← Countdown with Keith Olbermann
Countdown with Keith Olbermann
THINK BIG, BE BIG, DEMOCRATS! THIS IS NOT THE FINAL COUNTDOWN - 5.11.26
02:11:22
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Keith Olbermann
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Just in time for me to put this podcast on hiatus for my health. Yes, it was a bit of a dodge. I took the week off so I could go see some doctors. I'm okay. There's nothing life threatening. I don't even think there's anything that seriously threatens the long term future of this podcast. So you can turn it off now. I have to explain though, for at least two weeks, maybe a month more likely, I will not be doing this podcast because I have been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, which apart from the fact that it's a bad, bad thing to have. If you have trouble saying the letter L Enter the fibrillation as I do. AFIB is the most common cause of arrhythmia in the heart. And what you don't want in the heart is arrhythmia. You like it to go thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump. And mine is making a sound sometimes anyway, much more close to some jazz drummer going nuts with the cymbals and just making this kind of in the background. This came up somewhat suddenly. In retrospect, it's clear I've had many of the symptoms for a long time, possibly years, but there never was anything debilitating. And then during my physical three weeks ago now, I guess it is my gp, who is a cardiologist and a good one, was talking about how great my heart looked and how young it looked for an old guy like me. And then he said, and it's just perfect. Wait a minute. Two words or three words you don't want to hear in the middle of an exam. Wait a minute. And it's afib. So we are now exploring the non intervention kind of treatments for it, one of which involves reducing stress. And no offense to you, you're the best part of this podcast. But the topic matter is, for me, like juggling flaming chainsaws, it's nothing but stress. What's alarming and what I now see, in fact a symptom of this AFIB is the fact that the whole process of producing this, which normally I should be able to do in my sleep because other than the improvement in the quality of the equipment, doing this is basically what I used to do in college radio with razor blades standing up, this is actually should be a simple process. There's only two of them a week, there are limited deadlines, and yet the whole thing seems daunting sometimes. So this is probably in fact the afib, because this sense of being exhausted and not having energy and being artificially fearful or anxious about things, these are all symptoms of it. I urge you to get checked. If you ever have anything that doesn't seem right about your heart, get it checked anyway. I mean, that's a standard rule. But look, particularly for this AFIB thing, because it can be treated in many different ways, the first of which is they give you medication that ensures that you will not have a stroke, because that's one of the great fears. If your heartbeat is not going in the right way, your blood can coagulate in and around your heart and cause a clot which could cause a stroke, and then you're in trouble. As My cardiologist said 2020 five years ago, when he would find this in somebody, the next thing would be to put them in a cab over to a major medical center where they'd have to stay at least a night. Now, he says, I give you this box of pills, I stick this monitor on your chest, and you don't even have to take the pills for another four or five hours. So we're in the still in the pills stage, and I'm feeling a little bit better, actually. And then we go to the more invasive things, which include one of the treatments includes probably the best. The best treatment for an irregular heartbeat involves a mild shock to the heart to reset the rhythm and encourage the heart to go back to thump, thump, bum, bum, bum, bum, lub dub, lub dub. You know the rest. Now, perhaps, like you, or certainly like me, when I hear shock to the heart, I think clear. So what I wanted to do here was to do some headlines of the day. And also I have a great story about my dog Ted and his heart problems, which I have been keeping from you because I wanted to wait till there was an established story there. And it's a story. I'll save that for last. And I want to talk about my first TV boss of bosses, the late Ted Turner, and how basically what you see in tv, everything, including espn. Ted Turner created that, although he did not directly create it. But I wanted to do since, you know, the possibility is they're going to hit my heart with electricity. Are you sure this is a good idea? Since they're going to do something like that or keep me on these medications for a long time, I wanted to go big picture here first. Just. Just in case I don't resume this podcast in a month or less or whatever, or I get so well and feel so good that I say to hell with it. I'm not resuming this podcast. I wanted to just talk big picture for a change. Not the day's headlines, but the big implications. The sort of things people leave out of this commentary world because we're so occupied with these trees in front of us and the forests are full of nightmares. Besides being insane and capable of just the one emotion, what can I get away with besides being lost in Iran? And we are lucky that Iran has not already invaded Washington and taken over. I guess we're lucky. We have to remember something that is becoming increasingly evident but is not being said aloud. Donald Trump is Boss Tweed. Boss Tweed is a man who in today, money probably stole several billion dollars from the city of New York in the 1860s when there were no taxes. He was the all time financial crook. And Trump, I think is going to exceed him also, whether he knows it or not. Trump is reducing us to a second rate power, threatening democracy here and around the world, as you know, elevating China and trying to. Although I don't think there's enough left in Russia to really make them a world power. Again, elevating Russia, or at least Putin has managed to manipulate Trump for whatever reason and by whatever means. Those things, pee tapes and everything else that's almost incidental, I'm sorry to say, for those of you who like me, just giggle over this because you're 13. The, the fact about Russia is that, that Putin has successfully and continues to successfully manipulate Trump into doing things that stave off, you know, a Russia that looks like 1905 with mass starvation. I believe, truly. Still, I am still somewhat hopeful. I am not willing to say to hell with this America thing. I'm. I'm not there yet. I am still willing to believe that it will someday be illegal to use Trump's name anywhere or to say it out loud unless it is preceded by popular Anglo Saxon epithets. The way it was basically illegal to use Hitler's name in Germany in the recent past for like the 30 years after the Second World War. I still think we are going to wind up there. I also still think this all ends with one of them, one of the Trumps or one of his lackeys in the cabinet accidentally electrocuting everybody at a cabinet meeting. Every day I have a different favorite as to who's likeliest to do that. I think with the revelations about Kash Patel and his pictures of his bourbon with his name on it, his own branded bourbon, that it's not enough that he was accused of drinking bourbon more or less by IV drip by the Atlantic, I guess it was. And then he threatened to sue and then he started to investigate the leaks and then they came back with the next story, which was he wasn't just drinking bourbon. He was drinking bourbon out of bottles with his name on it that he gave out as gifts. If that were not bad enough, this is where we are. You've heard of this character Mark Burns, big fat guy who goes by the nickname Pastor. I thought for a long time he was a pastor. Pastor Mark Burns is how he identifies himself. In fact, it's a nickname because I'm confident that I have read much more of the Bible than he has and it's not on my top 100 reading list. He wrote the other day that he Went to Trump National Doral in Miami. Big words for a crappy golf course. And he made history. He led the dedication event for President Donald J. Trump and the unveiling. He wrote of the 22 foot statue created in his honor. If you have not seen it, it's a giant statue of Trump, 22ft high at a golf course and it is the color of urine. Big picture here. I think it's time to look at this and stop saying he makes everything look like gold or he puts gold on the wall. Call it what it is. Donald Trump recognizes only one color. It's the color of piss. It symbolizes him. It is his life's work. The color of urine. The stuff on the White House walls, that's not gold. It's the color of urine. Stop calling it gold. It's urine colored. His hair is urine colored. He is urine colored. He's President Donald Urine Trump. The more we get that point across, the better we will all be. But back to Mark Pastor Burns. Now, you might think that a statue 22ft high, gold of a living being, that they all stand around and talk about how much it's history and how deeply honored they are and dedicated and all these religious leaders were there. You might think that was. What's that story in the Bible again? The golden calf. Worshiping the golden calf. No, Mark has reassurance for you. Let me say this plainly. He said, this is not a golden calf. We worship the Lord Jesus Christ and him alone. The statue is not about worship. It is about honor. Mark. Bullshit. Mark. It's a golden calf. You're worshiping a false idol. I don't care much about the rules of your religion, whatever it is. Apparently you are in syen trumpology, but honestly, you would think by now that any deity supervising any religion that we've heard of or haven't heard of would have already thrown a bolt Mark's way and said, hey, something of an irony here about your name being Burns. So we have Patel brand bourbon and a giant 22 foot tall golden calf statue of Donald Trump. And it's urine colored. Those are the big picture issues on the maga side of this. But more seriously, I'd like to mention here, just in case this is the last one and perhaps when I resume, and I'm using when, when I resume these, I can pick up on some of these individually because I think they're actually quite interesting and they're the kind of things you think of when somebody says, yeah, it's fine, we're just gonna throw Some electricity through your heart. How does that feel? The leading threat to democracy in this country right now is not Donald Trump. He is obviously the precipitant for all of this. But the leading threat is a small time Democratic Party worldview. To quote the late John Candy in the movie Splash with my friend Tom Hanks, Think big, be big, my friend. Right now the big ideas on the left are, ooh, Gavin Newsom's gonna gonna write mean tweets, or should this candidate go on Joe Rogan's podcast? These are not big thoughts. These are thoughts you have on the way home from work while you're going to go out and get drunk on Patel brand bourbon. Think big, be big. We need a party that is thinking in terms of what this country will look like if it still exists 50 years from now and what we can do to save democracy. Not just now, but after we defeat Trump and MAGA in this fall and in 2028 and in 2032. And they have not gone away because the biggest problem of the last 15 years was, and I understand why he did it, but Joe Biden and everybody at that stage of the liberal side of the equation of politics in this country, who viewed the election of 2020 and the successful inauguration after Trump led a coup attempt in 2021, who viewed that as some sort of thing that merited the two word phrase the end. Like I said when Obama was elected and everybody said, oh, we can take a breath. Are you crazy? You think these people are going to go away now? They're angrier than they were. They have been thwarted. They are three year old children and you took away their dream of killing you. So let's think big and be big and some of these things will never happen. But if we don't start thinking about how to achieve them, we will not also come up with other ideas about how to achieve lesser doable things and maybe, maybe just pull off some of these things. Like the most important thing we could do to preserve this country going forward is eliminate senatorial balance. There is no reason anymore on God's green earth for Wyoming to have as many senators as New York. I don't know what the actual formula needs to be, but there should not be as many votes in Oklahoma as in California. Not in the Senate, not in the House. We recognize the wisdom of it. In the House, people vote. Not empty land. I like empty land. I like bison. As I will discuss later with Ted Turner. About Ted Turner. He's not my guest obviously, but we can't keep this going Much longer. Eventually we will be ruled by a minority of 15% of the population. Here's something else that we should work towards. You want to reform voting in this country? Well, it's very simple. You want everybody to be registered and ID'd. Okay, we'll do that with this caveat. You get automatic registration at birth or naturalization or, I don't know, when you register your car or get a license or all these other things. And they say, well, you have to show an ID to get a license or to buy a loaf of bread, even though nobody's ever had to show a loaf of bread or to get an ID or show an ID to get a loaf of bread. I don't know where that one came from. They keep saying this. You can't buy a pizza with an idiot. Where are you buying your pizzas? Moscow maybe? They are automatic registration to vote when you are born, when they take the baby's toe prints and they say 18 years from now, this baby's eligible to vote. Done. And by the way, mandatory voting. I've been pushing this for 30 years. Longer than that. They have it in Australia. And if you don't vote, you get fined. We could do it the other way. Since it's America. We could Reward people with $50 off your income tax if you can prove you voted. We have to eliminate the electoral college. That's obvious. And that's not a project that's going to take the storm or take the entire campaign world by storm in the midterms or in 2028. I don't think we're going to get that done in the next 50 years. But why are we not thinking long term ideas of immediate concern and consequence can be done if there is some measure of bold leadership. You saw the Virginia Supreme Court throw out redistricting there after it was voted on. The voters of the state approved it. The Supreme Court disapproved it. Well, the Supreme Court apparently did not know that there is absolute control of the mandatory retirement age for judges in Virginia given to the state legislatures. If you changed it today to 53, all of the members of the Virginia Supreme Court would have to retire two weeks from now. And then you just go back with your new Supreme Court and have that vote taken again and restore the redictory redistricting. We need that kind of thinking. And that has been proposed and that has to be done. And anybody who gets in the way of this needs to be eliminated from the Democratic Party and perhaps prosecuted, as we should do with John Fetterman. There Must be a way to take John Fetterman and not let him get away with this the way Manchin did or Kyrsten Sinema did. My old bedfellow. Politics makes strange ballot bedfellows, and none of them have ever been stranger than her. Why not? If this is my last podcast, you can quote me on that. Put that on my tombstone. Gotta be a way to force him out. Gotta be a way to do something. Because he's a liar. He lied all the way through the campaign. He has lied every moment. He has lied to every voter. He should be sued by everybody who voted for him. If everybody who voted for him sued him for a million dollars, he would flee the country within hours. Anyway, back to the more realistic ones. Eliminating the senatorial balance, automatic registration at birth or naturalization, mandatory voting. Eliminate the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, and there's more to come. But just as a pause before I get to the rest of my list, and you probably have your own list. Project 2025 was a crazy wish list, but the fascists had the vision that they would someday change everything. They started to create things on that list when Barry Goldwater led that party. We have spent 60 years staving off the Barry Goldwaters of this land. Successfully, sometimes. Obviously, more recently, not so much. We have been staving them off. They have been planning to unroll abortion rights, women's rights, voting rights, everything that we call America, everything that has changed since the New Deal. They're still angry about fdr, and they are finally doing something about it. And the actual anger that has motivated them and Trump and the support for Trump dates to 1930, effing two. And the election of 1932, when a good man named Herbert Hoover was garrotted by this class traitor fdr. The anger has been building there for more than nine decades. And we. What do we get? We get moderates. We get. Is Gavin Newsom going on Joe Rogan's podcast? I don't know. Let's have a conference about it. Think big. Be big, my friend. Commit to the prosecution and the restitution demands of the Trump family and his family of crooks and inside traders for all the money they've stolen. Commit to removing tax breaks for churches that are now just political organizations or fronts for political organizations. Dressed up in clerical robes that they bought on ebay, Pastor Mark Burns. He's worshiping a golden calf, but because he says it's not a golden calf, they all go, oh, it's okay. It's fine. God wants Trump. That's Not God. You're talking to the red tail. Should have been a hint. Commit to investigating and prosecuting the foreign bankrolling of conservative influencers and organizations like cpac. You have an admission from the new rulers of Hungary. The new leader, Peter Magyar says, oh, by the way, we've been bankrolling cpac. It shouldn't be that difficult. We start with Hungary and then all those match laps and such. They will flee the country too, obviously. There's so much to do at the supreme court. We need 91 Supreme Court justices. We need to eliminate lifetime membership on scotus. Perhaps we wanna go even bigger than that and think about the president nominates 10 candidates, the Senate nominates four candidates and you put them in a bubble machine, you put them in a plastic ping pong ball machine like the National Hockey League draft lottery and one of them becomes the Supreme Court Justice. Take a little of the politics out of it. The only way we can do it now, which is by random chance. Although somebody would try to fix the lottery. I'm not saying the National Hockey League lottery was fixed, but just because they keep letting the bad teams making bad choices have the number one draft choice because they're in the big markets, that's not, that's that. Okay, Nevermind. Commit to prosecuting Scalia and Clarence Thomas for the corruption we've detailed here and has been detailed in a thousand places. And commit to candidates, Democratic leaders. People who want to be President 2029. Need to commit now to prosecuting Barrett and Kavanaugh and Gorsuch for lying to the Senate during their confirmation about Roe v. Wade. They lied. Think big, be big. Make homeschooling illegal. I mean, I know perhaps it's more convenient for some of you, but I mean if you want to teach your kids how to live your life and do your, that's fine, but get them out of the House so they can meet people who are not identical to you and them. When states put in racist AP history classes like the one Florida announced in the last week, like the entire program in Oklahoma, we need candidates who will say, by the way, we're not going to let you use those for college credit outside of your own states. Does your son want to go to Yale? SUNY purchase Cal Davis. No offense to any of those schools. You can't get in with your Florida degree. Sorry, that history thing. You're 16 credits short. Spend another couple years in a real high school somewhere. Go back to the FCC and have the Fairness Doctrine or equal time restored. I know dying television is dying. But there should be some sort of FCC intervention in cable and streaming and the Internet. Not that they would rule, but some sort of avenue so there can be appeal and so monopolies can be attacked. And on the subject of monopolies, think big, be big, my friend. Corral the tech moguls while there's still a chance to stop them. Because, as has been noted many times, every goddamn science fiction movie from 1940 to 1990 featured a billionaire who had his own island and his own rockets. The goal should be to take all of the money from Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, the Ellisons and the other robber barons and use it for public good. Our forefathers did exactly that. And not all of the money. They didn't bankrupt Rockefeller, but they just took out of him and Morgan and all of the others and Jay Gould. Republicans led the way doing that 100 years ago, 120 years ago, 150 years ago. We can, too. And we have to. Because ultimately, it is either the robber barons or democracy. They are not mutually coexistent. Think big, be big, my friends. Unify with the small liberal parties and governments worldwide to encircle and shut down the fascist operations in Europe and elsewhere, like Reform UK and here like maga. Because MAGA and Reform UK want elections, but only until they win decisively. Then there'll be no more elections. Also, particularly to Reform UK as it's grown again in last week's elections, there, in the local elections, the council elections, Nigel Farage personally consists about 75% of the actual evidence of that. The old UFO conspiracy theory that many world leaders are in fact, lizard people. He is 75% of the evidence that that might be true. You ever seen him smile where his mouth extends back to each ear? Here we need to remove Chuck Schumer and the other dead weights and the moderates. Amy Klobuchar has now come out against redistricting in Minnesota. And now I think I should mention, I believe she was a little worse for wear once at the White House Correspondents Dinner. And she got a little too close, came up a little bit too close to me like this. Can you see in your earphones what I'm trying to demonstrate? I think she was. I think she might have been saying she liked me. It's just a little close. We want a Democratic Party in which the declaration that you're against redistricting on behalf of democracy is the immediate end of your career. Amy Klobuchar should have been forced out of office and Tim Waltz sort of been able to appoint a successor already this morning. And remember, on broad projects like the filibuster, like mandatory voting, like reforming the Supreme Court, all of the big ticket items, just because the Republicans would do it does not mean it's a bad idea for the Democrats to do it. Stop thinking that it's a reason for the good guys not to do something. The best time to hit the man with the knife is when he is having trouble getting it out of his pocket. Stop thinking of reform or progress or improvement or we'll get to single payer eventually and start thinking these issues are life or death of democracy issues. Unbalance the Senate. Defang the entire issue of voter fraud by making registration automatic in some way so that you don't have to do anything extra or pay more money. Because that's the whole thing. It's a poll tax. Think big, be big, my friends in the Democratic Party or its successor. While I'm on this meta kick. The second biggest threat, of course, is an inert news media. I don't know how many commentaries I've done about this. It must be in three digits by now. Preoccupied with their own careers and safety, as if they did not live in America and the future America they are helping create by their destination. Lack of attention won't affect them in some way. Tell me about it, all of you who've lost your jobs or gotten fired or work at CBS News. And you know what's going to have to happen. Somebody we're not expecting is going to have to risk their own careers. Somebody's going to have to get fired on the air. Somebody we do not expect anything from. The perfect example, the mean candidate for this is Kristen Welker of Meet the Press. Totally clueless. Once or twice in her entire tenure has she said anything followed up in any way or embarrassed anybody from maga? Margaret Brennan is an option. It wouldn't be enough for George Stephanopoulos to do this. It wouldn't be enough even for Jake Tapper. As bad a guy as Jake Tapper is and as useless as he is, it wouldn't be enough because that would be written off as, oh, he's just a left winger. Somebody's gonna have to do a cross between Cronkite and Howard Beale. Somebody who is not expected to be willing to risk anything. Now, who could those people be? They think Tony decouple is gonna do that. Maybe you wanna redeem yourself. Somebody could do this. Somebody could lose it in an interview with Trump and just tell him the truth. And say, this is where I am leaving broadcasting and going to run a bar. And I mean, lose it. Tell him the truth. Tell him he's crazy. Tell him he's losing in Iran. Tell him he's not popular. Tell him he's lying. Tell him he's insane. Tell him he smells like crap. Tell him his hair is the color of urine. Go ahead, Tony. Show me you're actually made of something. The Hollywood Reporter recently put out its most powerful list of people in New York media. Rebecca Blumenstein, Cesar Conde, who runs NBC News, although I don't think they've seen him there in about two years. Jerry Cardinale, Jeff Zucker, Joanna Coles, Anderson Cooper, Barry Diller, Meredith Kopit, Levian, Kara Swisher. Somebody please explain to me what it is she's supposed to be doing. David Haskell, Almond Karamedovic, John Kelly, Rebecca Cutler, who apparently runs msnbc. Rachel Maddow, who actually runs msn. Emma Tucker, Andrew Ross Sorkin, who's the one who sits there and goes, joe Kernan, I don't think you're right about that. That's power. And Emily Sundberg, any names I just mentioned to you there strike you as somebody who'd risk $20 to save the democracy, let alone $20 million. Rebecca Blumenstein or Stein is the head of NBC News editorial still. The last time we heard from her was when she was one of the people who tried to bring In Ronna Romney McDaniel as a commentator on n MSNBC. Did she get fired for that fiasco? She did not. What has she been doing since? She has been running the editorial content on NBC News. So she is Kristen Welker's boss. And what has she really been doing? She's been writing a book about her days at the New York Times. She is the head essentially of NBC News. And she's not writing memos about how to save democracy through good journalism. She's writing a book. And it's not even about NBC News. It's about her days, the good old days at the New York Times. She's everything that's wrong with media. I never met her. Politico put it this way. The idea of bringing the Trump flunky into NBC News began with negotiations for the NBC coverage of a Republican debate. And I'm quoting Politico, though that process. Through that process, rather, McDaniel built a good rapport with Budolph Brown and Blumenstein. McDaniel left the RNC, signed on with the CAA talent agency and went looking for a TV contract. While McDonald Daniel had talks with other networks. She was trying to avoid working for CNN but had serious discussions with abc. NBC always had the inside track. Quote, Rana had a good experience with Carrie and Rebecca and felt more comfortable than with them with than with some of the other networks. A person close to McDaniel said log rolling, I believe is the term. All that conversation was about putting Ronna McDaniel on NBC News was trying to advance her career and the career of those at NBC News who were going to put her on. And that's what television news is and most of news still is. Hey, the country's on fire. Yeah, but I made another $20,000. I am encouraged about the new bosses at Disney suing the FCC and Brendan Carr and by inference Trump over the chilling effect and their attempts to quash the First Amendment. And in so doing, they quoted then D.C. circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote in 2017 that the government could not, quote, tell Amazon or politics and Pros what books to promote or tell the Washington Post or the Drudge Report, what columns to carry or tell ESPN or the NFL Network what games to show or tell how appealing. Or bench memos, what articles to feature or tell Twitter or YouTube what videos to post or tell Facebook or Google what content to f favor Brett Kavanaugh 2017. And of course, the Trump administrations have tried to do everything Kavanaugh said they could not do. On the other hand, disabuse yourself of the notion that Brett Kavanaugh would say again what he said in 2017 now on the Supreme Court or even remember that he said it or remember what he said last week. Hey, you got any of that? Where's Cash Patel on the free stuff? People betray themselves and us on a daily basis in this country. That's where we are, especially betraying themselves. After this thing about ABC and Disney suing the fcc, the newsletter's status turned for comment to Floyd Abrams. They identified Floyd Abrams as one of the nation's leading First Amendment lawyers and did not note that he was the quisling who represented the scumbag anti free speech fascist DAV Bossy in the case that put us here, Citizens United. Floyd Abrams, First Amendment champion until Citizens United, which killed the First Amendment. Thank you, Floyd. As we have seen in the last year, especially to quote John Houston's character in Chinatown explaining to Jack Nicholson's character how he raped his own daughter, quote, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything. Thank you, Nancy. Faust. Yeah, this is not the Final Countdown, but Nancy never recorded a song called this is not the Final Countdown, so I had to take what I had. Thank you, Nancy Faust. It's probably the only song she never did record. Is there a song called that? Let's run some headlines before the break. Akeem Jeffries is apparently panicking over that Virginia idea that I mentioned, the forced retirement of the entire Supreme Court and doing the whole thing over again rather than pulling the emergency switch. The Times during a private discussion on Saturday that included Democratic House members from Virginia and Representative Akeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader. The most dramatic idea they discussed, which would involve an unusual gambit to replace the entire state Supreme Court with the goal of reinstating their gerrymandered map, drew mixed reactions on the call, said the people who were the other people on the call, Stephen Miller and effing Trump. And it was not clear that it would be even viable or palatable to Governor Abigail Spanberger and Democrats in the Virginia General Assembly. A warning here to the governor and the members of the Virginia General Assembly. Get your asses in gear and save your state or be prepared to be expelled from this country. Governor Spanberger, who the Times was nice enough to identify as Ms. Spanberger, nice sexism. I didn't even use that against her and I'm really pissed at her. Spanberger would have to sign off on any legislation the Times wrote that lowered the judicial retirement age. She has not been briefed on the proposal to people involved in the discussion or briefed, briefed on it, said, well, why hasn't she been? She was in the House. Akim, you should have met Abigail at some point or as the Times referred to her, Ms. Spanberger, the governor of Virginia. Times. Condescending mf ing bastards. Do it. Do it now. Do it before I finish this sentence. We don't have a lot of time left and your, your state map is vital to the nation. I don't give a crap about Virginia in the grand scheme of things. We're talking about whether it's going to be Republican owned for the next 200 years. Get off your ass, governor and minority leader, while you are still minority leader. Trump again on Iran. The latest Iran's response to his latest bullshit proposal to not end his bullshit war is, according to him, unexpected, acceptable bullshit. Anybody notice he just rotates the lies every day Trump says A, he won in Iran. Him personally, he won. The next day he says B, he may start blowing them to hell. The day after that he says C, peace is close and Iran is begging. Sir, please, we have tears in our eyes. Can we have a deal? Sir, please sir, I want some more. And our media, from Fox News to the New York Times, the whole gamut nods to this like a row of bobblehead dolls on a giveaway day at a ballpark. Can't you see it? It's a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday thing. He says the same thing in the same order. It should be obvious to 4th graders. I would rather have 4th graders populating the news organizations of this country right now. This is the one true thing that I worry about sometimes in my moment of absolute egotism. There is the possibility that this podcast is one of the top two or three news sources in America. Not because it's particularly good or because I do it, but because everything else sucks. On the newest Iranian response Trump I have just read the response from Iran's so called representatives. I don't like it. Totally unacceptable. Well F Trump, we don't like you and yet somehow you're still here. Urine hair from the Supreme Court Sam Alito Lying no. The claims that Samuel Alito made about voter turnout in Louisiana in a landmark Voting Rights act case were based on a misleading data analysis, a Guardian review has found, writes the Guardian. The New Republic version of this. In the court's majority opinion, Alito claimed that the kind of racial discrimination that had prompted the creation of the Voting Rights act no longer existed. He said black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana, Alito wrote he was citing a friend of the court brief submitted by the Department of Justice. That's Trump's Department of Justice, which is something out of Orwell's 1984. It's the Department of Trump justice, which is of course illegal. It relied on a statistical methodology that is not preferred by experts in determining statewide voter turnout. The brief calculated black and white voter turnout in Louisiana as a proportion of the total population of each racial group over the age of 18. This is generally considered a suboptimal method because it includes people who can't vote, including non citizens and people with felony convictions. In other words, Alito's arguing that there is no longer a disparity in who votes in Louisiana. And he uses this by and proves this by cooking the effing books. Sam Alito should be in prison. John Roberts, this is your last chance. The best thing for this country right now would be if we did not have a Supreme Court. It would be chaos. It would be better than this. Sam Alito is a crook. He is a megalomaniac. He is rewriting law and now changing numbers to justify his political prejudices and his hatred of minorities. Get him the F out of here. John Roberts. Roberts, when I said earlier we need a Cronkite moment or a Howard Beale moment from somebody. Yeah, I think Supreme Court Chief justice of the United States John Roberts might be the right guy. I'm not holding my breath. Speaking of which, Erica Kirk has given the commencement address at White Trash College. I'm sorry, I misread that. Hillsdale. As Ron Philipkowski noted on social media, her husband wrote a book on how kids should not go to college. College. Mrs. Kirk is requesting privacy at this time. Also, more speaking bookings. Cash only. Google's chief scientists its lead on Gemini AI went to give a scientific lecture at UC Berkeley. Complains a tech dude. Modern AI research was the topic. He was not there to debate Gaza or Google contracts. But protesters disrupted the event anyway and within 10 minutes it was shut down. Good F him F Google. If you're not going to address public issues in public, don't speak in public. It's simple. F off tech nerds. And by the way, leave all your money from the United Kingdom. After it literally Lost more than 11000 local council seats to every party except the World Party, the band from the 80s, Keir Starmer's prime ministership appears finally to be dying slowly. I have not thought that any of the challenges to it would actually unseat him. But it is now evident that there is a rebellion brewing inside his party because even British labor recognizes when it is time to change the leaders of the leading liberal unit, our version of labor, the Democrats. No Chuck Schumer another 20 years. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy went on Fox to defend, along with his wife, an idiot. Their the Great American Road Trip. This is a reality show that they have shot that will start dropping episodes online next month. They shot this while he was transportation secretary and I know how unseemly this sounds. On the other hand, why are we complaining about this? The less shit this idiot does in the office, the better. The less shit the idiot wife does on Fox, the better. And again, the bottom line here is he's been out. Out of the office. He's been shooting a reality show, something he's done before and represents the limit of his intellect. The further Sean Duffy stays away from the office, the fewer plane crashes we will have and the more of us might survive this. And Garrett Graff is back at Doomsday Scenario, his website on the White House Correspondent's Dinner. It wasn't an assassination attempt. Attempt. I wrote last week about how the shooting. Shooting. He put shooting in quotes. Bless you. Garrett Graff was so strange and how there seemed plenty of reason to doubt that the suspect, Cole Thomas Allen fired it all. With some further evidence, including the release of higher resolution security camera footage, Graff writes some evidence from the government statements and mostly work by the New York Times, I'm prepared to be convinced that Cole Thomas Allen fired his shotgun once, but man oh man, this still remains just about the strangest shooting I've ever seen. He continues, quote, the higher resolution video shows several things not evident in the low quality version that Trump tweeted in the hours after the incident. That's Trump who painted the gold. Not gold, but golden colored urine. Including that Allen was evidently brandishing the shotgun as he ran through the checkpoint. And we can see the muzzle flashes from the officer who opened fire in the bottom left corner of the video. There is still no indication Garrett Graff writes on the video, muzzle flash from Allen's shotgun nor any reaction from the officer who is the apparent target that he is hit by a blast. One more quote and then I have to send him a check. But Garrett Graff writes, the high resolution video of Allen barging past and through the Secret Service checkpoint raises its own set of meaningful new questions about the security. The one officer who opened fire does so in the most reckless way, firing basically every shot at the susp. When one of his own fellow officers or agents is downrange of the shot, he amazingly misses the suspect with every shot and only by some miracle also misses everyone around him. This, Mr. Graf concludes, could have been a mass shooting event from blue on blue fire of the Secret Service officer alone. Derek Graffiti Doomsday Scenario is his site. It's a great subscription. It's worth it. Are our intrepid reporters in the mainstream taking note just reading this the way I did? Perhaps. Yesterday the New York times put a 31 paragraph piece out about the White House correspondents dinner and the aftermath of the so called shooting. So called assassination attempts. And the 31 paragraphs are entirely devoted to whether or not they should still have the dinner. Nothing about the discrepancies in the video that this man and his laptop were able to perceive. The New York folks thank you Garrett Graff. You have tried. I appreciate you, but generally speaking, we're effed. Okay, two more segments before hiatus and I am not shortchanging you with this episode, am I? This might last you until I return. The rest of this episode is All Ted, all the Time. The real story of Ted Turner's triumph over intense suicidal impulses that he talked about with us, the lowest level CNN staffers 45 years ago and who helped him through it, and the amazing recovery of another Ted. My first rescue dog, Ted, the producer of this show, who I can now tell you in December had eight hours of open heart surgery and he was on a heart lung machine. All Ted, all the time. You give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the Ted 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 you might be shocked at what you find. Mypolicyadvocate.com it's a celebration 250 years in the making and we want everyone in America, from Maine to Montana, from Alabama to Alaska to be a part of it. This year marks America's 250th anniversary and we're coming together from coast to coast, host at star spangled events, live performances, and the largest day of giving in American history. Join the nationwide celebration at america250.org Amazon Health AI presents painful thoughts I I can't stop scratching my downtown. Mm, yeah, but I'm not itching to go downtown and tell a receptionist I'm here to talk about my downtown. Some things you'd rather type than say out loud. There's no question too embarrassing For Amazon Health AI chat your symptoms and get virtual care 24. 7 Healthcare just got less painful.
- [53:23]
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- [54:36]
Keith Olbermann
You know this is countdown with, you know keith olberman, Millions of Americans from many backgrounds, many lifestyles, and a wide several voices of my past who I wanted to put in here just in case. This is the last one, and I don't think it is. You're not getting away that easily. My late friend Richard Lewis. It's tough for me to hear his voice. It is still impossible for me to believe he is not with us. So in a sense, there he is introducing Countdown with the theme from the CBS Evening News on radio introducing him, followed by the newscast I interned on a scant 58. No, 48 years ago. It's not 58 yet. Hopefully it'll be 58 eventually. The Channel 510 o' clock news with Bill Jorgensen in the summer of 1978. I've told that story and the story of the fabulous and and gritty and highly principled newscaster Bill Jorgensen. And I'm always sorry that Bill Jorgensen did not associate himself or get tied in with in some way somebody else who I wanted to talk about in this episode, rather than doing a worse person segment here as I normally do, who passed away in the past week? Ted Turner. Ted Turner put me on television. He didn't do it directly, and given the amount of alcohol he was doing between 1981 when I started with CNN, and 1984 when I left CNN, he probably wouldn't have remembered at any point there that I worked for him. Although several times we did encounter each other directly. Once, as I have told here, almost resulted in a fist fight. Another time almost resulted in a fire that would have consumed RFK Stadium in Washington. It was an interesting period of time with Ted, and I'd like to pay tribute to him because if you can imagine this, a man whose whose passing was covered on networks worldwide as the father of essentially what we have now in television and in video news. So covering the whole gamut from TV to streaming to online stuff to videos on TikTok. I don't think he got his due 9/10 of what you see on television right now. Ted Turner either started, thought of himself or inspired. And there are still dozens and dozens of people who you see and you listen to who he rose or put in a position to rise to prominence in this business. And they are still there. And at a time when I am at that very sad, maximized window in which all of the role models and all of the key people from my past are gradually slipping away, his is almost indescribably important. And I'm going to read to you something I wrote about him in 2014 and the reaction that that got and why, particularly Ted's decline. And I want to discuss how Ted's decline, as sad as it is, it's amazing that he lasted as long as he did so that he could decline. But how Ted's decline actually may have unfortunately put us to some degree in the position we are in right now politically. As I said, he started my career indirectly. He was running cnn. It was already at the end of its first year, the beginning of its second year, and he'd already made his mark in sports. And people were forgetting that part of it. He'd already made his mark in cable. He was the guy who put the Atlanta local garbage UHF television station on the satellite for this burgeoning thing that he saw called cable. Because his father was an early television mogul in the 60s and in advertising, mostly in the South. He started my career indirectly because they needed to populate CNN sports with a wave of people who worked cheap. And then when those people, people turned out to be really good and got real jobs, the big jobs of the day at like, you know, Channel 45 in Scranton, which would have paid more than CNN did in 1980, he. He had to get a second wave of people to go on and do sports and news and all the rest. One of the interesting truths, and I don't know that it was Ted's idea. It may have been his factotum, the oddly named Ed Turner. It may have been his idea. I never did find out who this was, who thought this up, but the original hire hiring process at CNN favored married couples who both worked in the business. Was your wife also a newscaster? We'll offer you more for both of you to come down there because obviously the family moving was more likely to stay because they weren't both likely to get another job somewhere else. But they were often getting their first chance to work together, and they filled two jobs for the price of one move. So the company was populated by people who were married to each other. We had television directors who were married to producers, and we had. We had co anchors who were married couples. It was. It was quite an adventure. And then there was the second wave of people like me who had just no television experience, but who managed to, after the first day, anyway, not knock the camera over. And that was me. I met Ted for the first time at the football talks, the 1982 strike. I have told this story. I walked in and my camera crew and I had won CBS sports caps from the president of CBS Sports Because I asked him a question he had not been asked about the effect of the 1982 National Football League players strike on CBS Sports. And he had said, if you ask me a question I haven't been asked already, name was Neil Pilsen. If you ask me a question I haven't been asked, or I give you all. And we thought jobs, and he thought caps. And so we had caps. And I didn't think twice about it. But there comes my camera crew to go interview Ted Turner as he walks into the football strike talks at the Doral Hotel on Lexington Avenue in New York in 1982. And my camera crew is the same one, and they are proudly wearing their CBS Sports caps. And Ted recognizes me as he comes down the long hallway towards the meeting room. And suddenly he sees the camera crew with me in the se CNN microphone. And there we are wearing CBS sports caps. And he berated me in front of everybody. He wouldn't answer any questions. He just insulted me. And I thought, I don't like this job, not particularly, and I don't like him doing that to me in public. Maybe I'll just sock him. And instead, I had another idea, which was to stick CNN bumper stickers over the CBS Sports cap so that the next time he saw the crew, when the crew came in to take pictures of him meeting with all these football players he was trying to impress, there were CNN sports captain caps. And he loved that and vowed to get us all CBS or CNN sports caps for Christmas. And there they were. And I reminded him as he left, don't forget the caps. And he gave me a dirty look. And then for Christmas, he gave us caps. The second time I was at a football game with Ted when he, as I will describe in this piece that I aired in 2014, he managed to have essentially a pickup game of the striking players in front of literally invited guests at RFK Stadium in Washington. And he was so inebriated that, as I said, if he had lit a cigarette, the whole place could have gone up easily. That was Ted's life. And I wanted to emphasize something I heard nowhere else. And I've told the stories about his womanizing. I just told the story the other way the other day about him and the. And the camera person at CNN who he propositioned and who stood up and slapped him at a French restaurant, the French restaurant in Georgetown. And then they tried to make it good with her and gave her a job at the assignment desk, which led to her working in television news as an anchor for 20 or more years. Worked out okay. Nothing untoward happened. The only person who got actually violated in any sense there was Ted getting hit in the face. Not that he would have felt it because again, there was so much alcohol involved. But the one thing I did not hear in any of the obituaries of Ted Turner that kind of, of kind of disappointed me was this truth. Jane Fonda saved his life. There is no other conclusion. Ted Turner was on a suicidal jag. Whether or not he was overtly trying to kill himself with alcohol or just was passively doing it because he didn't want to do it in some other way. I'll leave to your conclusions and the conclusions of his various biographies. But I had one story. I don't think I've ever told it publicly. I've told it privately many times and it was well known around CNN. In 1982, again, because of that football strike, I spent a lot of time in Washington at the CNN bureau in Georgetown in 82 and to a lesser degree, 83, probably a couple of months old. And Ted was still drinking. And one day, one of our production assistants, runners, couriers, full time employee, lovely woman named Paula. And I'll just leave her last name out of it. Paula, wonderful, nice, pretty, intelligent. I don't know what happened in her career. I hope it was good. She was just a nice person there and she was just a friend of mine. And she used to come out on shoots with us to get an idea of how to do that. And that's all it was, and that's all it was gonna be. And that's, you know, that's just somebody who worked with. And Paula comes up to me one day and she's white as a shot. And Paula was, I don't know, five, two, five, three. And Paula was many wonderful things, but imaginative was not one of them. So I never had any doubts that this story was true. Keith. I just got back from picking up Mr. Turner at the airport and I went, oh boy, here we go. No, no, it wasn't like that. That's how big his reputation was among the women at CNN already by then point, I didn't have to say what, what she thought I meant or what I thought she meant. She said, no, no, no, I, I, we didn't have the, all the crew cars were out. I had to go use my. And she had like a Simca. She had a car with a, you know, a square footage of like 40 square feet. There might have been a passenger seat maybe. And the car knowing Paula was full of garbage anyway and she had to brush it off to get him. She drove to Washington National Airport, she explained, and she picked Paula up and he didn't care because he was kind of drunk. And they drove back to the hotel and I think he stayed at the Georgetown Holiday Inn where the rest of us did. I think CNN was usually 50% of the population at that hotel and it was 90 seconds walk from the bureau. So it made perfect sense. And I think Ted may have stayed there on a quick flying trip through D.C. and Paula went to get him and she was shivering and white as a sheet. And she said, she, Keith, he, I never got to say anything other than hello, Mr. Turner, this is my car over here. We haven't got with the crew car. Now that's not a problem. That little lady. Thank you. She, she said he got in, he got in the car and then he started talking about, talking about when he finally decided to do it, which way he was going to kill himself, not whether or not he was going to kill himself, but which way he was going to kill himself. And I went, oh God. And he said, he said, you can't do what my daddy did. You can't, you can't. I'm adding the accent and the whole routine. You can't do what my daddy did and blow your brains out in the toilet because then you never get the blood out of the grout. You have to redo the whole toilet, the bathroom, and you gotta pull out the sinks. And he talked about, apparently he went through every possibility of ending one's life and to possibly the lowest ranked employee in all of Turner broadcast casting. Paula. This is how self destructive Ted Turner was. And then he met Jane Fonda. Jane Fonda. I only know I met her once, very briefly. She was about 80 and extremely flirtatious and aghast to Be with. And the one thing I don't think anybody ever gotta read, people who hate her, people who love her, people who just know her from the movies. And she might have been taller, but not by much than Paula in Washington. Jane's not a big, big person, but the gigantic personality, 10ft tall. And I knew of her only through my friend Donald Sutherland, who had a relationship with her and described it in some detail. Nothing scandalous and nothing too detailed, but enough to make me respect Jane Fonda as an alluring individual. How's that for euphemisms? But she saved Ted Turner. Whatever it was that was about Jane Fonda. The Jane Fonda that Ted Turner knew, and I guess Donald Sutherland, too, and Roger Vadim and whoever else she was married to or involved with. Ted was told by Jane, you have to clean up your act. A, you're killing yourself. B, if you want to be with me, you have to clean up your act. And he did. In 1982. If you had said to me, okay, Ted Turner is going to last. He's going to be alive when you're 67 years old. I would have taken that bet for any amount of money. And I would have taken the rest of the possibilities of what would have happened to him. That and him living to 20, 26. Are you kidding me? I'm not sure he's going to live to. What time is it now? It's 10 after 4. I'm not sure he's going to make it to 5. 30, 30. And I'm not being exaggerative here. And Jane Fonda saved his life. And what did he do with it? Well, he repopulated the bison in this country. All the bison who exist in the United States basically have Ted Turner to thank. Much of the private environmentalism in this country was founded and funded by Ted Turner. He took the money that CNN began to produce for him in carload lots and spent it mostly on charity and the environment and goodwill measures across the country. And it turned out. And the world. And it turned out he was an extraordinarily sincere individual. And he meant all the things that he intended with cnn, some of which were achieved and some of which, the opposite of which was achieved. And none of which would have happened without Jane, period. She saved him. The second half of his life was sobriety, environmentalism, and one terrible mistake, Stake selling CNN and that horrible Time Warner merger. If he hadn't done that, and he said that, he might have been in position to do real damage to the creeping fascist movement that he recognized 20 years ago. And Trump, and I mean Trump, particularly, because Trump worshiped Ted Turner. Everybody has somebody they think is much better than them in life. And. And Trump's was Ted Turner. Not only did he worship him, he envied him, and he was, most importantly, afraid of Ted Turner. I never figured out what that was about, but I heard it on countless occasions from countless individuals. And you can go through all of the public comments that Trump made about Ted Turner over the years. Something about Ted Turner terrified Donald Trump. If Ted had been with us for the last 10 years in a more realistic sense than he was, who knows? If CNN had been with us in the last 10 years, if CNN had just had Ted Turner's name attached to it directly, rather than this succession of morons who have run it over the years, who knows how life would have been different in this country? And that leads me into what I promised before. I'm gonna reread this script with which I opened the ullerman show on ESPN2 on March 26, 2014. I think the script is self explanatory. I think it's worth reading it again. And then the reaction to it, I think, is the punchline that you may enjoy. All right, are you ready here? Go shows. We begin tonight with the sports Emmy nominations. Yeah, yeah. We got Best Daily Sports Studio Show. I'm delighted for the staff. They should get something besides having to work with me. But my attention was drawn to the Lifetime Achievement Award they will be giving out at the ceremonies here in May to Ted Turner. How did he not have one already? Already what you watch now, essentially, he invented all this, not espn. He didn't have that idea. And ultimately this idea would surpass and subsume one big idea that he did have. But sports on national television on more or less a daily basis. Ted did that. And the Daily Sports Studio show show on at the same time every day or night. Ted did that, too. And buying sports teams to have something to put on your television station, Ted did that, too. WTCG, channel 17. Atlanta was the fringiest of fringy television stations when he bought it in 1970. But then six years later, he bought first the Atlanta Braves and then the Atlanta Hawks box. And he bought a couple of satellite dishes. And the FCC made the fateful decision to let him put Channel 17 up on the satellite so it could be shown on those fledgling cable systems around the country. And Ted Turner, who was shameless, among other things, promptly outbid George Steinbrenner and the New York Yankees and signed the first baseball player ever to take advantage of what we now know as free Atrium. Andy Messersmith. Messersmith got what looked like all the money in the world from Ted Turner. More money than any baseball player had ever gotten or would ever get. $1 million. Yeah, over three years with one catch. He had to wear uniform number 17, like the station number. And instead of having Messer Smith written on the back of his uniform shirt, he had to have the word channel. So his uniform, for at least the first couple days, read channel 17. Baseball stopped that right quick. And it also stopped Ted the day he decided he would like to see what it was like to manage the Atlanta Braves. His lifetime record was.01. But the cable sports genie, that was out of the bottle and nobody was stopping it. And the bottle, and this is a fitting analogy if I've ever written one, had Ted Turner's name on it. Next came news. Even then, his crazy idea Cable News Network rested squarely on the first regularly scheduled nightly sports newscasts in national television history. CNN Sports Tonight at 7, 11 and 2am Eastern, while SportsCenter was on for 15 minutes one night at 7pm and an hour the next at 10:17pm Sports Tonight on CNN was there come news or high water seven nights a week. Of course, Ted Turner wasn't just shameless, he was also technically penniless. So he hired a couple of real veterans to run and anchor the thing. Bill McPherson, FAIL, who helped invent the NFL on CBS and Monday Night Football. And his former CBS colleague Bob Wassler. And Nick Charles, a star of Washington and Baltimore sportscasts. He spent the money on them. Everybody else. Well, in 1981, Ted Turner sent Bill McPhail to hire somebody like me. When I told bill I made $42,000 the year before working in radio for Charlie Stein, Bill spit his drink halfway across the room. We were planning on hiring six guys to start with for a total of 95,000. Later, when we recalibrated, who got what of that 95,000? They got me anyway. And they got Dan Patrick and Hannah Storm and Fred Hickman and Dan Hicks and Gary Miller and dozens of other others and reporters and cameramen and editors and executives. One sports production assistant wound up becoming the president of cnn. His name was Jim Walton. He worked on one of my shows. Another became president of msnbc. Phil Griffin. He was my field producer in New York. ESPN reshaped television sports, but early on, CNN staffed ESPN and much of the rest of the industry. And I'm skipping how Ted Turner mainstreamed World cup yachting at Least for a while. And Ted and TNT and Ted and the Goodwill Games. And Ted in World Championship Wrestling, whose matches were held right above the CNN newsroom. So you could hear the wrestlers falling, particularly on Saturday afternoons when they were live in the newsroom in Atlanta. You could hear them thudding into the sea. And by the way, The Braves winning 14 straight division titles under his ownership and the repopulation of Bison in this country. But my favorite Ted Turner story comes from something he did not pull off. Not that he didn't try. When the football owners forced the players out on strike in 1982, Ted sent me to cover it every day for eight months. And then one day he showed up to meet with the players players. And after a little tiff that I, by the way, mentioned earlier, when he came out, he announced that he would bankroll and televised two games. One at RFK Stadium in Washington, the other at the Rose bowl in Southern California. Basically, it would pit each of them pickup teams of striking players. The American Conference versus the National Conference. He called it the All Star season. All Star season acronym All Star season. I asked him about the acronym. He winked at me, he shushed me and then he took me aside and he asked me what I thought of it. And I told him nobody would watch and he would lose money. And he looked at me and he said, nobody watches you and I lose money on you. So what? He then explained that what he was really doing was setting the owners up. If he could put the games together and get them on TV with no more than a month's lead time, the players union was going to partner up with him. Ted Turner's real motive for the ass. The All Star season Ass. Ass. Ass was nothing less than creating his own Football League. 24 teams to begin play in this country in 1983 and be televised exclusively on TBS. All he needed was the players going along with him and then a labor court ruling that they would go and get that the owners had forced the players union to strike, which would thus allow the union to negotiate with new employers. It's a standard provision of the National Labor Relations Board. Obviously he didn't get that court ruling. It's still the National Football League as opposed to welcome to season 44 of Ted Turner's ass. But Ted was shooting for nothing less than killing the National Football League and replacing it with a new one that he owned all by himself. Ted would have owned owned football tactically co owned it with the players. It would have been pure goddamn socialism. And don't forget, nearly all of this was done on a shoestring budget with borrowed money, with all of us, his employees, convinced he was crazy and the whole thing wouldn't last till next Tuesday. And when we would get our paychecks, we would race each other to the bank to cash them, just in case there wasn't going to be enough for every everybody. A Lifetime Achievement award in sports television Emmys. Ted Turner has been in the Television hall of Fame since 1991. A Lifetime Achievement award. Hell, they ought to give him two. Couple days later Again, that was March 26, 2014. I got a letter at my home. Very unusual. I didn't give that address out. I got the mail somewhere else. March 28, 2024. Mr. Keith Alderman, 200 East 69th street, spelled correctly, I might add. New York, NY 10021. Dear Keith, your piece on Ted Turner and the Lifetime Achievement award was fantastic. And you're right when you say he should get two of them. Keep up the great ordinary work. Keep up the great work is underlined in black Sharpie, boldly with a stroke underneath it, with best wishes, sincerely, Donald J. Trump. And it's signed. It's signed. Rather reminiscent of that birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein. It's signed Just don't Donald. When I say Ted Turner somehow terrified Donald J. Trump, somehow was Trump's dream and nightmare at the same time. I ain't kidding. He was so important to Trump that Trump wrote me a fan letter about him. One more addition before we wrap this up and go on the actual hiatus. And it is the story of my dog, Ted. And if you're tired of me talking about dogs, A, screw you. B, you want to hear this one? Anyway, this is one of the most fantastic things that has ever happened in my life or anybody else's. 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. 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Some things you'd rather type than say out loud. There's no question too embarrassing For Amazon Health AI, chat your symptoms and get virtual care 24. 7 Healthcare just got less painful.
- [84:44]
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- [85:50]
Keith Olbermann
On 28th July 2025 I took my first rescue dog Ted, who had come to me nearly what, seven years previously as Spaghetti, a dog who needed a Maltese of several months who needed heart surgery. I took him in in for a checkup. Ted was supposed to be a foster. I was a perfect foster fail. Ted became part of our little family of mostly dogs and me who they shared ownership of and I said to him I will do anything for you except call you Spaghetti. So Spaghetti, Getty Teddy Ted, my dad's name. How perfect. Ted is a wonderful dog dog. He's about 8 pounds with a personality of about an 800 pound animal. He loves people. He goes hunting for Girls in Central Park. He likes to cuddle up next to girls on blankets in Central Park. They all say the same thing, how did you teach him to do this? And I say, I didn't teach him how to do it. I'm hoping I get to learn it from him anyway. Ted was having a checkup for his heart. He had the surgery and it was brilliantly successful under the the guidance of a cardiologist and surgeon at the Animal Medical center in New York named Dennis Trafni. He came through it with glowing results. So good that they wrote up the results of what they called a ballooning to loosen up a stuck valve inside his heart. They put a thread in through his jugular vein, stopped his heart, pumped this little balloon in his heart to knock the stuffy kind of valve open and closed again and again, like you knocked the rust off hinges by continually opening and closing, closing the door. And he was fine ever since. But as often happens, as usually happens with Malteses and with other small dogs, Jack Russell's are common breed for this. King Charles Cavaliers are common breed for this. He developed mitral valve disease. Most Malteses will have this. It will contribute to their deaths. However, most of them have it as an annoyance. It is quite literally a hole in the mitral valve and it causes blood to regurgitate and it screws up that system by which fresh blood with oxygen in it is pumped around the body. And the other blood, the used blood, if you will use that expression, is brought back into the heart and filled again in the lungs with oxygen. It slows that down, it tires them out, but usually it hits in their teens. And if it hurts them, if it contributes to premature death, it will be by a factor of a year, perhaps. And a Maltese in good health can live to 17. I believe the record might be 20. I know of some who have led lives of 18 years. Ted was seven and a half years old and he had been a year before diagnosed with this disease that his sister Rose was diagnosed with in 2018. Rose had had, by this point, had had mitral valve disease for seven years. They start with a drug called pimobendon, which is essentially a chewable supplement that improves the heart in every area except the mitral valve, so that everything else is working at top form. And if it works right, you are essentially improving everything else, while the mitral valve disease reduces the quality of the heart efficacy in one area and you balance it out. Rose's use of this drug has been so effective that she has never. She takes two a day. One in the morning and one at night. And she has never needed a third one, which she can have, let alone any kind of intervention. Rose has, since 2018, gotten those two pills, and every one of her checkups has been better than the previous one. Stevie, my oldest dog, has this, too. She has the following symptom. Every couple of weeks, she does this one cough every three or four weeks. This was the extent of her disease, her mitral valve disease, as she approached her 14th birthday. But Ted was beginning to. Well, he liked to sit on my lap during walks. Walks were okay for him. A little tense. Ted doesn't like dogs, dogs out there who are bigger than he is without written authorization. He's one of those dogs. He will not bark or bother dogs his own size or smaller, and he's often quite friendly to them. As I said before, he loves people. He has a wonderful personality and is as handsome as the devil. And he's very loud and he will bark a whole lot. And he loves to sit on my lap outside. He loves to stand on my lap and bark, bark at passerby dogs. He's wonderful. He is my son. And like my dad, Ted, he's actually an architect. He builds himself a little cocoon every night out of blankets. And sometimes, I swear to you, he puts them in perfect form. He's got a California ranch design he uses every six days with his head while grunting and clearly swearing like a stevedore. Ted puts together his home every night on my bed. He's marvelous. But on these walks, the stops to go and have a sit down on my lap were increasing. And I noticed that he seemed to be wanting to stop every couple of blocks or in the park, every, I don't know, two or 300 yards when it had been every 400 yards or every five blocks. Now it was half that. That was the only thing I noticed. No cough, no lack of appetite, no seeming lack of energy. Just this one trait. And so the checkup on July 28, 2025, was just that, a checkup, a biannual checkup. And the doctor came back. The cardiologist at the Animal Medical center in New York said he's now in advanced mitral valve disease. The next step is congestive heart failure, failure and death. And I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do about it. We can increase his pimobendon. We can try certain palliatives, but probably he has a year, a year and a half, and it will be of decreasing quality, increasing stress, increasing grief. Well, I was Stunned. Ted is as vibrant as any dog as I've ever, ever met. And his volume in barking didn't slow down. Ted is a straight forward, full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes kind of dog. Ted leaves nothing in the locker room. And I was shocked and I didn't see it. I didn't see any of the decline Dr. Dr. Betsy Bond was talking about. And there was no reason to suspect she was mistaken. Mistaken she had been. She was about to celebrate her 50th anniversary in the field at the Animal Medical center in New York and is revered. And as the joke goes, it is literally true that her ID is in black and white. She's been there that long and she is that much of an authority. In any event, I just didn't see it and I thought perhaps she was reading something wrong. Well, obviously that's how you begin to act in denial. But I did have something I could do to verify or refute what she said. He was operated on as a PUPPY Less than one year old by, as I mentioned before, Dr. Dennis Traffne, who had since left the hospital and become a cardiologist, working with dogs and other animals in New York on a kind of freelance basis, going from veterinary clinic to veterinary clinic on a once every two weeks basis or thereabouts, carrying his equipment with him and doing a great service to a lot of people who could not afford to go to the Animal Medical Center. So I made an appointment to go see Dennis Trafni because after all, he had been inside Ted's heart. He knew what he was talking about. He knew what he would see, he would recognize it. He would know the territory. He scoped Ted and felt his chest and assessed things and closed his computer and looked at me and said, no, she's right. And in fact, I think she may be understood selling it. This is what I would do if Ted were my dog and he was my patient. So I feel that sense of proprietorship. I would call the University of Florida at Gainesville. I would call their veterinary clinic, their small animal hospital, and I would do it not just today, I do it right now. I'd go out into the lobby of this building or out onto the street here and phone. I would not wait till you get home because it's already late in the afternoon and you will have lost today. If you call today, you can get this process started. Started today. Don't wait till later. Well, my blood ran cold at that. When was the last time you were told something like that about yourself or about a dog? Don't wait till you get home to make this call. You have to do this now. Not half an hour from now, Ted, blissfully unaware of this, simply barked at a large dog walking past us. And I called, prepared to call the University of Florida. And then I realized I didn't know why I was calling. I said, dennis, why am I calling them? And he looked at me like I had three heads. They're doing the Japanese surgery there now. And I blinked at him briefly, and he went, they are. The Japanese surgery was something that Dennis Trafni and I had talked about in 2018 when he operated on Ted for the stuck valve in his heart. It was the backup in case that did not work, because in Japan, Japan, at a clinic in, in fact, Yokohama, right outside of Tokyo, they had developed, perfected, and put into use surgery to repair mitral valves and other small, microscopically sized body parts in the hearts of small, almost microscopically sized dogs like Ted. They were doing the equivalent of surgery on a human infant, but on small dogs. And essentially it was bypass surgery. The dog would be hooked up to a heart lung machine. A perfusionist, which is what somebody who operates one of those is called, would be operating Ted's or whoever's body, his heart and lungs, her heart and lungs while this delicate surgery was done. The surgery itself was not that much of a problem. The process, process, the expense was. And it was being done in Tokyo. There are all sorts of issues about getting your dog to Tokyo from, say, New York, but now they were doing it the University of Florida. I had no idea. He said, well, they're not promoting it yet because they've just started it, I think, last year, maybe or two years ago. But one of the Japanese doctors is coming over and spends, I don't know, five months a year here, and he does the surgery and he's training the surgeons there, and they're doing it. And Ted would be a really good candidate, I think, for this, and I certainly would recommend him, and I'm sure they would at the amc. And I said, the amc, they don't. They said there was nothing to do. Well, there may not be official methods of recommending this yet, and I'm sure they're not convinced that this is any good. After all, it's only been done on earth for the last 10 years. They had begun to do it in London, I believe, in 2020. Again, repatriated Japanese surgeons who decided there was a field to work in outside of Japan and who also, altruistically, as is the case with the doctor who went to Florida, Dr. Matsura. They wanted to bring this to America and teach American surgeons to do the surgery so that this surgery could be done at every place where there were dogs facing death because of what could now be corrected surgically. Basically, damn the torpedoes and the cost. If you wanted to spend the money and they had the time, if you had eight days to keep your dog in a surgical ICU after eight hours of open heart surgery, why not? What is more important to you? Roughly the same price, the life of your daughter dog, particularly if he's 8 years or younger and might be getting 9 years more of life out of it instead of a terrible death or a mid range suv, about the same cost. Well, now they were doing this not in Japan and London, but in Florida. And so we put the wheels in motion to apply to the University of Florida, Gainesville, which I had never been at nor contemplated going, going to. And an application, a reference, a referral by the Animal Medical center to the facility in Yokohama in Japan and to the Royal Veterinary College in London, the three places on this planet where they did the surgery. Now, I immediately went into a stage in which I looked at Ted and his robustness and we, we walked home and he was fine. I think we only stopped once. So he belied all of the issues that, that were behind the idea that he was sick, that he was not slowing down because he wanted to spend more time on my lap. He was slowing down because he was running out of stamina, because his heart was very seriously damaged by this disease. None of that was apparent. And I suddenly began to think I was setting in process something that would risk his life for something that need not be risked. In other words, very bluntly, was I going to, going to send him onto an operating table for a very risky procedure that could kill him, for a disease that would not kill him. In other words, bluntly again, further on the bluntly scale, was I making the choice to kill him at the age of seven and a half. The application proceeded. We had zoom meetings with the University of Florida, Dr. Matsura and his fellow Dr. Greta Chew. And in one memorable zoom meeting, they scared the hell out of me. This exacerbated my feeling that what if I was doing this for me rather than for him? I mean, I know the death by mitral valve disease for a dog is unpleasant, to say the least. It is essentially an internal smothering. Fluid goes into the lungs on top of everything else that stops working. Now you have fluid in the lungs. There are awful coughs, there are Resting breathing rates of 50 breaths a minute while the dog is deeply asleep. A good number for a dog in a minute is 20, 25 is great, 30 is okay. Some dogs in deep sleep with great lungs and great hearts are as low 10 as 15. The dogs who succumb to mitral valve disease, it goes into the 50s. It's a horrible thing. It is literally your dog gasping for breath with no improvement possible. And the disease, as horrible as it is, sometimes sounded like it was better than the way they described this operation because of all the things that could go wrong and all the things you'd have to prepare yourself for. And when I say all the things, things, they listed 30 or 40 things that could go wrong and they do that deliberately. The demand for this surgery is extraordinary and they had just gone to doing two of them a week. Because it is an all day operation. It requires three people who are designated as surgeons. The profusionist, Dr. Chu, who is the number two on this, and Dr. Matsura, who is at this rate anyway, here in this country 30 weeks of the year working at the University of Florida. And there can be unbelievable consequences. Usually not on the table. The dog is usually, since he's supported by a heart lung machine, is usually in good shape throughout the surgery. It is in the hours thereafter that the nightmare can begin, when the body will not restart. That it's been through so much, that it's been through so much damage because of the mitral valve disease that simply eight hours of open heart surgery on an eight pound dog is a terrible ratio. And the dog succumbs and there are blood clots and there is internal bleeding and there are shocks and there are strokes and there are organ failures. And the night after the surgery, the hours between 2am and sunrise after the surgery are the dark period, period. Then every hour after that that the dog survives, it improves the chances that there'll be another hour and another day and another month and another year. But the point of that conversation is to get you off the list. If you are not prepared to go the distance, you got to go to Gainesville, Florida. You've got to stay there with your dog for at least eight days. He's going to be in the ICU and you're not going to see him pretty at least 48 hours. When you see him, he's going to be wired up and he's going to see you for about five minutes and then you'll see him in increasing doses during his stay there. But the reason we keep him there is he is still at mortal risk until we give him back to you literally one week after you checked in. Then we should probably have you stick around for another week and have you recheck him in another week after that. And then there's a recheck at your local hospital a month later. Later, and then at two months, three months, six months, a year if you're lucky. And then there is that haunting thought of what if he doesn't really need this? Ted was accepted. I didn't have a zoom call in Japan. He was accepted in Japan. He was to be accepted in London. But something went wrong in the process. And by the time that needed to be resolved, it was an academic question. I was ready to take him to Yoko to go through a sort of soft. He wouldn't have been in a cage somewhere, he would not have been in an embargo situation somewhere, but he would have had to have repeated tests so that he wouldn't carry rabies into Japan. The Japanese islands are free of rabies and they intend to keep it that way. But he was accepted at the University of Florida. The question now became came, when would he be scheduled? Our conference calls were in August and the beginning of September in 2025. And the next set of dates for this surgery, the mitral valve surgery at the University of Florida was to be in March of 2026 or March of 2026. And Ted would be put on the emergency list if there was a cancellation. Perhaps he could be scheduled earlier and repeated checkups at the Animal Medical center were recommended. And I should take good care of him and look for the following things and not stress him out too much and keep him on walks, but keep him on short walks and be very responsive to when he wanted to stop and perhaps carry him home and look for this, and look for that, and look for this. And I was one of the lucky ones who had been accepted. And all this time I'm still thinking, what if he doesn't really need this and I'm making a choice to put him on that table and what if he doesn't survive it? I can't think of anything more horrible. And everyone counseled me, oh, no, no, no, you're doing something extraordinary for him. You're doing more this way. No, no, no, no. So tell that to yourself at 3 o' clock in the effing morning. Unfortunately, or fortunately, perhaps in one respect, that became an increasingly academic question, as it was while we were waiting for something to happen with his scheduling. Is it going to be March? Something going to Open beforehand. Maybe January, December, perhaps if we were really lucky, something would happen. What kind of operation could I make to get him down there? We had all sorts of transportation issues, if you recall, in the fall and early winter of 2025, with airplane schedules being completely ruined by the Trump administration and flights being canceled and long delays. And what if I couldn't get him there in time? And what would I do? What about a train? What about making him a care dog? I mean, he was good at smelling those mini seizures that I have in connection to the not so harrowing sounding disease I have called restless legs syndrome. It's a real thing. But would he be qualified to get on a train? Can I get a car? How would I get there? I have never been. What? What's it near? One of the variables ended very quickly. While we were waiting for further word from the University of Florida and Dr. Matsura and Dr. Chu, Ted began to really show symptoms of this disease. And by that I mean his heart rate got out of hand. You could see the hair moving on his chest with every heart rate, heartbeat. And when he would fall deeply asleep, his breath would get up to 35, 40, 45aminute. And then he began to gasp for air. And as September became October, I had to rush him to the Animal Medical center four different times. Each time he stayed at least one night. I was with him on a walk when he went into congestive heart failure. I could see it on his face. I could not pinpoint the exact moment, but we were walking along and he slowed to a stop and looked up at me. And suddenly his eyes were a little cloudy. And Ted has beautiful, perceptive, piercing. I know what you did last summer. Eyes, as do all Maltese. And I saw it and I knew it had happened. And it was October and he needed the surgery. And it was clear to me he not only needed the surgery and all those worries I had about making him go onto a table when maybe he really didn't need this and I was risking his life unnecessarily. They were out the window and replaced entirely by I need to get him onto that table as quickly as. Goddamn his grade. And they grade. The candidates for this surgery at the University of Florida drop from A1, you have the disease, but it's not urgent. B2, which was Ted's initial assessment. It's worsening, but still totally manageable, not impacting his life significantly. He could plateau toe, he could get better. He could wait for a while for the surgery. And then you get into the numbers that indicate that congestive heart failure has begun and the descent could be within a matter of weeks, certainly within months. And that was the day they turned ted from a B2 to a C3. He stayed one night for three days and his habits, his willingness to eat, eat, dropped to almost nothing. And it got so bad that at the amc, one of his two cardiologists who worked with him on a regular basis, one was Aaron Achilles, and the other was a great, great doctor, Hunter Enderley, who took unbelievably personal care care of Ted in the worst of the hours in September and October and November of 2025, he gave him the cheapest, saltiest, tastiest human chicken in a can. And Ted would eat that. And we said, screw it. We're just trying to get him in one piece onto that operating table. Whenever that day comes. He ate that stuff. I mean, you could smell the salt on it. But he liked it and he would eat it and he would eat nothing else. And when I would go over and visit him while he was hospitalized, he would eat it out of my hand and then just curl up in my lap for an hour or so and just sleep, breathing monstrously heavily. All that time, slow motion. Suffocation of the first dog I ever rescued, who I promised to do anything for, and I could do nothing for him but wait. On the night of Friday, November 7, just as November descended, the dark November of our souls, as Melville wrote in Moby Dick. About quarter to seven, I think it was, my phone rang and the return address was Gainesville flight Florida. And I went, no way. And it was Dr. Greta Chu who said, there's been a cancellation. We have an opening. Could you bring Ted here and be here on. And I said, yes, I'll be there. And she said, I didn't tell you what day it was. I said, I don't care what day it is. Is it tomorrow? We'll be there tomorrow. And she said, no, but almost. It's a month from Sunday, December 9th. I said, we'll be there. What time will we check in? About 9:45. I'll be there at 8. So the next month literally became Hunter Enderley and Aaron Achilles and the senior cardiologists at the AMC Phil Fox, Betsy Bond, all, all of them just trying to get him to the finish line. Any trick we had to do, anything we had to do to improve something called C reactive protein score, which was an overall indication of inflammation, which I learned. I learned an awful lot about mitral valve disease. And then as it Became increasingly apparent that there was nothing I could rely on in a million years to get us there by commercial air. And of course, the variables of flying with a dog. Would he have to go in the hold? Would he have to go in a cage in the back? Could he sit on the floor? Could he sit on my lap? What about the train and the, and the guide dog, you know, wear dark glasses and lie and said was bad trouble with my vision. Was he, was he a support dog? Was he a seizure sensing dog? No. None of this, none of it made sense. Pay the $2. As the old line goes. I called up and rented a private jet. I have never been on a private jet in my life. I never anticipated doing it. I think it is wasteful. I think it is ruinous. I don't like it. I don't like small planes. I did it. I did it round trip. And I said, well, okay, I'm going to sell that baseball card and this used game, used baseball. And I'm going to sell that and I'm not going to buy this. And I'm going to do, I'm going to do it. We have to be there. We have to be there that morning. It's his chance, and I don't know if it will work. I may be bringing him to his death, but I know this. Whatever his chances are, and they guesstimated 70%. That's 70% he has. And his chances of seeing the year 2027 if we don't do this are 0%. So my attitude switched entirely. 2. I'm going to get this done. Ted, who I often quote as the producer of this show, sits at my feet as he is sitting now in my little studio. It is perhaps the only time he is entirely quiet. It's the best kind of producer. He's there to support, port and lick his feet. We got there, we flew out of Teterboro. And by the way, was I ever wrong about flying a small plane? Oh my goodness, I don't know how the hell I'm ever gonna get on a real one again, which is gonna be extremely costly in the days to come. And moreover, Ted loves flying. Who knew, even on the way down, as sick as he felt, he just enjoyed the hell out of it. And we got to Gainesville on Sunday, December 7, for a December 8 check in. And just after we arrived, airborne floods. It rained like hell. And I don't know how we would have gotten in commercially or any other way the rest of that day. We would have missed the check in at 9:45, his window, his check chance on December 9th might have gone to some other dog. And so on the 9th of December, I got an Uber and over we went to the University of Florida, which is a magnificent, sprawling, gigantic community that, other than the lack of snow and hills, immediately reminded me of Cornell University, especially the emphasis on agriculture and the intellectual superiority of that environment, even though it's surrounded by horse farms and open piles of manure, just like Ithaca, New York. Rural, rural, rural educational oasis. Rural, rural, rural. A magnificent facility at the University of Florida. The city in Florida, by the way, Gainesville, that is furthest away from any beach and so furthest away from your idea of what Florida cities look like. Spanish moss on the trees. It's just, it's just Georgia called Florida in many senses. I liked the town immeasurably. The hotel was great, and it was a hotel full of dogs because half the people who were there were there to have their animals treated at the small or large animal hospitals at the University of Florida, which, by the way, have a footprint the size of Madison Square Garden. I have never before being an arrogant New Yorker, ever thought of myself as the guy who just fell off the turnip truck. The yokel from out of town says, gee, look at all the big buildings. That was me. Their waiting room is three stories tall. It's a five minute walk to the back. And in the back of the waiting room there's a bagel shop. There's a bagel shop that serves mixed coffee like a Starbucks. The waiting room at the Animal Medical center, perhaps the finest facility in the north east, has a bench and a bunch of chairs. And they've recently celebrated the reopening of the parking space out front. 300 parking spaces at the University of Florida. I was kind of impressed. And then I met the doctors. Dr. Chu was gracious and professional. Dr. Matsura was warm, kind. I was told later that his favorite thing after one of these surgeries is to be the first to take the dog he has operated on out for a pee. I'd like to see your heart surgeon do that with you. Now. There was one shocking moment when I handed Dr. Matsura, my boy Ted, who of course, tail wagging and bright eyed even though he was so sick. I handed him to Dr. Matsura, and Dr. Matsura involuntarily felt how powerful, overly powerful his heartbeat was. And he just went. And I went, yeah, I have a feeling we got here just in time. And he said, yes, you did. We will take care of him. I would like to say that the next 24 hours were the longest of my life. But that would be a lie. Because my job was to get him there. And I did it. I spent the money, I made the effort. I got the right doctors to help him. I devoted that month to him. I couldn't do anything else, but I did it. I did my part of it. I'm not the surgeon. I know the difference. I was preparing to say goodbye to him when I handed him to Dr. Matsura. If I never saw him again, I knew at that point that the worst outcome was not him dying during the operation or after it, but him dying of this terrible disease and essentially suffocating over months while I watched and could do nothing. That was the worst outcome. Something untoward happening during the surgery was the second worst outcome. Everything else was, was perfection. And so I waited. And they spent the rest of the day examining him and checking blood pressure measurements In I believe, 36 different locations on his body. And he's not that big. So they knew exactly where to make the incisions. A day's worth of pre operation screenings. And the next morning, I guess about 6am he woke up, went in and was given the initial sedation so they could do even more tests and take more scopes and take more pictures and take more videos. Because as I said, the premise of this is not that it's untoward, outer space miraculous surgery. It's that you are applying what you would do to a baby that size only to a dog. And each time you do it, you learn a little bit more. Hasten the process, process, lower the cost and eventually the dog, God willing, this becomes available to almost everybody. The surgery itself began, I guess a little before 9 on December 9, Tuesday, 2025, and it lasted until about 4pm they told me to expect a call. There's no reason to hang around. They weren't going to let me see him. There was nothing I could do if it went wrong. Go back to the hotel and wait there, try to rest, do something. There are caves with bats in them if you want to go see that. And I was like, yes, that's exactly what I want to do. You'll be hearing from us no later than 5:30, 6 o'. Clock, 6 o'. Clock. They haven't called now I'm beginning to go cold. At 6:20, the phone rings. It's Dr. Chew. Everything went well. There were a few minor glitches, but nothing untoward. He was much sicker than we thought, just like you said. But you got the inflammation down sufficiently. That C reactive protein crap. That worked out okay. Good job by you and the guys at the amc. She didn't put it quite that way. Now we wait. We wait to make sure his heart gets going again on its own, all of his organs. And if you do not hear from us overnight, that's good news. On Wednesday the 10th, my eyes open, close, open slowly to the light coming in through the window. Window with the Hilton on the campus at the University of Florida. And I looked at my phone and it was 7:45 in the goddamn morning. And I shouted and the phone rang. I don't think it was 10 minutes later, it was Dr. Chu. He's doing very well. There was an hour in there where we weren't sure which direction it was going to go, but he followed through it. He had what we call smoke. And I said, what on God's name is smoke? Well, it's kind of a precursor for blood clots, kind of a haziness that appears in our videos and our scopes. And it was there. And we thus have to increase the blood thinners so that the clots don't form and the stroke doesn't happen and he doesn't die. Because of that, there's still many risks, but that's the primary one. We're beginning to see it dissipate. So you can come see him this afternoon. Okay. Fell back asleep immediately. Got up in plenty of time for the prearranged hour. Went in and saw him. And I walk in, and there he is in his oxygen room, awake, sitting up, not sedated, not zoned out by the drugs, a lot of wires, wearing a screen sweater. Dr. Matsura is there, big smile on his face. Shakes my hand. He says, I think it went very well so far. It has. There's no more smoke. Dr. Chu smiled. They opened the gates. I petted him. I leaned down and kissed him, which is when he recognized me from the smell, I assume, and started barking his head off. And I know all of Ted's barks, and that one was just get me the F out of here. At which point I said, I'll see you tomorrow. Let's not agitate him any further. And they put him back in. And the next day I came and saw him, and they brought him into the room with me. They detached him from all of his connections. And I saw him for maybe 20 minutes that day. The Thursday, and then Friday, it was more like an hour. And we went for a walk with Dr. Matsura. And then Saturday, it was a couple of Hours and Sunday it was more. And Monday they examined him and discharged him and I took him back to the hotel and I had thought about going immediately back to New York. But the point was that in that first week after the surgery, he's got to stay away from other dogs and he needs to be carefully controlled because he's on blood thinners because the clot risk is still there so he can't fall. So if you're going to have him anywhere, he's got to be in a position where if there is a fall or a collision or something, you can get him to the hospital immediately. Why am I going back also to New York when these doctors here in Gainesville who just did a literally life saving last minute job and you can see it in his eyes, they were just inside this heart. They know not only what they should see, but what they are not seeing. They were just there. So we hung around for a week, just me and Ted going for like three walks of maybe five minutes a day. And he got better and better and better and better. Her and Ted, who was on when we left New York, seven different medications and who was on in the week until the recheck. Before we left Gainesville, Florida Two days before Christmas 2025, Ted was on seven different medications, eight different medications, most of which had to be refrigerated and I had to give it to, to them three times a day. And he wanted to run around because he felt so good because of course his heart now worked and it wasn't leaking blood all through him. We come out of the recheck a week later and he's not on any medications anymore except the blood thinners. Three months on the blood thinners, that's it. We flew back to New York the next next day. Once again an hour on my lap. Ted looking out the window, clearly getting the concept, barking happily and waving his tail, waving his tail like a scimitar, waving his tail at the clouds. He loved flying, took a nap, woke up and got up and loved flying the rest of the way? That was Christmas. Every day since then, Ted has gotten a little bit better. The major issue with Ted at this point, Ted causes my wrist to hurt because he pulls on our walks. He pulls on the leash because he has so much energy, because his heart is now fine. The first time he was rechecked at the one month mark at the Animal Medical Center, Dr. Aaron Achilles, who I mentioned before with Dr. Hunter, Ed Tenderly, the two local managers of this project, said, well, he's doing fantastically. The results Are, this is a different dog. It's just great. But we want to continue the Pimobendon just for precaution. And I said, you know, he was taking off the Pimobendon after the surgery. And she went, what? Well, then these are not tremendous results. These are unbelievable results. Results. This is. This is perfection. The official opinion of the Animal Medical center on this procedure, on this surgery, on the Japanese surgery, to use Dr. Traffne's term, is they're now in favor of it and they now recommend it, and they now tell their clients who are in this situation, and unfortunately, there are dozens every month. You should call the University of Florida Small Animal Hospital Hospital, Because this works and it will save dogs. Ted was the 83rd dog to get this surgery in North America or South America for that matter, or in fact, anywhere except London or Japan, 83rd. If he had been born 10 years earlier than he was, if I had become a dog person 10 years earlier than I did, he would have been out of luck. We would have had to find a different planet to go to. They didn't do this surgery in 2014 anywhere. And now we had this. When I first found out about it, my first response was, what about the other teds whose humans can't possibly afford this figure? Well, I'm going to pay for somebody who can't do it. And then in discussions at the University of Florida and discussions with friends of mine, it dawned on me that it's not a bad gesture. But. But the problem is that doesn't increase the number of dogs who get this operation and get their lives saved. It just changes the socioeconomic, economic nature of one of them or two of them. So while I make efforts to, you know, fund another program somewhere so this can be done maybe here in New York, maybe an expansion of the program, since it's already up and running at the University of Florida. They are dark 22 weeks a year while Dr. Matsura is back in Japan. While we work on that, I am very happy to say that I met someone whose dog was also dying of mitral valve disease and who was, in fact, in worse shape than Ted. And this guy had the surgery, and he is now fine, and he is now off meds because this works. The punchline of all of this, especially in the context of other things I have discussed here on this program, was when they told me about the smoke and the threat of blood clots and thus seizures. I've mentioned before, I believe I'm pretty spiritual. Certainly dogs have increased my spirituality and my belief in the meaningfulness of the universe and the intentionality of the universe. But I subscribe to no religion, and most of them make me laugh out loud at the obviousness of the scam that they are perpetrating on people. But the belief is a different issue altogether. I just think you can talk directly with whatever you think the universe is. If you like to go to church because you like to sing, have a nice Sunday. Otherwise, I think you can do it in the privacy of your own own mind. And in the privacy of my own mind. When they told me what faced Ted on that night of nightmares in the hours after the surgery, as December 9th became December 10th, I said one thing. Universe. Blood clots, strokes, heart disease. Give it to me instead. I think it's nice to know that sometimes somebody, something, some entity in the universe listens to you and says, it's a deal. By the way, the large animal hospital down at the other end of the waiting room at the small animal hospital at the University of Florida at Gainesville, that's where they do dental, dentals on tigers. And as I said to Dr. Darcy Ayden, who's one of the heads of the small animal program there, and like me, a Cornell grad, Cornell vet, and I'm Cornell ag, I said, they are, they are sedated for that, right? If you, or a dog, if your dog or a dog, you know, is up against it, particularly if it's heart, call the University of Florida. Hopefully in the next 10 years, that can expand to University of Florida. Or over here, over there, over there, over here, over here, right now. Call them. I mean, I say, said to them, if I ever had a heart problem, could I just come down here and scrunch up on one of the tables? Or you guys could work on a bigger, you know, bigger canvas than you used to. I'll, I'll sign. I'll sign something. All right? On that point, I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. The musical directors of Countdown are John Philip Chenale on keyboards, handling the orchestration, Brian Ray on guitars, bass and drums. Their work is produced by TKO Brothers. And I think thank Mr. Chenale and my friend Mr. Ray with all of my heart. Nancy Foust is the best baseball stadium organist ever. She's responsible for the satirical and pithy musical comments and for a great deal of the support for this program. Thank you, Nancy. My announcer today was my late friend Richard Lewis. And I thank my other announcers, Larry David, John Dean, Stevie Van Zoe, Jonathan Banks, Dennis Leary, Kenny Main, Tony Korniser, Nancy, the late Howard Feynman. All of whom were willing to associate themselves with this ragtag podcast when we signed on nearly four years ago. You are all the best. This program was produced by Ted and Stevie and Rose and Kit and my late boys, Mine and Michelle. Everything else was, as always, my fault. That's Countdown for today. Day 477 of America held hostage. Again, exactly 986 days until the scheduled end of Trump's lame duck and lame brained term. Unless he's removed sooner by the Epstein files, remember them? Or Iran where he's losing because he's in idiot. Or by Patel brand bourbon. Or most likely by the urine colored walls of his oval office and his urine colored hair. In my absence, this is what I ask of you. Do not say that is Trump gold. Say that is Trump urine. The next scheduled countdown will be be. I don't know. I bet you can bet on it somewhere. Until the next one, I'm Keith Olbermann. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, good luck and think big. Be big, my friend. A total and complete disaster. Trump is not that stupid. He's made some deal with the deep state to throw the election to Democrats. That's the only this could be. Countdown with Keith Ulberman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Most people think their insurance will cover them when disaster strikes. The truth? Many are wrong. 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