What can you say about the carping that Obama has been on TV "too much?" 60 Minutes, Jay Leno, ESPN, a prime-time press conference, Bob Schieffer, an online town hall, and his Afghanistan policy all in one week. A guest spot on The Simpsons can't be far off.

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So I'm strolling the aisles of my favorite high-end boutique retailer  .. . Costco . . . the other day, and I spy a dozen or so DVDs of the 2001 BBC production of Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, which I remember reviewing way back when. A tale of social-climbing, pretense, greed, and financial fraud on an epic scale, the film was damn good fun. Eight years ago, of course, we could all sit in our over-leveraged McMansions with our three leased SUVs, planning spring break in Biarritz, and laugh at those silly Brits of the 1870s.

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Having stuck my wattled neck out with the prediction that the Twin Cities could be a paper-free newspaper metropolis by The Ides of March '10, I have to pass on this (sort of) counter prediction from something called The Silicon Alley Insider, which was waggled in my face by a Strib pal.

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Our girl Michelle is obviously making the familiar calculation that there really is no such thing as too much, too far, or excess when it comes to rallying the Republican Party's activist base. Her line about getting "armed and dangerous" in opposition to President Obama's carbon tax—a little straight-from-the-hip shootin' delivered on John "Powerline" Hinderaker's The Patriot 1280 radio show this weekend—was another example of where conservative leadership is in the country today, post two lost duels at the ballot box.

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You know a strange wind is blowing across the moor when Neal Conan . . . Neal Conan! . . . via his normally decorous NPR program, Talk of the Nation, is soliciting the rage of the populace like he was on Thursday afternoon. The topic, of course, were those AIG bonuses, that one-tenth of one percent of the real load of dough that has set off every niche, corner, and pitchfork of the media and citizenry.
 

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The combination of premature spring and some technical issues has taken a toll on my blogging the past few days. But now, like Nixon in '67, I'm back, (not so) tanned, rested, and ready to bloviate. (I am also, BTW, your go-to guy the next time you have to uninstall a satellite dish and re-wire cable.)

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Talk about appointment TV. After a week of shelling, the S.S. Jim Cramer floats in to Jon Stewart's studio tonight (taped this afternoon) to either plead for and establish a truce or take one last, fatal blast through the midship.

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There's never anything too empirical about these lists of "The 100 Greatest Movies of All Time" or "The 100 Greatest Rock Albums." But I suppose if you apply one of those exotic correlative algorithms that were all the rage on Wall Street the last few years and totaled up the debt cracking the spinal column of a daily newspaper, factoring in its declining advertising base and the indifference of its primary market to its degeneration, you could put a factual gloss on Time magazine publishing a list of The Ten Most Endangered Newspapers in America and ranking our own Star Tribune the second worst financial basket case.

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By dawn Thursday Jon Stewart's take down of CNBC for its bootlicking, fanzine style of "reporting" (i.e. cheerleading) of international finance in the run up to the meltdown was already the stuff legend, well on its way to pop culture immortality. And deservedly so.

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[UPDATED]:  It just keeps getting worse. Former City Pages owners Tom Bartel and Kris Henning, who now operate the online site Secrets of the City, home of the popular Today's Talk AKA MnSpeak forum, have been forced to stop payments to bloggers, including people such as veteran writer Britt Robson for his tireless Timberwolves/NBA coverage.

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One of the classic admonitions of political warfare says that when the other guy is doing a perfectly fine job of mounting the scaffold and hanging himself, you don't go mess up a good thing by warning him about the trapdoor.

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David Brauer has a post up over at MinnPost about the departure of Nick Coleman from the Strib, something neither Coleman nor Strib management has yet said . . . officially. Hell, the Strib hasn't even told its readers that Coleman won't be writing his column anymore. As though no one would notice or care.

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