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In This Issue

• Latvia, Land of Style and Lip-Hair, Too
• Liquids Banned
• Coke: Who Snorts What
• Hate for the Hate Squad
• Tales of the Inexpressible - Part I
• Al Franken Talks, Frankly
• Eggs Run with Claims of Cracker Nazis
• A Spears-Federline Manifesto
• What Goes on in my Head While I Get Paid to Pick Pine Needles out of the Gravel at my Local Country Club
• Hairless Man
• University to Fund Loan Elimination by Selling Drugs
• Proclamations from the Desk of Most Glorious Marshal Lee Bollinger
• Poland Ruined Everything
• Prez-Bo
• Tales of the Inexpressible - Part II
• Da Vinci Code Confirms Church Can't Tell Fiction From Non-Fiction
• On My Early Fame
• Able to Fuck My Anus in a Single Pound
• THEY WATCH

Shaina Rubin

Al Franken worked at Saturday Night Live as a writer for nearly 20 years and as an actor for nearly 10. He has three Emmys.  He is well-known as a political pundit. What he is doing talking to The Fed, I will never know. He is the subject of Al Franken: God Spoke, a documentary tracking his life from the publication of Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them through George Bush's re-election.  Al and I also have an odd connection through the complex network of Jewish geography: my sister interviewed him last year.

Should I call you Al, Mr. Franken, or, perhaps, Senator Franken?

I think Al.

You went to Harvard, one of our rival schools.  For the purposes of this interview, would you please describe how much Harvard sucks and the ways in which it sucks?

It sucks in that it has no engineering department.  My son is actually at another one of your rival schools, at Princeton, in engineering. He was up at MIT, and he was talking with a professor and a graduate student.  And they said, "Where else are you looking?"  He said, "I'm looking at Michigan," and they went, "Ah, that's a great engineering school."  Then he said, "Also Stanford."  "Oh, that's a fabulous program." And he said, "And I think I'm gonna look at Harvard, too."  And they just looked at him blankly and said, "Why Harvard?"  And he said, "Well, my sister goes there, and my dad went there."  They just looked at him blankly again, and the graduate student said, "Purdue!  That's a good program."  And I was absolutely delighted.  (Laughs).

Why do conservatives and talk radio mix so well?

Well, a couple things.  One, I do think there is a certain black-and-white aspect to them.  Two, I think they don't - I think, they're, um, they like demagoguery.  Three, they got started first.  Rush [Limbaugh] sort of created the new medium, and they built... he spawned these imitators, who are right wing imitators.  We didn't understand the importance of this.  When I started to consider doing a syndicated show, there were really very few places to syndicate, since all political talk radio was right-wing-no station was going to put me between [Sean] Hannity and Limbaugh.  So that's why the Air America model is working so brilliantly.

Do Sean Hannity and Neil Cavuto have a duty to report the news in an unbiased way, that you, a radio personality and pundit, don't have?

I don't think that [Sean] Hannity, in fairness to him-I choke on that-doesn't present himself as an unbiased journalist...

So if you present yourself as biased, then you have no duty to be objective at all?

You don't have a duty to be objective.  But I do think you have a duty to be truthful.

What about shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report?  Do they have a duty to be objective?

No, they have a duty to be funny.  (Laughs).

They have the duty to be funny, but I'd say about half their audience gets their news exclusively from The Daily Show.

Yeah, but they don't have the duty to be particularly fair or particularly balanced or particularly objective.  They have the duty to do satire.

As you say in the movie, your dad was a Republican up until 1964, but switched after Goldwater decided not to endorse the Civil Rights Act.  Where do people like your dad fit into today's Republican Party?

Well, um, they don't.  My dad was a Jacob Javits Republican.

Can you define that for us?

Well, Jacob Javits was a New York senator...

Nice Jewish boy?

Nice Jewish boy.  And he was a sort of old style, Rockefeller Republican. And my dad grew up in New York, and the Democratic Party in New York was Tammany.  My dad felt that Tammany was corrupt, so he became a Republican. But it was a certain style of Republican, which was, you know, progressive - I mean, everything that this Republican Party isn't. You know he didn't vote for Roosevelt once!  (Laughs).  Which is crazy.

I want to run a little acting exercise with you. I am an incumbent Republican congressman from a district so gerrymandered that from space, it looks like Ronald Reagan's face.  I am terrified about losing to my opponent because of anti-incumbent sentiments across the country.  As Stuart Smalley, please offer me some advice.

Okay, well, I just want to say that I don't know much about politics, although one of my heroes was Mahatma Gandhi, even though a woman in my OA group-Overeaters Anonymous-told me that he had an eating disorder.  I don't know about that.  Anyway, I would say it's okay to lose.  You know, we can't win all the time.  And what's important is sobriety.  Put the focus on you, and if you win, you win.  Good for you.  But if you lose, that's okay too because you tried your hardest.

Does it ever get annoying when people make you do Stuart?

I did Stuart today because Bob Ney, the Ohio congressman, said he was going to plead guilty to corruption charges and has checked himself into rehab. Stuart was actually on the air today, he came in and did an affirmation for Ney.

[Connecticut Senator] Joe Lieberman: did that pudgy little Jew get what was coming to him?

Well, that is a terrible thing to say.

Sorry, just kidding.

Joe just blew it.  I thought he sold out the Democratic Party in a number of ways. I'll tell you what they were.  One, he said that if you criticize the president, you're undermining his credibility. First of all, the guy that's undermining Bush's credibility is Bush.  Secondly, he was sort of making their argument for them.  He said something about the guys [in Britain] who were planning to blow up these airplanes, that they would have been encouraged by Ned Lamont's victory.

So is there a place in the Democratic Party for a guy like Joe Lieberman?

Yeah, I mean, if he wins, he'll be a Democrat, he'll caucus with the Democrats, and he'll call himself a Democrat.  But I don't like a Democrat not abiding by the bulk of the Democratic primary.

You are considering running for the US Senate from Minnesota in 2008, so I have compiled a little quiz of the official state animals, foods, etc. of Minnesota. What is the state bird of Minnesota, do you know?

The loon.

Yup.  How about the state tree?

(Pause).  Boy, I don't know.

The state tree is the Norway Pine, very Scandinavian.

Oh, that makes sense.

How about the state muffin?

Well, it's probably not the Norway Pine muffin.  (Laughs).  The state muffin...

Yes, there is a state muffin, and it's blueberry.  How about state beverage?  Nice dairy state where you're from.

That would be milk.

Do you know the state sexually precocious, gender-bending, race-bending funk rocker?

What?  What is a foam clocker?

Funk rocker.  It's Prince. He's from Minneapolis.

Oh. I thought you said "foam clocker."

I read that you were a champion wrestler in high school.

I wasn't a champion wrestler, I was a mediocre wrestler.

And Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert used to be a high school wrestling coach.  So my question to you is who would win in a wrestling match?

(Pause).  That's a good question.  I don't know what weight he wrestled.

He's a big guy.

Yeah. (Laughs).  I'd be very curious to know what level he wrestled at...

Well the next time you see him, tackle him and figure it out.

Or I could just ask him.  (Laughs).

In the 1970s, you created quite a controversy at Saturday Night Live over then-NBC president Fred Silverman, after a sketch where you accused Silverman of being such a bad network president that he didn't deserve a limo, and that you were more deserving of one.  Did you ever get that limo?

Silverman sent a limo for me, but it missed.

Would you consider wrestling Fred Silverman?

No.  No.

You had an SNL movie, Stuart Saves His Family, which - no offense - did not  do so well at the box office.  What's it like to have a flop?  Is it a mark of distinction to have your very own flop?

No, it isn't.  Boy, it's very painful actually.

Was it really?

Oh, yeah, it was terrible.  But I'm proud of the movie, and it is taught at rehabs. My wet dream is that Rush was made to watch the film with his wife [at his recent stint in rehab].

My final question is now that both my sister and I have interviewed you, do you have anything to say to my two siblings who haven't interviewed you?

What's wrong with you guys?

Al Franken: God Spoke and The Truth (with Jokes) are, respectively, in theaters and bookstores now.