National news media, Big Hairy Audacious Goal, and the dreaded 72-hour blackout rule

Andy Rooney says you have to have an ego to be a writer. He also said, "It’s egotistical to think anybody else cares what you think and put down on paper about anything."

What does Andy know anyway?

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In my eyes our national news media is a joke. Lately they’ve been after Sarah Palin. Okay, that’s fine. She bought a bunch of clothes with campaign money. I’ll bet that hasn’t been done before. How about Barack Obama? Where does his money come from? He’s raising a record amount of money for his campaign, and nobody looks into it? If you ask the media they’ll probably reply, "That’s okay, we like him." They tore Richard Nixon apart trying to get to the bottom of Watergate. Must be all of that work tuckered them out. I know that not too many years ago the news media did not touch a President. That ended when Richard Nixon was elected.

They didn’t like him at all.

To have the news media, along with whatever group or groups that are sponsoring Obama with their huge record contributions, try and influence the election that’s supposed to belong to the people — the citizens of this country — there’s something wrong going on.

They, the media, don’t care who’s funding Obama’s campaign. It could be Russia; it could be China, or it could be somebody in the Middle East. We do know for sure that he turned down public funding. That’s us.

All they know or care about is change; they have to have change. I’m not sure we’re going to like it when it gets here.

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The more they dig into the latest financial crisis we’re going through, the more it stinks. Turns out our Congress had a hand in it. They helped let the dogs loose. I wonder who paid them to do that. We had a similar situation at Federal-Mogul. The board of directors hired Dick Snell as the new CEO. Even the employees at the lowest level of the company heard that he would either make or break the company. He had that reputation. All the board of directors ever saw was dollar signs.

Snell came up with that infamous Big Hairy Audacious Goal to expand the company and make more money. We all know what happened after that.

The board of directors all should have been fired, but they weren’t. Instead they came out of it like they were innocent as hell.

That’s what’s going on today with this country. There are people who know and can’t do a thing about it. There are also people who know and can do something about it, but they won’t — too many of these $$$ floating around.

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I didn’t get a chance to watch or tape the Detroit Lions this weekend. They didn’t sell out for the first time since Ford Field became their home. I’m not sure yet why it’s a 72-hour no-broadcast rule if the tickets aren’t all sold by then. I always thought it had something to do with giving the networks time to set up their equipment. That’s probably a naive (and dumb) thought on my part.

I have a better plan. Let’s make it a 24-hour rule; and if the game doesn’t sell out by then, the owner of the team is billed for the unsold tickets as punishment for putting a bad product on the field. Then they can broadcast each and every game to those of us who live within 75 miles of Detroit but for whatever reason can’t make the game.

The stadium seats 65,000 people for a football game, but it’s a sure bet they can’t seat every Lion fan in the blackout area.

And another thing. These stadiums are funded mostly by public money. Isn’t that us — don’t we own the stadium?

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Have you ever noticed that the first song a musical group has a hit with really doesn’t count? What counts is their second, third, and fourth hit, etc. They’re called one hit wonders, and there have been a lot of them.

I’m sure there have been two-hit wonders as well.

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I’m still confused by the college football poll that selects the Top 25 teams. Less than two weeks ago Michigan State was ranked 20th in the nation. They lost to Ohio State (a very good team) and fell out of the Top 25. Then this past Saturday they beat Michigan (a horrible team with a losing record) and now Michigan State is 21st in the nation.

Does this make sense to you?

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By the way, for those of you who are by now wondering I looked up the word egotistical online; and this is one of the things it says: "An exaggerated sense of self-importance."

Way to go Andy. You let the cat out of the bag.

Until the next time . . .