Tagged: super bowl

With Ann Arbor’s own Harbaugh brothers about to square off in the Super Bowl, you’ll probably start to hear lots of stories from the folks who met them along the way. 

Well, count me in.

As Michigan Radio's Zoe Clark pointed out this morning, the stakes have been raised for Michigan's upcoming Republican presidential primary now that Rick Santorum pulled off a three state sweep last night.

The Republican candidates will be campaigning hard to win the state's 16 electoral votes.

For Mitt Romney, he might again face questions about his stance on GM and Chrysler's bailout.

In November of 2008, he wrote an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times with the headline "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" in which he argues the automakers should go through a managed bankruptcy.

Now, comedians from Chicago's Second City club have created a spoof of the Clint Eastwood Chrysler ad taking a shot at Romney at the end. In it, their version of Eastwood says:

"I've seen a lot of tough eras, a lot of downturns in my life. And sometimes it's best to lie down and watch from the couch. You can't win 'em all, right?"

Here's the Second City spoof:

Romney has maintained that the Obama Administration eventually adopted his call for a managed bankruptcy. The Washington Post took closer look at Romney's stance on the auto bailouts. They concluded:

Romney is correct when he says he has been consistent on the question of bailouts for the auto industry, but he pushes the envelope when he suggests the Obama administration, after wasting billions, ultimately reached the same conclusion. By most accounts, Romney’s approach would not have been viable in the depths of the economic crisis.

So what do you think. Will Romney's stance on the auto bailouts help him, or hurt him in Michigan's Republican primary?

Last night during the Super Bowl, Chrysler ran a follow-up to its much buzzed-about commercial from last year’s big game.

The new commercial, dubbed “It’s Halftime in America” ran, appropriately enough, during halftime.

Republican senatorial candidate Pete Hoekstra is defending a controversial television commercial attacking U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow.

He made statements during a call with the media today, you can listen to Hoekstra's statement in the audio file above.

The commercial aired during the Super Bowl and featured an Asian woman speaking in broken English thanking Senator Stabenow for sending U.S. jobs to China.

That ad has been criticized by Democrats, Asian groups and some Republicans as ‘insensitive’ and ‘racist’.

Hoekstra calls the ad aggressive.

“I’m excited,” said Hoekstra. “It has jump started the debate right to where Republicans, independents, fiscal conservatives, business people want this debate to go. It’s about stopping spending in Washington.”

Hoekstra is one of a half dozen candidates running for the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic incumbent Debbie Stabenow in November.

The Associated Press reports a coalition of black ministers in Detroit is calling on U.S. Senate candidate Pete Hoekstra to apologize for the Super Bowl ad:

Rev. Charles Williams II of Detroit's King Solomon Baptist church where Malcolm X once spoke said in a Monday release that the woman's broken English in the ad is no different than "having a black person speaking in slave dialect.

If Pete Hoekstra does not see any wrong in this commercial," he said, "he doesn’t deserve to be in the race."

Last week I had occasion to mention the famous author Upton Sinclair, and his now-forgotten campaign for governor of California in 1934. Afterwards, a friend told me, “I’ll bet that’s the last time you bring that up for about ten years.“

More likely, 20, I thought. Well, guess what. Here we go again. The reason I mentioned Sinclair was that his campaign was one of the first examples of moneyed interests spending lavishly to destroy a candidacy with outrageously false advertising, something we‘ve seen happen many times since.

 A group of Michigan State University professors will get together to watch the Super Bowl on Sunday.   But unlike most people, they won’t be watching the game, they’re more interested in the commercials.

Forty five years ago, the Super Bowl wasn’t even the Super Bowl.

They called it the NFL-AFL Championship game, until one of the founders renamed it after watching his grandson play with a “High Bouncing Ball” – a super ball.

Tickets were only fifteen bucks for that first game, and they barely sold half of those, leaving some 40,000 empty seats in the Los Angeles Coliseum.   

A 30-second ad cost only $42,000, and they weren’t any different than the ads they showed the previous weekend.

The half-time show featured three college marching bands, including one you might have seen from the University of Michigan.

Over the next couple decades, of course, the event became a veritable national holiday.  Tickets now sell for thousands of dollars, and ads for millions.  The game attracts more than 100 million viewers in the U.S. alone.

Here are a few stories that either I heard, my colleagues and friends heard, or pieces that our online friends found interesting on Michigan Radio this week.

(We want to hear about your favorites! Please add them to the comments section below)