everyone seems to forget about us

Air America, the left-handed radio network that is expanding slowly across the country in an effort to loosen the Fox News/Rush Limbaugh/Bill O'Reilly death-grip on politicized airwaves, has been made available in my area recently. Granted, it's on a feeble AM station so weak that in their first day, they were knocked off the air by a little black rain cloud. They sound like they are transmitting from the bottom of a well, and not one of those nifty wells from the Ring movies, but a really stanky well. A well of defeat and protracted failure.

What gets me about both sides - red/blue, left/right, liberal/conservative - is that they are so into their own their own argument and their attacks on each other that they seem to have forgotten about us here in the middle...the majority, I'd like to think. Bill O'Reilly sounds like a bitter, angry, school-yard bully. Al Franken sounds like a monotoned depressive. Janeane Garofalo comes across as neither cute nor funny, as I recall her from days gone by. Rush Limbaugh seems like a pompous blowhard. That these are some of the key players in the fight for what's right according to (name your side of the aisle) makes for a pretty bleak outlook.

Maybe we just need to clear the air - and the airwaves - of all this jabbing and ranting, and get back to what radio should be all about. Common man, common sense spokespersons who surround themselves with strippers and (actually funny) stand-ups. I'll take Howard Stern and Russ Martin over the political players any day of the week.

Unless it's best of, or Terri Gross is interviewing someone really cool.