SEASON 3 EPISODE 80: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

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

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

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

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

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

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