Countdown with Keith Olbermann

SEASON 3 EPISODE 118: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT:ICE Director Tom Homan and his boss Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem must be arrested for contempt of court. It SHOULD be President Ted Bundy Trump being arrested for contempt of court – potentially for ignoring the orders of the SUPREME COURT - but we already know how the laws of this land have been corrupted to protect the greatest criminal in our history. That it cannot be will simply hasten the latest iteration of the constitutional crisis created by a lawless chief executive who still has the military behind him. We are headed for a flashpoint, perhaps as soon as today. To summarize: Trump believes he is God.

But in the interim it is time for U-S District Judge Paula Xinis to send this rogue government a message. In fact it is well past time. “Time” was two days ago, at 5 PM. Noem and Homan are now in contempt of HER order in the case of the Noem-Homan-ICE abduction, the DISAPPEARING of a Maryland man already under the PROTECTION of the government of the United States, Kilmar Abrego Garcia. They are in contempt of the orders not of some judge – as the fascist Stephen Miller and his brownshirts call any representative of law and order – they are in contempt of the LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. It is not some judge. They are in contempt of the NATION and they are on the VERGE of being in contempt of the Supreme Court.

The point, of course, may be the admission that they abducted someone by "mistake." They sent a Massachusetts-born immigration lawyer a notice to leave the country by "mistake." They warned ICE will keep illegal "ideas" from entering the country, by "mistake." Maybe these are mistakes - God knows, it all involves Elon Musk - but now they see an opportunity to exploit even mistakes to deliver the message, passively but still aggressively, that even when they are wrong they are still RIGHT because even when they are wrong what do you think YOU are going to be able to DO about it? What do you think YOU are going to be able to DO about it, Mrs Abrego Garcia? What do you think YOU are going to be able to DO about it, Judge? What do you think YOU are going to be able to DO about it, AMERICA?

B-Block (40:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: We have a new member of the WPITW Hall of Fame, Linda McMahon. We dedicate this episode to Stephen A. Smith, still making a fool of himself. And then the nominees: Bill Maher makes a propaganda video for Trump saying all the nice things about Trump that Maher has forgotten he already said about them in 2016 and then repudiated. Trump butt dials the wrong McMaster. And Jeanine Pirro may be the dumbest person to ever work at Fox News. Do you know what an accomplishment this would be?

C-Block (1:04:05) GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK: A quick announcement about the immediate future of this podcast. Sounds more ominous than it is.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 117: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump has already LOST the tariff wars he finally claimed he paused yesterday (without really pausing). Already. Took him only eight days. From Liberation Day to a day when in any other war, literal or figurative, he would have been deposed - 8 days. And never mind how much YOU AND I think he’s crazy; a high-priced adviser to macro fund managers says “a few have quietly wondered if the president might be insane." And after Wall Street came off the ledge and got back to where it was Monday – only, what, seven trillion lost – he declared victory. “Up 2500 points. Nobody has ever heard of it. Gotta be a record.” Because he can’t admit he made a mistake; his head would fall off.

His approval numbers have cratered. He’s underwater by an AVERAGE of six points. LAST Wednesday it was an average of TWO points. Since the election he’s lost 20 points among those  over age 65; he’s lost 50 points among those under age 30. And he still raised the tariffs on the Chinese again – to 125 percent – because he’s mad at them. Because they of course are winning. Because the Chinese are not negotiating; the Chinese are as they have been for centuries, waiting for their opponents to DIE. The Chinese are apparently dumping our 10-Year Treasuries, driving up our debt. And they’ve opened trading partnership negotiations with the head of the European Union. 

And for all the claims about pausing the tariffs, a universal TEN percent tariff will be maintained.

He didn't pause anything. He simply lost everything.

B-Block (27:10) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Joe Manchin writes a book celebrating his middle of the road bona fides. The cover photo shows only the right half of his face, naturally. Marjorie Stupid Greene reveals she does not know what the word "Merch" means. And the president of the hockey writers' association, a bonehead named Frank Seravalli, not only defends Wayne Gretzky's attacks on Canada but his bringing FBI Director and Election Denier Kash Patel to the Ovechkin game - and calls CRITICISM of those decisions "political BS." Instead of, maybe, calling out Gretzky for BRINGING political BS into a moment of sports history.

C-Block (49:15) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: She's still at it. Even as Trump's boasts of pausing the tariffs while INCREASING them on China and maintaining them on everybody else, Laura Ingraham is still carrying his water for him. It's time for me to review my dates with her last century, and the extraordinary revelation she made during the first of them about the then-nascent Republican-Media Industrial Complex.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 116: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: I want polling on a special, emergency, extra-constitutional Presidential Recall Vote.

I know there isn't going to BE a Presidential Recall Vote. I know we're not going extra-constitutional, we're not REPUBLICANS dammit. But they are always making up laws (inside the Supreme Court and outside of it) on the premise that the people really want it, so after this week of unprecedented insane unnecessary failure on the part of Trump and his Team of Imbecilic Rivals, I want to know where we stand.

Because the moment we get 10 Republicans in the House and 14 in the Senate to believe that if Trump stays in office, their careers are over, he's gone. Half of them think he's nuts already and a quarter have had doubts. They need to be pushed and I don't want to wait until the mid-terms for them to get the damned message

I want SOME pollster - independent, news-related, hired by the Democrats, SOMEBODY - to ask these questions: 1) if the election were re-run today would you vote for Trump or a Democrat. Or another Republican. Or a fairly intelligent farm animal.

2) would you support a special recall vote to potentially reverse the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

3) would you describe the current financial panic and the upcoming tsunami of inflation and unemployment as a national emergency.

4) do you think Donald Trump has lost his mind.

5) do you think Donald Trump is mentally fit to run the country.

6) do you think Donald Trump is acting to destroy the United States on behalf of a foreign country.

7) do you think it is necessary to act outside the constitution if necessary to save the United States of America FROM Donald Trump.

8) if the midterm elections for the Senate and the House were tomorrow would you vote Republican or Democratic?

WHATEVER the percentages are they could easily scare the crap out of 10 House Republicans and 14 Senate Republicans and the day they do, Trump vanishes. You doubt me? Ask Richard Nixon. Ask Abraham Lincoln, whom they were ready to get rid of seven months before Lee surrendered at Appomattox because they thought he wasn't going to be re-elected.

Also is it possible the Democrats are listening to me? Obama emerges to spout sense, as I've asked. The DNC Chair founds "The People's Cabinet." All we need now is POLLING ON A PRESIDENTIAL RECALL VOTE.

B-Block (31:28) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The Pittsburgh Pirates rip a Roberto Clemente memorial off their outfield wall to make room for an ad for seltzer, a Republican influencer insists there are no tariffs on Russia because we don't import anything from Russia (we import $2.5 Billion a year from Russia), and the Secretary of the Treasury wants YOU to buy American while he buys British. (41:28) SPORTSBALLCENTER: Alexander Ovechkin DOES have more goals than Wayne Gretzky now, but no, that's still not the big league hockey record (and Gretzky managed to throw himself out another window during the celebrations) and the date of the first American, maybe the first human, to be photographed giving the finger to the cameraman has to be pushed back from 1886 to 1882 after a discovery this weekend about baseball Hall of Famer Old Hoss Radbourn.

C-Block (55:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I have been asked by a listener to expand on last week's news that Chuck Todd not only does not realize that his news career is over but he thinks investors are going to give him $2,000,000,000 to go buy a news organization now. The answer to the question "Chuck Todd: Why?"

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 115: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: It only took Trump losing a critical election by 10 points in a state he carried last November for even HIM to figure out that Elon Musk is the best electoral friend the Democrats have right now. The White House has leaked that Elon's 130-day exemption as a "Special Government Employee" is up at the end of May and so is his time inadvertently saving democracy from the MAGA cult.

We CAN'T LET HIM LEAVE! Also, INDICT ELON! Also also, PROTECT ELON AT ALL COSTS! The reporting suggests Trump intends to keep Musk as an informal advisor and frequent White House visitor and that is great news. If Trump won't keep Musk attached to him sufficiently, we have to do it for him. ELON MUSK'S UNFAVORABILITY AMONG DEMOCRATICS IN WISCONSIN IS 97 PERCENT. Let's take that national!

OH BY THE WAY TRUMP JUST TANKED THE WORLD ECONOMY. 54% tariffs on China? 26% on India? Huge on the EU and UK? 10 percent on the people he likes? This is the day the Leopards of Wall Street discover that Trump of the Leopards Eating Faces Party is a cannibal: he eats the faces of other leopards! Also I'll explain how this whole tariff crap mainlines back to Trump's insane fixation with gold and the color gold. 

MEDIA DISASTER: Bill Maher self-destructs. Stephen A. Smith thinks he's the first person to discover the Trump 3rd Term Scam. MSNBC's attempt to tank is so successful "Morning Joe" is now behind CNN in the demo.

B-Block (36:14) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Whoever let the BBC start a piece about the Myanmar Earthquake with the line "On the road to Mandalay." Ex-journalist Matt Taibbi will never testify to the House again. And Richard Carlson, at the center of transphobia, sports, TV news, Fox News, Renee Richards, and even worse things, is dead.

C-Block (49:45) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: With the New York Times reporting Chuck Todd is seeking to buy a podcast or local high school sports news company for two billion dollars, it's time for me to note that we are nearing the six year mark since I finally said "I have had enough of this idiot for one lifetime."

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 114: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: NO, NBC NEWS AND KRISTEN WELKER - YOU IDIOTS - TRUMP HAS NEVER BEEN 'JOKING' ABOUT A 3RD TERM: Only to dimwitted media types who have been lying to themselves and their audience was it a shock when Welker insisted yesterday to Trump that he’s “joking” about stealing an unconstitutional and illegal third term and the Dictator replying “No I’m not joking, I’m not joking" and he alluded to several ways to game the 22nd Amendment Term Limits.

Trump has been serious about this since at least 2023 and the first time I reported on that fact on this podcast was on Wednesday, November 8th… 2023. This has been the plan (like all the other plans) take something unconstitutional and illegal and do it anyway and dare you to sue and get his Concierge Supreme Court to invent a new law and a new country to LET him do it anyway AND insist THIS is the law and if you oppose him, YOU’RE breaking it. That’s the way they papered over Trump’s violation of the Insurrection Clause in the 14th Amendment. 

Worse yet, the man who has best encapsulated the evil inside Trump, Yale History professor Timothy Snyder, is leaving the country. Literally. Moving to the University of Toronto. If that doesn't tell you all you need to know about how much Trump is NOT kidding.

IF ANYBODY STOPS TRUMP it'll be the corporations and Wall Street types who suddenly realize that when he said he'd cook the economy to give all the money to the rich guys he meant just him and Musk. Or maybe it'll be Trump's Intel Community. Somebody is leaking career-ending stories about Pete Hegseth and Bring-Your-Wife-To-Secret-Meetings-Work-Day and Bring-Your-Brother-Into-A-Nepo-Job-Day and I wonder who it could be. Perhaps the National Security Advisor who needs Hegseth to take the fall for SignalGate and just happens to have the number of the editor of The Atlantic programmed into his phone? 

If we're lucky maybe Hegseth and Mike Waltz will accomplish the rare simultaneous double knockout!

B-Block (33:06) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Anna Paulina Luna thinks NBC is hiding a videotape with time code proving Oswald wasn't at the JFK Assassination (three years before time code was invented). A would-be GOP Nominee for Governor of Virginia thinks Anne Frank appeared in a classroom in California 20 years ago to tell gang bangers about the holocaust. And Bill Maher has self-destructed again. Now he thinks he's going to meet Trump because they respect him, because he was the first to predict Trump wouldn't leave office, and to heal the country. And Chris Cuomo and Gavin Newsom are there to reinforce Bill's gullibility!

C-Block (49:00) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: So I've resumed my TV sports career! I am back on the air this week in pre-season specials on nine regional baseball networks that carry nine major league clubs. This kinda conflicts with my complaints about the same guys doing sports and politics at this time. I'll explain my rationale.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 113: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (SPECIAL COMMENT): The reason Trump’s Team of Idiot Rivals sent each other their war plans on Signal wasn't to keep them secret from the Senate, or from future investigations it was to keep them secret from TRUMP.

They no longer TRUST Trump.

They no longer think Trump UNDERSTANDS what’s going on.

There WAS a work-around – AROUND TRUMP. They are CUTTING TRUMP OUT.

I'm NOT defending any of these sloppy, stupid, dangerous, morons. But behind their blithering incompetence is the WHY. WHY did they conduct this Signal Chat? Because they have established at least one Ghost Mechanism to allow Trump’s cabinet to try to get something done without him destroying the world (yet) and if THAT’S the case the POINT of this is: you have a president whose own people think he is now a complete FEEB, that he can not function, and cannot be trusted not to do something at least disastrously stupid, IF that thing requires him to do anything more than blather for 40 minutes and morph slowly into Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.

We need a whole new president, like, later today. This guy’s nuts.

Also, they can all be charged with espionage under 18 U-S Code 793 “Gathering, transmitting or LOSING defense information."And a German newspaper found live mobile numbers and email addresses for Waltz and Gabbard and Hegseth. I’ll circle back to that. Also Waltz and Gabbard and Hegseth are three of the biggest idiots in this nation’s history.

And I’m going to go further out on a limb and answer the MOST intriguing, MOST unaddressed question of this entire mess: why in the hell would the name of the editor of The Atlantic pop up automatically in the auto-composition in the phone of National Security Adviser Mike Waltz? Huh? Is MY name in there too? How about Jasmine Crockett? Goldberg was in Waltz's phone because Waltz put him there, and Waltz is denying it because Trump will fire him if he believes that's true.

The other issues here are all valid and intriguing and as a story, boy did they hit the cloud just right and we got 77 inches of snow, this story has TWICE as much engagement world wide as any other news story this year. But the NEWS here is, this is NOT a Trump plan to keep reality from America. THIS is an AMERICAN plan to keep reality… from TRUMP.

B-Block (31:30) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: American governments mishandle information as if that's what they were hired. It's been true since the Confederacy dropped Robert E. Lee's battle plans on the ground in Maryland in 1862. It was true when the Bush Administration spent a day unable to send me an email, and instead wound up revealing to me all the people inside NBC News that Bush could count on to give him favorable coverage.

C-Block (51:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: A Pennsylvania legislator is dumber than she looks. She's touting her career 100% Score from...The John Birch Society. Steve Bannon has finally been broken - he is caveating his own violent imagery. And Bill Maher keeps growing, keeps innovating, keeps finding new ways to make an idiot out of himself. This one involves Kid Rock and Trump.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 112: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Give me liberty or give me death. Patrick Henry said it 250 years ago yesterday, to galvanize Americans against the tyranny growing around them brought by an insane dictator-king. Not whatever was manifesting near St. John’s Church in Richmond where the Second Virginia Convention was meeting; not what threatened them individually; not what was at their door, but what they knew WOULD be at their door soon or late because it was already inside the homes of their fellow Americans in far off Boston.

Give me liberty or give me death - because whether or not the tyrant is here for US now, he is here for our brothers and sisters. He will be here for us soon enough.  

And what would OUR Patrick Henry have said on March 23rd, 2025?

Give me liberty or give me… a free 12-ounce coffee with the purchase of a dozen donuts while supplies last at participating outlets.

Add Columbia University, my alma mater Cornell and a major Democratic-heavy law firm to the list of those who when the chips were down saved themselves and told the rest of us to drop dead. The list already , the American news media, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party (save for AOC and Bernie), the former presidents, the laws, the courts, the Supreme Court, and every supposed guardrail you can think of 

It's not just that democracy is being raped by Trump.

It's that we're standing around shrugging.

And as soon as Columbia caved, Trump decided to Disappear a Cornell student. As soon as Paul, Weiss collapsed, Pam Bondi was sicced on all firms supplying lawyers to deportees or suing Trump.

Give me liberty or give meup to 30 percent off on rooms at select Disney Resort Hotels when I stay five nights or longer.

B-Block (33:15) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Trump again threatens MSNBC and NBC, saying MSNBC (and CNN) "will be turned off." A week ago he declared them "illegal." Do not misunderstand him. He means it. And I suspect since it's a month since MSNBC fired Joy Reid and the other anchors of color, NBC is going to through someone or something out the MSNBC window, and that right soon.

C-Block (54:45) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: How unpopular is Wayne Gretzky in Canada? They smeared feces on the statue of him outside the Edmonton hockey arena. New York's Mayor may have Trump but he also has raised $36,000 this year. And while celebrating the demise of the Department of Education, Musk misspelled "Department."

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 111: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: The White Supremacist Trash Trump Administration thought it had gotten away with memory-holing Baseball immortal and Civil Rights immortal Jackie Robinson. They eliminated the Pentagon web page honoring Jackie's service during WWII and re-directed you to a URL reading "DEI SPORTS." They thought they had gotten away with it so much that a Pentagon spokesman named John Ullyot boasted loudly about eliminating the DEI Robinson represented (and the Navajo Code Talkers and that one Native American at Iwo Jima and the Tuskegee Airmen).

And then when all hell broke loose, within 90 minutes they actually backed off and restored the page - and made it MORE racist, insisting that they would only honor Robinson as an ex-serviceman, not as a man who may have saved this country from becoming then, what Trump is trying to make it into now.

And for all the reversals, one other company's website associated with Jackie Robinson DID scrub any references to "DEI" from its mission statement and has not responded to the Robinson blowback. The other company is of course... Major League Baseball.

This is hardly the most important of the daily parade of Trump Atrocities. It may, however, may the most symbolic.

B-Block (23:40) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: A podcaster insists what's happening to Tesla is "worse than January 6." Life comes at you fast: Friday, Minnesota State Senator Justin Eichorn introduced a bill to make "Trump Derangement Syndrome" an actual legal thing there. Monday he was being arrested for trying to pay a 17-year old for sex. And why did Jake Tapper drink another pitcher of Kool-Aid and call it "The Gulf of America"? Well there are some people who become their salaries, nothing more. 

C-Block (43:00) GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK:

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

BULLETINSEASON 3 EPISODE 110: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) BULLETIN: Schumer follows his cowardice towards Trump with cowardice towards Democrats, cancels book tour the day it was to begin.

Insane Dictator Trump decides Biden's pardons are "void, vacant, and of no future force of effect" because he questions Biden's mental awareness, raising three small problems: 1) this puts TRUMP's mental awareness on the table and at the center of all HIS legal decisions going forward; 2) it obviously didn't occur to him but if President 47 can invalidate the pardons of President 46 for any reason, then President 48 can invalidate the pardons of President 47 for any reason - and all those people doing potentially indictable things like Marco Rubio and Tom Homan and Pete Hegseth and Elon Musk can no longer be certain they will avoid legal exposure (DUH) just as Rubio (with the help of countless agents and with Karoline Leavitt joining the plot from the White House podium) add to evidence of a conspiracy to violate the rulings of federal courts; and 3) it means that all the pardons Trump has already issued (like of the January 6th terrorists, or Steve Bannon, or Charles Kushner) or the ones he's about to (like Pete Rose) are in doubt.

Great work, Sparky.

THE REST OF THIS BULLETIN IS A REPRISE OF TODAY'S REGULARLY SCHEDULED PODCAST (17:15) SPECIAL COMMENT: How do you remove a Senate Democratic Leader? CAN you remove a Senate Democratic Leader?

Oh my, yes. You can do it before the top of the hour. Certainly before tomorrow.

I'll lay it out for you.

It can happen provided you note Schumer is having a book event tonight at the Enoch Pratt Central Library in Baltimore at 7 PM. It takes a little guts. Takes angry civilians. Takes the 36 Senate Democrats and one Independent whom Chuck Schumer betrayed to stick their necks out again. Takes the whole lot of them to run the minor risk of fracturing the Senate caucus or the Democratic Party - but why not? It's not like they're doing anything.

Not when TWO new polls suggest Democrats are fed up with this group, that vast majorities demand RESISTANCE to Trump, not bipartisan crap, that the leader who best represents the ideals of the party is AOC (10%) as opposed to Obama (4%) and Schumer (2%) and worst of all - nobody (30%).

We should be talking about resistance, about Trump being twelve points underwater on the economy, about Musk retweeting the claim that Hitler didn't commit the holocaust, his public sector workers did, about Trump beginning to defy court orders to illegally deport people to third-party strongman states. 

But we're not - because of Chuck Schumer. Time for him to GO.

B-Block (38:15) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The world is coming apart and Politico devoted its lead 26 paragraphs to a journalism party. Alina Habba is a moron, Part 9,763. And Marco Rubio and the "president" of El Salvador are mocking American law. See you at the World Court, boys.

C-Block (49:15) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I'm under the weather and that always flashes me back to the day I was 21 and my doctor since my childhood gave me some muscle relaxants without warning me of the side effects. Hilarity ensued.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 109: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: How do you remove a Senate Democratic Leader? CAN you remove a Senate Democratic Leader?

Oh my, yes. You can do it before the top of the hour. Certainly before tomorrow.

I'll lay it out for you.

It can happen provided you note Schumer is having a book event tonight at the Enoch Pratt Central Library in Baltimore at 7 PM. It takes a little guts. Takes angry civilians. Takes the 36 Senate Democrats and one Independent whom Chuck Schumer betrayed to stick their necks out again. Takes the whole lot of them to run the minor risk of fracturing the Senate caucus or the Democratic Party - but why not? It's not like they're doing anything.

Not when TWO new polls suggest Democrats are fed up with this group, that vast majorities demand RESISTANCE to Trump, not bipartisan crap, that the leader who best represents the ideals of the party is AOC (10%) as opposed to Obama (4%) and Schumer (2%) and worst of all - nobody (30%).

We should be talking about resistance, about Trump being twelve points underwater on the economy, about Musk retweeting the claim that Hitler didn't commit the holocaust, his public sector workers did, about Trump beginning to defy court orders to illegally deport people to third-party strongman states. 

But we're not - because of Chuck Schumer. Time for him to GO.

B-Block (23:45) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The world is coming apart and Politico devoted its lead 26 paragraphs to a journalism party. Alina Habba is a moron, Part 9,763. And Marco Rubio and the "president" of El Salvador are mocking American law. See you at the World Court, boys.

C-Block (33:40) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I'm under the weather and that always flashes me back to the day I was 21 and my doctor since my childhood gave me some muscle relaxants without warning me of the side effects. Hilarity ensued.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 108: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: If Donald Trump were a foreign agent trying to destroy the U-S from within… what would he be doing differently?

Crash the stock market, bring on a recession, make it worldwide, with economic policies so insane that yesterday CNBC called them insane, not only get out of NATO but pit the US AGAINST NATO, sacrifice countries to the Russian dictator, push a cease fire in Ukraine that serves only to give Russia 30 days to re-fortify their troop positions, threaten our forever allies like Canada and Mexico, cut off humanitarian aid fast enough to start killing people via disease outbreaks in the same month, start dragging citizens and LEGAL immigrants off the streets and hold them incommunicado in distant concentration camps without trial prior to deportation, try to break the constitution to hold office to avoid prison, blackmail the owners of the major media companies to support him or at least destroy their news outlets, violate every law and make sure all the prosecutors and judges are loyal to you and NOT to the law, decapitate not the EXCESS in government but the people who know how to stop plane crashes and epidemics, turn the agencies over to every con man and idiot and loser and lunatic he could find, roll back human rights for minorities, burn all governmental records, base his decisions on the failed economic policy of 1894 that the professor must’ve been talking about the ONE day he didn’t cut class in college, give a line item veto to a compulsive liar drugged-up foreigner who literally blows up everything he touches, and finally take a 100 million dollar bribe (I’m sorry, contribution) in public during a live infomercial for the druggie’s self-driving self-detonating cars.

AND WHY WOULD Democrats give these creatures what they want? Why would Chuck Schumer try to finesse the Continuing Resolution as it comes to the Senate, when it is really just a bill to let Musk continue to resolve to shut down the government. Amazingly, Democrats fear being blamed if they block the bill and... there is a COMPLETE shutdown of the government. It's madness. The Republicans celebrate what the Democrats fear.

AND UPDATED FOR 2025 with unspoken references to Trump and a video montage spanning the hero's time to literally this month that ended with Elon Musk and the loudest booing I've ever heard, last night saw the first preview of George Clooney's Broadway version of "Good Night And Good Luck" in which he stars as Murrow. It's a technical masterpiece and the message is as ever timely and even urgent. And I had the privilege of being there.

B-Block (27:50) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Baseball has more new crap caps, only among these is one that spells out a vulgar Hispanic term for women's breasts. One of Marco Rubio's top State Department employees turns out to have been an online troll aimed at... Marco Rubio. And The Guardian asks "Is Stephen A. Smith The Answer for the Democrats" and the answer is surprisingly simply: no damn way.

C-Block (43:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL. Since Stephen A. is clearly part of an organized campaign to make us all stop breaking into laughter at the thought of him running for president, let me just tell the story of why moving from sports into politics may not be the best idea. I use as my example... myself.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 107: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: He has to go. And Minority Whip Katherine Clark. And Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar. And for that matter, Gavin Newsom has to go.

Because after these standard-issue moderate Democrats vanished on election night they have suddenly reappeared 125 days later to address the REAL issue: Democratic House members who actually DID something to protest Trump - even just something symbolic like Al Green did, or those who supported him did.

Jeffries and the others called them to a "come to Jesus" meeting to warn them never to ignore his "Dear Colleague" letter again, that the way to stand up to Trump lighting the county and the world on fire is to hold up mincing little pickle ball paddles with mild words on them and especially to coordinate outfits while not clapping.

Out. Jeffries, Clark, Aguilar. And anybody else who doesn't realize that the last people capable of piercing Trump's bubble are Democrats at his speeches to Congress, and the media which has failed at the task even more than the Dems have.

We need civil disobedience and instead Jeffries is warning Democrats, and 10 Democrats are joining the fascists, in punishing Democrats.

And Newsom? His comments about trans athletes are bad enough. That he did them during a podcast with Charlie Kirk, arranged by Newsom's ex-wife Kim Guilfoyle, is far worse. I mean Newsom's judgment was already in doubt (he married Kim Guilfoyle FFS), but this is insanity.

The nation is ablaze and the Dems are sending strongly worded notes.

The media continues to collapse.It believed Trump's lies about pressuring Russia while he was in fact increasing his demands of Ukraine to include Zelensky resigning. And when Trump told a reporter he couldn't ask a certain question the White House Correspondents Association continued its policy of not commenting. And golly why did Trump think he could publicly threaten Nicolle Wallace and Rachel Maddow?

Well, because of Joe Scarborough, obvs.

B-Block (38:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Stephen A. Smith is not running for president, but keep asking him. Happily he IS showing he doesn't understand the first thing about any of this. His newest political crush? Candace Owens. Meanwhile Musk doesn't understand sports or America. And the Prime Minister of New Zealand fired a diplomat for reminding Britain that Trump is simply doing now what they did to Czechoslovakia in 1938.

C-Block (49:20) THURBER SPECIAL: Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio, needs about $200,000 to keep going. The least we can do is raise consciousness. So for the first time since the election here is not just one but two Thurber stories: my favorite ("A Box To Hide In") and my late father's ("I Went To Sullivant."

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 106: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Hidden behind Trump’s complex multi-layered endless hallucination that his address to Congress shows he is beloved and the stock market isn’t crashing and Speaker Johnson’s Chief of Staff WASN’T arrested on a DUI right after the speech and the MAGGOTS aren’t furious at him and the newest polling doesn’t suggest he’s already lost nearly a fifth of the Trump Bros under 30… there is a much more real and much starker truth: he has already moving to make NOT LOVING HIM… illegal.

The attempt is underway to make PROTESTING THE TRUMP DICTATORSHIP against the law. Early Tuesday, Trump posted what seemed like a warning against pro-Palestinian protests on American campuses. In fact it says nothing about what kind of protests he'd make illegal, so let me tell you what he really meant: 

Let me re-write this to reflect reality – the reality inside Trump’s plans to imprison you. 'All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Protests like ‘Black Lives Matter’ are now illegal. Protests to save Medicare are now illegal. Protests against your favorite president (me) are now illegal. Agitators will be imprisoned… American students will be permanently expelled or depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! NO DEMOCRATS! Thank you for your attention to this matter.'

He also dropped a second hint inside that test of human endurance in front of the House and Senate of how he will use the new anti-Deepfake law to prosecute you for sharing videos of him, whether they're real or they're not. Because therein lies the true danger of a deepfake law: claiming a REAL video is just a fake.

And of course don't miss out on the attempt to censure Rep. Al Green, the true hero of Tuesday night. They will vote today on punishing him for doing nothing compared to the previous Karen-ing by Boebert and Greene, or the infamous Joe "You Lie" Wilson. WE should be voting on whether we want Al to be the Democratic nominee in '28. Or the head of the entire party. Or the mandatory role model behind whom all the Democrats should've walked out in solidarity.

B-Block (31:00) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Those Trump Bros? The under 30s who pushed Trump over the finish line? They have abandoned him. Poll numbers among them down 15-30% in the first MONTH. Ukraine and the peacekeepers explained. Which Trumper would you take first in the Moron Draft, JD Vance, Karoline Leavitt, or Alina Habba? And when Joni Ernst campaigned on going to Washington to get hog and make 'em squeal, little did we know!

C-Block (44:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Jeff Shell, reportedly running CBS before he's legally allowed to? Well 15 years ago he tried to run NBC before he was legally allowed to, and I have the receipts. Appeaser Governor Polis of Colorado learns what you get for helping Trump: Trump wants to cut off funds to Colorado. And Nancy Mace has a Lion Gender Identity Crisis.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 105: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump has just lost World War Three.

Trump listens to Musk maybe because he recognizes Musk is more insane than he is. Musk literally wants to own and rule the world. Musk just demanded this country withdraws from NATO. Other Muskers and Trumpers are following. If we leave NATO its remaining members will turn into a private hunting ground for Putin, or China, or both. Eventually he or they will run out of European countries to destroy and subsume and he or they will turn to destroying us.

As Senator Chris Murphy said yesterday: "The White House has become an arm of the Kremlin." It's that simple. Trump is the Russian Commissar of America.

And he's already lost World War Three - and evidently so have the British. Back home, Prime Minister Starmer did the unthinkable, met Zelensky not at the front door of Number 10 but he went INTO Downing Street to embrace him on the sidewalk. The front page of yesterday’s far right tabloid the Daily Mail headlined “outrage over U-S President’s humiliation of Zelensky” and insisted “Now stop the state visit for Bully Trump.” Demanded the British WITHDRAW their invitation for Trump to go there. But within hours their ambassador here undid all of that. Lord Peter Mandelson went on ABC This Week here and called for a “very radical re-set” that “has to consist of the United States and Ukraine getting back on the same page and President Zelensky giving his unequivocal backing to the initiative that Trump is taking to end the war and to bring a just and lasting peace to Ukraine.” Europe's nations “need to back the calls for a ceasefire and by the way I think that Ukraine should be the first to commit to a ceasefire and defy the Russians to follow."

Hey, Lord Mendacious? Forgotten already? Zelensky already signed a cease-fire with Putin. Signed in 2019. Putin broke it in 2022.

200,000 guys named Lord Gaseous and Sir Toby Belch and they sent the one who sounds most like Neville Chamberlain. The British are defending Zelensky but their Ambassador just surrendered to Hitler. I mean Trump. No, Hitler. It’s impossible to believe the Prime Minister hasn’t fired Mandelson already (“recalled” is the polite term; “vaporized” would be the accurate one). Regardless the schism is present and the schism is a repeat, a throwback, a re-enactment of 1938, where as Churchill said the British leaders had a choice between shame and war. They have chosen shame, they will get war later. The war THEY got later was World War Two.

The war WE will get later will be World War THREE.

We will have to go to war – the real thing, none of this Iraq bullshit – the real thing, millions dead – not just to free Europe and all the other places who thought we understood that the world is simply successfully managed tension between the forces of more-or-less-good and the forces of the Putins, Hitlers, Musks, Trumps, Chamberlains, and Mandelsons… not just to free them but to save whatever’s left of this nation after the headstart Trump and Musk are giving, right now, as we speak, to Putin and China.

Thus I’ll repeat what I said in the bulletin after the pre-planned performative and nauseating ambush of Zelensky last Friday: Trump has not only imperiled the freedom of the United States of America AND the existence of Ukraine AND the independence of all the nations of Europe he has also lost all moral right to keep power in this country and he must lose that power.

B-BLOCK (25:00) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: So. HOW does he non-violently lose power (and it must be non-violent, albeit probably unconventional)? I have the beginnings of ideas: a shadow cabinet, weekly press conferences to co-opt the Sunday and Monday news cycles, a huge multi-faceted protest at Trump's speech to Congress tomorrow. Aggressive behavior. Maybe the Democrats can do it, maybe not. Also: some thoughts on Trump pardoning and baseball seeking to reinstate Pete Rose, the alleged pedophile and child rapist. 

C-BLOCK (48:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Andy Ogles just proposed a law that will fire anybody who altered the FBI evidence on Jeffrey Epstein. So you want a law forcing the firing of Kash Patel and Trump? Cool! Trump stooge Ed Martin wants to prosecute something that never happened. And we've missed the true meaning of the Jeff Bezos launch of Katy Perry, Lauren Sanchez and Gayle King on Blue Origin: BEZOS WANTS TO SEND HIS OWN GIRLFRIEND INTO SPACE LOL.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 104: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

BULLETIN: Firstly I apologize to President Volodomir Zelensky and the people of Ukraine, on behalf of the United States of America.

The REAL people of the United States of America, not the half-brained Russian stooges and assets. Our sense of shame and regret is immeasurable. OURS, the REAL people of the United States of America - almost always generous, largely well-intentioned, and when we are neither, when we are at our most self-centered, at LEAST smart enough and willing to let other people fight our fights for us, and die battling fascists and dictators like Putin instead of us.

We will never let Trump forget what he did to you do today. We will make him atone. And all those who serve him and do not resign just in sheer embarrassment over being so wrong so loudly and in the service of such a moron as Trump – they have from this day forfeited their legitimacy as quote “leaders” of this nation, as the pack of diarrhetic farm animals Trump calls a cabinet has from this day forfeited ITS legitimacy as a government. 

And to that point, Trump must now lose power.

Today was a 24-hour consumer boycott, poorly publicized, poorly covered by our increasingly stenographic media. Now we must have a 24-day consumer boycott. Then a 24-month consumer boycott.

Today we witnessed the most disgraceful and un-American act by any president in our history and I include Nixon and Watergate, and Bush and Iraq, and everything Trump has previously done. Now we must consume his presidency and force it to do nothing but defend this disgusting, pre-planned act on behalf of Putin and Russia every hour and every day and every week until we force him to resign the presidency.

On Presidents Day the 50501 Movement protested in Washington and in state capitols. Now we must protest Trump and his attempt, of which today’s shameful attack on Zelensky WAS a part, to install him permanently in power, and we must do it every day, in every city, until nothing else in this country matters and nothing else in this country HAPPENS.

In the ‘60s and before and after we mobilized on the street to protest and stop the degradation of our citizens of color and the murder of our citizens of EVERY color via the draft and the Vietnam War. Now we must have protests that recognize that at this moment, all of us, you and me, are being shaped by Trump and his terrorist gang into the equivalent of the victims of segregation and the draftees sent to Southeast Asia to be slaughtered. Civil disobedience, tax strike, general strike.

Today, CNN, Politico, The Washington Post and others downplayed what Trump did and positioned it as a "scolding" or a "shouting match" as opposed to a deranged attack by a deranged man. Now, these news organizations must either stop pandering to an immoral dictator or lose as he will. 

Because Trump crossed his Rubicon today.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 103: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: There is an alternate, rogue religious theory about an afterlife. It goes like this: "Hell" is not some place deep in the earth or anywhere else with eternal torture and fire. In fact, what we call "life" - THIS is hell.

There is considerable new evidence this week that this theory is probably correct. The Washington Post had already been proving that its slogan "Democracy Dies In Darkness" was not a warning but Jeff Bezos's game plan. Now he's made it official: Op-eds are out; pro-Trump "liberties" and "free markets" are in. Other opinions need not apply. Bezos is a fascist.

And he's only the third of three media disasters this week. To my surprise, Rachel Maddow DID say something about the Racist Purge at her MSNBC. Unfortunately, it wasn't the truth. She gave out the corporate cover story that Joy Reid "left" and "went out the door" and and and... she was FIRED.

I guess I should've known. Rachel also didn't tell the truth when I left. I had kept her in my confidence as I negotiated my exit in 2010 and 2011 and the night it happened she was on Maher's show and though she knew everything, when he asked her about the breaking news - a few hours after my last email to her suggesting "this is it" she answered "This is the first I’m hearing about any of this. I know nothing about it.”

And Trump's response to MSNBC throwing Reid into the volcano as a human sacrifice? He's threatening to sue them all anyway. And change the laws.

And then there's the White House Correspondents Association. It did nothing about Trump trying to rewrite the Associated Press's stories. So now he's told them they will no longer select the pool reporter. But don't worry, the WHCA's cowardice won't go unpunished. Its president will be one of the new MSNBC hosts who can get sacrificed in the Trump Bottomless Bit later.

B-Block (35:38) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Welcome to political scrutiny, Stephen A. Smith. Musk loves Trump - now. 2020? Called him an effing idiot. And this is how bad it is: Trump put one of my exes on the Kennedy Center board.

C-Block (44:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: She's in the news and we need the laugh, so once again, the saga of my two dates with Laura Ingraham, one of the last times I thought "this might be the night I die."

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 102: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN BULLETIN

A-Block (1:44) BULLETIN: Now FIVE different anchors of color have been dismissed, demoted, or had their shows cancelled in an MSNBC purge so brutal and racist that it makes you think the place is being run by Elon Musk.

The newest victims? Katie Phang, gone. Jonathan Capehart, loses his show. Ayman Mohyeldin, who was held up as the example of "we're not racist, we're giving him the show" when Mehdi Hasan was fired? HE'S lost the show. There wasn't even a non-anchor of color fired as cover (Katy Tur?)

If this sounds familiar it's the same playbook used at CNN three years ago. Destroy the product, drive away the audience, claim it's about business and not fascism. And it's something GE wanted to do with MSNBC in 2009 when our success was too much trouble for Chairman Jeff Immelt.

And where by the way are the protests from Maddow, Hayes, or O'Donnell?

(9:00) ON JOY REID'S FIRING: repeated from today's full episode of the podcast. Feel free to not listen again, it's half an hour. Yes, firing her is racist and maybe worse yes it is designed to keep out people who might think differently and it is designed to reward professional political salespeople like party chairmen and press secretaries. But most of all, since they also fired Alex Wagner, it means that four women of color have solo hosted prominent shows ON MSNBC and all four of them have now been fired. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 101: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and replaced him with a junior officer he brought back from retirement whom HE claims once wore a MAGA cap in his presence. Then he fired the Judge Advocate of the army, the Judge Advocate of the Navy, and the Judge Advocate of the Air Force.

What you have been told by news organizations – even ones that still have good reporters – that this is part of the Trump Racism Orgy. The fired Joint Chiefs Chairman Charles Q. Brown is black. The Chief of Naval Operations was a woman. Their identities are cover stories and red meat for the Trump cult. Trump looked at the top lawyers at the Army, Navy and Air Force, the ones who would tell him, no, you can’t have the Army shoot civilians, and you can’t have the Navy blockade Vancouver and Greenland and the Panama Canal, and you can’t bomb the next Democratic convention… and he fired them.

At least six different reporters and commentators on the military beat said the same thing. Firing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is bad and a red flag. Firing the T-JAGS, the Judge Advocates, the lawyers who tell you when something you are going to do with the military is illegal… can mean only one thing… you are planning to do something with the military that is illegal. You fire the people who would SAY it’s illegal and replace them with people who would say it ISN’T illegal.

There are degrees of nightmare ahead. They all amount to different versions of Trump's plot to permanently take over the government by using the military.

B-Block (26:20) THE FIRING OF JOY REID: Yes, firing her is racist and maybe worse yes it is designed to keep out people who might think differently and it is designed to reward professional political salespeople like party chairmen and press secretaries. But most of all, since they also fired Alex Wagner, it means that four women of color have solo hosted prominent shows ON MSNBC and all four of them have now been fired. 

C-Block (58:00) SPORTSBALL CENTRAL: I could not have been more wrong about hockey's Four Nations Faceoff. But at least I wasn't as wrong as Wayne Gretzky, now under deserved attack in Canada as a remorseless Trumpist, and rapidly becoming The Man Without A Country. (1:11:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Senator Thom Tillis begins to suck up to Trump. Jared Polis, "Democratic" governor of Colorado, should resign. So too should Phil Murphy, "Democratic" governor of New Jersey.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 100: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump thinks we are not vulnerable to attack because the Atlantic Ocean separates us from Europe. He literally wrote this yesterday. This illusion of oceanic walls was shattered no later than the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 and more likely the first time a German craft was seen off the shores of this country during the First World War.

It's madness. It's disqualifying. And it got lost amid the madness about calling Zelensky a dictator and threatening Ukraine and Trump describing himself as "King" and and and...

"This war is far more important to Europe than it is to us. We have a big beautiful ocean as separation.” 

Ironically, the man who disproved the "separation" was Charles Lindbergh with his solo crossing of the Atlantic and it is Lindbergh's America First Isolationists of the '30s whom Trump is now emulating. If you've ever wondered what it would have been like had Lindbergh become president and done a deal with Hitler, stop wondering. We're living through it now - only with Putin.

AND DON'T DISMISS THE "KING" STUFF: “Congestion Pricing Is Dead. Manhattan and all of New York is saved. Long live the king.” I don’t know who the king could BE in this construction if Trump doesn’t mean Trump. I do know a Tea Party slob Trump made Deputy White House Chief of Staff promptly tweeted it with an AI image of Trump in fetching king’s robes that like his suits was clearly cut to hide his belly. The official White House account then put out a fake magazine cover with him wearing a crown two or three sizes too small. It is tempting to dismiss this as trolling but at minimum this is part of the effort to make him look omnipotent and mandated instead of a president with 49-point-eight percent of the vote and a disapproval poll rating that went from 41 percent on inauguration day to 51 percent last week.

B-Block (31:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Markwayne Mullin makes everybody really uncomfortable at a Senate hearing. The NHL somehow thinks Trump's threats against Canada are an excellent marketing tool for their little hockey game tonight. And Stephen A. Smith thinks it's an embarrassment that people keep saying he should run for president and by people he means himself and by embarrassment he means please somebody say it.

C-Block (42:20) COMIC RELIEF: Two lighter stories. There's the weirdest thing ever said to me by an athlete in an interview, by the late hockey great Bobby Hull, who is posthumously in the news. And there was a flashback to my original MSNBC show at of all places The Animal Medical Center. And the flashback involved making fun of Wolf Blitzer.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 99: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: There's a small problem (naturally) that Trump overlooked (of course) when he misquoted (evergreen) the probably-apocryphal (saw that coming) Napoleon quote "He who saves his country does not violate any law.”

The problem should be obvious.

What if I think I'm saving my country FROM Trump?

What if you think you are saving your country FROM Trump?

Set aside for a moment the implicit stochastic call to terrorism or just law-breaking from Trump to his supporters. What about his message to them? Us? You? Me?

Did he just indemnify all of us?

Seems kind of dangerous. On the other hand, seems like something that somebody who has slipped fully into a delusion of universal support would say.

The implications are, like Trump and Musk, just staggering.

ALSO WHY IT'S TIME FOR A NEWS BOYCOTT OF THE WHITE HOUSE: Again, I don't have enough space or words to tell you how much this won't happen, but the response to the White House attempt to dictate what the Associated Press gets to write (and open the path to telling you what YOU get to write) should be obvious and unanimous: don't send any reporters to the White House or Air Force One until the AP is restored. And I'm sure The Washington Vichy Post and The New York Bothsidesist Times and CNN (Certainly Not News) will be right out front.

On the other hand, there IS a good media pushback idea: A Democratic Shadow Press Secretary,.

B-Block (31:25) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Some Dominican voters in Reading, PA, who according to the Mayor there voted for Trump because they just assumed when he said he'd deport "illegals" he'd give them amnesties because they're good people. Mark Zuckerberg is back, suppressing ads for the ever-controversial (checks notes) Invictus Games. And Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen praise the "masculinity" of Musk and Trump even though the four of them don't have enough masculinity to fill up a thimble.

C-Block (40:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: A confession. I didn't lie when I said why I discontinued the 2016-17 GQ Series "The Resistance." Nor did I tell the entire truth. I will now. It involves a threat against me, an inadvertent meeting with old SportsCenter friends, a deep hatred of the topic of Trump, and the firing of a loyal colleague.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 98: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Many Americans will not stop lying to themselves about Trump’s insanity.

But the rest of us have to. The rest of us: every politician who steps in front of a microphone, every news producer who begins a newscast with some other story made trivial in contrast, every columnist who writes about alarm or some quarters or this Ohio diner, every commentator tempted to say this was the moment Trump truly became president. Trump is manifestly insane and this week he has entered that stage of whatever it specifically IS that’s wrong with him, that is characterized by mania: the conviction that something that is impossible WILL happen simply because he SAYS it is going to happen.

HIS mania happens to be about Gaza. The next one could be about the sun rising in the west. Or about how Americans would survive a nuclear war because he’s leading them and he’s immortal. Mania doesn’t have to be MANIC. It doesn’t require hyperbolic words nor unsuppressed rage nor vivid hallucinations. He’s insane. He believes in things that aren’t true and can’t be true and he has a rationalization ready for whenever somebody tells him that they can’t be true. There is nothing of the cliched crazy man in his voice as he talks about Gaza. Nevertheless this guy is metaphorically about one inch away from having conversations with invisible gophers.

He says the land is beautiful and he will "cherish" it. His language matches what someone would say if they were having sex with the land. It's a form of what film-maker Billy Wilder allegedly told Nancy Reagan when she quizzed him about why the character played by Gloria Swanson had a pet chimp in their movie “Sunset Boulevard”: "that's because she was f'ing the monkey."

Trump talks about Gaza like he is f'ing the monkey.

B-Block (30:04) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Fox's Emily Compagno knows how to reform the media. Literally have them just republish Trump press releases. Well, it works for Fox. Dinesh D'Souza celebrates an Army Base NOT being re-re-named after a Civil War General, and Eric Adams, polling at 10% to be renominated for Mayor of New York, has not only sold out his city but now he is actively toying with switching to the GOP, where he will probably poll at LESS than 10%.

C-Block (41:10) IN SPORTS: Oh man do I hate it when leagues shut down their seasons so the players can play made-up international tournaments. Wait, only the National Hockey League does that? As part of its marketing strategy to make this great game even LESS prominent? And by the way its new tournament unfolds as the 45th anniversary hits of a truly great international tournament: the 1980 Olympic Hockey medal competition. I covered it, and I'm still cold. Memories, and one of my radio reports, included.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 97: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump and Musk and Vance are now clearly signaling their intent to ignore the court orders keeping Musk from pillaging the government financial computers and your personal information. It is the informal beginning of their Civil War against the government of the United States of America. We're not at Fort Sumter yet but it's visible.

Yet there has been no update on the news that Trump’s minions have already been giving loyalty tests to applicants to the FBI, other law enforcement, national security, that include questions like “Yes or No: Was The 2020 Election Stolen” and “Who is your REAL boss?” No updates from Saturday’s Washington Post story and as nearly as I can tell it didn’t even COME UP during any of the Sunday shows.

The question NOW becomes what happens when – and this seems increasingly inevitable – Trump and Musk defy the court orders and again access the treasury. First of all, who is there to STOP them? What do the courts who have ruled against them, and the others who are likely to rule against them THIS week, and the litigants like the 19 Attorneys General, do next? Does this go directly to the Supreme Court where the corrupt theologians can say “ah but we have precedent in this area. If you can’t prosecute an EX-President for crimes, if HE’S immune, how can you prosecute anybody for crimes ordered by a SITTING president?” in which case it’s official, it’s a dictatorship. Or TRUMP looks at the judges and say THEIR behavior is actually an attack on the country and HE invokes the Insurrection Act and rounds up the judges and the Democrats and… me.

The other option is intermediate steps by the judges who really really don’t like being ignored and who while they might hesitate to pursue Trump, would probably line up to pursue Musk and the others. They could quickly order Contempt of Court orders against Musk and his employees and there are scenarios in which they move quickly enough to put them in holding cells for defying legitimate orders. Or there could be a confrontation between Court Officers and police loyal to them, and Musk’s people and police loyal to THEM. Or there could be a VIOLENT confrontation between those groups. Or this could end up the Juan Merchan route in which the courts act so slowly, so stupidly, so violating their purpose and indeed their history of blocking corruption, especially corrupt businessmen maneuvering a hostile takeover of the government, do… nothing.

There IS one wild card I see here. Trump says he will have Musk look next at the Education Department and then the Army. If Musk tries to do to the Pentagon what he's done to the Treasury and goes in there, they may never find him.

The rest of this episode repeats Sunday's emergency edition about Trump is having them ask candidates for jobs in his administration’s FBI field stations away from D-C what is probably the most chilling question ever asked by any government of the United States: “Who is your real boss?”

This is, if you do not know, in The Washington Post’s brief, damning, almost (despite everything) unbelievable, nightmarish report posted late Saturday night. The Post is quoting applicants for the FBI and other top National Security positions – and they hint some of these are people who were IN these organizations, dismissed, and are being the opportunity to return to work. At least two FBI applicants were asked at least two questions out of George Orwell or the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. One, you heard: Who is your real boss? If you need more, don’t worry, there IS more. Who were “the real patriots on January 6th?”

We know through the Post’s reporting, of at least two other questions, asked of those being interviewed for some kind of leadership positions WITHIN the Trump national security apparatus IN Washington. They are told to answer yes or no to each. Question one: was January 6th an “inside job?” Question two: Was the 2020 presidential election stolen? At least these two applicants told their interviewers ‘no.’ Neither was hired.

Just the asking of these questions alone – never mind the answers, let alone the implications that it is anything BUT political science fiction to conclude that some people have already answered YES and are moving into roles at the FBI and other law enforcement and national security organizations – just ASKING these questions, signals the end of democracy because if today you can ask candidates for FEDERAL law enforcement positions to swear personal loyalty to their “real boss” and if today you can ask candidates for those same positions to insist lies about January 6th and the 2020 election are the truth, and that the truths are lies… then tomorrow you can make it ILLEGAL to answer that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, and then next week you can make it illegal to publish or broadcast that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, and then the week after that you can put anybody who does in prison.

We are already here. To be in law enforcement, you have to prove in advance you are willing to lie for Trump. I hope every bothsidesist reporter and whatboutist executive and bipartisan Democrat has a secret plan they've been saving for the last possible moment.

Because we are at the last possible moment.

PLUS: Musk is now hinting at ignoring the court ruling restraining him from further access to government computers and payroll systems. If he and Trump don't obey the rulings force of some kind will have to be applied and this entire issue of democracy versus dictatorship may come to a head faster than ever anticipated  

B-Block (41:42) MORE SPECIAL COMMENTS: We are at the point where I hope I've never been righter and the continuation of democracy actually does depend more on the stupidity of those trying to destroy it than it does on the efforts of those of us trying to save it. But there are measures we take - or at least our wobbling, dubious opposition party can take: deny support for anything in the House and put a personal hold on anything Trump wants from the Senate. And we need a Wartime Consigliere or if you're from this century, The War Doctor.

C-Block (56:45) WRAPPING IT UP: I don't know when the next episode will be. I do know we need our own answer from Hakeem Jeffries and every other Democrat to the question of the hour: Who's Your Boss?

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 96: EMERGENCY EDITION

A-Block (1:45) (AN EMERGENCY PODCAST): Trump is having them ask candidates for jobs in his administration’s FBI field stations away from D-C what is probably the most chilling question ever asked by any government of the United States: “Who is your real boss?”

This is, if you do not know, in The Washington Post’s brief, damning, almost (despite everything) unbelievable, nightmarish report posted late Saturday night. The Post is quoting applicants for the FBI and other top National Security positions – and they hint some of these are people who were IN these organizations, dismissed, and are being the opportunity to return to work. At least two FBI applicants were asked at least two questions out of George Orwell or the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. One, you heard: Who is your real boss? If you need more, don’t worry, there IS more. Who were “the real patriots on January 6th?”

We know through the Post’s reporting, of at least two other questions, asked of those being interviewed for some kind of leadership positions WITHIN the Trump national security apparatus IN Washington. They are told to answer yes or no to each. Question one: was January 6th an “inside job?” Question two: Was the 2020 presidential election stolen? At least these two applicants told their interviewers ‘no.’ Neither was hired.

Just the asking of these questions alone – never mind the answers, let alone the implications that it is anything BUT political science fiction to conclude that some people have already answered YES and are moving into roles at the FBI and other law enforcement and national security organizations – just ASKING these questions, signals the end of democracy because if today you can ask candidates for FEDERAL law enforcement positions to swear personal loyalty to their “real boss” and if today you can ask candidates for those same positions to insist lies about January 6th and the 2020 election are the truth, and that the truths are lies… then tomorrow you can make it ILLEGAL to answer that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, and then next week you can make it illegal to publish or broadcast that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, and then the week after that you can put anybody who does in prison.

We are already here. To be in law enforcement, you have to prove in advance you are willing to lie for Trump. I hope every bothsidesist reporter and whatboutist executive and bipartisan Democrat has a secret plan they've been saving for the last possible moment.

Because we are at the last possible moment.

PLUS: Musk is now hinting at ignoring the court ruling restraining him from further access to government computers and payroll systems. If he and Trump don't obey the rulings force of some kind will have to be applied and this entire issue of democracy versus dictatorship may come to a head faster than ever anticipated  

B-Block (26:20) MORE SPECIAL COMMENTS: We are at the point where I hope I've never been righter and the continuation of democracy actually does depend more on the stupidity of those trying to destroy it than it does on the efforts of those of us trying to save it. But there are measures we take - or at least our wobbling, dubious opposition party can take: deny support for anything in the House and put a personal hold on anything Trump wants from the Senate. And we need a Wartime Consigliere or if you're from this century, The War Doctor.

C-Block (41:20) WRAPPING IT UP: I don't know when the next episode will be. I do know we need our own answer from Hakeem Jeffries and every other Democrat to the question of the hour: Who's Your Boss?

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 95: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Now that the Democratic Party and the nation has realized that Musk is at the center of a Trumpian coup to privatize the government, the question becomes: HOW do we arrest Elon and his Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles?

The reality of the crises of the tech-bro coup and the putsch to violate the constitution and the multi trillion-dollar attempted heist and Trump’s plan to invade Gaza so he can personally own it has gotten through. Congressman Al Green has confirmed he will make a motion to impeach Trump and remember even failed impeachment bills give the impeaching party a perfect record in the next House, Senate, and Presidential elections. But until we can replace the Supreme Court, Trump is immune.

However, Musk is not immune. None of his little minions are immune. Any of the officials at USAid or in the Treasury Department or OMB who admitted these little clowns into secure areas are not immune, in fact they are subject to espionage charges and they will still be subject to them four years from now. There are at least 28 lawsuits in progress against the various tentacles of Musk's cyber-version of Oceans 11 meets The Nigerian Prince who only needs your routing number. One has already stopped the destruction of birthright citizenship in its tracks.

And local prosecutions are doable and reasonable. The key to putting Musk away is publicity. What he is doing a story CREATED for local television news and its older, less affluent audience: somebody sent hackers into the government where they, right now, could be stealing your medicare money and social security? It’s EXACTLY what local television producers live for: Here’s Jack Liveshot in Scarsdale with his guest Concerned Grandma. This is low-hanging fruit because everybody hates Elon Musk. EVERYBODY. And body will hate him more than all the little tech-bros after it turns out Musk is NOT omnipotent and to do his dirty work for him, ends with your ass in jail.

First one to flip on Musk gets probation and a brand new Hotmail account and AOL installation disk.

B-Block (29:24) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Did nobody tell Roger Goodell of the NFL that to suddenly declare yourself anti-"End Racism" is the same thing as saying you are PRO-Racism? The average Conservative who got David-and-Goliath wrong. And Rahm Emanuel is destroyed online by my pal Will Bunch with one of the most efficient burns I've ever seen.

C-Block (38:40) THINGS I PROMISE NOT TO TELL: I was quoted by the Washington Post complimenting Maddow and reportedly she's pissed (that they put me in her story). Coincidentally, this is more or less the anniversary that I bypassed my bosses and hired her at MSNBC out of my own pocket.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 94: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump and Musk are, at this moment, overthrowing our form of government.

And this is how to stop them: Yell. Keep yelling.

Government data about religious charities – private, if not necessarily secret – has wound up in the hands of Mike Flynn, the foreign asset, General Scumbag – and he’s posted it online, and mocked the Lutheran Church in doing so. Musk’s hatchet-men are literally inside the government right now demanding leaders of the U.S. Agency for International Development turn over classified documents inside restricted areas and those that have refused have been placed on leave. Trump has started a trade war with our closest allies just to have somebody for his morons to hate.

Quote: “It’s a coup. Elon Musk is running a palace coup. Musk is taking classified information. Musk has taken YOUR social security number. Everybody involved should be arrested, by local DA’s if that’s all we can do, and denied bail,” unquote. A Democratic Senator, Representative, Governor, Mayor, needs to stand in front of microphones today and say that today and say that THAT BLUNTLY today. And, quote: “Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump might as well have killed those teenaged skaters on American 5342 themselves. The DC crash was their fault. Period.” Some OTHER Democratic leader, maybe the head of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, elected Saturday, needs to say that. As it is, Martin says: “We’re taking the gloves off. I’m always viewed my role as a chair of the Democratic Party to take the low road, so my candidates and elected officials can take the high road. Meaning, I’m going to throw a punch.”Good. Start swinging.

Because the FIRST step towards stopping wrong is by publicly and loudly yelling, THIS is wrong.

A Minnesota colleague described the new DNC Chair: “Ken will cut you if he has to.” I’ll bring the metaphorical Ginsu set because right now where we actually ARE is: the nominal leading Democratic office-holder is Chuck Schumer and as Trump and Musk began to ransack your social security number and starting trade wars with our literally closest allies, Chuck Schumer’s social media Saturday afternoon was: “You’re worried about tomato prices…” and ten minutes later “You’re watching the Super Bowl…wait’ll Trump’s tariffs raise your guacamole and beer prices.” Useless. I need a thousand Ken Martins, throwing punches and metaphorically cutting a MAG-itch. I need them saying this is a coup, we will stop it, it will take time, we will beat them and jail them because bottom line is they are lazy and they leave half their lives to chance – just look at their haircuts.

B-Block (30:00) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: CBS, NPR, New York Times, Politico, NBC all tried to kiss Trump's ring. He just hurt them anyway. And this is not a joke: Semafor is hosting a "National Summit" on how to restore confidence in media. The speakers are Megyn Kelly, the idiot running CNN, the other idiot running NBC, and the idiot running The New York Times. No - seriously.

B-Block (37:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Chuck Todd gets scooped on his own firing. Chris Licht finally gets a new job. Free-lance. Temp. At scale. And Neto-Baby Peter Doocy asks Softball Scholarship Recipient Karoline Leavitt about DEI. Also you doubted she called Hitler "Hilter?" I'll show you.

C-Block (47:00) SPORTSBALL CENTER TONIGHT: A basketball trade deal so bad it must have been ordered by Trump. How many Petterssons? ALL the Petterssons. And for the last damn time: hockey's "Original 6?" They aren't original, and there aren't six of them.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 93 - COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

BULLETIN (1:45) TRUMP INSULTS DEAD FROM WASHINGTON PLANE CRASH: In a stunning, sub-human dismissal of those who perished over The Potomac Wednesday night that tops even his earlier insistence that "DEI" somehow was responsible for the 67 deaths (and that he knew this because he had common sense when nobody else did), Trump insulted the memory of the victims and the grief of their mourning relatives.

Asked if he would visit the site of the accident, he asked "You want me to go swimming?"

Also tonight: despite Trump's mindless protestations about "DEI" this is more about "DOGE." The New York Times got hold of the initial FAA report on the disaster and discovered that staffing at the Air Traffic Control Tower at Reagan National was lower than normal for this time of day and year.

The dead may have been victims of The Department of Government Efficiency. If "DEI" is a dogwhistle for enraged white supremacists like Trump, "Government Efficiency" is a dogwhistle for mindless billionaires like Musk who don't just want more money - they want ALL the money.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

BULLETIN - SEASON 3 EPISODE 92: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) While recovery crews were literally still trying to find the bodies of the dead in the Potomac and with no material evidence of the air tragedy over Washington yet analyzed, President Trump, his eyebrows dyed an unnatural bright yellowish-white, rushed to a White House podium to explain that the crash was caused by DEI.

He knows this because he claims he has "common sense," which he does not.

Trump's metamorphosis into a candidate for institutionalization has now peaked with his obsession, his conviction, that the answer to any crisis, that the answer to any tragedy, that the response to any real human pain, is to blame DEI. .He must be removed from office. Impeachment bills, to be filed weekly until the minority power regains control of the House, MIGHT work. The 25thAmendment, providing for an emergency remedy for the exact inability to discharge the powers and duties of the presidency that Trump exhibited today, is the correct way to save this country. It is also, I add with I hope gravity and not menace, also the easiest.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 91: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: While any culpability for the DC air disaster is still to be established and the dead are still in the water I want to withhold implying political or governmental meaning to it and focus instead on events we already can see with relative clarity.

Karoline Leavitt was already so stupid that she once on-air insisted there was a word pronounced "damaning" (as in 'the evidence is damaning') and pronounced the Nazi monster's name as "Hilter."

Now with one tweet she may have topped herself. How do you publicly announce that the spending freeze struck down by a federal judge wasn't withdrawn, only its ANNOUNCEMENT was withdrawn, and only in response to the judge's ruling, and the freeze is going on as planned?

That's called contempt of court. Trump's lawyers will literally have to talk their way out of spending a day behind bars. Besides which, another judge has said the conflicting statements about the freeze pause are irrelevant: it cannot proceed.

This all underscores what has been evident since Trump again seized power. He is burning through the relative approval and patience of an exhausted America far more quickly this time than last, and there is a reckoning coming. His disapproval number jumped SEVEN points from last Tuesday to this past Sunday. The judges are fighting back. His hirelings are idiots. The public doesn't want this. Hopefully what follows is not unprecedented.

B-Block (28:50) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The Washington Post continues to trivialize and normalize the Madness of King Trump. Lauren Boebert is an actual expert on laboring with your hands, so I guess her opinion on how the minimum wage is too HIGH matters. And it's Anna Paulina Luna who finally gives in and proposes a bill to put Trump's head on Mt. Rushmore. Unfortunately she's phrased it in such a way that it could mean LITERALLY: put Trump's head ON Mt. Rushmore.

C-Block (36:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Nothing like the stream of consciousness that comes as you awake from the stream of UNconsciousness. On the way back from the endoscopy I saw the building in which I met Jim Thorpe's Olympic roommate from 1912, and I rediscovered the game "Midpoint" and I remembered the Twitter game from two years ago: "Hitler Handshakes."

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 90: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: To repeat myself - because I’m RIGHT - File motions to impeach Trump NOW.

Move to impeach Trump today, AND KEEP MOVING to impeach Trump every day through next year’s midterms. Impeachment is UNDEFEATED. UNDEFEATED in American history. House Democrats: he handed you TWELVE, maybe FIFTEEN new counts on Friday night alone. Blatantly, brazenly illegal dismissals of Departmental Inspector Generals, just as Project 2025 promised, and the School Safety Board. Elimination of oversight. Elimination of legal protections against the mass murder of children. In the old days you might’ve arrested Trump. Now you are limited to impeachment bills that will all fail EXCEPT THEY WILL ULTIMATELY SUCCEED.

Impeach him for the Friday Night massacre. Impeach him for circumventing the 14th Amendment. He just ramped up the migrant arrest quota to 1500 a day and started raids in Chicago yesterday: Impeach him for violating the 4th Amendment. And if I hear one more piece of blowback to my PREVIOUS call to impeach him no matter the outcome, one more head-shake from a cowardly Democrat, and especially one more factually inaccurate claim that it doesn’t work, one more self-absorbed loser saying ‘Impeach? Yeah, sounds good. How did it work out for us last time?

Pretty effing well, actually. The mere TALK of impeaching Trump helped the Democrats win the House in 2018 and break Trump tri-partite control of government. The FIRST impeachment was followed by keeping the house in 2020 and after the Georgia election, taking the senate in 2020, and oh by the way the White House in 2020. The SECOND impeachment crushed any lingering attempt by Trump to overthrow the Biden Government-In-Waiting in 2021 and provided the impetus for the January 6th prosecutions. 

In fact, since Nixon, every party that impeached or TRIED to impeach a president won the next elections. House, Senate, White House. Thirteen straight.

IMPEACHMENT – EVEN FAILED IMPEACHMENT - IS UNDEFEATED.

ALSO: The Media capitulation continues. Acosta's show cancelled by the latest CNN job who hasn't been able to keep a job since 2000. And how did appeasing Trump work out for you ABC, CBS, and NBC? Trump's FCC reinstated license challenges against your stations, Trump wants Maddow jailed, and at Disney: ESPN's Stephen A. Smith just made a Trumpist idiot out of himself. 

B-Block (35:12) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Trump has too many Bennies to keep them all straight: can't remember the Chairman of the January 6th Committee he wants to jail. Even the NFL is sucking up to Elon "It Only LOOKED Like A Nazi Salute" Trump. And the first baseball player since like 1877 to get the mouth sores and skin rashes of Hand, Foot and Mouth disease just endorsed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

C-Block (46:25) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: You know what it's like in this country right now? It's like we all just woke up from the anesthesia in the MIDDLE of a medical procedure. You know how I know this? Because I'm one of those people who actually DID wake up in the middle of a medical procedure - and I'm having the same procedure TOMORROW.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 89: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Impeach Trump.

Now. Again.

No, it won’t pass, it won’t work now. But it will pass, and it will work, next year, and it win the Democrats the midterms and the year after that it will brand Trump yet again as the most treacherous garbage in our history. Because lost in the avalanche of evil he has perpetrated since beginning his dictatorship, lost in the astonishment and even the despair of true Americans, lost in the numbed terrified capitulatory media coverage is the reality that his pardoning of the January 6th Traitors is amazingly unpopular, literally unpopular enough to cost him at least 43 house seats, right now, BEFORE he mindlessly signs more red meat Steven Miller slides under his piggish face. And the second part of this is: he has also already violated the Constitution of the United States. Already. Not 48 hours on the job and he is already guilty of impeachable offenses. Already.

There is almost nothing to do to stop Trump NOW. The Democrats are minorities in both houses, the courts are crooked, the SUPREME court is just another Trump Scam, the billionaires like Musk and Bezos and Zuckerberg and the other tech scum have lined up beside him just as Krupp and IG Farben and Opel stood next to and behind Hitler.

There is nothing to do TODAY except (to borrow from the musicals of the fascists) to make sure Tomorrow Belongs To Us. Introduce a bill, or even multiple bills, to impeach Trump. Keep the crimes he has already committed, including the ones he has been convicted of, and the ones he wriggled out of with dubious legality and non-existant morality, front-of-mind. Fight back, thwart him, anger him, waste his time, make him play defense, enrage his base, and terrify the billionaires because you could see on that mouse Zuckerberg’s face at the inauguration that he wasn’t so sure any more he picked the right side, and fight back.

Moreover – give the opposition – not the resistance this time but the DEFIANCE – something to DO with this time other than just sit here and replay November 5th and all the days leading up to it in some P-T-S-D doom loop. Nothing that is wrong in the history of the world has ever been stopped without the same first step: people standing up and SAYING this is wrong, this must BE stopped. 76 and a half million people voted against Trump – 49 and two fifths percent - and we are all just sitting here saying nothing, doing nothing, watching Trump wreck train after train.

B-Block (28:03) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The Twitter-X user so stupid she thinks Biden "parted" more people than Trump. That he "partied" his whole family. Much worse, CNN's Jake Tapper thinks Trump ran a disciplined campaign that "depicted (him) as someone who was within the realm of normalcy." When was that, Jake? When he insisted Immigrants were eating pets in Ohio? No wonder CNN is on the verge of disappearance. And lastly: $MELIANA. You'll figure it out.

C-Block (38:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: When Trumpists say I should shut up because I don't know him and I have "TDS" (what's that, I ask. Trump's Deranged Syndrome?) I like to mention that I met him in December 1983 and he wrote me a fan letter once and I've ALWAYS thought he was off his rocker.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 88: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Which one of these stories will you be talking about tomorrow?Remember when he said he’d be a dictator but only on day one? It’s day one. BEST JOKE OF THE YEAR: “The great thing about moving Trump’s inauguration to the rotunda,” writes Biden-Harris advance man Doug Landry, “is that all of his supporters already know how to get there.” CAPITULATION NATION: CBS is discussing settling the most nonsensical lawsuit Trump has ever filed because the settlement would be a wonderfully legal bribe. IT'S NOT A SURPRISE IMMIGRATION RAID if you tell everybody. These fascist morons couldn't stop boasting about their move against Chicago. Now it's almost off. RAMASWAMY GONE! Or as we called him, The Schwam: GONE! Hey, whaddya know, the Department of Government Efficient actually HAS cut waste! 

B-Block (32:39) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Rand Paul is so stupid he thinks running hoses out of the Pacific Ocean could've stopped the Firestorm. An actual major brand is introducing a new product and the catch phrase is "It's soup you can suck!" And Trump finds a new way to spray paint something that cheap flat gold color he loves while getting the name of one of his education employees wrong.

C-Block (42:00) IN MEMORY OF BOB UECKER: The second worst thing about getting old – not VERY old, just old-old – is having to watch nearly all those older than you who, accepted in what was their field and then became theirs and yours – pass on. Especially when they are the widely beloved standard-setters of those fields  like Bob Uecker.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 87: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: A reminder that what would become the Confederate states thought that secession was constitutional. A reminder that three and a half years earlier the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had no right to ban slavery and slaves had no rights at all. I was thinking of that as President Biden gave his farewell speech last night. Where in the constitution does it say that the nation must commit suicide because a slim majority of its voters have been fooled into believing it ISN’T?

Where in the law does it say that a criminal has to be protected from all laws by judges he corruptly appointed? Where in the law does it say that one man is above it? Where in our agency over our own lives does it say that we must defer to a traitor who has corrupted politics, voting, the judiciary, everything that we must defer to him just because he’s good at being evil? And where does a President's loyalty to his people rest? In protecting the forms and rules of a broken system, or protecting those people from the greatest threat they have ever faced – the threat of his successor who has perverted that broken system to serve himself and a few cronies and whores, and condemn the rest of us? Is it Joe Biden's constitutional and moral responsibility to declare a state of insurrection and put them all behind bars… or NOT to do so?

As I’ve said before, I do not have either enough words nor enough time to tell you how much this ISN’T going to happen – Doomsday, and national suicide, will continue as scheduled. Have fun!

ALSO: The good news is: Pete Hegseth was interrupted three times by hecklers at the hearing for his nomination as Secretary of Brylcreem… the bad news is: it wasn’t three HUNDRED times. He might be the SMARTEST. Pam Bondi apparently didn’t hear a single threat Trump made during his campaign and Tulsi Gabbard doesn’t know what her new job is. Trump goes full Reagan: tries to grab credit for Biden and Blinken’s Hostage Deal and Cease fire. Times, Running Out: is the New York Times actually INTENTIONALLY following the self-destructive path of The Washington Post and CNN. This is not a boat accident. You don’t know Jack-Smith: going out with a whimper not a bang. Love him, but what the hell was that. And how much fun was it to hear Elon Musk make a fool of himself as LA firefighters doused his conspiracy theories with reality?

B-Block (29:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The final shoe has dropped in the saga of my ex, and it has knocked Ryan Lizza out cold. Someone named Dakota Lee Dilley has completely personified the Trump (lack of) mentality: sure they were traitors but they were GIFTED traitors. And if you hate Dan Abrams or Chuck Todd, wait'll you hear Dan Abrams DEFENDING Chuck Todd.

C-Block 49:30 THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Lawrence O'Donnell's last interview? My heart raced with excitement. Then it turned out it was Joe Biden's last interview. Lawrence was just doing it and he, who correctly predicted years ago he could never host a cable news show with any skill for any considerable span, is staying. A terrible human who tried to take Countdown away from me while he was filling in for me while my dad was dying.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 86: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: MAGA in disarray. While the mass deportation scheme becomes the latest casualty of having elected a bunch of incompetent egomaniacs, Steve Bannon has declared war on Elon Musk. AND Elon Musk’s toady David Sachs. AND Peter Thiel.

Bannon no longer will stop at getting Musk exiled from the White House because Bannon and the rest of the nativist lunatics hate all foreigners but Musk wants to not hate foreigners who can make him more rich via the H1B Visas. Bannon now wants Musk and the others to be the first immigrants thrown out of the country. He actually told this to Italy’s most-read newspaper, Corriere della Sala: "He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down... he should go back to South Africa. Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth...making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States."

The point isn't whether Musk actually does kill and eat Musk. It's that they fight. Because at the same time Musk is admitting he can only cut half of the "government inefficiency" he promised to, and "Border Czar" Tom Homan is warning Republicans that Trump won't be deporting millions immediately. More like 60,000. And the Trump junta has admitted it can't unilaterally lower grocery prices, or install universal tariffs, and he's not going to dig up the Panama Canal and move it to Mar-a-Lago on Inauguration Day, he ain’t buying Greenland and coercing Canada and guess what, he didn’t “settle” Russia’s war on Ukraine in 24 hours, and his minions are hinting his attempts to turn the LA fires into an exploitable political event are going to crash.

And even before re-gaining power, Trump has pre-failed.

B-Block (34:55) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Joe Scarborough doubles down on his role as Marshal Petain-In-The-Ass at MSNVIchy. Politico dubs him "Elon Mush" then deletes it. And Naomi Wolf thinks victims of the Southern California firestorm aren't panicking enough.

C-Block (45:20) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: It's bleak and the forecast for next week is Trump. So I need a laugh and maybe you do too. And this we bring you back to 1994 and the greatest off-air laugh in ESPN's history: Soccer Breakdown.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 85: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Justice Samuel Alito must be off from the Supreme Court of the United States. Immediately. Today. He is without any morals, ethics, judicial standards, and if he is aware of the CONCEPT of the appearance of the conflict he no longer gives a damn. ABC News reports – and Alito confirms – that on TUESDAY he SPOKE to Trump – the day before Trump’s lawyers filed an emergency request demanding Alito and the other justices BLOCK New York Judge Juan Merchan from sentencing Trump tomorrow for his 34 convictions in the Election Interference/Stormy Daniels case here. Even though there is 0% chance of jail time, and probably not much more of one of probation or a fine.

The convicted felon constitutionally ineligible president-elect is also has the TikTok case in front of the Supreme Court AND will probably take the release of either or both of the two halves of the Jack Smith report on Trump – Espionage and the Coup Attempt – to the Supreme Court to try to keep those reports from ever seeing the light of a day and this human embodiment of sleaze Sam Alito TALKED TO HIM BY PHONE less than 48 hours ago.And what is Alito’s excuse for this complete breach of judicial etiquette? Alito told ABC the conversation WAS not about the cases, it was about… a job reference he wanted to personally given to get his law clerk a job in Trump's administration - even if it's true, ALSO a conflict of interest.

Sam Alito to ABC News: "We did not discuss the emergency application he filed today, and indeed, I was not even aware at the time of our conversation that such an application would be filed. We also did not discuss any other matter that is pending or might in the future come before the Supreme Court or any past Supreme Court decisions involving the President-elect." 

Nonsense.

Sam Alito lied in the case of the political flags flown over his homes and his conflicts with neighbors. He has publicly complained that the American public has had the nerve to disagree with him. He has imposed his religious nut job views on cases at the Court. How could you be so dense, so unaware of the hatred you personally have brought down upon this once most respected of American governmental institutions, as to conduct that call, NOW? I mean this would be cheap and petty and obvious and a conflict of interest even by Trumpian standards.

Just recusing is insufficient. He must be off the court. In point of fact, Alito should recuse, resign… and go to hell.

SOLUTION TO AILEEN CANNON? Ignore her. Solution to Mark Zuckerberg: Wonder with what Trump has threatened him. Solution to a tough Fox News town hall: Give Trump the questions secretly beforehand. Solution to invading Greenland, Canada, and Panama when we are by treaty required to protect Greenland, Canada and Panama? You got me.

B-Block (46:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Jen Psaki does a lengthy commentary wondering, four years too late, if Merrick Garland was the wrong choice to be Attorney General and she was wrong to promote him. Ultimately she decides she didn't screw up because "nobody can predict the future" even though the rest of us did. Like even Erick Erickson, whose J6 tweet resurfaces in which he called for barring Trump for office for life. And the suicide bomber Bezos brought in to destroy the Washington Post actually asked how to attract Trump supporters.

C-Block (58:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: The mandatory evacuation line in Santa Monica is three blocks north of the home I used to own when I worked there. It's amazing how a trivial detail like that can clarify a disaster like the L.A. fires - and how millions of us Angelenos (me included) managed to live in denial about the risks of living and building and expanding there. This is not criticism - it's confession.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 84: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:50) SPECIAL COMMENT: Happy Insurrection Day, when Republicans will certify the election of a “president” who is constitutionally ineligible to hold the office according to the 3rd clause of the 14th Amendment and the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 and who himself fomented the assault four years ago that ended our conceit about the peaceful transfer of power. The illegitimate president’s Republican whores and servants may in fact trudge to the capitol through a blizzard to make this prostitution of democracy official

The Democrats? They won’t say anything because this didn’t TEST well as a campaign ad and their flaccid willingness to risk anything in our defense is further deflated by their perception that this is a fait accompli and since it is a fait accompli ESPECIALLY because of their own cowardice they now have to do their best to compromise, and obey in advance, a group of bandits and pirates posing as a presidential administration, whose only desire TO compromise is to compromise Democrats and the Free Press and Reality and democracy itself.

These are some of those Republicans: Freshman Congressman Riley Moore – “My constituents have sent me here to this town not to work with Democrats but to destroy their agenda." “We asked everyone not to leak. Please for god’s sake do not give inside information to the enemy” that's from the LEAD Republican in the House, the CREEPIEST Republican in the House since Denny Hastert, Mike Johnson and I don’t know if by “the enemy” he means the Democrats or the media or both or the temptations of his anti-porn app, and I no longer care.

This is Insurrection Day and we all KNOW what the Republicans would be doing today in the mirror version of this grim reality; if they were in charge and Trump were in office and had presidential immunity and a new president was about to sign off on putting him in jail and it would be what they actually did four years ago today only they wouldn’t bother to try to be subtle or legal about it (they’d be gassing up the tanks).

AND NO, JUDGE JUAN MERCHAN IS NO HERO. He too is obeying in advance. Along with the Washington Post, squeezing out cartoonist Ann Telnaes. And Brian Stelter, covering up for Fox News. And the media soft-pedaling the Vegas bomber's hopes to see all Democrats murdered, and Congressman Tom Suozzi, and soon-to-disappear Senator Kyrsten Sinema.

B-Block (29:30) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Those memorializing Aaron Brown without including the incident about his refusal to cover The Challenger explosion; Congresswoman Nancy Mace and "Gunther Eagleman" who only read the headline; and the meticulous Oliver Darcy who only gets mentioned here because he asked a question that really traumatized me: What will Olivia Nuzzi do in 2025? (42:14) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Remember dear Flaco? The majestic owl liberated from the Central Park Zoo? There is an extraordinary new book about him. And from an old book: remember the Ash Heaps in "The Great Gatsby"? They were real and you'll never believe what was built were they used to sit.

C-Block (52:00) EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY: Young Tippy needs the same surgery my new pup Kitt just got, and we need your help to pay for it. (55:30) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: It's an actors' story that invokes Trump, Orson Welles, The Odd Couple, Mike Nichols - and me?

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 83: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

Bulletin (1:45) In the worst post-disaster, post-terrorism news conference in our history, a string of elected officials and police and other law enforcement officers somehow managed to make worse a terror tragedy that has left at least ten people dead in the French Quarter of New Orleans on New Year's Day.

If the least sophisticated form of terrorism – a car driving onto a sidewalk and then into a crowd on the street during holiday celebrations – happens in a city known for crowds on the street during holiday celebrations – do not congratulate each other on the great job you’ve done and will do - and get mad at reporters for asking how the hell it happened.

And most of all, Superintendent of Police Anne Kirkpatrick and Captain LeJon Roberts, do not explain as if it were the most natural thing in the world, that the bollards – the removable stainless still blocks designed to keep terrorists from driving onto pedestrian-filled streets – that you bought a decade ago didn’t work right so two months ago you started to replace them and you have the new ones ready to go and they’ll provide total safety only they weren’t there on New Year’s Eve so you had a police car blocking the road but that the terrorist simply drove up onto the sidewalk instead.

And then to listen to Senator John Kennedy, the Foghorn Leghorn of American politics, and Governor Jeff Landry, with the tone and stupidity of a supervisor of a chain gang, try to score political points, foment conspiracy theories, make jokes while bodies still lay on the streets, and assure everyone The Sugar Bowl (and, in a month) the Super Bowl will be safe because he, Landry The Human Talisman, will be there - combined with the lies of Trump and Marjorie Greene about the Texas-born terrorist being an immigrant - add up to this: the non-rank-and-file people responsible for protecting New Orleans last night didn't know what they were doing last night, and they don't know what they are doing today.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 82: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: My friend – and what a privilege it has been to call him that – President Jimmy Carter would disagree that he is STILL the lead story, the day after. After all, he might note, he WAS 100, he was in hospice a year-and-a-half, his own grandson said he was in his final days – that was last May 15th. How, Keith, is this a surprise to you? The Braves letting Freddie Freeman leave should have been a surprise to you!

He would probably disagree he was the best since FDR, probably arguing that the best since FDR at least got re-elected. I will make my case, and more importantly, my case that the fact he WASN’T re-elected was the beginning of the end. The 1980 election was when I realized America wanted a spokesmodel, not a leader. A fake smile, not principles; often somebody dumber than they were. Even Clinton and Obama and their exceptional presidencies prevailed on charisma. That we turned away a complete human for a mentally diminished bad actor who wasn't that sharp to begin with has set a pattern we may never break before the nation ends.

I will also tell the thoroughly satisfying story of how President Carter became my friend, after which there was very little I could point to professionally and say 'I have left this unaccomplished.'

B-Block (29:52) NEWS BREAK: Two legal scholars insist that a week from today Democrats in the house must refuse to certify Trump’s election because the specific legislation to disqualify him for insurrection that the Supreme Court demanded in this year’s 14th Amendment case already exists.

But on the Washington-focused news site “The Hill” they insist no matter what the Supreme Court says and no matter what the consequences might be, Trump has already been DISQUALIFIED from federal office under the 14th Amendment AND Article Two gives the House sole authority to confirm a presidential election and I will add that while once again I cannot tell you how much this is not going to happen it would be nice to see Democrats do something, something, anything at all, just to peacefully protest what a failed and useless crapshow the government and its supposed protections against dictatorships and authoritarians and foreign control of our government has become – and what a hapless and flaccid vessel the Democratic party has become in the wake of Trump’s treacherous conspiracies to transform and subvert what was our clunky but largely functional form of representative government in, you know, the good old days of yore, like, oh, 2013 and 2014 into a subsidiary of Trump or Musk Enterprises. You know: AmericaX.

C-Block (56:20) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: What did you do on Christmas Eve? Go out into the cold, under-dressed, to search for Sasquatch? Last time they'll try that! Marianne Williamson is running for DNC chair because things ain't hella enough. And Cenk Uygur manages to beclown himself in a new way for the record-breaking 1000th time.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 81: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: To paraphrase Van Jones and other panderers: This was the weekend Elon Musk truly became president.

It was also the weekend the other guy became Donald J. Trumpuppet.

The number of Republicans who defied Trump over the Continuing Resolution ranges, depending on your point of view, from 29 to ALL of them. Because they also voted by unanimous consent to bury Musk's fabricated controversy over the no-cost land transfer to the District of Columbia. Trump, for his part, is in a bigger hole now than he ever was during his presidency as the self-inflicted losses pile up:

The Gaetz Lack-of-Ethics Report may come out today. Other nominations are in trouble. One new one may be Alan Dershowitz and another may have padded his resume. The idea of Recess Appointments is forgotten. Trump has been taunted with the "Musk Is President" chatter. Some Republicans are taking it seriously and suggesting him for Speaker. And that in turn let Democrats emphasize Trump tanked the deal to benefit his interests with the Chinese Communist Party.

And Trump spoke yesterday for the first time in weeks and sounded drunk - which is a problem, because he doesn't drink. All while he is being pursued by his two worst enemies: himself - and Musk.

B-BLOCK (27:00) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Remember my suggestion that MSNBC's response to Trump's win and its own tanking ratings was to do nothing but double down and exploit the Liberal Media Monopoly the cowards at CNN, The Washington Post and others were giving them? Guess what! MSNBC's new boss wants... better relationships with Republicans. (40:56) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Martin Shrkeli emerged from his sewer to get owned on social media, New York sends a bill for damages to the family of a guy a police officer killed with an unmarked car, and are there secret Mark Burnett Trump Outtake Tapes? Don't ask Burnett - he now works for Trump.

C-BLOCK (50:20) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: You have your Christmas story, I have mine. Mine is about falling off a cliff near Malibu filming a commercial for fast-food chicken. Stick around for the post-closing theme guest appearance Easter eggs courtesy some of my dogs.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 80: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump’s chief thug wants to put Rachel Maddow in prison. Steve Bannon: “I need investigations, trials and then incarceration… Andrew Weissmann on MSNBC and Rachel Maddow and all of them."

Oh and just so we are clear on this: YOU are next. Or close to it. Trump is this close to suing YOU for writing mean tweets about him. Or for not voting for him. Or, if your name is Anne Selzer, for putting out a Des Moines Register election poll that didn’t favor him. Emboldened by such pathetic self-prostituting excuses for American leadership as Jeff Bezos, Patrick Soon-Shiong, Joe Scarborough -- and Bob Iger and all the snatch-defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victory cowards at Disney and ABC News -- Trump has now lost any remaining sense that anybody is even going to try to stop him. It is hard to point at a crazy man and say he’s now lost it, but… he’s now lost it.

You are next. Well, you’re probably behind me, and we’re both behind Maddow, and she’s behind Anne Selzer, but you know what I mean.

So Bannon wants to lock up Maddow and others at MSNBC and their co-workers Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski scuttled to Mar-a-Lago to save their own worthless asses. Ten days ago the entertainment news site Variety asked me to write a piece for their year-in-review on what MSNBC should do now. The TL;dr was: double down because all the other progressive and neutral news organizations have fled in fear and left you the same kind of opportunity for monopoly that we had there in 2005. The audience will be back with you directly. Stay the course. Of course you have to fire Mr. and Mrs. Scarborough or you let them turn you into MSN-Vichy. I'll give you a longer version of what I did for the magazine. 

B-Block (32:07) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Trump's Tariffs Plan. It apparently never dawned on him it would draw retribution. Ontario's premier threatens to cut off the Canadian electricity that directly services 1.5 million Americans. A Democratic pollster says the campaign should've been food costs not democracy and never once gets near the actual answer: both. And the most recent GOP candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania can't tell the difference between a "downed drone" and a "toy movie prop headed for the next Comicon."

C-Block (41:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: At 86, Ted Turner is in-and-out. At 43, when I worked for him, none of us would have bet on him still being in, at all. He was a crazy man and a danger to himself, and thank goodness he steered out of the skid. But the crazy version left me countless stories, like the time he nearly fired me over the cameraman's choice of hats, and I nearly responded by socking him.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 79: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: It is now revealed that at a Thanksgiving-eve dinner on a patio at the Mar-a-Lago Crapshack, Trump had his minions play a recording of the national anthem sung by the January 6th Terrorists. Some of them at Trump’s table put their hands over their hearts as the people who stormed our capitol intending to take over our government sang words, the actual meaning of which they cannot possibly understand. Per The Wall Street Journal, one of those who put his hand over his heart during this travesty was… Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg leads the parade of pathetic billionaires also including Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman, who just happen to be donating a million dollars to Trump's inauguration committee. Except for ABC News, which is donating FIFTEEN million to Trump's presidential museum (which may be in an empty warehouse or a sinkhole somewhere) to settle his frivolous and easily winnable defamation case against George Stephanopoulos.

On March 22nd, 1979, I was ushered into the small office of a Vice President at the ABC television series “The Wide World of Sports.” His wife had been an assignment editor at the local New York TV station I had interned at the previous summer – though we were not there simultaneously. He and the Mrs. and my friends from the local station all warned me this gentleman would not have a job for me nor even any job leads, just advice.

His name was Robert Iger. “Call me Bob,” he insisted. Within fifteen years he was president of ABC and thus the boss of all my bosses at ESPN and he was my boss there three times and for two further years at ABC and he gave me brilliant advice I've repeated a thousand times: if you want to be on the air, don't take an off-air job. It has truly changed lives.

And now, after 45-and-a-half years I’d like to repay Bob Iger and give him MY advice: Sell ABC News to somebody who actually cares about the future of news and the future of journalism and the future of this country because you guys at Disney ain’t it any more.

What do you think you bought for yourself here, Bob? Trump’s gratitude? Him somehow remembering you fondly the NEXT time ABC News does something he doesn’t like, like, say, accurately report how many people show up to his inauguration, or how many insurrectionists he pardons, or how many people die during the migrant round-ups into the migrant concentration camps?

Even if Trump CAN still remember do you think he WILL remember? Or all the mini-Trumps? What you have done is merely become part of the process by which freedom of the press, and freedom in the nation, dissolve. My advice, offered again in gratitude for YOUR advice in 1979: sell ABC News to somebody who cares.

B-Block (27:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Did Trump demand the end of Daylight Savings Time but think he was demanding the end of STANDARD Time? Van Jones plus Chris Cillizza equals Extra Large Stupid. And the New York radio station that is quite literally running a bulletin "sound" for "DRONE WATCH 2024." (39:27) SPORTSBALLCENTER: I have actually solved baseball's playoff crisis, the one in which in three of the last four years the team with the best record has been eliminated in its first playoff round and 14 of the 24 division winners have, too. It's actually a really really good idea.

C-Block (52:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Offended by this CNN crapfest every night where Abby Phillip lets this jackass Scott Jennings insult everyone and everything good about America, in front of an ever-shrinking audience? We tried this at MSNBC long ago only the clown was Michael Savage. It didn't end well for us and it ain't gonna end well for CNN.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 78: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: How did this not generate more headlines? It's just a proposed maneuver out of the legal morass Judge Juan Merchan has helped Trump create. But New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg has suggested that one way to solve this sentencing/but he's president/but we can't dismiss the conviction is to treat Trump - in a legal sense - the way you treat a convicted defendant who DIES before he appeals or is sentence.

In short: just pretend Trump is dead.

SPEAKING OF A BROKEN LEGAL SYSTEM: I'm not advocating for that, nor for guys assassinating CEO's five blocks from my home. But our legal system is broken and it would behoove commentators, columnists, writers, those who suck up to the moneyed class, and conservatives to stop being so surprised at the idea that maybe a majority of Americans is not as outraged as the wealthy are at the actions of Luigi McDreamy. Maybe you need to wonder more about why they perceive the legal system to be broken and the corporations to be legal excuses for nobody being responsible for innocent people dying and being injured.

CHRIS WRAY OBEYS IN ADVANCE: He'll quit as FBI director before the inauguration. Maybe he can make a comeback as Trump's second pick for DNI because Tulsi Gabbard is being attacked from the left, the middle, and now from The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board. Also Hegseth's been caught in another lie, about something he had said in public 48 hours earlier. 

B-Block (23:46) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: The World Cup goes to Saudi Arabia because everything is for sale. And an announcement of a candidacy for New York City Council suddenly made me realize that Bill DeBlasio and Eric Adams both became mayor here in part because between us one of my exes and I screwed around with the 2013 campaign. OOPS. (30:22) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Yes she sneaked a gold-plated gun into Australia but how else was she supposed to protect herself at clown school? Speaking of: Newsweek beats the L.A. Times to a "Fairness Meter" for its articles. And Elon Musk insists there's no homelessness because now is exactly the right time for a CEO to assert that.

C-Block (39:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: My favorite Holiday story. The day, on my way to interview Mickey Mantle, I ran into somebody I mistook for just another fan - albeit a well-dressed man. Oops. Turned out he was one of the stars of the greatest movie ever made.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 77: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump's return to the world of TV interviews is important (and crazy) but the shooting of the head of United Health Care just blocks from my home actually seems to be one of the watershed moments of 21st Century American Politics. We have often descended into the slough of despond that all political parties, voting, law, government, the entirety of the power structure mean nothing and that the only way to change things is violence. I think we're entering such a stage. If so: fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night.

AS TO TRUMP apart from his latest threat to imprison opponents (everybody on the January 6 House Committee should go to jail) did anybody notice his insistence that we are "subsidizing" Mexico and Canada by $100 Billion a year and at those rates they should become states.

Wait. What?

Mr. Numb Nuts Psycho President? If Mexico is a STATE in the United States – you know, where you are right now – the people LIVING there become CITIZENS of the United States, so not only can’t you deport people from the US State of Mexico… but you can’t put up a wall between Texas and the state of Mexico and in fact you can’t inhibit movement BETWEEN Mexico and any state of the union. I hope somebody told MAGA about Trump’s new Mexico solution: make it a state. That’d be two senators from Mexico and if New York has 20 million people, 26 congressmen, Mexico with130 million people at 13 congressmen per 10 million residents would get 169 Congressional seats.

Trump proposes giving Mexico 169 seats in the US Congress.

Also a GOP Senate operative uses the A-word on Tulsi Gabbard, and a Trump operative is ready to blackmail Republican Senators to get Pete Hegseth confirmed anyway.

B-Block (25:00) THE OTHER WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: "Democratic" Governor Polis again sides with Sideshow Bob Kennedy. Laura Loomer isn't just hateful, she's stupid. And Marshal Petain would be proud: Jeff Bezos, Joe Scarborough, and Mika Brzezinski all double down on collaborating with the Trump Regime.

C-Block (35:55) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: My Lunch With Elie. How a delightful afternoon getting to meet Elie Mystal meant I did NOT meet Martin Scorsese. That, in turns, evokes the story of Francis Ford Coppola unintentionally paying a former colleague of mine something like a million dollars to be in the background of one scene in Godfather II.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 76: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: I'd like to thank the one person doing the most to undermine and derail the Trump transition, and dissipate any momentum he might have.

Trump himself.

He learned nothing from Matt Gaetz and so Pete Hegseth spends another day "twisting slowly, slowly in the wind." We are now reduced to Hegseth's mother pleading directly on Fox to Trump - staring in the camera as she does so - to continue supporting her idiot child for Secretary of Defense. But when asked if she'll testify on his behalf to the Senate confirmation hearings she refused to commit to it.

Amazeballs.

What's relevant here is that among the big names mentioned as Plan B is yet another Republican congressman. If he gets the job rather than Hegseth or DeSantis or Ernst, the GOP will have a House margin of one (1) vote - which isn't a margin at all.

ALSO: I TOLD YOU SO. Sunday night I suggested not only should Biden pardon Hunter but that he should pardon everybody else he thinks of. Last night Politico reported they're talking about it, but that only the names Adam Schiff, Tony Fauci, and Liz Cheney came up.

And in case like me you thought Chris Cillizza and Chuck Todd were the same person, have I got a shock for you.

B-Block (33:43) SPECIAL COMMENT NO. 2 - I have been pondering when we started on the road to Trump - or at least when we discovered that what should be the final guardrail to protect American democracy, the President himself, wasn't a guardrail at all. I've settled on January 19, 2009 and read you what I wrote and said that night and even what sounds awfully like a prediction of the advent of Trump Brand Stupid Fascism.

C-Block (52:00) IN SPORTS: Have you heard about it? The worst sports idea of all-time? "The Golden At Bat" as proposed by Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred. It is a gimmick as stupid as if you stopped the 7th Game of the NBA Finals and had the title decided by a free-throw shooting contest. And it's supposed to "attract young people to the game" which is a euphemism for "we expect you fans to be intensely concerned with how much money we owners make."

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 75: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

Special Edition (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Some time over Thanksgiving in Nantucket the light bulb went off over Joe Biden’s head and he finally realized that no, the norms and traditions and institutions to which he and most of the rest of us have dedicated our lives did NOT miraculously re-grow, did NOT suddenly spring, fully restored and intact, from the ground.

He saw that not only was his son about to go to prison because of his own foolish decision to not interfere with an enfeebled Department of Justice, and because of the dictator it let get away, who would now aim his DOJ at Hunter Biden - and Joe Biden - and anybody else - for personal revenge.

The President figured this out and pulled his son out of harm’s way. And much of he left attacked him for it. They are Morons. I don’t care about Hunter Biden, particularly. I care about the fact that we are 48 days away from a nascent military dictatorship taking over this government, supported by an unknown percentage of the population that wants to see Hunter and Joe Biden hanging from construction cranes parading through the streets, and wants to see Trump in power for life. A

We JUST got one more guy out of their sights and we JUST shoved one more plotline up Trump, and up Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller and whichever other lunatics Trump wants to take over the asylum. And countless liberals – and anti-Trumpers – think this will actually provide cover for Trump pardoning the January 6thinsurrectionists because apparently for the last ten years they have been hallucinating and thinking Trump has ever bothered to seek cover for anything. Or they think we should be "better" than them. The Trumpists are planning to put us in camps. I don’t care if we are better than them or worse than them or monstrous to them. If somebody’s going to go to camps, it ain’t going to be us, it’s got to be them. End of debate.

In addition to explaining why this was not just the right decision but should be a template of thousands of further pardons, permit me to excoriate a bunch of the clowns who cannot see the forest for the trees. Or the fact that the forest is on fire.

And then for giggles we have the moronic comments of Nate Silver and Dinesh D'Souza, complaining about pardons when he himself got an undeserved pardon. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 74: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) BULLETIN: Biden pardons his son. Terrific. Fully support.

Now, do the rest of us. Literally offer a pardon to anybody Trump might go after for prosecuting him, criticizing him, covering him, or looking at him funny. I want a 1-800-PARDONME hotline. I want 10 million pardons.

SPECIAL COMMENT (2:44): And the pardons should be a jumping off point for how Biden can protect the citizens of this country.

What does THIS mean, exactly?

“I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

Joseph Robinette Biden Junior has taken that exact oath NINE times – seven, as Senator, two as Vice President. He has sworn to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and nothing I have found, and no Constitutional scholar I have consulted, indicates that once taken, those oaths expire. 

And the obligation to defend the United States becomes more profound still now that presidents have been immunized by the Supreme Court from prosecution for.. effectively anything. The incoming President, the one who wants an unqualified toady like Kash Patel to head the FBI and desperately wanted a lawless menace like Matt Gaetz to head the DOJ but will instead settle for a cheap lawyer who LED the “lock her up” chanting against Hillary Clinton at the Republican convention, that president-to-be will be immune and thus unstoppable. The CURRENT  president IS immune and thus unstoppable. And already in power and in command and… under oath.

So. This raises this theoretical constitutional question: Do the TEN oaths Joe Biden took as Senator, as Vice President, and as President, even PERMIT him to NOT act against enemies, BOTH foreign and domestic – and defend the Constitution of the United States? So help him god? When the Supreme Court has immunized him from prosecution for doing… anything? Anything at all? As long as it’s official?

B-Block (24:52) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: You do realize that Trump's lies about his phone call with the president of Mexico means we will, soon or late, invade Mexico, right? The quote from the Trump Transition Team member to Rolling Stone is "How MUCH do we invade Mexico?" Trump has now nominated both his daughters' fathers-in-law as envoys to the Middle East - including the one who set up his brother-in-law with a taped sex sting and sent the tape to his own sister. And why did JD Vance post a meme of himself in a dress?

C-Block (36:00) THE OTHER WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Vivek Ramaswamy self-owns over unelected bureaucracy. We've found George Carlin's Worst Doctor In The World and he owns The Los Angeles Times. And Sideshow Bob (RFK Junior) is seen, uh, hanging out, in his wife's new supplements commercial.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 73: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Is Elon Musk going to buy MSNBC and turn it into pro-Trump propaganda channel?

And, if not Musk – could somebody else?

I may be asking the question backwards. Is there anybody to STOP someone, Musk or not, from buying MSNBC and turning it into pro-Trump propaganda? Well – who stopped Musk from doing that to Twitter? Who stopped Warner BROS Discovery from buying CNN and doing that incompletely but sufficiently enough to render CNN irrelevant in television news? We don’t know for certain that MSNBC is for sale. Companies like Comcast take assets like MSNBC – which by itself has made a profit of something around five or six billion dollars since I made it into “the liberal news channel” in 2006 – and spin them off into another separate company they also own, and throw in CNBC and Oxygen and The Golf Channel and USA Network and half a dozen other assets and do it so hastily they don’t even have a name for the new company and they’re just calling it “SpinCo” – companies like Comcast do that all the time and never sell the new separate company oh no I'm being informed they never do that.

Musk and Trump Junior have now had a "joking" exchange about it online but it underscores that this is exactly what Musk did to twitter and there's nobody and nothing to stop him from doing it here. This comes as The Wall Street Journal reports how corporations are seeing Musk as the new portal to Trump - and so is China. And as a purported old friend of his is insisting Musk has lost control of himself.

This did not begin with the Joe Scarborough Trump disaster last week (though his audience in the "advertiser demo" is down to 51,000 people). It didn't even start with Trump. It pre-dates even my arrival there in 1997. MSNBC and NBC News and NBC and NBC's corporate owners have been at loggerheads continuously since long before the first newscast in 1996. To understand what's happening now, you have to understand what's happened already.

B-BLOCK (31:35) SPECIAL COMMENT 2: This is not MSNBC's first existential crisis. The pre-Comcast corporate ownership at GE was ready to not merely sell the then-newly profitable network in June 2009, it was ready to shut it off and shut it down, just because the mother of the chairman of GE was a Fox fan and Bill O'Reilly was insulting her son. What happened then, and what happened with my departure in 2011, again forms a straight line with the sudden spin-off and the Musk "joke."

C-BLOCK (48:00) THE OTHER WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The Philadelphia police department thinks a burned body may be "suspicious" (no; it happened naturally). Pete Hegseth once insisted it couldn't be rape if she was too drunk to refuse consent. And Nancy Mace and her chest are attacked by her former Communications Director.

It's all part of life's rich pageant.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 72: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN:

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Hours after the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee ask the FBI for its report on the Attorney General Matt Gaetz Underage Sex Scandal, an extraordinary Gaetz Sex Diagram leaks. It's the Venmo records of the Venmo payments by Gaetz and others to the women in question, and there are more crossing lines and different routes than the map of the London Subway system.

And it underscores anew why the Democrats must never compromise nor collaborate with Trump or Republicans who defend him. To hell with Jared Polis, who decided to suck up to Sideshow Bob Kennedy about vaccines, or Hakeem Jeffries, who declared the nomination of these gangsters like Gaetz and Hegseth as "distractions." Throw punches. Eat faces. Metaphorically drive the metaphorical Trump Train off the metaphorical track as often as possible.

And most of all, never become Joe Quisling Scarborough or his wife, Marshal Petain Brzezinski. I can state with some assurance that this time, finally, he has ended his career. Morning shows the world over always see their ratings grow as it gets later (more people are awake). The average growth from 6 AM to 7 AM is around 20% On Monday, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski saw their 7 AM ratings DROP by 17 percent compared to their 6 AM ratings. 

On Tuesday, ratings for the WHOLE show were down ANOTHER eleven percent from Monday. Scarborough is now on the path we at MSNBC used to call “A Rita Cosby.” On Monday, the debut Rita Cosby Live and Direct has the highest ratings on the network. On Tuesday, it’s down a typical 10 percent from the debut. By Wednesday HALF the audience is gone. On Thursday, it’s a re-broadcast of “Rita Cosby Live and Direct.” On Friday it’s “What was the name of that show we used to have that Rita Cosby was on?”

Joe and Mika are done, and they are going to hit every stair on the way down. And for those of us for the whom the headline is "You somehow BELIEVED Scarborough was being sincere?" we are going to enjoy every thud.

B-Block (23:45) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Matt Gaetz gets dunked on about 18-year old laws, JD Vance directs his misogyny against Steve Bannon's woman CFO and has to eat it, and Marjorie Taylor Greene has actually invited a transgendered woman somewhere to meet her - Greene - in the bathroom and beat the crap out of her (Greene).

C-Block (34:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Because my schadenfreude diet hasn't started yet let me tell you the whole Joe Scarborough story. This scumbag finally ran out of other people to try to sabotage and instead destroyed himself. In my days before I escaped MSNBC it amazed me he ever got on the air: he spent 90% of his time and 99% of his energy on trying to sabotage Maddow and me and others. And so he goes from "Joey Scars" to "Joe Scared-Bro."

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 71: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump has started down the path to purges of the military, political prosecutions and show trials. His fascists have actually leaked plans to court-martial and even seek treason charges against army leadership and even retired generals. NBC News reports: "“The Trump transition team is compiling a list of senior current and former U.S. military officers who were directly involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan and exploring whether they could be court-martialed for their involvement, according to a U.S. official and a person familiar with the plan. Officials working on the transition are considering creating a commission to investigate the 2021 withdrawal… and whether the military leaders could be eligible for charges as serious as treason… “They’re taking it very seriously,” the person with knowledge of the plan said."

Thus, President Biden has to proactively pardon ALL of them. In point of fact, President Biden must now assemble a list of thousands of people to pardon – in the military – in the Democratic party – in state and local governments – in election supervision - in the media – in the protest movements – in the climate movement – people in any of the fields this psychopath Trump thinks wronged him and against which he is not only plotting retribution but now actively PLANNING it.

Hegseth, already facing an unlikely confirmation due to, you know, Crusader Tats, has now been revealed to have paid off a woman after a sexual assault allegation in 2017. Trump may throw him under a bus but he's reportedly doubled down on Matt Gaetz at DOJ: “Trump wants Gaetz confirmed ‘100%’ a source told CNN. ‘He is not going to back off. He’s all in’” This figures to turn on whether or not Trump and the majority of Republican Senators who will not vote for Gaetz meet in the middle - and the middle is a Recess Appointment (and a dictatorship).

So, back to my earlier point about Pardons.

B-Block (23:30) SPECIAL COMMENT 2: There IS much to do, no matter how January 20th and the days thereafter play out. You want some practical advice? A little spiritual inspiration? St. Hubbins Day if not St. Crispin's Day? Got half an hour? Cause I have half an hour of advice.

C-Block (56:0) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Haven't done these in awhile but somebody was asking about our election night and special political coverage at MSNBC in 2004-06-08-10 and I flashed back to the continuing adventure that was Chris Matthews - particularly how he began ogling a prominent woman in the church at a presidential funeral and I was assigned to get him to stop.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 70: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

BONUS EDITION: We are missing the POINT of the nominations of Sideshow Bobby Kennedy and Beavis and Botox Gaetz.

This, simply, is Trump finding out how MUCH of a dictatorship his Republican House and Senate slaves will let him have. It's hard to believe that the literally worm-eaten brain of RFK Jr and the Madison Cawthorn wannabe that is Matt Gaetz could decide whether the Republicans will stop him here (or anywhere) but this is where we are.

Because Trump is explaining his plan: I decide, I tell you what to do, and you do it or else. We are already HERE: THIS is the fork in the fascist road: deliberately choose people with no morals, no qualifications, and no qualities except absolute fealty to the dictator, then insist everybody else salute them. Same for Noem. Same for Gabbard. Same for Hegseth. Same for Patel.

THE NEXT TEST will be openly demanding that he be permitted to run again in 2028, if he isn't dead by then. A lot of people asked me why I devoted so much time to the topic yesterday since it's a settled issue. Congressman Dan Goldman was concerned enough by Trump's third term "joke" to introduce a resolution affirming that the 22nd Amendment precludes it.

Except, since early this year, the far right has been insisting that you're wrong, that's not what the 22nd Amendment says. The headline in a recent edition of the magazine The American Conservative: “TRUMP 2028.” Sub-head: “The 22nd Amendment is an arbitrary restraint on presidents who serve non-consecutive terms – and on democracy itself.”

The American Conservative, by the way, is a "partner" of Project 2025.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 69: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Forget for a moment "Attorney General" Matt Gaetz and the bottom falling out of the market for prosecuting men who have sex with underaged girls. Forget for a moment associating Tulsi Gabbard with the word "Intelligence." Forget the prospect of Press Secretary Sage Steele. Even forget Trump's plan to adjourn both houses of Congress so he can appoint an entire cabinet without a single hearing and the Republicans rushing to bark like seals as the Lame Duck Dictator starts rolling out the Third Reich.

The lead story was a different 'third.' “I suspect I won’t be running again,” Trump said to his newly elected Republican House slaves, “unless you say ‘he’s good, we got to figure something else” and every news organization reported he was joking and kidding and trolling and - spoiler alert - he’s NOT. He’s NOT kidding. He’s intending to stay in office and if we’re nice to him he’ll let us elect him again. They've been working on this for more than a year: it's a re-interpretation of the 22nd Amendment and the two-term limit, claiming it means three CONSECUTIVE terms, or going around it and getting him by any one of four different backdoors. 

That Trump is emboldened enough to go public with his "kidding" tells you how badly he has misread the shock this would create. Oh yes, everyone reported, he's a kidder. He's kidding. Ask Mike Pence how much of a kidder he is.

MEANWHILE: Lincoln had his "Team of Rivals." Trump is building his "Team of Trifles." And the key appointment isn't Gaetz or Gabbard or Huckabee or any of these other empty vessels. It's Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense because when the protests against Trump starts and he wants the protestors to face U.S. Army tanks and be shot with your taxpayer bullets, the guy who is just crazy enough to order it is this lunatic Hegseth.

B-Block (27:54): POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Jack Smith will get out, and get out a report. Putin continues to turn the screws on Trump. At Mar-a-Lago, Elon Musk is "getting a little big for his britches" (Ozempic time!). Musk is also at war with Steve Bannon. Melania won't live at the White House. And one third of network news viewers voted for Trump so all the limp ABC/CBS/NBC coverage mattered more than we thought.

C-Block (40:00): THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Olivia Nuzzi has suddenly backed off all her stalking claims against Ryan Lizza. Wait I'll get my dumpster-sized bag of popcorn. Tim Pool, Pine Cone. And the Idaho Republican who tells a Democrat to go back to where she comes from. You won't believe which minority group she belongs.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 68: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (2:00) SPECIAL COMMENT: If you're wondering who's the boss here it ain't Trump. Putin refused to call him first and instead had Russian State Television "celebrate" his becoming the 21st Century Grover Cleveland by showing nude photos of Melania.

Russian TV - which has figured out Trump is a lame duck - also reported Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo would not be in the new administration long before Trump announced it. Putin also seems to have soured on RFK Jr, leaving Sideshow Bobby to aspire only to becoming Secretary of Masturbation.

MEANWHILE, NO, THE ELECTION WAS NOT STOLEN - not in the sense you're thinking. It WAS stolen in the sense that the fascists and the anti-democracy billionaires have been running a series of illicit, hidden, disguised pro-Republican advertisements 24/7/365, for at least thirty years. They have been bombarding the underachievers of this nation, the incels, the morons, the idiots, the bros, and now the social media addicts of America, with a series of easy-to-digest, sweet-tasting conspiracy theories on a thousand streaming networks and podcasts and the Democrats have...MSNBC.

The Left not only doesn't compete in the new Marketplace of Ideas it doesn't know where the shops are. It has to change this or you can forget '26 and '28 as well.

On the other hand, this circular firing squad? Utterly ludicrous. It looks like Kamala Harris will have ultimately lost by 1.5% which would make Trump's the fifth SMALLEST popular vote win all time. You do not burn it all down after that. You rebuild.

B-BLOCK (32:15) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Corey Lewandowski and Chris LaCivita show us what winning means: you get to try to kill your rival on the winning team. Finally we figure out what's really behind the deportation scam: the companies that will make billions building the private prisons to turn into concentration camps for deportees. Nevermind the future of NATO. Will its members ever trust us with intel again? And the Dallas Cowboys honor founding coach Tom Landry on Veterans' Day by...misspelling his name. But it'll all come out in the wash.

C-BLOCK (40:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: With only 7% of the city believing he didn't commit a crime, New York Mayor Eric Adams has reached out to...Trump. The Massachusetts congressman has the New Democratic rallying cry: Transphobia! And the White House "correspondent" so stupid she publicly accused the Democrats of trying to fix the Kari Lake/Ruben Gallego race so they can "steal" Congress. Except Lake and Gallego were running for the Senate!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 67: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: "No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly." H.L. Mencken (1926).

Nice of Hispanic males to vote for the guy who will deport all their relatives and friends and namesakes and when they run out, deport them.

Also: the anti-Trump conservative who's trying to be optimistic: at least now Trump won't try another coup!

And Jeff Bezos congratulates Trump because if they're still blackmailing Bezos on Trump's behalf, this is what it would look like!

And details on the future of this podcast (yes, it has one).

B-Block (20:51) SPECIAL COMMENT TWO: My theory of The Lifeboat and how it explains who voted for Trump and why.

C-Block (34:00) GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 66: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

Russia has committed an act of war against this nation and our government.

We were attacked last night, as certainly as if they came across the borders or BOMBED polling stations - 40 or more - 32 Russian bomb threats just in Fulton county Georgia alone.

And what are you going to do about it, President Biden? What are you going to do about it Merrick Garland? There is real-time evidence of Russian interference in our elections. Russians deciding who becomes president, who goes to the Senate, the house.

32 bomb threats – many already identifying as coming from Russian email sources – in the most Democratic part of Georgia. A quarter of the state’s black population subjected to a terror attack – in Fulton and DeKalb Counties. And in Pennsylvania – one that closed a county elections offense for an hour, at least 10 others. AND in Wisconsin. AND in Michigan. AND in Arizona – at least 10 in Arizona. AND when Georgia extended voting, the Republican National Committee went to court to stop it.

Regardless of the outcome of the election, this is an act of war.

Russian interference means Trump – Trump already admitted at the debate he talked to Putin AFTER he left office - and now Trump means Elon Musk and we know Musk has been in contact with Putin frequently since 2022, and turned Twitter into a whorehouse for pro-Russian and pro-Trump indoctrination.

The Russians just shot our democracy in the heart and those who are there solely to protect it – and its citizens – have responded by establishing… a toll-free FBI tip line.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 65: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Well what do you THINK this episode is about?

There are plenty of polls, interior numbers, and tea leaves to read (see "Marist Poll," see Univision polls of Hispanics in Pennsylvania, see Harris outperforming Biden and Hillary in key demos). But if you want to know how this campaign is wrapping up it's way simpler.

The Trump-Vance closing argument: misogyny and violence against women. Trump says Mike Tyson should step into the ring against her. And after a week of trying to deny their comedian's "garbage" remarks had anything to do with their campaign, then trying to turn "garbage" into a bloody shirt attack on their own supporters, the night before the election, the world's most smug sexist J.D. Vance undid all of that by calling her "trash."

The public polls all look very good for Kamala Harris. The private polls the Trump people see? They must've decided their only chance is to get every last hateful white guy to vote for him - because nobody else is.

B-Block (26:54) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Politico's "Who Won The Day?" is a new high in low. Kari Lake explains her polling is better because she mixes in A.I., and Herschel Walker endorsed Trump. Or did he?

C-Block (33:45) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Solely because at times of stress it always gives me great joy to re-tell the story of how I met my friend the late actress Elizabeth Montgomery, and how she promptly pranked my parents.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 64: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Yeah, I heard it too.

I heard him he "shouldn't have left" the White House when his term ended. And I heard him say AT his rally that he wouldn’t mind people shooting at the reporters COVERING his rally. And I guess it’s shocking. Except he’s been saying these things (a little more coded) since 2015, and he said the shooting thing about Liz Cheney last Thursday night. And after all he is going through what the shrinks call “disinhibition” AT the rallies where he loses all sense of what he should say in private not public.

But that’s not what got me. I heard something I have never heard before. WHEN he said he wouldn’t mind people shooting the "fake news," he said he wouldn’t mind them shooting THROUGH "the fake news" - THROUGH it - AT him. Doesn’t that sound kind of… what’s the word? Suicidal?

Plus: I understand that we are inside the 48 hour bubble before the election and the pressure is like 887 Atmospheric Units and our rage against this creature and his cult that wants to burn this country to the ground – burn this world to the ground – and our amazement that there is ANYBODY voting for him – that RAGE is at unbearable levels – but… didn’t he sound kinda dead yesterday? At one point he was inaudible. At another, in North Carolina, he thought he was in Pennsylvania. Throughout, he sounded exactly like Hal the Computer in the movie “2001” when they unplugged him.

PRACTICALLY SPEAKING on the eve of the election, the polls continue to support a Harris victory (size TBD) and this shocking poll where she's up by 3 in Iowa hides an even more shocking number (she's ahead by 20 among women in the whitest part of the midwest). And the reaction to the pollster who published this 21 point swing from June tells you all you need to know about polling. They have previously insisted Ann Selser was an immortal. Now they're saying she's making the rest of them look bad by not tailoring her poll to fit their narrative.

B-Block (30:33) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: A Trumpist has vowed to "castrate himself on camera" if Harris wins Iowa (if you're a Trumpist, haven't you already castrated yourself?). Chris Cillizza 2024 mocks everybody who didn't buy the conventional wisdom about the vice presidency (evidently including Chris Cillizza 2020, who had disproved it), and courtesy Tim Alberta in The Atlantic, we find a new reason to hate Trump. This is the real reason he's so mad Biden dropped out. Trump thought he had the perfect nickname for the President - and it's appalling.

C-Block (37:48) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I call it The Annual Day I Get Trapped Inside My Home Day. You know it - and may have seen it on TV yesterday - as "The New York City Marathon."

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

BULLETINSERIES 3 EPISODE 63: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) In a late night appearance in Arizona, Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump said of former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney "Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. Let's see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face."

At publication time, no Republican had repudiated Trump for his implicit threat, nor had any even repudiated him upon realizing that the next time he expresses such a desire to have a critic killed by a firing squad, it could be them.

What follows is the Friday Countdown podcast as originally produced.

(3:52) TRUMP INTERNAL POLLS MUST BE TERRIBLE: HE IS ALREADY FOMENTING INSURECTION II: There can no longer be any doubt that the Trump camp knows that he is losing and losing by enough that however close the popular vote may turn out to be, he will lose handily in The Electoral College and his only chance is to foment another insurrection, whether by violence or by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.

Axios has printed a Trump press release (and describes it as a "scoop") that Trump's pollster has told him tells The Garbage Man "he's in a radically better position than he was right before the 2020 election...(it) draws on Real Clear Politics polling averages to argue that Trump's "position nationally and in every single Battleground State is SIGNIFICANTLY better today than it was 4 years ago."

This is like relying on stuff Rudy Giuliani heard from the voices in his head.

The Trump campaign is furiously stoking up racial hatred, white supremacism, anti-woman rhetoric - and the insistence that he's already being robbed in Pennsylvania. He'd only be doing that if he's being told he's LOSING in Pennsylvania and needs to try to steal the election.

Speaking of Rudy: he has now came this close to dropping a milder version of the N-word.

B-BLOCK (31:55) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Russia fines Google more money than there is in the world. Elon Musk goes full antisemite. Tucker Carlson insists he was mauled while asleep by demons. 

C-BLOCK (46:40) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: There's only one story for the weekend before the election. Thurber's Nostramadus moment: his prophecy of Trump, written in...1931?

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 62: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-BLOCK (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: There can no longer be any doubt that the Trump camp knows that he is losing and losing by enough that however close the popular vote may turn out to be, he will lose handily in The Electoral College and his only chance is to foment another insurrection, whether by violence or by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.

Axios has printed a Trump press release (and describes it as a "scoop") that Trump's pollster has told him tells The Garbage Man "he's in a radically better position than he was right before the 2020 election...(it) draws on Real Clear Politics polling averages to argue that Trump's "position nationally and in every single Battleground State is SIGNIFICANTLY better today than it was 4 years ago."

This is like relying on stuff Rudy Giuliani heard from the voices in his head.

The Trump campaign is furiously stoking up racial hatred, white supremacism, anti-woman rhetoric - and the insistence that he's already being robbed in Pennsylvania. He'd only be doing that if he's being told he's LOSING in Pennsylvania and needs to try to steal the election.

Speaking of Rudy: he has now came this close to dropping a milder version of the N-word.

B-BLOCK (29:53) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Russia fines Google more money than there is in the world. Elon Musk goes full antisemite. Tucker Carlson insists he was mauled while asleep by demons. 

C-BLOCK (44:30) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: There's only one story for the weekend before the election. Thurber's Nostramadus moment: his prophecy of Trump, written in...1931?

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 61: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: The Kamala Harris closing argument: "The fact that someone does not agree with us does not make them the enemy within…I will always put country above PARTY and above SELF."

The Donald Trump closing argument: "I'm not Hitler!"

Well, I'M sold! THAT'S the way to make sure you aren't associated with Nazis and Hitler. Bring them up! And the way to avoid the continuing reverberations from Tony Hinchcliffe's Puerto Rican "garbage" insult is to dress up in a garbageman's orange reflective suit and give interviews from the cab of a garbage truck with the TRUMP CAMPAIGN LOGO ON THE SIDE.

And Jeff Bezos has already learned the wages of sin: Trump is touting The Washington Post's "decision" to not endorse anybody as a repudiation of Harris and an endorsement of him. It's time to boycott Amazon, Whole Foods, The Washington Post.

GOOD POLLS NEWS: CNN polling, Harris by 5 in Michigan, 6 in Wisconsin, tied in Pennsylvania - but she leads by 3 in Pennsylvania among "extremely motivated voters." The interior numbers continue to go entirely in Harris's direction.

AND AN ANNOUNCEMENT about the short-term future of this podcast.

B-BLOCK (32:37) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Ohio's Republican Senate candidate doesn't realize the VICE President can't issue Executive Orders. Any remaining thin veneer of journalism falls away at Fox. And Politico's Rachel Bade and Ex-CNN Now Just Stopping Passersby Chris Cillizza humiliate themselves over Biden's quoting of Hinchcliffe's "garbage" remarks.

C-BLOCK (41:00) GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 60: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN - SPECIAL EARLY POSTING

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump keeps digging, and a Trump surrogate named Brenden Dilley doubles down on the scatological, foul, obscenity-filled insults against Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican people:

"F*** you, f*** you right back to f***ing Puerto Rico. If you are in the f*****g United States of America right now and you're on the actual f***ing, the lower 48, you're there, you're not on your s***-ass island, you have no right to complain about how people perceive your dirty-ass island. Period. I expect more from Puerto Rican Americans…so, yes, there was a joke made at your f****ing expense, and it wouldn't be funny if your island wasn't actually a floating trash heap."

As Trump pretends nothing happened Sunday - or again last night - he is torched by everybody from the Archbishop of San Juan to Bad Bunny to Megyn Kelly. A disturbed entertainer named Tony Hinchcliffe turns out to have been work-shopping the line at a New York comedy club Saturday night, destroying the Trump contention they didn't know what was coming. Now he may turn out to clinch Pennsylvania for Kamala Harris, and Pennsylvania would likely clinch the presidency for her.

Meanwhile she gave the speech of her life, nailing her "final argument" before a delirious crowd at the Ellipse. It was so good even Dana Bash noticed.

And there's a rumor posted online by a veteran investigative reporter about a relationship between Trump and my former MSNBC colleague Tampon Hall.

B-Block (25:30) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Almost a three-peat! After flooding the world with her side of the repulsive Nuzzi/Lizza/RFK Jr story, Olivia wants to seal all the subsequent legal action? Laura Ingraham outdoes herself in Trump sycophancy. And somebody actually defends Tony Hinchcliffe's right to be an unfunny racist (on the premise that well, he was funny at the Tom Brady roast). It's the incalculably overrated Jon Stewart.

C-Block (42:15) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Since he held a news conference yesterday where he took no questions, time to tell of when I met Trump at a news conference - and took questions! It was just the other day - in 1983!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 59: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: "GARBAGE" IS STICKING TO THE TEFLON DON AS SCANDAL WORSENS; 'COMEDIAN' WANTED TO CALL KAMALA HARRIS THE C-WORD:  The Madison Square Garden “Puerto Rico Is Garbage” disaster is not only NOT going away; it is still getting worse, with the news that Trump staffers VETTED that statement AND the tasteless reference to Latinos entering the country and the rest of the Tony Hinchcliffe comments and Hinchcliffe’s script originally included a line in which he dropped a c-word in describing Kamala Harris. The news site “The Bulwark” is reporting that, and that Trump staffers directed Hinchcliffe to take it out… BUT that they missed the anti-Hispanic material or as they have now claimed Hinchcliffe ad libbed all that even though the video clearly shows him reading his material off the same teleprompter everybody else used.

Day three of Trump’s self-immolation among Hispanic voters who make up twelve percent of the electorate – one WEEK before the election and no sign that it – like every previous racist Trump controversy – is actually abating. STILL the lead story at the New York Times – at one point it had SIX front page stories – AND at the Washington Post – AND on the Fox News talk shows AND at the Wall Street Journal AND at the ultra-conservative Washington Examiner AND when the Trump campaign’s defense is ‘well at least he didn’t call her a rhymes-with-bunt like he planned’ they have actually stepped neck high in it, especially since the pro-Trump PAC run by Elon Musk posted tweets based on the C-Word. Literally, says “The C- Word.”

Even the fig leaf usually accepted by the bothsidesist media looking for a way – SOME way, ANY way – to avoid slamming Trump – has opened up a whole new line of stories: the disingenuous statement from the conveniently Latina spokesperson disavowing the jokes only served to spin off a series of reports on all the OTHER remarks Hinchcliffe and others made Sunday at Madison Square Garden: from the line about African-Americans and watermelons and the line calling the Vice President’s staff “pimp handlers.”

And the story is still expanding. Now Joe Rogan and Robert F. Kennedy Junior have been sucked under.

AND AS THE VIBE KEEPS SHIFTING TOWARDS HARRIS there are plenty of different flavors of insurrection to worry about but a Contingent Election isn't one of them.

B-Block (21:05) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Trump has a "Sir" story. The Border Patrol agents said he was better on the border than Lincoln. The Don't-Cancel-Your-WaPo-Subscription crowd is missing the point: don't criticize angry ex-customers. If you can, join them. And it's not enough to bully reporters into sanewashing Trump, you must reward them. Thus CNN's embarrassment Dana Bash is profiled in The Wall Street Journal and we are told: This Is Her Moment.

C-Block (33:20) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: If Trump ruined Giuliani's life, why was Rudy at Trump's self-immolation at Madison Square Garden? Well among other things I believe Rudy now lives in a hallway at Penn Station so it was a quick commute. Plus, you may not have known but Rudy's been nuts since at least the mid-90's, as I'll tell you.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 58: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

As Kamala Harris's lead among Hispanic voters nearly triples in less than a month, one of Trump's preliminary speakers at his Nazi Rally at Madison Square Garden attacks them. “These Latinos, they love making babies, too" says somebody named Hinchcliffe.“There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.”

If a crass attack against 12% of the nation's likely voters would not cause enough damage to Trump in the final week, Hinchcliffe then added "There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico."

As even Florida Republican Senator Rick Scott attacks the remarks, a Trump flunky tries to distance itself from the extraordinary attacks saying they don't represent the campaign. At the same time, Donald Trump Jr re-posted video of the remarks.

There is a day in each failed presidential candidacy where the losing candidate woke up with his chances of BECOMING president still intact, but went to bed with them irrevocably destroyed. I think for Trump that day was yesterday. The viability of his candidacy has largely depended on his growing support among Latinos. 

450,000 residents of Pennsylvania self-identify as Puerto Rican – 127,114 of them in PhILLY and 33,531 in Allentown. 100,000 residents of North Carolina do so. 65-thousand in Wisconsin. 50,000 Michiganders. To say nothing of a million Floridians and a quarter million Texans.

EVEN IF YOU'RE NOT HISPANIC THERE WAS PLENTY OF HATE TO GO AROUND: Stephen Miller echoes Goebbels. Elon Musk, Dr. Phil, Hulk Hogan and Tucker Carlson beclown themselves. just as the German-American Bund discovered in 1939 when they paraded the swastika into the old Madison Square Garden, there is something about parading Trump’s backed-up sewer of hateful has-beens into the heart of bright blue New York City to scream their filth. Somehow the context, the location, underscores that they not only believe this, they not only see a future only for white people and others who have been approved BY white people, they not only think they are a majority, they not only think Trump is beloved, they not only think the tens of millions of us who repudiate their bestiality and their hatred and their racism are somehow just PRETENDING to repudiate these things but most of all, WORST of al these scumbags think they’re going to get away with it.

And against a fresh background, we are reminded what shame they have brought to us.

Meanwhile the interior numbers for Harris continue to explode. In the ABC poll, likely African-American voters are now hers… NINETY to seven. The CBS poll has her up by 1 despite something curious in the very first interior number. She leads among women by 12 points. He only leads among men by nine. If that difference is correct, she wins.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 57: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) BULLETIN: After the Wall Street Journal’s stunning story linking Elon Musk to Vladimir Putin and other members of the Russian dictatorship, it is no longer feasible nor safe to permit Elon Musk to continue to have access to any project involving the government of the United States, nor for Musk to remain at large in this country. The government should sever all connections with him immediately and seize all his technological assets including SpaceX, StarLink, and Twitter-X – and if need be, detain him, deport him, or if it descends to that level, arrest him. The safety of the nation may depend upon it. 

A team of journal writers led by Thomas Grove has now reported – to quote them - “Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a linchpin of U.S. space efforts, has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin since late 2022. The discussions, confirmed by several current and former U.S., European and Russian officials, touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions.” 

The Journal cites two sources who say that Musk’s relationship was more than just conversational. They claim Putin asked Musk to NOT activate his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan, as quote “a favor to Chinese leader Shee Jinping.” That, the Journal reports, happened late last year and its source is a former Russian intelligence officer.

The Journal further reports one of Musk's primary contacts is a Putin henchman just cited by the Department of Justice as the agent behind more than 30 websites designed to spread disinformation about Ukraine and the U.S. election - some of it via Musk's Twitter-X platform.

(7:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Why is Kamala Harris in Texas tonight? I mean, yes, Colin Allred has a longshot's chance of upsetting Ted Cruz and a Democratic Infomercial starring Beyonce is a national event not a local one. But taking the time from stumping in a battleground state would, on the surface, be something Trump would do (and will do, Sunday, in New York, unless he gets lost on the way to Madison Square Garden).

Strategically the Harris Texas trip makes no sense - unless...

Unless her internal polling confirms two things that are beginning to show up in the early voting data and polling, plus the simulations of the Electoral College vote. It appears that even in states where Republican early voters outnumber the Democrats, she's winning by 55-45 (or better). And the forecasters are suggesting that as close as the swing states look they make actually all go to one of the two candidates, though they can't say who.

So there is the very real possibility - and don't relax, just take a deep breath as you contemplate this - that Kamala Harris can actually afford to take the night "off."

(23:20) THE WORST JOURNALISTS IN THE WORLD: A special segment saluting the gutless owner of the L.A. Times who refused to print the paper's endorsement of Harris in one of the bluest communities in the country; Dana Bash, who somehow did worse than she did at the debate; Erick Erickson who says Trump has a type and it's not Melania.

B-Block (30:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Yankees boss Brian Cashman explains his total under-performance since 2001 by blaming cheaters (ignoring evidence of Yankee cheating in 1999, 2000, 2009, 2011). Nicole Shanahan reportedly offered to pay off a Washington Post reporter working on a story about her. Lara Trump thinks there are 81 states.

C-Block (40:10) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: The political fables! Including "The Peacelike Mongoose," "The Very Proper Gander," "The Moth And The Star," and "The Owl Who Was God."

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 56: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Republican silence or in some cases rationalizations have met General John Kelly taking his story ON the record about Trump coveting generals personally loyal to him the way Hitler's were personally loyal to him, and Trump insisting Hitler did good things for Germany.

With other of mortified Trump military officials reportedly contemplating going public in similar ways, it is absolutely necessary for General Kelly to convene a live news conference - to be joined by any of those other officials - to name names.

And the names he must name are Trump and Hitler.

We are at an inflection point right now as surely as we were at Yorktown or Gettysburg or Normandy except that with WORDS you can prevent the bloodshed that will happen not on ONE battlefield at home or abroad, but in every corner of this nation, because bloodshed and the threat of it will be the essence of the Trump dictatorship. And bluntly, General, you helped get us there because while you were witnessing this madman in real time yearn for a military personally sworn to him as the Wermacht was to Hitler, you… said nothing.

Now that you’re talking, and the test of your patriotism – to say nothing of the test of the CHANCE for this nation to still exist five years from now in something LIKE its current form – depends on YOU winning The Battle of Trump Because the choice, General, is: A free America, or a dictatorship where you in the military, are expected to shoot Trump’s critics for him. Period.

B-BLOCK (18:23) This issue merits an entire episode and a lot of explanation. It is only a year since Trump began to openly mimic Hitler but his admiration of him was first identified in 1990. The saga of Trump's gradual revelation, beginning with Ivana Trump's confirmation to Vanity Fair magazine that he kept a book of Hitler's speeches by his bed.

C-BLOCK (34:59) The darkest component to Trump's admiration of Hitler is that his defense against all such revelations is that he's such a supporter of Jewish Americans. But of course he isn't. He's a supporter of Israel, which buys him the support of Evangelical Christians who actually believe their "rapture" will happen only after all the Jews are in Israel, and they are converted - or killed.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 55: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: The obvious problem with John Kelly going on the record and saying yes, I heard Trump say quote “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had” is that a huge number of his supporters will applaud it.

And the obvious problem with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic quoting those who were there as Trump was told the cost of the funeral he’d offered to pay for, for a murdered U-S soldier named Vanessa Guillen, and Trump screamed “It doesn’t cost 60-thousand bucks to bury an effing Mexican!” is that even MORE of Trump’s supporters will applaud THAT.

Because the real, disgusting, nauseating truth behind the revelations in the Goldberg Atlantic piece is that it touches the third and FOURTH rails of Donald Trump’s America: many of his people believe whoever is in charge SHOULD be supported by and in fact kept in power by “the kind of generals Hitler had.” The antisemites in the Trump cult love it. And the ones who aren’t antisemites just authoritarians love it even if they’re queasy about the antisemitism. And the ones who aren’t antisemites or authoritarians but have always secretly believed the word “Democracy” was just another brand name or FLAVOR love it because it posits a kind of America not just where MIGHT makes RIGHT, but where ONLY might makes right.

And if there is anybody missing from the Trump Coalition of Evil, anybody who ISN’T inspired by “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had” they are certainly covered by “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury an effing Mexican” because if violence and militarism are the Trumpian third rail, racism and specifically anti-Hispanic racism are the FOURTH rail.

MEANWHILE:19% of Republicans think if Trump loses he should just seize power (28% of Mormon Americans). The latest great polling numbers for Kamala Harris? In July she was getting less than half of voters under 35. She's now getting 60% And it sounds ridiculous: Ex-Flamenco Correspondent and Trump concierge judge Aileen Cannon as Attorney General? 

Honestly - how much more could she do for Trump than Merrick Garland has?

B-Block (26:29) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Jeremy Peters of The New York Times says on MSNBC (with help from Katy Tur) that Kamala Harris is not as clear in her speaking as is Trump. Newsweek Magazine isn't certain if that photo of Trump in a Pittsburgh Steelers 100 pounds lighter and 40 years younger MIGHT BE A FAKE. And Trump's own campaign can't spell "Steelers" - and in a very Freudian way.

C-Block (36:05) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: More of my atypical World Series previews: Why I'm adopting ex-Yankees manager Ralph Houk's attitude towards the team he, like I, grew up with: "Piss on the Yankees."

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 54: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Ignore, for the moment, the horserace numbers in the national and even swing state polls and consider two "interior numbers." Emerson says those 20% or so of voters who hadn't decided for whom to vote until the last week or last month are breaking 60/36 for Harris.

The implications for this are profound. With two percent still undecided (around 3,250,000 people) if the pattern holds, Harris could see a net gain of 648,000 votes (perhaps a net 28,000 in Pennsylvania alone). That kind of gain applied to her swing state leads from The Washington Post poll could secure victory.

There's also some impressive work out of CNN's Harry Enten and his analysis of a small but important decline in the core of Trump's support: Non-College Whites in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Polls show he's down about 13% in that demographic and since in those states that demographic is a majority of likely voters, that's a world of hurt.

And then there is the Associated Press polling on economic issues where Harris is ahead of Trump on everything but handling gas and grocery prices (and trailing him by only two points in that).

Be of good cheer.

PLUS TRUMP KEEPS SAYING STUPID THINGS: Assassination attempt survivor Trump has now endorsed the threatening of FEMA officials by armed gunmen in North Carolina, and has said we have to go back to 1798 (you know, when it was illegal to criticize the government but legal to own other human beings).

I wonder how a pro-slavery position polls with late deciders?.

B-Block (20:45) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Dr. Said Masih Noori certainly appears to be what he claims: a British doctor who wrote that he would like to "vanish" Jews. His fulsome apology didn't work, so he went back on the attack and just to ratchet it up a notch he endorsed the Trump-Musk campaign. New York Magazine asks 57 experts you've never heard of if Media can survive. Not if people like those running New York Magazine keep running the field. Hours after publication they fired Olivia Nuzzi. And National Review promotes Rich Lowry's non-insightful criticism of the WNBA basketball finals. All 83 words of it. Which, like anything else he writes about women, requires another reading of his 2008 masturbatory paean to Sarah Palin after the VP debate.

C-Block (32:00) SPORTSBALLCENTER: We're on the eve of the World Series! Well, the eve of the eve OF the eve, because baseball can't get anything right. It's another legendary match-up between the legendary Yankees and legendary Dodgers who are, unfortunately, now legendary for being two of the most under-performing franchises in sports. But I can offer you an amazing fact you can stun your friends with, about how the starting pitching in THIS World Series is likely to be better than that in the 1955 Dodgers-Yankees clash.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 53: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: You are HERE - at this spot in the map of madness where the New York Times and Politico tried to get away with lying and reporting Trump’s Saturday Arnold Palmer Penis Length monologue – the first thing he has seemed actually INTERESTED in, in weeks - was just ‘telling golf stories.’ You are HERE - where Howard Kurtz actually held Trump more accountable than the Times or Politico or nearly every major news organization.

You are HERE where the Times has been front row for one of the greatest unprecedented political stories in human history – just on a sell-more-newspapers, first draft of history level – I mean it’s up there with the rise of Hitler and the mid-press conference suicide of the Pennsylvania State Treasurer and the death of President Faure of France with his mistress atop him and both of them atop the presidential desk – the Madness of King Trump – and the Times could have owned this story for all time but the Sulzberger-Kahn idea of how to cover this presidential race was to finally look at the Trump Penis Envy and try to explain or analyze it and come up with only two possible explanations: frustration or a desire to entertain. Not: Trump is a full-on KKK level racist and a rapist-in-spirit if not in absolute literal legal fact, and/or Trump is absolutely, positively nuts.

You are HERE where Nate Silver predicts Kamala Harris will win the popular vote, win the Electoral College - and still lose the election. Where the polls in Michigan have her behind by half a point OR ahead by eight. 

You are HERE where a putatively STRAIGHT man Trump spends an awful lot of time talking about other men’s penises and using expletives to demean women, and where Trump drags in a really damaged former SportsCenter co-anchor of mine named Sage Steele and makes her the emcee of one of his staged events and the crowd BOOS HER and he MISPRONOUNCES her name.

Journalism. Use it or lose it. On January 20th. Mr. Sulzberger, you and your Times executives and editors will have helped end democracy in America or damn near done so. Those of us who survive will remember.

B-Block (20:26) SPECIAL COMMENT: So why are we in this horrific place? How are we one week and one day to the election and how is it possible that the polls show anything other than a double-digit lead for the party of the non-racist, able-to-read, non-conspiracy theory candidate? The answer is two words: Mike Tyson. It was trainer Cus D’Amato and his associate Kevin Rooney who perfected managing Tyson’s medication in such a way that they could keep him stable nearly all the time, and then gradually lower his dose in the weeks and days before a fight so that all his maniacal energy would appear IN the ring. 

And then in 1988, two men stepped in to try to take over Mike Tyson’s contract and Mike Tyson’s life: Don King and Donald Trump. King said Tyson should be making millions more than he did under Rooney and manager Bill Cayton, and Trump showed Tyson the world of jet-setters. When Tyson complained that the drugs he needed to keep life manageable made him sleepy and uncomfortable and unhappy, Trump told Tyson: Why are you TAKING them? You are the youngest heavyweight champion in history, you can do what you WANT, you tell THEM what drugs you’ll take. They don’t know you and who knows if the drugs really do you any good? You’re not the troubled kid any more, you’re an adult man, a champion, a God. Dump these idiots making money off you and come with me and Don King and we won’t make you take those drugs!

Today? America is the Mike Tyson of 1988.

C-Block (28:00) GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 52: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: I suppose it is possible that Trump’s brain has liquified, and he’s cancelled half his events and all his interviews, and that he is now frantically demanding somebody FORCE Kamala Harris off the ballot and Joe Biden back ONTO it because he’s just been shown internal polling indicating he’s going to WIN two weeks from Tuesday.

Or nah. He's just been shown internal polling indicating he's going to LOSE.

Why else would he demand that she "be investigated and forced off the campaign, and Joe Biden be allowed to take back his rightful place" because 60 Minutes screwed up the editing the editing of its Harris interview? 

Trump is crazy and getting crazier, but this reeks of somebody showing him internal polling indicating he’s going to LOSE two weeks from Tuesday which means that he might avoid ONE of the criminal cases that would send him off to die in prison but he ain’t going to avoid BOTH of them and as the expert on cults and cult leaders Matthew Remski wrote the other day, Trump has become one of those quote “cultic leaders who – exhausted, ill – and at the end of their cognitive rope” reduced to a “shrinking repertoire of melted talking points.” 

Especially given that a network idiotically edits a clip with a presidential candidate means the. Presidential candidate has to drop out? So Harris has to drop out, and of course since Fox edited out the part where Trump talks about the enemy within, Trump also has to drop out so two Tuesdays from now it’s the presidential election between Tim Walz and Jayvee Vance?

MEANWHILE, IF SHE WINS it will have been sealed by the 24-hour span in which she looked authoritative and righteously indignant while on Fox News, followed by the moment some pro-Trump hecklers crashed her rally in Wisconsin and her response was... well, put it this way: There were no heckler survivors. 

B-Block (19:04) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: BBC News cancels one of the most informative news programs in the world: "HardTalk" dead after three decades. Dead inside: Christina Bobb predicts a surge of celebrities endorsing Trump after the election because...they're all pedophiles? So she's not just One America One Reich television crazy but QAnon crazy? And Chris Licht is tanned, rested, and ready, to help rebuild the fractured media landscape he personally helped fracture.

C-Block (28:21) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: He never wrote a novel, he did write a history of The New Yorker, he did write epic short stories like “The Greatest Man In The World” and at least three that became movies. But then there are his miniatures – his polished gems. His fables. There is more cynicism, more criticism, more liberalism, per square inch, in these – than in any other examples of his writing. So this week three of the Fables of James Thurber: "The Unicorn In The Garden," "The Moth And The Star," "The Rabbits Who Caused All The Trouble."

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 51: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: I’d like to congratulate Kamala Harris on her victory in the Presidential Debate last night against (checks notes) Bret Baier. Despite the refusal by the moderator to stop her opponent from compulsively interrupting her. The moderator… (checks notes) Bret Baier. And despite the fact that when she called out Trump for threatening to use the military against citizens and jailing those who criticize him and about “the enemy within,” the anchor claimed to playing a clip of Trump pertaining to that only they did a bait-and-switch – the anchor played a Trump clip about a different topic… the anchor… (checks notes) Bret Baier.

She kicked Baier’s ass. She went on Fox and despite being subjected to a failed gotcha and conspiracy-theory interview that could have been prepared by Catturd or one of the other neurotic paranoids on the right, answered his questions AND called Fox out on its lies.

THE POLLING IS THE CHEF'S KISS: As the Harris interview aired on Fox News it put out its new poll. Last month it had HARRIS up by two, 50-48. NOW it has TRUMP ahead by two, 50-48 HOWEVER Fox’s polling – Registered voters - shows HARRIS AHEAD IN THE BATTLEGROUND STATES BY SIX POINTS. That’s all they say. If their current polling is correct Trump would win the popular vote but Harris would win the Electoral College. There are four other prominent polls that now show Harris at 50% or higher nationally. 

It could all change tomorrow but right now, there is a polling surge - for Kamala Harris.

B-Block (19:41) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: More from America's favorite media-political complex love triangle: Nuzzi, Lizza, and RFK Jr. James Dolan is not only now tied to the fascism of Trump, but the Madison Square Garden/Knicks/Rangers owner is also now tied to the idiocy of Mayor Eric Adams. And why are David Zaslav and Elon Musk hanging out? Lots of postulations but the obvious one seems to have been overlooked. What if Zaslav is trying to sell CNN to Elon?

C-Block (29:50) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: The New York Post attacked me yesterday because I made a joke. A "crass" joke. One word and an emoji. It wasn’t crass. You may not have thought it was funny – but it wasn’t crass. THEY tweeted about the Ryan Lizza reply to my ex’s legal filing for what amounts to a restraining order against HER ex, with him saying she told him RFK Jr’s plan for Liv was to “impregnate and possess.” I added “Same” with the shrug emoji. Now it might not BE funny but to de-construct the effort: phrasing it that way I could’ve meant same as in that was ALSO my plan for her, or that it was RFK’s plan for me. Anyway – you decide if it was funny. I think it was. But they wrote an entire article about this because they were punishing me. When the Post attacks someone, if they fight bac, the rule there is – I’ve been told by their people – they have to attack harder. You’re supposed to accept the Post’s punishment and shut up. It’s Murdoch – it’s run like the mafia. Anyway, I didn’t. They were about to report that Olivia and I had dated, you may recall, so I beat them to it. Rupert Mad! So this was my punishment yesterday. They’ve been doing this – fake scandals followed by more fake scandals if I thwart them – since 1996.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 50: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: It is now Day Three of Trump’s Fugue State Crisis – from Monday night at Oaks, Pennsylvania when Trump abruptly STOPPED the town hall inexplicably and began to slur and behave bizarrely, through his announcement that Kamala Harris is physically disqualified from being president because she has hay fever through his cancelling of a softball interview on CNBC the same day she was to be interviewed on Fox, to the question from the Economic Club of Chicago about whether or not google should be broken up which he answered by talking about voting in Virginia.

A survivor of and expert on cults, Matthew Remski, has a different idea. What happened in Pennsylvania "echoes MANY instances of cultic leaders who, exhausted, ill, and at the end of their cognitive rope, outsource their emotional dominance subroutines to canned music they personally find exquisitely sentimental... The leader of the group I was in for 3 years maintained a Trump-campaign-like schedule of daily 2-hour sermons. Over the years he increasingly relied on his DJ to fill the room with emotional overwhelm whenever he gapped out. He was 78 too. He air-conducted the tunes. He had a shrinking repertoire of melted talking points. But because there was never any substance to his schtick, he didn't struggle to remember details that were slipping away. He just turned to the music."

B-Block (21:45) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Though The Washington Post noted this alarming change in Trump with real words and realer headlines, some of the key people along the tattered broken remains of some of the key guard-rails, are still sane-washing it. The New York Times: “Trump Bobs His Head To Music for 30 Minutes in Odd Town Hall Detour. After multiple interruptions, Trump cut off questions and seemed to decide that it would be more enjoyable for all concerned – and it appeared, for himself – if he fired up his campaign playlist.”

Joseph Kahn, executive editor of the New York Times, has been interviewed at length by Steve Inskeep of National Public Radio. The result is almost as disturbing as Trump playing the hits from that radio station that broadcasts only in his own mind. I’m going to read a lot of it, verbatim, because Joe Kahn is almost as detached from reality as Donald Trump.

C-Block (43:45) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Russell Brand will sell you a $240 amulet to protect you from negative forces. Like Russell Brand? The report of a state poll that's 51-50 Trump ("do the math"). And just when you thought it was quieting down, the Olivia Nuzzi/Ryan Lizza/Robert F. Kennedy Jr scandal roars back to life as Lizza answers my ex's lawsuit against him by claiming she told him RFK wanted to "possess and impregnate her." Via FaceTime? That'd be some accomplishment! I'll have the details, if I can stop laughing long enough

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 49: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Oh my God is this perfect.

Kamala Harris doing an interview on Fox with Bret Baier tomorrow night pushes ALL the fascist buttons, all at once, and she ESPECIALLY pushes the one button that proves, as Chrissy Teigen tweeted and Rep. Maxwell Frost got entered into a Congressional hearing, that Trump remains a "P.A.B."

Can you IMAGINE Trump sitting down to be interviewed by Maddow, or for God’s sakes even Andrea Mitchell. Or the Meidas Network guys. Or me? It is not only enraging Trump now, not just tomorrow, but for the rest of the campaign. Every moment. He cannot stop it. He cannot stop his own insanity, he cannot hope to contain it; there is an excellent chance it will literally push him fully over the edge and he will start dropping n-words. Trump only found out in late afternoon and promptly lost it. He attacked Fox as ‘weak and soft”, he called Baier “Fair and balanced” and meant it as an insult. On TOP of which, Trump had already been raging about Fox letting liberals on its network.

Now there is a chance that even the Washington Post and New York Times political reporters will skip whatever D-C cocktail party they were going to go to Wednesday night in hopes of getting into Politico’s “Spotted” column and start asking the Trump mouthpieces and the Republicans why if SHE can go on Fox, he can’t go on MSNBC. Or Washington Post Live. Or a New York Times cocktail party. This also, I think, finally puts a stake through the she’s-not-doing-interviews canard, and transforms that entire issue into a journalistic bidding war.

If you’re wondering if Baier might trip up Harris - worry more about Harris tripping up Baier. Madame Vice President? Ask HIM some questions. Ask HIM where Fox is, covering the guys who joined Lara Trump’s boat parade while flying Trump Flags and Nazi Flags with swastikas on them. Ask HIM where Fox is covering Trump’s obvious mental decline and whether he’s had a stroke or a tumor. Ask HIM where Fox is about Trump saying the military should be deployed against his enemies, and at the election three weeks from now. Ask HIM where Fox is covering Trump’s promise to invoke a law that lets him imprison or expel ALL Hispanics in this country based only on race. Or ALL African-Americans. Or ALL German-Irish-Americans named Baier.

PLUS: Now we know why Trump has been forced to do the stupidest thing possible, eight days before the election: spend a vital campaign day in New York, a state he cannot win. He is hosting a high-end fundraiser. If you're trading campaign time for campaign funds this late - you're losing.

B-Block (22:14) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: A hospital in the UK's National Health Service is now renting out wheelchairs £2 an hour. Hockey's Ottawa Senators failed to give away the Zamboni-Shaped Gravy Boats they promised yesterday. How is Canada supposed to put gravy on the biscuit it just put in the basket? And hi I'm David McCormick I'm running for the Senate from Pennsylvania and I am NOT actually from Connecticut. See me rooting for the Philadelphia Steelers?

C-Block (33:42) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: After the Mets tied up the National League Championship Series yesterday it means we still have the chance of another Mets-Yankees all-New York World Series. So while it's still a possibility, let me tell you how I wound up on the periphery of the biggest moment of the last one, in 2000, when Roger Clemens threw Mike Piazza's broken bat at him (if you're a Mets fan) or he didn't (if you're a Yankees fan) or how he actually threw it straight at me (if you were me, reporting for Fox from the camera well next to the dugout). Also why Mike Piazza threatened to sue me over it.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 48: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

Three times this weekend Trump announced he will invoke "The Alien Enemies Act" which gives him the personal, arbitrary power to send to a concentration camp, or to deport, anybody in this country based on their race. Make no mistake that he means it. Trump’s anti-immigrant, specifically anti-Hispanic, hate speech has now climaxed with a promise to invoke the 1798 law that permits the president – in war time – to arrest and detain or deport without a hearing or without evidence of crime – American citizens and others – at his personal whim – based on their race. NOT where they were born, NOT whether they’ve committed or been suspected of a crime, NOT whether they are here legally or illegally. Based on their race. 

The last time this country used it, in one of the most shameful episodes in our history, they rounded up the Japanese. Nearly all that lived in the Continental United States. Nearly none of them accused of crimes. Nearly all of whom had been born here. And you were Japanese, if you were one-sixteenth Japanese.

The latest New York Times-Siena poll shows that among Hispanic voters Harris leads Trump by only 54 to 36. Mike Podhorzer, the recently retired political director of the AFL-CIO, explains that this poll number is just what you think it is. “When we do focus groups with the segment of Latinos that are answering survey questions saying that they’re comfortable with mass deportation, what comes out quickly is” nobody has told them that things like the Alien Enemies Act gives Trump the PERSONAL right to send to concentrate camps or expel from this country, not criminals, not suspects, not undocumented immigrants, not gang members, not rapists, not murderers, but THEM. Then, says Podhorzer, you explain: Trump will have the right to expel your wife. And your children. And you. And no lawyer or court can stop him. What happens then? “That focus group flips.”

Kamala Harris needs to get a direct-to-camera commercial up immediately warning Hispanics in this country that Trump can and will send to concentration camps, without as much as a hearing, their relatives and friends...and them.

AS TRUMP SAYS THE MILITARY SHOULD BE DEPLOYED during this election, we learn he really wanted to use it to back a "new election" in the summer of 2021. And the media is still responding by saying that his return to power would be a "boon" to the business side of news. Not even Andrew Ross Sorkin, nominally an economics guy at CNBC, seems to understand that Trump will happily declare that "The Alien Enemies Act" can be applied to an industry and shut down all the news organizations, seize their assets, and turn them into state-run media. After all, that's what Hitler did.

THE COMIC RELIEF? J.D. Vance says he forgot to wear his earrings to a town hall. Misplaced them? I think I know where you should look for them, Jayvee.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 47: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump has now finally OVERTLY threatened to shut down the free press in the country, then repeated that threat in a speech at Detroit, and then descended IN that speech to meandering gibberish, the kind of incoherence that would get you institutionalized whether you were 28 or 78 – like him. “A FAKE NEWS SCAM, which is totally illegal. TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE.” Once again, he MEANS this. The intent is to punish, bankrupt, prosecute, anybody who criticizes him – that includes CBS, that includes me, and like all totalitarians and dictators that threat to destroy critics will soon or late include YOU.

But there is within the threat something almost as frightening. CBS does not HAVE a license. News organizations do not HAVE licenses. Individual over-the-air tv and radio stations HAVE licenses, but if he really managed to take their licenses CBS Television would still exist. So would 60 Minutes. He does not understand this. He is wrong about it. And as we have seen for a decade, when he is wrong, there is only one way out: what he is wrong about, must be CHANGED, so he’s RIGHT about it. What Trump is saying is: if he regains power there WILL BE LICENSES for news organizations, and the constitution be damned.

Trump also descended into ugly bodily noises and the intellectual skill of a Roomba. And to prove he really was Michigan's Man Of The Year in 2004 he finally produced a newspaper article - from 2023. About 2013. Which was immediately corrected to confirm he'd never been given such an award.

A NOTE ABOUT POLLS: If you're panicking, that's part of the plan. There really has been almost no movement in any of the polling averages in three months, and some of the outliers are beyond dubious. The TIPP Pennsylvania poll showing Trump ahead by a point-and-a-half among "likely voters" hides the fact that the data among "registered voters" is Harris by five! How did they doctor that? They cut out almost all the voters from Philadelphia.

B-Block (23:08) A LITTLE INSIDE BASEBALL: What happens when one of our celebrity announcers hears the "Toccata" theme from "Worst Persons" at a New York Yankees Playoff game? (27:23) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Should the part of a radio broadcast where the baseball relief pitcher comes in by sponsored by an anti-choking suction device? Kari Lake has a rough night with initials and genders. And The New York Times is right back to cowering before Trump. He talks eugenics and purging migrants; they talk "fascination with genes."

C-Block (38:00) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: If you ever thought the impossible stupidity began recently - how could people that dumb afford to travel that far - you're wrong. Thurber's 1937 story tells of an American traveler he met in England who was deeply offended when forced to read Macbeth because she was convinced Shakespeare had incorrectly identified the murderer, in "The Macbeth Murder Mystery."

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 46: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: I think Vladimir Putin just sent Trump two not-very-carefully coded messages and to borrow the stylings of Vice President Harris, one began with the letter F and the other began with the letter U. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov – as I assume you know – has confirmed to Bloomberg that Bob Woodward’s book is RIGHT, that Trump DID send tests and testing machines early in the Covid nightmare of 2020, but, quoting Peskov, “but about the phone calls – it’s not true.” Putin just outed Trump as a liar. Twice. In different directions. Confirming what he wanted denied; denying what he wanted confirmed.

NOT BAD FOR 81 DAYS: Kamala Harris has raised a billion dollars since becoming the presidential candidate. That's more than Trump has raised in ALL of 2024. Harris’s figure is just since the afternoon of July 21. New polling: Republicans and Independents who had supported Nikki Haley and Trump is only getting 45 percent of them and Kamala Harris is getting 36 percent. Lemmings gonna lemming, of course. But the interesting number here is that in the 2020 election these same voters had gone for Trump by 59 to 28.

HOW DO YOU NOT LISTEN TO HISTORY? Even in an America in which Trump’s all-too-obvious affection for Hitler and the Nazis is exceeded by the psychoses of so many of his supporters, it would seem to be obvious that the last thing that even Pro-Nazi Trumpists would want to do would be to invoke February 20th, 1939 and the German-American Bund rally at Madison Square Garden in New York. It didn't go exactly as the Nazis planned. The Garden was surrounded by ONE HUNDRED thousand ANTI-Nazi protestors who three times nearly broke lines manned by 2500 police. As it was, the Nazi presence in New York received fatal damage when a former Navy officer, now plumber’s assistant named Isadore Greenbaum sneaked inside the Garden and able to contain his rage no longer, rushed the stage. The Nazis didn’t know what to do and after a few flailed punches at Greenbaum, a handful of police stopped all of them and pulled Greenbaum out.

So what have Trump and reprobate garbage Garden/Knicks/Rangers owner James Dolan scheduled for October 27? A NEW Trump-Nazi rally at the new Madison Square Garden. Trump hopes 20,000 will attend. Has he or this idiot Dolan considered how many people will be outside the Garden THIS time?

B-Block (22:32) IN SPORTS: My first boss Sam Rosen was just named the winner of the Lester Patrick Award for service to hockey in this country (he had already been made a saint for having survived BEING my first boss) (26:29) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Maria Bartiromo is thrown when a Republican congressman accidentally tells the truth about FEMA. Marco Rubio wants you to believe the urgency of what the government is telling you. Just today, mind you. Not last week. And Jesse Watters calls Trump nihilist Stephen Miller a "sexual matador" and Miller explains that to attract women, men "should wear their Trump support on their sleeve." You mean like an armband?

C-Block (37:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: We take a break from news of my ex Kyrsten Sinema or my ex Laura Ingraham or my ex Olivia Nuzzi to discuss my ex Katy Tur, whose husband is in the news. He's Tony Dokoupil and I can't tell if CBS News is about to fire him or make him Chief Operating Officer. The sad saga of how my post-relationship friendship with her ended when he arrived.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 45: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: It is safe to extrapolate that Donald Trump killed at least one American in order to instead send the Covid testing machine that might have saved them to Vladimir Putin. Bob Woodward’s book says Trump "secretly sent Putin what were then rare Abbott Point of Care test MACHINES for the Russian’s personal use.” From the supply meant for American citizens then faced with a rapidly-spreading virus for which there was no vaccine, no cure, and next to no treatment. To save Putin and his fellow scumbags, even if it killed Americans.

May Donald Trump burn in hell – and the sooner the better. We know with certainty that Trump stole American testing machines from American hospitals and other crisis health facilities to give to Russia’s dictator between March 31st 2020 and May 7th 2020. The earlier date is when Abbott says was “we began distributing our rapid point-of-care Covid-19 tests for our ID NOW system.” On May 7th officials in Russia and Russia’s branch office at the Trump White House said “some (Covid) testing equipment as well as ventilators” had been sent to Russia.

March 31st. That was the day Doctors Fauci and Birx tried to warn the country that the best case scenario was between 100 thousand and 240 thousand American dead. By April 10th there were more than 18 thousand Americans dead and more than half a million cases – 160,00 of them here in New York state. Our outside date on this window of infamy is May 7, by which point there were 72-thousand dead. 10-thousand more Americans would die in the next week… the latest possible date that someone could not get a test because Trump prioritized Putin’s life over yours.

AS TO THE OTHER BIG WOODWARD HEADLINE: We know Trump is STILL Putin’s asset. Woodward quotes an unidentified Trump aide as saying the two creatures have spoken at least seven times since Trump was exiled from Washington. “In early 2024,” the Washington Post writes, “the former president ordered an aide away from his office at Mar-a-Lago… so he could conduct a private phone call with Russian leader."

It got lost at the time, but at the debate against Biden in June, Trump confirmed that he talked to Putin between our exit from Afghanistan (August 2021) and Putin's invasion of Ukraine (February 2022). He has been in contact with an enemy dictator. Were Trump an FBI or CIA agent with such contacts he and his lawyers could at this moment be negotiating a plea deal so he could avoid the death penalty.

B-Block (24:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Who's the worst person to speak to the future of legacy news media at The New York Press Club? No - none of my ex-girlfriends. Guess again. Joe Kernen is big mad at me, at Andrew Ross Sorkin, at Frank Luntz, at his own ferret toupees. And news chiefs Cesar Conde and Rebecca Blumenstein at NBC - Nothing But Cowards - now move into Catch-and-Kill mode, burying a movie critical of Trump until AFTER the election.

C-Block (33:15) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Of all the politicians I've met since I first went into the field in 1997 one stands head and shoulders above the others in terms of the ability to take a joke at his own expense. I thought I'd heard him at the high point of his self-deprecation. Then, last week, he topped himself, making such a joke HIMSELF.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 44: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: We are now at the eugenics stage of Trump morphing into Hitler. We are now at the they-murder-white-people-because-it’s-in-their-genes stage. I’m not exaggerating and I am just barely paraphrasing. Trump has now moved one step closer to eugenics, to classifying entire races and nationalities as genetically criminal, to fully embracing the nightmare insanity of Adolf Hitler, to ethnic cleansing and persecution of immigrants because he thinks they WILL commit murder. As Politico described it, a “blood libel,” in an interview with the conservative bobble-head doll of commentators, Hugh Hewitt. Trump quoted his fabricated number of 13,000 murderers migrating across the border, insisting murder is in "the genes" and "we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

Later with Laura Ingraham Trump didn’t get quite as literal about eugenics but he did say quote “I will keep you safe. I’m not going to allow prisoners to come out from Venezuela… the Congo… the Middle East… Yemen. I’m going to keep you safe. I’m not going to let them help you.”

I don’t know how much more he has to tell this country before even the coalition of the stupid and the hateful realize that sooner rather than later, a Trump returned to power will attempt to STAY in power beyond his expiration date, by killing somebody they LIKE. Even a tech bro. Or an Aryan with not enough Aryan blood. Or Nick Fuentes because, oops, Fuentes is the same name as some of them immigrants. Or JD Vance because Trump has a really bad loyalty record with Vice Presidents.

ALSO: If Republicans keep insisting Democrats are controlling the weather doesn't that imply that Trump was unable to? Musk is now bribing people $47 to sign up for his Trump PAC. He's going to campaign for Trump in Pennsylvania (his favorability is worse than Vance's). And an explanation from Nate Silver as to what kind of Popular Vote victory translates into what kind of Electoral College victory.

B-Block (26:30) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Anybody remember the JD Vance/Trump/GOP lie about Haitian immigrants killing and eating geese and pets in Springfield, Ohio? They've convicted the geese guy. His name is Brian and he ain't from Haiti. Jake Tapper opens himself up to fact-checking, or the lack thereof. And the hockey writer who dilutes the Johnny Gaudreau tragedy for a cute line in a season preview.

C-Block (34:30) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Howard Stern interviewing Vice President Kamala Harris? I wonder if they'll bring up what they were both doing half a century ago today. Because the odds are pretty good that half a century ago today, Howard was...meeting me. And if the anniversary isn't today, it's dang soon.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 43: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: It is time to cancel or suspend all of Elon Musk’s government contracts and subsidies. SpaceX, NASA, StarLink, Teslas, all of it. Musk and Trump are interfering in FEMA recovery efforts post-Hurricane Helene by spreading life-threatening disinformation, and are coordinating a political campaign with Trump which at its heart Trump advocates for the overthrow of the duly-elected government of the United States of America – by violence if necessary. And if all of that is insufficient to re-investigate and/or change his immigration status here in order to deport him back to South Africa or Canada, if it is insufficient to take ALL of his money from him, it is NOT insufficient to tie him up in court cases for the rest of his life.

He's also immorally transforming the Twitter-X platform he owns into a massive donation-in-kind to Trump’s campaign of lies, antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, hatred, and fascism. A donation-in-kind which the government should value at 44 billion, not the current number Musk has driven it down to which I haven’t actually checked lately but is probably down to about 50, 60 bucks. Oh and President Biden? The Starlink equipment and the network behind it and the rockets and the satellite access and the actual platform hosting X or what’s left of it? Seize it. If he wants it back, let him go to court. If he tries to shut it off, arrest him for tampering with evidence in a criminal case. Remember: Presidential immuuuuuuuuuuuunity! By the way his buddy Trump? Trump doesn’t know what Starlink is.

TRUMP IS SO GONE EVEN THE NEW YORK TIMES NOTICED: "Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age." They gingerly refer to computer analyses and the uncertainties of others, but given the number of other news outlets that think the Times is infallible, this could open a floodgate of coverage.

NOT THAT EVERYBODY GETS IT: Andrea Mitchell stopped herself midway through finishing the word "miscegenation" while whining about Vice President Harris not doing enough interviews. Politico thinks 60 Minutes, an Univision Town Hall, Howard Stern, and especially the "Call Her Daddy" podcast aren't real interviews. It also implied Harris shouldn't be appearing on a podcast that has included sexual content. That's pretty funny given that the editor of Politico Playbook - once fired by The New Yorker over sexual misconduct, is now on leave, accused of trying to blackmail his fiancee into more sex and when she refused, hacking her phone and leaking her sex life. So Politico, does "Call Her Daddy" have too MUCH sex, or just not as much as "Politico Playbook"?

B-Block (26:16) SPECIAL COMMENT NUMBER 2: Did "working the refs" work with The New York Times? Did all our complaining finally pierce the walls of the paper? Let me tell you a story from my past in which years of complaining to the Los Angeles Times not only got my complaint listened to, but corrected - and with the admission that the editor in charge never read anything written by the guy I was complaining about.

C-Block (43:40) GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 42: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Go and look for Jack Smith’s evidence against Trump on the front pages of America’s newspapers and the top of America’s newscasts. Go and look for the stories about the evidence he produced that there were not TWO coup attempts by Trump and his whores on January 6th, but three. Go. I'll wait.

Not even 48 hours since the most damning document ever composed about an American president, makes the Watergate testimony look like the comedian’s script at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and it’s already virtually disappeared from our American media because whether its leaders know it or not American media is not just in the tank for Trump but its leaders have already drowned there and there are only a few journalists left.

But her emails.

ALSO: Trump bleating about "Election Interference" and an "ironclad" DOJ rule that doesn't even exist, in any way shape or form. Trump insisting that the delays he caused make him the proverbial guy who wants to be treated as an orphan even though he killed his parents. Trump uttering a sound like "Wally." Mike Lawler in blackface, saying it doesn't count because he was simply pretending to be Michael Jackson. And the greatest story of the day: Melania Trump's publisher demanding $250,000 from CNN for an interview about her book (I mean, consider what kind of discount that represents!)

B-Block (22:41) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Conservative commentator Kurt Schlichter insists the Democrats have never "excepted" a presidential loss. Because he's a moron. Congressman Tim Burchett does an antisemitism against George Soros. And Chris Cillizza quite seriously reveals something he has just calculated: that the election will be decided based on WHO GETS MORE VOTES IN THE BATTLEGROUND STATES! (Chris is a genius).

C-Block (32:57) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: In an all-new episode, a story I haven't read you before, that rarest of Thurbers in which he is not the hero nor the lovable loser but the guy who has to leave town in embarrassment: the Zeph Leggin story: A Friend Of The Earth.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 41: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: “Make them riot,” a man described by Jack Smith as a Trump campaign employee, agent, and co-conspirator, his identity redacted, replaced by the ID number “P-5,” informs a colleague on the ground at the vote counting on Election Night 2020 in Detroit. “Do it!!!"

Trump Campaign knowledge that they had lost the election on November 4, 2020. Certainty from his campaign team that without vote triumphs and court orders, it was over on November 7. Withdrawal of the campaign's litigation in Arizona on November 13. 165 pages of this in Jack Smith's filing revealed by Judge Tonya Chutkan yesterday, all of it supporting what I suggested last week would be his core point: that everything Trump did after mid-November at the latest was in his private capacity of candidate, politician, fraud, traitor - and none of it was him just being a good president working his ass off to investigate a dubious election. 

In a just world it would put Trump in jail until he dies there. WE only have a chance at a just world if Trump loses November 5.

SPEAKING OF WHICH: Did JD Vance reveal a side hustle in the VP debate? Is he potentially running a coup against Trump? Did he play nice so it'll be Vance who takes over the Trump cult if Trump is beaten, takes it over if Trump really meant what he said about not running again if he loses, takes it over by force even if Trump DIDN’T mean it. And if Trump wins, do you think Vance would hesitate to lead a palace revolt? To invoke the 25th Amendment the moment Trump starts speaking in tongues or falls over during a speech?

THE POLLING IS BIZARRE: the debate was a tie but Tim Walz won all the internal numbers from who was more prepared to be president to who got the favorability bump. Vance got above water, but in one poll Walz is now +25 and in another +37. In short, he is now the most popular national politician in the country.

B-Block (29:15) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: On the second day of the  Playoff Telecasts, Baseball is surprised in court: the company that carries eight of its teams' games suddenly cancels the telecasts. Fox's David Asman confuses author Mark Helprin for pantsless ex-pundit Mark Halperin. And Chris Cuomo is so desperate to stay on television that he sides with JD Vance's lies and against journalism at the VP debate.

C-Block (43:10) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I swear somebody mentioned to me yesterday that she used to go skiing with his family. And I saw the woman involved in the story on TV over the weekend. On the SAME day, I knew the first guy - the head of CurrentTV - was going to end my TV news career, and that Uma Thurman and I would NOT be going out on a date!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 40: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:46) SPECIAL COMMENT: JD Vance blew an otherwise substantial debate with one remark that will echo through the history of presidential campaigns the way the spoofing of Gerald Ford in 1976 by Chevy Chase did ("It was my understanding there would be no math.")

Fact-checked once and only once by moderators Norah O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan about the fact that the immigrants of Springfield, Ohio, are there legally, Vance seemingly summarized the entire premise of Trumpism - deceit and using it to hamstring a cowering media. He was terrified of fact-checking, enraged by fact-checking, and finally had his mike cut because he was angry and tried to dress down the moderators by saying: "The rules were you guys weren't gonna fact check."

Vance did a surprisingly smooth if not always effective job of sane-washing Trump but he could have won a debate in which Tim Walz was so nervous at the beginning that I had a brief spell of 1st Debate PTSD. But Vance ultimately had only one product to sell - Trump - and only so much lipstick to put on it, or eyeliner to put on himself.

As Walz regained himself, he was practical, eloquent, and managed to pull quotes out of the Bible and the Hardware Store ("my pro-tip for today is...") He warned Trump talking about crowd sizes was not what the country would need right now in the Middle East crisis (Vance barely answered; he chose instead to introduce himself; it was a tactical disaster). And he gave the top two answers of the night, insisting that Mike Pence's decision to be a "firewall" against Trump on January 6th was why Pence "isn't on this stage tonight" and then a moving, personal story about gun violence and its myriad causes that ended with "Sometimes, it's just the guns. It's just the guns."

IS IT BAD THAT KELLYANNE CONWAY THINKS HER VP CANDIDATE IS NAMED “JD WALTZ?” Is she mistaking Vance for Walz? Vance for actor J.D. Walsh? The late actor J.T. Walsh? Maybe for The Last Waltz?

MEANWHILE, TRUMP SEEMS TO ACCUSE KAMALA OF MURDER EXCEPT HE SCREWS UP THE PRONOUNS: He says she might as well have held a gun in a murder case. Except he says Harris let HER in and murdered HIM. He’s also continuing to take credit for “being first” on the scene in the post-Helene chaos even though nobody wanted him there and all he did was start a GoFundMe, take credit for money that other people gave – and he didn’t.

AND IN NUZZI NUDES NEWS: NUZZI DOOZY – COURT GETS UP IN LIZZA’S BIZZA – OVER RFK RIZZ(a). CNN reports that the latest in the RFK Junior/Olivia Nuzzi story is: she has sued, and in the filing, says that the source of the leaks that got her suspended by New York Magazine for an undisclosed personal relationship with the perviest of the Kennedys was her former fiancee Ryan Lizza of Politico. When Olivia and I lived together and she still worked for The Daily Beast she frequently traveled to DCC on stories and whenever come back she’d give me a big hug and say she was sorry she took me for granted because there was the creepy guy who stalked her every time she went to Washington. ‘Do you know him,’ she’d ask? ‘His name is Lizza.’

Gotta run. Gotta check I have enough popcorn

B-Block (25:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The WNBA players association and executive director Terry Carmichael Jackson has attacked one of the reporters who might be on the Mount Rushmore of Women’s Sports in this country, Christine Brennan. And over nothing. They’ve slandered her and tried to get her fired. We need to boycott the WNBA until there is an apology and the executive director is fired. There’s Elon Musk, who has decided that a barely intelligible video by somebody who’s never heard of Roe-V-Wade “proves” Trump cares more about women. And then there’s Rob Schneider, who decided to turn the heartbreaking loss of 58-year old hoops immortal Dikembe Mutumbo to brain cancer into an anti-vax point. Maybe he meant it like a joke, since none of his jokes have ever been funny.

C-Block (36:15) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I spent years arguing against Pete Rose being admitted to baseball’s Hall of Fame. Then I campaigned IN FAVOR of putting him in baseball’s Hall of Fame. And then in 2017 the OTHER thing happened and that’s when I started campaigning again for NEVER putting him in baseball’s Hall of Fame. And all Monday night and all day yesterday, otherwise intelligent people explained that Pete Rose will go into the Hall of Fame because it was a lifetime ban and no – they put him on the “permanently ineligible list.” His life is over; his place on the list is not. And everybody has FORGOTTEN what the other thing was in 2017 - in the middle of his comeback, when he had gotten far along enough in his comeback that he was a regular on the Fox Baseball pre-game show I used to anchor – Pete Rose sued the investigator whose work led to his banishment from baseball in 1989 and in the discovery up popped a sworn deposition from a woman who, to quote The Hollywood Reporter, “alleges that Rose had a relationship with her for several years, beginning before she turned 16… Rose acknowledged in court documents that he had sex with the woman but thought she was 16 at the time.” When you admit to sex with a child and your defense was I thought she was 16, you’re done. THAT’S why he’s not in the Hall of Fame – and won’t be.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 39: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:48) SPECIAL COMMENT: CBS must either agree to fact-check the Vice Presidential candidates in tonight's debate, or cancel it. Its entire history and reputation is at stake and so is much of the chance of saving the democracy, even for the amoral cowards like CBS ownership.

But of course CBS won't cancel the debate: they've already spent more than $100 on it.

So, to Plan B: Tim Walz must politely acknowledge the first question, ignore it, and take the debate over. Immediately tell the television audience that J.D. Vance is a compulsive and pathological liar. Tell them that he is Trump’s deputy liar. Tell them as forcefully and as non-Midwesternly as possible, that this man is personally and indelibly responsible for death threats against white, Republican, small businessmen in Springfield Ohio because it is he, J.D. Vance, who personally and completely fabricated the Haitian immigrant story.

Tell them about Jamie McGregor of McGregor Metal, Trump voter. Tell them that all Jamie McGregor did was say that his thirty Haitian-born employees “come to work every day, they don’t cause drama, they’re on time” and within hours the death threats started. Tell them that Jamie McGregor got so many death threats that they had to have a lockdown at his factory. Tell them that there are MAGA posters around town calling him, a MAGA guy, a traitor. Tell them that Jamie McGregor had vowed to never have guns in his house and now the family is taking firearms training and he just bought a Glock and it’s for his daughter - his 14-YEAR OLD daughter.

Tell them, Tim, that MAGA isn’t just a threat to immigrants or people of color or Democrats. Tell them, that MAGA is a threat to the people IN MAGA because MAGA isn’t about making ANYTHING great – it’s about hatred and violence and cruelty. Tell them that Jamie McGregor’s wife said “we’re being hunted like animals.” TELL THEM that the latest person to be threatened with death is Jamie McGregor’s 80-year old mother.

And TELL THEM that this is all – all of it – the fault of, the personal responsibility of, the creation of, the goal of, this scumbag J.D. Vance. Point at him and tell him to get down on his knees and pray to his creator for forgiveness because he isn’t getting any from Jamie McGregor or America. Put him on the floor in a pool of his own urine, and then metaphorically… gut him like a fish.

B-Block (24:22) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Hey, Derrick Anderson, Republican nominee for Congress from the Virginia 7th, In your campaign photos! Great looking wife and kids! Whose are they? Annie Linskey, the same reporter who mocked Biden going to the family graveyard, now creates a new fascist talking point by falsely accusing Biden of being "testy" with a fool reporter Biden didn't suffer gladly. And it's the anniversary of the most patriotic idea John Roberts ever had and the one he never acted on.

C-Block (37:10) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Hours before the death of Pete Rose, Baseball had one of its greatest meaningful games in history yesterday. 3-0 Braves in the 8th, ends 8-7 Mets and they go to the playoffs where they only need to win...eleven more games to win the World Series? We are destroying a sport to create a 90-second highlight package. It flashed me back to when the long season sent teams almost directly to the ultimate sporting event: the Mets and the 1969 World Series.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 38: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:50) SPECIAL COMMENT: I have existential doubts about hell. But truly, I now hope there isone and I hope if there isn'tone I hope they make one, just for Trump. He did it Saturday in Wisconsin and then just in case you missed it he did it again yesterday in Pennsylvania and guess what? America’s news media - when it is has never been more urgently needed, failing, collapsing, cowardly protecting only its own money - America’s news media, in its death rattle before Trump extinguishes it, or with its own near-complete lack of courage, it extinguishes itself Trump did it again yesterday in Pennsylvania and the media MISSED IT.

This psychopathic, criminally insane narcissist; this damaged, malignant, diseased, dysfunctional, hallucinatory, drooling, demented, reptile-brained, and ultimately and perhaps most importantly, this STUPID slime slandered the mental capacities of the President and Vice President of the United States.

And how was that covered by our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying news media? Like they hoped to be covering Trump in hell. Bloomberg said Trump "sharpened his criticism on border security." The Guardian called these "Harris barbs." Reuters said Trump "escalates harsh rhetoric." On and on and on.

I cannot say this more clearly to the political journalists of this nation. The English language is full of… words. Words that actually DESCRIBE what JD Vance once aptly called Trump peddling quote “cultural heroin.” Words that MEASURE his deceit. Words that QUANTIFY his inhumanity. Words that will NOT get you fired and words that will not get your cowering bosses sued. Learn them. Use them.

Because if you don’t, you will die with me in the Trump camps. ALL of the bleak histories of the dictators of this world include that same chapter. If you cannot summon courage on behalf of your nation or your profession, summon it on behalf of saving yourselves.

AND NOW WE MOVE TO CBS NEWS which says no, it will not fact-check the candidates at its Vice Presidential debate tomorrow. Even as Vance devolves into a compulsive or perhaps congenital liar. I have a piece of advice for my old MSNBC colleague and professional friend of 25 years, Co-Moderator Norah O'Donnell. You have nothing to lose and a country to save. Ignore your bosses. Fact-check anyway. Emulate Edward R. Murrow - not Jake F'ing Tapper.

B-Block (26:18) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: I think I have some insight into the RFK Junior story that everybody else understandably missed. There has been a throwaway line in one account that refers to the contemplation of a "medical leave" for Olivia Nuzzi. I think that's the key to everything. But more importantly, I can finally explain my gratitude to her, and celebrate the great thing she did for me: (34:34) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Because it's Stevie Day - the anniversary of the day I got my first dog, Stevie (more correctly - the day she adopted me). And finally, FINALLY, I can tell the story without pulling any punches because of course the girlfriend who led me into the world of dogs - Stevie's Mom - is Olivia.

C-Block (54:00) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS, PART II: The saga of the arrival of Stevie rather improbably includes... Rudy Giuliani? And the small matter of the remodeling of my mind and life.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 37: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: I am only reading tea leaves here but Trump's panicked post yesterday about how HE did everything right on January 6th but the "deep state" let him down, followed by his afternoon lie about how Nancy Pelosi ignored his offers of troops MAY imply that he's gotten some sense of the evidentiary brief Jack Smith filed to Judge Chutkan before yesterday's deadline.

I'm guessing that Smith is going to try to start by proving that long before January 6th Trump knew damn well that he had lost the election and thus no act he took to get a recount or challenge it was an "official act" and thus immune but simply a personal one for which he'll have to face charges.

Smith's filing remains under seal.

MEANWHILE BACK AT THE RANCH: So New York Mayor Eric Adams allegedly sold himself to Turkey's dictator for only about $17,000 a year? Adams is a messianic idiot and his "I'm not resigning" press conference began with him being shouted down by a critic with a bullhorn, and his defense seems to have been damaged by his niece telling everybody to stop criticizing the Mayor because Jesus put him there.

AND LIKE I SAID: They published the "Iran Trump Hack" yesterday and it wasn't a big deal but the newspapers all made a big show over martyring themselves for supposed journalistic principles when in fact they weren't even sacrificing one good story.

ALSO: Brian Ray has done a new version of the theme! We'll premiere it Monday but there's a quick tease here, just for you.

B-Block (28:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: NYC Mayor doubleheader! Adams indicted, Giuliani disbarred. Media management suck up Dylan Byers accuses me of "rushing" to reveal something I actually stayed quiet about for more than a decade. And Clay Higgins managed to both try to walk back his racist, stochastic terror comments about Haitians AND double down on them at the same time!

C-Block (35:13) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: Muggs isn't the sweetest dog Thurber ever wrote about. But he may be the most memorable: "The Dog That Bit People."

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 36: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: White Trash Congressman Clay Higgins (R-Louisiana) has now targeted stochastic terrorism against the legal Haitian migrants in Ohio and elsewhere: "Lol. These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters, but damned if they don’t feel all sophisticated now, filing charges against our President and VP. All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th."

His enabler, Speaker Mike Johnson, has blocked efforts to censure Higgins - the idiot who believes "Ghost Buses" transported somebody to January 6th - and insisted that Higgins prayed over his tweet and then deleted it. This raises the question obvious to everybody but the world's smallest politician: Why didn't Higgins pray BEFORE he virtually dropped the N-word on a bunch of legal residents in Ohio?

If at any point between now and the election you stop being angry that Donald Trump and his fellow peddler of cultural heroin JD Vance have let creatures like Clay Higgins crawl out of the woodwork, suck it up. The election of November 5th is as existential for this nation as was the Civil War – and many of the issues are identical. And the results must be.

TRUMP ALSO AGAIN ADMITS HE LOST "BY A WHISKER" IN 2020. He apparently forgot he previously used the same analogy, then denied it and said he was being sarcastic, and has now said it again. He also says Iran is trying to kill him because he's trying to restore the furniture industry in North Carolina and "they only kill consequential presidents."

This psychopath is PRE-BRAGGING ON HIS OWN POSSIBLE ASSASSINATION.

There's extraordinary news out of polling for the Senate race in Nebraska and it IS Jack Smith day and there was a blooper on Fox yesterday so grotesque as to be hilarious.

B-Block (20:11) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: A brief Nuzzi update featuring my ex-girlfriend’s ex-fiancee’s because of my ex-friend’s sexts’ ex-wife. The medalists? Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski threatens Harris voters in Ohio. Jamie Dimon spits on all immigrants, like the grave of his immigrant grandfather. And Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are too stupid to understand that the Republicans will ban abortion whether the Democrats get rid of the filibuster or not.

C-Block (28:40) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: 20 years ago Nicolle Wallace was one of the Bush White House thugs trying to kill MSNBC, the Democrats, me - and especially the man who caught Bush lying about Saddam and uranium, Ambassador Joe Wilson. The Bushes were convinced I was on their side in the story, so they kept emailing me talking points, But because Nicolle and the others were too lazy to look up the correct spelling of my name, I never got the emails directly - only forwarded from the people within NBC whom the Bushies knew would carry their water for them.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 35: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) I wish these were metaphors.

In his latest fugue-state multi-hour you-know-how-old-he-is-he's-206 campaign speech at Savannah, Trump first literally drooled on himself in the middle of a sibilant "S" and a scant 45 minutes later revealed that he just found out that Russia beat Napoleon AND Hitler and suddenly he's the director in "The Producers" who says "I never knew the Third Reich meant Germany! I mean the play is drenched with historical goodies like that!”

CNN's coverage of this latest evidence that Trump's cheese has slid off his Ritz Cracker? “Trump focuses on economy at stop in battleground Georgia.” The term is sane-washing. If Biden had done this the replays would still be running on a loop on CNN.

And this doesn't even get to his insanity on issues of substance: the stalker language towards women. The first oblique promise to jail people who criticize the Supreme Court. The continued insistence he will send the legal migrants in Ohio who are from Haiti "back" to Venezuela because he evidently thinks that's where Haiti IS.

The stuff about the courts will re-surge in the next two days because Judge Tanya Chutkan has ruled Jack Smith can submit the phone book as his preliminary briefing in his revised Insurrection Case against Trump. 180 pages, probably, filled with evidence. Chutkan smacked Trump's lawyers around, too. Stand by for fun.

There's been more hacking of Trump campaign stuff and it won't be published either but the recipient at least characterizes it. The auteur of Project 2025 reportedly told colleagues he killed a dog with a shovel because he barked too loudly. And just for laughs, what the Prime Minister of the U.K. meant to say was "return of the HOSTAGES" but he must have been hungry.

B-Block (28:58) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: CNN's Abby Phillip is the Maggie Haberman of Chuck Todds. She beat up Harris for not going to the border. She is now beating up Harris FOR going to the border. Hers is the lowest rated prime time show in cable news and this podcast is approaching audience comparisons with it. Mike Lindell just dropped his pillow price and just accidentally picked a number that attracts Hitler Stans. And there are some Nuzzi updates: Ben Smith of Semafor says journalists SHOULD sleep with their sources. And even better, the New York Post has printed the funniest thing I've ever seen and I'm only going to reveal it reads "SHE ALSO DATED OLBERMANN."

C-Block (46:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: In the recent spirit of confession, I will reveal that 46 years ago while Sports Director and Vice President of Cornell's student-owned radio station I went on the air and lied and said that a local semi-pro hockey team had suddenly gone out of business. But I had damn good reasons and it turned out I was actually just off on my timing - they would, 16 months later. The saga of The Ithaca Stars.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 34: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) Yeah, the Nuzzi Nudes News Network stuff is included.

But the ACTUAL lead story is: There are heroes among us and even in politics and even in the Republican Party and no, their motives do not have to be absolutely pure, they don’t even have to be a little bit pure and such a man is Republican State Senator Mike McDonnell of Nebraska, and what he has now done, quoting a proponent “kind of closes the casket… kind of closes the lid” on the Trump bid to reshape the Electoral College just six weeks before the election by changing how Nebraska CASTS its five electoral votes from a split-them-by-district method that will probably give Kamala Harris ONE electoral vote and Trump FOUR, to winner take all which would give him all FIVE. He has killed it. He won't vote for it. "It is clear to me that right now, 43 days from Election Day, is not the moment to make this change.”

And in things I promised not to tell and boy is THAT true this time. When the RFK Junior/Olivia Nuzzi relationship story broke, I thought, oh here we go. Eventually and inevitably this story will get around to me because long ago she and I lived together. We had dogs and tattoos and rings. And when this story broke I decided: if nobody asks, I’m not volunteering this. It’s difficult to be even the most marginal public figure and keep any part of your life private. And nobody knows that better now, than does Olivia.

On the other hand, if I’m asked about this by the media, if somebody is going to write it, I’m not lying. I’m also not giving THEM the story. Especially not The New York Post, which called yesterday. I confirmed we dated and said I thought it was pretty general knowledge that we had dated but that nobody cared and that if they didn’t know this, well, to paraphrase Arthur Conan Doyle writing Sherlock Holmes’ lines for him: “I am not retained by the gossip columnists to supply their deficiencies.” In other words, I am not the Nuzzi Nudes News Network over here, giving away free stories! So I've put a few details in this podcast. And they are stunningly normal.

Did she do anything right here journalistically? No. But the bottom line: Olivia is responsible for me being born again in dogs. She will always have my support if she needs it.

B-Block (26:32) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: His career died seven years ago, but when a reporter asked him about the cause of death last week, Bill O'Reilly stormed out of the interview and threatened to sue her for, I dunno, telling the truth. The New York Times' newest bothsideist nonsense has taken a natural disaster bent, in which fascism sought by Trump has "erupted" along "fault lines." And the leading bothsidesist of the paper, Maggie Haberman, has helpfully revealed that there is a Left Wing Industry devoted to trying to tear her and her colleagues down. Which raises a vital question: WHERE IS MY MONEY, VAST LEFT WING INDUSTRY?

C-Block (38:30) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Since O'Reilly's name has come up in this All-New edition, I actually answer the FAQ about Billo (and Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh). Do they believe the poison they sell or are they just pimps? I have some evidence suggesting the answer is they started one way and ended drinking their own poison.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 33: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

The good news? Trump says if he loses, he won't run again in 2028.

The bad news? Trump lies about everything.

Strong polling numbers nationally and in the swings including a 16-point surge in Vice President Harris's approval score, and polling on how popular Project 2025 is (it isn't, and it isn't by 57% to 4%). Huge fundraising numbers. Mark Robinson's entire campaign leadership team quit to save their own skin, so he tried to frame it as "staff changes" (yeah, the rest of the race, I'm changing from having a staff to not having one). The Robert F. Kennedy Junior/Olivia Nuzzi story first gets more hilarious by the moment (like the fireworks explosion scene in 'Naked Gun') and then Kennedy reverts to being the Eternal Scumbag with a proxy saying on the record that he hopes to sue Nuzzi and then make "criminal referrals" because that's how you deal with a problem the proxy describes as Kennedy being "chased by porn." You don't, you know, warn the person, then call her employers and tell them to make it stop.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 32: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: So the next North Carolina Poll will be, what, conducted by Morning Consult for NudeAfrica-dot-com?

Nobody's surprised but everybody's shocked? Trump’s crazed choice for governor of North Carolina – and remember if he’s the nominee or presumptive nominee and you take him off, that’s a coup, Trump says so – said he was a black Nazi, supported reinstating slavery, loved transgender porn, loved a porn site called Nude Africa, and declared he was a perv. And then according to CNN there was the GROSS stuff.

And almost nobody's surprised.

This kind of behavior (run for office and threaten all the people who do the things you have secretly enjoyed for decades) is more common than it seems. There is a reasonably straightforward psychological explanation. I'll do my best to translate it.

MEANWHILE: THE TEAMSTERS WON'T ENDORSE except a majority of the 1,300,000 Teamsters have already endorsed Kamala Harris via their local Teamster chapters. Curious. I wonder how much somebody like Trump would know about bribing a union boss.

AND THE POLLS: Once again, The New York Times is the outlier - but even its poll is in line with two hugely important throughlines: the momentum is all on Harris's side, and she is ahead in Pennsylvania. Oh and it probably won't last but Colln Allred is ahead of Ted Cruz in Texas.

B-BLOCK (27:28) THE BREAKING NEWS: At an anti-Antisemitism event at the American Israeli Council last night, Trump shortened the distance between him and Hitler still further. We already knew him as an antisemite who spread the trope that Jews were loyal first to Israel and then whatever country they were in. Now, he has blamed Jewish Americans - in advance - for his potential loss. It is staggering, and confirms every previous warning that the Hitler comparison is apt, and terrifying: "If I don’t win this election, and the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens because at 40%, that means 60% of the people are voting for the enemy."

C-BLOCK (34:43) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: His most famous story remains so famous that 85 years after it was published, the name of its hero remains in the dictionary as a verb: The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 31: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Quinnipiac Poll: Harris by five in Pennsylvania (include Stein and Oliver and it's SIX). Harris by five in Michigan. Harris 50-48 in the Fox News poll. I’m beginning to suspect the Trump is this-close to offering anybody in a swing state who votes for him, a nude photo of Melania. I mean that’s neither as gratuitous nor crazy as it sounds. I heard about the post on Twitter and I thought this was going to be a Sarah Cooper bit or the rebirth of Jib-Jab and then I clicked on it.

She says: "Why do I stand proudly between my nude modeling work?"

That’s where we are. Ex-prosecutor Vice President swapped in for the retiring President, versus insane proto-Nazi racist would-be-dictator adjudicated sex offender with the nude model first lady and her stepsons are both appearing with an Oklahoma religious crackpot who has called the Vice President a quote “lying whore” and their Dad’s campaign is about the scary illegal black people eating cats but the grotesque misogynist Russian-produced sexual memes are about the Vice President.

THE WHOLE OHIO STORY about the cats and the migrants in Springfield, the WHOLE raison-d’etre of Jayvee Vance’s stochastic terrorism attack on the residents of his own STATE, has now been revealed as two LIES. The first was the woman who posted to Facebook about somebody’s friend’s neighbor’s aunt’s uncle’s condom salesman seeing somebody eat a cat. Vance’s campaign knew it wasn’t true – it called the Springfield city hall on September 9th – and was TOLD it wasn’t true. That didn’t stop Vance. The SECOND lie turns out to be by the woman in Springfield who told the police HER cat Miss Sassy had been taken and killed – that’s the story Vance keeps using as a fallback – oh there’s a police report! My constituents insist there IS a missing cat! The woman is named Anna Kilgore and guess what, the cat is alive. Sweet Sassy Molassey, the cat is alive. The Wall Street Journal did something that Trump and Vance and their fellow scumbags would never do – they fact-checked Vance. And Kilgore. And Miss Sassy. Who was discovered safe and sound in Kilgore's basement.

But Vance is still out there lying.

B-Block (19:36) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Maria Bartiromo explains that the director of Homeland Security is using P. Diddy to get the world to stop talking about Trump. The University of South Carolina lets its campus be used for an event assaulting the Vice President's sexuality. Chris Cuomo apologizes to Trump because...I have no idea.

C-Block (29:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Oh like you don't have a story like this. I went past my first NYC apartment the other day. The one that somebody lit on fire. While I was inside. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 30: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: The debate bounce is here. And maybe it’s more than that. Kamala Harris may – repeat MAY – caveat MAY – warning even if so keep your foot on the gas…MAY be beginning pulling away from Trump in the polls. She's up by six in Morning Consult, got a six-point swing in Mark Penn's Harris poll. 

According to the 538 Average of Polls, yesterday, for the first time since July 2021, her net favorability moved into positive territory: 46-point-6 percent approval to 46-point-5 percent disapproval. It’s about as NOT-a-landslide as you can get but it is an almost unprecedented turnaround. Vice President Harris, whose net approval is plus zero-point-one was on July 14th, -17.

There's also the 538 poll average where she’s up by three and its electoral college model in which Harris wins 61 times out of 100… and the Economist Polling Average… which shows her up by four… and Nate Silver’s OK-Maybe-I-Did-Pull-This-Number-Out-Of-My-Ass model which he acknowledges went from last week giving Trump a two-thirds chance of winning to him saying to Axios that Harris is quote “moving up in the polls enough that the model is converging back toward 50/50 in the Electoral College.”

JD VANCE IS A BLESSING - TO HARRIS: Insists Haitians are from "Haitia." Claims Robert F. Kennedy Junior was assassinated. Is doubling down on Springfield. May be dumber than Trump. And here's good news: the authorities are still investigating Trump's scandal at Arlington National Cemetery.

B-Block (21:35) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Megyn Kelly takes time from her bid to beat Kari Lake in the effort to corner the market in camera filters, to F-bomb Taylor Swift. Turns out at least one of the anti-Ukraine memes Elon Musk tweeted was made by the Kremlin's favorite disinformation creator. And Bill Ackman is so mad about the debate he's referring it to...a top college sports league?

C-Block (33:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I just re-told this story Monday in real life so I thought I'd bring it up again. 15 years ago this summer Bill O'Reilly sent Jesse Watters to stalk the chairman of GE because I was criticizing Billo and Fox. The chairman's mother called him up and yelled at him, and he of course responded as any true businessman would: he threaten to turn off MSNBC and its $200,000,000 annual profit like a light bulb so Mommy wouldn't be upset.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 29: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump’s newest threat: quote: “the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!” There WERE no bullets on Sunday, other than those fired by the Secret Service. There was no line of sight for any shots. There are thus far no charges other than gun possession and the reality of the case suggests there may never be. The man who voted for Trump in 2016 and wanted to shoot or shoot at hm in 2024 didn’t even make the slightest attempt to resist arrest. Trump knows he was never in real danger. In fact he was genuinely put out that they wouldn’t let him finish the round of golf he was cheating through when the would-be almost sorta kinda assassination attempt didn’t-actually-take-place.

JD Vance then followed with a tortured demand that America either let Trump do what he wants - including blaming the migrants for the security failures around him - including lying about the migrants - including destroying Springfield Ohio - or accept an America in which there's something wrong with falsely accusing beleaguered people with eating pets and those who make such accusations are subject to censorship and censorship inevitably leads to a bullet in the brain. Vance really said all this.

And it all comes back to those ten words: “the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!” Only getting worse, of course, is exactly what Trump wants. Any similarity between this madman and the president played by Martin Sheen in the Steven King film “The Dead Zone”: “The missiles are flying. Hallelujah, Hallelujah!”

PLUS: Inside the attempts to defend yourself against political violence and the awful truth that you really can't, and based on my experience during 2006 when I repeatedly received mailings of fake anthrax, much of what we assume is security is actually just security theater.

B-Block (35:10) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The leader of a Trumpler Youth Group named Brilyn Hollyhand thinks Trump was endangered by a "riffle." Speaker Mike Johnson's thumb is fine but Trump seems to be suffering from thumb erectile dysfunction. And his swipe at Taylor Swift may have cost him the support of Patrick Mahomes' wife Brittany because hatred and racism is cool but insulting Tay Tay is a bridge too far.

C-Block (41:45) A SPECIAL SPORTSCENTRAL CENTER UPDATE: Baseball's annual suicide attempt. As the World Series TV audience shrinks to 10% of what it was fun 1978, what does the game need? Giant ADS on BOTH SIDES of every player's batting helmet! Along with a picture of an OSTRICH.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 28: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

Republican candidate Domestic J. Terrorist has now broken the record for most sharks jumped in a single day – electric sharks, with frickin laser beams on their heads – and is claiming he was the target of another assassination attempt in which no shots were fired and none of it happened nearer than 400 yards away from him and there’s no video and a preliminary ID shows a career criminal who was posting about his Republican dream ticket of Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy and within minutes Trump was fund-raising off it and trying to erase the memory of a post he’d made earlier in which he declared without context or rationality quote “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT.”

Meanwhile his running mate Jayvee Vance confessed on national television that he “creates” stories like this lie about a city in the state he represents in the Senate, a lie that has led to the evacuation of schools, a hospital and a university and city offices, and if he cannot be forced to resign his office, there must be at minimum on the Senate floor TODAY, a motion to expel or at LEAST censure him.

Oh and Kamala Harris’s lead over this procession of train wrecks – so many train wrecks that some of them wrecked while still at the STATION, while still in the TRAIN SHEDS – Kamala Harris’s lead has extended to SIX points among likely voters.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 27: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Donald Ducks out of another debate – while inadvertently confirming he lost the last one. The self-destruction of the Trump campaign and fascist political machine – so thorough and unexpected that it looks intentional – has escalated. They used to be evil and clever; now they are evil and stupid. This happened moments after a little-noticed tweet resurfaced from one of his House Elves, Congressman Mike Collins of Georgia. As the debate ended Tuesday night Collins had written “You want to know who won? Find out who refuses to do a second debate.” Literally within minutes… Trump refused to do a second debate.

So burnt out that he RE-USED a line from Wednesday, Trump posted at 3:08 eastern yesterday, “When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are ‘I want a rematch.’ Polls clearly show that I won the debate…” They didn’t; but of course were Trump to admit this, I suspect he would die. I mean this literally; if he somehow acknowledged his utter failure, the violent self-destruction of his entire ecosystem would be so damaging that he could no longer exist. So blah blah; confuses political asylum with mental asylums again, again contradicts himself by noting that HE insisted on a second debate with Biden, tries to take the one glimmer of an impact he made during his closing statement about problems not solved during this presidency, then, in all caps so you know he’s especially crazy, quote, “THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!”

PLUS: Harris up by FIVE in Morning Consult polls and Nate Silver does something useful: explains why her Debate Bump may not happen for days or weeks. Panic and infighting in the Trump campaign as Lindsey Graham joins Marjorie Taylor Greene in the bid to break up Trump and his newest crush, Laura "Acting Melania" Loomer. A new journalistic outlet has the full backstory of the "Migrants Eating Cats" nonsense and surprisingly enough all the sources are fourth-hand. And how do you make another January 6th impossible? Make it as difficult to get around DC ON January 6th as it is to get around NYC during the UN General Assembly, and even Thump's thugs will give up in frustration and go the F home.

B-Block (21:03) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The Trump lawyer who defended separating immigrant families at the border insists you can't separate families for the 35 seconds it takes to put the supermarket shopping cart back in the rack. Fox's Rachel Campos-Duffy assumes that because Linsey Davis and Kamala Harris were in the same sorority 14 years apart there's a conspiracy. And the mask falls off: Trump Bigot-In-Chief Stephen Miller gets eaten alive by an immigrant, who gets Miller to confirm he believes Venezuelan Dictator Nicolas Maduro.

C-Block (36:43) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: As brilliant and subtle an insight into a writer's mind as Thurber ever offered. You'd never notice unless I mentioned it, but watch how his imagination could turn a casual overheard remark into a marvelous, self-satirizing, comedic spy story in "The Lady On 142."

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 26: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: “In the world of boxing or UFC," writes Trump between his chicken clucks, "when a fighter gets beaten or knocked out, they get up and scream ‘I demand a rematch, I demand a rematch!' Well it’s no different with a debate. She was beaen badly last night. Every poll has us winning – in one case 92-8 – so why would I do a Rematch?”

Actually in the world of boxing or UFC, Trump’s campaign would be in Intensive Care at this hour and the only demand would be to pull it off life support and end its suffering. And actually in the world of debates, it was TRUMP who had demanded additional debates with Joe Biden and then the Vice President so by his own rules Trump just proclaimed he LOST the CNN debate to the President.

It took Trump surrogate and pretend professor Hugh Hewitt more than 19 hours to come up with this second day excuse, quote: “Opinions are settling… Trump was not at his best BUT was usually ok and at some points good, especially on the border and his closing statement.” 19 hours to think up some means of pulling his life-line meal-ticket out of the Burning Trumpster Dumpster and Hugh Hewitt comes up with “he was usually ok.”

If you think that was bad, JD Vance then dismissed the Taylor Swift endorsement by encouraging voters to ignore billionaire celebrities who are out of touch with ordinary Americans.

And there was a cat eaten in Ohio. The woman - a native of the state (represented in the Senate by JD Vance) - the child of Ohio residents - was promptly arrested. She's not Haitian, but the right wing is trying to make her so.

It's going as well as Trump's debate night went.

B-Block (20:59) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Republican Virginia Senate hopeful Hung Cao decides to try a little play on words and has made medallions reading "I Want My Senator To Be Hung." A little moment behind the spin room curtain with the deplorable Tim Murtaugh and the despicable Byron York. And Russia Dave Rubin in a nice passive-aggressive threat against Taylor Swift because she had the nerve to disobey the right wing.

C-Block (27:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Maddow just celebrated her 16th anniversary. She almost didn't make it to her first. The day our corporate overlords threatened to fire her, fire me, and shut the damn network off!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 25: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: From the time she reached out to shake his hand and he didn’t seem to know how to do that, to his closing remarks where he basically threatened America with Russian nukes, the debate couldn’t have gone worse for Donald Trump.

Oh – yeah – it could. Afterwards, Taylor Swift formally endorsed Kamala Harris.

The Vice President’s control of the debate and the manipulation and baiting of Trump was so complete that very few fascists even feigned that he’d done well. The best they could do was insist that the moderators were “rigged” against him because David Muir and Linsey Davis did the best job of fact-checking against Trump yet. I mean ever. When Trump repeated his nonsense that babies could be murdered after birth, Ms. Davis simply stated there was no state in the country in which this was legal and then without a breath cut Trump off by evenly saying, “Vice President Harris, you have said…”

Every checklist box Harris had to mark, she aced. She introduced herself, she gave specific policy plans for subsidizing child care and small business, explained how Trump would lie and why – and that was just in the first answer. It was so thorough that I was genuinely surprised that when they came back from the first commercial, Trump was still there.

B-Block (30:30) SPECIAL COMMENT, PART 2: The Swift endorsement was one big accomplishment for the Vice President. The appearance of a bead of sweat above Trump’s upper lip at an hour in – and its dogged determination to stay there – was the other. By then Trump was insisting that Harris would spend your taxpayer dollars to give free transgender care to undocumented immigrants who were eating your pet duck.

C-Block (50:00) SPECIAL COMMENT, PART 3: I answered your questions in the immediate aftermath of the debate. I mean, what kind of questions could there be after a debate about which the New York Times, the Associated Press and other paragons of bothsidesist nonsense had to acknowledge was a Harris romp? What do you ask? “Did she win by 100 points or 200?”

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 24: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Will Trump be insane mass murderer Trump at the debate tonight, or just STRATEGIC mass murderer Trump at the debate tonight?

Because the debate transpires against the backdrop of what SHOULD have been the lead story everywhere yesterday and today, the Rolling Stone “effing kill them all story,” but nine years in, our political media STILL can’t process it, STILL thinks – institutionally and individually – that in a reversal of the famous H-L Mencken if they pretend it isn’t true often enough it’ll stop BEING true – that no one could have become president of the United States or try to stay in office extra-constitutionally or eventually become so insane and so damaged that he would openly boast that not only will he imprison in concentration camps millions of immigrants and others he intends to deport but that quote “getting them out will be a bloody story”–  and that he SAID that on Saturday only because the self-protective animal-cunning filter that used to STOP him from saying the Hitlerian mass murder “bloody story” part OUT LOUD is now breaking or broken and there is a chance – however small – that it could break a little more tonight and he could make it worse tonight, that if Kamala Harris has the courage to push this particular button she could not only win the debate and win the election but destroy Trump once and for all and maybe even present a scenario in which Joe Biden only becomes the candidate who dropped out merely the SECOND closest to the election.

Bloomberg's resident Trump expert (and victor in a lawsuit Trump filed against him) Tim O'Brien has seven pieces of advice for Vice President Harris. And a British newspaper claims she got Lee Strasberg to play Trump in the simulated debates. He died in 1982. If she can really pull that off, she should be elected unanimously.

Don't forget our live podcast on YouTube immediately following the Harris-Trump debate tonight at approximately 10:30 EDT.

B-Block (22:39) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: David Zaslav tops off his two years of humiliation by being caught seated next to Leon (Elon) Musk. The Russian Stooge scandal sideswipes Marsha Blackburn and Clay Travis. And as RFK Jr warns liberals that they're now on the same side as Dick Cheney, I must remind my former friend that he's now on the same side as our Proto-Hitler.

C-Block (36:51) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Tomorrow's podcast will be devoted entirely to tonight's debate, so I'll do my 9/11 reminiscences here. And instead of trying to recapture how I felt that day and on the days that followed, I will simply present the tapes of my radio reporting from 2001 for KFWB all-news radio in L.A., and the ABC Radio Network.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 23: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (2:00) TRUMP TO "BLOODY" IMMIGRANTS - AND ARREST YOU (and reveals the conspiracy theory he will launch against Kamala Harris in tomorrow night's debate).

And next to none of this has been on front pages.

Our nation is dying of an utter, consuming, fatal lack of courage. For eight years I have been talking and writing about Trump’s desire not just to purge America of immigrants – documented or otherwise – also he gets to decide who’s an immigrant and if you try to defend one of his targets you become his NEW target – but to purge them with violence, Concentration camps, swat team raids, informants, military weaponry, bloodshed. And now even HE is saying it, that bluntly. He promises, out loud, that "it will be a bloody story."

If you are an American and you are asking any question about this besides “Is he an insane mass murderer, or a strategic mass murderer,” you are now a Trump enabler.

Yet, Congressman Ro Khanna actually said yesterday that he’s upset his fellow Democrats are calling the Republicans “weird.” “We should lead with respect and make our case through persuasion of having a better vision for the nation.” Fine, Congressman, and when we do that and Trump regains power and he decides that all immigrants are illegal immigrants and anybody whose parents were not born in this country are immigrants, I’ll do what I can when Trump sends the National Guard to imprison you but by then I might already be in prison because of the OTHER thing Trump did over the weekend that nobody is taking seriously even though after Judge Merchan gutted the rule of law Friday here in New York, Trump has decided he can get away with - promising to threaten "lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, corrupt election officials" and anybody else who opposes him in this election.

And where is our courage? The New York Times' publisher thinks he's being impartial by not acting against Trump. The most vulnerable voting bloc - young women - will have the lowest turnout. George W. Bush won't endorse Harris because he's "retired." And worst of all, Judge Merchan folds in New York and pretends he's avoiding election interference by making sure the electorate doesn't know whether or not one of the candidates is going to be sentenced to prison.

Thus all of this falls to Kamala Harris to prosecute, tomorrow night.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 22: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Plot twist!

Judge Tanya Chutkan's rulings on a "mini-trial" regarding the impact of Trump's Concierge SCOTUS ruling on 'presidential immunity' will not only place some of Jack Smith's evidence before the American public before the election, but it may put Mike Pence in the delicious position of getting to testify against Trump for his attempt to foment a violent overthrow of the government of the United States.

Pence's testimony (or at least his sworn past statements) are at the center of a string of October Surprise hearings and deadlines Chutkan put in place yesterday. The first is three weeks from yesterday. She should take her free time to go and pose for the statue now.

I ASK AGAIN: IS TRUMP DYING OR SOMETHING? His performance at a New York speech was so halting, indistinct, moronic, that I continue to believe there is a physical crisis in progress. Plus, he was nice enough to invoke his Arlington National Cemetery scandal, the one he insisted never happened and was entirely made up by Kamala Harris, and now NPR has identified the TWO Trump campaign officials who abused the Arlington staffer - Justin Caporale is now a Trump campaign Deputy Manager and Michel Picard an advance man who was a contact point on January 6.

They both abused the staffer and then Picard shoved her - per Pentagon officials quoted by NPR.

Insert GIF of Sir Patrick Stewart on Star Trek face-palming here.

MORE FROM RUSSIA WITH CASH: So the co-founder of Tenet Media of Stooge-Gate infamy was fired by Glenn Beck, the assumption is she flipped, there may be others to come (a noted Russian disinformation expert has a list) and golly what a shock, Elon Musk amplified one of Tenet Media's tweets as recently as last week.

AND THE SULZBERGER CRIS-DE-COEUR: The New York Times publisher writes an Op-Ed for The Washington Post (what? The Times rejected it?) about the dangers of Trump and the perils of free press and how... he's not going to do a goddamned thing about any of it. Meet A.G. Sulzberger, gutless bastard.

B-Block (28:50) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: MSNBC dayside ignores the entire Russia Stooge-Gate story to cover the irrelevancy that the Hunter Biden case has become. Senator Ron Johnson is so stupid he is not only promulgating a conspiracy theory about the Great Depression being planned but he admits he doesn't understand how the theory works. And Jesse Watters bashes Tim Walz for drinking milk shakes even though Watters' old boss Bill O'Reilly sat there at Yankee Stadium night after night drinking milk shakes with... Donald Trump.

C-Block (41:00) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: I can’t be sure who wrote the first comedic bit about “Well of course when Iwas a kid we had it TOUGH” but it might have been Thurber. This was my father’s favorite Thurber story and it is the definition of subtle hyperbole. The different approach to kids and school in the year 1903, when, as you will hear, Thurber, some of his fourth grade classmates had reputedly REPEATED the fourth grade… every year… since 1883.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 21: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN                           ALL-TIME SERIES EPISODE 500

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: "Follow the money," said Deep Throat about Watergate.

Except he didn't..

My friend, the screenwriter of "All The President's Men," Bill Goldman - HE said it. Because they paid him to. The real "Deep Throat," Deputy FBI Director Mark Felt, never said anything like it. Goldman added he threw it in because it sounded more memorable. And it was. Now everybody remembers it as having happened, when it didn't.

Which is kind of the point about what Mark Felt's institutional descendants at the Department of Justice did yesterday about Stooge-Gate: In their indictment of two Russian propagandists THEY never say the Tennessee company through which they funneled money into the American right wing echo chamber is called Tenet Media and THEY never say that Tenet Media was founded by Lauren Chen who also happens to work for Glenn Beck and Blaze-TV and THEY never say that Tenet Media’s YouTube channel got ten million dollars from Putin’s propaganda arm, R-T, to grow and distribute videos about how America started the Russian war in Ukraine, and how it was all Biden’s fault, and vote Trump or die, and how America shouldn’t get trapped in forever wars and how terrorists were coming into the country across the southern border. And they didn’t say that through Tenet the Russians washed large sums of money to scumbags like Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin, and others to unwittingly do Putin’s work for him.

Some of those folks say they're unwitting victims. I actually believe it. Because if there was an Unwitting Fantasy League, Jesse Watters would be my first choice but I'd certainly be satisfied if I could get Pool or Johnson or Rubin.

My question is: Russia only had a handful of stooges here? I doubt that.

TRUMP GOES SILENT ON ARLINGTON: Possibly after reading polling showing that his standing with veterans, active service members, and their families is vanishing - he's in a virtual dead heat with Vice President Harris among the families.

AND THE RATS ARE LEAVING THE SINKING SHIP and boasting about it to Politico. Eighteen paragraphs about Republicans who are preparing a bunch of different songs to whistle past a bunch of different graveyards, but the lyrics are identical: we WANT Trump to lose, it's the GOP's only chance!

B-Block (25:22) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Mark Robinson allegedly owed the porn guy money, and then his wife owed the Girl Scouts money! The "Tim Walz Family Hates Tim Walz" campaign falls flat when it turns out the terrible story his brother had to tell was about Tim barfing in the car as a kid. And on Joe Scarborough's show, Mike Barnicle asked the fitting question: how did the Republicans get here, nominating a lunatic Trump for a third time? The answer - in part anyway - IS Joe Scarborough.

C-Block (42:37) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: The NFL season opens tonight. Why not look back at the day I had to call in sick as co-host of NBC's "Football Night In America" because I had unknowingly blown out my appendix! Surprise!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 20: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Bliock (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump completely changes his Arlington Cemetery Scandal story. He had already single-handedly reignited his Arlington National Cemetery scandal by implying the Veterans Administration and the Department of Defense are LYING about it, when Fox News doubled down on his lie, and basically put the entirety of the military establishment in the same position Senator Joe McCarthy tried to put it in, in 1954. The mistake – deciding you and your lies are more important than the military’s truth – destroyed McCarthy. And it could conceivably destroy Trump.

If one day your spokesclowns insist there WAS an event at the cemetery, only it was the fault of an unprincipled woman having a mental health episode, and that you have an exculpatory video proving so, and then you suddenly change the story and insist instead that "there was no conflict or 'fighting'...It was a made up story" by Vice President Harris, you give Senate Democrats and cemetery officials and the entirety of the Defense Department only one option: to investigate it fully.

You would've thought Trump would've remembered not to take on the military with lies. The man who led McCarthy to his doom was none other than McCarthy's chief counsel - future Trump mentor Roy Cohn.

And by the way: why is anybody - especially Trump - assuming that there is no security video from that day at Arlington National Cemetery that the military could release immediately? Why aren't news organizations demanding confirmation or denials that it exists, and copies of it if it does?

POLLING: Harris by six nationally and closing gaps on Trump in all issue categories, per USA Today. A Harris three-tenths of a point lead in Michigan turns into a Trump 1.2 point lead (but the pollster is one-and-a-half stars).

AND A DIFFERENT KIND OF POLLING: A North Carolina news outlet quotes six employees and customers of the city's video porn stores of a quarter century ago as saying current Republican candidate for governor Mark Robinson was a five-nights-a-week customer. 

B-Block (26:35) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Elon Musk advocates for the world to be run only by elite males. Why would he exclude himself like that? The newest participant in the Activote "poll" is Abbot Gregor Mendel (Died, 1884). And Timmy Tammy Tomi Lahren doesn't know that airbuds aren't secure and Vice Presidents can't use them.

C-Bloc (31:18) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Continuing our preview of the National Football League season, let's flash back to the one that started and suddenly stopped. The 1982 NFL strike and how I - as a 23-year old rookie reporter - somehow became the confidant of the union leaders, to the point of going drinking with them!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.