"David" wrote in message
...
How much listening are you doing?

I haven't done any listening since Air America stopped broadcasting in
Chicago. I was a semi-regular before that.


Except for Franken (who's not half
bad) and Garafolo (who pretty much sucks) the rest of the shows seem
pretty competent and well done. Franken is entertaining at times and
shows promise but is a tad less audience empathetic and tends to
experiment too much.

Franken is a good writer, and performs his own stuff reasonably well. I
think his real difficulty was having a good conversation with the callers.
I don't think his partner added much to the show.

I found Liz Whatever particularly annoying. She'd toss out lame wisecracks
and keep trying to get the joke to click while the others were trying to
talk to a caller or each other.

I thought most of the other hosts were, talent-wise, maybe about as good as
the average Limbaugh clone. That's not terrible, and guys like Michael
Medved and Sean Hannity somehow manage to get alot of listeners. But some
of the obligitary Bush/Republican bashing sounded forced. Maybe I'd have
liked the shows better if the hosts were allowed to present themselves as
interesting individuals. It also seemed to me that they were trying to
patch styleistic elements of Limbaugh's, Hannity's and Stern's shows into
their own. At times, it sounded clunky.

Chuck D had his interesting moments. On one of weekend night shows, he was
talking about illiteracy in the black community. Not just reading
illiteracy, but the problems which occur for people who don't even know the
meaning of a large percentage of words in standard english. For the moment,
he wasn't bashing the Republicans or praising some fix-it presented by the
Democratic Party. He was describing a problem which most Americans are, at
best, vaguely aware of. It was the most thoughtful thing I'd heard on Air
America.



It certainly is a refreshing change of pace from all the Right Wingers
parroting Ed Gillespie bullet points over and over like some kind of
Nazi propaganda channel.

There's an audience for the Limbaugh clones, so maybe there's an audience
for their flip sides. Neither side seems engaging to me. The Air America
hosts seemed a bit less strident to me during the last week of April, but I
wasn't listening much then.

Frank Dresser