Some very sad economy-related news yesterday:

LOS ANGELES — News Corp., the global media giant controlled by Rupert Murdoch, said Thursday it lost $6.4 billion in its most recent quarter….

The New York-based company, which owns The Wall Street Journal and the Fox broadcast network, also forecast a 30 percent drop in operating profits for the fiscal year to June from a year ago, when it earned $5.13 billion.

I know you all feel as sad as I do about that. I think it’s time to start calling for those overpaid blowhards like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity to take pay cuts. If we can hold UAW workers up as examples of the types of greedy pigs that epitomize all that is wrong with this country, then I think Billy and Sean (and Brit, and Weaselface…) should be held to at least the same standards.

But, in the most important news of the week, Kellogg has dropped Michael Phelps. I think these people are missing a big opportunity. Imagine a red-eyed, giggling Phelps rushing into the kitchen and consuming a box full of Corn Flakes (right out the box, no milk).

“There’s nothing better than Corn Flakes when you come home with a case of the screamin’ munchies at 3 AM.”

And, after former White House hypocrite and liar Andy Card appeared on Inside Edition and chided Obama for having the audacity to take his jacket off while working in his office (“there should be a dress code of respect….I wish that [Obama] would wear a suit coat and tie”), the Huff Post has a photo of dubya in the Oval Office (with former squeeze Harriet Miers), not wearing a jacket. Oh, the shame.

Gotta head in early this morning to take care of some HR-type stuff. Have a good one.

Good news for anybody not ready for the switch to digital broadcast TV, as the Democrats were successful in passing a delay. Folks now have until June to get a converter box, and hopefully they’ll actually be able to get their $40 coupons now. The local Meals-On-Wheels people are taking boxes donated by church groups and installing them. Makes me think I ought to do more to help people out. And when I say “more,” I really mean “something.”

Otherwise, it’s another cold day here. Especially for the 1,400 employees at New Process Gear. The parent company – Magna Powertrain – wasted little time yesterday in announcing they will be initiating a “wind down” plan for permanently closing the plant, now that workers rejected their “take it or leave it” contract renegotiation.

Not good news for the school district where the plant is located, either; they get 2% of their revenue from property taxes paid by the plant. That amounts to over a million dollars they’ll have to come up with elsewhere (or cut from their budget). That’s on top of the cuts that our Governor wants to make to school aid.

One more big empty factory to go along with Carrier, GE, and Pass & Seymour, just to name a few. The only thing left here is SU and the hospitals (and of course the Governor wants to close half the hospitals, too). Oh, and the Shopping Malls, where you can get all kinds of great deals at Circuit City’s going out of business sale this weekend.

Kinda sucks.

One of the few remaining places to work around here is a place called New Process Gear. It’s been around since 1888 or so, in various incarnations. Currently, they make transfer cases for SUVs, and I guess management has never considered diversifying. SUVs used to be the hot ride, but, as we all know, people are a little more interested in getting good gas mileage these days, so sales aint what they used to be.

Last year, the company told UAW workers they needed to accept huge cuts in wages and benefits to keep the company going, and they did. The agreed to a 31% cut in pay, and something like a 30% – 40% cut in benefits.

This year, the company came back for more. If the workers didn’t accept a new contract, they’d close the plant. Period. If they accepted the new contract, they’d lose a week of vacation and some other benefits. If the plant broke even by July 31, that’s all they’d lose. If they “came close” to breaking even, pay would be cut at least $4 an hour, and maybe as much as $7 (they make $20 today). If they weren’t as close to breaking even as the company wanted, they’d close the plant.

Last night, workers rejected the contract 76% – 24%. I can’t say as I blame them. Most thought they’d given up enough already to bail out crappy management, and I don’t think anybody really believed the plant wasn’t destined to close anyway. This new “deal” might have delayed things a bit, but that’s about it.

Still, this is a tough time to be out of work, and the local economy really can’t afford the loss of another 1,400 jobs. And it isn’t as if this is unique to our area, though things have sucked here (job-wise) for quite a while. I really don’t know how young people just starting out can make it these days. Tech jobs are outsourced overseas, and manufacturing jobs are just about all gone. I guess you can still work for Wal-Mart or McDonalds, but if nobody’s working, I don’t see how they can afford to buy shit.

Republicans seem determined to crush any effort to put regular people back to work, or extend a helping hand to those who have fallen through the cracks (and those cracks get wider every day). And all they need to do is filibuster everything that comes along. They have the media, and the Democrats, timid in the minority are equally feckless in the majority.

I’m grateful for what I have (assuming I get to keep it), but I worry about everybody’s kids and grandkids. We need another FDR. I hope Obama is it (providing he can find some friggin’ advisers that pay their taxes); I just hope it won’t take another World War to get the economy going again.

So, the woodchuck saw his shadow yesterday (at least in PA; the one from Staten Island bit Bloomberg, bless his furry little heart. I bet he made a tasty stew for some homeless people by evening), which is supposed to mean six weeks of winter, as opposed to spring being “right around the corner.” Hate to break it to these people but – at least around here – if spring is here by mid March, that is right around the corner. It’s when we get 8 inches of snow on Mother’s Day (and we have) that winter seems to be dragging on a little bit.

I feel kinda sorry for the mother of the octuplets. Looks like Michael Phelps doing a bong hit has totally ended her 15 minutes of fame. And now she’s stuck with 14 kids. I hope it was worth it. It appears that Phelps’ endorsement career may be in danger (he was pretty god awful in the Rosetta Stone ads he did anyway; maybe he was “rosetta” stoned). I guess he can try to get a gig promoting High Times magazine, or become the official spokesman for the EZGro Hydroponic Gardening System.

I’ve never wanted to live in Arizona (no offense, KP; I’d shrivel up and die in the heat, and there are too goddamn many Republicans there for my taste), but Tuscon area Comcast subscribers got a little bonus during the Super Bowl Sunday night: 30 seconds of porn. Kind of makes Janet Jackson’s Sheriff’s badge encased nipple seem a bit tame, doesn’t it?

In other news (not that it’s exactly new), it was 50 years ago today that the Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly, and pilot Roger Petersen died in a plane crash near Clear Lake Iowa. It was just a little before my time, coming about a year before my conception and 11 months before SU won its only football National Championship (immortalized in “The Express,” which was a box office bomb, but I highly recommend you rent it; my wife couldn’t care less about football – or sports in general – and even she liked it), but their music (among others, like that guy that was named after Elvis Costello) was the music of my very early childhood (though if I never hear “La Bamba” again, it’ll be OK with me).

Everything changed, of course, around 1965 or so, when the Beatles took America by storm, opening a beachhead for groups like the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, and many more. Makes me want to break out my stack of singles (first I’d have to find some 45 adapters, though; I wish I still had our old, massive Stereophonic (with its detached second speaker; the sound was great, once the tubes warmed up. Didn’t the Tubes warm up for Iggy Pop?) with the dildo-looking thing that allowed you to play a stack of singles. Not that we knew what dildos were back then.

But you folks in Tuscon know now, doncha?

I was gonna make about 20 identical posts for this today, but then figured it was too much effort for something not everybody would get. Anyhow, today’s the day when a bunch of creepy old men drag some poor drugged woodchuck out of his hole in the rather erotically named “Gobbler’s Knob,” to see whether we’ll get six more weeks of winter, or another month and a half instead. Or something.

As far as what the “real” weather prognosticators say, it looks like this big coastal storm is going to stay to the south and east of us. So, no more snow to add to our current pile, but as the storm moves through, it’s supposed to suck the cold air out of Canada and down our way. I guess two days of 40’ish weather is about all we can ask for this time of year.

Not a bad Super Bowl yesterday. Despite my near total apathy over the outcome, I did manage to stay up and watch the whole thing (gotta be able to talk about it at work today, after all). I was very happy there wasn’t OT though. And it was somewhat satisfying to see Arizona come back, only to allow the Steelers to drive down for the winning TD (serves ’em right for beating the Eagles; I heard PA Guv Ed Rendell before the game, saying that the state of Florida is lucky it wasn’t Eagles/Steelers, or Tampa would have been torn apart over the past week). So, six SB Championships for the Steelers. That ought to piss off Dallas.

I watched Matt “the rat” Lauer’s interview with President Obama before the game. Whether you agree with everything he says or not, it continues to be pleasant to have a President who can correctly pronounce polysyllabic words, and who doesn’t make you feel ashamed to be an American. At least, not on his account.

Whether you like his music or not, Bruce is just plain fun to watch. We only got 12 minutes of his show at halftime yesterday, but that was OK since Saturday night was Springsteen night on Palladia, with his “Songwriters and Storytellers” episode sandwiched in between live shows from Barcelona and NYC. After watching Stevie Van Zandt on the Sopranos for so long, I get such a kick out of seeing him play with the E-Street Band. Imagine stepping out from your “day job” as a rock star to be a teevee star on the side (oh, wait, it’s not TV, it’s HBO).

Of course, the big news of the weekend is that Michael Phelps smoked dope. Wow, imagine that, a 23-yr old kid took a hit off a bong at a party. Talk about shameful and ignominious. No wonder pot is illegal. Smoke it, and you might win eight gold medals at the Olympics.

Oh well, as one of the dwindling number of people who haven’t been laid off (yet), I reckon I’d better get ready for work.

Don’t much care who’s on the talk shows today. If you care about the Super Bowl, kickoff should be somewhere around 11:30 PM GMT. But then, if you care, you probably already know that.

So, yet another reason to be proud of our fine Democratic representatives.

Congressional Democrats stripped from President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan a local lawmaker’s bid to assure that American high-tech companies would get jobs funded by that plan.

I don’t know why we’d need to create jobs for Americans. Hell, only 100,000 people lost their jobs last week.

The “local lawmaker” in question is PA Republican Tim Murphy. I don’t know anything else about the guy, but I am rather chagrined to once again find myself agreeing with a Republican.

“From the iron mines to the manufacturers, to the mills, let’s use it to buy American,” the Upper St. Clair Republican said. “If we really are going to be serious about American jobs, we should require the billions in taxpayer funds go only towards American jobs and to buy products that say ‘Made in the U.S.A.'”

Sounds good. Just as good as President Obama’s and Chris Dodd’s rhetoric about Wall St. executives getting huge bonuses, all while working to block legislation that would allow the government to actually do something about it.

Nice to know we can still count on politicians to suck – no matter which side of the aisle they sit on.

So, it looks like Obama is considering appointing New Hampshire Republican Senator Judd Gregg as Commerce Secretary. Seeing as NH’s Governor is a Democrat and gets to appoint a new Senator, that sounds like a pretty good move to me. Once Al Franken is finally sworn in, that would give Democrats 59 Senate seats. If you add the two Independents (Bernie Sanders and he who shall not be named), that would give the Democratic caucus 60 votes. I hesitate to call that filibuster-proof, since getting Democrats to all vote the same way is tougher than herding cats, and we all know what a traitor that Independent from CT is.

Still, it’s a move that would at least piss off the Republicans, so that’s worth it all by itself. Of course, Republicans are already putting the screws to Gregg to keep him from accepting the job if offered. NH tends to be a pretty independent-minded state, but Republicans generally do what they’re told. I don’t know if there’s more potential graft available as Commerce Secretary than as a NH Senator, so it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Otherwise, it’s the end of another long week. We’ve got a bit of a reprieve from the snow (not much yesterday and nothing predicted for today), but there a couple more storms brewing for next week. We’re up over the ten foot mark for the season, so I’m hoping we can pull out another 80 inches before summer gets here and break the 200 inch mark.

First off, though, gotta get this week over with.

So I find myself agreeing with House Republicans, which makes me feel kind of dirty (where’s the Liberal Confessional when you need it). Not on the economic stimulus thingie, but on something more important: the analog teevee cutoff.

President Obama has been pushing to extend the February 17 changeover to all digital TV. Due to mismanagement (surprise, surprise) by the Bushies, the digital converter coupon fund has run out of money (there are apparently 3 million folks on the waiting list for the $40 coupons), and an estimated 6.5 million households are unprepared (meaning on all but low-power stations, which are exempt, all they’ll see is a whole lotta nothing on their teevees in three weeks or so). The Senate passed a bill to extend the deadline for four months, but the House failed to pass their version (by a large enough margin) yesterday.

While I feel a certain amount of comradeship with the procrastinators out there, I really don’t think extending the deadline will help. The only real way to give these slackers a kick in the butt is to have their teevees stop working. Few things strike more fear into the heart of Americans than the loss of their electronic babysitter. Once they see snow on the box (so to speak), they’ll get themselves out to the nearest Best Buy and take care of business.

I do feel bad for the old and/or lonely folks out there without friends and family who kind of rely on the TV for news and companionship. I can see them, slack-jawed and stunned, awash in the flickering glow of their snow-filled Zeniths, twisting knobs and fiddling with rabbit ears. No doubt a lot of TV repair people will make a lot of money on house calls come February 18.

But time marches on, and, in the scheme of things, these people will be better off without broadcast TV for a few days. There’s always the radio or (god forbid) they might even pick up a book. I know one of the things that I’ve all but abandoned in this electronic age is reading books. I can’t seem to concentrate on more than a paragraph or two these days (I keep trying to click something). It made going back to school pretty tough.

The House is apparently scheduling a new vote in an effort to pass an extension (because there’s nothing more important going on out there than teevee). Personally, I hope that fails as well. It’s time to put our long national analog TV nightmare behind us.

Another day, another snowstorm they’re trying to get us to obsess over. This time, it seems to be headed for everybody here in the Northeast. We got an inch or three overnight here, and the lo-cal teevee weather dork is predicting six to ten total by the time things pass through completely. Of course, after storms pass by here, they bring a sort of “back-door draft” across Lake Ontario, which means lake effect snow – probably another three to seven inches by tomorrow night. Not exactly a blizzard, but enough to get the shovel (which has been standing idle in the garage for the past week or so) out. We’ve had about 111″ so far this season (we’re kicking butt for the NY State “Golden Snowball” award – as usual – leading Buffalo and Rochester by over 30″), so this ought to take us over the ten foot mark.

On the bright side, it might actually get as warm as 30 degrees today, and that’d be pretty damn summer-like.