Al Mascitti has come full circle. Years ago, when he wrote restaurant reviews for The News Journal, a local steakhouse owner threatened to shoot him after Mascitti averred that steak was the only edible item on the restaurant’s menu. Recently, a caller to his talk show on WDEL 1150 AM challenged Mascitti to meet “face to face” to settle their dispute over labor unions.

“I hung around here for an hour waiting for him,” says the 52-year-old Mascitti. “He didn’t show.”

The potential confrontation was a sign of how Mascitti’s 9 a.m.-to-noon gig has evolved. When he began hosting the show two years ago (while still writing his political column for the Journal), he was somewhat tentative, or at least tentative in comparison to his bulldog print style. But as his radio chops developed, the decibel level has increased, and he has even banned a caller or two.

Mascitti’s tougher stance is reminiscent of the no-holds-barred columns he wrote for The News Journal, first on restaurants, and later on the local and state political scene. The Philadelphia native has lived in Delaware since graduating from UD in 1973, and he knows its politics and people as well as anyone. He offered some spot-on insights on a wide range of subjects during an interview in the WDEL studios.

No. [Pauses] Well, it depends on what you mean by threats. I know that they went in behind my back and talked to the public editor and tried to have me banned from ever writing about them again. This was all while they were being very nice to me to my face. Two-facedness doesn’t disturb me that much; I’ve come to expect it. If you’re at all interested in politics, you pretty much expect everyone to be, minimum, two-faced. Some are three- or four-faced.

I lose my temper sometimes on the air, especially when politicians call in to debate me. Which I don’t have a problem with if they’re going to be honest debaters, but if they call in with a line of b.s., then I lose my temper. I rarely schedule politicians as guests because I assume they are going to at best prevaricate to make their points, and some will just downright lie. And I really don’t feel like parsing through the crap politicians say. If I could just put them on hold and then give the translated version of what they’re trying to say, it would maybe work out better, but people who are going to come on and spout off some talking point that they’ve sat around and brainstormed to get exactly the way they want, no. People are too busy to listen to that stuff and life is too short.

Like trying to talk with [State Senator] Harris McDowell about energy in the state. I mean, everybody knows the guy is very tightly allied with Delmarva and Conectiv and with every power company we’ve ever had here. I recognize the actions of somebody flailing about for a rationalization for ideas that have their own genesis and their own reasons for being. When a newspaper reporter interviews them, that reporter is obligated to write down crap that he says even though they know it’s a lie and to not correct it. Our news programs, the people interviewing them can’t say, “I’m sorry, Sen. McDowell, that’s a lie, that’s a load of hooey.” Can’t say that. This is one of the things that has destroyed our political discourse. It’s now completely by the book to let somebody get on TV or radio or in the newspaper and just spout off their—I don’t even like to call it their version of truth. They know damn right well it’s not the truth. It might be their point of view, but it’s not the truth.

I’m just gonna skip all that crap and just say, “Here’s what’s goin’ on.”

No, they will never accept Protack. I don’t know. If Terry Spence does it, his career is over. In fact, [that applies to] anybody who holds elective office. Terry Spence would have to give up running for re-election to run for governor. Same with Charlie Copeland. That’s why he won’t do it. I think the same for John Still. Which means, I think [News Journal columnist] Ron Williams was right; I think they’ll get Judge [William Swain] Lee to go to bat for them—strictly as a sacrificial lamb. They don’t have the money, they don’t have the time, and they certainly don’t have the organization.

(After a brief discussion of Lee’s age—72—relative to presidential candidate John McCain, who’s 71): Keep in mind the strain of being governor is not exactly the strain of being president. If you need an argument for how light a job the governor’s job is, just take a look at the one we’ve got now. She did nothing for four years.

I’d like to say they’re 50-50; I’m not sure they’re that good; maybe 55-45. Let’s put it this way: I know where Carney’s votes are coming from. They’re coming from [party] stalwarts. Markell’s are coming from real people. It’s the same reason I like Obama better than I like Hillary. We’re coming up on a very precarious time in public policy, where the revenue stream that we’ve got and the expenses we’ve got are on differing inclines. I don’t necessarily say our revenue streams are shrinking—other than the lotteries—but the growth simply can’t keep pace with the growing expenses of government. It’s been 10 years since we’ve doubled the budget in this state. It’s insane.

Markell and I had these conversations back to I think the first year I was writing the column and I was first tumbling to the fact that Gordon and Freeberry were not the unalloyed force for good that they advertised themselves. They would talk about things like running government as a business, which is ironic considering they had both been on the public payroll their entire lives. You know, they went to Wilmington College, so somebody thought they knew something about business. I wrote a column saying this is a bunch of crap; you can’t run a government like a business. The things that lose you the most money in government are the very things that you have to keep going. You can’t just get rid of welfare because it’s an underperforming asset the way you would if it was a division of your business. I had devoted only a sentence or two in the column to this and I got a long letter from Jack Markell saying that after one year in office he had come to the same conclusion. That he went into government thinking he could bring business principals to bear on government. After one year in government he saw that no, he couldn’t, because the very things that cost you the most money are the very things you have very little control over. The idea that can lead you to things like the psychiatric center mess that we’ve got, the prison healthcare mess that we’ve got. If you look at these things with a bottom-line mentality, yeah, you can save a million dollars in there someplace, but in all likelihood it’s going to lead to a great deal of human suffering. And this is not the way we expect our government to work—at least if you’re not one of these libertarian Republicans, that’s not the way you expect it to work.

Let’s see, what was there? Seven times in [Gov. Tom] Carper’s eight years in office they cut taxes just slightly. Could it possibly be that maybe we should have only cut them six times during those eight years? Now, technically, we’d be increasing taxes, but maybe we’re just rejiggering them because we cut them too much.

The crap Republicans say about this is just wildly off-base, and keep in mind it’s all been market-tested to make sure it will fly in exactly the terms they use. That’s why we have a “death tax,” not an “estate tax,” because when we called it an estate tax, which is precisely what it is, it gave people the idea that only rich people paid it. But it didn’t scare people enough, and Republicans don’t operate without fear, so they called it a death tax, implying that you couldn’t die unless you paid it. I got news for you: If that’s really the way the death tax worked, they’d never collect a cent; no one would ever die if they could get away with living forever just by not paying a tax. They lie, and they lie knowingly to try to get people to do something it’s not in their best interest to do.