In a speech today, John McCain said he would fire Christopher Cox, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Cox, he said, had kept in place a series of "trading rules that let speculators and hedge funds turn our markets into a casino."
A more honest way of putting it would have been: "Cox kept in place all the idiot deregulation laws and policies recommended or written by my chief economic advisor, Phil Gramm."
This is a thirteen minute segment from yesterday's episode of Hardball with Chris Matthews. If you're waiting for members of the press to "grow a pair," you might enjoy seeing one of those all-too-rare occasions when Matthews acts like a newsman. It usually only happens when an interviewee uses a historical reference without knowing what it means and/or evades the question of whether he stands by what he's said or done. The tap dancer in this case is Rep. Eric Cantor, a Republican from Virginia who commits the latter sin. He doesn't want to respond as to whether or not he still supports a man named George W. Bush.
A general rule of thumb in politics: When someone says, "This is no time for finger-pointing," it's because they know and don't like where that finger will point.
According to Nicholas D. Kristof, the C.E.O. of Lehman Brothers (you know, the financial institution that just tanked) earned a nice piece of change. Between 1993 and 2007, it was around half a billion dollars.
This brings us back to that approximate quote I put up from Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony. He said — this is not verbatim but close — "The thing that will eventually doom much of American business is that your executives pay no price for failure. You can become CEO of a corporation, do everything wrong, drive your company into the ground and then retire and buy several mansions with the money they will pay you for doing this."
It's one of those situations that will probably never change. It's like the wartime scams depicted in Catch 22: Everyone knew it was crooked but nobody stopped it because anyone in a position to stop it was making money off it.
From Dennis McKay…
I want to compliment you on your casting ability. I just spent some time Googling and Yahooing and trying to figure out where on the net the notion of Tina Fey as Sarah Palin originated. It seems to have been on your blog, real time watching her being introduced for the first time by John S. McCain.
Thanks but if I was first, that may just have been because I'm a pretty fast typist. It had to have occurred to everyone the first time they laid eyes on the Governor of Alaska. Too bad McLean Stevenson isn't around to play Joe Biden.
Do you remember the Nauga? You should remember the Nauga. Perhaps you even sat on him at one time or another. Here's a remembrance of the Nauga.
Here's another one of those "may be of interest to someone" items. As we all know, a moment of TV history was made on the 1976 Jerry Lewis Telethon when Dean Martin made a surprise appearance, courtesy of Frank Sinatra. You've all seen the video. It's pretty clear that Jerry was surprised…but who else (besides Frank and Dino) knew about this in advance?
On November 30, 2005, Jerry appeared on Larry King Live and said several times that everyone on his staff knew but him. Here's an excerpt from the conversation…
KING: You said everyone knew but you, right?
LEWIS: Everybody in my staff, the crew, the production people, everyone knew but me.
Pretty straightforward, right? But in October of 2000, Lewis was interviewed for the Archive of American Television. The interview is online (here's Part One) and they've posted portions of the transcript. Here's one thing Mr. Lewis had to say during the interrogation…
Frank worked it out. He worked it out so that everyone in that studio, every member of my staff — nobody knew Dean was coming on. The only one that knew it was Ed McMahon. So I could never have heard about it. It was such a total surprise.
Actually, I'm not all that interested in who knew. Years ago, I asked Artie Forrest, who usually produces and directs the telethon, about it. I can't recall if Artie directed that particular one or not but he said, approximately, "Everyone who had to know knew and probably a lot of other people." There had to be some planning because the telethon is on a tight schedule with cutaways and certain hours where it's only seen in portions of the country. Sinatra, assuming he was the main driving force in all of this, would have to make certain that Dean was properly smuggled into the building and that he came out at the moment of maximum tune-in and impact. Most likely, everyone on the staff heard well in advance that a surprise guest was coming out at the specified time and many knew who it was. Jerry may even have known Frank was planning something.
What intrigues me is why Jerry has two different versions. What difference would it make if the crew did or didn't know about it? It doesn't make Jerry look any better or worse either way. No one is saying, "Boy, Jerry, it was dumb of you not to know Dean would be walking out there. Even the stagehands knew." No one is saying that. I guess it makes Sinatra look a bit cleverer if he'd managed to even keep it from the crew but so what? This kind of thing is why it's so hard sometimes to nail down history. People change their stories even after they've told them in front of millions of people.
The blog is hiccupping lately. I post something once and it shows up multiple times. It occasionally takes a while for me to be able to delete the extras. Do not panic. No need to write me. We will all get through this.
All right…now she's gone too far. Sarah Palin has assassinated Bullwinkle.
Assuming no miracle occurs in the next few days, it looks like Washington Mutual's going to need one of those massive, expensive-to-us bailouts. Hey, but at least the fundamentals of our economy are strong.
This goes far beyond Democratic or Republican irresponsibility. The G.O.P. has been the aggressor in pushing this idea that we should let companies pursue every possible profit angle. If they succeed, great…they keep all the money. If they fail, even if the execs make out like bandits, we pick up the tab. That's not the Free Market enterprise some make it out to be, and most Democrats have been complicit at every opportunity. Airline deregulation, which has been a long-term disaster in every possible way, was a Jimmy Carter crusade.
I think we should be a lot madder about this than we'll probably be. When it comes right down to it, most people will probably care more about lipstick on pigs.
Oh, my goodness! I haven't checked lately to see if Abe Vigoda is still alive!
A lot of folks loved the "surprise" ending to the last installment of Newhart, the sitcom Bob Newhart did after he did The Bob Newhart Show. Here's the last nine minutes of that historic episode of Newhart. Unfortunately, this clip does not end, as the original telecast of it did, with the theme music from The Bob Newhart Show.
And here's a brief interview with Bob explaining how they kept it a secret. There are those who dispute that the idea originated with Newhart's wife but I don't want to get into that.
The government is considering bailouts of the NBC prime-time schedule, the San Diego Padres, Madonna's acting career and my stomach after a bad tuna sandwich that I had from a Subway shop yesterday.
So now the U.S. government owns 79.9% of American International Group, one of the largest international insurance and financial services organizations in the world. Hey, what's that term we use when other countries do this kind of thing?
Oh, right. Communism. Well, that always works so well.
But don't despair. At least the C.E.O. of A.I.G. got a $47 million dollar severance package back in July. I mean, you have to reward a guy who does such a fine job steering his company. And I was glad to see that so many investors did well the last few days by selling the stock short. They made about $40 billion which doubled the price we (you and me, folks) paid for this failing insurance firm we now own.
Several years ago, I wrote a joke that Bush was doing such a bad job with the economy, his only hope was to burn the country down and try to collect on the insurance. Now we can't even do that because we're the insurance company…
I have to link to an article called Why Obama's Health Plan Is Better. Quick summary: His is better because he actually has one.
The Broadway show Xanadu will play its final performance October 12, which will mean it will have been there for 49 previews and 528 regular performances…a respectable but not spectacular number. I hope its backers made a profit as I enjoyed it a lot. A tour will follow and if it comes near you, go. Better still, if you're in New York before 10/12, go there.
You can watch their Tony Awards offering over at the Xanadu on Broadway website. But I'll warn you: It starts playing instantly once you go there. It's not the number I'd have chosen but it still demonstrates the charm and good humor of the enterprise.
This is something I've been looking for for some time: A late performance by The Banana Man, an eccentric performer who turned up on every national kid's show when I was a kid. If you're anywhere near my age (physically 56, emotionally 9), you'll remember this guy and his odd act, which never varied much except for time constraints.
There were actually a couple of Banana Men. The act was originated by a man named A. Robins but at some point, it passed on to a gent named Sam Levine, and this must be Levine doing it on the Captain Kangaroo show in the late sixties. I wrote about the act and linked to a clip of Robins in this post. There may even have been a third Banana Man between Robins and Levine…but they all seem to have used the same props.
Here's an anecdote about this performance which may or may not be true. The Banana Man was seen many times on the Good Captain's program. This was not a simple thing because for a long time, Captain Kangaroo was done live, twice in a row. Because of different time zones, Bob Keeshan would do the show for one time zone every morning and then, after saying their goodbyes and rolling credits, they'd have about sixty seconds to reset everything and do the entire show again for another time zone.
This was a special problem for The Banana Man because it took him a long time to prep all his tricks and load his pockets. So he'd finish one performance and then have to race like the dickens to get ready to do it again in one hour. Somehow, he always managed. After a while, the Cap'n went to tape and it got a lot easier for everyone but especially The Banana Man. They stopped having him come in at all. When they wanted him on the show, which was every few months, they'd just reuse the old tape and pay him again. After all, it wasn't like he was going to do anything different if he came in and took the same bananas out of the same pockets and made all the same silly noises.
This was black-and-white footage and when the show went to color, they needed to have him come back and perform it again for color cameras. By this point, Levine was pretty much retired but he hauled the props out, did a little refurbishment on the shabbier ones and trucked them into the studio. The problem was — and this is the part that may be legend, not reality — that all the props and costume pieces were old and moldy by then and Levine was afraid that if he tried cleaning them, they'd fall apart. So the act was taped with the crew literally sickened by the stench…and after he left, they had to spray the studio down.
I don't know if I believe that or not but it's a funny story. Talk about an act stinking up the joint. If it is true, this may be tape of it being true.
Thanks to Earl Kress for telling me about this. And now, I give you in one of his rare color appearances — The Banana Man…