Word: frankener
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...Saturday Night Live in 1977, writer-performer Al Franken - or, in the comic self-promotional character he played called "Me, Al Franken" - announced that he might run for President. In 2008, he will most likely run for U.S. Senator from his home state of Minnesota. As he says of his presumed opponent, Norm Coleman, "I?d be the only New York Jew in the race who is actually from Minnesota." For now, Franken writes best-selling Right-baiting books and hosts a daily three-hour show on Air America Radio, a perch from which he inveighs against the White House...
...Franken: God Spoke, by Nick Doob and Chris Hegedus, is most interesting in revealing the similarities between standup comedy and campaigning: in both venues, the speaker needs to charm his listeners and stir them to applause (the manual version of voting). Franken is a serious guy with irresistible comic impulses. The tummler in him can?t understand why a top politico would advise him not to tell his favorite joke - one by Buddy Hackett, about a penis growing out of a man?s forehead - on the campaign trail...
...Contempt ricochets through quarters of the commentariat that have long given Bush the benefit of the doubt. Through the 2004 campaign, when Don Imus was a genial Kerry supporter, he often made the point that he thought Bush was a decent guy; Imus was no firebreathing Franken. But Wednesday morning Imus kept playing a clip from Bush's speech in Iowa in which he insisted that America's golden fields of corn would rescue us from the environmental and strategic misery of dependence on Middle Eastern oil. The President sounded, Imus said, "trailer-park stupid...
...Joan Didion 2. Team of Rivals Doris Kearns-Goodwin 3. Education of a Coach David Halberstam 4. The Lost Painting Jonathan Harr 5. The Bedside Book of Birds Graeme Gibson 6. Teacher Man Frank McCourt 7. Little History of the World E.H. Gombrich 8. The Truth (with Jokes) Al Franken 9. Great War for Civilization Robert Fisk 10. Postwar Jonathan Kozol
...Mary Oliver 10. "Myth of You and Me" Leah Steward Hardcover Nonfiction 1. "Team of Rivals" Doris Kearns Goodwin 2. "Schooling America" Patricia Graham 3. "Moral Consequences of Economic Growth" Benjamin Friedman 4. "Year of Magical Thinking" Joan Didion 5. "Chosen" Jerome Karabel 6. "The Truth with Jokes" Al Franken 7. "Guynd: a Scottish Journal" Belinda Rathbone 8. "Two Lives" Vikram Seth 9. "Are Men Necessary?" Maureen Dowd 10. "Shame of the Nation" Jonathan Kozol