TRUMP IS LOSING ONE APPROVAL POINT EVERY FIVE DAYS - 5.1.25

went by so fast almost nobody noticed. Elliot Morris, the last king of five thirty eight dot com, now in charge of Strength in Numbers, calculated the chase in Trump's approval, the depth of his sinking underwater since day one to day one hundred, and it is the worst in American polling history dating back to nineteen fifty three, worse even than Trump's own first term. He was a net plus nine at the time of his inauguration, and he is at minus ten now plus nine to minus ten in

one hundred days. And the minus ten is itself a presidential record. The move from positive territory to gurgle, gurgle, You're drowning is a record. The dispelling of the notion that he might be okay. This fast is a record. He is the most worst president of all time. As Morris notes, only Gerald Ford is even in Trump's league, and even after Ford pardon Nixon and shed half his support, Ford was still a net plus and a net plus twenty four at one hundred days. Carter was a net

plus fifty five. George W. Bush was a net plus twenty seven. Trump is a net minus ten. He is drowning. He is losing an average of one approval point every five days. At this rate, by early August, he would be at net minus thirty. I mean, this is worse

than the economy. That's how bad these numbers are. Trump only wasted seven percent of the value of the stock market in the first hundred days, and gross domestic product only shrank three tenths of a point when it was supposed to continue the huge growth that had under Biden. Trump went from net plus ten to net minus ten in one hundred days. And that's just the start. The Republican internal polling may be even worse than that, if that is mathematically possible. This is from punch Bowl News.

Trump's approval rating is underwater, and our CC chair Richard Hudson told House Republicans during a private meeting on Capitol Hill, this is the Republican Congressional Committee to elect Republicans to Congress. Their poll, conducted April to thirteenth to eighteenth in competitive House seats, has forty six percent of respondents approving of Trump's performance fifty three percent disapproving. This is roughly in

line with public polling data. Trump is seven points underwater in vulnerable House seats, many of them now held by Republican congress people. Aggressive democratic campaigning focused on freedom, democracy, Trump's psychosis, Trump causing prices to rise, Trump threatening SS and medicare, Trump trying to kill small businesses in favor

of monopolies and cartels. Trump abducting Americans, Trump running a child trafficking gang, Trump threatening the constitution, Trump constantly denying reality, Trump threatening judges, Trump threatening you, Trump causing your costs to go through the roof. That could lead to a democratic landslide next year. And you can run on every kitchen table issue you want and against Trump and for

democracy in the same sentence. Happily, the Democrats are poised to take advantage of this polling opportunity to who the hell am I kidding? This is a simple fix. You just have to not be Chuck Schumer anymore. Chuck Schumer, who is somehow in charge, did say something yesterday at a Senate hearing about how Trump quote doesn't deserve to

be president. Schumer says he is planning to maintain his current strategy in the Senate, which is do nothing but try to negotiate more bipartisan appropriations bills with Republicans when Republican voters are headed for the lifeboats about Trump in winnable congressional districts and winnable Senate seats, Schumer says he thinks he can chip away at Trump's popularity. Trump's popularity the one thing they can let Trump take care of himself. But back to the good news, boy, is all of

these poll and stuffs pissing Trump off? The poles from the fake news are like the news itself fake. We're doing great, better than ever before. As they noted the other day, Trump's rage is fueled in part because those around him have learned to lie to him to keep him controllable. They are telling him the polls are fake. Did you see the televised Cabinet meeting yesterday, a series of ever increasing lies about how wonderful and gorgeous he is.

And they told him this, and he raged before the Fox News poll, which not only showed how far he was underwater personally, but pointed out and measured how close the individual sharks are to him. Border security, there he is ahead. He's above water fifteen percent. Everything else not so much. Underwater on immigration by a point, underwater, on deportations by four points, underwater, on guns by three, underwater, on foreign policy by fourteen, underwater on taxes by fifteen,

on the economy by sixteen, on tariffs by twenty. On inflation thirty three percent approved, fifty nine percent disapprove one hundred days in and Trump, who guaranteed to lower prices, is twenty six points underwater on inflation. The White House responds to this a disaster at every turn except border security from the Ministry of Truth. Steven Miller says to John Roberts on Fox News. There is our opinion that Fox News needs to fire its polster.

lost his seat. He's out of parliament, although he can try to coerce some sap who got elected to resign and hand him his seat or hand him his ass The American right wing response to this, it would be easier to invade Canada with the Liberals there in charge. Or you can look at it this way, it would be easier for Canada to invade the US with a guy who hates Trump in charge. And remember, Canadians, you

could to borrow a phrase of somewhat recent vintage. You could be greeted as liberators, and you might get help from Americans, a few of us, like three hundred million or more. The latest on the abduction and human trafficking scam. Judge Zennis yesterday denied the ICE and Department of Justice GESTAPO a long term delay in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, but gave them de facto small delays by seeing a series of deadlines in the next three weeks for sworn

statements and testimony. This might have had something to do with Trump making the faithful and possibly fate ole mistake of confessing that, yes, he could get mister Abrago Garcia back from l Salvador with one lousy phone call. He did this by saying one of the few non ambiguous things of his presidency in that sit down interview with Terry Moran of ABC quote, I could, I could unquote. Marian asked him if he could use that phone on the resolute desk and get Abrego Garcia back. I could,

I could, was the response. And I know this will be a controversial interpretation of what Trump said there, but I believe that when he said I could, I could, that could be read as meaning he could he could. Trump then added, and if he were the gentleman that

you say he is, I would do that. Trump then lost even more people who still think he is saying by insisting that the tattoos on Abrego Garcia's knuckles wrongly identified as representing the gang MS thirteen actually read MS one three like m is on the pinky and then s and then there's a dash, then one on the forefinger, and then three on the thumb. He really thinks that's what it says. He really thinks that's on the man's fingers.

Inadvertently confessed because the ABC interview was not with George Stephanoppolis or David Muhre, he was expecting more TV fillatio from Terry Moran, apparently unaware that Terry Moran has been savaging him online and on the air for a decade. Trump he had MSN fifteen known his knuckles tattooed Moran. That was photoshopped. Trump, Terry, they're giving you the big break of a lifetime. I picked you, but you're not

being very nice. In other words, Trump just assumed the ABC interviewer would join him in Lyne to the world about the man he had abducted and renditioned to an authoritarian country. Also the big break of a lifetime. Terry Moran is sixty four years old. I know he looks youthful, but he's sixty four. If he hadn't gotten his big break long before, now, Trump, you did not give it

to him on Tuesday Night. Meanwhile, well, Trump's employee who runs Al Salvador for him, completely blew the whole thing. As Trump was finally admitting yes, he can get Abrego Garcia home, in an instant, President Bucell said no, no, no,

you can't. As The New York Times put it quote yesterday, the Trump administration recently sent a diplomatic note to officials in L Salvador to inquire about releasing a Salvadoran immigrant whom government officials have been ordered by the Supreme Court to help free, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, but the authoritarian government of Naid Bukela, the leader of L Salvador, said no. Two of the people said the Bukela administration claimed the man should stay in L.

Salvador because he was a Salvadoran citizen. According to one of those people, that would have been exactly the statement Trump needed to bolster his phony Bolgoni case here if he hadn't pre contradicted it in the ABC interview by saying yes, I can get him back right now here for dinner. No, Moran wasn't very nice, and as usual, Trump wasn't very sane on the others, As you know,

the leader of the Columbia protests. The student Mosenne Madawi, was ordered released by a court yesterday after he had been kidnapped and detained. Madawi is wrong. He's hurting the Palestinian cause more than Netanyahu is. I think he's an idiot. But if you want to prosecute him for something, we have laws and you follow them and you go to a judge. That's why we have laws and judges. Assuming we still do. I have nothing new on the Honduras girls,

including the four year old with cancer. The hearing on the girl, the two year old identified as VML and the others is two weeks from tomorrow. You will recall, though Tom Holman's defense was if they didn't sell Miss VML with her mother when they renditioned her mother, we would be complaining about his Gestapo separating families. Well, it

turns out they're doing that as well. ICE sent a woman named Heidi Sanchez from a routine immigration check in in Tampa back to Cuba without her daughter, her one year old daughter, her one year old daughter who was still breastfeeding. We really need to make sure Homan and NOME and ICE agents and Pam Bondi are tried at the International Court of Justice at the Hague. They are the peacetime equivalent of war criminals. Then there are the

new victims. Xavier Salazar of Texas, aged nineteen, was picked up shackled on a bus heading towards rendition, probably to El Salvador. When the Supreme Court ordered no further abductions to other countries, he too was declared MS thirteen by the Trump fascists because there was a photo of him in his social media standing next to another kid, and the other kid had a water pistol a squirt gun. The squirt gun in the other kid's hand was enough for ICE to mark Salazar down as a member of

MS thirteen. There is not just the immorality of the entire process here, there is also the amazing stupidity and the slovenliness and the shoot first, asked questions later with a squirt gun quality of each individual case. They are trying to kill kids by proxy, using as evidence photos of a different kid holding what is not a gun. Turns out ICE is also lying about it. Its arrests totals. This is from Aaron Reichlan Melnick of the American Immigration Council.

He writes, Ice clarifies that the one hundred and fifty one thousand arrest figure put out by the White House is not internal arrests, as Caroline Levitt and DHS have implied. The figure likely includes all CBP encounters, including people with visa issues at airports. The actual ICE arrest number is sixty six thousand, five hundred high, but not historic. On March thirteenth, he writes, Ice said the agency had conducted thirty two, eight hundred and nine arrests in its first

fifty days. That would be an average of six hundred and fifty six arrests per day. So now they're averaging six hundred and sixty five arrests per day. If ICE manages to keep up this level of arrests, it would reach a level last scene in the first Obama term. Six hundred and sixty five arrests a day, on average would be two hundred and forty three thousand arrests for the year. ICE reported three hundred and twenty two thousand arrests in fiscal year twenty eleven, which is still the record.

In other words, all of this, all of this nightmare, all of this destroying of the fabric of the American consciousness and the American conscience, and they have to lie to make the arrest totals look big. They're not even doing their evil well up the road in the administration checking in on the administration's alcoholism problem, the Secretary of Whiskey has killed a Defense Department program that fostered and promoted the contributions of women in the national security area.

The Women Peace and Security Act WPS basically a backslapping thank you card kind of operation. Hegseeth's announcement quote, WPS has yet another woke, divisive social justice Biden initiative that overburdens our commanders and troops, distracting from our core task. Excuse me, war fighting. Department of Defense will hereby executive the minimum of WPS required by statute and fight to end the program for our next budget. Good riddence. WPS

Secretary Pete drunk Breath has one small problem here. WPS was signed into law by President President Trump. This is a Trump program WPS. Trump in twenty seventeen, hag Seth just killed a Trump program that was too woke. Why did Trump's numbers tank because he became too woke? Back then in twenty seventeen, it was championed by people who are in the new Trump administration, or, as we all are beginning to call it now, Titanic. More bad news

for mister. The next round is on me an amendment to a House bill from Congresswoman Sarah Jacobs of California limitation on use of funds for a makeup studio for the Secretary of Defense. None of the funds made available by this title may be used to construct sustained outfit or may a dedicated makeup studio for the Secretary of Defense within the Pentagon or any other building under the

jurisdiction of the Department of Defense. No response to Sarah Jacob's amendment from the Secretary of Mabelene the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Defense of Mabelene. Meanwhile, back in the private sector, Jeff Bezos is Trump's bitch. What does capitulating to blackmail get you, Jeff? What it always gets you more blackmail? Timeline one punch Bowl News reported Amazon would start noting how much more products on its site cost you because

of the tariffs. Sixty percent of Amazon sales are from the smaller businesses Trump is out to kill with the tariffs. Two. Within hours, Amazon publicly denied this. Three after that, lying Caroline lying Levitt attacked Amazon. I just got off the found with the President at death about Amazon, the announcement that the host dial and political act by Amathon four. An Amazon spokesman, then denied it was ever even possibly

remotely chance worthy going to be true. Tim Doyle, the team that runs our ultra low cost Amazon Hall store, considered the idea of listing import charges on certain products. This was never approved and is not going to happen. I swear, I swear to Jesus, I swear. Turns out there was one step on that timeline we didn't know about initially. It was step one A of all people. Fox News reported at first Jackie Heinrich, how she keeps

her job there? I don't know, but may the Good Lord bless her and keeper Confirming reports, sources familiar tell Fox that President Trump called Jeff Bezos this morning to complain about plans to display tariff impact on Amazon product prices. Every network in the world except the Game Show Channel then confirmed the report. Then Trump confirmed he called Bezos, and Bezos fielded the problem for Trump, or ren fielded the problem for Trump. Quote he was terrific. He solved

the problem very quickly. It's a good thing Jeff Bezos destroyed the Washington Post curry favor with Trump. Trump now owns him, and of course this will not stop as life worsens for Trump, as the net minus continues to grow, he will demand more and more from Bezos, because that's what blackmailers do, especially to those victims who have lost the will to metaphorically live, like Jeff Bezos obviously has.

It is sad but true. If you do not already doubt every word printed in the Washington Post, and if you don't already at least look for other buying options before going to Amazon start and this could boomerang badly for Trump. He has ordered that truck drivers now that they well, basically what President Ted Bundy told the truck

drivers is speak English here and fascist America. Now. Another royal decree from the man who thinks he's king and believes it because Pam Bondi keeps telling him it's true. Truckers quote should be able to read and understand traffic signs, communicate with traffic safety, border patrol, agricultural checkpoints, and cargo weight limit Station office drivers need to provide feedback to their employers and customers and receive related directions in English.

Have we noticed this as some sort of huge problem. Have they been driving past the wait limit station officers? Have they been parking there and just staying there for days at a time because they don't speak English or

won't speak English? No, sir, this is not just some sort of official language proclamation, which was bad enough as it was, if you don't recognize the Trump scam and the methodology therein by now this is a precursor to imposing English only restrictions in countless other aspects of American life.

One can imagine that it will extend into government and into politics, and especially into elections, because what could disenfranchise minority voters faster than English only election data and advertisements and campaigns and English only polling places. Of course, here is where it rebounds against Trump. If English does become mandatory in government or in politics, what are these fots

friends of Trump going to do for a living. Elon Musk unintelligible in any language, but especially in English, especially when he's wearing two Maga caps at the same time, like he was at the Cabinet meeting. Yesterday, the squeezing tightly what's left of his calcified brain. On the other hand, two caps is not enough. He really needs seventeen. Musk needs at least seventeen to cover each of his personalities. What about Senator Roger Marshall. What will he do if

English becomes mandatory? He still thinks the worst terrorist act in our history is pronounced nine to one to one. What about the Secretary of Insufficient Education Jaian McMahon, who believes the chatbot she has is using a one? What about herschel Walker? What about Marjorie's stupid green she doesn't speak English? And of course what about Press Secretary Lying Caroline Lying Levitt, who thinks the Nazi guy was named Adolph Hilter, Ladolf Hilter. And of course you have to

speak English to serve in government. Well, if that goes into effect, what the hell does Trump do? Then? No, I'm sorry, sir. You can't come into the Oval office. You can't say your name without getting something wrong. Also of interest here, yes, there are new developments in Bill Maher's self immolation. Thank you for asking he did something else seven years ago that he just attacked Larry David for doing earlier this month. That's next. This is countdown.

This is countdown with Keith Oberman still had on this initiative countdown. I saw a payphone in New York the other day, a working payphone, and memories came flooding back, including the time I literally stopped pedestrian traffic in New York on what must have been the first time anybody in the city ever saw the thing that killed off the payphone. Something lighter as comic relief. Next in things I promised not to tell first, Believe it or not,

there's still more new idiots to talk about. The roundup of the mis grants, morons and Dunning Krueger effects specimens who constitute the latest other worse persons in the world. Don't call collect. Let me dedicate this addition to Bill Maher and advise him he did not make the cut this time. This is principally in order to give him a few days to get his wounds attended to, mostly

the ones Larry David inflicted on him, but helped. Larry called my attention to and it was my old friend Sam Seedter of the Majority Report who found and clipped it. This additional Bill maher bit of hypocrisy. You will recall that Larry had turned Bill into confetti over going to the White House for dinner with Trump and falling for the Ted Bundy stuff all over again. His op ed in The Times was called My Dinner with Adolf. Bill immediately insisted that by comparing Trump to Hitler, Larry was

insulting six million dead Jews. I found clips from twenty fifteen in which Bill compared Trump to Hitler twice on his show in a span of just four shows. I also, as I told you, remembered being on with Bill as he repudiated his previous statements that Trump was a great guy. He said Trump had fooled him. Now Trump's fooled him

again because he doesn't remember anything. But it was Sam Cedar who found Bill also frying Geraldo Rivera for doing the other thing that Bill Maher has done here doubling down defending himself by trying to separate Trump, the power crazed demon from Hell, from Trump, the glib dinner host who only orders the best burgers from McDonald's. This is Bill Maher with Heraldo Rivera excoriating Heraldo Rivera over Trump from twenty eighteen, and I have stolen this clip from

the Majority Report. You know, Trump is my friend. I've known Trump for forty years. I don't have any I don't have He didn't Trump, he didn't go to Trump. He tru remain my friend when I felt he had a certain moral lack.

is in the Worst Persons in the World segment. The bronze worse Minnesota Congressman Tom Emmer, who in the House represents Trump and does not represent anybody from Minnesota, even though he was elected by Minnesota's sixth district. He is the majority whip, meaning he doesn't mind when Trump whips him,

which he does if Mike Johnson is unavailable. Emmer is a fully compromised Trump whore, and the degree to which that is true has been underscored again as Emmer files an ethics complaint in the House against another member of the Minnesota delegation, the Democrat Angie Craig of the Minnesota second District. Her crime, according to Emmer, quote misuse of public resources that erodes the trust Americans place in their elected officials and undermines the integrity of our institutions. So

resources taxpayer money? What did she do? Did she imbezzle it? Oh? Nos? What did Angie Craig do? Did she spend taxpayer money on a makeup studio? Did she dig up the Capitol Hill lawn to put down cement and to install one hundred foot flagpoles? Did she buy Ben Carson's old thirty one thousand dollars office desk for her own office? No, sir, since Tom Emmer wouldn't she held a town hall in

Minnesota in Tom Ehmer's district. Tom Emmer had had a virtual town hall in March, during which he insisted that when prices skyrocketed because of Trump's tariffs, that would make Trump more popular, and everything was great out there in Minnesota, even though he wasn't there and wouldn't go there, and wouldn't dare go there, and wouldn't talk to anybody in public in Minnesota, and if it's possible to get booed off the internet, he got booed off the internet during

this zoom call. He has not set foot in public in the Minnesota sixth since. So Angie Craig, being a servant of all the people of Minnesota, held a town hall in the Minnesota sixth for which Emmer wants her reprimanded by the House Ethics Committee. How dare you talk

to the citizens? One might think Tom Emmer would be momentarily smart about this and not call further attention to the fact that he's too much of a coward to hold a town hall anywhere in Minnesota, or calling more attention to the other inconvenient truth here, which is that Angie Craig's second district adjoins Tom Emmer's sixth district. There's a street somewhere that starts out in the second and ends in the sixth. If Emmer isn't going to listen

to vote, is there Angie Craig? Damn well? Should she should get a menu, a medal or a menu. She should get a menu full of medals for doing Tom Emmer's job for him.

knew nothing about Hale q Sinelli's psycho views. Quote. I denounce everything about what that guy said, everything about the way he talked and all as I've now seen it, at the time I didn't know it. Uh oh, here come the podcasts. Ed Martin not only hosted Timothy hale Qsinelli on his podcast on Ed Martin's podcast five times last year, just last year, but CNN also found that Martin defended the photos hale Qsinelli took of himself pretending

to be Hitler. He branded criticism of hale Qsinelli as character assassination, called him a great guy, and when that wasn't enough, he called hale Qsinelli an amazing guy. Well, the last part about an amazing guy, that's that's true. He's he's pretty amazing. Clearly, Ed Martin has to be withdrawn as DCUs attorney nominee and instead nominated to be Press secretary. But the winner worst el Trumpo himself President

Scrooge McDuck Ted Bundy himself. This time. The demand from Trump's education Gestapo is for the University of Pennsylvania to lose one hundred and seventy five million dollars in federal funding unless it restores quote to all female athletes, all individual athletic records, titles, honors, awards, or similar recognition for Division I swimming competitions misappropriated by male athletes unquote, and Penn must write a letter of apology to every female

athlete involved within ten days or quote risk a referral to the US Department of Justice for enforcement proceedings. We need the ten days so we could explain it to Pam Bondy, who's what we used to call slow. No, I'm not kidding about any of this except the Pam Bondi part. I mean explaining it to her. I don't

know if she's slow or not. This is about Leah Thomas, the Penn swimmer whose success destroyed America's favorite failure, Riley Gains, and caused her to finish tied for fifth rather than just fifth or maybe tied for fourth, tied for fifth in the only race she competed against that Thomas was in. Of course, Thomas also caused poor Riley Gains to finish eighty fifth in the Olympic qualifying events. Because, once again, as I've mentioned before, any female athlete who failed, it's

because of transgender surgery from some x guy. It's not because the female athlete wasn't any damn good at her sport. It couldn't possibly be because they like you and I and every American from you and I to Babe Ruth had to face the day when we realized we weren't good enough or good enough anymore at sports. The day we realized, if you are a first baseman who hits one thirty eight for NIMA New York Military Academy, like

Trump did, you're gonna have to try something else. And I wish to god he hit seven thirty eight and had been signed by the San Francisco Giants and was still playing Major League Baseball today at age two hundred and six or whatever he is. I wish I'd done his highlights every day on Sports Center, anything other than this. No, it's not that moment when you realize I can't swim. It's not that, it's not that, for all intents and purposes,

Riley Gains can't swim. It's transgender surgery. It's their fault. It can't be my fault. I'm Riley Gaines. I'm the eighty fifth best swimmer. Because we all remember what happened when my friend Renee Richards played in the US Tennis Open. Starting in nineteen seventy seven, after being born Richard Raskin you will remember that Renee won thirty consecutive US Open titles and thirty consecutive Wimbledon's and twenty nine out of

thirty French Opens. The only time she didn't win was once she had to do eye surgery on that guy and she had to drop out. It was an emergency. And you remember how Renee destroyed women's tennis, and you never heard of Martine and Nevertelova or Chris Evert or Tracy Austin or right, that didn't happen. None of that happened, because the best Renee Richards ever did at the US Open was losing the doubles final in nineteen seventy seven.

Because yes, transgender athletes might have some slight biological advantages, like, as Renee points out, longer bones. And guess what you could simply allow for that by giving the transgender athlete a slight disadvantage what they call in horse racing a handicap. When it's match play against CIS females, I could give the opponent a win in one tennis game before the match even starts, or you give them half a second in the pool before they get in the pool. And

thus this could all be resolved by next Monday. But this isn't about sports or athletes or Riley Gaines. It's about demonizing transgender athletes and transgender people. And what Pen should do is respond to this bullshit by saying Trump obtained his degree from their Wharton School of Business by fraud and suing Trump for it for one hundred and seventy five million dollars. And we'll see then how fast he falls on his bullshit. Donald, I didn't obtain my

degree from Wharton at Penn by fraud. There was nothing fraudulent about that money. Trump two days worse person in the world, to the number one story on the Countdown, and things I promised not to tell, which is now our humorous relief from the day to day series of nightmares from which we cannot wake. I saw something I had literally not seen in years in New York the other day, and it brought back a flood of extraordinary

memories that once weren't extraordinary at all. The thing I saw was a telephone attached to some sort of piece of metal, itself attached to some sort of pole like support coming out of the ground. There was a little hole at the top of this above the what was it called receiver? That's right above the thing you the handset, the thing you you put next to your ear and talked into and listened to. There was a thing of it, a hole in which you were supposed to put I

don't know, taffy. Oh, no, coins, that's what it was. Okay,

I'll stop. The number of memories that came flooding back to me about this payphone started with an episode this time of year, late spring, early summer, nineteen eighty eight, eighty nine, ninety, maybe as late as nineteen ninety one, when I emerged from Grand Central Station on an late spring, early summer day visiting from Los Angeles, on my way to see my folks, walked out of Grand Central Station at midday, around noon onto forty second Street, and for

only the second time in my life, I saw the pedestrian traffic of forty second Street stop and stare, and they were staring at me because something inside the bag I was carrying had made a noise and I had reached in and picked it out and started talking, and literally everybody stopped. I think you can guess what it was. I think you need to hear the background first to understand why it had that impact on people. The payphone had been part of my life for as long as

I could remember. I used to call home from school on a payphone at Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, to see and ask my mother if the mail had come yet and the baseball cards I had ordered the nineteen ten baseball cards were in the mail, so I had something to look forward to when I got home, something to get me through the rest of the day.

In school, as a reporter, I was part of near fistfights, and actually once saw a fistfight between a news reporter from the Westinghouse All News radio station in New York wi INS and the CBS All News Radio station in New York WCBS. I actually saw them come to shoving and throwing punches. Happily they were radio people. They missed over a payphone at a news story that I was also covering. They had to get live on the air,

and that's how you did it. In nineteen seventy nine, nineteen eighty, hell, in nineteen ninety, the number of times the biggest task of the day from a story I was covering in New York, primarily in radio, but even later in television was the sprint first off, finding where the payphones were outside the luncheon where the thing was being announced, or outside the breaking news or on the street, where was the nearest payphone, and then where was the

nearest payphone after that, in case there were six reporters lined up for that payphone, and the sprint to it afterwards, And could you leave the press conference before it was officially over so you could get to the phone first.

That's the way it was. It wasn't just a convenience of calling in as I did on my way to the radio network every Saturday, and asking my fellow employees at the RKAO Radio network in nineteen eighty one if they wanted something, because I was stopping at Arby's and I would bring in no drinks, but I'd bring in all the burgers I could carry or whatever. This time it was McDonald's one week and Burger came the next.

And the reason I did this was because there were no restaurants open in Times Square on the weekend, so they couldn't go anywhere nearer than a twenty minute walk to get food. No restaurants open in Times Square, we barely had electric light. In nineteen eighty one, everything was

in black and light. They hadn't invented color yet. Okay, it had been with me a long time, and it emerged later on in one of the great series of practical jokes, one of which I was a victim of in nineteen eighty one, and I know nineteen eighty two, at the football strike, I was covering it for CNN, and I walked in once and sat down because I wasn't going to have a camera crew for quite a while, and found Ed Garvey, the head of the union, sitting

outside the press conference that was being conducted by Jack Donolin, the Boston born guy who talked like that, the negotiator for the National Football League, was holding a news conference, and I sat outside with Ed because I already knew what he was saying, and you could hear him through the walls anyway. He had one of those voices, one of those South station PA voices. Let's go baggin. So Ed and I are talking, and out of nowhere, a small woman with glasses appears, and so this, excuse me,

excuse me. My name is Jane Miller. I'm with CBS News. Does either of you know where Ed Garvey, the head of the Football Players Union is. I was told he was going to be here. I was sitting with Ed Garvey. We shot each other looks from behind our glasses and I said, I haven't seen him, and Garvey went, I don't know where that son of a bitch is. We went on with Jane for quite a while and led her quite a merry dance about how Garvey had left

for Washington. Oh, no, I just came from Washington. I'll get fired if I don't get an interview with him. And Garvey and I took turns calling Ed, calling Garvey a liar, a manipulator, a thief, a crook, and a drunk Ed added that part he's a drunk too, Did you know that? Finally, something, and I don't remember what it was, caused me to burst into laughter, and Ed said, I'm sorry, I couldn't resist. I'm Ed Garvey. How can

I help you. I'll give you an exclusive interview. So it worked out well for Jane, and she forgave Ed Garvey immediately. She did, not, however, forgive me. Several weeks later, the talks in the Football Strike of nineteen eighty two had moved to Hunt Valley, Maryland, Cockeysville if you wanted to go by what it said on the map, fitting a location for the football talks that went on and on and on and on and on. Cockeysville, Maryland, the

Hunt Valley at Cockeysville. The number of potential mispronunciations and slips on the air that I avoided using Cockeysville and Hunt Valley, I lost count after the first two thousand. I was on the phone with CNN doing an update for the eleven o'clock News, the eleven o'clock sports cast we used to do because I didn't have a camera crew, a running theme of my days at CNN. Again, we were out in the wilds of Maryland. It would be a waste of a camera crew. To give me a

camera crew all the time. They would just stop when they were within an hour of the place, and I would do a stand up and hoped that my stand up report would somehow hold until it appeared at eleven o'clock. But that night something happened. We couldn't use the stand up I had recorded eight hours previously, and so instead I was on the phone on a payphone, and I'm talking to Fred Hickman and Nick Charles, and I see Jane Miller of CBS News still burning, seething with resentment

because of the joke I played on her. And I was only half of that. Garvey was talking about himself in the third person, pretending not to be him. I was just going along with it. I may have started it. Jane simply smiled at me realized from the monitor behind the bar where we were all based at the Hunt

Valley Inn in Cockeysville, Maryland. She realized that I was on the air live on that telephone, on that payphone, because the monitor had a picture of me and it said live on the phone from Cockeysville, Maryland at the Football Talks CNN Sports Keith Olberman. So Jane very sweetly smiled at me and reached over, and I didn't know what she was going to do. She pressed the button on top of the phone, and I was disconnected, right in the middle of my live report on CNN. Payphones

may have been important to you at some point. If you are old enough and understand now, you really need to be at least forty five to have used a payphone on a regular basis. Well, maybe maybe less than that, but I think forty five is probably a good number, and to have used it as an adult. To use a payphone as an adult, I don't know the last time I used one, maybe sometime around nineteen eighty seven

or eighty eight. There's one other professional concern though, my point being that it's not just your use as a person to call in an emergency or just call because you're not home and you don't have a phone with you. I mean, who's going to have a phone with them?

A hell of a long cord professionally. It also is involved in one of the great blooper tapes of all time when Pat summer All, the famous broadcaster, football announcer and father of the chief of staff at the White House that won't cost him any time in hell, Pat summer All is on the phone live from Madison Square Garden reporting on a basketball tournament in his role as the first sports director of the Affirmation, aforementioned CBS all

news station in New York WCBS. Pat is on the phone talking about the double header at Madison Square Garden, which they used to have all the time, college basketball being a big thing in those days in New York. Pat Smarl is talking and suddenly you hear a hit and a pre recorded voice of the universal operator, the sweet voice of the woman going, pardon me for interrupting, Please deposit ten cents for an additional two minutes, and then the thing would go off. The recording stopped. The

anchorman burst into laughter. Pat Sumrall burst into laughter, and he said, anyway, Columbia won the first game, and I'll get back to your Harvey, and I'll say I'll get back to you as soon as I can get the operator off the phone. One of the great bloopers of all time. And I did not do it justice. But it's pretty funny if you remember what a payphone was. So now my own experience in making the payphone a thing of the past. And I don't know what my

role was in this. I did not invent cellular communications. I did not invest in them when I had the opportunity to do so. But there was that story about me stopping traffic literally on forty second Street in eighty eight or eighty nine or ninety And it started in Palm Springs, California, in nineteen eighty six, my first year

covering the California Angels. Spring training. I did that for my television station, which carried the Angels games, KTLA, but I also did by that point the afternoon sports casts on kN X Radio, the CBS all news radio station in Los Angeles, and to do these reports from Palm Springs,

I had two choices. I would cover the Angels game for KTLA and then go and do my three or four afternoon sports casts at four forty five, five fifteen, five forty five, whatever the times were, and I would either have to stay at the ballpark for a couple of additional hours and do the reports from an empty Angels stadium in Palm Springs with the leaf blowers going in the background as they cleaned up all the debris from everybody going to those games, so you can imagine

how much fun that was, and then finding my way back to the hotel at some point point as it started to get dark in March of nineteen eighty six, or I could try to rush back to the hotel room and do the reports from there, and if I didn't make it, there wouldn't be a sportscast at four forty five pm on KNX. So by nineteen eighty seven, in anticipation of going and doing this again. I said to my friend, the assistant news director of KNX, Roger Nadell,

what about using one of these new mobile phones? And he went, what what do you mean mobile phones? Car phones? You don't drive. How are you going to use a car phone? I said, no, I saw something about them in the news. They'll they'll rent you a phone and it comes in a bag and you carry it with you and you can just use it. You just have

to keep it charged. Well. Sure enough, he looked into it and for a nominal fee for that time, I don't know, five hundred dollars, they loaned us a big, hulking phone that looked like it looked like a bowling ball in a bowling ball bag. And the warning that I got from Roger was don't let it sit in the sun or it will start to smoke. Now we're in Palm Springs, California, in March. There's a lot of sun,

so I had to be very careful about it. But it was a wonder for all of the overheating on all the need to recharge the thing for sixteen hours a day, it eliminated all the problems I could do the four to forty five sports cast from the ballpark in Palm Springs, then get in the car and go back to the hotel, or even walk back to the hotel and do the five to fifteen sports cast from

the hotel. It was a wonder So when I got back to Los Angeles in March of nineteen eighty seven or early April of nineteen eighty seven, I began to consider the possibility of buying a mobile phone. Los Angeles was filled in those days. Every day there seemed to be a new one with carphone stores. Car phones wants the elite rich symbol of those who drove Bentley's, but

not mere Catillac. The car phone was becoming a regular thing, and store after store opened, and the key thing was they would not only sell you the phone, they would install it, because of course a car phone needed a car. Who's going to have a car phone without a car. I went in and said could they work without a car? And after the guy, the salesman stopped laughing at me, he said, well, let me get the expert out, the guy who installs them. Let me find out. And Larry

came out and Larry said, yeah, yeah, they could. I mean, you have to keep it charged. But all the only thing that we really do is put a bracket in there so you can keep the phone on the dashboard and have it permanently plugged into the cigarette lighter in your dashboard. Something else that doesn't exist anymore. You could there's a jack that allows you to plug it into a wall socket. But why on earth would you want a car phone without a car? I said, to carry

it around with me on st I'm a reporter. Well that's a very specific use. Nobody'll ever carry around one of these. They didn't see it either. Frankly, I saw it for me and other reporters. I never thought it would be a commonplace thing. I mean, the phone without

the car cost I don't know, fifteen hundred dollars. I thought it was a great, great investment and a tax deduction to boot, and so I bought it, and soon I was going everywhere with it and talking to my friends and calling my girlfriend on it, and calling into the office to say I might be late, and calling into the office to go on the radio or sometimes the television. To the marvel of other reporters who said, what are you doing with a car phone if you

don't have a car you don't even drive. I said, well, that's what made me think of getting one without a car, because I don't drive. Needless to say, by nineteen eighty eight, the car phone was as attached to me as it was to any car. In southern California, I was the guy with the phone. You can always reach Keith wherever he is. He's walking outside the Arby's here in Hollywood if you want him to stop buy and get something for you, like this was Times Square in nineteen eighty one.

He's probably passing Arby's right now. So the first time I came to New York with a car phone a mobile phone, nobody apparently had done this in New York.

And so I got off the train in Grand Central Station, walked through it, and as I pushed passed through the doors into the brilliant, humid suns rise of midday New York, bustling with street traffic, hawkers of every possible item like the streets of Marrakesh, the phone rang, and I reached into my little shoulder bag and pulled it out and went Hello, at which point about one hundred people on the street on forty second Street froze, where they stood

and their jaws simultaneously dropped. If my pants had disappeared, not been removed, but disappeared, vanished, and I was standing there in my underwear, suddenly, they could not have been more astonished. What is he doing? I heard someone say, is it a walkie talkie? My god? What is it? Is it a bomb? It was, in fact a wrong number, and I hung up and looked around and literally did

one of those what moments. It's a phone. So my trip wherever I was going was delayed by fifteen minutes, as I explained to a series of passers by, and New Yorkers are never as friendly as when they want something from you. I say this as a New Yorker who's done it himself. I had to explain to them what it was. Why did you buy a car phone without a car? That question dogged me until we began to see the widespread use of cell phones in the

early nineties. I was the first, apparently, I was the first person in the history of New York to publicly answer a cell phone call. I should have written the date down. I don't have that record anywhere. It's too bad. It was as historic an event as the invention of the telephone or the installation of electric light in New York City. And it was my phone. And I'm sure within minutes I passed a payphone on forty second Street and I did not hear that as I passed it

with my cell phone in my hand. I did not hear the payphone that knew what it portended, the payphone that was silently weeping. I've done all the damage I can do here, including making up that last part. But it's a wow finish, wasn't it. Thank you for listening. Brian Ray and John Phillip Shanelle, 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 pithy and satirical musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. The sports music is the Olberman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN, Inc. The whole thing with the cell phone was so long ago that it was contemporaneous with ESPN making its second job offer to me, I only accepted the third one anyway. Other music arranged and performed by the group No horns allowed,

and my announcer today was my friend John Dean. Everything else was as ever my fault phone for you. That's countdown for today, Day one hundred and two of America held hostage, just one three hundred and sixty one days until the scheduled end of his lane duck and lame brained term, unless Musk removes him sooner or the actuarial tables do. The next scheduled countdown is Monday. As always,

bulletins as the news warrants, remember impeach Trump. It won't work now, it will win the Democrats the midterms, and the polling suggests they could win the all the midterms. Also, I want polling on a presidential recall vote. Let's put pressure on these guys until next time. I'm Keith Olberman. Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, 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.