Just out from USAToday …

Americans are as down as they’ve been in decades about the state of the country and its polarized politics, even as they express soaring confidence that Barack Obama will be able to turn things around.

A USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds stratospheric expectations for the incoming president that his own supporters acknowledge may be unrealistic. A majority of those surveyed say Obama will be able to achieve every one of 10 major campaign promises, from doubling the production of alternative energy to ensuring that all children have health insurance coverage.

Seven in 10 predict the nation will be better off when Obama’s term ends in four years.

Minneapolis Star Tribune, (aka the Strib) the paper that’s been doing such amazing work on the Minnesota senate recount, files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Whackjob Iowa Rep. Steve King (R) complains that Obama gets to use “Hussein” while taking the oath of office, but the name is off-limits to critics. That and the day’s other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

A Reader comments on the green energy provisions in the stimulus bill …

The range of subsidies for energy in stimulus bill is very impressive. It is noteworthy that there is a grant program for alternatives. Grants to start up businesses are very rare. Tax policy usually returns tax payments or creates deductions and credits against taxes. To send checks to people is quite extraordinary for Congress. So this is a sign of awareness that wind and solar need real cash, given that they are start up projects where there haven’t been taxes paid in the past. Giving them a transferable tax credit, one that they can sell to others, is not effective for the special bad reason that there is no appetite for buying tax credits just now, since folks don’t have profits and have plenty of losses from their own businesses and portfolios.

It is also good that loan guarantees appear in the proposal. But the big question is this: can the energy secretary guarantee $8b of loans or does the provision mean that he can guarantee approximately $100b as long as he doesn’t actually spend (that is, lose) more than $8 b.

I’ve been keeping you updated on the rash of major newspaper bankruptcies and other papers that are slated to cease publication altogether in weeks or months. But as TPM Reader JS notes the situation is more complicated and in some ways more promising than papers just not being able to make money any more. A lot of these papers that are in trouble are still profitable on an operating basis. They’re just leveraged with crazy amounts of debt and/or run by people who insist on making a annual profit margin that was just never sustainable …

I just wanted to comment on this (and other) newspaper bankruptcies. I have done a significant amount of strategic planning and management consulting work with major metro newspapers over the past 10 years and saw much of this coming via scenario-based planning in the late 90’s.

The problems are well documented by now – classified advertising (the most profitable part of the old print model) is done much better and much more cheaply online, young (and not so young) readers prefer the immediacy of the online channel, core display advertising clients have consolidated (fewer department stores, cellular providers, etc.). Meanwhile, advertising revenues always fall in a down economy (and this is a very down economy).

But, most of these businesses are still fine on an operating basis (i.e., they make money before interest and taxes). Having gone public (seemed like a good idea at the time given the 20% margins, etc.) and subsequently having been leveraged to the hilt, they are getting killed on debt-service as well as in the public equity markets (which prices assets based on future growth potential). For goodness sakes, every single operating entity owned by the now bankrupt Tribune Company is making money – but, Sam Zell (and John Madigan before him) loaded the company up with so much debt, there is no way out other than a bankruptcy judge.

The current owners (particularly the Sam Zell’s and private equity firms of the world) don’t give a hoot for the public trust aspect of the major metros that they own – unlike the families that started and ran these papers for generations. If they lose all their equity and the bond holders take big hair cuts (I’m talking buzz cut…), that strikes me as a fair and equitable outcome for people who never believed in the missions of the entities they owned.

So, these bankruptcies may in the medium to long run be good for journalism (in the traditional sense). Assuming the new owners emerge from bankruptcy with limited debt, the papers have many positive attributes upon which to earn a reasonable profit while building new sources of revenue. They have an unparalleled local focus and understanding, they are the most efficient vehicle for several categories of advertising, and they have significant advertising sales forces that can be re-focused on lines of business that can sustain the papers over the long haul. This is particularly true if the surviving owners are people who believe in the public trust mission of their papers and news-oriented web channels.

I remember back during the dot.com bubble they had a few websites with really snarky titles that chronicled each company that bit the dust.

It’s sort of similar now. Only these are real companies.

We’re in the final 100 hours of the Bush era, but we’re not out of the woods yet. Before its time is up, the Administration is still trying to open up new areas to offshore drilling, and they’re trying to bury a Pentagon inspector general report on the military’s TV pundits program with a 4 p.m. Friday afternoon release. Then there are the last-minute pardons expected sometime between now and noon Tuesday.

Last month I spent a lot of time marshaling arguments and expert opinions suggesting that the president actually lacked the power to revoke a pardon, as he did in the case of New York real estate developer Isaac Toussie. But as Steven Aftergood reports, a new Congressional Research Service report concludes that President Bush probably did have the power to revoke the pardon since it had yet to be ‘executed’. Again, past DOJ pardon attorney have said there’s no real ‘execution’ of anything that the Pardon Attorney does. And it’s worth noting that the CRS has no legal standing. But that’s their take.

From our Reader who’s watching this closely …

The stimulus bill gives the Secretary of the Energy Department the power to guarantee about $100 billion of loans to alternative energy projects. While this pales in comparison to guarantees given to many banks, and definitely in comparison to the $7.5 trillion of debt guaranteed by Treasury, FDIC and the Fed over last year, still this ability to get alternative energy investing across the valley of death now faced by the sector is hugely important as a green job creation mechanism and a major step toward energy independence and climate change abatement. Hat’s off to Chris Van Hollen and Ed Markey and other members of Congress — if the Energy Secretary has the freedom to administer the guarantees in a commercially reasonable way.