Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. My friend and colleague of twenty six years, Howard Feinneman has died, and I have much to tell you about him, and I will do so. But the journalist in Howard Feyneman would kick me in the shins if I led with his passing instead of with the alice through the looking glass.
News that the head of the House Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan, has managed to get the Attorney General of the United States, Merrick Garland, held in contempt of Congress for ignoring a House subpoena, even though it is now exactly seven hundred and sixty four days, two years and a month that
Jim Jordan himself has been ignoring a House subpoena. I have no use for Merrick Garland, and in part that is because Merrick Garland would never think of doing what he should do today, what he should do right now, which is to seek today and gain today and announce today the indictment of Jim Jordan for contempt of Congress.
We are metaphorically at war with these fascists who live among us, and who have decades ago jennisoned any standards or morality, have embraced only cheating, have used the legal system for purely political purposes as long ago as the Ken Star investigation of Bill Clinton and the illegal publication of Clinton's videotape grand jury testimony a quarter century ago.
They created what they have now named law fair. They created it in a preceding century, and they are pretending that they are its victims when they are its inventors and manipulators, when they are the criminals and the corrupted, remorseless authoritarians. When any time they lie that they are not behaving that way, they are pretending solely because their base now expects them to pretend and lie, and only expects of them a well crafted lie they can hold
on to. And there is no easier to digest proof of this than just the last two morally bankrupt years out of the morally bankrupt life of Jim Jordan and Merrick.
Garland should announce charges against him today now, and if he doesn't think so, and he doesn't, Garland should just change the names in this equation around and make the Attorney General Mike Davis the Trump lunatic, and make the chairman Jamie Raskin and ask what the Trumpsts would do in the hypothetical future, and the answer is Davis would have had Raskin indicted and arrested or just arrested, screw bothering with an indictment or a trial just arrested seven
hundred and sixty four days ago. The House Republicans did this yesterday because they and Trump's Republican Senate slaves are set to promise fealty to Trump at meetings today in Washington. It is a relief they do not have to offer him his weight in gold, as if there were that much gold. Fox reports that for his first trip to Capitol Hill since his attempted coup on January sixth, Trump will be at the Capitol Hill Club, and boy, they
sure amp the symbol up to eleven. This time. It was right between the Republican National Committee headquarters and the very same Capitol Hill Club that one of the pipe bombs was left the night before January sixth by a still unidentified mass murderer wannabe March. Of course, by the time of those kiss the ass meetings between Trump and the Republicans on Capitol Hill, America may have figuratively already
been blown up. The Supreme Court will issue rulings on pending cases like oh, maybe the Trump's fabricated monarchical concept of quote presidential immunity. We don't know which cases the Court will rule on today, We don't know when. We do know they scheduled two days for publishing decisions, which is an unusual step for them. And yes, you're right,
Sam Alito, tomorrow is Flag Day. Why do you ask if you were hoping that somehow Democrats would get a first step towards mandatory Supreme Court ethics codes through on unanimous consent. Oh well, why did you think that? Secondly, guess which Trump whore stepped up to proudly stop that, Lindsey Graham. Still more ripples in the pool of the
conviction of elderly first offender j. Trump. New Jersey's Attorney General and the Division of Alcoholic Beverage ConTroll There are now reviewing the liquor licenses at the three Trump owned golf courses. Quote. No license of any class shall be issued to any person under the age of eighteen years, or to any person who has been convicted of a
crime involving moral turpitude, reads Jersey state law. The alcoholic Beverage Control Division guidebook offers a definition quote a serious crime from the viewpoint of society in general, and usually contains elements of dishonesty, fraud, or depravity. Dishonesty, fraud, or depravity. They got you there, don And just one other note.
June thirteenth, This is so two weeks from tonight is the first Biden Trump debate, the one at CNN in Atlanta, which means Trump now has less than fourteen days to choose the excuse for backing out that he thinks we'll make it look most like Biden was actually the one backing out. This is countdown with Keith Oberman. That was my friend Howard Fineman, who died yesterday after And it is a cliche a long struggle with pancreatic cancer. This
is one of the worst of the diseases. And I will tell you the extraordinary story of Howard versus pancreatic cancer and how despite the outcome, Howard won at length. In a moment, Howard Fineman told me in the middle of January last year, twenty twenty three, that he had been diagnosed that they had found pancreatic cancer during another surgery. And that they had given him four to six months to live, and he was writing and then talking to
me to say goodbye. And he died yesterday, having survived the disease and survived it extraordinarily well for eighteen months. But let me tell that story in the correct chronological order. About a week before my thirty ninth birthday in nineteen ninety eight, when I was the unhappy new host of a show on MSNBC called The Big Show, and we
did things like this. I was in Hollywood, in Burbank, I think, on the set of Third Rock from the Sun, about to interview its lead actor, the great actor John Lithgow, when the producer of the show came to me and said, oh, by the way, slight change of plans. And I know
I've told this story before, slight change of plans. We are going to instead be doing a talkback with Tim Russert because the president may resign, and then we'll do lithgo and we'll we'll tape lithgo now and we'll get that out of the way, but we're going to do this first. And I went say that again. He went, what will tape lifth go now? He later became the president of MSNBC. I actually had to say to him, no, no, no, no, not the part about taping the actor. What was that
about the president resigning? Suffice to say, shortly thereafter, I was on the air with the top ranked person from Newsweek who would go on our air because our show was nothing. We had perhaps one hundred thousand viewers a night. Within a week we would have a million. The man from Newsweek who consented to come on with the Big Show with Keith Olberman then in its I guess third month on the air, not drawing any viewers, was named
Howard Feinneman. He was one of the political writers, and he was, if I remember correctly, if not the first guest, because the first guest was Tim Russert, but the first one to analyze what we were dealing with was Howard Feineman. I don't know that he knew me, other than perhaps from ESPN. I did not know him. We immediately hit
it off. At some point during the interview he laughed at something I said, and soon we were bringing on Howard Feinman as often as we could, because Howard had a unique capacity to not only tell you the facts of a story, what was actually out there to that minute, but he could then assess what that probably meant in the next week, month, year to these key people involved
in it. And then if you wanted him to to express some sort of historical perspective or analysis of the pasts of the people involved in this case, Bill Clinton, Knut Gingrich, ken Starr, whoever you needed to know about. If he didn't already know, give him twenty minutes and he would have found it out from people that he trusted, who knew the individuals. He was an all purpose all
star for us. And as I began to become disenchanted with the journalism surrounding that story, the person who told me I was right when everybody else covered the goddamned Clinton Lewinsky story insisted this was the worst thing that had happened in human history and we needed to cover it twenty four hours a day. And I said, sounds like they're trying to shoot the proverbial fly with an
atomic bomb. The one person who agreed with me from the beginning was Howard Feyneman, who said, I can't go full bore into this the way you are saying it, but I will backstop you anywhere I can say what you feel, and I will support what you say because you are right. Do not think I am somehow criticizing you by not going yes, You're absolutely right. This is insane and illegal, and it is Newt Gingrich trying to become president of the United States because he really thinks
it can happen. But that's what he's doing, needless to say. As I became more and more disenchanted with the story, Howard Feinneman became more and more valuable to me as a friend, and I talked to him more. Were often off the air, and he was one of the few bright spots of a long year in which I had to cover that story while I was trying to extricate myself from a company that could not understand why I would want to leave a show that now had an audience of fifty or sixty times what it had when
it began. When all this at NBC News was available to me, if I just stuck with the story and kept telling it, Howard Feineman got it. Howard Feieman was an old school newsman from Newsweek, and he'd been a great local reporter in Louisville and was a master of Kentucky politics. If you wanted to know about the Mitch McConnell of eighteen eighty seven, he would know, and he
knew everything about Pittsburgh from where he was. At the end, I finally extricated myself from this, and again one of the few people who called on the last day, because the NBC people were all mad at me, one of the few people who called me the last day to say goodbye was Howard Feineman. Not long after I left NBC in nineteen ninety eight and went to Fox Sports, a box showed up on my desk on the Fox office in Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. It was the size of a baseball, and I opened it up in
much to my surprise, it was a baseball. It was an autographed baseball, signed by all of the regulars on the MSNBC show The Big Show, including Howard. A souvenir he said, or if you really don't want to remember any of it, just throw it through the window. For a couple of years, as I went back into sports, I heard about Howard and heard from Howard. Occasionally. I get a letter, saw you on the World Series, saw at the All Star Game, saw at the Super Bowl whatever.
Always stayed in touch, and not stayed in touch because he thought, well, he's going to go back into politics someday and this will be my access to television. No, he stayed in touch. Howard stayed in touch with everybody. Howard was one of the original networkers in the best possible sense of that word. If you were in news and you did not know Howard Feineman and you did not know he was a good guy, guess what, I don't think you were in news the first or second time.
I appeared as a fill in host on MSNBC in two thousand and three as a little gratuitous mend some fences throwaway when I went back to what was supposed to be an NBC Sports Olympic hosting job at the two thousand and four Summer Olympics in Greece. I went over and did a couple of shows as a fill in for Jerry Nackman, who was very sick, in fact, fatally sick. Got a call from Howard Fyeman in the office, My god, you're back. What happened? He wanted to hear
the whole story, and he wanted to come on. Although we didn't cover much politics on that show, but soon we would cover politics again because then I came back to MSNBC with the Countdown program, and Howard was the first person I asked them to make an arrangement with to be a regular contributor to the show. And as Howard would say, he was not a television great. He did not have the sexiest stories, he did not have
the hottest takes. But as I'm referenced earlier, whatever you needed him to talk about, he knew it, and what he did not know, and sometimes what he already thought he knew. He would go and research fresh just to make sure that he was giving you his best. Howard Feineman, I in fact did approach him when I left MSNBC in twenty eleven after they breached my contract and I went over to Current TV for a lot of money.
I approached him about joining me there, about becoming a contributor or perhaps full time, and he said, no, I have something else I'm working on. I'll be probably leaving in a year or two, And sure enough he had, and he was one of the first people to recognize this. He was a by this point star at Newsweek, and he realized that Newsweek's shelf life was not very long. In fact, Time Magazine, the Washington Post, all the great news organizations of the early twenty tens, they were not
going to make it. Howard took a job basically running Huffington Post, and everybody went, he's going to go do something on the computer. Guess who was right there. There's not only no longer copies of Newsweek on newsstands in this country, there are no longer any newsstands on this country. Howard Fineman saw it coming old school, and yet one
of those few who saw the future coming. All this time, I stayed in touch with Howard Feinneman off and on irregularly, sometimes bursts of conversation, phone calls, running into him somewhere, sometimes a text, sometimes nothing for a year and then, and I mentioned that my first contact with him was just before my thirty ninth birthday, just before my sixty
fourth birthday. So in January of last year, twenty twenty three, I got an email from Howard and it was short, and it was sweet, and it ended with the word love. He'd had an operation. Then. I don't think I'm telling too much out of school, especially since Howard said when I'm gone, you can say anything you want about me, You can tell any details you want, because he won. And I'm getting to that. They had brought him in for surgery of some kind, and when he awoke, he
was told he had pancreatic cancer. He had four to six months to live. He said, he cherished our friendship. He was sorry to shock me goodbye. Well not quite. Uh, sometime in the middle of early spring, if that makes any sense. So sometime in late March or early April of last year, I called him or he called me, I don't remember which, and I said, well, how how are you? He goes, I'm I'm surprisingly well, he said.
I never really knew what that meant until now. I've been sitting here waiting for it to start, and it it hasn't started yet. And I just got back from my doctor and they haven't. They haven't found any more any more cancer. It's it's still there, but it hasn't moved or gotten worse. Or In May, another conversation about the same thing. July fourth, he was planning a trip to New York. Did I have any time? Yes, I
think I do. August September, mind you, he was supposed to be dead at the latest by June, or maybe July. I think it was August of last year when he said his kids had gotten him at T shirt that read outlier, and they went through the whole logic of the thing. If the average survival time for a diagnosis of advanced pancreatic cancer is four to six months, well to get that number. There's some people who heartbreakingly don't make it a month, and then there are the other
ones who go on for a long time. And as Howard said, I guess I'm one of those. He traveled. He went to see things, He went to see people, He went to visits. He went to Pittsburgh, he went to Kentucky. He went to New York to see his son who was a producer at MSNBC. He went everywhere. The holidays came and went last year and he was feeling fine February doing great, and he has now survived twice as long as they said he might. In March came the first bad sign. Quick texts say hello. I said,
how are you feeling? And he said fine, there's no pain or anything, but I'm beginning to fade. Well that was the sign. Howard Feinneman died after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. He died a year after what they had told him would be the longest he would survive. He played all that time with house money, and I can tell you without fear of contradiction, that he knew it and was rapturous about it, as were all of us who considered ourselves having the privilege to be his friend.
He beat the system, he beat the pancreatic cancer. If you accept the premise of the memento mora, we're all going to die. If you accept that premise, longevity is in fact victory. And when you are told you have maybe six months, mind you that was the high end, and you last for eighteen. When you treble the score, you have won. None of us. And my heartfelt condolences go out to his son Nick, and his wife Amy and everybody in the Fineman family. But all of us
had some sense of goddamn it, Howard, you pulled this off. Congratulations. So this is an awful time, and yes, it is an awful shock to those of us who were his friends. On the other hand, there is still that little corner of it in which we're kind of kind of laughing with him. I still have that autograph Baseball. It's still on my desk, along with all of my memories of Howard Feyneman, Pittsburgh Pirates fan. Thank you, Howard, from the sublime to the ridiculous. I guess I'm going to have
to talk about Katie Turr again. I'll do that next. I guess this counts as another episode of things I promised not to tell, honest to goodness, and I know this will not sound like me, but I am getting tired of talking about my ex living girlfriend Katie Terr, as you probably know. On the air, at the announcement of the guilty verdict in the Hunter Biden case on Tuesday, Katie Urr on MSNBC emphasized that Jill Biden, who flew to Delaware to be at the trial, was not, as
she put it, Hunter Biden's birth mother. The wrath of anger from people who have mothers who may not be biologically their mother, their birth mother. There might be some other consideration involved in this. The wrath of people for whom that is true has actually, I think, been exceeded by the wrath of people for whom that is not true, and who are just offended by that remark, the latest in a series of indefensible remarks from a woman who I once loved, who proposed herself as the mother of
my children. So this issue of motherhood, as much as I really am tired of talking about her and the things that have happened to her and have changed her in the last decade, I don't feel like I have any option but to talk to you about them, because this issue of motherhood is essential to the history of my relationship with her, and I would argue it is
essential to her history. And I think things have escalated or decomposed to the point where there is no rationale for continuing her career as an anchor, if it has anything to do with politics in this country. Something has warped her perception of reality and the reality we are in, and the frankly reality of the network she is on. MSNBC is not supposed to be a liberal network. It is supposed to be a true network. That these things
tend to overlap a lot is actually coincidental. But she seems to be rebelling against reality, and it is come to the fore now. It was also described what she said on the air on Tuesday, and I did not hear these things, and I have not seen clips of them, so I cannot verify this. But it was described as an emphasis on her part about who's the biological mother
of Hunter Biden, as someone phrased it on Twitter. Ex Katie Terre wants you to believe that President Biden is showing signs of dementia because he referred to Hunter as our son, meaning the hour being him and Jill. I cannot verify that that was said. I don't doubt for a moment that it could have been, and she would have meant that. The one component to this that I think I can actually add in terms of people's understanding or decreasing their understanding of what is actually going on here,
is that Katie Urr is herself a stepmother. Her husband was previously married, He has two children. There's nothing wrong with that. They live in Israel, there's nothing wrong with that. I do not know to what degree her relationship with them is good, bad, or indifferent or infrequent. I do know when she took and we had remained friends, solid friends, better friends as friends than when she lived with me for eight years after I asked her to leave my apartment.
She was excited and a little confused by the fact that she was going to be a stepmother. This was going to be something she was looking forward to. And since then she and Tony have had two children of their own. So she is a stepmother. And to emphasize that, technically, Jill Biden is a stepmother and a stepmother because of course, Hunter Biden's mother and his sister were killed in an
automobile accident in nineteen seventy two. To emphasize this is not just the wrong thing to do on television, But I don't understand where it is coming from from inside her. And this is the part that transcends the fact that I used to live with this woman. I wouldn't understand it if it was said by a man referring to stepfathers. If it was said by somebody I didn't know, If was said by somebody I was related to, it makes
it all the stranger. Why would you emphasize and seemingly criticize the fact that Jill Biden is the stepmother when you yourself are a stepmother more amazingly, And I don't think I'm telling stories out of school here, And I don't think that she meant it. I never since that she meant this fact as a kind of detriment or
criticism of her own mother. But Katie made no bones for years about the fact that the person in her family she was closest to, the one she relied on, the one whose memory she relied on, the one whose advice that she had been given a decade earlier when I knew her before this person passed away, the person she was closest to in her family was not her mother,
or a father or a brother, but her grandmother. So the idea that the sense of strength of who has raised you comes from outside the traditional well, biologically, that's my dad and that's my mom, and that can be fine too, but it doesn't have to be and it doesn't have to be the only solution for a family or configuration of a family. I don't understand this. I know relationships have always been fraught things for her. This I can talk about for several months without interruption. I
will spare you that. I will tell you that, in an attempt to keep our relationship going, we went to see a relationship counselor at whom she screamed, who told her at one point that she was being childish, who said, no, you're wrong about that, And even though I was not there to get validated, he said, this guy is right and you are wrong. It's normally not this black and white, but you're really wrong here, and she stormed out of
the place, swearing at the man. We got into a car on our way to see my friend Norman Lloyd, who was about ninety six years old at the time, for lunch, and she would not stop swearing in the car. It got so bad I got out of the car in the middle of traffic in New York and I said, you go wherever you need to go. I'm going to go have lunch with Norman. Do not show up. I'm not telling you where we're going. I may come off as a little mean in this except she then apologized
and said, let's go to see another counselor. Whether I screwed that up or he did, maybe we could try a different counselor. I said, yes, she did exactly the same thing. So this subject of family is fraught, and I'm not trying to come up with excuses for her. I was baked a little bit on Twitter by people who misunderstood a pronoun I used when I said she is a stepmother. They thought I was referring to Jill Biden. No,
I was referring to Katie. I wasn't trying to defend her then, and I'm not trying to defend her now. I'm not going to rehash every story I've told you previously about the vagaries of the relationship that I had. I'll leave a couple of details out and tell a couple of other details I have not told before. There was physical violence in the relationship, not a lot of it, but periodically when she would get frustrated, she hit me.
She hit me once the day after I came back from an emergency appendectomy and could barely stand up and could not wear a shirt because my temperature was like one hundred and three degrees and I was profusely sweating. I'll stop that imagery for you right now. She came over and hit me. I'm a foot taller than she is. What was I supposed to do? Apart from the fact that I was a little worried about toppling over because I was weak from the appendectomy and three days of hospitalization, Like,
what do you do? I couldn't even push her away. I could have knocked her over, or in the condition I was in, I could have fallen over. So there has been physical violence in a relationship situation instigated by her, And I'll balance this out by saying that she did many wonderful things in the relationship. I have no doubt she is an excellent mother. I have no doubt she's an excellent wife. I saw the good things too. The good things are good. She was a good friend for
a long time. These bad things are really bad, and they're especially bad if you happen to do an hour or two of news on a national network, the only one that is not in some way pandering to the fascists, either Lively Today because you are the fascist news channel, or like CNN preparing for the possibility that the fascists will take over in January of next year and you want to get in good with them, even though none of this will help you get in good with them.
She's on the only network that is not ostensibly doing that, and she is to some degree doing it and criticizing Jill for being stepmother to Hunter Biden and perhaps using it as a step back towards arguing that Joe Biden should not be president, should not be a candidate. You know what Nancy Pelosi said about her. It's been a rough year or so. And I don't want to make this just about me, even though it is things I promised not to tell. But have you ever trended on Twitter? Okay?
It's sometimes a pleasant experience. Sometimes it's a disturbing experience. Have you ever had a woman you used to live with trend on Twitter? How about twice? Three times in a week. Katie started trending on Tuesday afternoon and was still trending as I sat down to record this. And it's not just that. I'll tell you one comical story now, I'll save that for the end. I wanted to make the one point about the professional element here. Things were,
as I said, really good professionally. They probably were aided when Katie moved to London to work out of the NBC London Bureau in twenty fourteen or twenty fifteen, and her visits to New York were very, very sporadic, and I only saw her briefly, but we always visited, always talked about careers, always talked about advice. I always helped her with her scripts from the time she was working for News twelve of the Bronx until she was on
NBC Nightly News. Helped her write the scripts, rewrite the scripts, suggest things she could look into, try to steer her away from problems. When she was assigned to cover Donald Trump's campaign, she knew next to nothing about Donald Trump, even though we had lived together in a building that was called Trump Palace at the time, and she knew
next to nothing about Hitler. In any event, things changed late in the campaign of twenty sixteen, and I have always wondered if something between stuff home syndrome, and the impact of having your life threatened for doing your job on television combined to change her in some way. But one day late in the campaign, I got a call from Katie. And mostly I heard from her by email or text, especially when she was on the campaign, and one day I got a call from her criticizing me
for saying something mean about Kelly and Conway. If anything on the left is universally agreed upon, if anything in the middle is universally agreed upon, if anything of all the people, the entire subset of human beings who know Kelly and Conway is agreed upon, it's that Kelly and Conway is not only one of the worst persons in the world, but also has and I mean this metaphorically, the skin of a crocodile and three elephants wearing armor
on top of all of that. And Katie ter called me and said, you really shouldn't say such terrible things about Kelly Ann Conway. And I said, why not? Am I repeating myself? And she said, there are bad people on both sides. There are threats on both sides. And I said, I didn't know that I was supposed to prevent threats being made against someone who is trying to
get a fascist dictator. And this is twenty sixteen, a fascist dictator who's out of his mind and kept a book of Hitler's speeches on a bedstand, trying to get him elected president of the United States, where he probably when he is ever supposed to leave office, will probably not go voluntarily. As I said to her in twenty sixteen, I did not know I had to defend her or to somehow mute my comments, because what she's your source. There's a long silence. Katie would not confirm she was
one of her sources. She later did confirm that, but there was genuine anger in her voice. No, you should take that back, and she was totally confused about why I refused to delete the tweets in which I had called Kelly Ane Conway a liar and far worse than that. And the name Kelly Ane Conway would come up again
when she wrote her first book. I've told before the story of Katie coming to me late in twenty sixteen or early in twenty seventeen and asking me to write her book about the Trump campaign and her experiences on it for her, and I said, I think they'd catch us. And then she said, well, I'm going to have to give the money back because I can't write a book. And the next thing I knew the book was out.
In the interim, I had given her all of my files on the Trump campaign and on Trump, probably amounting to in a computer four hundred pages worth of links. And she said, what's the price for this? And I said, of course it's free. Just use it in good health. I said, just you know, don't leave me out of the acknowledgments the book comes out. I'm not in the
acknowledgments the book comes out. I'm not in the book except for one story, the story the Kelly an Conway story, her defense of Kelly an Conway, and there were some platitudes about how I was always a wonderful person and I've been a great friend to her. But I was only in the book mentioned once as somebody she had briefly dated in her twenties, because she wanted to tell the Kelly ane Conway anecdote. I've mentioned before that she
was promoting the book. The Washington Post wanted my comments on her and on the book. She asked me not to talk to the Post. I said, fine, whatever you want. She said, I'm not talking to the Post. A week later, the article came out in the Post. She had talked to the Post. She had lied to me to get
me to not talk to the Washington Post. Several months later, The New York Times came out with a whole story, and in the middle of it, her former boyfriend Keith Olberman refused to meant to The New York Times for this article. I'd never even heard of the name of the writer. She had, in fact told the writer who I spoke to that she would ask me on the writer's behalf to talk to the New York Times about her.
She never did. She lied again. So this is the roots of this week, and that singular feeling of going to see what's trending on Twitter and finding it's always your ex girlfriend. The roots of this are very deep, and I wish I could wade through them, but this
is as far as I want to go. My knowledge of her directly ended with those lies about the Times and the Post, less so the book, although I thought that was a pretty schmuck move on her part, but it really ended when she was actively lying to keep my name out of articles about her. And yes, I told her, I agreed with her it was sexist and unfair for every article about her to contain some kind of reference to me. And I helped her, in fact, to try to scrub my own name out of articles
and references to her online. But I thought lying to the New York Times and to me and to the Washington Post to keep me out of those articles was just a little bit beyond the pale. And now we have this whole episode with Jill Biden is not Hunter Biden's birth mother. Shame on you, Katie, and no apology.
And now the lighter side of the story as you know, twice in the last ten years, I have escaped this golden prison of mine in the world of politics that I have occupied off and on since nineteen ninety seven. Twice I have escaped to go back and work for ESPN for a time, largely simply because I wanted to enjoy what I do. This is why I do these terrible songs in this podcast, because it's just a little stupid, silly thing that makes me laugh and maybe it makes
you laugh. And here I thought, Okay, here's an opportunity to go work for ESPN and just do fun things and reminiscent things of my childhood in the media. I mean, I was thirty three years old today I showed up at ESPN. In fact, I was still thirty two years old. It was just before my birthday. It was nice to be nostalgic. It was nice to be giving scores. And then, of course, as the elections approached in twenty sixteen, in twenty twenty, I said I'd better get back to work now,
and I did, and here we are. But while I was at ESPN the second time, one of the joys of that assignment, in addition to getting to do a few baseball games with mixed results as a play by play man with mixed results and SportsCenter and go back to ESPN for the first time since nineteen ninety seven and be Rip van Winkle, Where did these eighty seven
extra buildings come from? In addition to that, one of the joys was that several times they sent me to Washington to fill in for Michael Wilbon and co host with Tony Kornheiser. Pardon the interruption. I loved working with Tony and he could not have been nicer nor more supportive to me, and we had a great time, and
I'd do it again in a heartbeat. But one day, in the very well equipped newsroom that they occupied at ABC News in Washington, in their building, I was seated out in the middle of the newsroom and talking to the executive producer of the show, and over his shoulder I could see into his office where he had three TVs. One of them was on Fox News, one of them was on CNN, and one of them was on MSNBC.
And it was the middle of the day. We were going to tape in an hour or two when we were preparing the show, and I was looking at the producer and we were talking. I don't know about what, but it was an interesting conversation. And yet my few kept drifting over to those three TVs that were framed right over his left shoulder, because they were the three
news channels. Fox News was in a commercial. On CNN, there was a pundit, a young woman that I also used to go out with, who I lived with in fact more or less for three and a half years. And then on the right channel, the one with MSNBC, Katie was anchoring. So we have two television networks, two of the three major news operations hebex live in Girlfriends of Mine, and the third one, Fox is in commercial. And I finally said to the executive producer of the
pardon the interim show, turn around, look at this. See Fox is in commercial. I used to live with her. I used to live with her on MSNBC. If when Fox comes back, Laura Ingram is on the air, run over to your TVs because I think a bunch of gold coins will come out of that bank of TVs. Because you have just hit the Keith Olderman girlfriend Jack Pott. I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank
you for listening. Count on. Musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip Schaneale arranged, produced, and performed most of our music. Mister Ray was on guitars, bass, and drums, and mister Shaneale handled orchestration and keyboards. It was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including some of the Beethoven compositions, were arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. Its music
is the Olberman theme from ESPN two. It was written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by Nancy Faust, the best baseball stadium organist ever, and everything else was pretty much my fault. So that's countdown for this. The one hundred and forty sixth day until the twenty twenty four presidential election, the two hundred and fifty fifth day since convicted felon Donald J. Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected
government of the United States. Use the July eleventh sentencing hearing, use the mental health system, use presidential immunity if it happens, use the not regularly given elector objection option to stop him from doing it again. While we still can. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow bulletins as the news warrants till then, I'm Keith Oulderman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck, and this episode has been dedicated to
the memory of my friend our refinement. Countdown with Keith Oldreman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.