June 16, 2023 • 42 mins
EPISODE 229: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:42) SPECIAL COMMENT: First The Washington Post reported Trump had ignored advice from his $3,000,000 flat fee lawyer to settle with the DOJ, return ALL the documents in exchange for no charges. But he refused because non-lawyer Tom Fitton - who has a BA in English - told him the lawyers were wrong. Then it turned out Fitton told him that because of a case Fitton's outfit, Judicial Watch, lost. And they couldn't have lost it because they suck, it had to be a definitive ruling that gave all presidents the right to keep everything.
Now it turns out that even after that revelation, Trump is STILL deferring to Tom Fitton for legal advice he is wildly unqualified to give. He seems to have done it... last night! Fitton tweeted some nonsense in the morning. Trump regurgitated it as a social media post at dinner time: “So now that everyone understands that the Presidential Records Act, plus the Clinton socks case, totally exonerated me… when are they going to drop all charges against me, apologize, and return everything that was illegally taken?” The answer, as any lawyer or sane person could tell you, is, they’re NOT. The Presidential Records Act DOESN’T exonerate Trump, nobody “understands” the specious claims of exoneration, the Clinton Socks case is an irrelevant red herring and it’s not even CALLED the “Clinton Socks” case, they aren’t dropping the charges against Trump, nothing was illegally taken, and nothing is being returned to him. But Trump isn’t listening to that. He is listening… to Tom Fitton, Pretend Lawyer.
Plus the New York Times goes inside the mind of Trump (careful): It explained in depth the reference to Trump’s “Beautiful Mind” boxes that when they appeared in the indictment document mystified so many while the rest of us immediately saw Russell Crowe. “It was a reference,” wrote The Times, “to the title of a book and movie depicting the life of John F. Nash Jr., the mathematician with schizophrenia played in the film by Russell Crowe, who covered his office with newspaper clippings, believing they held a Russian code he needed to crack. The phrase had a specific connotation. The aides employed it to capture a type of organized chaos that Mr. Trump insisted on, the collection and transportation of a blizzard of newspapers and official documents that he kept close and that seemed to give him a sense of security. One former White House official, who was granted anonymity to describe the situation, said that while the materials were disorganized, Mr. Trump would notice if somebody had riffled through them or they were not arranged in a particular way. It was, the person said, how “his mind worked.”
That explains Trump perfectly: hose are HIS documents. When will you give him back HIS documents. They are HIS. Not yours. Not the government’s. No law makes a difference. He held them. They have his name on them. He put them in the box. Not THAT box, THIS box. This is existential to Trump. To quote the Bugs Bunny cartoon about Daffy Duck and the treasure of Ali Baba “It’s mine, you understand? Mine! All mine! Get back in there. Down down down. Go go go. Mine mine mine.”
Oh and when Trump went into that Cuban bakery Tuesday to "celebrate" after his indictment and shouted "Food for everyone!" Guess who didn't pay.
B-Block (19:45) IN SPORTS: You've heard of Spiking The Football? The man who INVENTED Spiking The Football has passed away. Baseball's Commissioner insults the Oakland fans who were about to lose their team rather than empathizing them just to keep them as possible San Francisco Giants fans, and now the Justice Department will investigate the Saudis buying pro golf. (27:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Anti-transgender slob Michael Knowles says we need to revert to the world of the year 1220. Did I tell you Pat Sajak was a schmuck? He is retiring to run a whack doodle religious college. And the "Wannabe Dictato
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. A
man who is his own lawyer has a fool for
a client. A man who has a non lawyer as
(00:28):
his lawyer has a fool in the mirror. Trump not
only missed the chance to avoid his arrest and prosecution
for compromising national security because he ignored his lawyers and
instead relied on the legal guidance of a liberal arts
major who isn't a lawyer named Tom Fitten. But he
is clearly still ignoring his lawyers and instead relying on
(00:50):
this Tom Fitton, whose only connection to the law is
that the right wing nuisance factory he runs is named
quote judicial Watch, and there is reason to believe Trump
relied on Fitten again last night when he demanded that
the Department of Justice give him back the documents he stole,
(01:10):
the ones that could send him to jail for the
rest of his life. At ten thirty five am Eastern yesterday,
Judicial Watch tweeted at Wall Street Journal quote from an
attorney insisting that quote the Presidential Records Act allows the
president to decide what records to return and what records
to keep at the end of his presidency. The archives
(01:30):
and Records administration can't do anything about it. I know
about it because I'm the lawyer who lost the Clinton
sock drawer case. A few hours later, Fitten retweeted that,
and then at five to ten pm Eastern, Trump posted quote,
So now that everyone understands that the Presidential Records Act
(01:51):
plus the Clinton socks case totally exonerated me, when are
they going to drop all charges against me, apologize and
return everything that was illegally taken. The answer, as any
lawyer or sane layperson could tell you, is they're not.
(02:12):
The Presidential Records Act does not exonerate Trump. Nobody understands
the species claims of exoneration. The Clinton socks case is
in irrelevant red herring, and it's not even called the
Clinton socks case. They aren't dropping the charges against Trump.
Nothing was illegally taken, and nothing is being returned to him.
(02:34):
But Trump isn't listening to that. He is listening to
Tom Fitten, pretend lawyer. At seven twenty pm Eastern, Fitten
went on Newsmax and said Trump had cooperated fully with
the Archives had returned documents. Fitten implied Trump returned all
the documents without ever actually saying all. Fitten claimed that
(02:59):
Trump was indicted because quote he didn't search properly or
hid documents from his own lawyers. You know, I didn't
think there was any persuasive evidence of that, so Trump
fully cooperated. Fitten then invoked the Clinton sock drawer case,
getting the name correct, and he said it decisively proved
that quote there was nothing anyone could do about a
(03:20):
president who took records with them and designated them as personal.
And of course that is also wildly untrue. The President
Clinton case was brought by Fitton's company in two thousand
and nine. The government had decided that some recordings for
a Clinton biography were indeed Clinton's personal property. Judicial Watch
(03:42):
sued to get them declared government property so it could
then claim Clinton had broken a law. The judge laughed
Judicial Watch out of court. So, in Tom Fitton's world,
Judicial Watch lost that case, not because Judicial Watch was
wrong on the law and they suck, but because no
president could ever be kept from keeping anything and everything
(04:04):
all time. You can picture this Fitton explaining this to Trump,
and Trump's beady little eyes glazing over to the point
where he couldn't even remember the full name of the
case the Clinton sock drawer case, because at five whole words,
it was way too long to imprint on Trump's malformed mind.
(04:26):
And Trump can still only remember four of the words,
and he keeps calling it the Clinton socks case because
Clinton had a cat named Socks, and Trump's brain does
not work properly. Besides which, he was distracted by what
Fitton was saying. The only thing he really wanted to
hear that he could keep the documents, that the documents
(04:47):
were his, his, his, his quote. Trump time and again
rejected the advice from lawyers and advisors who urged him
to cooperate, wrote The Washington Post Wednesday, in its story
about the attorney he had hired for a flat three
million dollars, Christopher Kaisse, who last October told Trump to
(05:08):
make a deal with the Justice Department whereby he would
really return all the documents in exchange for a guarantee
there'd be no charges quote, and instead took the advice
Tom Fitten offered. Advisers said Trump would often cite Fitten
to others, and Fitten told some of Trump's lawyers that
Trump could keep the documents if, like me, you were
(05:31):
thrown over last weekend, when Politico reported that Trump did
not think he would take a plea deal in this case,
but quote, he left open the possibility of doing so
where they pay me some damages. Unquote, I think I've
got a pretty good idea. Who did not tell him
that that was not the kind of plea deal they
(05:53):
were going to offer. At the core of all this,
of course, is the statement Trump has repeated again and
again in private and in public, and he made it
again at five ten pm yesterday on social media. Those
are his documents. When will you give back his documents
to him? They are his, not yours, not governments. No
(06:17):
law makes difference. He held them, have name on them,
put them in box, not that box, this box. This
is existential to Trump, to quote the Bugs money cartoon
about Daffy Duck and the Treasure of Ali Baba. It's mine,
you understand, mine all mine. Get back in there, down down, down,
go go go mine mind mine. If none of this
(06:40):
still makes any sense to you, congratulations, you have passed
the first screening test for good mental health. The New
York Times yesterday explained in depth the reference to Trump's
beautiful mind boxes that when it appeared in the indictment
document mystified so many while the rest of us immediately thought, uh,
(07:01):
the Russell Crowe movie. It was a difference, wrote The
Times to the title of a book and movie depicting
the life of John F. Nash Junior, the mathematician with
schizophrenia played in the film by Russell Crowe, who covered
his office with newspaper clippings, believing they held a Russian
code he needed to crack. The phrase had a specific connotation,
(07:24):
The aids employed at the Times wrote, to capture a
type of organized chaos that mister Trump insisted on the
collection and transportation of a blizzard of newspapers and official
documents that he kept close and that seemed to give
him a sense of security. One former White House official,
who was granted anonymity to describe the situation, said that
(07:45):
while the materials were disorganized, mister Trump would notice if
somebody had riffled through them, or they were not arranged
in a particular way. It was the person said, how
quote his mind worked, unquote, oh boy. In other words,
Trump kept dozens of boxes of stuff, dozens and dozens
(08:09):
and dozens of boxes of stuff, all of it seemingly
packed randomly yet he could tell you in which box
any specific document or artifact could be located. And crazier still,
if somebody took, say the seventy ninth item from the
top in the twenty third box, but they moved it
(08:30):
so it became the one hundred and twenty ninth item
from the top in that box, Trump would know. Trump
would know that his papers had been messed with. Quote.
He could point to specific boxes that he wanted to
take with him on Air Force one when he was
traveling and declined to take others. The Times added, appearing
aware of the contents inside the boxes he chose. Both
(08:54):
officials said, I have been saying this and writing this
since the year twenty sixteen as a rhetorical question. Could
Trump pass a sanity test? This is not just scary though,
on the sanity insanity level, and it's plenty scary on
that level. There's a reason that the fifty eighth word
in the Times pieces quote schizophrenia. It is also curtains
(09:19):
for Trump because this literally obsessive, compulsive awareness of exactly
where each one of thousands of documents would be inside
dozens and dozens of boxes means there is not one
chance Trump took any document out of the White House
by accident, and not one chance Trump didn't know where
those documents were at Mary Lago, and not one chance
(09:41):
Trump didn't know where the ones he hid from the
government and then from his attorney wound up in that situation.
The defendant is going to need a really, really good
lawyer to have any chance of not dying in prison. Instead,
he has Tom Fitten. It's mine, you understand mine? Oh mine,
(10:05):
Get back in there, down down, down, go go go
mine my mind. There is other Trump business to review
as well, Some of it important, some of it just weird,
not that weird. Human events like judicial Watch and outfits
seemingly created to harass President Clinton in the nineties. Reported
(10:27):
that after his arraignment, but before his speech at Bedminster
Tuesday night, Trump quote attempted to call into Fox News
in the eight pm block. The request was denied by Fox.
Me I'm thinking Trump called collect Forbes has done other
math Quote. From twenty seventeen to twenty twenty two, and
(10:48):
Trump had access to classified documents, initially as president and
ultimately as a formal official living at the club the
Mari Lago. People applied for temporary work permits as servers, cooks,
and housekeepers. Produced a few foreign nationals who probably weren't
screened for anything besides their skills at serving, cooking, and housekeeping.
(11:10):
Just a few flitting in and out of mari A Lago,
in and out of Florida, in and out of the
United States, all of them coming and going in perfectly
nice people. Only a few, only three hundred and eighty.
Only three hundred and eighty foreign national temp workers at
mari A Lago from TPM, another hint that someday we
(11:31):
will learn the full extent of Rudy Giuliani's weirdness, but
not yet. He has been sued for defamation by the
Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss, and thanks
to filings in that case, TPM has discovered that during
his part of one of the many Trump coup attempts
in twenty twenty, Giuliani used the email address are Helen
(11:53):
zero five two eight at Gmail. A spokesman explains Helen
was the name of Rudy's late mother. He does not
explain why another email address has turned up in the filings,
Lucy three four one three at hushmail dot com, but
I would refer you to that videotape that we all
here in New York we knew about, but apparently his
(12:13):
news elsewhere. It's from a skit for a roast of
Giuliani at a charity event in the year two thousand
and In it, Juliani is dressed in full drag, I
mean full drag and using a falsetto, and he has
fake big breasts and a guy comes in and kisses
Juliani between the fake breasts, and the guy is Donald Trump.
(12:37):
And if you don't believe me, go look it up
on YouTube. And what was that again about schizophrenia? And
from the through the looking glass world of the GOP,
in which whatever Trump is accused of, Biden has had
to have done it first and worst. The FBI whistle
blower Barisma Foreign oligarch seventeen audio recordings rumor report allegation
(12:59):
tip this continues to melt in gooey wonder all over
the hands of the hill Billy f Lee Bailey representative
Jamie Comer, as Sean Hannity skeptically asked Comer about hearing
the recordings or at least confirming that they exist, or
at least confirming that the Oligarch exists, and yes, I
(13:20):
said Hannity skeptically. Comer admitted last night on Fox that
nobody has heard from the Oligarch in three years. Three years,
no contact with the guy who allegedly has the tape
that allegedly says this and allegedly is of these people
and allegedly allegedly allegedly And Comer still had a better
(13:43):
time on TV than did Senator Ron Johnson On Newsmax,
The Blonde news model t Johnson up perfectly on this
non story, non reality, and Johnson whiffed.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
If indeed the seventeen audio tapes exist, it would be
in effect, really a smoking gun for the big guy.
So I want to ask you first, Senator, do you
think they exist? And if he has how to obtain them?
Speaker 3 (14:11):
We don't know.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
And you know, Senna Grassley has never said they exist.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
He just said that there's.
Speaker 4 (14:16):
An FBI report on a confidential human source. In that
confidential human source says that the person who were talking
to you said that he taped he recorded seventeen times,
fifteen times, one hundred twice with the Joe Biden.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
But we don't know. That's one ugly Johnson, right, there.
And lastly, in the least surprising Trump's story of all time,
at least to anybody who knew him before, we have
the coda to his carefully staged fake post indictment and
birthday party at the Cuban Bakery Versaias in Miami on
(14:52):
Tuesday afternoon. Turns out it was not as carefully staged
as it might have been, as cameras rolled and Trump
apologists pawned and they sang him Happy Birthday, and only
one journal actually asked a question. Trump suddenly shouted food
for everyone, Food for everyone. You'll notice he did not
(15:15):
add on me, because it wasn't. The Miami New Times
reporting that moments after that shout, Trump left the Versias
Bakery without paying a dime. It was Ron philip Kowski
who said what many of us were thinking, that the
last person to promise the ordinary people free food at
(15:36):
Versaillas and then stick them with the bill was Marie Antoinette.
And look how good that turned out for her. And yes,
there are two different pronunciations. In France, it's Versailles or Versailles.
In Miami it's Versaias. Also of interest, here the wheels
(15:58):
are coming off at Fox They're continuing outrage at a
new Pride flag at the White House, which they say
is there to encourage grooming and pedophilia. They're actually reporting this.
Turns out Fox News did not know that the identical
flag was used last year at a Fox corporate event. Oops.
(16:19):
Just say oops and get out. That's next. This is
countdown food for everyone.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
This is countdown with Keith Olberman, my crazy friend. This
is Sports Center. Wait, check that not anymore. This is
(16:51):
Countdown with Keith Olberman in sports Spiking the football. Everybody
knows what that means.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Everybody knows the term, as used in football and as
used in life. The football player generally credited with inventing
spiking the football has died. Homer Jones was an underappreciated
star with the worst of the New York Giants teams. Ever,
in the late nineteen sixties, he averaged twenty two point
three yards per catch, which is still the NFL record. Quote.
(17:23):
I had always said that when I made my first touchdown,
I was going to throw the ball in the stands,
Homer Jones said about the day on October seventeenth, nineteen
sixty five, when he pulled down.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
An earl Morale throw for.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
An eighty nine yard TD against Philadelphia. They changed the
rules in the off season to I think a five
hundred dollars fine for throwing the ball into the stands.
And as I crossed the goal line. My intention had
always been to throw that ball into the stands, but
I thought about the five hundred dollars and I threw
it on the ground. So that was the original spike
right there. Spiking the football was designed to save five
(17:57):
hundred dollars. Homer Jones was eighty two from baseball shock
after remarks from Commissioner Rob Manfred about the Oakland maybe
Las Vegas A's, and if Rob Manfred can still shock you,
he's really said something stupid. In fact, he said a
lot of things that are something stupid. Understand that for
at least five years, the A's have dragged their feet
(18:20):
and starved their franchise in order to justify moving out
of town. But that's not how Rob Manfred sees it.
Asked about the fans, Manfred told reporters yesterday, quote, I
feel sorry for the fans in Oakland. I do not
like this outcome. I understand why they feel the way
they do. He then suddenly pivoted. The real question is
what is it Oakland was prepared to do. There is
(18:42):
no Oakland offer. Okay, they never got to a point
where they had a plan to build a stadium, which
is just simply Rob Manfred, lying flat out lying Oakland
repeatedly present an A's owner John Fisher, with offers to
build a new stadium. Asked about unanimous studies of stadium
construction proving that new ballparks do not generate jobs or
(19:05):
economic growth, Banford answered, I love academics. They're great. Take
the areas where baseball stadiums had been built. Look at
what was around Truest Park in Atlanta before that was built.
Academics can say whatever they want. A Rob Manfred transferred
from le Moyne College to Cornell and then got a
law degree at Harvard, and he never fails to mention
(19:27):
this never so bad news, Rob academics. You are a
product of academics. Secondly, one economist said he could show
me four hours worth of formulas proving that new ballparks
do not create growth. They just shift jobs and businesses
from one part of an area or city to another
part of the same area or city. But he said,
(19:49):
This is the easier explanation. If new ballparks actually generated
more money for anybody, team owners would build all the
new ballparks themselves and keep the money. That's what owners do.
But the real shock in what Rob Manfred said was
when he in insulted the Oakland fans who are trying
to keep their team and their city. They held a
(20:09):
reverse boycott Tuesday night and got twenty seven, seven hundred
and fifty nine people to show up to see the
worst team in baseball in probably the last fifteen years.
Previous attendance in Oakland's Tuesday night games this season had
been four thousand. Rob Manfred's reaction, I mean it was great.
It's great to see what is this year almost an
(20:30):
average Major League Baseball crowd in the facility for one night.
That's a great thing. It's one thing to be condescending
if you're smart, which Rob Manfred isn't. It's one thing
to be arrogant if you do your job well, which
Rob Manfred isn't. The one thing to be snarky, of course,
if you're honest, which Rob Manfred isn't. But let's just
(20:50):
say he is all those things. If the A's do
move out of Oakland, there will be an entire fan
base there without any team, a baseball fan base that
as recently as twenty fourteen drew two million fans in
one season into a crap shack stadium. Now, if the
A's move, you're gonna lose a lot of those people forever.
(21:11):
But that crap shack ballpark is exactly fifteen miles from
another major League baseball stadium with another major League team
called the San Francisco Giants, And ordinarily you would be
at least pretending to show those fans some empathy in Oakland,
because the San Francisco Giants are down nine hundred thousand
fans a year from their glory days just a decade agoing,
(21:34):
maybe maybe you could convince some of those disgruntled, orphaned
A's fans to keep buying your product over there in
San Francisco, which is what you would try to do
if you were smart. As noted above, the Commissioner of
Baseball isn't thank you, Nancy Faust. You can't stop Nancy Faust.
(22:26):
You can only hope to contain her. Golf told you so.
They're not phrasing it this way, but the sale of
the PGA golf tour to the investment arm of the
Saudi Arabian government will be held up at least a year.
The Department of Justice has reportedly advised the PGA it
will investigate the so called merger with Live Golf on
anti trust grounds. The DOJ was already investigating just the
(22:50):
PGA on anti trust grounds. The alleged merger was announced
last week, and since then, not only has a Senate
Subcommittee on Homeland Security announced a probe, now the DOJ
has announced its separate probe. European anti trust investigators arensidering
yet a third probe. But the commissioner of the PGA
tour has virtually disappeared due to a quote medical situation
(23:13):
which required him to take a leave of absence just
before the start of the US Open in La yesterday. Now,
a top golf writer is suggesting the commissioner, who thought
the PGA Lives Saudi deal would be well received in
golf circles. He says the commissioner will not resume his duties.
Nobody is saying what ails Commissioner J Monahan, But I'm
betting on a case of tertiary surprise since he is
(23:36):
dealing with the Saudis. I guess we have to assume
there is the possibility. That's what ailing Commissioner Jay Monaghan
is bone sawing machines still ahead on countdown. It would
(24:00):
make a classic scene in a great movie. I hope
just by reading it I can do it. Justice Fridays
with Thurber and The Night the Bed Fell. Next, first,
the daily roundup of the miscrants, morons and Dunning Kruger
effect specimens who constitute today's worst persons in the world.
Le bronze right wing troll and advocate for a transgender purge.
(24:22):
Michael Knowles, the former quote actor unquote who portrayed a
gay man having sex in a movie with other men.
Downloads must be down for him because he's now announced
that quote the Pride flag is offensive to all normal
people unquote and should be banned quote because it's evil
and degenerate, and quote I want our civilization to be
(24:44):
as socially conservative as we were in twelve twenty, before
all the modern ideology started corroding our civilization. So the
year twelve twenty, he actually said, twelve twenty, where were
you and what did you enjoy? On January first, twelve
twenty before Europeans came to America, and when life expectancy
(25:08):
in Europe was thirty to thirty five years. So you
heard him, everybody off the continent go home and knowles
by the way, with that aged span thirty to thirty
five years, life expectancy NOLES is thirty three. So wrap
it up, boy, here done? Runner up? Pat, say Jack?
I told you so? Did I tell you so? Do
you see what happens? Do you see what happens?
Speaker 3 (25:29):
Larry?
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Pat say Jack announced the other day's retiring from Wheel
of Fortune, and everybody issued in naudlin weepy farewells. And
I said, God, I'm glad he's gone. And I said
he's a schmuck. And what do we find out from
Channel four in Detroit. Pat Sajack is now the chairman
of the board of Trustees of Hillsdale College in Michigan.
(25:51):
Sound familiar, well. Hillsdale takes no government money, It adbuys
by no government regulations, and when it was challenged on
its diversity, its president said people had come to the
campus looking for quote dark one. Jinny Thomas ran the
speakers series at Hillsdale. Clarence Thomas gave the commencement one year.
Ron DeSantis and Mike Fence and Christy Nome have been
(26:14):
pushing the charter prep schools Hillsdale's trying to establish around
the country, and the one in South Dakota would teach
about the World War Two service of Conservative South Dakota
Governor Joe Foss, but not the World War Two service
of and he was a genuine hero. Liberal South Dakota
Senator George McGovern pat say Jack is chairman of the
(26:35):
board of trustees of this indoctrination factory. But the good
news is Hillsdale's influence is still so on the periphery
that he has been chairman since twenty nineteen and most
people only found out about it yesterday. But the winner
is Fox quote news unquote with a tuffer still running
with this pride flag at the White House nonsense suggesting
(26:58):
there was quote a controversial new transgender flag that promotes
grooming and pedophilia and it had a coming out party
at the White House. They actually put this on and
kept pounding this story punchline. Fox took the identical flag
and wrapped it around a giant version of its corporate
logo at a Fox corporate event last year, Big Giant
(27:22):
Fox letters several feet high, wrapped in exactly the same
flag that Fox says promotes grooming in pedophilia. Fox wearned
nothing from the dominion case. The network on the company
need to be metaphorically burned to the ground, happily. Happily,
they seemed to be doing that themselves. Remember the split
screen of President Biden and Trump speaking simultaneously Tuesday Night,
(27:46):
one from exile in Jersey, the other from the White House.
The one where Brian Kilmead the Dope introduced Trump as
the president. The one where the full screen graphic read
for twenty seven seconds quote wanna be dictators speaks at
the White House after having his political rival arrested. Somebody
asked about it at the White House Press briefing the
(28:07):
next day while Fox was carrying the White House Press
Briefing live, and Fox cut away for the answer, It's
they let's do a story about a giant crocodile in
a swimming pool at a house in Florida. Fox has
ousted the producer who wrote it, The Daily Beast, and separately,
Tucker Carlson reporting that Alexander McCaskill wrote that Cairn and
(28:27):
now he's kai gone. Alexander mccaskell used to be Carlson's
managing editor and senior producer. Carlson says mccaskell had been
there ten years, and Carlson claims he was thought to
be one of the most capable people in the building.
But quoting Carlson, the women who run the network panicked.
How mccaskell could not have seen this coming. How Fox
(28:48):
could not have seen this coming? I don't know. He
is mentioned in the Abbe Grosberg lawsuit against Fox for
misogyny and cute anti semitism. At least before they fired him.
They reduced him to writing the fea creaking chirrons Fox
News and a partial score Biden administration two Fox News
(29:10):
nothing two days, worst persons in the world. I have
argued before that James Thurber is the greatest American humorist,
(29:33):
and it dawns on me that the argument is not
unlike the idea that Shohei Otani of the Los Angeles
Angels is almost automatically the most valuable player in baseball
each year because he is an All Star hitter and
an All Star pitcher in the same body. James Thurber
was a brilliant writer, and in his spare time he
was an equally brilliant, almost avant garde artist in the
(29:56):
same body. His simple drawings to pick the most complex
of emotions and comedic situations. His dogs are immortal, and
then they're were his captions. Well, I can't do anything
with his drawings in a podcast, so I'll just read
and I will read you now in this episode, what
is probably his most famous story from my life in
(30:17):
hard Times, The Night the bed fell James Thurber. I
suppose that the high water mark of my youth in Columbus,
Ohio was the night the bed fell on my father.
It makes a better recitation unless, as some friends of
mine have said, one has heard it five or six times,
(30:38):
than it does a piece of writing, for it is
almost necessary to throw furniture around, shake doors, and bark
like a dog to lend the proper atmosphere and verisimilitude
to what is admittedly a somewhat incredible tale. Still, it
did take place. It happened then that my father had
(30:59):
decided to sleep in the attic one night to be
away where he could think. Mother opposed the notion strongly
because she said the old wooden bed up there was unsafe.
It was wobbly, and the heavy headboard would crash down
on Father's head in case the bed fell and kill him.
There was no dissuading him, however, and at a quarter
(31:20):
past ten, he closed the attic door behind him and
went up the narrow, twisting stairs. We later heard a'm
in his creakings as he crawled into bed. Grandfather, who
usually slept in the attic bed when he was with us,
had disappeared some days before. On those occasions, he was
usually gone six or eight days, and returned growling and
out of temper with the news that the Federal Union
(31:43):
was run by a passel of blockheads, and that the
Army of the Potomac didn't have any more chance than
a fiddler's bitch. We had visiting us at the time,
a nervous first cousin of mine named Briggs Beale, who
believed that he was likely to cease breathing when he
was asleep. It was his feeling that if he were
not awakened every hour during the night, I die of suffocation.
(32:07):
He had been accustomed to setting an alarm clock to
ring at intervals until morning, but I persuaded him to
abandon this. He slept in my room, and I told
him that I was such a light sleeper that if
anybody quit breathing in the same room with me, I
would wake instantly. He tested me the first night, which
I had suspected he would, by holding his breath after
(32:29):
my regular breathing, had convinced him I was asleep. I
was not asleep, however, and called to him. This seemed
to allay his fears a little, but he took the
precaution of putting a glass of spirits of camphor on
a little table at the head of his bed in
case I didn't arouse him until he was almost gone.
(32:50):
He said he would sniff the camphor. A powerful reviver,
Briggs was not the only member of his family who
had his crotchets. Old Aunt Melissa Belle, who could whistle
like a man with two fingers in her mouth, suffered
under the premonition that she was destined to die on
South High Street because she had been born on South
(33:10):
High Street and married on South High Street. Then there
was Aunt Sarah Schauf, who never went to bed at
night without the fear that a burglar was going to
get in and blow chloroform under her door through a
tube to avert this calamity, For she was in greater
dread of anesthetics than of losing her household goods. She
always piled her money, silverware, and other valuables in a
(33:34):
neat stack just outside her bedroom, with a note reading,
this is all I have. Please take it and do
not use your chloroform, as this is all I have.
Aunt Gracie's chauf also had a burglar phobia, but she
met it with more fortitude. She was confident that burglars
had been getting into her house every night for forty years.
(33:55):
The fact that she never missed anything was to her
no proof. To the contrary, she always claimed that she
scared them off before they could take anything by throwing
shoes ooze down the hallway. When she went to bed,
she piled where she could get at them handily, all
the shoes there were about her house. Five minutes after
she had turned off the light, she would sit up
(34:16):
in bed and say hark. Her husband, who had learned
to ignore the whole situation as long ago as nineteen
o three, would either be sound asleep or pretend to
be sound asleep. In either case he would not respond
to her tugging and pulling, so that presently she would arise,
tiptoe to the door, open it slightly, and heave a
(34:39):
shoe down the hall in one direction, and its mate
down the hall in the other direction. Some nights she
threw them all, some nights only a couple of pear.
But I am straying from the remarkable incidents that took
place during the night that the bed fell on father.
By midnight we were all in bed. The layout of
(35:00):
the rooms and the disposition of their occupants is important
to an understand of what later occurred. In the front
room upstairs, just under father's attic bedroom, where my mother
and my brother Herman, who sometimes sang in his sleep,
usually marching through Georgia or onward Christian soldiers, briggs Beale
and myself were in a room adjoining this one. My
(35:23):
brother Roy was in a room across the hall from ours,
and our bull terrier Wrecks slept in the hall. My
bed was an army cot, one of those affairs which
were made wide enough to sleep on comfortably only by
putting up flat with the middle section the two sides
which ordinarily hang down like the sideboards of a drop
leaf table. When these sides are up, it is perilous
(35:46):
to roll too far toward the edge, for then the
cot is likely to tip completely over, bringing the whole
bed down on top of one with a tremendous banging crash. This,
in fact, is precisely what happened about two o'clock in
the morning. It was my mother who, in rec hauling
the scene later first referred to it as the night
(36:07):
the bedfellow on your father, Always a deep sleeper and
slow to arouse, I had lied to Briggs. I was
at first unconscious of what had happened when the ironcot
rolled me onto the floor and toppled over on me.
It left me still warmly bundled up and unheard, for
the bed rested above me like a canopy. Hence I
(36:29):
did not wake up, only reached the edge of consciousness
and went back. The racket, however, instantly awakened my mother
in the next room, who came to the immediate conclusion
that her worst dread was realized. The big wooden bed
upstairs had fallen on father. She therefore screamed, let's go
to your poor father. It was this shout, rather than
(36:51):
the noise of my cot falling. That awakened Herman in
the same room with her. He thought that mother had
become for no apparent reason, hysterical. You're all right, Mama,
he shouted, trying to calm her. They exchanged shout for
shout for perhaps ten seconds. Let's go to your poor father,
and you're all right. That woke up Briggs. By this
(37:14):
time I was conscious of what was going on in
a vague way, but did not yet realize that I
was under my bed instead of on it. Briggs, awakening
in the midst of loud shouts of fear and apprehension,
came to the quick conclusion that he was suffocating and
that we were all trying to bring him out. With
a low moan, he grasped the glass of camphor at
(37:38):
the head of his bed, and instead of sniffing it,
he poured it over himself. The room reeked of camphor
ugh ah choked Briggs like a drowning man, for he
had almost succeeded in stopping his breath under the deluge
of pungent spirits. He leaped out of bed and groped
toward the open window, but he came up against one
(38:00):
that was closed. With his hand, he beat out the glass,
and I could hear it crash and tinkle on the
alleyway below. It was at this juncture that I, in
trying to get up, had the uncanny sensation of feeling
my bed above me foggy with sleep. I now suspected,
in my turn that the whole uproar was being made
(38:21):
in a frantic endeavor to extricate me from what must
be an unheard of and perilous situation. Get me out
of this, I bawled, Get me out. I think I
had the night marrish belief that I was entombed in
a mine. Gasp Briggs, floundering in his camphor. By this time,
my mother, still shouting, pursued by Hermann, still shouting, was
(38:43):
trying to open the door to the attic in order
to go up and get my father's body out of
the wreckage. The door was stuck, however, and would not yield.
Her frantic pulls on it only added to the general
banging and confusion. Roy and the dog were now up,
the one shouting questions, the other barking. Farthest away and
(39:06):
soundest sleeper of all had by this time been awakened
by the battering on the attic door. He decided that
the house was on fire. Oh, comeing, okay, he wailed
in a slow, sleepy voice. It took him many minutes
to regain full consciousness. My mother, still believing he was
caught under the bed, detected in his I'm coming, the
(39:29):
mournful resigned note of one who was preparing to meet
his maker. He's dying, she shouted. I'm all right. Briggs
yelled to reassure her. I'm all right. He still believed
that it was his own closeness to death that was
worrying Mother. I found at last the light switch in
my room, unlocked the door, and Briggs and I joined
(39:49):
the others at the attic door. The dog, who never
did like Briggs, jumped for him, assuming that he was
the culprit in whatever was going on, and Roy had
to throw Rex and hold him. We could hear Father
crawling out of the bed upstairs. Roy pulled the attic
door open with a mighty jerk, and Father came down
the stairs, sleepy and irritable, but safe and sound. My
(40:12):
mother began to weep when she saw him. Rex began
to howl, What in the name of God is going
on here, asked father. The situation was finally put together
like a giant gigsaw puzzle. Father caught a cold from
prowling around in his bare feet, but there were no
(40:34):
other bad results. I'm glad, said Mother, who always looked
on the bright side of things, that your grandfather wasn't here.
(40:57):
I've done all the damage I can do here. Countdown
has come to you from the Vin Scully Studio at
the world headquarters of the Old Women Broadcasting Empire in
New York. Here are the credits. Most of the music
was arranged, produced and performed by Brian Ray and John
Phillip Shanel. They are the Countdown musical directors. All orchestration
and keyboards by John Phillip Shanel, Guitars, bass and drums
by Brian Ray, produced by Tko Brothers. Other Beethoven selections
(41:20):
have been arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed.
The sports music is the Olderman theme from ESPN two
and it was written by Mitch Warren Davis CURTISYVESPN Inc.
Musical comments by Nancy Fauss, the best baseball stadium organist ever.
Even when I talk over her, iur announced her today
was my friend Tony Korneiser. Everything else is pretty much
(41:41):
my fault. So that's countdown for this, the eight hundred
and ninety second day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup
against the democratically elected government of the United States. Arrest
him again while we still can. The next scheduled countdown
is Monday. Till then, I'm Keith Olberman. Good morning, good afternoon,
good night, and good luck.
Speaker 3 (42:01):
Food for everyone.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. A
man who is his own lawyer has a fool for
a client. A man who has a non lawyer as
(00:28):
his lawyer has a fool in the mirror. Trump not
only missed the chance to avoid his arrest and prosecution
for compromising national security because he ignored his lawyers and
instead relied on the legal guidance of a liberal arts
major who isn't a lawyer named Tom Fitten. But he
is clearly still ignoring his lawyers and instead relying on
(00:50):
this Tom Fitton, whose only connection to the law is
that the right wing nuisance factory he runs is named
quote judicial Watch, and there is reason to believe Trump
relied on Fitten again last night when he demanded that
the Department of Justice give him back the documents he stole,
(01:10):
the ones that could send him to jail for the
rest of his life. At ten thirty five am Eastern yesterday,
Judicial Watch tweeted at Wall Street Journal quote from an
attorney insisting that quote the Presidential Records Act allows the
president to decide what records to return and what records
to keep at the end of his presidency. The archives
(01:30):
and Records administration can't do anything about it. I know
about it because I'm the lawyer who lost the Clinton
sock drawer case. A few hours later, Fitten retweeted that,
and then at five to ten pm Eastern, Trump posted quote,
So now that everyone understands that the Presidential Records Act
(01:51):
plus the Clinton socks case totally exonerated me, when are
they going to drop all charges against me, apologize and
return everything that was illegally taken. The answer, as any
lawyer or sane layperson could tell you, is they're not.
(02:12):
The Presidential Records Act does not exonerate Trump. Nobody understands
the species claims of exoneration. The Clinton socks case is
in irrelevant red herring, and it's not even called the
Clinton socks case. They aren't dropping the charges against Trump.
Nothing was illegally taken, and nothing is being returned to him.
(02:34):
But Trump isn't listening to that. He is listening to
Tom Fitten, pretend lawyer. At seven twenty pm Eastern, Fitten
went on Newsmax and said Trump had cooperated fully with
the Archives had returned documents. Fitten implied Trump returned all
the documents without ever actually saying all. Fitten claimed that
(02:59):
Trump was indicted because quote he didn't search properly or
hid documents from his own lawyers. You know, I didn't
think there was any persuasive evidence of that, so Trump
fully cooperated. Fitten then invoked the Clinton sock drawer case,
getting the name correct, and he said it decisively proved
that quote there was nothing anyone could do about a
(03:20):
president who took records with them and designated them as personal.
And of course that is also wildly untrue. The President
Clinton case was brought by Fitton's company in two thousand
and nine. The government had decided that some recordings for
a Clinton biography were indeed Clinton's personal property. Judicial Watch
(03:42):
sued to get them declared government property so it could
then claim Clinton had broken a law. The judge laughed
Judicial Watch out of court. So, in Tom Fitton's world,
Judicial Watch lost that case, not because Judicial Watch was
wrong on the law and they suck, but because no
president could ever be kept from keeping anything and everything
(04:04):
all time. You can picture this Fitton explaining this to Trump,
and Trump's beady little eyes glazing over to the point
where he couldn't even remember the full name of the
case the Clinton sock drawer case, because at five whole words,
it was way too long to imprint on Trump's malformed mind.
(04:26):
And Trump can still only remember four of the words,
and he keeps calling it the Clinton socks case because
Clinton had a cat named Socks, and Trump's brain does
not work properly. Besides which, he was distracted by what
Fitton was saying. The only thing he really wanted to
hear that he could keep the documents, that the documents
(04:47):
were his, his, his, his quote. Trump time and again
rejected the advice from lawyers and advisors who urged him
to cooperate, wrote The Washington Post Wednesday, in its story
about the attorney he had hired for a flat three
million dollars, Christopher Kaisse, who last October told Trump to
(05:08):
make a deal with the Justice Department whereby he would
really return all the documents in exchange for a guarantee
there'd be no charges quote, and instead took the advice
Tom Fitten offered. Advisers said Trump would often cite Fitten
to others, and Fitten told some of Trump's lawyers that
Trump could keep the documents if, like me, you were
(05:31):
thrown over last weekend, when Politico reported that Trump did
not think he would take a plea deal in this case,
but quote, he left open the possibility of doing so
where they pay me some damages. Unquote, I think I've
got a pretty good idea. Who did not tell him
that that was not the kind of plea deal they
(05:53):
were going to offer. At the core of all this,
of course, is the statement Trump has repeated again and
again in private and in public, and he made it
again at five ten pm yesterday on social media. Those
are his documents. When will you give back his documents
to him? They are his, not yours, not governments. No
(06:17):
law makes difference. He held them, have name on them,
put them in box, not that box, this box. This
is existential to Trump, to quote the Bugs money cartoon
about Daffy Duck and the Treasure of Ali Baba. It's mine,
you understand, mine all mine. Get back in there, down down, down,
go go go mine mind mine. If none of this
(06:40):
still makes any sense to you, congratulations, you have passed
the first screening test for good mental health. The New
York Times yesterday explained in depth the reference to Trump's
beautiful mind boxes that when it appeared in the indictment
document mystified so many while the rest of us immediately thought, uh,
(07:01):
the Russell Crowe movie. It was a difference, wrote The
Times to the title of a book and movie depicting
the life of John F. Nash Junior, the mathematician with
schizophrenia played in the film by Russell Crowe, who covered
his office with newspaper clippings, believing they held a Russian
code he needed to crack. The phrase had a specific connotation,
(07:24):
The aids employed at the Times wrote, to capture a
type of organized chaos that mister Trump insisted on the
collection and transportation of a blizzard of newspapers and official
documents that he kept close and that seemed to give
him a sense of security. One former White House official,
who was granted anonymity to describe the situation, said that
(07:45):
while the materials were disorganized, mister Trump would notice if
somebody had riffled through them, or they were not arranged
in a particular way. It was the person said, how
quote his mind worked, unquote, oh boy. In other words,
Trump kept dozens of boxes of stuff, dozens and dozens
(08:09):
and dozens of boxes of stuff, all of it seemingly
packed randomly yet he could tell you in which box
any specific document or artifact could be located. And crazier still,
if somebody took, say the seventy ninth item from the
top in the twenty third box, but they moved it
(08:30):
so it became the one hundred and twenty ninth item
from the top in that box, Trump would know. Trump
would know that his papers had been messed with. Quote.
He could point to specific boxes that he wanted to
take with him on Air Force one when he was
traveling and declined to take others. The Times added, appearing
aware of the contents inside the boxes he chose. Both
(08:54):
officials said, I have been saying this and writing this
since the year twenty sixteen as a rhetorical question. Could
Trump pass a sanity test? This is not just scary though,
on the sanity insanity level, and it's plenty scary on
that level. There's a reason that the fifty eighth word
in the Times pieces quote schizophrenia. It is also curtains
(09:19):
for Trump because this literally obsessive, compulsive awareness of exactly
where each one of thousands of documents would be inside
dozens and dozens of boxes means there is not one
chance Trump took any document out of the White House
by accident, and not one chance Trump didn't know where
those documents were at Mary Lago, and not one chance
(09:41):
Trump didn't know where the ones he hid from the
government and then from his attorney wound up in that situation.
The defendant is going to need a really, really good
lawyer to have any chance of not dying in prison. Instead,
he has Tom Fitten. It's mine, you understand mine? Oh mine,
(10:05):
Get back in there, down down, down, go go go
mine my mind. There is other Trump business to review
as well, Some of it important, some of it just weird,
not that weird. Human events like judicial Watch and outfits
seemingly created to harass President Clinton in the nineties. Reported
(10:27):
that after his arraignment, but before his speech at Bedminster
Tuesday night, Trump quote attempted to call into Fox News
in the eight pm block. The request was denied by Fox.
Me I'm thinking Trump called collect Forbes has done other
math Quote. From twenty seventeen to twenty twenty two, and
(10:48):
Trump had access to classified documents, initially as president and
ultimately as a formal official living at the club the
Mari Lago. People applied for temporary work permits as servers, cooks,
and housekeepers. Produced a few foreign nationals who probably weren't
screened for anything besides their skills at serving, cooking, and housekeeping.
(11:10):
Just a few flitting in and out of mari A Lago,
in and out of Florida, in and out of the
United States, all of them coming and going in perfectly
nice people. Only a few, only three hundred and eighty.
Only three hundred and eighty foreign national temp workers at
mari A Lago from TPM, another hint that someday we
(11:31):
will learn the full extent of Rudy Giuliani's weirdness, but
not yet. He has been sued for defamation by the
Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss, and thanks
to filings in that case, TPM has discovered that during
his part of one of the many Trump coup attempts
in twenty twenty, Giuliani used the email address are Helen
(11:53):
zero five two eight at Gmail. A spokesman explains Helen
was the name of Rudy's late mother. He does not
explain why another email address has turned up in the filings,
Lucy three four one three at hushmail dot com, but
I would refer you to that videotape that we all
here in New York we knew about, but apparently his
(12:13):
news elsewhere. It's from a skit for a roast of
Giuliani at a charity event in the year two thousand
and In it, Juliani is dressed in full drag, I
mean full drag and using a falsetto, and he has
fake big breasts and a guy comes in and kisses
Juliani between the fake breasts, and the guy is Donald Trump.
(12:37):
And if you don't believe me, go look it up
on YouTube. And what was that again about schizophrenia? And
from the through the looking glass world of the GOP,
in which whatever Trump is accused of, Biden has had
to have done it first and worst. The FBI whistle
blower Barisma Foreign oligarch seventeen audio recordings rumor report allegation
(12:59):
tip this continues to melt in gooey wonder all over
the hands of the hill Billy f Lee Bailey representative
Jamie Comer, as Sean Hannity skeptically asked Comer about hearing
the recordings or at least confirming that they exist, or
at least confirming that the Oligarch exists, and yes, I
(13:20):
said Hannity skeptically. Comer admitted last night on Fox that
nobody has heard from the Oligarch in three years. Three years,
no contact with the guy who allegedly has the tape
that allegedly says this and allegedly is of these people
and allegedly allegedly allegedly And Comer still had a better
(13:43):
time on TV than did Senator Ron Johnson On Newsmax,
The Blonde news model t Johnson up perfectly on this
non story, non reality, and Johnson whiffed.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
If indeed the seventeen audio tapes exist, it would be
in effect, really a smoking gun for the big guy.
So I want to ask you first, Senator, do you
think they exist? And if he has how to obtain them?
Speaker 3 (14:11):
We don't know.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
And you know, Senna Grassley has never said they exist.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
He just said that there's.
Speaker 4 (14:16):
An FBI report on a confidential human source. In that
confidential human source says that the person who were talking
to you said that he taped he recorded seventeen times,
fifteen times, one hundred twice with the Joe Biden.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
But we don't know. That's one ugly Johnson, right, there.
And lastly, in the least surprising Trump's story of all time,
at least to anybody who knew him before, we have
the coda to his carefully staged fake post indictment and
birthday party at the Cuban Bakery Versaias in Miami on
(14:52):
Tuesday afternoon. Turns out it was not as carefully staged
as it might have been, as cameras rolled and Trump
apologists pawned and they sang him Happy Birthday, and only
one journal actually asked a question. Trump suddenly shouted food
for everyone, Food for everyone. You'll notice he did not
(15:15):
add on me, because it wasn't. The Miami New Times
reporting that moments after that shout, Trump left the Versias
Bakery without paying a dime. It was Ron philip Kowski
who said what many of us were thinking, that the
last person to promise the ordinary people free food at
(15:36):
Versaillas and then stick them with the bill was Marie Antoinette.
And look how good that turned out for her. And yes,
there are two different pronunciations. In France, it's Versailles or Versailles.
In Miami it's Versaias. Also of interest, here the wheels
(15:58):
are coming off at Fox They're continuing outrage at a
new Pride flag at the White House, which they say
is there to encourage grooming and pedophilia. They're actually reporting this.
Turns out Fox News did not know that the identical
flag was used last year at a Fox corporate event. Oops.
(16:19):
Just say oops and get out. That's next. This is
countdown food for everyone.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
This is countdown with Keith Olberman, my crazy friend. This
is Sports Center. Wait, check that not anymore. This is
(16:51):
Countdown with Keith Olberman in sports Spiking the football. Everybody
knows what that means.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Everybody knows the term, as used in football and as
used in life. The football player generally credited with inventing
spiking the football has died. Homer Jones was an underappreciated
star with the worst of the New York Giants teams. Ever,
in the late nineteen sixties, he averaged twenty two point
three yards per catch, which is still the NFL record. Quote.
(17:23):
I had always said that when I made my first touchdown,
I was going to throw the ball in the stands,
Homer Jones said about the day on October seventeenth, nineteen
sixty five, when he pulled down.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
An earl Morale throw for.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
An eighty nine yard TD against Philadelphia. They changed the
rules in the off season to I think a five
hundred dollars fine for throwing the ball into the stands.
And as I crossed the goal line. My intention had
always been to throw that ball into the stands, but
I thought about the five hundred dollars and I threw
it on the ground. So that was the original spike
right there. Spiking the football was designed to save five
(17:57):
hundred dollars. Homer Jones was eighty two from baseball shock
after remarks from Commissioner Rob Manfred about the Oakland maybe
Las Vegas A's, and if Rob Manfred can still shock you,
he's really said something stupid. In fact, he said a
lot of things that are something stupid. Understand that for
at least five years, the A's have dragged their feet
(18:20):
and starved their franchise in order to justify moving out
of town. But that's not how Rob Manfred sees it.
Asked about the fans, Manfred told reporters yesterday, quote, I
feel sorry for the fans in Oakland. I do not
like this outcome. I understand why they feel the way
they do. He then suddenly pivoted. The real question is
what is it Oakland was prepared to do. There is
(18:42):
no Oakland offer. Okay, they never got to a point
where they had a plan to build a stadium, which
is just simply Rob Manfred, lying flat out lying Oakland
repeatedly present an A's owner John Fisher, with offers to
build a new stadium. Asked about unanimous studies of stadium
construction proving that new ballparks do not generate jobs or
(19:05):
economic growth, Banford answered, I love academics. They're great. Take
the areas where baseball stadiums had been built. Look at
what was around Truest Park in Atlanta before that was built.
Academics can say whatever they want. A Rob Manfred transferred
from le Moyne College to Cornell and then got a
law degree at Harvard, and he never fails to mention
(19:27):
this never so bad news, Rob academics. You are a
product of academics. Secondly, one economist said he could show
me four hours worth of formulas proving that new ballparks
do not create growth. They just shift jobs and businesses
from one part of an area or city to another
part of the same area or city. But he said,
(19:49):
This is the easier explanation. If new ballparks actually generated
more money for anybody, team owners would build all the
new ballparks themselves and keep the money. That's what owners do.
But the real shock in what Rob Manfred said was
when he in insulted the Oakland fans who are trying
to keep their team and their city. They held a
(20:09):
reverse boycott Tuesday night and got twenty seven, seven hundred
and fifty nine people to show up to see the
worst team in baseball in probably the last fifteen years.
Previous attendance in Oakland's Tuesday night games this season had
been four thousand. Rob Manfred's reaction, I mean it was great.
It's great to see what is this year almost an
(20:30):
average Major League Baseball crowd in the facility for one night.
That's a great thing. It's one thing to be condescending
if you're smart, which Rob Manfred isn't. It's one thing
to be arrogant if you do your job well, which
Rob Manfred isn't. The one thing to be snarky, of course,
if you're honest, which Rob Manfred isn't. But let's just
(20:50):
say he is all those things. If the A's do
move out of Oakland, there will be an entire fan
base there without any team, a baseball fan base that
as recently as twenty fourteen drew two million fans in
one season into a crap shack stadium. Now, if the
A's move, you're gonna lose a lot of those people forever.
(21:11):
But that crap shack ballpark is exactly fifteen miles from
another major League baseball stadium with another major League team
called the San Francisco Giants, And ordinarily you would be
at least pretending to show those fans some empathy in Oakland,
because the San Francisco Giants are down nine hundred thousand
fans a year from their glory days just a decade agoing,
(21:34):
maybe maybe you could convince some of those disgruntled, orphaned
A's fans to keep buying your product over there in
San Francisco, which is what you would try to do
if you were smart. As noted above, the Commissioner of
Baseball isn't thank you, Nancy Faust. You can't stop Nancy Faust.
(22:26):
You can only hope to contain her. Golf told you so.
They're not phrasing it this way, but the sale of
the PGA golf tour to the investment arm of the
Saudi Arabian government will be held up at least a year.
The Department of Justice has reportedly advised the PGA it
will investigate the so called merger with Live Golf on
anti trust grounds. The DOJ was already investigating just the
(22:50):
PGA on anti trust grounds. The alleged merger was announced
last week, and since then, not only has a Senate
Subcommittee on Homeland Security announced a probe, now the DOJ
has announced its separate probe. European anti trust investigators arensidering
yet a third probe. But the commissioner of the PGA
tour has virtually disappeared due to a quote medical situation
(23:13):
which required him to take a leave of absence just
before the start of the US Open in La yesterday. Now,
a top golf writer is suggesting the commissioner, who thought
the PGA Lives Saudi deal would be well received in
golf circles. He says the commissioner will not resume his duties.
Nobody is saying what ails Commissioner J Monahan, But I'm
betting on a case of tertiary surprise since he is
(23:36):
dealing with the Saudis. I guess we have to assume
there is the possibility. That's what ailing Commissioner Jay Monaghan
is bone sawing machines still ahead on countdown. It would
(24:00):
make a classic scene in a great movie. I hope
just by reading it I can do it. Justice Fridays
with Thurber and The Night the Bed Fell. Next, first,
the daily roundup of the miscrants, morons and Dunning Kruger
effect specimens who constitute today's worst persons in the world.
Le bronze right wing troll and advocate for a transgender purge.
(24:22):
Michael Knowles, the former quote actor unquote who portrayed a
gay man having sex in a movie with other men.
Downloads must be down for him because he's now announced
that quote the Pride flag is offensive to all normal
people unquote and should be banned quote because it's evil
and degenerate, and quote I want our civilization to be
(24:44):
as socially conservative as we were in twelve twenty, before
all the modern ideology started corroding our civilization. So the
year twelve twenty, he actually said, twelve twenty, where were
you and what did you enjoy? On January first, twelve
twenty before Europeans came to America, and when life expectancy
(25:08):
in Europe was thirty to thirty five years. So you
heard him, everybody off the continent go home and knowles
by the way, with that aged span thirty to thirty
five years, life expectancy NOLES is thirty three. So wrap
it up, boy, here done? Runner up? Pat, say Jack?
I told you so? Did I tell you so? Do
you see what happens? Do you see what happens?
Speaker 3 (25:29):
Larry?
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Pat say Jack announced the other day's retiring from Wheel
of Fortune, and everybody issued in naudlin weepy farewells. And
I said, God, I'm glad he's gone. And I said
he's a schmuck. And what do we find out from
Channel four in Detroit. Pat Sajack is now the chairman
of the board of Trustees of Hillsdale College in Michigan.
(25:51):
Sound familiar, well. Hillsdale takes no government money, It adbuys
by no government regulations, and when it was challenged on
its diversity, its president said people had come to the
campus looking for quote dark one. Jinny Thomas ran the
speakers series at Hillsdale. Clarence Thomas gave the commencement one year.
Ron DeSantis and Mike Fence and Christy Nome have been
(26:14):
pushing the charter prep schools Hillsdale's trying to establish around
the country, and the one in South Dakota would teach
about the World War Two service of Conservative South Dakota
Governor Joe Foss, but not the World War Two service
of and he was a genuine hero. Liberal South Dakota
Senator George McGovern pat say Jack is chairman of the
(26:35):
board of trustees of this indoctrination factory. But the good
news is Hillsdale's influence is still so on the periphery
that he has been chairman since twenty nineteen and most
people only found out about it yesterday. But the winner
is Fox quote news unquote with a tuffer still running
with this pride flag at the White House nonsense suggesting
(26:58):
there was quote a controversial new transgender flag that promotes
grooming and pedophilia and it had a coming out party
at the White House. They actually put this on and
kept pounding this story punchline. Fox took the identical flag
and wrapped it around a giant version of its corporate
logo at a Fox corporate event last year, Big Giant
(27:22):
Fox letters several feet high, wrapped in exactly the same
flag that Fox says promotes grooming in pedophilia. Fox wearned
nothing from the dominion case. The network on the company
need to be metaphorically burned to the ground, happily. Happily,
they seemed to be doing that themselves. Remember the split
screen of President Biden and Trump speaking simultaneously Tuesday Night,
(27:46):
one from exile in Jersey, the other from the White House.
The one where Brian Kilmead the Dope introduced Trump as
the president. The one where the full screen graphic read
for twenty seven seconds quote wanna be dictators speaks at
the White House after having his political rival arrested. Somebody
asked about it at the White House Press briefing the
(28:07):
next day while Fox was carrying the White House Press
Briefing live, and Fox cut away for the answer, It's
they let's do a story about a giant crocodile in
a swimming pool at a house in Florida. Fox has
ousted the producer who wrote it, The Daily Beast, and separately,
Tucker Carlson reporting that Alexander McCaskill wrote that Cairn and
(28:27):
now he's kai gone. Alexander mccaskell used to be Carlson's
managing editor and senior producer. Carlson says mccaskell had been
there ten years, and Carlson claims he was thought to
be one of the most capable people in the building.
But quoting Carlson, the women who run the network panicked.
How mccaskell could not have seen this coming. How Fox
(28:48):
could not have seen this coming? I don't know. He
is mentioned in the Abbe Grosberg lawsuit against Fox for
misogyny and cute anti semitism. At least before they fired him.
They reduced him to writing the fea creaking chirrons Fox
News and a partial score Biden administration two Fox News
(29:10):
nothing two days, worst persons in the world. I have
argued before that James Thurber is the greatest American humorist,
(29:33):
and it dawns on me that the argument is not
unlike the idea that Shohei Otani of the Los Angeles
Angels is almost automatically the most valuable player in baseball
each year because he is an All Star hitter and
an All Star pitcher in the same body. James Thurber
was a brilliant writer, and in his spare time he
was an equally brilliant, almost avant garde artist in the
(29:56):
same body. His simple drawings to pick the most complex
of emotions and comedic situations. His dogs are immortal, and
then they're were his captions. Well, I can't do anything
with his drawings in a podcast, so I'll just read
and I will read you now in this episode, what
is probably his most famous story from my life in
(30:17):
hard Times, The Night the bed fell James Thurber. I
suppose that the high water mark of my youth in Columbus,
Ohio was the night the bed fell on my father.
It makes a better recitation unless, as some friends of
mine have said, one has heard it five or six times,
(30:38):
than it does a piece of writing, for it is
almost necessary to throw furniture around, shake doors, and bark
like a dog to lend the proper atmosphere and verisimilitude
to what is admittedly a somewhat incredible tale. Still, it
did take place. It happened then that my father had
(30:59):
decided to sleep in the attic one night to be
away where he could think. Mother opposed the notion strongly
because she said the old wooden bed up there was unsafe.
It was wobbly, and the heavy headboard would crash down
on Father's head in case the bed fell and kill him.
There was no dissuading him, however, and at a quarter
(31:20):
past ten, he closed the attic door behind him and
went up the narrow, twisting stairs. We later heard a'm
in his creakings as he crawled into bed. Grandfather, who
usually slept in the attic bed when he was with us,
had disappeared some days before. On those occasions, he was
usually gone six or eight days, and returned growling and
out of temper with the news that the Federal Union
(31:43):
was run by a passel of blockheads, and that the
Army of the Potomac didn't have any more chance than
a fiddler's bitch. We had visiting us at the time,
a nervous first cousin of mine named Briggs Beale, who
believed that he was likely to cease breathing when he
was asleep. It was his feeling that if he were
not awakened every hour during the night, I die of suffocation.
(32:07):
He had been accustomed to setting an alarm clock to
ring at intervals until morning, but I persuaded him to
abandon this. He slept in my room, and I told
him that I was such a light sleeper that if
anybody quit breathing in the same room with me, I
would wake instantly. He tested me the first night, which
I had suspected he would, by holding his breath after
(32:29):
my regular breathing, had convinced him I was asleep. I
was not asleep, however, and called to him. This seemed
to allay his fears a little, but he took the
precaution of putting a glass of spirits of camphor on
a little table at the head of his bed in
case I didn't arouse him until he was almost gone.
(32:50):
He said he would sniff the camphor. A powerful reviver,
Briggs was not the only member of his family who
had his crotchets. Old Aunt Melissa Belle, who could whistle
like a man with two fingers in her mouth, suffered
under the premonition that she was destined to die on
South High Street because she had been born on South
(33:10):
High Street and married on South High Street. Then there
was Aunt Sarah Schauf, who never went to bed at
night without the fear that a burglar was going to
get in and blow chloroform under her door through a
tube to avert this calamity, For she was in greater
dread of anesthetics than of losing her household goods. She
always piled her money, silverware, and other valuables in a
(33:34):
neat stack just outside her bedroom, with a note reading,
this is all I have. Please take it and do
not use your chloroform, as this is all I have.
Aunt Gracie's chauf also had a burglar phobia, but she
met it with more fortitude. She was confident that burglars
had been getting into her house every night for forty years.
(33:55):
The fact that she never missed anything was to her
no proof. To the contrary, she always claimed that she
scared them off before they could take anything by throwing
shoes ooze down the hallway. When she went to bed,
she piled where she could get at them handily, all
the shoes there were about her house. Five minutes after
she had turned off the light, she would sit up
(34:16):
in bed and say hark. Her husband, who had learned
to ignore the whole situation as long ago as nineteen
o three, would either be sound asleep or pretend to
be sound asleep. In either case he would not respond
to her tugging and pulling, so that presently she would arise,
tiptoe to the door, open it slightly, and heave a
(34:39):
shoe down the hall in one direction, and its mate
down the hall in the other direction. Some nights she
threw them all, some nights only a couple of pear.
But I am straying from the remarkable incidents that took
place during the night that the bed fell on father.
By midnight we were all in bed. The layout of
(35:00):
the rooms and the disposition of their occupants is important
to an understand of what later occurred. In the front
room upstairs, just under father's attic bedroom, where my mother
and my brother Herman, who sometimes sang in his sleep,
usually marching through Georgia or onward Christian soldiers, briggs Beale
and myself were in a room adjoining this one. My
(35:23):
brother Roy was in a room across the hall from ours,
and our bull terrier Wrecks slept in the hall. My
bed was an army cot, one of those affairs which
were made wide enough to sleep on comfortably only by
putting up flat with the middle section the two sides
which ordinarily hang down like the sideboards of a drop
leaf table. When these sides are up, it is perilous
(35:46):
to roll too far toward the edge, for then the
cot is likely to tip completely over, bringing the whole
bed down on top of one with a tremendous banging crash. This,
in fact, is precisely what happened about two o'clock in
the morning. It was my mother who, in rec hauling
the scene later first referred to it as the night
(36:07):
the bedfellow on your father, Always a deep sleeper and
slow to arouse, I had lied to Briggs. I was
at first unconscious of what had happened when the ironcot
rolled me onto the floor and toppled over on me.
It left me still warmly bundled up and unheard, for
the bed rested above me like a canopy. Hence I
(36:29):
did not wake up, only reached the edge of consciousness
and went back. The racket, however, instantly awakened my mother
in the next room, who came to the immediate conclusion
that her worst dread was realized. The big wooden bed
upstairs had fallen on father. She therefore screamed, let's go
to your poor father. It was this shout, rather than
(36:51):
the noise of my cot falling. That awakened Herman in
the same room with her. He thought that mother had
become for no apparent reason, hysterical. You're all right, Mama,
he shouted, trying to calm her. They exchanged shout for
shout for perhaps ten seconds. Let's go to your poor father,
and you're all right. That woke up Briggs. By this
(37:14):
time I was conscious of what was going on in
a vague way, but did not yet realize that I
was under my bed instead of on it. Briggs, awakening
in the midst of loud shouts of fear and apprehension,
came to the quick conclusion that he was suffocating and
that we were all trying to bring him out. With
a low moan, he grasped the glass of camphor at
(37:38):
the head of his bed, and instead of sniffing it,
he poured it over himself. The room reeked of camphor
ugh ah choked Briggs like a drowning man, for he
had almost succeeded in stopping his breath under the deluge
of pungent spirits. He leaped out of bed and groped
toward the open window, but he came up against one
(38:00):
that was closed. With his hand, he beat out the glass,
and I could hear it crash and tinkle on the
alleyway below. It was at this juncture that I, in
trying to get up, had the uncanny sensation of feeling
my bed above me foggy with sleep. I now suspected,
in my turn that the whole uproar was being made
(38:21):
in a frantic endeavor to extricate me from what must
be an unheard of and perilous situation. Get me out
of this, I bawled, Get me out. I think I
had the night marrish belief that I was entombed in
a mine. Gasp Briggs, floundering in his camphor. By this time,
my mother, still shouting, pursued by Hermann, still shouting, was
(38:43):
trying to open the door to the attic in order
to go up and get my father's body out of
the wreckage. The door was stuck, however, and would not yield.
Her frantic pulls on it only added to the general
banging and confusion. Roy and the dog were now up,
the one shouting questions, the other barking. Farthest away and
(39:06):
soundest sleeper of all had by this time been awakened
by the battering on the attic door. He decided that
the house was on fire. Oh, comeing, okay, he wailed
in a slow, sleepy voice. It took him many minutes
to regain full consciousness. My mother, still believing he was
caught under the bed, detected in his I'm coming, the
(39:29):
mournful resigned note of one who was preparing to meet
his maker. He's dying, she shouted. I'm all right. Briggs
yelled to reassure her. I'm all right. He still believed
that it was his own closeness to death that was
worrying Mother. I found at last the light switch in
my room, unlocked the door, and Briggs and I joined
(39:49):
the others at the attic door. The dog, who never
did like Briggs, jumped for him, assuming that he was
the culprit in whatever was going on, and Roy had
to throw Rex and hold him. We could hear Father
crawling out of the bed upstairs. Roy pulled the attic
door open with a mighty jerk, and Father came down
the stairs, sleepy and irritable, but safe and sound. My
(40:12):
mother began to weep when she saw him. Rex began
to howl, What in the name of God is going
on here, asked father. The situation was finally put together
like a giant gigsaw puzzle. Father caught a cold from
prowling around in his bare feet, but there were no
(40:34):
other bad results. I'm glad, said Mother, who always looked
on the bright side of things, that your grandfather wasn't here.
(40:57):
I've done all the damage I can do here. Countdown
has come to you from the Vin Scully Studio at
the world headquarters of the Old Women Broadcasting Empire in
New York. Here are the credits. Most of the music
was arranged, produced and performed by Brian Ray and John
Phillip Shanel. They are the Countdown musical directors. All orchestration
and keyboards by John Phillip Shanel, Guitars, bass and drums
by Brian Ray, produced by Tko Brothers. Other Beethoven selections
(41:20):
have been arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed.
The sports music is the Olderman theme from ESPN two
and it was written by Mitch Warren Davis CURTISYVESPN Inc.
Musical comments by Nancy Fauss, the best baseball stadium organist ever.
Even when I talk over her, iur announced her today
was my friend Tony Korneiser. Everything else is pretty much
(41:41):
my fault. So that's countdown for this, the eight hundred
and ninety second day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup
against the democratically elected government of the United States. Arrest
him again while we still can. The next scheduled countdown
is Monday. Till then, I'm Keith Olberman. Good morning, good afternoon,
good night, and good luck.
Speaker 3 (42:01):
Food for everyone.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
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