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Speaker 1: Countdown with Keith Olbermann is a production of iHeartRadio. Trump's desperation is now so great that he has literally told his audience the check is in the mail. Said this to his audience in Ohio Saturday that his bribe is already on its way, quote, checks for $ 500 each are, quote, already in the mail. There's also some reference in my notes here to respecting you in the morning and something about a harp and a mouth, but I can't read my writing. This isn't the $ 5, 000 bribe, mind you. This isn't the recently revealed $ 100 bribe. This appears to be a different Trump lie about a different Trump bribe that he will give you. Oh no, this one is already on its way to, he said, 70,000 voters in Ohio. If you're lucky, you'll get the bribe before the election. And if not, he'll respect you in the morning. The midterms are a month from this past Saturday afternoon. And Trump is now flat out lying to the third degree, the third separate lie about bribing you to get you to vote Republican. It is so bad that in Texas, not only has Senate candidate Ken Paxton been caught on tape trashing Trump— that' s Ken Paxton trashing Trump on tape at his midterm convention— but the Texas GOP has somehow had to trot out a new ad starring the woman who is suing Ken Paxton for divorce. His soon-to-be ex-wife, Angela Paxton, suing him because of infidelity and biblical grounds, saying she is still voting for the Republican ticket anyway. She never mentions Paxton's name, her husband's name. She never mentions it in the ad, but she says she is voting for the Republicans anyway because... who knows what they bribed her with, if that's the way they went. My God, she says she is leaving the man over biblical grounds, but she's going to vote for the ticket he's on anyway. The closest to referring to him by name is the reference to the elephant in the room. As to the elephant in the room, he is, as I said, on tape per the New York Times, trashing Trump's Nuremberg rally midterms convention in Texas last month, asked, quote, do you feel like he's a little bit of a drag? Paxton answers, so to be honest with you, the numbers when we did that convention, it dropped our numbers. Everybody's numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good. He did not add Bob. Ken Paxton saying that the convention Trump thought was the coronation of Jesus hurt him in Texas. The reward for all of Paxton's blind loyalty. Trump never runs out of new ways to reward those who support him. Talking about Ken Paxton, whose ex, soon to be ex-wife, was willing to cut a commercial for him. It's that desperate. Paxton, he said, he may not be the best looking guy I've ever seen, but you know what? He's the greatest attorney general in America. Thanks a lot, Don. I'll run the polls in a moment. The overall big picture from Elliott Morris at strength in numbers in the House is he calls it spooky probability territory to go Democratic. Ninety nine percent, he says. He says the House polling area or error rather would have to be. double, twice the usual. It would have to be two times as large a polling error as previously ever recorded, or there'd have to be an actual shift in the last month from the Democrats to the Republicans. That shift would only have to be five times the average shift in the last month before the election. CBS even came out with a new poll over the Democrats 229, Republicans 206. That's CBS run by Barry Weiss and the Ellisons. In the Senate, according to Morris, 73% chance it is the Democrats 52, the Republicans 48 in January. In short, there are tightropes in politics and in government, and then there are tightropes that are not tied to anything on the other side. And that is where MAGA is at the moment. Things could change. There could be a polling error. There could be a sudden shift. And there is always the possibility Trump will use the military to try to steal the midterms. The Lord knows he's tried everything else. Maybe he'll bribe the military to come bribe at your house. It could change, but right now it doesn't look like it can. Morris also reports, quote, in our September poll, only 52% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents... 52% disapprove of Trump's handling of prices. So only 48% of Republicans approve of how Trump is handling the prices in their lives. That could be dragging down, he estimates, Republican Senate candidates in red states. And for once, I say to Julia Elliott Morris, you think? The choice for the GOP right now is Trump's approval on the economy overall is down to 25%. So most of them are out there trying to de-Trumpify, except Ken Paxton, who only de-Trumpifies off the record to donors. But Trump has decided that the problem in the last month for the Republican campaigns and the Republican candidates is not enough Trump on the stump. Don, you're right, absolutely. Get out there more often. Saturday night, Trump announced the polls were wrong because they have not accounted for his role in the campaign. If that's true, and he goes out and does more polling and more campaigning for these Republicans who are on the edge of disaster as it is, who are separating themselves, scrubbing Trump from their websites, if it's more Trump on the stump, the blue wave will be bigger. Lame Donald Duck. We'll be headlining a rally in Grand Island, Nebraska today, Monday. This is per the Republican National Committee. The district is that of the Republican Congressman Adrian Smith. It is the reddest district in Nebraska. Grand Island, a blood red state. Trump won it by 27 points and things are bad enough for Adrian Smith in a plus 27 Trump district that the Republicans are sending Trump there. They are in trouble in a plus 27 Trump district. Per semaphore, the Senate Republicans' top super PAC has made a tactical change. They have paused the ad campaign in the North Carolina Senate. They've paused it. Till when? Till November 4th? It's been paused. The Senate Leadership Fund is plowing seven figures into Kansas to try to save Roger 911 Marshall against the Democrat Adam Hamilton as that race slips away. They've spent $ 30 million in the North Carolina Senate race for Michael Watley, and they are basically saying that's money they poured down a rat hole. The super PAC is putting further spending there on hold. It's on hold. It's being paused until, hmm, 2032? A Trump-aligned group also has no further spending on the books passed this week either, according to Ad Impact. The move to shore up Marshall and put North Carolina on the back burner reflects a shifting Senate battleground map. Buy ya, Michael Watley! Buy ya! The de-Trumpification is accelerating, and it's now turning up in Freudian slips by Trump's greatest allies. I'm going to ask you if this is, in fact, a de-Trumpification message being sent out from a hostage, and the hostage is the last person you would think might be a hostage inside MAGA World. Pete Hegseth, Mr. Brill Cream, he has put out this on social media. No fatties. No trannies, no beardos, B-E-A-R-D-O-S, apparently referring to this as opposed to the late Lindsey Graham in some way. No weirdos, and he misspelled weirdos. No wimps, no radicals, just warriors. No fatties. Pete, is this a cry for help? No fatties? Who's the president again? Who is your leader, Pete? Who is he? Is he the fatty you're referring to, Pete? And no beardos? Who's the vice president? Jay? Somebody? Jay Montgomery Burns? Oh no, it's J.D. Vance, who has a beard. I believe even Pete Hegseth, behind his stimulants haze, is crying out for help and trying to de-Trumpify. We'll send in a rescue team for you, Pete, any day now, any month now. All right, maybe it'll be after they resume advertising for Michael Watley in North Carolina. J.D. Vance, Beardo, has a campaign message you want to hear. Quote, this is not the time to sort of gripe about all the little things. We need to get more done, which is why you need to give us two more years to get more great results for the American people. So in other words, everything sucks and you need to shut up about it, but it's great and you should give us two more years so we can give you two more years of the things that you are sort of griping about. What about the Susan Collins message? Oh boy, there's nothing like seeing Susan Collins slowly sink into the quicksand, is there? Susan Collins, could she be concerned? Is she insufficiently concerned? Should she be concerned about whoever's doing her goddamn advertising? She launched a new Collins TV ad with the NRSC saying, the official Republican Senate campaign committee last week that showed her in a Boston Red Sox cap. And the voiceover read, the Red Sox know how to handle the Yankees, and Susan Collins knows how to handle Yankee superfan Chuck Schumer. I do not expect you to understand or to care about what happens in the baseball playoffs. I barely care about them now. But the Yankees of Chuck Schumer swept the Red Sox in their wildcard series last week, two games to nil, and Schumer's Yankees in those two games outscored Susan Collins and the Red Sox 18-2 and were never competitive in two games. So that's the ad you want right now, Susan Collins, mentioning the Boston Red Sox. How about your cruise plans on the Titanic? Worse for Senator Collins, that bribery scandal about government contract influence peddling that they were pursuing in 2024 and then Trump fired all the prosecutors from the DOJ and fired all the investigators from the FBI. Well, they found video of her, Susan Collins, at a hearing May 2012, haranguing an Obama OMB nominee named Joseph Jordan, demanding that Joseph Jordan guarantee that he would not force the disclosure of political contributions from... Government contractors. What a coincidence. She not only did it, she is on tape beginning in 2012, her own cover up by proxy of the whole process by which it could have been found out. The other question in the Senate before we get to the polls is obviously how in God's name does Eric Schmidt ever live this down? In terms of a gaffe in the Senate, on official duty, on the record, live, shown to everybody on the right wing and the left wing alike, how could you ever come up with anything more damning? Unless you suddenly came out in the middle of this as that idiot Brit woman might have said, Trump's a moron. How could you possibly do anything worse than what he did to try to blow up Jack Smith and instead find out or reveal that you don't know the difference between the Iowa Hawkeyes and. and the Atlanta Hawks. It's not just Hawks, Hawkeyes. Okay, if you don't know anything about sports and you're an idiot who colors your own hair with coffee grounds like Eric Schmidt, of course, maybe you don't know the difference between the Hawks and the Hawkeyes. Plenty of actual smart people, let alone the Eric Schmitz of this world, don't know the difference between Hawks, Hawkeyes. Assume maybe Hawks is a short version of Hawkeyes. They all play basketball, right? Just because one's a men's team in the pros and the other's a women's team in... in the colleges. Well, that's no reason for you to know that, except it is not stopping. It's nearly a week later, and the memes keep coming, and I love this one. It's a meme with Eric Schmidt asking Jack Smith, did you or did you not sell hamburgers from a giant smiling head? Jack Smith saying, sir, that was Jack in the Box. Waiting for the one with Jack and Jill and the Hill. All right. As promised, the poll averages and the polls of relevance, as quoted by The New York Times and by G. Elliot Morris of Verisight and Strength in Numbers. Alaska Senate, Morris has the averages. Morris's numbers are averages of polls. Democrat by plus 4.1. The New York Times last poll ending October 1st was plus 7 Democrat. Georgia, Morris has the Democratic average plus 9.7. The Times quotes a Wedgwood poll that ended on Saturday afternoon at plus 10 Democrats in Georgia. Iowa, Morris has the Democratic average plus 1.0. The Times did a poll that ended October 1st that had the Republicans up by one, but a Fox News poll that ended on September 28th had Turek, the Democrat, up by plus two. In Kansas, Morris' Democratic average is plus 09 ahead. that Morris has the Democrat ahead of Marshall, the incumbent senator, and Moron by almost a full point. The New York Times poll of September 30 had them even, but Trafalgar, a Republican in-house pollster, ended a poll on October 1st showing the Democrat up by one point. So this is gonna come down the stretch. The Wichita Eagle newspaper has noted over the weekend that there are eight ex-living governors of Kansas Four Republicans, four Democrats, six out of eight have endorsed the Democrat Adam Hamilton over the incumbent Republican senator, the gynecologist, and resident dopey Marshall. In Maine, the Morris Democratic average is two and a half points in Democrats ahead. In Michigan, Morris has the Democratic average of 3.8 ahead. So nearly four points. Again, Trafalgar, GOP in-house, has El-Sayed up by two as of September 30th. In Minnesota, Morris has the Democratic average lead 2.3. In New Hampshire, Morris has, according to the averages, Democrats up by 5.8. In North Carolina, this is where they just bailed out on Whatley and conceded, Morris Democrats plus 11. In Ohio, Morris has the Democratic average plus 4.3. The Times poll ending October 1st has Sherrod Brown up by three in Texas. In Texas, where you're getting the guy's soon-to-be ex-wife endorsing the ticket, but never mentioning him by name because of biblical grounds. In Texas, Morris says the average of polls there has the Democrat ahead by plus 3.4. A New York Times poll ending September 30th had Tallarico ahead of Paxton by 6. In Florida, Morris has the Republican average still plus 4.7. So almost five points, a Republican lead in Florida. In Nebraska, the Republican has a 1.1 average lead, according to Morris. In South Carolina, the Morris average is Republicans ahead by 1.3. That's Lindsey Graham's sister is there because Lindsey can't come to the Senate right now. The New York Times also has the Democrats ahead for governor in Alaska, in Iowa, in Ohio, and in Texas. I am endorsing the entire Texas slate. I don't know any of their names. Signed, Mrs. Ken Paxton. There is a late ad from the NBC poll released yesterday. Latino voters nationwide say by 59 to 35, they prefer to see the Democrats win control of Congress over the Republicans in the midterms. That's considerably broader, says NBC. You betcha it's double the 12-point Democratic margin among Latino voters at this point in 2024. And now, in the wake of all this, there are two other things to add. Trump and the Time interview. I encourage you to take a look at last week's interview by Time magazine, which I know nobody knew still existed, but has put out some amazing work, including the transcript of what is clearly a bat guano crazy man posing as president of the United States who let his guard down and revealed he's 87 times more bat guano than we thought. He F-bombed Time magazine in this extraordinary softball interview in which he barely listened to any of the questions and simply said what he wanted to say, but he F-bombed them because, of course, he's a desperate, insecure, failed human being whose last living thought will be that he was not praised enough by his mother or the latest polls. It's rather startling. He's asked, have you seen the videos of Mitch McConnell back in the Senate? Do you think he should resign because of his health condition? And answers, it was a disappointment to a lot of Republicans. So that's just, well, Sleepy Joe gave pardons to everybody. He gave them to Fauci. He gave them to this. But you mean I'm not allowed to give them, but Sleepy Joe is allowed to give them? Sir, this is a Mitch McConnell question. This ain't going to be much of a story. Here we are doing this. You haven't asked me one effing positive question. He didn't say effing. I'm cleaning it up for the algorithm's sake on YouTube. All of this. What about this? What about this? And apparently he gesticulates, pointing to, I don't know, his willingness to give all of us mere humans something. What about this? What about that? What about this? All negative. Why are you devoting all this time to the White House? You know how I do. I do that out of my back pocket. I pay for a lot of it, but I fix it because the White House should look like that. Ah, blah, blah, blah. Then I'm doing very well with another war that we already won, Venezuela. Do you notice you haven't asked me a question about Venezuela? It is impossible for me to believe sometimes, but every time I state that Donald Trump is a terrorist, mass murderer, and completely out of his effing mind, I'm actually understating things. There's also this about how he let AI start the war. Increasingly enthralled to the tech executives courting him in December 2025, Elon Musk returned to the Oval Office for a clandestine meeting, according to Time magazine in connection to this interview. Trump spent hours asking Grok, Musk's AI chatbot, questions about his presidency and legacy, according to an official present. At that time, Trump was ordering missile strikes against Venezuelan boats he alleged were smuggling drugs into the U.S. He asked Grock how Venezuelans would react if the U.S. captured Maduro. According to the official present, the chatbot responded that Maduro was a repressive and deeply unpopular dictator and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall. Paul, after Trump ordered the mission to seize Maduro the following month, celebrations broke out in the streets. Trump, according to officials, came away thinking... Grok was ingenious. Remember when they said AI could destroy us all? It's now a race to see if AI can do it by itself or if it's going to join forces with another artificial thing, Donald Trump. So for comic relief, before we get to the subject of my alma mater in the news and that tragedy about that Jane Doe, I have to read you the social media post of the week from Threads, from KateGonzalez9726. Threads, almost as bad as TwitterX. As a kid, she writes, I was a Girl Scott. It says it, it says it right here. Girl Scott. I was a Girl Scott and a 4-H member, so apparently she successfully transitioned from being a Scott. Or she's no longer from Glasgow? She's not Glasguijan? As a kid, I was a Girl Scout and a 4-H member. As an adult, I served active duty and served in the reserves. I love my country. Go vote Republican, writes Kate Gonzalez. Ameriva is worth saving. Ameriva. A-M-E-R-I-V-A. So all you Girl Scots out there, all you Amerivan Girl Scots, listen to Kate Gonzalez and vote. I want to know how in the hell she spelled Republican right. Now about my alma mater. Obviously, factually, I can't add anything to this other than to express the same shame that so many of my fellow alumni of Cornell University feel, again, because of the frats, because of the university and the way it has been mismanaged. I only know how it's been mismanaged since, let's see, I applied in September 1974. I can only cover since 1974. My opinion about the frats and how the university has responded to the frats and to the protection of women and to the subject of violence and to the idea of the Cornell police, that has not changed since the day I arrived on the campus there, which was August of 1975. So I don't have anything new, but I may be able to offer some perspective based on being so old. Whatever happened to Jane Doe and I am mixed between rage and tears over what happened to Jane Doe. The frats should be closed. I'm sorry if you find something redeeming about them. They should have been closed in 1975. Most guys wouldn't go into frats in 1975. They should have been closed probably in 1935. Whenever the last risk there was of actual bears coming out of the woods and attacking students if they didn't huddle in groups at night on the Ithaca campus, so the 1880-something, they probably should have been closed after that bear attack issue dropped. I don't want to in any way minimize what we're dealing with now, but the frats have been a problem for a century. particularly at Cornell, but not exclusively, as I'll get into in a moment. No, let me get into it now. I will say this. The outrage at how Cornell University has handled this is obviously justified. It's obviously perhaps the outrage may in fact be lower than Cornell deserves at the moment, but it also risks becoming kind of a rationalization that this is somehow just Cornell or this is somehow just Ivy League or just elite universities or high money schools. I'm long beyond the age that I know a lot of people who are in college, and yet I know at least four women who were assaulted at frats at four different schools in the last decade, decade and a half. I know at least four, personally. Friends of friends, or in one case, a friend. Big schools, small schools, schools tightly affiliated with prominent religions, it doesn't matter. And in each case, the schools did nothing because frats. At Cornell, the frats are a separate world. I knew in four years at that university, two, three guys who were in frats. I was outside a frat once in the parking lot for the start of a road race. I was in a frat exactly once, and it turns out it was that frat, Chi Phi, covering a sports story there, if you can believe that. I'll talk about that in a moment because it's more meaningful than you'd think. And the place gave me the creeps. It looked like the start of every horror movie. It is a different world with outsized influence because donors, and especially big money donors and legacy family members lived in them, and they perpetuate themselves from this cultish kind of behavior. And these are the results. The Cornell president put out an eight-minute video statement on Saturday night. It was pretty good, all things considered. And still, he waited until the sixth minute to even mention the word fraternities. Because the frats at Cornell and elsewhere in this country are like corporations. They exist to relieve individuals of responsibility for morality and, more importantly, for any legal responsibility. Go into a frat, and you are a member. You're not an individual anymore. What happens in the frat is going to be dealt with with the frat. The frat brothers will look out for you. And it has been noted that, in fact, the frats may actually promote illegal behavior. I'm not saying they did that in this case, but they may promote illegal behavior of various kinds, especially drinking-related illegal behavior— Because if you broke the law with your frat brothers, your frat brother, your bosom buddy, your blood brother can always blackmail you with that fact 25 years from now in business, in politics, in your personal life. The being absolved of moral responsibility comes at a significant price. Back to this frat I went to, Chi Phi, which seemed to be about average in morals in 1979, which is when I guess I was there. The sports story was moronic. It was desk chair racing. But it really represents, now that I think about it, the frat system in microcosm. And I recall this bothered me then, too, and I think I even mentioned it on the radio station. One day every spring, the brothers in that frat would take the wheeled desk chairs out of their libraries and study rooms. which, of course, were barely used, and race these wheeled chairs down the hill, which was about a 30-degree angle, down the hill on the street in front of the frat, and they would go two at a time in heats, and they would end up at the bottom of the hill, which opened onto a main drag, which, if I remember correctly, was Buffalo Street, which is about the biggest of the main drags that surround the Cornell campus. And I asked the guy running the race while calling play-by-play of this, they had a play-by-play caller of their own there over a PA system announcing this admittedly suicidal behavior on the Frat Brothers' behalf. I asked the guy running the race, that's... vehicular traffic down there on Buffalo Street, isn't it? Aren't you running the risk of getting killed? Thinking to myself, I'm not sure I'm completely sold on the idea that that's a bad thing. But I said, isn't that a problem running down from a street that only has a stop sign on your end into traffic going in two different directions? And his answer was, Our competitors are considered pedestrians, so legally, we have the right of way. The cars... have to stop for us. Now, to some degree, he was self-mocking. There is no belief on my part that he actually thought the cars, and by the way, they were coming out of a blind intersection. There was all sorts of foliage on this side of the traffic as it approached them in this direction. I don't think he actually believed they were all going to stop for him. I believe he was mocking this. But there was something in the frat mentality that was expressed by that quote. The cars have to stop for us. Besides the frats, as I mentioned, the idea of the Cornell University police bothered me in 1975, and it bothers me now. What do you mean a university has its own police? Who are they protecting and serving? The students? The employees? the corporation that actually owns the place and its related businesses, and Cornell owns a lot of businesses in Ithaca, New York, not as many as they used to. Who are they protecting? Jane Doe? Did they protect Jane Doe? And the local prosecutors I covered in a little slight degree, local politics and local elections for four years in Ithaca, New York, and certainly was aware of the coverage. Our radio station, the sports department was My chair here in the news department was the rest of the chairs at a six-chair table. I was part of the news department. In fact, ran it for a couple of days in 1978. I know what we were dealing with there. The prosecutors from Tompkins County, New York, you're going to trust them to go against a Cornell University frat? Yeah, they may have gotten the job because of a Cornell University frat. But the Cornell police? Not a good idea. that it would be there perhaps to protect and patrol the campus and protect students, if that's all it did, rather than perhaps be involved in a cover-up of a gang rape, maybe it would be a good idea. I don't think as presently constituted, it's a good idea. I don't think as presently constituted when presently meant 1975, it was a good idea. I cherish my friends from Cornell, and I still have a bunch. I still support my Cornell radio station, which is now Was not then, but he's now on Buffalo Street. It's not far from this frat. When you saw reporters reporting from the Cornell campus with the hill behind them and the big clock tower atop it, that was the view I was greeted by coming out of my dorm room for three years. There were about, I would guess, about 100 yards tops from my dorm room at Mennon Hall at Cornell University. I still cherish my memories there. I still love my great teachers who helped me then and still help me now, like the late Don Martin. the late Jim Lawrence, the late Joel Silby, the late Charlie Russell, the late Russ Martin. I still love the campus, but not the weather. I'm still proud to have walked it at the same time in history when the 9-11 hero, Cornell's Eamon McEnany, walked it. But I've never had any confidence in the corporation that runs the place. We had Cornell credit cards. I could just buy anything I wanted to, and Dad got the bill. Dad wasn't fond of that. There were dozens of Cornell vice presidents who had nothing to do with education. There were Cornell investments in apartheid South Africa that the student government had to spend a couple of years trying to force divestiture and did. There were Cornell police and there were Cornell frats. And nothing that happened relating to them in 1975 surprised me. And certainly nothing that has happened to them in 2026 or 2024 surprises me. Also of interest here, a quick health update. Yes, I had another heart procedure last week. It's beginning to become routine. The guy at the desk at Mount Sinai recognized me this time. This was not another full-fledged ablation. There was nothing burned in my heart. Kinda. They zapped me. They did a, what is this called again? A cardio, cardio version. I don't know. It's cardio version. It left me looking like I had tried to iron my shirt while I was wearing it. They got to have, they got my heart rhythm back in, in correct position. It had come out of position in the week preceding. And whereas this is not likely to be fatal nor disastrous, you know, If they have to put you into a state of semi-consciousness and hit you with electricity round about your heart bone, I think it's kind of serious. So as I said, I needed that brief period of time last week off. I'm going to take these on a podcast to podcast basis. In other words, I'll be back Monday or this is Monday. I'll be back Thursday if I can remember what day it is. And maybe I'll be back next Monday and maybe I won't. I'm taking them day to day. As I used to say in a past life, we're all day to day. Also of interest here, Thurber returns. We're doing that to celebrate the memorial service for his daughter, Rosemary, who was a great friend of mine and precipitated the circumstances in which I got to read Thurber aloud. I'll tell that story and read you a great Thurber story at the end of the show. and also to celebrate the republication by the Library of America, Thurber's Dogs, his short stories and a lot of his drawings of the thing for which he is probably still the most famous and which we talk about the least, because you need to see the drawings. And it's very difficult to show the drawings even on YouTube, let alone on an audio podcast. So we'll do that. And then before that, if you think you were surprised... that MSNOW ran the Trump-Laney-Riefenstahl TV commercial last week. Wait till you find out who was chosen, who volunteered, perhaps, to rationalize running the Trump-Laney-Riefenstahl commercial on MSNOW, to rationalize this to the MSNOW staff. It was my former line producer at Countdown on MSNBC. He was the one who sold out the network. His name is VidKing Quizzling. That can't be right. That's next. This is Countdown. I'm sure you've seen them or at least seen them written about the Laney Reef install quality Trump ads that have been paid for by you and me, the stupid American taxpayer. Trump has jumped the final guardrail and is using tax money to run ads for himself and his party themselves. and his fellow scumbags and slaves before the midterms in a last desperate bid to hold on to power. There's one thing about these ads appearing on Fox stations and other broadcast networks that are staggering towards their eventual extinction. There's another thing that happened in the past week. At least one of the ads ran at least once on the former MSNBC, with which you may remember I have some past connection, like I invented it and saved it from being turned into a cartoon channel roundabout 2005. But they won't tell you that because they erased my history at the request of one of the nighttime anchors. In any event, the point of this is that they have now run on MSNOW, and incidentally, the logo for MSNOW with the waving American flag before MS, it looks like at first glance, EMS now. The new people at MSNOW running the place decided that they had to run because the Trump administration demanded that they accept taxpayer money to do this, one of these Laney Riefenstahl Trump ads, and I make that comparison totally intentionally. That's what this is, an attempt to convince the public that it is being well served by a criminal corrupt gang by using the public's own money to convince them of it. Laney Riefenstahl in action, 21st century edition. It turns out, and I was disappointed gobsmacked for about a full day after this, it had a bigger impact on me than my latest heart surgery did, when I found out the identity of the quizling at MSNOW who bowed to ownership's demand, Versant, which is just another handoff of Comcast, the demand by his financial bosses that the network run the Trump-Laney-Riefenstahl ads. The guy who did this, the guy who made it supposedly palatable to the editorial staff, is Greg Cordick, the former line producer of Countdown, a guy whose bonus check I signed every year and who supposedly understood what we were doing at the old MSNBC. When I got back there in 2003, he was producing afternoon cut-ins and writing bumpers. And I thought he was pretty good at one skill, which he had, which is pretty hard to find, a non-editorial skill of timing a show live in progress. It's something I could never do in a million years, actually make a complicated show with live guests and lots of videos and lots of things changing and lots of things not happening on time actually come out at exactly 8.50 for the handoff to the nine o'clock show. He was very skilled at it and he was very rewarded for it. He didn't really understand what was on the air. He only understood what time it was. Again, a valuable resource and one that I encouraged him to continue to use on Countdown. In any event, he never quite understood why we had gone all politics in 2003. He complained bitterly, and five years after the fact that we had established the worst persons in the world segment without his consent, which was not needed in the line of command there, But he didn't understand why we were so liberal or why I did commentaries rather than more oddball segments and interviews with celebrities. He didn't really get that. Then I now find in the Oliver Darcy newsletter status, which I quote so often, I probably should send Oliver some money as one of my writers. As you know, you are looking at the only writer of the show, except when I quote somebody else. And in this case, I am again quoting Oliver Darcy's status newsletter. Quote, Greg Cordick, MSNOW's Senior Vice President of Programming. tried to quell concerns about the ads in question. Now, the reason I wanted to bring this up with you is what follows, but I must say that if you are me and you read these words, Greg Kordick, MSNOW's Senior Vice President of Programming, it would be the equivalent of anybody in this country, particularly though in New York real estate, who had awakened in the last few weeks from a, say, 15-year coma to read the words, Donald Trump, 45th and 7th President of the United States, and they spent the rest of the day going, could you put me back in my coma? Because that's what this feels, the idea that editorially, the person in charge of the programs at MSNBC and making the bridge between the business end of that network, as it is now called MSNow, and its editorial employees, most of whom still have... an actual intent to do, you know, journalism and liberal commentary and broadcast the truth, no matter how self-serving most of the programming is, the intent is still there. They've gone totally off the tracks in terms of the presentation, but that's not my point right here. But to hear that Cordick is in charge really is, if you said my dogs were in charge, I would feel the network was in much safer hands. Let me read you the rest of what Oliver Darcy's status wrote. Cordick told the gathered employees at a meeting to discuss why the F they were running the Laney Reef install Trump ads, told the gathered employees that the network planned to release a statement after airing the pro-Trump spot. I would say running the pro-Trump spot was enough of a statement, Greg, but you do you. Cordick informed staffers that the network's top boss, Rebecca Cutler, wanted the statement to point out that Trump refers to the network as failing but was still spending money to run spots on the channel. Cordick also said it was suggested that MS Now disclosed to the audience precisely how much it had been paid to run the spots and then say the proceeds were going to charity, status has learned. But Cordick indicated that Cutler did not wish to go that far and... inflame the situation. You bet she didn't. The problem, Ms. Cutler, President Cutler doesn't seem to understand, is that by running a pro-Trump ad on MSNBC Now, you have already inflamed the situation and sold your own soul. I mean, you're president of a television network. How much soul did you have left? Sold your own soul to the devil, the fat orange devil in Washington. Back to status. In response to inquiries about the ads, MSNOW took the route that Cordick had foreshadowed. Quote, we know the size, engagement, and influence of the MSNOW audience, and apparently the White House does too, network spokesperson Richard Hudock told Status. The decision to spend taxpayer dollars to reach our audience speaks for itself. Now, I would suggest here that there are rationalizations, and then there's the rationalization that is a confession that you, collectively, an organization, has sold your own soul permanently. And to say in defense of doing this heinous betrayal of the liberal audience that keeps you people from starving on the streets... The idea that to tell them that this is okay because it indicates that Trump believes that there's a large audience and he gave us money— in other words, we have profited off you, the viewer, by Trump paying us money to contact you, the viewer— that' s not perhaps the flex that you think it is, Richard Hudock. They're saying, in other words, the money is what counts. As the late TV playwright Dennis Potter once explained in saying that when he had terminal cancer, when he had pancreatic cancer, he had named his cancer Rupert, so he had something to fight against. Rupert Murdoch's crimes in the country that he was from, the UK, was putting a price tag on everything. If the statement that the White House... Buying this ad on MSNow, the importance of this is an indication that MSNow is a success. If that's your rationale for doing this ridiculous betrayal and total denial of what you are there for and the only reason that you exist, if that's not an indication that you have put a price tag on the entire product and that everything that comes out of the mouths of the people on that network is now suspect— and also for sale to the highest bidder, I don't know what could be. There's more from Mr. Hudak. Like all paid advertising on MSNOW, this spot was subject to an established review process by the sales team. He added, accepting an advertisement is not an endorsement of its message, and purchasing airtime will never purchase favorable coverage. Of course, that's the point of advertising, isn't it, Mr. Hudock? If you buy an ad that is already prepared and prepared by outside sources and contains news footage, it's going to supplant any need and go around any need for positive coverage because you're simply buying the time from the network. That's what an advertisement is. He didn't like what was on MS Now. He couldn't buy it like he had his proxies by CNN, so he's simply buying it 30 seconds at a time. This is not a significant jump from one ad, one Laney Riefenstahl pro-Trump ad, and the Rachel Maddow show brought to you by the Trump administration. The full rationalization is that given the company's ads... And they're, as referred to in that quote, the review process by the sales team. If it's the same sales team that I knew in 2010 and before, I hope you made them pay the bar bill. The full rationalization is that given this company adds standard that every ad has to go through. If they didn't sell Trump the time that he demanded, they would be guilty in some way of political discrimination and the White House would have a fight over it. The White House would now go after Versant and Comcast and Ms. Now and all the rest of it over the idea that they were refused on political grounds from buying an advertisement on a political network. Well, by that token, an actual Nazi organization advocating for the establishment of the body of Adolf Hitler as dictator of the United States could say the same thing. Why don't you let us buy an ad on MS Now? The point, though, that they're implying and trying to have it both ways is... that they're making money off this ad, and that's a good thing. But on the other hand, if they didn't take the ad, they would have to have a fight with the most evil man in the world's history since Hitler was offed in 1945. And at a more basic level, To use a line from the last Winston Churchill movie, how many times must the lesson be learned? How many times must the lesson be learned? The bully does not hit you because you have done something or not done something. The bully hits you because he's an effing bully. If you are going to have a fight with Trump, have a fight with Trump because you stood up for some kind of principle, not because you tried to avoid the punch. He's going to find something to punch you with anyway. He's fought you and punched you repeatedly over nothing. The fact that there might be something in your own records that gives him a slight foothold to stand on is totally irrelevant, and it is a dodge. for the fact that what is wanted here by MSNOW and Versant is an excuse to go home early and spend the weekend in the Hamptons and, oh, by the way, get the price of the spot. I would assume the maximum price that MSNOW charges for ads. There was an additional quote in this from Rebecca Cutler, who is the president of MSNOW, about whom I know nothing other than her name is Cutler and she spells it with a K. Other than that, I know nothing and there's no meaning to that. The quote to status in Oliver Darcy from a long time prior to this was, quote, I think a functioning, healthy newsroom is a newsroom where there's disagreement. Okay. So my disagreeing with other people in the newsroom was a bad thing or a good thing? Do you want me to come back and disagree some more? You repudiated? I'm not clear on the disagreement thing. I'm going off on another tangent. I think a functioning, healthy newsroom is a newsroom where there's disagreement. That is okay. I don't ask everyone to agree with every decision that we make. I ask them to respect the decisions we make. Sorry, we don't. You sold an ad to Donald Trump. You can come up with a million responses and excuses for it, but simply put, you sold an effing ad to Donald effing Trump. I don't care if he had a gun to your head. I don't care if he paid you enough money to operate the entire network and give some money back to each viewer. You sold an ad to Trump rather than stand up and have a minor fight with Trump. You are cowardly scum. Back to the exact quizzling moment and Greg Cordick, whose dedication to the network is such that he used to ask for special treatment to leave a workday early every couple weeks or so, so he could go sing in a church choir around about six o'clock in New Jersey. He was the line producer of the show, as I mentioned, challenged by a very, very complicated process, as I described earlier, of timing the show in progress, the equivalent of being not just an air traffic controller, but the head air traffic controller. And I will insist he was one of the best I ever encountered. Top five throughout my career. But he would leave and miss the show so he could go sing in his church choir. Several reasons. times a year, maybe half a dozen, maybe more. He would miss the show. His only job on the show was to be there and run the clock during the show. He couldn't do it at home. And I've, by the way, got nothing against church choirs, singers, or people who sing in church choirs. Good for them. But anybody else on the staff who wanted to go sing in their church choir during the show would have had to take a day off. If I wanted to come into work for about six hours, and then at six, seven o'clock, go do something at my church, I would have had to take a day off. That's the way that works. That's why there are days off. Or I would have had to change shifts to make it more amenable to my priority of going to church and sing in the church choir. What they used to do was let Cordick leave early and then not even make him take half a day off. That's how dedicated the senior vice president of programming who rationalizes the sale of the Trump ad on what was MSNBC, that's how dedicated to the work he really is. I wish I was surprised Greg Cordick sold out his network, his viewers, his colleagues, his country. I'm not. Actually, I never worked with anybody who was more selfish than Greg Cordick, nor who was less capable of understanding his own role on a team or the concept of a team. This pile of rationalizations that I read to you is Greg Cordick to a T. The only surprise I have is he's still working. As a personal aside here, in early 2010, at the end of the ordeal in which my dad lay dying over seven months in surgical ICU at a couple of hospitals here, where I would go and see him twice a day and do the show in between. While all of these people, Greg Kordick included, said, what can we do to help you? And I would tell them and then they wouldn't do it. I would say, can you just get the scripts in a little earlier so I have more time to review them? Because my day is a little bit compressed. And by the way, I did not leave the show in the middle of the show or the middle of the show prep day to go see my dad while he was dying. I waited till the show was over. I didn't go sing in the choir at six o'clock at night for an eight o'clock show. But during this time, early in 2010, as the sad climax became inevitable and we moved sadly towards it, Kordick and the executive producer, a woman named Izzy Povich, and the president of MSNBC, a man named Phil Griffin, tried to run a coup while I was out when I finally, after my dad died, took about a week and a half off to just recover from all the exhaustion and, of course, his passing. They tried to run a coup while I wasn't there, along with Lawrence O'Donnell, who was the guest host who I did not choose to be the guest host of the show because I didn't trust him. I wouldn't have loaned him a quarter, and I still wouldn't. The coup that Griffin and Povich and Kordick and O'Donnell tried to run was one that would get me demoted from Countdown or removed from the show or bought out of my contract or otherwise encouraged to leave the network or give me a reassignment to 4 p.m. and install as the new anchor of Countdown, Lawrence O'Donnell. I think Zucker and ironically, Steve Kappas, the president of NBC News, whose actions later in 2010 actually were the final straw that led me to leave the network when he suspended me for violating contract clauses that were not in my contract by making a political donation, which was completely authorized by my contract. And they wound up having to apologize to me and give me all the money from the time they suspended me. And they kind of breached the contract, so they had to give me a lot of money. It was ironically, as I suggest, Kappus and Zucker, who I believe stopped this coup. And so Griffin's next idea was to create a new show for Lawrence O'Donnell at 10 o'clock. And they moved Izzy Povich and Greg Kordick off my show onto the O'Donnell show as, I believe, co-executive producers. And the important part about the 10 o'clock show, I Don't really begrudge Lawrence O'Donnell taking advantage of this situation in which I was not there to defend myself and a coup attempt was possible. What I think was relevant was the new 10 o'clock show replaced the replay of Countdown that used to run at 10 p.m. That show cost MSNBC, the replay that is, zero dollars a year. Well, whatever the cost of the salary was for the guy who pushed the button that played the tape of the 8 p.m. show we'd already done. They got two hours out of one hour of production. The production cost at 10 o'clock went from $ 0 to however much, $ 10 million, $ 20 million a year, it cost to produce a brand new show again at 10 o'clock, saying all the same things, only not as well. O'Donnell thus, in that math, very simply, and anybody, Jesus fresh off the cross would have had to do this, needed to get an audience of at least twice what we were getting with the replay at 10 o'clock to make as much money as the replay did because there were no costs. When you figured out the profit of the 10 p.m. countdown, you subtracted expenses, zero dollars. Now suddenly expenses were $ 20 million, which I believe is more. It never got the O'Donnell show An audience even as large as the Countdown 10 p.m. replay used to get all those years ago, and in 16 years since, it's never come close to the numbers that the Countdown replay did at 10 p.m. Eastern time. I don't know how many hundreds of millions that that has cost NBC and in the old days, GE and in the years since Comcast, how many hundreds of millions of dollars that decision to put Lawrence O'Donnell on with his own show rather than to continue to replay Countdown. I don't know how much that's cost them. let alone the fact that it set off a series of dominoes that let with me or ended with me voluntarily leaving the network of my own accord and whatever they lost because they have not had me there to lead into the Rachel Meadows show and other programs there to say nothing of the actual cost journalistically that now ends with them selling an ad to Donald effing Trump and trying to rationalize it. And having Greg Cordick doesn't quite understand why the network does what it does on the air, explain it to the people who work there. That's the other cost, never mind the financial one, but the human cost, the soul cost. How many hundreds of millions of dollars, if it's reached a billion dollars in profit by now, it's absolutely possible. As I said, it's been 16 years. Izzy Povich later recanted and repented to me about all this. She said she'd already been punished. She had to work with Lawrence O'Donnell for a couple of years and then left for CNN. But apparently Greg Kordick, from all that I had heard, felt great about all the way things turned out. While I'm on the subject of media, a quick postscript to this on a happier note. Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame along with Stephen A. Smith, Andy Cohen, and Bobby Flay. And Suzanne Scott was joined in celebration by Sean Hannity, Ainsley Earhart, Bill Hemmer, Dana Perino, Harris Faulkner, and Martha McCallum, and Lawrence Jones, and Emily Compagno, and Jessica Tarloff. And if you take Tarloff off the equation, the total IQ there is still in triple digits. Suzanne Scott, Andy Cohen, Bobby Flay, and Stephen A. Smith into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame. And I need to ask this question. How much does it cost to buy somebody a place in the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame?
00:59:41
Speaker 2: This is SportsCenter.
00:59:57
Speaker 1: Wait, check that. Not anymore. This is Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Sports Ball Center tonight, and a quick thought on the baseball playoffs. The chances of the New York Yankees, not my favorite team, were affected seriously by roster construction due to a calf injury to superstar Aaron Judge, which impacted on an injury to superstar Giancarlo Stanton, who was out with an injured calf. And across town, the New York Mets, who probably are my favorite team, their chances of making the playoffs were completely destroyed by a calf injury to superstar Juan Soto, which followed a calf injury to superstar Francisco Lindor, and another injury to Soto, which was an injured calf. Then there were 15 other injuries unrelated to Soto or Lindor or Stanton or Judge that all seemed to have been strained calves. Now, looking in previous recent years in baseball, 2025, there were not significant injuries. Wait a minute. That Kyle Tucker, who signed a $ 60 million a year contract with the Dodgers, September 2nd, 2025, strained calf. Jake Myers of Houston, strained calf's never been the same. Jameson Tyon of the Cubs has, I think, not basically pitched since then. What's the injury? Oh, a strained calf. Austin Hayes, later released by the Reds, strained calf. DJ LeMayhew, strained calf. Let's see, what about 2024? Oh, there was one other guy from 2025. Uh, yeah. Okay, 2024 looks like there's about 25 strained calves. Why, if you were a conspiracy theorist, you would suggest that perhaps something was happening in baseball to some of the star players, especially those trying to come back from other injuries, that led them to suddenly having strained calves. But I'm not going to say what you might think, because it's what you would think that counts, isn't it? How are your calves feeling?
01:02:13
Speaker 2: This is Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
01:02:21
Speaker 1: To the number one story on the countdown, and I first read James Thurber aloud in a class at Cornell University in either 1978 or early 1979. A classmate of mine said, you should forget the sportscasting thing. You should live on the money you make reading James Thurber aloud. And I said, well, that's not going to be very much. Who's going to ever let me read James Thurber in any situation that has money involved in it? I mean, I might be good at it. You might be right about that I'm pretty good at it, but it's not a living. Well, it turned out I was wrong. I didn't get a chance to read again professionally any of this until my father got ill, terminally ill as it turned out, and was in the hospital and I read aloud to him. And among the many things I read aloud to him was from the Library of America and its compendium of Thurber. This doesn't look like much of a book, but I think it's about 18,000 pages, and it has most of the Thurber short stories. And that's how I began reading to him. And he said to me, you should put this in your show. And I said, countdown? He said, yes. I said, it's a newscast. He said, how many times have I ever suggested that you do anything on television or radio? And I said... I think this is the first. He said, maybe you want to try it. I said, I believe there are copyrights involved. And, you know, somebody would say that you owe us $ 27, 000 for reading that story on the air. And he said, why don't you find out? I said, I'm going to get an email. He said, just indulge me. So I read a story, a short story, a Thurber fable. And sure enough, the email came in from the Thurber literary family. And it turned out that they were all viewers and they were delighted that I was reading the works of the person to whom they had devoted their lives. And in the case of one of them, Rosemary Thurber, somebody who happened to be their father, James Thurber. And so I professionally read James Thurber for the first time. in the year 2010, a scant, what, 31 years after I first read him as an amateur. I have to credit somebody else for this besides my dad. My first experience hearing Thurber recited, because it was done in his case, because he was better at it than I am, recited from memory by the great actor William Wyndham, who is in many halls of fame for various parts of his entertainment career, including the Trekkies, the Star Trek people adore him as a role, as a troubled and indecisive commander of some kind or Commodore in the Starfleet. And it was a brilliant actor who played a thousand different characters throughout history. I think he's in, I think he's in Inherit the Wind too. It just an extraordinary career, but he did something that I saw on PBS that, the William Wyndham review of Thurber and the stories of Thurber dressed in an editor's little visor, green visor. He told some of the stories and showed Thurber's drawings. And this was a PBS special that I thought was absolutely outstanding. And he had done a series that NBC actually put on the air in, in this timeline in 1969 called my world and welcome to it. That was a kind of interpretation of Thurber stories into a sitcom that which lasted only half a year because it was 10 to 15 times smarter than the average sitcom viewer, even in 1969. Nonetheless, I later actually corresponded with James Thurber's personification, William Wyndham. We had conversations about how to possibly clean up some of the stories that needed cleaning up for the 21st century audience. He treated me like an equal and addressed me by the names of some of the characters in the stories. there could be no better outcome. I was reading Thurber to my father when he died. He listened to his favorite story. He let out a long sigh at the end of it. He waited till the end of it. It was about a 10 minute story. And then he died. I think perversely, that's as high a compliment as you could possibly give an author. And it got to James Thurber. They keep putting out new books about James Thurber. And I'm happy to say I played a small role in that. Thurber's Dogs is coming out now. Library of America again. There's a new book of fables, which has just been translated into other languages. And those have been 21st century publications, giving those of us who are devoted still to James Thurber, who died in 1961 or two, those of us who are still devoted to him, a hope that he will continue to maintain a place in American letters well into the Now, which century do you think we're finally going to destroy the world in? I'm hoping he outlasts the last human being. Regardless, the first story I read aloud was the one that resonates with me still, and one that I heard recited by William Wyndham and went, that's pretty special. Not just the story, but William Wyndham reading it. I hope I do it justice. I hope I do Thurber justice. And I hope I do some of my previous readings of it Justice, there is actually an audio book of me reading Thurber, the Thurber Collection, performed by Keith Alderman. Performed, not just read, performed. Permit me to perform for you, A Box to Hide In by James Thurber. I waited till the large woman with the awful hat took up her sack of groceries and went out, peering at the tomatoes and lettuce on her way. The clerk asked me what mine was.' Have you got a box?' I asked.' A large box? I want a box to hide in.'' You want a box?' he asked.' I want a box to hide in,' I said.' What do you mean?' he said.' You mean a big box?' I said I meant a big box.' big enough to hold me. I haven't got any boxes, he said. Only cottons that cans come in. I tried several other groceries, and none of them had a box big enough for me to hide in. There was nothing for it but to face life out. I didn't feel strong, and I'd had this overpowering desire to hide in a box for a long time. What do you mean you want to hide in this box? One grocer asked me. It's a form of escape, I told him. hiding in a box. It circumscribes your worries and the range of your anguish. You don't see people either. How the hell do you eat when you're in this box? Asked the grocer. How the hell do you get anything to eat? I said I had never been in a box and didn't know, but that that would take care of itself. Well, he said finally, I haven't got any boxes. Only some pasteboard cartons and cans come in. It was the same every place. I gave up when it got dark and the groceries closed and hid in my room again. Turned out the light and lay on the bed. You feel better when it gets dark. I could have hid in the closet, I suppose, but people are always opening doors. Somebody would find you in a closet. They would be startled and you have to tell them why you're in the closet. Nobody pays any attention to a big box lying on the floor. You could stay in it for days. And nobody'd think to look in it. Not even the cleaning woman. My cleaning woman came the next morning and woke me up. I was still feeling bad. I asked her if she knew where I could get a large box. How big a box you want? She asked. I want a box... Big enough for me to get inside of, I said. She looked at me with big, dim eyes. There's something wrong with her glands. She's awful, but she has a big heart, which makes it worse. She's unbearable. Her husband is sick and her children are sick and she's sick too. I got to thinking how pleasant it would be if I were in a box now and didn't have to see her. I would be in a box right there in the room and she wouldn't know. I wondered if you have a desire to bark or laugh when someone who doesn't know walks by the box you're in. Maybe she would have a spell with her heart if I did that and would die right there. The officers and the elevator man and Mr. Grammage would find us. Funny doggone thing happened at the building last night, the doorman would say to his wife. I let in this woman to clean up 10F, and she never come out, see? She's never there more than an hour, but she never come out, see? So when it got time for me to go off duty while I was on the elevator, I says, what the hell you suppose happened to that woman cleans 10F? He says he didn't know. He says he'd never seen her after he took her up. So I spoke to Mr. Grammage about it. I'm sorry to bother you, Mr. Grammage, I says. But there's something funny about that woman cleans 10F. So I told him. So he said we better have a look and we all three goes up, knocks on the door and rings the bell and nobody answers. So he said we'd have to walk in. So Krennic opened the door, and we walk in, and here was this woman, cleans the apartment, dead as a herring on the floor, and the gentleman that lives there was in a box. The cleaning woman kept looking at me. It was hard to realize she wasn't dead. It's a form of escape, I murmured. Let's say... She asked, dully. You don't know of any large packing boxes, do you? I asked. No, I don't. I haven't found one yet, but I still have this overpowering urge to hide in a box. Maybe it will go away. Maybe I'll be all right. Maybe it will get worse. It's hard to say. 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 the orchestration and Brian Ray on guitars, bass and drums. Their work is produced by TKO Brothers. Nancy Faust, the best baseball stadium organist ever, is responsible for the satirical and pithy musical comments. When we play sports music, it's from the old Olbermann Show, the theme from ESPN2, written by Mitch Warren Davis, courtesy of ESPN Inc. Other music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. The Thurber was by James Thurber and copyright the Thurber Literary Trust. My announcer today was my friend Stevie Van Zandt. Everything else was, as always, my fault. That's Countdown for today, day 610 of America held hostage again, exactly 839 days under the scheduled end of his lame duck and lame brained term, unless it ends early due to Trump's checks not really being in the mail. 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 and not have to look at me wherever you podcast. The next scheduled Countdown is Thursday, Probably, management reserves the right to get another heart procedure instead. Bulletin's 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's desperation is now so great that he has literally told his audience the check is in the mail. Said this to his audience in Ohio Saturday that his bribe is already on its way, quote, checks for $ 500 each are, quote, already in the mail. There's also some reference in my notes here to respecting you in the morning and something about a harp and a mouth, but I can't read my writing. This isn't the $ 5, 000 bribe, mind you. This isn't the recently revealed $ 100 bribe. This appears to be a different Trump lie about a different Trump bribe that he will give you. Oh no, this one is already on its way to, he said, 70,000 voters in Ohio. If you're lucky, you'll get the bribe before the election. And if not, he'll respect you in the morning. The midterms are a month from this past Saturday afternoon. And Trump is now flat out lying to the third degree, the third separate lie about bribing you to get you to vote Republican. It is so bad that in Texas, not only has Senate candidate Ken Paxton been caught on tape trashing Trump— that' s Ken Paxton trashing Trump on tape at his midterm convention— but the Texas GOP has somehow had to trot out a new ad starring the woman who is suing Ken Paxton for divorce. His soon-to-be ex-wife, Angela Paxton, suing him because of infidelity and biblical grounds, saying she is still voting for the Republican ticket anyway. She never mentions Paxton's name, her husband's name. She never mentions it in the ad, but she says she is voting for the Republicans anyway because... who knows what they bribed her with, if that's the way they went. My God, she says she is leaving the man over biblical grounds, but she's going to vote for the ticket he's on anyway. The closest to referring to him by name is the reference to the elephant in the room. As to the elephant in the room, he is, as I said, on tape per the New York Times, trashing Trump's Nuremberg rally midterms convention in Texas last month, asked, quote, do you feel like he's a little bit of a drag? Paxton answers, so to be honest with you, the numbers when we did that convention, it dropped our numbers. Everybody's numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good. He did not add Bob. Ken Paxton saying that the convention Trump thought was the coronation of Jesus hurt him in Texas. The reward for all of Paxton's blind loyalty. Trump never runs out of new ways to reward those who support him. Talking about Ken Paxton, whose ex, soon to be ex-wife, was willing to cut a commercial for him. It's that desperate. Paxton, he said, he may not be the best looking guy I've ever seen, but you know what? He's the greatest attorney general in America. Thanks a lot, Don. I'll run the polls in a moment. The overall big picture from Elliott Morris at strength in numbers in the House is he calls it spooky probability territory to go Democratic. Ninety nine percent, he says. He says the House polling area or error rather would have to be. double, twice the usual. It would have to be two times as large a polling error as previously ever recorded, or there'd have to be an actual shift in the last month from the Democrats to the Republicans. That shift would only have to be five times the average shift in the last month before the election. CBS even came out with a new poll over the Democrats 229, Republicans 206. That's CBS run by Barry Weiss and the Ellisons. In the Senate, according to Morris, 73% chance it is the Democrats 52, the Republicans 48 in January. In short, there are tightropes in politics and in government, and then there are tightropes that are not tied to anything on the other side. And that is where MAGA is at the moment. Things could change. There could be a polling error. There could be a sudden shift. And there is always the possibility Trump will use the military to try to steal the midterms. The Lord knows he's tried everything else. Maybe he'll bribe the military to come bribe at your house. It could change, but right now it doesn't look like it can. Morris also reports, quote, in our September poll, only 52% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents... 52% disapprove of Trump's handling of prices. So only 48% of Republicans approve of how Trump is handling the prices in their lives. That could be dragging down, he estimates, Republican Senate candidates in red states. And for once, I say to Julia Elliott Morris, you think? The choice for the GOP right now is Trump's approval on the economy overall is down to 25%. So most of them are out there trying to de-Trumpify, except Ken Paxton, who only de-Trumpifies off the record to donors. But Trump has decided that the problem in the last month for the Republican campaigns and the Republican candidates is not enough Trump on the stump. Don, you're right, absolutely. Get out there more often. Saturday night, Trump announced the polls were wrong because they have not accounted for his role in the campaign. If that's true, and he goes out and does more polling and more campaigning for these Republicans who are on the edge of disaster as it is, who are separating themselves, scrubbing Trump from their websites, if it's more Trump on the stump, the blue wave will be bigger. Lame Donald Duck. We'll be headlining a rally in Grand Island, Nebraska today, Monday. This is per the Republican National Committee. The district is that of the Republican Congressman Adrian Smith. It is the reddest district in Nebraska. Grand Island, a blood red state. Trump won it by 27 points and things are bad enough for Adrian Smith in a plus 27 Trump district that the Republicans are sending Trump there. They are in trouble in a plus 27 Trump district. Per semaphore, the Senate Republicans' top super PAC has made a tactical change. They have paused the ad campaign in the North Carolina Senate. They've paused it. Till when? Till November 4th? It's been paused. The Senate Leadership Fund is plowing seven figures into Kansas to try to save Roger 911 Marshall against the Democrat Adam Hamilton as that race slips away. They've spent $ 30 million in the North Carolina Senate race for Michael Watley, and they are basically saying that's money they poured down a rat hole. The super PAC is putting further spending there on hold. It's on hold. It's being paused until, hmm, 2032? A Trump-aligned group also has no further spending on the books passed this week either, according to Ad Impact. The move to shore up Marshall and put North Carolina on the back burner reflects a shifting Senate battleground map. Buy ya, Michael Watley! Buy ya! The de-Trumpification is accelerating, and it's now turning up in Freudian slips by Trump's greatest allies. I'm going to ask you if this is, in fact, a de-Trumpification message being sent out from a hostage, and the hostage is the last person you would think might be a hostage inside MAGA World. Pete Hegseth, Mr. Brill Cream, he has put out this on social media. No fatties. No trannies, no beardos, B-E-A-R-D-O-S, apparently referring to this as opposed to the late Lindsey Graham in some way. No weirdos, and he misspelled weirdos. No wimps, no radicals, just warriors. No fatties. Pete, is this a cry for help? No fatties? Who's the president again? Who is your leader, Pete? Who is he? Is he the fatty you're referring to, Pete? And no beardos? Who's the vice president? Jay? Somebody? Jay Montgomery Burns? Oh no, it's J.D. Vance, who has a beard. I believe even Pete Hegseth, behind his stimulants haze, is crying out for help and trying to de-Trumpify. We'll send in a rescue team for you, Pete, any day now, any month now. All right, maybe it'll be after they resume advertising for Michael Watley in North Carolina. J.D. Vance, Beardo, has a campaign message you want to hear. Quote, this is not the time to sort of gripe about all the little things. We need to get more done, which is why you need to give us two more years to get more great results for the American people. So in other words, everything sucks and you need to shut up about it, but it's great and you should give us two more years so we can give you two more years of the things that you are sort of griping about. What about the Susan Collins message? Oh boy, there's nothing like seeing Susan Collins slowly sink into the quicksand, is there? Susan Collins, could she be concerned? Is she insufficiently concerned? Should she be concerned about whoever's doing her goddamn advertising? She launched a new Collins TV ad with the NRSC saying, the official Republican Senate campaign committee last week that showed her in a Boston Red Sox cap. And the voiceover read, the Red Sox know how to handle the Yankees, and Susan Collins knows how to handle Yankee superfan Chuck Schumer. I do not expect you to understand or to care about what happens in the baseball playoffs. I barely care about them now. But the Yankees of Chuck Schumer swept the Red Sox in their wildcard series last week, two games to nil, and Schumer's Yankees in those two games outscored Susan Collins and the Red Sox 18-2 and were never competitive in two games. So that's the ad you want right now, Susan Collins, mentioning the Boston Red Sox. How about your cruise plans on the Titanic? Worse for Senator Collins, that bribery scandal about government contract influence peddling that they were pursuing in 2024 and then Trump fired all the prosecutors from the DOJ and fired all the investigators from the FBI. Well, they found video of her, Susan Collins, at a hearing May 2012, haranguing an Obama OMB nominee named Joseph Jordan, demanding that Joseph Jordan guarantee that he would not force the disclosure of political contributions from... Government contractors. What a coincidence. She not only did it, she is on tape beginning in 2012, her own cover up by proxy of the whole process by which it could have been found out. The other question in the Senate before we get to the polls is obviously how in God's name does Eric Schmidt ever live this down? In terms of a gaffe in the Senate, on official duty, on the record, live, shown to everybody on the right wing and the left wing alike, how could you ever come up with anything more damning? Unless you suddenly came out in the middle of this as that idiot Brit woman might have said, Trump's a moron. How could you possibly do anything worse than what he did to try to blow up Jack Smith and instead find out or reveal that you don't know the difference between the Iowa Hawkeyes and. and the Atlanta Hawks. It's not just Hawks, Hawkeyes. Okay, if you don't know anything about sports and you're an idiot who colors your own hair with coffee grounds like Eric Schmidt, of course, maybe you don't know the difference between the Hawks and the Hawkeyes. Plenty of actual smart people, let alone the Eric Schmitz of this world, don't know the difference between Hawks, Hawkeyes. Assume maybe Hawks is a short version of Hawkeyes. They all play basketball, right? Just because one's a men's team in the pros and the other's a women's team in... in the colleges. Well, that's no reason for you to know that, except it is not stopping. It's nearly a week later, and the memes keep coming, and I love this one. It's a meme with Eric Schmidt asking Jack Smith, did you or did you not sell hamburgers from a giant smiling head? Jack Smith saying, sir, that was Jack in the Box. Waiting for the one with Jack and Jill and the Hill. All right. As promised, the poll averages and the polls of relevance, as quoted by The New York Times and by G. Elliot Morris of Verisight and Strength in Numbers. Alaska Senate, Morris has the averages. Morris's numbers are averages of polls. Democrat by plus 4.1. The New York Times last poll ending October 1st was plus 7 Democrat. Georgia, Morris has the Democratic average plus 9.7. The Times quotes a Wedgwood poll that ended on Saturday afternoon at plus 10 Democrats in Georgia. Iowa, Morris has the Democratic average plus 1.0. The Times did a poll that ended October 1st that had the Republicans up by one, but a Fox News poll that ended on September 28th had Turek, the Democrat, up by plus two. In Kansas, Morris' Democratic average is plus 09 ahead. that Morris has the Democrat ahead of Marshall, the incumbent senator, and Moron by almost a full point. The New York Times poll of September 30 had them even, but Trafalgar, a Republican in-house pollster, ended a poll on October 1st showing the Democrat up by one point. So this is gonna come down the stretch. The Wichita Eagle newspaper has noted over the weekend that there are eight ex-living governors of Kansas Four Republicans, four Democrats, six out of eight have endorsed the Democrat Adam Hamilton over the incumbent Republican senator, the gynecologist, and resident dopey Marshall. In Maine, the Morris Democratic average is two and a half points in Democrats ahead. In Michigan, Morris has the Democratic average of 3.8 ahead. So nearly four points. Again, Trafalgar, GOP in-house, has El-Sayed up by two as of September 30th. In Minnesota, Morris has the Democratic average lead 2.3. In New Hampshire, Morris has, according to the averages, Democrats up by 5.8. In North Carolina, this is where they just bailed out on Whatley and conceded, Morris Democrats plus 11. In Ohio, Morris has the Democratic average plus 4.3. The Times poll ending October 1st has Sherrod Brown up by three in Texas. In Texas, where you're getting the guy's soon-to-be ex-wife endorsing the ticket, but never mentioning him by name because of biblical grounds. In Texas, Morris says the average of polls there has the Democrat ahead by plus 3.4. A New York Times poll ending September 30th had Tallarico ahead of Paxton by 6. In Florida, Morris has the Republican average still plus 4.7. So almost five points, a Republican lead in Florida. In Nebraska, the Republican has a 1.1 average lead, according to Morris. In South Carolina, the Morris average is Republicans ahead by 1.3. That's Lindsey Graham's sister is there because Lindsey can't come to the Senate right now. The New York Times also has the Democrats ahead for governor in Alaska, in Iowa, in Ohio, and in Texas. I am endorsing the entire Texas slate. I don't know any of their names. Signed, Mrs. Ken Paxton. There is a late ad from the NBC poll released yesterday. Latino voters nationwide say by 59 to 35, they prefer to see the Democrats win control of Congress over the Republicans in the midterms. That's considerably broader, says NBC. You betcha it's double the 12-point Democratic margin among Latino voters at this point in 2024. And now, in the wake of all this, there are two other things to add. Trump and the Time interview. I encourage you to take a look at last week's interview by Time magazine, which I know nobody knew still existed, but has put out some amazing work, including the transcript of what is clearly a bat guano crazy man posing as president of the United States who let his guard down and revealed he's 87 times more bat guano than we thought. He F-bombed Time magazine in this extraordinary softball interview in which he barely listened to any of the questions and simply said what he wanted to say, but he F-bombed them because, of course, he's a desperate, insecure, failed human being whose last living thought will be that he was not praised enough by his mother or the latest polls. It's rather startling. He's asked, have you seen the videos of Mitch McConnell back in the Senate? Do you think he should resign because of his health condition? And answers, it was a disappointment to a lot of Republicans. So that's just, well, Sleepy Joe gave pardons to everybody. He gave them to Fauci. He gave them to this. But you mean I'm not allowed to give them, but Sleepy Joe is allowed to give them? Sir, this is a Mitch McConnell question. This ain't going to be much of a story. Here we are doing this. You haven't asked me one effing positive question. He didn't say effing. I'm cleaning it up for the algorithm's sake on YouTube. All of this. What about this? What about this? And apparently he gesticulates, pointing to, I don't know, his willingness to give all of us mere humans something. What about this? What about that? What about this? All negative. Why are you devoting all this time to the White House? You know how I do. I do that out of my back pocket. I pay for a lot of it, but I fix it because the White House should look like that. Ah, blah, blah, blah. Then I'm doing very well with another war that we already won, Venezuela. Do you notice you haven't asked me a question about Venezuela? It is impossible for me to believe sometimes, but every time I state that Donald Trump is a terrorist, mass murderer, and completely out of his effing mind, I'm actually understating things. There's also this about how he let AI start the war. Increasingly enthralled to the tech executives courting him in December 2025, Elon Musk returned to the Oval Office for a clandestine meeting, according to Time magazine in connection to this interview. Trump spent hours asking Grok, Musk's AI chatbot, questions about his presidency and legacy, according to an official present. At that time, Trump was ordering missile strikes against Venezuelan boats he alleged were smuggling drugs into the U.S. He asked Grock how Venezuelans would react if the U.S. captured Maduro. According to the official present, the chatbot responded that Maduro was a repressive and deeply unpopular dictator and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall. Paul, after Trump ordered the mission to seize Maduro the following month, celebrations broke out in the streets. Trump, according to officials, came away thinking... Grok was ingenious. Remember when they said AI could destroy us all? It's now a race to see if AI can do it by itself or if it's going to join forces with another artificial thing, Donald Trump. So for comic relief, before we get to the subject of my alma mater in the news and that tragedy about that Jane Doe, I have to read you the social media post of the week from Threads, from KateGonzalez9726. Threads, almost as bad as TwitterX. As a kid, she writes, I was a Girl Scott. It says it, it says it right here. Girl Scott. I was a Girl Scott and a 4-H member, so apparently she successfully transitioned from being a Scott. Or she's no longer from Glasgow? She's not Glasguijan? As a kid, I was a Girl Scout and a 4-H member. As an adult, I served active duty and served in the reserves. I love my country. Go vote Republican, writes Kate Gonzalez. Ameriva is worth saving. Ameriva. A-M-E-R-I-V-A. So all you Girl Scots out there, all you Amerivan Girl Scots, listen to Kate Gonzalez and vote. I want to know how in the hell she spelled Republican right. Now about my alma mater. Obviously, factually, I can't add anything to this other than to express the same shame that so many of my fellow alumni of Cornell University feel, again, because of the frats, because of the university and the way it has been mismanaged. I only know how it's been mismanaged since, let's see, I applied in September 1974. I can only cover since 1974. My opinion about the frats and how the university has responded to the frats and to the protection of women and to the subject of violence and to the idea of the Cornell police, that has not changed since the day I arrived on the campus there, which was August of 1975. So I don't have anything new, but I may be able to offer some perspective based on being so old. Whatever happened to Jane Doe and I am mixed between rage and tears over what happened to Jane Doe. The frats should be closed. I'm sorry if you find something redeeming about them. They should have been closed in 1975. Most guys wouldn't go into frats in 1975. They should have been closed probably in 1935. Whenever the last risk there was of actual bears coming out of the woods and attacking students if they didn't huddle in groups at night on the Ithaca campus, so the 1880-something, they probably should have been closed after that bear attack issue dropped. I don't want to in any way minimize what we're dealing with now, but the frats have been a problem for a century. particularly at Cornell, but not exclusively, as I'll get into in a moment. No, let me get into it now. I will say this. The outrage at how Cornell University has handled this is obviously justified. It's obviously perhaps the outrage may in fact be lower than Cornell deserves at the moment, but it also risks becoming kind of a rationalization that this is somehow just Cornell or this is somehow just Ivy League or just elite universities or high money schools. I'm long beyond the age that I know a lot of people who are in college, and yet I know at least four women who were assaulted at frats at four different schools in the last decade, decade and a half. I know at least four, personally. Friends of friends, or in one case, a friend. Big schools, small schools, schools tightly affiliated with prominent religions, it doesn't matter. And in each case, the schools did nothing because frats. At Cornell, the frats are a separate world. I knew in four years at that university, two, three guys who were in frats. I was outside a frat once in the parking lot for the start of a road race. I was in a frat exactly once, and it turns out it was that frat, Chi Phi, covering a sports story there, if you can believe that. I'll talk about that in a moment because it's more meaningful than you'd think. And the place gave me the creeps. It looked like the start of every horror movie. It is a different world with outsized influence because donors, and especially big money donors and legacy family members lived in them, and they perpetuate themselves from this cultish kind of behavior. And these are the results. The Cornell president put out an eight-minute video statement on Saturday night. It was pretty good, all things considered. And still, he waited until the sixth minute to even mention the word fraternities. Because the frats at Cornell and elsewhere in this country are like corporations. They exist to relieve individuals of responsibility for morality and, more importantly, for any legal responsibility. Go into a frat, and you are a member. You're not an individual anymore. What happens in the frat is going to be dealt with with the frat. The frat brothers will look out for you. And it has been noted that, in fact, the frats may actually promote illegal behavior. I'm not saying they did that in this case, but they may promote illegal behavior of various kinds, especially drinking-related illegal behavior— Because if you broke the law with your frat brothers, your frat brother, your bosom buddy, your blood brother can always blackmail you with that fact 25 years from now in business, in politics, in your personal life. The being absolved of moral responsibility comes at a significant price. Back to this frat I went to, Chi Phi, which seemed to be about average in morals in 1979, which is when I guess I was there. The sports story was moronic. It was desk chair racing. But it really represents, now that I think about it, the frat system in microcosm. And I recall this bothered me then, too, and I think I even mentioned it on the radio station. One day every spring, the brothers in that frat would take the wheeled desk chairs out of their libraries and study rooms. which, of course, were barely used, and race these wheeled chairs down the hill, which was about a 30-degree angle, down the hill on the street in front of the frat, and they would go two at a time in heats, and they would end up at the bottom of the hill, which opened onto a main drag, which, if I remember correctly, was Buffalo Street, which is about the biggest of the main drags that surround the Cornell campus. And I asked the guy running the race while calling play-by-play of this, they had a play-by-play caller of their own there over a PA system announcing this admittedly suicidal behavior on the Frat Brothers' behalf. I asked the guy running the race, that's... vehicular traffic down there on Buffalo Street, isn't it? Aren't you running the risk of getting killed? Thinking to myself, I'm not sure I'm completely sold on the idea that that's a bad thing. But I said, isn't that a problem running down from a street that only has a stop sign on your end into traffic going in two different directions? And his answer was, Our competitors are considered pedestrians, so legally, we have the right of way. The cars... have to stop for us. Now, to some degree, he was self-mocking. There is no belief on my part that he actually thought the cars, and by the way, they were coming out of a blind intersection. There was all sorts of foliage on this side of the traffic as it approached them in this direction. I don't think he actually believed they were all going to stop for him. I believe he was mocking this. But there was something in the frat mentality that was expressed by that quote. The cars have to stop for us. Besides the frats, as I mentioned, the idea of the Cornell University police bothered me in 1975, and it bothers me now. What do you mean a university has its own police? Who are they protecting and serving? The students? The employees? the corporation that actually owns the place and its related businesses, and Cornell owns a lot of businesses in Ithaca, New York, not as many as they used to. Who are they protecting? Jane Doe? Did they protect Jane Doe? And the local prosecutors I covered in a little slight degree, local politics and local elections for four years in Ithaca, New York, and certainly was aware of the coverage. Our radio station, the sports department was My chair here in the news department was the rest of the chairs at a six-chair table. I was part of the news department. In fact, ran it for a couple of days in 1978. I know what we were dealing with there. The prosecutors from Tompkins County, New York, you're going to trust them to go against a Cornell University frat? Yeah, they may have gotten the job because of a Cornell University frat. But the Cornell police? Not a good idea. that it would be there perhaps to protect and patrol the campus and protect students, if that's all it did, rather than perhaps be involved in a cover-up of a gang rape, maybe it would be a good idea. I don't think as presently constituted, it's a good idea. I don't think as presently constituted when presently meant 1975, it was a good idea. I cherish my friends from Cornell, and I still have a bunch. I still support my Cornell radio station, which is now Was not then, but he's now on Buffalo Street. It's not far from this frat. When you saw reporters reporting from the Cornell campus with the hill behind them and the big clock tower atop it, that was the view I was greeted by coming out of my dorm room for three years. There were about, I would guess, about 100 yards tops from my dorm room at Mennon Hall at Cornell University. I still cherish my memories there. I still love my great teachers who helped me then and still help me now, like the late Don Martin. the late Jim Lawrence, the late Joel Silby, the late Charlie Russell, the late Russ Martin. I still love the campus, but not the weather. I'm still proud to have walked it at the same time in history when the 9-11 hero, Cornell's Eamon McEnany, walked it. But I've never had any confidence in the corporation that runs the place. We had Cornell credit cards. I could just buy anything I wanted to, and Dad got the bill. Dad wasn't fond of that. There were dozens of Cornell vice presidents who had nothing to do with education. There were Cornell investments in apartheid South Africa that the student government had to spend a couple of years trying to force divestiture and did. There were Cornell police and there were Cornell frats. And nothing that happened relating to them in 1975 surprised me. And certainly nothing that has happened to them in 2026 or 2024 surprises me. Also of interest here, a quick health update. Yes, I had another heart procedure last week. It's beginning to become routine. The guy at the desk at Mount Sinai recognized me this time. This was not another full-fledged ablation. There was nothing burned in my heart. Kinda. They zapped me. They did a, what is this called again? A cardio, cardio version. I don't know. It's cardio version. It left me looking like I had tried to iron my shirt while I was wearing it. They got to have, they got my heart rhythm back in, in correct position. It had come out of position in the week preceding. And whereas this is not likely to be fatal nor disastrous, you know, If they have to put you into a state of semi-consciousness and hit you with electricity round about your heart bone, I think it's kind of serious. So as I said, I needed that brief period of time last week off. I'm going to take these on a podcast to podcast basis. In other words, I'll be back Monday or this is Monday. I'll be back Thursday if I can remember what day it is. And maybe I'll be back next Monday and maybe I won't. I'm taking them day to day. As I used to say in a past life, we're all day to day. Also of interest here, Thurber returns. We're doing that to celebrate the memorial service for his daughter, Rosemary, who was a great friend of mine and precipitated the circumstances in which I got to read Thurber aloud. I'll tell that story and read you a great Thurber story at the end of the show. and also to celebrate the republication by the Library of America, Thurber's Dogs, his short stories and a lot of his drawings of the thing for which he is probably still the most famous and which we talk about the least, because you need to see the drawings. And it's very difficult to show the drawings even on YouTube, let alone on an audio podcast. So we'll do that. And then before that, if you think you were surprised... that MSNOW ran the Trump-Laney-Riefenstahl TV commercial last week. Wait till you find out who was chosen, who volunteered, perhaps, to rationalize running the Trump-Laney-Riefenstahl commercial on MSNOW, to rationalize this to the MSNOW staff. It was my former line producer at Countdown on MSNBC. He was the one who sold out the network. His name is VidKing Quizzling. That can't be right. That's next. This is Countdown. I'm sure you've seen them or at least seen them written about the Laney Reef install quality Trump ads that have been paid for by you and me, the stupid American taxpayer. Trump has jumped the final guardrail and is using tax money to run ads for himself and his party themselves. and his fellow scumbags and slaves before the midterms in a last desperate bid to hold on to power. There's one thing about these ads appearing on Fox stations and other broadcast networks that are staggering towards their eventual extinction. There's another thing that happened in the past week. At least one of the ads ran at least once on the former MSNBC, with which you may remember I have some past connection, like I invented it and saved it from being turned into a cartoon channel roundabout 2005. But they won't tell you that because they erased my history at the request of one of the nighttime anchors. In any event, the point of this is that they have now run on MSNOW, and incidentally, the logo for MSNOW with the waving American flag before MS, it looks like at first glance, EMS now. The new people at MSNOW running the place decided that they had to run because the Trump administration demanded that they accept taxpayer money to do this, one of these Laney Riefenstahl Trump ads, and I make that comparison totally intentionally. That's what this is, an attempt to convince the public that it is being well served by a criminal corrupt gang by using the public's own money to convince them of it. Laney Riefenstahl in action, 21st century edition. It turns out, and I was disappointed gobsmacked for about a full day after this, it had a bigger impact on me than my latest heart surgery did, when I found out the identity of the quizling at MSNOW who bowed to ownership's demand, Versant, which is just another handoff of Comcast, the demand by his financial bosses that the network run the Trump-Laney-Riefenstahl ads. The guy who did this, the guy who made it supposedly palatable to the editorial staff, is Greg Cordick, the former line producer of Countdown, a guy whose bonus check I signed every year and who supposedly understood what we were doing at the old MSNBC. When I got back there in 2003, he was producing afternoon cut-ins and writing bumpers. And I thought he was pretty good at one skill, which he had, which is pretty hard to find, a non-editorial skill of timing a show live in progress. It's something I could never do in a million years, actually make a complicated show with live guests and lots of videos and lots of things changing and lots of things not happening on time actually come out at exactly 8.50 for the handoff to the nine o'clock show. He was very skilled at it and he was very rewarded for it. He didn't really understand what was on the air. He only understood what time it was. Again, a valuable resource and one that I encouraged him to continue to use on Countdown. In any event, he never quite understood why we had gone all politics in 2003. He complained bitterly, and five years after the fact that we had established the worst persons in the world segment without his consent, which was not needed in the line of command there, But he didn't understand why we were so liberal or why I did commentaries rather than more oddball segments and interviews with celebrities. He didn't really get that. Then I now find in the Oliver Darcy newsletter status, which I quote so often, I probably should send Oliver some money as one of my writers. As you know, you are looking at the only writer of the show, except when I quote somebody else. And in this case, I am again quoting Oliver Darcy's status newsletter. Quote, Greg Cordick, MSNOW's Senior Vice President of Programming. tried to quell concerns about the ads in question. Now, the reason I wanted to bring this up with you is what follows, but I must say that if you are me and you read these words, Greg Kordick, MSNOW's Senior Vice President of Programming, it would be the equivalent of anybody in this country, particularly though in New York real estate, who had awakened in the last few weeks from a, say, 15-year coma to read the words, Donald Trump, 45th and 7th President of the United States, and they spent the rest of the day going, could you put me back in my coma? Because that's what this feels, the idea that editorially, the person in charge of the programs at MSNBC and making the bridge between the business end of that network, as it is now called MSNow, and its editorial employees, most of whom still have... an actual intent to do, you know, journalism and liberal commentary and broadcast the truth, no matter how self-serving most of the programming is, the intent is still there. They've gone totally off the tracks in terms of the presentation, but that's not my point right here. But to hear that Cordick is in charge really is, if you said my dogs were in charge, I would feel the network was in much safer hands. Let me read you the rest of what Oliver Darcy's status wrote. Cordick told the gathered employees at a meeting to discuss why the F they were running the Laney Reef install Trump ads, told the gathered employees that the network planned to release a statement after airing the pro-Trump spot. I would say running the pro-Trump spot was enough of a statement, Greg, but you do you. Cordick informed staffers that the network's top boss, Rebecca Cutler, wanted the statement to point out that Trump refers to the network as failing but was still spending money to run spots on the channel. Cordick also said it was suggested that MS Now disclosed to the audience precisely how much it had been paid to run the spots and then say the proceeds were going to charity, status has learned. But Cordick indicated that Cutler did not wish to go that far and... inflame the situation. You bet she didn't. The problem, Ms. Cutler, President Cutler doesn't seem to understand, is that by running a pro-Trump ad on MSNBC Now, you have already inflamed the situation and sold your own soul. I mean, you're president of a television network. How much soul did you have left? Sold your own soul to the devil, the fat orange devil in Washington. Back to status. In response to inquiries about the ads, MSNOW took the route that Cordick had foreshadowed. Quote, we know the size, engagement, and influence of the MSNOW audience, and apparently the White House does too, network spokesperson Richard Hudock told Status. The decision to spend taxpayer dollars to reach our audience speaks for itself. Now, I would suggest here that there are rationalizations, and then there's the rationalization that is a confession that you, collectively, an organization, has sold your own soul permanently. And to say in defense of doing this heinous betrayal of the liberal audience that keeps you people from starving on the streets... The idea that to tell them that this is okay because it indicates that Trump believes that there's a large audience and he gave us money— in other words, we have profited off you, the viewer, by Trump paying us money to contact you, the viewer— that' s not perhaps the flex that you think it is, Richard Hudock. They're saying, in other words, the money is what counts. As the late TV playwright Dennis Potter once explained in saying that when he had terminal cancer, when he had pancreatic cancer, he had named his cancer Rupert, so he had something to fight against. Rupert Murdoch's crimes in the country that he was from, the UK, was putting a price tag on everything. If the statement that the White House... Buying this ad on MSNow, the importance of this is an indication that MSNow is a success. If that's your rationale for doing this ridiculous betrayal and total denial of what you are there for and the only reason that you exist, if that's not an indication that you have put a price tag on the entire product and that everything that comes out of the mouths of the people on that network is now suspect— and also for sale to the highest bidder, I don't know what could be. There's more from Mr. Hudak. Like all paid advertising on MSNOW, this spot was subject to an established review process by the sales team. He added, accepting an advertisement is not an endorsement of its message, and purchasing airtime will never purchase favorable coverage. Of course, that's the point of advertising, isn't it, Mr. Hudock? If you buy an ad that is already prepared and prepared by outside sources and contains news footage, it's going to supplant any need and go around any need for positive coverage because you're simply buying the time from the network. That's what an advertisement is. He didn't like what was on MS Now. He couldn't buy it like he had his proxies by CNN, so he's simply buying it 30 seconds at a time. This is not a significant jump from one ad, one Laney Riefenstahl pro-Trump ad, and the Rachel Maddow show brought to you by the Trump administration. The full rationalization is that given the company's ads... And they're, as referred to in that quote, the review process by the sales team. If it's the same sales team that I knew in 2010 and before, I hope you made them pay the bar bill. The full rationalization is that given this company adds standard that every ad has to go through. If they didn't sell Trump the time that he demanded, they would be guilty in some way of political discrimination and the White House would have a fight over it. The White House would now go after Versant and Comcast and Ms. Now and all the rest of it over the idea that they were refused on political grounds from buying an advertisement on a political network. Well, by that token, an actual Nazi organization advocating for the establishment of the body of Adolf Hitler as dictator of the United States could say the same thing. Why don't you let us buy an ad on MS Now? The point, though, that they're implying and trying to have it both ways is... that they're making money off this ad, and that's a good thing. But on the other hand, if they didn't take the ad, they would have to have a fight with the most evil man in the world's history since Hitler was offed in 1945. And at a more basic level, To use a line from the last Winston Churchill movie, how many times must the lesson be learned? How many times must the lesson be learned? The bully does not hit you because you have done something or not done something. The bully hits you because he's an effing bully. If you are going to have a fight with Trump, have a fight with Trump because you stood up for some kind of principle, not because you tried to avoid the punch. He's going to find something to punch you with anyway. He's fought you and punched you repeatedly over nothing. The fact that there might be something in your own records that gives him a slight foothold to stand on is totally irrelevant, and it is a dodge. for the fact that what is wanted here by MSNOW and Versant is an excuse to go home early and spend the weekend in the Hamptons and, oh, by the way, get the price of the spot. I would assume the maximum price that MSNOW charges for ads. There was an additional quote in this from Rebecca Cutler, who is the president of MSNOW, about whom I know nothing other than her name is Cutler and she spells it with a K. Other than that, I know nothing and there's no meaning to that. The quote to status in Oliver Darcy from a long time prior to this was, quote, I think a functioning, healthy newsroom is a newsroom where there's disagreement. Okay. So my disagreeing with other people in the newsroom was a bad thing or a good thing? Do you want me to come back and disagree some more? You repudiated? I'm not clear on the disagreement thing. I'm going off on another tangent. I think a functioning, healthy newsroom is a newsroom where there's disagreement. That is okay. I don't ask everyone to agree with every decision that we make. I ask them to respect the decisions we make. Sorry, we don't. You sold an ad to Donald Trump. You can come up with a million responses and excuses for it, but simply put, you sold an effing ad to Donald effing Trump. I don't care if he had a gun to your head. I don't care if he paid you enough money to operate the entire network and give some money back to each viewer. You sold an ad to Trump rather than stand up and have a minor fight with Trump. You are cowardly scum. Back to the exact quizzling moment and Greg Cordick, whose dedication to the network is such that he used to ask for special treatment to leave a workday early every couple weeks or so, so he could go sing in a church choir around about six o'clock in New Jersey. He was the line producer of the show, as I mentioned, challenged by a very, very complicated process, as I described earlier, of timing the show in progress, the equivalent of being not just an air traffic controller, but the head air traffic controller. And I will insist he was one of the best I ever encountered. Top five throughout my career. But he would leave and miss the show so he could go sing in his church choir. Several reasons. times a year, maybe half a dozen, maybe more. He would miss the show. His only job on the show was to be there and run the clock during the show. He couldn't do it at home. And I've, by the way, got nothing against church choirs, singers, or people who sing in church choirs. Good for them. But anybody else on the staff who wanted to go sing in their church choir during the show would have had to take a day off. If I wanted to come into work for about six hours, and then at six, seven o'clock, go do something at my church, I would have had to take a day off. That's the way that works. That's why there are days off. Or I would have had to change shifts to make it more amenable to my priority of going to church and sing in the church choir. What they used to do was let Cordick leave early and then not even make him take half a day off. That's how dedicated the senior vice president of programming who rationalizes the sale of the Trump ad on what was MSNBC, that's how dedicated to the work he really is. I wish I was surprised Greg Cordick sold out his network, his viewers, his colleagues, his country. I'm not. Actually, I never worked with anybody who was more selfish than Greg Cordick, nor who was less capable of understanding his own role on a team or the concept of a team. This pile of rationalizations that I read to you is Greg Cordick to a T. The only surprise I have is he's still working. As a personal aside here, in early 2010, at the end of the ordeal in which my dad lay dying over seven months in surgical ICU at a couple of hospitals here, where I would go and see him twice a day and do the show in between. While all of these people, Greg Kordick included, said, what can we do to help you? And I would tell them and then they wouldn't do it. I would say, can you just get the scripts in a little earlier so I have more time to review them? Because my day is a little bit compressed. And by the way, I did not leave the show in the middle of the show or the middle of the show prep day to go see my dad while he was dying. I waited till the show was over. I didn't go sing in the choir at six o'clock at night for an eight o'clock show. But during this time, early in 2010, as the sad climax became inevitable and we moved sadly towards it, Kordick and the executive producer, a woman named Izzy Povich, and the president of MSNBC, a man named Phil Griffin, tried to run a coup while I was out when I finally, after my dad died, took about a week and a half off to just recover from all the exhaustion and, of course, his passing. They tried to run a coup while I wasn't there, along with Lawrence O'Donnell, who was the guest host who I did not choose to be the guest host of the show because I didn't trust him. I wouldn't have loaned him a quarter, and I still wouldn't. The coup that Griffin and Povich and Kordick and O'Donnell tried to run was one that would get me demoted from Countdown or removed from the show or bought out of my contract or otherwise encouraged to leave the network or give me a reassignment to 4 p.m. and install as the new anchor of Countdown, Lawrence O'Donnell. I think Zucker and ironically, Steve Kappas, the president of NBC News, whose actions later in 2010 actually were the final straw that led me to leave the network when he suspended me for violating contract clauses that were not in my contract by making a political donation, which was completely authorized by my contract. And they wound up having to apologize to me and give me all the money from the time they suspended me. And they kind of breached the contract, so they had to give me a lot of money. It was ironically, as I suggest, Kappus and Zucker, who I believe stopped this coup. And so Griffin's next idea was to create a new show for Lawrence O'Donnell at 10 o'clock. And they moved Izzy Povich and Greg Kordick off my show onto the O'Donnell show as, I believe, co-executive producers. And the important part about the 10 o'clock show, I Don't really begrudge Lawrence O'Donnell taking advantage of this situation in which I was not there to defend myself and a coup attempt was possible. What I think was relevant was the new 10 o'clock show replaced the replay of Countdown that used to run at 10 p.m. That show cost MSNBC, the replay that is, zero dollars a year. Well, whatever the cost of the salary was for the guy who pushed the button that played the tape of the 8 p.m. show we'd already done. They got two hours out of one hour of production. The production cost at 10 o'clock went from $ 0 to however much, $ 10 million, $ 20 million a year, it cost to produce a brand new show again at 10 o'clock, saying all the same things, only not as well. O'Donnell thus, in that math, very simply, and anybody, Jesus fresh off the cross would have had to do this, needed to get an audience of at least twice what we were getting with the replay at 10 o'clock to make as much money as the replay did because there were no costs. When you figured out the profit of the 10 p.m. countdown, you subtracted expenses, zero dollars. Now suddenly expenses were $ 20 million, which I believe is more. It never got the O'Donnell show An audience even as large as the Countdown 10 p.m. replay used to get all those years ago, and in 16 years since, it's never come close to the numbers that the Countdown replay did at 10 p.m. Eastern time. I don't know how many hundreds of millions that that has cost NBC and in the old days, GE and in the years since Comcast, how many hundreds of millions of dollars that decision to put Lawrence O'Donnell on with his own show rather than to continue to replay Countdown. I don't know how much that's cost them. let alone the fact that it set off a series of dominoes that let with me or ended with me voluntarily leaving the network of my own accord and whatever they lost because they have not had me there to lead into the Rachel Meadows show and other programs there to say nothing of the actual cost journalistically that now ends with them selling an ad to Donald effing Trump and trying to rationalize it. And having Greg Cordick doesn't quite understand why the network does what it does on the air, explain it to the people who work there. That's the other cost, never mind the financial one, but the human cost, the soul cost. How many hundreds of millions of dollars, if it's reached a billion dollars in profit by now, it's absolutely possible. As I said, it's been 16 years. Izzy Povich later recanted and repented to me about all this. She said she'd already been punished. She had to work with Lawrence O'Donnell for a couple of years and then left for CNN. But apparently Greg Kordick, from all that I had heard, felt great about all the way things turned out. While I'm on the subject of media, a quick postscript to this on a happier note. Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame along with Stephen A. Smith, Andy Cohen, and Bobby Flay. And Suzanne Scott was joined in celebration by Sean Hannity, Ainsley Earhart, Bill Hemmer, Dana Perino, Harris Faulkner, and Martha McCallum, and Lawrence Jones, and Emily Compagno, and Jessica Tarloff. And if you take Tarloff off the equation, the total IQ there is still in triple digits. Suzanne Scott, Andy Cohen, Bobby Flay, and Stephen A. Smith into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame. And I need to ask this question. How much does it cost to buy somebody a place in the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame?
00:59:41
Speaker 2: This is SportsCenter.
00:59:57
Speaker 1: Wait, check that. Not anymore. This is Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Sports Ball Center tonight, and a quick thought on the baseball playoffs. The chances of the New York Yankees, not my favorite team, were affected seriously by roster construction due to a calf injury to superstar Aaron Judge, which impacted on an injury to superstar Giancarlo Stanton, who was out with an injured calf. And across town, the New York Mets, who probably are my favorite team, their chances of making the playoffs were completely destroyed by a calf injury to superstar Juan Soto, which followed a calf injury to superstar Francisco Lindor, and another injury to Soto, which was an injured calf. Then there were 15 other injuries unrelated to Soto or Lindor or Stanton or Judge that all seemed to have been strained calves. Now, looking in previous recent years in baseball, 2025, there were not significant injuries. Wait a minute. That Kyle Tucker, who signed a $ 60 million a year contract with the Dodgers, September 2nd, 2025, strained calf. Jake Myers of Houston, strained calf's never been the same. Jameson Tyon of the Cubs has, I think, not basically pitched since then. What's the injury? Oh, a strained calf. Austin Hayes, later released by the Reds, strained calf. DJ LeMayhew, strained calf. Let's see, what about 2024? Oh, there was one other guy from 2025. Uh, yeah. Okay, 2024 looks like there's about 25 strained calves. Why, if you were a conspiracy theorist, you would suggest that perhaps something was happening in baseball to some of the star players, especially those trying to come back from other injuries, that led them to suddenly having strained calves. But I'm not going to say what you might think, because it's what you would think that counts, isn't it? How are your calves feeling?
01:02:13
Speaker 2: This is Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
01:02:21
Speaker 1: To the number one story on the countdown, and I first read James Thurber aloud in a class at Cornell University in either 1978 or early 1979. A classmate of mine said, you should forget the sportscasting thing. You should live on the money you make reading James Thurber aloud. And I said, well, that's not going to be very much. Who's going to ever let me read James Thurber in any situation that has money involved in it? I mean, I might be good at it. You might be right about that I'm pretty good at it, but it's not a living. Well, it turned out I was wrong. I didn't get a chance to read again professionally any of this until my father got ill, terminally ill as it turned out, and was in the hospital and I read aloud to him. And among the many things I read aloud to him was from the Library of America and its compendium of Thurber. This doesn't look like much of a book, but I think it's about 18,000 pages, and it has most of the Thurber short stories. And that's how I began reading to him. And he said to me, you should put this in your show. And I said, countdown? He said, yes. I said, it's a newscast. He said, how many times have I ever suggested that you do anything on television or radio? And I said... I think this is the first. He said, maybe you want to try it. I said, I believe there are copyrights involved. And, you know, somebody would say that you owe us $ 27, 000 for reading that story on the air. And he said, why don't you find out? I said, I'm going to get an email. He said, just indulge me. So I read a story, a short story, a Thurber fable. And sure enough, the email came in from the Thurber literary family. And it turned out that they were all viewers and they were delighted that I was reading the works of the person to whom they had devoted their lives. And in the case of one of them, Rosemary Thurber, somebody who happened to be their father, James Thurber. And so I professionally read James Thurber for the first time. in the year 2010, a scant, what, 31 years after I first read him as an amateur. I have to credit somebody else for this besides my dad. My first experience hearing Thurber recited, because it was done in his case, because he was better at it than I am, recited from memory by the great actor William Wyndham, who is in many halls of fame for various parts of his entertainment career, including the Trekkies, the Star Trek people adore him as a role, as a troubled and indecisive commander of some kind or Commodore in the Starfleet. And it was a brilliant actor who played a thousand different characters throughout history. I think he's in, I think he's in Inherit the Wind too. It just an extraordinary career, but he did something that I saw on PBS that, the William Wyndham review of Thurber and the stories of Thurber dressed in an editor's little visor, green visor. He told some of the stories and showed Thurber's drawings. And this was a PBS special that I thought was absolutely outstanding. And he had done a series that NBC actually put on the air in, in this timeline in 1969 called my world and welcome to it. That was a kind of interpretation of Thurber stories into a sitcom that which lasted only half a year because it was 10 to 15 times smarter than the average sitcom viewer, even in 1969. Nonetheless, I later actually corresponded with James Thurber's personification, William Wyndham. We had conversations about how to possibly clean up some of the stories that needed cleaning up for the 21st century audience. He treated me like an equal and addressed me by the names of some of the characters in the stories. there could be no better outcome. I was reading Thurber to my father when he died. He listened to his favorite story. He let out a long sigh at the end of it. He waited till the end of it. It was about a 10 minute story. And then he died. I think perversely, that's as high a compliment as you could possibly give an author. And it got to James Thurber. They keep putting out new books about James Thurber. And I'm happy to say I played a small role in that. Thurber's Dogs is coming out now. Library of America again. There's a new book of fables, which has just been translated into other languages. And those have been 21st century publications, giving those of us who are devoted still to James Thurber, who died in 1961 or two, those of us who are still devoted to him, a hope that he will continue to maintain a place in American letters well into the Now, which century do you think we're finally going to destroy the world in? I'm hoping he outlasts the last human being. Regardless, the first story I read aloud was the one that resonates with me still, and one that I heard recited by William Wyndham and went, that's pretty special. Not just the story, but William Wyndham reading it. I hope I do it justice. I hope I do Thurber justice. And I hope I do some of my previous readings of it Justice, there is actually an audio book of me reading Thurber, the Thurber Collection, performed by Keith Alderman. Performed, not just read, performed. Permit me to perform for you, A Box to Hide In by James Thurber. I waited till the large woman with the awful hat took up her sack of groceries and went out, peering at the tomatoes and lettuce on her way. The clerk asked me what mine was.' Have you got a box?' I asked.' A large box? I want a box to hide in.'' You want a box?' he asked.' I want a box to hide in,' I said.' What do you mean?' he said.' You mean a big box?' I said I meant a big box.' big enough to hold me. I haven't got any boxes, he said. Only cottons that cans come in. I tried several other groceries, and none of them had a box big enough for me to hide in. There was nothing for it but to face life out. I didn't feel strong, and I'd had this overpowering desire to hide in a box for a long time. What do you mean you want to hide in this box? One grocer asked me. It's a form of escape, I told him. hiding in a box. It circumscribes your worries and the range of your anguish. You don't see people either. How the hell do you eat when you're in this box? Asked the grocer. How the hell do you get anything to eat? I said I had never been in a box and didn't know, but that that would take care of itself. Well, he said finally, I haven't got any boxes. Only some pasteboard cartons and cans come in. It was the same every place. I gave up when it got dark and the groceries closed and hid in my room again. Turned out the light and lay on the bed. You feel better when it gets dark. I could have hid in the closet, I suppose, but people are always opening doors. Somebody would find you in a closet. They would be startled and you have to tell them why you're in the closet. Nobody pays any attention to a big box lying on the floor. You could stay in it for days. And nobody'd think to look in it. Not even the cleaning woman. My cleaning woman came the next morning and woke me up. I was still feeling bad. I asked her if she knew where I could get a large box. How big a box you want? She asked. I want a box... Big enough for me to get inside of, I said. She looked at me with big, dim eyes. There's something wrong with her glands. She's awful, but she has a big heart, which makes it worse. She's unbearable. Her husband is sick and her children are sick and she's sick too. I got to thinking how pleasant it would be if I were in a box now and didn't have to see her. I would be in a box right there in the room and she wouldn't know. I wondered if you have a desire to bark or laugh when someone who doesn't know walks by the box you're in. Maybe she would have a spell with her heart if I did that and would die right there. The officers and the elevator man and Mr. Grammage would find us. Funny doggone thing happened at the building last night, the doorman would say to his wife. I let in this woman to clean up 10F, and she never come out, see? She's never there more than an hour, but she never come out, see? So when it got time for me to go off duty while I was on the elevator, I says, what the hell you suppose happened to that woman cleans 10F? He says he didn't know. He says he'd never seen her after he took her up. So I spoke to Mr. Grammage about it. I'm sorry to bother you, Mr. Grammage, I says. But there's something funny about that woman cleans 10F. So I told him. So he said we better have a look and we all three goes up, knocks on the door and rings the bell and nobody answers. So he said we'd have to walk in. So Krennic opened the door, and we walk in, and here was this woman, cleans the apartment, dead as a herring on the floor, and the gentleman that lives there was in a box. The cleaning woman kept looking at me. It was hard to realize she wasn't dead. It's a form of escape, I murmured. Let's say... She asked, dully. You don't know of any large packing boxes, do you? I asked. No, I don't. I haven't found one yet, but I still have this overpowering urge to hide in a box. Maybe it will go away. Maybe I'll be all right. Maybe it will get worse. It's hard to say. 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 the orchestration and Brian Ray on guitars, bass and drums. Their work is produced by TKO Brothers. Nancy Faust, the best baseball stadium organist ever, is responsible for the satirical and pithy musical comments. When we play sports music, it's from the old Olbermann Show, the theme from ESPN2, written by Mitch Warren Davis, courtesy of ESPN Inc. Other music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. The Thurber was by James Thurber and copyright the Thurber Literary Trust. My announcer today was my friend Stevie Van Zandt. Everything else was, as always, my fault. That's Countdown for today, day 610 of America held hostage again, exactly 839 days under the scheduled end of his lame duck and lame brained term, unless it ends early due to Trump's checks not really being in the mail. 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 and not have to look at me wherever you podcast. The next scheduled Countdown is Thursday, Probably, management reserves the right to get another heart procedure instead. Bulletin's 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.
