Countdown with Keith Olbermann

SEASON 3 EPISODE 114: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: NO, NBC NEWS AND KRISTEN WELKER - YOU IDIOTS - TRUMP HAS NEVER BEEN 'JOKING' ABOUT A 3RD TERM: Only to dimwitted media types who have been lying to themselves and their audience was it a shock when Welker insisted yesterday to Trump that he’s “joking” about stealing an unconstitutional and illegal third term and the Dictator replying “No I’m not joking, I’m not joking" and he alluded to several ways to game the 22nd Amendment Term Limits. Trump has been serious about this since at least 2023 and the first time I reported on that fact on this podcast was on Wednesday, November 8th… 2023. This has been the plan (like all the other plans) take something unconstitutional and illegal and do it anyway and dare you to sue and get his Concierge Supreme Court to invent a new law and a new country to LET him do it anyway AND insist THIS is the law and if you oppose him, YOU’RE breaking it. That’s the way they papered over Trump’s violation of the Insurrection Clause in the 14th Amendment.  Worse yet, the man who has best encapsulated the evil inside Trump, Yale History professor Timothy Snyder, is leaving the country. Literally. Moving to the University of Toronto. If that doesn't tell you all you need to know about how much Trump is NOT kidding. IF ANYBODY STOPS TRUMP it'll be the corporations and Wall Street types who suddenly realize that when he said he'd cook the economy to give all the money to the rich guys he meant just him and Musk. Or maybe it'll be Trump's Intel Community. Somebody is leaking career-ending stories about Pete Hegseth and Bring-Your-Wife-To-Secret-Meetings-Work-Day and Bring-Your-Brother-Into-A-Nepo-Job-Day and I wonder who it could be. Perhaps the National Security Advisor who needs Hegseth to take the fall for SignalGate and just happens to have the number of the editor of The Atlantic programmed into his phone?  If we're lucky maybe Hegseth and Mike Waltz will accomplish the rare simultaneous double knockout! B-Block (33:06) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Anna Paulina Luna thinks NBC is hiding a videotape with time code proving Oswald wasn't at the JFK Assassination (three years before time code was invented). A would-be GOP Nominee for Governor of Virginia thinks Anne Frank appeared in a classroom in California 20 years ago to tell gang bangers about the holocaust. And Bill Maher has self-destructed again. Now he thinks he's going to meet Trump because they respect him, because he was the first to predict Trump wouldn't leave office, and to heal the country. And Chris Cuomo and Gavin Newsom are there to reinforce Bill's gullibility! C-Block (49:00) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: So I've resumed my TV sports career! I am back on the air this week in pre-season specials on nine regional baseball networks that carry nine major league clubs. This kinda conflicts with my complaints about the same guys doing sports and politics at this time. I'll explain my rationale.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 113: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (SPECIAL COMMENT): The reason Trump’s Team of Idiot Rivals sent each other their war plans on Signal wasn't to keep them secret from the Senate, or from future investigations it was to keep them secret from TRUMP. They no longer TRUST Trump. They no longer think Trump UNDERSTANDS what’s going on. There WAS a work-around – AROUND TRUMP. They are CUTTING TRUMP OUT. I'm NOT defending any of these sloppy, stupid, dangerous, morons. But behind their blithering incompetence is the WHY. WHY did they conduct this Signal Chat? Because they have established at least one Ghost Mechanism to allow Trump’s cabinet to try to get something done without him destroying the world (yet) and if THAT’S the case the POINT of this is: you have a president whose own people think he is now a complete FEEB, that he can not function, and cannot be trusted not to do something at least disastrously stupid, IF that thing requires him to do anything more than blather for 40 minutes and morph slowly into Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. We need a whole new president, like, later today. This guy’s nuts. Also, they can all be charged with espionage under 18 U-S Code 793 “Gathering, transmitting or LOSING defense information."And a German newspaper found live mobile numbers and email addresses for Waltz and Gabbard and Hegseth. I’ll circle back to that. Also Waltz and Gabbard and Hegseth are three of the biggest idiots in this nation’s history. And I’m going to go further out on a limb and answer the MOST intriguing, MOST unaddressed question of this entire mess: why in the hell would the name of the editor of The Atlantic pop up automatically in the auto-composition in the phone of National Security Adviser Mike Waltz? Huh? Is MY name in there too? How about Jasmine Crockett? Goldberg was in Waltz's phone because Waltz put him there, and Waltz is denying it because Trump will fire him if he believes that's true. The other issues here are all valid and intriguing and as a story, boy did they hit the cloud just right and we got 77 inches of snow, this story has TWICE as much engagement world wide as any other news story this year. But the NEWS here is, this is NOT a Trump plan to keep reality from America. THIS is an AMERICAN plan to keep reality… from TRUMP. B-Block (31:30) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: American governments mishandle information as if that's what they were hired. It's been true since the Confederacy dropped Robert E. Lee's battle plans on the ground in Maryland in 1862. It was true when the Bush Administration spent a day unable to send me an email, and instead wound up revealing to me all the people inside NBC News that Bush could count on to give him favorable coverage. C-Block (51:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: A Pennsylvania legislator is dumber than she looks. She's touting her career 100% Score from...The John Birch Society. Steve Bannon has finally been broken - he is caveating his own violent imagery. And Bill Maher keeps growing, keeps innovating, keeps finding new ways to make an idiot out of himself. This one involves Kid Rock and Trump.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The podcast dives into the powerful legacy of Patrick Henry's declaration, linking it to today's political struggles. It critiques modern institutions for their failure to protect liberties during protests and reflects on the ethical dilemmas faced by law firms under political pressure. There's a sharp analysis of the media's role in shaping narratives amidst a climate of authoritarianism. Lastly, it humorously addresses absurdities in current events, reminding listeners of the urgent need to safeguard democracy and free expression.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 111: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: The White Supremacist Trash Trump Administration thought it had gotten away with memory-holing Baseball immortal and Civil Rights immortal Jackie Robinson. They eliminated the Pentagon web page honoring Jackie's service during WWII and re-directed you to a URL reading "DEI SPORTS." They thought they had gotten away with it so much that a Pentagon spokesman named John Ullyot boasted loudly about eliminating the DEI Robinson represented (and the Navajo Code Talkers and that one Native American at Iwo Jima and the Tuskegee Airmen). And then when all hell broke loose, within 90 minutes they actually backed off and restored the page - and made it MORE racist, insisting that they would only honor Robinson as an ex-serviceman, not as a man who may have saved this country from becoming then, what Trump is trying to make it into now. And for all the reversals, one other company's website associated with Jackie Robinson DID scrub any references to "DEI" from its mission statement and has not responded to the Robinson blowback. The other company is of course... Major League Baseball. This is hardly the most important of the daily parade of Trump Atrocities. It may, however, may the most symbolic. B-Block (23:40) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: A podcaster insists what's happening to Tesla is "worse than January 6." Life comes at you fast: Friday, Minnesota State Senator Justin Eichorn introduced a bill to make "Trump Derangement Syndrome" an actual legal thing there. Monday he was being arrested for trying to pay a 17-year old for sex. And why did Jake Tapper drink another pitcher of Kool-Aid and call it "The Gulf of America"? Well there are some people who become their salaries, nothing more.  C-Block (43:00) GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK:See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

BULLETIN SEASON 3 EPISODE 110: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:45) BULLETIN: Schumer follows his cowardice towards Trump with cowardice towards Democrats, cancels book tour the day it was to begin. Insane Dictator Trump decides Biden's pardons are "void, vacant, and of no future force of effect" because he questions Biden's mental awareness, raising three small problems: 1) this puts TRUMP's mental awareness on the table and at the center of all HIS legal decisions going forward; 2) it obviously didn't occur to him but if President 47 can invalidate the pardons of President 46 for any reason, then President 48 can invalidate the pardons of President 47 for any reason - and all those people doing potentially indictable things like Marco Rubio and Tom Homan and Pete Hegseth and Elon Musk can no longer be certain they will avoid legal exposure (DUH) just as Rubio (with the help of countless agents and with Karoline Leavitt joining the plot from the White House podium) add to evidence of a conspiracy to violate the rulings of federal courts; and 3) it means that all the pardons Trump has already issued (like of the January 6th terrorists, or Steve Bannon, or Charles Kushner) or the ones he's about to (like Pete Rose) are in doubt. Great work, Sparky. THE REST OF THIS BULLETIN IS A REPRISE OF TODAY'S REGULARLY SCHEDULED PODCAST (17:15) SPECIAL COMMENT: How do you remove a Senate Democratic Leader? CAN you remove a Senate Democratic Leader? Oh my, yes. You can do it before the top of the hour. Certainly before tomorrow. I'll lay it out for you. It can happen provided you note Schumer is having a book event tonight at the Enoch Pratt Central Library in Baltimore at 7 PM. It takes a little guts. Takes angry civilians. Takes the 36 Senate Democrats and one Independent whom Chuck Schumer betrayed to stick their necks out again. Takes the whole lot of them to run the minor risk of fracturing the Senate caucus or the Democratic Party - but why not? It's not like they're doing anything. Not when TWO new polls suggest Democrats are fed up with this group, that vast majorities demand RESISTANCE to Trump, not bipartisan crap, that the leader who best represents the ideals of the party is AOC (10%) as opposed to Obama (4%) and Schumer (2%) and worst of all - nobody (30%). We should be talking about resistance, about Trump being twelve points underwater on the economy, about Musk retweeting the claim that Hitler didn't commit the holocaust, his public sector workers did, about Trump beginning to defy court orders to illegally deport people to third-party strongman states.  But we're not - because of Chuck Schumer. Time for him to GO. B-Block (38:15) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The world is coming apart and Politico devoted its lead 26 paragraphs to a journalism party. Alina Habba is a moron, Part 9,763. And Marco Rubio and the "president" of El Salvador are mocking American law. See you at the World Court, boys. C-Block (49:15) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I'm under the weather and that always flashes me back to the day I was 21 and my doctor since my childhood gave me some muscle relaxants without warning me of the side effects. Hilarity ensued.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 109: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: How do you remove a Senate Democratic Leader? CAN you remove a Senate Democratic Leader? Oh my, yes. You can do it before the top of the hour. Certainly before tomorrow. I'll lay it out for you. It can happen provided you note Schumer is having a book event tonight at the Enoch Pratt Central Library in Baltimore at 7 PM. It takes a little guts. Takes angry civilians. Takes the 36 Senate Democrats and one Independent whom Chuck Schumer betrayed to stick their necks out again. Takes the whole lot of them to run the minor risk of fracturing the Senate caucus or the Democratic Party - but why not? It's not like they're doing anything. Not when TWO new polls suggest Democrats are fed up with this group, that vast majorities demand RESISTANCE to Trump, not bipartisan crap, that the leader who best represents the ideals of the party is AOC (10%) as opposed to Obama (4%) and Schumer (2%) and worst of all - nobody (30%). We should be talking about resistance, about Trump being twelve points underwater on the economy, about Musk retweeting the claim that Hitler didn't commit the holocaust, his public sector workers did, about Trump beginning to defy court orders to illegally deport people to third-party strongman states.  But we're not - because of Chuck Schumer. Time for him to GO. B-Block (23:45) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The world is coming apart and Politico devoted its lead 26 paragraphs to a journalism party. Alina Habba is a moron, Part 9,763. And Marco Rubio and the "president" of El Salvador are mocking American law. See you at the World Court, boys. C-Block (33:40) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I'm under the weather and that always flashes me back to the day I was 21 and my doctor since my childhood gave me some muscle relaxants without warning me of the side effects. Hilarity ensued.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 108: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: If Donald Trump were a foreign agent trying to destroy the U-S from within… what would he be doing differently? Crash the stock market, bring on a recession, make it worldwide, with economic policies so insane that yesterday CNBC called them insane, not only get out of NATO but pit the US AGAINST NATO, sacrifice countries to the Russian dictator, push a cease fire in Ukraine that serves only to give Russia 30 days to re-fortify their troop positions, threaten our forever allies like Canada and Mexico, cut off humanitarian aid fast enough to start killing people via disease outbreaks in the same month, start dragging citizens and LEGAL immigrants off the streets and hold them incommunicado in distant concentration camps without trial prior to deportation, try to break the constitution to hold office to avoid prison, blackmail the owners of the major media companies to support him or at least destroy their news outlets, violate every law and make sure all the prosecutors and judges are loyal to you and NOT to the law, decapitate not the EXCESS in government but the people who know how to stop plane crashes and epidemics, turn the agencies over to every con man and idiot and loser and lunatic he could find, roll back human rights for minorities, burn all governmental records, base his decisions on the failed economic policy of 1894 that the professor must’ve been talking about the ONE day he didn’t cut class in college, give a line item veto to a compulsive liar drugged-up foreigner who literally blows up everything he touches, and finally take a 100 million dollar bribe (I’m sorry, contribution) in public during a live infomercial for the druggie’s self-driving self-detonating cars. AND WHY WOULD Democrats give these creatures what they want? Why would Chuck Schumer try to finesse the Continuing Resolution as it comes to the Senate, when it is really just a bill to let Musk continue to resolve to shut down the government. Amazingly, Democrats fear being blamed if they block the bill and... there is a COMPLETE shutdown of the government. It's madness. The Republicans celebrate what the Democrats fear. AND UPDATED FOR 2025 with unspoken references to Trump and a video montage spanning the hero's time to literally this month that ended with Elon Musk and the loudest booing I've ever heard, last night saw the first preview of George Clooney's Broadway version of "Good Night And Good Luck" in which he stars as Murrow. It's a technical masterpiece and the message is as ever timely and even urgent. And I had the privilege of being there. B-Block (27:50) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Baseball has more new crap caps, only among these is one that spells out a vulgar Hispanic term for women's breasts. One of Marco Rubio's top State Department employees turns out to have been an online troll aimed at... Marco Rubio. And The Guardian asks "Is Stephen A. Smith The Answer for the Democrats" and the answer is surprisingly simply: no damn way. C-Block (43:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL. Since Stephen A. is clearly part of an organized campaign to make us all stop breaking into laughter at the thought of him running for president, let me just tell the story of why moving from sports into politics may not be the best idea. I use as my example... myself.    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 107: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: He has to go. And Minority Whip Katherine Clark. And Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar. And for that matter, Gavin Newsom has to go. Because after these standard-issue moderate Democrats vanished on election night they have suddenly reappeared 125 days later to address the REAL issue: Democratic House members who actually DID something to protest Trump - even just something symbolic like Al Green did, or those who supported him did. Jeffries and the others called them to a "come to Jesus" meeting to warn them never to ignore his "Dear Colleague" letter again, that the way to stand up to Trump lighting the county and the world on fire is to hold up mincing little pickle ball paddles with mild words on them and especially to coordinate outfits while not clapping. Out. Jeffries, Clark, Aguilar. And anybody else who doesn't realize that the last people capable of piercing Trump's bubble are Democrats at his speeches to Congress, and the media which has failed at the task even more than the Dems have. We need civil disobedience and instead Jeffries is warning Democrats, and 10 Democrats are joining the fascists, in punishing Democrats. And Newsom? His comments about trans athletes are bad enough. That he did them during a podcast with Charlie Kirk, arranged by Newsom's ex-wife Kim Guilfoyle, is far worse. I mean Newsom's judgment was already in doubt (he married Kim Guilfoyle FFS), but this is insanity. The nation is ablaze and the Dems are sending strongly worded notes. The media continues to collapse.It believed Trump's lies about pressuring Russia while he was in fact increasing his demands of Ukraine to include Zelensky resigning. And when Trump told a reporter he couldn't ask a certain question the White House Correspondents Association continued its policy of not commenting. And golly why did Trump think he could publicly threaten Nicolle Wallace and Rachel Maddow? Well, because of Joe Scarborough, obvs. B-Block (38:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Stephen A. Smith is not running for president, but keep asking him. Happily he IS showing he doesn't understand the first thing about any of this. His newest political crush? Candace Owens. Meanwhile Musk doesn't understand sports or America. And the Prime Minister of New Zealand fired a diplomat for reminding Britain that Trump is simply doing now what they did to Czechoslovakia in 1938. C-Block (49:20) THURBER SPECIAL: Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio, needs about $200,000 to keep going. The least we can do is raise consciousness. So for the first time since the election here is not just one but two Thurber stories: my favorite ("A Box To Hide In") and my late father's ("I Went To Sullivant."      See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SEASON 3 EPISODE 106: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Hidden behind Trump’s complex multi-layered endless hallucination that his address to Congress shows he is beloved and the stock market isn’t crashing and Speaker Johnson’s Chief of Staff WASN’T arrested on a DUI right after the speech and the MAGGOTS aren’t furious at him and the newest polling doesn’t suggest he’s already lost nearly a fifth of the Trump Bros under 30… there is a much more real and much starker truth: he has already moving to make NOT LOVING HIM… illegal. The attempt is underway to make PROTESTING THE TRUMP DICTATORSHIP against the law. Early Tuesday, Trump posted what seemed like a warning against pro-Palestinian protests on American campuses. In fact it says nothing about what kind of protests he'd make illegal, so let me tell you what he really meant:  Let me re-write this to reflect reality – the reality inside Trump’s plans to imprison you. 'All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Protests like ‘Black Lives Matter’ are now illegal. Protests to save Medicare are now illegal. Protests against your favorite president (me) are now illegal. Agitators will be imprisoned… American students will be permanently expelled or depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! NO DEMOCRATS! Thank you for your attention to this matter.' He also dropped a second hint inside that test of human endurance in front of the House and Senate of how he will use the new anti-Deepfake law to prosecute you for sharing videos of him, whether they're real or they're not. Because therein lies the true danger of a deepfake law: claiming a REAL video is just a fake. And of course don't miss out on the attempt to censure Rep. Al Green, the true hero of Tuesday night. They will vote today on punishing him for doing nothing compared to the previous Karen-ing by Boebert and Greene, or the infamous Joe "You Lie" Wilson. WE should be voting on whether we want Al to be the Democratic nominee in '28. Or the head of the entire party. Or the mandatory role model behind whom all the Democrats should've walked out in solidarity. B-Block (31:00) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Those Trump Bros? The under 30s who pushed Trump over the finish line? They have abandoned him. Poll numbers among them down 15-30% in the first MONTH. Ukraine and the peacekeepers explained. Which Trumper would you take first in the Moron Draft, JD Vance, Karoline Leavitt, or Alina Habba? And when Joni Ernst campaigned on going to Washington to get hog and make 'em squeal, little did we know! C-Block (44:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Jeff Shell, reportedly running CBS before he's legally allowed to? Well 15 years ago he tried to run NBC before he was legally allowed to, and I have the receipts. Appeaser Governor Polis of Colorado learns what you get for helping Trump: Trump wants to cut off funds to Colorado. And Nancy Mace has a Lion Gender Identity Crisis.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The podcast dives deep into the alarming geopolitical shifts under Trump's leadership, suggesting he has lost World War Three. Discussions reflect on Musk's outrageous demands regarding NATO, likening him to a wild card in global politics. The dire implications for Ukraine and U.S. relations are highlighted, alongside critiques of the political chaos in the U.S. Strategies for non-violent political change are proposed, while absurdities of prominent figures in today's political landscape add a touch of humor amidst the seriousness.