Could the Pioneer Press buy the Star Tribune?

Dean Singleton, the owner of the Media News Group (the Denver-based company that bought the Pioneer Press after Knight Ridder dissolved) has made a career of buying papers in crisis, gutting their staffs, and then cracking the whip. It's publish or perish.

It's a strategy that has supposedly made Singleton a multi-millionaire. Or is that billionaire?

For years, the talk was that the Star Tribune would oneday absorb the Pioneer Press, a stalwart underdog in one of the last great media rivalries in the United States of America.

But if the Avista Corp., which bought the Star Tribune not long ago and has no great love of media holdings, is doing as poorly financially as it claims to be, perhaps things could go the other way around?

City Pages ponders the possibility and dishes on the Star Tribune's meager finances here, as the New York Post did before it:

City Pages article on the Star Tribune

Singleton could, in theory, ride in and buy the Star Tribune, and either merge the two papers or create a joint operating agreement of sorts. Shared content. Shared printing presses. But separate identities, each capitalizing on the loyal fan base for each paper in each city.

A group of eight rival newspapers in Ohio just did something along a similar vein here, sharing content between them as an answer to the Associated Press rate hike:

More on the operating agreement-style parternship here:
Ohio papers share content

Hillary, please go away.

Message to Hillary Clinton:

Please. go. away.

You're not helping. You will never defeat John McCain in the general election. Maybe Obama can. Maybe he can't. But at least he's got a shot. You don't. Now go clutch success from the jaws of defeat by rallying women voters and Latinos for Obama. That would get McCain on the ropes. That it would. Yes it would.

The minority vote was a hugely decisive factor in Bill Clinton's two victories. And Gore and Kerry's inability to excite and attract minorities in their close races against Bush are why they failed. Hands down.

You wanna win, go for the 'brown' vote.

More on why minority voters may stay home if Hillary wins, thereby giving McCain the advantage, here:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/politics/5751006.html

Save the world!!! ... by starving the poor?

Every policy decision that fixes a problem creates a new one. Ain't that a fact.

At my last meeting of my Spanish-language discussion group, the subject was literature and the environment.

A Costa Rican economic development dude who works with Latin businesses up and down Lake Street, brought up ethanol and biofuels, and how they've been a double-edged sword for developing countries, and probably for the U.S., too. It was once foreseen that increased demand for corn-based fuel products would give poor countries something they could market to the world.

Corn is relatively common and inexpensive to grow, after all.

That plan has worked -- in a strange way, almost too well. The growing price of corn is hitting the poor where it hurts most by raising food costs everywhere.

For more on that, here's an article from the Star Tribune:

"Rush to biofuels leaves a world of emptier plates
In 2007, two University of Minnesota economists forecast that biofuels would sharply increase food prices by 2020, leading to many more empty bellies in the world. How wrong they were. It took only a year. Updated 20 minutes ago"

Here's what I have to say, and the world had better by god damn listening:

Ouch!

Hillary stands a better chance nationally against McCain????

DREAM ON!

Obama won purple state Iowa. Obama TROUNCED Hillary in purple state Minnesota.

Now Hillary thinks she'll play better to the purple-staters? Where is the proof of this utter nonsense?

Without a handful of purple states, the Dems will lose. And Hillary ain't winnin' em over.

Everything I have predicted....

....is coming true. All hail my powers of political divination. Romney did not stand a chance.

Onward to the future: In a match-up between McCain and Hillary, the moderate McCain beats the H.C.-polarizer to a political pulp.

But in a match-up between McCain and Obama, it's a tad more even-steven. Here's where Barack loses ground, however: Obama never seems to speak in specific details, just rhetoric. He's an incredible orator, but once he's challenged on how he'll make his populist rhetoric a practical reality, he'll lose a little steam.

And anti-black wingnuts will appear out of the woodwork to vote against him. The racists and "Hey, I'm not racist, I'm friends with a guy who golfed with Clarence Thomas" types will surely grit their teeth and vote McCain, no matter what people say. A war hero? It's not tough for the typical nationalistic flag-waver to swing that way, and justify that vote to himself.

So I give McCain the edge for the moment. But if Obama can drag Latinos, blacks and college students to the polls, and the Greatest Generation is feeling too old or disillusioned and stays home in their assisted living facilities, he could make it. Make it, he could.

Handy Washington Post caucus map, and my little predictions

This political mapping site on WashingtonPost.com makes all this caucus-schmockus stuff so much easier to follow:

Washington Post interative caucus map

So it looks like a candidate needs about 2,000 votes to win. We're still in the double-digits on the GOP side and just breaking the triple-digits on the Democratic side, so the numbers showing Huckabee ahead of McCain I think are misleading at this point. But what do I know?

I predict:

FOR THE DEMS:
Obama the orator will beat the pants off of Hillary "stiff, tired and no fun at a party" Clinton. She seems to have picked up nothing from her husband but a funny-looking child.

FOR THE GOP:
McCain the war hero will beat the pants off of Mitt "I was born rich and look the part, which is a liability in a recession" Romney. Huckabee will garner a few hundred delegates on Super Tuesday and win some headlines, but won't really register after too long. We do not mix God and politics in this country as much as people think.

END RESULT:
In a general election race between Obama and McCain, the "war on terrorism" gun-nuts will square off against the "let's pull out and leave the middle east in even more chaos" defeatists, each calling the other wimps or Nazis. Whoever yells the loudest wins.

THE SAD PART:
Bill Richardson was the only viable candidate with international experience (former ambassador to the U.N., and hostage negotiator!), executive-level experience (Governor of New Mexico), immigration experience (Governor of New Mexico), and federal experience in a field that really affects our daily lives (former Energy Secretary). And he's out of the race.

The rest are all sad-sacks and I just don't care anymore...

THOUGHTS?

Aqua vs. Aura

I was just invited to party tonight at Aqua, the trendy, dress-to-get-sexed downtown Minneapolis club.

I momentarily confused it with Aura, the intimate martini bar in Calhoun Square, Uptown Minneapolis, which is very Brooklyn-esque: http://www.mndaily.com/drinkanddine/details/88/Aura

Either way, I'm a bit of a fish out of water at either venue. But it's time to test my comfort zones and booty-bump with the beautiful people. Right after I do two months worth of laundry.

What the Star Tribune is doing to its Jimmy Olsens

It looks like all the young talent at the Star Tribune has been put on probation -- indefinitely! For a union-paper about to enter contract negotiations, that's a clear sign that Avista Co., the Star-Tribune's parent company, is going to use the youngsters as a bargaining chip in a blood-bath of a contract dispute that will surely see an end to the STRIB as we know it. These are tough times. Sigh. Sigh.

MinnPost / MPR media media critic David Brauer has been following the re-re-restructuring of the Star Tribune, which has been so dizzying over the past few years that he deserves a cigarette and a band-aid for paying so close attention. I mean, it's like watching rough sex, man.

Just click the headline above to find out about the push toward weekly suburban coverage, and then the push away from it in favor of folding coverage of the 'burbs into the zoned daily editions, and now back toward the weekly model. Jeez criminy!

At least the Strib is honest about the fact that this is advertiser-driven. Advertisers apparently prefer being associated with a once-a-week insert that was dotted with news than with a daily package that was sparse on it.

Here's a little footnote to this advertiser-sponsored indecisiveness: The 7 or 8 20-something cub reporters who wrote for weeklies like "Strib South" and "Strib North" were folded into the newspaper (and the Minnesota Newspaper Guild / Communications Workers of America labor union) as the Strib went to daily zoning. Now, despite their AFL-CIO cards, they could all lose their jobs!

Here's why: These hard-working Jimmy Olsens were all treated as new employees and put on 3-month probation when the Strib began zoning their daily editions a couple of months ago, even though some had been with the paper for more than a year.

Well, those "three-month" probations are "over" but they just got extended ... to 9 months!

This is a bare-faced bargaining tool for parent corp. Avista Co. You're jerking your 20-something reporters around, and expecting loyalty to the paper and to the profession as the newbies mature into the profession? Ouch. Is Minnesota Public Radio hiring??

Sick of flag-waving as a defense for not asking basic questions

Apologies to my untold fans for being incommunicado these many months. Life changes took precedence....

There's an Oscar-nominated documentary out that takes a look at the death of a 22-year-old Afghan taxi driver who was beaten to death by U.S. troops after five days in a military prison camp. The military later released his passengers from Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, finding no evidence the prisoners took part in any wrongdoing.

The soldiers were later tried and convicted of assault, but they appear on camera saying they were scapegoated by superiors who basically told them to get information out of the poor guy anyway they could. The superior officers looked the other way when these interrogators used increasingly brutal force.

The film is called "Taxi to the Dark Side." A CNN video is available through the headline link above.

Look, I'm as patriotic as the next guy, I truly believe America is a great country and allows us many freedoms other countries don't, and that our constitution is the best-written constitution around, and the most noble, notable and enduring. (Not that 200 years is all that long a time in the scheme of things, but still...)

But if you're still taking an "ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies" approach to our habit of detaining Iraqis and Afghanis and holding them for years without charges, then... um... you suck.

So far, 250 Americans have been tried for heinous interrogation methods, according to the CNN clip. Those are just the ones that have been caught.

Yes, we were attacked on Sept. 11. And we have a right to find those perpetrators and bring them to justice. But let's get real. A 22-year-old taxi cab driver? What did he ever do to anyone? We're squandering U.S. lives and the lives of the people we're supposedly out there to protect.

Be patriotic by holding the right people accountable up and down the line, not just the adrenaline-blinded army grunts who were pressured into these heinous crimes.

The D word is everywhere --- and I'm not even married.

Suffering through the death throes of an ill-fated, on-again, off-again relationship, I once made the mistake in college of turning to my friend Sam for advice. "You could always ask her to marry you," said Sam, a brilliant pre-medical student who had recently become engaged to his girlfriend of three months.

"It's a way of realling hooking someone in there," he continued, with a little clutching gesture, like someone who has just scored in tennis. "And if things don't work out, that's what divorce is for."

For various reasons, Sam and I did not stay friends much longer. Marriage proposals used as carrot / stick bargaining tools -- or hostage tools, more like it -- falls somewhere between incredibly tacky and mildly criminal in my eyes. That said, such crap is probably fairly common.

But what's just as, if not more, concerning to me is the D word. The Star Tribune is doing a depressing yet informative series on divorce and its many zany permutations. For instance, there's the divorce where the couple remain best of friends and still vacation together with the kids, otherwise known as the "And why did we bother getting divorced?" divorce.

Then there's this trend of wife-initiated divorces. Now 66 percent of all divorces involving women over age 40 are apparently her idea, with boredom being a top reason giving up on couplehood. Hope you're better entertained flying solo...(supposedly, many women say they are!)

None of this sounds like much fun, from my self-serving male perspective. Sure, it's nice to know that if I ever get married, and things turn out as rocky as my last five relationships (I average a new one every two years, since college), there's an "eject button."

Scratch that last thought. It isn't nice knowing that, not at all. It's scary. Because odds are, with two people both stationed by the escape hatch, when traffic gets bumpy, someone will use it.

So what's the big deal? If everyone is getting divorced (except my parents, almost 40 years and still going strong!) and there's no longer a taboo associated with a failed union, why fear the marriage reaper?

Perhaps that's precisely what scares me most. It isn't taboo any longer to simply give up and walk away. And that speaks loads about how self-interested we've become as a society, our uniquely American brand of individualism par excellence.

What's ironic here is that as our willingness to put up with our mate's body odor or stale sweat socks diminishes, our childcentric rhetoric only increases. Everything is "for the children."

An exasperated mom wrote an excellent piece for Time Magazine about how sick to death she is of her fellow suburban soccer moms and their germ-phobic helicoptering. (Tonight at 9: How safe is your playground? Could your child slip off the slide???)



It doesn't take a Sept. 11 to get us to look out for each other, to remember the other person is in the room. It takes a Sept. 11 to get us to like ourselves.