Some of you may remember that I told you in Friday's MULLINGS that I was going to be on Bill Maher's HBO program, "Real Time." I said that I was going to be on with, among other people, Keith Olbermann.

Then I typed:

"Olbermann & Maher v Galen. I think that's a fair fight, don't you?"

Turns out it wasn't. I kicked butt.

The show is produced at the CBS studios in Los Angeles, and I got to the Studio at about 4:30 Pacific (it goes on live at 7 PM), so I had plenty of time to poke around and look at stuff.

One of the stuffs I looked at was flipping through the channels on the TV set in my dressing room and I came upon the closed circuit channel showing the camera rehearsal in the studio downstairs.

They ran through the segments with writers and other staffers filling in for the "talent" so I had a pretty good idea what was going to be in the show. After a while Bill Maher and Keith Olbermann appeared on the set to run through a "bit" they were going to do: Embarrassing a "typical Republican voter" who, as it happened, was being played by a writer on the show.

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They tried too hard, it ran too long, and the bit wasn't that funny.

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During the chit-chat someone came up to Maher and showed where each of the three panelists would be sitting. I would be closest to Bill; Jennifer Donahue, a Fellow at the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College would be In the middle; and Olbermann would be on the far end.

Maher wanted to switch Keith and me because he would introduce the person closest to the audience first. He said, "You'll get a lot more applause than … Rich Galen," as if he were saying, "You'll get a lot more applause than a used brick."

I Tweeted (you should follow me at @richgalen): "Haven't even been on the #BillMaher set yet and was dissed already."

About 12 seconds after that Tweet hit, one of the producers came racing into my dressing room to explain that I wasn't being dissed at all; that Bill and Keith were going to be doing that Republican Voter bit and Bill wanted to show Keith how much he appreciated it.

Later, I