About

City Winery NYC Presents The Al Franken Podcast LIVE! Election Preview with Molly Jong-Fast, Mark Leibovich, Jessica Taylor, & Jeremy Peters on Monday, October 28th at 7:30 PM

As far as I know, I’m the only U.S. Senator who was also one of the original writers for Saturday Night Live, where I worked for fifteen seasons. I’ve won five Emmys for writing and producing – even though Wikipedia says I won three. Wikipedia is wrong. I’m also the author of four #1 New York Times bestsellers, including Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them – A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, and Al Franken, Giant of the Senate. I also won two Grammys, which Wikipedia also doesn’t mention. But that’s okay.

I served Minnesota in the Senate from 2009-2018, clobbering my first opponent Norm Coleman by a margin of 312 votes. My second time around I won by a larger margin that’s not worth mentioning. I served on the Judiciary, Energy, Indian Affairs, and HELP (Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions) Committees where I routinely embarrassed badly prepared witnesses and was a fierce opponent of media concentration, mandatory arbitration, and Betsy DeVos.

I wrote a key provision of the Affordable Care Act – the Medical Loss Ratio, which requires insurance companies to spend at least 80% (85% for large group plans) of premiums on actual health care and not profits, administrative costs, executive salaries, and marketing. If they don’t, they must rebate the difference to policyholders. Millions of Americans, very likely including you, have received billions in rebates. You’re welcome.

At the moment, I am the host of The Al Franken Podcast. My political action committee, Midwest Values PAC, supports Democrats and a host of other good, non-political things.

Franni and I have been married for 48 years, many of them happy. Our two kids, Thomasin and Joe, have each produced two grandchildren. All four are spectacular!

Molly Jong-Fast

MSNBC Political Analyst, Host of the Fast Politics Podcast & Vanity Fair Special Correspondent. Molly Jong-Fast is an American writer, journalist, author, political commentator, and podcaster. Jong-Fast is the author of three books and her memoir “How to Lose Your Mom” will be coming out from Viking in June of 2025. You can find her on Threads/X/Instagram as mollyjongfast

Mark Leibovich

Mark Leibovich is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of five books, including three New York Times best sellers, and two No. 1 Times best sellers, “This Town” (2013) and “Thank You for Your Servitude” (2022). He is the recipient of a National Magazine Award for profile writing. Before joining The Atlantic in 2022, he spent 16 years at The New York Times, based in Washington, serving as the chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine. Prior to that, he worked at The Washington Post, where he covered technology and national politics. He is also a political analyst for NBC and MSNBC.

Jessica Taylor

Jessica Taylor is the Senate and Governors Editor for The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. Before joining Cook, Taylor was a political reporter for National Public Radio for five years, where she covered elections and breaking news, ranging from the White House to both chambers of Congress and statewide elections. She is the first female senior author for The Almanac of American Politics in the book's 50 year history. Her quotes and analysis regularly appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and numerous other publications, and she has appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, C-SPAN and CNN. She has reported on politics for several prestigious outlets over the past decade — including the NBC News Political Unit, National Journal, Politico and The Hill, where she served as campaign editor. Her expert analysis contributed to real-time election night coverage and analysis at CBS in 2012 and for C-SPAN in 2020 and 2022.

Jeremy Peters

Jeremy Peters is a correspondent for The New York Times. He has covered a wide variety of beats for the paper over a career that has spanned nearly 20 years, including three presidential campaigns (2012, 2016, and 2020), Congress, the conservative movement, right-wing media, financial news, the auto industry and New York politics. He spent seven years based in the Times Washington bureau and, before that, two years in Albany, N.Y. He now resides in New York City. In 2022, he turned his reporting on Donald Trump and the Republican Party into his first book, “Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted.” He is also a contributor to MSNBC.

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