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 Conan O’Brien’s easily-scheduled emergancy guest.”

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.

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.

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…

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

Al Franken has evidentally gotten under Bill O’Reilly’s skin…

And now Air America Radio…

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…

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…

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