Public radio firing becomes public fight It's not show friends, it's show business. Ex-Baltimore public radio talker Marc Steiner thinks his firing for low ratings is personal, and ripped WYPR president Anthony Brandon...

"Tony Brandon has been trying to diminish my power at the station and move me off the air for six years. It has been his agenda," Steiner said. "It has been one thing after another, and I've always tried to take the high road and never say anything about it publicly."

Steiner, while acknowledging that his ratings had fallen, questioned whether a public radio station should be primarily concerned about ratings.

If ratings mean listeners and more listeners means more people pledging money to support the station in exchange for t-shirts and tote bags, then yeah, they have to be concerned about ratings.

Show business.

The guy's 61 years old. I'm betting whenever the station launches its new Statewide program in Marc's slot, the host and/or hostess will be a lot younger. He was getting like 37,000 listeners. Dude, start blogging, you can get that much online, especially when the Volvo-driving, Sideways-watching, yoga-stretching, patchoulli-smelling, sandal-wearing, granola munching, public radio types who already have blogs let people know about you.

Image courtesy Baltimore Sun

Honesty honestly not the best policy Deny, deny, deny, or at least don't say it on television. All the fun on Fox's Moment of Truth, a program up to Rupert Murdoch's usual standard of high quality, may be a workplace death trap.

Answering some of the more...personally interesting questions...isn't much different than taking the last train to Firedville, population you. Check out this lawyer talking to Fortune...

Could these people be denied promotions, demoted or even fired for behavior on the job or off that's considered deviant? Perhaps, employment lawyers say. "What a person discloses is fair game for an employer to use, particularly with an at-will employee, and most people who work are at-will employees," says Howard Wilgoren, an employment lawyer in Boston. (An at-will employee, unlike, say, a union worker, can be dismissed at any point for cause or no cause at all, and is also equally free to quit.)

All I'm saying is if you're doing something with coffee besides drinking it from a mug, network TV may not be the best place to share it. Really, like, ick people.

Massachusetts doesn't listen to Buffett or Dilbert If I've blogged about firings that involved companies instead of people, I've forgotten them. People are funnier, anyway.

Governments and big companies can be funny too. Just look at Goldman Sachs, the latest money firm fired by Massachusetts for navigating state pension funds into less than profitable waters...

Travaglini alleged Goldman had been failing to meet the pension board's expectation to outperform the S&P 500 index. The board will now temporarily invest the money in a passive fund that tracks the index until it completes a review of its domestic equity allocation.

I'm going to break with tradition here to pass along advice from a couple of the wisest philosophers of our time. Warren Buffett and Dilbert's human side, Scott Adams, both offer the same investment suggestions.

The Oracle of Omaha put it this way...

In response to a question about why Buffett recommends index funds to investors, he said that for "a know-nothing investor, a low-cost index fund will beat professionally managed money." He also said he had a standing offer to anyone who could name 10 hedge funds that will beat a low-cost index fund. No one has taken him up on his offer.

As for the guy who wags Dogbert's tail, Scott Adams echoed that advice in his 9-Point Investment Plan...

Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement

See, if Massachusetts spent more time listening to cartoonists and old billionaires, and less time over the past five months firing money managers and obsessing over the choke-job Patriots, they would have been ticking along nicely in an index fund, probably with a discount for being a big investor.

But what does a snarky blogger know? Well, this one knows how to get to Vanguard's web site and not dump money into funds with front-end loads and high expense ratios. That would make me the smartest kid in Boston.

Truckers want to drive off DOT Secretary Big rig drivers with the Teamsters sound like they wouldn't mind seeing Mary Peters as roadkill. I think the Teamsters were some scary union types back about forty years ago, when shooting people over their minestrone soup was all the rage in New Jersey and Philly.

They're the scared ones now, terrified by Secretary Mary for opening the border to Mexican trucks. So they want her fired...

“It’s a disgrace that Mary Peters is still in office,�? Teamsters General President Jim Hoffa said. “She has broken the law and defied the will of the American people by exposing them to dangerous trucks from Mexico.�?

Anyone who's followed the Bushies won't be surprised to find out she opened the border despite both sides of Capitol Hill passing legislation to keep out those trucks. A Republican disdain for law? Shocked I am.

Big mustache? That's a firing No idea if this epic stache belongs to Joynath Victor De or not, but if it does, it's what got him fired a long time ago.

Courts in India must move at the same pace the cows do. He got demoted in 1998 and fired in 2001 over the family tradition facial hair.

As Jim Rome would say, EPIC. Especially since he's had the mustache since 1968, when he joined Air India...

When his moustachioed woes were narrated by counsel Sanjiv Sen before a Bench comprising Justices H K Sema and Markandey Katju, it immediately issued notice to the airline and observed: "Can the size of moustache be a ground for dismissal in a democratic country? This is shocking."

Try reading this blog sometime, guys.

Image courtesy AFP

GM tries driving off 74,000 workers GM lost $39 billion dollars last year, mostly thanks to a big tax asset writeoff, whatever that means. They'll try to make that up by waving a big severance carrot in front of the workers they have today.

If the workers take the bait, they can hire younger, cheaper people to replace them...

GM is offering hourly employees incentives of $45,000 for production workers and $62,500 for skilled trades workers in exchange for an agreement to retire early. About 46,000 of GM's 74,000 UAW-represented workers have the required 26 years of service and are eligible for early retirement.

The remaining will be offered between $70,000 and $140,000, depending on length of service, to take a buyout.

Take the deal, and GM gets to ditch pension and health benefits for those workers. The next people to fill those jobs will do so for half the pay the older workers got, $14 an hour instead of $28.

GM and the unions managed to make this mess, and look what's going to happen. Instead of being paid enough to buy a house, line workers will be paid enough to buy newspapers that tell them what kind of house Bob Lutz can afford.

You can't teach with a gun in your truck Scratch one popular myth about Florida. There are places you can't carry a gun, even though there's probably enough guns in Miami alone to make South Beach the third most heavily armed nation on the planet.

In Polk County, the school board decided they were so horrified by Phillip Bradley having a nine in his truck that he had to be fired...

A hearing officer had recommended just a 90-day suspension, but school board members said that would have set a bad example for students.

Bradley said he was sorry for his students. He also said he felt as if the board was making an example of him in an election year.

If they really wanted to make an example for the kiddies, the teachers should haul out the 2006 crime report for Polk County and explain how tossing the truck mechanics teacher made the school safer. Three thousand violent crimes, population of a little over half a million? You'd be stupid not to get a gun permit.

Sideline reporters sidelined by ESPN Depending on who you listen to, Michele Tafoya and Suzy Kolber have either been fired from Monday Night Football, or given new roles at the sports network. Andrea Kremer is ticked off...

Says Kremer, who worked at ESPN for 17 years before joining NBC: "They were doing the role that ESPN asked them to do — more feature-ish stuff — and they were fired for it? If you don't like them in that role, change their role. Don't humiliate them like that. The way (ESPN) handled it was terrible, just disrespectful. … They treated two professionals in a completely non-professional way."

Hello, it's show business, not show friends. Lesley Visser got replaced by Melissa Stark once upon a time. It wasn't very nice of ABC to do that, but skewing younger meant screwing Lesley over, and they did it in a heartbeat.

The real lameoid is the ombudsperson at ESPN. She had all of this to say about Suzy and Michele...

ESPN confirmed reports that the mid-game role of sideline reporters will be reduced next year.

Fired? Reassigned? Stuck watching the game from a sports bar eight miles from the stadium? What's going on?

Ombudsperson also said boo hoo, but ESPN simply can't be expected to make Monday Night Football a viewing experience for the *sniff* purists...

These viewers offered a hard knot of resistance to MNF from first game to last, and I imagine they are ESPN's nightmare -- they are football's true faithful, purists important to please, and yet perhaps impossible to please while MNF seeks an audience large enough to justify its eight-year, $8.8 billion rights contract with the NFL.

As a football purist who thinks anything beyond the occasional cheerleader or crowd shot after a score borders on excessive overindulgence, Monday Night Football is nearly unwatchable. There is so much going on that the game takes a back seat to the chatter, the guests, the millions of little things ESPN pukes onto the screen.

I'd like to see Roger Goddell fire ESPN. Just call ESPN into NFL HQ and tell them their services are no longer required, here's a pro-rated refund of the contract, now get out before I have some linebackers pummel you.

Then Roger could hire Suzy and Michele to do the Monday night games.

CNN producer axed for blogging The closer you are to the public eye, the more you have to keep some things quiet.

To readers of Chez Pazienza's Deus Ex Malcontent, their readership was the same as watching Icarus take the wax wings too far up into the skies, only to fall to earth as the symbol of Led Zeppelin's record label, Swan Song...

As far as CNN knew, I was a valued employee, albeit one with almost no say in the day-to-day editorial decisions on American Morning. This held true even as I began contributing columns to the Huffington Post, giving my writing more exposure than ever before.

Then, last Monday afternoon, I got a call from my boss, Ed Litvak.

It wasn't an invite to lunch. An obscure line in CNN's employee manual gave Evil Ed and an HR robot the means to chuck Chez out of his job as one of American Morning's producers.

Smart move, CNN. You just freed a guy who hates what you've become, a drug dealer pushing scary stuff on the public day after day, to devote even more time to blogging.

Care to guess what kind of vitriol Chez can unleash now that he has no reason to hold back? Here's a hint...

Awhile back I was watching a great documentary on the birth of the punk scene, it closed with former Black Flag frontman and current TV host Henry Rollins saying these words: "All it takes is one person to stand up and say 'fuck this.'"

Chez said there was no severance or anything other than his abrupt dismissal over the content, not the act, of his writing. He doesn't have to be nice or even circumspect now. His blog just became a must-read.

Coaches: Martz dishes, Sampson going, O'Brien cashes in Looks like it's all over but the paperwork in Bloomington. Kelvin Sampson won't be coaching Indiana anymore, leaving the bench open for a triumphant return by Mr. Bob Knight, late of Texas Tech. Yeah, that'll happen. Off ya go Kelvin, and try to keep under your mobile plan minutes if you ever get another coaching job...

According to a third source, there was a team meeting at 3:00 p.m. ET in which several of the players — including D.J. White and Eric Gordon Jr. — were told that Sampson would not coach the team the remainder of the season. The source did not know if Sampson would be fired, or merely suspended.

Meanwhile, someone got fired in the Detroit Lions organization last month. To the sadness of Lions football fans, it wasn't Matt Millen, but Mike Martz, the madman offensive coordinator. He's got a new job trying to turn the 49ers offense into something resembling an NFL unit. But first, he had a few words to say to the media at the NFL combine in Indy...

Q: So they did fire you?

A: “Oh, yeah. They fired me. Absolutely fired me.”

Q: How is a firing a mutual thing?

A: “That I agreed I should probably go (laugh). When they fired me, it became mutual. I said, ‘You’re right. I probably should go.’ That’s how it became mutual.”

Q: Were you surprised the Lions danced around it, never saying you were fired?

A: “I can’t explain anything that they do. I can’t.”

That's ok, neither can anyone else in Detroit, except maybe the voices in William Clay Ford's head when he keeps giving Matt Millen extensions.

Ex-The Ohio State University hoops coach Jim O'Brien should finally get a big check from the school for firing him and breaking his contract. The Buckeyes appealed the decision all the way up to the Ohio Supreme Court, which decided they aren't going to hear the case...

O'Brien, the men's basketball coach at Ohio State from 1998 until 2004, was fired after he told then-athletic director Andy Geiger that he had given a $6,000 loan to a prospective recruit. Such loans are a violation of NCAA rules.

O'Brien sued the university for wrongfully firing him and won $2.2 million plus interest in the Ohio Court of Claims in 2006. The university appealed to the Supreme Court after an appeals court upheld the award. The university and O'Brien's lawyers figure the total award will be $2.7 million to nearly $3 million.

I think some OSU alums will be getting some frantic calls from their alma mater this weekend.

Cathay Pacific pilot buzzes unemployment line Massive stones on Ian Wilkinson, the now former pilot for Cathay Pacific. He decided to give the passengers on the maiden flight of a Boeing 777-300 a little something to remember the historic day by. Namely, soiled trousers...

Hurtling through the air at 322mph, the pilot took the 365-seater jet down to 28ft above the ground for several seconds before pulling up.

Passengers, including Cathay Pacific's chairman Chris Pratt, were said to be "stunned into silence" while onlookers cheered the astonishing fly-by. The flight had left Seattle, the home of Boeing, for Hong Kong, where Cathay Pacific is based.

The whole life flashing before your eyes thing must not have been on the menu for the flight. Cathay Pacific will have us believe he wasn't fired for the improvisational ground-skimming maneuver, but for not asking permission first. Nothing to do with making the big boss spill his champagne, sure.

Being Brian Billick Someone ought to get inside the fired Ravens coach's head. Brian Billick has no idea why he was fired in Baltimore.

Maybe he ought to read the Ravens Central blog. Mike Preston all kinds of reasons why Brian got crunched by Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti...

Billick was fired because he lost to a quarterback named Cleo Lemon. He was fired because the offense was inept. He was fired because the Ravens couldn't score touchdowns. He was fired because he was changing offensive coordinators like Hillary Clinton changes moods in the presidential election race. He was fired because fans stopped coming to games and his locker room was in disarray. He was fired because he no longer could connect with his players, and he won only five games and had a losing record with a team that was expected to be one of the league's elite.

No tears for Billick, for sure. He'll get $15 million to sit around the house over the next three years. That's a lot of time for him to get good at Madden NFL and figure out how to run an offense again.

Photo credit: David Hobby, Baltimore Sun

Hi honey, sorry about your job I think Timmy Moseley probably knows the most comfortable position for sleeping on his couch. Maybe his wife's firing was as much her fault as his, but you know how it goes. It's always the guy's fault.

To keep his job, Timmy needed a tanker certification for his driver's license. The missus may have been of some help here...

After investigators found testing procedures at the state Department of Motor Vehicles office in Peekskill were susceptible to corruption and fraud, the DMV fired employee Crystal Moseley, 39, because she monitored and graded her husband's commercial driver's license test, according to a report released Tuesday by Inspector General Kristine Hamann.

Corruption and fraud in a government office? About as surprising as finding fish tacos at Tacos Baja, I always thought.