hero who achieved nothing, and of all that Cinema stuff
(35:14):
bothers you. I used to go out with her. We
all know things are bad. Worse than bad, They're crazy.
It's like everything everywhere has going crazy. Even the fascists
who hate or fear Trump have something closer to a
plan than we do. This town. Author Mark Leibovich quoted
(35:37):
a former Republican congressman is saying, quote, look, we have
no plan for this except sitting around hoping he dies, unquote,
which actually sounds like more of a plan than our plan.
Our plan make sure Democrats help the craziest Trump supporters
(35:57):
and election deniers. And it's not iqanon. It's just QAnon.
Nutbags get nominated because us. We're confident we can beat
them right right right this weekend, it will be nineteen
months since the coup. They have plans for more coups.
(36:20):
A coup in Washington, a coup in every state, a
coup in every county. Looks like they compromise the Secret Service,
and it's still compromised. Looks like they compromise the Inspector
General at Homeland Security. They've compromised half the cops in
this country. A little less, a little more. They've compromised,
as my hero's Bob Elliott Ray Goulding once joked, everything
(36:41):
except the Visiting Nurse Association. They have built a cult
around denying the twenty twenty election. And if you haven't
figured out what's behind that nonsense, by the way, seemingly
quicksotic and academic at the same time, here's the little secret.
The idea about the twenty twenty stuff still being talked
about is if l. Douche gets elected in twenty twenty
(37:03):
four and goes back to the White House, he will
somehow make somebody like I don't know, the Supreme Court
confirm that, yes, he actually won in twenty twenty, but
was denied that rightful term in the White House, so
he will be given a third term in twenty twenty eight,
(37:24):
or at least allowed to run for it. In short,
if twenty twenty was stolen from him, he's owed another term.
Right That's in the Constitution, isn't it. Gee, maybe we
could just, you know, skip the twenty twenty eight election outright.
The fascists have all this in the works. And what
do we have. We have Chuck Todd three weeks ago
(37:49):
asking a Republican governor, quote, what's best for the country?
Do you think the country can handle prosecuting the former president?
And we have less year Holts one week ago telling
the Attorney General of the United States, quote, indictment of
former president and perhaps a candidate for president would arguably
tear the country apart. Is that your concern? They have
(38:15):
Fox News? We have Fox News only we call it NBC.
I will do this podcast every weekday morning, no holiday, mondays.
Sorry I'm getting old. It will be as best as
I can do with the podcast version of what the
old TV show was. I will explain to you later
(38:37):
in this first episode what exactly happened to the old
TV show. And here's a tease. It's none of the
things you've heard. And I'll have comments on the news
and comments on the sports. Did you know I used
to do sports? And the worst persons in the world
are back? And why Trump gets a tax break for
(38:58):
burying his wife in the golf course. But first I
want to button up this topic about getting mad as
hell with two quotes and one question. Quote number one,
it's General William to comes to Sherman, and it's meant metaphorically.
So don't think I'm talking about bloodshed, because you can't
do political bloodshed in this country unless you're a Republican.
(39:22):
This was Sherman the last time Americans tried to overthrow
American democracy. Quote. War is the remedy our enemies have chosen.
Other simple remedies were within their choice. You know it,
and they know it. But they wanted war. And I say,
let us give them all they want, not a word
of argument, not a sign of let up, no cave
(39:43):
in till we are whipped or they are end Sherman. Quote, First,
you've got to get mad. What greater act of war
against the United States by someone owing allegiance to the
United States within the United States could there ever be
(40:04):
than to and armed militias into the United States Capital,
than to encourage them to attack and kill members of Congress,
members of the Senate, even the Vice President. What greater
act of war against the United States could there be
than to try to prevent by violent revolution the peaceful
transfer of power in the United States. I have no
(40:27):
complaints about the January sixth Committee. I do not buy
the argument that it's the Liz Cheney Show, And so
what if it were. Chairman Thompson and the other Democrats
have been terrific if, as I speculated months ago, they
are programming to the proverbial audience of one and it
is named Merrick Garland Dandy. But I don't see exactly
(40:49):
how they plan to end this. So what if first
they realized, you've got to get mad, You've got to
say I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going
to take Trump anymore. What if they ended it with
another quote? What if the January sixth Committee ends its
final hearing by simply quoting just the start of Title
(41:10):
eighteen USC Chapter one fifteen, Section two three eight one quote. Whoever,
owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them,
or adheres to their enemies giving them aid and comfort
within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason
(41:31):
and shall suffer death. So for our number one story
(41:53):
on the Countdown, my favorite topic me. Each podcast will
conclude with me telling you a story from my career
or life, usually hanging off the day's news, or at
least an adverse of some kind. The people I've known,
the places I've worked, the innumerable morons I have encountered,
some of the women I've dated. If it's relevant, like Laura,
don't judge me. It all began with a small five
(42:16):
thousand watt radio station in Presno, California. On Fridays. Instead,
we will read from the great works of the great
James Thurber, just like we used to do on the
TV show. And when I say we, of course, I
mean I. If you're not interested, you just want the
day's news, cool, turn it off. I will not be offended,
but I think these stories will explain, entertain and often
(42:40):
enrage you. Lord knows they will enrage me. So as
I launched this frail bark, where better to start than
here if you were a viewer of the old TV show.
Let me explain finally how that became this my original
nineteen ninety seven MSNBC News Hours, The Big Show and
The White House in Crisis were the first programs that
(43:01):
made MSNBC any money. I mean seriously. The network otherwise
hemorrhaged cash from its launch in nineteen ninety six until
about two thousand and five. That's when the show I started.
Upon my return in two thousand and three, Countdown, a
low rated nightly news digest. It was a pretty good show,
started getting really political and suspicious of Bush and Iraq
(43:23):
and especially the Republicans political manipulation of the threat of terrorism,
and the viewers arrived in droves by the next year.
The ads salesman and contrary to all logic, they are
the ones from whom you get the truth in a
news company. They were sending me models of champagne and
revealing that Countdown was now earning a fifty million dollar
(43:44):
annual profit, then seventy five million, then one hundred million.
They liked me, they really really liked me. But management
at NBC not so much. Right after MSNBC started to
make money, it started making enemies. The Republicans came right
to our door and through it the psychos at Fox
(44:04):
News like O'Reilly and Hannity and Ales. Remember we called
them Fixed News or Fox Noise. They started calling the
executives at NBC and its parent company GE, demanding that
I stopped criticizing them softer than church music. These fascists
could not take criticism when Tim Russert was still alive
(44:25):
and defending me internally and externally, watching every night and
sending me tips and warnings and ideas, and capable of
playing the Republicans inside NBC and outside NBC like fiddles.
Everything was fine. Then came that horrible day June thirteenth,
two thousand and eight. Tim died, and suddenly NBC News
(44:46):
was in the hands of a lot of cowards and
bullies like Tom Brokaw and Joe Scarborough and Jeff Zucker
in names you would not know, like Jeff Immelt and
Steve Kappus and Phil Griffin and Chris Licked And I
really wish you didn't need to know Chris Licht's name,
but he was Scarborough's henchman, and now he's the new
president of CNN, and you don't know how bad that
(45:09):
news is for the future of this country. Anyway. I
will go into depth on all this background in future episodes.
How men like these spent a year keeping Rachel Maddow
off the air, telling me I couldn't even put her
on as my guest host because nobody would watch a woman,
or a lesbian or another liberal. That's what they said.
(45:31):
Then they lied to me and told me they had
hired her so that one night Larry King talked to
her into going on his show on CNN for two
hundred and fifty dollars, and I wound up hiring her
out of my own pocket to keep MSNBC from losing her.
Literally the cash in my wallet four hundred and thirty
seven bucks. Anyway, by August of two thousand and eight,
(45:51):
Republicans were threatening Brokaw that if he did not get
me fired from MSNBC's coverage of the presidential election, John
McCain would not show up for the debate that Brokaw
had inherited from the late Tim Russard. So Brocaw went
in and threatened, and that's a nice euphemism NBC management
on behalf of the GOP just to get to host
(46:11):
one more debate. I mean he boasted about it in
the New York Times. Then within a year it was
Fox blackmailing the executives at GE, actually getting the chairman
of GE, Jeff Immelt, to threaten to take MSNBC off
the air, just shut it down if Fox continued to
criticize him. Immelt because his mommy was a Bill O'Reilly
(46:33):
fan and Billow kept claiming her little boy Jeff was
producing weapons used to kill Americans in Iraq. I mean, honestly,
these were adults behaving like this. Well, as I tell
everybody in the business, there are no adults. It got
worse and worse. Zooker and Roger Ayles meeting inside thirty
Rock no Less to decide what I could and could
(46:54):
not say about Fox News, negotiating what could be in
our news and what could not. And in twenty ten,
NBC started suggesting that we put Republicans on countdown like
Michael's and the deplorable Scarborough. Nobody ever asked me a
direct question as to how in January twenty eleven, I
left MSNBC and the highest rated cable news show that
(47:15):
was not on Fox, and I kept telling them, just say,
we don't consider Fox to be news. It isn't news,
so why are we comparing our ratings to them? Was
I fired? Did I quit? Was it something else? So
I've never actually told the actual story because I wasn't
asked a direct question about it. Well, one of the
perks they threw at me when I re signed with
(47:36):
MSNBC rather than jumping to CNN in two thousand and
six two thousand and seven was a slot on the
Sunday night NBC football broadcast. It was a nice change.
I got to work with my old ESPN partner, Dan Patrick.
It wasn't life and death. I could do the catchphrases
and the silly voices and say they're not gonna got them.
But right before the twenty ten season, Jeff Zucker called
(47:59):
me into his office told me I was not focusing
enough on countdown and I was off the football show. Now,
the following portion is, of course a pure hypothetical, which
is really better designed for a college course in contract law.
But if in a case like this hypothetical, the guy
doing a let's say, hypothetical football show wasn't actually being
(48:21):
paid to do the hypothetical football show. If doing that
hypothetical football show were a perk, if it was a
non cash payment or an incentive to sign a contract
rather than to go to some other hypothetical network like
CN hypothetical n well, then when that hypothetical announcer is
taking off that hypothetical football show, the people who hypothetically
(48:43):
took him off the show have hypothetically breached his hypothetical
contract and all of a sudden, the hypothetical companies, hypothetical
lawyers are asking the hypothetical announcer how much money it
would hypothetically cost them to hypothetically cure a hypothetical breach.
Back to the non hypothetical portion of our story. So
(49:03):
now it's a few months the week before the twenty
ten midterms, which I would be anchoring on MSNBC, and
while I would be covering the Senate and governor races
right through election night, we were done reporting on the House.
I did an interview on Thursday, I think, with the
Congressman Raoul Grihalva of Arizona, and then I did a
special comment on Friday about all the Tea partiers running
for Congress that year, and that was it. And that
(49:26):
night I was on the phone with my friend Kirsten Cinema, YEP,
at Kirsten Cinema. How many Kirsten Cinemas could there be?
She told me that Grihalva and another Arizona representative had
gotten a lot of death threats late in the campaign
and they had spent virtually every last dollar they had
on security. Kirsten asked, can you donate to these campaigns?
(49:48):
And I said, I had never donated before, but yeah,
to Grahalva and to a senator in the South, I think,
and the other Arizona representative who had gotten a lot
of death threats. Her name was Gabby Giffords. The next Tuesday,
I anchored the those midterms, didn't mention one house race
or candidate, and everything was fine. And then somebody called
(50:09):
one of the political websites to say, oooh, Oberman donated
to some Democrats, and they called NBC public Relations, and
NBC public Relations called the president of MSNBC, and the
president of my MSIBC called me and he said, this
looks bad. I know it's your right to do it.
It's not like we're going to suspend you or anything
stupid like that. Why would we do that. This is
sort of our fault too, But it just looks bad.
(50:31):
Can you know, can you say something? And I said, yeah,
you're right, it does look bad. I'll apologize on the
show tomorrow, even though I don't have to. I will
voluntarily stop any campaign contributions as long as I'm doing
this show. And he said great, and I said great,
And I wrote the apology that night and I sent
(50:52):
it to him, and he said great, and I said
great because I already had part of tomorrow's show written.
And that was it. And the next morning, without a hearing,
without a phone call, without an email, without a warning,
this hysterical teenager disguised as an adult named Steve Cappus,
President of NBC News, he puts out a press release
in which he angrily suspends me indefinitely without pay, for
(51:17):
violations of the NBC News employee rule book that says
NBC News employees can't make donations to political campaigns. Now,
NBC had an obvious, huge problem. Within hours, there was
a petition on social media demanding my reinstatement two hundred
and fifty thousand signatures. I was stunned. NBC tried to
(51:39):
get Chris Hayes to fill in for me that night.
He refused. Even people at Fox News went on the
air and said this was absurd. And at NBC there
was a lot of shushing and worrying because everybody at
NBC News made political donations. They just hid them by
donating in their wife's name or the kid's name, or
to some sort of fund or whatever. I was the
(52:01):
only one who admitted to it, but this guy kappus.
He was pissed off and dug in and demanded I
be suspended for a month through I don't know, one
hundred years without pay at least and all. This is
already public and well documented, but hypothetically, again, there could
have been more to it. See if you hypothetically suspend
(52:24):
your hypothetical announcer guy again for violating the employee handbook.
What happens if that hypothetical announcer is not actually an employee.
What if the hypothetical employer has written the contract of
the hypothetical announcer so that it specifically declares, several different
(52:46):
hypothetical times in the hypothetical contract that the hypothetical announcer
is not an employee but just say, to pick a
term out of thin air, an independent contractor what if
hypothetically the employer could be NBAE, could be a bakery somewhere.
What if hypothetically the employer did this in contract legal
(53:10):
ees so they did not have to pay the hypothetical
announcer health insurance or dental will. Then, hypothetically, that phrase
breach re enters the chat and the hypothetical companies hypothetical
lawyers go to the executive who just suspended the employee
who legally is not an employee, And they say, hypothetically again,
(53:31):
you now have four hypothetical choices. One reinstate the hypothetical
non employee immediately and hope we don't get sued. Two
reinstate the hypothetical non employee, immediately, apologize and write up
a new contract for God's sake. Three end the show,
pay the hypothetical non employee every dollar you owe for
(53:51):
the remainder of the hypothetical contract, and hope you don't
get sued for damages anyway. Or four hypothetically throw a
lot of money in the air and negotiate a settlement
and end the hypothetical showithetically. In the short term, what
happened was, and I'm quoting from the New York Times,
they told me on Friday I was suspended. I was
(54:13):
back on the air Tuesday. They didn't even dock my
pay or charge me for any days off, making this
wilder still. Hours after I was suspended, Al Gore called me.
Al owned a struggling TV network called Current, and he said,
what NBC is doing is illegal, and if you sue them,
you could own the place. But I think I have
(54:35):
a better idea that can be the start of something big.
You can bring Countdown to Current TV. We'll give you
fifty million dollars plus bonuses, plus a piece of the network.
You'll be an owner. This is me talking in the
long term. For two months, these two roller coasters went
up and down, and my agents negotiated attentive contract with
(54:58):
Current while there was a hypothetical attempt to settle the
other hypothetical non employee cluster hypothetic f and then literally
during the MSNBC Countdown show on January twenty first, twenty eleven,
during a commercial break, everything got finalized all at once.
(55:18):
My agent told me it was done. I went on
the air and said so, and nobody, not even the
staff knew, which I am still sorry about. Very greatly unavoidable,
but that's the way it worked. So no, I was
not fired, Countdown was not canceled. The Current TV deal
had already been in place for weeks. And by the way,
(55:38):
during every step of this, I kept Madow and her agent,
who had been my agent for twenty seven years, fully informed,
and so that very night that Countdown ended on MSNBC,
Mattow was on Bill Maher's show right after it all happened,
and naturally he asked her about it, and she lied
and said, this is the first I'm hearing of it,
(55:59):
and I thought, uh boy, that might be the end
of that friendship. Haven't spoken since. Anyway, the current thing
turned out to be a scam and it blew up
rather quickly, and I'll tell that story in a future
episode two. On the other hand, I don't have to
work for money again. But the weirdest thing started happening
(56:20):
in September twenty eleven, not eight months after I left
MSNBC feelers from the new owners of NBC Comcast. Would
I consider coming back to MSNBC. Yes, I would. Then
they got cold feet. Then the next year more feelers.
This time I got cold feet, and I started negotiating
and go back to ESPN instead, and I did. In
(56:42):
twenty fourteen, I actually met with the new NBC News
executives for two hours, and they wanted me to bring
Countdown back as soon as possible. And then the Brian
Williams scandal broke and these new executives all got themselves fired.
And then in October twenty fifteen, I met with the
new new executives, and they wanted me to come back.
They made an actual offer, and it was stupid. It
(57:05):
was predicated on my doing a show without commentaries, like
what was the point of Countdown or me without the commentaries?
And even that guy got fired in twenty nineteen, and
the new chairman of the entire NBC corporation, Jeff Shell,
was an old friend of mine from Fox Sports, and
he wanted me to bring the show back, and we
(57:26):
got close, and then the word came in from the
guy who was negotiating for me that the chairman of
NBC News, Caesar Conde, had told him the whole thing
had cratered because one person at NBC had never and
would never forgive me for something. And that person, said Condey,
(57:48):
was Rachel Mattow. Rachel Mattow, per Sezar Conde vetoed the
last chance and ended literally a decade of talks about
putting this program back on MSNBC. By the way, NBC's
denial of this last set of flirtations was that, yes,
for two years, NBC's CEO, Jeff Schell kept scheduling meetings
(58:10):
with me, but I should have known he didn't really
mean it. Basically, their explanation was I should have known
the chairman of NBC was a liar. As the kids say,
weird flex but okay, and that's the short version. So
last winter, that's when I began exploring a new venue
(58:31):
for Countdown, and here we are a daily podcast, Sam Keith,
new platform, and I don't have to shave or wear makeup,
and I hope you'll enjoy the content as much as
I already enjoy the not shaving. So that's where we
(58:59):
began a year ago today, two hundred and fifty eight
episodes ago. I thank you kindly for your patronage. Tell
the others I've done all the damage I can do here.
Thank you for listening. Here the credits. Most of the
music arrange produced and performed by Brian Ray and John
Phillip Shaneil, who are the Countdown musical directors. All orchestration
and keyboards by John Phillip, Schanel, guitars, bass and drums
(59:21):
by Brian Ray, produced by Tko Brothers. Other Beethoven selections
have been arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed.
Sports Music is the Olderman theme from ESPN two, and
it was written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN, Inc.
Musical comments by Nancy Faust, the best baseball stadium organist ever,
and my special thanks to Nancy. Our announcer today was
(59:42):
my friend Larry David, and everything else was pretty much
my fault. So let's countdown for this, the nine hundred
and thirty seventh day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup
against the democratically elected government of the United States. Arrest
him again while we still can, I have an opening
this afternoon. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow, Bolton says.
The news warrants till then. I'm Keith Oulverman. Good morning,
(01:00:05):
good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith
Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(01:00:29):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Foreshadowing
indictment foreshadowing quote, this is really bad news for Biden,
(00:31):
Trump wrote last night, though not really no quote, which
means I will probably be indicted again soon unquote. Do
you like that foreshadowing or how about this foreshadowing? Fannie
Willis sends an email to county commissioners asking them to
make sure they keep themselves and their staff safe and
(00:56):
orange security barriers have gone up around the Fulton County courthouse,
and yesterday was the first of ten days before August eighteenth,
when she ordered seventy percent of her staff to work remotely.
I don't know what could all that possibly mean. Willis
gave a TV interview quote, the work is accomplished. We've
(01:17):
been working for two and a half years. We're ready
to go. Unquote. I wish the district attorney would not
be so bloody evasive. The judge, the same judge, Robert McBurney,
like they only have the one in all of Georgia.
McBurney tossed the last Trump attempt to toss the evidence
yesterday and to disqualify the DA yesterday, and the untossed
(01:41):
DA also says her schedule is her schedule two grand juries.
Neither meets on Wednesday, and in the same interview quote,
I don't know what Jack Smith is doing, and Jack
Smith doesn't know what I'm doing. In all honesty, if
Jack Smith was standing next to me, I'm not sure
I would know who he was. My guess is he
(02:02):
probably can't pronounce my name correctly. Unquote. We can skip
for a moment the reality that it is essential that
the two of them do know what the other is doing,
if only after they announce what they are doing, because
simultaneous trials not only have their own perils and pitfalls,
but twin trials carry the danger that Georgia might assert
(02:25):
one fact or one date or one timeline and be
contradicted by what the Department of Justice is asserting, which
could be fatal for both cases. We now go back
to the DOJ, and there is still that January sixth
target letter from Jack Smith hanging like the sword of
Damocles over Trump's head. And the fact that if Smith
(02:47):
sticks to a timeline that matches the document's case, he
is indicting today or Thursday at the latest. And the
fact that his Trump January sixth Grand Jury was expected
to convene today, and while Trump's latest self pitying post,
which would be number three million, four, one hundred and
forty seven, two hundred and thirty seven collect the whole series,
(03:09):
this latest post is not necessarily time sensitive. It sure
is funny if he already knew from his attorneys that
the indictments are coming tomorrow or Thursday, and instead of
just revealing it like he did last time, he's milking
it this way in order to further feed the fascist
storyline that the entire prosecution of Trump is being made
(03:31):
up as they go along, and being made up in
just a matter of hours for one reason only, namely,
as Trump also posted last night in order to kill
the news cycle. Exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point. I mean,
(03:53):
what does Trump think his supporters are idiots? Yes, he
thinks they're idiots, and that's largely because they're idiots. You
doubtless saw the interior numbers on the latest New York
Times GOP poll, which were far more important than the
exterior ones about how much he's leading DeSantis by because
(04:14):
the interior numbers shows ninety one percent of Republicans who
rely on Fox do not think Trump committed any serious crimes.
Ninety one percent and eighty five percent say Republicans must
(04:34):
stand behind Trump regardless, and eighty three percent say Trump
was merely exercising his right to contest his twenty twenty loss.
And it's just too bad nobody was ever out there
twenty twenty five years ago saying Fox News and Rupert
Murdoch would end democracy and kill us all, and the
uninfected portions of American media and the public had to
(04:56):
do everything we could to kill Fox News first. Oh yeah, right,
I did all that and got dismissed as the O'Reilly
of the left. And I was only doing it for ratings.
And my tendency to say I told you so only
in many, many, many more words is perhaps my least
attractive personality. Trait especially went up to half the nation
has literally succumbed to this mass hysteria in which no
(05:19):
fact or reality can interrupt their loyalty to an authoritarian,
anti democracy movement. And they believe that those of us
who will not simply get out of their imposition of
their own hallucination, we must somehow be removed from the equation.
And this is unfolding on the eve of the election
that will decide who is president during what is probably
(05:42):
mankind's last window to regain the rains of the uncontrolled
climate catastrophe, and the fascists literally have a thoroughly vetted
and organized plan to roll back all environmental controls and
actually burn more fossil fuels as part of their Project
twenty twenty five. Under the circumstances, I'll try to keep
(06:06):
the eye told you so as to a minimum. Also,
I will try not to either try to solve nor
to utterly succumb to the climate emergency during a podcast,
and instead he Marcus Aurelius and his wise words and
concentrate on doing that which is in front of us,
(06:28):
and that would be right now. This guy di Olivierira
and the postponement of his actual indictment yesterday because he
doesn't have a Florida lawyer just like the last guy,
add another week's delay to the Trump documents trial schedule.
Aileen the Olivera does have a Trump pack attorney named
(06:48):
John Irving, and thus Carlos the Boss wants the server deleted.
The Olivera lives in as my childhood friend Will Bunch
of the Philly Inquirer noted he lives in the world
according to Trump, This latest of Trump's countless victims. You
ft up, you trusted, U might scare the hell out
(07:09):
of Trump because if he flips the way the IT
manager you Seal Taveres flipped. Trump can't beat the obstruction
of justice rap cannot. But legal minds think the fact
that he's already been indicted makes him a less likely flippy,
because how does that look when he testifies for the
prosecution and the defense says, aren't you simply saying what
the special counsel told you to say? Because he indicted you,
(07:32):
then he dropped the charges, so you're not going to jail.
There was one other minor news blip last night. CNN
reported that a new court filing from Jack Smith's office
confirms that it has obtained new security video that pertains
to the effort to destroy evidence, and that is all
it reveals. We don't know what it is, just that
(07:54):
they got it after the last set of indictments. It'd
be video of di Olivera and Walt Nauda carrying bankers
boxes on their backs, would be video of the Evanna burial.
We don't know of much more interest. The federal election
campaign filings were due yesterday, and the Ethics Outfit Crew
(08:18):
analyzed the one submitted by the Trump Leadership Pack, which
is sarcastically named Save America. It finds the pack made
three payments to political allies, which is what a leadership
pack of any stripe is supposed to do. Three. It
made just a few more payments to Trump's lawyers, one
hundred and sixty nine of them. The money figure is unclear,
(08:41):
could be twenty million, could be forty million, as originally reported.
The fact that Save America is now Save Trump's ass
with lawyers that is not unclear. Three payments to political allies,
one hundred and sixty nine of them to Trump's lawyers.
When news broke that Trump's campaign is actually short enough
(09:03):
on cash that that pack asked for sixty million dollars
back from another pro Trump pack. I have joked here
that if we can't put Trump in jail before the
twenty twenty four election, maybe Jack Smith and Fannie Willis
and Alvin Bragg can bill him into the ground. Those
lawyer hours can mount up quickly, even if other people
(09:28):
are paying for twenty million forty million eight hundred and
seventy five eleventy billion. It does hurt you because it
means that those same other people are not paying that
amount of money into your campaign. What if Trump or
his campaign or both really, really, really had money troubles.
(09:51):
This was posited seriously on Twitter yesterday, And as I
say that, I am thinking you have become everything you hate,
you are this close to saying that you read something
on Facebook from Trump's cousins, nephew's next door neighbor, entamer
But there is no mistaking than as devoted as Trump
has been to never letting a dollar go unspent as
(10:14):
long as it is your dollar, the legal bills are
mounting exponentially now and having your pack ask for your
money back from the other packs cannot be an ordinary
day at the campaign. God knows Trump has gone bankrupt before,
and his life has been structured exactly to project wealth,
(10:36):
whether or not he actually has any, and everybody I
actually have known in forty years of knowing Trump who
knows him better, has always insisted that he guarded the
tax returns so jealously because they would prove he was
nowhere close to being a billionaire, and perhaps only barely
into nine figures. This on Twitter was the thesis that
(11:02):
what Trump is is poor, that he could be telling
the truth about his net worth without revealing that. As
the writer put it, his businesses are worth a lot
of money, but they don't make a lot of money.
Some don't make any money at all. And that is
one hundred percent provably true. The writer was a man
(11:25):
named Brian Jacobson, a self announced veteran of twenty five
years in the tech sector and the cloud expert, and
also a second Amendment advocate. So I ain't just echoing
an opinion from our side of the cognitive gap here.
It is this Jacobson's contention that quote truth social is
killing Donald Trump's finances and may sink his presidential bid.
(11:50):
I'm not sure about the second part of that, but
the first part may really be true. The idea he
posits was to launch that social media site, grab all
the Twitter users angry at Jack Dorsey's successors, and then
take it public and let stockholders fund it via the
merger with the Digital World acquisition company, the merger that
(12:11):
just fell through, the merger which government agencies are now querying. Instead.
Elon Musk bought Twitter turned it into what it has become,
the playpen of the clouds. Truth Social got half the
users it expected or less, the merger collapsed, and instead
of getting a check for up to half a billion dollars,
(12:33):
Trump winds up still owning ninety percent of truth Social
himself and paying all of its operating expenses. And what
are they fifty million, thirty million? Who knows how much
it is mister Jacobson's conclusion that this means Trump suddenly
has a little less than the five hundred million Trump
owned dollars with which to self finance his campaign, or
(12:54):
his legal defense or di Olivera's legal defense, or all
of the above. No cash flow, just bills, bills, bills
from lawyer about Jack Smith and lawyers about Fannie Willis,
and lawyer is about Alvin Bragg and lawyers about truth
Social and this merger that went belly up. Jacobson then
(13:16):
jumps to the rather startling conclusion, which is where I
seem to be getting off the train here, that Trump
will either have to get a huge amount of money
from this legal defense fund he is just starting, or
he will be faced with folding truth Social or bowing
out of the presidential race, and I think that's farcical.
Trump is not smart enough to do either, and he's
(13:38):
congenitally incapable of admitting defeat either in social media business
or in a presidential candidacy that, oh, by the way,
is literally necessary to keep his own ass out of jail.
But what is absolutely logical and legit is that the
truth social gambit may seriously hamstring Trump's ability to keep
(14:01):
money flowing into his legal defenses and into his campaign simultaneously.
And then my guest would be, no, he's not going
to drop out. He would simply try to campaign with
less money than this extraordinary attempt to extricate himself from
jail and put all the rest of us in it
in his place. We'll need plus ultimately. Even if the
(14:25):
theory is crap, the bottom line is Jacobson's theory is
absolutely delightful, and it's worth wallowing in for a moment because, yeah,
this is true. And I hadn't thought about this before.
(14:46):
Donald Trump's social media ambitions and his personal finances and
to some degree fatal or trivial, have been seriously damaged
by Elon Musk Let them fight. Also, of interest, here
(15:12):
did I mention this is the anniversary of the podcast
a year ago today, and I said it would never last.
We will do minimal celebrations meantime, if you are a
Republican member of Congress and something messy involving you unfolds
(15:32):
at a public event, and your office then finds it
unavoidably necessary several days later to issue a statement that
refers to the police getting involved, and in that statement,
your office also finds it unavoidably necessary to insist that
the congressman quote was not drinking. Guess what literally or metaphorically, you, sir,
(15:58):
have a drinking problem. That's next? This is countdown? Is countdown?
Keith Alboman postscripts to the news, some headlines, some updates,
some snark, some predictions, date line, White Deer, Texas. His
(16:21):
office now admits that Congressman Ronnie Jackson, the disgraced former
White House physician and withdrawn Trump candidate to run the VA,
was quote briefly detained by law enforcement at a rodeo
outside Amarillo, Texas, Saturday night. The office insists Jackson had
been summoned to help a fifteen year old girl having
(16:43):
some sort of medical emergency, and somehow it was so
noisy that the cops grabbed him. Then comes this remarkable statement.
Jackson was sitting the office says quote, in the stands
during the entire rodeo, in full view of the assembled crowd,
and was not drinking unquote. All you need to know
(17:05):
about Ronnie Jackson is contained in the reality that his
office needed to put out a statement saying he was
not drinking as the police detained him as he put
his hands on a fifteen year old girl at a rodeo. Also,
if Ronnie Jackson has not been drinking, watch out the
Texas economy is about to collapse. Thank you, Nancy Faust.
(17:46):
Dateline San Francisco. The giant glowing X sign has been
taken off the roof of Twitter headquarters. Looks like it
was an inside job rather than the city stepping in.
If only Musk himself could be removed so easily. Dateline
Colorado Springs Space Command will remain in Colorado. The Biden
administration overturning a January twenty twenty one Trump decision to
(18:10):
move it to Alabama. The good news is this really
pisses off Senator Tommy Tuberville. The bad news is this
lets Lauren Bobert claim she made it happen and Dateline Washington,
this will stun you. After the FEC filings yesterday, it
turns out Robert F. Kennedy Junior's presidential superpack raised nine million,
(18:31):
eight hundred thousand dollars through the end of June, five
million of which more than fifty percent was from one donor,
Timothy Mellon, eighty one year old heir to the banking
fortune and longtime Trump donor. So RFK Junior is running
as a Democrat financed by a Republican when in fact
(18:53):
he is actually an asshole. Still ahead on the first
anniversary edition countdown, we will go back to episode one
because you can't do that yourself. It's not like episode
one is still online anywhere. Oh right, it is what
(19:17):
the hell? First time for the daily roundup of misgrants,
morons and the Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's
worst persons in the world. The Bronze Musk again he
is threatening the Bill O'Reilly record, which has stood since
two thousand and five. Musk is a free speech absolutist,
as you know, and what that means is he's a
(19:39):
free hate speech absolutist. Musk is now threatening to sue
the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the nonprofit that tracks
hate speech online, for quote a series of troubling and
baseless claims that appear calculated to harm Twitter generally and
its digital advertising business specifically. Unquote. First of all, please
(20:03):
it's x. It's not called Twitter. You think Musk would
know that. Secondly, Musk has spent the entirety of his
time owning that site trying to find out who is
destroying its reputation. We need to start a gofund me
to buy elon amirror. I think you'll show up in
a mirror. The runner up, Ron DeSantis, remember him, mister
(20:26):
Woki Finocchi Swamp Remember his fanboy magazine editor and Tucker
Carlson Darling Pedro Gonzalez and then Breitbart produced a series
of anti semitic text messages by Pedro Gonzalez and other
DeSantis supporters, including his unofficial magazine, The Florida Standard, rallied
to support Gonzales. Turned out, there were even more Gonzales
(20:51):
anti semitic text messages published by the right wing Washington
Free Beacon, in which Gonzales laments that Nancy Pelosi quote
can't be criticized because she is Jewish. Yeah, this is
one of those not that's smart anti Semites, waiting for
reaction from DeSantis if he can find his mouth with
(21:12):
both hands. But our winner, Congressman Derek van Orden of Wisconsin,
you heard about this right last week. A group of
sixteen and seventeen year old Senate pages, on their last
night in the Capitol, took photos of the place, and
some apparently got down on the floor to grab images
of the magnificent ceiling with their iPhones, which is when
(21:32):
Van Orden, in whose office the same night, passers by
photographed a significant amount of alcohol in bottles. Van Orden
approached the group and started swearing at the sixteen and
seventeen year old kids, what the f are you all doing?
Get the f out of here. You are defiling the space,
you pieces of s Who the f are you? They
(21:54):
told him, I don't give an f who you are.
Get out. Condemned by Democratic leaders and Republican leaders and
Senate leaders and House leaders, this Van Orden schmuck down.
He not only insisted the pages were treating the Capitol
quote like a fratthouse common room, he told a Milwaukee
paper that they were quote terribly disrespectful to lay on
(22:18):
the grave of a soldier that died fighting for freedom. Yeah, Congressman,
and I use the term loosely. Even in this day
and age. There are no graves in the US Capital.
You're thinking of the tomb of the unknown soldier Van Orden,
or you're thinking of Jack Daniels, or they taught it
(22:40):
at Excelsior College where you got your degree online. But this,
of course gets worse. Turns out that while Van Orden
was running for that house seat, he went into a
Wisconsin library and he went nuts over a display of
books on LGBTQ topics during Pride month. He started shoving
the books and he lit into what he assumed, I
(23:00):
guess was a library stafford, but was, guess what, a
seventy old girl, another teenager who was a library page
another page. So this Van Orden is not only a
historical ignoramus who thinks somebody is buried under the floor
of the Capitol, but he's a fifty three year old
(23:21):
man who has a habit of picking on teenage girls.
And there's an even bigger issue. Van Orden continues to
believe he is in the right here because the pages
were quote unquote defiling the capitol. Van Orden was in
Washington on January sixth, attended the Trump rally and then
went to the Capitol and he thinks somebody else defiled it, Derek.
(23:44):
The only thing buried at the Capitol is your empties,
Van Orden. Two Day's worse Parsonden.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
And did I mention it was the anniversary of the podcast?
Speaker 1 (24:29):
I can't remember. Have I brought that up at all?
I've always thought anniversaries were overdone things, but they do
provide excuses for assessment and calculation and milestones. And the
month we started, I think we were shy of six
hundred thousand downloads, which was still a pretty good start,
but not really near the threshold for success in one
of these podcasts, which is a million a month. Well
(24:51):
we hit that mark in January. Now with the addition
of the YouTube option, which is itself getting between one
hundred and twenty and one hundred and fifty thousand plays
a week. I mean, you guys listening to all or
most of the show, even though the the video on
YouTube is just a cartoon of me. I know, cartoon
of me. That phrase sometimes seems a little redundant. That
(25:12):
is pretty remarkable all things considered. Well, anyway, between YouTube
and all the podcast options for the month just passed,
we exceeded two million downloads and plays in one month,
and there were only eighteen new shows. I actually took
four days off for a change. Okay, enough boasting for
the moment. One of the many odd things about podcasts,
(25:35):
maybe the oddest is the reality that people do best
of podcasts even though all the originals are, as I
alluded to a segment ago, still online somewhere. I did
a few of these early on, and I may still
do some more, but at least when I do them,
I try to give you a little added value. I
stitched together thematically three segments, so you get three pieces
(25:57):
about that Trump is national security risk, or Biden confronting
MAGA or whatever the Supreme Court, and there is some
value in being able to hear shorter versions of the
commentaries as they happened in real time and trace a
story as it develops. Well, rather than do that for
this anniversary, I thought the simplest thing was to take
the first episode from a year ago, when the same
(26:18):
day audience was like forty percent of what it is
now and at least there's a chance people had not
heard this before, and replay the opening commentary, which was
a takeoff on the mad as Hell speech from Network,
and the closing commentary, which explained where the hell I
had been for the preceding two years. As always, if
you hit stop now, I'm not going to take it personally.
(26:39):
So those bastards who hit stop earlier, they're the ones
who frost my beer Stein. Where were you and what
were you doing on August one, twenty twenty two when
you first heard this? This is countdown with Keith Olberman.
(27:11):
I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody
knows things are bad. It's a recession. Everybody goes to work,
but they're still scared of losing their job. The corporations
make sure the dollar buys in Nicholsworth Banks are making
record profits. Teachers are told to keep a gun under
the desk. Punks are running wild in Congress, and there's
nobody anywhere seems to know what to do, and there's
no end to it. We know the air is unfit
(27:34):
to breathe and our planet will be unfit for life,
and we sit watching our TVs while some Fox newscaster
tells us that today Trump is the real victim and
minorities are the real problem. As if that's the way
it's supposed to be. We all know things are bad.
Worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is
going crazy. So we don't go out anymore. We have
(27:55):
the Senate in the house, but slowly the democracy we're
living and is getting smaller. And all we say is, please,
at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let
me have my president, my RBG shrine and my January
sixth hearings, and I won't say anything, Just leave us alone. Well,
I'm not going to leave you alone. I want you
to get mad. I want you to protest. I want
(28:15):
you to strike. I want you to write to your congressman,
because you don't need me to tell you what to write.
You know what to do about the recession and the
inflation and the Russians and the Nazis in the street.
All I know is first you've got to get mad.
You've got to say I'm a human being, God damage,
my life has value. So I want you to get
(28:38):
up now. I want all of you to get up
and out of your chairs. I want you to get
up right now and go to the window, open it
and stick your head out and yell, I'm as mad
as hell and I'm not gonna take Trump anymore. I
want you to get up right now, Get up, go
to your windows, open them, and stick your head out
and yell, I'm as mad as hell and I'm not
(28:58):
gonna take Trump anymore. Things have got to change. But
first you've got to get mad. You've got to say
I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take
Trump anymore. Then we'll figure out what to do about
the recession and the inflation and the oil cartels. But first,
get up out of your chairs, open your windows, stick
your head out, and yell and say it. I am
as mad as Helen, I'm not gonna take Trump anymore.
(29:21):
The lot as hell, we're gonna take Trump anymore. I
am mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take Trump anymore.
Who but sorry, couldn't resist. And for the first time
in my life, even through the brutal years of Reagan
and even through the psychotic years of Bush, that famous
Howard Beal speech from the nineteen seventy six movie Network
(29:42):
seems to fit this moment. With some revisions. Of course,
the Beal character as portrayed by Peter Finch, and especially
that speech, and especially that catchphrase I'm as mad as
hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore, spoke to
long before it became a cliche. This weird overlap between
somebody who is so enraged that he is angry mad
(30:05):
as hell, and somebody who may be so insane that
he is crazy mad as hell. But there's also a
third subtext to it, which only occasionally gets mentioned and
only occasionally gets appreciated, And it is why beal and
mad as hell means something today. It's that line towards
the start. We all know things are bad. Worse than bad,
(30:26):
they're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy. In short,
it's like Howard Beale, representing all of us, is going
crazy because nobody else is when they should be. If
in school you had read that one hundred years ago,
or one hundred and fifty years ago, or whenever a
president of the United States fraudulently denied he lost the
(30:48):
election and tried to overturn it in the courts and
in the Congress, and it didn't work because it was
one big lie. So he invited gangs of thugs and
racists and guns suckers and militias to come to the
Capitol during the most boasted about part of democracy, the
peaceful transfer of power, And having invited them, he then
(31:09):
incited them to try to overthrow the government by violence.
You would have expected to then have read about the
police and the military and the laws that stopped him,
and the arrests and the indictments and the lifetimes in
prison and the vengeance that followed. Hell, what precipitated the
Civil War? If not eleven states trying to stop the
(31:33):
peaceful transfer of power because they didn't like who got elected.
We are supposed to do something about this. When a
large minority of Americans stood up and said only whites
are real people, and when they said we will use
the police to lynch black people, and when they said
guns settle everything, and when they said women are here
(31:54):
only to breed, and when they said we own the
Supreme Court now, and when they said we will not
teach history because we don't want children to know there's
a more righteous way, and when they said this is
our world, and you the majority, your votes do not
count here, your cities do not count here. Your lives
do not count here. Your president does not count here.
(32:15):
When all that happened within thirty nine days, our anger
and our vengeance, democracies anger and vengeance began. It was
eighteen sixty one. But first you've got to get mad.
Today they have Trump and Schedule F and a plan
to impeach Biden for whatever. And they've already turned the
(32:40):
Supreme Court into the theocratic Republican Supreme Religious Court, and
they've overturned abortion, and next will be marriage equality. And
they intend to investigate the January sixth committee members and
pardon everybody who actually attacked the capital, even though you
and I grew up presuming you know, if I attacked
the capital during the peaceful transfer of power, I'm gonna
(33:02):
guess they'll give me about five seconds to stop before
they start shooting at me. And they want to put
Fauci in prison, and their passing laws prosecuting doctors and
prosecuting women who leave a state to go to another
state for an abortion. In other words, they want to
prosecute women who leave a slave state to go to
(33:23):
a free state and bring them back to the slave state.
And they have a Fox News and another worse Fox News,
and another worser even than that Fox News. And what
do we have? We have once a week somebody who
says we must find a compromise with them. We must
(33:46):
be bi partisan, We must be Democrats and liberals who
act like Republicans and fascists and Nazis. We have Joe Mansion,
And for eighteen months, Joe Mansion has obstructed all the
good Joe Biden has tried to do and prevented all
the emergency measures we must have to keep the last
(34:08):
words by the last humans surviving the climate catastrophe on
this planet. From being a chairman of Excellent Mobile, I
want to report record profits for the year e twenty
fifty two. And when the bribe for Joe Manchin, the
Senator from fossil fuel gulch West Virginia, is finally sufficient
(34:32):
to his liking and he finally agrees with Chuck Schumer
on the seven hundred and forty billion dollar Climate and
Deficit Reduction Bill, what does he get? He gets to
go on all five network Sunday political television Nitwit shows
the proverbial full Ginsburg Glory, Glory, Hallelujah. It's Joe Manchin,
(34:53):
our lawgiver, the true Democrat. And yet Kirsten Cinema could
still kill the thing today and Joe Manchin would then
still look reasonable. By contrast, tomorrow, he'd still be the
hero who achieved nothing, and of all that Cinema stuff
(35:14):
bothers you. I used to go out with her. We
all know things are bad. Worse than bad, They're crazy.
It's like everything everywhere has going crazy. Even the fascists
who hate or fear Trump have something closer to a
plan than we do. This town. Author Mark Leibovich quoted
(35:37):
a former Republican congressman is saying, quote, look, we have
no plan for this except sitting around hoping he dies, unquote,
which actually sounds like more of a plan than our plan.
Our plan make sure Democrats help the craziest Trump supporters
(35:57):
and election deniers. And it's not iqanon. It's just QAnon.
Nutbags get nominated because us. We're confident we can beat
them right right right this weekend, it will be nineteen
months since the coup. They have plans for more coups.
(36:20):
A coup in Washington, a coup in every state, a
coup in every county. Looks like they compromise the Secret Service,
and it's still compromised. Looks like they compromise the Inspector
General at Homeland Security. They've compromised half the cops in
this country. A little less, a little more. They've compromised,
as my hero's Bob Elliott Ray Goulding once joked, everything
(36:41):
except the Visiting Nurse Association. They have built a cult
around denying the twenty twenty election. And if you haven't
figured out what's behind that nonsense, by the way, seemingly
quicksotic and academic at the same time, here's the little secret.
The idea about the twenty twenty stuff still being talked
about is if l. Douche gets elected in twenty twenty
(37:03):
four and goes back to the White House, he will
somehow make somebody like I don't know, the Supreme Court
confirm that, yes, he actually won in twenty twenty, but
was denied that rightful term in the White House, so
he will be given a third term in twenty twenty eight,
(37:24):
or at least allowed to run for it. In short,
if twenty twenty was stolen from him, he's owed another term.
Right That's in the Constitution, isn't it. Gee, maybe we
could just, you know, skip the twenty twenty eight election outright.
The fascists have all this in the works. And what
do we have. We have Chuck Todd three weeks ago
(37:49):
asking a Republican governor, quote, what's best for the country?
Do you think the country can handle prosecuting the former president?
And we have less year Holts one week ago telling
the Attorney General of the United States, quote, indictment of
former president and perhaps a candidate for president would arguably
tear the country apart. Is that your concern? They have
(38:15):
Fox News? We have Fox News only we call it NBC.
I will do this podcast every weekday morning, no holiday, mondays.
Sorry I'm getting old. It will be as best as
I can do with the podcast version of what the
old TV show was. I will explain to you later
(38:37):
in this first episode what exactly happened to the old
TV show. And here's a tease. It's none of the
things you've heard. And I'll have comments on the news
and comments on the sports. Did you know I used
to do sports? And the worst persons in the world
are back? And why Trump gets a tax break for
(38:58):
burying his wife in the golf course. But first I
want to button up this topic about getting mad as
hell with two quotes and one question. Quote number one,
it's General William to comes to Sherman, and it's meant metaphorically.
So don't think I'm talking about bloodshed, because you can't
do political bloodshed in this country unless you're a Republican.
(39:22):
This was Sherman the last time Americans tried to overthrow
American democracy. Quote. War is the remedy our enemies have chosen.
Other simple remedies were within their choice. You know it,
and they know it. But they wanted war. And I say,
let us give them all they want, not a word
of argument, not a sign of let up, no cave
(39:43):
in till we are whipped or they are end Sherman. Quote, First,
you've got to get mad. What greater act of war
against the United States by someone owing allegiance to the
United States within the United States could there ever be
(40:04):
than to and armed militias into the United States Capital,
than to encourage them to attack and kill members of Congress,
members of the Senate, even the Vice President. What greater
act of war against the United States could there be
than to try to prevent by violent revolution the peaceful
transfer of power in the United States. I have no
(40:27):
complaints about the January sixth Committee. I do not buy
the argument that it's the Liz Cheney Show, And so
what if it were. Chairman Thompson and the other Democrats
have been terrific if, as I speculated months ago, they
are programming to the proverbial audience of one and it
is named Merrick Garland Dandy. But I don't see exactly
(40:49):
how they plan to end this. So what if first
they realized, you've got to get mad, You've got to
say I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going
to take Trump anymore. What if they ended it with
another quote? What if the January sixth Committee ends its
final hearing by simply quoting just the start of Title
(41:10):
eighteen USC Chapter one fifteen, Section two three eight one quote. Whoever,
owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them,
or adheres to their enemies giving them aid and comfort
within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason
(41:31):
and shall suffer death. So for our number one story
(41:53):
on the Countdown, my favorite topic me. Each podcast will
conclude with me telling you a story from my career
or life, usually hanging off the day's news, or at
least an adverse of some kind. The people I've known,
the places I've worked, the innumerable morons I have encountered,
some of the women I've dated. If it's relevant, like Laura,
don't judge me. It all began with a small five
(42:16):
thousand watt radio station in Presno, California. On Fridays. Instead,
we will read from the great works of the great
James Thurber, just like we used to do on the
TV show. And when I say we, of course, I
mean I. If you're not interested, you just want the
day's news, cool, turn it off. I will not be offended,
but I think these stories will explain, entertain and often
(42:40):
enrage you. Lord knows they will enrage me. So as
I launched this frail bark, where better to start than
here if you were a viewer of the old TV show.
Let me explain finally how that became this my original
nineteen ninety seven MSNBC News Hours, The Big Show and
The White House in Crisis were the first programs that
(43:01):
made MSNBC any money. I mean seriously. The network otherwise
hemorrhaged cash from its launch in nineteen ninety six until
about two thousand and five. That's when the show I started.
Upon my return in two thousand and three, Countdown, a
low rated nightly news digest. It was a pretty good show,
started getting really political and suspicious of Bush and Iraq
(43:23):
and especially the Republicans political manipulation of the threat of terrorism,
and the viewers arrived in droves by the next year.
The ads salesman and contrary to all logic, they are
the ones from whom you get the truth in a
news company. They were sending me models of champagne and
revealing that Countdown was now earning a fifty million dollar
(43:44):
annual profit, then seventy five million, then one hundred million.
They liked me, they really really liked me. But management
at NBC not so much. Right after MSNBC started to
make money, it started making enemies. The Republicans came right
to our door and through it the psychos at Fox
(44:04):
News like O'Reilly and Hannity and Ales. Remember we called
them Fixed News or Fox Noise. They started calling the
executives at NBC and its parent company GE, demanding that
I stopped criticizing them softer than church music. These fascists
could not take criticism when Tim Russert was still alive
(44:25):
and defending me internally and externally, watching every night and
sending me tips and warnings and ideas, and capable of
playing the Republicans inside NBC and outside NBC like fiddles.
Everything was fine. Then came that horrible day June thirteenth,
two thousand and eight. Tim died, and suddenly NBC News
(44:46):
was in the hands of a lot of cowards and
bullies like Tom Brokaw and Joe Scarborough and Jeff Zucker
in names you would not know, like Jeff Immelt and
Steve Kappus and Phil Griffin and Chris Licked And I
really wish you didn't need to know Chris Licht's name,
but he was Scarborough's henchman, and now he's the new
president of CNN, and you don't know how bad that
(45:09):
news is for the future of this country. Anyway. I
will go into depth on all this background in future episodes.
How men like these spent a year keeping Rachel Maddow
off the air, telling me I couldn't even put her
on as my guest host because nobody would watch a woman,
or a lesbian or another liberal. That's what they said.
(45:31):
Then they lied to me and told me they had
hired her so that one night Larry King talked to
her into going on his show on CNN for two
hundred and fifty dollars, and I wound up hiring her
out of my own pocket to keep MSNBC from losing her.
Literally the cash in my wallet four hundred and thirty
seven bucks. Anyway, by August of two thousand and eight,
(45:51):
Republicans were threatening Brokaw that if he did not get
me fired from MSNBC's coverage of the presidential election, John
McCain would not show up for the debate that Brokaw
had inherited from the late Tim Russard. So Brocaw went
in and threatened, and that's a nice euphemism NBC management
on behalf of the GOP just to get to host
(46:11):
one more debate. I mean he boasted about it in
the New York Times. Then within a year it was
Fox blackmailing the executives at GE, actually getting the chairman
of GE, Jeff Immelt, to threaten to take MSNBC off
the air, just shut it down if Fox continued to
criticize him. Immelt because his mommy was a Bill O'Reilly
(46:33):
fan and Billow kept claiming her little boy Jeff was
producing weapons used to kill Americans in Iraq. I mean, honestly,
these were adults behaving like this. Well, as I tell
everybody in the business, there are no adults. It got
worse and worse. Zooker and Roger Ayles meeting inside thirty
Rock no Less to decide what I could and could
(46:54):
not say about Fox News, negotiating what could be in
our news and what could not. And in twenty ten,
NBC started suggesting that we put Republicans on countdown like
Michael's and the deplorable Scarborough. Nobody ever asked me a
direct question as to how in January twenty eleven, I
left MSNBC and the highest rated cable news show that
(47:15):
was not on Fox, and I kept telling them, just say,
we don't consider Fox to be news. It isn't news,
so why are we comparing our ratings to them? Was
I fired? Did I quit? Was it something else? So
I've never actually told the actual story because I wasn't
asked a direct question about it. Well, one of the
perks they threw at me when I re signed with
(47:36):
MSNBC rather than jumping to CNN in two thousand and
six two thousand and seven was a slot on the
Sunday night NBC football broadcast. It was a nice change.
I got to work with my old ESPN partner, Dan Patrick.
It wasn't life and death. I could do the catchphrases
and the silly voices and say they're not gonna got them.
But right before the twenty ten season, Jeff Zucker called
(47:59):
me into his office told me I was not focusing
enough on countdown and I was off the football show. Now,
the following portion is, of course a pure hypothetical, which
is really better designed for a college course in contract law.
But if in a case like this hypothetical, the guy
doing a let's say, hypothetical football show wasn't actually being
(48:21):
paid to do the hypothetical football show. If doing that
hypothetical football show were a perk, if it was a
non cash payment or an incentive to sign a contract
rather than to go to some other hypothetical network like
CN hypothetical n well, then when that hypothetical announcer is
taking off that hypothetical football show, the people who hypothetically
(48:43):
took him off the show have hypothetically breached his hypothetical
contract and all of a sudden, the hypothetical companies, hypothetical
lawyers are asking the hypothetical announcer how much money it
would hypothetically cost them to hypothetically cure a hypothetical breach.
Back to the non hypothetical portion of our story. So
(49:03):
now it's a few months the week before the twenty
ten midterms, which I would be anchoring on MSNBC, and
while I would be covering the Senate and governor races
right through election night, we were done reporting on the House.
I did an interview on Thursday, I think, with the
Congressman Raoul Grihalva of Arizona, and then I did a
special comment on Friday about all the Tea partiers running
for Congress that year, and that was it. And that
(49:26):
night I was on the phone with my friend Kirsten Cinema, YEP,
at Kirsten Cinema. How many Kirsten Cinemas could there be?
She told me that Grihalva and another Arizona representative had
gotten a lot of death threats late in the campaign
and they had spent virtually every last dollar they had
on security. Kirsten asked, can you donate to these campaigns?
(49:48):
And I said, I had never donated before, but yeah,
to Grahalva and to a senator in the South, I think,
and the other Arizona representative who had gotten a lot
of death threats. Her name was Gabby Giffords. The next Tuesday,
I anchored the those midterms, didn't mention one house race
or candidate, and everything was fine. And then somebody called
(50:09):
one of the political websites to say, oooh, Oberman donated
to some Democrats, and they called NBC public Relations, and
NBC public Relations called the president of MSNBC, and the
president of my MSIBC called me and he said, this
looks bad. I know it's your right to do it.
It's not like we're going to suspend you or anything
stupid like that. Why would we do that. This is
sort of our fault too, But it just looks bad.
(50:31):
Can you know, can you say something? And I said, yeah,
you're right, it does look bad. I'll apologize on the
show tomorrow, even though I don't have to. I will
voluntarily stop any campaign contributions as long as I'm doing
this show. And he said great, and I said great,
And I wrote the apology that night and I sent
(50:52):
it to him, and he said great, and I said
great because I already had part of tomorrow's show written.
And that was it. And the next morning, without a hearing,
without a phone call, without an email, without a warning,
this hysterical teenager disguised as an adult named Steve Cappus,
President of NBC News, he puts out a press release
in which he angrily suspends me indefinitely without pay, for
(51:17):
violations of the NBC News employee rule book that says
NBC News employees can't make donations to political campaigns. Now,
NBC had an obvious, huge problem. Within hours, there was
a petition on social media demanding my reinstatement two hundred
and fifty thousand signatures. I was stunned. NBC tried to
(51:39):
get Chris Hayes to fill in for me that night.
He refused. Even people at Fox News went on the
air and said this was absurd. And at NBC there
was a lot of shushing and worrying because everybody at
NBC News made political donations. They just hid them by
donating in their wife's name or the kid's name, or
to some sort of fund or whatever. I was the
(52:01):
only one who admitted to it, but this guy kappus.
He was pissed off and dug in and demanded I
be suspended for a month through I don't know, one
hundred years without pay at least and all. This is
already public and well documented, but hypothetically, again, there could
have been more to it. See if you hypothetically suspend
(52:24):
your hypothetical announcer guy again for violating the employee handbook.
What happens if that hypothetical announcer is not actually an employee.
What if the hypothetical employer has written the contract of
the hypothetical announcer so that it specifically declares, several different
(52:46):
hypothetical times in the hypothetical contract that the hypothetical announcer
is not an employee but just say, to pick a
term out of thin air, an independent contractor what if
hypothetically the employer could be NBAE, could be a bakery somewhere.
What if hypothetically the employer did this in contract legal
(53:10):
ees so they did not have to pay the hypothetical
announcer health insurance or dental will. Then, hypothetically, that phrase
breach re enters the chat and the hypothetical companies hypothetical
lawyers go to the executive who just suspended the employee
who legally is not an employee, And they say, hypothetically again,
(53:31):
you now have four hypothetical choices. One reinstate the hypothetical
non employee immediately and hope we don't get sued. Two
reinstate the hypothetical non employee, immediately, apologize and write up
a new contract for God's sake. Three end the show,
pay the hypothetical non employee every dollar you owe for
(53:51):
the remainder of the hypothetical contract, and hope you don't
get sued for damages anyway. Or four hypothetically throw a
lot of money in the air and negotiate a settlement
and end the hypothetical showithetically. In the short term, what
happened was, and I'm quoting from the New York Times,
they told me on Friday I was suspended. I was
(54:13):
back on the air Tuesday. They didn't even dock my
pay or charge me for any days off, making this
wilder still. Hours after I was suspended, Al Gore called me.
Al owned a struggling TV network called Current, and he said,
what NBC is doing is illegal, and if you sue them,
you could own the place. But I think I have
(54:35):
a better idea that can be the start of something big.
You can bring Countdown to Current TV. We'll give you
fifty million dollars plus bonuses, plus a piece of the network.
You'll be an owner. This is me talking in the
long term. For two months, these two roller coasters went
up and down, and my agents negotiated attentive contract with
(54:58):
Current while there was a hypothetical attempt to settle the
other hypothetical non employee cluster hypothetic f and then literally
during the MSNBC Countdown show on January twenty first, twenty eleven,
during a commercial break, everything got finalized all at once.
(55:18):
My agent told me it was done. I went on
the air and said so, and nobody, not even the
staff knew, which I am still sorry about. Very greatly unavoidable,
but that's the way it worked. So no, I was
not fired, Countdown was not canceled. The Current TV deal
had already been in place for weeks. And by the way,
(55:38):
during every step of this, I kept Madow and her agent,
who had been my agent for twenty seven years, fully informed,
and so that very night that Countdown ended on MSNBC,
Mattow was on Bill Maher's show right after it all happened,
and naturally he asked her about it, and she lied
and said, this is the first I'm hearing of it,
(55:59):
and I thought, uh boy, that might be the end
of that friendship. Haven't spoken since. Anyway, the current thing
turned out to be a scam and it blew up
rather quickly, and I'll tell that story in a future
episode two. On the other hand, I don't have to
work for money again. But the weirdest thing started happening
(56:20):
in September twenty eleven, not eight months after I left
MSNBC feelers from the new owners of NBC Comcast. Would
I consider coming back to MSNBC. Yes, I would. Then
they got cold feet. Then the next year more feelers.
This time I got cold feet, and I started negotiating
and go back to ESPN instead, and I did. In
(56:42):
twenty fourteen, I actually met with the new NBC News
executives for two hours, and they wanted me to bring
Countdown back as soon as possible. And then the Brian
Williams scandal broke and these new executives all got themselves fired.
And then in October twenty fifteen, I met with the
new new executives, and they wanted me to come back.
They made an actual offer, and it was stupid. It
(57:05):
was predicated on my doing a show without commentaries, like
what was the point of Countdown or me without the commentaries?
And even that guy got fired in twenty nineteen, and
the new chairman of the entire NBC corporation, Jeff Shell,
was an old friend of mine from Fox Sports, and
he wanted me to bring the show back, and we
(57:26):
got close, and then the word came in from the
guy who was negotiating for me that the chairman of
NBC News, Caesar Conde, had told him the whole thing
had cratered because one person at NBC had never and
would never forgive me for something. And that person, said Condey,
(57:48):
was Rachel Mattow. Rachel Mattow, per Sezar Conde vetoed the
last chance and ended literally a decade of talks about
putting this program back on MSNBC. By the way, NBC's
denial of this last set of flirtations was that, yes,
for two years, NBC's CEO, Jeff Schell kept scheduling meetings
(58:10):
with me, but I should have known he didn't really
mean it. Basically, their explanation was I should have known
the chairman of NBC was a liar. As the kids say,
weird flex but okay, and that's the short version. So
last winter, that's when I began exploring a new venue
(58:31):
for Countdown, and here we are a daily podcast, Sam Keith,
new platform, and I don't have to shave or wear makeup,
and I hope you'll enjoy the content as much as
I already enjoy the not shaving. So that's where we
(58:59):
began a year ago today, two hundred and fifty eight
episodes ago. I thank you kindly for your patronage. Tell
the others I've done all the damage I can do here.
Thank you for listening. Here the credits. Most of the
music arrange produced and performed by Brian Ray and John
Phillip Shaneil, who are the Countdown musical directors. All orchestration
and keyboards by John Phillip, Schanel, guitars, bass and drums
(59:21):
by Brian Ray, produced by Tko Brothers. Other Beethoven selections
have been arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed.
Sports Music is the Olderman theme from ESPN two, and
it was written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN, Inc.
Musical comments by Nancy Faust, the best baseball stadium organist ever,
and my special thanks to Nancy. Our announcer today was
(59:42):
my friend Larry David, and everything else was pretty much
my fault. So let's countdown for this, the nine hundred
and thirty seventh day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup
against the democratically elected government of the United States. Arrest
him again while we still can, I have an opening
this afternoon. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow, Bolton says.
The news warrants till then. I'm Keith Oulverman. Good morning,
(01:00:05):
good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith
Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(01:00:29):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.