← Countdown with Keith Olbermann
Countdown with Keith Olbermann
PATEL JOCK SNIFFS AT OLYMPICS ON OUR DIME; TRUMP OWES US $293 BILLION - 2.23.26
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Terms Countdown with Keith Olbermann is a production of iHeartradio. Before we start, I want to make sure you know about this this taxpayer funded FBI Olympic jock sniffing yesterday though I ass. That is the sound of you and I paying for Cash Patel. Okay? Crash Patel to go to the Olympics in Italy yesterday and go into the US Hockey team dressing room after the gold medal was won and pretend like he was on the team and swill beer with the boys and dance his little cringe cross eyed dance with them wearing his little USA sweater and have his press flack indignantly insist he was there on business supervising 100American agents at the Milan Joint Operations center protecting all the American tourists and they just had to have the FBI director there among the 100 agents present. And and and and this probably cost us $400,000 but at least we didn't pay for him to go see his girlfriend quote sing unquote again. Yet we did pay to underscore Kash Patel's amazing hypocrisy. Ron Philipkowski found this. It's from three years ago. And if the name he uses here doesn't ring a bell, Chris Wray was Kash Patel's predecessor as director of the FBI. He was in fact the last director of the FBI who did any directing of the FBI or investigating as part of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or pretty much anything besides spending our goddamn damned money on permanent road trips. I'm not the defund everything guy. I'm just saying Chris Wray doesn't need a government funded G5 jet to go to vacation. Maybe we ground that plane 15,000 every time it takes off. Just a thought for now. Patel gets away with this. If the cards fall correctly, this will end in a couple of years with a future director not of the FBI but of the DOJ prosecuting him and putting him in prison for misappropriation of public funds. Cash Patel starring in the FBI. That's FBI fanboy International. He stole $1,000 per family per household with illegal tariffs last year. That's 135 billion. It'll be at least that much this year before they can stop it from the tariffs. That's another 135 billion. 10 billion from the treasury for this Board of Peace that he's in charge of for life. 10 billion more he's demanding from the Justice Department for prosecuting him for insurrection just because he was guilty of insurrection. There's another 400 million for building his ballroom. I don't wanna see his ball room. So, okay, if it's 400 million to build his ballroom, it's what? To destroy the East Wing. Dump that part of the White House. The White House onto the East Potomac Golf Links, because he's trying to take that over and make it another Trump golf course. So it's gonna be more to clean that up and clean up the East Potomac Golf Links. That's what, another 400 million. Then when we destroy the Trump Memorial Ballroom in January 2029 and rebuild the East Wing the way it was, that'll be what? Another half billion. So, so far, that's 135 billion. 135. 10, 10. 2/5 of 1. 25th. 1/2 of 1. Carry the 4. It's $291,300,000,000 Donald Trump has stolen from us. 291.3 billion that Donald Trump owes you and me, and we are getting it back. What we should do is declare January 20, 2029, Trump Day, in which Congress authorizes simply seizing all Trump family financial assets and dispersing them immediately to the citizens of the United States. Trump. Trump Purge Day. Because my figure here. 291.3 billion. That's just on the tariff money he stole from us and the illegal destruction of the White House. We haven't gotten to the lawsuits over psychological and reputational damage to the United States of America, internationally and every citizen of the United States of America. And of course, we haven't even gotten to the. The money filched by Uday and Koussay and Kushner. Let's just even it out here. Round it up, call it a trillion dollars. Let's just say Donald Trump has already stolen a trillion dollars from us on top of everything he's done to destroy democracy, destroy this position of this country in this world, favor the Russians, act on behalf of other tyrants and nations. Just the money. He's stolen a trillion dollars from it, and we want it back. Let's just say Donald Trump is the greatest thief in American history. Let's just round it up and say, Trump, you're going to give all of it back because to quote the great George C. Scott in the Paul Newman Jackie Gleason pool movie, the Hustler, you owe me money. He owes us the money. Because this weekend past was the weekend when Trump got his comeuppance. Well, he got a comeuppance. The comeuppance uppances. Later on Friday, as you know, three of the members of his concierge Supreme Court rebelled and struck down his usurpation of Congress's tariff privileges. He immediately went nuts, that is more nuts, and started swearing uncontrollably during a governor's meeting. Trump responded to having the unappealable decision of the high court go against him by trying to figure out a way around it and as usual by simply announcing he had found a way around it and it was perfectly legal and he was applying a 10% global tariff because the court said that was okay. When the court said no such thing, he also explained everything was still just fine with his genius economic plan, except that the explosive economy that had already made us the hottest country in the world, like that was a thing, like that was all that mattered in the world, profits for businessmen. That while it had already made us the hottest something, it would really only start to impact actual Americans later. That later used to be after he had been in office for a year, which was a month ago, then it became 2Q26, which starts April 1st. Then it was the third quarter now, quote, you'll start to see the results in a year from now. Anyway, that was Friday night. Then Saturday somebody explained to him that the new 10% tariff was not in fact authorized by the Supreme Court or anybody else, but there was was a 15% tariff permissible on a limited basis for 150 days, 150 days only under section 122 of the Trade act of 1974. So Saturday, he changed Friday's tariff, which was changed from Thursday's tariff to Saturday's tariff and from 10% to 15%. Problem with that, of course, as was widely noted by my old friend Neil Cachow and others on Sunday, is that when Trump's lawyers went to the Supreme Court to defend the tariffs by fiat that they struck down on Friday, they defended those tariffs by writing, quote, nor does 122 have any obvious application here where the concerns the President identified in declaring an emergency arise from trade deficits which are conceptually distinct from balance of payments deficits. So if anybody wants to go to court to challenge Saturday's tariffs as opposed to Friday's tariffs or the Thursday tariffs the court struck down. All they really have to do is face Trump's lawyers and quote Trump's lawyers. To them, Trump's biggest problem right now isn't the 291.3 billion at least he owes us, or the tariff mess he has to unravel. Or the small detail that he has a special trade deal with the United Kingdom that guarantees them a 10% tariff but he just raised raised all tariffs to 15%. Or the fact that his lead tariff supporters right now are President McKinley who died in 1901, and Special Adviser Peter Navarro, who thinks the Dow Jones is measured in dollars when it's actually measured in points. And Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. And you know who Howard Lutnick is. He's Epstein's friend. His biggest problem is that between what the court did and the fact that Trump had to reverse course Friday, then re reverse course Saturday, and we'll probably have we re reverse course today or tomorrow, it is now obvious to even the most ardent and self blinding members of the Trumptown Guiana death cult that he is making this shit up as he goes along. He goes into the State of the Union address having just revealed there is no plan, there is no logic, there is nobody at the wheel. As the poem from the British magazine Punch that Winston Churchill loved in his childhood went, who is in charge of the clattering train? The axles creak and the couplings strain, for the pace is hot and the points are near, and sleep hath deadened the driver's ear, and signals flash through the night in vain, for death is in charge of the clattering train. That was first published on October 4, 1890, so Trump probably read it new when it came out. It wasn't just that Trump was enfeebled by three of the worst villains in Supreme Court history, two of whom he appointed. It was that they came as close as anybody yet has to some kind of official announcement that the emperor has no clothes, or in this case, no plan. Trump's petulant, stupid and most importantly, impotent response to the ruling was so childish, even for him, that even the Wall Street Journal editorial board noticed Trump owes the Supreme Court an apology, the Wall Street Journal has now written to the individual justices he smeared on Friday and the institution itself. Mr. Trump doubtless won't offer one. But his rant in response to his tariff defeat at the court was arguably the worst moment of his presiden. Well, first of all, it wasn't. Still can't top that day. He tried to inspire a mob to overthrow our form of government and prevent a duly elected president from taking office. And he forever broke our whole peaceful transition of power thingy. But it was pretty bad. And if any other president, like if we had a human one, perhaps, if any other president had written that or had that written about him by his pet Wall Street Journal editorial board, they'd probably be keeping him from jumping out one of those White House windows now, maybe into the mud and snow covered mess that is the Trump Memorial Ballroom construction pit of shame. Trump got his comeuppance. Well, he got a comeuppance. Two other notes on this There is, as ever, with the Supreme Court, John Roberts officially fronts, but only because Alito thinks it's cooler to have Roberts stand in front of him in case there's shrapnel, the potential for a booby prize if you have not gathered by now, the Supreme Court is viewed rather the way veteran hockey people view the referees in a game. If the visiting team in a hockey game has drawn three penalties in a row and then one of their guys takes out one of the home players, Moellers with his stick, the hockey folks still expect the refs to not call a fourth straight penalty on the visiting team because that's too many in a row on one team. But instead look for something, anything to call against the home side because the referees are not doing what they're supposed to do according to the rule book. They're not calling them as they see them one at a time. They are managing the game. Individual decisions of right or wrong or a dental rearrangement were lost years ago and we got this crap instead. It's now big picture this and balanced opportunities that the Court goes. This same line of thinking only ruled against tariffs so that when it has its next Roe v. Wade level bomb to throw into the American public square, it will be able to say but we ruled the last one. For the other team, the next Roe v. Wade level bomb would probably be a ruling finishing off what little is left of the Voting Rights act, which if done this late before the midterms, could easily throw the midterms to maga. And Sam Alito would never do that, would he? Not when Democratic victories this November and two Novembers after that could lead to the Supreme Court being so packed that he and Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas would have to do their fascism standing up and would have to hope that any of the 10 new Democratic appointed justices would stop laughing long enough to throw them a bone once in a While. Because as hockey referees, they're still gonna manage the game. Even a 19 member Supreme Court with 10 new Democrats on it is gonna be too worried about what their friends from law school are going to say if they decide. 17 in a row for the liberal team. Wouldn't want Justice Kachal and Justice Mark Elias and Justice Elie Mistal to be uncomfortable, by the way. You wait. We'll get the trifecta. The democratic trifecta in 2029. And President whoever will still appoint Merrick Garland. You know they will. You know it. I said two other tariff notes. The second one is a quote from Jared Kushner. And you wonder how anybody could say anything this ridiculous without their heads spontaneously blowing off like in that movie Scanners. Only in this case, from all the hot air inside this latest Board of Peace scam. A billion dollars to get into Trump's tree house. 10 billion from the U.S. no government oversight, no law, no congressional approval. Trump is head of the Board of Peace for Life, so he's in charge of the 10 billion American. And they already bought stationary and everything. Kushner spoke about it during one of his visits to this plane of existence, quote, people are not personally profiting from this, unquote. What he meant by that, of course, was you people are not personally profiting from this. I guess we haven't blown up Iran yet. You. You remember Iran? That's the place where Trump said he had obliterated their nuclear capability. So obviously he has to go in now and re. Obliterate it or something. That's the place where he guaranteed to protect the protesters if the government attacked them, and he didn't, and thousands of them were slaughtered. And it turned out he intended to protect those protesters in Iran, just like he protected Renee Good and Alex Pretty and the Epstein victims. I continue to note that with which I began Thursday's bulletin on the former Prince Charles. For all the astonishment here that the British arrested him over the financial end of his sad relationship with Epstein, to say nothing of the realization that the British are moving to take him out of the line of succession, even though he's eighth. And the only place the eighth in line to the British monarchy actually gets there is in bad John Goodman movies called King Ralph. For all that astonishment, we really are underreacting to the reality that the British have done more about Epstein over just two guys, Andrew and Peter Mandelson, than we have about the thousands of Americans in the Epstein files. Holy effing f. This is our pedophilia scandal. We ought to be able to prosecute somebody. It's as embarrassing as South Korea putting President Yoon in jail for life for trying to declare martial law and cancel elections and election results. And right now, our national response to something ten times as bad as that is to give the guy who arranged it a $10 billion bonus check and let him use some of the mentally challenged members of the government and the conspiracy mob, use people like Gabbard and Clayta Mitchell and Sidney Powell to go steal actual ballots. And, oh, by the way, while we're rewarding Trump for trying to end America again, the South Korean public is pissed off because Yoon only got life instead of being executed. I've never really seen one of them before, but America 2026 has all the makings of a failed state. Well, if we failed, we are a failure. We are failing. We have the right guy here to lead us. On the other hand, we might have inadvertently found out during all this what happened to the Washington Post. I've mentioned a thousand times that they clearly went to Bezos with some kind of blackmail to get him to turn the Post into a pro Trump outlet during the first dictatorship, and he told them to f off. He'd happily pay off his wife rather than try to hide what he did by giving Trump what he wanted in the way of a supportive newspaper. But then, sometime in 2024, maybe earlier, presumably the same people came back to Bezos and repeated their threat, only the weapon was far, far stronger. We don't know what that was. Sure enough, what comes out from the Republicans on the Oversight Committee, no less, the dummies, what comes out but the deposition of the old Victoria's Secret CEO Les Wexner, about the 20 years when he employed as his financial manager, one Jeffrey Epstein. This isn't a lawsuit deposition, and it isn't testimony. So, yes, the lawyer can lean in and swear into Wexner's ear for saying too much. And that's exactly what the lawyer did and what he said that was too much about Epstein's other clients. And golly, golly gum drops, guess whose name popped up there. Oh, spoiler alert. It's Bezos. He represented their whole family. So there had been a whole bunch of people, most of them I never would have met, but I knew la he would say, like, I'm providing financial advice to the founders of Google. I'm financial providing financial advice to Jeff Bezos. Answer the question. Okay, gee. So the guess would have to be that they went to Bezos and threatened him first time with telling his wife about Lauren Sanchez. And he said, sure, go ahead. Like they told Dustin Hoffman and the Graduate, just one word, plastics. But last couple of years they went back to Bezos and mentioned something much, much worse. And all of a sudden, Bezos hired the worst newspaper executive in the English speaking world. And the Post is a shipwreck now. So now that there have been vague Larry Ellison Epstein hints, and it's the Ellisons who are reenacting the slow starvation death of the Post at CBS News, courtesy of this bubble head, Barry Weiss. It is fascinating to see who is coming to Barry Weiss's defense. And boy, was I surprised when it turned out one of those people was one of my former agents. This was the guy, Jay Shurris from United Talent Agency, uta, which, yeah, always sounded to me like upper urinary tract something. UTA a decade ago, made a huge pitch to sign me as a client and he flew to New York to do it in person. And he flew another guy to New York overnight. And I said, well, I'm impressed. And I agreed. And like 12 hours later I got a voicemail from him saying he'd never done this before, but he had to retract his offer to represent me. And then somebody else in the company called and explained it was because Jay Suris also represented Bill O'Reilly, and Bill O had just found out. Remember Bill O'Reilly? Wow. Well, maybe two years later, Bill O self destructed for good. And Jay Suras and his guys were back on the blower saying, sorry if you're still interested. And they repped me for a while and they did okay. Although Seuras disappeared when the new head of NBC, Jeff Schell, reneged on his idea to bring me back to MSNBC in. What was it, 2019, 2020 and 2021. Anyway, this, this for once, I'm not the point what happens the other day. But this clunky propagandist who has somehow completely convinced herself she is the greatest journalist of all time, this Bari Weiss clown, suddenly is not giving the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture at ucla. The ridiculousness of having Bari Weiss give any speech about journalism, I mean, a speech in favor of journalism is self evident, but especially this one about a guy killed by Al Qaeda, Daniel Pearl. Protests were planned that she was giving the Pearl speech. Petitions were signed, students were angered. She is a pariah, though I don't think she knows how to spell that word, let alone what it means. Most of American media just shook its head and wondered who was stupid enough to schedule her in the first place. When who speaks up in her defense, but a member of the University of California Board of Regents in a statement to the Hollywood Reporter. As someone who has paid the price with having my personal security violated as a consequence of being outspoken about rampant anti Israel and anti Semitic sentiment on college campuses, I fully understand why Barry would cancel. Why in the world would she put herself and her family in harm's way? I understand why she would do this in the environment we live in today. Signed J. Cyrus uta, Keith Olbermann's former agent. No, he didn't. He didn't include the last part. First of all, there is no definitive answer over who canceled the school or the moron. And I'm sure Siris isn't making that part up about family in harm's way. I get a death threat a week. I'd just like to suggest that I am deeply regretful if you are in harm's way to and if it's over Israel or Palestine right now. And ordinarily this would be front of mind, as any harm's way is. But here's the thing. America is burning to the ground and we are in America right now. And that has to be the first consideration. Barry Weiss is helping to destroy American democracy. Barry Weiss is helping burn America to the ground. And I don't care if the rest of her agenda is how to make life easier and cheaper for Keith Albertman. The rest of it does not matter at the moment. If America goes fascist, we aren't going to be able to help your favorite foreign country or people, whether that's Israel, Ukraine or Luxembourg. Also, I hate to break this to you, but nearly all of the conservative gentile support for Israel continues to root back to these crazy fundamentalists who, who for their ending of the world need all the world's Jews to be in Israel so they can be forcibly converted. And that will be the last big thing before their rapture. That's all it is. And don't forget, they may want you to think that all the world's Jews to be in Israel is some sort of pro Jewish, pro Israel statement, but they don't really care how they achieve the idea that everybody's in one place. And think real hard how if you don't care and you're talking about the end of the world where everybody dies anyway, how do you make sure everybody named Johnson is in Baltimore, Maryland? How if you say the way the world ends and whether or not we go to heaven depends on all the Johnson's in the world being in Baltimore so we can convert them to Smiths One way to do that is simply eliminating anybody named Johnson who refuses to go to Baltimore, Maryland. Duh. And speaking of Johnson, Boris has actually had a good idea. I know. I'm stunned, went on. The BBC said the midterm plan. If you get a ceasefire in Ukraine, you send European peacekeepers to Ukraine, specifically British peacekeepers. That's not bad, but it should be done now. Send those British troops now, Boris Johnson told the BBC yesterday. If we are willing to do it in the context of a ceasefire, which of course puts all the initiative, all the power in Putin's hands, why not do it now? There is no logical reason that I can see, he said, why we shouldn't send peaceful ground forces there to show our support, our constitutional support for a free, independent Ukraine. Well, his logic is very simple. And even though it is Boris Johnson, it's startlingly correct. Send the troops now, especially if they're English troops. And not only might they actually increase the odds of some kind of solution, but they would snap Putin out of this idea that Europe is actually going to let Trump continue to lead the Western response to Putin's terrorism when Trump is simply Putin's sock puppet. Send European troops now to areas that do not have any fighting in them, and you might just shake the madman out of his overconfidence. Then you can pick which madman I'm talking about because it would work on Putin and Trump. Wow. Boris Johnson, a good idea. Finally, Boris Johnson, you have unsuspected depth. And concluding the invisible thread of news, the Byron Donald story. The Byron Donald story is courtesy of one of the British tabloids, the kind for which Boris Johnson once wrote. In this case, it's the Daily Mail, and it's from the first wife of the hapless Trump whore, Congressman Byron Donalds. She is named Biza hall and she was married to him from 1999 to 2002, when one day it turned out he had a pregnant girlfriend and he thought he liked to be married to her instead. We discovered this when the second Mrs. Daniels posted a Valentine's Day message on Insta, which inadvertently revealed she had started dating him while he was still married to beza Hall. Because Mrs. Donalds the second is apparently just as careless as Byron is. What she revealed is not just stupid, but it may summarize everything you need to know about the Florida con man and the Trump he serves. Beza hall says when she met Byron Daniels at Florida A and M University, he had a Jamaican accent. Byron Donalds is from Crown Heights in Brooklyn. It's still Possible. My mother's aunt by marriage had a Scottish brogue and she was from the Bronx. Anyway, Beza says when Byron asked her out, he absolutely did have a Jamaican accent. Then plot twist, quote, it was gone within a few days. He said that he used the fake accent because he wanted to stand out. There were a lot of guys at our university from New York, but very few from Jamaica. If you're thinking, what an asshole. Yeah, but she married him because her in state scholarship had run out and the only way to stay in school cheaply was to marry a state resident. So whenever you see Byron Daniels, keep your ears open. You never know what he'll be pretending to be next. Right now, he's an ardent Trumpist, so no Jamaican lilt. Now, that accent he's using is the one he uses when he pretends to be an American. Which leads us to one last impersonator note. No, sorry, that wasn't Trump calling into C SPAN as John Barron on Saturday. I guess for a second, if you listen to it for the first second, it's a vague possibility. And then you go, the voice is too high. The comments are much too much about other people rather than about himself. And most tellingly, what he says, what John Barron says on C Span before they hang up on him, what he says is coherent. So how could, how could you ever mistake that for Trump? This is SportsCenter. Wait, check that. Not anymore. This is Countdown with Keith Olbermann in Sports Ball tonight, hope you enjoyed the greatest hockey game of the last two weeks. I mean, a good overtime game for the gold medal. That's, that's great. The US and finally winning a gold medal in an Olympics not held in the United States. They didn't emphasize that during the celebration, did they? The US Also finally proving it can win a gold medal in an Olympics I don't cover ending a 46 year streak, but at what price? Was that really worth shutting down the National Hockey League for two weeks? I mean, if you're not a hockey fan, why do you care? I guess it was good Sunday morning tv, but they had to shut down the whole National Hockey League for two weeks. As I have discussed here previously, they subjected Sidney Crosby, one of the top with three players of this century, to an injury. The captain of the Canadian team and the Pittsburgh Penguins. An injury that was bad enough that he missed the gold medal game. How hurt is he for that to have happened? He's what, 39, 38? Is his career in jeopardy? Did you just trade Sidney Crosby's career or at least his effectiveness for one game on a Sunday morning in February after an exciting seven game tournament when they used to play 61 game pre tournament schedules and it broke the leg of Kevin Fiala which probably kills the LA Kings playoff chances. Morrissey of Winnipeg got hurt. This altered the regular season for what amounted to the National Hockey League all star game. And it counted for something more than an all star game because they tried hard enough to get hurt, which is the problem, but it didn't really count for all that much. And once again this is why they don't try so they don't get hurts because the regular season is what counts. Don't have all star games. It will not bring in new hockey fans. As I said, I covered Lake Placid in 1980 and among the relevant parts of that in addition to me boasting about it, 1980 did not bring in new hockey fans. Not long term. I hope they will not do this again. I suspect they will because TV ratings. Me as a hockey fan, I would rather have two weeks of really good National Hockey League games in the middle of February during that hockey window after the super bowl games that matter towards the playoffs rather than one overtime thriller and a bunch of blowouts and Sidney freaking Crosby getting hurt. Why is that worth a US Gold? I don't get it. I just don't get it. Also of interest here, back to MAGA marriages like Byron Donald's mon. Again with this Katie Miller the stupidity bloopers are too many now to not believe that they are in fact Freudian cries for help from her. She has done it again. A malapropism while she is trying to compliment herself or her man. The little pocket Nosferatu. That's next. This is Countdown. Most people think their insurance will cover them when disaster strikes. The truth? Many are wrong. You pay premiums and assume you're protected until the fine print hits, exclusions, limits, loopholes. Suddenly that coverage isn't coverage at all. My policy advocate reviews your policies, home, auto, life and breaks them down in plain English. They show what's really covered and what isn't. It costs just 27 cents a day less than a cup of coffee. For peace of mind, before you assume you're covered, go to mypolicyadvocate.com youm might be shocked at what you find. Mypolicyadvocate.com Support for the show comes from
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Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On public, you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com podcast paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. Mercer Member FINRA and SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors llc. SEC Registered Advisor. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete Disclosures available at public.comDisclosures sink into
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I think when you're diagnosed with cancer you crave a semblance of normalcy and control and so work allowed me to be me. So I think it's really important that companies stay flexible. Cancer in a diagnosis can be all consuming, but it doesn't have to be. Research shows there is a significant connection between the ability to continue to work and cancer recovery. We can make work a better place for healing, learn more and sign the pledge@workingwithcancerpledge.com this is Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Still ahead on this volume of Countdown. Ah, baseball is underway because spring training games should start in February before the Olympics come to an end. I don't know who decided that, but here we are. So now, before the end of February, it's time, as it turns out, for my annual answer to the annual question, hey buddy, why aren't you on the baseball channel MLB Network? The answer is I'm not because the New York Yankees reportedly threatened to cut all the electricity to the MLB Network equipment at Yankee Stadium if the MLB Network hired me because the son of George Steinbrenner who owns the team now, is a moron with skin thinner than the finest Napa Valley grapes. Sorry Hal, that two sewer pipes broke outside your stadium on the first day of spring training Saturday, flooding your clubhouse full of. Well, let's just call it Yankee fluid. The story of the day MLB Network ghosted me next in things I promise not to tell first. However, we always have more new idiots to talk about. That would be the roundup of the miscreants morons and dunning Kruger effect specimens who constitute today's other worst persons in the world, the bronze worse. Mark Zuckerberg. I don't think he's ever made this list before. Probably because his baseline worseness would always win him fifth or sixth place anyway. Plus this event, this is last week now, I think last Wednesday. Did you see this? I did not see it as it happened. He is one of the defendants in a lawsuit in California in which the social media monsters are charged with deliberately making their product addictive to teens whose brains have not fully formed yet. You think companies like Meta spend tens of millions at least on consumer stuff and public relations and lobbying and how to deal with things like lawsuits. And yet in his bubble, in his separate universe constructed out of his vanity, his money and his terror of whatever it is he's hiding being revealed. Zuckerberg thinks this was a good idea. When he went to testify, Zuck and his security bros were all wearing glasses. Weird, clunky, bad looking nerd glasses. And Judge Carolyn Kewle saw them come into her courtroom in these glasses and freaked out cause she recognized or was told what they were. They were wearing Meta AI glasses complete with built in cameras and microphones in her courtroom. And they thought that would be okay because our billionaires have completely detached from reality and they think they own us and they own the courts and they own the governments and this is not going to end well for them. It just isn't. Maybe not today, maybe not 50 years from now, but history teaches us how not well it always ends for these turds who ultimately only have money. Judge Kuehl ordered them to take the glasses off and turn the glasses off and then send one of the bodyguards out of the jury room, the chambers with all of the glasses that were recording audio and video. And she added, quote, this is very serious. A reminder, I speak to you as somebody who made a lot of money in his life. Not 10 figure money, not 9, but pretty high 8.5% of the money you make in your lifetime. If it's that kind of money, 5% is skill, maybe 5% of it is timing, and 90% of it is lucky. If it were otherwise, Zuckerberg, you'd be smart enough not to wear your goddamned recording classes into a courtroom. On the other hand, there is a chance those might be the only six pairs of those pos AI glasses Meta sold. The runner up worser. At the other end of the spectrum, there are dumb people who don't know that they're just there because of luck. Kid Rock. Did you know he isn't just a Trump whore, but apparently he plays music of some kind. Did you know this? I didn't know this. I just thought he was this unwashed looking guy who stood around Trump a lot to make Trump look a little less disgusting looking. You want to look less disgusting? Hang around with a bunch of disgusting looking people like Kid Rock and people buy tickets to watch him play music of some sort of. What is it? Is it a ukulele? Is it a zither? Is he a zither player? I guess they buy tickets to watch him play the way people buy tickets to watch Demolition derby. Anyway, the price has become a story. The price of the tickets because this people's Rocker is charging $5,000 for some front row tickets. Except he disputes this and he's angry about the reporting that says he charges $5,000. Let me read you the hill he's dying on in which he explains he's not charging $5,000 for front row tickets. And then he quickly reveals he is charging $5,000 for front row tickets. Listen to this carefully. Idrock writes. Here we go again. The fake liberal media says I'm charging $5,000 for front row tickets. They know damn well that's not the full story. Those are extremely limited first class seats like I explained. 4 tickets per row, first 5 rows only, 5k per seat. Row 1, 4k, row 2, 3k, row 3, 2k, row 2, 4, 1k, row 5. Again, only 4 seats in rows 1 through 5. 20 first class seats in venues that hold 15k to 25k people. Now that that clears it up. He's not charging $5,000 a ticket for front row seats. He's charging $5,000 a ticket FOR front row seats, $4,000 for row 2 seats, $3,000 for row 3 seats, etc. He's mad that reporters did not give the full pricing schedule for 15,000 seats. Like he's selling 15,000 tickets. By the way. Well done, genius. You prove that liberal media is lying about you by confirming it's telling the truth about you. You are selling tickets for $5,000 in the front row, Kid schlock. But the winner, the worst. Boy, oh boy, oh boy. Every week we get a better idea, a better answer to that rhetorical question. Who on God's green earth would actually get married to Stephen Miller? And why? And now we know. And every week we find out a little bit more about the why part. Why did this Katie Miller marry Stephen Miller? Well, they were made for each other. Not made, well, just made for each other. She does a podcast, she does a lot of social media and there is one Freudian slip per podcast or post. It is amazing the number of mistakes, the number of screams from inside her soul that this woman makes. It's amazing. The latest, she has decided that birth control leads to increased infertility in women. Birth control leads to increased infertility in women. Wow, you figured that out for yourself, huh, Katie? But that's just the background. That's just the context. Listen to the Freudian dunning Kruger apex moment blooper in here as she chastises educating educational education. As countries get richer, women become more education and have increased career opportunities. As countries get richer, women become more education. She's, she's taking the anti education point of view. You wouldn't want women to become more education, Ms. Miller. My God, sounds like you need to become more education. Katie. There are fewer children being born because women are too smart. And I'm fighting back by being dumber. Miller, today's other worst person in the world. 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I think when you're diagnosed with cancer you crave a semblance of normalcy and control and so work allowed me to be me. So I think it's really important that Kevin stay flexible. Cancer in a diagnosis can be all consuming, but it doesn't have to be. Research shows there is a significant connection between the ability to continue to work and cancer recovery. We can make work a better place for healing, learn more and sign the pledge@workingwithcancerpledge.com. The owners of at least at least five different Major League Baseball teams have tried to get me fired over the years and one, the New York Yankees, kind of succeeded. On November 26, 2012, my agent followed the instructions of Tony Petiti, then the president of the TV Publicity channel owned by Major League Baseball MLB Network and called Petiti to finalize a deal by which I would join the channel to do a daily show probably at 5:30 at night. It was going to be weird. MLB Network and its sister hockey channel NHL Network originate in the same studios in Caucus, New Jersey that MSNBC used every day from the day I started there in October 1997 through the day in October 2007 when NBC finally moved us to New York City. I had been asked to do something for MLB network in 2008 and 2009 before it ever got on the air. The request came directly from the then commissioner of baseball, Bud Selig. He also asked me to write for baseball's website, mlb.com we actually got that done. But the TV show was impossible because of my schedule until I was a free agent in the fall of 2012. So I was invited in the fall of 2012 to do a couple of guest appearances at MLB Network. And they went well, except for this crazy deja vu kind of thing that hit me when I went into the building and found that while Baseball had spent $60 million to upgrade all the technical stuff in the studio designs, they had touched anything else from the MSNBC era. The carpet tiles were the same, the ping pong table in the break room was the same. The signs on the back of the bathroom door telling you who to call if the John overflows were the same. It was like having a dream where you're back in your childhood home and everything is exactly the way it was, including the creaks in the floorboards, except, oh, by the way, there's a nuclear reactor in the middle of your den and you keep saying, where did that come from? Anyway, the guest appearances on MLB Network went well, and this guy Petiti, the president, asked if I would fill in for two days on their new morning show the week of Thanksgiving 2012. I certainly knew how to get to the building. I did the shows with Brian Kenny and Ken Rosenthal and Bob Costas son Keith and Alana Rizzo, and we had a good time. And Tony Petitti, the president of MLB Network, attended the meetings that we would have before and after each show. I mean full staff meetings, 15 or so people standing around a bunch of cubicles and in front of all of them, Tony Pacitti began asking me if I thought my new show for MLB Network would do better at 5 or 5:30 and if I agreed with him that I should work only during the baseball season and spring training and playoffs and winter meetings and then stay fresh by taking the rest of the year off. He asked me if there were people on the staff of the morning show who I would like to work with. I mean, this is in front of all of the staff of the morning show. He warned me they couldn't pay me the kind of salary I was used to. And I said that happily the kind of salary I was used to meant I did not need the kind of salary I was used to. He told me to remind my agent to call him the Monday after Thanksgiving. He wished me a happy turkey, and everybody left. And everybody heard his plans. And a couple of the producers asked me if I was recommending them to be on my new show on MLB Network. So how come I don't have a new show on MLB Network? Or how come we're not celebrating the 10th anniversary of my new show on MLB Network? Well, on Monday afternoon, my agent calls me and says he's just gotten off the phone with Tony Patiti, and it was the strangest conversation he had had since he became an agent. No, let me rephrase that, he said, because it wasn't a conversation, it was an attempted conversation. I kept asking him what he told me to call him about, and he would then say nothing. Initially, I did not understand. What do you mean he said nothing? My agent said he meant literally that I say, so, Tony, what's your offer to Keith? And then there was silence. And I thought the phone call had dropped out. So I said, tony, are you there? And he say, sure am. So again I ask him, you know, what's your offer to Keith? And again, literally, silence. Only this time, I can hear him breathing. I tried like 10 different ways. Are we talking about Keith now? Silence. Is there a reason you're being silent about Keith, Tony? Silence. If I changed the subject, talked about somebody else, he was his normal self. If I mentioned your name, he went silent. The next day, the agent calls me back. Petiti just did this again with me on the phone. He wouldn't speak literally, wouldn't say any words in any language. If I mentioned your name. Took me a long time to find out what had actually happened. The next baseball season, after I'd gone back to work at espn, I'm at a game. There's one of the MLB Network officials whom I'd met on my two days before Thanksgiving 2012. And this person comes up to me and apologizes. We all heard what happened. It's so embarrassing. Petiti is such a coward. The Yankees got to him and another club. I never found out which one. There was some kind of conference call a Monday after Thanksgiving to tell the teams about your new show. And whoever was on the call for the Yankees went ballistic. They said something like, if you put them on MLB Network, we will disable your cameras at Yankee Stadium and never let any of you inside the building again. Instantly, I knew why the Yankees would have done that. I was, and my father before me, a season ticket holder for 42 years for Yankee games. And for 10 of those years, I was also one of the two announcers who did a kind of play by play over the public address system at Yankee Stadium on Old Timers Day. And then one day in 2011, I tweeted a photo of a Yankee employee in the stands giving some sort of hand signals to Alex Rodriguez in the on deck circle. The guy was clearly telling Alex Rodriguez what the last pitch had been. It wasn't cheating. It was helping a supposed superstar who apparently could not figure out for himself from on the field what the last pitch had been. I tweeted the photo. Major League Baseball called the Yankees and told them to cut it out. The Yankees in a rod looked stupid in the newspapers, and the Yankees management said they were not mad at me. And then three months later, days before Old Timers Day, they leaked to the papers that I had been fired as Old Timers Day. Play by play, man, because I had tweeted that photo of Alex Rodriguez and the guy in the stands. So rather naturally, my response was to not renew my season tickets. And my tickets were right behind home plate, and they cost like $400,000 a year. And relax, I gave about 70% of them to make a wish. But the Yankees being the Yankees, were furious that I would not give them $400,000 a year anyway. So they told MLB Network if MLB Network gave me a show, they would unplug MLB Network's cameras. Actually, they did more than that. I asked my friend, the MLB Network official, the real puzzler of the saga, why this MLB Network president, Tony Petiti literally would not speak, would not say anything, not even deals off to my agent. Oh. The official said Yankees were specific about that. If you say anything to him or his people, we will get you fired. So Fatiti took it literally. He said if you called or your agent called to just give you the silent treatment. These are adults, mind you, and they say that on air talent are the prima donnas. As I said, the Yankees are the closest of five different teams who tried to have actually gotten me fired, sort of. When I was in local news in Los Angeles, Jackie Autry, the woman who went from being Gene Autry's banker to being his second wife, tried to get me fired from my station in LA because I had criticized their team, the California Angels. She tried again a few years later after I got to espn. Then there were the Tampa Bay Rays. Well, the Devil Rays at that point, whose first owner, Vince Nimoli, was convinced I had a vendetta against his team and was making up stories about them that were accidentally true. He could not conceive that somebody in his organization who he paid actually hated him so much that this person called me up and volunteered to feed me anything bad that went on there. But that is exactly what happened. So that's the Yankees, the Angels, and the Rays. And there's a mystery fifth team that was also involved in the MLB Network thing. And then there were the Chicago White Sox. One of their co owners, Eddie Einhorn, was a big fan of mine. But for 44 years, the team has been run by the other co owner, Jerry Reinsdorf. And Jerry Reinsdorf was one of the key figures in the strike that killed the 1994 baseball season. During that terrible winter that followed, my sources in the Baseball Players association showed me a copy of their offer to the owners. The owners were led by Reinsdorf, and in the player's offer, they were willing to actually negotiate one of the players union's sacred cows salary arbitration. They were willing to cut it or maybe eliminate it outright. But after complaining about salary arbitration for 20 years, the owners committee, led by this Reinsdorf idiot, turned the players down. Apparently, most of the owners did not know that Reinsdorf had passed on a chance to eliminate salary arbitration, a kind of automatic inflation thing within baseball contracts. And they came down on Reinsdorf like a ton of bricks. What do you mean you turned down the chance to stop salary arbitration? So naturally he blamed me, and he called up ESPN and he demanded they fire me, which to their credit, they never did do. Revenge is a dish which people of taste prefer to eat cold, goes the old Italian proverb. Reinsdorf is today despised within baseball. He has once again ruined the Chicago White Sox. The Tampa Bay Rays owner, Namoli sold the team unknowingly, obviously, to a man named Stuart Sternberg, who turned out to be married to a friend of mine from college. So whenever the Rays would come into New York, I would sit with Stu and his wife Lisa in their box. Their eldest son interned for me. MLB Network, which started out pretty good, is now just a propaganda machine in which every team is unbeaten and every player is the greatest ever. And they fired their best reporter, Ken Rosenthal, because he he dared to write something critical of the idiot Commissioner Robert Manfred and Mr. Reneg on the offer. Petiti. He really got his. Three years later, he was promoted to deputy commissioner of baseball. But that new commissioner, Manfred squeezed him out and he had to go work as the president of some esports company in 2020. And then they offed him a year later. And I have not heard anything about Tony Petiti since. Literally, it's been absolute silence. Not a single spoken word. And why does that sound so familiar? It worked out for the best. The network, which started off the way Bud Selig, the then commissioner of baseball, wanted it to, which was independent and sometimes critical, certainly critical of individual teams like the bad ones, the ones that lost 100 games in a season. They'd say, that's not a good team. As opposed to now, in which everybody on MLB Network is insisting that all teams are162.0. It's unbelievable. It is the most rah rah, blind to reality of all the sports networks. I mean, and that's saying something. Networks owned by the National Football League and the NBA and the National Hockey League and Major League Baseballs is the most like North Korean news. But they have a good theme on their show. Anyhoo, the shame is it really was at the beginning really good. It was probably better than watching live games. And now. Oh, my God. Not as a hostage. Thank you. I've done all the damage I can do here. I know it sounds like sour grapes, and obviously there's an element to it that is sour grapes. On the other hand, if it had worked out and they had not bent to the Yankees and hired me, I would have been fired. That one. They would have the stories. Keith always gets fired. Keith does not always get fired. Keith would have gotten fired from that job. Or.
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Or.
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Or quit in the middle of a show. I've done all. You know how we worked that out with Bud Selig. Bud Selig, when he offered me that job that MLB later backed out of, Bud Selig called me and said, before you go on and erupt against something that we're doing, call me so I can at least explain it to you. All I ask is that you put my side of the story in your rant. That's all I want. And I went, that's fine. Not with this Manfred guy. That's not what they want. And I know this guy, Tony Petiti, who was literally frightened into silence at the end there. He's like commissioner of one of the college leagues. So he's gone to one of the few structures that has less of an ethical background in sports than MLB Network. Commissioner of the Big Something. I've lost track. They used to be identifiable based on where they were. Like the Big east, the Big East Conference used to not have teams in it that were based in Nebraska, because there's nothing east about Nebraska. Well, I guess there's East Nebraska. Where was I? Oh, saying goodbye. I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening, especially if you work for MLB Network Network. I'll keep your secret. Our musical directors of Countdown are John Philip Chenale on keyboards and handling the orchestration, and Brian Ray on guitars, bass, drums and of course, vibes. Their work is produced by TKO Brothers. Nancy Foust, the best baseball stadium organist ever, is responsible for the satirical and pithy musical comments. Whenever we play the sports music, it's the old Alderman show. The from ESPN2 what was written by Mitch Warren Davis, courtesy of ESPN Inc. Other music arranged and performed by the group no horns allowed. My announcer today is my friend Jonathan Banks from Breaking Bad. This program was produced by Ted. Everything else was, as always, my fault. That's Countdown for today. Day 400 of America held hostage again, but just 1063 days until the scheduled end of his lame duck and lame brained term unless he is removed sooner by himself or by our friends the Supreme Court. John Roberts and I have the same birthday. Did I ever mention that the next scheduled countdown is Thursday Bulletins as the news merits, until the next one. I'm Keith Olbermann. Good morning, 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 PODC podcasts. Most people think their insurance will cover them when disaster strikes. The truth? Many are wrong. You pay premiums and assume you're protected until the fine print hits. Exclusions, limits, loopholes. Suddenly that coverage isn't coverage at all. My policy advocate reviews your policies Home, auto, life and breaks them down in plain English. They show what's really covered and what isn't. It costs just 27 cents a day less than a cup of coffee. For peace of mind before you assume you're covered, go to mypolicyadvocate.com you might be shocked at what you find.
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I need to be healthy every day to survive it and go through the next chemo round and the next chemo round. So it's important that work was part of that to keep my mind busy for 8, 9 hours and then I had to go back and face the reality. I had a goal and the goal is to survive. Research shows there is a significant connection between the ability to continue to work and cancer recovery. We can make work a better place for healing, learn more and sign the pledge@workingwithcancerpledge.com over the last couple years, didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by black people because of what happened in Alabama? This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B. Unpacks black history and culture with comedy, clarity and conversations that shake the status quo. The Crown act in New York was signed in July of 2019 and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race. To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B. From the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.