Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Cancel the Vice presidential debate tonight. CBS News should cancel it, or Tim Walls should cancel it, or the Harris campaign should cancel it because journalistic principles have been so thoroughly removed from it that it is going to amount to nothing more than an ad for Trump and Vance and fascism and lying. To Wendy McMahon, the new president of CBS News, I urge you, before it is too late, fact check jd Vance or get your company out of the news business, because if you let this proceed as planned, you will burn the reputation of CBS News to the ground. Murrow gone, Cronkite gone see it now devotes its entire half hour to a report on Senator McCarthy gone the news apparently official gone Nixon to rather, are you running for something, no, sir, mister President, or you gone? Don Hollenbeck, gone Heywood fing hail brun gone ashes. You are putting on a professional liar in order to let him lie to America for ninety minutes in primetime. This is the exact opposite of news. You are now actively contributing to the gaslighting of this country and its potential destruction. This time, CBS News is siding with the McCarthy in the equation. This time you are lying alongside Nixon. This time you are selling out the truth for the sake of the revenue from two four minute commercial breaks. And if in your negotiations with the Trump campaign to get Advance to attend, if they included either an offer from you to exclude fact checking or the acceptance of their demand to exclude fact checking, you have gone further into the morass. Still. You have deliberately frauded the American public for ratings, and you have prostituted yourselves. Find somebody in the building with a moral or journalistic compass and put them in charge of CBS News. Right now, because guess who is going to quote fact check unquote your CBS News Vice president cidential debate on this the last day of CBS News quote. I will be doing the personal play by play of the debate between the brilliant jd Vance and the highly inarticulate tampon Tim Walls. I hope that cognitively challenged lion Kamala Harris will be listening so that she can again show the world how she will make up false facts and stories in order to change around an administrative failure. Unquote, that is the side you are on, CBS. That is the side Desmond Tutuo ment when he wrote, if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. CBS News will, of course, not cancel the debate. Its masters, President McMahon included, will not tell Vance that the rules have changed. He can accept live fact checking or it's off. I've worked for CBS News. The retrenchment in news spending in television began with them in nineteen eighty six. Now, if they have already spent one hundred dollars, they're not writing that off. That's serious money. They're not canceling nothing. Besides, they have doubled down on their secret weapon of truth here and in so doing, hung this poor chief of the CBS News confirmed unit Claudia Milne out to dry. We quote will provide fact checking and analysis on our live blog during the debate. As pathetic as that sounds, honest to god, I'm surprised Trump and Vance are still letting them do that. No, CBS is not going to cancel the debate. It will be neutral in this situation of injustice, and it has chosen the oppressor. So plan b Tim Walls. Tim Walls, I need you to take the debate over. Forgive me Nora. I'll always love you, politely and metaphorically. Governor you have to push Nora and Margaret Brennan out of the way and take the debate over. Acknowledge Norah's first question, and then let it rip. Tell the television audience that JD. Vance is a compulsive and pathological liar. Tell them that there is no side of any debate or issue that he has not already taken, then rejected, then taken again. Tell them that he is Trump's deputy liar. Tell them, and tell them as forcefully and as non midwesternly as possible, that this man, this individual over here, is personally and indelibly responsible for death threats against white Republican small businessmen in Springfield, Ohio, because it is he JD Vance who personally and completely fabricated the Haitian immigrant story. And then Governor Walls tell that audience about Jamie McGregor of McGregor Metal. Tell them about this Trump supporter, this man who voted for Trump in twenty sixteen, this man who again voted for Trump in twenty twenty. Tell them about the tractor parts that Jamie McGregor makes in Springfield, Ohio. Tell them that all Jamie McGregor did was say that his thirty odd Haitian born employees come to work every day, they don't cause drama, they're on time, and within hours the death threats against Jamie McGregor began. Tell them that Jamie McGregor got so many death threats that they had to have a lockdown a factory. Tell them that there are Maga posters around town calling him a Maga guy, a traitor. Tell them that Jamie McGregor had vowed to never have guns in his own home, and now his family is taking firearms training and he just bought a glock and it's for his daughter. Tell them Governor that Jamie McGregor's daughter is fourteen fing years old. Tell them tim Tell them that Maga isn't just a threat to immigrants or a threat to people of color, or a threat to Democrats. Tell them that Maga is a threat to the people in Maga because Trump and Maga. It's not about making anything great, it's about hatred and violence and cruelty. Tell them that Jamie McGregor's wife said, we are being hunted like animals. Tell them that the latest person to be threatened in Springfield, Ohio with death is Jamie McGregor's eighty year old mother. And tell them that this is all, all of it, the fault of the personal responsibility, of the creation, of the goal of the point of this scum bag j. D. Vance. Point at him and tell him to get down on his goddamn knees and to start praying to his creator for forgiveness because he's not going to get any from Jamie McGregor or from America Governor. CBS News said, it is your job to fact check this lying son of a bitch. They just provide the Mike's and the coffee. Do it. Start the debate by doing it. Put Vance on the floor in a pool of his own urine, and then then you can do a little Midwestern not him. Then you can metaphorically gut him like.

Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Cancel the Vice presidential debate tonight. CBS News should cancel it, or Tim Walls should cancel it, or the Harris campaign should cancel it because journalistic principles have been so thoroughly removed from it that it is going to amount to nothing more than an ad for Trump and Vance and fascism and lying. To Wendy McMahon, the new president of CBS News, I urge you, before it is too late, fact check jd Vance or get your company out of the news business, because if you let this proceed as planned, you will burn the reputation of CBS News to the ground. Murrow gone, Cronkite gone see it now devotes its entire half hour to a report on Senator McCarthy gone the news apparently official gone Nixon to rather, are you running for something, no, sir, mister President, or you gone? Don Hollenbeck, gone Heywood fing hail brun gone ashes. You are putting on a professional liar in order to let him lie to America for ninety minutes in primetime. This is the exact opposite of news. You are now actively contributing to the gaslighting of this country and its potential destruction. This time, CBS News is siding with the McCarthy in the equation. This time you are lying alongside Nixon. This time you are selling out the truth for the sake of the revenue from two four minute commercial breaks. And if in your negotiations with the Trump campaign to get Advance to attend, if they included either an offer from you to exclude fact checking or the acceptance of their demand to exclude fact checking, you have gone further into the morass. Still. You have deliberately frauded the American public for ratings, and you have prostituted yourselves. Find somebody in the building with a moral or journalistic compass and put them in charge of CBS News. Right now, because guess who is going to quote fact check unquote your CBS News Vice president cidential debate on this the last day of CBS News quote. I will be doing the personal play by play of the debate between the brilliant jd Vance and the highly inarticulate tampon Tim Walls. I hope that cognitively challenged lion Kamala Harris will be listening so that she can again show the world how she will make up false facts and stories in order to change around an administrative failure. Unquote, that is the side you are on, CBS. That is the side Desmond Tutuo ment when he wrote, if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. CBS News will, of course, not cancel the debate. Its masters, President McMahon included, will not tell Vance that the rules have changed. He can accept live fact checking or it's off. I've worked for CBS News. The retrenchment in news spending in television began with them in nineteen eighty six. Now, if they have already spent one hundred dollars, they're not writing that off. That's serious money. They're not canceling nothing. Besides, they have doubled down on their secret weapon of truth here and in so doing, hung this poor chief of the CBS News confirmed unit Claudia Milne out to dry. We quote will provide fact checking and analysis on our live blog during the debate. As pathetic as that sounds, honest to god, I'm surprised Trump and Vance are still letting them do that. No, CBS is not going to cancel the debate. It will be neutral in this situation of injustice, and it has chosen the oppressor. So plan b Tim Walls. Tim Walls, I need you to take the debate over. Forgive me Nora. I'll always love you, politely and metaphorically. Governor you have to push Nora and Margaret Brennan out of the way and take the debate over. Acknowledge Norah's first question, and then let it rip. Tell the television audience that JD. Vance is a compulsive and pathological liar. Tell them that there is no side of any debate or issue that he has not already taken, then rejected, then taken again. Tell them that he is Trump's deputy liar. Tell them, and tell them as forcefully and as non midwesternly as possible, that this man, this individual over here, is personally and indelibly responsible for death threats against white Republican small businessmen in Springfield, Ohio, because it is he JD Vance who personally and completely fabricated the Haitian immigrant story. And then Governor Walls tell that audience about Jamie McGregor of McGregor Metal. Tell them about this Trump supporter, this man who voted for Trump in twenty sixteen, this man who again voted for Trump in twenty twenty. Tell them about the tractor parts that Jamie McGregor makes in Springfield, Ohio. Tell them that all Jamie McGregor did was say that his thirty odd Haitian born employees come to work every day, they don't cause drama, they're on time, and within hours the death threats against Jamie McGregor began. Tell them that Jamie McGregor got so many death threats that they had to have a lockdown a factory. Tell them that there are Maga posters around town calling him a Maga guy, a traitor. Tell them that Jamie McGregor had vowed to never have guns in his own home, and now his family is taking firearms training and he just bought a glock and it's for his daughter. Tell them Governor that Jamie McGregor's daughter is fourteen fing years old. Tell them tim Tell them that Maga isn't just a threat to immigrants or a threat to people of color, or a threat to Democrats. Tell them that Maga is a threat to the people in Maga because Trump and Maga. It's not about making anything great, it's about hatred and violence and cruelty. Tell them that Jamie McGregor's wife said, we are being hunted like animals. Tell them that the latest person to be threatened in Springfield, Ohio with death is Jamie McGregor's eighty year old mother. And tell them that this is all, all of it, the fault of the personal responsibility, of the creation, of the goal of the point of this scum bag j. D. Vance. Point at him and tell him to get down on his goddamn knees and to start praying to his creator for forgiveness because he's not going to get any from Jamie McGregor or from America Governor. CBS News said, it is your job to fact check this lying son of a bitch. They just provide the Mike's and the coffee. Do it. Start the debate by doing it. Put Vance on the floor in a pool of his own urine, and then then you can do a little Midwestern not him. Then you can metaphorically gut him like.

A fish like a fish, or we could do the fact checking thing, but no, CBS, you know what you're doing because when you don't fact check Vance's lies and for that matter.

A fish like a fish, or we could do the fact checking thing, but no, CBS, you know what you're doing because when you don't fact check Vance's lies and for that matter.

When you don't fact check anything Governor Walls gets wrong, what you'll get from Trump will be silence, blessed silence, no complaints for a day, or a week, or a month, there may be a year, and then someday, sooner or late, he will forget about that, and he will circle back to you at CBS and you will get the Google treatment from last week. Well, instead of where it said Google, it'll say CBS News, where he announces. It has been determined that CBS News has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump, some made up for this purpose, while at the same time only revealing good stories about whoever he doesn't like that day. This is an illegal activity and the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant interference of elections. If not, and subject to the laws of our country, I will request their prosecution. But don't worry about it, CBS. There's always the chance that despite the fact that you are on the wrong side of the famous quote that the famous eighteenth entry British politician Edmund Burke famously did not say that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Maybe what you are not doing, the nothing you are doing, maybe it won't help Trump regain power and put all of you in prison. Anyway, were there any doubt, it is now official. Trump's campaign is about lying. That it is only about lying. In the wake of Hurricane Helene, Trump goes to Valdosta, Georgia. They built him a little stage out of bricks that fell off a building there. Franklin Graham, an asshole, dragged some of his cultists out to stand there and bark like seals. There were as many of them, and as many of the first responders present diverted to protect him as there were residents, a couple of dozen of each. Maybe Trump then existed. Nobody saw this coming because it's past hurricane season, which actually goes to November, same as every year. And this all took some of us back to twenty nineteen and the Hurricane Dorian map, and the madness inside his brain so complete and insanity so untreatable that when he lied and said that the hurricane had been projected to hit Alabama, instead of just replacing that lie with a milder lie like I was given bad info, he actually drew on the map with a sharpie to extend the path of the hurricane, to make it look like he was right and everybody else in the world was wrong. And he got to Georgia and he lied. But it was a triple saturation lie. He began by posting lies online about supposed non response from the Biden administration and a Katrina like situation in the wake of the storm, and then he added to the lie a second dimension by telling that news conference quote, as you know, our country is in the final weeks of a hard fought national election. At a time like this, when a crisis hits, when our fellow citizens cry out and need, none of that matters. We're not talking about politics now. We have to all get together and get this solved. And then he proceeded to lie about the response, lie about the president, lie about the governor of Georgia, and reduce this tragedy to yet another Trump lies like other people's sweat moment, and a Trump will turn anything into a photo op moment, And having just said he's not talking about politics now, he will turn any photo op into an opportunity to lie about politics.

When you don't fact check anything Governor Walls gets wrong, what you'll get from Trump will be silence, blessed silence, no complaints for a day, or a week, or a month, there may be a year, and then someday, sooner or late, he will forget about that, and he will circle back to you at CBS and you will get the Google treatment from last week. Well, instead of where it said Google, it'll say CBS News, where he announces. It has been determined that CBS News has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump, some made up for this purpose, while at the same time only revealing good stories about whoever he doesn't like that day. This is an illegal activity and the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant interference of elections. If not, and subject to the laws of our country, I will request their prosecution. But don't worry about it, CBS. There's always the chance that despite the fact that you are on the wrong side of the famous quote that the famous eighteenth entry British politician Edmund Burke famously did not say that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Maybe what you are not doing, the nothing you are doing, maybe it won't help Trump regain power and put all of you in prison. Anyway, were there any doubt, it is now official. Trump's campaign is about lying. That it is only about lying. In the wake of Hurricane Helene, Trump goes to Valdosta, Georgia. They built him a little stage out of bricks that fell off a building there. Franklin Graham, an asshole, dragged some of his cultists out to stand there and bark like seals. There were as many of them, and as many of the first responders present diverted to protect him as there were residents, a couple of dozen of each. Maybe Trump then existed. Nobody saw this coming because it's past hurricane season, which actually goes to November, same as every year. And this all took some of us back to twenty nineteen and the Hurricane Dorian map, and the madness inside his brain so complete and insanity so untreatable that when he lied and said that the hurricane had been projected to hit Alabama, instead of just replacing that lie with a milder lie like I was given bad info, he actually drew on the map with a sharpie to extend the path of the hurricane, to make it look like he was right and everybody else in the world was wrong. And he got to Georgia and he lied. But it was a triple saturation lie. He began by posting lies online about supposed non response from the Biden administration and a Katrina like situation in the wake of the storm, and then he added to the lie a second dimension by telling that news conference quote, as you know, our country is in the final weeks of a hard fought national election. At a time like this, when a crisis hits, when our fellow citizens cry out and need, none of that matters. We're not talking about politics now. We have to all get together and get this solved. And then he proceeded to lie about the response, lie about the president, lie about the governor of Georgia, and reduce this tragedy to yet another Trump lies like other people's sweat moment, and a Trump will turn anything into a photo op moment, And having just said he's not talking about politics now, he will turn any photo op into an opportunity to lie about politics.

Now moment, the governor needs to he's been trying to get them, and I'm sure they're going to come through. But he's been calling the President, hasn't been able to get him, hasn't this called.

Now moment, the governor needs to he's been trying to get them, and I'm sure they're going to come through. But he's been calling the President, hasn't been able to get him, hasn't this called.

Me yesterday afternoon. I missed him and I called him right back and he just said, hey, what do you need? And I told him, you know, we got what we need. We'll work through the federal process. He offered that if there's other things we need, just to call him directly.

Me yesterday afternoon. I missed him and I called him right back and he just said, hey, what do you need? And I told him, you know, we got what we need. We'll work through the federal process. He offered that if there's other things we need, just to call him directly.

That second voice you heard was Governor Kemp saying, no, he didn't. He didn't call President Biden for help because Biden had called him first. And how did this most obvious and appalling of Trump's exploitations of American suffering in the last few weeks at least go over exactly as it always does. Some idiot on television news bought it completely. Yesterday's idiot turned out to be Kristin Holmes, National correspondent of CNN, and to the Trump lie about oh, I'm not here to talk politics, she actually said Trump was quote on the ground, tried to show he is there in support of the people on the ground in Georgia. And of course this comes as he is again offering a message of unity. He has spent the last several days slamming Kamala Harris's rival for not being on the ground, for not helping with this storm. Surprisingly enough, despite what has to be to some degree her shame, Kristin Holmes is expected to show up for work today at CNN rather than retire to the Andes on a religious retreat. The good news is Kristin Holmes was one of CNN's voter integrity correspondents during the twenty twenty election. Not reporter integrity. Voter integrity again. From the Yale historian Tim Snyder via The New York Times, Trump is in the classic dictatorial position. He needs to i in bed holding all executive power to stay out of prison. This means that he will do whatever he can to gain power, and once in power, will do all that he can to never let it go. This is a basic incentive structure which underlies everything else. It is entirely inconsistent with democracy. Timothy Snyder of Yale in that context, cancel the debate or Governor Walls metaphorically gut him like a fish. I'll leave you leavened with two kickers. Clarity campaign polling, which works for various Democratic groups has produced this rather startling national poll result. Ready Kala Harris fifty eight percent, JD Vance thirty seven percent. Wait what Harris fifty eight Vance thirty seven After hours of searching, I cannot find any other explanation for this. It's not a personal approval disapproval rating comparison between the presidential candidate of one party and the vice presidential candidate of the other. It does not seem to be some sort of typo. I can only conclude that they took a poll actually asking people. It says more than a thousand likely voters who they would vote for for president Harris or Vance, and then in that matchup, she's ahead by twenty one goddamn points, which is nice to know in case in the next five weeks Trump really does what I've suggested to him constantly since twenty sixteen, Trump really does in the next five weeks flee to Moscow and to circle back to the vice presidential debate. I'll confess I only saw this in a clip online. I cannot recall the last time I actually watched the network in question. It might have been twenty twenty one, But there is a promo box in the corner on MSNBC and technical jargon. It's called a bug promoting the network's preview show for the debate tonight. And it's got Rachel Meadow's face on it and a flag and a big MSNBC logo and vance versus Walls and the time and then the title of the show she is hosting before the debate, and the title of the show is Debate Countdown, and under that it says MSNBC. So it says countdown on MSNBC. Wait a minute, I've seen this part of this movie already. This is where I came in, Meadow filling in on Countdown on MSNBC. Yeah, put that on the list of deja vus. Also of interest here. I will have to wait until tomorrow so I can gather my thoughts because they are multilayered on the death of baseball's Pete Rose, the only athlete I know of who managed to fully embrace the words famous and infamous simultaneously for decades. As for today, Hey Republican candidate for the House from the Virginia seventh in your campaign photos, that's a lovely wife and kids you've got there. Who's are they? That's next? This is Countdown. This is Countdown, with Keith Olberman still ahead of us on this edition of Countdown. The Braves led the Mets three nothing in the top of the eighth, then the Mets led the Braves six to three in the bottom of the eighth, Then the Braves led the Mets seven to six in the top of the ninth. Then the Mets led the Braves eight to seven in the bottom of the ninth, then won the game to reach the playoffs. And it was rightly considered one of the all time most exciting baseball games. And it still doesn't reflect that games like that just thirty years ago meant you were four wins away from playing for its championship, playing in the World Series. Now it's like a month from now. Is the thrill of one game, the sort of artificial environment that creates a game like that worth the continuing downsizing of what used to be a stretch in which it felt like they were playing the Super Bowl every day for ten days. A reminiscence about going to see the Mets, the nineteen sixty nine Mets in the World Series ahead in things I promised not to tell first, there are still more new idiots talk about the daily roundup of the Miss Grant's morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens, who constitute today's worse persons in the world. Worse Derek Anderson, former Green Beret, now running for the House from the Virginia seventh. How Annie Carney and Katie Edmondson the reporters got this through The New York Times, deflavorizing and both sizzing machines. I will never know. Maybe they deliberately wrote this boring opening line. Wives are hitting the airwaves across the country. Three quarters of readers were asleep before the second the in that sentence, lives are hitting the airwaves across the But what the Times reporters revealed in the story is that Republican candidate Anderson in the Virginia seventh well quote, has posted footage of him posing with a woman and her three daughters in what looks like a photo that might be used for an annual holiday card. In another scene filmed for potential use in a campaign ad, mister Anderson is seated around the dining room table with the same woman and three girls, chatting and smiling. But the people are not relatives. They are the wife and children of a longtime friend. Mister Anderson, who announced this month that he was engaged, does not have any children of his own. His campaign website says he lives with his dog and does not display any of the photos. Are you saying there's something wrong with displaying photos of a man and his dog. A spokesman for mister Anderson criticized the New York Times decision to focus on the footage and said that Derek's opponent and every other candidate in America are in similar pictures and video with supporters of all kinds. The spokesman said the video simply showed mister Anderson quote with female supporters and their kids rent to kids. The guy got rent to kids for a commercial like JV Vance got to rent a dog like Trump got to rent a third wife. Is there anybody anybody at all in the Republican Party who is on the level anybody? Is it just hucksters? Now? Is there anybody with any self respect? Okay, I'll stop. We knew it the day Mitt Romney went to dinner to beg Trump for a job. The answers to my questions are no, no, no, no, and new the runner up worser annie Lynskey. Hey, it's Annie Day. Annie Lynskey works for the Wall Street Journal. They call her a reporter. I would, but she's not. She's just a bitter employee. Her job there is to take shots at Joe Biden whenever she can, gratuitous, irrelevant, invariably quickly disproven shots at Joe Biden. She was one of the authors of the hit piece last spring about his health, the one that only quoted Republicans and even then didn't quote Kevin McCarthy of all people, saying he never saw any slowness in the president, the one that the media thinks they got right because Yeah, Biden withdrew from the race because he was having trouble making public appearances. He didn't slow down, hasn't slowed down as president. There's nothing wrong with his presidency anyway. This Annie Lynskey is back back before the Washington Post report, or the Washington Post rather got rid of her. She was the reporter there who mocked Biden. Quote walking through a graveyard, That was Annie Lynsky quote. Biden goes to a church and walks through a graveyard in Wilmington, as his legislative agenda is dying in Washington. That was October third, twenty twenty one. That was three years ago. At face value, it was tasteless as it was, but annie Lynskey either didn't know enough about her own job, or didn't care enough, or did it deliberately one way or the other. She evinced no knowledge that the graveyard in Wilmington was the one in which the president's late son, and his late daughter and his first wife are all buried. Well, yes, annie Lynsky's back. Yesterday, Biden, suffering from a cold, became testy when asked why he was in Delaware over the weekend amid the storm. I understand she now works for a fascist Murdock propaganda sheet. But what I will never understand is and all the right wingers picked this up too, thanks to people like annie Lynsky. How at her age, she has not yet figured out that people record audio and video of these things. I mean, I know that's new. The handheld cassette tape recorder just came onto the market in nineteen sixty six, and they didn't have walk bands that you could hold in your hand and record anything until like nineteen seventy nine, and that iPhone at brand you can still have your new iPhone from two thousand and seven. Here is the President of the United States not becoming testy, even though Annie Lynsky lied that he became testy.

That second voice you heard was Governor Kemp saying, no, he didn't. He didn't call President Biden for help because Biden had called him first. And how did this most obvious and appalling of Trump's exploitations of American suffering in the last few weeks at least go over exactly as it always does. Some idiot on television news bought it completely. Yesterday's idiot turned out to be Kristin Holmes, National correspondent of CNN, and to the Trump lie about oh, I'm not here to talk politics, she actually said Trump was quote on the ground, tried to show he is there in support of the people on the ground in Georgia. And of course this comes as he is again offering a message of unity. He has spent the last several days slamming Kamala Harris's rival for not being on the ground, for not helping with this storm. Surprisingly enough, despite what has to be to some degree her shame, Kristin Holmes is expected to show up for work today at CNN rather than retire to the Andes on a religious retreat. The good news is Kristin Holmes was one of CNN's voter integrity correspondents during the twenty twenty election. Not reporter integrity. Voter integrity again. From the Yale historian Tim Snyder via The New York Times, Trump is in the classic dictatorial position. He needs to i in bed holding all executive power to stay out of prison. This means that he will do whatever he can to gain power, and once in power, will do all that he can to never let it go. This is a basic incentive structure which underlies everything else. It is entirely inconsistent with democracy. Timothy Snyder of Yale in that context, cancel the debate or Governor Walls metaphorically gut him like a fish. I'll leave you leavened with two kickers. Clarity campaign polling, which works for various Democratic groups has produced this rather startling national poll result. Ready Kala Harris fifty eight percent, JD Vance thirty seven percent. Wait what Harris fifty eight Vance thirty seven After hours of searching, I cannot find any other explanation for this. It's not a personal approval disapproval rating comparison between the presidential candidate of one party and the vice presidential candidate of the other. It does not seem to be some sort of typo. I can only conclude that they took a poll actually asking people. It says more than a thousand likely voters who they would vote for for president Harris or Vance, and then in that matchup, she's ahead by twenty one goddamn points, which is nice to know in case in the next five weeks Trump really does what I've suggested to him constantly since twenty sixteen, Trump really does in the next five weeks flee to Moscow and to circle back to the vice presidential debate. I'll confess I only saw this in a clip online. I cannot recall the last time I actually watched the network in question. It might have been twenty twenty one, But there is a promo box in the corner on MSNBC and technical jargon. It's called a bug promoting the network's preview show for the debate tonight. And it's got Rachel Meadow's face on it and a flag and a big MSNBC logo and vance versus Walls and the time and then the title of the show she is hosting before the debate, and the title of the show is Debate Countdown, and under that it says MSNBC. So it says countdown on MSNBC. Wait a minute, I've seen this part of this movie already. This is where I came in, Meadow filling in on Countdown on MSNBC. Yeah, put that on the list of deja vus. Also of interest here. I will have to wait until tomorrow so I can gather my thoughts because they are multilayered on the death of baseball's Pete Rose, the only athlete I know of who managed to fully embrace the words famous and infamous simultaneously for decades. As for today, Hey Republican candidate for the House from the Virginia seventh in your campaign photos, that's a lovely wife and kids you've got there. Who's are they? That's next? This is Countdown. This is Countdown, with Keith Olberman still ahead of us on this edition of Countdown. The Braves led the Mets three nothing in the top of the eighth, then the Mets led the Braves six to three in the bottom of the eighth, Then the Braves led the Mets seven to six in the top of the ninth. Then the Mets led the Braves eight to seven in the bottom of the ninth, then won the game to reach the playoffs. And it was rightly considered one of the all time most exciting baseball games. And it still doesn't reflect that games like that just thirty years ago meant you were four wins away from playing for its championship, playing in the World Series. Now it's like a month from now. Is the thrill of one game, the sort of artificial environment that creates a game like that worth the continuing downsizing of what used to be a stretch in which it felt like they were playing the Super Bowl every day for ten days. A reminiscence about going to see the Mets, the nineteen sixty nine Mets in the World Series ahead in things I promised not to tell first, there are still more new idiots talk about the daily roundup of the Miss Grant's morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens, who constitute today's worse persons in the world. Worse Derek Anderson, former Green Beret, now running for the House from the Virginia seventh. How Annie Carney and Katie Edmondson the reporters got this through The New York Times, deflavorizing and both sizzing machines. I will never know. Maybe they deliberately wrote this boring opening line. Wives are hitting the airwaves across the country. Three quarters of readers were asleep before the second the in that sentence, lives are hitting the airwaves across the But what the Times reporters revealed in the story is that Republican candidate Anderson in the Virginia seventh well quote, has posted footage of him posing with a woman and her three daughters in what looks like a photo that might be used for an annual holiday card. In another scene filmed for potential use in a campaign ad, mister Anderson is seated around the dining room table with the same woman and three girls, chatting and smiling. But the people are not relatives. They are the wife and children of a longtime friend. Mister Anderson, who announced this month that he was engaged, does not have any children of his own. His campaign website says he lives with his dog and does not display any of the photos. Are you saying there's something wrong with displaying photos of a man and his dog. A spokesman for mister Anderson criticized the New York Times decision to focus on the footage and said that Derek's opponent and every other candidate in America are in similar pictures and video with supporters of all kinds. The spokesman said the video simply showed mister Anderson quote with female supporters and their kids rent to kids. The guy got rent to kids for a commercial like JV Vance got to rent a dog like Trump got to rent a third wife. Is there anybody anybody at all in the Republican Party who is on the level anybody? Is it just hucksters? Now? Is there anybody with any self respect? Okay, I'll stop. We knew it the day Mitt Romney went to dinner to beg Trump for a job. The answers to my questions are no, no, no, no, and new the runner up worser annie Lynskey. Hey, it's Annie Day. Annie Lynskey works for the Wall Street Journal. They call her a reporter. I would, but she's not. She's just a bitter employee. Her job there is to take shots at Joe Biden whenever she can, gratuitous, irrelevant, invariably quickly disproven shots at Joe Biden. She was one of the authors of the hit piece last spring about his health, the one that only quoted Republicans and even then didn't quote Kevin McCarthy of all people, saying he never saw any slowness in the president, the one that the media thinks they got right because Yeah, Biden withdrew from the race because he was having trouble making public appearances. He didn't slow down, hasn't slowed down as president. There's nothing wrong with his presidency anyway. This Annie Lynskey is back back before the Washington Post report, or the Washington Post rather got rid of her. She was the reporter there who mocked Biden. Quote walking through a graveyard, That was Annie Lynsky quote. Biden goes to a church and walks through a graveyard in Wilmington, as his legislative agenda is dying in Washington. That was October third, twenty twenty one. That was three years ago. At face value, it was tasteless as it was, but annie Lynskey either didn't know enough about her own job, or didn't care enough, or did it deliberately one way or the other. She evinced no knowledge that the graveyard in Wilmington was the one in which the president's late son, and his late daughter and his first wife are all buried. Well, yes, annie Lynsky's back. Yesterday, Biden, suffering from a cold, became testy when asked why he was in Delaware over the weekend amid the storm. I understand she now works for a fascist Murdock propaganda sheet. But what I will never understand is and all the right wingers picked this up too, thanks to people like annie Lynsky. How at her age, she has not yet figured out that people record audio and video of these things. I mean, I know that's new. The handheld cassette tape recorder just came onto the market in nineteen sixty six, and they didn't have walk bands that you could hold in your hand and record anything until like nineteen seventy nine, and that iPhone at brand you can still have your new iPhone from two thousand and seven. Here is the President of the United States not becoming testy, even though Annie Lynsky lied that he became testy.

Why byn't she and Vice President Harris Sharon Washington commanding this just be had I was getting it.

Why byn't she and Vice President Harris Sharon Washington commanding this just be had I was getting it.

I was on the phone for at least two hours yesterday in the day before as well.

I was on the phone for at least two hours yesterday in the day before as well.

I commend this all the telephone. It's all my security.

I commend this all the telephone. It's all my security.

It's an order for the country to see.

It's an order for the country to see.

That's the President of the United States exit stage right, closing the door on that idiot reporter. And I tried it. I've been unable to reveal who that is. I'll get it eventually. That is called Joe Biden calling out a lie from a liar posing as a reporter. He didn't swear, he didn't mock, he didn't become testy, he didn't shoot the guy a dirty look. But what he also didn't do was bow and curtsey to the guy or the annie Lynskys of this world. And what you saw in this story Biden became testy is half of the essence of the problem with our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying news media. The only things most of them really pay attention to are when somebody in power makes them feel good, or when they can make somebody in power feel bad. Say something snotty and factually erroneous to the President of the United States, as the reporter who asked that question did, and if he's Biden and he doesn't defer to you, and I know him a long time, he doesn't defer to you, and so you then after he leaves, you go take the opportunity to scurry back into your rat hole and you tweet something mean about how testy he is. You know who's testy here, Annie Lynsky, you're testy. Now. If you say something like that about Trump, you'll get fired, or if he's reelected, you'll have your new Trump journalism license revoked. Annie, first offense, second offense, you go to Trump journalistic re education camp. I hate people like this. I hate them all. We could fire all the reporters except for like the top three percent in this country tomorrow and replace them either with the average sports reporter or the average college senior or post grad student in journalism in this country, and the quality ofjournalism in this nation tomorrow first day would improve by five to ten percent. Immediately, but the winner the worst. John Roberts, Chief Justice of the United States of America. Oh, you want to tales right, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. The anniversary is Thursday. It's forty one years now. But the leaf Lever News podcast master Plan mentioned this the other day. It's a memo to Reagan advisor Fred Fielding. We used to work for a friend of mine in the Nixon White House, Dean somebody. It was from one of the young in this case, twenty eight year old lawyers, one of the associates in the Office of White House Counsel Under Reagan. There is a proposal in the Senate in nineteen eighty three, as this is written, a bill that would launch a constitutional amendment to end lifetime appointments for federal judges and limit them to ten years on the bench. Fielding is asked for an analysis and advice because Reagan wants the Department of Justice to publicly oppose the proposed amendment, because of course he's coming up for election and the idea of term limits or age limits was going to be really bad for Ronald Reagan in nineteen eighty four. Yes, we need somebody's less than two hundred and six or unf President Reagan, I need to see you. But this kid in the Council's office who's writing to Fred Fielding, he's not so sure that this is that bad an idea. This is what he wrote. The Justice report is similar to other reports it has filed in recent years, and I do not propose to object to it. I would point out, however, that there is much to be said for changing life tenure to a term of years without possibility of reappointment. The Framers adopted life tenure at a time when people simply did not live as long as they do now. A judge insulated from the normal currents of life for twenty five or thirty years was a rarity then, but is becoming commonplace today. Setting a term of say, fifteen years, would ensure that federal judges would not lose all touch with reality through decades of Ivory Tower existence. It would also provide a more regular and greater degree of turnover among the judges. Both developments would, in my view, be healthy ones. Denying reappointment would eliminate any significant threat to judicial independence. The memos suggesting hey, you know what, the federal judges and the Supreme Court justices just aren't dying as fast as they used to. Was sent to Reagan advisor Fred Fielding forty one years ago Thursday by John Roberts, who, if it had been adopted, would have retired this week as Chief Justice this week in twenty twenty, like Thomas would have retired from the bench of the Supreme Court in two thousand and six Alito in twenty twenty one. Hell, if this had been passed nine years from next week, we'd be having the farewell party for Brett f and Kavanaugh. Don't bother to b Yob, John, Always go with your first idea, Roberts two days worst person. Hello, the number one story on the Countdown now and it's my favorite topic. Me and things I promised not to tell. I was ten years old, and I'm not sure that this was the last week that baseball was more important than nearly everything else in this country. But if not, the chronology is pretty close by legend in my hometown, Miss Barton had been standing on Farragut Parkway when they decided to put the school there in nineteen oh five, so they just built it around her. In fact, she had only been at the head of her homeroom since nineteen forty two, but for us seventh graders of the year nineteen sixty nine, the year nineteen forty two might as well have been a date from the reign of Julius Caesar. Miss Barton was friendly but formidable, and what if any connection she had to the world outside school eluded us In retrospect, it took a good deal of courage for me to have handed her the note my mother had scribbled asking her permission for me to miss school on October fifteenth, nineteen sixty nine. She read it, and she looked up at me with unalloyed shock, and I knew my plans were doomed. And then she smiled broadly and warmly. It was not the last time any of us sought, but it probably was the first time we had seen her smile. You're going to the World Series? Have you got an extra ticket? They were all like that. Mister Madolinski, the science teacher, who looked like nothing less than a proto Nathan Lane, had not only accepted my carrying a transistor, radio and an earphone into class, but he had periodically called on me during science class for the score. Mister bub the hard assed phized teacher who once fended off twenty seven kids who tried to force him into the showers on the last day of school, suggested that when I went to Game four, I should bring a movie camera with me and we could watch the highlights instead of Jim whenever the film got back from the developers. The social studies teacher, my favorite missus Rice, the first love of my life, out did them all. She moved my chair up next to the blackboard and turned a corner of that blackboard into a makeshift scoreboard. Every half inning, and in those days you could cram a lot of half into your average seventh grade social studies class, not just like one or two half innings. I would add a digit to the line score Baltimore zero zero three, Mets zero zero zero. My dad got somewhere two tickets for Game four. It turned out to be the Tom Seaverer game. It ended in JC Martin's bunt thrown away down the first baseline by relief fitcher Pete Rickord of Baltimore, with pinch runner Rod Gasbar of the Mets scoring the winning run in the tenth I got to know all those guys I sent Rod Gasbar some previously unseen photos of him crossing the plate. He sent one back, autographed, inscribed Keith, thanks for attending Game four of the nineteen sixty nine World Series, Please drive home safely. My dad and I in fact took the train in from Westchester. I think we went first, at his insistence, to Barney's, which was then exclusively a men's clothing store in Union's Square. That's where I got my first adult style suit with a tailor and everything. And then up to Times Square to change trains, where we were nearly run over by the Moratorium Day protesters. That was Moratorium Day, the first big nationwide protest against the Vietnam War, October fifteenth, nineteen sixty nine. We changed trains and then out to Chase Stadium by the number seven. The seats on that perfect crystal day were in distant left field, but I had brought my binoculars, really my dad's, and they brought me into the game. I could see the Commissioner of Baseball clearly, and stand Musials sitting next to him, and sitting next to the Mets dugout, and I could see the sweat on Tom Seever's face as he delivered strike after strike and the emotion I had when I got home that night, a temporary Mets fan because the Orioles always beat up my Yankees, that emotion was simple. Whatever else would happen in my life, I had done it. I had been to a World Series game. I was the envy of my classmates for months. The previous school year, they had herded us all into the vast Cobwebby auditorium at the top of the school to watch Richard Nixon's first inauguration. Several times. They had done the same thing for Gemini and the Pollo space launches, but those had tangible, albeit to us vague connections to you know, actual school work. The World Series, however, was apparently more important than school work. It was more important than school. I don't remember anything else that adults would admit was more important than school all these years later, and hearing those words world and Series still sends a chill through me as reflexively as the loudest Pavlovian bell. I could not have known then I was part of the last generation to be so indoctrinated. I assumed it had always been that way, and it always would be, and it no longer is the twenty twenty two World Series was the third worst rated in television history, not quite as bad as twenty twenty one, which itself was not quite as bad as twenty twenty. There's a myriad of causes. I have about five hundred and seventeen more television and streaming channels to choose from than I did in October nineteen sixty nine. I mean, we didn't even have the color TV yet in October nineteen sixty nine, at least not an our house. I have at least five times more TV channels than I did in October two thousand and one. And similarly, baseball no longer dwarfs the sports landscape, even just for the World Series. The de nationalizing of baseball was symbolized by the presence of two geographically homogeneous teams. Formerly a boon ratings now a curse. This was the two thousand World Series, the Mets and the Yankees, the dream of every New York sports fan, and nobody cared outside of New York the beginning of the end. Yet the underlying cost of baseball's malaise is that, like me, the owners just assumed it would always be the way it was in nineteen sixty nine. I had an excuse for believing that I was ten. Their excuse that mentally they're all ten is insufficient. All but a few of the owners have failed to understand television in any way other than as a revenue source. They have never recognized its function as merchandising, even as a mechanism for proselytizing. They didn't know about miss Barton and mister Madolinsky and missus Rice, and they did not care about them. They didn't know about the kids with their cheesy white plastic earplugs and their scratchy transistor radios. They didn't cultivate the tradition they had been given by their forebears in the first half of the twentieth century. They let the World Series become less important than schools, and less important than the NBA, and less important than Taylor Swift. That's what they needed. They needed to get Taylor Swift to go with Travis Kelcey to that playoff game. It takes a certain foresight to say to a television executive, no, we can't play the whole World Series at night because the kids won't be able to watch. We can't bend to society and prime time and the other sports and demographics. Because to do that is to lessen the obligation to watch the World Series. We have to play some day games. Here's some of the money back. It would take a certain foresight and reproductive organs the size of I don't know, fill in the analogy yourself. As evidenced by well everything. Baseball owners don't have them or the foresight to plan for the twelve inning of a game, let alone twelve years from now. They did not write off the few million less NBC would have paid them as seed money for this. Instead, it's the World Series that has gone to seed, sometimes being reduced to being the symbolic filler between Fox's next two promos for this year's implausible sitcom. As I've discussed here previously, Baseball's owners never noticed that the separation and isolation of the two leagues had assured that while the audience might be divided among the fans of sixteen, then twenty, then twenty four then twenty six different teams, it also meant that nearly all of them also divided into two groups, American League fans and National League fans, so that even if their quote own team unquote was not in the World Series, they still had a rooting interest in the World Series and a re to watch to see their league win or, as in my case as an American League fan when I was ten years old, to see their league lose because it was the Baltimore Orioles and they beat the crap out of my Yankees. I was not rooting for the Mets in the nineteen sixty nine World Series. I was rooting against the hated Baltimore Orioles. TV usually takes the sole blame when this subject is introduced, but I know from my own experience when the executives who make the nuts and bolts decisions about televising baseball seeing them actually do it, that they have done everything but beg the owners to return daylight to the series, and not just when the games have to start at five pm Pacific for the sake of the East Coast audience. One of my bosses, Dick eversaw, the head of NBC Sports, sat there rejiggering the first pitch times for one series. No, no tell, buddy, he has to start Wednesday at eight thirty seven and not eight o seven. He knows that we've got a sitcom premiering on Wednesday. He told me about offering to split the difference in the revenue lost because of a late afternoon start on a Saturday. I told Buddy, think of the future. He kept saying, think of the money. It isn't just the sizzle, of course, there are now severe problems with the stake as well. In Bob Costas's memorable phrase, as my friend put it, the wild card has indeed turned the series into the MLB Finals. The viewers were way ahead of the Cognizani on this celebration of mediocrity. Amid all the explanations for the ever plummeting ratings, the simplest one inevitably gets bypassed. If you're scoring at home, or even if you're just by yourself. This just isn't very good baseball played by not really that good baseball teams. Five hundred foot homers and no hitters with multiple pitchers in them and seventeen strikeout games. They are impressed, But if they happen every night, they take on the falsity of the plot twists in pro wrestling, and in a sports world full to overflowing with last second touchdowns, buzzer beaters from the popcorn stand. All offense, all the time is no longer enough to hide the fact that to be watchable baseball has to be a balance of hitting and pitching. In one year, the number of World Series starting pitchers who lasted seven innings or more dropped from nine to none. One day, all the runs in the world next day, a no hitter. Same two teams, same two lineups. In the old days, the pretenders, one dimensional teams like last year's Phillies, were eliminated in the slow but fair crucible of the regular season. If the best team in baseball occasionally had a bad week and undeservedly lost the World Series, that merely served to create endless spodder for the off season, something for people to talk about until March. Now the candidates for best team in twenty twenty two. That was the Braves, the Dodgers, even the Mets. They can be eliminated almost by chance at two levels, even before they stagger into a sometimes anti climactic World Series. There are now two nightmare scenarios for the television ratings. If they had continued to decline at the rate they did in the ten years after nineteen ninety one, ratings for the World Series of twenty twenty five would be about a tenth of what they were in nineteen ninety one. The collapse slowed, however, great news twenty twenty two ratings were one quarter what they had been in nineteen ninety one. That they weren't one tenth is the good news. It is no coincidence that the three worst rated World Series of all times have all occurred since twenty twenty. The regular season has already been new to even the teams given new free stadiums are beginning to fail. The owners know this, and they floated an obvious solution. They added more wildcard teams. Throughout the eighteen eighties, the nascent World Series it was called the World's Championship Series. It was the World Series was mismanaged completely from an instant attention grabber in eighteen eighty four where the winners of the American Association and the National League said, hey, we should have a series to determine which of US's best. From that explosive big bang berth, it was turned into an endless traveling freak show by eighteen eighty seven. In eighteen eighty seven, they played best eight out of fifteen, and they kept playing it in different cities. It wasn't just the two cities of the two teams in it, Detroit and Saint Louis. The eighteen eighty seven World Series was played in ten different cities, and the denumont of labor wars and over expansion came in eighteen ninety. The eighteen ninety World Series pitted the Louisville Cyclones, who had risen from worst to first in the American Association, which was a major League, against the Brooklyn Bridegrooms, who had won the American Association pennant the year before eighteen eighty nine, and then the franchise just jumped into the National League for eighteen ninety and won that pennant. There were storylines of plenty, but so full of rancor and devoid of talent was the eighteen ninety World Series that, even though the host Brooklyn Bridegrooms entered Game seven leading Louisville three games to two, Game three had been a tie, they needed just two more wins for the title. The crowd the crowd for that game Game seven of the World Series in Brooklyn three hundred fans. Louisville then tied the series in that game three wins apiece and a tie, and they would need a decisive eighth game and the rest of the series, and they never played it. They abandoned the World Series tied three and three and one quote. There is scarcely enough interest in the series, noted a writer for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. To induce the people to read the scores. The most frightening part about that quote that's from eighteen ninety. I felt that way the last three octobers during the World Series. The world has made itself over a thousand times. Since that sobering revolt by the board against the boring baseball's resiliency reminds us that the World Series broadcast might still inspire another generation wearing not transistor plugs but buds hooked up to a live stream. Or like that unhappy eighteen ninety classic, the whole thing could wind up getting canceled, and this time it'll be canceled by TV executives. I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. We're now back to five episodes a week, posting nightly just after midnight Easter. Once again, there is a Monday countdown and tell the others. Please send this podcast to somebody who does not listen yet but could benefit from my analysis of stuff. Brian Ray and John Phillip Shanelle, the musical directors, have Countdown, arranged, produced, and performed most of our music. Mister Schanale handled orchestration and keyboards. Mister Ray was on guitars, bass and drums. It was produced by Tko Brothers. Our satirical and fifty musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faus. The sports music is the Olberman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis Curtesy of ESPN Inc. Other music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. My announcer today was my friend John Dean. Everything else was as usual, pretty much my fault. That's countdown for today. Five weeks until the twenty twenty four presidential election, the one three hundred and sixty fifth day since convicted felon drooling Jay Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the United States. Use the election, use the mental health system, use presidential immunity if we have to to keep him from doing it again. Wow, we still can. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Bulletins as the news requires. Until then, I'm Keith Olberman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, 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.

That's the President of the United States exit stage right, closing the door on that idiot reporter. And I tried it. I've been unable to reveal who that is. I'll get it eventually. That is called Joe Biden calling out a lie from a liar posing as a reporter. He didn't swear, he didn't mock, he didn't become testy, he didn't shoot the guy a dirty look. But what he also didn't do was bow and curtsey to the guy or the annie Lynskys of this world. And what you saw in this story Biden became testy is half of the essence of the problem with our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying news media. The only things most of them really pay attention to are when somebody in power makes them feel good, or when they can make somebody in power feel bad. Say something snotty and factually erroneous to the President of the United States, as the reporter who asked that question did, and if he's Biden and he doesn't defer to you, and I know him a long time, he doesn't defer to you, and so you then after he leaves, you go take the opportunity to scurry back into your rat hole and you tweet something mean about how testy he is. You know who's testy here, Annie Lynsky, you're testy. Now. If you say something like that about Trump, you'll get fired, or if he's reelected, you'll have your new Trump journalism license revoked. Annie, first offense, second offense, you go to Trump journalistic re education camp. I hate people like this. I hate them all. We could fire all the reporters except for like the top three percent in this country tomorrow and replace them either with the average sports reporter or the average college senior or post grad student in journalism in this country, and the quality ofjournalism in this nation tomorrow first day would improve by five to ten percent. Immediately, but the winner the worst. John Roberts, Chief Justice of the United States of America. Oh, you want to tales right, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. The anniversary is Thursday. It's forty one years now. But the leaf Lever News podcast master Plan mentioned this the other day. It's a memo to Reagan advisor Fred Fielding. We used to work for a friend of mine in the Nixon White House, Dean somebody. It was from one of the young in this case, twenty eight year old lawyers, one of the associates in the Office of White House Counsel Under Reagan. There is a proposal in the Senate in nineteen eighty three, as this is written, a bill that would launch a constitutional amendment to end lifetime appointments for federal judges and limit them to ten years on the bench. Fielding is asked for an analysis and advice because Reagan wants the Department of Justice to publicly oppose the proposed amendment, because of course he's coming up for election and the idea of term limits or age limits was going to be really bad for Ronald Reagan in nineteen eighty four. Yes, we need somebody's less than two hundred and six or unf President Reagan, I need to see you. But this kid in the Council's office who's writing to Fred Fielding, he's not so sure that this is that bad an idea. This is what he wrote. The Justice report is similar to other reports it has filed in recent years, and I do not propose to object to it. I would point out, however, that there is much to be said for changing life tenure to a term of years without possibility of reappointment. The Framers adopted life tenure at a time when people simply did not live as long as they do now. A judge insulated from the normal currents of life for twenty five or thirty years was a rarity then, but is becoming commonplace today. Setting a term of say, fifteen years, would ensure that federal judges would not lose all touch with reality through decades of Ivory Tower existence. It would also provide a more regular and greater degree of turnover among the judges. Both developments would, in my view, be healthy ones. Denying reappointment would eliminate any significant threat to judicial independence. The memos suggesting hey, you know what, the federal judges and the Supreme Court justices just aren't dying as fast as they used to. Was sent to Reagan advisor Fred Fielding forty one years ago Thursday by John Roberts, who, if it had been adopted, would have retired this week as Chief Justice this week in twenty twenty, like Thomas would have retired from the bench of the Supreme Court in two thousand and six Alito in twenty twenty one. Hell, if this had been passed nine years from next week, we'd be having the farewell party for Brett f and Kavanaugh. Don't bother to b Yob, John, Always go with your first idea, Roberts two days worst person. Hello, the number one story on the Countdown now and it's my favorite topic. Me and things I promised not to tell. I was ten years old, and I'm not sure that this was the last week that baseball was more important than nearly everything else in this country. But if not, the chronology is pretty close by legend in my hometown, Miss Barton had been standing on Farragut Parkway when they decided to put the school there in nineteen oh five, so they just built it around her. In fact, she had only been at the head of her homeroom since nineteen forty two, but for us seventh graders of the year nineteen sixty nine, the year nineteen forty two might as well have been a date from the reign of Julius Caesar. Miss Barton was friendly but formidable, and what if any connection she had to the world outside school eluded us In retrospect, it took a good deal of courage for me to have handed her the note my mother had scribbled asking her permission for me to miss school on October fifteenth, nineteen sixty nine. She read it, and she looked up at me with unalloyed shock, and I knew my plans were doomed. And then she smiled broadly and warmly. It was not the last time any of us sought, but it probably was the first time we had seen her smile. You're going to the World Series? Have you got an extra ticket? They were all like that. Mister Madolinski, the science teacher, who looked like nothing less than a proto Nathan Lane, had not only accepted my carrying a transistor, radio and an earphone into class, but he had periodically called on me during science class for the score. Mister bub the hard assed phized teacher who once fended off twenty seven kids who tried to force him into the showers on the last day of school, suggested that when I went to Game four, I should bring a movie camera with me and we could watch the highlights instead of Jim whenever the film got back from the developers. The social studies teacher, my favorite missus Rice, the first love of my life, out did them all. She moved my chair up next to the blackboard and turned a corner of that blackboard into a makeshift scoreboard. Every half inning, and in those days you could cram a lot of half into your average seventh grade social studies class, not just like one or two half innings. I would add a digit to the line score Baltimore zero zero three, Mets zero zero zero. My dad got somewhere two tickets for Game four. It turned out to be the Tom Seaverer game. It ended in JC Martin's bunt thrown away down the first baseline by relief fitcher Pete Rickord of Baltimore, with pinch runner Rod Gasbar of the Mets scoring the winning run in the tenth I got to know all those guys I sent Rod Gasbar some previously unseen photos of him crossing the plate. He sent one back, autographed, inscribed Keith, thanks for attending Game four of the nineteen sixty nine World Series, Please drive home safely. My dad and I in fact took the train in from Westchester. I think we went first, at his insistence, to Barney's, which was then exclusively a men's clothing store in Union's Square. That's where I got my first adult style suit with a tailor and everything. And then up to Times Square to change trains, where we were nearly run over by the Moratorium Day protesters. That was Moratorium Day, the first big nationwide protest against the Vietnam War, October fifteenth, nineteen sixty nine. We changed trains and then out to Chase Stadium by the number seven. The seats on that perfect crystal day were in distant left field, but I had brought my binoculars, really my dad's, and they brought me into the game. I could see the Commissioner of Baseball clearly, and stand Musials sitting next to him, and sitting next to the Mets dugout, and I could see the sweat on Tom Seever's face as he delivered strike after strike and the emotion I had when I got home that night, a temporary Mets fan because the Orioles always beat up my Yankees, that emotion was simple. Whatever else would happen in my life, I had done it. I had been to a World Series game. I was the envy of my classmates for months. The previous school year, they had herded us all into the vast Cobwebby auditorium at the top of the school to watch Richard Nixon's first inauguration. Several times. They had done the same thing for Gemini and the Pollo space launches, but those had tangible, albeit to us vague connections to you know, actual school work. The World Series, however, was apparently more important than school work. It was more important than school. I don't remember anything else that adults would admit was more important than school all these years later, and hearing those words world and Series still sends a chill through me as reflexively as the loudest Pavlovian bell. I could not have known then I was part of the last generation to be so indoctrinated. I assumed it had always been that way, and it always would be, and it no longer is the twenty twenty two World Series was the third worst rated in television history, not quite as bad as twenty twenty one, which itself was not quite as bad as twenty twenty. There's a myriad of causes. I have about five hundred and seventeen more television and streaming channels to choose from than I did in October nineteen sixty nine. I mean, we didn't even have the color TV yet in October nineteen sixty nine, at least not an our house. I have at least five times more TV channels than I did in October two thousand and one. And similarly, baseball no longer dwarfs the sports landscape, even just for the World Series. The de nationalizing of baseball was symbolized by the presence of two geographically homogeneous teams. Formerly a boon ratings now a curse. This was the two thousand World Series, the Mets and the Yankees, the dream of every New York sports fan, and nobody cared outside of New York the beginning of the end. Yet the underlying cost of baseball's malaise is that, like me, the owners just assumed it would always be the way it was in nineteen sixty nine. I had an excuse for believing that I was ten. Their excuse that mentally they're all ten is insufficient. All but a few of the owners have failed to understand television in any way other than as a revenue source. They have never recognized its function as merchandising, even as a mechanism for proselytizing. They didn't know about miss Barton and mister Madolinsky and missus Rice, and they did not care about them. They didn't know about the kids with their cheesy white plastic earplugs and their scratchy transistor radios. They didn't cultivate the tradition they had been given by their forebears in the first half of the twentieth century. They let the World Series become less important than schools, and less important than the NBA, and less important than Taylor Swift. That's what they needed. They needed to get Taylor Swift to go with Travis Kelcey to that playoff game. It takes a certain foresight to say to a television executive, no, we can't play the whole World Series at night because the kids won't be able to watch. We can't bend to society and prime time and the other sports and demographics. Because to do that is to lessen the obligation to watch the World Series. We have to play some day games. Here's some of the money back. It would take a certain foresight and reproductive organs the size of I don't know, fill in the analogy yourself. As evidenced by well everything. Baseball owners don't have them or the foresight to plan for the twelve inning of a game, let alone twelve years from now. They did not write off the few million less NBC would have paid them as seed money for this. Instead, it's the World Series that has gone to seed, sometimes being reduced to being the symbolic filler between Fox's next two promos for this year's implausible sitcom. As I've discussed here previously, Baseball's owners never noticed that the separation and isolation of the two leagues had assured that while the audience might be divided among the fans of sixteen, then twenty, then twenty four then twenty six different teams, it also meant that nearly all of them also divided into two groups, American League fans and National League fans, so that even if their quote own team unquote was not in the World Series, they still had a rooting interest in the World Series and a re to watch to see their league win or, as in my case as an American League fan when I was ten years old, to see their league lose because it was the Baltimore Orioles and they beat the crap out of my Yankees. I was not rooting for the Mets in the nineteen sixty nine World Series. I was rooting against the hated Baltimore Orioles. TV usually takes the sole blame when this subject is introduced, but I know from my own experience when the executives who make the nuts and bolts decisions about televising baseball seeing them actually do it, that they have done everything but beg the owners to return daylight to the series, and not just when the games have to start at five pm Pacific for the sake of the East Coast audience. One of my bosses, Dick eversaw, the head of NBC Sports, sat there rejiggering the first pitch times for one series. No, no tell, buddy, he has to start Wednesday at eight thirty seven and not eight o seven. He knows that we've got a sitcom premiering on Wednesday. He told me about offering to split the difference in the revenue lost because of a late afternoon start on a Saturday. I told Buddy, think of the future. He kept saying, think of the money. It isn't just the sizzle, of course, there are now severe problems with the stake as well. In Bob Costas's memorable phrase, as my friend put it, the wild card has indeed turned the series into the MLB Finals. The viewers were way ahead of the Cognizani on this celebration of mediocrity. Amid all the explanations for the ever plummeting ratings, the simplest one inevitably gets bypassed. If you're scoring at home, or even if you're just by yourself. This just isn't very good baseball played by not really that good baseball teams. Five hundred foot homers and no hitters with multiple pitchers in them and seventeen strikeout games. They are impressed, But if they happen every night, they take on the falsity of the plot twists in pro wrestling, and in a sports world full to overflowing with last second touchdowns, buzzer beaters from the popcorn stand. All offense, all the time is no longer enough to hide the fact that to be watchable baseball has to be a balance of hitting and pitching. In one year, the number of World Series starting pitchers who lasted seven innings or more dropped from nine to none. One day, all the runs in the world next day, a no hitter. Same two teams, same two lineups. In the old days, the pretenders, one dimensional teams like last year's Phillies, were eliminated in the slow but fair crucible of the regular season. If the best team in baseball occasionally had a bad week and undeservedly lost the World Series, that merely served to create endless spodder for the off season, something for people to talk about until March. Now the candidates for best team in twenty twenty two. That was the Braves, the Dodgers, even the Mets. They can be eliminated almost by chance at two levels, even before they stagger into a sometimes anti climactic World Series. There are now two nightmare scenarios for the television ratings. If they had continued to decline at the rate they did in the ten years after nineteen ninety one, ratings for the World Series of twenty twenty five would be about a tenth of what they were in nineteen ninety one. The collapse slowed, however, great news twenty twenty two ratings were one quarter what they had been in nineteen ninety one. That they weren't one tenth is the good news. It is no coincidence that the three worst rated World Series of all times have all occurred since twenty twenty. The regular season has already been new to even the teams given new free stadiums are beginning to fail. The owners know this, and they floated an obvious solution. They added more wildcard teams. Throughout the eighteen eighties, the nascent World Series it was called the World's Championship Series. It was the World Series was mismanaged completely from an instant attention grabber in eighteen eighty four where the winners of the American Association and the National League said, hey, we should have a series to determine which of US's best. From that explosive big bang berth, it was turned into an endless traveling freak show by eighteen eighty seven. In eighteen eighty seven, they played best eight out of fifteen, and they kept playing it in different cities. It wasn't just the two cities of the two teams in it, Detroit and Saint Louis. The eighteen eighty seven World Series was played in ten different cities, and the denumont of labor wars and over expansion came in eighteen ninety. The eighteen ninety World Series pitted the Louisville Cyclones, who had risen from worst to first in the American Association, which was a major League, against the Brooklyn Bridegrooms, who had won the American Association pennant the year before eighteen eighty nine, and then the franchise just jumped into the National League for eighteen ninety and won that pennant. There were storylines of plenty, but so full of rancor and devoid of talent was the eighteen ninety World Series that, even though the host Brooklyn Bridegrooms entered Game seven leading Louisville three games to two, Game three had been a tie, they needed just two more wins for the title. The crowd the crowd for that game Game seven of the World Series in Brooklyn three hundred fans. Louisville then tied the series in that game three wins apiece and a tie, and they would need a decisive eighth game and the rest of the series, and they never played it. They abandoned the World Series tied three and three and one quote. There is scarcely enough interest in the series, noted a writer for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. To induce the people to read the scores. The most frightening part about that quote that's from eighteen ninety. I felt that way the last three octobers during the World Series. The world has made itself over a thousand times. Since that sobering revolt by the board against the boring baseball's resiliency reminds us that the World Series broadcast might still inspire another generation wearing not transistor plugs but buds hooked up to a live stream. Or like that unhappy eighteen ninety classic, the whole thing could wind up getting canceled, and this time it'll be canceled by TV executives. I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. We're now back to five episodes a week, posting nightly just after midnight Easter. Once again, there is a Monday countdown and tell the others. Please send this podcast to somebody who does not listen yet but could benefit from my analysis of stuff. Brian Ray and John Phillip Shanelle, the musical directors, have Countdown, arranged, produced, and performed most of our music. Mister Schanale handled orchestration and keyboards. Mister Ray was on guitars, bass and drums. It was produced by Tko Brothers. Our satirical and fifty musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faus. The sports music is the Olberman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis Curtesy of ESPN Inc. Other music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. My announcer today was my friend John Dean. Everything else was as usual, pretty much my fault. That's countdown for today. Five weeks until the twenty twenty four presidential election, the one three hundred and sixty fifth day since convicted felon drooling Jay Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the United States. Use the election, use the mental health system, use presidential immunity if we have to to keep him from doing it again. Wow, we still can. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Bulletins as the news requires. Until then, I'm Keith Olberman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, 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.