SEASON 3 EPISODE 81: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: To paraphrase Van Jones and other panderers: This was the weekend Elon Musk truly became president.

It was also the weekend the other guy became Donald J. Trumpuppet.

The number of Republicans who defied Trump over the Continuing Resolution ranges, depending on your point of view, from 29 to ALL of them. Because they also voted by unanimous consent to bury Musk's fabricated controversy over the no-cost land transfer to the District of Columbia. Trump, for his part, is in a bigger hole now than he ever was during his presidency as the self-inflicted losses pile up:

The Gaetz Lack-of-Ethics Report may come out today. Other nominations are in trouble. One new one may be Alan Dershowitz and another may have padded his resume. The idea of Recess Appointments is forgotten. Trump has been taunted with the "Musk Is President" chatter. Some Republicans are taking it seriously and suggesting him for Speaker. And that in turn let Democrats emphasize Trump tanked the deal to benefit his interests with the Chinese Communist Party.

And Trump spoke yesterday for the first time in weeks and sounded drunk - which is a problem, because he doesn't drink. All while he is being pursued by his two worst enemies: himself - and Musk.

B-BLOCK (27:00) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Remember my suggestion that MSNBC's response to Trump's win and its own tanking ratings was to do nothing but double down and exploit the Liberal Media Monopoly the cowards at CNN, The Washington Post and others were giving them? Guess what! MSNBC's new boss wants... better relationships with Republicans. (40:56) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Martin Shrkeli emerged from his sewer to get owned on social media, New York sends a bill for damages to the family of a guy a police officer killed with an unmarked car, and are there secret Mark Burnett Trump Outtake Tapes? Don't ask Burnett - he now works for Trump.

C-BLOCK (50:20) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: You have your Christmas story, I have mine. Mine is about falling off a cliff near Malibu filming a commercial for fast-food chicken. Stick around for the post-closing theme guest appearance Easter eggs courtesy some of my dogs.

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SEASON 3 EPISODE 80: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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SERIES 3 EPISODE 79: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: It is now revealed that at a Thanksgiving-eve dinner on a patio at the Mar-a-Lago Crapshack, Trump had his minions play a recording of the national anthem sung by the January 6th Terrorists. Some of them at Trump’s table put their hands over their hearts as the people who stormed our capitol intending to take over our government sang words, the actual meaning of which they cannot possibly understand. Per The Wall Street Journal, one of those who put his hand over his heart during this travesty was… Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg leads the parade of pathetic billionaires also including Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman, who just happen to be donating a million dollars to Trump's inauguration committee. Except for ABC News, which is donating FIFTEEN million to Trump's presidential museum (which may be in an empty warehouse or a sinkhole somewhere) to settle his frivolous and easily winnable defamation case against George Stephanopoulos.

On March 22nd, 1979, I was ushered into the small office of a Vice President at the ABC television series “The Wide World of Sports.” His wife had been an assignment editor at the local New York TV station I had interned at the previous summer – though we were not there simultaneously. He and the Mrs. and my friends from the local station all warned me this gentleman would not have a job for me nor even any job leads, just advice.

His name was Robert Iger. “Call me Bob,” he insisted. Within fifteen years he was president of ABC and thus the boss of all my bosses at ESPN and he was my boss there three times and for two further years at ABC and he gave me brilliant advice I've repeated a thousand times: if you want to be on the air, don't take an off-air job. It has truly changed lives.

And now, after 45-and-a-half years I’d like to repay Bob Iger and give him MY advice: Sell ABC News to somebody who actually cares about the future of news and the future of journalism and the future of this country because you guys at Disney ain’t it any more.

What do you think you bought for yourself here, Bob? Trump’s gratitude? Him somehow remembering you fondly the NEXT time ABC News does something he doesn’t like, like, say, accurately report how many people show up to his inauguration, or how many insurrectionists he pardons, or how many people die during the migrant round-ups into the migrant concentration camps?

Even if Trump CAN still remember do you think he WILL remember? Or all the mini-Trumps? What you have done is merely become part of the process by which freedom of the press, and freedom in the nation, dissolve. My advice, offered again in gratitude for YOUR advice in 1979: sell ABC News to somebody who cares.

B-Block (27:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Did Trump demand the end of Daylight Savings Time but think he was demanding the end of STANDARD Time? Van Jones plus Chris Cillizza equals Extra Large Stupid. And the New York radio station that is quite literally running a bulletin "sound" for "DRONE WATCH 2024." (39:27) SPORTSBALLCENTER: I have actually solved baseball's playoff crisis, the one in which in three of the last four years the team with the best record has been eliminated in its first playoff round and 14 of the 24 division winners have, too. It's actually a really really good idea.

C-Block (52:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Offended by this CNN crapfest every night where Abby Phillip lets this jackass Scott Jennings insult everyone and everything good about America, in front of an ever-shrinking audience? We tried this at MSNBC long ago only the clown was Michael Savage. It didn't end well for us and it ain't gonna end well for CNN.

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SERIES 3 EPISODE 78: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: How did this not generate more headlines? It's just a proposed maneuver out of the legal morass Judge Juan Merchan has helped Trump create. But New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg has suggested that one way to solve this sentencing/but he's president/but we can't dismiss the conviction is to treat Trump - in a legal sense - the way you treat a convicted defendant who DIES before he appeals or is sentence.

In short: just pretend Trump is dead.

SPEAKING OF A BROKEN LEGAL SYSTEM: I'm not advocating for that, nor for guys assassinating CEO's five blocks from my home. But our legal system is broken and it would behoove commentators, columnists, writers, those who suck up to the moneyed class, and conservatives to stop being so surprised at the idea that maybe a majority of Americans is not as outraged as the wealthy are at the actions of Luigi McDreamy. Maybe you need to wonder more about why they perceive the legal system to be broken and the corporations to be legal excuses for nobody being responsible for innocent people dying and being injured.

CHRIS WRAY OBEYS IN ADVANCE: He'll quit as FBI director before the inauguration. Maybe he can make a comeback as Trump's second pick for DNI because Tulsi Gabbard is being attacked from the left, the middle, and now from The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board. Also Hegseth's been caught in another lie, about something he had said in public 48 hours earlier. 

B-Block (23:46) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: The World Cup goes to Saudi Arabia because everything is for sale. And an announcement of a candidacy for New York City Council suddenly made me realize that Bill DeBlasio and Eric Adams both became mayor here in part because between us one of my exes and I screwed around with the 2013 campaign. OOPS. (30:22) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Yes she sneaked a gold-plated gun into Australia but how else was she supposed to protect herself at clown school? Speaking of: Newsweek beats the L.A. Times to a "Fairness Meter" for its articles. And Elon Musk insists there's no homelessness because now is exactly the right time for a CEO to assert that.

C-Block (39:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: My favorite Holiday story. The day, on my way to interview Mickey Mantle, I ran into somebody I mistook for just another fan - albeit a well-dressed man. Oops. Turned out he was one of the stars of the greatest movie ever made.

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SEASON 3 EPISODE 77: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump's return to the world of TV interviews is important (and crazy) but the shooting of the head of United Health Care just blocks from my home actually seems to be one of the watershed moments of 21st Century American Politics. We have often descended into the slough of despond that all political parties, voting, law, government, the entirety of the power structure mean nothing and that the only way to change things is violence. I think we're entering such a stage. If so: fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night.

AS TO TRUMP apart from his latest threat to imprison opponents (everybody on the January 6 House Committee should go to jail) did anybody notice his insistence that we are "subsidizing" Mexico and Canada by $100 Billion a year and at those rates they should become states.

Wait. What?

Mr. Numb Nuts Psycho President? If Mexico is a STATE in the United States – you know, where you are right now – the people LIVING there become CITIZENS of the United States, so not only can’t you deport people from the US State of Mexico… but you can’t put up a wall between Texas and the state of Mexico and in fact you can’t inhibit movement BETWEEN Mexico and any state of the union. I hope somebody told MAGA about Trump’s new Mexico solution: make it a state. That’d be two senators from Mexico and if New York has 20 million people, 26 congressmen, Mexico with130 million people at 13 congressmen per 10 million residents would get 169 Congressional seats.

Trump proposes giving Mexico 169 seats in the US Congress.

Also a GOP Senate operative uses the A-word on Tulsi Gabbard, and a Trump operative is ready to blackmail Republican Senators to get Pete Hegseth confirmed anyway.

B-Block (25:00) THE OTHER WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: "Democratic" Governor Polis again sides with Sideshow Bob Kennedy. Laura Loomer isn't just hateful, she's stupid. And Marshal Petain would be proud: Jeff Bezos, Joe Scarborough, and Mika Brzezinski all double down on collaborating with the Trump Regime.

C-Block (35:55) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: My Lunch With Elie. How a delightful afternoon getting to meet Elie Mystal meant I did NOT meet Martin Scorsese. That, in turns, evokes the story of Francis Ford Coppola unintentionally paying a former colleague of mine something like a million dollars to be in the background of one scene in Godfather II.

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SEASON 3 EPISODE 76: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: I'd like to thank the one person doing the most to undermine and derail the Trump transition, and dissipate any momentum he might have.

Trump himself.

He learned nothing from Matt Gaetz and so Pete Hegseth spends another day "twisting slowly, slowly in the wind." We are now reduced to Hegseth's mother pleading directly on Fox to Trump - staring in the camera as she does so - to continue supporting her idiot child for Secretary of Defense. But when asked if she'll testify on his behalf to the Senate confirmation hearings she refused to commit to it.

Amazeballs.

What's relevant here is that among the big names mentioned as Plan B is yet another Republican congressman. If he gets the job rather than Hegseth or DeSantis or Ernst, the GOP will have a House margin of one (1) vote - which isn't a margin at all.

ALSO: I TOLD YOU SO. Sunday night I suggested not only should Biden pardon Hunter but that he should pardon everybody else he thinks of. Last night Politico reported they're talking about it, but that only the names Adam Schiff, Tony Fauci, and Liz Cheney came up.

And in case like me you thought Chris Cillizza and Chuck Todd were the same person, have I got a shock for you.

B-Block (33:43) SPECIAL COMMENT NO. 2 - I have been pondering when we started on the road to Trump - or at least when we discovered that what should be the final guardrail to protect American democracy, the President himself, wasn't a guardrail at all. I've settled on January 19, 2009 and read you what I wrote and said that night and even what sounds awfully like a prediction of the advent of Trump Brand Stupid Fascism.

C-Block (52:00) IN SPORTS: Have you heard about it? The worst sports idea of all-time? "The Golden At Bat" as proposed by Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred. It is a gimmick as stupid as if you stopped the 7th Game of the NBA Finals and had the title decided by a free-throw shooting contest. And it's supposed to "attract young people to the game" which is a euphemism for "we expect you fans to be intensely concerned with how much money we owners make."

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SEASON 3 EPISODE 75: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

Special Edition (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Some time over Thanksgiving in Nantucket the light bulb went off over Joe Biden’s head and he finally realized that no, the norms and traditions and institutions to which he and most of the rest of us have dedicated our lives did NOT miraculously re-grow, did NOT suddenly spring, fully restored and intact, from the ground.

He saw that not only was his son about to go to prison because of his own foolish decision to not interfere with an enfeebled Department of Justice, and because of the dictator it let get away, who would now aim his DOJ at Hunter Biden - and Joe Biden - and anybody else - for personal revenge.

The President figured this out and pulled his son out of harm’s way. And much of he left attacked him for it. They are Morons. I don’t care about Hunter Biden, particularly. I care about the fact that we are 48 days away from a nascent military dictatorship taking over this government, supported by an unknown percentage of the population that wants to see Hunter and Joe Biden hanging from construction cranes parading through the streets, and wants to see Trump in power for life. A

We JUST got one more guy out of their sights and we JUST shoved one more plotline up Trump, and up Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller and whichever other lunatics Trump wants to take over the asylum. And countless liberals – and anti-Trumpers – think this will actually provide cover for Trump pardoning the January 6thinsurrectionists because apparently for the last ten years they have been hallucinating and thinking Trump has ever bothered to seek cover for anything. Or they think we should be "better" than them. The Trumpists are planning to put us in camps. I don’t care if we are better than them or worse than them or monstrous to them. If somebody’s going to go to camps, it ain’t going to be us, it’s got to be them. End of debate.

In addition to explaining why this was not just the right decision but should be a template of thousands of further pardons, permit me to excoriate a bunch of the clowns who cannot see the forest for the trees. Or the fact that the forest is on fire.

And then for giggles we have the moronic comments of Nate Silver and Dinesh D'Souza, complaining about pardons when he himself got an undeserved pardon. 

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SEASON 3 EPISODE 74: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) BULLETIN: Biden pardons his son. Terrific. Fully support.

Now, do the rest of us. Literally offer a pardon to anybody Trump might go after for prosecuting him, criticizing him, covering him, or looking at him funny. I want a 1-800-PARDONME hotline. I want 10 million pardons.

SPECIAL COMMENT (2:44): And the pardons should be a jumping off point for how Biden can protect the citizens of this country.

What does THIS mean, exactly?

“I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

Joseph Robinette Biden Junior has taken that exact oath NINE times – seven, as Senator, two as Vice President. He has sworn to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and nothing I have found, and no Constitutional scholar I have consulted, indicates that once taken, those oaths expire. 

And the obligation to defend the United States becomes more profound still now that presidents have been immunized by the Supreme Court from prosecution for.. effectively anything. The incoming President, the one who wants an unqualified toady like Kash Patel to head the FBI and desperately wanted a lawless menace like Matt Gaetz to head the DOJ but will instead settle for a cheap lawyer who LED the “lock her up” chanting against Hillary Clinton at the Republican convention, that president-to-be will be immune and thus unstoppable. The CURRENT  president IS immune and thus unstoppable. And already in power and in command and… under oath.

So. This raises this theoretical constitutional question: Do the TEN oaths Joe Biden took as Senator, as Vice President, and as President, even PERMIT him to NOT act against enemies, BOTH foreign and domestic – and defend the Constitution of the United States? So help him god? When the Supreme Court has immunized him from prosecution for doing… anything? Anything at all? As long as it’s official?

B-Block (24:52) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: You do realize that Trump's lies about his phone call with the president of Mexico means we will, soon or late, invade Mexico, right? The quote from the Trump Transition Team member to Rolling Stone is "How MUCH do we invade Mexico?" Trump has now nominated both his daughters' fathers-in-law as envoys to the Middle East - including the one who set up his brother-in-law with a taped sex sting and sent the tape to his own sister. And why did JD Vance post a meme of himself in a dress?

C-Block (36:00) THE OTHER WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Vivek Ramaswamy self-owns over unelected bureaucracy. We've found George Carlin's Worst Doctor In The World and he owns The Los Angeles Times. And Sideshow Bob (RFK Junior) is seen, uh, hanging out, in his wife's new supplements commercial.

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SEASON 3 EPISODE 73: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Is Elon Musk going to buy MSNBC and turn it into pro-Trump propaganda channel?

And, if not Musk – could somebody else?

I may be asking the question backwards. Is there anybody to STOP someone, Musk or not, from buying MSNBC and turning it into pro-Trump propaganda? Well – who stopped Musk from doing that to Twitter? Who stopped Warner BROS Discovery from buying CNN and doing that incompletely but sufficiently enough to render CNN irrelevant in television news? We don’t know for certain that MSNBC is for sale. Companies like Comcast take assets like MSNBC – which by itself has made a profit of something around five or six billion dollars since I made it into “the liberal news channel” in 2006 – and spin them off into another separate company they also own, and throw in CNBC and Oxygen and The Golf Channel and USA Network and half a dozen other assets and do it so hastily they don’t even have a name for the new company and they’re just calling it “SpinCo” – companies like Comcast do that all the time and never sell the new separate company oh no I'm being informed they never do that.

Musk and Trump Junior have now had a "joking" exchange about it online but it underscores that this is exactly what Musk did to twitter and there's nobody and nothing to stop him from doing it here. This comes as The Wall Street Journal reports how corporations are seeing Musk as the new portal to Trump - and so is China. And as a purported old friend of his is insisting Musk has lost control of himself.

This did not begin with the Joe Scarborough Trump disaster last week (though his audience in the "advertiser demo" is down to 51,000 people). It didn't even start with Trump. It pre-dates even my arrival there in 1997. MSNBC and NBC News and NBC and NBC's corporate owners have been at loggerheads continuously since long before the first newscast in 1996. To understand what's happening now, you have to understand what's happened already.

B-BLOCK (31:35) SPECIAL COMMENT 2: This is not MSNBC's first existential crisis. The pre-Comcast corporate ownership at GE was ready to not merely sell the then-newly profitable network in June 2009, it was ready to shut it off and shut it down, just because the mother of the chairman of GE was a Fox fan and Bill O'Reilly was insulting her son. What happened then, and what happened with my departure in 2011, again forms a straight line with the sudden spin-off and the Musk "joke."

C-BLOCK (48:00) THE OTHER WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The Philadelphia police department thinks a burned body may be "suspicious" (no; it happened naturally). Pete Hegseth once insisted it couldn't be rape if she was too drunk to refuse consent. And Nancy Mace and her chest are attacked by her former Communications Director.

It's all part of life's rich pageant.

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SERIES 3 EPISODE 72: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN:

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Hours after the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee ask the FBI for its report on the Attorney General Matt Gaetz Underage Sex Scandal, an extraordinary Gaetz Sex Diagram leaks. It's the Venmo records of the Venmo payments by Gaetz and others to the women in question, and there are more crossing lines and different routes than the map of the London Subway system.

And it underscores anew why the Democrats must never compromise nor collaborate with Trump or Republicans who defend him. To hell with Jared Polis, who decided to suck up to Sideshow Bob Kennedy about vaccines, or Hakeem Jeffries, who declared the nomination of these gangsters like Gaetz and Hegseth as "distractions." Throw punches. Eat faces. Metaphorically drive the metaphorical Trump Train off the metaphorical track as often as possible.

And most of all, never become Joe Quisling Scarborough or his wife, Marshal Petain Brzezinski. I can state with some assurance that this time, finally, he has ended his career. Morning shows the world over always see their ratings grow as it gets later (more people are awake). The average growth from 6 AM to 7 AM is around 20% On Monday, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski saw their 7 AM ratings DROP by 17 percent compared to their 6 AM ratings. 

On Tuesday, ratings for the WHOLE show were down ANOTHER eleven percent from Monday. Scarborough is now on the path we at MSNBC used to call “A Rita Cosby.” On Monday, the debut Rita Cosby Live and Direct has the highest ratings on the network. On Tuesday, it’s down a typical 10 percent from the debut. By Wednesday HALF the audience is gone. On Thursday, it’s a re-broadcast of “Rita Cosby Live and Direct.” On Friday it’s “What was the name of that show we used to have that Rita Cosby was on?”

Joe and Mika are done, and they are going to hit every stair on the way down. And for those of us for the whom the headline is "You somehow BELIEVED Scarborough was being sincere?" we are going to enjoy every thud.

B-Block (23:45) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Matt Gaetz gets dunked on about 18-year old laws, JD Vance directs his misogyny against Steve Bannon's woman CFO and has to eat it, and Marjorie Taylor Greene has actually invited a transgendered woman somewhere to meet her - Greene - in the bathroom and beat the crap out of her (Greene).

C-Block (34:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Because my schadenfreude diet hasn't started yet let me tell you the whole Joe Scarborough story. This scumbag finally ran out of other people to try to sabotage and instead destroyed himself. In my days before I escaped MSNBC it amazed me he ever got on the air: he spent 90% of his time and 99% of his energy on trying to sabotage Maddow and me and others. And so he goes from "Joey Scars" to "Joe Scared-Bro."

 

 

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