TRY AND STOP ME: THE NEW TRUMP 3RD TERM PLOT - 5.8.25

SEASON 3 EPISODE 124: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: The new Trump plot to beg, borrow, or steal a third term has dropped (that makes four different) and it follows the others in that a) somebody besides Trump has suggested it AND b) they've made it seem harmless AND c) they've made it seem like Trump has nothing to do with it and probably won't do it anyway AND d) they'll leave it to the will of the people to decide to convince him to, reluctantly, violate the Constitution.

The twist in this new one is, it's positioned as: "The Constitution is Unconstitutional!" - namely, that because only the presidency is term-limited among federal offices, this must be invalid and overturned. Not that Trump wants it to be overturned. No, YOU want it overturned. Not that HE wants to stay on. But YOU will want him to.

People are still not taking it seriously and still see the 22nd Amendment as a bulwark against any possibility of it happening. I'll review the other three plots and the fact that they've been working on them since at least 2017, and why you should never ever keep your eye off their machinations, nor forget the Trump Political Mantra: I'm going to do it - TRY AND STOP ME.

STATE SECRETS PRIVILEGE: Trump and Stephen Miller are so scared that they won't get away with renditioning Kilmar Abrego Garcia that they have now thrown up the "State Secrets" crap to further stall his return. And they're talking about kidnapping people off our streets and sending them to Libya or Ukraine. And Trump's craziness continues to double as we get the back story on the movie tariffs and a redux on windmills and it makes me mad enough to SING ABOUT THE WINDMILLS IN TRUMP'S MIND.

B-Block (49:30) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The far right's open racism is on display as a Minnesota woman calls a five-year old the N-word and a million dollars is raised to defend her. Laura Loomer employs one of Hitler's first catchphrases. And they so distrust the Deputy Secretary of State that they won't let him touch the thermostat in his office.

C-Block (58:22) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: This time of year in 1997 I saw a ghost. I know who he was. I know why he was there. I know why he was silently laughing at me. And I did what he wanted me to do. His name was Glenn Corneliess and there's a reason the new facilities of WVBR-FM in Ithaca, N.Y. are the Olbermann-Corneliess studios.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Try

(00:24):
and Stop Me. Another plot to evade the twenty second
Amendment and enable Trump to seek a third term has
floated up to the surface of the MAGA Latrine. The
constitutional term limit on presidents, this one goes, is in
fact unconstitutional because no other federal office is term limited.

(00:50):
I'll go into depth about this in a moment. But Americans,
especially displaced Americans in other countries and people here who
are not really paying attention but think they know the Constitution,
are not taking any of this seriously. But the twenty
second Amendment, said an expatriate to me the other day.

(01:10):
I sighed, I said, Trump will try. He has to.
He cannot leave office. He will be prosecuted if he
leaves office. He will be jailed by somebody. If he
leaves office, he will die in prison if he leaves office,
Trump twenty twenty eight. The methodology ultimately will be I'm

(01:35):
doing it, try and stop me, just like everything else.
And I might add he is still talking about it
Trump on Sunday. So many people want me to do it.
I have never had requests so strong as that. But
it's something that to the best of mine knowledge, you're

(01:56):
not allowed to do. But there are many people selling
the twenty twenty eight hat. But this is not something
I'm looking to do. I'm looking to have four great years.
It's best of my knowledge, not allowed, not something I'm
looking to do. The unspoken conclusion of all that is,

(02:18):
of course, But if you all really want me to, okay,
I guess I'll make the sacrifice. I'll come off the
golf course two or three times a week, but I'm
not going to come up with the plot. I'm not
going to make it happen. You're going to have to
do it. And then I'll pretend I don't want to,

(02:40):
but I'll let you convince me, just to show how
easy this is, how easy this evil is. You do
not have to be a constitutional scholar to come up
with a way for Trump, reluctantly, of course, to evade
the Constitution. I mean it's not just that you don't

(03:01):
have to be a constitutional scholar. You don't have to
have a fourth grade degree to come up with something.
Give the proverbial monkeys enough time and enough typewriters, and
they will come up with an idea. No one better
fits that analogy than Greg Kelly of Newsmax, a bonehead
so dense that he makes Jesse Waters of Fox look like, well,

(03:26):
there's so many choices. Greg Kelly makes Jesse Waters of
Fox look like he's not Jesse Waters.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
That twenty second amendment about not being able to run
for a third term just might be unconstitutional. Nobody else
has term limits in the federal government. The Court, the
Supreme Court. You're there for a lightetime. If you want it,
you can stay as long as you like. How about
the United States Senate? Those guys run for reelection. There

(03:55):
is absolutely no term limits whatsoever. It's a big deal
to change the constitution, but they did it. However, it
just might be unconstitutional itself.

Speaker 3 (04:08):
President Trump, it should be looked at.

Speaker 2 (04:11):
This is a way the deep State keeps the presidency
under their thumb.

Speaker 3 (04:15):
Only two terms.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
Nobody else in federal government other than the vice president,
I guess is no. I don't know if it applies
to the vice president anyway. President Trump is not running
in twenty twenty eight. But this looks to me and
some other constitutional well some constitutional heavyweights.

Speaker 3 (04:32):
I'm not one. There's something to be done here, and
it should be explored.

Speaker 1 (04:37):
So there it is a guy coming off is kind
of rambling moron, just throwing it out there like it
just occurred to him, rather than somebody handed this to
him and said, read it in that stupid way of yours.
Make it seem like it's your idea, the way Trump
does it. Oh, I'm not trying to seek a third term,

(04:57):
but everybody else wants me to, So I guess I'm
going to have to. I don't really know the law.
We'll just add ask other people as if he has
had less than four hundred committees working on this in
secret since the first election, since the first election. There

(05:18):
it is the newest Trump third term plot. Trump can
run for a third term because the Constitution is unconstitutional.
And what phrase could better sum up this last decade
in terms of the rules and the regulations and the
laws and the impermeable boundaries and the guardrails. What could

(05:39):
better sum that up than the concept just expressed by
Greg Kelly that the constitution is unconstitutional in the olden times,
say something like that on TV, even on TV like Newsmax,
say the Constitution is unconstitutional and you would have been
fired before the show was over. Say it now and

(06:02):
instead of getting fired, some trump Ist will instead, I
don't know, start a signal chat or something about your
newest outline for their biggest scam ever and their most
evil scam ever. There's one other new and frightening development
on the eternal Trump plot front. It pertains to the

(06:26):
arrest of Judge Dougan and the ominous follow up from
Deucy the Younger of Fox to the White House Press
Secretary MS Caroline Liar. Deucey asked, would you ever arrest
a federal judge or even a Supreme Court justice? And
Caroline Levitt Liar answered, I'd refer you to the DOJ

(06:48):
for individuals they are looking at, but then concluded, anyone
who is breaking the law or obstructing federal law enforcement
officials is putting themselves at risk of being prosecuted. Absolutely so.
Ultimately that means if Trump does go along with one
of these many plots to stay on past twenty twenty

(07:10):
eight and again, whether he's successful or ruinous, or half
the country is underwater, it doesn't matter. This is not
about us. This is about him keeping his sad ass
out of prison. If he tries something and say it
gets just for the sake of process. As far as
the Supreme Court and they rule against him, he will

(07:33):
arrest them. She just said it, because they will simply
put it in terms of obstructing federal law enforcement officials
and denying the unique executive authority of the executive which
is how they have read the Constitution, even though the
founding fathers, many of whom then became president, did not

(07:54):
view it that way, viewed it exactly the opposite way.
But clearly they were right when they wrote what they wrote,
but wrong in how they applied it. All right, let's
go back to the beginning. Remember the five main rules
of Trump's various plots to get around the Constitution and
not leave office alive. And then I'll go through the

(08:17):
already extant three plots I haven't mentioned yet.

Speaker 4 (08:20):
Rule one.

Speaker 1 (08:21):
He will try this, he has to. He might be stopped,
let's hope, so he might die in office another convenient
exit route. But he will try this. If he is
alive in the year twenty twenty nine, he will try
to stay in office, and he may have begun that

(08:42):
in the election of twenty twenty eight. Main Rule number two,
he will try multiple routes again. I see at least
four of them. Now I mentioned the Constitution is unconstitutional
because there aren't term limits for everybody one that has
just been invented. Three, he will use surrogates to keep
his hands clean. The goal to this, of all else,

(09:05):
other than staying in office, is to make sure that
as few people as possible really think he's behind this
plot to erase the Constitution. It must be others. He
must be responding to the will of the people, even
if he's the one who has purchased the will of
those people. But he did say in a slip that

(09:28):
I bet he never makes again. He did say that
he knew that there were methods that would allow him
to stay in office past two terms that others are
quote studying. This was a major, major accidental confession, and
again I would not expect him to do it again,
no matter how crazy he is, and he's lots of crazy.

(09:51):
Mainline rule number four. His only involvement in this, at
least publicly, at least superficially, will be to thank everyone
for making this day necessary and that lawmakers. In other words,
his Republican prostitutes will change things if he's done enough

(10:12):
good while in office, meaning if He's made them enough
money and gotten them enough power. Why is he doing
this money and power? Why are they supporting him? Power
and money? Are there any other possibilities? Well, there's power,
money and money. Power the fifth main rule to consider here.

(10:34):
If nothing else works, he will ultimately turn to a
fake emergency to stay in office. I have been questioned
if he would do a fake emergency to stop the
midterms if it was clear he's going to lose and
potentially be impeached and potentially be convicted in the Senate,
if the midterms by this time next year looks so
bad that they might lose the Senate and actually get

(10:56):
past the threshold to convict him, Well, would he stop
the election? Would he go to that degree? Well, he
would have to admit to losing in advance, which he
would never do, and he would essentially be putting himself
at maximum risk for others, for the congressman who would
not be elected in that scenario. And he never does

(11:17):
that because nobody else actually exists in his mind. But
the fake emergency is there, as it was ready to
go in the dear Departed days of twenty twenty one.
On January sixth, for him and him alone. If you
remember that he is the only person in the world
down at the base of his feral brain. Down there,

(11:40):
at the bottom of the reptile spine, there is Donald Trump,
and the rest of us are just at our best
extras in his movie. Most of us are just cardboard
cutouts furniture that can be moved around on rollers. Now
to the methods. I mentioned that one from Greg Kelly,

(12:02):
you can't term limited president if nobody else term limited.
The oldest of the four methods has now been formalized
and the Bigs, the Trump whore from Tennessee who sits
in Congress, actually introduced a constitutional amendment to twist the
meaning of the twenty second Amendment into not a two
term limit, but a two consecutive term limit. This is

(12:25):
the oldest of the arguments. They have been putting this
one out since early twenty twenty three. The Biggs Amendment
reads The proposed amendment specifies that no person shall be
elected to the office of the President one more than
three times two for any additional term after being elected
to two consecutive terms, or three more than twice after

(12:50):
having served as president for more than two years of
a term, to which some other person was elected president.
For example, if a president died after serving for one
year and the vice president became president for the remaining
three years of the term, that person may subsequently be
elected president no more than two times. In other words,
this would be an amendment that allows Trump to run

(13:12):
for a third term, but not Obama or even Bill Clinton.
Of course, the idea of doing this by a new
amendment to supersede the twenty second Amendment's term limitation is
just them playing nice. Somebody somewhere has a sentimental feeling

(13:33):
for Hamilton and Jefferson and John Adams and everybody else,
the founding fathers. Again, as I said the other day,
it was a surprise to me when Trump recognized the
name John Adams when he was questioned about John Adams.
And we are a country of laws and not men.
He knew John Adams because he knew there was a
picture of him somewhere on the wall. The headline in

(13:57):
the magazine The American Conservative read Trump twenty twenty eight,
and the sub had read the second Amendment is an
arbitrary restraint on presidents who serve non consecutive terms and
on democracy itself. This is from nearly two years ago,

(14:19):
the Republicans started quote joking and quote tweaking the Libs
and quote triggering the left with variations on this idea
ever since. Trump mused in twenty eighteen that he was
owed an additional term, a third term, because during his
first term he had been unfairly preoccupied with defending his

(14:42):
you know, criminal acts intended to overthrow the democracy. Then
there was that jokey animation of a Trump twenty twenty
campaign sign followed by a Trump twenty twenty four campaign sign,
followed by a Trump twenty twenty eight campaign sign followed
by a Trump twenty thirty two campaign sign, and on
and on and on until it would have been a

(15:04):
one one hundred and two year old Trump running in
the year twenty forty eight, and nobody was wondering if
he'd be dead by then and running from a coffin,
because all they were doing was trying to own the Libs.
Except that's not what they're doing. He is going to try.

(15:26):
Let me quote the author of that article in The
American Conservative. His name is, I swear to Jesus, his
name is Peter tung It ton gu E tte tungue
It tung It on Trump Trump by tung It the quote,

(15:49):
Trump's re emergence as the Republican nominee in twenty twenty
four is a triumph of democracy. Not only did Trump
secure the nomination following his defeat in twenty twenty a
rather incredible feat in and of itself, but did so
in spite of every obstacle the mainstream media, the Republican establishment,
and the law fair apparatus have put in his way. Well,

(16:11):
you can look at it that way, or you can
point out that the leading opponents to his candidacy inside
the Republican Party were Ron DeSantis an idiot, and Nicky Haley,
an even bigger idiot. Continuing from mister tung Its tonguing
of Trump, Trump, however, makes an even more forceful ethical

(16:32):
argument against the twenty second Amendment and for its repeal.
If a man who once was president returns after a
series of years to stand again for the office and
proved so popular as to earn a second non consecutive term,
as Trump seems bound to when they wrote this, to
deny him the right to run for a second consecutive
term cuts against basic fair play. Unquote ah, the familiar

(17:00):
no fair constitutional argument. I think that was Alexander Hamill
to new thought that one up, or maybe it was
George Hamilton. Quote. If by twenty twenty eight, voters feel
Trump has done a poor job, they can pick another candidate.
But if they feel he has delivered on his promises,
why should they be denied the freedom to choose him

(17:21):
once more? You see where this is going. Trump overcame obstacles,
or if you prefer, Trump overcame mediocrity, and he weaponized
stupidity and hatred on his own behalf. Therefore the constitution
doesn't apply to him, especially them pesky term limits. In

(17:41):
that twenty second Amendment, Republican primary voters chose him, writes
The American Conservative, because they damn well felt like it,
and they count. If you want to choose Obama or
Bill Clinton, you can't because write something fast, write something
why they can't the twenty second Amendment two full terms

(18:06):
or one and a half if you're serving out another
president's term quote sounds reasonable enough, especially in light of
FDR's hold on the office. Yet those who supported the
amendment more than seventy years ago could not have foreseen
the prospect of a one term president who lost the office,
but who later regained it in a subsequent election. The

(18:27):
author then immediately turns to that time that that exact
thing happened Grover Cleveland all the way back in eighteen
ninety two. No one could have ever seen this happening,
except I'm going to mention that it already had happened
when they passed this amendment. The author leaves out that's
mister Tungue it that while he may see this as

(18:49):
something from prehistory Grover Cleveland, that is, when dinosaurs still
had the vote or something. The twenty second Amendment is
surprisingly modern, and yet it reaches back into our past
so far that when it was introduced was by a
Michigan congressman named Earl Mitchner and Earl Mitchener. When he
was sixteen years old and preparing to go to University

(19:12):
of Michigan law school, Grover Cleveland was elected President of
the United States. The guy who wrote the twenty second
Amendment was already an adult or a near adult during
Grover Cleveland's non consecutive terms, so in Congressman Mitchener's lifetime,

(19:34):
he had not only seen Cleveland re elected after four
years in the wilderness as an ex president, regaining the
office four years later. But he'd also seen former President
Theodore Roosevelt one and three quarters terms try for a
third non consecutive term in nineteen twelve, And he'd seen
the Republican bid to draft the former President Calvin Coolidge

(19:56):
to run for a third non consecutive term instead of
President Hoover in nineteen thirty two. And he had seen
the former President who Hoover try for a nomination for
a second non consecutive term in nineteen thirty six and
again in nineteen forty oh And he Mischner, the author
of the twenty second Amendment, had seen Franklin Roosevelt run
for a third term and get it, and run for

(20:18):
a fourth term and then get it. And he had
seen William Jennings Bryan get the Democratic nomination in eighteen
ninety six and nineteen hundred and, having not had enough,
run for it again in nineteen oh eight and began
to try for a fourth time at it in nineteen twelve. Mitchner,
the congressman behind presidential term limits, only saw all of

(20:41):
that unfold in one lifetime. But nobody, according to mister Tungatt,
could have seen Trump serving two non consecutive terms, nobody
except the guy who wrote the rule against three terms
if you're non consecutive or any other kind of president.

(21:01):
Once again, if they do this wrong, it would not apply.
Just to suddenly Barack Obama, who will be sixty seven
in the year twenty twenty eight, and Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton,
who is still and would presumably still be two months
younger than Trump, they would be eligible to run for
their own third terms. Not so fast. What the trumpists

(21:24):
are setting up in this scenario is a Supreme Court
ruling that only presidents who've served two non consecutive terms
can seek a third, as if that made any possible difference.
Lisa Needham at the site Public Notice connects the final

(21:45):
dots here in case you think this is just some
guy named tung It with the kind of life you
must have had if your name was tung It, expressing
the frustrations of his impossible existence by writing this bullshit,
it's not. He wrote it in The American Conservative, which,
as Lisa Needam notes, is a quote partner en quote

(22:07):
of Project twenty twenty five. So that's plot one. Plot
two from Joel A. Ready of the Cornerstone Law firm
and his site, which also features pieces on security deposit
laws in Pennsylvania and courtroom movies to watch. This spring

(22:31):
thinks you don't have to have an amendment or any
alteration of the twenty second Amendment because quote the twenty
second Amendment doesn't say what you think it says. This
piece offers not only ways to ignore the twenty second Amendment,
like the it doesn't say you can't serve a third
term and only says you can't be elected to a
third term, but it provides additional workarounds like electing an

(22:55):
entirely different Republican ticket in twenty twenty eight and making
Trump Speaker of the House and then getting the new
electees to both resign immediately, which would make Speaker of
the House Trump president without violating the constitution. Plot three.
And the purists here will say this is actually just

(23:16):
plot two. A. I like to think of it as
a third, separate plot because it's important to remember that
as stupid as all this sounds, this is deadly serious.
This is the end of democracy, in its embryonic stage,
in its fetal heartbeat stage, in its personhood stage. One
of these infants in the womb will come out like

(23:41):
Rosemary's Baby. Plot number three, the one minute presidency of JD. Vance. JD.
Vance runs with some clown as his vice president, somebody
who pays enough money. I mean, pick them, you're your
choice here. My favorite would be Mike Lindell. The ticket

(24:04):
Advance and Lindell gets elected and the Republicans retain the
Senate and the House in twenty twenty eight, and the
vance inaugural address on January twenty, twenty twenty nine consists
of my fellow Americans. Vice President Lindell has resigned. I
hereby advice the House and Senate, I am nominating as
the new Vice president, Donald J. Trump. The Senate and

(24:28):
the House convene same day, maybe because this wasn't planned
in advance, and they each approved Trump as vice president. Whereupon,
the moment that's sign sealed and delivered, Vance resigns as president.
Trump accedes to the presidency having never been elected. And
of course we could never actually have this happen in

(24:48):
real life. We could never have a president who wasn't
at least elected vice president. Oh right, Gerald Ford, Now
there is a problem with this one. The last sentence
of the twelfth Amendment is about the Electoral College, and
the twelfth last sentence reads, quote, no person constitutionally ineligible

(25:09):
to the office of president shall be eligible to that
of Vice President of the United States. Well, they are
already looking at that in the phony Bologne argument from
the fascists. Here is that phrase constitutionally ineligible. The word constitutionally.
They say that covers only the presidential eligibility terms in
the Constitution, not the logical ones. And those terms are

(25:34):
natural born citizen at least thirty five years old, resident
for at least fourteen years. And what's even better from
their perspective is they are quoting an NYU law professor
who pointed all this out that the terms ineligible constitutionally
ineligible only mean those three things citizenship, age, residency. The

(25:57):
guy who pointed this out did so in the year
two thousand and three because he was trying to get
a former president to run for vice president, and that
former president he wanted to be the vice president was
Bill Clinton. The fourth one I've mentioned, the new one

(26:17):
up is down, left is right, fiction is truth, The
Constitution is itself unconstitutional. I'm sorry I've enjoyed parts of this.
There is something to be said in unraveling how they
have packaged this, how they have gotten around America to

(26:40):
create new America. They have not been stopped. This has
been going since twenty fifteen, with varying degrees of success.
But this is the ultimate test, and they are bound
to try it, in Trump's case, to literally die trying
if need be. I will again quote Tim Snyder, and

(27:03):
I have been quoting him so long that he he
used to be at Yale and now he's at the
University of Toronto because he got out while the getting
out was good. Quote Triump is the classic dictatorial position.
He needs to die in bed holding all executive power
to stay out of prison. This means that he will

(27:26):
do whatever he can to gain power, and once in power,
will do all that he can to never let it go.
This is a basic incentive structure which underlies everything else.
It is entirely inconsistent with democracy. So if somebody tells

(27:50):
you the fascists are joking about Trump in twenty twenty eight,
or if somebody tells you, or if you believe the
twenty second Amendment flat out precludes this, what are you
all talking about? Just remember the only one on the right,
the only one of the undead pretending to not be

(28:11):
doing this right now, pretending to not be trying to
get Trump a third term, or we don't even know
what their reasons would be for further terms thereafter. The
only one pretending to not be doing this, the only
one pretending not to be in on the plot, the
greatest crime in American history. The only one pretending not

(28:33):
to be involved is Trump itself, and Trump itself denying
this is an essential ingredient to the plot. Trump here
is Julius Caesar refusing the crown, or Richard the Third
refusing office. And remember what Tim Snyder says, and remember

(28:56):
what I say, and God help you, remember what Greg
Kelly says, and remember this above all else. The Trump
political baseline mantra is the Hitler political baseline. Mantra is
the Mao political baseline. Mantra is the pole Pot political

(29:18):
baseline mantra quote, I'm going to do it, Try and
stop me. The bad news among Thursday's headlines is Trump's nosferatu.

(29:55):
Stephen Miller is still trying to ignore and bypass the courts.
The good news is Miller is clearly too scared to
just go ahead and do it. He's trying to create bullshit,
legit sounding reasons to allow him to bypass the courts
and yet not go to prison for contempt. As a result,
the government has now invoked the state secrets privilege in

(30:19):
the Kilmar Abrego Garcia abduction case. It clearly it is crap,
but they've been voked it anyway, and Judge Zennis has
only given them until Monday to file twenty five pages
or less on what the f they think they are doing,
and only until a week from tomorrow to prepare for
an in person hearing about what the f they are doing. Clearly,

(30:42):
since the most they've actually been able to dig up
on this wrongly renditioned man that their own DOJ admitted
was wrongly renditioned, so they fired the guy who admitted
he was wrongly renditioned was the possibility that he was
a driver for undocumented workers going from one state to another.
There is no chance there are any state secrets involved

(31:04):
in this case, and the point of this is the
point of all Trump's court cases, to stall, to fill
up the calendar with hearing after hearing and then appeal
after appeal so they can run out the clock. Presumably
both on the orders to return Abrego Garcia and all
the possible contempt charges piling up against Stephen Miller and

(31:24):
the leaders at Ice and hopefully that witch Christy Nome
now with eight new action dress up outfits. As usual,
when faced with the six foot thick walls of the
actual remaining laws and actual remaining American principles, Trump and
his minion and especially this Eichmann level nerd monster Miller,

(31:45):
are simply stepping on the gas and headed right for
the walls. They have not only installed these new hurdles
in the Abrego Garcia case, but they are now kidnapping
and renditioning immigrants to Libya at least they want to
to a hellhole of a prison in a country in
a state of full on civil war. They are basically

(32:06):
sending people who, if nothing else, have a right to
do process into a dangerous prison inside a dangerous country
where there is every chance they can get killed inside
the prison or outside the prison. They also apparently wanted
to send other people they have kidnapped off our streets

(32:27):
to Ukraine. This while the memo is out confirming reporting
that America's intelligence agencies, now run by trumpists, had concluded
that the entire excuse for all of this from kilmar
Garcia through the Libya airliners is crap that there is
no basis for President Scrooge McDuck to invoke the Alien

(32:49):
Enemies Act because of the Venezuelan based gang trend Aragua,
which must really piss Trump off because he had just
managed to somehow learn to say the Intel community's conclusion,
the Venezuelan govern does not control that gang, and the
country's dictator Maduro also does not control that gang. Thus,

(33:11):
any gang members here are not part of some kind
of invasion, and thus they are not subject to the
Alien Enemies Act. Thus, if the laws and the courts
still have any purpose or influence here, Trump has to
bring them all back and either let them go or
give them the same hearings they would have gotten under
Biden and every preceding president. This also raises the stakes

(33:36):
for Miller and increases the chances that Judge Zennis or
Judge Boseburg in the other case, may actually take the
step of putting one of these bastards behind bars, at
least briefly, for their continuing and now escalating contempt of court.
Before the memo confirming all this was declassified and released.
The New York Times reported the conclusions in the memo

(33:59):
in March, and Trump's response, naturally, was to threaten prosecution,
not of Stephen Miller, nor of Tom Homan, nor of
Christy Nome, but of those who leaked it and those
who printed it. Miller, Holman, Gnome, and of course Trump
are Unamerican bastards, and if we do not stop them now,
we will soon be deprived of the ability to do so.

(34:23):
The only alien enemies here right now are the members
and supporters of this rogue and immoral Trump dictatorship. Naturally,
the Trump response to the whole thing, promote Stephen Miller
to National Security Advisor, hasn't happened yet expected to within months,
just as the response in trump Land to his asinine

(34:46):
idea of an Anschluss in Canada and something akin to
Mussolini invading Ethiopia in Greenland is for Trump to have
the brain dead Director of National subpar Intelligence, Tulsey skunk
Streak Gabbard, issued what is called a collection emphasis message
to the chiefs of the various intel services to ramp

(35:08):
up spying on Greenland, among other things. This will cue
a search of both Greenland and Denmark for people there
who want Trump to invade Greenland and annex it should
be a pretty long search producing a pretty short list.
But at underscores, we may wake up one morning to

(35:28):
find out that overnight Trump has invaded Greenland and given
the knee jerk reaction of so many in this country
who view the world as a video game. I don't
know what happens after that, besides a lot of the
same blood and guts, flag waving and accusations of disloyalty
that followed Bush attacking Iraq, and once again, like Iraq,

(35:51):
this invasion would be in the interests of private industry.
And no, we didn't go into Iraq for oil. We
went into Iraq so we could have a war in Iraq,
so we could use in Iraq all the weapons made
by the Halliburtons of this country and employ all the
Eric Prince mercenaries. Now we would be deploying to Greenland,
maybe Denmark in order to get elon Musk his rare earths.

(36:17):
Donald Trump does not know what rare earths are. He
barely knows where Earth is. This is the same Musk
for whom Trump is now pressuring countries facing tariffs to
adopt Starlink, per the Washington Post, to bribe their way
out of tariffs that way. This is the same Musk

(36:38):
who reportedly just told a Milken conference that he expects
a SpaceX mission to get to Mars next year and
maybe a manned mission to Mars by twenty twenty eight.
Cynics would say it is safe to assume Musk is
high as a kite all the time, and he may
be high as a kite and be the somewhat perturbed

(37:01):
victim of that reported botched penile implant. But even if
neither is true, that is exactly the way Elon Musk acts.
In any event, this is not the first time. It
is of special note that Musk keeps making these Mars predictions,
and so far there is not one indication he's taken

(37:25):
even the preliminary steps to make any of them come true.
He made the next year prediction in March. He made
it in December twenty twenty when he said the unmanned
mission would occur within six years. In fact, quote, if
we get lucky, maybe four. He made the prediction in

(37:45):
September twenty sixteen, adding the competing people on Mars quote
might kind of be in the ten year range. He
also predicted a million humans on Mars by twenty fifty,
and I'll just note for perspective, twenty fifty is now
only as far ahead as two thousand is behind, and

(38:05):
that nowhere did he predict that those million humans on
Mars by twenty fifty would still be alive. Maybe that's
Trump's next location for renditioning immigrants. So crazy Musk has
already blown through his first prediction. If we're lucky, that
would have been December twenty twenty four. As it is,

(38:27):
he sent nothing to Mars. The fastest possible trip from
here to Mars is seven months in length. More likely
it's eight nine, ten months. Give him the benefit of
the doubt. Here. The unmanned mission he's talking about must
take off by next year, by next May, to get

(38:47):
there by twenty twenty six, a year from now. It
has to take off right now. Musk can't launch a
cyber truck that your average American can't peel apart with
their bare hands. But yeah, let's attack Greenland so this
guy can get some rare earths. And if we're lucky,

(39:10):
Trump will think we are going to Greenland to rescue
the seventies band Rare Earth, and that they'll perform. I
just want to celebrate and their cover of get Ready
at the White House while he and Musk dance, or
more correctly, while he and Musk make those spasmodic, embarrassing
body movements. That is as close as either one of

(39:33):
them will ever get to dancing. Meanwhile, Generalissimo Donaldo Trumpo
is still nuts. There is a kind of brilliance in

(39:55):
the SoundBite I am about to play for you asked
about his blasphemous image in which he depicted himself as pope.
He posted that image himself, he goes in a matter
of seconds from A Catholics can't take a joke to B.

(40:15):
There's no problem here with Catholics. It's fake news. To C,
I didn't do it. To D, maybe it was AI.
To E, I know nothing about this. To F, I
just saw it for the first time. To G even
though I know nothing about it and I had nothing
to do with it, and I just saw it. I

(40:36):
know Millenia liked it. This is magnificent in a way,
completely insane, but magnificent.

Speaker 4 (40:47):
Catholics, we're not so happy about the image of you
looking like the Pope.

Speaker 5 (40:52):
Oh, I see.

Speaker 6 (40:53):
You mean they can't take a joke. You don't mean
the Catholics, you mean the fake news media, not.

Speaker 3 (40:58):
The Catholics loved it.

Speaker 1 (40:59):
I had nothing to do with it.

Speaker 6 (41:01):
Somebody made up a picture of me dressed like the
Pope and put it out on the internet. That's not
me that did it. I have no idea where it
came from. Maybe it was Ai, but I know nothing
about it. I just saw it last evening. Actually, my
wife thought it was cute. She said, isn't that nice?

Speaker 1 (41:20):
It makes your head spin. Of course Trump's head is
already spinning like an exorcist. And Trump confirmed he met
with the insurrectionist Henry Tarrio with that metro sexual beard,
and he told Tario to thank the January sixth insurrectionists.

(41:42):
And then there is the insanity of him wanting to
reopen Alcatraz, closed in nineteen sixty three because it was
no longer viable, which followed by six hours Channel twenty
six the PBS station in Miami playing the movie Escape
from Alcatraz, and all of a sudden, Trump believes what
he sees on PBS. Are there any films about Just

(42:07):
to pick a topic, at random presidential suicide. Oh right,
the Salvador Allende documentary. Hey, Channel twenty six, can you
run the Salvador Allende documentary? And he wants one hundred
percent tariffs on foreign made films and at least technically
all films are foreign made, and John Voight gave him

(42:28):
that terrify idea, and Trump doesn't realize. John Voight's career
peaked when he played Milo Minderbinder in Catch twenty two
in nineteen frickin seventy. The process is always the same.
Tell Trump he's great, Tell Trump a lie he wants
people to believe, and he will then do whatever you
suggest next. Gee, mister president, I'm John Voight. You're great.

(42:50):
Ever seen the Salvador Allende documentary? And of course the
likeliest outcome to all of that will be no American
made films get booked in any other country in the world,
and prices here go up like egg prices went up,
though he lied and said they went down. And then

(43:11):
there was the part about rationing the dolls so your
child only gets three and his military parade and the
cancer causing wind mills in his mind.

Speaker 5 (43:25):
Hey, wait a minute, oh, Nancy, like the gas that
costs two dollars, like eighty three percent of eggs, never
ending or beginning.

Speaker 1 (43:43):
Like a tariff on your legs, like a prison on
an island that was closed in sixty three, Like a
ninety dollars sir, charge on any movie you might see,
like rationing the doll so your child only gets three
mill tarily parading, but it's really just forummy, like the

(44:09):
bullshit that you find in the windmills of Trump's mine. Buh,
thank you, Nancy Faust. I have to confess I'm not
exactly sure how I turned into Bernie Sanders while singing that,

(44:32):
but there you have it. By the way, Nancy Faust
is returning this Sunday as the organist at the Chicago
White Sox game, the job she performed brilliantly for the
White Sox for forty one years. Bravo. And incidentally, Nancy
Faust immediately becomes the best player on the White Sox.

(44:53):
Also of interest, here, a Minnesota woman calls a five
year old the N word, and the lunatic right rallies
to defend the woman and raises a million dollars for her.
I don't know what we can do with all these people,
except maybe sequester them in Wyoming or somewhere for their
own safety. Also, I've seen a ghost. That's next. This

(45:19):
is Countdown, the the the.

Speaker 5 (45:22):
The do Do.

Speaker 1 (45:27):
Do Do Do Doom. Let's go take two.

Speaker 3 (45:40):
This is Countdown with Keith Oberman, my crazy friend.

Speaker 1 (46:05):
Still ahead. On this edition of Countdown. I saw ghost,
I mean really a ghost. Not only that, but I
recognized him immediately, and I knew why he was there
with me. And there was our old commercial radio station
run by Cornhill students in Anthaca, New York. And I
knew why he was there. He wanted me to save

(46:27):
the station. And on top of everything else, the ghost
was laughing at me things I promised not to tell
about ghosts. Next first, believe it or not, there's still
more new idiots talk about the roundup of the mis grants, morons,
undunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute the latest other worst

(46:48):
persons in the world, the bronze worst Shiloh Hendrix on
a playground in Minnesota. This white garbage saw a five
year old black child trying to steal from her bag.
Is not a good thing. I am not endorsing anybody
stealing from anybody's bag. But Shiloh Hendrix did what anybody

(47:10):
would do in this situation, anybody who's a racist scumbag
who shares a name with a battle started and lost
by the racist Confederate trader during the Civil War. She
called the five year old boy the N word. When
a Somali American man confronted Shiloh Hendrix, she called him
the N word. Two there's video. It went viral, and

(47:34):
the obvious then happened. Right wing groups raised seven hundred
thousand dollars for her. The goal is a million. How
because as the almost equally clownish Timpool you know, Beanie baby,
the I'm bald and I'm not proud of it guy,
how he put it quote, she's making money. This sends

(47:57):
a message to other white people stop taking racial abuse.
White guilt is largely over because in the world of
Tim Poole, who is also white garbage, it's the racist
woman named Shiloh from Minnesota who's the real victim here
because she's so oppressed because she's white. Of course, she

(48:18):
blurted out the N word because in her mind, she's
tired of all these N words who are oppressing her
by denying her the right to call them the N word.
I'm going to quote from the ken Burn Civil War documentary. Now,
Shiloh is a Hebrew word meaning peace. I wonder if

(48:39):
anybody's told Shiloh Hendrix that fact, and if so, what
she called them or what she calls Hebrews. The answer
to the latter question may be provided by our runner up,
Laura Lumer. Shiloh might use the phrase blood and soil
to them Hebrews, as did this Trump whisper and school

(48:59):
shooting denier, the one who has all that plastic melting
on her face. Lumer. Lumer best described as it is
writing about Shri Thanadar, the Indian American congressman from Michigan, who,
as I mentioned the other day, has introduced the seven
articles of impeachment against Trump. It's not enough for Lumer
and the others to lash out against the impeachment. They

(49:21):
have to attack the congressman and particularly his ethnicity, and
to pretend that their attack, their racism, is actually somebody else's.
And they're just giving these unnamed others a platform like
Trump talking about a third term. I don't want this,
they want it. This is Lumer quote. They are embarrassed

(49:44):
by Shri Thanadar, So maybe he'll get a primary. I
don't know. I mean, if he's such a heavy immigrant community,
it'd be nice to have an American there, like a
real blood and soil American. But if we can't get
a real, true blood soil American to represent that district,
and it has to be an immigrant, there's got to

(50:05):
be at least a patriotic, pro Maga pro Trump, patriot
immigrant who lives in that country. There's a terrible hypocrisy
here on top of all the hate and the stupidity.
Laura Lumer identifies as Jewish, and she dropped two blood
and soil references in that quote. Blood and soil, of course,
is not just a Nazi rallying cry. It was one

(50:26):
of the first Nazi rallying cries from the twenties to
evoke pure blood and arians and all those things. Lumer
thinks Thanador is not all those things the Nazis and
most of today's Trumpers actually believe Lumer is not. But
she hasn't found that out about her quote, friends yet,

(50:49):
because she thinks the current twenties are somehow different from
the previous twenties. Oh boy, is she in't for a surprise,
but the winner the worst. How do you top these
racists stupidity? Christopher lan Deputy Secretary of State, the guy
who theoretically is dumber than Marco Rubio. Apparently even others

(51:13):
in the Trump Government of the Undead realize that the
Deputy Secretary of State, Christopher Landau is a moron. He
tweeted this alongside a photo of a thermostat. As Deputy
Secretary of State, the number two official in our state department,
You'd think I'd at least be free to set the
temperature in my own office, where I spend some twelve

(51:35):
hours a day. Well, you'd be wrong. The thermostat is
encased in a locked container so that I have to
call someone if it's too hot or cold. Seems like
I should be trusted with this awesome responsibility, but I'll
guess I'll have to work my way up to that level.
Ps He adds. I asked the state official photographer who

(51:57):
is in my office for another event to take this picture,
because I'm also not allowed to bring a cell phone
or camera into my own home office. If you want
to blame somebody for the lack of trust, for the
need to lock up the thermostat. Well, you've got to
keep the thermostat locked, because otherwise Elon Musk will steal

(52:21):
it and try to build a rocket out of it
or attach it to his car and charge you twelve
thousand dollars for it. If you want to blame somebody
about the cell phone and the camera, Christopher, go talk
to Mike Waltz, Pete the keg heg Seth, get him
on a signal chat and ask them about this, or

(52:43):
Rubio your boss. But it's interesting because Landou is a
fascinating case. It may be just about him. It's possible
that in the other offices they don't lock up the thermostats,
lock up your thermostats. Landau's in town. He clerked for
Clarence Thomas and Scalia, but he went to Harvard, which,

(53:06):
as you know, his boss Trump is trying to put
out of business. So every day he should go into
that office of his and check not his thermostat, but
should check whether his bosses hate him that day or
love him that day. They must issue a calendar or
something along with instructions on who gets to touch the

(53:26):
Holy thermist out of Antioch and who, like Chris Landau,
does not Christopher, he runs with scissors Landau two days
other worse Porthidden. Go to the number one story on

(53:58):
the countdown and my favorite topic me and I once
saw a ghost. I have never talked about this before,
not publicly anyway, but I once saw a ghost. And
it wasn't one of these vague things where you're not
sure what you're seeing or who you're seeing. I know
exactly who the ghost was. I will get to this story,

(54:20):
but first, the setup requires a cassette tape I found
that dates from February nineteen seventy seven. And the damnedest
thing about this cassette tape is, if you were familiar
at all with cassette tapes, they used to have little
pinholes at the top, little pieces of plastic that you
were supposed to break out or break off or punch

(54:41):
through after you were done recording on the tape so
you could not accidentally record over the tape. And when
I found this cassette the other day, these little things
that you had to make not intact anymore, were still intact.
So this tape has survived not only intact since nineteen
seventy seven, but it has not been accidentally erased even
though I left it eligible to be accidentally erased every

(55:05):
day since February nineteen seventy seven, and it contains, among
other things, the voice of the ghost. The setup here
is The radio station involved is called WINR in Binghamton,
New York. The man you will hear calling himself Tom
Daniels is actually named Glenn Cornelius. He called himself Tom
Daniels because that's what the jingle package said, and they

(55:28):
had a variety of Tom Daniels's over the years at
WINR in Binghamton. He was our friend Glenn who worked
at WVBR, the Cornell radio station. I have mentioned m
teen thousand times on this podcast. He was going to
be the program director and tried to become the general
manager of the station. And he was my original frenemy

(55:48):
best friends. Helped me out in a thousand different situations
as I did he and we once had a fist
fight over a girl. He won the girl, and of
course that turned out to be the best thing he
ever did for me, but that's another story for another time.
As they say so, Glenn is portraying Tom Daniels, and

(56:08):
one weekend in the winter of nineteen seventy seven. He
brought his friends me, Peter shack now and Pat Lyons
that's now Patrick J. Lyons, executive Foreign Desk editor of
The New York Times. He brought the three of us
down there with him to see a real radio station,
and he put Peter and I on the air, Peter
doing a newscast and me doing the sportscast. The only

(56:30):
part of this before I play this tape that requires
a setup is the explanation of the vitamin B twelve joke.
Peter used to introduce me on the newscast at WVBR,
and he used to ask me a trivia question every Tuesday,
and got so frustrated in my always getting the answers
to his trivia questions that he changed the trivia question
from a sports trivia question to a question, the answer

(56:52):
to which was vitamin B twelve. And I didn't get it,
and it became a running joke inside the studios of
WVBR for quite a while. That's the setup. And then
there is the additional detail that Glenn Cornelius portraying Tom
Daniels on this next tape was the ghost I.

Speaker 4 (57:12):
Saw sixteen minutes after one o'clock in the morning, on
a Sunday, which is now February twentieth, nineteen hundred and
seventy seven. My name is Tom Daniels, and I have
a question for you. If I was as old as
Joe Namath's football number, how old would I be?

Speaker 3 (57:25):
Well, of course I would be twelve.

Speaker 4 (57:27):
And on that note, we'll have the sports.

Speaker 3 (57:33):
Here's Wyon r Sports.

Speaker 7 (57:35):
The Oaklona's have sol relief pitcher Paul Lindblad to the
Texas Rangers, despite Baseball Commissioner Bowie kwans edict that no
such players sales be made without his approval. Oakland owner
Charlie Finley, who likes to le jingle very much never
one of Kewan's best friends, says he'll ignore hwes ruly
and may just sell ace pitcher.

Speaker 1 (57:52):
Vital Blue too.

Speaker 7 (57:52):
Montreal expos on the sports scoreboard. Last night in the NBA,
the New York Nets came from behind to beat the
New York Knicks eighty six eighty five. It was Cleveland
ninety two Phoenix eighty eight, twenty three points and eighteen
rebounds for Jim Jones. Mac Calvin, signed as a free
agent the other day by Denver, led the Nuggets to
a one thirty three one twenty four win over Portland.
Some other scores Washington one oz five, Detroit ninety five,
Buffalo one o three, Seattle one hundred and Kansas City

(58:14):
one fifteen Houston one oh nine.

Speaker 3 (58:16):
In college hoop action.

Speaker 7 (58:18):
Anthony Roberts Pty in sixty six points as Oral Roberts
beat North Carolina A and T won ten to sixty four,
which Aitaw State ruined. Marquette coach Al McGuire's last home game,
beating the Warriors seventy five to sixty four. And some
other scores Kentucky ninety, LSU seventy six, Oregon toppling UCLA
sixty six six AS fifty five rather and it was
Michigan eighty nine Minnesota seventy on the ice. Last night

(58:39):
in the NHL, Rene ro Bear scored a late goal
lead Buffalo over Detroit two to one. The New York
Islanders smashed the Rangers by the score of five two.
Yvon Cornwaia scored two goals, including number four hundred, as
Montreal beat.

Speaker 1 (58:50):
Philly five to two.

Speaker 7 (58:51):
Rookie Bernie Federko he has a funny name, scored his
second hat trick in only two weeks of play as
Saint Louis toppled Washington Will four to one, and Derek Sanderson,
back in the NHL with Vancouver, had a goal and
an assist tonight as the Canucks beat at Lanta five
to oneis Pittsburgh in Toronto six to sixth tie in
Minnesota Beach Chicago six to two, and that's wyn r
sports great sister.

Speaker 1 (59:19):
So I will come back to that cassette from February
nineteen seventy seven later on to give you a few
more laughs. But now to the little story about how
I saw a ghost and it was Glenn. As I said, frenemies,
I think the last conversation we actually had sometime in

(59:40):
the nineteen eighties was about the fact that I graduated
on time, beating odds of probably five million to one,
and he did not graduate on time. That was probably
an even bet. But nevertheless, at the actual graduation ceremony
at Cornell with me and my cap and gown drinking
champagne at ten o'clock in the morning with all the
other graduates and just happy to get out by hook

(01:00:02):
or by crook, Glenn looked up towards me and had
the forlorn look of sadness that I can't quite describe,
and I may have given him a popular three thousand
year old Anglo Saxon gesture involving fingers. Later on, in
what I think was the last conversation we ever had,
he said he deserved that, and I said, yes, you did.

(01:00:24):
On the other hand, I shouldn't have done it. And
he said, no, you probably shouldn't have. And that was it.
That would have been somewhere in the eighties. Early in
nineteen ninety six, Glenn, who was then thirty nine years old,
died suddenly while he was giving a lecture about radio

(01:00:44):
at Katz Radio in New York. He had a hidden
heart defect that could not have been identified, certainly not then,
except in the autopsy. It killed him before he hit
the floor. And so the rest of us, Pat and
Peter and all the rest of us from that era
at Cornell at WVBR reunited recreating a film. And as always,

(01:01:06):
when you get to recreate a film, it is not
the one you want. It is, in fact the one
you want the least. And it was the big Chill.
And so we said goodbye to Glenn. And I don't
think a month has passed, maybe not a week has
passed without my thinking of him. And then there was
the time I saw him after he died. In nineteen

(01:01:28):
ninety seven, Dan Patrick and I wrote a book about
sports Center called Surprisingly Enough, This is Sports Center, and
simultaneous with its publication, accidentally with its publication, I was
invited to come back to Cornell for the first time
in fifteen years to give the graduation party, the annual
graduation party speech at the graduation dinner of the Cornell

(01:01:54):
Daily Sun newspaper, which I had worked for for one
day in nineteen seventy five before. They said, we have
to choose between us or the radio station that you
also want to work for, and I said, well that
that's damn stupid, especially since the Cornell station. The radio
station is just kind of a slight walk up the hill,
but the one to the Cornell Daily Sun newspaper is

(01:02:15):
then down a twenty minute hill and then back up
a twenty minute hill. I'm going into radio in any event.
They asked me to come up and give a speech,
and I arrived by car. I said, send a car
for me, and I brought my stuff with me and
got into the Cornell Hotel and checked in and had
some time before my speech that night, and I went

(01:02:36):
over to WVDR, where I had not been to see anybody,
not since Glenn's death, in fact, not since nineteen eighty two.
It had been fifteen years since i'd been there. Now
I had this book, I had just done the Boston
Market commercial, which made me a lot of money, and
I was and I think it was already out. Then
I was going to leave ESPN to go somewhere else

(01:02:58):
with even more money, and I was beginning to run
into tax problems. And that sounds dull and conceded, but
there's a elevance to the story. So I get it
to the radio station at WVBR to twenty seven Linden Avenue.
It had not been cleaned since my last appearance there
in nineteen eighty two, and probably had not in fact

(01:03:19):
been cleaned since my first appearance there in nineteen seventy five.
And I buzzed my way in and the first person
I saw was a man named Phil Shapiro, who was
a salesman who had come to WVBR in about nineteen
sixty seven and never left. He managed to make a living,
just barely a living, selling time on a nominally college
radio station that had advertising. I won't go into the

(01:03:41):
explanation as to why we had advertising. But Phil Shapiro
stopped and stared at me, and he said, what are
you doing here? He also did the folk show every
Sunday night, the Folk Music Live Festival, show Bound for
Glory from the law school at Cornell, and he had
one of those voices, and he did a lot of
commercials and he just had enough money to get by.

(01:04:04):
And he said, what are you doing here? And I said,
I used to work here?

Speaker 3 (01:04:07):
Remember?

Speaker 1 (01:04:07):
He said, no, of course, of course, of course we
remember you. What are you doing here now? I said, well,
I'm up here to give the speech to the Daily
Sun people. And you know that's of course I'm going
to come over here now. I walked around campus for
about five minutes and here I am, just like the
old days. He goes, no, why are you here today?
And I said, I'm not getting your point. He said,
we are holding a Board of director's emergency meeting in

(01:04:31):
one hour, and we're going to shut the radio station
down for the summer. And I said, what, You can't
shut the radio station down for the summer. It'll never
go back on the air, He said, I know, I said, well,
what happened. Well, now we go to the explanation as
to what happened. They ran out of money, but they
didn't run out of money. The place was still making

(01:04:51):
advertising money enough to make a profit every year, although
we couldn't keep the profit because of the hybrid nature
of the radio. You don't care about this part. They
had borrowed so much money in the eighties for various
capital projects that the the debt was killing the radio
station and the only solution they could come up with
was to take the radio station off the air for

(01:05:12):
the summer and then bring it back in the fall
when the students came back and there were more listeners
and therefore more profits to make, or some profits to make,
and they had a chance of paying off the debt.
And we all knew that if the radio station went
off the air, it would never go back on the air.
They would sell the license to somebody else, carve up
the money, take some sort of AM carrier, current radio signal,

(01:05:36):
and reduce this factory of broadcasters that everybody that you
could think of, whoever went to Cornell and went into broadcasting,
went through. They're going to take it off the air,
the place that I owed my entire career to, and
I sat down and listened to Phil, and he said,

(01:05:57):
let me get the general manager. And they brought out
this fella from the class of ninety eight, and we
sat down in the business office. And the business office
was really just big enough for four large desks, and
the promotion director had a desk, and I believe the
music director may have had a desk, and the program
director had a desk over in the other corner. The

(01:06:18):
fourth corner was saved for the copying machine. That's how
small a business office it was. That far corner, essentially
the upper left hand corner of this office had been
Glenn's desk, and every time, for probably two years, even
before he was program director of the radio station, when
I would go into this office, I would see Glenn

(01:06:40):
on the phone with his feed up talking to a
music rep from Los Angeles, trying to get free radio
players of various kinds and performances or records or least
or tickets to concerts or something, and ultimately to get
himself a career in the business, which I admired him for.

(01:07:00):
He was really good at it and it worked, but
I could see him then, and it occurred to me
as I sat down, to my surprise, that I could
see him now, not if I look directly at the
corner of what was his desk, but only if I
maintained my eye contact with the general manager of the

(01:07:20):
radio station and with Phil Shapiro, who was basically explaining
to me the two of them were that the radio
station was going to go out of business shortly like
forty five minutes from now, and I just happened to
wander in for the first time in literally fifteen years,
on the day they were going to vote to take
the radio station off the air. So that was Phil

(01:07:41):
Shapiro's question, what are you doing here today? I said,
I don't know. Now I begin to understand what I
was doing there, because when I did not look into
the corner that had Glenn's desk in it, I could
see him quite clearly, with his feet up on the
phone and now hanging the phone up, and now putting

(01:08:02):
his feet down, and just sort of sitting back in
the chair with his hands behind his head, rocking back
and forth in that chair and smiling and smiling more
and more broadly at me. And he was there and
I don't think I've ever told anybody about this, but
I could see him. If I snapped over and tried
to catch him, he wasn't there. If I looked at

(01:08:24):
the general manager and at Phil Shapiro, he was there.
And they began to explain to me the whole history
of the ten or fifteen year decline of the finances
of a WVBR, which apparently was the last radio station
in this country to try to go top forty for
some reason in the mid nineteen eighties. And that's where
the financial problem, which was not truly a financial problem.

(01:08:46):
If they could get rid of the debt, they'd be
making money. I mean, it sounds academic, and for my
financial cuman, which is almost nothing, it is kind of academic.
But literally, if they could just wipe out this debt,
but there was no way to wipe out the debt,
they could never get out from under it. And that
was what the meeting was about. And the votes were

(01:09:07):
there to shut the radio station down and there would
be no chance it could ever resume. It had to
stay on the air during the summer, for if no
other reason, in the summer was when the real training
was done. The people who aspired to be professionals in radio,
stayed in Ithaca, New York for the summer and were
on the air five, six days a week as disc jockeys,

(01:09:28):
as newscasters, as sportscasters, as salesmen, as running a radio
station for three months in a small town. I did
it for one summer, and it doubled my ability in
three months. And so everything I had owed to WVBR,
and I knew it, and the ghost in the corner

(01:09:51):
knew it too. And now I'm waiting for the punchline
to this how much money they have and how much
money they owe, and what the debt service is, and
how much money there is standing between them and the
apocalypse of shutting down for the summer. And I'm waiting

(01:10:12):
to hear half a million dollars, seven hundred and fifty
thousand dollars, even three hundred thousand dollars something enormous. Remember
at ESPN doing Sports Center, I never made three hundred
thousand dollars, not in the nineties, and I was the
highest paid guy doing SportsCenter. They didn't even offer me

(01:10:34):
half a million dollars to stay in nineteen ninety seven. There,
I'm not going to pay anybody to do SportsCenter for
that much money. So I'm listening, and the only thing
that occurred to me was, well, maybe maybe I can
throw some money at it and we can delay this
a couple of weeks. Maybe, because what had happened was

(01:10:56):
because of the book, which made me some money, and
that commercial when I fell off the cliff, the Boston
Market commercial which I've made, had made me some money. Two,
my tax guy had told me that I had to
find a charitable donation to make to a nonprofit of
some sort. And WVBR qualified as a nonprofit because of

(01:11:21):
this byzantine tax structure and legal status granted by it
the FCC to it in nineteen thirty nine. It had
those properties. But what good would it be if they
needed ten million dollars I had to give away, according
to my accountant, about fifty thousand dollars, or just give

(01:11:42):
it to the irs. So he said, be on the lookout.
You have about a month to make up your mind.
And I listened to this nightmare. I listened to Glenn's
radio station about to go off the air, and Peter's
radio station, and Pats radio station, and my radio station
going off the air because among other things. I hadn't
paid any attention to it for fifteen years. And Joyce

(01:12:04):
Brothers worked at that radio station, not with me, she
was some years before. And I listened to this, and
in the corner of my eye, in the corner of
the office, I could see Glenn, and I what could
not understand about this? It made absolute perfect sense to
me that Glenn Cornelius's ghost would be in the corner

(01:12:25):
of the business office at WVBR, and my first appearance
there in fifteen years, when I happened somehow to have
been driven there in one hour shy of the moment
that they were going to take the radio station off
the air. That I happened to be there that day,
I could understand why Glenn's ghost would be standing there,
or sitting there in the corner, staring at me. What
I could not understand was why he had a smile

(01:12:47):
on his face. This did not seem to make any sense.
That was the part that disturbed me, Not that I
could see him even though he had been dead for
more than a year. Not that part. It was that
he was smiling at me. That's when I cut to
the chain with Phil Shapiro and the general manager of

(01:13:07):
the radio station. I said, how much do you need
and I'm waiting for the answer three hundred and seventy
nine thousand foot and the guy goes, well, I haven't
checked it today, and I'm thinking, oh my god, it
goes up every day. Oh my god, why is Glenn
laughing at this? It can't possibly be something I can

(01:13:28):
help with. It'll be a drop in the bucket even
if I had to, he said, But I think the
last time I looked earlier in the week, it was
forty nine, nine hundred and eighty three dollars and twenty
seven cents. Now I saw Glenn's ghost burst into laughter silently.

(01:13:49):
Of course I burst into laughter full volume. I said,
say that again, hewa forty nine thousand and nine and
twenty seven cents. And I said, Okay, you're not shutting
down the radio state on my watch? Can you keep
it open until tomorrow morning? Without any help? Well, I suppose,

(01:14:15):
I said, okay, Because here's the deal. My accountant wants
me to give away fifty thousand dollars in the next month.
And I happen to be here an hour before the
meeting at which you're going to shut down because you
don't have fifty thousand dollars. So here's what I propose
to do. In addition to the fact that I had
to pay for the limo to take me up here

(01:14:38):
from New York, and I thought it was going to
be one check for the trip up and one check
for the trip back. In fact, they demanded the round
trip in advance, so when I got out of the
car an hour ago, I had to give them a
round trip fee on one check. I still have one
of my corporate checks back in the hotel, so I

(01:14:58):
have a check, a blank check, and I have a
need to give away fifty thousand dollars, which is slightly
more than you need by about thirteen bucks. So here's
what I want. I want you to rename that studio
over there where you do most of the music programming from.
I need you to rename that after Glenn and I
want to party tomorrow with Cake, and I want balloons,

(01:15:22):
and I want this announcement to run just once. You're
listening to WVBRFM ninety three point five Ithica, New York,
an Olderman broadcasting Empire station. You don't have to run
it once. And they went, what and Phil Shapiro went
white as a sheet. I said, I'm giving you the

(01:15:43):
money you need. How's that? Can you stay open until
tomorrow without it? Because I have it back in my
room and I really don't want to go over there
and come back again today. I'll come back tomorrow. I mean,
I'm not criticizing anybody. None of you are the ones
who are responsible for turning this into a top forty

(01:16:03):
radio station in nineteen eighty five. That wasn't your fault.
It's nineteen ninety six. Those people are long gone from
this radio station. I said, okay, can you can you
just not shut down my station, Glenn's radio station? Can
you just stay on the air and stay in business

(01:16:27):
till tomorrow morning? And Phil Shapiro, who I thought, was
going to faint, and I'm thinking, oh great, now there'll
be two ghosts in this room, Phil, and I think
we can handle it. What do you think? And the
general manager just looked at me, like, oh, thank god,
how did you come here today? I went, I looked
over in the corner of the room and there was
no ghost anymore. And I said, someday I'll explain it

(01:16:49):
to you. The radio station survived. They managed to keep
it open till the next day, and then we had
a party, and then they put up a plaque that
called at the Glenn Cornelius Memorial Studio. And then they
got into other problems that really were not their fault,
where we had to build them a new studio in
about two thousand and ten or so, and it has

(01:17:11):
a little bit more money circulating through my life. So
I helped them out there too, and now they operate
from a much nicer multi media facility called the Olderman
Cornelius Studios, which I claim are named after Glenn and
after my father, because my father put in such effort
to getting me into that place in the first time,
and into Cornell in the first place. But obviously it

(01:17:35):
also the other Olderman in the equation is me, but
it's Olderman Cornelius rather than Cornelius Olderman, because as I
think Glenn would have agreed with me, the damnedest part
of this would have been if somebody someday had thought
there was actually somebody named Cornelius Olderman, so we wouldn't
have that, neither he nor I, And so it is
now today the Olderman Cornelius Studios. But I saw him

(01:18:01):
laughing his ass off. Something put me in that studio
an hour before they were going to go out of
business after not being there for fifteen years, nor worrying
about their financial status. Something put me in that studio
having to give away fifty thousand dollars for tax purposes
when they needed just slightly less than that. I'm happy

(01:18:26):
to say that they spent the additional thirteen dollars on
the cake. I saw him, didn't hear them, didn't ask
him questions, didn't say anything. I saw him. And then

(01:18:52):
the other day I found this cassette.

Speaker 4 (01:18:58):
All right, that's what I like to see. A record
that's hop skipping and jumping.

Speaker 3 (01:19:02):
There, Paull the young dues. Let's listen to this, folks.
You are a wait, that wasn't your cue. Hold it.
We're not quite ready yet. Time out one. Two?

Speaker 4 (01:19:13):
Okay, wait, don't go yet. Well that's three and a
half minutes before two o'clock. We're w I at our Binghamton.
My name is Tom Daniels, and we're going off the
air in a very little while.

Speaker 3 (01:19:21):
I'll be back tomorrow.

Speaker 4 (01:19:22):
Morning and maybe at ten o'clock, and I'll be here
through four Dandy down Morgan at four o'clock.

Speaker 3 (01:19:28):
And now this message are well.

Speaker 4 (01:19:33):
The world may never recover from this. I certainly won't
ever recover from this. But Al Stewart's gonna come and
he's gonna sing a.

Speaker 3 (01:19:40):
Song, and this is entertaining. It's a nice song to
go to bit too.

Speaker 4 (01:19:43):
It's all about you're the cats mine? Yes, all right,
Hurricane list enough, Hurricane you're not listening. I'm gonna have

(01:20:07):
to take a sisive action here. A hurricane doesn't watch out.
I told you you weren't nice. Well, the views and
opinions expressed by this activity do not particularly reflect the
opinions or the views of anyone, most especially Chief or
Peter or Bat or anybody else like that. Thirteen before

(01:20:28):
one o'clock at WI n R. That was a little
bit of Hurricane Smith. Luckily not a whole lot, though
eagles are here.

Speaker 1 (01:20:47):
I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank
you for listening. Brian Ray and John Phillip Schaneille, the
musical directors have Countdown Range, produced and performed most of
our music. Mister Chanelle handled orchestration and keyboards. Mister Ray
was on the guitars, bass and drums, and it was
produced by Tko Brothers. Our satirical and pithy musical comments
are by the best baseball stadium organist ever, my accompanyous missist,

(01:21:13):
Nancy Faust. The sports music is the Ulderman theme from
ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis Curtisy of ESPN Inc.
Other music arranged and performed by No Horns allowed. My
announcer today is my friend Tony Kornheiser, and everything else was,
as ever, my fault. So that's countdown for today, Day
one hundred and nine of America held hostage. Just one

(01:21:36):
three hundred and fifty four days until the scheduled end
of his lame duck and lame brained term, unless Musk
removes him sooner, or the actuarial tables due, or we do.
The next scheduled countdown is Monday. As always, bulletins, as
the news warrants, remember, he is, as you listen to this,

(01:21:56):
laying the groundwork now to not leave office later. Also,
I want polling on a presidential recall Von't somebody do
polling on a presidential recall vote? Won't somebody think about
the polling on a presidential recall vote? Until next time?
I'm Keith Olberman, good morning, good afternoon, good night, and
good luck. All right, we're gonna try this. The windmills

(01:22:26):
of Trump's mind take one, like the gas that costs

(01:22:50):
two dollars, like eighty three percent of eggs, never ending
or beginning, like a tariff on your legs, like a
prison on an island that was closed in sixty three,
Like a ninety dollars searcharge on any movie you might see,

(01:23:11):
like rationing the dolls, so your child only gets three
militarily parading, but it's really just for me, Like the
bullshit that you find in the windmills of Chomp's my

(01:23:33):
thank you Nancy post? Why does that sound so echoey?
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