12: A Conversation With Howard Fineman

The Al Franken Podcast

Government, Progressive, Politics, Senate, Liberal, Senator, Minnesota, Franken, News, Saturday Night Live, Comedy, Snl

4.6 • 7.7K Ratings

🗓️ 30 July 2019

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How awful do you think Mitch McConnell is? Well. He’s worse than that. Howard Fineman, who began his career at the Louisville Courier Journal, has been covering McConnell for decades. Fineman’s McConnell relishes being a big prick. When coal miners with black lung disease travel from KY to ask Congress to restore the tiny tax on coal that funds their treatment, McConnell gives them all of 30 seconds. Fineman explains. Hell – the miners aren’t going to vote for him; the coal companies have always supported him with tons of campaign funds; and these black lung miners came to D.C. just to embarrass him. Well, screw you, coal miners with black lung disease – you’re all going to die soon anyway. Al tells a lighter story about presiding over the Senate during the debate over Elena Kagan’s confirmation to SCOTUS. Mitch gave the most condescending, sexist speech, typified by the following: “No one has any doubt that Ms. Kagan is bright and personable and easy to get along with. But the Supreme Court is not a social club. If getting along in polite society were enough reason to put someone on the Supreme Court, then we wouldn’t need a confirmation process at all.” Al breaks up and gets a nasty case of church laughter, as McConnell grows more and more infuriated. Find out how it ends in this fun, if somewhat dark episode.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, welcome to the Al Franken podcast. We've got a really good one for a change. It's Howard
0:11.4	Feynman, who younger folks listening may know only from MSNBC. He's the guy who looks like
0:18.6	an older, grayer Max Weinberg, Bruce Springsteen's drummer.
0:24.4	Howard has had a 45-year career thus far as a journalist.
0:30.8	For years, he wrote the political cover stories for Newsweek,
0:35.1	and Howard was one of those guys like David Broder, who would travel all over
0:39.5	the country, and he'd ride the bus with the other reporters, and he'd talk with locals as part
0:45.8	of his story. So Howard knows this country very well, but a part of the country he knows probably
0:52.2	better than any other Beltway journalist is Kentucky,
0:56.7	because Howard's first job as a reporter was for the Louisville Career Journal.
1:03.3	So, Howard knows Kentucky, and he's covered Mitch McConnell for decades.
1:09.2	And I thought it was time for a podcast to help my listeners
1:14.2	understand how cynical and power hungry and just awful the current majority leader is.
1:22.7	And so Howard and I sat down this past Thursday and recorded our conversation, but Mitch is so awful that while we were discussing how he is destroying our institutions and our democracy, he did another wretched thing.
1:41.6	What McConnell did was put a hold on the Securing American Federal Elections Act. Now,
1:49.2	this is a bill that had been passed by the House that would direct $600 million in election
1:57.0	assistance to the states and require backup paper ballots so the results can't be hacked.
2:06.0	And you can do a recount that you can rely on.
2:09.8	Now, I'm going to quote from the Washington Post Dana Milbank, quote,
2:14.7	McConnell himself responded this time, reading from from a statement his chin melting into his chest
2:21.3	his trademark thin smile on his lips it's just a highly partisan bill from the same folks who
2:29.4	spent two years hyping up a conspiracy theory about President Trump and Russia, he said.
	...

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