IS TRUMP DYING OR SOMETHING? - 8.21.24

you hear Trump yesterday? Did you hear him talk? He's in Howell, Michigan, where it might as well be Alabama in the year eighteen fifty five, where they marched chanting, we love Hitler, we love Trump a month ago, and he came out at the County Sheriff's office and behind him with the cops as the props, and in front of him the local fascists all named jan an irv irv with an E. And if he had had ten times the energy and ten times the focus he actually had,

you would have said, what's wrong with Trump? Is he dying or something?

his annual South in travel bookings for Christmas. And they hospitalized him and medicated him, and he was already in there three days, and he still had not slept, He still hadn't fully left the high end of the spectrum. And he phoned me and pretended he was not in the hospital, and he pretended he had not gone sleepless for seventy two hours, and he pretended everything was just fine. And he sounded like he had been gargling with battery acid. And he sounded better in that phone call than Trump

sounded yesterday. In Ku Klux Klan City, Michigan.

done to destroy the state. The law enforcement has been decimated. The judges. What's gone on with the judges in New York. Nobody can There's no justice have They just have it out for the police. Nobody knows why. I don't understand why. From the common sense, I like to say the Republican Party is now the party of common sense. Conservative, Yeah, I guess conservative, It doesn't matter. It's the party of common sense. We want to have borders, we want to

have strong police protection. We want a military they can protect us.

contrast what the Democrats are doing at their convention. Look, we can argue policy all you want, mis Levitt, but one thing the Democrats are doing at their convention is remaining audible and intelligible to people who are standing more than five feet away. Have you ever heard Trump like this? My god? I mean, I don't think he's dying dying. I think there are intermediate stages between having every single thing in your presidential campaign turn against you in a

matter of thirteen days two weeks and actually dying. But look, if this mumbling stuff continues at this rate, they're going to have to start putting live captions over him. Shaking off his somnambulance for a second. Trump did respond to the overture from the RFK Junior camp about dropping out if Trump would give him a role in his cabinet. I didn't know he was thinking about getting out, Trump said, But if he is thinking about getting out, certainly I'd

be open to it. I would accuse Trump of lying about this. Every poll for a month has been unmistakably clear Kennedy's support has been cut by half, and that half went to Kamala Harris. And what's left is almost entirely coming at Trump's expense, and there had been talk about this last week, but maybe Trump didn't know Kennedy was thinking about it, because getting back to my original question, is Trump dying or something? Of course, it's not Kennedy

who's thinking about doing any of this. He's too busy knifing bear cubs on the parkways around fun City here or something. It's this idiot Nicole Shanahan, whom he named his quote running mate unquote because she was willing to basically finance ninety percent of their nut job campaign, and because every single conspiracy theory he does not believe in,

she does. And even Shanahan has figured this out, telling a podcast called Impact Theory that there's a choice between continuing which case, quote, we run the risk of a Kamala Harris and Wall's presidency as we draw votes for Trump, we draw somehow more votes from Trump, or we walk away right now and join forces with Donald Trump. Translation, bribe us and we will go away and endorse you.

Based on Shanahan's comments, again, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Is somewhere insisting that I don't know dangerous Wi Fi signals caused putin to go into Ukraine or something. What they apparently want for dropping out is Secretary of Health and Human Services, for him Kennedy, or for somebody they approve. Verifying as that thought is, I can answer only Secretary

of Education Betsy Debos. Whatever deal Shanahan brokers with Trump, and she says she has been in contact with that campaign and it's going well, she better do it damned fast. A friend of Kennedy's has reportedly delivered boxes to election officials in Arizona, boxes containing one hundred and ten thousand

ballot signatures. Only they had been gathered by a super pack supporting Kennedy, and such coordination between the actual Kennedy campaign and a super pack supporting Kennedy is wildly illegal. On the other hand, at this point, what other option does Kennedy have? The New York Times reports that the campaign itself gathered nine thousand signatures in Arizona. The number to get on the ballot in Arizona is forty two thousand.

So they better act quickly with Trump, or they might have nothing to withdraw from and thus nothing to negotiate with. On the other hand, I hope somebody from the Kennedy campaign has also reached out directly to JV Vance because

you know, is is Trump dying or something? Now to the self defenestration of the Washington Post and the New York Times and Politico and CNN and all the other news organizations that have disconnected their political coverage from reality and insulated their decision makers from the fact that they are burning themselves to the ground. And we'll skip for a moment. The idea that suddenly where the leaked campaign memos came from matters when eight years ago, when they

were Clinton campaign memos, it didn't matter. Oh, we can't touch it. It's from Iran. The Times really did this yesterday, really did this. I thought I was reading the onion. They did it with no sense of irony, no of meta self reflection that would make you go, all right, I'll stick around for another day or two before I canceled my subscription for the third time this year. They actually printed this, you ready. Kamala Harris's tan suit was

a surprising choice. Our fashion critic rights, Holy effing Christ, and they did it just as Maureen Daoud did it on Sunday. The Dems are delighted, but a coup is still a coup. That headline came exactly twenty nine days after Maureen Dawd wrote Lord Almighty Joe, let it go. And there's no meta there either. There's no second paragraph in which Dowd writes a paragraph owning up to her own mental faculties and their decline, and her own fitness

for office or her own age. The Post really did it yesterday and very late Monday, as well, fact checking Biden's speech and other elements of the Democratic National Convention first night. Only it wasn't about getting the facts right. It was as if there were somebody from the Trump campaigns standing over fact checker Glen Kessler's shoulder saying, if you get this long and they've in, if you put you in jail, well verse, if you make sure you

never get a dinner reservation in this town. Again, more on the thing with fact checking and the Post in moment, But first Politico did it again too, with their newsletters that, at the present rate of deterioration will be by September first or so forty percent news and sixty percent lists of birthdays, who showed up to what book party, new kids sightings of Tammy Haddad and other realizations of what used to be the self policing joke of all political

reporters that the White House Correspondence Dinner was the Oscars for ugly people. That joke. Only now these same reporters who used to make that joke, they think the Oscars is the White House Correspondence Dinner for unimportant people. I was thinking that the Times, the Post, CNN, Politico, Axios, and lots of others have become utterly self referential and designed only to be read by the Times, Posts, CNN, Politico, and Axios when Meredith Schiner published a piece yesterday in

the New Republic that makes this point beautifully. If I may, the headline, beware the pundit brained version of the Democratic Convention. Yep, the subheadline. As everyday Americans tune in to watch Kamala Harris receive her party's nomination, they should trust what they see with their own eyes, especially as DC's chattering class tries to gaslight them. I have to read some of what she wrote. It was as if she mined mind my own mind for this information and then wrote it

better than I could quote. As this class of political elites descends on Chicago this week for the Democratic National Convention. The average consumer of news needs to know they are not really coming here to workshop policy, interpret or execute progressive politics, or even discuss electoral strategy. They're coming to attend corporate sponsored happy hours, eat free meals together at the CNN Grill, and maybe, if they're really lucky, snag

a selfie with John Legend. And now more than ever, we should ask who all of this, this punditry, this hobnobbing, this naval gazing, is really four to continue, Because if this summer has revealed anything, it's that, just like the scott Walkers of your we are watching the national meetia short circuit before our very eyes. They are insular, they are unprepared, and after years of watching Morning Joe and searching for their birthdays in the Politico playbook, I feel

so seen. After years of watching Morning Joe and searching for their birthdays in the Politico Playbook, they do not see their role as speaking to us, but rather speaking to themselves. While this may seem ancillary to the main plotline of our national politics, the mainstream media own golding themselves out of civic relevance is a net negative for anyone who believes in the outcome of better, more representative, good government. Of course, she continues, the Beltway media are conservative.

This is not a novel argument by any means. It's an industry run by increasingly reac actionary plutocrats who reliably summon their charges to lead a highly effective but how will you pay for it? Pincer movement against anything resembling liberal policy. Meanwhile, there is seemingly no sin grievous enough to earn a Republican the same sort of nullifying skepticism. The Trumpists who aided and abetted the former president's attempt to overturn a lawful election remain in the good graces

of America's cable news bookers. Oh my god, I love this. Can we make it into a series? Still, we need to acknowledge that the media are conservative in the most traditional, unideological sense of the word. They are clinging to a status quo, their status quo that has not matched our reality.

Since Barack Obama was elected president in two thousand and eight and the Tea Party emerged as the energized manifestation of Ronald Reagan's nineteen eighties fevered their rules, their conventional wisdom, their savvy takes, become more stale, more detached from normal life, and more cartoonish with every passing day. End quote begin applause. Tempting as it is, I have not read Miss Shiner's

piece in The New Republic allowed in its entirety. I encourage you to do so, and to do so on their website, and I don't know, buy something from their advertisers.

I will note I have been hitting this one point for at least ten years now that the political cognizantee have not covered Trump nor any of the consequences of his raping and pillaging of America because they still haven't figured out which reportorial template fits all of this or which news cubby hole they can stuff the whole thing into. Chuck Todd, Chris Solissa, Maggie Haberman, and Ryan Lizza don't

actually exist. They are just mediocre people doing bad impressions of David Brinkley, Tom Wicker, Tim Russert, Woodward and Bernstein. They read what was written or said before, and they think, only, how can I now write that again? It had not happened by the time Miss Shiner wrote her masterpiece. But speaking of Woodward, The Washington Post actually had to be pressured into fact checking it's timid, terrified fact checking of

the first nine of the convention. The Post still will not fix its assertion claiming Trump wanted Americans to inject bleach to fight COVID was quote exaggerated. It still says because Trump later contradicted himself that he didn't really mean it when he said that women who had abortions had to be punished in some way when he said it

on videotape. The Post will not correct its inaccurate criticism of Joe Biden for saying Trump answered the Charlottesville white supremacist attack by saying, there are very fine people on both sides. But the Post insisted that there was no evidence that Trump ever sent love letters to dictators, with mister Kessler writing, we do not know what Trump wrote to Kim Jong un. Folks at Media Matters went appropriately not. Of course, we know what Trump wrote to Kim Jong un.

Trump showed those letters to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. The Washington Post fact check now has its own fact check about the Washington Post quote. Parts of the letters were revealed in a twenty twenty book by Washington Post Associate editor Bob Woodward after Trump permitted him to read the letters into his tape recorder at the White House. This article has been corrected. The problem is that's it for the corrections. The Times, Post, Politico at al are

still reporting as Miss Shiner noted for each other. I was flashed back to a day thirty five years ago when I was the sports director of the CBS television station in Los Angeles and our network got the baseball contract. This is when people still wanted to watch baseball on television. I was nominated to be the host of the pregame show for the new CBS Game of the Week, a role I would later fill at NBC and Fox and Turner. The same job at four networks would have been pretty good,

you have to admit that. But the guy making the call on this at CBS in nineteen eighty nine was some dult named Rick Losovita las Avita. There's a coincidence, and he and Brent Musburger interviewed me one Sunday morning because Brent was supposed to be the CBS baseball play by play man, but he did not know CBS was

about to fire him. The week before the season began. Anyway, los Avita, who if I remember correctly, had been a second baseman at Harvard, rather listlessly asked me whose point of view CBS Baseball should take the batter important but myopic, ultimately an irrelevancy, the pitcher, the truly uninvolved non athlete, or perhaps the second basement at the center of all the action, captain of the defense lynchpin in any play. And I said, I think we should take the point

of view of the fan. Lsavita looked at me in the eyes for the only time he would do so during the interview, and he said, with genuine surprise, the point of view of the fan? What's that? And why on earth does that matter? Bluntly? Right now, our political media is this CBS sports guy Rick Glarsovita. A couple poll notes the UVA Center for Politics. This is the Larry Sabato operation has, for the first time this cycle, moved a state from Lean's Republican to toss up. The

state is North Carolina. This is in line with polling that suggests she has closed the gap on Trump and continues to improve there. Virginia Roanoke College polling a little old closed last Friday. Harris forty seven, Trump forty four in Virginia, swing state's focal data polling for I'm a four News, also a little old. It closed last Friday. Trump by two in Arizona and four in Georgia. They

are tied in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Harris by four in Wisconsin, Harris by six in Michigan, Harris by eight in Nevada. The electoral college map based on the Siena polls Harris three hundred and thirteen, Trump two hundred and twenty five ipsos, ABC unfavorables. Get a load of this. Harris favorable opinion forty seven percent, unfavorable opinion forty seven percent, less than most others, but still positive. But this is remarkable.

Trump favorable opinion thirty six percent, unfavorable sixty percent. That's negative twenty four. No wonder he's m mean. I'm not saying he's dying. I'm just saying, is he dying? It looks sounds like he's anyway. Also of interest here the right wing responds to all of this. It's almost unbelievable, But they have gone back to blaming it all on the mastermind behind the scenes pulling the strings. A foreigner manipulating America and laying plans to continue to manipulate America

for the next quarter of a century. And that foreigner's name is Barack Obama. Bertherism reborn. That's next. This is countdown. This is countdown, with Keith Oberner still ahead of us on this editionive Countdown. I walked past the bar yesterday on a beautiful day in New York. It was forty three years ago, like last month, when a bunch of us wasted an entire day trying to find the owner of the New York Yankees in hopes that for some reason he would give us some vital information. We never

found him. After I gave up, I went home, I got a pizza. I walked past this bar down the street from my house, and who steps out the side door but the owner of the New York Yankees. And that's not even the most amazing parts ahead in things I promised not to tell first, there are still more new idiots to talk about. The daily roundup of the miscrants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute two days those persons persons in the world, world worse Eraser had

himself Jesse Waters of Fox News. This is what he said yesterday. There's a weird vibe going on. I can't figure it out. He could have stopped there and could have summarized his entire career, but he went on, there's a weird vibe going on. I can't figure it out. Barack Obama is still the godfather of this machine. He gave us Joe Biden as VP, he gave us Hillary as Secretary of State. Then he coued Joe, put all his boys with Kamala's team, and he had his wingman,

holder Vett Waltz. I don't know who Waltz is. I presume he means Governor Walls, the vice presidential nominee. They've given up trying to mispronounce Kamala Harris's name, and now they've moved on to mispronouncing Walls's name. Now the guy's a young sixty three. He's going to be doing this the next twenty five years. He's definitely going to interfere with this election. By that, Waters means Obama plans to

vote interfere. This is why we will be ending Johnny to Hawaii to get the truth about the birth certificate. This time we will dig deep and find out what really happened. Yeah, okay, Number one Fox just re embraced birtherism if you missed it. Number two Waters just confessed the greatest fear at Fox. The ongoing obsession now in its what seventeenth year? This idiot Waters speaking of seventeen years.

He's only seventeen years younger than is Barack Obama. They really think that they will be living in a world manipulated by Barack Obama until the year two thousand and forty nine, to which I say, good, have a great time. Moron. Number three, This Johnny that Eraser had Jesse ascending to Hawaii. Johnny is a houseplant. Then again, so is Jesse Waters. The runner up worser Amy Kramer, Georgia Republican Committee woman,

former TEA partier and January sixth speaker. You know this not too bright, possibly brain damaged right wing troll Jack Posobic, who's been thrown off everything. He went to the Democratic National Convention and decided to interview protesters in hopes of getting them to I don't know, I say that they were being paid by mautseetungue or I don't know, say that they have the real birth certificate for Barack Obama,

who knows. They just assume that what they would do, how they would try to cheat, break the law, do immoral things. They just assumed the Democrats and the Liberals have done that, because the Democrats and the Liberals have succeeded it and they've failed, so they must just be doing more of it. That's the way they think when they think this. Pasobic, of course, promptly got a hold of two women who turned out to be Democrats who showed up there deliberately to f with Jack Posobic, to

mess with his interviews. This didn't fool a lot of people. There is evidence that Jack Pisobic has realized now that the two women that he interviewed first at the Democratic National Committee protests were in fact people there looking for him. Pasobic disguised himself by wearing a facial covering, and everybody went and said, oh, he looks even dumber wearing facial

clothing in any event. Amy Kramer, Georgia Republican Committee woman who wore some sort of leopard print mink to the January sixth insurrection and spoke nonsense and Gibberish played a clip of Jack Pisobic interviewing these two women who were effing with him, and she didn't realize it, and she wrote, a woman admits she's going to have an abortion on stage at the DNC. Everyone thought Laura Lumer was crazy when she said it was going to happen. Lara was right.

This is sick. In no world is this okay? This woman needs counseling and mental treatment. Number one. Laura Lumer now claims that when she said that there was going to be a live abortion on stage of the Democratic National Committee, that she was being satirical. Republicans, by definition, can't be satirical because they would have to have an

advanced sense of humor. And the only thing that Republicans laugh at usually is pointing at somebody who's injured themselves, or perhaps the video from the Simpsons man hit in groin by football. But this woman, Kramer, part of the January sixth Trump event, thought this was legit, that the woman was going to have an on stage abortion. The woman added, and her name was Anarchy princess with the

handles satire. I'm also having a visectomy on stage. I forgot to mention that this did not deter Amy Kramer in the slightest Who is satire ap who was interviewed by Jack Pisobic and said she was going to have an on stage abortion and then added and a vasectomy satire ap Anarchy princess is no other person than the woman who keeps appearing at all of the Peter Navarro events, at his sentencing, at his hearings, the guy the woman who's interrupting him and holding up placards and saying you're

going to jail, And this boneheaded insurrectionist Republican still cannot process that this was a stunt designed to embarrass Posobic and anybody who would take something this stupid seriously, people like Amy Kramer, Republican Committee woman from Georgia fifth a thick in nowhere out the fifth. Okay, this was a tea party organizer. I told you about the Tea Party

when they started, we had to stop them. Then this is what they've morphed into once again, more proof of my theory that our attempts to preserve democracy do not succeed as much as do their efforts, and the stupidity of those who want to destroy democracy. They inadvertently protected. Still none of these are our winner. Our winner. Stephen L. Miller, formerly of The National Review Online, formerly of Fox News. He's been fired from a lot of places. Apparently he

does a podcast now. Nothing against podcasts, but I looked at the name here, and apparently nobody listens to it. You will have seen from Monday night at the DNZ that Mallory McMorrow, the Michigan State Senator, not only got up and gave an excellent address, she brought props. She brought a giant, like five times normal size book about Project twenty twenty five and held it up so everybody could see it and could identify what everybody from Project

twenty twenty five is insisting. Is there intimate connection with the Trump plans for his next presidency. God help us if there is anything resembling one. But the prop was a giant, as I say, book that reads twenty twenty five mandate for leadership. Stephen L. Miller writes, When it's Friday class, and this is over a picture of Malory McMorrow.

When it's Friday class, and you think the substitute teacher might be cool and she turns out to be a massive And then there's a four letter word that begins with C. He actually did this, Stephen L. Miller calling somebody else that Stephen L. Miller. She turns out to be a massive seaword. Hey, Stephen, do you have a mirror, because, in a remarkable coincidence, you too are a massive conker

in today's competition for worst person in the world. Now from the files of things I promised not to tell, and I recently went past the building, my second professional home, and I was flooded with my memories of a place called the RKO Radio Network. This is nineteen eighty and I'm nearing my twenty second birthday, and I'm working real hard at one radio network run by the United pres International Wire Service, in my second year and making around

well nearly twenty thousand dollars a year. And in September, a drunken manager had tried to get me fired, tried to fire me himself for being young. And I'll by damned if I can remember getting consecutive days off there. This was UPI in a nutshell for my first few weeks there. I thought whoever had decorated the newsroom had found the floor tiles with the ugliest design pattern in history. And then finally I saw a colleague grind his lit cigarette into that floor, and only then did I realize

that was what the ugly design pattern was. Hundreds of ground out cigarettes, years and years of ground out cigarettes in the tiles. Anyway, the main advantage to working at UPI was that everybody in what was then a flourishing radio business knew UPI, and thus they knew you, and they knew you were underpaid. The top all news radio station in the country, WCBS in New York, had already asked if I might be a candidate for a coming

opening in their sports department the spring. I'd actually interviewed with two vice presidents at this thing. The yachtsman Ted Turner, who owned the Atlanta Braves, was going to try to start something he called cable news Network, but they were not initially interested in me, and after meeting with them, I was certain they would never get it launched, let alone get an audience for it. I was working there

literally fourteen months later. I'd also been flown to Boston, like they spent fifty five dollars on me by a radio station that really wanted me to do a morning sports shift for them, and they were offering forty thousand dollars a year, twice my salary, and I was ready to do it. And I was sitting in the office in Boston trying to figure out where I could live and how late I could sleep and still get there

in the morning. And then the news director said, now, except if there's a big story, you can do the after noon sports cast from home over the phone, which is when I realized I was supposed to do the morning and the afternoon. I was essentially on the clock from five am to six x pm. And the forty thousand dollars would have had to go to my sister because the schedule would have killed me within three months.

And then there was this RKO radio network. UPI was in the unique position of having RKO as a client, so RKO heard and used our stuff all the time. And also they had from their beginning used our UPI feed as a kind of twenty four to seven constantly flowing turned on Spigot audition service. From the time I got to UPI in July nineteen seventy nine, it seemed like one radiopaerson from UPI per month was hired away

by RKO. Sometime in the early autumn of nineteen eighty, I was covering a New York Rangers game at Madison Square Garden, and the guy next to me, smoking a cigar inside the garden, right in front of all the fans, turned out to be the sports director of this RKO network. In fact, he was the entirety of the RKO sports department. But we're doubling in size. I'm going to start doing weekend sports casts, and I get to hire a new person to do the weekends. It's a union shop, so

it's fifty one dollars a sports cast. After there's ten a weekend, so you get twenty two for eighty dollars to reports for reports from the field, and you'd be my backup. Twenty two bucks from the field and a guarantee of five to ten weekend and you got to come in one day a week to book the stringers of the weekend games. That'd be free, but the guarantee is twenty six thousand dollars plus those twenty two dollars every time you have file a report from the field.

You interested, well, I did some quick math. This was about forty percent more money for about forty percent less work, and there were no five am to six pm schedules. When the sports director called me back a few weeks later to offer me the gig, I did not hesitate. His name, by the way, was Charlie Steiner. Charlie would later be a colleague of mine at Sports Center, and then he did the Yankees games, and now he does the Dodgers games, and he's been a friend for forty

two years. The network itself was also space age, shiny and new, and it had carpets, whereas UPI had the stubbed out cigarettes decorps. RKO was literally the first radio network in this country to deliver all of its programs to its stations via satellite. No more scratchy, hyper expensive phone lines. RKO came through crystal clear, and that was our pitch to the stations. All the newscasts, all the sports casts, all the features ended with the same tagline

bya satellite, this is the RKO Radio Network. And then a spot for Hubba Bubba gum. For my first few weeks there. Part of the job also included doing two sportscasts today for RKO's local station WOIR. The first time I went up in the elevator to their studio. It dawned on me that it was the exact same studio where seven years before I had been invited by the great comedians Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding along with my dad to sit and watch in amazed appreciation as Bob

and Ray did their show on WR. So basically, as of December nineteen eighty, I had accomplished all of my childhood goals. The only problem with the place was the location. RKO was on the southeast corner of Times Square, probably the low watermark in the history of Times Square. It was in fourteen forty Broadway at the corner of fortieth Street. There was a back door at forty first Street and

sixth Avenue, right across from Bryant Park. On those occasions when I filled in for Charlie Steiner on the weekdays for his morning show, which they would tape overnight, I would often be at the studios until two or three AM, and my walk home was a little sketchy. In point

of fact, I would not walk home. I would run, I mean run run from that back door at forty first and sixth I'd pass Bryant Park on my right as fast as I could passed all the drug dealers and other folks, then dart on the north side of forty second between sixth and fifth, and once you got to that corner of fifth and forty second, you were back in civilization, with good street lights and other people on the streets, no matter how late the hour, or

as we called them in New York then witnesses. Occasionally I might have to walk in Times Square itself, usually when it was daylight. What surrounded me there was about as far from today's Disneyland East Times Square as you could imagine. In fact, you could not imagine. There were porn theaters everywhere. And it wasn't just porn theaters. They were spaced part and in between them. Other businesses existed, porn peep shows, porn sex shops, and porn video rental stores.

I remember always making sure I was walking on the ho outside edge of the street, nearest the gutter, on the premise that in the event somebody tried to mug me, I stood a much better chance by running right out into automobile traffic. Besides which, I used to worry that if I walked too close to the porn theaters and the shows, and the shops and the video stores. One day,

I might just get stuck to the sidewalk. Time Square was so different in nineteen eighty and nineteen eighty one that I really can't imagine that the annual income made there from anything but porn and the RKO radio network was more than twenty dollars a year. In total. There was nothing else, I mean nothing. On weekends, walking over from my home on the East Side, I would decide which fast food place I'd be getting lunch from, somewhere on Fifth Avenue or Lex. I'd go to the nearest payphone.

I'd call the RKO newsroom desk, and I would offer to bring in food for everybody, for the simple reason that in Time Square forty years ago, there were no restaurants open on weekends. I'll say that again, in Times Square forty years ago, on the weekends, all the restaurants that existed there were closed during the day. And forget

public transportation to Times Square. I would finish my brisk, twenty five minute walk to work one night in that frigid winter of nineteen eighty eighty one and see my colleagues looking unusually pasty and drawn. You didn't take the subway in, did you, asked one of the editors, Tom Ryan. I looked at him like it was crazy. Well good. Some guy got stabbed by the stairs closest to our building. I asked if he was okay. No, he's not okay. He's dead. But they got the guys who did it.

They arrested fifty one people. One guy got stabbed to death, fifty one people were arrested. I asked if they had been restaging a reenactment of the assassination of Julius Caesar. Still, the equipment was brand new and easy to use, and the staff was all young. We all had fun, and we had parties, and everybody lived in the city, and for the most part, it was a pleasure to work there, and it was way more lucrative even than Charlie Steiner

had suggested. Those twenty two dollars voice reports from the field, they piled up fast. The baseball players went on strike that June nineteen eighty one, and every time I covered a bargaining session I could be certain of at least another forty four dollars. And if that doesn't sound like much, the rent on my very nice studio apartment never got higher than four hundred and ninety eight dollars a month. RKO's location also provided me with some wacky logistical problems.

I filled in for Charlie on most holidays, plus I did the same thing at a local radio station WNW. This made the actual Christmas into my metaphorical Christmas. If I had to fill in for both of these operations

on the same day. My schedule went like this, get into RKO in Times Square at maybe two am, tape Charlie's morning show by four am, then walk cross town very quickly to WNEW over on Third Avenue and do those sportscasts live between five thirty and nine, and then go home and maybe take a nap, but not a long one because I would have to be back at RKO by one pm to do Charlie's afternoon show, rinse repeat a lot of work. On the other hand, just one week of those days paid the rent for two months.

On a wet New Year's Eve nineteen eighty one, I treated myself to a cab to go to RKO, which put me in the bizarre position of getting into a cab on the East Side at one thirty am New year's morning and saying take me to Times Square and the driver saying, you missed it, buddy, it's been nineteen eighty two for an hour and a half. Nothing like being the only person going into Times Square while one

million people are leaving it drunk. Most of the sportscasts I did at Arkao or pretty textbook, But there did come the day that I walked in to fill in for Charlie who was at Wimbledon. So this is the summer of nineteen eighty one, and the newswires were full of this story of some unnamed American radio reporter getting into a brawl with a London tabloid writer at a Wimbledon press conference, and it slowly evolved that the reporter was Charlie, my boss, and we were going to have

to figure out a way to cover this. At first, Charlie wanted to do it in the third person and say the reporter did this, and the reporter said that, And I said, you know, I really don't think we're going to get away with that, given how much wire copy I'm seeing here, Charlie, this is probably going to be on the front page of the New York Times in the morning. Sure, enough, it was above the fold.

We're still unbeknownst to Charlie his fight took place in a corner of the Wimbledon press room, right under the camera that fed out a shot of that room twenty four to seven to every television network in the world.

Sure enough. The last item on ABC's six thirty newscast that night with Peter Jennings was a feature on Charlie Steiner fighting with the British over how they broke up the John McEnroe post match press conference, and he was pissed off because that meant he wouldn't get any soundbites from McEnroe. I managed to run home from RKO and record the report by Dick Schapp, and when Charlie got back from London, I loaned it to him. This was in July nineteen eighty one. Charlie still hasn't given me

the tape back. Every time I see him, he swears he's still looking for it. It's in a box somewhere. But I'm beginning to think he may not be telling me the whole truth about what happened to my video cassette. But my favorite RKO story is about Charlie's sudden and inexplicable obsession with the story. During that nineteen eighty one baseball strike I mentioned in the middle of this thing which stopped the season for fifty days and was really really the beginning of the end of that time when

baseball truly mattered in this country. When every day in that strike somebody on all the TV newscast set and the baseball strike is in its twenty third day, a story broke that George Steinbrenner, the owner of the Yankees, was going to meet with Baseball Commissioner Buye. Qune and a couple of other owners who realized that the work

stoppage was financial madness. As George told me years later, he was losing about a million dollars in revenue every day so that the Milwaukee Brewers could save five thousand dollars in salaries every year. Well, my boss, Charlie Steiner, decided he was going to scoop the world about this secret Steinbrenner Kune meeting. So he told me to come into the office on one of my off days and

work the phones. Work the phone. Sun. Two of us, me and the newly hired producer, my friend John Martin, were supposed to call everybody we knew and find out for Charlie when these guys were meeting and where and who would be there, and to not go home until we had nailed it down. Well, it was madness. I didn't know anybody in baseball, let alone anybody who knew where the owner of the Yankees was going to meet in secret with the Commissioner of Baseball, let alone who

knew all that and would tell me. But I tried everybody I could think of, and had already suggested to John Martin that I was just going to start dialing ten digits at random and asking whoever answered if they knew when. After about eight hours of this, well past my dinner time, I was on the phone with some executive of some West Coast team when he said hold

on a minute. I got another call, and a moment later from the adjoining room in my office, I heard John Martin say, mister Smith, Hi, this is John Martin from the RKO Radio network, and yes, RKO Radio Network, Yes, I'll hold sir. Mister Smith picked up my call again and I said, is this really two of you calling me about this crap at the same time from the same network? And I said yes, and I apologized, and I told him I was going home. If Charlie doesn't like it, I told John he can fire me, so

follow me on this because I had missed dinner. When I got back to my street on the east side, I was famished. I don't know nine o'clock, ten o'clock. The last two blocks of my walk home was always identical. I'd come up Third Avenue and then hang a right at the southeast corner of Third Avenue and fifty fifth Street. I lived at the other end of fifty fifth Street and your second Avenue. But now I was going to go pick up some pizza in a very nice place

on the northwest corner of this same block. I got the slices. The lights changed. Now I was crossing towards the northeast corner of fifty fifth and Third, which itself was the home of a famous New York bar, PJ. Clarks. Ordinarily I would never have been on that side of the street at that hour, but there I was. And as I slipped past the ancient front door, I saw the side exit open in a burst of bright yellow light, like in an Edward Hopper painting shoot out onto a

limo waiting on fifty fifth Street. Then, as I walked, carrying my box of pizza and wearing my RKO Radio Network black jacket, who emerges from that light of that side door at PJ. Clark's, But George Steinbrenner in a tux.

and said, with evident exasperation, what now. George Steinbrenner shouted, what time are you and I and Chiles meeting with Bowie tomorrow? Ah. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe my luck. Williams had not seen me Steinbrenner had not seen me. Williams sighed again for the tenth time. George nine nine thirty in the morning, George nine thirty Booie's condo. I now plastered myself against the wall of Clark's. I hope they had not seen me at all, without so

much as asking the question. I had learned at the Orioles owner and Chiles, Eddie Chiles, the owner of the Texas Rangers. They would be accompanying Steinbrenner to the meeting, and it would begin at nine thirty at the condominium of Commissioner Buie Kun. And I was wondering if I could try to fake Steinbrenner's voice and shout, Eddie, where's Booie's condo again? When suddenly I heard Steinbrenner say, Eddie, where's Booie's condo again? By now, Edward Bennett Williams had

re lit a cigar he was holding. George write it down this time five seventy five Park five seven five. I could barely breathe. Good God, they had handed me everything but the cross street. Eddie, Eddie, what's the cross street? Williams now swore, Oh, for f's sake, George sixty third sixty third in Park, five seventy five Park at nine thirty in the morning. Okay, Steinbrenner got into the limo.

It squealed off, the door closed. I wrote what I had heard on the top of the pizza box and took off at a dead run to my apartment at the corner of fifty fifth and Second, pausing only to take a quick bite of pizza. I called John Martin back at the RCAO Radio Network. I got it, John said, you got what I got everything about the meeting. John said, I'll get the Boss soon. All three of us were on the phone. Charlie did not bel leave I had gotten him any information, so I laid it on thick.

You're writing this down, Boss, nine thirty tomorrow morning. It's at Bowie Kune's condo at five seventy five Park. That's the corner of sixty third, of course. Then there was silence at Charlie's end of the phone. Oh and uh, Edward Bennett Williams of the Orioles and Eddie Child's of the Rangers. They'll be there too. I don't know, Charlie if it's just them or there are others, but those four will certainly be there. Booi's condo five seventy five

Cross Street is sixty third. Charlie started to make a kind.

I told George Steinbrenner that story once, and he laughed, like hell, I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Please share this pod with somebody who doesn't. If you can find somebody who doesn't, something happened. I guess it's all the good news. More people listening than ever before, up about twenty five percent.

and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. My announcer today was my friend Dennis Leary, and everything else was pretty much my fault. So that's countdown for this the seventy seventh day until the twenty twenty four presidential election and the three hundred and twenty second day since convicted felon dementia j Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically

elected government of the United States. Use the September eighteenth sentencing hearing if it happens, use the mental health system. You have this now, President Biden, use presidential immunity as assigned by the Supreme Court. Use it all to stop him from doing it again while we still can. And anti Semitic, anti immigration, gun nut Republicans please stop shooting at Trump. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Bulletins is the news requires till the next one. I'm Keith Oldman.

Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck.