TRUMP LACKEY SAYS HE WANTS TO JAIL RACHEL MADDOW - 12.18.24
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Countdown with Keith Olbermann is a production of iHeartRadio. Trump's chief thug wants to put Rachel Maddow in prison. This is not hyperbole. This is not symbolism. This is not an empty threat. Quote, I need investigations, trials, and then incarceration. Andrew Weissman on MSNBC and Rachel Maddow and all of them, unquote.

Oh, and just so we are clear on this, it's Rachel Maddow now. You are next, or close to it, because Trump is this close to suing you for writing mean tweets about him, or for not voting for him, or if your name is Ann Seltzer, for putting out a Des Moines Register election poll that did not favor him enough. Not, I may sue them, at least I'll scare them, a lawsuit.

In Iowa, for consumer fraud filed against the Des Moines Register. Lawyer hired. His name is Alan Ostergren. And if you look him up in Google reviews, like Phil Bump of the Washington Post did, you will find he literally has a one-star rating.

emboldened by such pathetic, self-prostituting excuses for American leadership as Jeff Bezos, Patrick Soon-Shiong, Joe Scarborough, and Bob Iger, and all the snatched defeat from the jaws of victory cowards at Disney and ABC News, Trump has now lost any remaining sense that anybody is even going to try to stop him.

It is hard to point at a crazy man and say he's now lost it, but he's now lost it. You are next. Well, you're probably behind me, and you and I are both behind Maddo, and she's behind Ann Seltzer, but you know what I mean. ABC folds on Saturday, and by Tuesday, Trump has sued the Des Moines Register for what might have been an accurate poll...

because it said he wouldn't win Iowa by as much as he thought he would. In other words, he's suing a newspaper for having dared to not predict he was going to run up the score. And the creature who wants to imprison Maddow for some conspiracy that exists only in the place his brain should be is Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon, the guy who looks like a boxing hobo traveling the country in empty freight trains.

Trump, though, is still thinking about suing Bob Woodward for election interference. He is still thinking about suing the Pulitzer Prize Committee, and if that sounds familiar, it's because he already sued them two years ago. Helpfully, an op-ed in the Washington Post, Jay Bezos' proprietor, from a Columbia historian named Robert Y. Shapiro, which is still prominent on the Washington Post site, insists none of this will happen. Mr. Shapiro...

and I want to see a copy of his diploma before I call him professor, insists Joe Biden should pardon Trump in part because, quote, it would enable Trump to devote all of his administration's attention to governing instead of seeking revenge and retribution against his enemies, unquote. And if that isn't the dumbest, most naive thing ever written, it's close.

Revenge and retribution are two of only four or five emotions that Trump shares with human beings.

Mr. Shapiro also notes in his op-ed how well Ford's pardon of Nixon worked out for the country. And here is a man employed at any institution of higher learning more respected than the good humor ice cream truck. And he does not realize that Ford's pardon of Nixon is how humanoids like Trump first understood that he could get away with it. Trump sued ABC. He may sue CBS. He's just sued a pollster.

His boxing hobo wants to arrest Maddo. Trump wants to sue the Pulitzer Prize people. Again, they're going after Liz Cheney. He's in revenge and retribution reruns. But go on. Tell me why we should permit him to become president a month from now. I'm doing this not because I want to. I'm doing this because I feel I have an obligation to. I'm going to be bringing one against Trump.

The people in Iowa, their newspaper, which had a very, very good pollster who got me right all the time. And then just before the election, she said I was going to lose by three or four points. And it became the biggest story all over the world because I was going to win Iowa by 20 points. The farmers love me and I love the farmers.

And it was interesting the way she did it. She brought it down two weeks before. She said, I was going to only win by four. That was a big strike. Suing the pollster for publishing a poll that had him winning, insisting that is consumer fraud. When he won Iowa, when he won the election, how can he say this with a straight face? Because he thinks he has now gotten the right to avenge himself against anybody who didn't support him or who didn't support him enough.

And crazier still, he thinks there is general agreement that he is entitled to this. I cannot state this more simply nor state it too often. This is just the beginning. Today, Trump and his scumbags are merely suing or threatening public figures who have thwarted or angered or disagreed or just not agreed enough with him.

He is still threatening CBS with a lawsuit over how it edited an interview that wasn't with or about him. Next, he will be suing people for voting for Nikki Haley or for moving out of a Trump building or for thinking bad thoughts about him. Like in that Twilight Zone episode.

Some of these hypotheticals are too crazy even for Trump, but do not forget that part of Trump's personal motivation for pursuing the presidency in the first place was his longstanding dream of, as he put it in 2016, opening up the libel laws. Opening them up to make it easier to sue you for anything. Not voting for him. Not writing an op-ed praising him enough.

giving an award to somebody who investigated his crimes. From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish, says the revolutionary leader Esposito after he seizes control in the political comedy Bananas and goes crazy with power. In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check.

I mean, what is the exact distance between that and suing a pollster for saying you are winning? How much shorter is it than we would have thought before this blight descended upon us? How much shorter is it when Trump has appointed former newspaper flamenco correspondents as his own concierge judges and cases go to this judge? How far are we away from this?

When nut job congressman Barry Loudermilk just issued his own made up report in which he recommends criminal charges against Liz Cheney for, I don't know, snideness. I don't know. But I'm so glad ABC News and Disney and my old pal Bob Iger settled Trump's case against them. And everybody's just moving on to Morning in America.

That's the case where George Stephanopoulos accurately paraphrased Judge Lewis Kaplan's finding about Trump and rape.

The one in which Judge Kaplan wrote, quoting the judge, "...the only point on which Ms. Carroll did not prevail was whether she had proved that Mr. Trump had quote raped unquote her within the narrow technical meaning of a particular section of the New York penal law, a section that provides that the label rape, as used in criminal prosecutions in New York, applies only to vaginal penetration by a penis."

The definition of rape in the New York Penal Law is far narrower than the meaning of rape in common modern parlance. It's definition in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal statutes, and elsewhere.

The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was, quote, raped, unquote, within the meaning of the New York penal law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump, quote, raped, unquote, her, as many people commonly understand the word, quote, rape, unquote. Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump, in fact, did exactly that, unquote. Judge Kaplan, in his written filing in the E. Jean Carroll case.

Well, I wouldn't have wanted to go on the court with just that as my evidence, that I didn't make a demonstrously false statement of fact. Would I, Bob Iger? Wouldn't have wanted to have to prove that George's statement wasn't false and didn't have reckless disregard for its lack of falsity. Wouldn't have wanted to have to prove you didn't damage Trump's reputation.

That's Trump, whose own vice president-elect J.V. Vance once called him Hitler. Gotta settle that case, because not only do you have to protect your money, but you know there was this great op-ed in the Washington Post by some guy named Shapiro about how pardoning Trump would enable him to stop seeking revenge and retribution against his enemies. This is for the public good. Tell me something, Bob. Tell me something, Jeff Bezos.

Tell me something, Patrick Shun Shang, you little L.A. Times whore, after you ordered your newspaper to stop writing about Trump's nominees for a while and to send you anything they ever did write about them again. Tell me what you do now. The next time you report that Trump lost the 2020 election and Trump sues you.

Suddenly I have the perfect idea for an ABC reality show. Just put a little lipstick camera next to every one of the executives at ABC and Disney going forward. And when Trump sues them next time, because he will, just take their reactions and put them on TV. You'll break all ratings records. But we settled with him. We gave him $15 million for his Trump presidential memorial speech.

Sinkhole. They have all gone nuts. Further nuts. It was at the same young Republican dinner in New York where that one bozo pitched face first off the stage and took the podium down with him in the most eloquent expression by any Trumpist in the history of their movement, at which Steve Bannon issued his threat against Rachel Maddow.

The third term magic act in which you make the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution disappear came up again. I recall being mocked for insisting here again and again and again that as soon as Trump was back in office, they would start making up a path focused on whether it means only two terms or only two consecutive terms by which he could run again in 2028 if he isn't dead then, or maybe even if he is dead.

I was told I was laugh out loud wrong. He'd never try that. It's in the Constitution. And I was wrong. They didn't wait for him to go back into office before they started this. Bannon, quote, the viceroy Mike Davis tells me, since it doesn't actually say consecutive, that maybe we do it again in 28. Here it comes.

And then the smooth segue into Soviet-style vast conspiracy show trials. Quoting Bannon again, "...we want retribution, and we're going to get retribution. You have to. It's not personal. It's not personal. They need to learn what populist nationalist power is on the receiving end."

I need investigations, trials, and then incarceration. And I'm just talking about the media. Should the media be included in the mass criminal conspiracy against President Trump? Should Andrew Weissman on MSNBC and Rachel Maddow and all of them? We want all your emails, all your text messages, everything you did. You colluded in a conspiracy with Merrick Garland, Nancy Pelosi, Lisa Monaco, and Jack Smith, unquote.

A conspiracy against Trump involving Merrick Garland? I wish! These are the people who guide Trump. The ones Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski in effect went and before whom they prostrated themselves. The ones who want to arrest Scarborough's and Brzezinski's co-workers.

Now, honestly, it's not that big a jump for Scarborough. He tried to get Matto fired in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010. I can't testify to any days since, but I've been told it continued after I left there. So arrest her? Eh. A week, 10 days ago, the entertainment website Variety asked me to write a thing for their year-end issue, 700 words on what MSNBC should do now.

Because, of course, the ratings collapsed at MSNBC after the election and Scarborough and Mika also collapsed. 700 words. Now, surprisingly enough, I have a lot more than 700 words on this topic. I believe, in fact, the word count on my laptop read infinity.

But Variety did a nice job of editing, and I thanked them for it before it posted yesterday. I'd like to read you the piece now, but annotated and expanded upon in some places, and I put a few things back in that they took out for space, nothing more than that, and amplify in a couple

of points. Originally, they titled this when it posted yesterday, Keith Olbermann on how MSNBC should approach Trump 2.0. But shortly thereafter, they changed the headline. And unlike the New York Times, they didn't stuff it through the deflavorizing machine. The new variety headline, Keith Olbermann, how can MSNBC save itself after Trump's win? First step, fire Mika and Joe. Okay, I have to admit, I giggled for an hour.

And then I guffawed. Keith Olbermann, how can MSNBC save itself after Trump's win? First step, fire Mika and Joe. By Keith Olbermann. This is the article, quote, by Keith Olbermann.

What does MSNBC do now after Trump accomplished the undead thing and retook the White House? After Comcast announced plans to spin off the network, along with others, in such haste that its new company was named Spinco? After Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski went on their show and welcomed our new insect overlords? After its audience vanished? Nothing. Stay the course.

The audience is exhausted and needs a break. It'll be back and resistier than ever. Suffer the ratings trough. Here's my first aside. How has this not occurred to anybody else? That it's a trough. I cut back from five podcasts a week to two. You want to listen to five of these right now? Every week? You think I want to write five of these? I'm having trouble doing two.

Maybe in January we could do more. Right now we need to rest and husband our resources. And I might point out, and then in terms of the ratings, although the Fox ratings went up from disastrous to 20% better than disastrous after Trump won, after Obama won in 2008, the ratings at MSNBC collapsed. There were meetings with executives there who couldn't understand it. But Obama won.

Why a week later are we getting one tenth of the audience? And I said, everybody's still drunk. They really didn't understand it. I believe sometimes, often as I'm just dozing off, falling asleep at night, I sometimes actually believe that there is a place in this country where they decide who runs all the television networks.

All of them, not just MSNBC or ESPN or any of the ones I've worked at, but all of them, Une Vision and Telemundo included, where they all sit around and they go, all right, who's the worst possible person to run the Hallmark Channel? This guy doesn't like romance movies. Put him in charge. I really think so. The ratings are down at MSNBC. I can't imagine why the audience does not want to see the news.

And unlike other places, you can't just lie to them about what's happening. I mean, not really. You can soften it up a little bit. You can try to be encouraging. You can try to be entertaining. You can do that maybe twice a week, like I'm doing, rather than, say, 24 hours a day. Of course, the audience is going to go away. Anyway, back to what I wrote for Variety. I mean, obviously, you have to fire Mr. and Mrs. Scared Bro.

However, continue their banal but largely benign political coffee clatch show without them and their insistence that we all join their MSNVC. Nobody will remember they were ever there. Another aside, I happen to be very proud of that phrase, MSNVC. If you don't know about Vichy France, Google it. It's on every morning now at Joe Scarborough.

They also cut the next sentence, which I thought sold the point. Remember The Daily Show with Craig Kilborn? Yeah. When Craig Kilborn left The Daily Show to go do the CBS show after David Letterman, boy, oh boy, the predictions were the new host was never going to be able to live up to Kilborn's reputation. It was never going to be as good as it was with Kilborn. The next host was Jon Stewart.

Do you remember MSNBC mornings with David Gregory and Contessa Brewer? They were the ones who succeeded Don Imus when they fired Imus. When they didn't work out, they went to Scarborough and get some, we have some woman who's free in the mornings. Brzezinski? Okay, I guess. That's how that happened. I mean, look at how MSNBC has excised me from their history. Nobody would notice if Scarborough disappeared. Or if you don't like the idea of firing them both, just have him come back next Monday with a different wife.

Lord knows it wouldn't be the first time. Back to the article. Plus, the next money is coming from more fervent opposition to MAGA, not less. Wasn't the Scarborough disaster 60% of the demo audience gone in three days instructive enough? Did you not notice CNN going from fact-based criticism of Trump's madness to hours of cacophonous shouting and sinking to whatever is the next level down from irrelevance? Another aside, looking at you, Abby Phillips,

This formula in which you get eight people around a table yelling at Scott Jennings, everybody yelling at everybody else. This was the one trick that the former MSNBC executive, later president Phil Griffin, knew. Every show, every show that ever got into ratings trouble, every new show, every old show was eventually approached by the show doctor, the man with the magic touch at MSNBC, Phil Griffin.

And his solution was always, "I think we should have a panel with like six people on it." Every show. Phil Griffin is now the president of the Rachel Maddow Production Company. If there are any actual charges to be brought against Rachel Maddow for anything in this world, it's hiring Phil Griffin. Back to the article. Did the quarter of a million canceled Washington Post subscriptions not tell you something? Or the exodus from Twitter X? What do you think happened to all these news consumers? That they were raptured?

They're all still there, waiting to spend their time and money at the only liberal candy store still open, yours. These other supposed bastions of journalism have left you a near monopoly. And MSNBC only exists today because the last time NBC was handed a near monopoly, your management ancestors said, 100 million in profits from Alderman's liberal show? I guess we'll take it if we have to.

They did cut out something which suggests that the resonance of what you and I know about what's going on in the media, not necessarily nationally understood. I added to the part about the exodus from Twitter X and the quarter of a million Washington Post subscriptions canceled and the Scarborough disaster and the CNN ratings. I added the New York Times losing its way for the sake of some flaccid, both sides headlines. They cut that out. Still true. Back to the article.

In the early years of this century, the great minds at GE, then NBC's parent, were trying to go to the right of Fox by putting on Tucker Carlson, Michael Savage and Laura Ingraham. They were thus too busy to notice that I was putting on Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell and Chris Hayes.

While they were trying to steal Bill O'Reilly away from Fox or failing that to transform MSNBC into a literal prison documentary channel, I kept Rachel from jumping to CNN by giving her $437 out of my own pocket. And the next thing the corporate masters knew, we'd spun them all off into their own shows and MSNBC was profiting a billion a year. By the way, I'd like the $437 reimbursed, please. Another aside, I know you haven't heard the $437 story before.

I've kept that as relative secret. I've only told it on, let's see, 216 episodes of this podcast. Well, I'm bitter. Back to the article. Generation after generation of NBC executive idiots viewed politics as nothing more than a soda brand and believed there was some additional audience, undecided or right wing, that they could add to the present one if only they also offered a different flavor called new MSNBC. The new flavor invariably turns out to be turnip.

Besides, that right wing ruled you out in 1996. Pursuing it results in only one thing, the scar-borrowing of your present audience.

That doesn't mean you can't tweak stuff. Your primetime audience doesn't want new faces. It wants comfort food. So refresh the menu and decor. Scuttle those daytime shows, which always existed solely to give NBC News execs something to stare at while they pretended to work, and replace them with the morning formula, only with different sets and different titles. Try outsider big personality hosts like Elie Mistal and Pablo Torre.

You could even try for a truce with your prodigal anchor so he'll be inside the tent peeing out for a change. You may have noticed that I included in this one paragraph and buried rather successfully, I might add, a suggestion that they fire Katie Turr and hire me. Back to the article. And now you can finally do something I first suggested in 1998. Change the damn name of the network.

Use the acronym NEWS or American News Network. Or how about a nice self-explanatory F Trump TV? What all this will get you besides the kinds of profits only a monopoly can provide are non-cash virtues like moral force and ethics and journalism and patriotism and liberty.

You may now be the last line of defense for the free press and thus the future of representative government in this country. The bullies don't stop hitting you because you're nice to them. They stop hitting you when you knock them out cold. Put that on MSNBC and all will be well, unquote. Thanks, Keith. Great report.

Also of interest here, Pennsylvania state senator, their 2022 Republican nominee for governor in that state erupts at a photo of a downed drone being carted off on a Northeastern expressway. He feeds all the conspiracy crap. Only one problem. That was not a downed drone. It was a famous movie prop. Now, if this had been Trump, he would be suing me for disagreeing with him. That's next. This is Countdown.

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Hi everyone. It's Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb from the Today Show. We love this time of year. There's so much to celebrate. That's right. Nobody does the holidays quite like today. All season long, join us for special performances with the brightest stars. Plus, festive recipes to whip up the perfect holiday feast and great deals on the hottest toys and gifts for everyone on your list. So join us every morning on NBC to make today your home for the

This is Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Still ahead of us, at lunch the other day, a new friend and fellow former colleague of Ted Turner said he would be going south and seeing Ted while he was south, and he hoped to get him on a good day. Ted is 86 years old.

And I don't think I'm telling anybody anything they don't know. He's been in and out for at least 10 years, 15 years. Now, having known him half his life, having worked for him half Ted's lifetime ago, I think we should look at this positively. When Ted Turner was 43 years old, none of us who worked for him would have expected him to live to, well, 44.

He drank incessantly. He never slept. He took every risk he could find. He's 86. He's still in and out, rather than just out. That's a win. Ted won again. And boy, could CNN use Ted now. But I want to tell one of those stories from the out days, when his outness often produced such rage inside him.

that he almost fired me over the hat that my cameraman was wearing at a story, and I almost responded by socking him in the jaw. But we made up in the end. Things I promised not to tell about Ted Turner. Next. First, believe it or not, there's still more new idiots to talk about the Daily Roundup of the Miscreant's Morons and Dunning-Kruger Effect specimens who constitute today's other worst persons in the world.

The bronze? Worse? Trump and this tariff bullshit because he thinks the year 1894 was great. The Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, has responded in a way that could help us go back to 1894. He says if Trump follows through on this threat of a 25% tariff on Canadian goods, he will simply stop Ontario from exporting to the U.S. any more electricity.

Canada is the source of 20% of our crude oil, a lot of our natural gas, and of course, electricity they generate, which a million and a half Americans use in Michigan, New York, Wisconsin, places like that. Lights out. Incidentally, the website GasBuddy says the tariffs could increase the price of a gallon of gas by at least 30 cents a gallon, maybe 70 cents. The runner up, Molly Murphy, a pollster who did work for Kamala Harris and who should now be on a rocket ship to the sun.

She addressed the Democratic National Committee Executive Committee's first post-election party. I'm sorry, first post-election conference. Molly Murphy said they blew the election because they spent too much time attacking Trump over this irrelevant topic of norms. Voters, Molly says, believe, quote, norms have not worked for them. And so we certainly shouldn't ask them to clutch their pearls. We risk sounding like hall monitors.

As to the here and now, Molly adds that voters don't care who he's putting in cabinet positions. These voters are saying, I will give him a pass on the outrageous if my costs come down. She insists they should have been focused on household costs. Look, if you were a Harris pollster and you are speaking up now, instead of on October 18th or August 18th, first off, F.U.,

Secondly, it's pretty clear millions of Americans, or at least the 229,766 voters in the swing states who actually decided the election, it's pretty clear 229,766 people who have the right to vote in America chose the wallet over the polio and the fascism. Nobody's arguing that. They're morons.

We have bred them to be morons. We have educated them to be morons. We have let them educate themselves in homeschooling to be morons. They're morons. What a shock. But the point that continues to mystify me about second-guessers like Molly Murphy and other narrow-minded pinheads is this. The Democrats spent $11 billion on advertising. With that much money, I'm just guessing here, but I think, I think, hear me out, we could have covered both topics.

We could have covered the whole insurrectionist-y, dictatorship-y thing in the ads and the price of the sandwiches and the gas thing. Could have done them both. Could have put them both in the same commercials even. You think the cost of groceries is going down under a Trump dictatorship? He wants tariffs on everything, including oil and gas and electricity. Your gas is going up under Trump, at least 30 cents a gallon, at least. Oh, and if you try to complain about it, Trump will sue you.

I'm Kamala Harris and I approve this message because your food prices will also double under Trump. See? Other than the choice of voices there, you can walk and chew gum at the same time, Molly Murphy. Well, the generic you. But our winner, State Senator Doug Mastriano of Pennsylvania. If that name sends a shudder down your spine, well, it should, please. He was the GOP nominee for governor that year.

In 2022, the one who lost to Josh Shapiro by 14 because Mastriano was a fundamentalist theocrat and an election subverter and a COVID denier and most importantly, a moron. And he's still a moron. Mastriano posted a photo of what he says is a drone. Looks to be four or five feet high, maybe 12 feet wide.

lashed to the back of a flatbed trailer and being transported on a major highway. Breaking news, reads the caption to this photo, crashed drone in Orange Beach, retrieved from water and taken to undisclosed location for further investigation. But Mastriano, though he has the IQ of a brain-damaged fish that just had a drone crash into it, had much more to say about this. Above the photo of the drone...

It is inconceivable that the federal government has no answers, nor has taken any action to get to the bottom of the unidentified drones. The fecklessness of this administration was on display last year when a Chinese surveillance balloon was allowed to fly over the entire continental United States before being shot down. Such should be viewed as a threat to our nation and citizens. An action is long overdue. We have recourses and assets in our arsenal to get answers, but I suppose Ukraine is more important to the White House. January 20th can't come soon enough.

Mastriano's post got a community note, because the photo that has driven him to this madness is not of one of the so-called Northeast Drones. It's a model of a TIE fighter from Star Wars. A motion picture. It was photographed being driven along a highway in the Philippines, which Doug Mastriano could not distinguish from his ass or his elbow.

The community note also disappeared sometime yesterday, then reappeared, leading to the conclusion that perhaps Elon Musk also cannot tell the difference between an actual craft capable of flight and a toy on the way to the local Comic-Con convention.

Doug Mastriano boasts he spent 30 years in the army and is a veteran of Desert Storm in Afghanistan. And thank you for your time. If we hadn't already been doing this, we should start doing this immediately. We should question anybody who served in combat in the last 35 years about literal brain damage. Because we see this time after time. They come out of service with the best of intentions and with the IQ of a fish that was just hit by a drone.

Because this bonehead simply picked up this photo from some conspiracy website and either assumed he could fool everybody with it or is too far gone himself to know it was a photo of a movie prop. Doug, these are not the drones you're looking for. Mastriano, idiot, and today's other worst person in the world and outer space. Ah!

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Sponsored by Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary. VGW Group. Void where prohibited by law. 18 plus. Terms and conditions apply. What's up, everybody? Adnan Virk here to tell you about a new podcast from iHeart Podcast and the National Hockey League. It's NHL Unscripted with Virk and Demers. Hey, I'm Jason Demers, former 700-game NHL defenseman turned NHL network analyst. And boy, oh boy, does daddy have a lot to say. I love you, by the way, on NHL Network.

We're looking forward to getting together each week to chat and chirp about the sport and all the other things surrounding it that we love, right? Yeah, I just met you today, but we're going to have a ton of guests from the colliding worlds of hockey, entertainment, and pop.

Pop culture. And you know what? Tons of back and forth on all things NHL. Yeah, you're soon going to find out we're not just hockey talk. We're into all kinds of random stuff on this podcast. Movies, television, food, wrestling, even the stuff that you wear on NHL Now. You wish you could pull off my short shorts, Berkey. That's sure to cause a ruckus. Listen to NHL Unscripted with Berk and Demers on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I have one more story to tell you about covering the 1982 National Football League players strike. And this is less about the strike itself and more about the man for whom I covered it, Ted Turner.

Ted Turner had put CNN on the air just two years earlier, and his sports guy, Bill McPhail, had interviewed me for a job as their New York sports reporter even earlier than that, May of 1980. And when I did not get it, I was genuinely relieved because I was convinced there was no way they would ever get CNN on the air. No chance. Ever. Obviously, I did not account for Ted Turner's stubbornness.

Anyway, I wound up going there freelance in 1981, as I have related in some detail here when Lou Dobbs and his girlfriend, the New York sports reporter, had to get out of town fast at the insistence of Mrs. Lou Dobbs. Eight months later, as the 1982 NFL strike loomed, they had made me staff and given me a contract, first offering me $1,000 less a year than they were paying me freelance. Even CNN of 1982 acknowledged the absurdity of that mathematical proposition.

So I was infested already whining about Ted Turner, employee of CNN, when the football players walked out on strike in September 1982. And that strike was my beat every day from March to November. A day or so after the strike began, we set up an interview with the president of CBS Sports, Neil Pilsen, about the effect that the strike would have on TV sports in general and CBS Sports in particular. And as the camera crew and I filed into his office, Pilsen wearily said...

Nothing against you guys, but I've done so many interviews already about this strike that if you actually come up with a question I haven't been asked already, I'll give you... Well, we all leaned in towards him. Give us what? A job? A job interview at least? $50? I'll give you CBS sports caps. Nah, not exactly a job, but better than nothing.

So we rolled tape and I said, so Mr. Pilsen, in light of the strike, do you wish CBS Sports did not have the Super Bowl this year as it does? And he laughed and he took off his mic and he went over to his office phone. He buzzed his assistant. Bring in three caps, will you? And he sat back down. He said, you guys did it. Nobody asked me that yet. And it's like the only question that really interests me. You still rolling?

Neil Pilsen then proceeded to give a lengthy and thoughtful answer about how, as long as the season was not canceled, it was probably better to have the next Super Bowl because people would be so grateful that after the strike they wound up playing it anyway. So now a week goes by after that interview and the bargaining sessions between the players and the owners are taking place in a Manhattan hotel, the Lowe's on Lexington Avenue, a dump with a nice lobby, a

All that matters to me is the Lowe's with the dump and the nice lobby is literally three blocks from my apartment. The players and the owners just march through a long hallway into private rooms. That's all we see of them. It is not heavy lifting. There are nice seats, at least in that lobby. But it is enlivened one day by news that our boss, Ted Turner, has asked the union if he can come in and meet with their 20-odd player negotiating team because he wants to pitch them on something.

He was in fact due there yesterday, but was unavoidably detained. The rumor the players told me, never confirmed, was that while changing planes in Chicago, Turner and an air hostess had ensconced themselves in a dumpster, or the other version was in a janitor's closet, for 12 hours of whoopee. And that's why he was a day late.

Anyway, I walk into the Lowe's that morning, and if somehow I had not been able to recognize my camera crew, sure enough, it is the same two guys who had been with me at Neil Pilsen's office at CBS when I asked him the question he had not been asked before, earning us free CBS sports caps. And the cameraman and the deck operator are, of course, wearing their CBS sports caps. And understand, in 1982, CNN was not an upstart. It was not the feisty outsider. It was not the future of news.

We were called Pretend TV. It was said that CNN stood for Chicken Noodle News. One day, I called somebody up and asked for press credentials for Cable News Network, and the guy said, Cable News Network? Are you the people who own the newsstands downtown? I had no idea what he was talking about, so I went to one of the newsstands, and I asked the guy, who owns this place? And he pointed to a plaque, and it said, owned by Cabell News Company.

The Cabell News Company, owner of Downtown Newsstands, was better known than Cable News Network. We got scoffed at. In some arenas and venues, like Madison Square Garden in New York, our crews were not admitted because they were not in the union. So the CBS sports caps were an important, albeit borrowed, touch of legitimacy and dignity, especially for my cameraman and my deck guy.

So the three of us position ourselves in that long hall in the lobby waiting for my boss, Ted Turner, me holding the mic with the big red CNN logo on the mic flag and the crew wearing their gaudy CBS sports caps. And in Ted walks emerging from the brilliant early autumn sunshine filtering in from behind him from the street like this was a perfectly lit movie scene.

And he sees me and recognizes me and smiles and comes over and beams, hot damn, it's my CNN crew. And he shakes my hand and we roll tape and I start to ask him my first question and suddenly the joy drains from his face. And he stops me. Hold it. What they wearing on their heads? He gestures at the cameraman and the deck guy and I explain to Baxter, I don't give a damn who gave them them.

This is CNN crew. They weigh in CBS sports caps. Get them off their damn heads. And he pushes me. I mean, really shoves me and strides past us. Now, even then, I'm five, six inches taller than Ted Turner and 25 pounds heavier at least. And maybe I can live with my employer embarrassing me in public, but I do not have to let him shove me in front of all the other reporters. So for a second, I think,

I'm just going to run down the hall and catch him and horse collar the bastard from behind. About a year into my TV career, I have already accepted that there are positives to television, but I've also already learned nearly all the negatives. And not three months earlier, I had gone over to ABC to interview with them about going back to do radio sports. Seems to me, given what I know about Ted Turner, dragging him to the ground and then quitting TV forever would be a pretty appropriate farewell.

And then one word popped in my head. Rent. So quickly I go to plan B. To be fair, in thought, if not in action, Ted Turner was right. Looked pretty silly to have the CNN camera crew wearing CBS sports caps while interviewing the founder and owner of CNN, who, by the way, was in the newspaper constantly because he kept saying he was going to buy CBS.

Plus, I still had a story to do that day, and that crew was going to have to go back into the room where Turner would be meeting with the players about an hour later for the proverbial spray shot that would give us some video to use of their meeting. And simply having my guys take their caps off was not going to suffice.

So I ran the three blocks back to my apartment to grab the only bit of merch or swag produced in the first two years of CNN, something they had an apparently inexhaustible supply of. CNN bumper stickers. I must have had a hundred of them in my place alone, and there were boxes and cartons and boxes and cartons of them in the New York bureau, which was funny enough as it was, since I don't think all the people who worked at CNN in New York in 1982 owned six cars among them.

Anyway, I trimmed a couple of the stickers down to just the CNN logos and raced back to the crappy Lowe's hotel. And just as they were calling for the crews to come in to get the spray shots of Ted meeting with the players, I put those CNN logo stickers over the CBS logos on my guys' caps. And to my delight, they stuck in place. Little large, but it worked.

minutes later the boys came out of the meeting room and the cameraman was in hysterics he wound the video back and had me watch it through the viewfinder of the camera as soon as they had walked in turner started to give them dirty looks and then suddenly one of the nfl players said hey ted there's your crew there's your cnn crew hey cnn over here everybody was laughing and now ted was beaming that them that's my cnn crew all right good work boys

When his meeting with the players broke up an hour later, I got a message from Ted's assistant to wait for him around a corner from the main lobby so he could give me, give CNN, exclusive details about what he was trying to sell the players on. It was a series of exhibition games so the striking players could make a little money on the side.

that he could televise, and there would be a pitch to the National Labor Relations Board that the strike had been forced on the players by the owners, which would have meant the players would have all become free agents. Ted wanted them, all of them, every player in the National Football League, to sign instead with him. He would create a 24-team league. He would give the union half ownership of every team. He would find backers for the other half, and all he wanted was the TV rights.

It didn't happen, obviously, but what a breathtaking scheme. Anyway, Turner was all smiles when he came out of the meeting to tell me before he met with the rest of the press. And he said, great with the hat. Good work. I have to get you guys some real CNN sports hats for Christmas. Ted stayed another 15 or 20 minutes doing God knows what with God knows whom. I didn't see any dumpsters in the hotel. And then he left by the main exit as the rest of the camera crews and reporters trailed him.

I went along just to see if there was anything he hadn't told me. And as he went out the doors to his car, he said, see you, Elmer. And I said, don't forget the hats. And Ted Turner gave me one of the dirtiest looks I have ever gotten in my life. Sure enough.

Couple days before Christmas, I get a call from my boss in Atlanta. We just got a box of 100 CNN sports truckers caps from Ted Turner's office. I don't know what the hell this is all about, but his assistant says if we wanted to know, we should call you. I was very proud of making the correct choice between correcting a mistake and getting us all hats and assaulting him. There is one postscript that

Ted talked the players into the exhibition games I mentioned, only two of them, one at RFK Stadium in Washington, which I went to on assignment, seated next to Ted Turner. He had two flasks with him. Anyway, the crowd was so small at RFK Stadium in Washington that at one point they got on the PA system and asked all the fans to go sit down behind the player benches so the TV shots of the game wouldn't show all those empty seats.

The other game was in the Los Angeles Coliseum. They drew even less. Maybe 1,000 fans? Probably more like 500? 500 fans in the L.A. Coliseum? 500 fans looks like the raisins and rice pudding. But it was the name of his ad hoc league with these games in Washington and L.A. that still sticks with me 40 years later. Ted named it himself.

I'm pretty sure he did this deliberately. I know nobody else noticed it until I made a big deal about it. Ted Turner called his ill-fated venture, his ersatz National Football League, the, quote, all-star season. And I said, perfect. The acronym you have built for it is A-S-S. ♪♪

I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Brian Ray and John Philip Chanel, the musical directors of Countdown, arranged, produced, and performed most of our music. Mr. Chanel handled orchestration and keyboards. Mr. Ray was on the guitars, bass, and drums, and it was produced by TKO Brothers. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. The sports music is the Old Roman theme from ESPN2, written by Mitch Warren Davis, courtesy of ESPN, Inc.,

Other music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. And my announcer was my friend, why this is a coincidence, Nancy Faust. Everything else was, as ever, my fault. My best wishes, of course, to Ted Turner, my first television boss of bosses. That's Countdown for today. Just 1,495 days until the scheduled end of the lame duck presidency of Trump. Probably. Your lawsuit may vary.

The next scheduled countdown is Monday. As always, bulletins as the news warrants. Till the next one, I'm Keith Olbermann. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olbermann is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, the next generation of AI glasses. Just say, hey, Meta, to harness the power of Meta AI. Shop now at meta.com slash smart glasses. What's up, everybody? Adnan Virk here to tell you about a new podcast. It's NHL Unscripted with Virk and Demers. Jason Demers here, and after playing 700 NHL games, I got a lot of dirty laundry to air out. Hey, I got a lot to say here, too, okay? Each week, we'll get together to chat about the sport that we love.

Tons of guests are going to join in, too. But we're not just going to be talking hockey, folks. We're talking movies. We're talking TV, food, and Edna's favorite, wrestling. It's all on Le Table. Listen to NHL Unscripted with Verkan Demers on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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What's up, everyone? It's Justin Penick from John Boy Media, the host of the Football Today podcast with Bobby Skinner and Chris Rose. We roll three times a week on Mondays, on Wednesdays, on Fridays, breaking down everything you need to know about the NFL. We're gearing up for the NFL playoffs. I hope you can join us. Join in with us three times a week. Listen to Football Today on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and you will be glad you did.