TRUMP FLOATS REINSTATING THE MILITARY DRAFT - 6.12.24

national service requirement. But make no mistake about it, Trump has now floated the one thing that would unquestionably lose him the election in a landslide, and it is a military draft. It seems to be targeted at eighteen, nineteen, and twenty year old American boys and girls, and maybe seventeen year olds as well. And it start with a mandatory military aptitude test administered by the Pentagon in your local high school. And any kid who refused to take

that test might be prevented from graduating. And any school that hesitated to go along with this would lose all federal funding. So Trump, breaking precedent and using the American Army domestically to suppress protests and conceivably kill civilians he does not like, is not the bottom of the plan for the military dictatorship Part of the Trump dictatorship, those army soldiers and marines and whoever else firing on other Americans, many of them or most of them, or maybe all

of them would be draftees. And when the Washington Post reported this and the story got no traction and no pickup at all. And even though the paper reported Trump had not expressly endorsed the draft himself, within six hours Trump posted an enraged, chaotic denial, reading quote, in fact, I never even thought of that idea, which even for Trump is a disastrously transparent non denial denial. Of course,

he never thought of that idea. When has Donald Trump ever thought anything about a military draft except about how to dodge it? Somebody else thought of that idea. And that's somebody else is the former Secretary of Defense, Christopher Miller. The burden of this trial balloon turned led balloon, now lead balloon that may have made somebody else the early front runner for the first Secretary of Defense in a

Trump dictatorship. That burden has fallen on this idiot Miller, the ex soldier, defense contractor and weapons fetishist who took over at the Pentagon after an enraged Trump fired Mark Esper November twenty twenty, because Esper clearly would not let Trump use the military to overthrow the civilian government and void the election, the Post interviewed Christopher Miller, and Miller said a national service requirement should be quote strongly considered.

He described the concept as a common rite of passage, one that would create a sense of shared sacrifice among America's youth unquote shared sacrifice, right, just like in Vietnam the military draft, a national service requirement, a shared sacrifice of fifty thousand Americans was the animating force behind all the protests of the nineteen sixties. It was such a third rail that the president who ended it was Richard Nixon.

And you can dress the draft up any way you want, but under a draft requirement, American citizens, almost always teenagers, almost always minorities, or economically or educationally deprived teenagers were forced against their will to go to Vietnam or somewhere else and kill or be killed. It reinforces the bonds of civility. Miller also told The Washington Post, why wouldn't

we give that a try. If we're going to prepare for a great power competition, it's helpful to have a baseline understanding of the pool of potential military service members and their specific aptitudes prior. We don't have a mechanism now in our society that levins everyone and provides a common focus and a common vision. Let me translate this mad man Miller's euphemisms here, and how many goddamned mad

men Miller does Trump have working for him anyway? A great power competition, as Christopher Miller said, is in fact some kind of war or near war conflict with China. Potential military service members, as Miller put it, are your kids who would be forced to take that aptitude test. The mechanism to provide a common focus and a common vision that would be the Draft. Trump tried to run away from this picture of a future America as military state, but the Draft plan is far enough along inside the

fascist Republican Party that it is now chasing Trump. This is not some half baked dream of an American SS about which Miller just offhandedly mused to The Washington Post.

This entire National service structure is inside Project twenty twenty five, the Trump and Federalist Society blueprint Project twenty twenty five for converting this country into something more resembling Iran, and that part of Project twenty twenty five that includes the mandatory military exam and an interim and immediate step of greater access to secondary schools for military recruiters. That thing

in Project twenty twenty five. That essay just happens to have been written by former Trump Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller. Now and before Trump got some understanding that any sign of him supporting a draft will instantly kill his campaign if handled correctly by the opposition, some of his sick offense had already endorsed it. To the Post. Quote I like the idea of national service, and I'm not talking

about in wartime. That was said by Ohio idiot Senator JD. Vance, who is furiously peddling to become the vice presidential nominee. If he had not sufficiently come out in favor of conscription and forcing American teenagers to kill or be killed against their will, Vance then said something stupid and even macabre. He told the Post he wants more Americans to put

quote some skin in the game unquote. Who knows if Vance, who appears ever more so to be an utterly moronic, deranged lunatic who knows if Vance realizes that his use of the words skin there may not be some kind of metaphor. Trump's non denial denial just does not hold up.

This is his clientt ex Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, whose chief of staff was Cash Patel Miller, who wrote up the plan for Project twenty twenty five, which Trump has sworn to implement, which includes a military draft that Senator Vance just endorsed. And if you're still not seeing this for what it is, the Post found disturbing enthusiasm from another man who was not only Trump's former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs, but who was also

in George W. Bush's administration. So he's one deal with the devil's shy of the elusive evil hat trick. His name impossibly is Rob Hood. And if the nightmare that opens up before US mandatory military proficiency tests for high school girls, roundups of defiant school administrators and students, a draft, if those parts of the nightmare were not horrifying enough, Hood was willing to say the even quieter part out loud, even louder, that our young people are losers and takers,

and if they won't shape up. They need to be shaped up by a draft. Eighteen to twenty year olds would benefit from gaining who had told the paper quote a better appreciation for how great this country is. Who gave them their Social Security numbers? The United States government. There can be the takers, and there can be the givers. And once we're all a bunch of takers and there are no givers, this country will collapse. Un Quote Rob Hood, He's not a taker. The only thing he would take

is your child's life. One more part of the Post's story merits quotation. The paper is paraphrasing the man whom Trump might now disappear after this public relations disaster. Quote. A national service requirement, Christopher Miller contends, would afford young people from across the country the opportunity to learn about and rely on one another. He and other advocates on the political rights say they believe the United States is losing its civil cohesion and view this as a solution.

In other words, force all of the teenagers into camps and give them guns and teach them about our enemies. And as Trump said on television just this month, just this time, quote the enemy from within. They are doing damage to this country. Under Trump, the military would not be there to defend our allies. It would not be there just in the event of conflict. It would be mandatory.

It would be fascistic, It would be used domestically, and it would be aimed at Trump's political opponents, his enemies. I never even thought of that idea. He belches. He didn't have to. Every dictator in history has already thought of that idea for him. And by the way, I

am not exaggerating. I don't think about the impact this Washington Post story and just that Gateway drug in at the initial plan to make a military assessment of each high school kid in the United States mandatory, just that, the impact just that would have on Trump's campaign, if only it were to be handled correctly by Biden's campaign. Trump wants to reinstate the draft. The draft. There were revolutionaries blowing up buildings in this country because of the draft.

The nineteen sixty eight Democratic Convention and most of its campaign was sabotaged because of the draft. The Lyndon Johnson presidency and the Great Society and the strides towards integration died because of the draft. One hundred thousand young men fled this country because of the draft. No protest movement in the half a century since has carried the weight of nor had the impact of those of the sixties and early seventies, because simply the draft was not a

vague concept. Theft was literally life and death. Your life and death, My life and death. Is there a more powerful campaign message conceivable than Trump wants to draft your kids or Trump wants to force your kids to kill or be killed? Actually there is, because the voting age is not what it was in the nineteen sixties. The eighteen year olds vote now, So there is a more powerful campaign message, and it is this, Trump wants to draft you. Trump wants to force you to kill or

be killed. Trump's legal status news remains in stasis. I will note that his former campaign staff for Jessica Denson, who broke the grip of Trump's non disclosure agreements and now hosts The lights On podcast, noted two side effects to his probation interview Monday, which have not only been criminally undercovered, but which could theoretically put Trump at further criminal risk. It is widely reported and Trump did not

winally deny this. That at the end of the Zoom session he told the probation people in New York, quote, be safe. As a former Trump worker and courtroom opponent, she knows what the rest of us can only suspect here. Trump telling New York State Corrections employees to be safe. That's a threat. And even if the word threat is a little too strong at minimum, that's yet another stochastic warning. Be safe, not be well, be good, be happy, be healthy, but be safe. Be safe from what? Safe? Safe from

Trump's mobs? What else? More tangibly miss Denson notes that in his probation interview, Trump confirmed he is in possession of his firearm at his home in Florida. Felons are not permitted to possess firearms in Florida, but he has now for thirteen days, longer than Hunter Biden possessed one separately. It now proves at least two state organizations forbid nominating

felons for political office. Articles SEKX of the Nevada Republican State Party by Laws insists that that organization quote shall neither recognize nor support any candidate for public office who has been convicted of a felony or while serving in a public office, was impeached and convicted or removed from office for any reason, how close on the last one

there got them on the first. Of course, there are Republicans there in the Republican Party of Nevada, so there is another article permitting them to behave immorally and override Article sixteen by a two thirds vote. Unresolved, however, is the matter of Trump and Washington State. Denny Westnead of the Seattle Times notes that since eighteen sixty five, Washington, before it was a state, has had a law barring

felons from holding elected office. It was updated in twenty sixteen to read that any registered voter can challenge the right of any candidate to be on the general election ballot in Washington State for any one of five reasons, including those candidates who were quoting convicted of a felony by a court of competent jurisdiction, the conviction not having been reversed nor the person's civil rights restored after the conviction columnis. Westneat quotes an attorney named David Vogel in

Washington State who says, I have clients lined up. We're going to be all over pursuing a ballot challenge in Trump's case, mister Westnate notes plenty of presidential candidates have been thrown off Washington state ballots in the past, always from minor parties and also on the legal front, for reasons I can only shake my head at. And I'm beginning to think there may be a masochism requirement if you want to be both a prosecutor and a Democrat.

The Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Prosecutor Matthew Colangelo have agreed to voluntarily testify to Jim Jordan's latest dog and pony show, which Jordan, for some reason, calls the House Judiciary Committee. Brag and Colangelo will appear on Friday July twelfth. And if you're saying, wait, July twelfth, July twelfth, why does that date ring a bell? It's because Thursday,

July eleventh is still the date scheduled for Trump's sentencing. Happily, it's not like they'll actually be sending Trump to jail just one day before Bragg and Colangelo go and testify to the Jordan Star Chamber, you know, sending him to jail for illegal possession of a gun while felon or threatening the jury, or violating the gag order a dozen times, or committing the thirty four crimes he was convicted of. I know he's not going to jail. Jonathan Turley told

me so. It also would be absurd to sends him to jail. He is an elderly first defender, nonviolent crime. He is an elder lee first offender.

year talking about almost nothing except President Biden's age. Returns to complain that nobody is talking about President Biden's age, and he's doing this because Hunter Biden's conviction means that president is even older than and should drop out. Honestly, I don't know what Jonathan Martin is talking about, except that while he was talking about it, he also managed

to invoke Aaron Sorkin. So for all I know, he may be reporting that Sorkin may have just borrowed something else from my life to make into a third TV series. That's next. This is Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Olboman still ahead of us on this edition of Countdown.

So there's a story in the TV sports world that Stephen A. Smith is about to sign another deal with ESPN and that the key bargaining point, reportedly is that he believes he must be paid more than ESPN pays that challenged guy it has on its air, Pat McAfee.

And this made me laugh and flashback to nineteen ninety seven, this time of year when there were more people watching ESPN studio shows than there are now, and I was the lead anchor of Supports Center, and they were paying me a little less than three hundred thousand a year, and I figured out the show was profiting like sixty million a year, and the rule of thumb in TV was ten percent goes to the talent, ten percent of the profit. That meant they should be paying me and

Dan three million each. And I told this to one executive and then he looked like he was going to have a stroke, and now Smith wants twenty million for an audience that's only half as profitable as it was in nineteen ninety seven, which means I need to tell you the saga of how I quit Sports Center twenty seven years ago and left for NBC, and then ESPN tried to rehire me. Coming up, but first, As ever,

there are still more new idiots to talk about. The daily roundup of the miscreants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens, who we celebrate as two days worst persons in the world. However, the bronze worse. And I mean this affectionately. A Twitter exer self identifying only as a follower of mine named Art Martin. Art responded to a Nate Silver tweet, and he has struck me right in my guilt. Nate Silver's tweet began if I told you ten years ago, and

it ended with would you be surprised? Mister Martin replied to Nate Silver with quote if I had told you ten years ago that Nate Silver would turn into someone as quote credible unquote as Chris Solicit, would you be surprised?

You may remember Jonathan Martin from such worst person entries as I had him important Trump news, but I sat on it until I got a book deal, and I spent eighteen months calling Trump the front runner. Then the polls change, so I wrote an article saying Trump's the front runner. Not so fast, and most relevantly, Biden should stop calling David Axelrod a prick and admit he's too old. Now Jonathan Martin is back to the only topic he can handle, Biden's age, and he's back with the kind

of brilliant take that will make America ring. If this is nineteen ninety nine and it invokes Aaron Sorkin quote in the Sorkin version of twenty twenty four, Hunter's conviction would be the escape hatch Biden takes to focus on family and drop out of the race, deferring to a Democrat who is not approaching eighty two here in reality, it will take the jaws of life to get Biden out, and Dems will continue what they've done for two years,

grumbling but saying nothing in public. Okayst staff In the twenty twenty four Sorkin version of twenty twenty four, Aaron Sorkin would not write this scene unless somebody else wrote it for him first, then it would mysteriously appear in his script. Also, mister Martin writes, Dems will continue what they've done for two years, grumbling but saying nothing in public. Why, Yes,

Danny Konkannon's summer vacation relief guy. Not one Democrat has said anything in public about Joe Biden's age these last two years. Not one. Why are American news organizations imploding the unrecognizable, ever changing marketplace? Yes, the collapse of the

media industry as a business. Absolutely that The Washington Post had ten people cover the Hunter Biden trial, and all of its tweets about the guilty verdict combined in the first five hours had gotten only sixty retweets because the Post doesn't understand that its audience doesn't give a crap, and the audience that did give a crap would never read the Post's coverage of that story. You bet you.

But there's a fourth factor about which we will continue to do what we've done for two years, grumbling but saying nothing in public. I guess the quality of today's political journalists is so mediocre that there was actually a bidding war for this one note idiot Jonathan Martin, but our winner, Royce White. I love this guy, the ex NBA player whose principal campaign issues are his own rage and his own NBA career. His NBA career, which lasted

exactly eight minutes and fifty five seconds. White was the Republican who lost to ilan Omar seventy five to twenty five. He is now poised to be the Republican nominee for the Senate in Minnesota to try to unseat Amy Klobashar.

As The Daily Beast has extensively reported, mister eight minutes and fifty five seconds has had a campaign ethics complaint filed on him after it turned out some of his campaign money was spent at a strip club, and here come the g Strings, an all nude strip club in Florida, not Minnesota, A strip club called the gold Rush Cabaret would be Republican Senator White went on David Pacman's show,

where the following exchange took place. Pac Man, your claim is there were filings which said you spent campaign funds at a strip club, but they were incorrect filings. White, No, they didn't say I spent the funds at a strip club. Or let's say they didn't say I spent the funds on strippers, Pacman. But it was spent at a strip club. Why, well, they sell food at the strip club, don't they A yes, yes, yes, food. You spent the money at the strip club on food

the gold Rush Cabaret, Well, maybe the campaign was prospecting. Later, in the same interview, White, who had already said they didn't say I spent the funds on strippers, implied that it may have been somebody else in his campaign who who spent the money at the gold Rush Cabaret, not him, even though he just said it was him and it was it was spent on fine dining. Royce, I spent it on food at the strip club. White. I never heard that described as food before. I love this guy.

He's his own series and he's today's worst person. And that's the word Latakos. There is a huge oral history of ESPN from twenty eleven by Jim Miller, and most of it is pretty good, but there's one line in it that triggered this recollection. The executive vice president of the company in nineteen ninety seven was named Howard Katz, and in this ESPN book he was quoted as saying, I didn't fire Keith. I just chose not to renew

his contract. And then there's a couple of quotes from guys I never heard of who said, no, we fired him. None of it's true. Howard and I got along surprisingly well at ESPN and even better since, so I'm just going to assume he misremembered all this, and he's right. I mean, legally, he chose not to renew my contract early in nineteen ninety seven, and a couple of weeks later, instead he offered me a new four year contract which would have basically doubled my salary. And even after I

had said no, thanks and I signed with NBC. The then president of ABC, Bob Eiger whatever happened to him, tried to get me to back out of the NBC deal, to renege on it, and then sign a new deal at ESPN. So they offered me two new deals after they didn't renew my old contract. See how this works. In ninety six and ninety seven, it was no secret that my first choice was to leave ESPN. I had come within hours of asking to be let out of

my deal. In the summer of nineteen ninety six, a radio station in Chicago WMVP had wanted me to go do the afternoon drive show there, a mix of news and sports, and they were offering me twice the money I was getting to host SportsCenter, and I was ready to go. Loved it, had a great week there. They wined me, they died me, and everybody offered me a free beer, Welcome to Chicago, you're from out of town.

And then ownership of the radio station simply pulled the plug on the station it was in thirty first place and said they could save a lot more money by simply rebroadcasting what was on FM radio. And eventually, and this would have been interesting had I gone to Chicago.

Eventually the owners sold WMVP to ESPN. Anyway, My ESPN deal was set to expire on December thirty first, nineteen ninety seven, but they had the option to extend it for I can't remember either either for a year after that or two years, but they had to notify me really early in ninety seven, and instead, on February eighteenth, nineteen ninety seven, Howard Katz proposed to my then agent that we tear up the contract and do a new four year deal that started at seven hundred thousand dollars

a year and covered a radio show with Dan Patrick, and the Sunday edition of Sports and the sp Awards ceremonies, and the Internet and everything else. This was a lot of money for ESPN in nineteen ninety seven, seven hundred thousand dollars a year, so we played around with that for a while. But I didn't really want to go into radio full time, not then when I still had

dark hair. So on April fourth, nineteen ninety seven, Howard Catz came back with another offer, three sports centers a week plus some radio, starting at five hundred and fifty

thousand dollars a year. I noticed that this was less than the first offer, so two weeks later, at the first ever Jackie Robinson Night at Chase Stadium in New York, Howard came up to me and asked me, in front of everybody in our booth, ranging from Chris Berman to Robin Roberts, to all the producers, and briefly to President Bill Clinton, he asked me if we were close on this new deal that he'd offered me. I got angry at him. He got angry at me for getting angry

at him, and I said, you know, forget it. And what's more, it makes no sense for me to hang around here as a lame duck. Howard wait, Howard the duck, and he calmed down. He said I could look at other jobs and we'd let things cool off and talk again about a new deal in a few weeks after I looked around to see if it was something I'd rather do than be at ESPN, and if it still wasn't going anywhere, we would agree on a date early in the summer and I could leave six months before

the contract officially ended. And then three huge things happened about this that most people still don't know to this day. Even after all that, When I called Phil Mushnick of the new York Post and Richard Sandomir of The New York Times, and I told them I would be leaving ESPN, and it appeared I would be going to go to Court TV to be the host and executive producer of my own sports show, four nights a week. I almost stayed at ESPN once it got out that I was leaving.

I got a letter from a viewer who told me that his son, who had autism, had been at his other son's little league game, and when his brother banged out a base hit, this kid, who had rarely ever spoken in his life, suddenly shouted out one of my catchphrases. This guy said, he hit the ball real hard. Then there was a flyball, and the boy said it's deep, and I don't think it's playable. Then they went home, and this virtually noncommunicative child began to draw illustrations of

my catchphrases. For whatever reason, I had triggered some kind of blossoming by this child and his brother and his father sent me a book of the child's illustrations of my catchphrases. I am not trying to suggest I really had anything to do with this. It was good fortune and circumstance and probably something to do with the tone of my voice, nothing more. But I was very moved by this, and I remained so and by other things.

People wrote to me or wrote in the press about how much the show Dan and I did men to them, and I went back to Howard Katz and I said, look, I know I've been impossible. You have to understand that from my perspective, the company has also been impossible. But Dan and I created too good a show to let it die. When I go here to Court TV, I'm only going to work Monday through Thursday on this new thing.

If you will send a car to take me to and from Bristol every Sunday and give me some tokensal give me fifty thousand dollars or something, I'll just do the Sunday night show for you every week. You'll never see me. I'll never see you. It's the show that has the highest factor of management control. It's basically coloring in by numbers, and it reruns all morning on Monday. So forty percent of the people who see Dan and I during the week they see this one show. That's it.

If you want some other stuff for me to do, like radio commentaries. Great, we can negotiate that, but we should not let this die. At least let's have it on once a week. And Howard Katz said, Okay, let me think about this. It sounds really good. And he got back to me the next day and he said it was the most difficult decision he had ever made

in this business, but he just couldn't do it. It established too much of a precedent, especially the idea that somebody could work at ESPN and also at some other TV operation. He put it very bluntly. If ESPN was not the sole employer of its people, it could not

control them by threatening to fire them. And he looked at me and he said, especially you, And in the same sentence he said, look, we'd love to continue the relationship, though we see lots of ways you could fit into ESPN Classic, like once a week or once a month or whatever, and we'd like to get in on the bidding for these radio commentaries that you're going to do

on the side. Well, it all ended surprisingly amicably. I decided to go to MSNBC and NBC Sports instead of Court TV, and as I signed the contract, I called the ESPN president, Steve Bornstein and the head of Sports Center, John Walsh. I called them from the office of the head of NBC Sports, Dick Eversol, And in my diary, I can't tell if that was June nineteenth, nineteen ninety seven or June twentieth, nineteen ninety seven, but I made the calls, and it was Eversall's idea called them. Now

call them right now, it'll matter later. The funniest thing was the following Monday, June twenty third, I was packing up my stuff in my house in Connecticut. I am all set, and I am officially beginning my first week not working for ESPN and instead working for NBC. And the phone rings and it's John Walsh in Los Angeles for something, and he has to talk to my agent immediately. Do you know where she is right now? Howard Katz?

And I have just spoken with Bob Iger and he wants to present a primetime proposal to you for ABC and until you can continue at ESPN. And I laughed, and I said, John, I signed with NBC last week the World Series and the news show, oh and super Bowl stuff. Remember I called you from Dick Ebersoll's office. You remember it was Friday or Thursday, whatever it was, we're having the news conference today. And he is dead serious, and he says to me, oh oh oh, and there's

a long pause. Well, well, I still need to talk to your agent. Well. I had known Bob Iger, who had apparently precipitated this phone call, since I was in college in nineteen seventy nine. He had given me an hour of his time just for career advice because I had interned at the TV station for which his first wife had been a news producer, Channel five in New York. I told that story I think two weeks ago, and

Bob was wonderful to me. So I called Bob and I explained what had happened, and he said, Steve Bornstein only told me that you were leaving this morning. I'm very very sorry. I knew there were contentious negotiations about a new deal for you, but I had no clue it was at the point where you might actually leave. I should have known. That's my fault. That's why I told John to make the call. He did. Trust me. If I'd known would have been totally different. I would

have made it right by you. You would have wanted to stay, and if it doesn't work at NBC. You call me directly and I'll bring you back here myself. I mean, the ending was so unexpectedly and surprisingly pleasant that even when my new bosses at MSNBC suddenly announced I think it was in newsweek that they were going to call my program The Big Show, which was our nickname for Sports Center at ESPN, the Big Show. But they hadn't told anybody at ESPN that we were going

to call our MSNBC show the Big Show. It was me who got on the phone with Howard Katz and a couple of other people at ESPN to apologize and to make sure they were okay with it. So, even after my ESPN career was officially over and all chance of my returning was dead, we tried to revive it, both of us, Howard Katz and me, in good faith. And I don't think Bob Iger was blowing smoke at me. He had no reason to. And even after all that,

the parting was non nuclear. I think they sent me a fruit basket for my first night at MSNBC on October first, and then it all blew up. John Walsh called the TV sports columnist at USA Today, Rudy Marski and gave him my first set of ratings from MSNBC just to try to make me look like I couldn't succeed without ESPN. Marski told me that direct quote, they want to punish you publicly. Walsh has been pressuring me to run the very poor ratings, and he said, I'm

going to finally do it. I just wanted to give you a little warning and maybe you have a comment. Well, that set the tone for the next five years of warfare, and it was nuclear pretty quickly. But this impression that ESPN chose to dismiss me or not renew me, or not bring me back, it's nonsense. Howard did not not renew me. Instead, he offered to double my salary if

I stayed. If I had signed with NBC, Iiger was still trying to get me to back up out after I had signed with NBC and stay at ESPN and ABC. The irony of this minor detail from about nineteen ninety seven printed in twenty eleven, I think is that I had already returned to ESPN by the time it was printed. I took an hour out of my day at MSNBC to go on with Dan Patrick on his ESPN radio show from two thousand and five through two thousand and seven.

A year after that book came out with that quote in it, twenty twelve, I was talking to the executives at ESPN about going back full time, and a year later I did to launch a nightly show on ESPN two. And that ended when they laid off like one hundred

million dollars worth of talent salaries in twenty fifteen. But then I went back again in twenty eighteen and I did Sports Center, and I did baseball games on radio and on TV, and I did reports, and I did commentaries and did the not top ten plays of the week, and on and on and on, and finally we parted happily in the late summer of twenty twenty so I could return to political cover Bridge and I knew they wouldn't want that, and I didn't want to put it

on ESPN, and the unlikely result of that my parting happiway in twenty twenty. On the books at Disney, I am listed as a Disney and ESPN retiree. I get benefits I retired from ESPN. I mean, they didn't give me a gold watch or anything. But I'm technically a retiree. And if you had predicted that in nineteen ninety seven

or twenty eleven, well you know the cliche. I bring all this up again because I don't know how often I have thought of that father and his two boys, and the one who started speaking, but only in my catch phrases. I would guess it's at least once a month. Those boys would have to be in their thirties by now or nearly, and I wonder often of what has become of them, and I sure hope they are well. I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank

you for listening. Countdown Musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip Chanelle arranged, produced, and performed most of our music. Mister Ray was on guitars, bass and drums. Mister Chaneale handled orchestration and keyboards, and it was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including some of the Beethoven compositions, were arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. The sports

music is the Olberman theme from ESPN two. It was written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. And our satirical and fifty musical comments are by Nancy Fauss, the best baseball stadium organist ever, who, of course accompanied me on the Trump Elderly Saw. Our announcer was my friend Jonathan Banks from Breaking Bad and better call Saul and airplane. Everything else was pretty much my fault as usual.

That's countdown for this the one hundred and forty seventh day until the twenty twenty fourth presidential election, and the two hundred and fifty fourth day since convicted felon and first time elderly offender Donald Trump's first attempt at coop

against the democratically elected government of the United States. Use the July eleventh sentencing hearing, use the mental health system, use presidential immunity if it happens, Use the not regularly given elector objection option to stop him from doing it again while waste can. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Bolton says the news warrants till the next one. I'm Keith Olderman, good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck.

I'm an elderly first offender. I have been found guilty in the stormy jury had no nut and forn't you old to go to prison? But Turly says I'm fine for the word. The End 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.