Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. This ends with Elon Musk demanding that the government bail out Twitter. Right, I will get to this unexpected observation by one leader about another from the Michigan State Republican Conference quote he kicked me in my balls as soon as I opened the door, and also Trump's apparent use of the IRS to punish his opponents. But first with Threads, a pale and mostly flaccid knockoff of Twitter run by the man who preceded Musk as the most unpopular tech pro in the world, crossing the one hundred million users threshold overnight, Musk expecting that someday, someday, soon he will be shaved by Uncle Sam. That has to be his end game, doesn't it. I mean, it barely makes sense as it is, but it would be the only thing that would even barely make sense after the bottomless pit of debacles since he took over the nation's prominent clearinghouse for news and political exchange and turned it into the world's largest, overflowing fascist toilet. Mark Zuckerberg's new site, Oh this is nice. Does it do anything now? Maybe it'll do something later? Sign me Up. It exceeded seventy five million users by Friday, ninety million on Saturday night, and based on the account serial numbers appearing on Instagram, shows no sign of slowing down as it barrels past one hundred million all since coming online last Wednesday night. It ain't the product. It is the seething hatred of Elon Musk, a hatred he cannot possibly understand, a hatred that merely burst out of control when, as Jonathan v Last put it, he turned Twitter into the cable company exactly, and all Musk has been able to do since all of this happened is tweet quote Zuck is a cook and personally service the account of the dangerous Libs of TikTok, which maybe makes sense after all, because at this rate, within a week or two, Libs of TikTok will be the last account still using Twitter. But back to my point, Musk has to have some vague way out in his mind. He must have some fantasy that he will eventually turn to the government to save Twitter. He paid forty four billion dollars for this thing in March, he placed its value at twenty billion by May. Fidelity Investments PEG did at fifteen billion. If he is losing two and a half billion dollars a month, Twitter goes broke around Thanksgiving. Musk belongs to that group of quote businessmen on quote who succeed based on three things and three things alone, government handouts, suing when he does not get his way, and then loudly and publicly pretending he does neither of those things. It is the Trump formula. It would have been the Elizabeth Holmes formula except somebody realized she was speaking in a phony. Boys. The only thing Musk has actually done since Threads went live was step one threatened to sue Zuckerberg UH for hiring all the people Musk fired, and he actually has sued somebody else. Musk's ex corp. Has sued what had been Twitter's law firm to get the money back that the previous Twitter owners paid them when they successfully kept Musk from walking away from his deal to buy the Dump. The lawsuit seeks to recover most of the ninety million dollars Twitter paid Woktel, Lipped and Rosen and Cats in the days before the closing of the Musk deal last October twenty seven. It says Waktel at all quote exploited Twitter by accepting the money that Twitter agreed to pay it because Musk agreed to pay Twitter. Come on, judge stuff, These mean people from making me do what I agreed to and what the company I bought agreed to in writing. The only other play Musk has is to ask for a bailout. It seems improbable he would do it unless a Republican regains the White House, but God forbid that happens. That would only be about eighteen months and eighteen days from now, and by the way, that would be Musk asking for another bailout, not just a bailout. The Ally Times investigated him years ago and his various companies and found they had gotten nearly five billion dollars in government support by two tho fifteen. Since then, SpaceX beat out Jeff Bezos for a six hundred and fifty three million dollar NASA contract to go to Mars. New York State gave Musk three quarters of a billion for a solar panel plant. I mean, you can just see it coming. You can hear it coming, Musk's self driving Twitter mobile screeching to a sudden stop, and just before he goes through the windshield his tone changes to pleading a noble and marketplace of ideas this and freedom of expression that and save Twitter, Save Twitter, Save Twitter. And to paraphrase the line from the classic movie Airplane, he bought his ticket. He knew what he was getting into. I say, let him crash. Meanwhile, this is not the biggest political story of twenty twenty three, but I would argue it is thus far the greatest political story of twenty twenty three. Quote. We're so divided, Claire County Michigan Republican chairman Mark DeYoung told the Detroit News. I just wish we could come together. Quote. Mister de Young gave his account to the outlet over the phone from an emergency room, where he said he was being treated for a broken rib. It seems Mark Deong of the Claire County Michigan Republicans had had a little disagreement with James Chapman of the Wayne County Michigan Republicans. Quote. He kicked me in my balls as soon as I opened the door, mister de Young said, adding that mister Chapman ran at him and slammed him into a chair. Maga make America groin again. Now I understand if you're not as excited about this story as I am, based on the last eight years, you may have a kind of baseline assumption that this is how all Republicans behave all the time. No, sir, only the ones in Michigan. Only at the annual State Committee meeting at the Darty Hotel in Claire, which is why if you were in the neighborhood there over the weekend you saw all the cops there. Republicans had traveled from across the state to that gathering by plane, by car and I believe, in the case of the new state Chairwoman, Christina Carramo by Broom, Karamo is the wackadoodle who insists demonic possession is sexually transmitted. And as an assigned I would just like to ask a question I have not heard raised before about this. How does she know? That? Turned out the weekend riot was only supposed to be open to State Committee members, so everybody else, all the other Republicans were locked out. So this Chapman of Wayne County, the Kicker, led them in the pledge of allegiance out in the lobby, and that's what led this de Young of Claire County, the kick e to peek out to a small window in the door, whereupon he saw somebody flipping him off. And when DeJong went to see what was happening, I'll just repeat the quote, he kicked me in my balls as soon as I opened the door. Now, Chapman says he only did this because de Young had swung at him and said, I'll kick your ass. Michigan Republicans apparently unanimously agree that Chapman ran at DeJong and slammed him into a chair, and, after first removing his own glasses because a gentleman does not kick another gentleman in the balls while wearing glasses, Chapman grabbed de Young by the legs and knocked him down. This is at least the second physical brawl among Michigan Republican leaders since April. There are at least two lawsuits pending, to say nothing of the criminal charges pressed over the weekend. And ice packs, plenty of ice packs. And the cause of this discontent Joe Biden Trump versus DeSantis. Ha ha ha, No, it's that Chairwoman Caramo. She has removed veteran committee members, and one of them, the ex budget chair. Fairman, told the Detroit News that spending under Caramo is quote so far out of proportion with income as to put us on the path to bankruptcy. And all I can say about this nauseating, unprofessional, degrading, fiscally imprudent descent into financial chaos and ball and ass kicking by Michigan Republicans is keep it up, fellas, in fact, take it national. Speaking of which, even in twenty twenty three, Coulch, you have imagined this headline. Ron DeSantis has accused someone of conspiring with big tech to supposedly bury the Hunter Biden so called scandal in twenty twenty before the election. Who does the small man in the high heels in search of a balcony think colluded in the effort to protect Hunter Biden and Joe Biden. Trump No that Trump. DeSantis went on Fox, and I'm thinking he may be a little desperate at this point. DeSantis went on Fox and said, quote, I look at the Hunter Biden censorship, and yet those were Donald Trump's own agencies that were colluding with big Tech. I would never allow that to happen. I would fire those people immediately. I don't know if you've noticed that here. I am often critical of Donald Trump, But I must say that I'm not exactly sure if Ron Desatus's charged that Trump worked with big tech to protect the bidens before the twenty twenty election really stands up to scrutiny. This may be a calumny up with which mister Trump should not put no other than that bit of farce. It was all quiet on the Trump in front over the weekend, though a few burps were omitted here and there, and one of them struck home no pun intended. In the Peters Struck Lisa Page suits against the Department of Justice, no less a figure than ex Trump chief of staff John Kelly quoted his own real time notes from twenty eighteen to state under oath for the lawsuit that quote, President Trump questioned whether investigations by the Internal Revenue Service or other federal agencies should be undertaken into mister Struck and or Miss Page. I do not know of President Trump ordering such an investigation. It appeared, however, that he wanted to see mister Struck and miss Page investigated. You may recall that previously Trump's fired FBI director James Comy and Deputy Andrew McCabe were each subjected to the most exhaustive kind of IRS audit, which about five thousand taxpayers out of one hundred and fifty three million taxpayers are put through annual. Everybody involved has sworn up down in sideways that the McCabe and Komy audits were not Trump political revenge, although now Kelly's statement about struck end page may change that. Thinking the personal note, I received notice that I was being audited in twenty seventeen, in January twenty seventeen, on January twenty fourth, January twenty fourth, twenty seventeen. Honest to god, I do not think it had anything to do with Trump having been inaugurated four days previously. Four days previously, among other things, would have meant he'd have to have worked and worked quickly. And then there is the revenge of my distant cousin, Voladimir Zelenski. Martha raddits on this week on ABC. By the way, again everything revolves around me. I worked with her in nineteen eighty four. Martha raddits quote, Trump says he would end the war in twenty four hours if he was elected president. Cousin Zelensky quote, Well, it looks as if Trump already had these twenty four hours once in his time we were at war, and as I assume he had that time at his disposal, he must have had some other priorities. Obviously, in an ideal world, we should admit Ukraine to NATO immediately, just because Zelensky would class the joint up. But the arguments against doing it now are inarguable. And whatever you make of the president's stutter, stumbles, and he's often whispery asides and sometimes slowness to do things like, you know, expand the Supreme Court or even entertain it, Joe Biden's logic continues to be both succinct and inarguable. He noted two things about Ukraine and NATO yesterday on CNN. First, russia'srategic goal is to divide NATO, break it up. A vote to admit Ukraine to NATO now would not be unanimous, It might not even pass. To vote now about Ukraine is ironically to give Russia what Russia wants. More importantly, what happens to the Ukraine war with Russia if it stops being Ukraine and allies versus Russia, or all right, more cynically, if it stops being Ukraine as proxy versus Russia. What if Ukraine is in NATO, the war instantly becomes NATO versus Russia, quoting the president. If the war is going on, then we're all in a war. We're at war with Russia. Also of interest here they or may not care about sports. But what were once the two largest American metropolitan newspaper sports departments have basically gone out of business on the same day, with the one in New York having the added attraction of ending up with a full fledged revolt by the twenty eight remaining sports staffers at the New York Times. And how did they express that? Well, what else? They wrote a letter to the editor. But for absolute media collapse, Neither of those stories comes close to a media meteor who in thirty five days has gone from a claimed audience of one hundred and twenty million viewers to a claimed audience of nine million viewers one hundred and twenty million to nine That is a drop of ninety two and a half percent. That's a lot of percent. And who who has fallen on so far so fast? His name is? That's next? This is countdown. This is countdown with Keith Oberman, my crazy friend. Postscripts to the news, some headlines, some updates, some snart, some predictions. Dateline, Woodstock, Maine. Remember Tucker Carlson. The eighth episode of his Twitter video series, recorded in his studios in the main Woods, dropped eleven days ago, and the metrics provided by his new home suggested has been viewed by nine million people on Twitter, or at least seen by them in passing nine million people on Twitter is slightly down from the first episode of Tucker's Twitter Hour one hundred and twenty million, slightly down ninety two and a half percent down. The collapse has been terrifying, even if, like me, you hate Tucker Carlson, as Media Matters for America noted, first episode one hundred and twenty million, fourth thirty three million, fifth, seventeen and a half million, eighth, nine million, and Twitter views even if they really meant you had nine million people watching all five minutes of a Tucker Carlson twitterview, which they don't. They just are not comparable to TV ratings. TV viewers are the average number watching in any given minute in a quarter hour, So one and a half million people watched Fox at eight pm last Thursday. That's the last set of ratings we have so far, that's basically one and a half million people per minute. So Tucker Carlson's old venue is outrating him in his new venue by at least ten to one. If a Tucker Carlson episode drops in the woods and nobody hears it, does it make a sound of rage, thwarted, fascist, scheming, scumbag agony? I sure hope, so dyline the White House happily. I have next to no practical experience with this, but it's probably a good idea not to giggle uncontrollably if you are actually asking a question at the White House press briefing about cocaine.

Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. This ends with Elon Musk demanding that the government bail out Twitter. Right, I will get to this unexpected observation by one leader about another from the Michigan State Republican Conference quote he kicked me in my balls as soon as I opened the door, and also Trump's apparent use of the IRS to punish his opponents. But first with Threads, a pale and mostly flaccid knockoff of Twitter run by the man who preceded Musk as the most unpopular tech pro in the world, crossing the one hundred million users threshold overnight, Musk expecting that someday, someday, soon he will be shaved by Uncle Sam. That has to be his end game, doesn't it. I mean, it barely makes sense as it is, but it would be the only thing that would even barely make sense after the bottomless pit of debacles since he took over the nation's prominent clearinghouse for news and political exchange and turned it into the world's largest, overflowing fascist toilet. Mark Zuckerberg's new site, Oh this is nice. Does it do anything now? Maybe it'll do something later? Sign me Up. It exceeded seventy five million users by Friday, ninety million on Saturday night, and based on the account serial numbers appearing on Instagram, shows no sign of slowing down as it barrels past one hundred million all since coming online last Wednesday night. It ain't the product. It is the seething hatred of Elon Musk, a hatred he cannot possibly understand, a hatred that merely burst out of control when, as Jonathan v Last put it, he turned Twitter into the cable company exactly, and all Musk has been able to do since all of this happened is tweet quote Zuck is a cook and personally service the account of the dangerous Libs of TikTok, which maybe makes sense after all, because at this rate, within a week or two, Libs of TikTok will be the last account still using Twitter. But back to my point, Musk has to have some vague way out in his mind. He must have some fantasy that he will eventually turn to the government to save Twitter. He paid forty four billion dollars for this thing in March, he placed its value at twenty billion by May. Fidelity Investments PEG did at fifteen billion. If he is losing two and a half billion dollars a month, Twitter goes broke around Thanksgiving. Musk belongs to that group of quote businessmen on quote who succeed based on three things and three things alone, government handouts, suing when he does not get his way, and then loudly and publicly pretending he does neither of those things. It is the Trump formula. It would have been the Elizabeth Holmes formula except somebody realized she was speaking in a phony. Boys. The only thing Musk has actually done since Threads went live was step one threatened to sue Zuckerberg UH for hiring all the people Musk fired, and he actually has sued somebody else. Musk's ex corp. Has sued what had been Twitter's law firm to get the money back that the previous Twitter owners paid them when they successfully kept Musk from walking away from his deal to buy the Dump. The lawsuit seeks to recover most of the ninety million dollars Twitter paid Woktel, Lipped and Rosen and Cats in the days before the closing of the Musk deal last October twenty seven. It says Waktel at all quote exploited Twitter by accepting the money that Twitter agreed to pay it because Musk agreed to pay Twitter. Come on, judge stuff, These mean people from making me do what I agreed to and what the company I bought agreed to in writing. The only other play Musk has is to ask for a bailout. It seems improbable he would do it unless a Republican regains the White House, but God forbid that happens. That would only be about eighteen months and eighteen days from now, and by the way, that would be Musk asking for another bailout, not just a bailout. The Ally Times investigated him years ago and his various companies and found they had gotten nearly five billion dollars in government support by two tho fifteen. Since then, SpaceX beat out Jeff Bezos for a six hundred and fifty three million dollar NASA contract to go to Mars. New York State gave Musk three quarters of a billion for a solar panel plant. I mean, you can just see it coming. You can hear it coming, Musk's self driving Twitter mobile screeching to a sudden stop, and just before he goes through the windshield his tone changes to pleading a noble and marketplace of ideas this and freedom of expression that and save Twitter, Save Twitter, Save Twitter. And to paraphrase the line from the classic movie Airplane, he bought his ticket. He knew what he was getting into. I say, let him crash. Meanwhile, this is not the biggest political story of twenty twenty three, but I would argue it is thus far the greatest political story of twenty twenty three. Quote. We're so divided, Claire County Michigan Republican chairman Mark DeYoung told the Detroit News. I just wish we could come together. Quote. Mister de Young gave his account to the outlet over the phone from an emergency room, where he said he was being treated for a broken rib. It seems Mark Deong of the Claire County Michigan Republicans had had a little disagreement with James Chapman of the Wayne County Michigan Republicans. Quote. He kicked me in my balls as soon as I opened the door, mister de Young said, adding that mister Chapman ran at him and slammed him into a chair. Maga make America groin again. Now I understand if you're not as excited about this story as I am, based on the last eight years, you may have a kind of baseline assumption that this is how all Republicans behave all the time. No, sir, only the ones in Michigan. Only at the annual State Committee meeting at the Darty Hotel in Claire, which is why if you were in the neighborhood there over the weekend you saw all the cops there. Republicans had traveled from across the state to that gathering by plane, by car and I believe, in the case of the new state Chairwoman, Christina Carramo by Broom, Karamo is the wackadoodle who insists demonic possession is sexually transmitted. And as an assigned I would just like to ask a question I have not heard raised before about this. How does she know? That? Turned out the weekend riot was only supposed to be open to State Committee members, so everybody else, all the other Republicans were locked out. So this Chapman of Wayne County, the Kicker, led them in the pledge of allegiance out in the lobby, and that's what led this de Young of Claire County, the kick e to peek out to a small window in the door, whereupon he saw somebody flipping him off. And when DeJong went to see what was happening, I'll just repeat the quote, he kicked me in my balls as soon as I opened the door. Now, Chapman says he only did this because de Young had swung at him and said, I'll kick your ass. Michigan Republicans apparently unanimously agree that Chapman ran at DeJong and slammed him into a chair, and, after first removing his own glasses because a gentleman does not kick another gentleman in the balls while wearing glasses, Chapman grabbed de Young by the legs and knocked him down. This is at least the second physical brawl among Michigan Republican leaders since April. There are at least two lawsuits pending, to say nothing of the criminal charges pressed over the weekend. And ice packs, plenty of ice packs. And the cause of this discontent Joe Biden Trump versus DeSantis. Ha ha ha, No, it's that Chairwoman Caramo. She has removed veteran committee members, and one of them, the ex budget chair. Fairman, told the Detroit News that spending under Caramo is quote so far out of proportion with income as to put us on the path to bankruptcy. And all I can say about this nauseating, unprofessional, degrading, fiscally imprudent descent into financial chaos and ball and ass kicking by Michigan Republicans is keep it up, fellas, in fact, take it national. Speaking of which, even in twenty twenty three, Coulch, you have imagined this headline. Ron DeSantis has accused someone of conspiring with big tech to supposedly bury the Hunter Biden so called scandal in twenty twenty before the election. Who does the small man in the high heels in search of a balcony think colluded in the effort to protect Hunter Biden and Joe Biden. Trump No that Trump. DeSantis went on Fox, and I'm thinking he may be a little desperate at this point. DeSantis went on Fox and said, quote, I look at the Hunter Biden censorship, and yet those were Donald Trump's own agencies that were colluding with big Tech. I would never allow that to happen. I would fire those people immediately. I don't know if you've noticed that here. I am often critical of Donald Trump, But I must say that I'm not exactly sure if Ron Desatus's charged that Trump worked with big tech to protect the bidens before the twenty twenty election really stands up to scrutiny. This may be a calumny up with which mister Trump should not put no other than that bit of farce. It was all quiet on the Trump in front over the weekend, though a few burps were omitted here and there, and one of them struck home no pun intended. In the Peters Struck Lisa Page suits against the Department of Justice, no less a figure than ex Trump chief of staff John Kelly quoted his own real time notes from twenty eighteen to state under oath for the lawsuit that quote, President Trump questioned whether investigations by the Internal Revenue Service or other federal agencies should be undertaken into mister Struck and or Miss Page. I do not know of President Trump ordering such an investigation. It appeared, however, that he wanted to see mister Struck and miss Page investigated. You may recall that previously Trump's fired FBI director James Comy and Deputy Andrew McCabe were each subjected to the most exhaustive kind of IRS audit, which about five thousand taxpayers out of one hundred and fifty three million taxpayers are put through annual. Everybody involved has sworn up down in sideways that the McCabe and Komy audits were not Trump political revenge, although now Kelly's statement about struck end page may change that. Thinking the personal note, I received notice that I was being audited in twenty seventeen, in January twenty seventeen, on January twenty fourth, January twenty fourth, twenty seventeen. Honest to god, I do not think it had anything to do with Trump having been inaugurated four days previously. Four days previously, among other things, would have meant he'd have to have worked and worked quickly. And then there is the revenge of my distant cousin, Voladimir Zelenski. Martha raddits on this week on ABC. By the way, again everything revolves around me. I worked with her in nineteen eighty four. Martha raddits quote, Trump says he would end the war in twenty four hours if he was elected president. Cousin Zelensky quote, Well, it looks as if Trump already had these twenty four hours once in his time we were at war, and as I assume he had that time at his disposal, he must have had some other priorities. Obviously, in an ideal world, we should admit Ukraine to NATO immediately, just because Zelensky would class the joint up. But the arguments against doing it now are inarguable. And whatever you make of the president's stutter, stumbles, and he's often whispery asides and sometimes slowness to do things like, you know, expand the Supreme Court or even entertain it, Joe Biden's logic continues to be both succinct and inarguable. He noted two things about Ukraine and NATO yesterday on CNN. First, russia'srategic goal is to divide NATO, break it up. A vote to admit Ukraine to NATO now would not be unanimous, It might not even pass. To vote now about Ukraine is ironically to give Russia what Russia wants. More importantly, what happens to the Ukraine war with Russia if it stops being Ukraine and allies versus Russia, or all right, more cynically, if it stops being Ukraine as proxy versus Russia. What if Ukraine is in NATO, the war instantly becomes NATO versus Russia, quoting the president. If the war is going on, then we're all in a war. We're at war with Russia. Also of interest here they or may not care about sports. But what were once the two largest American metropolitan newspaper sports departments have basically gone out of business on the same day, with the one in New York having the added attraction of ending up with a full fledged revolt by the twenty eight remaining sports staffers at the New York Times. And how did they express that? Well, what else? They wrote a letter to the editor. But for absolute media collapse, Neither of those stories comes close to a media meteor who in thirty five days has gone from a claimed audience of one hundred and twenty million viewers to a claimed audience of nine million viewers one hundred and twenty million to nine That is a drop of ninety two and a half percent. That's a lot of percent. And who who has fallen on so far so fast? His name is? That's next? This is countdown. This is countdown with Keith Oberman, my crazy friend. Postscripts to the news, some headlines, some updates, some snart, some predictions. Dateline, Woodstock, Maine. Remember Tucker Carlson. The eighth episode of his Twitter video series, recorded in his studios in the main Woods, dropped eleven days ago, and the metrics provided by his new home suggested has been viewed by nine million people on Twitter, or at least seen by them in passing nine million people on Twitter is slightly down from the first episode of Tucker's Twitter Hour one hundred and twenty million, slightly down ninety two and a half percent down. The collapse has been terrifying, even if, like me, you hate Tucker Carlson, as Media Matters for America noted, first episode one hundred and twenty million, fourth thirty three million, fifth, seventeen and a half million, eighth, nine million, and Twitter views even if they really meant you had nine million people watching all five minutes of a Tucker Carlson twitterview, which they don't. They just are not comparable to TV ratings. TV viewers are the average number watching in any given minute in a quarter hour, So one and a half million people watched Fox at eight pm last Thursday. That's the last set of ratings we have so far, that's basically one and a half million people per minute. So Tucker Carlson's old venue is outrating him in his new venue by at least ten to one. If a Tucker Carlson episode drops in the woods and nobody hears it, does it make a sound of rage, thwarted, fascist, scheming, scumbag agony? I sure hope, so dyline the White House happily. I have next to no practical experience with this, but it's probably a good idea not to giggle uncontrollably if you are actually asking a question at the White House press briefing about cocaine.

Secondly, sorry, cocaine again, but that was questioning history during press gaggle with Andres. That was I guess he said that he had. He didn't keep his avoiding it because of the halftime. I'm just asking you again, who just said once for all whether or not the cocaine belongs to the Wine family.

Secondly, sorry, cocaine again, but that was questioning history during press gaggle with Andres. That was I guess he said that he had. He didn't keep his avoiding it because of the halftime. I'm just asking you again, who just said once for all whether or not the cocaine belongs to the Wine family.

So the reporter, if you're wondering, and I was, is named Caitlin Dornboss. She is new to the New York Post. Naturally, don't giggle. Having known White House reporters and Washington reporters who frequent the White House, having known them off and on for about thirty years, even dated one, lived with one basically for three years. I just assumed it belonged to one of them, or one hundred and thirteen of them. Dateline Council Bluffs, Iowa. Juxtaposition is everything. First that cocaine question, then Donald Trump again with the free food, but at a dairy queen.

So the reporter, if you're wondering, and I was, is named Caitlin Dornboss. She is new to the New York Post. Naturally, don't giggle. Having known White House reporters and Washington reporters who frequent the White House, having known them off and on for about thirty years, even dated one, lived with one basically for three years. I just assumed it belonged to one of them, or one hundred and thirteen of them. Dateline Council Bluffs, Iowa. Juxtaposition is everything. First that cocaine question, then Donald Trump again with the free food, but at a dairy queen.

Everybody wants a blizzard, Okay, I will do the blizzard things.

Everybody wants a blizzard, Okay, I will do the blizzard things.

See, you don't know what a blizzard might be, ask Junior. Now, this has nothing to do with blizzards or Trump or Iowa, but it does have something to do with dairy queen, So why not tell it here? My dad delighted in telling this story in the late seventies early eighties. Maybe he was the architect on two shoe stores in the Southwest that he and the team from the shoe company had, for whatever reason, decided to drive to while they were building one in one location something like Luaco, Texas, to drive to the other location in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Why they drove nobody knew then or now, And after hours of driving on the highways of Texas and seeing literally nothing, my dad said. There suddenly appeared an exit sign on the highway, and the name of the town on the exit sign read Capital Nacogdches nac Ogdches, and the four men simultaneously burst into laughter. After arguing for a few minutes how in the world to pronounce the name of that place, they decided, well, let's get off at the exit and we'll go to a coffee shop or something. We'll find out. What they found at the end of the dust covered exit was a dairy queen. The street was covered in dust, the parking lot was covered in dust. The floor of the dairy queen was covered in dust. It fell to my dad to ask the teenaged kid behind the counter four vanilla cones and four black coffees, and say, son, how do you pronounce the name of this place? My dad said. The boy looked at them like they were aliens, slowly and making sure he moved his gaze from the one to the other. As he did it, he said.

See, you don't know what a blizzard might be, ask Junior. Now, this has nothing to do with blizzards or Trump or Iowa, but it does have something to do with dairy queen, So why not tell it here? My dad delighted in telling this story in the late seventies early eighties. Maybe he was the architect on two shoe stores in the Southwest that he and the team from the shoe company had, for whatever reason, decided to drive to while they were building one in one location something like Luaco, Texas, to drive to the other location in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Why they drove nobody knew then or now, And after hours of driving on the highways of Texas and seeing literally nothing, my dad said. There suddenly appeared an exit sign on the highway, and the name of the town on the exit sign read Capital Nacogdches nac Ogdches, and the four men simultaneously burst into laughter. After arguing for a few minutes how in the world to pronounce the name of that place, they decided, well, let's get off at the exit and we'll go to a coffee shop or something. We'll find out. What they found at the end of the dust covered exit was a dairy queen. The street was covered in dust, the parking lot was covered in dust. The floor of the dairy queen was covered in dust. It fell to my dad to ask the teenaged kid behind the counter four vanilla cones and four black coffees, and say, son, how do you pronounce the name of this place? My dad said. The boy looked at them like they were aliens, slowly and making sure he moved his gaze from the one to the other. As he did it, he said.

Day, queen, this is sports Senate. Wait, check that not anymore. This is countdown with Keith Ulberman in sports.

Day, queen, this is sports Senate. Wait, check that not anymore. This is countdown with Keith Ulberman in sports.

Of course, it's Nacadochis. Everybody knows that Nacadochus, home of Darryl Brandon of the nineteen sixty seven American League champion Boston Red Sox daye queen in sports. It's been heading this way since the first radio station signed on just over a century ago. But if you need an official date when the American newspaper sports section died market down is July nine, twenty twenty three. Yesterday, separately, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times revealed that's about it here in fun City. It's full mutiny. Everything but the staff barricading itself inside the New York Times Sports office, which used to produce a daily sports section thick enough to kill rodents. With all twenty eight remaining writers and editors in the Time Sports department, wrote a letter. The Washington Post got a copy of the letter, and they sent it to executive New York Times editor Joe con and company chairman A. G. Sulzberger. And it is a declaration of war. Quote. For eighteen months, the New York Times has left its sports staffed twisting in the wind. We have watched the company by a competitor with hundreds of sports writers and way decisions about the future of sports coverage at the Times without in many instances so much as a courtesy call, let alone any solicitation of our expertise. What the New York writers are particularly worried about is the company's acquisition of the website The Athletic, and indications it will be merged into their department in some way, which would be a saving grace at least for readers, Except The Athletic itself just wiped out about twenty sports beat writers across the country. The writing has been on the wall at the Times for years. They are basically down to one full sports section a week. They put a smiley face meanwhile, on the disaster at the Los Angeles Times, but even as the sports editor there jauntily wrote, today we are introducing a new era. She went on to reveal that the new era means, quote, you no longer will see box scores, standings and traditional game stories, but those will be replaced by more innovative reporting, in depth profiles, unique examinations of the way teams operate, investigations, our distinct columnist voices, elite photography, and more. In other words, you're all fired. God forbid. They train artificial intelligence to write sports columns. Actually, I lived in LA twice for a total of about ten years, and in retrospect, it's clear that for at least three decades their TV sports column was generated by artificial intelligence, and not a lot of it. The cutbacks are just a shame. Sports newspaper columns and articles and sections especially, and the smell of them where the way most of us came into sports as fans, and they are not going to be re established somewhere else, not at ESPN, not online, even with a perfume that smells like newsprint, nowhere, thank you, Nancy Faust. There are cutbacks everywhere, even in the sports themselves. Major League Baseball held its draft last night. Baseball is desperately trying to make its amateur draft into something like the NBA or the NFL, without recognizing that the only way to do that is to make high school and college baseball as important as high school and college football and basketball are. And it's not sorry. Good news is I did recognize the name of the first pick this year, for the first pick of.

Of course, it's Nacadochis. Everybody knows that Nacadochus, home of Darryl Brandon of the nineteen sixty seven American League champion Boston Red Sox daye queen in sports. It's been heading this way since the first radio station signed on just over a century ago. But if you need an official date when the American newspaper sports section died market down is July nine, twenty twenty three. Yesterday, separately, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times revealed that's about it here in fun City. It's full mutiny. Everything but the staff barricading itself inside the New York Times Sports office, which used to produce a daily sports section thick enough to kill rodents. With all twenty eight remaining writers and editors in the Time Sports department, wrote a letter. The Washington Post got a copy of the letter, and they sent it to executive New York Times editor Joe con and company chairman A. G. Sulzberger. And it is a declaration of war. Quote. For eighteen months, the New York Times has left its sports staffed twisting in the wind. We have watched the company by a competitor with hundreds of sports writers and way decisions about the future of sports coverage at the Times without in many instances so much as a courtesy call, let alone any solicitation of our expertise. What the New York writers are particularly worried about is the company's acquisition of the website The Athletic, and indications it will be merged into their department in some way, which would be a saving grace at least for readers, Except The Athletic itself just wiped out about twenty sports beat writers across the country. The writing has been on the wall at the Times for years. They are basically down to one full sports section a week. They put a smiley face meanwhile, on the disaster at the Los Angeles Times, but even as the sports editor there jauntily wrote, today we are introducing a new era. She went on to reveal that the new era means, quote, you no longer will see box scores, standings and traditional game stories, but those will be replaced by more innovative reporting, in depth profiles, unique examinations of the way teams operate, investigations, our distinct columnist voices, elite photography, and more. In other words, you're all fired. God forbid. They train artificial intelligence to write sports columns. Actually, I lived in LA twice for a total of about ten years, and in retrospect, it's clear that for at least three decades their TV sports column was generated by artificial intelligence, and not a lot of it. The cutbacks are just a shame. Sports newspaper columns and articles and sections especially, and the smell of them where the way most of us came into sports as fans, and they are not going to be re established somewhere else, not at ESPN, not online, even with a perfume that smells like newsprint, nowhere, thank you, Nancy Faust. There are cutbacks everywhere, even in the sports themselves. Major League Baseball held its draft last night. Baseball is desperately trying to make its amateur draft into something like the NBA or the NFL, without recognizing that the only way to do that is to make high school and college baseball as important as high school and college football and basketball are. And it's not sorry. Good news is I did recognize the name of the first pick this year, for the first pick of.

The twenty twenty three MLV Draft. It's Hurt Hirts pick Paul Teams R.

The twenty twenty three MLV Draft. It's Hurt Hirts pick Paul Teams R.

Ironically, it was the New York Times on its demise day yesterday, which did a story on one of the flailing draft innovations that has actually hurt baseball, limiting the draft to just twenty rounds roughly six hundred and thirty players or so, when the draft used to go on forever infinity now to be fair. In twenty twenty, Baseball cut the draft to just five rounds because of the pandemic. So twenty rounds is a lot better than five. But as Tyler Kepner noted in The Times yesterday, he was one of the signatories to the Times Letter to the Editor. Hall of famer John Smoltz was chosen in the twenty second Kevin Kiermeyer, the star outfielder of Toronto thirty first round, Zach McKinstry, lead off man in Detroit thirty third round. Those rounds don't exist anymore. As I noted in a piece I did for ESPN three years ago, first Baseball had purged the minor leagues, cut from the official Major league affiliated minor league's forty teams one thousand roster spots, eliminating the Williamsport Crosscutters who play where the Little League World Series is, eliminating the Auburn Double Days who played two hours drive from the Hall of Fame. Just awful optics, though Williamsport has come back in a new prospects league, a kind of desperate circuit for everybody who was not drafted, and there are more of them than ever. You may already know about Mike Piazza, who's in that Hall of Fame near where the Double Days used to play, sixty second round in nineteen eighty eight, pick one, three hundred and ninety overall, forty third from last, none of which is mentioned on his plaque in Cooperstown. His draft round long gone, his pick number eliminated along with the seven hundred and eighty nine picks before it. The stars, the immortals do not always go early in the baseball draft. It's not like the football draft. It's not like the basketball draft, and the people running baseball, led by this idiot Rob Manfred, don't understand that and believe they can change it. The last nine picks of the twelfth round in nineteen sixty five were in order, Carl Ergenzinger, C. A. McGowan, Don Alley, Manny Washington, Gary Wormol Duff, Craig Scoggins, Ron Mattney, who made it to spring training with the Cubs a couple of times, Rich Coslick, and then in round twelve of nineteen sixty five, after the immortals like worml Duff and Ergenzinger, then the Matt's drafted a guy named Nolan. Baseball needs the men who went in the twenty first round or later two and not just as players. In nineteen seventy five, that was Ron Rennicke, an outfielder future manager of the Brewers in the Red Sox. In nineteen ninety four, pick number seven eighty one was Boston immortal and longtime Major leaguer and current LA Dodgers manager Dave Roberts. In nineteen eighty two, pick number five five four was the now general manager of the Washington Nationals, Mike Rizzo. In nineteen sixty seven, pick number eleven of round number twenty six was Dusty Baker, and in nineteen sixty six, number eight thirty three in the sixty third round, the last player chosen was a five foot six inch tall second baseman from Saint John's University named Matt Galante. Matt Galanty never played in the Majors, went to one spring training with the Yankees, but he coached with the Astros for sixteen years, managed them for f month. He taught Craig Bigio how to be a second baseman, he taught Jeff Bagwell how to be a first baseman. And in their Hall of Fame induction speeches, each of them thanked Matt Gallante by name, the ultimate baseball lifer. Then how does the next ultimate baseball lifer, the next Matt Gallante, even begin his baseball life if the draft has ended forty three rounds before he would have been chosen still ahead. The twentieth anniversary was last Thursday, the day former Ambassador Joe Wilson wrote his famous op ed in The New York Times that destroyed the Bush Administration, destroyed its lie that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So the Bush Administration decided to destroy him, to destroy Joe Wilson and his wife, the secret CIA operative and craziest of all, they thought I would help them do all that. Next in things I promised not to tell first time For the daily roundup of the miss Grants, morons and Dunning Kruger effect specimens who constitute today's worst persons in the world. The Bronze. Jene Piro, America's leading authority on boxed wine. For once, it's less what she said than where she said it. She's gone on the podcast of Michael Schuyer, a man so overwhelmed by fantasies of genocide and slaughter that he was even fired by Fox. During the podcast, Schuer told Piro that the Second Amendment was needed quote to take care of these vermin who quote rigged elections that echoed Shoyer's previous online arguments that we need to quote liquidate quote Fauci, Kate Sperks, the Bidens, Harris, the Clintons, the Obamas, the Bushes, and most media because they quote are all direct descendants of Mount Setungue. Joseph Stalin, Paul Pott, Margaret Sanger, Adolf Hitler. Schoier is nuts? What's Nutsier? Janeine Piro did not hang up on him, even for her the runner up, Nicki Haley. Each of the one hundred and seventy three different Republican presidential candidates has a core issue. Nicki Haley's is she knows who will live and who will die and when. For at least the third time fourth time, she has stated or implied that if Joe Biden is re elected, he will die in office. Anyone is better than President Kamala Harris. She told the Fox Good Morning Fascism show. Brian Kilmead, who is not in on the Haley wishes death on people thing, replied, you mean President Biden, to which Haley responded, well, I think it's President Harris. A vote for President Baden is a vote for President Harris. Of late, Haley has seemed to try to swerve away from her explicit April twenty seventh announcement that quote, the idea that Biden would make it until eighty six years old is not something that I think is likely. But of course, now there is a second aspect here. As I just mentioned, a Fox News character appeared on a podcast hosted by a man who insists President Biden should be liquidated by the Second Amendment. So when Nicki Haley says this about him dying in office included in her morbid fantasies, is of course that one that he wouldn't die of natural causes, And Nicki Haley should be ashamed of herself even being Nicki Haley. Somebody of course needs to explain to her why if you're going to try it, give yourself a few hours. But our winner, Andrew Mitchell of NBC News and MSNBC, it is an awful thing to have to tell somebody from your own home county, who has been in this business since nineteen sixty seven, who has done spectacular work, who help you at critical times in your own career, who is a role model to as many women in her field as Barbara Walters was, and men too. But you have to tell her this. She's now just cannibalizing her own reputation. I mean, the daily grind of doing a television news show was enough that when I saw the opportunity to take a lot of money and get out more than a decade ago, I grabbed it. Then it was offered to me again the next year, and I grabbed it again twice. I was fifty two and fifty three years old. It's like a kid. But Andrew Mitchell is going to turn seventy seven in a little over three months, and it's time to go. This is not agism, this is self protection. You can argue this should not have been a big story, maybe not a story at all on her show, but that's not her fault. MSNBC is now just another say what we tell you to say, or you're out shop. But in asking NBC News reporter Mike Momoli about the cocaine in the White House, Andrew Mitchell said, quote Mike two questions. Everybody goes through magnetometers, so this would not have been picked up by the magnetometers. I mean, I don't know if it's in somebody's pocket or bag. Magnetometers magnetometers to detect cocaine. Reporter Momoli gently tried to explain to m mis Mitchell that magnetometers quote are mainly, of course, looking for metallic objects. Unquote, Andrew Mitchell is probably thinking one of those catch evil stuffometers, which can detect if people are carrying drugs or carrying weapons, or carrying anthrax or you know, communicable diseases, or they have evil spells cast on them, or they're carrying those little wrapped bath soaps that they stole from the Willard Hotel. You know those scanners, the ones that don't really exist, but she may have dreamt about them. There's one of these a month now on Andrew Mitchell reports. It is just sad cut back to special projects. It'll give you your life back less is more. I know this and I'm only sixty four. It'll give you your reputation back. Do it, or you'll wind up like Tom Brokaw Andrew Mitchell Magnetometers catch powder, Today's worst person in the World. Finally to the number one story on the Countdown and my favorite topic, me and things I promised not to tell. And on Monday, May third, two thousand and four, my executive producer phoned me at home and said, we got Ambassador Joe Wilson. He'll be on the show tomorrow. Within hours, the communications office of the White House of George W. Bush began a desperate, ceaseless, tireless effort to send me one email with talking points about Ambassador Joe Wilson, which repeatedly hilariously failed to get through to me because none of them could spell my name correctly. By late in the evening of May third, and throughout the morning of May the fourth, I got calls and forwarded emails from people throughout NBC who had received emails of their own from the Bush White House Communications Office, all of them with attachments addressed to Keith Oberman without the L Keith Olberman, with only one n Kaieth Olberman, Keith spelled wrong, and even Keith overman with a V. This was actually truly the first day I believed I was having an impact on the Bush White House, and also the first day I realized they were incredibly stupid. There democracy still had a slim chance. The Internet had been operating at more or less its present speed since about nineteen ninety seven or nineteen ninety eight. My name was all over the Internet in article about my news career, about my sports career, about my previous news career. There were articles I had written, there were books I had written, and these people who were trying to reshape the United States of America into a reactionary, conservative, cruel, xenophobic, semi authoritarian state, we're not smart enough to figure out how to spell my name, just so we know who we are talking about. By this point, Scott McClellan had succeeded the infamous Aary Fleischer as Press secretary. His deputies were Dana Perino, who went from being the stupidest person ever to be White House Press secretary to being one of the stupidest persons ever to have a show on Fox News. Pamelas Stevens, who later wound up as a producer at CNN, because political press people are exactly like unemployed football coaches or baseball managers who get TV jobs and then leave the TV jobs to go back onto the field. The communications director was named and Bartlett, and there was another communications person there named Nicole Wallace, who has somehow shaken off the stink of working for both George and Jeb Bush and is now considered a darling of MSNBC, even though her only true non fascist credential is she doesn't like Trump either. The crack White House media team representing the most powerful man in the world in the anxious and foreshadowing years after nine to eleven, and on one of them could even find anybody else who could spell my name, let alone spell it themselves. More on them in a moment, But I need to explain who Joe Wilson was if you don't know, and why he was so important. Long before Colin Powell confessed to Tim Russert that he had been lied to by the White House and thus he himself had lied to the United Nations about Sadam Hussein's imaginary weapons of mass destruction. Those were the excuses from Bush Cheney for dragging this country into an unneces siri and national soul destroying war in Iraq with lies and torture and scapegoating and suppression and brutality. Before that, there was Ambassador Joseph Charles Wilson the fourth and in two thousand and two, after pressure from the White House, the CIA sent him back to the scene of his first diplomatic posting, the African nation of Niger to get proof for Bush that Saddam was trying to buy yellow cake uranium there to make nuclear bombses out of and Wilson quickly found out it was nonsense, and he reported back and the Bush White House promptly buried his findings and instead, in the two thousand and three State of the Union address, just before he started bombing Iraq, George W. Bush said, the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. It was and remains a complete lie, and war occurred because of it. And Joe Wilson called it a complete lie in an op ed in The New York Times on July sixth, two thousand and three. The Iraq war was still at this stage defined by rah Rah, we're winning, but Sadam's WND and his biological weapons and his chemical weapons might be over the next hill. And you'd better not criticize what we're doing, or maybe you're a terrorist. Joe Wilson said, the Emperor had no clothes. In two thousand and three, he was an American hero of the highest order. A week later, a Dick Cheney flunky named Scooter Libby and a Deputy Secretary of State named Armitage began a campaign to punish Joe Wilson and discredit him. They leaked to a dyspeptic and hate filled columnist named Robert Novak, who is now working in the Bureau in Hell, that Wilson's wife was an undercover agent for the CIA, and that her name was Valerie Plame, and that the pair of them were dirty Democrats. And moreover, it was Plame who had urged that her own husband be sent to Niger to deliberately not find and the uranium or the Sadam Hussein signed receipts or whatever Bush expected to find there. The Bush White House destroyed the career of risked the life of and ruined several assignments and contacts of one of this country's own secret CIA agents just to make her husband look bad. So in May two thousand and four, when Joe Wilson wrote a book about all this crap, and he inexplicably wanted to go on MSNBC, which was still at that point trying to be more conservative than Fox Nudes, and wanted to go on My little Watched show, which was considered the neutral outlier on a network full of Joe Scarbroughse and Michael Savage's. This was a happy surprise for us, which was followed by this wonderful, flailing effort by the Bush White House to send me talking points about Joe Wilson before I interviewed him. They not only could not spell my name, but they were utterly convinced that my interview was designed to discredit Joe Wilson. The talking points, which eventually got to me from Assistant Press Secretary Pamela Stevens, consisted of six items over two pages. The headings were as follows. One political motivation This was about Wilson calling Dick Cheney a lying sob about a year after the knee jair trip. I couldn't figure this one out. Dick Cheney was a lying SOB. That's how I got to be Vice president. Two. Gingridge spokesman calls allegations about alleged March two thousand and three meeting completely falls. This cited Newt Gingrich and his people as if they were good sources, as opposed to the punchlines they already were back then in two thousand and four, talking point number three, McClellan points out political objective, and four McClellan addresses accusations. These were quotes from the press secretary. This man suddenly quit that job two years later two thousand and six, and confessed he had repeatedly lied for George W. Bush and the others, and now he just couldn't take it anymore. And he would come on my show and give one of the best atonement interviews I've ever heard. It went on for forty five minutes. Five Fleischer says VP office did not request trip a quote from McClellan's predecessor, who unless he is talking about baseball, you should assume he's lying. Plus he might be lying about baseball. And finally, six statement by George J. Tennant July eleven, two thousand and three. This was a quote from the CIA director which they thought was their home run, and it basically consisted of this. Bush never saw that report that was it. There are three punchlines to this story. Number one. I don't know why the Bush Communications office assumed I was there to take down Joe Wilson, But the moment I saw these talking points, any lingering doubt I had that they were not all lying bastards down there was erased. I used the talking pl points in my interview, all right. I read them out loud to Joe Wilson, and he rebutted each of them with impeccable charm and elegance. He and Valerie Plain became regular guests on My show and would beat the crap out of George Bush with the plum right through the morning of January twenty, two thousand and nine. Second punch line. A year earlier, a supply clerk with a maintenance company on the ground in Iraq was captured Private Jessica Lynch. The military and the Bush administration immediately put out the story that she was being tortured by them evil Iraqi Sadam Hussein doctors. There was the glorious rescue of Jessica Lynch which followed, and the parades and the you better not question this story period which lasted about six weeks until a Toronto newspaper printed a substantially different account that Lynch was rescued from an Iraqi hospital and a US military team in good faith went in to extract her, but that this was all arranged, not by some sort of part of intelligence or US operations or the Allies, but by the Iraqi doctors. Some of them sneaked over to American lines at great danger and said, one of your soldiers is hurt and we don't have the right equipment to help her. Could you swing by and pick her up? I reported that version on MSNBC, and the next day, as I was still taking my coat off, my boss, Phil Griffin called me in and said that the head of NBC News and the president of NBC, Bob Wright, had been on the phone all morning to him, insisting I should be fired for implying that the Bush administration had lied. Griffin proudly said he had talked him into letting me get away with just apologizing to the troops. I can't even read this with a straight face now twenty years later, apologizing to the troops who rescued her. I must credit myself when my brain was fulled in that I did some quick thinking. The demand was comical nonsense journalistically. On the other hand, if I agreed to apologize to okay, the troops who rescued her, whoever you want, I would get the chance to tell the whole real story of Jessica Lynch again. So I did. The apology was fifteen seconds, and while unnecessary, was sincere. I didn't want to make the troops look bad. They didn't know anything about this crap. I made sure, however, that the retelling of the true Lynch rescue story took about two and a half minutes. That was in June of two thousand and three. So why as of May of two thousand and four, the Bush White House thought I was sympathetic to them, I'll never know, Or why they bothered with me, I'll never know, which brings me to the last point. The unintended side effect with the long term impact of all those failed White House emails with my name misspelled was that this Pamelas Stevens person promptly forwarded them to people around NBC whom she considered friendly to George W. Bush. One of them was Tom Brokaw's assistant, another was in the office of future NBC News president Steve Cappus, and the final one was to some guy named George Ribey. And so I found out all the people in the Bush administrations we like them, list at NBC News who I should avoid under all circumstances. Let's see Brokaw's assistance. So no Brokaw, somebody in Cappus's office, and no Cappus, and this guy George Ribey. And George Reba turned out to be a guy hired by MSNBC from Fox News to go work for Scarborough. He fell out of favor with Joe Scarborough, and I guess he didn't henchman enough for Joe's taste, and his influence fell to a guy. I don't think I've mentioned him to you yet, Chris, I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Here are the credits. Most of the music arranged, produced and performed by Brian ray and John Phillip Schanel, who are the Countdown musical directors. Guitars based and drums by Brian ray All orchestration and keyboards by John Phillip Schaneil, produced by Tko Brothers. Other Beethoven selections have been arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. Sports music is the Olberman theme from ESPN two and it was written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN, Inc. Musical comments by Nancy Fauss, the best baseball stadium organist ever and star of Saber fifty one. Our announcer today was my friend Tony Kornheiser, escaped sportswriter. Everything else was pretty much my fault. Don't forget. Countdown now also available on YouTube. Subscribe there as well give yourself options. That's countdown for this to nine hundred and sixteenth day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the United States. Arrest him again while we still can. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Bulletins as the news warrants till then, I'm Keith Alderman. Good Morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts

Ironically, it was the New York Times on its demise day yesterday, which did a story on one of the flailing draft innovations that has actually hurt baseball, limiting the draft to just twenty rounds roughly six hundred and thirty players or so, when the draft used to go on forever infinity now to be fair. In twenty twenty, Baseball cut the draft to just five rounds because of the pandemic. So twenty rounds is a lot better than five. But as Tyler Kepner noted in The Times yesterday, he was one of the signatories to the Times Letter to the Editor. Hall of famer John Smoltz was chosen in the twenty second Kevin Kiermeyer, the star outfielder of Toronto thirty first round, Zach McKinstry, lead off man in Detroit thirty third round. Those rounds don't exist anymore. As I noted in a piece I did for ESPN three years ago, first Baseball had purged the minor leagues, cut from the official Major league affiliated minor league's forty teams one thousand roster spots, eliminating the Williamsport Crosscutters who play where the Little League World Series is, eliminating the Auburn Double Days who played two hours drive from the Hall of Fame. Just awful optics, though Williamsport has come back in a new prospects league, a kind of desperate circuit for everybody who was not drafted, and there are more of them than ever. You may already know about Mike Piazza, who's in that Hall of Fame near where the Double Days used to play, sixty second round in nineteen eighty eight, pick one, three hundred and ninety overall, forty third from last, none of which is mentioned on his plaque in Cooperstown. His draft round long gone, his pick number eliminated along with the seven hundred and eighty nine picks before it. The stars, the immortals do not always go early in the baseball draft. It's not like the football draft. It's not like the basketball draft, and the people running baseball, led by this idiot Rob Manfred, don't understand that and believe they can change it. The last nine picks of the twelfth round in nineteen sixty five were in order, Carl Ergenzinger, C. A. McGowan, Don Alley, Manny Washington, Gary Wormol Duff, Craig Scoggins, Ron Mattney, who made it to spring training with the Cubs a couple of times, Rich Coslick, and then in round twelve of nineteen sixty five, after the immortals like worml Duff and Ergenzinger, then the Matt's drafted a guy named Nolan. Baseball needs the men who went in the twenty first round or later two and not just as players. In nineteen seventy five, that was Ron Rennicke, an outfielder future manager of the Brewers in the Red Sox. In nineteen ninety four, pick number seven eighty one was Boston immortal and longtime Major leaguer and current LA Dodgers manager Dave Roberts. In nineteen eighty two, pick number five five four was the now general manager of the Washington Nationals, Mike Rizzo. In nineteen sixty seven, pick number eleven of round number twenty six was Dusty Baker, and in nineteen sixty six, number eight thirty three in the sixty third round, the last player chosen was a five foot six inch tall second baseman from Saint John's University named Matt Galante. Matt Galanty never played in the Majors, went to one spring training with the Yankees, but he coached with the Astros for sixteen years, managed them for f month. He taught Craig Bigio how to be a second baseman, he taught Jeff Bagwell how to be a first baseman. And in their Hall of Fame induction speeches, each of them thanked Matt Gallante by name, the ultimate baseball lifer. Then how does the next ultimate baseball lifer, the next Matt Gallante, even begin his baseball life if the draft has ended forty three rounds before he would have been chosen still ahead. The twentieth anniversary was last Thursday, the day former Ambassador Joe Wilson wrote his famous op ed in The New York Times that destroyed the Bush Administration, destroyed its lie that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So the Bush Administration decided to destroy him, to destroy Joe Wilson and his wife, the secret CIA operative and craziest of all, they thought I would help them do all that. Next in things I promised not to tell first time For the daily roundup of the miss Grants, morons and Dunning Kruger effect specimens who constitute today's worst persons in the world. The Bronze. Jene Piro, America's leading authority on boxed wine. For once, it's less what she said than where she said it. She's gone on the podcast of Michael Schuyer, a man so overwhelmed by fantasies of genocide and slaughter that he was even fired by Fox. During the podcast, Schuer told Piro that the Second Amendment was needed quote to take care of these vermin who quote rigged elections that echoed Shoyer's previous online arguments that we need to quote liquidate quote Fauci, Kate Sperks, the Bidens, Harris, the Clintons, the Obamas, the Bushes, and most media because they quote are all direct descendants of Mount Setungue. Joseph Stalin, Paul Pott, Margaret Sanger, Adolf Hitler. Schoier is nuts? What's Nutsier? Janeine Piro did not hang up on him, even for her the runner up, Nicki Haley. Each of the one hundred and seventy three different Republican presidential candidates has a core issue. Nicki Haley's is she knows who will live and who will die and when. For at least the third time fourth time, she has stated or implied that if Joe Biden is re elected, he will die in office. Anyone is better than President Kamala Harris. She told the Fox Good Morning Fascism show. Brian Kilmead, who is not in on the Haley wishes death on people thing, replied, you mean President Biden, to which Haley responded, well, I think it's President Harris. A vote for President Baden is a vote for President Harris. Of late, Haley has seemed to try to swerve away from her explicit April twenty seventh announcement that quote, the idea that Biden would make it until eighty six years old is not something that I think is likely. But of course, now there is a second aspect here. As I just mentioned, a Fox News character appeared on a podcast hosted by a man who insists President Biden should be liquidated by the Second Amendment. So when Nicki Haley says this about him dying in office included in her morbid fantasies, is of course that one that he wouldn't die of natural causes, And Nicki Haley should be ashamed of herself even being Nicki Haley. Somebody of course needs to explain to her why if you're going to try it, give yourself a few hours. But our winner, Andrew Mitchell of NBC News and MSNBC, it is an awful thing to have to tell somebody from your own home county, who has been in this business since nineteen sixty seven, who has done spectacular work, who help you at critical times in your own career, who is a role model to as many women in her field as Barbara Walters was, and men too. But you have to tell her this. She's now just cannibalizing her own reputation. I mean, the daily grind of doing a television news show was enough that when I saw the opportunity to take a lot of money and get out more than a decade ago, I grabbed it. Then it was offered to me again the next year, and I grabbed it again twice. I was fifty two and fifty three years old. It's like a kid. But Andrew Mitchell is going to turn seventy seven in a little over three months, and it's time to go. This is not agism, this is self protection. You can argue this should not have been a big story, maybe not a story at all on her show, but that's not her fault. MSNBC is now just another say what we tell you to say, or you're out shop. But in asking NBC News reporter Mike Momoli about the cocaine in the White House, Andrew Mitchell said, quote Mike two questions. Everybody goes through magnetometers, so this would not have been picked up by the magnetometers. I mean, I don't know if it's in somebody's pocket or bag. Magnetometers magnetometers to detect cocaine. Reporter Momoli gently tried to explain to m mis Mitchell that magnetometers quote are mainly, of course, looking for metallic objects. Unquote, Andrew Mitchell is probably thinking one of those catch evil stuffometers, which can detect if people are carrying drugs or carrying weapons, or carrying anthrax or you know, communicable diseases, or they have evil spells cast on them, or they're carrying those little wrapped bath soaps that they stole from the Willard Hotel. You know those scanners, the ones that don't really exist, but she may have dreamt about them. There's one of these a month now on Andrew Mitchell reports. It is just sad cut back to special projects. It'll give you your life back less is more. I know this and I'm only sixty four. It'll give you your reputation back. Do it, or you'll wind up like Tom Brokaw Andrew Mitchell Magnetometers catch powder, Today's worst person in the World. Finally to the number one story on the Countdown and my favorite topic, me and things I promised not to tell. And on Monday, May third, two thousand and four, my executive producer phoned me at home and said, we got Ambassador Joe Wilson. He'll be on the show tomorrow. Within hours, the communications office of the White House of George W. Bush began a desperate, ceaseless, tireless effort to send me one email with talking points about Ambassador Joe Wilson, which repeatedly hilariously failed to get through to me because none of them could spell my name correctly. By late in the evening of May third, and throughout the morning of May the fourth, I got calls and forwarded emails from people throughout NBC who had received emails of their own from the Bush White House Communications Office, all of them with attachments addressed to Keith Oberman without the L Keith Olberman, with only one n Kaieth Olberman, Keith spelled wrong, and even Keith overman with a V. This was actually truly the first day I believed I was having an impact on the Bush White House, and also the first day I realized they were incredibly stupid. There democracy still had a slim chance. The Internet had been operating at more or less its present speed since about nineteen ninety seven or nineteen ninety eight. My name was all over the Internet in article about my news career, about my sports career, about my previous news career. There were articles I had written, there were books I had written, and these people who were trying to reshape the United States of America into a reactionary, conservative, cruel, xenophobic, semi authoritarian state, we're not smart enough to figure out how to spell my name, just so we know who we are talking about. By this point, Scott McClellan had succeeded the infamous Aary Fleischer as Press secretary. His deputies were Dana Perino, who went from being the stupidest person ever to be White House Press secretary to being one of the stupidest persons ever to have a show on Fox News. Pamelas Stevens, who later wound up as a producer at CNN, because political press people are exactly like unemployed football coaches or baseball managers who get TV jobs and then leave the TV jobs to go back onto the field. The communications director was named and Bartlett, and there was another communications person there named Nicole Wallace, who has somehow shaken off the stink of working for both George and Jeb Bush and is now considered a darling of MSNBC, even though her only true non fascist credential is she doesn't like Trump either. The crack White House media team representing the most powerful man in the world in the anxious and foreshadowing years after nine to eleven, and on one of them could even find anybody else who could spell my name, let alone spell it themselves. More on them in a moment, But I need to explain who Joe Wilson was if you don't know, and why he was so important. Long before Colin Powell confessed to Tim Russert that he had been lied to by the White House and thus he himself had lied to the United Nations about Sadam Hussein's imaginary weapons of mass destruction. Those were the excuses from Bush Cheney for dragging this country into an unneces siri and national soul destroying war in Iraq with lies and torture and scapegoating and suppression and brutality. Before that, there was Ambassador Joseph Charles Wilson the fourth and in two thousand and two, after pressure from the White House, the CIA sent him back to the scene of his first diplomatic posting, the African nation of Niger to get proof for Bush that Saddam was trying to buy yellow cake uranium there to make nuclear bombses out of and Wilson quickly found out it was nonsense, and he reported back and the Bush White House promptly buried his findings and instead, in the two thousand and three State of the Union address, just before he started bombing Iraq, George W. Bush said, the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. It was and remains a complete lie, and war occurred because of it. And Joe Wilson called it a complete lie in an op ed in The New York Times on July sixth, two thousand and three. The Iraq war was still at this stage defined by rah Rah, we're winning, but Sadam's WND and his biological weapons and his chemical weapons might be over the next hill. And you'd better not criticize what we're doing, or maybe you're a terrorist. Joe Wilson said, the Emperor had no clothes. In two thousand and three, he was an American hero of the highest order. A week later, a Dick Cheney flunky named Scooter Libby and a Deputy Secretary of State named Armitage began a campaign to punish Joe Wilson and discredit him. They leaked to a dyspeptic and hate filled columnist named Robert Novak, who is now working in the Bureau in Hell, that Wilson's wife was an undercover agent for the CIA, and that her name was Valerie Plame, and that the pair of them were dirty Democrats. And moreover, it was Plame who had urged that her own husband be sent to Niger to deliberately not find and the uranium or the Sadam Hussein signed receipts or whatever Bush expected to find there. The Bush White House destroyed the career of risked the life of and ruined several assignments and contacts of one of this country's own secret CIA agents just to make her husband look bad. So in May two thousand and four, when Joe Wilson wrote a book about all this crap, and he inexplicably wanted to go on MSNBC, which was still at that point trying to be more conservative than Fox Nudes, and wanted to go on My little Watched show, which was considered the neutral outlier on a network full of Joe Scarbroughse and Michael Savage's. This was a happy surprise for us, which was followed by this wonderful, flailing effort by the Bush White House to send me talking points about Joe Wilson before I interviewed him. They not only could not spell my name, but they were utterly convinced that my interview was designed to discredit Joe Wilson. The talking points, which eventually got to me from Assistant Press Secretary Pamela Stevens, consisted of six items over two pages. The headings were as follows. One political motivation This was about Wilson calling Dick Cheney a lying sob about a year after the knee jair trip. I couldn't figure this one out. Dick Cheney was a lying SOB. That's how I got to be Vice president. Two. Gingridge spokesman calls allegations about alleged March two thousand and three meeting completely falls. This cited Newt Gingrich and his people as if they were good sources, as opposed to the punchlines they already were back then in two thousand and four, talking point number three, McClellan points out political objective, and four McClellan addresses accusations. These were quotes from the press secretary. This man suddenly quit that job two years later two thousand and six, and confessed he had repeatedly lied for George W. Bush and the others, and now he just couldn't take it anymore. And he would come on my show and give one of the best atonement interviews I've ever heard. It went on for forty five minutes. Five Fleischer says VP office did not request trip a quote from McClellan's predecessor, who unless he is talking about baseball, you should assume he's lying. Plus he might be lying about baseball. And finally, six statement by George J. Tennant July eleven, two thousand and three. This was a quote from the CIA director which they thought was their home run, and it basically consisted of this. Bush never saw that report that was it. There are three punchlines to this story. Number one. I don't know why the Bush Communications office assumed I was there to take down Joe Wilson, But the moment I saw these talking points, any lingering doubt I had that they were not all lying bastards down there was erased. I used the talking pl points in my interview, all right. I read them out loud to Joe Wilson, and he rebutted each of them with impeccable charm and elegance. He and Valerie Plain became regular guests on My show and would beat the crap out of George Bush with the plum right through the morning of January twenty, two thousand and nine. Second punch line. A year earlier, a supply clerk with a maintenance company on the ground in Iraq was captured Private Jessica Lynch. The military and the Bush administration immediately put out the story that she was being tortured by them evil Iraqi Sadam Hussein doctors. There was the glorious rescue of Jessica Lynch which followed, and the parades and the you better not question this story period which lasted about six weeks until a Toronto newspaper printed a substantially different account that Lynch was rescued from an Iraqi hospital and a US military team in good faith went in to extract her, but that this was all arranged, not by some sort of part of intelligence or US operations or the Allies, but by the Iraqi doctors. Some of them sneaked over to American lines at great danger and said, one of your soldiers is hurt and we don't have the right equipment to help her. Could you swing by and pick her up? I reported that version on MSNBC, and the next day, as I was still taking my coat off, my boss, Phil Griffin called me in and said that the head of NBC News and the president of NBC, Bob Wright, had been on the phone all morning to him, insisting I should be fired for implying that the Bush administration had lied. Griffin proudly said he had talked him into letting me get away with just apologizing to the troops. I can't even read this with a straight face now twenty years later, apologizing to the troops who rescued her. I must credit myself when my brain was fulled in that I did some quick thinking. The demand was comical nonsense journalistically. On the other hand, if I agreed to apologize to okay, the troops who rescued her, whoever you want, I would get the chance to tell the whole real story of Jessica Lynch again. So I did. The apology was fifteen seconds, and while unnecessary, was sincere. I didn't want to make the troops look bad. They didn't know anything about this crap. I made sure, however, that the retelling of the true Lynch rescue story took about two and a half minutes. That was in June of two thousand and three. So why as of May of two thousand and four, the Bush White House thought I was sympathetic to them, I'll never know, Or why they bothered with me, I'll never know, which brings me to the last point. The unintended side effect with the long term impact of all those failed White House emails with my name misspelled was that this Pamelas Stevens person promptly forwarded them to people around NBC whom she considered friendly to George W. Bush. One of them was Tom Brokaw's assistant, another was in the office of future NBC News president Steve Cappus, and the final one was to some guy named George Ribey. And so I found out all the people in the Bush administrations we like them, list at NBC News who I should avoid under all circumstances. Let's see Brokaw's assistance. So no Brokaw, somebody in Cappus's office, and no Cappus, and this guy George Ribey. And George Reba turned out to be a guy hired by MSNBC from Fox News to go work for Scarborough. He fell out of favor with Joe Scarborough, and I guess he didn't henchman enough for Joe's taste, and his influence fell to a guy. I don't think I've mentioned him to you yet, Chris, I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Here are the credits. Most of the music arranged, produced and performed by Brian ray and John Phillip Schanel, who are the Countdown musical directors. Guitars based and drums by Brian ray All orchestration and keyboards by John Phillip Schaneil, produced by Tko Brothers. Other Beethoven selections have been arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. Sports music is the Olberman theme from ESPN two and it was written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN, Inc. Musical comments by Nancy Fauss, the best baseball stadium organist ever and star of Saber fifty one. Our announcer today was my friend Tony Kornheiser, escaped sportswriter. Everything else was pretty much my fault. Don't forget. Countdown now also available on YouTube. Subscribe there as well give yourself options. That's countdown for this to nine hundred and sixteenth day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the United States. Arrest him again while we still can. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Bulletins as the news warrants till then, I'm Keith Alderman. Good Morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts