When I was a kid, and my parents would catch me picking my nose, my mother would quip, "pick a winner."

I would never deign to compare the Star Tribune's political endorsement process to nose-picking, but having read nearly a week's worth of them, the first general election under editorial pages editor Scott Gillespie, I must say I am not getting it. Until yesterday's endorsement of El Tinklenberg in the Sixth District Congressional race, the paper has just endorsed incumbents. Republican here, DFLer there.

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I just got back from a week out of the country. Somewhere far, far away from a Starbucks. And boy, did I miss those venti iced teas in a place where the temperature and humidity were sweltering. When I landed at LAX and saw a Starbucks in the terminal, I knew I was home again. And boy, were the lines long.

But Starbucks is apparently not what it seems. If you follow the business press, you would conclude that Starbucks is one of the more troubled companies in America. About a year ago, it stopped showing growth in same-store sales and profits after years of breakneck growth. Wall Street turned on Starbucks, and its visionary but impetuous founder Howard Schultz took back the reins. Stores were shuttered in places such as Albert Lea. Hot sandwiches were taken off menus because Schultz said you couldn’t smell the coffee; oatmeal is now a morning staple. But the numbers have not rebounded.

Remember Krispy Kreme, the cult donut that went national, started offering its product everywhere from gas stations to Target stores, and flamed out? Is that where Starbucks is headed?

Or consider an alternate analysis: What’s wrong with Starbucks is Wall Street. Walk into any Starbucks and what do you see? People who love the brand, its products, and vibe. Starbucks reinvented coffee and leisure breaks for a whole generation of Americans. Not everything it serves is great, but the ratio is pretty impressive. Where Starbucks went wrong was it believed that its product was for everyone and belonged everywhere.

And who drove it to that conclusion, like Krispy Kreme? That was Wall Street. It’s not enough to run a profitable but mature, slow-growth business anymore. If you want to trade on the Street, you need to be growing the top and bottom lines or your stock tumbles.

It’s a sick system that’s evolved because it pushes companies to grow beyond their natural constituencies and clientele, and over-leverage so to take short-term risk without regard to long-term stability. Product and customer-experience innovation takes a back seat to expansion. That’s why there was a Starbucks in Albert Lea and that’s why there were analysts suggesting the company needed to serve dinner at those underutilized stores.

So now Starbucks is retrenching. Trying to figure out what went wrong. Krispy Kreme commoditized its product, sapping it of consistency and excellence. Starbucks hasn’t gone there yet, but probably only because its founder remains in office, refusing to destroy its essence.

There’s little wrong with Starbucks to its customers and thousands of employees. That there is so much wrong with it in the eyes of Wall Street is just another piece of evidence of how screwed up America’s business culture is. When the only universally accepted measure of a company’s success is growth, inevitably recklessness and short-term thinking ensues. Let’s hope it doesn’t destroy one of the great retail success stories of our era.

I used to commute on I-94. I lived in St. Paul for years, but I never took a job after college that wasn’t in the west metro. A decade ago, we decided to move to Minneapolis. I had already given up the car commute for the express bus, convinced the daily freeway commute was taking years off my life, but thousands of I-94 commuters don’t have that option.

Though I understand why MNDOT is ending the temporary full fourth lane on I-94 that was instituted after the 35W bridge collapse, I don’t really get it. There is nothing that promotes traffic jams quite like freeways that narrow then enlarge then narrow again, and our local highways are poster children for that.

The current plan for I-94 will create a westbound freeway that goes from four lanes to three to four to three in less than a mile and a half. Trust me, it’s a recipe for backups. The eastbound freeway will retain the fourth lane until a study is completed about its future.

The changes are designed to restore a shoulder that can be used by express buses so they can regain an advantage over car traffic. I’m the biggest transit backer out there, but I’d rather have a freeway that moves much better with buses going a bit slower than one that is an infuriating mess every day of the week for everyone but buses.

The bottleneck at the east end of I-394 led me to question MNDOT’s ability to design a smoothly functioning freeway. The changes just made to I-94 reinforce that concern.

One of the more interesting aspects of this global financial meltdown is how there is now a partisan divide over its cause. More and more right-wingers are focused on the quasi-socialist mortgage guarantors Fannie and Freddie and longstanding federal law that compels banks to make home loans to the working poor. See Michelle Bachmann’s recent Strib op-ed for the party line.

Last night’s 60 Minutes (watch the video) took a different tack. Steve Kroft and his producer spoke to several non-partisan Wall Street insiders, and what they had to say was revelatory. The headlines:

—Bad mortgages make up only 6 percent of the overall mortgage pool, not nearly enough to cause a global financial meltdown. Enough to screw up the nation’s housing market and result in a wave of foreclosures, but the bad borrowers and the sleazy brokers are not causing this.

—Everyone knows about the repackaging and repackaging of these high-risk mortgages into opaque tranches of investments that were sold and resold all over the globe and labeled grade A by the major ratings firms. That’s a big part of it, but not what the markets are reacting to now and not what drove Lehman and AIG under.

—This second wave is rooted in something called “credit default swaps,” which many of the largest financial firms sold to buyers of this opaque sub-prime debt as a form of insurance against a default. Now, the insurance market is regulated and requires insurers to carry reserves to pay off claims. But these “swaps” were not and did not, and the coup de grace came when many of the largest financial firms in the world had to make good on this insurance. How was Wall Street able to sell financial insurance instruments without regulatory scrutiny and maintaining reserves? Apparently because the world of “swaps” and their confusing cousins, “derivatives,” are so poorly understood outside Wall Street (though they have their own trade association to defend them, anyway).

—The ultimate conclusion of these experts is that an astounding level of “blue sky” thinking and incompetence drove this crisis from a housing bubble into a global finance meltdown. Excess in the consumer markets was doubled-, tripled-, and quintupled-down by people who should have known better. And it all seemed so complex that no one could grasp what was going on, not the financial media, not the regulators, not the insiders who should have protected their own firms.

The more your learn about this mess, the more preposterous it becomes, the less confidence I have in our system, and the more outraged I get. But don’t let anyone tell you this crisis is largely the fault of borrowers and mortgage brokers. That crisis could have been contained. This thing just ripples, and ripples, and ripples.

Watch the 60 Minutes video, or read the transcript—it is important information.

I’ve decided to veer away from the miasma of depressing political campaigns and global financial turmoil to explore a topic more than a few of us are talking about—Southwest Airlines’ long-awaited decision to fly to MSP. (How interested are we? The story made both local papers’ front pages and was “most viewed” for hours on the Strib website.)

It’s interesting because it offers some insight into how and why things happen in the mystifying world of the airline industry, which so many of us rely on these days.

Chicago is the most traveled air destination from MSP, and for most of the past decade, it has boasted a discount carrier (defunct ATA, then Air Tran), which kept fares and restrictions low. When Air Tran pulled out in spring, saying it could not make money on the route, fares and restrictions skyrocketed. For much of the summer and early fall, the minimum fare MSP-CHI has been $397, which is higher than SFO, LAX, Vegas, NYC, and Denver from MSP. A same-day round trip for shopping, business, or a ball game jumped from as little as $138 to nearly $900.

Our homegrown discounter, Sun Country, always shunned the route—perhaps due to the discount competition and the Chicago market’s proclivity to air delays, which can wreak havoc with a small carrier's national operations. Sun Country surprisingly did not fill the void after Air Tran left in May, in part due to its precarious financial state, I imagine.

Southwest has long pursued the low-hanging fruit, focusing on the largest markets and heaviest-traveled routes—MSP-CHI was a gimme, it seemed. It jumped now because the MSP-CHI market was “open,” it’s a very profitable route for several carriers, and it wanted to get a jump on Jet Blue if it was considering coming in.

But Southwest shunned many of the hubs of other carriers, never serving Atlanta, Boston, Cincy, MSP, Memphis, Chicago O’Hare, Miami, JFK, etc. Southwest has been especially cautious about taking on Northwest Airlines (known for its effective competitive response to discounters), offering a skeleton network of flights out of Detroit and none from its other hubs. Sun Country’s presence here was an additional deterrence.

But after Southwest’s primary markets became saturated and other discounters added service in may of them, the airline tweaked its strategy. A major push into Denver (United and Frontier’s hub) last year paid off handsomely for SW, and this year it deployed additional aircraft and resources from other markets there.

Southwest will certainly add destinations from MSP if flyers embrace the carrier. (Twin Citians have shown a profound reluctance to abandon Northwest and Worldperks when a discounter comes calling.)

It may not happen until Southwest begins service, but fares in the Chicago market will return to what they looked like a year ago under AirTran’s influence. The major carriers will match Southwest’s pricing and rules, which are among the lowest and loosest in the business. And unlike ATA and AirTran, Southwest is among the most financially stable airlines out there—it has taken on the nation’s biggest carriers, and it usually thrives and coexists. Once Southwest arrives, it is generally there to stay.

No, Southwest will not change air travel as you know it. It’s just a 737 flight with peanuts. Its frequent-flyer program cannot get you out of the US forty-eight, you can’t get upgraded to first class or get an assigned seat or fly to many of the fifty states. But it is among the simplest of airlines to fly—with no fees for checked baggage, ticket changes, premium seating, etc. And it will restore our most popular air route to one of our most economical.