After just two weeks on the air, Air America Radio, the fledgling liberal talk-radio network featuring Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo, and that really loud woman from Florida, appears to have encountered serious cash-flow problems.

Stop the presses!!! There’s nothing more exciting than half a story from a third hand source!!!!

Insiders tell SLUDGE, that the reason the network was pulled off the air this morning in Chicago and Los Angeles, the network's second- and third-largest markets, was because, the owner of both stations, Arthur Liu of Multicultural Broadcasting, said, the network bounced a check and owes him more than $1 million! The run-on sentence, tortured grammar and the exclamation point clearly means it’s true!!

Only it isn’t.

Normally we’d let this go because “habitual liars” like Drudge are laughable, and ridicule is our business.

But  Arthur Liu --- not funny. He lied to us, he ripped us off and now we’re chasing him down with a pipe wrench. It’s a metaphor.

Here’s what really happened.

What's so amusing about this is that so soon after the Kerry incident people, bloggers even, were so quick to take Drudge's word as solid fact. I don't care if you are on the right or the left, but when someone states rumor as fact, or blows half truths up into huge lies again and again, echoing him seconds after he opens his mouth really hammers away at your own credibility. Might be better to check it out yourself first. Really, you are better than that.