Countdown with Keith Olbermann

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.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 19: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Once again, American political media is broken in a new way. Trump has now blamed the families of the dead servicemen he was supposedly honoring at Arlington for his campaign illegally filming and illegally using that video for political purposes. The female victim of physical abuse by Trump staff is afraid to escalate her complaint and so is the military - and the media is doing its best to cover it all up like they cover up everything else Trump does. TRUMP filmed a commercial while standing on top of the graves of dead American war heroes. I’m surprised he didn’t try to sell us sneakers or bitcoin or the rest of his crap. And his staffers assaulted a woman employee at Arlington National Cemetery. And he blamed the families of the dead because his campaign broke the law. And his fascist gang of thugs is running wild with this as if Kamala Harris has anything to do with it. And eight days later there STILL isn’t a Senate investigation or a Defense Department investigation and one of them better be started goddamned immediately. The media is ALSO covering up Trump's Egypt bribe, his mental condition, whatever was in the emails hacked from his campaign, and the nonexistent Wille Brown Flight Logs. Because between its own failures, its own loss of moral compass, and its own fear of retribution, it is a de facto arm of the Trump campaign. THERE IS GOOD POLLING NEWS: Not only is Harris up by 6 in ABC-Ipsos but the Times' battleground data suggests the number one issue for women in swing states has changed from the economy to abortion. And private polling for Trump in New Hampshire is so bad they're punting the state - and punting the guy whose memo about the polling somehow got to the Boston Globe. B-Block (30:41) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Peter Hasson of Free Beacon and the implication that because Kamala Harris never put her summer job on her resume, it didn't happen (I will tell you of my summer job climbing into Hostess Thrift Store Dumpsters with an exacto knife). Harris has "puppet masters" says Tulsi Gabbard, who evidently doesn't know about antisemitic tropes. And Erick Erickson says her career began on her knees in front of Willie Brown, as if Erick Erickson could ever get up off his own knees. C-Block (43:40) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: If fall college semesters have started and the National Football League starts Thursday that means only one thing for me: the day my college professor nearly failed all of us, because of one of the most infamous meatheaded plays in NFL history. Of Joe Pisarcik and Cornell History.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 18: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump has doubled down on his defiling of Arlington National Cemetery. Title 32, Part 553, Subpart C: Memorial Services and Ceremonies at Army National Military Ceremonies will not include partisan political activities. Trump’s team exploited a memorial service at Arlington on Monday, broke the law by privately photographing and filming it, physically assaulted Arlington National Cemetery staff who asked him to stop, he gave a thumbs up and smiled idiotically while literally standing on the graves of dead U-S military heroes, and now they have turned it into an online campaign advertisement – by definition, a partisan political activity. This could’ve been trivial. It could’ve been “there was a miscommunication.” Not even an apology – like anybody in the Trump campaign were human enough, or honest enough, or RESPECTFUL OF OUR WAR DEAD ENOUGH to apologize. Just “misunderstanding.” No. They blamed the Cemetery staffer, they blamed the media, they blamed Vice President Harris for not being there to commemorate the sad anniversary of deaths in Afghanistan – the commemoration Trump has illegally turned into a campaign AD – the commemoration Trump skipped last year and the year before. Because to Trump, and to this robot JV Vance, those buried AT Arlington are just another product, just another SELL, just another gimmick, just another BRAND NAME. And they got the brand name wrong. Trump thug Chris LaCivita wrote that Arlington "most hollowed" ground. Corrupted news outlets like The New York Times covered for it by claiming he wrote "hallowed." Hallowed, is Arlington. Hollowed, is Trump's brain. TRUMP IS NOW MORE DANGEROUS THAN EVER. Another new round of polls underscores: he's losing, and dragging down the down-ballot MAGA GOP: a total swing in four states of 25 points to Harris. She leads by one in Arizona, two in Georgia and Nevada, and has cut it to one in North Carolina. The Fox poll in Arizona scores the Senate as Ruben Gallego 56, Kari Lake 41. How is Kari lake going to be able to afford to buy 900 more camera filters THIS late in the race? The Fox poll in North Carolina scores the Governor’s race as Josh Stein 54 Mark Robinson 43. The Fox poll in Nevada scores the Senate race as Jacky Rosen 55 Sam Brown 41. TO LEAVEN THE MOOD A LITTLE: A comedian named Dan Wilbur has done a spot-on impression of JD Vance trying to be a human for 9 minutes at a donut shop. It's better if you go watch it. It's not bad if you listen to it here. B-Block (25:31) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Texas political hitman Ken Paxton sends nine armed troops to 87-year old Democratic woman's home because she registered voters. CNN/Gary Tuchman "Uncommitted Voter" scandal worsens: the guy is now selling t-shirts. And asked about phones for kids during emergencies at school Jesse The Idiot Watters thinks that means HIS emergency when he has to call them in math class. C-Block (36:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I was talking about Bill Clinton yesterday and I think it's time to tell the entire story of how NBC tried to blackmail me into NOT quitting the Clinton-Lewinsky MSNBC show in 1998 because it made them too much money. An emissary from then NBC News President Andy Lack threatened to sue me and get me blacklisted from television AND make sure my parents wound up homeless.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 17: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump is now claiming that the White House rigged the presidential election in 2020. HE was president in 2020. HE was in the White House. "Zuckerberg admits the White House pushed to suppress Hunter Biden laptop story, in other words the 2020 presidential election was rigged," Trump writes. I'm telling you: Mijni-strokes. SPEAKING OF WHICH: There's way more to Trump exploiting Arlington National Cemetery on Monday to take smiling thumbs-up selfies while literally standing on the graves of American heroes. An Arlington official tried to stop the photography; a Trumpist allegedly shoved him; the Trump Campaign decided the correct response was to claim the Arlington official was "suffering from a mental health episode." JACK SMITH OUTWITS THE SUPREME COURT: This one weird trick actually works. He filed his superseding indictment in the Insurrection case in Washington. It's a little more complicated than this, but basically he got around SCOTUS by changing every reference to "President Trump" to "Candidate Trump" and calling the 1/6 Call To Arms a "campaign speech." RAGE IN THE MACHINE: Thousands of newspaper columns were deleted (hundreds at The New York Times alone) when Kamala Harris agreed to her first sit-down interview. It's with Dana Bash on CNN so she still hasn't scheduled one anybody will SEE. The Cook Political Report has moved two more states from "Lean Democrat" to "Likely" and moved North Carolina from "Lean Republican" to "Toss-up." Maybe that's why Trump has agreed to the September 10th debate - or seemed to. The actual words in his acceptance never says he'll actually be there. And we have the first polling on weirdness by party and while the GOP is accurately seen as more weird, the lead is hardly big enough. B-Block (23:55) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: RW troll blasts Democrats for "not being interested" in the Trump assassination attempt. Turns out all the Democrats on the House committee went to the site survey Monday. Only three of the seven Republicans bothered to. Trump makes the list too after what HR McMaster revealed about the Taliban Trump ordered released. And somebody who made this list in 2007 for indiscretions as a tv reporter is back for mocking Gus Walz while not merely a right wing media nut but also the volleyball coach at a high school with a praised and cherished program for learning-challenged kids. C-Block (33:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: 43 years ago now, my television career starts because the late Lou Dobbs had issues keeping his pants on. It's still amazing.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 16: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: The full Reichstag-Fire-level propaganda site Red State may have commissioned, certainly got first access, to a poll showing Kamala Harris leading Trump 52 to 45 among LIKELY voters, and 50 to 46 percent among REGISTERED voters. It’s OUTSIDE the margin of error according to the head of the firm, which is SO right wing that the pollster’s pinned tweet is about how in 2011 he predicted a Trump presidency. They also did favorability scores and claim Harris is at 50-50 and Trump only eleven points underwater. “The biggest factor helping Harris is how she has neutralized the immigration issue. In both polls, immigration was the fourth most important issue, or rather – only 10 percent told us it was their number one.” Also on polling, the weekly update from Morning Consult has shown no Convention Bump for Harris, or maybe just a continuation of the previous bumps – unchanged at Harris 48 Trump 44. But there ARE signs of… a Tim Walz bump. His favorability was at 39 percent and plus three before the convention; it is 42 percent and now plus SIX after it. SOLUTION: MUTE HIS MIC THROUGHOUT THE DEBATE: Trump is back to trying to back out of the presidential debate and he’s not even doing it well and the American political media is, as always, astonished. As soon as Harris replaced Biden he claimed all agreements were off, now he is enraged she wants the mikes always open not muted, not because he objects to the mikes not being muted, but because she wants it. Let me summarize this: he is trying to back out of the debate. He is hoping to be able to back out and blame her. He did this with Biden too. He is using as an excuse an objection to something he agrees with. What is Harris doing? Harris, bluntly, is EFFING with him. The Harris team has already proven to be the most successful anti-Trump entity in the fertile field of EFFING with him. MORE MEDIA MADNESS: CNN interviews eight "undecided" voters after Harris's acceptance speech. Except one of them told them in advance he was voting for Trump. Chris Cillizza tops himself. And the Times' latest self-destructive Op-Ed? "Trump Can Win On Character," written by the guy who followed the 2008 Vice Presidential Debate with the infamous masturbatory column about Sarah Palin. B-Block (25:33) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The Covfefe of 2024 as DonOld shows more evidence of mini-strokes. Andrea Tantaros compares Harris's appearance to...Hitler's "manscaping." And Jason Miller mocks a Kamala TV political surrogate as so old he should be in a rest home. The guy is 18 months YOUNGER than Trump. C-Block (32:25) SPORTS FOR PEOPLE WHO DON'T LIKE SPORTS/THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: The former ESPN Big Show SportsCenter producer who went on to run ESPN, is succeeded by the guy who succeeded him AS the ESPN Big Show SportsCenter producer. Turns out the death of WCBS NewsRadio in New York was largely my fault. And I've found another cassette, so if you want to hear the day I was first paid to do the news (July 25, 1980, WNEW Radio, New York) you're in luck.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 15: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: The special guest was the next President of the United States. Kamala Harris nailed the speech. It could not have been better. Not a sour note, not a space for complaint, not an issue avoided. Plus: Harris has cut Trump’s lead from nine points to five points… in TEXAS. Harris is now AHEAD in North Carolina by a point. There is the RFK Junior thing coming today. There is leaked audio of Trump pledging fealty to the families of the January 6th traitors and hosting an event for them two weeks from now, and more blatant Trump antisemitism hinting at a nightmare scenario in which he merges the streams: where the conspiracy theories about rigged elections and immigrant voting gets fully crossed with racism and anti-semitism (and the advanced kind, where there are “good” Trump-supporting Jewish people, and “bad” Trump-hating Jewish people. There is also the increasing evidence that Trump is, at least accidentally, giving up on winning the election and instead trying to raise the temperature so much among his fascists that they can run a coup from behind in the legislatures and the House and try to force a Contingent Election. Again from Yale historian Timothy Snyder via The New York Times: “Trump is in the classic dictatorial position: He needs to die in bed holding all executive power to stay out of prison. This means that he will do whatever he can to gain power, and once in power will do all that he can to never let it go. This is a basic incentive structure which underlies everything else. It is entirely inconsistent with democracy.” And time to make the donuts: JV Vance actually manages to fail at the simple buy-food photo-op. B-Block (24:55) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Megyn Kelly’s stupidity mixes with her racism: she doesn’t realize HBCU’s exist because so many black students were excluded from other colleges. And Trumpsucker Mike Crispi and the one famous Cornell alumna whom the university does not recognize tie for pure inhumanity when it comes to Tim Walz’s son Gus. C-Block (37:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: For everybody who’s ever asked “Olbermann? Did you hit your HEAD or something?” the answer is yes and the 45th anniversary is tomorrow. Don’t worry, I’ll be getting better any day now. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 14: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: You heard that right. RFK Junior will drop out of the presidential race tomorrow. Whether or not he then endorses Trump reportedly depends on when his wife, Curb Your Enthusiasm actress Cheryl Hines, relents on her opposition to Trump. Of course it may not matter. There is no reliable polling on what Kennedy's remaining support thinks of Trump or Harris or anybody else. And despite what individual state polls suggest, national polling suggests he's been taking 2% or 3% support from both Kamala and Psychotrump. The other wild card is what position in his cabinet Trump is willing to offer. I'm thinking "Secretary of Bears." THE OTHER NEW POLLING IS SO ASTONISHING that the whole thing may be irrelevant. Rasmussen Republican polling has her up by one in Wisconsin. University of New Hampshire polling has her having gone from four behind Trump in the conservative Maine 2nd District to five points AHEAD of him. And Politico analyzed ten quality polls and suggests that the data suggests the snowball is forming. MEANWHILE TRUMP'S GREATEST FREUDIAN SLIP EVER: His antisemitic trope about Democrats and Jews is well known by now. "If Jewish people vote for her they ought to go out and get their heads examined." And yet on the Hugh Hewitt show yesterday he forgot the back half of it. He stopped after "go out" and started talking about something out. The part he left out was "get their heads examined." Trump also made up a story about Harris meeting with Putin before the Ukraine invasion. This also sounds crazy but may be less insanity and more an indicator that the Trump campaign is giving up on actually winning at the ballot box and just amping up the conspiracy theories so its minions in state legislatures and the House can try to steal the election by coup after Harris wins. B-Block (21:05) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: How could you misspell Bruce Springsteen's name? A Philly hotel managed to do it! Rudy Giuliani says Steve Bannon is being "tortured" in prison (I wish), and should the FBI or Secret Service be visiting Hulk Hogan and asking him why he threatened the Vice President of the United States? C-Block (29:30) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: A non-broadcasting friend of mine brought up the name the other day and I was surprised he knew him. Meet the former president of MSNBC who threatened - while his screams were audible in the background live on the air - to destroy and kill me. Fun place to work!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 13: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Did you HEAR Trump yesterday? Did you HEAR HIM TALK? He’s in Howell, Michigan, where it might as well be Alabama in the year 1855, where they marched chanting “We Love Hitler, We Love Trump” a MONTH ago, and he came out at the County Sheriff’s Office, and behind him with the cops as the props and if he had had ten times the energy and ten times the focus you would have said: what’s wrong with Trump? Is he DYING or something? I mean I don’t THINK he’s dying, I think there are intermediate stages between having every single thing in a presidential campaign turn against you in a matter of two weeks and actually dying, but look if this mumble thing continues, at this rate they’re going to have start putting live captions over him. Trump responded to the overture from the RFK Junior camp about dropping out if Trump would give him a role in his cabinet. “I didn’t know he was thinking about getting out, but if he is thinking about getting out, certainly I’d be open to it.” RFK's running mate Nicole Shanahan appears to be doing the bargaining. Even she has figured it out: "We run the risk of a Kamala Harris and Walz presidency, as we draw votes from Trump. We draw, somehow, more votes from Trump. Or we walk away, right now, and join forces with Donald Trump…” Translation: bribe us and we’ll go away. Looks like what they want is Secretary of Health and Human Services. THE SELF-DEFENESTRATION OF THE POLITICAL MEDIA: The Times really did it yesterday, with no sense of irony, no meta self-reflection: “Kamala Harris’s tan suit was a surprising choice, our fashion critic writes.” The Post, meantime, did a DNC factcheck and got half a dozen things wrong: the Post insisted that there was no evidence that Trump ever sent love letters to dictators with Kessler writing “we do not know what Trump wrote to Kim Jong Un,” Media Matters went appropriately nuts. Of course we know. Trump showed them to… Bob Woodward of the Post. The factcheck now has its own factcheck. I recommend to you and will quote extensively from a masterpiece on this topic in The New Republic. Meredith Shiner writes: "after years of watching Morning Joe and searching for their birthdays in the Politico Playbook, they do not see their role as speaking to us, but rather speaking to themselves." Ex-effing-actly. B-Block (26:47) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Jesse Watters has rebirthed birtherism. He's sending "Johnny" to Hawaii to get the real story about Barack Obama's birth certificate because Harris. Amy Kremer, a GOP Committeewoman from Georgia, is the sucker born every minute. A liberal trolls the idiot Jack Posobiec by saying she'll have an abortion and a vasectomy onstage at the DNC and Kremer believes her. And Stephen L. Miller - the "other" Stephen Miller - uses the c-word about Mallory McMorrow with no self-awareness that it's used about him. C-Block (37:10) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: It was a lovely day in Fun City yesterday so I was out all day and I walked right past it: the bar out of which George Steinbrenner stepped one night in 1981 after I had spent the day trying to find... George Steinbrenner.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 12: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump has doubled down on his smearing of military heroes, of Medal of Honor recipients, by comparing them to the likes of Miriam Adelson and her late husband Sheldon. To a local news reporter in Pennsylvania, he insisted veterans are not enraged, that he has not done untold damage to his supposedly-ultra-patriotic base, and naturally he made it worse because now he had to clarify that what he meant was that Miriam Adelson LOOKS better than Medal of Honor winners because the Medal of Honor winners are often horribly wounded or dead and who wants to look horribly wounded or dead. The polls continue to be so good, so uniformly, that it’s now hard to keep up with them and probably not worth doing so. As you already know, Sunday CBS News polling put her up THREE but ABC and the Washington Post pegged it at SIX. Morning Consult not only saying its tracking poll has her now up 48-44. It was THREE points last week. She’s also above water on favorability, 50 to 45… so plus-five-favorable, her high water mark and something Trump has never approached J.V. VANCE, MEANWHILE figuratively stumbled over the ordering of a cheese steak in Philadelphia. And if he brings "his" new dog Atlas back on th campaign trail, dog-walking experts predict he literally stumble over him. OH THE CONVENTION? From deep in their souls you can hear the disappointment forcing its way out like a primal scream: the primal scream of reporters who were promised tear gas and got only their own tears, the reporters – nationwide on Fox, internationally on BBC – heart-broken, stunned, disbelieving: There were no riots at the Opening Day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Not one goddamned canister of tear gas. And the number of protesters turned out to be overestimated by perhaps 90%. And yes I'll be damned if I know why they still hold conventions. Your time is much better spent listening to a guy from NewsMax explain that Trump is in a slump and needs to reintroduce himself to the electorate by going retail. Drop the hour-long speeches. Give golf tips. Bring his grandchildren to supermarket parking lots. No, I'm not kidding, and no, I cannot sufficiently convey how hilarious it is. B-Block (23:50) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Laura Ingraham - who once turned the Republican National Convention into a Hitler Salute To Trump - complains there's too much "show" at the DNC. Sure Nancy Mace is an idiot, but if Abby Phillip and CNN wouldn't platform her, we wouldn't have to listen to the idiocy. And Marcel Teloma has a foolproof plan for Trump Victory but I have a better one: why settle for JUST the Republican nomination? C-Block (32:59) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: The television world - and the liberal world - rightly mourn Phil Donahue, who died Sunday. But it must be said and it must be said now: the final act of the Donahue TV story, in which he claimed MSNBC fired him for opposing the Iraq War even though he had the network's highest ratings. Almost none of the story is true, and I know this not merely because I was there as it happened as what was an initially disinterested uninvolved bystander, but more importantly, why would they have fired him for opposing Bush and Iraq when the show that replaced him was called "Countdown With Keith Olbermann"?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

BULLETIN: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-BLOCK (1:44) Trump, “honoring” Miriam Adelson, a wealthy widow trying to help him buy the election and the government, has denigrated and insulted our nation's greatest military heroes by saying that the PRESIDENTIAL medal of freedom he gave her was quote “better” than the Congressional Medal of Honor because the recipients of the latter were usually deceased or injured. "When we gave Miriam the Presidential Medal of Freedom," Trump said at an event Thursday night at his ramshackle golf course in New Jersey, "that’s the highest award you can get as a civilian. It’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor. But civilian version, it’s actually much better because everyone [who] gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they're soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead, She gets it, and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman, and they’re rated equal." at any other point in our nation’s history a presidential candidate who said what Donald Trump has now said about winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor, would not only have had had his nomination rescinded by his party, but its leaders would have expelled him, and probably chased him out of the country or at least into hiding. This latest in a series of Trump blasphemies against American war dead and wounded comes in the middle of an attempt by his campaign to ride the limited military service of his vice presidential pick, Senator Vance, as an indicator of patriotism and bravery, and the attempt to swift-boat his Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz because there are nuanced details of the end of his TWENTY-FOUR year career in the military – a career which he resumed, coming out of retirement after 9/11. Vance has accused Walz of "stolen valor" and just yesterday in Pennsylvania a campaign surrogate called Walz a "coward." Lastly, there is Trump’s own original sin in this area: he somehow obtained five deferments from service in Vietnam in the 1960’s using “bone spurs” that mysteriously ended at the same time the military draft did.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 10: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: First he held a news conference where the reporters didn't have microphones. Then he held a news conference where the reporters basically didn't get to ask questions. What's next? A Trump News Conference without Trump? Sounds like a good idea. Incredibly, CNN ran the whole nonsensical non-news conference rant live. As somebody who was hired by CNN as its first year ended in 1981 I have a secret for them – the acronym stands for “Cable NEWS Network.” You’re no longer news. Cut to a test pattern, fire everybody, and start from scratch. Which also applies to Trump’s running mate. I’m beginning to think J.D. Vance is actually a Democratic plant. New Kensington, Pennsylvania. At VFW Post 92. That’s Veterans of Foreign Wars, the post number is 92, and there is still the Sarah Palin rule. Vance called it "VFA," forgot the number, had to fish into his pocket for a card that had the number written on it, and forgot the Palin rule (if you're an idiot running for Vice President, and you have to remember something, just write it on your hand). There are more polls and Kamalapalooza continues. She's pulled off a nine-point swing in Pennsylvania and a ten-point swing nationally. So naturally Politico led with 28 paragraphs on Vivek Ramaswamy insisting Trump was listening to his advice to focus on the issues and not attack her. This is while the Republican campaign is imploding so quickly that now Frank Luntz is wondering if Trump is trying to lose. And as the Trump campaign continues to try to insist it has nothing to do with Project 2025, Media Matters uncovers the implausible. There's a Project 2025 training video starring Karoline Leavitt, who is now Trump's Campaign spokesperson. As the video ends she tells Project 2025 trainees that if they need any help to just contact her. B-Block (23:57) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The Republican House Candidate accused, as a cop, of handcuffing an infant. RFK Junior hires somebody to program political ads to you based on data on your phone. And baseball's new low: the Mets' ceremonial first pitch was thrown out by the Hawk Tuah woman. I presume she threw a spitball. C-Block (33:10) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: It's got everything: Suspense, Baseball, Red Barber, a story that was turned into a movie with Peter Sellers. It's "The Catbird Set."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 9: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Yesterday I said that the USA Today poll that had Vice President Harris down by five Florida was a great indicator of the Democratic tsunami that could be gathering but it’s not like she’s actually going to WIN Florida, and literally hours later in comes a new poll and she may actually WIN Florida. She's ahead in all but one of the Cook Political Report swing state polls. There are three new national polls (including Monmouth's) in which she's ahead. She's grown the Democratic lead among Latinos from 5% to 19%. Democratic enthusiasm has shot through the roof. She's cut Trump's lead among non-college-educated white people almost in half. It's such a torrent that even Frank Luntz has noticed, says it will soon be time to start figuring out if her coattails will win the House and Senate for the Democrats and “The people who were undecided have all collapsed towards Harris. The entire electoral pool has changed. Kamala Harris has got an intensity advantage, and I haven’t seen anything like this happen – in 30 days – in my lifetime.” AND REMARKABLY I'M GOING TO DEFEND TRUMP: Not his campaign, not his hate, not WHAT he said while he was on with Elon Musk. But his claim that the equipment gave him that lisp/slurred words/sibilant 'S'? He's right. Anybody who's ever worked with audio processors designed to improve phone signals knows exactly what happened here. We used to call it 1979 Comrex Martian Disease. I'll explain. B-Block (23:50) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Internet trolls "Gunther Eagleman" and "End Wokeness" complain that the Ilhan Omar primary count didn't go fast enough, then went too fast, then they didn't like the outcome. Laura Ingraham complains Kamala likes curse words when Laura swears like a stevedore. And they play a prank on Liz Truss and she doesn't like it. C-Block (37:10) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Last weekend somebody told me their career was over and asked if anybody ever told me that and I said yeah, in 2016. And 2001. And 1984. Oh and 1977. Haven't gotten me yet.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 2 EPISODE 8: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: ActiVote, completely its survey in Texas yesterday: Trump 53.3% Harris 46.7% In Texas. The lead is Trump +6.6; the margin of error is 5 points. Their last poll was July 19th, it was Trump by NINE points. So she cut the lead by nearly a third in three weeks. She is ostensibly within the margin of error. In Florida, in polling led by USA Today: Trump 47 Harris 42, so Trump is ahead by 5. IMargin of error is 4.5 points so Kamala Harris IS within the margin of error. All previous polls, from the one by the University of North Florida Research Lab to the one by a Trump pollster, McLaughlin, had it Trump by eight. As recently as last Thursday. Is she going to WIN Florida or Texas or both? I don’t think so. Registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats in Florida by a MILLION. Trump won Texas in 2016 by nine points. Five-and-a-half in 2020. But that the FACT of Kamala Harris, before the convention, before the campaign has really even begun, has cut Trump’s lead by nearly a third in Texas and nearly forty percent in Florida tells you just how bad things were and just how much better they have already gotten in Florida and Texas – and Michigan and Pennsylvania – and America. I have this urgent request of the Trump campaign: please continue to do EVERYTHING exactly the way you are doing it now. Thank you. You are Kamala Harris’s primary asset. You are her ROCK. MEANWHILE, THERE'S ELECTION INTERFERENCE by Politico, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. The Post is explaining WHY the Post cannot publish nor even IDENTIFY internal documents and computer traffic STOLEN from a presidential campaigns - THIS time. There's some lofty bull about pausing and considering motives and outside actors and then the Executive Editor of the Post tells the truth."In the end," says Matt Murray, "it didn’t seem fresh or new enough." Of course there is a clip on YouTube from 2016 in which the Post's Wikileaks reporters explain that's why they published then and yeah they were sure it'd happen again. So they knew this would happen again and they knew they were setting the precedent and they knew they wouldn’t do better next time and now they’re pretending that it HASN’T happened again and they’re pretending NO precedent was set and they’re confirming they AREN’T doing better next time and they haven’t learned a damn thing. Lastly, Trump's campaign has been slammed by an unlikely source, the man who might be his only friend in the world: Bill O'Reilly. It's hilarious. And the quotes let me do my Bill O'Reilly voice again. B-Block (26:56) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: He's back and badder than ever, suggesting Kamala Harris hasn't done enough interviews. It's Chris Cillizza (two Z's and an endless number of L's); Trump War Room goes full racist and shows you the future and in one the houses everything is neat and clean and evidently all the people are dead; and why Elon Musk's Eleventy Billion views for Trump turns out to imply that the average viewer stayed for ONLY FOUR MINUTES. C-Block (39:35) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Sam Rosen retired yesterday - effective at the end of the next season - as the Hall of Fame play-by-play announcer of hockey's New York Rangers. Sam just happens to have succeeded so well AFTER he was my boss when I was 20 and 21 years old! The saga of Sam, who I know so long I wrote a paper about him in college.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 2 EPISODE 7: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump. Friday, Microsoft said the Iranians would try to meddle in the election. SATURDAY… YOUR campaign computers get hacked - you say. By the Iranians – you say. And you didn't report it to the FBII. Even though it’s by Iran and part of your whole campaign scam, Trump, is that Iran is the root of all evil. And you didn’t report it to the F-B-I, and you didn’t provide any evidence. Only yesterday, the FBI issued another anonymous, not even a spokesman’s name attached to it, just like that No-He-Was-Too-Hit-By-A-Bullet announcement – gave a clear and compelling picture of the vast team that has fanned out across the country, across the internet, across the world to track down this evil. Quote: “We can confirm the FBI is investigating this matter.” Investigating… who? Investigating… what? Whether they were really hacked? Whether they were really hacked by the Iranians? Whether Trump made it all up? Whether the Trump campaign fell for some sort of phishing by a porn site? Also the material was supposed to hurt Trump? And was leaked to The Washington Post and Politico, which have repeatedly been helping Trump in this campaign? What's hurting Trump, and which the media is under-reporting, is that his polls are now cratering. Last week The New York Times had Kamala Harris ahead by 4 in each of the Rust Belt States. Now, Bullfinch Group for a site supposedly servicing independent voters: Harris by FOUR in Pennsylvania, by FIVE in Michigan, by NINE in Wisconsin. There's a tie in North Carolina. There's a lead of nearly three points at 538 and of more than half a point at the right-poisoned RCP poll of polls. And most staggeringly - and most undercovered - from The New York Times: “Two private polls conducted in Ohio recently by Republican poillsters – which Mr. Trump carried in 2020 with 53 percent of the vote – showed him receiving less than 50 percent of the vote against Ms. Harris in the state, according to a person with direct knowledge of the data.” Holy crap. B-Block (31:40) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The unaided ease by which that Turkish guy won a shooting medal at the Olympics has the inevitable side effect. 27% of Brits tell pollsters that if they started now THEY could make the 2028 British Olympic team. The aforementioned LaCivita gets blown up by Matt Dowd over Swift Boating. And the tape CNN found from January 6th from the North Carolina candidate to run schools there, Michele Morrow. All it is is a demand that Trump conduct a military coup against then President-elect Biden. (41:50) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: In memory of WCBS Radio, the day its news director validated my entire existence as an aspiring 20-year old broadcaster. The saga of The Adler Letter. C-Block (50:30) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: The Adler Letter and MY legacy of WCBS Radio, Part TwoSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 6: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: There's no other word for it. Collapsed. Trump's poll numbers have collapsed. Poll numbers collapse all the time – relatively speaking; measured across the arc of American political history. If they had had them in 1864, ABE LINCOLN’S poll numbers would have collapsed. But I do not think that any other presidential candidate’s poll numbers have collapsed, this late, this fast, after this much of a twin honeymoon of a convention and a failed assassination attempt. Ipsos Polling: Harris by FIVE, 42-37, last surveys taken Wednesday. In the July 23rd Ipsos poll it was Harris by three, 37-34. Ipsos Repeat Polling (same respondents as last poll) of the Big Seven Swing States: Harris by TWO, 50 to 48… that’s Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The LAST Ipsos poll of the SAME voters in these states, also concluded July 23rd it was Trump by THREE. MARQUETTE LAW SCHOOL also released its national results very early Thursday Morning and among likely voters it’s Harris 50 Trump 42 – Harris by EIGHT. Everybody has their own criteria for “likely voters” so if you drop to just registered voters it’s still Harris by SIX. Most intriguing: among independent voters where Marquette has her head by 60 to 40. TWENTY points among Independents. What we are seeing as of THIS moment is exactly why this unprecedented move: changing horses not mid-stream but mid-tightrope was attempted. To get these results. And nobody, NOBODY, expected them this fast. NOBODY. Which leads me into the second thing I mentioned previously and I mentioned it on Wednesday July 24th and before I mentioned it I took a deep breath and asked myself do you really want to mention this already but I did and I repeat it: I have been thinking since no later than (hours after President Biden dropped out) that there will come a point, this year, this election, maybe this MONTH, where we will all be saying “Can you believe we came THIS CLOSE to not making Vice President Harris the nominee?” I’m not building the Joe Saved Democracy Again statues quite yet. But I am beginning to think of maybe what they kinda could LOOK like. AND IS ANYBODY GOING TO DO OR WRITE ANYTHING about Trump's Health Crisis? His “news conference” was, objectively, twice as bad, FOUR times as bad, as the President’s performance at the debate. Throughout, it bordered on – and often crossed the line INTO – fugue state. And this got no headlines. Trump always SOUNDS like he doesn’t know where he was. This time he also LOOKED like he didn’t know where he was. Can’t convey that on a podcast: when a question came from the right side of the room he looked frightened as if he had just discovered there WAS a right side of the room. He looked lost. More shockingly, perhaps, he looked pale. The New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, Axios, ABC, NBC and CBS had NO front page stories about the demented nature of his performance yesterday. Within an hour of its conclusion. Each hid behind his vague commitment to debates. Axios, incredibly, LED with “Vice President Harris still hasn’t given an interview or taken questions from voters since she became a presidential candidate…” B-Block (24:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: A former mediocre football player named Marcellus Wiley claims Democrats are trying to bribe celebrities like him to support them (like him?) Trump makes up a story about Biden trying to seize back the nomination; his social media whore Dan Scavino posts 'I hear Biden is trying to seize back the nomination.' Elon Musk posts a fake London newspaper headline claiming there are going to be internment camps for conservatives (I WISH). Dear UK: what is the point of HAVING a Tower of London if you're not gonna use it? C-Block (34:50) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: The most amount of action in the smallest amount of space in any Thurber story. His impeccable tale of one hour of confusion in his childhood home: "The Night The Bed Fell."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 5: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Thank the lord for J.D. (J.V.) Vance. Even if you're atheist or agnostic, thank somebody. It is a given that they should have Tim Walz make ten speeches a week, every warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse, and doghouse. But Democrats should also anonymously flood the Trump campaign with the succinct and anonymous message: SEND MORE JD VANCE! Vance has launched, twenty years after, a new version of the anti-John Kerry Swiftboat Campaign against Walz, a man who served in the military for 24 years. Falsely accused him of "stolen valor" because he retired before his unit was ordered to Iraq. And he’s not only done so while being the running mate of a draft dodger. He's done so when his own role in the military was: Marine Correspondent. Brian Williams in uniform. As late as 2010 he was publicly supporting Iraq, now says he fell for George W. Bush’s propaganda about Iraq. Means that Public Affairs Colonel J.D. Vance was a propagandist. By his own definition. Brian Williams in a uniform. After that disaster, and a clumsy stunt in which he portrayed himself as a creepy weirdo trying to get on the Vice President's plane, they gave Vance the chance to push back on the thing that allowed Tim Walz to burst out of the gate Monday: that he's happy and voters want at least some happy. Asked what makes him happy, he was asked. He promptly berated the reporter and said he was angry. Never change, Dude. You're the worst. ALSO of note: more polls, from Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, showing an eight point swing from Trump to Harris in a little over two weeks. Eight. Points. B-Block (25:33) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Critics of the Paris Olympics, please meet Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo. She has a lovely bouquet of F-Bombs for you. Philly radio man Howard Eskin hasn't been fired after "unwanted kiss" and I haven't gotten over something he did to me in 1980. And Valentina "Gun Moll" Gomez didn't win the Fascist Primary for Secretary of State in Missouri. In fact she didn't even finish Top Five! C-Block (36:52) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: It was such a dumb move that the other executives at MSNBC actually thought it was a practical joke. And then they found out the only joke was on them. NBC is known for its ability to erase people from its past but nobody has been erased more than the ex-host who was inexplicably promoted to General Manager in 2006 (and then stripped of power about a week later).See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 4: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: People. Like. Him. In a time when 50% approval is a landslide of support, when the very few most earnest and most honest politicians are still tolerated, when we have had a decade of one of the most disliked humans on the planet hating everything and everybody, the idea that the Democrats are running not one but TWO likeable candidates is staggeringly important – and simple – and novel. Tim Walz is HAPPY to be living here, and fighting to help other people become happy, and now to join Kamala Harris, who is ALSO happy and smiles – like a person. Trump isn’t HAPPY! At every moment of what should be success he’s degrading someone, he’s embittered, he’s angry, he’s the victim, he’s shortchanged, he’s threatening revenge. As shown on his spectacular first day as her running mate, Walz and Vice President Harris recognize what Trump does not: America is so worn out by and done with, unhappy weirdos. THE POLLS CONTINUE TO BE ALL KAMALA: Marist for PBS: Harris 51 Trump 48. Harris by three. Previous poll: Trump by one. Marist for PBS: Who do you trust more on abortion? Harris… 56-to-41. Who do you trust more on preserving democracy? Harris 53-46. Who do you trust more on the economy? Trump… but only by three. Who do you trust more on immigration – this is the killer, right? Trump’s real chance to survive the tsunami? Yes, poll says Trump but only by six. And some very pro-conservative swing state polling were also all positive. And all conducted before Tim Walz. B-Block (26:40) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Jim Vandehei of Axios not only fires ten percent of his staff, but he makes them read about it in a memo written in the impenetrable Axios 'style.' Bloomberg editors' response to their decision to break the embargo on the trade for Evan Gershkovich? Fire the reporter! And a member of Code Pink who was already ahead of Congressman Derrick Van PTSD Orden is delayed slightly, he yells at her to move, as she moves she brushes past him, he is now demanding she be charged with "assault on a member of Congress." C-Block (37:25) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I was supposed to anchor NBC’s cable coverage of the Summer Olympics in 2000 in Sydney. But I quit the job in 1998. Then I was supposed to anchor NBC’s cable coverage of the Summer Olympics in 2004 in Athens. But I told them – no, I think I’d prefer to stay in New Jersey and try to grow this new news show Countdown and there are still executives at NBC who think I am insane. And I am proud to tell you that I have not watched ONE minute, not ONE highlight, from the 2024 Olympics. I'm beginning to think I might not LIKE the Olympics. If this is true it dates to 1980 and my experience as part of a two-and-a-half man team that covered the ENTIRE WINTER Olympics at Lake Placid, New York – just the two-and-a-half of us. It was rewarding, it was challenging, it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and I have done everything since then to make SURE it WAS just once-in-a-lifetime, especially after the other one-and-a-half guys – my boss and my boss’s boss – got me drunk one night and then sent me to cover the skiing at sunrise and I almost didn’t survive.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 3: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: The selection of Kamala Harris's Vice President is a big story and I'm really interested and it could be Joe Biden and I'd go "Whatever You Want, Queen." The lead story today is ANOTHER poll explosion She’s ahead in the Morning Consult poll 48-44. A week ago she was ahead by ONE point. Two weeks ago TRUMP was ahead by TWO points. That's a seven point swing since President Biden bowed out. They polled on six key attributes in seven swing states: she wins not too old in a landslide. She wins "mentally fit" in a landslide. She wins "less dangerous" in a landslide. She wins "cares about me" by as much as ten. She's tied with him on "more presidential." She's up. by three in SurveyUSA. CBS (which never had Biden ahead) has her up by one. Decision Desk HQ shows her improved in nine of its ten battleground states (the only one she didn't improve on? Virginia, where she and Biden were each up by three). For the first time even Nate Silver's projection says she has the better chance of winning the electoral college – 53% – and winning it by 282 votes to 255 for Trump – and has her up in the polls by one and nine tenths points, largely because HIS average of the polls in Pennsylvania has her up by a point and in Michigan by just under three. Nate Silver has Kamala Harris within six points of leading in… Florida. ALSO THERE'S THE VP THING. Reuters reported Tim Walz and Josh Shapiro are the finalists. It might be Mark Kelly in the mix, too. Sure great fine get Walz new younger glasses. End advice. AND NOW WE KNOW WHY RFK MADE THE BEAR VIDEO: Yes, sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you and sometimes when you try to get ahead of The New Yorker story about you dumping in Central Park the dead carcass of a bear cub you say another motorist killed, it turns out there were stories the bear had stab wounds, and oh yeah the magazine has a PHOTO of you mocking the dead bear and in it your fly is unzipped. B-Block (29:45) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: TWO Supreme Court Justices. Gorsuch threatens Biden. Thomas takes more trip courtesy Harlan Crow Travel Agency. Elon Musk warns of civil war in Europe - for at least the fifth time in ten months. Does he own a civil war distributorship or something? C-Block (38:30) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: The anniversary looms: my greatest scoop proves you can accomplish great things by doing nothing and just letting everybody else do all the work for you. I broke the trade of Wayne Gretzky to the L-A Kings – as important a moment as there has been in the history of the development of hockey in this country – by just answering the phone a couple times. I mean I didn’t even have to leave my office. The Gretzky Trade And My Absolutely Unnecessary Role in Breaking It.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 2: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Don’t look now but I think a certain Russian dictator has stopped betting on Trump. In fact, he’s started humiliating him. Whatever the deal between Trump and Putin was on Gershkovich – and there is every chance it existed only in that great, amorphous, bug-filled attic that is Trump’s mind – it’s gone now. On June 5 Trump insisted only he could get him home. Only he would be the recipient of Putin’s trust and agreement. He even put a date on it. Not when he was back in the White House but as soon as he was president-elect. Instead Putin just kicked Trump in the balls. Whatever happened, Trump was no longer worth enough to Putin for Putin to let Trump lie to cover his own useless ass. He just let Trump step on that rake. He just LEFT Trump to post impotently on social media about whether we got more prisoners then they did, like he was talking about getting 13 burgers for five bucks at McDonald’s instead of just a dozen. TRUMP DOUBLES DOWN ON 'KAMALA IS NOT BLACK, SHE'S JAMAICAN.' Since he thinks immigrants are from asylums because he doesn't know the word has multiple meanings, there's every chance he thinks the "Jamaica" is the part of his home borough, Queens. The stupidity of The New York Times and Washington Post may have helped convince him he's got the winning campaign theme here but his claim she's not really black really cut through - and cut him. THERE'S VP NEWS: JD Vance says nobody's trying to get him off the ticket, everybody's been treated like this. Mike Pence was treated like this (JD? A word, please?) But everybody says the Dump-Vance movement is coming from Kellyanne Conway. On the other side, the tea leaves suggest Josh Shapiro may be Kamala's choice. AND ONE WEIRD TRICK: Imagine being born in 1946, living through Korea and the Cold War and JFK and Vietnam and the Swinging 60s and Watergate and Reagan and The Tech Boom and 9/11 and Obama and every day of your life since you learned how to talk, somebody has called you weird and apparently you’d never heard this… until last week. Happily, Trump has the perfect response to this: I’m not weird, you’re weird. B-Block (24:30) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: As Mike Trout loses another season to injury and entropy, Angels' owner Arte Moreno must move him, or the team. The editor of the Cook Political Report thinks if the election is about the issues and not Trump, Trump will win. And Musk says he and Maduro will fight. Ever heard of the boxing matches where the two guys score simultaneous knockouts? C-Block (34:50) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: From his great near-novel "My Life And Hard Times" it's just another kid from another century trying to get through the bewildering bureaucracy that is a major American college: "University Days."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 3 EPISODE 1: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: After his demented, prejudiced paroxysm at the National Association of Black Journalists, as he signaled the start of his full-on, hateful, disgusting, apartheid-and-slavery-level-appalling campaign of birtherism and racism, Donald Trump must withdraw from the presidential election and commit to psychiatric institutionalization. There is no longer any room in the political discourse of the United States of America for anyone both so deeply disturbed AND so deeply possessed by a hate of people of color that it reaches the levels of insanity and prejudice Trump not only DISPLAYED in Chicago yesterday but gloried in. More over, there is no room in American SOCIETY for anyone with such an immeasurably dysfunctional and dangerous mental illness as that which Trump showed again and again at the NABJ event. This country is not safe if Donald Trump is free to walk on its streets. This country is not safe if those who have mistaken him for sane, or rational, or patriotic, or just American, are not shown in no uncertain terms that what he radiated yesterday on that stage is a disease At the National Association of Black Journalists event in Chicago he went full birther, again. He went full racist, again. He not only questioned the ethnic history of the Vice President of the United States, but he accused her of either CHANGING that history or changing her STATEMENTS ABOUT that history – Trump’s insanity permitted him to be vague even in his apartheid-level racist accusation. As he did so his stooges like Jesse Watters were going on Fox claiming Vice President Harris is quote “not African-American, technically” and Laura Loomer was disseminating a Harris birth certificate and the gutter trash congresswoman from Colorado Lauren Boebert wrote quote “she switched” and the Trump parking lot attorney Alina Habba said quote “Unlike you Kamala, I know who my roots are and where I come from." Not again. We must - using the law and the ballot box - destroy this man's evil and metaphorically bury his campaign and those who support under the rubble of birtherism. B-BLOCK (24:50) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Mar-a-Lago insiders selling info to supplicants about when Trump is in a good mood. Musk and Ramaswamy say America needs more people (but not immigrants like their own parents) and the Oklahoma school nazi wants to fire any teacher who wasn't worried enough about Trump's ear-piercing. C-BLOCK (35:38) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Ah for the simpler times of 46 years ago when the big issue was: will I get my seersucker suit dirty on the subway as I travel up to my internship at Channel 5 News. The story of Keith The Intern and Bill Mazer, See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 2 EPISODE 222: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: As reports mount that she'll select her Vice Presidential running mate next Monday or Tuesday, Kamala Harris - ten days into her campaign - surges into the lead in the swing states: Michigan: Kamala Harris 53 Trump 42 Arizona: Harris 49 Trump 47 Wisconsin: Harris 49 Trump 47 Nevada: Harris 47 Trump 45 Georgia: Harris 47 Trump 47 North Carolina: Trump 48 Harris 46 Pennsylvania: Trump 50 Harris 46 Seven Swing States Combined in these polls by Morning Consult for BLOOMBERG News: Harris 48 Trump 47 or as they headlined it “Harris erases Trump’s Swing State Lead.” But Nate Silver told me Harris only has a 38 percent chance of winning, the New York Times told me this is just a "honeymoon" period (a term for the time AFTER a VP is chosen and a convention is held) and Axios told me Trump is selecting his cabinet. Explaining the polls, and the media's inability to believe anything that never happened before is happening now. B-Block (30:38) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Honorary mention, me, for coughing on the podcast yesterday. So now Matt Gaetz is OPPOSED to electoral losers insisting they really had won? Laura Loomer makes up a story no crazier than the other stories she's made up and got mad at all of us for taking her seriously. And the National Association of Black Journalists is entitled to host Trump for an interview at its convention. It is NOT allowed to let him bring his own pet propagandist with him to "interview" him. C-Block (44:33) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: In those days there was no internet, no ESPN, no CNN, and no weekday national sportscasts. So when the captain of the New York Yankees crashed his private plane 45 years ago this Friday, it was left to eight or so network radio sports guys to cover the nightmare in real time. And one of them was a rookie with about eight days' experience in the business: Me.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 2 EPISODE 221: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT (NOW! WITH LESS COUGHING!): Looks like you can build a couple new towers and an extra moat at Kamalot: Morning Consult poll, which Trump still led a week ago today 47 to 45, now shows Vice President Harris AHEAD 47 to 46 and yes it is all within the margin of error; nevertheless it is a 3-point swing in ONE WEEK. Just as importantly: FIFTY PERCENT of voters in that poll view her favorably, 46 percent unfavorably, that’s a net of +4 and in our fractured landscape that is landslide territory and nothing Biden OR Trump achieved. As Morning Consult notes her popularity score swung by twelve points since last week, driven mostly by… INDEPENDENTS. A week ago 31 percent of INDEPENDENTS viewed her favorably and now it’s 48% percent. Kamala Harris is also killing it in the stodgier polls. FOX surveyed four swing states. Harris up by six in Minnesota. They’re TIED in Michigan and Pennsylvania. She trails by a point in Wisconsin. The new Wall Street Journal Poll: she's cut Trump's lead from six to two Harris 47. In short, there’s simply not a more CONGENIAL spot. For happily-ever-after-ing than here in Camelot. MEANWHILE TRUMP (WITH A NET FAVORABLE OF -16)? Of COURSE he meant if Christians voted for him now they wouldn’t have to vote again in 2028 BECAUSE he meant there wouldn’t BE elections - or maybe even more likely, there wouldn’t be elections in 2028 that HE COULD LOSE. There are a lot of reasons we can be certain of this, the easiest of which is that we all UNDERSTAND that he is running because if he doesn’t win the 2024 election and go to the WHITE HOUSE, he instead WILL go to prison, and he WILL die there. And if that is true in 2024 – guess what – it would ALSO be TRUE in 2028. B-Block (26:40) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: RFK says he was rambunctious so yeah there may be more sexual assault charges. A woman named Amy Vandersteel thinks 0.4% is forty percent. And right wing nut job Bill Mitchell explains there's a replacement Joe Biden who is four inches taller and deliberately tanked the debate so the Democrats could complete their intricate scheme to get him out and Kamala in I WISH. C-Block (36:20) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: MSNBC didn't make a big deal about it but they just hit their 28th anniversary on the air, and what I believe is the 19th anniversary of the day they fired Rachel Maddow, before I hired her back out of my own pocket.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 2 EPISODE 220: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Finally somebody has said SOMETHING confirming we don't have any idea whether Trump was hit by a bullet or a piece of bubble gum during what was - unquestionably - the assassination attempt, now nearly two weeks ago. And the doubt is from no less a figure than the head of the FBI, in Congressional testimony day before yesterday that got almost no attention for hours after he gave it. This led to considerable umbrage from Ex-Doctor Congressman Ronny Glug Glug Jackson of Texas who insists he saw the wound (of course it was the next day) even as video emerges of him explaining his own nephew was near Trump and suffered minor superficial injuries from... debris evidently thrown up by a bullet hitting something. Something that is ever more certainly NOT Trump. ALSO: Superb polling numbers for Kamala Harris from The New York Times (Biden was behind by six; she is behind by one), Morning Consult (she is now ahead by one) and Change Polls (It was Trump by four over Biden. It is now Harris by one over Trump). The Times had to find some disaffected Democrat and somehow found a confidence trickster (literally, she went to prison over a fake finger-in-the-chili thing) and quoted her. The Times has jumped the shark. I AM BEGINNING TO THINK TRUMP WILL DUMP JD VANCE. It's not just the couch embarrassment (So-fa, so-good) or the horrible approval numbers. This video of him complaining that Harris has 'no skin in the game' because she's not a biological parent? So - Lindsey Graham has no skin the game? Tim Scott? George Washington? And maybe best of all, there is a new nickname for Vice President Harris and the momentum she's building: Kamalot. It's courtesy Trump's second worst press secretary, the imbecilic Kayleigh McEnany, who is convinced it's an insult. This person has had one good idea in her life - this is it - and she's disowning it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 2 EPISODE 219: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump’s nephew Fred III – the one who likes him – says Trump told him, in the oval office, in May 2020, that the disabled, quote, “these people…the shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.” It is somehow worse than it seems. Fred Trump III has a son William who has spent the whole of his 25 years on this planet fighting illness after illness and complication after complication. When the medical fund the family set up for William began to run dry in 2020, William called his uncle and asked for more help. “I don’t know,”Fred Trump quotes Donald Trump. “He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.” There are lots of words for this: euthanasia, mercy killing, assisted suicide, quietus; for the elderly senicide or geroniticide, the Nazis called it Akt-zone T-4. We all have our differing moral north stars but for most of us I think there are at least some circumstances in which it is valid and justifiable. You and I both knew Trump was this kind of monster. What we must realize is that while others might see individually justifiable acts of assisted suicide, with Trump we are talking forced euthanasia - mass murder. I have asserted here before that we saw of Trump during Covid suggested this was at the heart of his attitude towards people: that they were just another commodity. Kill a few… kill a few thousand… so what. Just let them die and move down to Florida. Round them up by the millions in camps before deporting them, leaving lord knows how many to DIE in those camps. "These people. The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die." It's kind of amazing that in Fred Trump III's upcoming book he quotes his uncle using the N-word to blame damage to his car and that's barely an afterthought here. Which circles back to the campaign against Harris. Brian Kilmeade of Fox may have said the Vice President was going to a "college sorority" and he may have said "colored sorority" but two weeks ago Trump flunky Sebastian Gorka proudly called Harris "colored" - and the birtherism has started again. This while Biden gave a moving and eloquent farewell address, Kim Jong Un told Trump to stuff his friendship, CBS reported there are a dozen potential VP candidates, and the next round of polls shows her - in a wildly conservative poll - just a point back in Pennsylvania, and cutting Trump's lead in half in the CNN poll while improving 5 points on Biden's last numbers among female voters and 11 among young voters and 16 points among black voters B-Block (27:46) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: To analyze how the fascists are NOT running a misogynistic campaign against Kamala Harris, NewsMax brings on Mark Halperin and Ed Henry - both fired for harassment and worse. If you think Trump has been screwed up by Biden bowing out, The New York Times is down to criticizing HOW he bowed out and the astonished headline "The Most Ruthless Political Operator in the Country Is a WOMAN." And Russell Brand, super-genius, thinks melatonin controls skin color. C-Block (42:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: The old joke about this hated baseball figure was: you're in a boat with this guy, Hitler and Mussolini. You have a gun and two bullets. What do you do? Answer: shoot this guy, then throw Hitler overboard, then throw Mussolini overboard, then shoot this guy again just to make sure. The saga of how the Los Angeles Dodgers "lost" several million dollars in 1964 while making a huge profit.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 2 EPISODE 218: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) I have been thinking for awhile now that there will come a point, this year, this election, maybe this MONTH, where we will all be saying “Can you believe we came THIS CLOSE to not making Vice President Harris the nominee?” You have heard about THE poll: Ipsos for Reuters (Harris 42 Trump 38 Kennedy 8 third-party race; Harris 44 Trump 42 head-to-head) that's a four point shift TO Kamala Harris… in a week. But have you heard the OTHER polls? Marist for NPR and the PBS News Hour? Harris 42 Trump 42 Kennedy 7 / Trump 46 Harris 45.YouGov for Yahoo News? Harris 46 Trump 46. These numbers are from the FIRST FULL DAY of the Harris campaign and she is already in a statistical tie. Harris's favorables are at a net -2, sounds meh. Biden's? A net -18. Trump's? Net -19. More jaw-dropping still? The top Republican internal pollster in Georgia has Harris starting off there, trailing just 48-47. And best of all: Do you agree or disagree: at 78 years old Trump is too old to work in government? Agree – 53%. Disagree – 43%. Trump's pollster issued a panicked memo lowering the bar just as the Reuters poll was coming out. Funny he never mentioned the age issue! Polling, polling, polling. Plus it's hard to tell what the Fascists are freaking out about the most: the polls, Kamala declaring war on their suddenly oldest-ever candidate, or their leadership's insistence that they can't call her "colored" (like Sebastian Gorka did a week ago) or use racial epithets and especially not call her "DEI." Which, of course, is what they immediately called her. Or maybe it's J.D. Vance. There's instant buyers' remorse because he's so bad on stage that they can't tell if he's inflated or stuffed - or both. B-Block (35:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Colombian emigre Valentina Gomez is running for Secretary of State in Missouri on an anti-immigration platform and now she's illegally used the balcony of the Speaker of the House on which to film an ad. An Ohio State Senator becomes the last Republican to threaten Civil War, and the New York Post and Senator Mike Lee both fall for the worst fake announcement of the fake death of the fake Jimmy Carter on fake stationery imaginable. C-Block (47:10) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I mentioned Aaron Sorkin yesterday. Time to explain the story of the day I was watching one of his TV shows and suddenly my father's favorite saying was coming out of the mouth of Aaron's lead character because Aaron had gotten in the habit of borrowing my life. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 2 EPISODE 217: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Oh, nothing. Kamala Harris only raised $223,000 a MINUTE or $13,380,000 an hour in her first 24 hours as the Democratic presidential candidate-presumptive and will only rap up the pledged delegates by today or tomorrow and has already opened her campaign five points closer to Trump than any other Democrat. And as somebody mentioned (cough; cough cough) Friday it turns out if President Biden had not seen the wisdom of the choice and bowed out before the new week started Nancy Pelosi was ready to go public - with polling. And now, everybody's together again and everybody's endorsed here and even that moron Manchin has gotten out of the way and the only question is where in town do you want YOUR Joe Biden statue to be. ON THE OTHER HAND Trump intends to sue. Somebody. Maybe Hannibal Lecter. The man who is suddenly history's oldest presidential candidate wants to be reimbursed and the debate moved and they want to force Biden to stay in the race AND resign as president and don't you know Trump was shot with a wadded up piece of gum so you must defer to him. If there's anything more delightful than watching Trump implode because it never occurred to him the other side had better tactics, it's watching Hannity complain that Kamala Harris has a funny laugh when... shoot... who has ever actually heard Trump laugh? Like a person? There's a lot to go through, including the reminder that if you're worried about this nation's racism and its misogyny: in the last four US elections: we have elected a man of color president, then re-elected him, then a woman candidate won the popular vote, and most recently, a woman of color was elected VP defeating a ticket led by racist incumbent Assume nothing. But - Excelsior! B-BLOCK (37:40) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: So. Much. Stupid. Takery. Aaron Sorkin, Brian Stelter, Olivia Nuzzi and Katy Tur could've forged a four-way tie (well, three; Sorkin would've just 'borrowed' one of their ideas). C-BLOCK (56:15) IN MEMORY OF MINET: I'm a little unfocused today and when I get unfocused I get verbose because I'm ad libbing. And if you didn't see it on social media, my extraordinary 17-year old rescue pup, Minet, died Sunday just six days after hitting that amazing milestone of longevity. If you've been scared off adopting a senior dog or even a geriatric one, please listen to Minet's story and how much he gave me - and consider getting one yourself!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 2 EPISODE 216: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-BLOCK (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: I’m sorry to write this, but it is now time for Joe Biden to withdraw his name for nomination for re-election as president of the United States. He should release his delegates with instructions to vote for Kamala Harris for president. We can, I hope, spend the next twenty years embracing Joe Biden and the greatest sacrifice made by any American politician in our lifetimes while we celebrate Trump being turned down by the pardon board for the twentieth consecutive year. For now, we must approach this without emotion because what is now a problem is on the verge of becoming a disaster. Its essence can be boiled down to five points. First: democracy lives or dies on this. Also the climate and thus continuing life on the planet. We have to choose whatever path offers the best odds. Second: the long awaited FOB (Friends of Biden) push in private is complete. Friends of Biden. Obama’s warning to “allies” that the Biden path was “greatly diminished” followed Pelosi, Schumer, Jeffries, and possibly the Clintons reaching out in private to the president to tell him he must exit. I believe if he does not do so by next week these same leaders will risk a temporary rupture of the party by publicly saying they can no longer support him. Third: as I said previously America will always choose the old man yelling at the cloud, especially over the old man whispering intelligently but inaudibly. This nation elected Reagan twice. Fourth: the president has said he will be re-elected because he’s done such a good job. This, sadly, is no longer predominant in elections. And it is no how you beat a liar promising the gullible eternal life. Fifth: the polls are cratering. The last 47 of them, Trump leads. I’m beginning to spot a pattern. In new polling by Emerson College, Biden is down by four nationally, and now an average of five-and-a-half in the seven swing states. On the other hand, the same poll pitted Trump against a mythical “younger Democrat who is qualified for the job.” As ludicrously vague as that is, and as much as the rule that the Imaginary Candidate always out-polls the real one, the results are too staggering to totally ignore. In those same seven swing states, that imaginary Democrat beats Trump by an average of seven points. The pendulum swings nearly thirteen points, and even with all the caveats it should at least reassure Democrats that they would not be throwing away their only chance of victory by changing – even now. MEANWHILE: Evidence continues to mount that Trump was not hit by a bullet but by debris knocked towards him, and is lying about it - as he lies about everything else. The usual idiots were fooled into believing he’d pivot. His acceptance speech at FascistCon24 was the pivot everyone expected, until he demanded that all the charges be dropped against him CUZ UNITY. And the exploitation of the firefighter killed at his rally kind of went off the rails when he brought what was supposedly the man's uniform onstage as if it were a religious icon - and they had misspelled his names. And one of Trump's longest-standing pro-conspiracy co-conspirators is dead. Lou Dobbs – an original birther and a despicable human being – died yesterday. B-BLOCK (32:25) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: We now have more information on who thought MSNBC would do better taking Joe Scarborough off the air as the Republican convention opened and replacing him with NBC’s online-only news anchors. It’s Cesar Conde, the NBC News boss who’s as bad as all the other NBC News bosses. Matt Gaetz spoke at the RNC and he either got too much botox or he had himself laminated. And we have that rare consecutive edition winner. Van Jones of CNN is back and badder than ever. C-BLOCK (47:47) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: So the Republicans have officially nominated a convicted felon still scheduled to be on trial for espionage and for leading an attempted violent overthrow of the government. In view of that, I must again read you the story James Thurber wrote about Trump fifteen years before Trump was born: The Greatest Man In The World. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 2 EPISODE 215: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: It is now my expectation that if by next week President Biden has not withdrawn from the presidential race, a coterie of key Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries will publicly announce that they and their caucuses cannot support his candidacy. The first true dam break in that process occurred Saturday, but only became known last night when ABC News reported that Schumer went to the president's Delaware home and "forcefully made the case that it would be better for Biden, better for the Democratic party, and better for the country if he were to bow out of the race." The Schumer office issued something less than a non-denial denial and the White House press office put its head down and shouted full steam ahead. But the Schumer news followed a day in which it became more and more apparent that those key Democrats no longer care if this becomes public. Congressman Adam Schiff, soon to be Senator from California, publicly called for Biden to step aside. More and more ugly details emerged from a Zoom call between the president and House Democrats. A really startlingly tepid defense of Biden's continuing on the ticket by Bernie Sanders was published by The New Yorker. And it was revealed that Schumer and Jeffries working in concert got that "virtual roll call" confirming Biden's nomination delayed into August. There was also new polling (65% of Dems want a new candidate, Associated Press) that wasn't so new (66% of them wanted one in April, Pew Research). And then there was that weirdly timed presidential positive test for COVID yesterday in Las Vegas forcing the cancellation of a speech and a trip back east. From all I can tell that's what it is: the virus. Your willingness to compare it to the "cold" President Kennedy suddenly developed while on a campaign tour during The Cuban Missile Crisis is up to you. ALSO: Five days after the assassination attempt and we now have to assume that Trump is LYING about getting shot. That he was SHOT AT, is not in doubt. That the blood came from - in the unfortunate phrase he himself chose – his EAR BEING PIERCED, by a bullet – has been verified… by absolutely nobody. Nothing from Butler Memorial Hospital in Pennsylvania. Nothing from the Secret Service. Nothing from the Department of Justice. Nothing from ANY branch of government. Nothing from the FBI even though it has gone to unusual lengths of confirming the INVESTIGATION is of an assassination attempt AND domestic terrorism AND they’ve broken into the shooter’s phone AND they know there were eight shots AND they know who ELSE was shot AND they released names AND Nothing from ANY news organization, each of which has cleverly and almost ARTISTICALLY avoided saying Trump WAS shot and avoided saying Trump WASN’T shot. The entire official medical report from the Trump campaign is that he is quote “fine,” unquote. 100 hours and they can't get an anonymous statement from a hospital. We now have to assume he's lied about something about the attempt. B-Block (25:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: It's been awhile. Time for Ted Cruz to make a jackass out of himself again. The Washington Post editorial writer with the unfortunate name of "Shadi" asks if Trump not dying was "God's will." And CNN must fire Van Jones. Its remaining 837 viewers will accept no less. C-Block (37:10) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: The onetime American counter-culture soccer star Alexi Lalas is now just another D-list "celebrity" at the Republican Convention. But once he was the straight man in an ESPN commercial that rings through the ages. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 2 EPISODE 214: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Whaddya MEAN Tucker Carlson warned Trump last month that he might be assassinated if he DIDN'T pick a non-Neocon VP like J.D. Vance? Whaddya MEAN The New York Times had Carlson warning Trump weeks ago that if he chose somebody besides Carlson's choice - Vance - "the U.S. intelligence agencies would have every incentive to assassinate Mr. Trump in order to get their preferred president" - and they put it in paragraph 69 of a 71-paragraph article? Anybody ASKING Carlson about this, uh, coincidence? Or the Times about the sources? Or Vance? Trump still hasn't called the family of the man murdered at his rally; England's Channel 4 says the 2016 Trump Campaign had the shooter's family in a special database of battleground state voters who probably owned guns. Nothing new from the Pittsburgh station's report that there were Trump signs in front of the family home. There's new polling on who voters blame for the atmosphere that led to the Trump shooting (Trump), their reaction to his selection of Vance (27% of Republicans think he was the best choice; 56% have no idea who he is), Rudy Giuliani falls at the convention, and why nobody should ever compare Trump to Braveheart. BIDEN MEANWHILE is going to run against Trump AND the Supreme Court and propose term limits and mandatory ethics. And while he is reportedly not broadening but tightening his circle of advisers about the race, the impossible happens. The polls show Trump ahead by about two - no "near miss bump" - but the 538 Electoral College simulator shows Biden with a 53% chance of winning (and by 16 votes). B-Block (24:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: I got Jon Stewart interviewing Bill O'Reilly in a kind of Old Timers' Day of frauds. Joe Scarborough is so mad at NBC for suspending his show to appease the Republicans that he's risked firing by calling them out on the air (who do you root for in THAT battle?), Katy Tur seems to have forgotten Trump tried to get her killed, Ron Johnson becomes the latest to lose in Republicans Versus TelePrompters, and inexplicably Hugo Lowell deletes the greatest tweet to emanate from the Republican convention C-Block (35:50) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: MSNBC silencing Joey Scars and having Tur praise him seems awfully familiar to some of us and when I say 'some of us' I mean: Me. The Republicans blackmailed NBC to get ME off the air after their convention in 2008 because nothing is more easily scared than a billion dollars. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 2 EPISODE 213: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: This is the America Trump wanted. This is the America Trump got. He was shot at by a gun-obsessed MAGA kid, with Trump signs in the front yard of his home, in a MAGA world in which stochastic terror threats are Trump's only campaign, only belief, only religion. Republicans! Stop shooting at Trump! This wasn't an MSNBC viewer and it wasn't a Democrat and it wasn't the fault of the corporate media and Biden's oratory didn't impact him and this didn't happen because I keep saying Trump is a Hitler. TrumpIS a Hitler. The Republicans trained the weapon on Trump and they fired. And shame on Biden and the other Democrats and the eternally gullible media for falling for the promises of a Trump pivot. He said we need to unite the way the extraterrestrials put "To Serve Man" on their Twilight Zone cookbook. The moment the Democrats took the bait, he explained what his demands were: as part of "unity" he expects all criminal charges to be dropped against him immediately. He probably secretly hopes the Democrats will also nominate him. Same fraud. Different con. ALSO: Anybody see those photos of him as he screamed "Fight!" like a giant rabid rodent? When he let his true soul out? They were chanting that as the GOP convention yesterday. There is no joining of hands here. As always, when the Republicans mean unity, they mean everybody has to agree...to do what they say. Nice timing on delaying the Documents case, "Judge" Cannon, until the morning the GOP Convention opened, and dismissing it. Bluntly, Biden should take presidential immunity and use it. What would Trump do in the mirror image of the assassination attempt? Less than four months before the election and the guy ahead in the polls gets shot at. And the Secret Service clearly screwed security into the ground. And we don’t know WHY a kid registered with the same party as the candidate would try to kill the candidate. And we don’t know WHY a local police officer confronted the shooter moments before the shots only to back away. And we don’t know why, most insanely of all, the kid had a cameo in a Black Rock commercial for retirement plans. And we DO know it is being investigated as an act of domestic terrorism. And you know, you KNOW, a Trump in charge would look at this and say ‘good enough excuse for me! I am declaring a national emergency and invoking the insurrection act.” Do it, Joe. AND: please, stop with the "violence has never had a role in America." Our politics is a river of blood. 20 of the 45 presidents have either been shot and killed in office, shot and wounded in office, shot and wounded while seeking to regain office, or the subject of shooting plots averted at the last minute or last hour. If we stopped lying to ourselves about how peaceful we are, maybe we could begin to fix our bloody story. B-Block (27:52) SPECIAL COMMENT II: The conventional wisdom of the electoral effect of the assassination attempt against Trump is - as always - wrong. The attempted murder of a Republican gun nut by a Republican gun nut using a weapon Democrats tried to ban is no longer even the lead Republican story. It may have no impact on the election at all. Candidate victims in the past have always lost. C-Block (41:30) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: So many fascists said so many stupid things before the truth came out about who the shooter was, that the list today is literally EIGHTEEN PEOPLE LONG, climaxing with Chuck Todd, Lester Holt, Mike Johnson, Elon Musk, Mike Lee, Mike Collins, and J.D. Vance - who once compared Trump to Hitler (those Biden ads are gonna be lit)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 2 EPISODE 212: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: I've never actually seen it done before: somebody put the toothpaste back into the tube. Not all of it. Not hardly. There are still a thousand reasons to ask President Biden to leave the ticket. He called Zelensky "Putin" and Kamala Harris "Vice President Trump" and when Trump tried to mock him on it he shoved it up Trump's posterior. And more importantly, for 50 minutes he interwove foreign and domestic policy, his own post-debate mistakes, the history of the relations between South Korea and Japan, his own calculations and miscalculations about retaining the presidency, and expressed an openness to change both his approach and maybe candidates. It was unprecedented. Simply, if he had been like this at the debate, or if he had held this news conference the day after it, it is impossible that the events of the last two weeks could've unfolded the way they have. So I do not know what to think (that'll get me kicked out of the pundits club) but I think there is a germ of an idea here if the plan is to stick with Biden atop the ticket: Put him on TV live once a week. Press conferences, sit-down TV interviews, Town Halls. Put him on TV to do THAT every week and maybe he will put all the toothpaste back in the tube. In the interim, he needs to offload many of his campaign advisers and handlers because they are killing him. B-Block (25:25) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Chuck Todd somehow transfers his own selfishness and personal failure onto Biden. In humorous relief, the Toronto Globe and Mail asserts that a man fought for his life while being interviewed by NBC. And Lauren Boebert gets caught speeding. Was it because she couldn't handle a stick? C-Block (30:20) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: Fitting for an examination of the dumbing down of America and how it has kept Trump viable: the woman who thought MacBeth wasn't as good as her standard paperbacks: "The Macbeth Murder Mystery."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 2 EPISODE 211: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: "I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat," said Will Rogers. I said in February that the worst outcome was the scenario in which this played out in public and Biden dug in and those who doubted him kept coming back every 48 hours and saying “what about NOW?” And yet here we are. In February, Axios reported, quote: “When White House aides appear on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," they're often booked between 7 and 7:40 AM ET. That's so they'll reach one crucial and loyal viewer: President Biden.” Guess who was on yesterday at exactly 7:39 AM? To speak to the proverbial audience of one? Nancy Pelosi. And she soft-soaped him and urged him to make his decision. Obviously the point is: she said he should make a decision and of course he has not only insisted for ten days now that he’s MADE his decision but he PUT IT IN WRITING. Why? So it alarms him, without looking like she’s providing a platform or encouragement for the Joe-Must-Go’s – encouraging them YET anyway. THE BEST THING SAID YESTERDAY was actually from Biden's former White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield: “I know first hand better than almost anyone,” Ms. Bedingfield writes “how smart the Biden team is about DATA and about ignoring the noise. They are right that the game here is to convince voters, not pundits. But when the battle over the public data is so overwhelmingly negative, it’s a good moment to put forward your theory of the case. If they have data that supports the path to victory that they see, they should put it out there now and help people who badly want to beat Trump, rally around it. People want to see the path.” The thing is, there actually ARE indicators that there IS a path: a study suggesting that Biden retains 94% of the support he had before the debate while Trump only retains 85%. And “Asked about the upcoming presidential election,” Warner Bros Discovery CEO and CNN Uber-boss David Zaslav, "said it mattered less to him which party wins, as long as the next president was friendly to business. ‘We just need an opportunity for de-regulation, so companies can consolidate and do what we need to, to be even better.” Good morning fascism! B-Block (26:14) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Yeah the Federalist Society sure is backing up Trump's contention he knows nothing about Project 2025. It is a SPONSOR of the Republican National Trump Fascist Convention. There's a new exoplanet in the neighbor and to put it bluntly it smells like Fart. And speaking of which, Trump whore Sebastian Gorka just called Kamala Harris "Colored." C-Block (29:46) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Since I'm trashing corporate media it's a good time to talk about how, in the span of a couple of minutes in 1905 or so, my great grandfather made a great observation and a terrible mistake that handed as much as $70,000,000 to a big American corporation. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 2 EPISODE 210: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: It's over. If President Biden and his campaign team and his party discipline team can handle Trump and the electorate and the news conferences and the debates as efficiently as they have turned around the effort to push him off the ticket, they are going to win the election in a landslide. You never say it’s over, especially not with Biden headed for a news conference tomorrow as the NATO summit in Washington concludes in which literally two bad answers or one REALLY bad answer could end his candidacy before noon on Friday. But for now, and skipping for a moment the obviously larger question over whether this signals the start of democracy’s going out of business sale… it… is… over. Final score: Number of Democrats in the House who called for him to step down, on the record… SEVEN. Number of Democrats in the Senate who called for him to step down, on the record… NONE. Number of ex-presidents who called for him to step down… NONE. Number of historians he loves who called for him to step down…NONE. Number of former Speakers of the House who reportedly told friends in private she’s deeply uneasy with his continued candidacy and of whom a Biden confidante said "He would listen reluctantly, but he'd listen to her”who called for him to step down… NONE. Semafor News asked an attendee, off the record, if the mood was comparable to that at a funeral. The answer? “That is an insult to funerals.” Now there’s just one problem in all this and I think you already know what it is. The only problem it solves is the one Joe Biden had, or has. Out here on the going-out-of-business sale floor, the President is suddenly losing Wisconsin by five, and the Cook Political report just moved Arizona and Georgia and Nevada from Toss-Up to Lean Trump; and just moved Minnesota, Nebraska-Second, and New Hampshire from Likely Biden to Lean Biden. And the Biden Campaign seems to think this is over, rather than permanent. They will find out otherwise tomorrow night when he gets parsed at that press conference like he was a newly-found Dead Sea Scroll. ALSO: Two Senators actually call for a Special Prosecutor to investigate Clarence Thomas! Project 2025 is trending. And we'll play another edition of "What Crime Did Trump Commit TODAY?" B-Block (27:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: There are people preparing to be cryogenically frozen at the facility where they still keep Ted Williams in a jar who are setting up thousand-year investment funds for when they get thawed. Brian Stelter is so desperate to be rehired by The New York Times he's pretending his old paper also wrote an editorial calling for Trump to bow out. And Dana Bash? Jake Tapper? Trump praised your work on the debate. Your careers are thus over. C-Block (38:10) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I watched an Atlanta Braves game the other night and was thus flashed back to the World Series I covered there where the hotel put me in a room next to all-night choir practice.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 2 EPISODE 209: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: The dam was supposed to break yesterday, against President Biden. It didn't. Meetings were delayed and stances were softened. And if we are really going to do this, I finally have some actual advice for the president. If you want to change the topic, REALLY change the topic: Arrest the Trump terrorists. This Federalist Society president who again yesterday vowed revolution against the government of the United States and implied he was ready to make it bloody and violent? Arrest him. The North Carolina Republican candidate for governor? Who called for mass killings of the people he doesn't like? Arrest him. The Supreme Court - corrupt, insane, amoral - was also ultimately unimaginative. It tried to give Trump absolute immunity from prosecution for official acts. It didn't even think it was giving Biden the same tools. Use them, Mr. President. Arrest Kevin Roberts for calling for the violent overthrow of the government. Arrested Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson for terroristic threats. Arrest Trump's gang. If need be, invoke the Insurrection Act as Trump intends to - and arrest him. If you really want to change the topic, CHANGE THE TOPIC. Change it from words, to action. Save the nation. Now. B-Block (25:30) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Maureen Dowd finally writes a column about Maureen Dowd writing a column and misquoting Biden in it. Marjorie Taylor Let's Compare Biden's Acuity To Hers Greene lists a dozen signers of the Declaration of Independence, there are only eight names on it, and six didn't sign it. And of all times, NOW the Biden Campaign is posting online ads looking for... a Rapid Response Director? C-Block (36:20) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Perfect time to retell it, forgive me if you've heard it before. 17 years ago I was taken to lunch by a senator looking to stop sounding crazy when he was angry, and instead sounding more like my righteous indignation. His name was Joe BidenSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 2 EPISODE 208: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) COUNTDOWN BULLETIN: In a disturbing end to an otherwise low-news interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, President Biden was asked how he will feel if he stays in the race and loses to Trump. "As long as I gave it my all and I did as good a job as I know I could do, that's what this is all about." I'm not sure how that question could be answered, but that answer is terrifying. As Mr. Biden undertakes his second rehab tour this year, with the interview and a rally in Madison, Wisconsin, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia is reportedly convening a meeting among his Democratic colleagues to urge them to join him in a trip to the White House to burst what they see as an informational bubble around the president. In the meantime, Governor Maura Healey of Massachusetts, who just six weeks ago led a big-money fundraiser for the president, issued an on-the-record statement urging Biden to carefully reassess whether he's the right candidate to defeat Trump. And House Minority leader Jeffries will convene his committee ranking members on Sunday to discuss the situation. While a groundswell seems to be forming for a consensus Kamala Harris candidacy, there seem to be two questions to ask yourself in formulating your own opinion as to what to do next: 1) the debate is two months from next Tuesday. Do you want JOE Biden participating in it? And 2) Do you want a story, the lead story, or the only story every day between now and the debate to be some form of: How does the president seem?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SERIES 2 EPISODE 207: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: “No one’s pushing me out. I’m not leaving.” The President yesterday on a conference call with his campaign staff, and notably ALSO with Vice President Harris. “Let me say this as clearly and simply as I can: I’m running. I’m the Democratic Party’s nominee. No one is pushing me out. I’m not leaving. I’m in this race to the end…” the President’s fundraising email last night. “I had a bad night… I screwed up,” he told a radio interviewer. I understand why the president said what he said, and I understand why the email reads as it does, and I understand he may fully or almost fully believe all that and I do NOT understand WHAT they are doing at The White House. The New York Times led a succession of reports that President Biden had told an ally “that he is weighing whether to continue in the race” although, perhaps crucially, after the White House issued a flat denial the Times ALTERED the hook and the story to focus on the idea that “he may not be able to salvage his candidacy if he cannot convince voters that he is up to the job." I do NOT understand the litmus test the President and his advisers have apparently convinced themselves will be the magic wand. I’ll quote The Times: “Mr. Biden’s allies said that the president had privately acknowledged that his next few appearances heading into the July 4 holiday weekend must go well, particularly an interview scheduled for Friday with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News and campaign stops in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.” The interview with Stephanopoulos is not live. It is taped. The campaign stops in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are presumably going to follow all the other campaign stops with teleprompters. If someone is telling the President that doing well in more totally controlled, utterly contained, hothouse environments, is going to quell in the slightest the impact that continues to resonate from a week ago in Atlanta, THEY are crazy. And if the PRESIDENT thinks doing what amount to canned events will quell the impact, he is DOOMED. And between them, if he gets through a pre-recorded sitdown interview, and he gets through two speeches and there AREN’T questions from reporters or at minimum questions from THE CROWD, and he and the campaign boast about these events as some kind of TRIUMPH, then the outcome will be this: he will have forced HIMSELF off the ticket, NOT because of the debate, but because of the week AFTER the debate. The way to steer out of the skid, the way to find the magic wand, the way to “salvage his candidacy” as the Times put it and “save his reelection bid” as CNN put it and “stay in the race” as ABC put it, was – maybe still IS – to hold a news conference, and I mean call a news conference on 20 minutes’ notice – not one next week at the NATO summit in DC, but NOW, and take whatever they’ve got for you; and it’s to do a town hall somewhere (or as Jim Clyburn says, a series of them), and if you want some comparatively comfortable exercise, that Stephanopoulos interview has got to be LIVE. And it would be best to do these things on consecutive days. B-Block (19:49) JULY 4TH AND THE BAD PRESS LOU GEHRIG GOT FOR DYING: It's a remarkable reflection on media then and now. We think of the tragedy of the New York Yankees star as having moved 85 years of fans and writers and just humans. Not so. One columnist insisted Gehrig was faking it. Another insisted he had infected his teammates. Funny you don't hear those articles read often. I'm going to do it for you. C-Block (47:00) GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCKSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.