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"Gloom, despair, and agony" on Al. Just what he deserves. I'm a power TV channel surfer, and one night landed on SUNDANCE channel, # 280 on Comcast Cable. It was a replay of a simul-cast, of Franken's radio show. Oh Lord, it was painful! He and a woman were "reading" a script. I couldn't tell if it was supposed to be canned conversation or if they were telling a joke, as George & Gracie Allen used to do.

Franken would read something, she would respond, he would come back with another line, something about him buying stock. (No joke, (pun intended), the "joke" went on forever, and I wasn't really sure they ever got to the punchline. Whatever it was, joke or conversation, the point was making fun of Bush, oil, and Haliburton....I think.)

while watching, I couldn't help but compare. Rush would never commit such dreadful radio, and who ever heard of a talk radio show host who would expose the fact that he's reading a word for word script?

"Franken named his show The O'Franken Factor to tweak his archrival, populist pundit Bill O'Reilly"

I'm not a fan of Bill O'Reilly. I think he's a phoney blowhard, but his show is good TV. How can O'Reilly be Stuart Smalley's "archrival"? Stuart isn't fit to clean O'Reilly's toilet.

I have worked in syndicated radio for over 25 years, and I said repeatedly on these boards before it ever launched that AA was a Hindenburg waiting to happen. Nobody involved had the slightest idea of how radio works, they did everything bass-ackwards, they targeted a nonexistent audience, and they hired people who'd never done radio before and had annoying voices and repellent personalities.

People like Franken all assumed that if an "idiot" like Rush Limbaugh could do it, it would be a snap for supergeniuses like them. As always with liberals, they mistook their own arrogance for talent, intelligence and ability. They also didn't take into account that if someone is going to welcome you into his life for three hours a day, five days a week, you have to be likable and have a lot of interesting and entertaining things to say. AA has none of that. They just spit one-sided partisan bile all day long, which they assumed would work because they mistakenly thought that's what Rush Limbaugh did. Problem is, Franken apparently wrote an entire book about Limbaugh without ever once actually listening to him, a fact that was apparent to me from the factual errors I spotted in the first two pages.

Radio, like the Broadway theater, is littered with the corpses of egomaniacal neophytes who were going to come in and show the pros how it should be done. The only question for AA is how long will partisan media figures and investors keep tossing them free publicity and paying to keep them on life support when hardly anyone is listening.