Are The Wheels Coming Off in Detroit?

Take a look at your garage or driveway right now. (Go ahead. We'll wait.) If that car (or cars) you and yours are driving is anything other than a Ford, or is made in Asia or Europe, then you might just have yourself a collector's item.

Having already blown through all the government funds just to stay in business, General Motors and Chrysler were told by President Barack Obama Monday to get their act together if they want more money. They have 30 to 60 days to--among other things-- (A) get rid of some of their brands, (B) work with the unions on concessions that will likely be unpalatable to them, and (C) in the case of Chrysler, find themselves a new financial partner such as Fiat. Otherwise, we'll see you in bankruptcy court.

Obama has also taken the opportunity to replace GM's CEO Rick Wagoner, who's been accused of running the company into the ground, with Frederick "Fritz" Henderson. (Wagoner goes home with a nice parting gift of $20 million.) Leaving aside the legality of a President of the United States removing a president of a private company, Obama is simply responding to the national outrage over executives who prosper while their corporations--especially those who took government bailout money--fail.

It should be noted that Ford is not involved in any of this at the moment. They're not exactly in the best financial health, either.

We could point to a number of reasons why the auto industry is where they are today: lack of cars worth buying, failure to get on the hybrid bandwagon fast enough, competition from overseas, too many brands in too many dealers, and just plain arrogance. But we'd be stating the obvious.

So how does this help the typical American consumer, who has been forced to pinch pennies ever since Wall Street tanked and the job losses began? If there's still money left, is that person going to spend it on a car from a company whose future is in doubt?

Things will have to be very different if Detroit is to get back on the road to recovery. Until then, you might want to consider taking good care of the car you're driving now. Who knows? The longer you keep it, the more valuable it becomes. And someone might offer enough money for it so that you don't have to worry about your 401 (k) ever again.

A Flood of Questions

Certainly you've heard about the Red River along the North Dakota-Minnesota border threatening to inundate Fargo, Moorhead and points south with crests surpassing the levels set in 1997. It's been the dominant news story around here for a week, and will be for a while longer. We're not experts on flood control, having never been in that situation ourselves. But we do have a few questions.

• Why do officials usually get it wrong on how high the river will be before bigger barriers are needed?
• Why do people choose to live by the river, knowing full well they might get flooded out once a decade? We might ask the same of those who choose to live in hurricane-prone coastal areas, or next to a volcano.
• Why do authority figures feel it necessary to behave like jerks in times of crisis? Is it because they think it makes them look like leaders?
• Why do we see long lines of people passing around heavy bags of dirt in freezing weather? Is the economy that bad?
• Why are there mandatory evacuation orders in North Dakota, but not in Minnesota?
• Why is Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty working so hard to free up money for the Red River Valley at the same time he's starving his own government?
• When news of the crisis began, Twin Cities TV stations referred to Fargo-based reporters as coming from their "sister stations". What does that mean, and would it kill them to mention who that "sister station" is?
• Did network correspondents fly to the Twin Cities, then take buses (or some other form of transportation) to Fargo? Do they even know where it is?
• Once they are there, why do some of those correspondents feel compelled to do stupid things such as standing waist-deep in the frozen river (as one CBS reporter did), or get arrested for standing where they shouldn't be standing (as one CNN reporter allegedly did)? Is it for the same reason why they hang onto lampposts during hurricanes?
• Has anyone bothered to go up to Grand Forks to see how things are since the city was almost destroyed in the '97 flood?
• The University of North Dakota's hockey team gave up the tying goal to the University of New Hampshire with .01 seconds remaining in an NCAA playoff game, then lost it in overtime. How much more bad news can North Dakota take?
• How long will it be before certain organizations try to separate us from our money in these Difficult Economic Times, under the pretense of helping out the poor folks who were flooded out of their homes? We don't need another AIG.

Hey, we're just asking questions. Any answers?

Coleman vs. Franken: Wake Us When It's Over

Due to technical problems, we've been having trouble posting lately. Until those problems are resolved, we'll put one of these out whenever we can. Thank you.
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It's official, folks. The U.S. Senate race between Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken has become the longest-running election in Minnesota history, surpassing the 1962 governor's race between Karl Rolvaag and Elmer L. Anderson, which ended with Rolvaag's victory by recount in 1963.

Leaves and snow have come and gone since Coleman claimed victory with less than one percent of the vote, triggering an automatic recount. That went through the holidays, with Franken taking a 225-vote lead. Then we had the trial to determine which votes were legitimate and which weren't. Now it is all up to a three-judge panel.

Even then it may not be all over. Coleman and his attorneys have been making noises about filing an appeal before the Minnesota Supreme Court should they lose, because they believe that is their best chance of winning re-election.

Neither Franken nor Coleman have been certified by Governor Tim Pawlenty and Secretary of State Mark Ritchie to be seated by the Senate, preferring to wait until there's a verdict, as required by Minnesota law. What are the odds that Pawlenty is just holding out until his fellow Republican wins?

No matter what happens, Coleman and Franken are now considered damaged goods politically. If Coleman appeals--and loses--as expected, he might hurt his chances of succeeding Pawlenty in the governor's chair should he decide to run for Presdent in 2012. Then again, does Coleman really want to risk more ridicule after (A) losing the 1998 Governor's race to a former pro wrestler, (B) winning his Senate seat in 2002 only after his Democratic opponent was killed in a plane crash a week before the election, and (C) potentially losing re-election to someone who had once been on Saturday Night Live?

As for Franken, he wasn't the Democrats' first choice to challenge Coleman until he (A) moved from New York to Minnesota, and (B) built up this enormous war chest funded by his celebrity pals. If the verdict goes against Franken, would he ask for his old job back on Air America radio? Or go back to writing books explaining why Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot?

Minnesota currently has one Senator, Amy Klobuchar, trying to do the work of two while this legal battle plays out. Meanwhile, Congress has been passing bills expediting President Barack Obama's agenda to fix the mess the previous President left him with. This tit-for-tat needs to be settled soon, but the damage to Minnesota's reputation may be too much to overcome.

Admit It, Folks. You'll Get Over "Our Jeanette".

I just saw Neal Justin's interview with former WCCO anchor Jeanette Trompeter on his blog at http://www.startribune.com/. not long after she was unceremoniously dumped by the station. It wasn't nearly as interesting as the 90-or-so e-mail responses that followed. They were mostly "I'm never gonna watch Channel 4 again!", "We love you, Jeanette!", or "Fire Don Shelby/Frank Vascellaro/Amelia Santaniello/whoever that idiot in management is instead of Our Jeanette!".

Get a grip, folks. As I told you in the last post, Trompeter was let go because the station must have thought she was getting paid a lot to do little more than read news at 5 and doing lifestyle features. To me, she came across as vapid and naive, anything but a serious journalist.

As for the remaining WCCO anchors, Santaniello can be a bit condescending at times, and makes her husband Vascellaro look like a wimp on the air. Shelby is the Elder Statesman of local TV news, but his nightly pontifications from the mountaintop should be called something other than the cringe-inducing "Good to Know".

Taken as a whole instead of the sum of its personalities, WCCO simply produces a better newscast than the other guys. KSTP has a no-nonsense news format with no-name anchors, but they need to put the brakes on ambulance-chasing journalism. I'm having trouble separating "KARE 11 News" from the station's "KARE Bear" image. And KMSP is owned by the same people who brought you the Fox News Channel. Enough said.

To all of those respondents on Justin's blog, dry your eyes. You'll get over Jeanette Trompeter in no time, as she finds another job somewhere else. And no matter how many stupid mistakes management makes, people will continue to watch WCCO because it's WCCO. Old habits die hard around here.

News Flash: Trompeter Out at WCCO

One year after getting ripped to shreds over how it handled the dismissal of meteorologist Paul Douglas, CBS station WCCO swung the budget ax again, and this time news anchor Jeanette Trompeter was the recipient. She got the word minutes before she was scheduled to do the 5 p.m. news Monday.

Unlike what happened to Douglas, this time the station made sure its viewers knew about it. They ran a statement from its general manager Susan Adams Loyd praising Trompeter, which was followed by remaining anchors Frank Vascellaro, Don Shelby and Amelia Santaniello telling us how shocked they were.

Truth be told, WCCO can't be blamed for letting Trompeter go. Between anchoring the 5 p.m. news and doing lifestyle features, there wasn't that much for her to do. She was never going to be sitting next to Shelby or Vascellaro at 10 as long as Santaniello (the latter anchor's wife) was around.

Still, there was no reason for WCCO to suddenly take Trompeter out with the trash. We realize that the same scenario is happening at companies everywhere, but CBS isn't in danger (as far as we know) of turning into another AIG or General Motors. Give the woman some dignity, folks.

Douglas, after getting whacked by WCCO, has landed on his feet in starting up two weather-related companies. But that doesn't mean he's at all happy with the way the station treated him on his way out, as recent interviews with online media attest.

Trompeter will face a more difficult road, as she joins thousands of other print and broadcast journalists looking for work. Because newspapers are either going bankrupt, going online or shutting down. Because TV networks and stations believe they have to answer to their stockholders instead of their viewers. And because people like you and me are reading things like this on the Internet.

Cramer vs. Stewart: Round One Is No Contest

On a day when Bernie Madoff pled guilty to bilking a lot of people out of a lot of money, another little drama of the Great Recession took place in New York at the taping of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

There Stewart, a self-admitted fake news anchor who has been known to express real opinions from time to time, had as his guest Jim Cramer, the screaming meemee from CNBC who makes stock picks on a show called Mad Money. It was hyped by Comedy Central as this week's version of the Media Showdown at the OK Corral, or something like that.

What brought this on? It began when CNBC's Rick Santelli, who gained notoriety when he attacked President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package on live TV in front of a group of traders, blew off an appearance on The Daily Show. Stewart responded with a tirade of how CNBC, a financial news channel owned by General Electric, had been getting it wrong in its coverage of the economic meltdown.

As I see it, CNBC (and its competitors at Fox, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal) is intended for business junkies who live, eat and breathe the financial markets 24/7. It is not intended for Mr. and Mrs. Average Investor, whose main concerns are that foreclosures are up, their 401(K)s are down, and their employment situation is up in the air.

That said, Stewart was in great form taking down a poorly-prepared Cramer. But that was on Stewart's home turf with a live studio audience. How would he have fared on CNBC, answering tough questions from men and women in business suits with no help from his writers? Would they have left Stewart as exposed as Cramer was?

Jon Stewart has every right to be angry at the financiers who bet their investors' life savings and lost, CEOs who lived high on the hog while their companies take government money and lay off employees, people sweet-talked into buying homes they couldn't afford, etc. But he is a paid entertainer who doesn't have to worry about where his next meal is coming from. The rest of us do.

Stem Cell Research: No Panacea, But It's a Start

President Barack Obama repudiated eight years of Bush-era ostrich-like behavior with the stroke of the pen Monday, signing an executive order expanding government funding of embryonic stem cell research.

This decision will jumpstart potential breakthroughs into the treatment of--and possibly cures for--types of cancer, Parkinson's and other diseases. Human cloning, we should tell you, is not included.

So why are there still those who oppose this life-saving initiative? Because those stem cells, they say, are coming from the tissue of dead fetuses.

Not surprisingly, these are the same people who have made it difficult for women who, for circumstances known only to them, need to have a legal procedure to terminate their pregnancies.

They believe life begins at conception. If that were true, we wouldn't be celebrating birthdays. Instead, we'd have Conception Days, held nine months earlier, to commemorate the day Mommy and Daddy "forgot" to wear protection at a motel someplace. Sounds awkward, doesn't it?

These people are opposed to abortion and birth control, and they are entitled to their opinion. Are they willing to sacrifice the health and well-being of millions, even their own families, for the sake of fetuses that might never grow to full term?

On the other hand, billions have been spent over the past half century on medical research. What happened? Where did all that money go? Did the pharmaceutical and insurance companies somehow get involved and slow down progress? Heaven forbid they should ever discover a cure, because that would be bad for business. Even if there is one, few people would be able to afford the cost of treatments. And you wonder why we have a health care crisis?

There are many medical breakthroughs waiting to be discovered through stem cell research that could someday make our lives better. Let's not let ideologues and big money interests make the cure worse than the disease.

The Most Powerful Dittohead In America

Five months after the Republican Party went down to defeat at the polls, we find that George W. Bush had even more power as President than we thought (thanks to documents recently released), John McCain is back at his old job in the Senate, and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's daughter Bristol--a new mother--says abstinence doesn't work.

These days, it's more about who controls the soul of the GOP. At the recent CPAC convention in Washington, a straw poll of who conservatives thought would make the best presidential candidate in 2012 was all over the map, with no one getting a majority. Not even our beloved Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota.

But there is one man Republicans are rallying around, and it's not the party chair Michael Steele (His selection must have been the GOP's way of saying "Hey, we've got black leaders too!"). Instead, it's a rotund man who sits behind his golden microphone making outrageous comments weekdays over 600 radio stations.

His name is Rush Limbaugh. I used to listen to this guy when he started out in syndication, but no longer do because of his pomposity, his bashing of liberals (which has become so effective that they now call themselves progressives), and his condescending attitude toward callers. Limbaugh's run-ins with the law over his alleged misuse of painkillers caused others to take him less seriously. But enough of his acolytes (also known as "dittoheads") still tune in daily to make him the standard in conservative talk radio.

Now Limbaugh has become the defacto head of the GOP, eclipsing Steele and any other party member who gets in his way. It's amusing to watch them kiss his rear end after they dared to cross him. You don't think Rush is enjoying all the attention he's getting?

What's not so amusing is that, with President Barack Obama getting high marks in the polls after one month in office, Limbaugh has been openly rooting for him and his policies to fail. The country is mired in a deep recession and two wars, looking to a new President in hopes of stemming the tide. But the Republicans who complain about the way things are going and try to stop Obama's efforts to improve things? Well, they're the same ones who, over a 25-year period, are the ones whose policies helped create this mess.

The sooner Republicans figure that out, the less they'll have to rely on figureheads and extremist talk show hosts to take back control of Washington.

. . . And You Thought Digital TV Was Confusing

Thirty years ago this week, as President Jimmy Carter donned a sweater to keep warm in an energy-conscious White House and disco ruled the music charts, three of the four Twin Cities TV stations swapped networks.

KSTP (Channel 5) changed from NBC to ABC, which moved from KMSP (Channel 9). NBC took on WTCN (Channel 11), leaving KMSP as an independent. WCCO (Channel 4) stuck with CBS.

ABC had the top-rated shows on network TV back then: "Happy Days", "Laverne & Shirley", "Three's Company", etc. They weren't pleased with low-rated KMSP, so they made a deal with KSTP, the Hubbard-owned station that had been with NBC since they went on the air in 1948. It was considered quite the blockbuster move in the industry at the time.

NBC's best-known shows in 1979 were "Little House On The Prairie" and "The Rockford Files". They usually languished at the bottom of the prime-time ratings because of turkeys like "Supertrain" and "Waverly Wonders". The fact that they were now on a former independent like WTCN must have reflected their willingness to start from scratch.

Some of the fallout from the switch :

• To promote their new affiliation, KSTP brought in Howard Cosell to help cover the State High School Hockey Tournament with longtime North Stars announcer Al Shaver.
• Overnight broadcasting is now commonplace, but it was a novelty when KSTP started doing it in 1979. Laird Brooks Schmidt, a local comedian and schoolteacher who described himself as a "one-man group thinker", was host for a show that featured some of the most godawful movies ever made. Over at WTCN, the stuff they used to run as an independent--"The Merv Griffin Show", "The Mary Tyler Moore Show", "The Bob Newhart Show"--became night-owl fodder.
• Metromedia, which owned WTCN at the time, spent around a million dollars to build a news department from the ground up. The result was "News Center 11", which was widely panned by critics for being too fast-paced for local viewers more used to the likes of Dave Moore.
• Poor, poor, pitiful KMSP. All they did was pick up leftovers from other stations. Twins baseball. North Stars hockey. High school basketball tournaments. "The CBS Late Movie". And they did much better as an independent than as a network affiliate.

Thirty years and 500 channels later, fortunes changed for the three stations. Gannett bought WTCN from Metromedia in the 1980s, then changed the name to KARE. Today, they run neck-and-neck with WCCO in the local news wars, in spite of NBC's woeful prime time performances.

KMSP is now a Fox affiliate, its parent company having been taken over by Rupert Murdoch a few years ago. Besides "American Idol" and Vikings football, they have a significant news presence during the morning and at 9 p.m., something that could not have been imagined during the ABC days.

KSTP, whose top-rated "Eyewitness News" in the 70's was the reason ABC made the switch, is now mired in fourth place after playing musical anchors a bit too often. You think they're regretting the move?

As for the rest of us, changing networks was one thing. Changing from analog to digital TV--its deadline changed once--is quite another. Who knows what the fallout will be from that?

The End Is Near In Iraq, But The Cost Of War Continues To Rise

Six years and more than 4000 dead American soldiers later, President Barack Obama made good on one of his major campaign promises: Ending the United States' military commitment to Iraq.

The President wants to withdraw around 100,000 soldiers by August 31, 2010. After that, 35-to-50,000 troops would be left behind to assist the Iraqi army in non-combat roles.

Is this "mission accomplished", as President George W. Bush declared to his everlasting regret? Not really. Things may have calmed down in Iraq, but that doesn't mean the embattled country has become a safe place to take the wife and kids.

It also doesn't necessarily mean those soldiers are coming home. Instead, some of them will be sent to Afghanistan, where the Taliban has again reared its ugly head, and the U.S.-backed government is teetering on the brink. There's also the matter of finding Osama bin Laden, who is believed to be holed up in the mountains somewhere. And at least 650 Americans have been killed in action so far.

Next door is Pakistan, a critical U.S. ally that is getting more and more dangerous. The government there recently agreed to let the Taliban control the northern parts of the country, conceding that the military couldn't handle them. Terrorists attacked a bus carrying the Sri Lankan cricket team that was playing matches in the country. And Pakistan has nukes. Need we say more?

Should those American soldiers not survive the battlefield, you will now be able to watch them come home in flag-draped coffins, courtesy of the Pentagon. (Provided, of course, that the families give their OK.) The lifting of the ban on news media coverage of those ceremonies was a belated victory for those who believe we should witness the true cost of America's conflicts, whether they're justified or not. Say what you want about the possible exploitation of dead soldiers and their families, but really--if you've seen one flag-draped coffin, you've seen them all.

Dover Air Force Base in Delaware isn't the only place where you can find the true cost of war. You can see it in military hospitals where they try to piece broken lives back together, families who have had to make major adjustments when one or more parents may or may not come back alive, and society still divided over the worth of it all.

The fighting may soon end, but we're about to pay the price for political arrogance.

Paul Harvey (1918-2009)

Paul Harvey, 2005 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Hello Americans, this is Paul Harvey. Stand by for news! If you listened to the radio during the noon hour during the past half-century, especially in the Midwest, chances are you've heard the unmistakable and unavoidable voice of Paul Harvey. He was heard on 1,200 stations of the ABC Radio Network and on Armed Forces radio worldwide, reportedly the largest personal network in the world.

Harvey died at his winter home in Arizona Saturday, according to ABC Radio Networks. He was 90.

Page Two. Harvey's style of mixing the news of the day with conservative political comment had been running on ABC since 1951, in an era when radio networks routinely gave commentators such as Edward R. Murrow, Lowell Thomas and Gabriel Heatter their own programs. But Harvey wasn't really about reporting the news. He was more of a showman, borrowing from the storytelling techniques of sportscaster Bill Stern, whose 1940s broadcasts were filled with over-the-top tales of sports stars that may or may not have been true. You could hear that style on "The Rest of the Story", which ABC added in 1976.

Page Three. Occasionally, some of Harvey's comments caused him or his network problems. He was a supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy back when he was looking for Communists in every closet. He also supported the Vietnam War until he chastised President Richard Nixon for escalating the fighting.

Page Four. Harvey survived the end of network radio, which has devolved into programming services such as ABC and Westwood One. His programs had been heard on all sorts of radio stations, with formats ranging from rock and country, to news and talk. But stations have found it increasingly difficult to schedule Harvey's 15-minute broadcast around syndicated talkers like Rush Limbaugh (the new king of midday radio), Don Imus and others without cutting into local programming. (KSTP-AM, the ABC affiliate in the Twin Cities, played hide-and-go-seek with Harvey, scheduling his newscasts for 9 a.m. and 11;50 a.m. , and "Story" for 2 p.m weekdays. His Saturday broadcast ran at around 4 p.m.) Plus, it must be said, most of Harvey's audience reached the nursing-home demographic.

ABC Radio Networks, and its parent company Citadel Broadcasting, have yet to make an announcement on what will happen to Harvey's programs. The guessing here is that the 15-minute broadcast is history.

Page Five. Whatever you thought of Paul Harvey's on-air style or his politics, touting the wonders of America's can-do spirit while reading commercials, you couldn't turn him off. You were drawn in by his storytelling, his phrase making, and those dramatic pauses. He did his broadcasts mostly from Chicago, which in the days when he started, he might have made a good radio actor. Now 22 million listeners (Harvey's estimated audience) will have to get along without him, an era in American radio truly ended.

Paullll Harveeeeyyyy . . . good DAY!