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.