Al Franken Leaving Air America Radio On Valentine's Day

Bummer.

I posted this on the Air America site today:

Thanks, Al

This past year has been one of the most difficult and trying of my adult life and honestly I don't know what I would have done without your daily presence on the radio every working week.

To say that your leaving the air waves saddens me would be to profoundly understate how I feel about this, having Jerry Springer go was one thing, but this is on par when Bob & Ray's afternoon drivetime show left WWOR Radio in New York to be replaced by the likes of that hater Bob Grant that ultimately bequeathed us the likes of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk.

Thank god it's not going to be that bad, Thom Hartmann has got the wonky thing down and I'm hoping that he has on some of your same regulars like Stormin' Norm Ornstein, Christy Harvey, Tom Oliphant, Joe Conason, Melanie Sloan, Paul Krugman, on on a regular basis, but not your old friend Martin Luther, sorry, though I'm going to miss all the theme music and the bits like "Wait, Wait, Don't Lie To Me." and "The Hate Email of the Day..."

Then again, for me it's just as well, as that I'm interviewing with the DNC's Grassroot's Campaign this Wednesday for work for the 2008 Presidential Campaign and maybe it's time to apply all this that I learned from to that effort of finishing the job and taking back the White House.

"Norm In The USA!!!"
(Norm Ornstein's of AEI theme song plays on the air)

I love that song, "Because it can only mean one thing, it's time for......"

Man, I'm not gonna lie to you, I'm gonna miss that bit with the theme music, especially Christy Harvey's song.

Sniff....

Love you dawg and good luck with whatever it is that you do next, fighting the good fight.

~nyc A Pen Warmed In Hell

PS: I wrote this elsewhere today about the AAR Chapter 11 stuff:

"Air America may have gone bankrupt, so did Chrysler, Arthur Andersen and Enron, to name a few others, if memory serves, but even with that, we did manage to get the House and Senate back.

So there, you bitches.

neener neener."

by DigitalComponents at January 29, 2007 - 2:41pm | login or register to post comments | email this comment

And I wrote this on an Electronic Dance Music mailing list, that has gotten madly political ever since the year 2000 Presidential S/Election, gee I wonder why. (My co-correspondent's name has been changed for obvious reasons):

Tigger The Tiger wrote:

I really hope that when Al leaves, they put Thom Hartmann's show on in its place. Currently Thom is an "alternate" syndication by AA, but he is the smartest person on that network, and his show actually gives you information every day that helps you see positive directions for change, not just things to get pissed off about. Plus, almost every day he will have at least one guest on from the hard Right, and try his best to engage them in a real, rational debate, which does a great job of exposing most of their positions for the ridiculous things they are...

Ditto all that.

And Thom *will* be the replacement, which is better than we could have hoped for.

Thom is a wonk's wonk, but not near as funny, and I'm gonna miss the bits Al did on the show, nobody on radio today does that kind of thing anymore.

The only thing close to losing this kind of a voice on the airwaves when when Bob & Ray (the comedian Chris Elliot is Bob's kid), went off the air on WOR Radio in NYC in the 1980s to be replaced by spewer Bob Grant at the dawn of AM Hate Radio. That really sucked, as did losing CBS Radio Mystery Theater at about the same time.

This is bad, but not near as bad as those were.

And yeah, Thom is good w/the conservatives in not fighting with them just on GP. Only Jerry Springer comes close. In fact he even wrote a book with one of them, Lamar Waldron, (the graphic novel guy), on the Kennedy assassination not too long ago called "Ultimate Sacrifice". http://tinyurl.com/yoca4t I know this because I have wing-nut friend, that's obsessed with JFK, (this friend makes Entropy look like Che Guevara, btw, it's amazing we didn't come to blows this past fall when I was working with him. The Mark Foley thing in the middle of the job didn't hurt from keeping me from doing something stupid), and he asked me track down the book and I had a lot of fun telling him who Thom Hartmann is.

heheheh.

Speaking as a writer, I don't know how Thom does it, the man must write his books in his sleep, because I have no idea how he finds the time to do what he does.

I'm still mad at AA for dropping Mike Malloy, though.

No kidding, though teh Phoenix station Mike's on is also an AAR affiliate, you can hear their bumpers during the commercial breaks on the stream.

The show's archive's have been moved from the White Rose site to NovaM Radio, here's the latest batch: http://www.novamradio.com/archive_malloy_hiq.php (Warning, Premium Content).

~nyc

So there you have it, folks, Air America Radio's ass has been pulled out of the sling, and Big Al kisses off his loyal listeners on Valentine's Day, a day that just doesn't work for my family, (having 100 members of my family die in Dresden, Germany on that date in WWII speaks to that, how do you think my hair got white in the picture here, huh?), and me, since on Valentine's Day, 2005 I had the bad luck to have Paul Wolfowitz, that murderous scumbag, cross my path, as I was gong out to a nice crab dinner, in front of the Bethesda Barnes & Nobles.

Ugh, that's enough to put any man off of his feed.