657 A Matter of Honor

657 A Matter of Honor

Stu and Hashi have been a couple longer than most married couples. Stu is a Doctor of Medicine and teaches it. Hashi is an early 1980s Toyota Corolla. Here's how they met: Doc needed a car, thought about a Buick. They used to call that the Doctors' car. Then he thought about a Ford. Then he thought about a Dodge.

But that little voice in his head kept saying "Corolla, Corolla, Corolla." So one day instead of teaching, working at the clinic, golfing or (gasp!) treating patients, Stu waltzed into the Toyota dealer in East Moote Pointe, NY and told the first sales guy who approached him "I want a Corolla." "Surely sir. Would you like to test drive a few?" "No, just wrap it up and do the paperwork."

No test drive, no negotiations, no nothing. Just in and out like it was an ice cream pop or a Big Mac. Hashi's been on the road for 263,000 miles and counting and never once has anything big gone wrong. Oh, he had to replace the muffler twice and the tires and some of the lights. And Hashi's got the scars of all those years on the BQE and Flatbush and Moote Pointe on her. But she's still going and stopping when she should and never when she shouldn't.

And in those days and in the years that followed, there were a lot of guys like Stu. That segment of the market is gone.

Toyota has become just another car. Millions recalled, manufacturing stopped until they figure out and solve the "rapid acceleration problem," This only used to happen to Plymouths and Chevies and Mercuries. Toyota always banked on being the more or less Plain Hashi that was sensible, reliable and cheap on gasoline.

The company will recover. But it's made two big mistakes and is paying dearly for them.

The first is called the GM Mistake: The GM Mistake is when you're edging toward being the world's biggest seller and you just HAVE to make it past the guy who is in that spot now. This mis-focuses your energy, your ability and causes you to think more about numbers than reliability.

The second mistake is called the Volkswagen mistake. That's when you decide your handful of basic models isn't enough and you start building stuff for every market segment. Big ones, small ones, mid sized ones, seven sizes of trucks and vans and SUVs. That dilutes your energy, your ability and causes you to think more about market segments than actual customers.

Toyota's done both.

This will not kill them. It didn't kill GM and it didn't kill VW. But damned close.

What will happen is this: for the next three or four years, Honda will not be able to keep up with demand from people who likely would have bought Toyotas, and will do nothing to fix that shortage and shouldn't.

Toyota will recover. They'll remember what they do. And they will keep selling plenty of cars. But they've lost the Dr. Stus of the world who didn't need to test drive, dicker on price or negotiate about accessory packages.

And they will have lost that mystique of imperviousness to earthly woes, even though what they make post-recall and when production resumes will be better than anything they've ever built previously.

It's a matter of honor.

I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you're welcome to them.®

©WJR 2010

I'm Wes Richardes

656 Hot Air America

656 Hot Air America

The newly dead liberal talk radio network was on life support for all its life, about six years. It's not the death of all liberal talk radio, although what's left isn't voluminous. Hartmann, Schultz, Henican and a handful of others. But there's no longer a main player in the field, and what we have left is the extreme right, which is getting more extreme by the day, hence Hot Air America. No major counter voice. No major place where like minded companies, such as there are of them, can advertise.

Everyone has an opinion about why it failed, and they're all different and they're all right. Al Franken abandoned his pioneer program to run for Senate. They never recovered from that. His show wasn't much. But the name recognition was important.

They were over ambitious, under funded and managed like, well, a typical radio station, which is to say ineptly. That kind of management doesn't work on a national level. (It really doesn't work on a local level, either, but somehow the badly run locals soldier on.)

Without Franken, who was left? Rachel Madow emerged from the herd and became a TV superstar. The rest were phoning it in.

Hot Air America is entertaining. Air America wasn't. Rush can be funny in an evil way. Savage: people listen to him for the same reason they watched Dan Rather -- hoping to be on hand when the guy implodes. Mark Steyn is an amusing player of word games. Air America's Lionel, for example, never was.

Money was always a problem for AA. Getting and keeping affiliates was another problem. A liberal talk operation needs a New York outlet. AA's was WWRL, which at 1600 on the dial can't be heard 20 miles from its transmitter, let alone across the whole metro area.

They lost their Los Angeles outlet early on. Ditto Washington, DC. They were weak in Detroit and Chicago and so-so in San Francsico.

Their programming model was wrong. Instead of trying to be a full service network, they should have just syndicated their programs like Premier or even the sorry, bankrupt Citadel.

And many say liberals don't need talk radio in the same way conservatives do. Liberals can't be herded, and think independently.

Air America was the Terri Schiavo of broadcasting. And no members of congress or the judiciary made any kind of fuss about saving it.

Shrapnel:

--The President is about to deliver the State of the Union Address. Reporting to Congress annually is his constitutional duty. It is not a constitutional duty to have to hear an opposition party reply immediately thereafter, but we're going to get one.

--The dual speech arrangement turns the President's reporting to Congress into a political campaign event. That's not what the founders had in mind, most likely. And if the counter-speech were a point by point refutation of the address, we might actually learn something, but it won't be and we won't.

--That's the bad news. The good news is most people will tune out the second speech. And those that don't, should.

I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you're welcome to them.®

©WJR 2010

655 The Supremes: Love Child

655 The Supremes: Love Child

This was a big hit for Diana Ross and company in 1968-ish. Today, a whole new meaning. The stately justices of the United States Supreme Court have given birth to what's not Diana's poor ghetto baby girl, but more like some demon baby from a horror film. And she's not poor and from the ghetto, she (or he, for that matter,) is rich and from Wall Street.

By a one vote margin, the Supremes have sold America to the highest bidder. They've allowed corporations to pay for political candidates' ads without limit. (Unions, too. But they're relative pikers.) They have uprooted decades of settled law and shown themselves (again) to be tools of the Republican establishment and not the originalists they claim to be.

There are some interesting premises at work here. The first is Advertising Is Effective. Indeed it is. And if you can blanket the airwaves with anything you want and in any amount, you can drive a message -- true or false -- home to the voters. Another is they have unsettled settled law. Can the end of Roe V Wade be far behind? It's a bandwagon upon which no one has leaped yet, but it won't be long. Still another is the definition of corporation as a person -- a ridiculous concept to begin with and now a dangerous one. But, of course, if corporations WEREN'T legal persons, they wouldn't have the first amendment rights that the court just granted.

Back to the main issue: your vote only counts if you buy into the megatons of messages that the Corporate States of America is going to be putting out, starting now.

In their laugh a minute way, some CEOs of two large and a handful of mid sized companies wrote a letter to Congress asking members to stop hitting them up for contributions and pass full public financing of the electoral process. This means you would be underwriting the present two party system. On one hand it seems fair. You're underwriting GM and Chrysler, so why not Republicans and Democrats? All four are corporations. On the other hand, who wants to fund these guys?

The public option makes sense as an option, which it already is. The public option as law -- that's another story.

So get ready for pay for play the way they do it in banana republics.

The Supremes have unleashed a demon seed love child and it's going to be a big hit, where it counts.

Shrapnel:

--Peyton Manning brought the Jets back to normal, which means losing bigtime. The Indiana quarterback dissected New York like the Supremes dissected the constitution, bringing to an end the Jets' best season since 1969. Final: Colts 30 Jets 17 and so much for the AFC Championship.

--The Jets and Giants, of course, are both New Jersey teams, even though they claim "New York" in their names. The Giants defected years ago. But it's only recently that the Jets abandoned their one and only real connection to NY by moving their practice field from Hofstra University in Hempstead NY to Joisey. And the brilliant, beautiful season gone by ended in calamity as karmic punishment.

I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you're welcome to them.®

©WJR 2010

654 The Late Night Drama Kings

654 The Nighttime Drama Kings

Leno, O'Brien, Letterman.

Dave was truly funny when he worked for NBC. NBC didn't give him a chance to continue, so he went to CBS, where he's still truly funny. And after 17 years has finally risen to number one in the ratings. He hasn't been hurt by disclosure that he parks really really close to some of his staff members. So far, no paternity charges. This kind of publicity is good for ratings.

O'Brien was pretty funny as a writer on Saturday Night Live. He was sort of funny on Late Night. He's not at all funny on the Tonight Show.

Leno was and is funny no matter where he works -- stage, TV, whatever.

When he started on Tonight, the show was already king of the ratings and it stayed there until O'Brien took over.

Now O'Brien's out with a 45 million dollar severance, some of which goes to his staff, which followed him to the coast from New York expecting sustained employment. And, presumably, Leno's back at the Tonight Show.

Complicated. And stupid.

NBC promised O'Brien the program so they could keep him under contract. They gave him a start date five years before the fact. Now, what to do with Leno? Give him a five night a week show at 10 PM. The show's terrific, but it's a ratings bomb. Why do such a thing to so valuable a money maker for the network? Talk shows are way cheaper to produce than the dramas and sitcoms everyone else runs. A real money saver.

Except now, after all this, it means spending much more money to get four or five shows ready for prime time in no time. Shooting costs, script costs, crew costs, actor costs, producers, etc., etc. Ad that to the O'Brien severance and what have you saved? Not even face.

It'll be good to see Jay in the spot where we want to see him and where we're used to seeing him. But can he regain the number one spot that Conan lost to Letterman? Probably for the first week. People will tune in just to say they tuned in. Can he sustain the position? Maybe. But NBC's been no help with that. They make Leno look like a shark, which he may be. But he's the funniest shark in the sea.

Shrapnel:

--Let's quote former President Bush on this one, the election of Scott Brown to the United States Senate from Massachusetts. "You're doing a heck of a job, Brownie." Now, please do what the REAL Brownie did: quit.

--This guy's a Brownie with some evil drug baked inside. Not pot. More likely poisoned tea.

--Guy next door has one of those fancy new iPhones. He can do anything on the web, get driving directions, read the paper, all on his phone. Two things it doesn't do too well, though: making and receiving calls.

(Note to readers: Your correspondent worked for NBC for a long time and knows most of the players in this drama. Including the one that should have been mentioned and wasn't: Aging wunderkind Jeff Zucker.)

I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you're welcome to them.®

©WJR 2010

653 France's Joy Boy

653 France's Joy Boy

In a world full of crazies, some are so nuts they stand out like pustules on the skin of an otherwise flawless complexion of a 20-something college girl.

Such a crazy is Alain Joyandet, the French "Minister of Cooperation." Monsieur Joyandet apparently believes the United States, by leading the relief effort in Haiti, is somehow trying to "occupy" the country. What? What nation in its right mind would want to occupy Haiti?

None. But nevertheless, France did for about 100 years and left it in ruins. Joyandet, born on the same day of the same month as Martin Luther King, Jr., is a political hack who calls himself a former journalist and is running for president of a French province, home to almost two million people. He is a member of a center-rightist party that at the moment has a majority in the French national assembly and a near-majority in the National Senate. Same party as president Nicolas Sarkozy, and is known for being only slightly to the left of the infamous racist Jean-Marie Le Pen.

France was one one of the world's great colonial powers. Does Joyandet fear that someone will outdo his ancestors? Is he just making a campaign speech. Or is just having a foot-stomping little fit because US forces operating Haiti's main airport put off the landing of a French aid plane for 24 hours until congestion cleared?

Apologists for Joyandet are busy telling us it was this last that set his mouth a ratcheting. Minister of cooperation, indeed. He wants the US role in Haiti "clarified." How much clearer can it be? We're the lead in this effort. We're the next door neighbor. We're the ones pledging aid larger than the GDP of the Tokelau Islands of New Zealand in one fell swoop.

We are the ones leading the digging of rubble, of bringing in medicine, of running an airport that was in chaos in a country that was chaotic even before the earthquakes struck. We are the ones appealing to our allies and to our trading partners to get on board. We are the ones who will pull that miserable pile of poverty up on its feet. We are the ones relieving the street gangs of their machetes. How much clearer does it get, Mr. Joy-less?

Go back to your office. Find a dictionary. Look up the word Cooperation. It's spelled the same in French and in English.

Shrapnel:

--The Scott heard round the world? Massachusetts picked the wrong senator. And the White House blew its chances for meaningful health care reform by fiddling while its 60 vote majority burned.

--Robert B. Parker has died. He was a best selling mystery writer and author of the Spenser books, some of which were turned into the TV series "Spenser For Hire." Parker was 77.

--Guns don't save people, people save people. Uh... but not always. Guy in California drove his SUV into a fairly deep creek. Used his handgun to blast out a window and then swam to safety.


I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you're welcome to them.®
©WJR 2010

652 Rutch

652 Rutch

There's a 1957 movie with Andy Griffith and a number of other people who would later become stars. It's called "A Face in the Crowd." And it's about a guy from the hills of Arkansas who becomes a local radio personality and later a TV sensation with a huge audience. The character, Lonesome Rhodes hides his contempt for the audience behind a kind of country populism until one day he gets caught on the air smearing "his people." A career ender.

The film is at least partly based on the early radio and television personality Arthur Godfrey, though Godfrey never really screwed up in that way. But it might also have been a foreteller of today's media sensation Rush Limbaugh. We have studiously and purposely stayed away from saying anything about this guy for years. But the time has come.

Rutch, right wing whack job and preacher-esque showboater may have at last pulled a Lonesome Rhodes.

His biggest complaint about the people who write or speak about him is that they don't listen regularly to his program and therefore don't get the whole context of what he's saying when he says stuff like "I hope Obama fails," or "Teddy Kennedy, that great swimmer," or plays a so-called comedy bit called "Barack the Magic Negro." And he's right. People who generally write about him are not regular listeners. Unfortunately, I am and have to be. Rush is on in the studio when I come to work and I have listened to the guy I refer to as "my opening act" for years.

We have lots of room for far-out opinions, left, right and otherwise. But sometimes it's even too much for Lush Rimbaugh's sycophants.

Retch does not want us to contribute to the Haiti relief efforts. He says we've already done that by paying US income tax. So, what -- let 'em die? Other right wing whack jobs like Mike (Smelstor) Gallagher are even criticizing his idol on the air.

At some point, combining the anti-black, anti-poor, anti-Muslim, anti Haiti rhetoric has to come back and hit him in the rear. A guy who spends ten seconds a day saying something off the charts and the rest of his three hours defending himself and blaming others for misquoting him has eventually to end up on the scrap heap.

He's a (former?) drug addict and has piloted his plane into a pile of enormous wealth and influence. But he's wrecking the Republican Party by trying (and often succeeding) in dividing it between the country club set and the hard-right conservatives. And if one of the two major parties is in shambles, so is democracy.

He describes himself as a man of principle, believing in small government and self reliance. Translation: NO government and reliance on one's self to the point of forcing every waking minute to be devoted to the farm animal repetitive tasks required just to survive. Wretch wants America to be Haiti, with its anarchy and poverty on one side and the rich elite in mansions on the hill.

While on a recent vacation, Rush was hospitalized with chest pains. At first, doctors feared a heart attack. But it turned out not to be. Which most of the rest of us knew all along. In order to have a heart attack, one must first have a heart.

Note to readers: Today is Martin Luther King Day, and for the first time since the start of this blog, I have nothing new to say on the subject and therefore won't say anything. If interested, two previous items were posted on 1/19/09 and 1/15/08, 1/16/06 and 2/6/06.)

I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.®

©WJR 2010

651 It's What We Do.

651 It's What We Do

On its best day in its best year, Port Au Prince is a sewer. When you get out into the countryside, it's even worse.

You see pictures here in the US. They do not begin to tell the story.

And when a disaster hits -- and one always seems to -- you look at it and your heart sinks.

A foreign born America asks "Why are we helping them when we can't or won't help ourselves?" The answer is easy: "It's what we do."

Political or natural disaster in a nearby neighbor brings out the best in us. It took only moments -- literally -- for the first offers of help to come in. And coming in they still do.

What was your reaction to all this? If you are typical, chances are it was two simultaneous thoughts: (1) Oh my God! and (2) How can I help? It's what we do.

Yeah, we have problems: Job problems, financial problems, health insurance problems, health problems, credit problems, two wars and counting, bailouts, torn safety nets. But help for Haiti was never in question. It's what we do.

At this writing, there's no accurate death count, no accurate count of the injured and the missing. There won't be for weeks, maybe months. But what does it matter? The number is big. And in the words of one member of either Congress or the Florida State Legislature, born in Haiti they "have no first responders... no emergency rooms."

The country is one big emergency room now as makeshift hospitals are set up in airport hangars and under tents and in towns more than 100 miles from the capitol.

A guy in the neighborhood, a guy who lives in a run down mobile home asks "where do I send my money order?" His own poverty doesn't count for him -- at least not now.

It's what we do.

And hats off to President Obama. Somewhere in the bowels of that administration there has to be a guy who said early on "we're not going to have another Bush era Katrina response. If something big happens, we're going to be there." Probably, the President thought the same way. In any event, there he was on TV only hours after the quake struck, and presenting a fully fleshed out plan for us to help.

And the day after, he was there for us with money and food and water and medicine.

Former President Clinton is US special envoy to Haiti for the United Nations. He was all over the dial telling people what was needed and when. He's doing the right thing. It's what we do.

You do not need this post for a list of places taking contributions. That's all over the internet. All the places you'd expect to be working this are working this. All the churches, the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, Care, Project Hope, even Google.

Just be careful. Already there are charity scams. There's no degree of human suffering and misery that doesn't bring out the con men. It, too, is what we do.

I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you're welcome to them.®

©WJR 2010