TRUMP CALLS BIDEN "JOE BRIDE"; And Willie Mays Passes - 6.19.24

in Milwaukee. Joe Bride, No, he's fine. Ask doctor Johnson, Doctor Jackson, Doctor Johnson, Doctor Jackson, my sister, my daughter, Joe Bride, asked Joe Bride. Trump also stepped into it again, not in Milwaukee, but about it. His campaign had to deny a heavily sourced report from the ABC television station in Chicago that during the Republican convention in Milwaukee, the place he called horrible last week, he will not even stay in a hotel there. He will stay rather in

his building in Chicago and commute to Milwaukee. Just to add a little to the sense of the scenes coming apart the Wisconsin congressman who last week insisted Trump never said a thing to the Republican House conclave about Milwaukee being horrible, then an hour later went on television and denied his own denial. Screwed up again in Milwaukee. This is Congressman Brian's style. He's supposed to be saying that Joe Biden is so old, or at least that Joe

Bride is so old. Instead he screws up, and he makes the age joke about Trump and makes himself look like an idiot. It's hard to believe Donald Trump was first elected to the United States Senate when I was negative eight years old. That's true. President Biden was elected when I was negative eight years old. Sure, whatever you say, buddy, tell it to Joe Bride. Meanwhile, Susie Wiles and Chris Losavita, who are in essence running the Trump campaign, are reportedly

worried about Trump, specifically about his deteriorating mental condition. Can't imagine why Joe Bride, and this is coming from two former Republicans still plugged into that side of the ball. Wiles and las Avita, per Rick Wilson are going to friendly journalists now and quoting Wilson, are starting to whisper

that no one can control Trump. Former Republican Senate aide Tom Nichols meanwhile put his finger to the wind and then wrote that the flood of Trump campaign efforts to make it look like no one can control President Biden are making him suspicious. Nichols now writes, quote, Republicans and their media ecosystem seem to be in a panic about

their candidate. If Trump is doing so well, why is his campaign and its support system in right wing media resorting to easily disproved lies because their candidate cannot remember the name of the man he is running against. Meanwhile, back at Joe Bride headquarters, I hate background insider how it happens stories, but Politico has an unusually useful one. Why the Biden campaign finally read the room and called Trump a convicted criminal in its new ads going into

the swing States this month. It's got a Biden polster on the record, but anonymous quoting We've seen in polling since the conviction that the more the conviction is front and center in voters' attention, the worse it is for Trump. The pollster said. Their research conclude that Trump's conviction could effectively be used in a broader depiction of Trump as being self centered and unwilling to take responsibility for his actions,

quoting him. Trump has dug his own hole deeper on the convictions, the poster said, and we're seeing him pay the price for that in the polling. Maybe more impressively, Politico also had Third Way co founder Matt Bennett underscoring the fact that the convictions are really affecting independent voters, quoting him. What the polling clearly shows is there is a group of voters for whom the convictions matter, and it is the voters who are going to decide the election.

A lot of us were skeptical that it would, but I think it's clear that these voters were shaken by the idea of a convicted felon becoming president. It's a pretty potent argument to make for voters who are on the fence unquote. Goddamn right. It is at the other end of the journalism scale, though the Biden is going to be replaced plot. Maybe he's going to be replaced by Joe Bride. The Biden is going to be replaced.

Plot is ramping up again, and here's a shock. Three names still pushing the thing are Mark Penn, Joe Klein, and Kathleen Parker. You remember Kathleen Parker. She's the Washington Post idiot who eight years ago managed to get not just the election wrong, but managed to get it wrong in both opposing directions. She wrote, no matter who won, we would be fine. There would be no wall, Republicans would contain Trump, and Hillary Clinton would be handled by

her handlers. Inexplicably, Parker is still at the Washington Post, and now she is suggesting that Biden has not dropped out only because Democrats don't believe Vice President Harris would win. So her headline, Democrats are wrestling with an age old problem. Maybe Hillary Clinton could come to the rescue. Unquote poker note, Secretary Clinton has endorsed a Democratic congressional candidate, and she thinks that means well, let me just quote this dribble.

The question is why, now, Why would she suddenly get involved in a congressional race. We are left to speculate about motive, but the effect of Clinton inserting herself into the news cycle is to remind voters that, but for her defeat in twenty sixteen, we wouldn't be stuck in this old white man dilemma. No one has mentioned her as a possible running mate for Biden far as I know, but why not replace Harris with Clinton? At seventy six? She might want no part of it, but it's hard

to retire when you feel your job isn't done. If Biden needs to step down, even those who didn't vote for Clinton would have confidence in her ability to keep the country on track. It's just a thought, But worse ideas have met with regrettable success. Unquote. Yeah, CNN once thought Kathleen Parker co anchor their eight PM newscast, and that had regrettable success. Oh no, it didn't. They fired

her after a couple of months. As to Mark Penn, he is referenced in Britain's Daily Mails article about how if the president struggles in the debate, a group of Democratic elders will convene and blah blah blah blah blah. You know the rest. Worse that British tabloid quotes the former political columnist Joe Klein with one of the dumbest things ever written. Kathleen Parker would not have written this quote if Biden were to stand down. Quote a vigorous

young candidate. Don't ask me who could win over the country with a single convention. Speech in August. In Kline scenario, the Democratic Party savior would deliver an Obama asque inspirational speech akin to Barack's famous two thousand and four Democratic Convention address that would quickly bring together disaffected Democrats and

moderate independence unquote. All you really need to know about Joe Klein's incompetence is he and I went to the same prep school, not at the same time, but we had the same immortal English teacher who reshaped us from bad writers into well not so bad writers. The teacher's name was Arthur Nathan, and twenty years ago Kleine and I co chaired his retirement ceremony, for which a couple of hundred students, maybe a quarter of all he ever taught, traveled back here to thank him. This is the all

you really need to know about Klein part. Kleine emphasized at that event that mister Nathing had taught him the essence of good writing, namely that you must write as if your name were in bold print at the end of every page, every paragraph, perhaps every sentence. Joe Kline was, of course, the man who wrote the novelized version of

the Bill Clinton campaign primary colors. What you may not know about that is that Kleine, molded by Arthur Nathan to remember that his words carried his very identity, originally published his book Primary Colors anonymously. Meanwhile, almost as big as Trump calling Joe Biden Joe Bride Rogers, Stone may

have conceivably cost Judge Eileen Cannon her job. In the latest undercover audio released by my friend, the investigative journalist Lauren Windsor and her colleague Ali Somarco, Stone at a Catholics for Catholics event at Mary Lago made the mistake of hinting that the fix could be in in Trump's trial for stealing and keeping classified documents and other Espionage

Act crimes. That when the Trump appointed Cannon conducts a hearing day after tomorrow on the Trump motions to dismiss all or most of the charges on the fabricated premise that the Special Council was unlawfully appointed, Stone seems, even for him, unusually confident that Cannon really will throw the

case to Trump. I think the judge Stary Lords is dismissing that Judges gets what Jack Smith could do about that Cannon, whom Trump elevated to the bench after she began as literally the flamenco and yoga correspondent of the Miami Nuevo Herald newspaper. What Jack Smith could do is unclear.

There have already been complaints about Judge Cannon's conduct, especially her slow walking this case and her overall obvious, painful inability to do ordinary judge things like scheduling and ruling that has all already made it to the Eleventh Circuit Court.

What Stone's words might do is even more speculative. As close as he has been to Trump, He's not officially involved in this case, but as long ago as April, Trump's former attorney Ty Cobb said he thought her conduct was so unprofessional, leaving aside the potentiality of it also being corrupt, that Cobb expected the Eleventh Circuit to remove

Judge Cannon eventually. Unfortunately, from more of the windsor Somrco recordings of Stone at marri Lago last month, if Canon is defused and another judge takes over the Trump Document's case, Stone ain't worried judges. He's got a million judges and he expects to deploy them and lawyers and something closer to his Brooks Brothers riot during the judicial selection of George W. Bush as president in the early winter of two thousand, rather than you know, the real riot at

the Capitol on January sixth. We're working on it. We're working on it.

Right now, if they steal the peoples of arts impossible, SIOF is leading all the poll They walk to try and suffer his money, suffered his time, and create the reasons why their death is plausible in the.

To restore social securities intent, policymakers should gradually increase the normal retirement age from sixty seven to sixty nine or seventy, moving the age up by one or two months per year, and indexit to life expectancy. How do you not make that into a Biden ad? I'm Joe Bride, and I approve this message because the Republicans want you to work

till you die. A Steve Bannon update, It is now reported that when his four month jail term starts on July first, it will not be at some club fed, but rather at the Federal Correction facility at Danbury, Connecticut, which, among other unpleasant realities, is halfway between New York City

and ESPN World headquarters. Also, Bannon would be in jail while he goes on trial here as part of that Build the Wall financial scam that would be in September, and if he thinks Danbury is fun, the expectation is that when court is not in session in New York they would keep him at the Rikers Island jail. I mean Rikers Island. This is a jail jail. I have been there, not as an inmate, but I have been there. They have sent prisoners to Rikers and lost them. I

don't mean they died, I don't mean they escaped. I mean they get sent there, and bureaucratically they get lost, and I don't know that they stay and open a shoeshine, stand in a cell block or something. Two other notes, The Trump family Daily Self Unawareness Award actually does not go to elderly offender Trump, even for Joe Bride, but to his son, idiot Junior. Donald the second tweeted a photo of CNN's anchor Jim Acosta and wrote, Lol, looks

like CNN fake news loser. Acosta got an embarrassingly bad hair dye job, leaving his father's hair diary job out of it. Talk about embarrassingly bad hair dye job, Remember that, among the other living hells of his life, Don Junior is the guy who, on some kind of regular basis, mounts that gargoyle Kimberly Gilfoyle, who at age fifty five, is trying to look thirty five and who now has so much makeup and so much hair dye that she looks like Betty Davis in the movie Whatever Happened to

Baby Jane? And lastly, there has been a Milania Trump sighting the log Cabin. Republicans are holding a fundraiser at Trump Tower on July eighth. It has been announced, and she is going to be the host. And joke all you want about a homophobic organization like the Republicans having an LGBTQ arm and the most recent missus Trump being their host, But the real news here is surprise, surprise, surprise, we were all wrong. Milania Trump has not fled the

country speaking of unexpected sightings and fleeing. Jeff Bezos has actually said something about the fact that the guys he hired imploded his Washington Post out first, evacuating the staff or the paper's reputation. He sent an email and it is so vacuous and so vapid that if you told me it was generated by artificial intelligence, I would argue your use of the word intelligence, but I would applaud your use of the word artificial That's next. This is

countdown with Joe Bride. Joe Bride, Willie Mays died yesterday. Willy Mays was Baseball's greatest living player, the best defensive athlete I have ever seen, and the author of the most celebrated defensive play in baseball history, maybe in sports history,

and with timing that defies belief. Willie Mays died at the age of ninety three, two days before his San Francisco Giants and the Saint Louis Cardinals are to play a salute to the Negro Leagues, the leagues in which he began his career at the oldest ballpark in America, Rickwood Field, where his Birmingham Black Barons played. I saw William Mays play several times. I saw him play once in Montreal, saw him in New York a lot. Saw

him in his last two years with the Mets. He spoke at my high school right after his retirement, and he was simply one of those athletes who seemed to be seen and experiencing the world a few seconds before the rest of us. The old cliche applied, where the ball is going to be, not where it is. That's where you will find Willie Mays. And I remember him playing one game in his twenty three season National League career, a career played entirely in a different world than ours.

He played it not in his customary center field for the San Francisco Giants, but he played it in right field because they wanted to give Willy a little bit of a break since he was playing with a strained groin muscle. And yet, for all his greatness and his longevity, my thoughts flashed back, as they inevitably do, to the person.

He was singular, different, funny, unusual, and even at the somber news of his passing, my thoughts flashed back to the fact that it was Willie Mays who was on the other end of the damnedest interview I ever did. This was at my first job for my radio network at UPI, when God helped me. Willie Mays was sixteen years younger than I am now, and like I wasn't scared enough to be on the phone with Willie Mays. He started the interview by doing a bit, a bit twitch.

If I had done that bit, they would have fired me. The other thing I think of is an amazing injustice that befell Willie Mays, that nobody talks about and nobody

registers anymore. Okay, the first part. So it's a Saturday afternoon, October twenty seventh, nineteen seventy nine, just forty three and a half years ago, and Willie Mays has just been banned from baseball because word has gotten out that he has signed a contract to do promotional events for a casino in Atlantic City, and there is a news conference coming up in two days on Monday. Now, try explaining

this whole concept to any current sports fan. Any current sports fan now used to seeing retired players on TV telling them how to bet and who to bet on, or the sportscasters doing the games giving you the latest odds and how they have changed since the last period

or inning started. Plus this was like three months after Willy Mays was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, three months after the celebration of this brilliant career, and now they've banned him for life for something that today the commissioner would have sent him a note of congratulations,

to say nothing of a large paycheck. And nobody has done an interview with Willy Mays yet because he has been traveling, and my phone rings in my little cubby hole at the United pres International Radio Network that I've only been working at since August three months. That's how long my full time broadcasting career has been to this point. And on the phone is maybe the top baseball reporter of the second half of the twentieth century. Keith, it's

Milt Richmond. This man once reported it in July nineteen fifty five that if the Milwaukee Braves did not start winning, that they would fire their manager. Exactly one year later, and they didn't start winning, and exactly one year later to the day, they fight their manager. Keith, write this phone number down. It's Willie May's. Milt never got excited about anything. He talked like this all the time. William Mays is expecting your call for an interview about this

banishment story. And I squeaked yes, sir, And I went into one of our recording studios and I dialed Willie Mays's phone number. And I will not recreate the voice that I heard answer Willie May's phone, because while doing this voice was once considered to be a staple of American humor, even American humor written or performed by liberals. I mean, James Thurber's short stories are full of this voice.

The voice is wildly racist. It is racist enough that if today you heard an African American man do it, even Willie Mays, you probably say no, no, no, no, no, still still racist. Don't don't, don't do it, Willie. It was a voice similar to the actress Hattie McDaniel, who won the Academy Award in nineteen thirty nine for Gone with the Wind. She was a world class blues singer, a top patriotic fundraiser during World War Two, and she

played maids housekeepers in maybe two hundred films. She also played one on a famous radio show, and was paid so little that while she was performing her role of the pretend maid, she had to keep working as a real maid. Okay, so I'm twenty years old and I have to interview Willie Mays about him getting banned from baseball,

which is crazy enough. And I call and the phone is answered, and a gravelly but feminine voice that sounded exactly like Hattie McDaniel says, hello, mister Mays's residence, and I'm a little throne, but I power through it somehow, and I explain who I am, and she says ahah, And I say where I'm calling from and she says ahah, and I say, Milt Richmond said Mays was expecting my call, and she interrupts and goes, this is Willie. The Hattie McDaniel impersonation was being done by Willie Mays. Now I

do not have this on tape. Silly me. When my bosses said you may not start recording before you get express permission from the interviewee to start recording, I believed them and I lived by that rule. Anybody else would have a tape of this phone being answered and the Hattie McDaniel impression done by Willie Mays, because the first thing you do is record, so you don't have to

remember to record, because otherwise you'll forget to record. But I'm afraid you are going to have to take my word for this, because why would I make this up. October twenty seventh, nineteen seventy nine, and I still haven't recovered mister Mays's residence. Happy ninety second birthday, Willie Mays. Now the injustice that Willy Mays suffered that nobody talks about. In fact, I've never heard him talk about it. This

is something else that no fan believes today. The United States military used to draft Major League baseball players and NFL players and NBA players and send them into the service in the middle of their seasons, in the primes of their careers, even if there was no war in progress.

They only did it a couple of times after saying nineteen forty five, and usually that was thinly veiled racist political pressure, such as when they drafted Muhammad Ali in nineteen sixty six when he was heavyweight champion of the world and an activist Muslim and he was twenty four years old when everybody else getting drafted was eighteen. Remember that. But in nineteen fifty two they also drafted Willie Mays.

He had come up from the Miners the year before and had led the New York Giants feen games back to the National League pennant, and he was the kind of all around whirlwind of a player nobody had ever seen before in Major League Baseball. And on May twenty ninth, thirty four games into his second season boom, he was drafted and inducted. And he missed the rest of that season and all of the nineteen fifty three season. I

can't think of a parallel today. Maybe maybe they they draft in the middle of his second season somebody like Fernando Tatis and in the middle of May, he's gone for the rest of this year and next year because he has to go serve in the military. Now, they didn't draft Mickey Mantle, who also broke in in New York in nineteen fifty one, the way Mays did, And to be fair, Mickey Mantle had about four hundred medical problems that would have kept anybody out of the military,

and it was all legit. But they also didn't draft the nineteen fifty one American League Rookie of the Year winner, Gil mcdouge of the Yankees, who was a white guy, or Walt Dropo, who was the Rookie of the Year in nineteen fifty or Roy Sievers, who was the Rookie of the Year in nineteen forty nine, or or you get the point here. Now, trying to calculate should have beens in sports is a risky enough business, but you

can get an approximation of what might have happened. If a player hits twenty homers in his first year and then misses two years, and then he comes back and he hits forty one homers in his first year back, you can excrapolate that he probably would have hit twenty seven homers in the first missing year and thirty four in the second missing year. Your numerical sequence is twenty homers and twenty seven homers, then thirty four homers, then

forty one homers. You have to tinker a little bit with it in Maze's case, because he didn't miss all of that second season nineteen fifty two. He just missed from June on and he'd had a slow start. He'd only hit four homers in the first two months of nineteen fifty two, so instead of twenty seven that year, maybe he only hits twenty four that year. So a good guess as to how many homers Willie Mays did not get to hit because he got drafted and all the white guys did not get drafted is all told

fifty four. In real life, playing between nineteen fifty one and nineteen seventy three, Willy Mays finished with six hundred and sixty home runs. For most of the nineteen sixties, it was thought he was the man who would challenge Babe Ruth's career record, not Hank Aaron, but Willie Mays. Willie Mays hit six hundred and sixty homers, but if you give him those fifty four more homers he might

have hit. If he hadn't been so curiously drafted in nineteen fifty two, Willie Mays would have finished with seven hundred and fourteen home runs, seven hundred and fourteen, which

is exactly how many Babe Ruth hit. So if he doesn't get drafted, maybe in nineteen seventy two and nineteen seventy three and nineteen seventy four, we are seeing Willie Mays hit his seven hundredth career home run, challenging Babe Ruth's record, and then tying and breaking Babe Ruth's record, and then right behind him, Henry Aaron hits his seven hundred and fifteenth homer and then his seven hundred and sixteenth homer to break the all time record held by

Willie Mays, still ahead of us on this edition of Countdown. Jeff Bezos is in the news, as you will hear in a moment, And if Jeff Bezos is in the news, then his fiance Lauren Sanchez is in the news, and thus the fact that Trump's tabloid allies tried to blackmail both of them is in the news. Anybody remember the

Stormy Daniels trial. We almost had a Lauren Sanchez trial, and thus I am inevitably reminded that I used to work both with her, a blackmail victim and a guy who tried to blackmail David Letterman coming up in things I promise not to tell, but first there's still more new idiots to talk about. The daily roundup of the mis grants, morons and Dunning Krueger effects specimens who constitute

two days worst persons in the world. The bronze worse Senator Josh Hawley you may remember him from his raised fist to the traders just before the assault on the Capitol on January sixth. Well Sir, one of his former staffers is a financial backer of this new fascist disinfo site,

Washington Reporter. That's the place that made up a story about Biden demanding that he and Trump could sit during next week's debate, which CNN, which is running the debate, immediately denied because it's not true, and Washington Reporter posted it anyway. Because Washington Reporter has the journalistic chops of cat turd. Hawley has helpfully retweeted that lie and adding a President Biden. Quote, he can't stand for ninety minutes, but he's one hundred percent able to be president. Have

fun explaining that. Well, to explain something to Josh Haley, you have to speak slowly, as if you were talking to a four year old child. Because one of the things that the insurrection and the fascism makes us forget about Josh Holly is that he's an idiot. So, Josh, Joshua, Josh, look over here, look at the shiny object. Joe Biden's last State of the Union address was sixty seven minutes, and he stood up through the whole thing and he was the only one talking. The one the year before

was seventy three minutes. Also, we're really going to talk about standing and movement in government type things, mister Holly, when the only thing you will be remembered for when you're dead will be that image of you running for your life from the same insurrectionists you had just saluted during the coup attempt, running through the Capitol and creating that freeze frame, forming with near perfect accuracy with your own body a swastika. You can't stand for ninety minutes.

You can't run and look like a swastika. At the same time, I'll give Biden credit for that. Hawley can the runner's up worser the BBC. The BBC has an email newsletter of its job postings, and the demon of the twenty first century spellcheck has turned the latest edition of its email job newsletter into a disaster. Now, not the one at the top. There the opportunity to become the assistant producer in charge of Sliced Bread. That's not a typo, nor is it a toast related assignment. There's

actually a show called Sliced Bread. This is the one at the bottom of this email, which is looking for an assistant producer of classical music for BBC Audio North. They note the job as part of the BBC's Quote Extend program for disabled people unquote, and then comes the shocker quote to apply. You should identify as dead, disabled or neurodivergent. I identify you as dead. That's diverse hiring. I would also explain a lot of the executives I've

worked for, especially at NBC. Oh they were dead on a regular basis, a daily basis or intermittently or what Oh okay, I get it. The typo is not hard to unravel. It's supposed to read quote to apply, you should identify as death disabled or neurodivergent. Although if they're

hiring dead people but our winner. Speaking of which, the worst Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, depicted in the gossip pages this week on vacation in Greece with his carefully reconstructed fiance my former Fox Sports colleague Lauren Sanchez. More about them coming up, but this about Bezos, who has apparently been informed while on vacation that his as they call corporate newspapers and newsletters, his little house

organ is burning to the ground. The new publisher of the Washington Post tried to bury a story in that paper about his past violations of every known journalistic principle while he worked in England. He attacked another reporter at NPR who uncovered it. He's brought in ex Murdoch people to run the paper. And if democracy dies in darkness, this publisher, Will Lewis, has just turned off all the

lights in the newsroom. The staff is in revolts, the readers have fled, and mister Bezos has now decided to send his employees an email of reassurance and a typo like the BBC's Dead for Deaf That would have been an improvement on this quote subject quality journalism. Team. I know you've already heard this from Will, but I want it to also weigh in directly. The journalistic standards and ethics at the Post will not change. To be sure,

it can't be business as usual at the Post. The world is evolving rapidly and we do need to change as a business. With your support, we'll do that and lead this great institution into the future. But as the newsroom leaders who've been shaping and guiding our coverage, you also know our standards at the Post have always been very high. That can't change, and it won't. You have my full commitment on maintaining equality, ethics and standards we

all believe in. A huge thank you for continuing to do the work that makes us all proud and makes this institution so important. Jeff, Wow, the latest estimate of Jef bezos Is worth is two hundred and one billion, two hundred million dollars. Yet he could not hire somebody to write something better than that piece of crap, something with at least some indication that he has an idea of what the problem is at the Washington Post. There

are only four names in that entire email. One is Will, the publisher, who Bezos is going to have to get rid of, and the other three are quote the Post. You could change just a few words in there and tighten it up a little bit, and Bezos could repurpose that email as the fortune in a fortune cookie. I mean, how many platitudes can you fit into one paragraph? Post will not change business as usual evolving rapidly. Change is a business lead this great institution standards Post can't change.

You have my full commitment. Make us all proud. He's got everything in there except push the envelope. Value added failure is not an option to whom it may concern. Employees must wash hands and let them eat cake. Jeff ps Sanchez says, Hi Bezos emailing it in and two days worst Parson and Lord. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, was being blackmailed by allies of Crazy Trump, who expected to get positive coverage for their leader of their cult. What they had

on Bezos was he had a girlfriend. They had pictures. It would cost him hundreds of millions of dollars. Were his wife to find out, he said, that'll happen. In February twenty nineteen, Jeff Bezos went public, said his marriage was ending anyway. He was sorry about the pain this caused his wife, but he would now give her all she wanted, and the National Inquirer blackmailers could shove it

amid everything else. It suggested to me that when you cannot figure out what happened to the people who once seemed to have principles, or at least seemed to have enmity towards crazy Trump, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, others, remember that the odds were amazingly small that the first time Trump's allies tried to blackmail somebody on his behalf, that they would find in Jeff Bezos the one guy who would say no on the first try. I don't think so.

I have assumed ever since that this process has been utilized for years on Trump's behalf, in business, inside politics and at its fringes, and that Bezos was not the first victim of this, just the first victim who said, few, this is why we have fuw money. But beneath all that important stuff was yet another occasion where my jaw dropped to the floor and I had to reattach it

with l Ohmer's glue. The woman at the center of the blackmail, the woman for whom Jeff Bezos was going to leave his wife, was named Lauren Sanchez, and like everybody else in this twenty first century America, I used to work with her. Lauren was a reporter and sometimes anchor at Fox Sportsnet when I got there in nineteen ninety eight. Only sometimes they wrote her a script once that actually read Roger Clemens ra is one of the greatest in his era, and she, of course read Roger Clemens'

era is one of the greatest in his er. She was much better at interviewing Lakers players after games, particularly Shaquille O'Neill, even though he was more than two feet taller than she was, and she used to insist on interviewing him standing up. These little visits looked so odd on camera that I remember seeing one of her stories being fed in from the LA Forum and I asked the producer, were we actually putting that on the air

or just onto the gag reel for Christmas? We did not overlap long there After, she gave birth to the child of NFL tight end Tony Gonzales. Long after she had ended her relationship with him. Lauren Sanchez was hired to anchor the news on Channel thirteen, which is a station that was apparently created because somebody would always have to be in last place in the news ratings, and

it might as well be them. I was back visiting in LA in the spring of two thousand and two and dived in and out of as many newscasts as I could so I could see what my two ex employers there, and so many of my old colleagues and rivals were doing. That's when I saw it the worst or perhaps the best commercial for a local television news sweeps series in human history in any language. Sweeps series

used to be local TVs bread and butter. During the weeks when the local ratings were tabulated and used to establish who was number one and thus how much everybody's commercials would cost, each station would do a series of special reports within each newscast. They were designed solely to be advertised, to be sponsored, and to be as salacious or silly or unbelievable or titillating or just as memorable

as possible. When I was in local news in LA in the eighties and nineties, we had a series at Channel two with a very good reporter named Dorothy Lucy, and the series was called The Search for Slees. The commercials for The Search for Slees showed her riding around in a jacuzzi built into the back of a stretch limo with an old guy with a beard and a couple of bikini models in there too. That had been, to my knowledge, the low point of the Sweeps series.

But now, as I watched in my hotel room in Santa Monica in the spring of two thousand and two, this is more or less what I heard the voiceover announcer say. This week, a special report, ca COP thirteen News anchor Lauren Sanchez brings you how to Meet a Baller. Ladies, find out where to meet the athlete of your dreams, Lakerers, Clippers, Kings, Dodgers, Angels. Do you want to meet him? Do you want to get to know him? Do you want to date him?

How to beat a Baller? This week on the KCP thirteen News at ten with Lauren Sanchez, How to Meet a Baller. I'm not certain how they restored me to human form from the puddle into which I had dissolved. I do remember calling the desk to ask if it was still Tuesday. It felt like I had been out cold for several weeks. I was appalled, shocked, chagrined, nauseated, mortified, embarrassed, humiliated, And then I stopped, and as an angelic choir sang

in the background, I changed my mind completely. This was not Sweep's series madness. This was not a woman debasing herself by teaching other women how to debase themselves, how

to meet dollars. This was, for perhaps the first time in Sweeps series history, perhaps the first time in local television news history, a true expert, lending her panoramic learned comprehensive knowledge about one subject, requiring subtlety, insight, insider information, and the selflessness to share it with mere ordinary women viewers. How do you meet a baller? I would never have known who to ask. I never would have known to whom to send my wife or daughter or friend. Not really.

I knew there were experts, there were scholars, there were fonts of wisdom. But Lauren Sanchez was the Einstein of meeting ballers. And even in the glimmering light of knowledge that radiated from her that week on Channel thirteen, Los Angeles, two decades ago. Even in the blinding aura of her brilliance, could she have known that the ultimate target of the Little Sweep series should have been No, mere Tony Gonzalez? Or do you want to meet him? Do you want

to get to know him? Do you want to date him? It should have been do you want to meet him? Do you want to get to know him? Do you want to date him? How to meet a bezos in life? You just don't expect people you worked with for a few weeks, like Lauren Sanchez, to you wind up as part of modern American history. It just seems unlikely, not that they could be involved in a blackmail story like hers and she was a victim, but that you could have known her. And yet, for me this was the

second time. On October first, two thousand and nine, it was the anniversary that reminded me of both of these stories, my friend David Letterman came out onto the stage of the CBS Late Night Show and revealed that he had had a series of consensual relationships with women on his staff. The studio audience laughed, assuming it was the start of some bit in which the guys at the Hello O

Delhi would somehow of a roll of some sort. But Dave went on and on and on, and finally revealed he had been the victim of an extortion plot, and that he and the Manhattan DA's office set up a meeting with the blackmailer, who wanted two million dollars, with the cover story being that he had written a screenplay about Letterman that would reveal all the relationships, but he would sell the quote screenplay unquote two Letterman for two

million dollars. Within hours, Letterman's blackmailer was identified by authorities. I saw the name pop up on my computer terminal, NBC, Robert Joel, Joe Halderman, and I looked at it, and I said, of course, Joe Halderman. He had been the assignment editor at CNN in New York from the day I broke into television in August nineteen eighty one until he left for CBS News a year later. All television

assignment editors have to deny reporters camera crews. There are invariably scheduling conflicts, and ultimately there are always two stories to shoot for every one camera crew available. But Halderman used to enjoy denying us reporters crews. He used to like to mock us, to make us grovel, and then when you got to your story with your crew, he would page them and tell them to go cover something else and leave you stranded there. And personally he had

absolutely no redeeming qualities. If you could travel back in time to the twenty two or twenty three year old me and explain who David Letterman would be and what his fame would be like, and how I'd be a guest on his show one night when a presidential candidate canceled at the last minute, and how somebody I already knew and had worked with at age twenty two or twenty three would try to blackmail him over staffers he'd slept with, and could I I would have interrupted you

by that point and said, matter of factly, oh, it's Joe Halderman, right, of course, Halderman, total creep. You say he blackmails this letterbox guy. Frankly, forty year old me probably could have figured out the whole Lauren Sanchez thing for some time traveling quiz master as well. Although I will make no comparison between Joe Halderman and Lauren Sanchez. Lauren was very pleasant, and there is a lesson in that for you. It's not just nostalgia. It's not a

brush with greatness, to use a lettermanesque term. Wherever you are in life or in your career, you may have yet to meet them, or you may have already met them. But this I know to be true. You have your own Lauren Sanchez and your own Joe Halderman already or already in the past. And whatever your first impressions about them were, or are or will be, you're damned right they are. And also keep in mind that thought I

mentioned that I had about Bezos and the blackmail. Do you really think he could have been the first one they tried to blackmail into supporting Trump and the first one turned them down and went public? Don't think so. Did you see the pictures of Bezos and Lauren Sanchez on vacation. In the pictures they are the same height. Used to work with her, She's like five to two. He claims to be five to seven. Maybe, along with all the other work they threw in legbone extensions for free,

I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Contown musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip. Shanelle arranged, produced, and performed most of our music. Mister Ray was on the guitars, bass and drums. Mister Chanelle handled orchestration and keyboards. It was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including some of the Beethoven compositions, were arranged

and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. Sports music is the Olderman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by Nancy Faust. The best baseball stadium organist ever our and out through today is my friend Tony Kornheiser, And everything else was pretty much my fault. Remember only you can promote Countdown the podcast. Send this to somebody who hasn't listened to it yet. Thank you.

You need a receipt that is countdown for this. The one hundred and forty first day until the twenty twenty four presidential election, the one two hundred and sixtieth day since convicted fellon Donald Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the United States. Use the July eleventh sentencing hearing, use the mental health system, use presidential immunity if it happens, use the Biden campaign ads to stop him from doing it again. While we still damn.

The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Bulletins is the news warrants till then. I'm Keith Olremman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Joe brig Countdown with Keith Olreman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.