{"id":1203,"date":"2004-03-27T16:49:45","date_gmt":"2004-03-27T23:49:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/?p=1203"},"modified":"2004-03-27T16:49:45","modified_gmt":"2004-03-27T23:49:45","slug":"the-rise-of-al-franken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2004\/03\/27\/the-rise-of-al-franken\/","title":{"rendered":"the rise of Al Franken"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Just about one year ago, Al Franken parlayed a Book Expo joustle with Bill O’Reilly (Molly Ivins was there; Tucker Carlson was absent) at a Book Expo panel broadcast on C-SPAN into a career advancement opportunity.<\/p>\n

I don’t know. Prior to that event, I’d peg Al Franken as “Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live, and Conan O’Brien’s easily-scheduled emergancy guest.”<\/p>\n

Next week, he’ll be the anchor of the new “Air America Radio” network, broadcast in a small handful of markets… its New York City affiliate made sure to purchase the “WLIB” station.<\/p>\n

Between the C-SPAN broadcast and the liberal radio network release, Bill O’Reilly convinced Fox News to sue Franken for the use of the phrase “Fair and Balanced”. A judge threw that out, saying that “there are easy cases and there are hard cases” and that “this case is wholly without merit.” Fox News declined to appeal.<\/p>\n

This lawsuit propelled every blog that gave a damned to rename their blog “Fair and Balanced”, and shoved the release schedule of Franken’s book up…<\/p>\n

Last December, Bill O’Reilly made the absurdly easily verifiably false claim that “his book<\/a> is outselling Franken’s book<\/a> and is almost catching up with Hillary Clinton’s book.<\/a><\/p>\n

Al Franken has evidentally gotten under Bill O’Reilly’s skin…<\/p>\n

And now Air America Radio<\/a>…<\/p>\n

Just what the nation needs. To combat the right-wing dominance of the talk radio airwaves, disseminating Republican talking points, a couple liberal radio programs to disseminate Democratic talking points…<\/p>\n

I wonder if the Kerry administration will follow the Bush II administration’s lead and schedule “Talk Radio Day”, White House tours for synchoprantic hosts where they get to have soft-ball interviews with White House staff…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just about one year ago, Al Franken parlayed a Book Expo joustle with Bill O’Reilly (Molly Ivins was there; Tucker Carlson was absent) at a Book Expo panel broadcast on C-SPAN into a career advancement opportunity. I don’t know. Prior to that event, I’d peg Al Franken as “Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1203\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}