KAMALA'S SECRET WEAPON: PEOPLE REALLY LIKE TIM WALZ - 8.7.24

like him. In a time when fifty percent approval for a politician is a landslide of support, when the very few, most earnest and most honest politicos are still just tolerated. When we have had a decade one of the most dislike humans on the planet, hating everything and everybody, the idea that the Democrats are running not one but two

likable candidates is staggeringly important and simple and novel. I mean, when you get literally one hundred words into the founding document of this nation, the Declaration of Independence, you hit the unalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Happiness. Tim Walls is happy. Tim Walls is happy to be living here, happy to be fighting to help other people become happy. And now to join Kamala Harris, who is also happy and who smiles like a person Trump isn't happy.

At every moment of what should be rapturous success. Trump is degrading somebody else. He's embittered, he's angry, he's the victim, he's been shortchanged, he's threatening revenge. And he hasn't even digested the newest new Paul. And yes, they continue to be all Kamala, and I will review them in depth in a moment. But to finish up this point, Trump has dug up from the garbage dumps of this nation, every slob who wants to force his will on you.

The latest of them is this robot dvance. Every slob who believes that for him to succeed, somebody else must fall, preferably one hundred somebody else's must fall. They're evil, they're greedy, they're malignant, But at their core they fulfill hl Mankin's priceless definition of puritanism, the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy and it's not a one way street. In response to them, we have become angry and self righteous, and I put myself at the top of that list.

And then Vice President Harris steps out of the background, smiling and laughing and underscoring a point I made two weeks ago. When the hell have you ever seen Trump actually laugh? And now here's Tim Walls and he's been the vice presidential candidate for eight hours and he's not just telling dad jokes. He's telling some dirty dad jokes.

photo of JD. Vance in a podcast appearance seated either on a love seed of some sort of divan maybe, legs spread as far apart as they can go, man spreading. The pros call it as he sits on a large, wide chair or a small narrow couch. The couch is JD. Vance's dead bear cub and all credit to the Vice President.

Kamala Harris barely knew Tim Walls last week, and by Monday he had vaulted over her favorites who supposedly carried guarantees of guaranteeing states like Pennsylvania or Arizona, and barely into day two. Is there any question that as good as Senator Kelly and Governor Shapiro might be as leaders or pola petiticians, is there a chance they could do for this campaign what Tim Walls can do? Do you want to hear what Tim Walls says next? Do you you know like him? I don't like quoting Politico, but

they got it exactly right. Kamala Harris loved Tim Wallas's governing record in Minnesota, his biography and record of winning tough races resonated with her, and most of all, she just really liked him. I also don't like videos of the phone call. They are universally cringe except this one. The words beautiful, enthusiasm, enjoyed, and joy are all used in this phone call, and not ironically and not by the goddamned candidate about himself. These two people get it.

America is so worn out by and so done withhappy weirdos. Would you be my.

wrong with this weirdo? Thank goodness, the Trump people took this well, it is instructed that the Trump cult, having spent literally five years focused on nothing but Joe Biden, has three weeks after his departure, still not come up with one attack line against Kamala Harris. They were convinced she was going to pick Josh Shapiro, so they had attacks ready on him, and now they have nothing but Nicki Haley accusing the Democrats of anti Semitism because they

didn't pick him. When Trump admitted to owning a book of Hitler's speeches which he kept on a night stand in his bedroom, and Trump is openly anti Semitic, and she bowed to him after insisting she never would. They threw everything at the wall at the tim walls. Am I right? I can hear him making that joke. Maybe I'm learning something. Not only did nothing stick to that wall or walls, but there is no evidence that any

of it even hit the walls. Steven Miller insists going to turn the Midwest into Mogadishu, which would be nice and racist if any of Trump's supporters knew where the hell Mogadishu was, or if they were certain it was not some kind of delicious foreign food. Kevin McCarthy says, Walls was known as the Bernie Sanders of the House, and it was like, wait, is that is that an insult? People like Bernie Sanders. People who don't like the policies of Bernie Sanders, like Bernie Sanders. They look at him

and they see Larry David. You want to insult Tim Walls, Kevin McCarthy, You tell them people said Tim Walls was known as the Kevin McCarthy of the House. That's an insult. They sent JD. Vance to Philadelphia to proactively attack Walls, even before Kamala introduces him, and they have Vance stand in front of a huge banner reading Kamala Chaos, which isn't a bad line C minus maybe, especially not for Republicans, especially not for Republicans in disarray. But they can't snap

out of their one template. So in the little mandatory tableau they insist on there have to be people behind Vance. It has to look like like there's a crowd of people who agree with him, even if you have to pay them. And there are no seats, so everybody is standing behind Vance. So they're standing behind him, and because they're not all three feet tall, you can't see the

word chaos, So all you get is JD. Vance giving an impossibly monotonous speech, another one under a big banner that reads Kamala, and you're thinking, man, now, this is a surprise endorsement. And of course Vance is only out

there because Trump is taking the week off. And as the Democrats go from political honeymoon number one through the Harris Walls political honeymoon number two, on their way to political honeymoon number three, the one that is the convention, why would the Republican presidential candidate bother to appear in public? Let the freak in the eyeliner do it all while

Trump stays home and tweets. Trump's campaign is suddenly bleeding to death, and he's getting laughs scored off him by the guy who would have been about the five hundredth

likeliest vice presidential candidate in the gambling houses two weeks ago. While, by the way, all the networks carry his speech live, and Carrie Harris's speech live, and Carrie Josh Shapiro's speech live, and somebody at CNN who can read the ratings is thinking, say, maybe we should show all of their speeches live from here on in huh instead of three more hours of

Van Jones. Maybe Trump in the Bunker is in fact the best for the cult, because, on top of everything else that has gone wrong for the Republicans, Trump has turned into a moron. Yesterday he posted nothing less than very bad fan fic wherein Joe Biden storms into the Democratic Convention to take back his nomination. And I'm sitting there reading it, thinking, could you make the projection about what you would do? Trump? Could you make it slightly

difficult to deduce from what you've written? After apparently deciding to power through on what is also hands down the worst attempt to tag an opponent with an insulting nickname, the Biden fanfic was the highlight of the Trump social

media day. Face it. The nicknames are perhaps Trump's only true political skill other than the fire hose of lies that makes checking each lie impossible, and he has decided, after years of success at political nicknames, that putting a B the letter B in the middle of Kamala Harris's name is the greatest idea he's ever had. Kamala with

a bee e Kama b La. I have spent more time than I care to admit over the course of two full days now trying to figure out what the hell it means, what the hell it's supposed to mean, how he is hearing it sound in the big cobweb filled attic that is his head. Moble co maele come maybe la comabla ca mable. I see the word able in there. Donnie, sorry, punt on this one, or let JD have a try at giving her a nickname, because in the world of American politics twenty twenty four, jokes matter.

This is your fault and you are winning all this time on this topic. But at three o'clock the high school got out of class, and now they're out there with you, kicking your ass. Sometimes it happens like that in life, unbeaten, unchallenged, always at worst competitive, a perennial threat, and then one day they go right off the cliff, never to be heard from again. One day you are the best, the next day it's all gone, the muse

has packed and moved out to like Australia. Let me swing off into a baseball analogy for a moment before I run the polls crazy. I know I never do a baseball analogy. The nineteen eighty three Philadelphia Phillies had four future Hall of Famers in their lineup, plus Pete Rose. A sixth player won a Most Valuable Player award. Another one won the Cy Young Award for Best pitcher. Four

other players won Gold Glove awards. Of the remaining fourteen guys on their roster, eleven were passed or future All Stars. The Phillies won twenty of their last twenty five games in the nineteen eighty three season, but in the playoffs they faced the Dodgers, to whom they had lost eleven of twelve games during the season. It didn't matter. They beat the Dodgers in four games. They rolled into the

World Series as an unstoppable juggernaut. They beat Baltimore and Young Cal Ripken in Game one at Baltimore, and many observers thought the nineteen eighty three Phillies might sweep the World Series. And then the sun rose and they awoke on the morning of Wednesday, October twelfth, nineteen eighty three, and the Juggernaut overnight had become a bunch of washed up old trumps. Phillies led Game two one to nothing

in the fourth inning. They blew that lead. They only scored six more runs in the entire rest of the Series, they benched Pete Rose and there was a huge controversy. They lost the World Series in five games. They got rid of Pete Rose, they got rid of two of the Hall of Famers, most of the All Stars. The award went. They next won the World Series twenty five years later. And a little known baseball fact, it was

all because they tried calling her Combbla. They didn't. But how great would it be if they had Marist polls for PBS Harris fifty one, Trump forty eight. Harris by three. Previous poll, Trump by one Marist for PBS. Who do you trust more on abortion? Harris fifty six to forty one. Who do you trust more on preserving democracy? Harris fifty three to forty six. Who do you trust more on the economy? Trump? But by only three. Who do you trust more on immigration? Well? This is the killer right,

Trump's real chance to survive the Harris tsunami. Yes, the pole says they trust Trump more on immigration only by six. That is as startling a poll number as I have seen in two years. Swing state polls Redfield, Wilton. The polling was done Saturday. New Mexico is Harris by seven. Minnesota is Harris by five that may rise. Arizona is Harris by one. In this poll. It had been Trump by three. Pennsylvania is Trump by two. In this pole, it had been Trump by four. Michigan is Trump by one.

In this poll. It had been Trump by three. Georgia is Trump by two. In this poll it had been Trump by five. Nevada is tied at forty Wisconsin is tied at forty three. Same pole. Harris approval up by one point in Arizona and Georgia. Up by three points in North Carolina, up by five in Wisconsin. All of this, all of these numbers before Tim walls happily for Trump, he can turn to his in house geniuses like senior campaign advisor Chris Losavita and spokesperson Caroline with A k

Levitt los Avida. July twenty fourth, reliable sources confirm Kamala to pick Governor Shapiro from Pennsylvania. Chris Losovita from August fifth, five thirty PM breaking news. According to my sources, Kamala

Harris is not picking Josh Shapiro Pennsylvania. Caroline Levitt Yesterday's statement on Kamala's selection of radical leftist Tim Walls doesn't mention Joe Manchion supporting Tim Walls for Vice president, from proposing his own carbon free agenda to suggesting strict your mission standards for gas powered cars and embracing policies to allow convicted felons to vote. Wait wait, wait, what was the part in the middle there about embracing policies to

allow convicted felons to vote. Trump is opposed to this. Trump is a convicted felon. I think he knows clearly his spokesperson does not. Don't worry all as fine as Trump Headquarters from now on, We're just gonna mention Caroline Lovett's name, but put a B in the middle of it, so she's Carol blind lev bit. How could this possibly get any better? How could a day have gone better

for the Democrats than it did yesterday? How well? Monday at twelve I'm sorry, I'm laughing in advance Monday at twelve thirty four pm Eastern, retweeting the Writer's bulletin that Josh Shapiro and Tim Walls were the vice presidential finalists for Kamala Harris. One pundit retweeted this, adding, it's gonna be Shapiro people signed Chris silzit. Oh, that's it. Trump, That's it right there, that's it. I shouldn't say it because this is it. This will put you right back

in the race. Hire Chris Slizza. Have him workshop the Kamabla nickname. Maybe Cambabla, cub blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, something like that. Give Chris a few years, he'll come up with it. It's gonna be Shapiro people. Chris is the Crystaliza of crystalizzes. Also of interest here, somebody touches Congressman Derek van Orden brushes past him in a line going into a hotel. He wants them charged with assaulting a member of Congress because Derek van Orton

is nuts. And not only does Axios dot Com fire ten percent of its staff, but the boss makes the departed read about it in a memo that is written in that disgusting, impossible to understand axios ease. That's next. This is Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Oberman stell

ahead of us on this edition of Countdown. I was supposed to anchor NBC's cable coverage of the summer Olympics in two thousand from Sydney, Australia, but I kind of quit the job in nineteen ninety eight, so that didn't happen. Then I was supposed to anchor NBC's cable coverage of the Summer Olympics in two thousand and four from Athens in Greece, but I told them no, no, I'd rather stay in New Jersey and try to grow this new

news show on MSNBC called Countdown. And there are still former sports executives at NBC who are now retired who continually think I am insane, even though that decision turned out the way it did. I was also supposed to cover the Summer Olympics in nineteen eighty in Moscow, but then the US pulled out of those games in a political thing, so that was not my fault. But I am proud to tell you that I have not watched one minute, not one highlight from the twenty twenty fourth

Summer Olympics in in France. France. I mean, you could tell me Kamala Harris won the Olympic skeet shooting on ice gold medal yesterday and I'd say, sure, sure, yeah, she was great. I was watching. I'm beginning to think I may not like the Olympics. If this is true. My not liking the Olympics dates back to nineteen eight in my experience as part of a two and a half man team that covered the entire Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, New York. Just the two and a half

of us. The half a guy was management. He was in the office most of the time. It was rewarding, it was challenging, it was snowy cold. It was a once in a lifetime experience, and I have done everything since then to make sure that it was literally just once in a lifetime, especially after the other one and a half guys, my boss and my boss's boss got me drunk one night and then sent me to cover the skiing at sunrise and I almost did not survive it.

Next in things I promised not to tell first, there are still more new idiots to talk about. The daily roundup of the miscreants, morons and Dunning Krueger effects specimens who constitute two days worst persons in the world from the top of a mountain mountain, mountain mountain. The Bronze Worse co founder Jim VandeHei of Axios dot com, the news organization which fired fifty people yesterday five ozho and did it not just by memo, but by Axio style memo.

Axios pretty much sucks. They overextended, they paid management too much. They spent most of their time complimenting themselves. They relied on a cut c style they called smart brevity, in which they would state the basic facts of a story for about a paragraph or so and then begin to spin it with a subheadline indented that read why it matters. This was part of the memo from Jim Vanda Hi difficult changes. We're making some difficult changes to adapt fast

to a rapidly changing media landscape. Why it matters. We're eliminating about fifty positions to get ahead of tectonic shifts. And that they used the format of the publication that CEOs puts out twice a day, their newsletters, to inform the people writing the newsletters and reporting for the newsletters that they were being fired from the company. It's like I don't know, getting a pink slip inside a custom made Ford motor company. I don't know, cover for your

inside windshield. Unbelievable. Why it matters? Why it matters you might be unemployed. And there's an intented paragraph later on that reads with a little dot if your job is being eliminated, you will receive an accompanying email in the next few minutes with information about your severance package and a calendar invite for a meeting with a leader from your team and a member of the people team. We wanted to tell each of you in person first, but

the mechanics of that proved infeasible. In other words, Jim Vandeheid didn't want to go to the office in the morning. Why it matters, you may not have a job anymore. Speaking of which, the runner up worser Bloomberg News. Sure it's White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs was Trump's favorite, and sure she once tried to make a thing out of the Vice president saying the as in the point here, And she did a lot of stupid stuff and a lot of bad coverage and a lot of absolutely the

worst elements of Washington inside the Beltway. We just talked to each other and have no idea that there are human beings affected by this kind of insider access stuff. Sure she did that. On the other hand, she was apparently reportedly fired because Bloomberg blew the embargo on the rescue mission the trade of hostages that got the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich back they reported it too early. She was the principal writer on the story, so naturally

she got fired. As some He wrote, I haven't heard the last time that a reporter actually hit send on their own story. Unless it's a one person website, even at axios, they don't get to say why it matters. An editor gets to say that. And so the Bloomberg editor in chief, John Micklethwaite, disciplined staffers for jumping the

gun on the dramatic deal. This according to New York Magazine, and he didn't seem to fire any editors, or if he did, they were not as prominent in the organization as this Jennifer Jacobs, who was fired because the story she wrote was put out before the embargo was lifted.

There may be other details to this. Perhaps she told her bosses that the embargo had already expired, or that she had authorization from her sources, or that everybody there at the White House team for Bloomberg said it was okay. But we don't know any of that. Right now, it just looks like Bloomberg fired the reporter because the editors did something wrong, once again in the story of journalism.

But our winner, Congressman Derek Van Orden of Wisconsin, we have talked about him too many times for me to go into a review about him and the fact that it looks like he has PTSD and has never done anything about it. He was about twenty five years in the military and the wear and tear seems to have gotten to him. Plus he's a Republican from Wisconsin, so

he's an asshole. However, Rep. Van Orden was in line for the morning event at the Republican Convention in Milwaukee and happened to find himself trying to get into the Fister Hotel. That's right, They've kept the name Fister for a century, the Fister Hotel. I'll meet you at the Fister. Also, the Fister is supposedly haunted by people who were really bothered by the name Fister. I suspect, were people sentenced to eternity in the Fister Hotel? Where were you sentenced? Well?

I went to hell for a thousand years. Where did you? Oh, it's much worse than Hell. I went to the Fister Hotel pfi st er Fister. Anyway, I'm getting away from the point here. He was in line, Van Orden was, and if he's going to purgatory, he's definitely going to

the Fister. Van Orden was in line along with the members of the protest group Code Pink, including one newer Jagama, a twenty four year old woman who was in line apparently just in front of Van Orden in this security line to get in during the Republican National Convention along with other members of Code Pink. The congressman seemed to

touch her gently to get her to move. When the line towards the security box began to move, she said we're moving, or he said we're moving, and she moved, and she grumbled about it, and she said something wise, and then she walked back in front of him, which is where she had been before the line was moving, and he then says, ma'am, you'd better watch it, and begins to claim that she has cut in front of him. She was already in front of him, and Van Orden

then accused her of political violence. You just assaulted a member of Congress. Van Orden is about a foot taller than this woman. He said he'd be filing a police report. He told policemen on the scene that he would do that, and as usual, the real victim here is always Derek Van Orden. A helpful cop then says to another officer, she just shoved a senator. There was no shove, and Van Orden is not a senator, He's barely a congressman. Van Orden is seen saying this blank ain't happening anymore.

Then the police bodycam video, which reporters were told did not exist, suddenly existed again and it was released, and on it you see it the way I've just described it to you. There's a woman standing in front of a congressman. A line starts to move. She doesn't move fast enough for him. He tells her to move, She moves and mouths off to him. She moves back in front of him where she was, and he accuses her of well, to use the parlance of the time, an

attempted assassination. Well almost Then there is a conversation between Van Orden and one of the cops. The questions one of the cops asks Van Orden, They're gonna ask is did you feel pain? Van Orden replies, I have really bad hips. Okay, so pain. The officer asks again. Then Van Orden pauses and says, yes, my hip, my hip hurts. I mean it hurts already. Did she exacerbate it? I don't know, but a hip check is a hip check. Van Orden was a Navy seal. He was deployed five times,

but oddly go look up the five deployments online. The only one you'll find named that he boasts about is going to Bosnia, where I guess he suffered a hangnail. I don't know if he received the Congressional Medal of Honor, but I'm sure he thinks he did. Congressman Derek Oh oh, I have been mortally wounded my hip parts. Oh nos, it's an act of political terrorism. This tiny woman, five foot nothing just knocked me to the ground. My legs have fallen of Oh no, oh, I'm bleeding. I'm dash.

He actually murdered me. Van Orden two Day's worst person in Oh no, the world soft as a great. The alarm goes off. It is pitch black in my room at the Swiss Acres Motel. It is Valentine's Day and I am still drunk. Keith knew he was in trouble, but I was also twenty one years old, and in fact, my twenty first birthday had only been eighteen days earlier. So somehow I survived, showered, dressed, packed, and I mean I packed two cassette tape recorders, four sets of batteries,

an audio processing machine that weighed like fourteen pounds. The nine volt batteries it took, I think it was a dozen of them, a telephone, a backup telephone, twelve assorted patch cords, two loose leaf notebooks, about eight pens, two microphones, two extra pair of socks, and I got dressed, two full sets of thermal underwear, shirts, sweaters, snow pants, snow shoes because it was eleven degrees below zero that morning.

I got something quick to eat at the commissary, and I made it out somehow to the line for the bus from the Lake Placid Olympics Center to the Lake Placid Transportation Center to Lake Placid's own White Face Mountain, then onto the snow track the open penned mountain tractor that went up the side of Whiteface Mountain and took me to the finish line of the nineteen eighty Olympic Men's downhill ski final still drunk. That is how a

reporter covered the Olympics nearly forty three years ago. You drank, you woke up, you went, You stood near the finish line, and when the skiers completed their runs, you hiked or wobbled over to them and you took out your microphone or your pen and you interviewed them, like two minutes after they had finished hurtling towards you down the hill. You could see almost nothing of the race from there.

There were no TV monitors. Basically your only clue was the sound of the crowd that would give you about thirty seconds worth of warning that the skier was coming over the near horizon and you should be prepared to

flee just in case he or she wiped out. Also, you were on top of a mountain at the dead point of winter, and whereas it might have been a balney eleven degrees below zero in the comfort of the Swiss Acres motel with the wind chill, at the base of the mountain, it was forty eight below zero and there had already been four inches of new snow since the sun came up, which is where the still drunk

part came in handy. My boss is at my first job, the thousand station radio network called United pres International Audio, had decided the night before to teach me how to

drink while on assignment. My bosses were the bureau manager for that part of you PI, the late Stan Sabik, who had hired me, and Sam Rosen, the sports director of the network, who not only somehow survived being my first boss, but today, just forty three years later, is still working as the television voice of the New York hockey team and is in the Hockey Hall of Fame. So I guess my reputation is a tough employee is

wildly overrated, or at least Sam thinks. So Sam and Stan kept me drinking at the motel until two am, knowing full well that I had to get on the six am bus to go cover the men's downhill because it was the two of them who had assigned me to go cover the men's downhill, And bluntly, I was surprisingly pleased with myself that freezing morning because I had

indeed learned how to drink while on assignment. I had somehow found the phone jack for the UPI phone buried under all the new snow, which of course was buried under all the old snow. Attached the phone to it, gotten a dial tone, called the office, checked the alligator clips with which I would feed the tape, and all was well until I went to put a cassette tape into the cassette recorder. I didn't have one fat lot of good two cassette tape machines. Gonna do you without

a cassette to sticking one of them? I looked forlornly around the base of Whiteface Mountain, twelve hundred feet above sea level. As we were. There was a surprisingly nice chalet and a decent restaurant, but there were no radio shacks or other electronics stores. There was, however, one other radio guy, Jack Briggs, from the Associated Press Radio Network, the nominal arch rival to our own UPI Audio. I

knew Jack a little. He was a nice guy. I went and explained my plight, making sure to blame my bosses for my predicament. Oh man, he said, his breath turning into first steam and then ice cubes. I'm so sorry, but I can't give you a cassette. I'm sorry you were UPI, and I'm ap oh I laughed. That was a great line to say to a rookie reporter still drunk. Thanks to the initiation rituals of his own bosses, the possessor of one great buzz but zero audio cassettes, Jack

Briggs could tell I thought he was kidding. That's when he said, I'm not kidding. Look, if my boss, Shelby Whitfield, ever found out, he'd fire me. I suddenly wasn't drunk anymore, not at all. My boss will will fire me. Briggs was adamant. I can't run the risk of Shelby finding out. I have to confess. I shouted, how the hell is he gonna find out? Jack? I think subconsciously I was hoping to create an avalanche, which would have been a

better solution than the one I was faced with. I said to him, there's you and there's me, and we're on top of a goddamn mountain, and Shelby Whitfield, your boss is in Washington, DC, and he's a drunk. He's probably more drunk than I am, and he'd probably thank you for helping me to drink more. Briggs would not budge.

I told him I would pay him. I told him I would give him the cassette back after I fed my boss the interviews over the phone, so there'd be no evidence and he wouldn't even have to do any interviews. No good, I'm sorry, and I know you're going to tell this story about me for a while. As he walked away from me, I shouted after him. Forever. Turned out there was no radio shack and no camaraderie, but there was a West Coast newspaper reporter atop the mountain

who heard some of this conversation. I guess I yelled a little loudly at mister Briggs. Some guy standing next to a Saint Bernard told me to quiet down. He mentioned something else about the avalanches, or maybe I dreamed that part. I don't know. Anyway, the West Coast newspaper guy said he had a micro cassette machine and he would loan it to me and I could give it back to him at the media center that day or

the next one. But I had to do him because there was this really cute reporter in our UPI bureau and he really wanted to be introduced to her. And I said, I can promise you nothing but a handshake, and he understood and That's how I did not get fired. But of course a story like this has punchlines, and this one has two of them. The first is two years and a couple of months later, Shelby Whitfield asked

me to lunch. He had left the Associated Press to run the sports department at the ABC Radio network, back when that was not only a thing, but a big thing. We went to a terrific New York City Chinese restaurant near ABC called shun Lee, and Shelby Whitfield interviewed me for a job when that kind of job paid eighty thousand a year in my very nice studio apartment and a very nice part of town costs less than five hundred dollars a month later, in an interesting twist, I

found out that jobs didn't exist. I was mentioning the interview in a press box somewhere I think Madison Square Garden, and there was another kid reporter named Howie Rose, and how he is still working, he does the New York Mets games on the radio. And how he said, wait, they interviewed me for that job last year. Just an excuse for that damn Whitfield to go drink his lunch on ABC's tab. Anyway, before we started the interview for the job I did not know did not exist at ABC.

I told Shelby Whitfield the White Face Mountain? Can I borrow a cassette Jack Briggs story? And Shelby's exact reply was, I don't know. Was I going to find out? There was you and there was him, and you were on top of a goddamn mountain and I was in Washington. Only he didn't say goddamn that Briggs. He added, always trying to suck up to me, I got to tell you something I actually once promised I wouldn't tell you

if we ever met. This. When the Olympics were over and came back to the office, he told me what happened. He expected me to be happy or give him a bonus or something, and I called him a little snitch. Only Shelby didn't say snitch, just a word that rhymed with it. The other punch line is from nineteen ninety two,

and remember this happened at the nineteen eighty Olympics. I go to work at ESPN and come in a little early to launch their radio network, a story I've told here before, and there I find a friend of mine since my radio days, who I had not seen in a year or so, and he says, Hey, last month, I was at an NBA game in Washington. I ran into Jack Briggs. He heard you were going to ESPN.

He asked me if you were still telling that story about the time you got stuck on Whiteface Mountain without a cassette, And he was the only other reporter there, and he wouldn't give you a spare And I told him you were, and I smiled, and I replied, I hope you remembered to use the word forever. I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Brian Ray and John Phillip Shaneil, the musical directors of our little countdown podcast here, have arranged, produced, and performed

most of the music you've heard throughout. Mister Schaneil on orchestration and keyboards, Mister Ray on guitars, bass and drums, and their work was produced by TKO Brothers, which is the two of them and me. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. The sports music is the Olderman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN, Inc. Other music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed.

My announcer today is my friend John Dean. Everything else was pretty much my fault. And yes, part of me is still in line somewhere waiting for a van at Lake Placid, New York in February nineteen eighty. Let's countdown for this the ninety first day until the twenty twenty four presidential election, and the one thy three hundred and eighth day since convicted felon Donald J. Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.

Use the September eighteenth sentencing hearing. Use the mental health system. You've got it. President Biden used presidential immunity to stop Trump from doing it again while we still can. And also anti Semitic, anti immigration, lunatic Republicans, please stop shooting

at Trump. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. If you've suffered along with me and my voice today, I'll just mention here that I'm living in the middle of a construction site and there is every impossible debris in the air, and that's causing my voice a lot of harm. So if there's none tomorrow, blame the construction site. I'll do my best bulletins as the news requires until the next one. Whenever it is. I'm Keith Olrumman. Good morning, good afternoon,

good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.