Tell It To Al

Toyota executives seemed unable to explain some of the bizarre accidents involving their cars during Congressional hearings last week.

Accident victims, on the other hand, can’t seem to fully explain them either.

Most puzzling of all, some of them have time for phone cars while their accelerators are stuck. Click here to read column.

Jim Press is a guy who left Toyota Motor Corp. in 2007 to go work for Chrylser.

Need I say more about his ability to envision the future?

Press apparently was trying to help out his old pal at Toyota when he emailed this statement to The Wall Street Journal about Toyota’s sticky gas pedal crisis.

“The root cause of their problems is that the company was hijacked, some years ago, by anti-family, financially oriented pirates,” he wrote. “They didn’t have the character to maintain a customer first focus.”

I read this to mean a bunch of greedy profiteers took over the company and did everything on the cheap, even at the expense of human lives, to make themselves a buck. And how is this different than any other corporation, Mr Press?

When Press couldn’t pull this kind of stunt off at Chrysler, he turned to the government for a bailout.

I’m not sure how much help his statement is going to be for Toyota when it goes to court on wrongful death claims.

Sure, Press was just sticking up for Toyota’s president Akio Toyoda, who was unmercifully grilled before Congress this week. But he probably did more harm than good.

“Akio Toyoda is not only up for the job, but he is the only person who can save Toyota,” Press said.

Maybe Toyoda would be better off getting a recommendation from someone at Zastava Corp., which used to make a car called the Yugo.

Of all the things to steal in New York, who takes off with a shoeshine stand? I found longtime shoeshine Don Ward making due without his stand during my visit to the Big Apple. Click here to read my column on Ward, who despite the loss, is keeping his business going with an old desk chair and a milk crate.

Former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, left, takes questions from GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt. Photo by Joyce Culver, www.JoyceCulver.com

One of the most bizarre sights in New York last week was former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, on a stage at the 92nd St. Y, taking questions from none other than General Electric Co. CEO Jeffrey Immelt. Paulson took a bow for saving capitalism using a lot of measures some of us have come to call socialism.

Click here to read my column on this sold-out event. I also talked about it on Happy Hour with Fox Business News’ resident illuminati, Cody Willard.

I ran into Eliot Spitzer last week at New York University. He struck me as a man doing everything possible to redeem himself, but that’s not going to be easy to do given America’s obsession with infidelity and, of course, the hypocrisy of a lawman frequenting a prostitute.

Click here to read the column I wrote about it.

I hadn’t seen Spitzer since since 2005. He was at the top of his game as the Sheriff of Wall Street, and he was gracious enough to grant me an interview in his office in lower Manhattan, as you can see by the photo above.

At the time, I was a business columnist for The Denver Post, and not part of the New York media, but as New York’s Attorney General, Spitzer was going after our hometown mutual fund company, Janus, for improper trading, and decided to give me about 30 minutes.

I liked Spitzer because he was doing what the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators refused to do: Go after white collar fraudsters. I came back to Denver and wrote a piece lauding him, noting that yes, he may be using legal extortion, as his critics contended, but it was difficult to feel sorry for many of the people he was extorting. Spitzer then went on to become governor of New York and then Client No. 9 of a pricey prostitution service – and the rest is history.

Nobody in the small audience at NYU seemed the least bit interested in this history, though. How many times does a guy have to apologize? Spitzer is a brilliant and gutsy man with deep flaws. Will he ever deserve the redepmtion he seeks?

My favorite toys at this year’s Toy Fair in New York City were stuff animals fashioned after germs, bacteria and diseases.

Click here to read my column about Giantmicrobes and some great toys I found at the fair.

And can you believe I finally got to meet Donny Osmond?

I can only hope I live long enough to think the blow-up walker and oxygen tank from Bluw isn’t funny.

I am always about the small entreprenuer with an innovative idea. Anne Zacharias came to the Toy Fair to launch her idea of turning ceiling fans into mobiles. Click here to check out her product, Fandangling.

I also ran into Brooklyn entrepreneur Terry McTigue. His computer cleaning products company wasn’t doing so well, so he developed a line of products called Shield It All to clean toys and protect them from microbial buildups. Click here for more on Shield It All.

And it’s always a pleasure to run into Denver’s own TV science guy and toy creator extraordinaire, Steve Spangler. You can watch Steve on Denver’s 9News. We ran into eachother at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. My 10-year-old son thought this brush with celebrity was way cooler than Donny Osmond.

Early in my career, an old former mayor of a West Texas town told me the best way to make sure something doesn’t get done is to appoint a commission.

Moralists were always trying to get him to get rid of the hookers on a gritty stretch of town. He didn’t want to do it. So he appointed a commission.

Today, Obama has appointed a commission to deal with burgeoning deficits. Click here to read more about it. Some people instantly found it dubious.

“While the goals of this debt commission are laudable, I am skeptical that the administration and Congress will act on their recommendations in a substantial manner,” said Rick Berman, executive director of Employment Policies Institute in Washington D.C. “This debt commission was created because Congress doesn’t have the political will to confront the entitlement programs driving our national debt.”

The EPI notes a few similar commissions that sound a lot like the plans of an indifferent West Texas mayor:

“1995: President Clinton’s Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform – a 32-member bipartisan panel tasked with creating a plan to control the growth of programs like Medicare and Social Security – couldn’t reach a consensus solution. The commission didn’t offer official recommendations, simply concluding that “the present trend is not sustainable.”

“1997: President Clinton’s 13-member commission on Social Security released three separate proposals on reforming the entitlement program. Congress failed to act on any of the proposals.

“2001: President Bush’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security reached an agreement on broad principles of reform, but failed to reach a consensus on a particular plan. Three alternatives were released, one of which President Bush embraced in 2005. This “privatization” campaign was roundly rejected by Congress and the public.”

So ask yourself this: If our nation’s growing deficit is too big a problem for Congress and the president, how’s a commission going to tackle it?

Clearly, the average IQ level of the Twitter community isn’t low enough for some people.

That’s why Mattel Inc. has come out with Puppy Tweets, a dog collar with built-in Twitter access unveiled in New York this week at the 2010 Toy Fair.

All you need is a Wi-Fi Internet connection and a Twitter account for your dog.

Then, instead of the mundane updates you get from other family members, like “It’s a nice day,” and “I am going to the grocery store,” you’ll be getting important updates like “I rolled in garbage” and “Guess what I am licking right now.”

Puppy Tweets will hit stores this fall. So far I haven’t seen any plans to give Twitter access to birds, which actually invented tweeting.

Zhu Zhu Pets, those cute little electronic hamsters that dominated Christmas toy sales, are getting outfitted with military hardware to defend their turf in the competitive toy industry.

Click here to read my column on these fast-evolving toys. I also talked about it with Connell McShane at Fox Business News.

The toy industry is prospering, despite the recession, driven to a large extent by toys that cost less than $30 and feature really cool technology. That’s what I gathered at the 2010 Toy Fair in New York this week. I talked about it on The Wall Street Journal’s live online show. And wait ’till you see what this thing below is.