Countdown with Keith Olbermann

SERIES 2 EPISODE 72: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Literally, Trumped-Up Charges: in Univision interview Dementia J. Trump has confirmed last Sunday's Washington Post story that if we do not stop him from again taking over The White House, he WILL openly politicize the Department of Justice and order it to create fictional indictments of his political rivals in order to prosecute them from campaigns or elections. He literally boasted that he would do what he has falsely accused the legal system of doing to him. And of course if Trump can fabricate charges against politicians, he can fabricate them against you. "If I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business, they’d be out of the election.” He also blamed the Democrats for his own evil, and in the process exposed more of his Swiss-cheese brain: "What they’ve done is, they’ve released the genie out of the...box." It's BOTTLE, genius. The Jack Smith Mar-a-Lago shocker: Potential witnesses against Trump? The receptionist, the head of maintenance, the housekeeper who cleans his bedroom suite and a woodworker who installed the Crown Molding in the bedroom (I'm guessing the color was gold). Trump was reportedly "ballistic" about the housekeeper. Could we get more obscure heroes like Alex Butterfield and Frank Wills? If you don't know them, you will. Another judge muddies the 14th Amendment case. In Michigan, Judge James Robert Redford (seriously) asks the suing attorney if the clause means you can only disqualify somebody AFTER he’s been ELECTED? To which the lawyer aptly asks “That would require, what? The country to re-run an entire presidentical election?” And President Biden reminds us that his best re-election campaign ads would be ones in which he mocks Biden. Talking to auto workers yesterday he mocked him with instant success, and then doubled the laughter when he made the stations of the cross. B-Block (21:57) IN SPORTS: The Chicago White Sox suffer the greatest loss of free agency so far as play-by-play man Jason Benetti leaves for Detroit. The departure of Milwaukee manager Craig Counsell for the Cubs may not be the end of a retrenchment there. There might have been more of it around baseball at the General Mangers' Meeting - except it was cancelled a day early due to a raging virus that sent at least 10% of the executives to the restrooms. (25:44) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Nancy Mace is still getting skewered by Kevin McCarthy and by one remark she will never live down. New York rep Claudia Tenney is a veteran of making a fool of herself. She's done it again. And NewsNation - the Nick-At-Nite of TV News, hires yet another fired failure who doesn't have enough self-respect to find a different line of work. Megyn Kelly will moderate a GOP debate...free-lance? C-Block (32:05) FRIDAYS WITH JAMES THURBER: A selection of his shortest short stories: the fables, including his wonderful "The Unicorn In The Garden."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 2 EPISODE 71: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: We are so goddamned afraid of OFFENDING somebody by DEFENDING democracy. The Minnesota State Supreme Court, whose Chief Justice is a pioneer and the daughter of a pioneer (the first African-American football coach at a predominantly white college in modern times) managed to find a way to NOT rule for OR against the bid to disqualify Trump from the ballot there via the 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment IS self-executing. You ARE presumed guilty until you are proven innocent. It was designed by Americans who had survived the Civil War and didn't want us to have to go through that. If there are extenuating circumstances, there's an override mechanism: Congress can vote by 2/3 to waive application of the clause. Otherwise - you're out. Yet the Minnesota court has chosen the escape route, the way to shirk responsibility for fear of blowback or appeal or who knows what. Everybody placed in the position in which they can risk a little to defend freedom and the constitution rather than waiting until freedom and the constitution are DEAD and millions have to risk everything to restore them, seems to want to get out of it. Kristen Welker got out of it last night. That buffoon Vivek Ramaswamy, so loathsome that even Nikki Haley called him "scum" during the debate, pointed at Welker and demanded that she explain NBC's coverage of the Trump-Russia conspiracy. "Was that real or was that Hilary Clinton made-up misinformation." And instead of realizing he had just gifted her the chance to DO something for democracy - to speak to an audience consuming its first "mainstream media" in a decade and tell them the truth, whether they accepted it or not - she just smiled moronically at him.  There’s an extraordinary French film, La Regle du Jeu, The Rules Of The Game. It premiered on July 7th, 1939…354 days before France fell to the Nazis. It was written and directed by Jean Renoir and in it he plays the hero’s buddy Octave and at one point Octave says something about the corruption and lack of morals and just plain lack of effort to stand up for what’s right, and it’s a quote that has come to symbolize the France that folded like a card table to the Hitler onslaught and the Vichy France full of more collaborators than the Germans believed possible. “You see, in this world, there is one awful thing,” Octave says, seemingly fighting back, and then gives up with a shrug, “and that is… that everyone has his REASONS.” We may be the 21st Century version of Pre-Hitler France. We all have our reasons to just shrug, or smile idiotically at hallucinating psychopaths who seem to believe more in (and are willing to fight more for) their delusions than we do about our reality. B-Block (24:42) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Lauren Boebert discovers that being in Congress means if it's a spending bill you have to talk about spending in the bill, courtesy Professor Steny Hoyer. I'm sure she'll eventually get a grip on it. For a day, Twitter's "NY Times Pitchbot" predicted it and finally Nate Cohn did it: the story explaining why Tuesday's Democratic ass-kicking of MAGA was bad news for Joe Biden. And remember Cygnal? The right wing pollster I praised here yesterday for reporting, though it defied their side's narrative, that Biden's "image" had jumped five points in just one month and voters ranking inflation as the key issue had dropped six points in just two months? They've responded by attacking me. For...quoting their press release hyping their own poll. When you are strangled by slavery to your own ideology... C-Block (34:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos is moving to Florida to be closer to his partner Lauren Sanchez. And as I've mentioned before, I used to work with her and she has now achieved her life goal. Just as I used to work with the guy who would eventually try to blackmail David Letterman and yeah, I think that might've been HIS life goal too.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 2 EPISODE 70: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) ELECTION SCOREBOARD: Democrats and democracy kick MAGA’s ass: another Trump off-year disaster as Republicans not only don't flip the Virginia Senate, they've lost the Virginia House! Deep discounts on "PRESIDENT YOUNGKIN 2024" Red Vests! In Ohio, it's a landslide as Issue 1 wins by 57-43 and puts Abortion Rights INTO the Ohio Constitution. And Kentucky Democratic Governor Andy Beshear goes from winning by 4000 votes four years ago, to winning by five points last night. Plus there are expansions of Democratic control in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It's another state-level disaster for Trump's GOP and what's the response of the CNN political director who whored himself out to get Trump live from that disastrous Kaitlan Collins Town Hall? David Chalian says "It's not the Democratic BRAND that's in trouble here, it's Joe Biden that's in trouble here." Actually that's not true either - and CNN should fire this idiot Chalian ASAP because it's CNN that's in trouble here. (9:43) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump managed to combine stochastic terrorism and his Dementia J. Trump/Elmer J. Fudd split personality in one post, insisting someone “must stop” people who don’t realize he’s worth billions more even than he claims. America’s leading Parking Lot Legal Scholar Alina Habba insists they’ll be filing for a mistrial because they didn’t let Trump talk enough in court (oh, they let him talk enough in court). The good news is, Judge Chutkan shut them down on the latest delaying tactic. They wanted three more months for pre-trial motions; she told them she’ll give them two weeks and they’ll like it. And as more details emerge of Trump’s plan for a military dictatorship, Jeff Clark, the mediocre little man who might be the Attorney General who oversees the transition of the DOJ into the Ministry of Vengeance will finally have to face having his law license suspended.   While most reporting stays focused on Sunday’s New York Times Biden poll crater, there’s a new CNN poll that’s a little better. And everybody ignores the work of a private, right-leaning pollster called Cygnal with eye-opening good news for President Biden. Not only has his net approval/disapproval improved a whopping five points in ONE MONTH but the issue seen as sinking Biden – inflation – is beginning to shrink its dominance. A year ago 42% said inflation was the key topic. Two months ago it was still 37%. Now it’s down to 31%. The less it is decisive, the more it points to Biden’s reelection.   Still, Politico reports that after three months the Biden campaign has the results of its almost exclusively positive, issue-focused, non-Trump advertising: It’s failed. Completely. The campaign is being urged to re-focus on Trump but remains reluctant, still convinced that Trump will be torn down enough by his Republican challengers (if it doesn’t happen at tonight’s debate, it won’t). And more over, the question has to be raised: if you ARE selling Joe Biden’s Greatest Accomplishments, isn’t the first thing on that list, the fact that HE beat Trump? Wasn’t the most vivid, youthful, meaningful moment of his presidency his Defense-Of-Democracy speech in Philadelphia last year? Isn’t the greatest image of Biden, “Dark Brandon?”   Joe? You beat him. You’re the only one who has. We need you to do it again. And we need you to TELL US THAT. Not only WHY he and the evil he personifies and spreads MUST be defeated, but, bluntly, that you did it before and you will do it again: that you are the man to… beat the ever-loving shit out of him. B-BLOCK (30:49) IN SPORTS: Now begins the blowback. Wisconsin says goodbye and good riddance to no-longer-beloved-son Craig Counsell. The President of Mexico knows who the next manager of the Padres should be. And that drying up of the nourishing milk of ever-increasing TV fees for baseball? It just spread to basketball and hockey, where right now 26 teams are making $0 for telecasts during the 2024-25 season. (35:57) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The Washington Post followed up on its Trump Dictatorship piece with more good analysis and a Bothsidesist headline that would’ve looked stupid even above a travel story. There’s yet ANOTHER scandal for new 5th String Speaker Mike Johnson. And yesterday he was excoriating Rep. Tlaib for hate and prejudice. A month ago he was promising to turn Gaza into a parking lot. It isn’t which side you’re on – it’s that violence and destruction are fine as long as you’re MAGA. C-BLOCK (41:24) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: The New York City Marathon ended Sunday night. I swear, there are people walking the streets of my Fun City, still wearing their gold medals indicating they ran the damn thing. It flashes me back to the days when the Marathon had to beg for me to do a preview for CNN, and to the nightmares I still have of anchoring the Los Angeles Marathon… on RADIO.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 2 EPISODE 69: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: It is a damp drizzly November in our polls, but Dementia J. Trump not only inadvertently confessed to fraud at his New York trial but also managed to repeat - on the record - that he has no idea what year this in, nor when his presidency ended. The first will cost him $250,000,000 in cash and all his New York properties. The second could cost him his bid to seize power in 2025. And it had better. You saw Trump’s plan for a Special Prosecutor to attack anybody named Biden, and deliberately politicizing the Department of Justice, and this Project 2025 and Trump’s White House Budget Director Russ Vought going on the record to say that TO politicize the DOJ quote “You don’t need a statutory change at all, you need a mindset change. You need an attorney general and a White House Counsel’s Office that don’t view themselves as trying to protect the department from the president” which I think is even nastier sounding in the original Russian when Stalin devised it. Trump is convinced he made mistakes during his presidency and he won’t repeat them and the foremost of those mistakes was NOT to install a military dictatorship. Quoting The Washington Post, his team of evils is "drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.” And the creature at the center of that plot is Jeffrey Clark, indicted in Georgia, unindicted co-conspirator in Washington, would-be Attorney General, the environmental lawyer who wants to turn the world over to the least pro-environment person on the dying planet. Clark devised the last-minute January 2021 plot for the DOJ to seize voting machines and when told that if Trump stayed in office there would be riots in every major city he answered “Well, that’s why there’s an insurrection act.” Just remember that by August 1934 Hitler re-shaped the entire judiciary of Germany so that every judge and prosecutor had to swear an oath TO HIM and apparently the total number of resignations was one guy, a prosecutor in Wuppertal and his name was Martin Gauger and he wound up fleeing to the Netherlands and the Nazis caught him and sent him to Buchenwald and he was dead by 1941 and Trump has a four-year head start on Hitler. And then there are the polls. I'd love if they looked differently. On the other hand, no incumbent president hasn't been underwater to an opposition opponent - real or generic - at this point in the timeline in decades. And amid the calls to dump Biden, who's your choice? Who else are you willing to bet democracy on? B-Block (26:12) IN SPORTS: Cubs double the all-time salary for a baseball manager to hire Craig Counsell away from the Brewers (and outbid the Mets for him). Lovely guy. Has managed his team to six playoff series and lost five times. Mets go to Plan B, Cleveland gets one, All-time worst World Series TV ratings and don't dismiss them: baseball's business model DEPENDS on the game getting MORE money from TV each year, not less (31:18) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Sarah Huckabee does what the lectern tells her. Boris Johnson shows he REALLY doesn't know what a hair dryer is for. And Speaker Mike Johnson gets weirder and weirder: what do you mean you and your 17-year old son exchange updates on your porn usage? C-Block (32:34) THINGS I PROMISE NOT TO TELL: On busy baseball days like this one somebody always asks me why I don't work for that baseballl network. Wellllll... I was gonna, but one team got me fired before they had finished hiring me!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 2 EPISODE 68: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) BULLETIN: The District of Columbia Court of Appeals Friday afternoon halted Judge Chutkan's gag order against Trump for at least the next 17 days. Rather than deal with it on an emergency basis, it scheduled the first in-person hearing for NOVEMBER 20. The members of the three-judge panel consisting of two judges appointed by Obama and one appointed by Biden should be impeached and disbarred because they actually fell for not just a pathetically weak 1st Amendment excuse but also for a series of arguments based on the delusions-of-grandeur, megalomaniacal premise that this madman Trump believes a 100,000,000 Americans are somehow being deprived of their right to hear him because a judge had ruled no, Trump was not allowed to threaten the judge and the court officials and the prosecutors and not allowed to try to convince his cultists to try to kill them. He had already been given – BY the Judge who issued the gag order – the right to continue to insanely claim that the prosecution of his attempt to overthrow the government and foment violent revolution in this country and install an authoritarian regime with him as its permanent dictator was actually a political vendetta personally ordered by the President of the United States. All she wanted to stop was the continued attempt by Trump to use the social media site he OWNS and the propaganda video networks that make their only money by platforming him and the fascist rallies he stages to say it in just the right way to get somebody to KILL special counsel Jack Smith and to KILL judge Tanya Chutkan and to call in bomb threats to the court room and to doxx the jurors, the way he got hundreds of his cultists to attack the Capitol on January 6 and the way he doxxed Obama and one of his cultists went to Obama’s neighborhood and hunted him, with the ultimate goal being obvious and evil: to institutionalize political violence and turn it into the determinative factor in how this country is not governered but RULED. Donald Trump is a terrorist. A. TERRORIST. And he has been using terrorism by proxy to destroy the laws and rules of this country, without interruption by the law or the courts for fully EIGHT years now. And when the justice system FINALLY stands up on its feet and the courts FINALLY stand up on their feet and recognize that after ALL of our other institutions have utterly failed and ALL of our leaders have failed to protect the nation against domestic terrorism in the form of Trump and his family and his enablers, when SOMEBODY finally BEGINS to do SOMETHING about it, this DC Appeals court say well, no, maybe the legal system of this country has been bending over backwards to protect the rights of this man who would destroy it and KILL anybody in it he doesn’t like, but we don’t see that in bending over backwards it has yet severed its own SPINE yet, so we’re going to grant an “administrative stay” until at least November 20th to prove that we’re great legal scholars and we’re giving Trump every opportunity to get Jack Smith or Merrick Garland killed and why, yes, if there HAD been some sort of legal case against Osama Bin Laden before us in the summer of 2001 we would have delayed the injunction against him for two weeks because it’s FAR more important to give people bent on destroying the United States every last ounce of their rights, than it is to protect the LAWS of this country or the JUDGES of this country or the REPRESENTATIVE FORM OF GOVERNMENT of this country itself. (17:48) The rest of this edition of the podcast is a repeat of Friday's 67th episode and if you've heard it there is no reason to listen again after this point.  SPECIAL COMMENT: Dementia J. Trump’s lawyers last night filed a 35-page document to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, one or two paragraphs of which asks that court to BAR Judge Tanya Chutkan from reinstating the gag order on him. The rest of it is about how wonderful he is and how much he leads in the primary polls and it sounds like the dialogue they gave Rita Moreno in the last scene of the Jack Nicholson movie “Carnal Knowledge.”  From the first (!) page: “President Trump’s uniquely powerful voice has been a fixtue of American political discourse for eight years, and central to the American fabric for decades.” Well, true, like car alarms. Or Herpes. From Item 4, on Page 11: "The Gag Order violates the rights of tens of millions of Americans to receive President Trump’s speech: A restriction on President Trump’s speech inflicts a reciprocal injury on the rights of over 100 million Americans who listen to him…" Listen to him bout how big and strong he is and how he is better, more beautiful, more powerful, more perfect, more strong, more masculine, more extraordinary, more virile, more domineering, more irresistible and more up in the air and I may have added a little something to the text there. More importantly, but less entertainingly, Judge Chutkan hits the gas, Judge Engoron hits the roof, Judge Cannon does NOT hit the pause button. Chutkan sent a not so subtle sign to the Trump Cult that the Subversion trial will start as planned 123 days from now, and Jack Smith let Cannon know that Trump was playing her like a two dollar banjo. Also, here in New York, the FBI searched the home of the Mayor's top campaign fundraiser and all of a sudden there is a money scandal involving her, him, a construction company, the nation of Turkey, donors who didn't donate, and don't blame me, I voted for the Garbage Commissioner Lady. And back in DC, Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Chip Roy in a three-way… war of words. It began with a post by Roy, explaining why he moved to stop the vote to censure Representative Tlaib. Then Barney Rubble sub-tweeted him: “You voted to kick me out of the freedom caucus, but keep CNN wannabe Ken Buck and vaping groping Lauren Boebert…” to which Roy replied “Tell her to go-chase so-called Jewish space lasers if she wants to spend time on that sort of thing.” And Greene responded “Oh shut up Colonel Sanders” and predicted that this would all end with him reciting “powdered wig soliloquies as Americans are marched to the firing squads”and no, I don’t get the reference either. Curiously silent through all this was Vaping Groping Lauren Boebert. Sources say she’s simply sitting there quietly, trying to get a grip on the situation.  B-Block (40:19) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD (26:03) Dean Phillips, the Harlan Crow-funded "Democrat" challenging Biden, may have a bigger problem even than Crow. Fox is equally-opportunity hate: Jesse Watters gets suspended for threatening Arab Americans; Mark Levin lies about Wolf Blitzer's grandparents and denies they died in the holocaust. And after an ex-NHL player dies from taking a skate to his neck, how could an NHL team glorify one of their players nearly cutting another player with EACH of his skates? C-Block (49:21) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: There is boredom, there is paranoia, there is fantasy, there is detective fiction, there is self-satirization. Put them all together and you get Thurber's epic "The Lady on 142."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 2 EPISODE 67: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Dementia J. Trump’s lawyers last night filed a 35-page document to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, one or two paragraphs of which asks that court to BAR Judge Tanya Chutkan from reinstating the gag order on him. The rest of it is about how wonderful he is and how much he leads in the primary polls and it sounds like the dialogue they gave Rita Moreno in the last scene of the Jack Nicholson movie “Carnal Knowledge.”  From the first (!) page: “President Trump’s uniquely powerful voice has been a fixtue of American political discourse for eight years, and central to the American fabric for decades.” Well, true, like car alarms. Or Herpes. From Item 4, on Page 11: "The Gag Order violates the rights of tens of millions of Americans to receive President Trump’s speech: A restriction on President Trump’s speech inflicts a reciprocal injury on the rights of over 100 million Americans who listen to him…" Listen to him bout how big and strong he is and how he is better, more beautiful, more powerful, more perfect, more strong, more masculine, more extraordinary, more virile, more domineering, more irresistible and more up in the air and I may have added a little something to the text there. More importantly, but less entertainingly, Judge Chutkan hits the gas, Judge Engoron hits the roof, Judge Cannon does NOT hit the pause button. Chutkan sent a not so subtle sign to the Trump Cult that the Subversion trial will start as planned 123 days from now, and Jack Smith let Cannon know that Trump was playing her like a two dollar banjo. Also, here in New York, the FBI searched the home of the Mayor's top campaign fundraiser and all of a sudden there is a money scandal involving her, him, a construction company, the nation of Turkey, donors who didn't donate, and don't blame me, I voted for the Garbage Commissioner Lady. And back in DC, Lauren Boeber and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Chip Roy in a three-way… war of words. It began with a post by Roy, explaining why he moved to stop the vote to censure Representative Tlaib. Then Barney Rubble sub-tweeted him: “You voted to kick me out of the freedom caucus, but keep CNN wannabe Ken Buck and vaping groping Lauren Boebert…” to which Roy replied “Tell her to go-chase so-called Jewish space lasers if she wants to spend time on that sort of thing.” And Greene responded “Oh shut up Colonel Sanders” and predicted that this would all end with him reciting “powdered wig soliloquies as Americans are marched to the firing squads”and no, I don’t get the reference either. Curiously silent through all this was Vaping Groping Lauren Boebert. Sources say she’s simply sitting there quietly, trying to get a grip on the situation.  B-Block (26:03) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD (26:03) Dean Phillips, the Harlan Crow-funded "Democrat" challenging Biden, may have a bigger problem even than Crow. Fox is equally-opportunity hate: Jesse Watters gets suspended for threatening Arab Americans; Mark Levin lies about Wolf Blitzer's grandparents and denies they died in the holocaust. And after an ex-NHL player dies from taking a skate to his neck, how could an NHL team glorify one of their players nearly cutting another player with EACH of his skates? C-Block (35:05) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: There is boredom, there is paranoia, there is fantasy, there is detective fiction, there is self-satirization. Put them all together and you get Thurber's epic "The Lady on 142."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 2 EPISODE 66: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Aileen Cannon, Trump's Personal Concierge Judge, is poised to delay his trial for stealing, stashing, stacking, and sharing secret documents and US war plans - at least until after the primaries and probably until after the election, possibly as early as today. Her excuse will be: he traitor so much that the court schedules are just too crowded with traitor trial stuff. She will first delay by giving him rights to see secret documents he does not have the right to see. She will then use the delay she's fabricated to say that NOW she has to delay everything because the Florida Documents trial schedule is colliding with the Washington Election Subversion trial schedule. That'll be her excuse. The reality is that three years ago a week from Monday, she was still just one of 6300 Assistant United States Attorneys and it was Trump who made her a judge for the first time. Happy Anniversary, Concierge Judge. THE DEMENTIA J. TRUMP SCHEDULE: More insomnia, more crazy threats against judges, and then one of the all-time lulus. On a video designed to inflame the cult, he tells them it's "Your chance to take a stand against tyrants that support the one and only movement the can save our country and Make America Great Again." In other words, for some reason, Trump is saying that you must FIGHT THE TYRANTS THAT SUPPORT MAGA. It's either a Freudian slip, or syphilis. AND THE MIKE JOHNSON MOTHER LODE continues to produce unbelievable and damaging gold. The new speaker a) doesn't understand deficits and offsets b) has claimed he has not had a bank account since at least 2016 and c) was once a major player in forced Conversion Therapy for gay teens.  WHAT'S in his closet? My guess is, the first thing is, the doors to several MORE closets. B-Block (23:47) IN SPORTS: The Diamondbacks never led once, not one inning, in the last three games and Texas polished them off 5-0 to win their first World Series. The TV ratings are likely to be the worst ever, by 20% or more. The San Diego Padres had to borrow $50 million in September to make payroll. And Bobby Knight has died. I'll neither mourn nor mock him but I will tell you of the day 30 years ago he tried to get me fired from SportsCenter (36:05) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: A crazy bulletin from Fox News; How HBO used burner accounts to criticize the critics; the GOP Pennsylvania Senate candidate who thinks he could fight a bear - and win. C-Block (43:40) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: From The Desert To The Sea To All of California: the story of one of the most remarkable newscasters I ever worked in the same market with.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 2 EPISODE 65: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: The likeliest explanation is that she said it in order to fool the cultists to think that there is no chance Trump could actually go to JAIL in Washington, Florida, New York, or Atlanta (or to fool Trump himself) but Trump's noted parking lot attorney Alina Habba has gone on NewsMax and insisted that she tells anybody who panics about the prospect that Trump will be arrested that "He's protected by Secret Service. Period. He's protected by Secret Service, number one...Number two, he did nothing wrong...Secret Service will always protect President Trump. That's the truth. They have to. Wherever he is. But it's not even something we think about." The NewsMax host then literally dares a judge to try to jail him. Did they literally present a passive-aggressive threat? Or just carefully phrased one to reassure the idiots that Trump, who is at great risk in four different courtrooms, is not at risk at all? DEMENTIA J. TRUMP SCOREBOARD: He has gotten the day wrong again (and this time it's on videotape) AND gotten the year wrong - twice - while the time stamps of his posts indicate he's being plagued by insomnia. We can't ignore these little-for-Trump things. The bar has to be: if Biden did this, what would The Times, The Post, and the Networks say about him? Remember the polling: if both are thought too old, Biden wins in a landslide. AND YOUR JOHNSON MAY NOT LAST: The 5th-String Speaker continues to pile up L's and the creepy factor continues to mount. Not only did he try to tie aid to Israel to cutting IRS investigation of wealthy tax cheats, but it turns out that as late as seven years ago he demanded that every candidate for office be subjected to a religious purity test - exactly the opposite of what the constitution says. B-Block (25:03) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Senator Josh Hawley humiliates himself while trying to brand Holocaust survivor DHS Secretary Mayorkas as an antisemite. Wait, there are POPULAR Senators and Governors? And woo hoo, Elon Musk proves that you are safe in his Cybertruck if you are attacked by a squadron of medieval French archery. (30:29) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: My ex Kyrsten Sinema, followed by my ex Laura Ingraham, followed by... Dean Phillips. Who I don't even know. But - Harlan Crow DOES know him. C-Block (36:40) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: It's nerve-wracking enough to be handed, at age 20, the home phone number of a very famous athlete and be told he's expecting your call and you have to interview him. When it gets interesting is when he picks up the phone and pretends to be a woman.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 2 EPISODE 64: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: The Biden Campaign slogan should literally be “MY OLD MAN CAN BEAT UP YOUR OLD MAN.” It is the most remarkable, unexpected, startling, counter-intuitive polling data I have ever seen: The future of democracy. The future of the prosecution of Trump. The future of the nation. The future of planetary climate. It may depend on convincing voters NOT that Joe Biden is somehow NOT TOO old but on convincing voters that he and Trump are BOTH TOO OLD. New polling shows 43 percent of Americans BELIEVE they’re BOTH too old and they plan to vote as follows: Biden 61% Trump 13% In Pennsylvania it’s Biden 66% Trump 11%! If they’re BOTH too old – Biden wins in a landslide. Just growing the percentage IN Pennsylvania who believe they’re both too old by FIVE percent would flip 110-thousand Trump votes TO BIDEN. And helpfully Trump is not only acting old, he’s acting demented. In the last 48 hours he hasn’t known WHERE he was, nor what YEAR it was, and even The New York Times is writing about it. Meanwhile, in a Washington courtroom, we had what one observer called a "proxy battle" for what might happen when Trump truly violates the newly-reinstated gag order. A J6 defendant freed while awaiting sentencing began to send violent, racist, homophobic, antisemitic texts to an FBI agent involved in his case, AND threatened to doxx him. The Judge had no problem cancelling his release and sending him directly to jail to await sentencing (the problem arose when he tried to resist the handcuffs and nearly took down four security officers). B-BLOCK (28:44) IN SPORTS: What if they gave a World Series and nobody watched? Texas survived the by-now traditional early departure of Max Scherzer to pull ahead of Arizona (on the road of course) in last night's 3rd Game. But the bad TV ratings and lack of national interest among baseball fans was far worse than even I had expected. In fact, they were record-setting worse. Plus the first star of the Texas franchise, Frank Howard, died yesterday. (31:50) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Boris Johnson goes into TV news, possibly for the free hairstyling. Tim Scott says it's Iowa or bust. And why are the Philadelphia Eagles advertisements appearing next to videos of lunatic Stew Peters spewing hate and giving voice to calls for violence against organizations like Catholic Charities? And why isn't the team or the NFL doing anything about it? C-BLOCK (37:50) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: October was the birthday month of one of my favorite humans of all-time. I met him only once but it was so memorable, so warm, so funny that a decade later when he died, I was stunned when I heard the news and broke into tears.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 2 EPISODE 63: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) BULLETIN: Details are sketchy because of an online systems failure (who names their system after the AMC Pacer?) but Sunday evening Judge Tanya Chutkan REINSTATED her Gag Order against Trump - presumably because of his threats to Mark Meadows and his misconduct in the New York gag order case - and Trump has acknowledged online that it has been reimposed. (8:47) The remainder of this bulletin is a repeat of Friday's Episode #62 and if you've heard it there's no reason to continue to listen. Although you'll have a damn good time if you do! SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump threatens the New York judge, while Jack Smith goes not for a stronger gag order but something closer to a Hannibal Lecter mask.  “This is judicial misconduct, coupled with prosecutorial misconduct, and somebody from the state of New York must step in and stop this complete and total miscarriage of justice,” unquote. BECAUSE Trump had earlier suggested that New York’s GOVERNOR should “get involved” and because he capitalized the word “State” in State of New York, he kept one foot in that shadowy region in which he’s lived that life and his attorneys could argue that he was NOT asking “somebody from the state of New York” to “step in and stop this” by attacking somebody like the judge or the district attorney. The rest of the filing shows that Trump IGNORED the New York Gag Order, IGNORED it again, was called to the witness stand to explain what he said, LIED ABOUT IT – PERJURED HIMSELF – and has proven to be unrestrainable even with the Gag Order as presently constituted. Jack Smith isn’t telling the Judge that Trump has violated her GAG ORDER. He is telling her that Trump has violated the ORIGINAL CONDITIONS under which she did NOT jail him until the trial starts. To resume the quote. “Accordingly, the court should modify the defendant’s conditions of release by making compliance with the Order a CONDITION or by clarifying that the existing condition barring communication with witnesses about the facts of the case, INCLUDES indirect messages made publicly on social media or in speeches.” Plus, Trump's faint grip on sanity seems to be slipping and the tell on that is: he has reverted to the genuinely unfathomable dog analogies that he fell into during the most stressful times of 2015-2016. When Trump starts claiming dogs get fired, he's about to lose it. And Speaker Mike Johnson, Day 2: For a man who spent twenty years advocating for sending gay people to prison for having sex, advocating for sending doctors to prison for providing family planning, advocating for a national abortion ban, advocating for fewer laws against guns, advocating for more laws against divorce, advocating for gutting of the entire societal safety net, advocating for disenfranchising minorities and entire states, advocating for using the constitution to destroy the constitution, advocating for the forced conflation of church and state, advocating for a conservative group that makes employees swear an oath to Jesus, advocating against transgenderism, advocating against men wearing women’s clothes, advocating against women wearing MEN’S clothes, advocating restrictions against Muslims, advocating against federal disaster relief, advocating for more oil and gas and against science that has proved we are all going to be KILLED by more oil and gas, advocating for that idiot Amy Coney Barrett since he met her in 1988, advocating for a limit of three terms in the House and then running for this one – his FOURTH, and advocating for the overthrow of the duly-elected government of the United States throughout the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021. For a guy who has done nothing but comment on everything, all the time, and always wrong… so far… he sure has been Speaker of The House Mr. No Comment. B-Block (31:08) IN SPORTS: Oh boy. The World Series. The 7th best regular season team versus the 12th best. I have never been less interested. Here's a shock: after legal sports gambling websites become the primary sponsor of all North American sports league, a player is suspended for half a season for...using one. And the brilliant idea from England's Tottenham Hotspur: give each player in its team history their own "legacy number." (35:08) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: President Duda of Poland may be trying to Trump the last election. E-Bikers should be saving the planet; instead they're menacing New Yorkers. And I do not pretend this isn't a crass idea. I think we should name the mass shootings after the politicians and propagandists who have enabled them. So Lewiston, Maine, should be named after Speaker Johnson or Susan Collins or Sean Hannity. C-Block (44:35) BULLETINS WITH THURBER: A story I have not previously read you, to which almost everyone can relate. How science and swimming almost kept him from graduating in "University Days."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.