SLEAZE: ALITO, TRUMP TALK, BEFORE ALITO RULES ON TRUMP CASES - 1.9.25

one of the people destroying this nation. He should not be allowed to park near the Supreme Court, let alone serve on it. ABC News reports, and Alito actually has confirmed that on Tuesday he spoke to Trump the day before Trump's lawyers filed an emergency request demanding that Alito and the other justices block a state judge, New York State Judge jan mere Shan from sentencing Trump tomorrow for

his thirty four convictions in the election interference Stormy Daniel's case. Here, even though there is zero percent chance of jail time and probably not much more of chances of probation or fine, the convicted felon and constitutionally ineligible president elect who is running because Alito in the Supreme Court made up a new interpretation of an amendment that has never before been made,

and then made up something called presidential immunity. He still has the TikTok case in front of the Supreme Court. Now he will probably take the release of either or both of the halves of the Jack Smith report on Trump espionage the coup attempt to the Supreme Court in the next few days to try to keep those reports from ever seeing the light of day. And this human embodiment of sleas Sam effing Alito talked to him by phone less than forty eight hours ago. And what is

Alito's excuse for this complete breach of judicial etiquette? Alito told ABC the conversation was not about that case, was not about that case that was not filed till the next morning. It was about a job reference. I'll quote what he told ABC. Quote William Levi, one of my former law clerks, asked me to take a call from President elect Trump regarding his qualifications to serve in a government position. I agreed to discuss this matter with President

elect Trump, and he called me yesterday Tuesday afternoon. We did not discuss the emergency application filed today Wednesday, And indeed I was not even aware at that time of our conversation that such an application would be filed as an aside. That makes Aledo stupid. On top of everything else, we also did not discuss any other matter that is pending or might in the future come before the Supreme Court, or any past Supreme Court decisions involving the President elect.

Sam Alito to ABC News unquote bullshit. Sam Alito has lied in the case of the political flags flown over his homes and his conflict with his neighbors. He has publicly complained that the American public has had the nerve to disagree with him. He has imposed his religious nut

job cult views on cases before the court. There is an argument that he has long since passed the Chief Justice at the time of the Court's affirmation of slavery, Roger B. Tawney as the worst human ever to sit on that court a job reference a job for one of his former clerks in Trump's administration, while Trump has

business before the Court and more to come. Even if this far fetched excuse is somehow true, how could you talk directly to Trump with cases coming before the court centering on Trump to say nothing of cases to come in the years ahead, where you have essentially asked Trump to hire your former law clerk. It looks like the first half of a bribe. If you did it, that's what they'd say about you. How could he be so dense, so unaware of the hatred he has personally brought down

upon this once most respected of American governmental institutions. As to conduct that call now thirteen days before the inaugural I mean, this would be cheap and petty and obvious and horrish, and a conflict of interest, or at least, at best, the appearance of a conflict of interest, even judged against Trump's conduct. That's how bad this is. This is not difficult. Recusing is insufficient here he must be off the court. In point of fact, Alito should in

this order recuse, resign, and go to hell. And this also is not difficult. Eileen Cannon, Trump's other concier's judge ruled the DOJ can't release Smith's report on the espionage and Stolen Secret Documents report in the case, which she herself threw out corruptly. That report is still nominally vaguely in her purview, but probably not. But she also wanted and still wants to throw out the Smith investigation report

of Trump's involvement in the attempted revolution January sixth. The solution here is far easier than in the case of sam Alito. Oh, He's only talking to him about a job. The solution here is far easier. Ignore Eileen Cannon, to his very small credit. Merrick Garland is going to release the January sixth part of Smith's final report on Trump,

but withhold the document's part until a final court ruling. Doubtless, Trump and his legal whores will go to the Supreme Court and try to at least run out the clock on the January sixth stuff, just as they have gone to the Supreme Court to try to run out the clock on the sentencing in the Trump election interference Stormy Daniels case. Here in New York, an internal Department of Justice report has nothing to god damned do with a case that no longer exists because the judge threw it

out corruptly. If her superior judges at the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals do not immediately overturn her transparent payback to the man to whom she owes her job, President Biden himself must release all of Smith's report on the stolen documents on national security grounds, and if somebody in the Trump regime doesn't like it, they can prosecute Biden. All right, It's an official presidential act, and thus Biden

is immune. By the way, Biden, who yesterday said he is considering preemptive pardons for people like Liz Cheney and Tony Fauci, and I still think there should be a million more on the list, should hit Trump with one final, short, sharp shock. He should take the whole Smith report on the insurrection and the documents and release it a week from Sunday, the night before the inauguration, or crack of

dawn on Inauguration Day itself. The Attorney General, who can snatch some small part of his dignity from the jaws of humiliation, was not planning to release the two volume report before tomorrow morning at the earliest. Hold on to it, Bigfoot. It overshadow the inauguration with it every humiliation of Trump and these idiots, I mean, besides the humiliations he keeps making out of himself every goddamn day. No matter how temporary one of these humiliations is, it is a victory. Hell.

I still think Biden should retire before the twentieth for the sole reason of making just for a few hours or a few days, Kamala Harris the forty seventh president anyway, and to do, if nothing else, screw up Trump's forty seven merchandise. Meanwhile, the Eleventh Circuit Court should not only reprimand Eileen Cannon, but they should attempt to suspend her, and, however fruitless it may ultimately be, they must try to

remove her from her ill gotten position. She is the personification of the Trump Maga Republican Party, prostitution of the bench. And to the degree it is still possible, those few left in the justice system, all committed to the law and the Constitution and the idea of truth, should go

to the mats to get rid of Eileen Cannon. Ignore her ruling, release the damn report, print a million copies of it, and drop them from helicopters over every Trump property in this country, especially over his home at Muscalago. And as to the courts still hearing these cases, this is it for your entire profession, kids, for possibly centuries

to come. It is now or never. Stand up for the law and for what you have supposedly don detiquete to your lives too, or the entire structure and all of you will have to be replaced if this nation is ever to again function as what it claims to be, a system in which no man, even a fat, stupid, crazy one, is above the law. And now to your obeying in advanced scorecard. And it is hard to believe

that we could see somebody hore themselves out. And I know I'm pushing my show limit for the word horror, but it is amazing to see somebody hore themselves out worse than Elon or Jeff Bezos. Mark Zuckerberg in a expensive watch and a bad rug on top of his head bands, fact checking on Facebook threads whatever else. He owns Meta Matza what I don't even know what it's called anymore, to enable conservative lying, which is what it's for, eliminate fact checks that allows conservatives to lie and to

groom young people into believing their lies. He puts the UFC slimeball Dana White on the board of Mega Maga Zuka. He appoints a Trump flunky to a position from which he has just fired an actual journalist as a top executive. He has the Trump flunky go on Fox News to announce this change in the elimination of Facebook, essentially to

fellate Trump on Fox. Then, just in case you thought somebody was freelancing inside Meta Muda mita, Hello Mudda, Hello fada, he Zuckerberg puts out a pathetic string of tweets on threads or or whatever it's called threats. An A makes it sound like he is in a BDSM relationship with Trump, and by the way, not in the ass part, and

b makes elon musk sound subtle. Let me read this and translate it, and it's basically already a transcription of a video Zuckerberg did in which he's wearing some sort of religious pendant or something and a nine hundred thousand dollars watch and a bad rug from zuck It's time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Yes, yes, that was

free expression. That was the thing that got you hauled in front of Congress several times because people were printing damaging lies and getting away with it. Because the major failure in online communication is you let people use anonymity to smear other people and to tell lies. Nearly every problem on the Internet would disappear tomorrow. If everything written on it had to be signed, as we say, had to have your name on it. Would this increase some problems? Yes?

Would it decrease whistleblowing? I guess when was the last time a whistleblower went to Facebook or Thrills or whatever it's called. When was the last time that happened? Would there be some more risk of people trying to jump from the Internet world to real life and cause problems for people? They're doing that now. People are docksed every hour, And basically what Zucker saying is sure, you can dox them, you can slander them. We're going back to our roots.

Here's what we're going to do. One replace fact checkers with community notes. Starting in the US. He just fired the pros and let the average user of Facebook and the other meta products decide what is reality and what is not reality. And George Carlin's joke comes back into the fore here. Consider the average intelligence of the absolute average person in America who has the average intelligence, and remember that that means that all nearly fifty percent of

the public is dumber than that guy. So we're going to let those people decide what is real and what is a fact and what is not. Two, simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse. So get out all of your jokes about transgenders and your

threats against them, mar Zuckerberg and immigration. You can start using terms that were dropped from polite conversation in this country in the nineteen seventies about people from Mexico, for instance, or Jewish people. If you want, go right ahead, immigration, gender, open warfare is now permitted on Facebook, threads, Instagram, instacrap,

whatever it is. Three change how we enforce our policies to remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high severity violations and

requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action. Yes, because there were so many censorship mistakes banning Trump from the Internet basically from social media actor he tried to use social media to cause an armed insurrection in which police officers and other law enforcement officers were killed as a result of a mob filled with all kinds of weapons and militias with organized game plans to potentially hang the vice president of the United states. That's right removing

that policy because that was a censorship mistake. Four, bring back civic content. We're getting feedback that people want to see this content again, so we'll phase it back into Facebook, Instagram, and threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive. I thought you said you were going to stop fact checking the conservatives. How is it ever going to be friendly and positive again? I mean I got into an argument once on Twitter about the fact that I was

not a big fan of rap music. I think every time other than that that there have been harsh words, it's been with a conservative. Five. Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that bias employees are overly censoring content. People in Texas are less biased than people in California. Zuckerberg, you

know you're talking about Texas. If they find out that you think that the people in Texas are more fair and honest to immigrants and Hispanics and gay people, they're going to run you right out of Texas. That's not what they do in Texas. Work with President Trump to okay, just give it up. Right here. Just stop pretending in your nine hundred thousand dollars watch and your bad rug

work with President Trump. You do not work with the government to do things like this on an ordinary basis to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more as the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world, and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government. There is nothing at all in the Constitution or in any law that says

that there cannot be consequences for bad free speech. You still cannot shout fire in a crowded theater, according to the Supreme Court. And no matter what you say, if it's wrong, if it inspires bad conduct, there are results. Your company can fire you. But this idea that constitutional protections for free expression means everything goes is something that someone who is living an abject terror of being blackmailed

would say. It'll take time to get this all right, and these are complex systems, so they'll never be perfect. But this is an important step forward, and I'm looking forward to this next chapter. What is this mark Chapter eight hundred. You've been doing this how long thirty years and you still aren't even close to fulfilling the responsibilities you should have started with Delete your company. Dictatorship requires

the sublimation and perversion of media. The Nazis cut to the chase and simply eliminated private broadcasting in the thirties and controlled the newspapers directly. Other authoritarians managed to control news and communication forums by intimidation or influence, but bribing or rewarding amoral whorees like Zuckerberg and bus Musk with billions is just a new streamlining of the Hitler Stalin

Mao playbook, now the Hitler Stalin Mao Trump playbook. What a dispiriting and self destructive, self disemboweling, pathetic excuse for a human being. Mark Zuckerberg is not to be outdone Jeff Bezos, who is also all of those things. Plus I tried this not in a social setting, but in a work setting. I tried to spend part of every day with Laurence Sanchez. I don't know if he had told me he was not. I wasn't gonna say it. I can't say it. All I know is that it

would eventually disturb your brain. Jeff Bezos se is signaling he will pay to play in this space. Oh no, Zuckerberg's gonna turn Facebook and Meta and threads over to Trump and eliminate all fact checking. Ah, hold my beer. Bezos is signaling he will pay to play to so to speak, pay to play with Milania Trump. He didn't just buy a documentary about Trump's quote wife unquote for forty million dollars, he leased it. He didn't even get

ownership of it. Fuck's Matthew Boloney scooped. I've also learned that Amazon is paying a cool forty million to license the film, per three sources familiar with the deal. The price includes the Ratner documentary, which will get a small theatrical release and then appear on Prime Video, plus a previously undisclosed two to three episode follow up docuseries on the First Lady. Milania will participate in both projects. As an aside, I believe the title of this series will

be who cares? But seriously, dude, forty million dollars to Milania Trump and you don't even own it. Of course, come to think of it, that sounds exactly like Trump's deal with her. As to Trump himself, if you had any doubt it's true that every Republican accusation is a confession. Politico reporter Alex Eisenstadt has a new book coming out, and in it he says that Trump could not even get through a town hall just him, no Common, no Biden, no NICKI Haley, just him, just a foxtown hall without

being given the questions in advance. This Fox hall on town hall was a weird A year ago Friday, year ago tomorrow. Quoting CNN, Eisenstadt describes a deep relationship between Trump and those within Fox News. Eisenstadt reports that in January twenty twenty four, then candidate Trump was sent to hold a town hall with Iowa voters, moderated by Fox News anchors Brett Baher and Martha McCallum. They're not anchors,

they're opinion people pretending to be anchors. Though not all of Trump's advisors wanted him to attend, they quote were still peeved at Fox, whose coverage they continued to find antagonistic, and did not want the former president to do the primetime event. Eisenstadt writes, but Trump had a good relationship with Bear. They were golf buddies and wanted to do a sit down. About thirty minutes before the town hall was due to start, a senior aide started getting text

messages from a person on the inside at Fox. Holy s hyphen t. The team thought they were images of all the questions Trump would be asked and the planned follow ups, down to the exact wording Jackpot. This was like a student getting a peek at the test before the exam started, Eisenstadt writes. In other words, Fox was giving Trump help to finish first in his class, and his class consisted of only one student. Now you know

how Trump got through Wharton. The amazing part about this is that Fox responded by saying it would invest to Gate. It didn't like the fact that there were sources, even though every minute of Fox is sourced to some anonymous source.

But the most important part I thought was they complained about that description of Brett Behar as a golf buddy of Trump's because the implication is that these text messages were, or these pictures of the questions were gotten to Trump's people by or under the influence of, or at the direction of Brett Behar. That's the implication of this. That is the way this is phrased from a person on the inside at Fox right after the reference to a

good relationship with Bear, they were golf buddies. Fox has denied their golf buddies. Of course, since this happened, whatever actually happened, he needed help finishing first in a one man race. Of course, since then, a year ago tomorrow, Trump has gotten far crazier. And the nice thing about being in insane and constitutionally ineligible president is that you never have to say you're sorry, or take any more

crazy pills or anything that might be true. You don't have to say that, or you don't have to make sense when you talk, or you don't have to say something that just holds together as bullshit. I mean, I thought he couldn't have sounded nor looked crazier in his brain damaged Grant on Tuesday if his eyes had suddenly done a Marty Feldman and began pointing in different directions. I can't begin to tell you how much was wrong

with that news conference. We are founding signatories to two important treaties, not just to NATO but to the Rio Pact which preceded NATO. These both require us, in writing to come to the defense if any of our allies and co signatories in NATO or in the Rio Pact are attacked. We have to defend allies like Canada, Greenland and Panama. So after his latest dose of the crazy pills, he no longer needs. Trump wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America as a compromise,

I recommend the Gulf. Between Trump's insanity and reality. He wants to coerce Canada into merging with us. Actually that's cool. I like that we get their land, they get to run the government. Seems like the optimum outcome for the possibility of freedom on the continent. And he wants to buy or try out his beloved Hitler style an shlush

on Greenland at its protector Denmark. And he wants to just go seize the Panama Canal and will not rule out using troops against countries we are sworn to defend. So this could legally put us in this position. And I know Trump doesn't believe any rule applies to him, and therefore no treaty applies to him, and no reality applies to him. And he's not going to die, And if he wanted to, he could turn off the gravity. He's crazy as f but we could legally be in

this position internationally. Trump sends troops to Canada, Greenland, and Panama, and we also simultaneously send different troops to Canada, Greenland, and Panama to help them defend themselves against US. Even Trump's media sycophants, We're not ready for all of this? How not ready? This is fill in Fox News nitwit. Rosanna Scatto on the idea of buying Greenland.

as high as six. More recently, Greg Kelly told his Newsmax idiot viewers that idolizing Taylor Swift was a sin and it's in the Bible. And then he went back idolizing Trump. And just remember miss Scotto was considered the smart one to be fair in the year twenty ten. Scotto, who was a member of the family that runs some Okay restaurants here, showed off her food sophistication by on the air calling soy milk quote cow jism on the news on the Morning News at quarter to eight, cow

good Kennedy. Then there is immigration and the purge of minorities, and the growing indications that the guy Trump put in charge of all that, Stephen Miller, may not be right in the head, and the guy Stephen Miller put in charge of pulling it off maybe even less right in the head than Stephen Miller. A week after the Vegas and Nola attacks, and Tom Homan and boy is that a perfect name, home Man still insists immigrants had something

to do with both of those attacks. Something something borders something, something, terrorsts crossing something something. Let their clown voters make up their own nonsense connection I Tom Hoeman have run out of them. But the madness is not contained to the Department of Ethnic Cleansing, Norm Eisen and Thomas Joscelyn in the Bulwark quote what was the FBI doing planning January

sixth for a year? Cash Patel, Trump's dominie to serve as FBI director, asked that question during a November twenty fifth, twenty twenty two episode of Cash's Corner podcast for The Epoch Times. It was no slip of the tongue, As the title of that episode suggested, what did the FBI know before January sixth? Patel spent considerable time trying to cast the FBI as a villain responsible for January sixth.

Patel noted that FBI Director Christopher Ray had quote testified that the FBI never instigated or helped the January sixth protesters commit crimes, but citing a report that the FBI had confidential human sources in the crowd, Pttel asserted, Okay, well, that was in planning for at least a year. It's the FBI. It's a major political event taking place in Washington hours before the certification of the election, which Trump has been spending months trying to prevent, and you are

surprised that the FBI was there. The FBI is supposed to be there. Somebody is supposed to be there. Everybody else blew it. Every other aspect of that Trump administration controlled Justice Department and law enforcement officials, they blew it. But the FBI confidential program had a couple of people

in the crowd good. During the September thirtieth, twenty twenty two episode of Cash's Corner, by the way, that was the best name you could come up for a podcast, Cash's Corner, Patel said, the question that has to be answered is when did the FBI put those goes in and where and did those confidential human sources engage people who are not going to conduct criminal activity and convince them to do so. Come on, everybody, let's stage a revolution.

Battel claimed that it is the definition of entrapment, which is illegal, and you can't charge someone who's been entrapped, and he wondered who was running this confidential human source network and reporting it to FBI Director Chris Ray. Petel added he would venture a guess that once we see the documentation from January sixth, you will see the FBI's confidential human source corruption cover up network on blast and he accused the FBI of inserting these human sources into

these matters. Petel asked rhetorically, why why would you say January sixth? Because they wanted a political target, a political prosecution, not one based on law. In fact, it's an interesting article the Bulwark, Thomas Joscelyn and Norm Eisen. The problem, of course, is that as a corrupt head of the FBI with a screw loose cash, Patel could easily fabricate documents or order equally maniacal subordinates to do it for him and pass them off as evidence of whatever it

is he thinks happened here. And then we have jumped immediately into the Stalin Purge trials of the nineteen thirties with fabricated evidence against Chris Ray. No, Biden's got a powerdon Chris Ray, who's not that cleaner record. But now I's got to everybody else. Is all going to come back to. Liz Cheney was in the crowd dressed as I don't know, Abraham Lincoln, like in the Manchurian Candidate.

She was wearing a Lincoln beard and a hat. That these people are not very bright is established fact that I cite often It does not change the fact though, that they can still be very dangerous. But sometimes there is comic relief in the stupidity of the Greenland thing. The Midas Network quotes Danish media on truth social Trump posted a video of a man from Greenland asking him to purchase the Danish colony. As it turns out, the man, Timmy Zeb tim eh Zeb Zeeb, is a convicted drug dealer,

according to dr News quote. But Timmy Zeb, who on Trump's profile has been made the face of Greenlander's desire to become part of the United States, has a long list of convictions behind him, most striking as a verdict from twenty nineteen, where Timmy Zeb was sentenced to four years in prison in one of Greenland's largest cannabis cases. Back in two thousand and nine, Greenlandic police described how Timmy Zeb was known for crimes that were dangerous to people.

This happened in connection with Timmy Zebe's escape from prison. Well, I mean, he not only fits right in with Trump, he should be in the cabinet or at least ambassador to Greenland. Mister Zeb also apparently said Americans were too fat, which I guess means that how fat he appears in his video, which I would roughly describe as ten pounds and a five pound bag would be just fat enough. Yet through all this, Trump of course reserved the ultimate

crazy about January sixth to himself. He has now dropped the hint of a new plot line coming up, suggesting maybe January sixth was done by I can barely say it has Belah, you might as well Trump have said January sixth was a conspiracy led by the Visiting Nurse Association and the Los Angeles Fires. As a former resident, I'm a mess. You may have heard it. I'll go into this at length later. The fatal, arrogant, and worse mistake of Trump and the cult is that the only

force on earth that matters is money. When say, Florida is rendered unlivable at some point in the next fifty years, five years, five months, whatever it is, by winds, by fires, by storms, by nature, by God, whatever, all the money will mean nothing that moment when you discover that Trump is wrong, that money is not the only force in the universe that matters, was on public display in the last few days at the height of the disaster, as others perished and fire after fire broke out a celebrity

house flipping guy or a real estate jackass or something. A week ago was touting the great investments in Pacific Palisades, where much of the destruction occurred posts this. His name is Keith Watserman and on behalf of all the Keiths in the world. I'd like to apologize for this. Does anyone have access to private firefighters to protect our home in Pacific Palisades? Need to act fast here all neighbors' houses burning. Will pay any amount, thank you, Please save

my luxury home firemen. I can pay more than those people who will pay you to save their children. I'm even in this America, even in this America that has been building since I was a child, in which people believe that money can get them anything. And remember there is an eternal life cult around the idea that if they spend enough money, they can live or be frozen and resuscitated in a thousand years. They really believe this.

They can extend their own life last to one hundred and twenty five years and then get frozen and resuscitated. Ted Williams was right seeing the condition his head is in. No, I haven't well look around the room later. It's got to be here somewhere. Does anyone have access to private firefighters to protect our home? And Pacific Palisades need to act fast here all neighbors' houses burning will pay any amount,

thank you. So just picture this. Somebody says yes to this and sends private firefighters weaving through everybody being evacuated from Pacific Palisades to go in and just save this one guy's house, as if that was physically possible. When winds of up to one hundred miles an hour, we're blowing the fire dozens, perhaps one hundred miles across southern California in a forty eight hour period. This idiot believes that his home and his home alone can be saved

by private firefighters because there must be private firefighters. There must be for him. He just didn't know about it beforehand, or he would have signed a contract and probably left a five dollars tip. Wait, it gets worse. This is this same guy, Keith Wasserman. Also on ex Twitter in September, Trump reposts, your automobile insurance is up seventy three percent. Vote for Trump. I'll cut that number in half. He retweets this and adds property taxes too. Please, you know

what property taxes go to. Yeah, trying to stop your goddamn house from burning down, and your neighbor's house and everybody else's house, because it's cheaper that way and more efficient, because you can't just go into a burning neighborhood and go thirty two seventy one will save that one. The rest of you can go to hell. I never dreamed the cut taxes so your house burns down party would

let my house burn down. Thousands of buildings destroyed by the mill of yesterday afternoon, at least seventy thousand evacuated, more than one million people without power in Los Angeles. The total number in Southern California in the Greater Area was approaching a million and a half. Wind gusts up to one hundred miles an hour to the point where they could not fly those planes dropping the water and

the fire retardant. But only when you discover a piece of trivia like the following does it become personal and help you clarify your mind about why we continue to tempt climatic disaster and the local tragedies that will precede it like this in Los Angeles, when we imagine something like this every day, every day, a little worse than the last one. The denial of disasters from my own time living in Santa Monica, where I found out yesterday that my old house is literally the last time I

looked three blocks south of the mandatory evacuation. All right, I know I've taken up a lot of your time, but there's much more to come. Also of interest here in an all new edition, the guy in charge of the Washington Post actually is quoted by a staffer who resigned as having asked a reporter for the Washington Post quote, what can we do to attract Trump supporters? Well, he's doing what you could do. Go out of business. That's next.

This is countdown. This is countdown with Keith Albumen still ahead of us on countdown. To paraphrase the old radio joke, No it's not leaving here. Fine, I hope it sounds fine. The episode has been a little ragged. I want to go into length and distance about why it has been so ragged. The short answer to that is two words, three words. Really, Southern California fires. I used to live there, and I mean there at the intersections. Believe it or not,

there's still first more new idiots to talk about. The daily roundup of the miscrants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's other worst persons in the world, the bronze worse. Jen Saki. Jen Saki is not terrible on MSNBC, although if they had wanted to hire somebody to do a Rachel Matdow impression, they should have gotten somebody to commit to the bit like Abby Elliott used

to on SNL. She does, however, have that little I'm going to explain this to you like you were a child tone to her voice. She's gotten that now very nicely. But boy, oh boy, oh boys, can she not shake the propagandist part. That was not the idea of MSNBC. When the Democrats aligned with our positions as we thought them out, and our guests believed that was great. When they didn't, we slammed Democrats. When we made mistakes, we

apologized for them, even in past lives, in past careers. Nope, Jensaki has now descended into rationalizing fatal mistakes made by Jensaki and the presidential administration for which she worked four years ago. Talking on MSNBC about Merrick Garland, who right now will go down into history as one of the great and perhaps final villains of American democracy. This is

a man, Jensaki said, who has an unassailable resume. I believe you have the tense wrong there and views the job as it should be viewed through the prism of the law and history. No, clearly that's not true. But I do wonder if that at that moment in history, he was the right choice for the job. She went

on a long monologue about her internal wonderings. She wondered if she should have helped support Garland from the White House press podium or gone along with not addressing the second Trump impeachment, or much of January sixth from the White Ho press podium. A lot of wondering and that sort of meanderingly went to her excusing herself for not

being more aggressive towards Trump. We can't predict the future, she said, Funny, Jen, everybody else did, everybody else, pretty much in the Democratic Party, everybody else in America told you lock him up, send him to ELBA, put him and everybody who was involved in this, and put him away for good forever, and most importantly, do it before he regains strength. You are talking about the Godzilla of politicians. Oh,

you can't predict the future now. Of course, Jensaki is still doing the job she quit in twenty twenty two. Stop giving these ponderous, overwrought commentaries that somehow always end up with you distancing yourself from the disaster you participated in, and then end with you forgive yourself. You failed, you

all failed. You may have cost America representative government, but no, write a long commentary about how you wonder now if Merrick Garland at that moment in history was the right choice for the job he wasn't, or at any other point in history right now, If you want to do a commentary about Merrick Garland having vaguely worked for him, with him or with the people who chose him, I think you should devote it to wondering whether or not he's actually a Democrat, a liberal, or a believer in

representative government. How about that for a commentary. On the other hand, your disgrace, your failure, has been rewarded with the high paying TV job that you don't do very well and you clearly don't understand the purpose of So you got that going for you? Runner up worser. We'll let Eric Erickson represent all the fascists who now have trumpsomnia. But also playing back to what Jensaki said, you can't

predict the future. Eric Erickson is one of I don't know how many ten million Republican commentators, all of whom, all of whom have somehow memory hold January sixth and changed its meeting, altogether, changed it utterly beyond all recognition, as if the Civil War was in fact the war of Northern aggression to destroy Confederate property rights, you know,

the slaves. On January sixth, twenty twenty one, at three o'clock in the afternoon Eastern Standard time, Eric Erickson, a Conservative who came from such humble beginning beginnings that his family could only afford the one name. Eric Erickson tweeted, shoot the protesters, wave the rules, impeach, wave the rules, convict, waive the rules, deny the ability to run for election again.

Possibly the only time and certainly the last time. Eric Erickson was right, and today he and all the rest of them have rationalized putting the man he wanted to impeach, convict and deny the ability to run for election again. Back in the White House to run the world again and rename it the Gulf of America or the gulf

between Trump's insanity and reality. Eric Erickson representing that group, and that group is now pushing, if you have not heard this, for an investigation into the death of the terrorist Ashley Babbitt, the one he said should have been shot along with all the other protesters. I'm not a big fan of shooting people. I'm certainly not a big fan of shooting people who are expressing political opinions, even if they are completely wrong. And they want to shoot me,

but shoot the protesters. That was a pretty good idea, and we didn't do it. Instead we got Merrick Garland shoot the protesters. And now they want to investigate the death of Ashley Babbitt. And you know already where this ends. This ends with indicting people who were involved in protecting the capital for the simple reason that not only does Trump have to be cleared and made the actual victim of all this, but they want to lay the groundwork for when they do it again. And they'll do it again,

I mean, if there's another election. Instead of an investigation into the death of Ashley Babbitt, may I suggest this instead, which will go over really big, I think in conservative circles. How instead about doing this, you fascists, bring Ashley Babbitt back to life again. The way you convinced your dim bulb occultists that you could bring JFK Junior and JFK back to life again, and you can vince them that you could bring RFK Junior back to life again. That

didn't go so well. Hey, Robert, are you over? Oh you're on, You're on, You're on FaceTime. Okay, take that in the other room, please, AnyWho. I think they should bring Ashley Babbitt back to life so she can go and do the same insane, stupid, self destructive, anti freedom, anti American conspiracy theory crap again and the officers can shoot her again now again. I will be happy if they bring her back to life and they shoot her and they just wound her and she recovers. The point

will have been made by that. And with all of this, this winner is very brief and very much to the point. The CEO Will Lewis of The Washington Post also known as The Washington Post going out of business sale, the Washington Post, what's left of it? The Washington Post no longer at this address. The Washington Post now printing three times a month. This is from Semaphore News. The Post's former deputy Democracy editor, Mary Joe Murphy, quietly quit in

response to owner Jeff Bezos killing its presidential endorsement. She wrote about it on a Facebook page for New York Times alumni Quizzlings. She wrote, are inside the house that Graham's and Bradley's, Woodwards and Bernstein's built. She recalled here's the fun part that CEO will Lewis had asked a reporter she managed quote what the Post could do to attract Trump supporters parenthesis, I don't know, she wrote, lie

to them. Will Lewis Jeff Bezos, proprietors of after the upcoming doubtless inevitable merger will Lewis, CEO of The Washington Post, Penny Saver and Hot Singles News two days Whisson in the world. Finally to the number one story on the countdown and things I promised not to tell. And if this episode has seemed a little ragged, a little more ragged than usual, I have an explanation, if not an excuse.

I spent much of Tuesday night not sleeping, but watching and listening to local television and radio coverage of the disaster in southern California, specifically in Los Angeles, specifically in the area basically north of Santa Monica along the Pacific Coast Highway. Other fires, aided by wind gusts approaching one hundred miles an hour, afflicted the other parts of the area,

and it is not fire season. I used to live there, and as I said, I was almost an honorary native in the news business in Southern California, in TV, particularly if you get to seven years on the air there in local news, you can be there forever. There were people with whom I broke in in Los Angeles television in nineteen eighty five who are still on the air, and I'm not being critical of them, nor the fact that I got to like six and a half years and that was it. So I didn't quite make my

permanent honorary native status. But I enjoyed my time there. It was my second favorite place to live in the world and was always an option that I considered moving

back to as recently as twenty and sixteen. In any event, I have affection for la and I have affection particularly for that part of LA that was so immediately affected, with so many homes lost and so many people evacuated overnight Tuesday that I could not stop listening to what was, of course a radio station, an all news station that I used to work for for the better part of my first trip in La KNX. Then they did a marvelous job, not surprising. People who are working there are

people I worked with there. In any event, I went back to LA for a second time to work for Fox in nineteen ninety nine, two thousand and two thousand and one, and I lived in Santa Monica, and in fact I lived on Pacific Coast Highway in the area in which Santa Monica slowly evolves into Malibu. There were a couple of country clubs and tennis establishments just north of me. It was a beautiful house. It was a house that would I believe was built in nineteen twenty

seven by a Hollywood producer. It was a house there that had the inter section of Pacific Coast Highway and the California Incline, a key visual from the movie from the sixties, It's a Mad, Mad Mad Mad World. The California Incline is this hill that goes up from the Pacific Coast Highway to Santa Monica proper. And so this house, four stories tall, seven bedrooms and priced ridiculously low, had at one end past the little spare guesthouse and the pool.

Beyond that there was a gate, There was the beach, there was the ocean, and there was off in the distance somewhere Hawaii, which no, you could not see from my house. It was great. There was one problem and one fear, and it's why I'm bringing all this up now, other than simply to say this is part of me that was in spirit there as this has unfolded, as it is for all calamities in that community. There was one problem with the place. When it was built. It

was on the beach. Santa Monica was not necessarily unpopulated, but it was difficult to get to. There wasn't a Pacific Coast Highway per se, and in any event, traffic was not like it was in nineteen twenty seven. By the time I lived there in nineteen ninety nine, there was a red light at the California incline that you could sort of reach out of my house and touch, which meant that at peak driving hours, which are in

California daylight. The rush hour starts at daylight and ends at the sunset, except in winter, when it's about four hours longer. At that light, whenever it would turn red on Pacific Coast Highway, there would be sixty seventy cars idling going in each direction, So a constant rumble was in the background there, and when there wasn't a red light, you were treated to this sound from Pacific Coast Highway echoing through the house, except at night when it was

motorcycles making that sound. Soon after about the third or fourth day that I lived there, I began to find myself involuntarily making those sounds myself while I was on the phone with people who said are you okay, and I would say I'm fine, even when I was seated in the back of the backyard visiting with my neighbor the beach and the Pacific Ocean. So that was the problem,

and I didn't stay there that long. But there was also something else that worked on my mind then, and I didn't really fully understand it and why it was such a problem until I watched the fire in Santa Monica on the same street on which I lived. Consume most of the area and the structures on each floor of this magnificent nineteen twenty seven underpriced four story building built by the way like a British castle. There weren't even cracks in the masonry, and it had been there

through countless earthquakes. On each floor there was a small door, and inside it there was on a wheel on a big roof, sometimes rusty and repaired wheel, a fire hose. I don't know. I never took one of them out. I wasn't there long enough, and I didn't need to. I think they might have been fifty feet long. I don't know. I'm not good at estimating these things. Let's put it this way. These were not seven foot long hoses,

and these were not garden hoses. These were big, flat, leather bound firefighters hoses like I used to see in my grandfather, the New York City Fireman's pictures of himself driving the hook and ladder in nineteen thirty one, big

hoses for home use. And obviously I rationalize this by saying, well, you know, when they built this in nineteen twenty seven, Santa Monica was not out in the middle of nowhere necessarily, But the idea that there would be conceivably a fire in the house, and you'd need to deal with it, and you should have something like this, And it was instead of sprinklers, it instead of rapid response. Now I

know better. The fear has always been there in southern California all and I read this when I lived there and was worried about the earthquakes. All of the prophecies of the doom of Los Angeles have been about not earthquakes but fires. Nathaniel West the day of the Locust, los Angeles burns to the ground, painting after painting is

Los Angeles burning. The real story always from the scientists who studied earthquakes was because, of course, an earthquake, no matter how damaging it is, is over in a minute, or if it's a disastrous, world shaking earthquake, two three minutes. A fire, as we see can be two three days. And so now they have one hundred mile an hour gusts, and I understand why I can still see those little doors and the little rusty wheels and the fire hoses.

I sold the place because somebody else fell in love with it, got my money back, and moved out and moved back into where I live for most of my time in southern California, second time around in a hotel or one of two hotels, which, by the way, is the reverse of living in a troublesome house or a discounted house. It is, as Warren Batty said about moving into a hotel, it takes you a long time to adjust to living into a hotel room or hotel suite

several hours. Other than occasional noise from neighbors, there's really very little wrong with it, and of course the cost, but what the hell, There's something else about the southern California aspires that strikes me. And this might be interpreted, especially by my friends from that time, with whom I am still in touch with many of them, as criticism or tisking or you see, you got what you paid for,

and it's not meant to be that way. But as I just expressed, to live in that house in Pacific Coast Highway, just north of the California Incline, like the westernmost building at home on the continental United States, I guess to live in that required a certain amount of denial.

I didn't recognize that those fire hoses were kept in working order because you might need them because something like this could happen someday, because fires burning towards the coast from the wooded areas, if hit by the winds just right, would jump Pacific Coast Highway and burn everything till it

got to the ocean, as we have seen. But the other part of denial and physical calamity in southern California has always stayed with me, And it also came back to my mind as I heard the announcers on kN X again and again try to place the disaster they were seeing and the damage they were seeing in historical context for native southern California, and they kept referring back to nineteen ninety three and the Northridge earthquake and what that did to the entirety of the community, and fires

the same year and what that did to the entire community. So thirty two years ago nearly was the first historical comparison, and they were all saying, it's dark, we can't really

see how much damage there's been. It may be nineteen sixty one on the Malibu fires, but nineteen ninety three and Northridge was the first time that I ever heard my friends who had been born and raised in southern California, and by the time I knew them, when we were all in our twenties and thirties, shook off earthquakes and it was like, yeah, that was a bad one. I had forgotten about it in the three hours since it happened.

But the Northridge one was not that at all. Nobody that I talked to who was from southern California when I talked to them by phone in my new haunts of Bristol, Connecticut in nineteen ninety three, not one of them made a joke, not one of them seemed anything but still shaken. Days, weeks, months, years later. I had

friends who lived in the apartment building that pancaked. In fact, some of them occupied one of the apartments that was totally crushed, and a couple of them, one of them in particular, had moved out at my slight help from Southern California to ESPN months earlier, and the first thing he did was get his roommates jobs at ESPN, and they all moved out and the apartment building was empty.

If you'd like to think about the consequences of your job choices and your career pursuits in any event, when I got to southern California and experienced my first minor earthquake and went, oh, I get it. That thunking sound in the chugga chugga chugga for a minute is like an old train, a subway train pulling out a Times Square station or Grand Central and everything rattling and you get all the noises, only it's everything that's shaking, not just the train that you're in, but you can pretend

it's a train. So the first couple of earthquakes in the first couple of years, I was okay. And then in nineteen eighty seven we had a big one on October first, that was I believe five point eight, and the pictures on my wall moved, and a star player for the Los Angeles Dodgers injured his back and was never the same because he tried to catch his big

screen TV as it fell off the wall. Oops. And later on all the crazy earthquakes with people being hit by arm wairs in their bedrooms, and of course the number one injury requiring hospital at least doctor attention after earthquakes of all sizes, it's people stepping on broken glass in their home. It was evident to me from the day that I moved in. If you want anything in your particularly your bedroom, and you're living in southern you

put up a poster. Put up a cat. The cat poster that says, hang in there and use nothing sharper or more potentially damaging than thumbtacks. Tape is recommended. The other thing was I once saw a special about what you needed in an earthquake and how you could fit it in a box and store it in your closet. You needed a device a wrench that could actually shut

off the gas meters again fire not earthquakes. You needed some form of water supply that could leave you alive at the end of a couple of days when they could not get to you through the rubble. You needed a radio and batteries. You needed a small shovel, You needed a medical kit. Just a few things, and they

sold these things for two hundred dollars. And then there were little household things that you could do to make things easier to survive an earthquake and not be hit in your neck with an armoire as you got out

of bed and stepped on broken glass. Drill a little drill and put in a couple of screws and tie things like bookcases to your walls with piano wire, a very simple process, so simple that I was able to do it with everything in all of my apartments, and even I was starting to do it when I moved into Pacific Coast Highway, just not screwing them into the wall, but just attaching them to the wall, with the premise being that if there's a major earthquake enough to knock

one of them over, it probably will not come over. All you'll have to deal with is all of your books flying off and hitting you in the head. And anybody can say you got a choice of a bookcase full of books fawing on you or a bunch of books flying off the wall and hitting you in your forehead. You'll take the books hitting you in the forehead. But at some point, I think around nineteen eighty eight, I had an idea, because I wanted to go into some

sort of advanced prepper stuff about earthquakes. What else could you do besides tying your bookcase to the wall. What else could you do besides having that one box in your closet. And I looked and looked for stores in the malls, and there were very healthy malls in those days in nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties in southern California, healthy malls with stores of all kinds, and never was

there a earthquake preparedness store. And finally the bright idea came to me, I would open an earthquake preparedness store. Clearly somebody had missed this entire market. I mean, I was already at the stage where whenever I went into a building, and since you didn't really have to deal with too many high rises, you're talking about the buildings of four to twelve stories tall, I guess would be

probably the main rage in southern California. I would take the elevator up and take the stairs down, having thus decreased by fifty percent my chances of getting stuck in an elevator during an earthquake. A minor thing like that, just improve your numbers. You cannot earthquake proof yourself in earthquake country. Well what else could you do? What else

could I be selling people? What else could I? And I got this far of seeing the logo for this place called be Prepared with me in a boy Scout uniform with my fingers up in the boy Scout salute or you know, maybe go a little edgy and do the other finger salute. And I thought this was the greatest idea of all time. And my friends from Southern California looked at me not only like I was crazy and going to lose every dollar I had, but they

looked at me as if I were insulting them. This confirmed, after years of things that I had noticed vaguely that the main defense against earthquakes and other disasters in Southern California is denial. And again I'm trying not to be critical here because I did it myself. But if you go into a building and your first thought is how the hell would I get out of here? If this hallway is blocked, that can quickly turn into the government is causing the earthquakes. It's a straight line from one

to the other. You have to call it off somewhere and have some sort of reasonable idea. Attach your bookshelves to your walls with string or with wire or with chewing gum. Take the elevator up but not down. Don't accept the office at the radio station in Los Angeles

that's seven doors away from the nearest window. Yeah, at that point, like keeping a box full of emergency equipment and food stuffs in your closet, and you begin to have to acknowledge that you are in denial because you are making preparations for a thing that you are convinced cannot happen. No matter how many previews you have gotten. It was denial, and it was capped by this one winter. The company that had sold and they delivered them by ups.

I think these boxes full of water in some kind of plastic pouch, impermeable plastic pouch, water that would last you several days, and that God bless America gigantic wrench to shut off the gas. Yeah, I want to be playing with the gas during an earthquake and aftershocks. What do hell do I know about turning off the gas. We're not talking about turning off the gas on your stove.

Worry about it, going in, finding in your building or the building which you live, or your home, going in finding the main artery to the gas and making sure you turned this. And by the way, you and sixteen neighbors probably could not turn it if you all turned it at the same time. But it had everything else that you needed, particularly the medical supplies and the radio and the batteries and the little little alerts that told you when you needed to throw in more batteries into

your box in your closet. And for Christmas one year, I chose my twenty dearest friends and sent them all one of these boxes. Four or five of them not born in southern California called me on Christmas to say thanks. From four or five, I received no response whatsoever. The other ten or twelve either returned the box to me or called me up and yelled at me for having had the nerve to disturb them with something like this on Christmas. I swear denial is a hell of a

drug in some respects. As I have indicated from my own behavior, it is necessary to live in a place like southern California, or I imagine in hurricane country, in cyclone country, in those areas of the Midwest with twisters. In fact, in all of human life, we have to have some denial or you will never ever go outside again, and while you're inside, you'll be worried about the roof falling in. You can't live that way. You do have to proceed, But in some areas where it's much more dangerous and

the dangers are much more lethal. You then resort to denying everything and thinking, well, those four giant industrial grade fire hoses, they were just here for the problems they had in the twenties. It's not like that anymore. Unfortunately, as the climate continues to deteriorate, and we now know that the process by which we make the planet uninhabitable has just been advanced by fifty years. Because that's the

real story of the Trump election. The key decisions that will mitigate or worsen the immediate effect of climate change and let's call it for what it is, atmospheric disaster, those decisions will now be in the hands of a madman who doesn't believe in any of it and can't make money off of it. As I said earlier, the fatal element of the Trump madness is the idea that the only force in the world that matters is money.

Money did nothing other than hasten a vaccine when a pandemic hit, and it will do nothing to stop fire like we have seen in southern California, and it will do nothing for whatever else is next. So when we are in denial, and we are now dealing with the scenario in which the time off in southern California from wildfires. Was the midwinter Rose Bowl Rose Bowl Parade, no fires. It's a great time of year, fifty sixty degrees every day, sometimes into the eighties. It's great being here. What do

you mean Santa Monica is on fire? These are the changes we will see. It doesn't get warmer, it doesn't get colder. It just gets more extreme, more often. And now we have a man who thinks somehow that is caused by Hezbollah, So we will all have to make contain a little denial going forward. I don't know how

much time the planet has left. The scenes I saw from southern California that kept me up all night Tuesday night and led this to being a ragged broadcast make me thinks, as always that it's sooner rather than later. My heart goes out to my former home. I don't know what happened to the brick spit house at the California Inc Line in pch, but I know I heard addresses mentioned Montana Lincoln Boulevard taking people off the freeway at Lincoln Boulevard. He used to get my mail on

Lincoln Boulevard. The distance between Lincoln Boulevard and where I lived throughout My last stay in southern California was walking distance and that's where I got my mail. And there were fires, and there were blockades, and there were refugees. So the question that I raised earlier, which is, what the hell does all this wasted energy that this country is putting into blocking people from coming here who have

nowhere else to live? What the hell does that mean when we are rendering parts of the planet uninhabitable, the areas around the equator, that within a few years it won't be oh, ten thousand migrants are at the border, or there's imaginary caravans on Fox News, there will be millions of people trying to get here because guess what, They're not going to stay and live in a place that's one hundred and fifty degrees. They're going to do

something else. And the people, the number of people at the border may exceed the number of people inside the country. So the solution to immigration is not building walls which will not hold out a million people a day, which would be three hundred and sixty five million people in a year, which will be the size of our population. Anyway, that's not the solution. The solution is to do our best to mitigate all of this and to arrange in

advance areas for which these people can go. And I don't care if you have to bend some rules and say, well, you refugees from climate crises, you have to live in the unpopulated areas, which will be a little bit colder, because there are going to be more climate problems here too, but not like we're dealing with in the equatorial part

of the country of the planet. I think there would be ways we can handle this, But we live in the land of stupid people, led by Trump, who is crazier than ever and there's something wrong with his eyes.

And even if he does succumb to whatever is wrong with him, and he looks like he's on the verge, but often he's looked like that's imminent, he'll be replaced by a bunch of other people who get their news from YouTube conspiracy videos, to believe that the only force that matters in the world is money, and who do not know how to process nor act upon situations in which nature, the universe, the climate, the atmosphere, God, whatever you want to call the forces of reality tell you

to shove your money up your ass and take what you can with you because we're burning down your house in your neighborhood. We should have some denial, We should try to outlive our lives. But we can't have that much denial. And so back to the memo or the mantra I was going to use and trying to sell my stores that so offended Southern California with earthquake preparedness, it is be prepared. I've done all the damage I can do here raggedly, but I've been prepared. Thanks for listening.

Brian Ray and John Phillip Shaneil the musical directors have Countdown, arranged, produced, and performed most of our music. Mister Chanelle handled orchestration and keyboards, Mister Ray was on guitars, bass and drums, and it was produced by Tko Brothers. Our satirical and fifthy 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 was my friend Larry David, who I'm sure long ago screwed his cabinets, into his walls. Everything else was, as ever, my fault. You can't believe. Even thirty five years later, one of my friends from southern California brought up that gift of the earthquake preparedness box,

like I had sent her a box of manure. Now I'm going to be thinking about earthquakes for the whole year. Yeah. Yeah, that's countdown for today, week and a half until we inaugurate a constitutionally ineligible president who does not believe in any of this and has no connection to reality anymore and thinks that there is money and him and nothing else in the world that matters. But it's just four hundred and seventy three days until the scheduled end of

his lame duck term. The next scheduled countdown is Monday. I hope to announce a new schedule for this series by then. Maybe in the interim has always bulletins as the news warrants till the next one. I'm Keith Olderuman. 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.