We had a laugh a few months ago, when there was that little dust-up between the gay fellows over at Powerline and the Star Tribune’s Nick Coleman. They’d all been in a running firefight—liberal this, neo-con that—and while we’ve come to appreciate the deceptively euphonious rhetoric of the full-time bloggers and Rather-slayers, they were far outmatched in wits by Coleman, who is, after all, a professional.
But that little flap went nookular when the bloggers’ boss at TCF Bank decided to step into this little flea-circus with a sledgehammer. Bill Cooper, an excitable, longtime GOP honcho, pledged that his bank would buy no more advertising with the Star Tribune so long as he was at the controls. (We commented at the time that TCF stockholders and directors were no doubt gratified with Cooper’s decision to make sure the last anyone heard about the company was that its CEO was making such an aggressive personal stance with ~their~ money.)
Now TCF has ingeniously gone one better—they’ve committed to buy the naming rights to the new stadium at the University of Minnesota for the kingly sum of $35 million. That kind of cabbage would have bought a lot of advertising in the Strib, of course, but we think it’s a brilliant move. Given that the daily—and all dailies like it—have rolled over on this insidious form of commericalizing public information, TCF will get its advertising and brand extension into the fish wrap anyway, without having to give the employers of Nick Coleman one red cent. Take that, you pantywaist, glue-sniffing liberals!
We note that the words “Target Center” have appeared in the pages of newspapers around the land more than one thousand times in the last month—ninety-seven times in the Strib. The cancelled NHL season didn’t prevent the words “Xcel Energy Center” from being recorded in the Newspaper of the Twin Cities nearly sixty times in the last three weeks.
This give us a great deal of Adidas-brand pride in the Visa-Mastercard ingenuity of the entrepreneurial spirit, still so manifestly alive and well here in the United States of Halliburton.
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