SERIES 2 EPISODE 69: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: It is a damp drizzly November in our polls, but Dementia J. Trump not only inadvertently confessed to fraud at his New York trial but also managed to repeat - on the record - that he has no idea what year this in, nor when his presidency ended. The first will cost him $250,000,000 in cash and all his New York properties. The second could cost him his bid to seize power in 2025.

And it had better. You saw Trump’s plan for a Special Prosecutor to attack anybody named Biden, and deliberately politicizing the Department of Justice, and this Project 2025 and Trump’s White House Budget Director Russ Vought going on the record to say that TO politicize the DOJ quote “You don’t need a statutory change at all, you need a mindset change. You need an attorney general and a White House Counsel’s Office that don’t view themselves as trying to protect the department from the president” which I think is even nastier sounding in the original Russian when Stalin devised it. Trump is convinced he made mistakes during his presidency and he won’t repeat them and the foremost of those mistakes was NOT to install a military dictatorship. Quoting The Washington Post, his team of evils is "drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.” And the creature at the center of that plot is Jeffrey Clark, indicted in Georgia, unindicted co-conspirator in Washington, would-be Attorney General, the environmental lawyer who wants to turn the world over to the least pro-environment person on the dying planet. Clark devised the last-minute January 2021 plot for the DOJ to seize voting machines and when told that if Trump stayed in office there would be riots in every major city he answered “Well, that’s why there’s an insurrection act.” Just remember that by August 1934 Hitler re-shaped the entire judiciary of Germany so that every judge and prosecutor had to swear an oath TO HIM and apparently the total number of resignations was one guy, a prosecutor in Wuppertal and his name was Martin Gauger and he wound up fleeing to the Netherlands and the Nazis caught him and sent him to Buchenwald and he was dead by 1941 and Trump has a four-year head start on Hitler.

And then there are the polls. I'd love if they looked differently. On the other hand, no incumbent president hasn't been underwater to an opposition opponent - real or generic - at this point in the timeline in decades. And amid the calls to dump Biden, who's your choice? Who else are you willing to bet democracy on?

B-Block (26:12) IN SPORTS: Cubs double the all-time salary for a baseball manager to hire Craig Counsell away from the Brewers (and outbid the Mets for him). Lovely guy. Has managed his team to six playoff series and lost five times. Mets go to Plan B, Cleveland gets one, All-time worst World Series TV ratings and don't dismiss them: baseball's business model DEPENDS on the game getting MORE money from TV each year, not less (31:18) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Sarah Huckabee does what the lectern tells her. Boris Johnson shows he REALLY doesn't know what a hair dryer is for. And Speaker Mike Johnson gets weirder and weirder: what do you mean you and your 17-year old son exchange updates on your porn usage?

C-Block (32:34) THINGS I PROMISE NOT TO TELL: On busy baseball days like this one somebody always asks me why I don't work for that baseballl network. Wellllll... I was gonna, but one team got me fired before they had finished hiring me!

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