Homeland security on the range

Like many of the small towns across America, Hardin, MT (pop. 4,300) is hurting for jobs these days. It also has a surplus of prime real estate, assuming that anything other than buffalo steaks can be called prime in the microscopic hamlet in southeastern Montana.

Downtown Hardin, not a bustling city center even in good times, is quieter than ever. The Dollar Store reportedly is going out of business and the Mini Mall soon will be shuttered. A few blocks away, a new $27-million detention facility also sits empty.

When they floated some bonds a few years ago to build the Two Rivers Regional Correctional Facility, Hardin's city fathers hoped the prison would generate employment opportunities beyond the handful of guards that would be needed to keep the local cattle rustlers under lock and key. Obviously, some short-order cooks would be engaged to feed the staff and inmates, and a couple of locksmiths would be on call to keep the latches working. Eventually, perhaps, a Walmart would arrive to provide all the sundries yearned for by a growing population.

It didn't work out that way. The facility has yet to house any prisoners, even though it was ready to receive them two years ago.

The 464-bed prison has scores of surveillance cameras, a magnetometer, and dozens of orange prison jump suits in a storage room filled with shoes, towels, blankets, razors and underwear. It also has a generous supply of riot helmets, gas masks, batons, shields, and guns for guards. Just no prisoners.

Confronted by a collapsing economy and little prospect of a sudden crime surge, Hardin's leadership did what Westerners are famous for -- they improvised. When he caught wind of the hubbub in Washington over President Obama's decision to close the infamous prison in Guantanamo, Cuba, Greg Smith, Hardin's economic development administrator, sprang into action.

While the rest of the country was fixated on the debate over whether to transfer any of the terrorist detainees now housed at Guantanamo into the United States -- and most of the members of Congress were shouting an emphatic ''No!'' -- Smith announced to Hardin's city council that he had come up with an idea that could solve everybody's problem.

Let's take all of the detainees in Guantanamo and bring them here to our prison in Hardin, he declared. ''It would bring jobs. Believe it or not, it would even bring hope and opportunity,'' he later told CNN.

Hardin's prison has single, double, and dorm-style cells, but Smith says it could be modified to keep detainees separated. He points out that because only terror detainees would be housed at Two Rivers, they couldn't radicalize run-of-the-mill felons. Smith also told CNN that a large dormitory room in the prison, now filled with empty bunk beds, could be converted into a mosque. Smith, who apparently doesnŐt have any correctional facility experience, also claims it would be simple to upgrade the medium-security prison to meet maximum-security standards.

Even more startling than Smith's proposal was the reaction of Hardin's city council: they voted 5-0 to endorse the idea.

Since we already are about 14 minutes into Hardin's 15 minutes of fame, here's a brief synopsis of what happened next.

Montana's congressional delegation rose as one and did their best imitation of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch's seminal painting, The Scream. When they were able to speak after the initial shock wore off, the state's two U.S. senators made it clear that Smith's proposal is a non-starter.

"Housing potential terrorists in Montana is not good for our state," said Sen. Max Baucus. ''These people stop at nothing. Their primary goal in life, and death, is to destroy America.''

Sen. Jon Tester also weighed in -- ''I just don't think it's appropriate, that's all. I don't think they know what they're asking for.''

According to CNN, the opinions of Hardin natives are mixed. A sampling taken on North Central Avenue in the heart of downtown Hardin ranged from a waitress who said she would move out if the terrorists moved in, to a manicurist who said bringing the detainees to the poorest county in Montana would create jobs and make the place safer since it would get special attention from law enforcement.

When we last checked, economic development director Smith was offering to give any doubters a free three-day test lockup so they can see for themselves how secure the prison is.

Sorry, Mr. Smith. We enjoy taking economic development tours, but we'll pass on that one.

We will, however, tip our hat to your moxie and can-do patriotism. And we're pleased to offer a helpful suggestion for filling Two Rivers if your Guantanamo transfer plan doesn't work out --

Round up your posse and ride on over to Wall Street, pardner. They got more criminals there than you can shake a lasso at.

The Blago Infamy Factory Expands

On April 23rd, I declared as the "Best Idea of the Week" an Illinois' court's denial of Rod Blagojevich's participation in an upcoming reality show, "I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!" Citing reasons such as his pending criminal charges and the fact that he is not a celebrity, I felt Blago did not deserve to use his impeachment as a launching pad to TV stardom and monetary reward.

Well, the Chicago Sun-Times reports today:

In another bizarre chapter of Illinois political history, the wife of onetime governor Rod Blagojevich is likely to finalize a deal this week to appear in a reality TV show.

"It appears she's going to do it," said Sheldon Sorosky, attorney for Rod Blagojevich.

Patti Blagojevich will appear as a contestant on the reality TV show "I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!" according to an attorney for her husband, Ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

Sorosky said Patti Blagojevich plans to fly to Los Angeles this week to finalize a deal to appear on the new NBC prime time TV show: "I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!" There's no indication what NBC has offered to pay Mrs. Blagojevich, but her husband's onetime deal called for up to $123,000.

NBC executives sought to woo Patti Blagojevich onto the show almost immediately after U.S. District Judge James Zagel last month blocked the former governor from being a contestant.

The show will be filmed in Costa Rica. Because of the federal charges against Rod Blagojevich, he needed approval to leave the country.

Meanwhile, Sam Adam Jr., onetime lawyer for R&B star R. Kelly, formally filed his intent with the court to act as the ex-governor's lawyer.

"I'm ready to go," he said Monday.

I'm really not a fan of the advancement of despicable people due to their despicable actions. "Profane Patti" is even less of a celebrity than her husband, for starters, but NBC's hasty move to replace the ex-governor with one of his (life) partners in crime is nauseating. Surely there are other fame-hungry, D-list attention seekers who would be willing to compete for cash in Costa Rica. Give Ann Coulter a call. I hear Manny Ramirez has some time to spare. Pluck out one of the Jackson 5 or one of the Brady Bunch....anyone but ousted politicians and/or their spouses.

An even better idea for NBC: fill the Costa Rican jungle with Americans who were recently laid off from their jobs. Let THEM compete for cash.

Paging Little Caesar

California is making preparations to hold a fire sale of some its most iconic properties as it continues to grapple with a gargantuan state budget shortfall.

The nation's largest state, which patched together an emergency budget fix in February that closed a $42-billion deficit, now projects at least $15 billion in red ink for the fiscal year that begins July 1.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has signaled that his initial strategy for dealing with the latest budget gap may include deep cuts in state education spending and the auctioning off of some of the most famous state-owned addresses in California.

The potential for-sale list released by the governor's office this week includes the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which has hosted two Olympics and can seat almost 100,000 patrons, and San Quentin Prison, currently home to some of the state's most hardened criminals. Also under consideration for privatization are the Cow Palace concert hall in Daly, CA, and the Orange County fairgrounds.

According to reports, San Quentin isn't considered an attractive property simply because it evokes memories of tough guys and machine guns. The legendary prison sits on a prime piece of scenic waterfront real estate north of San Francisco. So, presumably, the prison would be shut down if the property is purchased by private developers.

However, there may be a considerable snag to any plan to raise money by selling San Quentin. Gov. Schwarzenegger has hinted that the sale of the prison would be accompanied by an early-release program that would spring about 40,000 inmates currently incarcerated in the state's overcrowded prison system. California legislators have rejected the early-release idea in each of the past four years, most recently in April.

The proposed $400-million price tag for the Coliseum also may prove to be unrealistic: according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, a 2001 appraisal of the landmark stadium pegged its value at just $16 million -- a figure that may drop when currently depressed market levels are included in the calculation.

We've given some thought to the identity of the ideal buyer for both the Coliseum and San Quentin. Since we assume that it would need to be someone with a ''Caeser-like'' persona who also may be comfortable in a prison setting, the first name that came to mind was...Edward G. Robinson!

Unfortunately, the star of one of our all-time favorite gangster flicks died in 1973. So that leaves us with ---

Donald Trump in a fedora?

Hydrogen bombshell

A few months ago, we reported in this space about a test-drive we took in a hydrogen-powered Chevy Equinox. The car was one of about 100 fuel-cell-powered prototypes that had been hand-built at General Motors' Fuel Cell Activities Center in Honeoye Falls, NY, a few miles from Rochester.

The only sound coming out of the hydrogren-powered Chevy as it accelerated was the hum of the tires, and the only exhaust it produced came out in the form of water vapor.

We left the General Motors facility near Rochester last year hopeful that we had just experienced a preview of the car of the future. We looked forward to the mass-production of fuel-cell powered vehicles as a key solution to a carbon-based transportation system that is contributing to the looming catastrophe of climate change.

However, we noted in our report that the limited range of the prototype (160 miles on a full four-kilogram tank of hydrogen), the high cost of producing it, and the lack of a network of hydrogen gas stations in the U.S. were major hurdles that would have to be overcome to make hydrogen-powered cars a reality.

It now appears that the U.S. Department of Energy has concluded that these hurdles are insurmountable, at least for the next couple of decades.

Releasing energy-related details of the federal budget last week for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, Energy Secretary Steven Chu disclosed that the government has determined that development of hydrogen fuel cells is not feasible at this time. Therefore, Dr. Chu said, the government will cut off funds for continued development of hydrogen-powered vehicles.

Chu indicated that coming up with a way to transport hydrogen across the country as part of a new fuel system was the biggest obstacle to commercializing the technology. As a result of the Energy Department's decision, government funding will be steered toward the continued development of electric car batteries that can be plugged directly into the power grid.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is indicating it is preparing to authorize an increase in the amount of ethanol that can be blended with gasoline. The percentage of ethanol permitted in the blend likely will increase from 10 percent to 15 percent.

Engine manufacturers and consumer advocates have raised concerns about the impending ruling, suggesting that warranties for many of the estimated 500 million gasoline engines in use in cars, trucks, lawn mowers and other products prohibit use of fuel containing more than 10 percent ethanol.

EPA is responding to a request from Growth Energy, an ethanol lobbying group, which joined with 54 ethanol manufacturers to ask for a waiver of the Clean Air Act to permit more ethanol to be added to gasoline.

According to the American Petroleum Institute, nearly three-quarters of the gasoline sold in the U.S. last year contained some ethanol. EPA previously has approved the use of ethanol blends of up to 85 percent ethanol, but only for cars and trucks certified by manufacturers as ''flexible fuel'' vehicles. The requested 15-percent blend would replace the standard blend that is sold across-the-board for all vehicles.

POTUS envy

You've probably heard by now that former President George W. Bush already has raised $100 million for his presidential library in Texas, outpacing previous fundraising efforts for the mausoleums built to honor other U.S. chief executives.

We're not sure why it became a tradition to build a mammoth facility dressed up as a tourist attraction to house all of the papers a president hasn't shredded, burned or buried on his way out of the White House.

The first official presidential library honored Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio, who grabbed the big prize in 1876 in a disputed election with Samuel Tilden, then New York's governor. Tilden appeared to have won the popular vote, but some wild shenanigans blocked the Electoral College from confirming the result. After several weeks of ugly political mud-wrestling, a special "commission" of five U.S. senators, five House members and five Supreme Court justices handed the presidency to Hayes by one vote, an eerie precursor to the Bush v. Gore fiasco of 2000.

Hayes wasn't exactly Rushmore material. The most interesting items found at his library in Fremont, OH, are the pair of fuzzy slippers Abraham Lincoln was said to be wearing the night before he was shot (they have deer antlers on them) and a piece of the actual White House fence, which surrounds the building.

There's even a presidential library honoring Gerald R. Ford, who became the 38th president when Richard Nixon crawled out of Washington in disgrace in 1974. In the first application of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, Ford had been appointed vice president by Nixon after Spiro Agnew resigned as part of a plea bargain to avoid jail time for accepting envelopes stuffed with cash from Maryland contractors. Unable to get elected president on his own after he pardoned Nixon, Ford only served for two years.

Speaking of Nixon, there are some rather unusual displays at his museum in Whittier, CA. A glass case devoted to Nixon's war record includes a pair of deuces said to be the hand Tricky Dick deployed to bluff a colonel out of $1,500 while he spent WWII playing poker on a supply-chain outpost in the Pacific. There's also a picture of the future president in uniform manning a grill at ''Nick's Hamburger Stand.''

Because Nixon resigned after the Watergate scandal consumed his presidency, his was the first library built entirely with private funding. Nixon's devotees came up with a novel solution to deal with the scandal: visitors walk through an empty room with mirrored walls fronted by what appear to be knee-high benches. It is only by leaning over the benches and looking at the mirrors that one sees the Watergate timeline, which is reflected from the back of the benches.

You can almost hear the 37th president telling the designers: ''We could do that -- but that would be wrong!''

In recent years, architecture has become almost as important as substance in our presidential libraries.

This trend was established by I.M. Pei's spectacular homage to John F. Kennedy's love of the sea. The Kennedy library, which sits on a small peninsula jutting out into the middle of Boston Harbor, is shaped like a huge white sail. Every accoutrement in the building has an ocean-going theme, right down to the door knobs.

Which brings us back to George W. Don't tell anybody, but a guy who runs a liquor store in Crawford, TX sent us a detailed plan for the George W. Bush Presidential Library. W. apparently left it on his counter when he stopped in recently to purchase a bottle of Jim Beam.

We don't want to spill all the beans, but we can tell you that the governing principle of the library's design will be ''Fun and Games.'' The place is going to be set up like an amusement park, with several nods to the 43rd president's quirky sense of humor and his penchant for going on vacation, which is where he spent at least a third of his presidency.

According to the plan, architect Frank Gehry is the leading candidate to design the building, if he can figure out how to make a 1-million-square-foot structure shaped like a 10-gallon hat.

Visitors will enter through the brim of the hat, where they immediately will be confronted with the quandary of whether to step on a mosaic, imbedded in the floor, that bears the likeness of W.'s father, George H.W. Bush, the 41st president.

This was W.'s idea. He had the mosaic removed from the entrance to Baghdad's biggest hotel (where it had been installed by Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War). W. can't wait to see the look on Poppy's face when Bush 41 enters the new museum after the ribbon-cutting.

Once inside, visitors will board a roller-coaster tram about the size of the Space Mountain ride in Disneyland but shaped like an old-fashioned Western stagecoach.

We don't want to spoil all the surprises, but here are some coming attractions:

The roller coaster starts slowly, moving past a marble gateway with the giant words HALL OF GREAT ACCOMPLISHMENTS chiseled on its front. It enters a huge empty space with some fuzzy photos of W. greeting various luminaries hanging on the walls. As visitors try to focus on the pictures, huge jets of steam start spraying from nozzles in the ceiling, the lights dim, and everyone is showered with a substance that feels and smells like baby powder. A neon sign flashes: WEAPONS OF MASS DISTRACTION!

The coaster does several spins upside down in a series of tunnels labeled STRATEGERY ALLEY. In the last tunnel, the walls change colors as a sign flashes THREAT-LEVEL HIGH! All of the visitors' cell phones suddenly start ringing at the same time. Then the coaster climbs a steep hill labeled BUILDUP TO WAR.

Once the tram reaches the top, it plunges into a deep abyss at bloodcurdling speed. At the bottom, what looks like a huge data punch-card swings down and threatens to decapitate the visitors. The bottom half of the card breaks off harmlessly at the last second. ''Hanging chad,'' says the tour guide.

The coaster hits another incline labeled THE SURGE and then enters a hall of funhouse mirrors where the visitors see grotesquely distorted images of themselves under the label COUNCIL OF ECONOMIC ADVISORS.

Near the top of the second incline, a Dick Cheney robot dressed as Darth Vader douses everybody with a bucket of water. They are dried off by hot air shooting out of nozzles embedded in the mouth of a bust of Karl Rove.

When the coaster hits the peak, a group of beauty queens in swimsuits with sashes labeled WALL STREET will appear offering the visitors flutes of Cristal champagne. But before anyone can grab a free drink, the lights suddenly go out and the coaster drops off the edge of a 90-degree, 10-story embankment and takes a plunge that will, according to the plan, ''create G-forces equivalent to those that induce blackouts on jet fighter pilots.''

At the end of the ride, dizzy visitors will stagger across the faux deck of an aircraft carrier, where they can have their photos taken next to a cardboard cutout of W. in his flight suit under a MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner.

Then it's on to the doghouse-shaped snack bar, called Barney's Cafe, for some dog dishes filled with pretzels. Visitors will be handed thick menus by waitresses wearing Barbara Bush masks.

Opening the menu, they will be startled by an incredibly realistic hologram of George H. W. Bush throwing up on the Japanese prime minister. A cardboard cutout next to the lunch counter of W. with a bullhorn will play a recorded message from the 43rd president:

''HEH...HEH...HEH -- HOPE Y'ALL ENJOY THE FOOD!''

The George W. Bush Presidential Library will be rated PG-13, meaning the average 13-year-old will really like the place.

Best Idea of the Week: Retrofitting ASAP

On the whole, the retail industry (except, tellingly, consignment shops) has suffered sales declines in the past several quarters and top-tier chain stores have shut down shops. I have been speculating what will happen to all of the vacant storefronts. In Business Facilities' April 2009 Top Executive Interview, I posed a related question to Colliers' International's Ross Moore.

I asked Mr. Moore, "How have the closures of many retail super-stores affected their communities? Do you foresee these commercial properties being repurposed or remaining vacant?"

Moore replied, "Empty stores are never a good thing. Vacant stores donŐt help neighboring retailers and become a target for vandalism and usually fall into some form of disrepair.
Leasing up large stores is never easy, and never more difficult than in the current environment. Many will have to be retrofitted for alternative use, while some may sit empty until the economy recovers. In a worst-case scenario the building will be demolished and the site redeveloped. In every up-cycle a small percentage of retail space gets developed where it probably shouldnŐt. This cycle was no different."

On the heels of this recent interview, it was just announced today that Silver City, NM has been allocated a $2-million grant from the federal Economic Development Administration.

The funding will be used to renovate a former Wal-mart building that is owned by Grant County and re-make it into a community events center and a site for housing small businesses.

Fred Mondrag—n, secretary of Economic Development for the state, said the funding is critical for the area, which has been hit hard by the recession and recent mine closures.

Mondrag—n and his staff have worked with the community to increase economic growth in the area. They will assist officials in Silver City with finalizing the grant paperwork.

Toni Balzano, spokeswoman for the Economic Development Department, said normally, the Economic Development Administration gives about $2 million in grants total to this region every year. But since it received money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA, it has more funds to give out.

I think it's a great sign that some communities are using federal grant money to repurpose store space for positive, community-related interactions and smaller business development as soon as possible. Best Idea of the Week! Don't let rehabbing shopaholics turn your once bustling strip malls into galleries for graffiti (unless sponsored by your local arts council).

Sacks of gold

We had some trepidation when Australian-turned-American press baron Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago.

Murdoch has a well-earned reputation for dumbing down his publications and infecting them with his retrograde political preferences. He most famously transformed the nation's oldest daily, the New York Post, from a staid liberal icon into a snarling, outrageous tabloid unearthing headless bodies in topless bars.

But we have to admit that Murdoch's feistiness has injected new life into the WSJ, and his brass-knuckles approach to the political class has enabled the Journal to throw a spotlight on the sleaziest machinations of the current fiscal crisis.

Like the seasoned war correspondents of yore who braved bullets with nothing more than a notepad and a camera, the Journal has been on the front lines of the global economic calamity exposing the scandalous behavior of the nationŐs top bank executives.

When New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo alerted Congress in January that the Merrill Lynch gang had grabbed an estimated $3.5 billion in federal bailout funds and showered ''bonuses''on the traders who bankrupted the investment bank, the Journal put a rogue's gallery of Merrill's biggest money-grubbers on its front page.

Not doubt the WSJ would have followed this up with a directory of the 700 instant millionaires amongst Merrill's bonus babies. Unfortunately, Cuomo refused to cough up the names produced by Merrill after his subpoena was upheld by a federal judge, despite promising to do so.

The latest fiscal atrocity to appear on WSJ's front page involves the current chairman of the New York Federal Reserve, Stephen Friedman, who also holds a seat on Goldman Sachs' Board of Directors.

When a desperate Goldman Sachs converted itself from an investment bank into a Fed-regulated ''bank holding company'' in September so it could get in line for billions in federal TARP bailout funds, Mr. Friedman was obligated under federal conflict-of-interest rules to step down as a Goldman director.

Instead, the New York Fed chairman applied for a waiver from the government permitting him to continue to serve two masters. The former New York Fed president, Timothy Geithner, now the U.S. Treasury Secretary, took three months to ''evaluate'' this request, then granted the waiver.

Here's what happened while Mr. FriedmanŐs waiver was being processed:

-- Friedman installed a Goldman Sachs executive as Geithner's replacement as president of the New York Fed.

-- Friedman, who already had significant holdings in Goldman Sachs as a director, purchased an additional 37,000 shares of Goldman Sachs stock, which increased in value by almost $2 million after Goldman received more than $10 billion in federal bailout funds.

The New York Fed has responded to the outrage generated by the WSJ's scoop by issuing a tepid statement claiming that it couldn't afford to lose Mr. Friedman's expertise at such a critical time in the nation's history.

Haven't we seen this movie before?

Shortly after Barack Obama named Geithner as his pick to head Treasury, which runs the Internal Revenue Service, Geithner was exposed as a tax cheat. He was nonetheless confirmed as Treasury Secretary by a Congress that decided we couldn't afford to lose his expertise at such a critical time in the nation's history.

So we were all treated to the spectacle a few days ago of President Obama trying to keep a straight face while standing next to Timmy the tax cheat as he announced that Treasury is going to crack down on corporate tax cheats who park their profits in Cayman Islands havens.

As Obama himself famously said during the presidential campaign, ENOUGH!

It's time to take out the garbage, Mr. President. It's piling up, and it really stinks.

Final edition

Thomas Jefferson once famously said that he would rather have newspapers without a government than a government without newspapers.

It is becoming increasingly evident in recent days that we rapidly are approaching the latter.

The 137-year-old Boston Globe became the latest arrival this week in a linotype hospice crowded with venerable newspapers on their last legs.

The New York Times Co., which owns Beantown's largest daily, has informed the Boston Newspaper Guild, which represents 600 workers at the Globe, that it needs about $20 million in union givebacks or it will consider closing the paper in 60 days.

The Globe, said to be facing losses totaling $85 million this year without the cuts, is the latest in a long line of newspaper dominos that have been falling with disturbing regularity since the economy collapsed last fall.

Obituaries already have been written this year for print editions of the Rocky Mountain News, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The Denver paper went under, while the latter two said they would try to survive as online-only publications.

Major newspapers across the country -- including the Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times, and BaltimoreŐs Sun -- have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection since the beginning of the year. The deathwatch also has begun for leading dailies in San Francisco, Miami, Minneapolis and Cleveland.

As these and dozens of other newspapers circle their fiscal wagons, job cuts are being accompanied by service reductions and reduced page-counts.

Several papers have followed the lead of the Washington Post, which eliminated its influential Book Review section, and the Times, which reportedly is enlisting journalism students to cover outlying boroughs of New York City and New Jersey. The Detroit Free Press cut more than its pages: home delivery has been sliced to three days a week.

The numbers are stark. Publicly traded publishers collectively have lost about 39 percent of their market value since Jan. 1, according to USA Today. The Newspaper Association of America reports a 16.5 percent drop in newspaper ad sales in 2008.

Even before the economy tanked, the print news business was having its lunch eaten by the proliferation of low-cost local advertising on cable TV outlets. To make matters worse, the print behemoths only recently woke up to the fact that their failure to protect copyrighted content from free distribution on the Web has ceded a potentially lucrative new revenue stream to bloggers and other entrepreneurs who are more than happy to piggyback on the journalistic cache of the mainstream media without paying a dime for it.

Since our high school civics teachers always told us a thriving free press is essential to the functioning of a democracy -- much more so than a Wall Street investment bank or a failing auto manufacturer -- it would be logical to assume that the ailing newspaper business will be next in line for a government bailout.

Unfortunately, logic has nothing to do with it.

Let's face it, politics in 21st-century America is an exercise in reality TV. Newspapers, when they actually do their job and try to keep the politicians honest, mess up the sound-bite driven story line.

Our political leaders first and foremost want to keep the TV moguls happy because their programming decisions provide homogenized access to millions of voters. Do you see any TV execs wringing their hands over the demise of the ''Fourth Estate''?

So if you want to avoid Jefferson's nightmare and keep getting your loyal companion delivered to the driveway each morning, you'll have to keep reaching into your pocket and fishing out those coins with TJ's likeness on them.

Otherwise, the next time somebody shouts ''Stop the Presses!'' will be the last time you hear it.