Al Franken--with a huge publicity assist from the asinine legal strategies of Fox Corp.--is currently riding high in the bestsellers' lists with "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right." He treads the same sort of terrain Michael Moore's occupied repeatedly, most recently with "Stupid White Men." Turns out there's an audience for this stuff. Who knew? And who says liberals don't have a sense of humor?

Actually, a lot of people have said just that over the years--but Franken, Moore, Molly Ivins, and (to a lesser extent) Jim Hightower are now perhaps the four most visible lefty political commentators in the country. Each of them has gotten there in large part with humor.

That's why Franken's next likely big project is as exciting as it is long overdue. He's the programming name most frequently linked with a Chicago outfit called AnShell Media, a new company fueled by a wealthy liberal couple that is putting $10 million, and trying to raise more, into a proposed national network for left-of-center commercial talk radio.

With a handful of exceptions, such talk radio, essentially, does not at present exist. It's hard not to notice this aspect of modern American media, not so much a void as a black hole; there's no widely heard syndicated national liberal talk at all on commercial stations, and only a handful of liberal hosts at the local level--Neil Rogers in Miami, Bernie Ward and Ray Taliaferro in San Francisco, Mike Webb pulling the late evening shift on KIRO in Seattle. Even then, such hosts are buried on largely conservative stations--sort of like playing country music all day and then throwing in the Stones (or 50 cent) at night and hoping for good ratings.

Seattle is as good an example as any in the country. In our city, Democrats not only hold every elected office, but Greens often get more votes than Republicans. Our larger metropolitan area and state consistently vote Democratic. Yet you'd never know it from the radio dial.

Seattle's top-rated commercial political talk station, KIRO, features the right-center Dave Ross (who also works nationally for CBS radio) in mornings, the Neanderthalic Dori Monson in afternoons, and consigns its liberal voice to evenings and weekends. The other two major talk stations, KVI and KTTH, are in a righter-than-thou pissing war over Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and a gaggle of other national and local right wing voices. Beyond that, there's two Christian talk stations, both of the Pat Robertson political variety; a "lifestyle" talk station whose best-known syndicated host, Tom Leykis, trades on being a sexist ass; several other stations that drop their regular programming for innuendo-laden morning talk; and three hours a day of somewhat liberal chatter on one of the two local NPR affiliates.

Our region votes 60% Democratic, and its airwaves are 90% Republican. Why?

"If I was five time more capable than the guy next to me (in a job interview) and he was a Republican, he'd get the job," says Webb, who's been working evenings, weekends, and fill-in shifts at his station for seven years. "The imbalance...comes from lazy program directors who are afraid to take a chance. I don't believe it's some deep conspiracy to keep `The Bush Cabal' voice alive.' It just comes down to an old, embarrassing radio basic: If the other guy did it well, maybe I can just copy him."

Webb ticks off the barriers: program directors victim to the herd mentality, sales departments that don't know how to sell talk formats when they're not conservative, program brokers and big ownership chains that sell syndicated programs to dozens of stations at a time.

And those damned earnest liberals and their tendency to carefully consider questions, rather than just yell at people.

That's a bum rap--not just because conservative hosts are capable of thoughtful dialogue that considers multiple views (if they want to), but because media sensations like Moore traffic heavily in ridicule of their opponents, too. The bigger question, perhaps, is whether commercial radio, with its insistent need to interrupt a thought for traffic, news breaks, and (especially) commercials every five minutes or so, can be a conducive vehicle for useful political dialogue at all.

But that's beside the point. In the chicken and egg question of whether the market creates conservative radio, or conservative radio creates conservative voters, there's no question that the massive array of conservative media echo chambers in our country is a huge advantage for Republicans wanting to frame issues in popular media. If politics in the 21st century involves wars of ideas, media like talk radio are critical parts of the armory.

AnShell has its work cut out for it. It proposes to syndicate talk shows, similar to the way Limbaugh, Hannity, and other right-wing programs are produced, and to then buy time on local stations and sell its own commercials to pay for it. Yet most stations willing to sell time in such blocks are A radio's weak sisters--suburban stations with poor signals and awful ratings, where listeners and sponsors rarely go. It's a radio graveyard. The stations with the big signals are owned in cities large and small by a handful of large companies. In Seattle, for example, three of the talk stations--KIRO, The Buzz, and KTTH (slogan: "You Deserve the Truth") are all owned by one company, Entercom. It's easy to imagine a host like Franken being bartered on some inaudible 500 watt station in the next county, and all concerned then deciding the format doesn't work.

It would, of course, if given the chance. There's just too much out there to laugh at.