Your Cuppa Morning Sedition

Well, not quite. But here in New York, progressive talk radio, which has sucked royally since Air America moved to the weak-signalled WWRL, has become even suckier this week. The suck started with the move, was mitigated somewhat when long-in-the-wilderness Richard Bey was brought on to do an evening show. Then, just as that show was achieving a kind of groove, WWRL owner Rennie Bishop hired Mark Riley and put Bey on with him in the morning. This duo worked well, even though the callers were often not up to the intellectual level of the hosts. But Mark Riley decided he didn't want the hours and went back to his old stomping grounds at WLIB. Bishop brought in the clearly lunatic Coz Carson, and before I could turn around, Bey was out of there. And with Air America having decided to abandon morning drive time altogether, that left Carson to rant and rave all by himself -- without me.

This week, the so-called "flagship station" of Air America Radio, jettisoned two more Air America shows -- the Lionel Show, otherwise known as Mark Green's Boondoggle (well, David Bernstein's boondoggle, actually, but Bernstein was Green's boondoggle) -- a show that will NOT be missed, and the Thom Hartmann show. Hartmann's timeslot here in New York will be taken by Ed Schultz, which I guess is better than, say, Rush Limbaugh, but it's enough to make me miss All Franken. So now WWRL's lineup is chock full of vitamin supplement infomercials, punctuated only by Randi Rhodes and Rachel Maddow -- the latter at least until the suits at MSNBC get smart and give her a show there. And the hour of Seder on Sundays that they had deigned to give us for a while is gone as well.

This morning Air America boasts a new web site, which looks much better than the old one but is even more difficult to navigate and slow as molasses; and the whole thing is enough to make me want to pull out some old Morning Sedition podcasts from 2005 to listen to today, except that our old friend and fellow Seditionist Vernon sent along this clip of Marc Maron on Tampa Bay's Media Talk: