Countdown with Keith Olbermann

COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN – SEASON 5 EPISODE 11 A-Block (SPECIAL COMMENT): This is not complicated. Trump: ”They could take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.” U.S. Constitution: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” It’s impeachable aid and comfort to an enemy. Literally. Definitionally. PER THE CONSTITUTION. Add it to the $14 Billion he freed up by letting Iraq and its investors regain access to their oil money in March - $14 Billion they could use to fund a “take out” of L.A. or San Diego or – moron – the all-MAGA corridor between the two cities. So impeach him next January. The chances that there will be 60 Senators willing to convict continue to increase, between Democratic chances, terrified GOP Senators up for re-election in 2028, and accelerating De-Trumpification. Greg Abbott blew him off in San Antonio yesterday. Mike Rogers cut an anti-tariff ad in Michigan. Sununu. Rupert Murdoch! Maybe even David Ellison! -And an all-time great meme is born. Susan Collins continues to self-destruct in Maine, giving birth in the middle of a debate to ‘Let Them Eat Road Salt.’ -Plus why Trump is actually right about Murdoch throwing him under the bus, and the indicator that new CNN/CBS owner David Ellison is backing into the hedges. The phenomenal story of Kash Patel appearing to put fugitives on the FBI’s Most Wanted List just as the FBI is about to arrest them – they’ve even corrupted THAT. B-Block (39:00) SPORTSBALL CENTER TONIGHT: The Secret of Don Larsen’s World Series Perfect Game is Revealed! 70 years ago today a mediocre pitcher who had led the league in losses two years earlier and would be traded nine times in his career, threw the only perfect game in the history of the World Series (indeed any post-season game). Don Larsen of the Yankees: 27 Dodgers up, 27 inexplicable Dodgers down. Well it WAS inexplicable. A revelation on a long-lost kinescope of the game telecast from 1956, and two sets of previously unknown color photographs, explains the whole thing. I own the photos and I’ll share them with you. In short: the Dodger batters never saw the ball coming out of Larsen’s hand! Can't see ball, can't hit ball! C-Block (55:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Since we’re doing baseball in the middle of the baseball playoffs – why not? Let me tell you the unexpectedly hilarious story of the day in 2000 my Mom, sitting in our seats at Yankee Stadium, got hit in the face with a wild throw by the second baseman, Chuck Knoblauch. She was the star of the New York tabloids for a week, she never had more fun in her life, and to ratchet it up a notch – I was ON THE AIR anchoring the Game-of-the-Week broadcast on Fox and got to narrate highlights of my own Mom becoming the most famous fan in America.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN - SEASON 5 EPISODE 10 A-Block (SPECIAL COMMENT): Even Trump sees the wave of Blue water forming on the horizon, now less than a month out. It's so bad he's resorted to one of the three classic cliched lies: "The check is in the mail!" He has actually said it, virtually word-for-word, in Ohio, talking about his latest attempt to buy votes. Not $5,000 apiece this time. Not even a $100 advance he mentioned. This is $500 to Ohioans. It's desperate, stupid, and invites Natalie Harp jokes that even I just won't make lol. But he has reason to panic. G. Elliott Morris at Strength In Numbers now puts a Democratic House at 99% and a Democratic 52-48 Senate at 73% and Republican bastions are crumbling. They've abandoned the Senate race in South Carolina. Two ex-Republican governors of Iowa have endorsed the Democrat. Ken Paxton is losing so badly in Texas he trashed Trump's Nuremberg Rally off the record, and now he's had to beg the wife who is divorcing him on BIBLICAL GROUNDS to do a TV ad endorsing the statewide ticket even though she refused to say his name. Texas Toast, indeed. (SPECIAL COMMENT 2): If you are shocked and shamed and furious at the plight of Jane Doe at Cornell, imagine how we alums feel. Imagine how we alums who have wanted to see the fraternities banned at Cornell...since 1975. They still bully and influence not just the lives of anyone they want to manipulate, but the University itself. And they encourage and protect criminal behavior. Beyond what must be done to reform Cornell and every other university where sexual violence is protected, the frats have to be banned. Today. B-Block (40:00) SPECIAL COMMENT 3: If you flinched when you saw Trump's Leni Riefenstahl commercial run on MS NOW - at Taxpayer Expense - imagine my shock when it turned out the Quisling at the former MSNBC who rationalized it to his enraged colleagues was the former line producer of Countdown, a skilled show timer with absolutely no editorial sense who used to regularly leave the studio to go sing in a choir just before showtime - and insist he not be docked any time off. His name is Greg Kordick and of COURSE it's him who sold out the network and its viewers.  B-Block (1:04:00) SPORTSBALL CENTER TONIGHT: Aaron Judge has a calf injury. Giancarlo Stanton has a calf injury. Francisco Lindor had a calf injury. Juan Soto had a calf injury. And a second calf injury. Funny thing - what did we used to presume when there was a seeming epidemic of soft tissue injuries in joints?  C-Block (1:08:00) MONDAYS WITH THURBER: We celebrate the memorial service for his daughter Rosemary, and the re-publication of "Thurber's Dogs", with the first reading of this new series: the first one I ever read aloud, the unparalleled "A Box To Hide In."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN - SEASON 5 EPISODE 9 A-Block (SPECIAL COMMENT): You heard me. Trump wrote me a fan letter - but he hates me. Yet here's something I never write: but this is not about me! We'll get to it later. It's important because it is a metaphor for what's happening to the Republican Party as the midterms speed towards us: all of their candidates are vulnerable because their base is sick of the war and sick of Trump and especially sick of a guy who on the same day launches a tax-payer tirade concluding "America will never become a Communist country!" and then hours later is holding a State Dinner for the number-one ranked communist in the world. Even for a man who has never held the same thought in his head for two days in a row, it's bad. The De-Trumpification is picking up speed. ANOTHER Republican Trump Darling has scrubbed Trump from his site. The small-c conservative Cook Report has moved fifteen House races towards Democrats. An Iowa religious broadcaster says all the House candidates there have been told they are vulnerable, even if Trump won their district by 15 points. It. Is. Happening. B-Block (33:00) OK, the story of the fan letter from Trump and my other encounters with him, that date back to December 1983 (and which was followed by me walking in silence and then blurting to my camera crew the still-unanswered question 'WHAT THE EFF WAS WRONG WITH THAT GUY?" C-Block (58:00) WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Succession? The fourth best TV show of the century? I worked for the Murdochs. "Succession" is laugh out loud bad. Then there's the National Hockey League trying to manipulate history, and why the newest craze of paying half a million or two million or three million for an active athlete's trading card is madness. It's simple: what if he gets hurt, and you just paid $500,020 for his card, as some fool just did for a card of football's Jaxson Dart.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN - SEASON 5 EPISODE 8 A-Block (SPECIAL COMMENT): BREAKING: Republicans finally throw Trump overboard - or maybe it's "Republicans finally throw Trump under the campaign bus." -Trump toady Byron Donalds, running for Governor of Florida and only ahead in the polls by 1/10 of a percentage point, scrubs Trump from his website. - Foundering GOP Senate candidates in Iowa and Michigan criticize Trump's war in Iran and resultant high prices. - Trump's approval among Pure Independents drops from +15 to -71 since Election Day (an 86 point swing against Trump!; 99 point swing on the economy) -The percentage of Trump voters who supported him - not the GOP - goes from +23 on Inauguration Week to -22. -And the Tump staff response? They want to rename Ford's Theatre after Trump! 'Ford's Theatre - because the one thing you really want as the midterms loom is some commercial that includes the tag lines 'The Lincoln Assassination - brought to you by Donald Trump!' The De-Trumpification Has Begun! PLUS the polls are crashing around him and Trump can't decide if the midterms are about him or aren't about him, and I have to take some of your time to protest this claim that a baseball player who may lead the American League in Runs Batted In this year after leading the National League four years ago, will be the first to ever do it. He isn't. There is now a desperate bid to make everything that happens, something that has never happened before. 'The first time since 1904' is a plenty big enough accomplishment without hyperbole. B-Block (40:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Stephen A. Smith is back and fully up to date on politics (as long as that date is July 15 2024). Jared Golden, phony Democratic congressman from Maine, endorses a Republican in New York because they worked together prioritizing lobstermen over democracy. And Friedrich Merz, a German chancellor having trouble fending off a bunch of fascists bent on ethnic cleansing. Get some help, Ethel Mertz. C-Block (52:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I cherish the memory of a friend no longer with us and the extraordinary person she was. In fact, she should've been president - at minimum, she should've been the VP candidate on the Democratic ticket, not her husband. Elizabeth Edwards - my friend.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN - SEASON 5 EPISODE 7 A-Block (SPECIAL COMMENT): I confess - I fell for it. Trump banned CNN and MS Now from the White House  and I immediately thought: the rest of the media finally, FINALLY, has to walk out and not give this bastard any further coverage. No - I was wrong. Then I thought: he ADMITS “we took the freedom of speech away.” And I thought: it IS the most blatant attack on the 1st Amendment in the history of our country And it should – it WILL – it MUST inspire even this nation’s somnambulant media to rise up as one and for once use its power to fight back – to defend not their jobs, but their country. No. I was wrong. On second thought, I realized this was a set-up. Trump has picked fights with Iran, with Canada, the EU, over oil, over tariffs, over hockey, over arches, over the Kennedy Center - and he's lost them all. He needs a fight against a weak opponent who will fold up when the first punch lands. It's his only chance to salvage the midterms. Weak opponent? Who will fold up? When the first punch lands? That's our White House press corps! I'm asking them to do what comes naturally to them - do nothing. Nothing until after Trump gets fricasseed in the midterms. Don't give him the fight he needs. Then, humiliate him. And at this rate he is going to get fricasseed. 97% chance the Democrats take the house, 65% the Democrats take the Senate, Democrats winning all the key Senate races (the one in North Carolina by FIFTEEN points). Let's not shoot off our big bazoos and snatch defeat from the jaws of Trump's defeat. Also: he's threatening Iran again, the Greenland deal is just a climbdown, and if the 25-story D.C. Arch (a life-sized reproduction of Trump's ego) weren't already bad enough, he's added a platform for snipers and a staging ground for drones. Because that's what you need next to a major airport. B-Block (38:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: King Charles, some rando on Threads who thinks the Democrats are admitting "illegal ALLENS" and Puck media guy Dylan Byers, not only carrying water for the disaster that is Bari Weiss, but now with new reported financial conflicts of interest whenever he covers CBS (The Conservative Brainwashing System). C-Block (51:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: MS NOW is in the news for being too political and as the founder of the only iteration of it or MSNBC that succeeded, I find this infuriating - and ironic. During my first stint there in 1997-98 we were so non-political and so ultra-tabloid that I walked in one day and the rundown said our lead story was an advance look at the publication of "The Farmers' Almanac" and our guest was its publisher. Live. Lead. FARMERS. ALMANAC.    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.