Yep, it’s apparently true. Check out this column from Maureen Dowd that appeared in today’s New York Times.

Camus Comes to Crawford
By Marueen Dowd

Strangely enough, we find two famous men reading Albert Camus’s “The Stranger” this summer.

One is Jean Girard, the villainous gay French race car driver hilariously played by Sacha Baron Cohen (a k a Ali G and Borat) — the sinuous rival to Will Ferrell’s stocky Ricky Bobby in “Talladega Nights.”

Girard, a jazz-loving, white-silk-scarf-wearing, America-disdaining Formula Un driver sponsored by Perrier, is so smooth he can sip macchiato from a china cup, smoke Gitanes and read “L’Etranger” behind the wheel and still lead the Nascar pack.

Frenchie contemptuously informs “cowboy” Bobby that America merely gave the world George Bush, Cheerios and the ThighMaster while France invented democracy, existentialism and the ménage à trois.

The other guy kindling to Camus is none other than the aforementioned George Bush, who read “The Stranger” in English on his Crawford vacation and, Tony Snow told me, “liked it.” Name-dropping existentialists is good for picking up girls, as Woody Allen’s schlemiels found, or getting through the clove-cigarette fog of Humanities 101. But it does seem odd that W., who once mocked NBC’s David Gregory as “intercontinental” for posing a question in French to the French president in France, would choose Camus over Grisham…

…If there was ever a confirmation of Camus’s sense of the absurdity of life, it’s that the president is reading him.

[We needed that.]

With the not-so-secret news that Anthony Pollina and his rag-tag band of not-so-accomplished cohorts are about to jump into the milk business, don’t think you’re hearing things when you hear cheering from your Democratic friends. The cheering is real. And it’s accompanied by the relief that the Pollina show has found a political and economic dead-end to occupy his time for a few years.

Democrats, still smoldering over Pollina’s election night hug to Brian Dubie in 2002, have been wanting Pollina to find a hobby outside of politics for years now. Things looked good when he got into the radio business a few years ago at WDEV, but anyone who’s listened to his show for any amount of time knows that it simply can’t last.

First, Anthony’s got no radio presence. He’s apparently become so confused over the years after running for political office under every political banner except Republican that he can’t get his thoughts straight before coming out of his mouth. The result is a bizarre hodge-podge of left/liberal platitudes, served with more than a heaping helping of apologies. In other words, not exactly the ingredients necessary for successful radio talk shows.

Compare, for example, Pollina’s meanderings and his constant apologies for his “opinions” with that of his rightwing cohort at WDEV, Paul Beaudry. Both pay handsomely for the their hour of time, but Beaudry doesn’t mind spewing opinions without apology and pushing an agenda. Pollina, on the other hand, seems to have his own internal opinion editor that stops him from saying ANYTHING that matters. Or, if he does, he apologizes before anyone has a chance to rally behind him. It’s just tedious.

There’s no fight left in Pollina. And that’s clearly understandable given how many times he’s lost. But instead of standing up for some principles, Pollina thinks that if he just keeps blurring his real feeling he’ll fool enough people into supporting him in the future. What he doesn’t understand, however, is that this is about as transparent as transparent can be.

But now, after having failed at electoral office, failed at issues like campaign finance reform and genetically modified foods, and on the precipice of failure in political talk radio, Pollina’s now going into business: the milk business.

Given his business experience – zero – we can all easily predict where this is going. But, hey, it’ll certainly keep him out of the electoral arena for a while. And, if his everything-he-touches-fails streak continues, it might even keep him out of politics for good.

Pollina’s got quite the uphill battle with his new milk effort. We all know from the headlines that the dairy industry is struggling big time right now. The dairy monopolizers in Vermont – Cabot, Booth, etc. – are screaming to the high heavens about how hard it is to turn a profit on dairy in this region. And the reasons are obvious: Vermont’s terrain and climate simply will not allow our traditionally smaller dairies to compete with the mega-dairies in the Midwest and West.

There’s only one segment of the dairy industry that’s making a run at the big fellas of milk and that’s the organic producers. But Pollina and his new milk venture have already announced that they will NOT be organic at first, instead trying to lend a hand to the “traditional” dairies in the Northeast Kingdom. Yeah sure, and I’ll bet there were well-intentioned people who were willing to lend a hand to the dinosaurs at one point, too.

But the business math simply does not add up with Pollina’s plan to turn a profit in the milk business. If Cabot and Booth can’t do it by paying less to the farmers, how can the inexperienced Pollina do it by paying more to the farmers AND having the enormous capital overhead of a start-up? Sounds like someone needs an intervention.

Interestingly enough, it was the State of Vermont that gave the best reaction to Pollina’s nefarious adventures into milkdom. A couple of years ago, as he and his merry band of hangeroners approached the State for $500,000 in taxpayer capital to launch this very same project, the legislature responded with the obvious: Your business plan sucks.

But now Pollina’s apparently got the private capital he needs to purchase a milk processing plant in the Northeast Kingdom – most likely a site in Hardwick – to launch his latest failure. And the Democrats can only cheer because St. Anthony will be too busy toiling in the milk plant to hand yet another statewide office to the Republicans.

P.S. I wonder if Brian Dubie is a donor to Pollina’s milk dreams?

P.S.S. Snarky Boy still thinks Pollina is really Gene Simmons of KISS.

I’ve got the kind of job that requires talk radio. I’m a house painter, you see, and there’s nothing more boring than seeing your brush go back and forth 20,000 times a day and listening to that same voice in your head over and over. No thanks. I’ll take talk radio over that voice any day, and everyday I do.

WDEV’s my favorite station by far – at least in the morning. And Mark Johnson’s got the best show going – by far. Sure, he can get a bit bland more frequently than I’d like but he knows how to interview better than anyone else in the state. Johnson’s at his best, however, when he’s had a little too much of that Vermont Coffee Company coffee he flacks for. His hyper-silliness is strangely endearing in a very nerdy kind of way. You can imagine his offspring rolling their eyes and giving that youthful “Daaaaaaad,” when he gets rolling into his giddy zone.

You can always count on Johnson having a more than listenable show. He usually does his homework – with the exception of the other day when he had a man named “Robin” on the show and he introduced him as being a woman. Oops. But he rolled with the blunder and came out and admitted the obvious: “I obviously haven’t read your book.” Or the book jacket, I might have added.

The worst thing Johnson’s got going for him are his obnoxious regular callers. Good grief, where do these folks find the time – or gall – to call every single day? Worse, they say the same damn thing every time they call. Don’t they know that we know what they’re going to say before they say it? Hell, all I need to hear Mark say is “we’ve got Dick from St. Albans on the line” and I can hear Dick’s rant about the big, horrible government in my head. And the same goes for “Bill in Waterbury” and his angry rants about the Constitution. Or “John in Barre,” who has to begin every call with a bit of history about himself (where he worked, where he studied, how long he’s been retired). Ugh.

As these all-to-frequent-callers attest to, Johnson’s one-call-a-day policy is way too lax. He needs to figure out a way to shut the door on these same old, same old, same old callers, one after the other, day in and day out. Not only do they bring the show to a grinding halt, I think they prevent new callers from calling just because they don’t want to be lumped in with the caller drones. “Ew,” I can hear someone saying to themselves as they dial up WDEV, “am I going to sound like THEM?”

For the most part, however, Johnson just puts up with them. I guess that’s what makes Johnson such a nice guy. Until, of course, the nutcake named Brian Pearl calls him. But even Pearl gets through and gets his time to spread his hyper-right-wing paranoia. If anyone ever gets Johnson’s ire, it’s Pearl. Notice, for example, the little game the two of them have with the introductions they give themselves. Most everyone else is simply referred to by his or her first names, but Brian Pearl is introduced as “Brian Pearl.” To which, Pearl responds without fail: “Hello, Mark Johnson.” Oh boy, feel the tension.

Pearl doesn’t have the guts to bitch about Mark to Mark, though. He knows Johnson will cut him off at his knees. Instead, Pearl waits to bitch about Mark until True North Radio begins after Mark signs off at 11. On True North, Pearl gets to fall into the rightwing arms of host Paul Beaudry, a man who is trying like hell to be Rush Limbaugh but he’s missing one key ingredient: a brain.

Last week, Pearl called Beaudry to report that he was convinced a “terrorist cell” was formed in Central Vermont and they were calling Johnson’s show to foment the notion that Israel might be overreacting in its response to the kidnapping of two of its soldiers. And Beaudry latched onto it like Rush would latch onto a prescription medication, later declaring that these “terrorists sympathizers” wouldn’t be allowed on his show. Way to go, Paul! Score one for homeland security!

Other than the fact that Johnson’s listenable and Beaudry’s not, there’s another big difference between the two: Johnson’s paid to do his show and Beaudry pays for his hour of airtime. Trust me, WDEV’s Ken Squire is no dummy. If someone like Beaudry’s going to slobber on Squire’s microphone, he’s going to pay handsomely for it. I’ve heard that Beaudry and his rightwing supporters are paying close to $200 an hour for the chance to spew their hate on a daily basis on WDEV – the same Anthony Pollina pays for his “Equal Time” show.

And there’s a reason Johnson gets paid for his work. He’s damn good. And he helps me get through the morning. I just wish I wasn’t on a ladder so I could give him a call once in a while. What’s your excuse?