You know it's bad when Target starts whacking staff. But there are still a few glamour jobs out there, I mean, besides the late shift at Jiffy Lube.

Check out this, for example: (Note: Actual Star Tribune job posting.)

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Barack Obama may easily spend his first month in office just authorizing 180 degree turnabouts from the Bush years. But his executive order to federal agencies, ordering them to begin cooperating with Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests rather then stonewalling them as the previous administration preferred, is a highly significant step in the right direction—presuming the D.C. bureaucracy, which has ways of outliving every president, follows through.

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Indulge me here.

As a lifelong movie fan, I'm always a sucker for the Oscar race. It's great, escapist fun. Hell, my old Twin Cities Reader crony, David Carr, is in expense account heaven covering the month leading up to the nominations (out last Thursday) and the month until the awards themselves. (I've reminded him how cruelly he used to mock me back in my cozy-with-the-stars days.)

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A week ago, back in beautiful Edina, I had lunch with a local ad guy. It wasn't on record. We were just catching up after several years. Then this week, down here in Phoenix, I called Tim McGuire, former editor and senior vice president of the Star Tribune—pre-McClatchy—for a cup of coffee. Topics such as cratering ad sales and the disintegration of traditional media weren't focused entirely on money—or lack thereof—but the acceptance that some things we thought pretty damned fundamental have not just broken down and fallen apart but are so badly screwed, they aren't going to get put back together in anything like their old forms.

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We'll see what the arbiters of instant history decide was the "takeaway line" from Barack Obama's inaugural address today. But his quote from Corinthians about it being a "time to put aside childish things" struck me as extraordinarily apt. Put another way, he's saying, "Hey, America, grow up already."

Of all the stark contrasts between what The Previous Regime did to this country and what Obama is promising to undo, the starkest may be that he brings what the former never did--namely, the enormous reassurance of an adult's thought processes and composure. It always stunned me how much George W., Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, their Greek Chorus of Misinformational Foghorns, Limbaugh, Hannity, and the rest sounded and behaved like adolescents, relentlessly, unapologetically ignorant, and/or indifferent to the consequences of their actions.

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There are several disruptions to being, um, "right-sized," one of which is that HR orders a cutoff of all communication functions. E-mail, passwords, etc. Gone before you know it. A concern about spontaneous, impulse embezzlement, I guess. Whatever went down with the logins and passwords to this blog, which will continue here for a bit longer, has taken until tonight, inauguration eve, to undo.

Several interesting stories have burbled up since the plug was pulled last Thursday. In the interest of keeping these things brief and readable enough for the ADHD set, I'll try to play them out throughout the next few days instead of running everything now.

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I lost track of Jack Bauer three or four years ago, sometime after the second nuclear bomb went off outside Los Angeles. Man, that is some seriously distressed real estate out there.

Bauer got a lot of hype for his return Sunday night, and I just finished watching the second two-hour download. Frankly, after four hours, I think I have a pretty good idea where this is going. But I may hang in there—no election zaniness or the NFL to distract me on Monday nights anymore.

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A beautiful winter day of cross-country skiing up here in northern Wisconsin has turned into long-ish night at the Dry Dock Tavern (WiFi in the woods, woo hoo!). This, of course, is usually the redoubt of Randy, the Star Tribune's out-sourced Readers Representative/ombudsman. But no one has seen either Randy or his snow (machine) today. Mike at the bar thinks he may have gone on a poker run down through Solon Springs.

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It's, of course, easy for someone with no skin in the game to urge others toward risk-taking and bravery. (Think Dick Cheney and Iraq.)

But because the situation Avista Capital Partners finds themselves in here with the Star Tribune is hopeless, I've been convinced there simply is no good reason for unions at the paper to even bother negotiating with them. The game is over. Put another way, the unions could never reach a point where they could give up enough to save Avista from its multiple torments.

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My one brush with Ann Coulter was about three years back. I was doing a radio show here in town, and Coulter was plugging a book. (Big shock on the former, none on the latter.) Since the station I was on was committed to lavishly publicizing anything that called Clintons child rapists and the 9/11 widows "whiners," Coulter was booked.

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Is all that happy holiday stuff finally over? Is it safe to come up out of the root cellar bunker? Is everything really 90 percent off?

Throughout the last two weeks, I must have read 300 "listicles" on the Top 10 Movies, Ten Worst TV Moments, Ten Biggest Media Blunders, Ten Fattest Reality Show Contestants, Ten Public Figures We'd Most Like to See in Gibbets in Times Square. In my newspaper days, you could never go wrong proposing a list story. Modern editors are required to believe that no one reads, at least no one they want reading the paper--namely, teenagers and recently arrived immigrants. I think one year I came up with a whole week of lists. But that was back in the days of Russell Shimooka and The Chevy Chase Show.

My preferred shtick these days is a list of ten things I'd command tomorrow . . . If I Were King, which I believe I should be, based on my ablity to admire comely maidens, laugh at jesters, and wear a crown. The basic idea is that this democracy and committee thing are huge time-wasters. A guy on a throne with power of life and death. Now THAT is how you get things done. So what if he gets a few things wrong? A king can change his royal mind. He can do a 180 a week later. When you're King, no one can complain . . . out loud.

So here, by decree of King Lambert the First, are ten decrees to take hold across the land at dawn tomorrow on the first real work day of the new year.

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