Interesting thoughts from Alexandra Petri about Alec Baldwin and the new-media culture -- and not just about AB

Tina Fey and Elaine Stritch were on hand to cheer on 30 Rock cohort Alec Baldwin when he was one of the Tisch School for the Arts's 2009 honorees for achievements and philanthropy in the arts.

by Ken

"Attention, everyone! Alec Baldwin is leaving the public eye!" So Alexandra Petri began her washingtonpost.com blogpost this morning, "The most important paragraph from Alec Baldwin’s farewell to public life."

There is, of course, an enormously rich vein of humor to be mined from AB's harrumphing declarations of intent to turn his back on: (a) New York and (b) the public eye, and everyone and his brother, sister, nieces, and nephews is accepting the invitation to jump sarcastic on poor Alec.

It would be unfair to ask washingtonpost.com's Alexandra, whose brief after all is to find the humorous side of the news to decline such an invitation, and she has some excellent fun with AB's New York Magazine "Vulture" as-told-to blogpost "Good-bye, Public Life." Like her note that AB has "a great deal to say -- about paparazzi, new media, his experience losing a TV show on MSNBC and being called out for homophobia, and whose fault all of it was (spoiler: not his!)."


BEFORE GOING ON, LET ME SAY TWO THINGS

(1) In the matter of X v. Paparazzi, where X = Just About Anybody on the Planet, in the absence of pretty clear evidence to the contrary I rule by default in favor of X. I don't want to see any of their damned pictures, so let them not claim that they do any of what they do on behalf of my right to see.

(2) I'm a huge Alec Baldwin fan. For the record, I wasn't always. In his earlier supposed hot-leading-man career, I didn't buy him. But over time I warmed to him, and in his years as Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock he gave us one of the stupendous characters to be created on a stage or screen of any size. I felt that way as the series unfolded, and felt it more strongly in years of watching syndicated reruns, and now that i've started working my way through my Amazon Gold Box Deal complete 30 Rock DVDs I can say it that much more emphatically. Every scene he played with every actor he worked with on the show is magic, and I couldn't begin to find words to describe all the years of his collaboration with Tiny Fey as Liz Lemon or the incandescence of the episodes he did with Elaine Stritch as the one and only Colleen Donaghy. (I hope it goes without saying that the collaboration included the brilliant 30 Rock writers. Clearly the writers were in turn further inspired by their discovery of what their stars could do.)

But AB's professional accomplishments of course have nothing to do with either his personal qualities or the rightness or wrongness of his pronouncements. So let's get back to that.


ALEXANDRA IS ACTUALLY RATHER GENTLE
IN CHIDING ALEC'S "NEVER AGAIN" STANCE

"I'm aware that it's ironic that I'm making this case in the media, but this is the last time I'm going to talk about my personal life in an American publication ever again.'

-- Alec Baldwin, in the NYM "Vulture" blog interview

To which Alexandra says:

Yes. Nothing says, 'Farewell, news media! I hate and distrust you with a blinding passion! I am a recluse now!' like 'Here I am on your newsstands, large as life!' "Goodbye,' in print, is so seldom "goodbye.' I say this as someone who has written possibly a dozen pieces announcing that I Will Never Write About Sarah Palin Again (And Next Time There Will Be No Next Time). This only goes one way.

MORE IMPORTANTLY, ALEXANDRA CREDITS
ALEC WITH MAKING "ONE INTERESTING POINT"

Alexandra directs us to this paragraph from the interview:

In the New Media culture, anything good you do is tossed in a pit, and you are measured by who you are on your worst day. What's the Boy Scout code? Trustworthy. Loyal. Helpful. Friendly. Courteous. Kind. Obedient. Cheerful. Thrifty. Brave. Clean. Reverent. I might be all of those things, at certain moments. But people suspect that whatever good you do, you are faking. You're that guy. You're that guy that says this.

She allows that she's "not sure Baldwin's own case is the best illustration of this principle (see Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic for an eloquent explanation of why)," but allows as well that "it still has a ring of truth to it."

Boy Scout values aside, is this what we're dealing with now? What are we judged by?

F. Scott Fitzgerald called personality 'a series of successful gestures.' And with new media, every single gesture has to be successful. One false move, one ill-thought remark, one Weiner picture, and -- there you go. It's always the worst story that floats to the top of your Google results. Even if you're a public figure like Baldwin, with years of goodwill at your back.

Alexandra goes on to make the point more forcefull with reference to people other than AB, on whom this fact of new-media life "comes to bear most painfully," since AB "was famous already" and "will be fine."

But many people want to be famous. Few people actually are, at least not the level of famous that most of us would consider to be worth the trouble. Famous is always 1,000 more twitter followers than you've got, just as drunk is one more drink than you've had. Still, everyone's living in public, never far from a camera or a smartphone. And all our unsuccessful gestures get caught -- in print, on tape, where they can stick.

The low point always pops back up. And there's countless examples of people saying one lousy thing -- be it racist, sexist, homophobic, too-soon-after-a-tragedy, or just downright ugly in another way -- and being shamed to the point where that will be the only thing that ever appears when you Google them, and some will even lose their jobs. Maybe some of these people are awful all the time. But you don't need a pattern. One -- as long as it sticks in the craw -- is all you need. And it's not just ugly remarks that can be your lowest point. Look at what happens with nude pictures or whenever it surfaces that a teacher had a porn career. No matter how hard you dig yourself out, you're that guy.

And not all of us can stuff a magazine article at the top of our search results.

Nice, Alexandra.

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The "30 Rock" finale: The New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum says she'll miss the show ("quotable to a nearly psychotic degree") "like a stalker misses her stalkee"

by Ken

By the time this post posts, new episodes of 30 Rock will be a thing of the past, at least on the East Coast -- I guess in the Mountain and Pacific time zones the one-hour finale will still be upcoming. I've got the finale happening in real time as I write, though I can't say I'm really watching it, since I'm, you know, writing this post. (I'm trusting the DVR to do its thing, though it has been increasingly independent-minded over the last year or two. Well, there's always "On Demand.")

As it happens, The New Yorker's TV critic, Emily Nussbaum, is watching now too, as she explained today in a newyorker.com blogpost, "'30 Rock': I Love This Dirty Sitcom":

Tina Fey's sitcom ’30 Rock" ends tonight, dammit. I haven't yet seen the finale (I'll be watching it along with you screener-deficient folks), but I'm genuinely sad to lose my Thursdays with this awesomely dense comedy, which amounted to a grenade made of zingers. Sweet yet sour, at once funny ha-ha and funny-peculiar -- and also funny-relevant, if that were a thing -- "30 Rock" is quotable to a nearly psychotic degree. I'll miss it like a stalker misses her stalkee.

Not that Emily knows about it, but over the time that I've been getting a fix on her patrolling of The New Yorker's TV beat, I've settled on an uneasy truce. We actually like a lot of the same things, and dislike some of the same things, but we don't usually follow the same path toward those likes and dislikes. So while I haven't found her very useful to me as a sentinel, I'm sure there are people for whom she's just the ticket, and so not to be made light of as I had frequent occasion to do with her risible predecessor, Nancy Franklin.

However, on 30 Rock Emily and I are seeing pretty much eye to eye -- at least on this sad Final Night. (I do seem to recall at least one earlier piece of Emily's which seemed to me a profound misunderstanding of the shape of the journey TGS head writer Liz Lemon has traversed over these seven happy seasons.) The show seemed to me to start out fine and then over the first season or two or three to really gather both momentum and focus.

Emily has some plausible things to say touching on this, and we'll get to that. But first, she has come up with an ingenious angle from which to view tonight's series finale:

I could take pretty much any angle in looking back on "30 Rock," but I'll take the one that I am currently experiencing: looking straight at the Empire State Building. When the sitcom débuted, it was based on Fey's experience as the first female head writer for "Saturday Night Live," but it quickly became something bigger, stranger, and bolder: a surreal machine capable of commenting on anything, from feminism and prismatic perspectives on race to national politics, reality television, and corporate culture -- always from a New Yorker's P.O.V.

Not that the characters were native New Yorkers, mind you, other than Tracy (who was born in Yankee Stadium and attended middle school at an Exxon station in the Bronx). The rest had moved to Manhattan from somewhere else: Pennsylvania, Florida, Massachusetts, Georgia. They were ambitious nuts who lived for their jobs, injecting the office comedy mold with both workaholism and a recurrent anxiety about what that might mean. ("I wish I'd worked more," confessed Jack on his near-deathbed. Later, during a time-travel sequence, Future Jack told Jack he needed Liz to distract him from his own ambition.) While many shows have been set in a bland facsimile of "New York," "30 Rock" was obsessive about the actual city, referring to events large and small, including several elections, the financial crisis, and that weird maple-syrup smell that floated over Manhattan. It wasn't sentimental, either, or unafraid to make a sick joke, like the moment a subway speaker announced, "This train is going express for nooo reason. Next stop: One Millionth Street and Central Park Jogger Memorial Highway."

I haven't thought about it much over these seven years, because as Emily suggests the show has been so un-self-consciously dead on about its hometown. Now that I do think about it, she's quite right about its immersion in a New York that is both real and weirdly, wonderfully idiosyncratic -- and with an outpouring of prompting she solicited via Twitter, she fills three generous paragraphs with examples. Which brings her to this point:

the story of Liz Lemon is one version of the New York dream -- she may be an artistic sellout, but she's wildly successful. At first, Lemon was a frazzled, underpaid "creative" working on a mediocre skit show; she became a comparatively chill, well-paid professional, still running a mediocre skit show, but capable of getting Jack Donaghy to negotiate her salary against himself, on her behalf. (Many mid-series episodes were all about Lemon's anxieties about becoming a rich Manhattanite: at one point, she even considers becoming a wealthy Upper East Side woman of leisure, only to discover her fancy new friends are in a fight club.) In Season 2, she interviews with a co-op board, which turns into a drunk-dialing debacle. ("You know what? I've moved on. I bought a whole bunch of apartments. I bought a black apartment.") But eventually, she does buy an apartment, then the apartment upstairs, building a duplex so enviable that her new female page fantasizes about wearing Liz's lips as a mask.

There were also regular indications of a New York outside this glamorous Upper West Side existence, especially Tracy's repressed memories of his Bronx past: "All my life I've tried to forget the things I've seen. A crackhead breast-feeding a rat, a homeless man cooking a Hot Pocket on a third rail of the G train!" (These particular traumas come flooding back up during the E.G.O.T. plot arc, when Tracy gains prestige for his appearance in the movie "Hard To Watch: Based on the Novel Stone-Cold Bummer, by Manipulate.")

There will be other New York shows set in New York -- you may have heard about a few that are set in Brooklyn. But there won't be another "30 Rock." Instead, we'll have to carry in our hearts Liz's immortal words, words that will echo in reruns: "It doesn't matter how long you've lived in New York. It's still fun to pretend all the buildings are giant severed robot penises."

I'm not going to try to top those severed robot penises, so let me just say for now that this wild ride of a final season, which has been preparing us for an end, has been wilder and more compelling than even the splendid seasons that preceded it. Never mind that viewership has been shrinking rather than growing. In the end this has been one of the great runs in TV history.

If you'll excuse me, I'm going to watch the rest of the episode now. Then one of these days, when I feel up to it, I'll watch the whole thing. It may not be for a while, though. For now, let me just thank everyone involved in the production of the show -- including NBC itself (and of course most-of-the-way parent company GE), which took quite a beating over these seven years.

#

Is everyone ready for the great Leap Day festivities?

"Poke your eyes, pull your hair, you forgot what clothes to wear." Liz gets the situationally mandated eye poke for failing to wear the Leap Day-appropriate yellow-and-blue from -- of all, er, people -- Lutz. Jack Donaghy will register astonishment that "the woman who watches all six pawn-shop reality shows" has never seen the classic film Leap Dave Williams, making her apparently the only American suffering such cultural deprivation. Watch the instant-classic "Leap Day" episode of 30 Rock here.

"Leap Day's not a thing."

-- Liz Lemon, in the "Leap Day" episode of 30 Rock

"We should live every day as if it's Leap Day, and every Leap Day as if it's your last."

-- at episode's end, the real Leap Day William?

by Ken

Politics is one of the uncommon fields in which it's not necessarily a godsend for an incoming officeholder to replace what we would call "an easy act to follow." Look how Barack Obama botched the sweet deal of taking the reins from Chimpy the Ex-Prez. Now there would have been a heap of perilous passage to maneuver based just on the interlocking network of cosmically fine messes the Bush regime psychos and thugs go us into, but it didn't help that the new president often seemed to forget that he wasn't the old one.

In other fields the transition should be easy as pie. Replacing Nancy Franklin as TV critic of The New Yorker, for example. This would have been a cushy gig for anyone from Rose the Talking Parrot to that plucky squirrel you watched climb a tree last weekend in the park. I'm still trying to get a fix on Emily, whose writing at New York magazine I'm unfamiliar with, but there's no question that it's an upgrade. How could it not be? (For the record, I see that New Yorker Editor David Remnick told WWD Media in September, "Nancy decided she was tired of writing for a while, and tired of writing about TV I expect, after she catches her breath, she'll begin writing for us again and I dearly hope so." I'll take the high road and refrain from obvious sarcastic comment, but don't let me stop you.)

I bring this up because just as I've been thinking about the amazing stride 30 Rock has maintained in its belatedly begun new season, I stumbled across a February 23 newyorker.com blogpost of Emily's {"In Defense of Liz Lemon"), in which I learned:

Judging from my Twitter feed, there's been a backlash to "30 Rock" this season, particularly the character of Liz Lemon, played by Tina Fey. Here's one example of these anti-Lemon blog posts. [You'll find this link and the following ones onsite. I didn't read them, but you may want to. -- Ed.] Here's another. Here's another. The argument in all these pieces (many by writers I respect) is pretty much the same: "30 Rock" used to be funny, but now it's sour and negative. Liz Lemon was once our heroine -- a sassy, confident, if somewhat neurotic single career lady. Now she's become infantilized and dumb. She behaves as if Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) is her daddy. She doesn't trust her own judgment, she's bad at her job, and there's something awfully misogynist about all this! Liz Lemon is pathetic.

At the outset I had to override my instinctive prejudice against anyone who judges anything by anybody's Twitter feed. Emily went on to write:

Well, I can't get on board the hate train, especially after last week's tour-de-force episode, in which Liz morphed from a crazy old subway lady (every New Yorker's dream: she gets her way at every turn) into Heath Ledger's Joker. Someone needs to speak up for the Lemon, and for the Fey. Because from the beginning Liz Lemon was pathetic. That was what was enthralling, and even revolutionary, about the character. Unlike some other adorkable or slutty-fabulous characters I could name, Liz only superficially resembled the protagonist of a romantic comedy, ready to remove her glasses and be loved. Beneath that, she was something way more interesting: a strange, specific, workaholic, NPR-worshipping, white-guilt-infected, sardonic, curmudgeonly, hyper-nerdy New Yorker. In the first episode, Jack nails her on sight as "a New York third-wave feminist, college-educated, single-and-pretending-to-be-happy-about-it, over-scheduled, undersexed, you buy any magazine that says ‘healthy body image' on the cover and every two years you take up knitting for … a week." Even Liz had to admit he scored a point.

That was why the show worked: it rarely made Liz an empowering role model, although many women certainly identified with her. The show let her be the George Costanza, not the Mary Richards. And, refreshingly, this appeal had little to do with sex or relationships: a lot of it was about her job. Liz was professionally successful, but she was a sellout. . . .

I mostly kind of skimmed the piece, and there's a lot about women's roles on TV that I wouldn't be allowed to comment on in any event, since you can't unless you're a woman, but since I do frequently watch 30 Rock reruns from earlier seasons, I don't think there's any question that Emily has a better grasp of how the character of Liz Lemon began and subsequently evolved than the Twitterers she's taking issue with. For example, later she writes, "That has always been one of the most radical things about “30 Rock,” the way it has continually punctured Liz’s image of herself as a spunky brunette underdog." And later:

And the thing is, Liz’s confrontations with her worst qualities have actually strengthened her. That’s what so odd about the backlash. This season, Liz is happier than ever—and for once, she’s rejecting Jack’s influence, finding her own bliss, embracing her oddball nature, going on the Oprah-style vacations she feels like taking.

I'm not sure that Tina Fey would express quite such a pluckily cheery view of where and how Liz has wound up. She seems to be enjoying piling on poor Liz, perhaps relishing the ways in which her fictional alter-ego has stumbled down her Road Not Taken. But the Nussbaum piece is still worth a skim.

AS FOR THE SUBLIME "LEAP DAY" EPISODE . . .

Kenneth the decommissioned NBC page does his much-admired rendering of Leap Day William. We'll find out that apparently he's not, as we (like Jack) would assume, wearing a bald cap.

There isn't much I can say that wouldn't detract from rather than add to the pleasures. It's true that Leap Day has been featured all over the TV dial -- or rather the cable and satellite program guide, but nobody nailed it the way the 30 Rock people did, making Liz Lemon the only noncelebrant in a world gone quadrennially Leap Day-mad. These days the show's writing is so thorough, intricate, and dazzling, and the characters are so ingrained in the writers' consciousness, that there really doesn't appear to be any separation between writing and acting.

Sure, the celebrity cameo roles can become gimmicky, and this episode was studded with them, but they're usually well done, and I thought one of them from this episode, the very last, with John Cullum at his most ineffably charming, dressed as -- what else? -- Leap Day William, who then reappears after the final commercial break as -- dare we imagine? -- the real Leap Day William:

"Well, I guess we all learned something tonight, about love, friendship, about taking chances, about the true meaning of Leap Day. But these lessons aren't just good for every four years. No-o-o! They're good every year, because we should live every day as if it's Leap Day, and every Leap Day as if it's your last. Oh, and if you should ever see an old man in a blue suit bustin' out of the middle of the ocean, take the time to say, "Howdy." It might just be [takes off his hat] worth your while [opens his mouth and reveals a mouthful of short but fanglike teeth.]"

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The "30 Rock" gang shows us the true spirit of Christmas -- from which "as hard as you try, no one can escape"

"Christmas Attack Zone": In this year's Christmas episode of 30 Rock, Jack (Alec Baldwin) explains, "We Donaghys believe that when there is something at all delicate to talk about, it is best to suppress it-- until it erupts into a fistfight in a church barbecue," and his seven-months-pregnant lady friend Avery (Elizabeth Banks) chimes in, "The symbol on the Jessup family crest is a knight refusing to talk about his feelings."

"You know what I learned tonight? As hard as you try, no one can escape the horror of Christmas."

-- Liz Lemon (Tina Fey), in this year's
Christmas episode of 30 Rock

by Ken

Liz, who'd been ducking "the annual Lemon family blow-up" of Christmas back in White Haven, planning to travel on Christmas Day and swoop in in time for presents, but instead has found herself immersed in the Christmas dramas of all her NBC-TGS nearest-and-dearest, went on to say:

As hard as you try, no one can escape the horror of Christmas. So it might as well be with your onw family. I'm going to go get a bus to White Haven now, and I should be home just in time for Aunt Linda to try to prove that she's sober by holding someone's baby while cooking.

I know Christmas is over, but I'm so imbued with the holiday spirit that I just rewatched the 30 Rock Christmas episode, which is just chockful of it, what with Liz accepting an invitation to the Donaghy family Christmas, figuring it's safe thanks to the dependable old-line right-wing tradition of keeping feelings safely bottled up, only to find herself in the midst of a family free-for-all -- starring, of course, the reigning queen of family dysfunction, Colleen Donaghy, direct from the Death Shore Retirement Community -- another memorable appearance by the great Elaine Stritch, but also featuring the return of Jack's "hippie pacifist" real father, Milton Greene (Alan Alda), who reported excitedly from Vermont that they've just gotten caller ID there!

It's also an episode in which Tracy, still trying to establish his new image as a "serious actor" in hopes of winning a Golden Globe, appears at a Christmas Eve charity function, as Dotcom (Kevin Brown) points out many stars do, including Russell Crowe, who's holding one "for victims of his own mood swings." Resuming tomorrow there'll be plenty of time for the Social Security mess, the Obama triangulation mess, the Afghanistan mess, the Irish mess, and all those other messes and messes-to-come. For now let's just revel a bit more in the spirit of the holidays. (Of course Jack Donaghy would insist on "Christmas" rather than "holidays." He's the pathologically Jesus-defiling Bill O'Reilly's and Bill Donohue's kind of guy.)


SOME ELAINE STRITCH MUSICAL MEMORIES

It seems to me we're going to need a DVD compilation of Elaine Stritch's memorable 30 Rock episodes. Meanwhile, I yanked these records off the shelf, memorializing two memorable Stritch Broadway roles: the first a smallish one in a landmark musical with a large ensemble cast in with which she darned near stole the show, the second a starring role in a not very successful and now (despite the distinction of its principal creator, Noël Coward) mostly forgotten show.

Regular readers won't be surprised that I'm presenting these numbers in exactly backwards order (both the two shows, and the numbers within the Sail Away group). Note that tonight's late-night post (midnight ET, 9pm PT) features a much more recent Elaine Stritch video performance of "Here's to the Ladies Who Lunch."

From Company (1970), music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

"Here's to the Ladies Who Lunch"
Elaine Stritch, from the Original Broadway Cast Album, Harold Hastings, cond. Capitol, recorded 1970

From Sail Away (1961), music and lyrics by Noël Coward

(Sorry about the LP surface noise early on in the "Why Do the Wrong People Travel?" track. I came close to paying the 99 cents to download this great song, but the noise cleared up, and as I like to say, 99 cents saved here and there adds up to 99 cents saved here and there.)

"Why Do the Wrong People Travel (When the Right People Stay Back Home)?" (Mimi Paragon)

"You're a Long, Long Way from America" (Act I finale, Mimi and company)

"Come to Me" (opening number, the Stewards and Mimi)

Elaine Stritch and company, from the Original Broadway Cast Album, Peter Matz, arr. and cond. Capitol, recorded October 1961

#

"Surplus canvas waterboarding hoods" made into messenger bags? It appears "30 Rock"'s ratings are good enough to get away with such stuff!

In the 30 Rock episode "Brooklyn Without Limits," clueless "maverick" congressional candidate Steve Austin (John Slattery) encourages blind voters to believe that he's the wrestler of the same name and "senile" voters to believe that he's the Six Million Dollar Man.

"As God is my witness, we will build casinos on the moon!"

-- Rhode Island "small government" crackpot congressional
challenger Steve Austin, pressing his signature issue

"In the mid-'90s [Halliburton] found themselves with a surplus of canvas waterboarding hoods, so they had sweatshops make them into messenger bags to sell to outer-borough idiots."

-- Jack Donaghy, bursting Liz Lemon's mini-green
eco-bubble in last Thursday's 30 Rock

by Ken

An amazing episode this week (written by Ron Weiner), as --

TRACY TURNS TO JENNA FOR ADVICE
ON WINNING A GOLDEN GLOBE AWARD

And Jenna (Jane Krakowski) advises Tracy (Tracy Morgan), who has been nominated for his undoubtedly aptly named movie Hard to Watch, on how to make an impression on the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, including -- "when the time's right" -- attempting to bribe them.

TRACY: I'm not an expert at morality, but isn't that wrong?
JENNA: You're asking me?
[TRACY and then JENNA burst into laughter.]

(It turns out that Jenna is actually trying to sabotage Tracy, as she readily admits to Liz when Liz points out that Jenna is still jealous of Baby Jessica for drawing all that attention away from her. It seems Jenna knows from personal experience that it's not possible to buy a Golden Globe award. She shows Liz her Golden Globes banned-for-life card to prove that she's been banned for life for attempting it.)

JACK LEARNS CONGRESSIONAL NEMESIS REGINA
BOOKMAN FACES A STIFF REELECTION CHALLENGE

Grandstanding Rhode Island Congresswoman Bookman (Queen Latifah), you'll recall, has been threatening to block the acquisition of NBC by cable giant Kabletown. On learning that she faces a serious reelection challenge, Jack (Alec Baldwin) orders his toadyingly loyal assistant, the hopelessly love-struck Jonathan (Maulik Pancholy), to bring challenger Steve Austin to him for vetting. It turns out that Steve, played by John Slattery (Mad Men's Roger Sterling), is building his electoral strategy around encouraging voters to think he's either wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin or the Six Million Dollar Man.

Still, Jack is encouraged to learn that Steve believes in small government.

STEVE: Or no government at all. If it works in Antartica [sic], why can't it work here? If we have to have government, make it as small as possible. Dwarves. Tiny buildings. Pizza bagels for lunch --
JACK: Maybe we should stop at "small government." Let's cut to the chase. I need you to assure me you would never allow the government to interfere with the sale of one company to another.
STEVE: Course not! The government shouldn't interfere in anything. What happens inside a man's own rain poncho at a minor-league baseball game is his own business.
JACK: Well, Steve, we should stop talking.

Jack supervises the filming of a Steve Austin TV spot. Steve delivers the text mechanically, with occasional semaphore-style arm gestures.

STEVE: I am a constitutional originalist, and I believe that our founding fathers had it right. We need to get back to their America: [ticking the points off with his fingers] no paved roads, rum used as an anesthetic, legalized slavery.
JACK: All right --

LIZ'S LIFE IS TRANSFORMED BY THE DISCOVERY
OF MIRACLE-FIT JEANS FROM A STORE IN BROOKLYN

One and all are stunned by the transformation in our Liz (Tina Fey). Is it any wonder that after seeing her miraculously slimmed lower torso in the mirror Liz bought an additional ten pairs on the spot, and instructed the store clerk to burn her old jeans?

What's more, Liz is under the (mis)impression that the maker is a small eco-friendly company that's engaged in saving the world. Jack bursts her mini-green eco-bubble.

LIZ: Hey, don't talk down Brooklyn Without Limits. Stores like this are saving the world.
JACK: Really? You're going to lecture me about big business again. Do you know who owns Brooklyn Without Limits?
LIZ: Brooklyn Zack! He throws pool parties in Dumpsters.
JACK: Halliburton. In the mid-'90s they found themselves with a surplus of canvas waterboarding hoods, so they had sweatshops make them into messenger bags to sell to outer-borough idiots.
LIZ: You don't know what you're talking about. [She swivels so the BWL jeans label, which says "HAND-MADE IN USA," is facing Jack.] "Hand-made in USA."
JACK: Your magic jeans are from BWL? Oh, Lemon, it's not "hand-made in USA." It's pronounced "Hond-made in Oosa." The Hand people are a Vietnamese slave tribe, and Usa is their island prison. They made your jeans. You know how they get the stitching so small? [Whispers through his hand.] Orphans.
LIZ: No! Brooklyn Zack is real. He just got back from Peru, where he met a family that's been making hats for 2000 years.
JACK: We all make our compromises. At least I'm doing it for our company, for jobs. You're doing it [turning and shouting so everyone around can hear] for your ass.
LIZ [as JACK walks away]: I don't believe you. The liberal media would have told me about this.
JACK [turning back to face her]: There's no such thing. The New York Times is owned by NYT Incorporated, which is owned by Altheon Ballistic Dynamics, which is owned by the Murdoch family, which is owned [great dramatic two-hand gesture of surprise] by Halliburton.
[With JACK gone, LIZ is left with a wounded look on her face.]

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Mother's Day on "30 Rock": Oh, the horror!

by Ken

Imagine the surprise of NBC chief cheese Jeff Zuckerman to discover that there are actual disadvantages to not having a programming department. Sure, you save a lot of money in salaries that way, and considering the quality of the stuff the last programmers standing at the network were putting on, the falloff in quality wasn't as severe as it might have been with the new scheme of having Jay Leno standing by around the clock with a card table and folding chairs, ready to go before the cameras to run off his mouth anytime the network had anything else to send out over the airwaves.

It's nice to have Friday Night Lights back finally, even if this season has already been shown . . . what was it, on some satellite feed? I tried to watch a couple of episodes online, until I found out that eventually they would be run on Last-Chance Television, NBC. And now that I've gotten to watch the first episode again on a proper TV, I see that it looks surprisingly normal, considering this drastic budget cuts. (As I understand it, instead of scenery the actors are acting in front of old sheets hung on the wall -- cheaper than using a green screen -- which was later filled in with an Etch-a-Sketch.)

She's back! Colleen Donaghy descended on Jack, not because of Mother's Day, but because word had reached her in Florida of the chaos in Jack's love life.

But to get back to this crazy scheme I'm proposing that NBC employ actually "programming people," let's say there were such, keeping body and soul together on modest six-figure salaries, and not just people who thinking up "ideas" for new shows (not to be confused with that preposterous time-filler in the post-30 Rock time slot, where each week several pleasingly cheeky folks like Ricky Gervais watch video of scary people in pathetic relationship crisis , then take cast votes in favor of one aggrieved party or the other -- is it still on the air? what the hell was that anyways?), but maintaining periodic contact with the people putting out their existing "programming."

Let's say that such "programming people" got wind that the 30 Rock people, who continue to do brilliant work seemingly heedless of the disaster area their network has become, rather as if George Bernard Shaw had written a couple of vimtage plays while sailing on the Titanic, were planning, of all things, a Mother's Day show! Naturally this provided a pretext for a return visit from the sublime Elaine Stritch as Jack Donaghy's (Alec Baldwin's) truly infernal mother.

JACK: Happy Mother's Day, Colleen!
COLLEEN: I'm not here about Mother's Day, John Francis. You know who's in my water aerobics class down in Florida?
JACK: Yes, Mother, I've memorized the names of everyone who's in your water aerobics class.
COLLEEN: Patricia Goodban (name?), whose sister runs the Friday night bingo game at Our Lady of Reluctant Integration in Waltham. Turns out last week that the game was won by Anne O'Connor, who mentioned that her niece, Nancy Donovan, got divorced and was runnin' around with a hotshot in New York City who pours scotch like a woman.
JACK: If I don't always share my personal life with you, Colleen, it's because you've never approved of any woman I've shown an interest in.
COLLEEN: Now that's not true.
JACK: I'm not having this conversation with you right now. I have work to do, and I'll be joining you for lunch. [KENNETH the page enters.] In the meantime, Kenneth here will be entertaining you. [JACK leaves.]
COLLEEN [to KENNETH]: Okay, entertain me!

This year the 30 Rock gnomes hatched a mad for Mother's Day. The entire TGS staff is ordered to bring their moms to town to appear on the show, in a desperate effort to counteract the disastrous P.R. of the network's airing of its supremely offensive show Bitch Hunt (with Will Ferrell as the marauding bitch hunter).

So it's not just Colleen Donaghy who's back, but Jenna's (Jane Krakowski's) appalling mother Verna (Jan Hooks, given license to be as revolting as she can be). Meanwhile Liz (Tina Fey) catches her mother (Anita Gillette) leaving money for the show's food spread.

LIZ: Mom, what are you doing? You don't have to pay for the food.
MARGARET: Honey, nothing is free. You remember that when a man buys you an expensive meal.
LIZ: Yeah, that's happening a lot.

Gross Frank's mom (Patti LuPone) hands Liz a photo of "Little Frankie in the bathub getting ready for the senior prom." Lutz's mom looks terrifyingly like "her" son -- a barely human appearance for someone of either gender. Whereas beautiful new kid Danny, the all-Canadian-boy-next-door, and his Japanese mother are horrified when it's suggested that he's adopted.

Since it has proved impossible to locate Tracy's mother based on the limited information he's able to supply (he remembers seeing her once in 1984), director Pete comes up with the idea of hiring a suitable actress to play the role, and Tracy's okay with the idea ("like when they was looking for John McCain's running mate"), except that he insists on names for his fake-mother candidates -- someone like Phylicia Rashad, for example.

All of this without even mentioning that Liz's mother had the one true love Liz dreams about meeting, only it wasn't Liz's father, it was Buzz Aldrin. And all of this in just a half hour, with all sorts of plot mayhem barely touched on here.

What I'm saying is that if NBC had "programmers," they would have pounced on the idea of an hourlong Mother's Day episode in a special Sunday time slot. Or maybe a two-part episode begun Thursday night and completed tonight. Instead it seems just a matter of time before 30 Rock is leading into Bitch Hunt in the late-Thursday time slot.

#

The view from Texas: Thomas Jefferson? That commie's as phony as a two-dollar bill

It's the only clip NBC is offering from last night's 30 Rock, but at least it's not a bad one. With Tracy (Tracy Jordan) in turmoil because of a tell-all book's shocking revelation that he's never been unfaithful to his wife, Jenna (Jane Krakowski) offers predictably dreadful advice, which he immediately tries to act on, to the dismay of Liz Lemon (Tina Fey).

"All these books, sir! I feel like I'm back in school, learnin' about the dangers of book learnin'!"

-- Kenneth the page (Jack McBrayer), excited to find

books on Jack Donaghy's desk, on Thursday's 30 Rock

by Ken

Howie and I have been kicking this around for days, what to say about the latest disgrace to storm out of Texas, where the right-wing doodyheads are determined to establish their state as the Land That Brains Forgot. A dentist who is by the most generous standard out of his friggin' mind has led a cadre of savage ignorance-worshipers similarly implanted in the Texas State Academy of Stooges (and I don't mean funny stooges -- we're talking, say, Curly Joes) that is the state Board of Education to dictate to textbook publishers how they must henceforth rewrite history if they wish to sell their books for teaching in the Lame Brain State.

Yesterday's editon of The Progress Report from ThinkProgress had an outstanding report on what happened, how it happened, why it happened, and what it means. If I didn't have a couple of thoughts of my own, I would just send you there.

I would certainly recommend that our friend Elizabeth, who commented last night on Howie's post paying tribute to Speaker Pelosi's outburst of persuasiveness on the health care bill, if she's with us again, to repair immediately to The Progress Report. Elizabeth is a "moderate" and likes to hear opinions on both sides, and is upset with us for being rude to the crooks and liars (to coin a phrase) and numbskulls and fugitive mental patients on the Right.

Now, since Elizabeth singled out Howie's calling one of those assholes a "dope," I'm guessing she would be a lot more upset by this. We're supposed to be polite, just like we try to teach our children to be. "If you don't agree with someone or something - fine! Disagree!" she says. "But do it without joining in on low-class mud-slinging; that's how animals resolve things."

No, Elizabeth, I think you mean physical violence is the way animals resolve things. You rarely hear, say, lions and wildebeests insulting each other. Physical violence, by the way, is the way the dumb animals and their crook manipulators already began moving during the last presidential campaign, inspired by the flying animal-slaughtering voodoo priestess of ignorance Sarah Palin. And the Teabaggers seem only too happy to show off their willingness, if not actual eagerness, to smash some heads. The saintly Teabaggers have in their midst no shortage of folks who show the same disposition to shoot them some sumbitches that ticks them off.

The fact is, we no longer have a situation where there are tidily diverging sets of opinion charmingly arrayed on either side of some imaginary middle. We have a cancerous Extreme Far Right that has long since jumped the bounds of sanity and reason and planted its political standard way out in the galaxy far, far beyond Pluto. The "middle" between there and reality is still somewhere way out beyond Saturn, and much as I might wish to be able to reach reasonable moderates like you, Elizabeth, I don't see how polite discourse is possible.

And, as I noted, it was interesting that she should bring up what we teach our children, because right now we've got this situation in Texas -- and we have to assume that the potential for similar ugliness is festering in other states with heavy concentrations of primitives in the populace -- where the state board of education has been hijacked by thugs who want not just their children, but all of Texas's children, and by extension most of America's children (because publishers simply can't afford to publish textbooks tailored to the bigotries and crazinesses of loons in individual states) to be morons.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. For the basic facts of the case, here is The Progress Report's lead paragraph from yesterday. Note that onsite the text is riddled with links, which you can check out there.

If America's lucky, what happens in Texas will stay in Texas -- at least when it comes to education standards. It would even better if the right wing's destructive manipulation of the state's schools wasn't happening at all. Last week, the Republican-dominated Texas Board of Education approved a social studies curriculum that extols the importance of the National Rifle Association, Phyllis Schlafly, Confederate leader Jefferson Davis, and Joseph McCarthy. Right-wing board members removed Thomas Jefferson from "a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century"; many of them bear ill will toward the third U.S. president because he coined the term "separation between church and state." They also decided to require U.S. history classes to teach the difference between legal and illegal immigration. Last week's vote was the culmination of a decades-long plot by social conservatives to gain control over the influential Board of Education and, ultimately, the power to impose a far-right ideology on the nearly 5 million schoolchildren in Texas. Unfortunately, what's happening in the Lone Star State may spread nationally: Texas is one of the largest textbook buyers in the nation, and publishers, eager to get the business, often tailor their books to the state's standards.

As TPR says, "The Texas Board of Education is trying to create an alternate universe where McCarthy's dangerously slanderous allegations were true, Ronald Reagan was the greatest president in U.S. history, the separation of church and state doesn't exist, global warming is a myth, and people of color barely exist."

Now some of the individual points aren't entirely beyond the pale. For example, the dentist wants Texas young uns to read Jefferson Davis's inaugural address alongside Abraham Lincoln's, and there's no reason why kids shouldn't learn more about the government of the Confederacy. I don't remember learning much about it.

But that doesn't mean that it's in any way, shape, or form okay to treat Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln as equivalent, any more than the Confederate States of America and the United States of America can be treated to as any way equivalent. They aren't, and they aren't, and the reasons have nothing whatsoever to do with "liberal bias"; they have to do with some of the fundamental realities of our country and our history. The people who are peddling their biases are the Texas loons.

Joe McCarthy was right? Ronald Reagan was our greatest president? These are opinions, and pretty demented ones (the historical evidence weighs overwhelmingly against both). Parents are entitled to hold even these crap-brained delusions as opinions, and I'm afraid they're even entitled to inculcate them in their unfortunate offspring. The only corrective for this is the possibility that the offspring will one day encounter reality and come to hate their parents for being crack-brained, hate-mongering idiots.

One thing parents are emphatically not entitled to do is to try to impose their delusions and bigotries on other people, including (perhaps I should say especially) other people's children. In just the way that Americans are free to practice just about any kind of delusional set of beliefs and worship practices as a religion, but are not free to attempt in any fashion to impose those beliefs on anyone else.

By strange coincidence, it is by and large the same people doing both, trying to impose both their political and historical delusions and their religious ones on others. (Does the name Bart "The Stupe" Stupak ring a bell?) The assault on history is frequently linked to a Crap Christianity that seems to take special pleasure in trashing the teachings of Jesus and dumping doody over everything he stood for, even if they have to rewrite the Bible to do so (again, check out Noah's "Why Do You Hate the Bible? Award" from his holiday Scorn Awards), to give voice to those same demonic outpourings of hatred and worthlessness and self-loathing that explode at them every time they glance in a mirror.

Of course life is hard when you look in the mirror and see doody (note to Elizabeth: I could have used a different, less polite word), at least until you make the mental adjustment that being a worthless pile of hateful doody is really a good thing. Which is where Ronald Reagan truly earned his place in history: by assuring people filled with churning demons that it's all OK -- OK to hate, OK to cheat, OK to demean anyone you don't care for. Stop beating yourself up! Celebrate your doodyfulness! It's morning in doody-filled America!

Who wouldn't like to hear that? (Besides anyone with a shred of dignity, morality, or principle, I mean.) And America embraced its doody-filled self, with a vengeance. Eventually they put that pile of worthless ignorance and puke in the White House (or allowed the Supreme Court to put him there), to pursue on the grandest scale the demolition of reason and decency, and sure enough, he and his puppet master Big Dick did everything they could to turn the country into a pile of doody.

Yes, these people are entitled, thanks to our fundamental Bill of Rights-protected freedoms (which they have spent so much energy and venom trashing) to their political and religious views. But that they are entitled to substitute them for reality for those of us trying to live in the real world is, well, just another of their poisonous delusions.

I'm sorry, Elizabeth, I try to be polite, I really do. But what do you do in the face of people who imagine they can surgically excise Thomas Jefferson from the founding of our republic, in the apparent belief that they can thereby refashion the history of the founding of our republic to suit their delusional view of it?


YOU'RE NOT GETTING THE PROGRESS REPORT?

Since we lost Rachel Maddow's old Air America radio show, The Progress Report provides the best daily digest I know of what a progressive-minded person needs to know to face the world in the morning. In addition to an admirably thorough report on the day's chosen lead subject, the team of top-notch writers provides an "Under the Radar" item (yesterday it was fallout from "Sunny John" Boehner's disgraceful pep rallly with the banksters at their annual convention Wednesday, with pushback from Larry Summers and Barney Frank) and "Think Fast," a roster of in-brief items. You'll always find the latest edition at pr.thinkprogress.org (for the weekend that will presumably remain yesterday's), with a link to sign up -- yes, it's free!


THURSDAY'S 30 ROCK: BEST EPISODE EVER?

"Best episode ever?" is just a cheap attention-getting headline-writing trick. The show has long since hit its stride, and seems to me to be cruising at an altitude not worth measuring. Nevertheless, this last one, "Don Geiss, America and Hope," written by Jack Burditt and Tracey Wigfield, was a humdinger. The pre-credit sequence, in which Jack tries to boost GE morale in the face of the looming sale to Kabletown-with-a-K, via a worldwide-teleconferenced pep talk, certainly could have been the best ever.

We had Jack, speaking at the funeral of revered departed GE chairman Don Geiss (the great Rip Torn, whose infrequent appearnces will be missed), where Geiss's "mentally challenged" daughter Kathy (Marceline Hugot) plays "Ave Maria" on the trumpet, having a sudden inspiration that could change the Kabletown we-do-nothing culture. His idea, porn for women (it turns out that 91 percent of Kabletown's profits come from porn its channels 551-600, which feature porn for men) by his onetime protege Dave Hess (Scott Bryce), now a Kabletown exec: "Women hate porn, almost as much as men hate going to outlet malls." But that was before he heard Jack's idea of porn for women.

As seen in the video clip, we had Tracy in crisis over the ruthless tell-all book that revealed shocking truths like his marital fidelity. And we had Liz continuing to run into her post-root-canal-anesthesia "future husband" Wes (Michael Sheen; they're seen in happier times at right), who turns out to be named Wesley Snipes (but please don't get him started on that!), and finding ever more evidence of how incompatible they really are, notwithstanding which Wes decided that they should declare each other their "settle soul mates," until finally she stalked him at a wine store ("I figured you wouldn't miss a tasting of 'The White Wines of Scotland'") to "tell you to your face that I know that I can do better than you, and I'm never going to be Mrs. Snipes."

By the way, the link to "Thursday's 30 Rock" at the top of this post will take you to a page where you can watch Thursday's episode complete online.


UPDATE: From Howie And Jefferson

Well, it's just Howie quoting a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to Edward Rutledge in 1796 that I remember a History teacher of mine and Ken's from James Madison High School reciting for us (Mr. Feldman or Mr. Feldstein; I remember the quote but not really the teacher.) Ken has mentioned above that the current crop of wingnuts bear ill will toward the third U.S. president because he coined the term "separation between church and state." True, true, but all conservatives from all times hate Jefferson for pointing out to Rutledge that "There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him." This is exactly what conservatives do not want anyone thinking about. It leads to everything they hate most in the world: egalitarianism, democracy and... progressive taxation.


AND KEN ADDS . . .

Feldstein, I think it was. Wasn't it? I vaguely remember that, but I'm sorry to say that I did not remember that Jefferson quote. On the other hand, not remembering it allows me the pleasure of (re)discovering it. I think it bears repeating:

"There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him."

That Jefferson was in so many ways -- most of them good! -- and so obviously the intellectual father of this country, and the ambassador and inspirational spokesman to the world for our best ideals, that the Texas follies stand in even starker relief. You'd think that being the idealistic heir of T.J. is one of the things Americans are most proud of.

Patriotic, freedom-loving Americans, I mean.

FURTHER THOUGHT FROM KEN:

Hmm, now I'm thinking Feldman, not Feldstein.

#

Quote of the week: Jack Donaghy, preparing to negotiate Tracy Morgan's new contract, explains to Liz, "With Tracy it's not about money anymore"

Tracy and Jack in pre-contract-negotiation times

"With Tracy it's not about money anymore. His video game made a fortune, and he invested all of it in a company that dismantles bank signs. They're doing very well."

-- Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), from this week's 30 Rock

Think of this quote as an introduction to the post that will follow it at 5pm (PT)-- and of this little song about Paul Krugman a take away from both:

I can't believe Goobernor Booby's performance either, but the thing I want to say is that he's not our Kenneth from 30 Rock

A taste of everyone's favorite NBC page, including such gems as: "I was pretty addicted to coke back in my Wall Street days" and, stretcher-bound, "If I die, will you take care of my birds?" Our Kenneth is not the Goobernator, uh-uh, no way.

by Ken

Really, we should be talking about the president's speech today, not the stupefying spectacle that followed it.

Now, I make it a policy, or thought I did, not to watch presidential speeches. I mean, really, what do you learn? But I watched last night's, and wow! Talk about a guy showing real understanding of the fix we've gotten ourselves into -- not least that it goes way beyond the housing debacle -- with real determination and vision, not just for getting us out of this fix, but for using it as an opportunity to seriously change the course we're on for a better future.

That was some kind of speech.

Actually, though, I'm not sure there's much more to say about it right now. It all depends on the follow-through. If the speech turns out to be the starting point for the kind of re-creation of our economy and society it envisioned, it may go down as one of the great, seminal speeches in the country's history. If not, well, it will be (barely) remembered as just another spell of gum-flapping.

We need to see the details unfold. I'm not complaining about the amount of detail included, which seemed to quite right for a State of the Union-equivalent speech, where the purpose is to set forth the president's goals and try to rally support for them. In this regard, the president offered plenty of detail -- I'd say a breathtaking amount. If he can now back that up with concrete programs intelligently designed to bring us closer to the vision, I think he did a splendid job of rallying political support.

If the president can maintain this level of commitment and inspiration, I think he's going to have so much of the country behind him (there will, apparently, always be that other 30 percent) that the Republican pols are going to face the choice of working with him or becoming simply irrelevant politically, their only available game plan being the one they're using in Congress now to sit on the sidelines whining, hoping and praying that it all fails and they get to come in and pick up the pieces. This is, I think, a wildly risky strategy, and one that many Americans will have great trouble either accepting or forgetting.

Meanwhile, there's the grotesque spectacle poor Bobby Jindal made of himself, and while I hate to pile on, and think it may be all the more redundant considering that the goobernor may just have ended his political career outside Louisiana, it's kind of hard not to talk about that one of the saddest, lamest performances I've seen in my decades of watching American political theater.

But the thing that moves me to write is the evocations I'm hearing of 30 Rock's beloved super-weird super-page Kenneth. As I've written, not only love do I 30 Rock, but I especially love Kenneth (Jack McBrayer), as I suspect all viewers of the show do. As I wrote, he and Alec Baldwin's Jack Donaghy have been one of the elements of the show that always worked, back to the pilot episode, even while the other elements needed (how shall I say?) "seasoning."

But Kenneth is not Bobby Jindal. Kenneth is very weird, yes. Hardly an episode goes by when we don't find out that the depths of his weirdness lie even deeper than we thought. But Kenneth is not Bobby Jindal. Everybody loves Kenneth. Bobby Jindal, as far as I can tell from my mercifully limited explosure, and certainly off last night's fiasco, is just a creep. I mean, anyone who could start such a speech with that creepy telling of his life story, which ought to have some inspirational value, and instead make it sound utterly pointless, cheesy, embarrassing, and, yes, kind of creepy comes off as, you know, a creep.

Viewers may love Kenneth, but it would never occur to us to have him hold public office. Being an NBC page -- this is Kenneth's life work, and he's doing it, living his dream! Now, if Goobernor Booby has any interest in joining the NBC page program, I'll bet Tina Fey and Lorne Michaels know people they could talk to.

Normally I would never use the phrase "allowing for the right-wing spin" with Michael Gerson, since normally with MG if you take away the right-wing spin there's nothing left. But while I doubt that any of us would be much taken with the Bobby J he's touting in his Washington Post column today -- printed, alas, a day too late for our Michael's credibility -- this is apparently what his admirers see, or saw, in him. Is it necessary to say that none of this was on view last night, unless you count the unbearably mawkish litany of his personal background with which he opened, a subject that he's supposed to prefer to downplay! (Does he perhaps like to downplay it the way Young Johnny McCranky just hated talking about his POW experience, which he nevertheless seemed to do at every opportunity?)

All I can think is that someone (it can't possibly have been the governor's own idea) decided that the country would love him if he could just give them the old Sarah Palin dumbth. (That's a Steve Allen word, "dumbth." He thought there needed to be a word for, well, dumbth. You know, the way that something that's warm has the quality of warmth.) And it's really only a second consideration that only Sarah Palin can do Sarah Palin dumbth. The first consideration about Sarah Palin, always, is that zowie, she's hot! She shows up, and all those limp-dicked,beer-bellied limp-dicked Republican guys get a groin tingle, thinking, "Wow! 40-whatever, five kids, and still -- wow! man, could I make music on those bazongas!"

Is there anyone out there who wants to make anything with Goobernor Booby's bazongas?

The interesting thing is that, assuming Gerson is right about whatever appeal Booby is supposed to have for people for whom he has appeal, last night he did a 180 and -- I think -- destroyed his political career. More than anything now I'll be curious to learn the dirt, I mean the back story of that speech. Who exactly was involved in the strategizing and the implementation? Did somebody make Booby do it? Or did he really think it was a good idea?

I just couldn't believe that the clown had nothing of substance to say except, eventually, a few bromides. ("Tax cuts!") I mean, he -- and whoever -- must have been provided in advance with at least some form of the president's speech, and of course then they had the opportunity to watch it. Did it really not occur to any of them that the response they apparently had in mind had been rendered irrelevant? A speech this filled with determination and vision, this skillfully executed, would have been tough to respond to under the best circumstances, but who thought it would be smart to counter with a guy who's clearly not a dope in real life but chose, or was chosen, to play a village idiot on TV?

Of course, on the whole I'm grateful for the ineptitude of the production. In the old days, Karl Rove would have had his crack team of obfuscators and spinners lying in wait, armed with all their focus-tested buzzwords for an orgy of obfuscation and a breathless round of spin-the-media. This, this was simply hopeless. It's hard to believe that anyone with, say, a fourth-grade education could have been involved in writing that speech. And I believe if you'd plucked anybody off any high school Debate Club or Public Speaking Club in the country, he/she would have done a better job than Goobernor Booby did of making it sound like he was talking about something.

I'm sure Rush and Sean and Billo and the others will find a way to spin the two speeches, but I tell you, this time out, the kids are really going to have to work to earn their blood money.


KENNETH ON "THE PAGE WORLD" AND THE U.N.

I found this lovely deleted scene ("embedding disabled by request") between Kenneth and Jenna (Jane Krakowski), after he's demolished his page jacket and, since it was her fault (we actually saw this happen in the above compilation clip), she offers to buy him a new one, or at least talk to someone, and in horror at the prospect of her talking to that singularly august personage the head page, he warns her:

"The page world is a political rat's nest. It's sort of like the U.N. except we're still relevant in the modern world."

No, this isn't the deleted "U.N." scene. This is from the episode where Jenna got really fat, and TGS viewers loved it, so it became Kenneth's job to spoon-feed her to keep her fat in order to maintain those great show ratings. (He's playing "airplane hangar" with her here.)

#

21st-Century Banking, III: All we need is can-do-type execs interested in doing a seriousjob for a serious paycheck -- yup, that's all!

Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) in church? Jack commemorates the Martyrdom of St. Valentine with the lovely Elisa (Salma Hayek) -- before she insists he take confession.

JACK DONAGHY [in the confessional booth, to the young PRIEST]: I have faith, in things I can see, and buy, and deregulate. Capitalism is my religion. Now you want to have an intellectual argument? Okay, but I should warn you, I went to Princeton.

PRIEST: I went to Harvard Divinity School.

JACK [chuckling]: You Crimson guys never miss a chance, do you? You want a confession? Let's get this done, so I can go eat. [PRIEST looks on in bewilderment bordering on panic.] I am divorced. I take the Lord's name in vain often, and with great relish. I hit my mother with a car -- possibly by accident.
[Time gap.]
JACK: I almost let him choke to death right there on the football field. [PRIEST is shocked.] I looked the other way when my wig-based parent company turned a bunch of children orange. I once claimed "I am God" -- during a deposition.
[Time gap.]
JACK: And I may have sodomized our former vice president while under the influence of some weapons-grade narcotics. Ahhh! It feels good to say that out loud. Actually, that one was weighing on me.

PRIEST: Wow! I, uh . . . I don't know what to say.

JACK: I don't want you to say anything. I already made that clear.

PRIEST: Then what brought you here tonight?

JACK: What brought me here? What brings anyone anywhere? Why do men build bridges? Why are there jets? I was trying to have sex tonight. Have you ever made love to a woman, father?

PRIEST [desperate]: Come on, man!

JACK: Imagine cradling your face into the curve of a velvety-soft neck, your hands cupping the warm heft of the greatest pair of --

PRIEST [bolting from the confessional]: I need backup! Harvard did not prepare me for this!

-- from Thursday's episode of 30 Rock

"Hope for the best! Expect the worst!
The rich are blessed. The poor are cursed."

-- from Mel Brooks's The Twelve Chairs

by Ken

We come finally, in our little series on Modern Banking, to the issue of executive compensation, which obviously applies to the whole economy and not just the banking segment.

Yesterday, in addition to seeing (in the "Power of Populism" segment from Rachel Maddow's Wednesday show) fake contrition exuded by the eight megabank CEOs hauled before the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday, we were introduced (courtesy of Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein's Wednesday column) to a local North Carolina bank CEO, Kim Price of Citizens South, who was smart enough to keep his institution mostly out of the subprime-mortgage craziness, and devised a plan for using federal bailout money to actually promote lending -- all of this for a pay package, all told, under a half-mil.

We noted the inclusion in the conference version of the economic stimulus package passed by both houses of Congress of Sen. Chris Dodd's amendment seeking to impose some enforceable limits on the payment of bonuses to top-ranking execs of banks accepting federal bailout money.
Naturally, today most of the discussion focuses not on whether this is a good idea, or really doable, but how those execs will get around it. (Deck on the story in today's Washington Post: "More Rigorous Limits Trigger Concerns Over What Banks Might Do To Be Free of Them.")

And if you didn't watch the Maddow show clip, I encourage you to do so now. I just looked at again, the whole thing, and was not only caught up in Rachel's sharp and impassioned commentary on the upswell of populist sentiment around the country ("little people" all over are tired of being shafted while fat cats line their silk pockets), but impressed once again by the degree of nuance she's able to introduce to the discussion, including wondering whether the course we're on is going to get us toward the goal. (Answer: She doesn't know.)

Of course the argument from the business community regarding executive compensation is that they have to offer these preposterous compensation packages to secure the services of the best executive talent, and then to hold onto their prize catches. (And of course, when the geniuses are finally sent packing, they're sent wafting gently to earth in the comfort of the golden parachutes the companies were forced to give them.)

As should be clear by now, this is bullshit. Those people weren't creating anything, least of all wealth; all they made was deals, scams, cons. They aren't "executive talent"; they're a breed of parasitic, egomaniacal, sociopathic thieves. As many commentators, we have been inflicted, over the last couple of decades, with the Cult of the CEO, these make-believe geniuses who have gotten away with something more or less equivalent to murder over that time. Of course CEOs who serve their companies well should be well compensated, but these levels of compensation are orders of magnitude in excess of reasonable compensation, even for good performance, which, incredibly, was increasingly not demanded or apparently even expected of them. We all know the horror stories.

And the price for the aggrandizement of these diseased egos has been systematic exploitation of and outright theft from the working stiffs who made those companies function. At a tenth what these leeches are being paid, they would be grotesquely overcompensated, at the expense of both their workers and the economy. Henry Ford may have been a bigot and a son of a bitch, but he understood that his workers were also his customers, and that giving them their fair share of his profits not only increased those profits but primed the economy. These parasites, who seem unable to see anything beyond their insane greed, don't understand that by bleeding every dollar they can out of the economy, they have gradually left themselves no one to do business with.

That is, if they had any business to do.

Even dull-witted prosecutors should be able to find enough criminal activity to secure these goons several lifetimes' worth of incarceration. Their companies should be scouring their contracts to prove malfeasance sufficient to justify the return of every dollar they extorted, with contributions from the people inside the companies who abetted the fleecing.

Or, perhaps more subtly and more appropriately, their compensation might be recalculated to minimum wage for a 35-hour work week for the term of their employment. And yes, I mean a strictly limited 35 hours, notwithstanding that these people were so dedicated that they worked, oh, 500-hour weeks.

Unfortunately, I have to make do without a quote I would have like to introduce from a New Yorker "Notes and Comment" piece by E. B. White, I guess from the early '50s. Somehow my cheesy old Perennial paperback edition of The Second Tree From the Corner (and also One Man's Meat) has mysteriously gone AWOL. I'm not pointing any fingers, just suggesting that anyone who knows anything about the vanished paperbacks would do well to spill his/her guts now rather than later. (Okay, so I've been watching too much Law and Order.)

The piece was an account of what I recall was a New York City-wide bomb-alert drill, in which, eerily, the entire city came to a standstill. I recall the report of a visitor unaware of the proceedings happening onto a no-longer-bustling city street and commenting, "What's this, something new?" And I remember in particular White's report of calculations of economic loss from that "lost" hour.

In The New Yorker's own offices, the business people were lamenting that by bad luck they had the company's lawyers present (and presumably billing). And they had a dollar figure to put on that loss.

But that calculation of loss, White suggested, depended on the quality of the advice the lawyers were giving. If by chance it was poor advice, he pointed out, then missing out on an hour's worth of it actually put the magazine ahead.

What ever happened to American ingenuity and the real American spirit of "can do"? Have the ambition, will, and knowhow to build companies that contribute real value to their customers, their workers, and the country as a whole been bred out of us?

I don't think so. I think we've just succumbed to misguided business goals, bad values, and really atrocious leadership models. I don't know how we turn that around, but I do know that there's a difference between the way Kim Price conceives of his job as a bank CEO and the way the megabank CEOs seem to. We need to learn how to value the one and kick the others' sorry asses out the door.

And somehow we need to figure out how to do the same thing with companies that become proverbially "too big to fail." I know this is appallingly naive of me, but it has to be possible. Let American ingenuity plug the gap with companies that actually do the job that the behemoths have failed at.

I mentioned yesterday the great innovation my friend Terry encountered at her bank, J. P. Morgan Chase, where customers are apparently now officially called guests. Guests. I would love to know how much the person who came up with that genius idea is paid.

I don't know what it's like in your town, but here in New York City, over the last decade or two the number of storefront banks has exploded. For a time there it seemed as if every property that became available was being swooped up by one of those banks.

It mystified a lot of us, who remembered the immediately preceding fetish among the banking elite, which was to segregate customers (not yet guests, of course) by economic status, the way casino operators pamper their high rollers, which in the extreme included trying to deny insufficiently important customrs access to tellers. Now, apparently, those banks couldn't open new locations fast enough.

But was there really any business justification for any of this? No bank offered to show me their books, but I had to figure their overhead was soaring. True, at the same time, the people inside all those banks were devising ever more ingenious ways to provide fewer services and to charge fees for what services remained. Was that really good business? For some of us there's some small ironic pleasure in the banks' discoveries that a lot of their high rollers were either dupes or crooks.

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