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Speaker 1: Countdown with Keith Olbermann is a production of iHeartRadio. Trump, who has convinced himself that his approval rating is actually 60%, has started... to steal the midterms. The 60% thing in a moment. First, have you seen the Alaska Senate ballot that they're suing over? Have you seen this thing that he's had his attorney general, Todd Blanch, Trump prostitute, sue over to prevent certification in Alaska? Okay, which one of these four names is the incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan? Sullivan Dan S., registered Republican, incumbent, the first name, or Hickus, Gerald L., registered Republican, or Peltola, Mary, registered Democrat, or Sullivan Daniel J., Jr., nothing. That's the confusion. That's the confusion? Trump yesterday, a lot of people don't know what incumbent means. Translation, I don't know what incumbent means. Wait till he finds out there's a B in it. Wait till he finds out it has the letters C-U-M in the middle. He'll start talking about John Husted in Ohio again. Husted, hello. I mean, I know to be a Republican, particularly to be MAGA, you have to be stupid or visually impaired or psychologically blind, more likely. But you can't tell which of those is your current Republican Senator Sullivan when it says registered Republican incumbent? I mean, they're not all as dumb as Trump. Besides which, if you really are going to be confused by that ballot, is it not the presence of the two Republicans that would confuse you? And whose idea was it to put a second Republican on the ballot? The Democrats? And by the way, the Alaska Supreme Court already ruled on this four freaking months ago. There is no confusion, except the confusion Trump is deliberately trying to sow so he can steal the elections, because he is the greatest criminal in American history. This is all he is good at. This is all he can see. And the alternative is the process by which he gets impeached, removed from office, and sent to prison. The Department of Justice suit is to overturn the election in Alaska, to not certify it, to give it to a loser if the ruling junta's candidate does not win it. It is as simple as that. It is Trump's imitation of Putin in Russia. The Department of Justice suit is to prevent certification if Mary Paltola wins. And it's at Trump's instructions. There's no vagueness, no matter what that idiot Todd Blanche tried to do and what they're blackmailing him with. I'll never know. He looks like he's about to jump out a window. No, that's Russian again. Trump said, I'm the one that said to do it. Quote, the treasonous disintegrating mobster. We are a banana republic already. We are a failed state. We are a kleptocracy now. We are as ugly and corrupt and fat and as near death as Trump himself. Trump is suing because there is Senator Dan Sullivan and a fisherman named Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. on the same ballot, and Trump's life is and always has been about suing and looking for loopholes and demanding special treatment and poisoning this country for his own personal criminal profit in the billions of dollars. Legal experts think the suit is crap. and it violates DOJ guidance 9-85.300 and 9-85-500. Stay out of the freaking elections. Stay out of the big footing election authority business. And stay out of the purview of judges and states. Stay out if a state Supreme Court has already acted. Stay out of sowing debt and doubt in elections. Trump is doing all the above, and this idiot whore Todd Blanche, this Trump slut, is doing exactly that. The attitude of this morally bankrupt organization, the Trump crime family, is that of what Thaddeus Stevens said about Lincoln's corrupt Secretary of War, Simon Cameron. Quote, I do not believe he would steal a red-hot stove. The second Sullivan, who is Daniel Jay, has said he decided to run on his own, Republicans content. He's some sort of Democratic plant to siphon votes away. These are the Republicans of Jill Stein, of RFK Jr., of Cornel West, of Stephen A. Moron Smith, and other sock puppet stalking horses, some of them like Smith, too stupid to understand that they're stalking horses. F them. F them all. Even Lisa Murkowski, a rabid right-winger, if not MAGA, gets it. Alaskans don't need any help voting for their preferred candidates, and the state of Alaska has already handled this by clearly distinguishing the candidates on this year's ballots. The Department of Justice should never have filed this lawsuit. She wrote that and promptly was attacked by Trump, a sitting Republican senator who would vote on his conviction after impeachment. Smart move, fat ass. He called her a disgrace and again threatened the state, the red state that he wants the votes from a week from tomorrow with cutting off all federal services, essentially, if it votes Democratic. And that's another part of stealing the election is to threaten the voters of a particular state or reward other ones. It's called blackmail. And of course, in blackmailing Alaska, Grandpa Shardy screwed that up even. He writes they will, quote, come to an immediate halt. H-A-U-L-T. Freaking imbecile. Halt. That's because that's the way they say it in Queens. He's trying to steal the midterms, and he's not just doing it in Alaska. In California, it's a lawsuit and intimidation, and the motive is not really clear because there isn't much doubt as to what's going to happen in California. But the Trump administration asked for an emergency court order from the federal court yesterday to segregate ballots from 20,000 voters that the DOJ suspects are actually not American citizens. The Department of Justice also sent letters on Friday, and this is what this is really about. Terror. Trump terrorism. Trump is a terrorist. This government is a terrorist government. The Department of Justice, at Trump's behest, sent letters on Friday to local election officials across California. The letters demand that they help, personally help, to identify potential non-citizens on their voter rolls and set aside their ballots. That's what the 20,000 votes are about. Those are 20,000 drops in the California ocean. If the local officials do not knuckle under to Trump's blackmail, the letter from the U.S. Attorney's Office in L.A. reads, the officials personally, quote, risk significant federal scrutiny. In short, Trump's DOJ is not just blackmailing states, not just threatening to go to court, blackmailing individual state election officials to try to steal the midterms. Let's say this again and again every day until next Tuesday. Trump is trying to steal the midterms through coercion, blackmail, and bribery. The other truth is here, there is no secret army of illegal voters in California. or anywhere else. They are all up in Trump's ass, and we know there is a lot of room there for them. 23 million registered voters in California. They want 20,000. They suspect 20,000, even that number would be ridiculously tiny, And it is unbelievably large. Last week, federal prosecutors, Trump's federal prosecutors, charged all the ones who have cast ballots illegally in all the elections there in California that they can find the number of people that the Trump DOJ has charged, 28. 28. Not 28,000. Not 2,800. 28. Two. Eight. Like Trump's approval on the economy. That's how many illegal voters there are in California, and they're threatening more than that in the number of local election officials, blackmailing them into coercing their colleagues into reporting fake, non-illegal votes. There is no doubt that Trump's attempt to steal the primary or steal the midterms is to try to overturn any vote he doesn't like in court, even courts in states and in elections that are not in any doubt. Peltola could win Alaska by 30% and they'd still file this suit. The Senate obviously is the big one, the one he has to metaphorically kill for, I think metaphorically, because it's the Senate that can remove him from office. And his legal slut, Todd Blanche, is already on his back awaiting further instructions. Is there any scenario in which the Department of Justice would try to block states from certifying the election? Blanche, some sort of doomsday scenario. It is not DOJ's intention to, and it's never our intention, to improperly interfere with elections on the state certification process. But to say there's no circumstances, we already know what you are, Todd Blanche. We're just arguing about the price. Happily, There, over there, in the illegal knife fight part of the midterms that Trump started, one group is trying to throw the elections to the Democrats. The Republican candidates and their campaign geniuses. There is a problem when you run idiots for office. The Vivek Ramaswamy ad with Amy Acton's disgusting mother continues to destroy Vivek Ramaswamy. All the ad did was remind us that the GOP is the party of child rapists, the party that supports and endorses and believes pedophiles. And it defends child rapists. And it defends burying government files about child rapists. Epstein. And covering up for child rapists, dead or alive. America first. MAGA is child rapists first. and the perpetrators may actually finally pay a price for doing this. Ramaswamy, who is an anus with big hair, and the crazed vocal delivery of somebody who's strung out on all known drugs at the same time, Ramaswamy put up the ad starring the rotting carcass of Amy Acton's estranged mother, who stood by as her own preteen daughter, was raped by her husband, and to this day believes the incestuous child rapist and not her own daughter, and calls the woman who is trying to prevent another child rape apologist from taking office, trying to prevent the woman who's trying to prevent that, her own daughter, calling her the liar in this equation. And it turns out this was not a mistake, some sort of terrible error by the Ramaswamy goons. Ramaswamy's running mate for Lieutenant Governor in Ohio, some other jackass named Macaulay, said Acton's stepfather indeed sexually abused her and that was horrible. The lying they're talking about and have re-edited the ad to emphasize was lying that Acton did when she was an adult. Doesn't have anything to do with what happened to her in her past, even though previously Ramaswami said the only campaign that Amy Acton has was complaining about what was done to her in the past. Ramaswami is not actually a human being. He's a hairdo. So they dragged out her scumbucket mother. to allow her daughter to be abused yet again, knowing full well that Amy Acton was a child rape victim, and this woman, in one way or the other, passively, aggressively at least, let it happen. That's Team Ramaswamy. And the public reaction is disgust. It's actually blown back on them. Ohio told mommy procurer and Ramaswamy to F off from Zedio News. Businesses that were to host Ramaswamy events this week have canceled them. Quoting them, quote, we're getting calls that people don't want him there. A top Ohio Republican tells us that's Zedio. This source adds that some business owners and event hosts have explicitly told them they do not want the horrendous publicity or angry phone calls or social media attacks or customer complaints that they would get for hosting Ramaswamy's campaign tour at this juncture. This would indicate to you, if you're in Ohio or elsewhere, to make sure you contact every business that has associated itself with the Ramaswamy campaign or hosted one of its events or has not canceled in the week to come Call them and tell them what you think, or call them out on social media. Use their handles. Be courageous here. There are things you can do without getting up from your chair that can be as valuable as going door-to-door or making phone calls. This is one of those rare occasions when they appear to be working in Ohio. The Cook Political Report, which changes its predictions with glacial speed, and I don't mean melting climate change glacier melting. I mean melting the old-fashioned glacier melting over thousands of years, has moved the Ohio race in the last week since the ad came out from toss-up to lean Democratic, and it's Jessica Taylor writes, quote, the trajectory of Ramaswamy's odds in the Ohio governor's race has been clear to us for the last few weeks, but the campaign's decision this week to air a deeply personal attack ad against opponent Amy Acton confirmed that the race is slipping away from him. Perhaps he forgot to wash all that crap he puts on his hair. off his fingers and perhaps creating some collateral damage for fellow Republicans on the way. We are moving this race from toss up to lean Democrat, lean Democrat. Cook, by the way, again, conservative with a small C about everything it does. Cook moved 19 House races towards the Dems in the past week. 218 in the House, they say, is guaranteed. But back to Ramaswamy in Ohio, something I had missed there that makes this even worse somehow. Ramaswamy met a guy named Vernon Edwards at a county fair. Now, I understand this is Ohio and county fairs. There must be dozens of Vernon Edwards there. I don't want any confusion about this. This is the Vernon Edwards whose wife moaned and almost cried to Ramaswami about high taxes. And so they put them, with the wife doing the talking, in a Ramaswami ad and Ramaswami this and Ramaswami that. And guess what? Vernon Edwards, registered sex offender. The wife says her husband is an exemplary citizen and registered sex offender. Ramaswami's campaign slogan is, he'll fix it. Apparently he means fixing it like fixing an election or a thrown baseball game. Meanwhile, the other Ohio Republican moron, John, I swear I'm never going to stand in front of Trump again, Husted, hello, was asked about Iran. And he answered, quote, it needs to be over on America's terms, not Iraq's terms. Good call, Skitch. Iraq, Iran, Iran. Whatever, as the old Saturday Night Live joke went, they merged and formed the new nation of Iraqan. More on Iran and some unanticipated leaks about how Trump will be escalating that war that killed his party. He'll escalate it in about two weeks and how it might go on to drive up prices for another year shortly. But there's still more disasters for the Republicans in their own Iowa ads. Washington Post, the woman in an ad for a deplorable Iowa Republican congressman, Zach Nunn. This woman said a Democrat endangers kids. She pleaded guilty to endangering kids. Quoting the Post, Shelley Flockhart, who called Iowa Democratic House candidate Sarah Trone Garriott dangerous for kids, pleaded guilty after authorities said she drove drunk. With her children in the car in 2017, she is naturally a local Republican council member and international scold. Please vote Republican in Iowa. Zach Nunn knows all about dangers to kids. He's been endorsed by the woman who drove drunk with her own kids in the car. And in Massachusetts, I'll just quote this from Western Massachusetts Politics and Insight, a website, which is about Ed Markey's Republican opponent in the Senate race there, and they quote the Boston Globe, so it's not originating in some place you never heard of. John Deaton's path to politics was unconventional. That's the word. And like Graham Platner, his story includes an incident of sexual impropriety. However, in Deaton's case, there's no question he wrote about it himself. The Republican candidate for Senate, Massachusetts. According to Western Massachusetts Politics and Insight, quoting the Globe and other more mainstream pubs. In his 2023 self-published memoir, Deaton details several transgressions, small-time drug dealing, a shootout, possible homicide, drunk driving, filing a false police report while serving as a Marine JAG officer. How is he not in the Senate? How is he not in the Trump administration? How is he not Trump's heir apparent? Oh, I left this one out. As an adult, he approached a 15-year-old girl, began a sexual relationship, and had her move in with him as she completed high school, unquote. of the relationship. The site quotes Deaton's own book. I made the inherent mistake of thinking because she was young, I could mold her into the perfect partner. Yeah, that was the mistake there. Republican candidate for Senate in Massachusetts. Second time he ran against Liz Warren two years ago. Ever get the feeling some people just stop trying? He's not going to win. It's not going to stop him. At least, though, you could make some cursory effort to find a candidate who doesn't have a list of accusations against him in his own hand of drunk driving, false police reporting, drug dealing, shootouts, and statutory rape. And then there's Georgia. Then there's Georgia. There are MAGA schmucks, and then there's Mike Collins. In the debate, John Ossoff, who is on fire, accused the Republican Mike Collins of calling for immigrants to be thrown to their deaths from helicopters, and Collins just ignored it. CNN, in 2021, Collins reposted and commented on posts of an image that purported to show the Taliban hanging somebody from a helicopter. He wrote, quote, if someone said this is what should happen to some of our military political leaders for everything that's happened in Afghanistan lately, they'd probably get banned. So good thing no one says that. Turns out it's way worse than that passive-aggressive reference to hanging people out helicopters. Soon afterwards, Collins joked about pushing Nancy Pelosi out of a plane. Joe Kent was discussing his travel arrangements, another winner, when a right-wing nut host, Sandy Rios, joked that Kent could instead catch a ride with Pelosi. Kent, she'd be happy to give me a ride, I'm sure, and Collins interjected, might push her out. And in Michigan... hoisted on his own trumpetard, Mike Rogers continues not just Islamophobia, but being really bad at it. Breaking news. Meet the Press actually did something good yesterday. They found a Mike Rogers 2012 comment to Reuters supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. Supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt during the uprising there. in exactly the same way Al-Sayed did. The quote from him to Reuters, 2012, Mike Rogers, do I think there are moderate Muslim Brotherhood individuals we're going to have to reach out to and talk to? Yes, but we're going to have to watch it carefully. They read that to him, and I thought he was going to cry, and here is my advice to Mike Rogers, start crying, it's your only chance. And then there is one last weapon for Democrats against Trump. Trump Going out and boasting that America is making hundreds of billions of dollars on higher gas prices and then clarifying, oh, no, it's not America. It's just America's oil and gas industry, none of whose members was in the audience at the time. And it's not just hundreds of billions of dollars. It's African fortune. Trump is talking about all the money they're making while people are suffering at the pump. That'll be the headline. But I said, I don't give a damn. I'm going to say it. We'll make it a freaking fortune. So there it is as he tries to steal the midterms. Trump closing message to the midterm voter, quote, I don't give a damn, unquote, about you. With all this, Trump has convinced himself his real approval rating is 60%. Byron York of the Washington Examiner, buttonholed, madman munt, about his approval rating, which, as you know, is actually 32% on the high end, and on the economy, it's 28%. And he answered quickly, it's fake, it's fake. He quickly turned his actual lie into somebody else lying when they did not. He claimed the New York Times used the now discredited as fabricated Wedgwood poll, which it did not. The job approval, they said it's 37, 38. He asked incredulously, I'm not at 38. I don't believe I could be beaten by anybody. I think that if I needed it, which I don't, I think 60. York writes, quote, I asked if he meant that he would be at 60 if he were running for office himself. Yeah, I think I'd be in the 60s now. Now in the Republican Party, I'm way up. Show him the 99%. I wonder who that was dictated to. Show him the 99%. Have you seen it? So in one second, he lies. He falsely accuses a scrupulous and ethical group of people of lying, which they did not. He's guilty of sophistry. He's guilty of changing and moving the goalposts. He's guilty of playing a shell game about which poll numbers from which group he's actually talking about. And of course, most importantly, there's nuclear-powered cope. Trump's only true skill, and I've always given him credit for this, his comprehensive lifelong ability to separate himself and his slaves and his prostitutes and his cult members from from inconvenient reality. He went on to attack the infamous 98% support for MAGA quote from a good pollster who's a terrible broadcaster named Harry Enten of CNN. Trump, I always cater to my base. My base is big. Yeah, we've seen the recent photos of your base. It is big. I think my base is close to 100% of the Republican Party. I think I'm close to 100. It's not MAGA. It's just Byron York writes, at that moment, I interjected, but it's not the whole Republican Party. Trump, I think it's close. I think the bushes have largely faded. They're gone. What you're seeing in this is the one thing that lets me sleep at night, the realization that no matter what he achieves, no matter what happens to him in the rest of his life, no matter what he's done in the last 10 years, he cannot enjoy it for more than a few minutes because after, say, I'm guessing, 22 minutes, the ghost of Mary Trump appears to him and says, not good enough. Whatever happened in his childhood, whatever was wrong with those parents of his, somewhere there is something that makes it impossible for him to accept the idea that he has 98% support from a group of cultists. Has to be 100%. Or more, as we've seen him speculate with what 1,000% improvement means. or cutting something by a thousand percent. The former is possible and the latter isn't. So what happens when you are the least approved president in history? What happens nine days before the midterms that could either turn you into a lame duck at best, or maybe remove you from office and send you to prison where you will die in jail? You lie to yourself, you lie to your cult, you lie out your own big base. Now, a lot of people point at this and say it's a sign of mental deterioration, and I have to disagree with this. I encountered this exact same thing when I interviewed him, and he insisted he had research that indicated that his football team, the New Jersey Generals, was more popular than the New York Giants and the New York Jets combined. This was delusional. His team and the league they played in would go bankrupt and two seasons after we did this interview, and they went bankrupt largely because when you extract threats and blackmail and dishonesty from his business skill set, all you have left is the fact that he's a terrible businessman. And he applied these terrible businessmen to the United States Football League, and the league went out of business less than two years later. The interview I did in which he revealed his delusion about numbers and percentages and popularity and approval occurred in December of 1983. It is the same delusion that allowed him to try to convince Byron Yorick that the approval rating is actually 60%, and the economy is great. If you need, in moments of darkness, to try to understand Trump, remember, he thinks his hair looks great. He thinks his hair makes him look young. He thinks his suits and ties make him look skinny. I'd like to understand more of what is clinically wrong with him, but I'm afraid we can't do that until the autopsy. So what do you do when you have secret 60% approval and the New York Times has stolen it from you? You turn to your real winner, Iran. Did anybody notice that Netanyahu, facing his own life or death election... says that he and Trump will be resuming a regime change war in Iran after the midterms. On Wednesday, Netanyahu wrote, together with President Trump, I will complete the mission and we will bring down the regime in Iran. This is the problem with an ally who will go everywhere with you until what he needs conflicts with what you need, in which case, man overboard. I love you. I love you. I love you. Also of interest here, sports. I'd like to apologize for the World Series. And speaking of apologies, the New York Knicks don't after their owner ruins the team's first championship since I was 14 years old. by turning it into a phishing scam to trap his own employees. It's hard to believe Jim Dolan finds new ways to humiliate himself and his team and his sport, but he does because he's a putz. This is Countdown with Keith Olbermann. This is Sports Center. Wait, check that. Not anymore. This is Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Sports Ball Center tonight. And on behalf of Major League Baseball and everybody who likes the sport, I'd like to apologize for games one and two of the World Series and encourage you to give it another chance in game three. Because I don't think there's going to be a game five. I'm actually dreading seeing the TV ratings for the first two games. On the other hand, I have one of those questions to ask that nobody asks. Why do we care what the TV ratings are? They are uniformly used as a barometer for everything, trends about the game, the cities, the teams, the managers, the announcers, the networks, whether the cities or towns are considered red state or blue state or the bat boys are, but who cares? Do you own Fox? Are you on Fox? Do you get a cut of the playoffs? shares or the money from TV? I mean, when I did the World Series in the playoffs for NBC in 97 and 98, and Fox in 99 and 2000, and Turner in 2013, I cared about the ratings because they more or less vaguely reflected on my work, but not really that much. I didn't get a bonus. I didn't even get beaten by Rupert Murdoch if they weren't good. But otherwise, honestly, who cares? Until a network stops making more money from broadcasting those games than they do paying for the rights to broadcast those games, it means nothing to you and me. Nothing. Now, if they released audience change numbers... They released the quarter hour ratings, what it looks like at 9.30 as opposed to 9.15. Maybe we would learn something. Maybe baseball looks at these, but I suspect it's Rob Manfred. He transferred into Cornell from some small college. I don't think he understands this. But if you could look at the numbers and they could show you where people went, oh, God, and watched hockey instead. How many people were fed up by a really embarrassing performance by the Tampa Bay Rays, either Friday or Saturday night? 4-0 lead in the top of the first in Game 2, and they didn't score again. Game 1, they ran themselves out of two innings, almost a third. Game 2, the third base coach sent a slow runner, a catcher, on base at second. They tried to score him on a short grounder to left with a good arm in left field for Milwaukee. He was out by 87 miles. Countless errors. Defensive just misses by Tampa Bay. What did the TV ratings look like in the seconds after those events? Personally, I prefer this kind of baseball, if it's well executed. There were no homers until the first inning of the second game. I prefer the double plays and clutch fielding, except the Rays didn't have any clutch fielding. They kept missing by that much. Missed catches, double plays not made. There were so many Milwaukee defensive plays that they just made that it emphasized what is going wrong here that people haven't noticed. It's defensive positioning scouting. It's where you put your fielders at a specific time against a specific hitter with a specific hit to be or pitch to be thrown because you know where if the batter hits the ball, that ball is likely to go. I covered a World Series in 1999 in which the New York Yankees swept the Atlanta Braves in four games, and it looked like Their fielders never moved once in four games. I think I saw center fielder Bernie Williams go like two feet to the right to get a fly ball once. That was defensive scouting. The man in charge of it, their former general manager and manager Gene Michael, the late stick, knew where to play every Atlanta hitter based on every Atlanta pitch before he had videotape at his fingertips to double check everything. And somehow Tampa Bay scouting was non-existent. This is the first time I have ever seen a team win the opening game by 3-2, then win the second game by 5-4, and I am left thinking that the likeliest outcome is they are going to sweep the series in four games. That's how much in two one-run wins Tampa Bay sucked. Also, I love Kevin Burkhart. and Ken Rosenthal, but good God is the Fox broadcast and the pregame show and postgame show. Terrible! It's worse than when I did it with Steve Psycho Lions, who did not get that nickname, ironically. Basketball. After the New York Knicks won their first NBA title since 1973, employees at Madison Square Garden... thought they had gotten shocking reputation-restoring generosity from the noted paranoid tightwad MSG Rangers and Knicks owner, pond-scum-fat Jim Dolan. Congratulations, read an email. Your employee championship ring is here. This is according to The Athletic, quoting the email, and MSG has not disputed this. Then each employee is addressed by name in its own email. This one is on the house. MSG is issuing a complimentary employee championship ring. The same jeweler, the same craftsmanship, personalized with your name, no cost to you. There are two designs to choose from, championship gold and garden classic. Reserve the one you want below. You click and you get a notice that there is no ring. There's just a test fishing scam button. that you have fallen for, and to keep your job with the Knicks and MSG, you have to attend a mandatory cyber security class because Jim Dolan, who is already the worst owner in sports, and is already, and we have had them since 1876, the worst owner in sports history in New York City, Jim Dolan is also paranoid and hates everybody who doesn't give him money, and abuses his employees regularly, and has found a way to combine these things, cybersecurity paranoia and abusing his own employees. And just to top it off, the Knicks issued a condescending statement criticizing the story when it was reported by The Athletic, which blew it up further and kept it in the news for a day. And then the next day they issued another statement saying, oh no, it was a mistake, claiming unconvincingly that those employees will be getting a ring or jewelry at a later point, like 3,000 years from now. Good work by the Knicks to keep the, we ruined the NBA title for our employees because Jim Dolan is a bulbous, paranoid, flatulent asshole story alive. Some of those words also pertain to the third of three sports stories, Riley Gaines. Riley Gaines, who apparently was a swimmer or perhaps just a girl who fell into the water at some point, Hillary Clinton might be the only person in America, writes Riley Gaines, professional complainant. Hillary Clinton might be the only person in America who thinks that her loss belongs in the conversation. Oh, Riley, there's somebody else who thinks that way about their loss. Gaines has also positioned herself as a political expert. She complains she hates liberals. She looks like a Kewpie doll. She's perfect for Fox. Riley Gaines wrote that James Tallarico was a creep. And the account on Twitter X Evan Loves Worf immediately connected with yet another whack on the hapless pinata that is Riley Gaines. Oh, did James Tallarico also beat you at swimming? To the number one story on the countdown and things I promised not to tell or Thurber. And in this case, the roulette wheel of countdown has spun and you get a things I promised not to tell about what has heretofore been the worst day of my life. Certainly in terms of expectations versus reality. I believe without any modesty or any maudlin quality to this, I have no doubt that the day I die will exceed this day that I'm thinking about from 2012 as the day in which the fall off from expectation to reality will be a little bit greater. On the other hand, I'm hoping I won't have too much time to think about it then, and I won't really remember the one in 2012. It'll just be snap, goodbye, gone, to borrow an old friend's phrase. But up until that point, I believe it'll probably be this date in, I guess, June or July of 2012. I don't speak a lot here about my time at Current TV. This was the network of Al Gore and his business partner, and business is used very loosely here, Joel Hyatt. They were the ones who, the day I was suspended spuriously by NBC for making what they called illegal campaign contributions that were in fact completely legal under my contract. And when they found that out, they had to rescind my suspension and give me my money back and apologize to me. When that happened, Al Gore called me at home and said, if you wind up leaving NBC, come work for me and my partner Hyatt at our TV network, Current TV. We'll bring Countdown. We'll pay you more than you're making now. We'll give you $ 50 million to start. We'll hire your entire staff, everybody you can bring with you. We'll give you complete control and we'll build out a liberal TV news network around your show. And I foolishly thought Al knew what he was talking about. He didn't lie to me. He just didn't understand what was actually going on at Current TV. Someday I will tell that entire story, but let me just say that the first night we were on, the first show on Current TV in March, or no, excuse me, June 2011, the first night we were on, we beat MSNBC and and CNN in the advertiser-friendly demo, the money demographic. We had more viewers on this little dipshit digital cable channel that we had, channel 101 in low def at the exact time when everybody else was going high def. We beat MSNBC. We beat Lawrence O'Donnell. And for the first week, we beat them and CNN. We didn't fully know that because our network had bought the wrong ratings. So we didn't get the DVR and live ratings that week. So we thought we'd only beaten MSNBC. In fact, we'd beaten MSNBC, my successor show, and CNN. It was a good start. It couldn't last. There were not resources. And every once in a while, the building would simply shut down that we were in. It wasn't so much a studio as it was a portal to hell with lights. I'm going to stop complaining about this now before I go completely off tangent and stop talking about the real key to this story, Uma Thurman, the actress. So things got worse and worse at Current TV, and the ratings got worse and worse, and my spirits got worse and worse, and the shows got better and better, ironically enough. It was really good content and really solid and fair liberal commentary, and Al Gore was often a guest on the program and actually contributed something to it, and we had a good time doing the show. We had a good time being on the show, even if we were the only ones watching, and every once in a while the lights went out. At some point in the spring of 2012, two things developed simultaneously in my life. The nominal president of the network and the operation was not Al Gore, and it was not his business partner, Joel Hyatt. It was a veteran TV executive from MTV at one point named Mark Rosenthal. And Mark Rosenthal called me and said, this is entirely off the record, but I believe I have a way that I can use the board of directors of Current TV to to go around Hyatt and seize control of this network and redo what we need to redo to save this project before it collapses under its own weight. And the only person who walks out of here with their money is you. And by that point, we'll be down to like nine viewers because this guy signed contracts that basically make it impossible for us to put any content online. And you know where this is going. If there's no online feed, there's no TV network. He saw the future in 2012 pretty clearly, did Mark. He said, I want to take you to dinner. I'm going to be in New York on such and such a night, and we'll go to dinner and map this out. And it's a kamikaze mission, he said. I'm quoting him. It's possibly that. We may all go down in flames doing this. On the other hand, we may save this operation and ourselves in the process. And I said, okay, it's got to be better than this. At the same time, one of my producers wound up in a gym every day working out before coming into work and working out next to Uma Thurman, the actress, as if I have to explain who Uma Thurman is. And somehow or another, the subject of me came up because she worked for me and she was really good and they were talking about me. And Uma Thurman said something that indicated that she found me good on television or who knows what. And gradually, the story got from Uma to my producer and then to me that Uma was interested in talking to me on a social basis to see if I might be a suitable date for For her, she had broken up with her longtime live-in boyfriend, husband, whoever he was, father of her child or children. I didn't get the whole story straight, but sure enough, one day, I walk in after a game at Yankee Stadium. It's about 11 o'clock at night, and my phone is ringing in my apartment, and I pick it up. It's an odd time to get a phone call, and there, on the other end of the line, Hi, Keith, this is Uma Thurman. Well, we talked for about three hours and it was a really great conversation and we hit it off and it was about anything and everything. And she said, let's have coffee. And I gave it the amount of time that a middle-aged bachelor would give in that occasion, which was what's the smallest micro measure of a second. That's how much time I thought, is this a good idea before saying yes. And we tentatively scheduled a date for coffee and a time. She said, I'll be over by your studios. Maybe you want to show me the studios. I went, no, you don't want to see the studios. I want you to remain impressed with me. And she laughed and I laughed and we figured out, okay, we're going to find a place. She said, let me find a place that's not going to be a paparazzi driven kind of thing. And I will text you and we will meet at three o'clock on this afternoon. Well, it turned out it was the same afternoon of the night that Mark Rosenthal and I were going to have dinner. and discuss the future of current. So, in effect, within a span of three or four hours, it was potentially the case that my entire social life would change, and my entire professional life would change, and one would assume, in both cases, for the better. At about two o'clock, and the meeting time with Uma was three, at about two o'clock, the phone rings, and it's Mark Rosenthal. And Mark Rosenthal says, dinner's off. And I say, why is that? And he said, because Hyatt just found out that we were going to have dinner tonight. And so I'm no longer the president of Current TV. And I went, what? He says, yeah, I got to get out of town. I've got to go talk to somebody. This is always happening to me. Networks go off the air. local radio stations that are about to give me twice what I'm making from ESPN. They decide to simulcast FM rock music instead of continuing in an all-sports talk format. an hour before I'm going to agree to a contract with them. Networks go off the air. CNN was going to hire me to run their all-sports network in 2001 after Fox blew me out. And literally, as the meetings went on, so did the CNN plans to take the network off the air. This goes on and on throughout my career, and here it is once again. The man who could have saved Current TV got fired the day we were supposed to meet. And then I thought, well, At least I have coffee with, and a little beep goes off on my phone, and there's a text from Uma Thurman. And it says, sorry, can't make it today. Let's reschedule for next week. As I said, this is sometime in 2011, June, July, something like that. Next week still has not come. I did see Uma Thurman, and I don't want to make this out to be a tragedy, except for the fact that I was kind of depressed the rest of the day. Like, well, let's see. I suppose there's no chance Uma Thurman will become the new president of Current TV, is there? Huh? Huh? Maybe? No? No, she didn't. They in fact brought in somebody who was totally ill-suited for the job, and the thing went right off the cliff, and much faster than it would have if we'd just left it alone. I tried. Never heard from Uma again, and then I got involved in a project that perhaps you know me for called Bojack Horseman. the lowest, easiest lift I've ever had of the best written material I've ever seen, in which they asked me to portray myself only evil and stupid. And think about this. Think about the opportunity and the joy there would be in simply letting go of every effort you make not to be good and not to be smart, and to get paid for this and for nobody to be harmed by it, for the result to be people laughing, and good laughing, laughing with you. The satirization of yourself for fairly good cash... and a very easy process in which you just go to a studio on 39th Street with very warm and good and professional audio artists who record your voice while others in Los Angeles tell you exactly what they want from you in terms of intonation and intent. It was wonderful. I loved being a voice actor, and I portrayed Tom Jumbo Grumbo, the newscaster, who was in fact me, only not a sports background, but a background hosting entertainment tonight for Wales, and who occasionally did commentaries that ended with, well, I'll put it to you the way they put it to me one day. They said, listen, in addition to the script, If you were doing a commentary and you were a whale and you got really angry and at the end you decided to express your rage by not screaming or saying, shut the hell up, Mr. President, but by somehow screaming through your blowhole, do you think you could do that? And I went, you'd be surprised how many times I've been asked that question. And I made this sound. Ha! And they went, that's perfect. Can we do three takes? Sure enough, there is now an animated version of me making that sound. It has been recorded and will be available somewhere. forever. There's a point to this. So now I go in to record, as I did, I don't know, every three, four months, the latest sides for BoJack Horseman. Here, you're on three of the next six episodes. Can you just record these lines? Everything, almost everything on BoJack Horseman was recorded individually. When you hear Will Arnett talking to Patton Oswalt, or you hear me talking to Patton Oswalt, or you hear me talking to, who was on it, Amy Sedaris, We were never in the same room. There was one read-through that was done on a conference call, but nothing was recorded in person. Together, only individually, and they edited it together and made it sound like a seamless conversation. It's not just the miracle of animation. It's the miracle of audio mixing. So I go in by myself, and as I'm finishing up, I come out, and the guy goes, you know who's in the other studio? I went, I couldn't guess. I was in this studio recording. And the guy says, Uma Thurman. She's doing some voiceovers for some Japanese car commercial. And I went, do I leave or what? I was like, no, come on. We had a great conversation. I just go, I'll go away just to wait. Oh yeah, she's finishing up. She'll be out in a minute or two at the most. And I was like, okay. I was like, well, maybe we can still save Current TV, which by this point had been sold to Al Jazeera and was already going out of business as Al Jazeera because the whole thing was a house of cards, and I'll leave it at that. And I'm waiting for the door to open, and out steps Uma Thurman, and she gives me the generic... high look that all actresses give and all actors too, I might add, in which they want to say, I'm glad you recognize me, but I don't recognize you, but I'm going to be polite. And I introduced myself and she went, oh, of course. How are you? And then we just chatted about what we were doing there. And I was doing this. Oh, cartoons. I love doing cartoons. I've seen Bojack. That is you. Of course it. And on and on and on. And then finally she says, I've got to go. But you know what, Keith? We should have coffee sometime. I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Our musical directors of Countdown are John Philip Chanel on keyboards and handling orchestration, and Brian Ray on guitars, bass, and drums. Their work is produced by TKO Brothers. Nancy Faust, the best baseball stadium organist of all time, is responsible for the satirical and pithy musical comments. The sports music is from the old Olbermann Show on ESPN2, a theme written by Mitch Warren Davis, courtesy of ESPN Inc. Other music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed, and my announcer today, speaking of old and ESPN, was my friend Tony Kornheiser. Everything else was, as always, my fault. That's countdown for today, day 631 of America Held Hostage Again, exactly 818 days until the scheduled end of his lame duck and lame-brained term, unless it ends early because Trump blows the midterms completely for his party and then winds up getting impeached and convicted by a pro-democratic, pro-democracy Senate. If you're listening, remember you can see the whole thing now on YouTube. If you're watching, remember you can just listen to the whole thing wherever you podcast and skip the whole watching thing. Next scheduled countdown is Thursday, probably. Management reserves the right to get another heart procedure instead, which is looking increasingly likely. Bulletins is the news merits. Until the next one, I'm Keith Olbermann. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olbermann is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Countdown with Keith Olbermann is a production of iHeartRadio. Trump, who has convinced himself that his approval rating is actually 60%, has started... to steal the midterms. The 60% thing in a moment. First, have you seen the Alaska Senate ballot that they're suing over? Have you seen this thing that he's had his attorney general, Todd Blanch, Trump prostitute, sue over to prevent certification in Alaska? Okay, which one of these four names is the incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan? Sullivan Dan S., registered Republican, incumbent, the first name, or Hickus, Gerald L., registered Republican, or Peltola, Mary, registered Democrat, or Sullivan Daniel J., Jr., nothing. That's the confusion. That's the confusion? Trump yesterday, a lot of people don't know what incumbent means. Translation, I don't know what incumbent means. Wait till he finds out there's a B in it. Wait till he finds out it has the letters C-U-M in the middle. He'll start talking about John Husted in Ohio again. Husted, hello. I mean, I know to be a Republican, particularly to be MAGA, you have to be stupid or visually impaired or psychologically blind, more likely. But you can't tell which of those is your current Republican Senator Sullivan when it says registered Republican incumbent? I mean, they're not all as dumb as Trump. Besides which, if you really are going to be confused by that ballot, is it not the presence of the two Republicans that would confuse you? And whose idea was it to put a second Republican on the ballot? The Democrats? And by the way, the Alaska Supreme Court already ruled on this four freaking months ago. There is no confusion, except the confusion Trump is deliberately trying to sow so he can steal the elections, because he is the greatest criminal in American history. This is all he is good at. This is all he can see. And the alternative is the process by which he gets impeached, removed from office, and sent to prison. The Department of Justice suit is to overturn the election in Alaska, to not certify it, to give it to a loser if the ruling junta's candidate does not win it. It is as simple as that. It is Trump's imitation of Putin in Russia. The Department of Justice suit is to prevent certification if Mary Paltola wins. And it's at Trump's instructions. There's no vagueness, no matter what that idiot Todd Blanche tried to do and what they're blackmailing him with. I'll never know. He looks like he's about to jump out a window. No, that's Russian again. Trump said, I'm the one that said to do it. Quote, the treasonous disintegrating mobster. We are a banana republic already. We are a failed state. We are a kleptocracy now. We are as ugly and corrupt and fat and as near death as Trump himself. Trump is suing because there is Senator Dan Sullivan and a fisherman named Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. on the same ballot, and Trump's life is and always has been about suing and looking for loopholes and demanding special treatment and poisoning this country for his own personal criminal profit in the billions of dollars. Legal experts think the suit is crap. and it violates DOJ guidance 9-85.300 and 9-85-500. Stay out of the freaking elections. Stay out of the big footing election authority business. And stay out of the purview of judges and states. Stay out if a state Supreme Court has already acted. Stay out of sowing debt and doubt in elections. Trump is doing all the above, and this idiot whore Todd Blanche, this Trump slut, is doing exactly that. The attitude of this morally bankrupt organization, the Trump crime family, is that of what Thaddeus Stevens said about Lincoln's corrupt Secretary of War, Simon Cameron. Quote, I do not believe he would steal a red-hot stove. The second Sullivan, who is Daniel Jay, has said he decided to run on his own, Republicans content. He's some sort of Democratic plant to siphon votes away. These are the Republicans of Jill Stein, of RFK Jr., of Cornel West, of Stephen A. Moron Smith, and other sock puppet stalking horses, some of them like Smith, too stupid to understand that they're stalking horses. F them. F them all. Even Lisa Murkowski, a rabid right-winger, if not MAGA, gets it. Alaskans don't need any help voting for their preferred candidates, and the state of Alaska has already handled this by clearly distinguishing the candidates on this year's ballots. The Department of Justice should never have filed this lawsuit. She wrote that and promptly was attacked by Trump, a sitting Republican senator who would vote on his conviction after impeachment. Smart move, fat ass. He called her a disgrace and again threatened the state, the red state that he wants the votes from a week from tomorrow with cutting off all federal services, essentially, if it votes Democratic. And that's another part of stealing the election is to threaten the voters of a particular state or reward other ones. It's called blackmail. And of course, in blackmailing Alaska, Grandpa Shardy screwed that up even. He writes they will, quote, come to an immediate halt. H-A-U-L-T. Freaking imbecile. Halt. That's because that's the way they say it in Queens. He's trying to steal the midterms, and he's not just doing it in Alaska. In California, it's a lawsuit and intimidation, and the motive is not really clear because there isn't much doubt as to what's going to happen in California. But the Trump administration asked for an emergency court order from the federal court yesterday to segregate ballots from 20,000 voters that the DOJ suspects are actually not American citizens. The Department of Justice also sent letters on Friday, and this is what this is really about. Terror. Trump terrorism. Trump is a terrorist. This government is a terrorist government. The Department of Justice, at Trump's behest, sent letters on Friday to local election officials across California. The letters demand that they help, personally help, to identify potential non-citizens on their voter rolls and set aside their ballots. That's what the 20,000 votes are about. Those are 20,000 drops in the California ocean. If the local officials do not knuckle under to Trump's blackmail, the letter from the U.S. Attorney's Office in L.A. reads, the officials personally, quote, risk significant federal scrutiny. In short, Trump's DOJ is not just blackmailing states, not just threatening to go to court, blackmailing individual state election officials to try to steal the midterms. Let's say this again and again every day until next Tuesday. Trump is trying to steal the midterms through coercion, blackmail, and bribery. The other truth is here, there is no secret army of illegal voters in California. or anywhere else. They are all up in Trump's ass, and we know there is a lot of room there for them. 23 million registered voters in California. They want 20,000. They suspect 20,000, even that number would be ridiculously tiny, And it is unbelievably large. Last week, federal prosecutors, Trump's federal prosecutors, charged all the ones who have cast ballots illegally in all the elections there in California that they can find the number of people that the Trump DOJ has charged, 28. 28. Not 28,000. Not 2,800. 28. Two. Eight. Like Trump's approval on the economy. That's how many illegal voters there are in California, and they're threatening more than that in the number of local election officials, blackmailing them into coercing their colleagues into reporting fake, non-illegal votes. There is no doubt that Trump's attempt to steal the primary or steal the midterms is to try to overturn any vote he doesn't like in court, even courts in states and in elections that are not in any doubt. Peltola could win Alaska by 30% and they'd still file this suit. The Senate obviously is the big one, the one he has to metaphorically kill for, I think metaphorically, because it's the Senate that can remove him from office. And his legal slut, Todd Blanche, is already on his back awaiting further instructions. Is there any scenario in which the Department of Justice would try to block states from certifying the election? Blanche, some sort of doomsday scenario. It is not DOJ's intention to, and it's never our intention, to improperly interfere with elections on the state certification process. But to say there's no circumstances, we already know what you are, Todd Blanche. We're just arguing about the price. Happily, There, over there, in the illegal knife fight part of the midterms that Trump started, one group is trying to throw the elections to the Democrats. The Republican candidates and their campaign geniuses. There is a problem when you run idiots for office. The Vivek Ramaswamy ad with Amy Acton's disgusting mother continues to destroy Vivek Ramaswamy. All the ad did was remind us that the GOP is the party of child rapists, the party that supports and endorses and believes pedophiles. And it defends child rapists. And it defends burying government files about child rapists. Epstein. And covering up for child rapists, dead or alive. America first. MAGA is child rapists first. and the perpetrators may actually finally pay a price for doing this. Ramaswamy, who is an anus with big hair, and the crazed vocal delivery of somebody who's strung out on all known drugs at the same time, Ramaswamy put up the ad starring the rotting carcass of Amy Acton's estranged mother, who stood by as her own preteen daughter, was raped by her husband, and to this day believes the incestuous child rapist and not her own daughter, and calls the woman who is trying to prevent another child rape apologist from taking office, trying to prevent the woman who's trying to prevent that, her own daughter, calling her the liar in this equation. And it turns out this was not a mistake, some sort of terrible error by the Ramaswamy goons. Ramaswamy's running mate for Lieutenant Governor in Ohio, some other jackass named Macaulay, said Acton's stepfather indeed sexually abused her and that was horrible. The lying they're talking about and have re-edited the ad to emphasize was lying that Acton did when she was an adult. Doesn't have anything to do with what happened to her in her past, even though previously Ramaswami said the only campaign that Amy Acton has was complaining about what was done to her in the past. Ramaswami is not actually a human being. He's a hairdo. So they dragged out her scumbucket mother. to allow her daughter to be abused yet again, knowing full well that Amy Acton was a child rape victim, and this woman, in one way or the other, passively, aggressively at least, let it happen. That's Team Ramaswamy. And the public reaction is disgust. It's actually blown back on them. Ohio told mommy procurer and Ramaswamy to F off from Zedio News. Businesses that were to host Ramaswamy events this week have canceled them. Quoting them, quote, we're getting calls that people don't want him there. A top Ohio Republican tells us that's Zedio. This source adds that some business owners and event hosts have explicitly told them they do not want the horrendous publicity or angry phone calls or social media attacks or customer complaints that they would get for hosting Ramaswamy's campaign tour at this juncture. This would indicate to you, if you're in Ohio or elsewhere, to make sure you contact every business that has associated itself with the Ramaswamy campaign or hosted one of its events or has not canceled in the week to come Call them and tell them what you think, or call them out on social media. Use their handles. Be courageous here. There are things you can do without getting up from your chair that can be as valuable as going door-to-door or making phone calls. This is one of those rare occasions when they appear to be working in Ohio. The Cook Political Report, which changes its predictions with glacial speed, and I don't mean melting climate change glacier melting. I mean melting the old-fashioned glacier melting over thousands of years, has moved the Ohio race in the last week since the ad came out from toss-up to lean Democratic, and it's Jessica Taylor writes, quote, the trajectory of Ramaswamy's odds in the Ohio governor's race has been clear to us for the last few weeks, but the campaign's decision this week to air a deeply personal attack ad against opponent Amy Acton confirmed that the race is slipping away from him. Perhaps he forgot to wash all that crap he puts on his hair. off his fingers and perhaps creating some collateral damage for fellow Republicans on the way. We are moving this race from toss up to lean Democrat, lean Democrat. Cook, by the way, again, conservative with a small C about everything it does. Cook moved 19 House races towards the Dems in the past week. 218 in the House, they say, is guaranteed. But back to Ramaswamy in Ohio, something I had missed there that makes this even worse somehow. Ramaswamy met a guy named Vernon Edwards at a county fair. Now, I understand this is Ohio and county fairs. There must be dozens of Vernon Edwards there. I don't want any confusion about this. This is the Vernon Edwards whose wife moaned and almost cried to Ramaswami about high taxes. And so they put them, with the wife doing the talking, in a Ramaswami ad and Ramaswami this and Ramaswami that. And guess what? Vernon Edwards, registered sex offender. The wife says her husband is an exemplary citizen and registered sex offender. Ramaswami's campaign slogan is, he'll fix it. Apparently he means fixing it like fixing an election or a thrown baseball game. Meanwhile, the other Ohio Republican moron, John, I swear I'm never going to stand in front of Trump again, Husted, hello, was asked about Iran. And he answered, quote, it needs to be over on America's terms, not Iraq's terms. Good call, Skitch. Iraq, Iran, Iran. Whatever, as the old Saturday Night Live joke went, they merged and formed the new nation of Iraqan. More on Iran and some unanticipated leaks about how Trump will be escalating that war that killed his party. He'll escalate it in about two weeks and how it might go on to drive up prices for another year shortly. But there's still more disasters for the Republicans in their own Iowa ads. Washington Post, the woman in an ad for a deplorable Iowa Republican congressman, Zach Nunn. This woman said a Democrat endangers kids. She pleaded guilty to endangering kids. Quoting the Post, Shelley Flockhart, who called Iowa Democratic House candidate Sarah Trone Garriott dangerous for kids, pleaded guilty after authorities said she drove drunk. With her children in the car in 2017, she is naturally a local Republican council member and international scold. Please vote Republican in Iowa. Zach Nunn knows all about dangers to kids. He's been endorsed by the woman who drove drunk with her own kids in the car. And in Massachusetts, I'll just quote this from Western Massachusetts Politics and Insight, a website, which is about Ed Markey's Republican opponent in the Senate race there, and they quote the Boston Globe, so it's not originating in some place you never heard of. John Deaton's path to politics was unconventional. That's the word. And like Graham Platner, his story includes an incident of sexual impropriety. However, in Deaton's case, there's no question he wrote about it himself. The Republican candidate for Senate, Massachusetts. According to Western Massachusetts Politics and Insight, quoting the Globe and other more mainstream pubs. In his 2023 self-published memoir, Deaton details several transgressions, small-time drug dealing, a shootout, possible homicide, drunk driving, filing a false police report while serving as a Marine JAG officer. How is he not in the Senate? How is he not in the Trump administration? How is he not Trump's heir apparent? Oh, I left this one out. As an adult, he approached a 15-year-old girl, began a sexual relationship, and had her move in with him as she completed high school, unquote. of the relationship. The site quotes Deaton's own book. I made the inherent mistake of thinking because she was young, I could mold her into the perfect partner. Yeah, that was the mistake there. Republican candidate for Senate in Massachusetts. Second time he ran against Liz Warren two years ago. Ever get the feeling some people just stop trying? He's not going to win. It's not going to stop him. At least, though, you could make some cursory effort to find a candidate who doesn't have a list of accusations against him in his own hand of drunk driving, false police reporting, drug dealing, shootouts, and statutory rape. And then there's Georgia. Then there's Georgia. There are MAGA schmucks, and then there's Mike Collins. In the debate, John Ossoff, who is on fire, accused the Republican Mike Collins of calling for immigrants to be thrown to their deaths from helicopters, and Collins just ignored it. CNN, in 2021, Collins reposted and commented on posts of an image that purported to show the Taliban hanging somebody from a helicopter. He wrote, quote, if someone said this is what should happen to some of our military political leaders for everything that's happened in Afghanistan lately, they'd probably get banned. So good thing no one says that. Turns out it's way worse than that passive-aggressive reference to hanging people out helicopters. Soon afterwards, Collins joked about pushing Nancy Pelosi out of a plane. Joe Kent was discussing his travel arrangements, another winner, when a right-wing nut host, Sandy Rios, joked that Kent could instead catch a ride with Pelosi. Kent, she'd be happy to give me a ride, I'm sure, and Collins interjected, might push her out. And in Michigan... hoisted on his own trumpetard, Mike Rogers continues not just Islamophobia, but being really bad at it. Breaking news. Meet the Press actually did something good yesterday. They found a Mike Rogers 2012 comment to Reuters supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. Supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt during the uprising there. in exactly the same way Al-Sayed did. The quote from him to Reuters, 2012, Mike Rogers, do I think there are moderate Muslim Brotherhood individuals we're going to have to reach out to and talk to? Yes, but we're going to have to watch it carefully. They read that to him, and I thought he was going to cry, and here is my advice to Mike Rogers, start crying, it's your only chance. And then there is one last weapon for Democrats against Trump. Trump Going out and boasting that America is making hundreds of billions of dollars on higher gas prices and then clarifying, oh, no, it's not America. It's just America's oil and gas industry, none of whose members was in the audience at the time. And it's not just hundreds of billions of dollars. It's African fortune. Trump is talking about all the money they're making while people are suffering at the pump. That'll be the headline. But I said, I don't give a damn. I'm going to say it. We'll make it a freaking fortune. So there it is as he tries to steal the midterms. Trump closing message to the midterm voter, quote, I don't give a damn, unquote, about you. With all this, Trump has convinced himself his real approval rating is 60%. Byron York of the Washington Examiner, buttonholed, madman munt, about his approval rating, which, as you know, is actually 32% on the high end, and on the economy, it's 28%. And he answered quickly, it's fake, it's fake. He quickly turned his actual lie into somebody else lying when they did not. He claimed the New York Times used the now discredited as fabricated Wedgwood poll, which it did not. The job approval, they said it's 37, 38. He asked incredulously, I'm not at 38. I don't believe I could be beaten by anybody. I think that if I needed it, which I don't, I think 60. York writes, quote, I asked if he meant that he would be at 60 if he were running for office himself. Yeah, I think I'd be in the 60s now. Now in the Republican Party, I'm way up. Show him the 99%. I wonder who that was dictated to. Show him the 99%. Have you seen it? So in one second, he lies. He falsely accuses a scrupulous and ethical group of people of lying, which they did not. He's guilty of sophistry. He's guilty of changing and moving the goalposts. He's guilty of playing a shell game about which poll numbers from which group he's actually talking about. And of course, most importantly, there's nuclear-powered cope. Trump's only true skill, and I've always given him credit for this, his comprehensive lifelong ability to separate himself and his slaves and his prostitutes and his cult members from from inconvenient reality. He went on to attack the infamous 98% support for MAGA quote from a good pollster who's a terrible broadcaster named Harry Enten of CNN. Trump, I always cater to my base. My base is big. Yeah, we've seen the recent photos of your base. It is big. I think my base is close to 100% of the Republican Party. I think I'm close to 100. It's not MAGA. It's just Byron York writes, at that moment, I interjected, but it's not the whole Republican Party. Trump, I think it's close. I think the bushes have largely faded. They're gone. What you're seeing in this is the one thing that lets me sleep at night, the realization that no matter what he achieves, no matter what happens to him in the rest of his life, no matter what he's done in the last 10 years, he cannot enjoy it for more than a few minutes because after, say, I'm guessing, 22 minutes, the ghost of Mary Trump appears to him and says, not good enough. Whatever happened in his childhood, whatever was wrong with those parents of his, somewhere there is something that makes it impossible for him to accept the idea that he has 98% support from a group of cultists. Has to be 100%. Or more, as we've seen him speculate with what 1,000% improvement means. or cutting something by a thousand percent. The former is possible and the latter isn't. So what happens when you are the least approved president in history? What happens nine days before the midterms that could either turn you into a lame duck at best, or maybe remove you from office and send you to prison where you will die in jail? You lie to yourself, you lie to your cult, you lie out your own big base. Now, a lot of people point at this and say it's a sign of mental deterioration, and I have to disagree with this. I encountered this exact same thing when I interviewed him, and he insisted he had research that indicated that his football team, the New Jersey Generals, was more popular than the New York Giants and the New York Jets combined. This was delusional. His team and the league they played in would go bankrupt and two seasons after we did this interview, and they went bankrupt largely because when you extract threats and blackmail and dishonesty from his business skill set, all you have left is the fact that he's a terrible businessman. And he applied these terrible businessmen to the United States Football League, and the league went out of business less than two years later. The interview I did in which he revealed his delusion about numbers and percentages and popularity and approval occurred in December of 1983. It is the same delusion that allowed him to try to convince Byron Yorick that the approval rating is actually 60%, and the economy is great. If you need, in moments of darkness, to try to understand Trump, remember, he thinks his hair looks great. He thinks his hair makes him look young. He thinks his suits and ties make him look skinny. I'd like to understand more of what is clinically wrong with him, but I'm afraid we can't do that until the autopsy. So what do you do when you have secret 60% approval and the New York Times has stolen it from you? You turn to your real winner, Iran. Did anybody notice that Netanyahu, facing his own life or death election... says that he and Trump will be resuming a regime change war in Iran after the midterms. On Wednesday, Netanyahu wrote, together with President Trump, I will complete the mission and we will bring down the regime in Iran. This is the problem with an ally who will go everywhere with you until what he needs conflicts with what you need, in which case, man overboard. I love you. I love you. I love you. Also of interest here, sports. I'd like to apologize for the World Series. And speaking of apologies, the New York Knicks don't after their owner ruins the team's first championship since I was 14 years old. by turning it into a phishing scam to trap his own employees. It's hard to believe Jim Dolan finds new ways to humiliate himself and his team and his sport, but he does because he's a putz. This is Countdown with Keith Olbermann. This is Sports Center. Wait, check that. Not anymore. This is Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Sports Ball Center tonight. And on behalf of Major League Baseball and everybody who likes the sport, I'd like to apologize for games one and two of the World Series and encourage you to give it another chance in game three. Because I don't think there's going to be a game five. I'm actually dreading seeing the TV ratings for the first two games. On the other hand, I have one of those questions to ask that nobody asks. Why do we care what the TV ratings are? They are uniformly used as a barometer for everything, trends about the game, the cities, the teams, the managers, the announcers, the networks, whether the cities or towns are considered red state or blue state or the bat boys are, but who cares? Do you own Fox? Are you on Fox? Do you get a cut of the playoffs? shares or the money from TV? I mean, when I did the World Series in the playoffs for NBC in 97 and 98, and Fox in 99 and 2000, and Turner in 2013, I cared about the ratings because they more or less vaguely reflected on my work, but not really that much. I didn't get a bonus. I didn't even get beaten by Rupert Murdoch if they weren't good. But otherwise, honestly, who cares? Until a network stops making more money from broadcasting those games than they do paying for the rights to broadcast those games, it means nothing to you and me. Nothing. Now, if they released audience change numbers... They released the quarter hour ratings, what it looks like at 9.30 as opposed to 9.15. Maybe we would learn something. Maybe baseball looks at these, but I suspect it's Rob Manfred. He transferred into Cornell from some small college. I don't think he understands this. But if you could look at the numbers and they could show you where people went, oh, God, and watched hockey instead. How many people were fed up by a really embarrassing performance by the Tampa Bay Rays, either Friday or Saturday night? 4-0 lead in the top of the first in Game 2, and they didn't score again. Game 1, they ran themselves out of two innings, almost a third. Game 2, the third base coach sent a slow runner, a catcher, on base at second. They tried to score him on a short grounder to left with a good arm in left field for Milwaukee. He was out by 87 miles. Countless errors. Defensive just misses by Tampa Bay. What did the TV ratings look like in the seconds after those events? Personally, I prefer this kind of baseball, if it's well executed. There were no homers until the first inning of the second game. I prefer the double plays and clutch fielding, except the Rays didn't have any clutch fielding. They kept missing by that much. Missed catches, double plays not made. There were so many Milwaukee defensive plays that they just made that it emphasized what is going wrong here that people haven't noticed. It's defensive positioning scouting. It's where you put your fielders at a specific time against a specific hitter with a specific hit to be or pitch to be thrown because you know where if the batter hits the ball, that ball is likely to go. I covered a World Series in 1999 in which the New York Yankees swept the Atlanta Braves in four games, and it looked like Their fielders never moved once in four games. I think I saw center fielder Bernie Williams go like two feet to the right to get a fly ball once. That was defensive scouting. The man in charge of it, their former general manager and manager Gene Michael, the late stick, knew where to play every Atlanta hitter based on every Atlanta pitch before he had videotape at his fingertips to double check everything. And somehow Tampa Bay scouting was non-existent. This is the first time I have ever seen a team win the opening game by 3-2, then win the second game by 5-4, and I am left thinking that the likeliest outcome is they are going to sweep the series in four games. That's how much in two one-run wins Tampa Bay sucked. Also, I love Kevin Burkhart. and Ken Rosenthal, but good God is the Fox broadcast and the pregame show and postgame show. Terrible! It's worse than when I did it with Steve Psycho Lions, who did not get that nickname, ironically. Basketball. After the New York Knicks won their first NBA title since 1973, employees at Madison Square Garden... thought they had gotten shocking reputation-restoring generosity from the noted paranoid tightwad MSG Rangers and Knicks owner, pond-scum-fat Jim Dolan. Congratulations, read an email. Your employee championship ring is here. This is according to The Athletic, quoting the email, and MSG has not disputed this. Then each employee is addressed by name in its own email. This one is on the house. MSG is issuing a complimentary employee championship ring. The same jeweler, the same craftsmanship, personalized with your name, no cost to you. There are two designs to choose from, championship gold and garden classic. Reserve the one you want below. You click and you get a notice that there is no ring. There's just a test fishing scam button. that you have fallen for, and to keep your job with the Knicks and MSG, you have to attend a mandatory cyber security class because Jim Dolan, who is already the worst owner in sports, and is already, and we have had them since 1876, the worst owner in sports history in New York City, Jim Dolan is also paranoid and hates everybody who doesn't give him money, and abuses his employees regularly, and has found a way to combine these things, cybersecurity paranoia and abusing his own employees. And just to top it off, the Knicks issued a condescending statement criticizing the story when it was reported by The Athletic, which blew it up further and kept it in the news for a day. And then the next day they issued another statement saying, oh no, it was a mistake, claiming unconvincingly that those employees will be getting a ring or jewelry at a later point, like 3,000 years from now. Good work by the Knicks to keep the, we ruined the NBA title for our employees because Jim Dolan is a bulbous, paranoid, flatulent asshole story alive. Some of those words also pertain to the third of three sports stories, Riley Gaines. Riley Gaines, who apparently was a swimmer or perhaps just a girl who fell into the water at some point, Hillary Clinton might be the only person in America, writes Riley Gaines, professional complainant. Hillary Clinton might be the only person in America who thinks that her loss belongs in the conversation. Oh, Riley, there's somebody else who thinks that way about their loss. Gaines has also positioned herself as a political expert. She complains she hates liberals. She looks like a Kewpie doll. She's perfect for Fox. Riley Gaines wrote that James Tallarico was a creep. And the account on Twitter X Evan Loves Worf immediately connected with yet another whack on the hapless pinata that is Riley Gaines. Oh, did James Tallarico also beat you at swimming? To the number one story on the countdown and things I promised not to tell or Thurber. And in this case, the roulette wheel of countdown has spun and you get a things I promised not to tell about what has heretofore been the worst day of my life. Certainly in terms of expectations versus reality. I believe without any modesty or any maudlin quality to this, I have no doubt that the day I die will exceed this day that I'm thinking about from 2012 as the day in which the fall off from expectation to reality will be a little bit greater. On the other hand, I'm hoping I won't have too much time to think about it then, and I won't really remember the one in 2012. It'll just be snap, goodbye, gone, to borrow an old friend's phrase. But up until that point, I believe it'll probably be this date in, I guess, June or July of 2012. I don't speak a lot here about my time at Current TV. This was the network of Al Gore and his business partner, and business is used very loosely here, Joel Hyatt. They were the ones who, the day I was suspended spuriously by NBC for making what they called illegal campaign contributions that were in fact completely legal under my contract. And when they found that out, they had to rescind my suspension and give me my money back and apologize to me. When that happened, Al Gore called me at home and said, if you wind up leaving NBC, come work for me and my partner Hyatt at our TV network, Current TV. We'll bring Countdown. We'll pay you more than you're making now. We'll give you $ 50 million to start. We'll hire your entire staff, everybody you can bring with you. We'll give you complete control and we'll build out a liberal TV news network around your show. And I foolishly thought Al knew what he was talking about. He didn't lie to me. He just didn't understand what was actually going on at Current TV. Someday I will tell that entire story, but let me just say that the first night we were on, the first show on Current TV in March, or no, excuse me, June 2011, the first night we were on, we beat MSNBC and and CNN in the advertiser-friendly demo, the money demographic. We had more viewers on this little dipshit digital cable channel that we had, channel 101 in low def at the exact time when everybody else was going high def. We beat MSNBC. We beat Lawrence O'Donnell. And for the first week, we beat them and CNN. We didn't fully know that because our network had bought the wrong ratings. So we didn't get the DVR and live ratings that week. So we thought we'd only beaten MSNBC. In fact, we'd beaten MSNBC, my successor show, and CNN. It was a good start. It couldn't last. There were not resources. And every once in a while, the building would simply shut down that we were in. It wasn't so much a studio as it was a portal to hell with lights. I'm going to stop complaining about this now before I go completely off tangent and stop talking about the real key to this story, Uma Thurman, the actress. So things got worse and worse at Current TV, and the ratings got worse and worse, and my spirits got worse and worse, and the shows got better and better, ironically enough. It was really good content and really solid and fair liberal commentary, and Al Gore was often a guest on the program and actually contributed something to it, and we had a good time doing the show. We had a good time being on the show, even if we were the only ones watching, and every once in a while the lights went out. At some point in the spring of 2012, two things developed simultaneously in my life. The nominal president of the network and the operation was not Al Gore, and it was not his business partner, Joel Hyatt. It was a veteran TV executive from MTV at one point named Mark Rosenthal. And Mark Rosenthal called me and said, this is entirely off the record, but I believe I have a way that I can use the board of directors of Current TV to to go around Hyatt and seize control of this network and redo what we need to redo to save this project before it collapses under its own weight. And the only person who walks out of here with their money is you. And by that point, we'll be down to like nine viewers because this guy signed contracts that basically make it impossible for us to put any content online. And you know where this is going. If there's no online feed, there's no TV network. He saw the future in 2012 pretty clearly, did Mark. He said, I want to take you to dinner. I'm going to be in New York on such and such a night, and we'll go to dinner and map this out. And it's a kamikaze mission, he said. I'm quoting him. It's possibly that. We may all go down in flames doing this. On the other hand, we may save this operation and ourselves in the process. And I said, okay, it's got to be better than this. At the same time, one of my producers wound up in a gym every day working out before coming into work and working out next to Uma Thurman, the actress, as if I have to explain who Uma Thurman is. And somehow or another, the subject of me came up because she worked for me and she was really good and they were talking about me. And Uma Thurman said something that indicated that she found me good on television or who knows what. And gradually, the story got from Uma to my producer and then to me that Uma was interested in talking to me on a social basis to see if I might be a suitable date for For her, she had broken up with her longtime live-in boyfriend, husband, whoever he was, father of her child or children. I didn't get the whole story straight, but sure enough, one day, I walk in after a game at Yankee Stadium. It's about 11 o'clock at night, and my phone is ringing in my apartment, and I pick it up. It's an odd time to get a phone call, and there, on the other end of the line, Hi, Keith, this is Uma Thurman. Well, we talked for about three hours and it was a really great conversation and we hit it off and it was about anything and everything. And she said, let's have coffee. And I gave it the amount of time that a middle-aged bachelor would give in that occasion, which was what's the smallest micro measure of a second. That's how much time I thought, is this a good idea before saying yes. And we tentatively scheduled a date for coffee and a time. She said, I'll be over by your studios. Maybe you want to show me the studios. I went, no, you don't want to see the studios. I want you to remain impressed with me. And she laughed and I laughed and we figured out, okay, we're going to find a place. She said, let me find a place that's not going to be a paparazzi driven kind of thing. And I will text you and we will meet at three o'clock on this afternoon. Well, it turned out it was the same afternoon of the night that Mark Rosenthal and I were going to have dinner. and discuss the future of current. So, in effect, within a span of three or four hours, it was potentially the case that my entire social life would change, and my entire professional life would change, and one would assume, in both cases, for the better. At about two o'clock, and the meeting time with Uma was three, at about two o'clock, the phone rings, and it's Mark Rosenthal. And Mark Rosenthal says, dinner's off. And I say, why is that? And he said, because Hyatt just found out that we were going to have dinner tonight. And so I'm no longer the president of Current TV. And I went, what? He says, yeah, I got to get out of town. I've got to go talk to somebody. This is always happening to me. Networks go off the air. local radio stations that are about to give me twice what I'm making from ESPN. They decide to simulcast FM rock music instead of continuing in an all-sports talk format. an hour before I'm going to agree to a contract with them. Networks go off the air. CNN was going to hire me to run their all-sports network in 2001 after Fox blew me out. And literally, as the meetings went on, so did the CNN plans to take the network off the air. This goes on and on throughout my career, and here it is once again. The man who could have saved Current TV got fired the day we were supposed to meet. And then I thought, well, At least I have coffee with, and a little beep goes off on my phone, and there's a text from Uma Thurman. And it says, sorry, can't make it today. Let's reschedule for next week. As I said, this is sometime in 2011, June, July, something like that. Next week still has not come. I did see Uma Thurman, and I don't want to make this out to be a tragedy, except for the fact that I was kind of depressed the rest of the day. Like, well, let's see. I suppose there's no chance Uma Thurman will become the new president of Current TV, is there? Huh? Huh? Maybe? No? No, she didn't. They in fact brought in somebody who was totally ill-suited for the job, and the thing went right off the cliff, and much faster than it would have if we'd just left it alone. I tried. Never heard from Uma again, and then I got involved in a project that perhaps you know me for called Bojack Horseman. the lowest, easiest lift I've ever had of the best written material I've ever seen, in which they asked me to portray myself only evil and stupid. And think about this. Think about the opportunity and the joy there would be in simply letting go of every effort you make not to be good and not to be smart, and to get paid for this and for nobody to be harmed by it, for the result to be people laughing, and good laughing, laughing with you. The satirization of yourself for fairly good cash... and a very easy process in which you just go to a studio on 39th Street with very warm and good and professional audio artists who record your voice while others in Los Angeles tell you exactly what they want from you in terms of intonation and intent. It was wonderful. I loved being a voice actor, and I portrayed Tom Jumbo Grumbo, the newscaster, who was in fact me, only not a sports background, but a background hosting entertainment tonight for Wales, and who occasionally did commentaries that ended with, well, I'll put it to you the way they put it to me one day. They said, listen, in addition to the script, If you were doing a commentary and you were a whale and you got really angry and at the end you decided to express your rage by not screaming or saying, shut the hell up, Mr. President, but by somehow screaming through your blowhole, do you think you could do that? And I went, you'd be surprised how many times I've been asked that question. And I made this sound. Ha! And they went, that's perfect. Can we do three takes? Sure enough, there is now an animated version of me making that sound. It has been recorded and will be available somewhere. forever. There's a point to this. So now I go in to record, as I did, I don't know, every three, four months, the latest sides for BoJack Horseman. Here, you're on three of the next six episodes. Can you just record these lines? Everything, almost everything on BoJack Horseman was recorded individually. When you hear Will Arnett talking to Patton Oswalt, or you hear me talking to Patton Oswalt, or you hear me talking to, who was on it, Amy Sedaris, We were never in the same room. There was one read-through that was done on a conference call, but nothing was recorded in person. Together, only individually, and they edited it together and made it sound like a seamless conversation. It's not just the miracle of animation. It's the miracle of audio mixing. So I go in by myself, and as I'm finishing up, I come out, and the guy goes, you know who's in the other studio? I went, I couldn't guess. I was in this studio recording. And the guy says, Uma Thurman. She's doing some voiceovers for some Japanese car commercial. And I went, do I leave or what? I was like, no, come on. We had a great conversation. I just go, I'll go away just to wait. Oh yeah, she's finishing up. She'll be out in a minute or two at the most. And I was like, okay. I was like, well, maybe we can still save Current TV, which by this point had been sold to Al Jazeera and was already going out of business as Al Jazeera because the whole thing was a house of cards, and I'll leave it at that. And I'm waiting for the door to open, and out steps Uma Thurman, and she gives me the generic... high look that all actresses give and all actors too, I might add, in which they want to say, I'm glad you recognize me, but I don't recognize you, but I'm going to be polite. And I introduced myself and she went, oh, of course. How are you? And then we just chatted about what we were doing there. And I was doing this. Oh, cartoons. I love doing cartoons. I've seen Bojack. That is you. Of course it. And on and on and on. And then finally she says, I've got to go. But you know what, Keith? We should have coffee sometime. I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Our musical directors of Countdown are John Philip Chanel on keyboards and handling orchestration, and Brian Ray on guitars, bass, and drums. Their work is produced by TKO Brothers. Nancy Faust, the best baseball stadium organist of all time, is responsible for the satirical and pithy musical comments. The sports music is from the old Olbermann Show on ESPN2, a theme written by Mitch Warren Davis, courtesy of ESPN Inc. Other music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed, and my announcer today, speaking of old and ESPN, was my friend Tony Kornheiser. Everything else was, as always, my fault. That's countdown for today, day 631 of America Held Hostage Again, exactly 818 days until the scheduled end of his lame duck and lame-brained term, unless it ends early because Trump blows the midterms completely for his party and then winds up getting impeached and convicted by a pro-democratic, pro-democracy Senate. If you're listening, remember you can see the whole thing now on YouTube. If you're watching, remember you can just listen to the whole thing wherever you podcast and skip the whole watching thing. Next scheduled countdown is Thursday, probably. Management reserves the right to get another heart procedure instead, which is looking increasingly likely. Bulletins is the news merits. Until the next one, I'm Keith Olbermann. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olbermann is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
