Dropping the ball in the worst way - Alan Greenspan isn't all that smart

Being a kid in the 1980's, I grew up as a "Reagan baby." Back then, you couldn’t have convinced me or any of my friends at Weston High School that we weren’t going to make our first million by 30 and be retired by 40.

It wasn’t a regional phenomenon, either. One of my best friends grew up in Berkeley and after seeing how Dan Akroyd lived in "Trading Places," he and I both knew we wanted to become commodities brokers. The point is that for a lot of us, growing up in the ‘80s meant believing in American capitalism and its power to provide the lifestyle to which we aspired.

But American capitalism died last week and I found it poetic that Alan Greenspan, the man whose supposed brilliance helped it thrive for the better part of two decades, drove the stake through the heart of the beast he helped create.

Greenspan was a believer in markets and he hated inflation. He was the main reason a steady supply of cheap money was available.

In practical terms, if you bought a house, a car, a boat, new furniture, a walk-in freezer, or anything else that required financing, this man (more than your FICO score) determined how much you’d be paying every month. And he always wanted you to pay less. He made credit so easily available that going into debt almost became fashionable.

Can’t afford the payment to buy a new Mercedes? Lease it instead.When the lease is up you’ll have nothing to show for all that money you spent, so just lease another one. Can’t get your customers to pay you for the goods and services you’ve already provided? Just borrow the money to make payroll. You’ll make back whatever you have to pay to service that debt.

Need to get out from under the credit card bills you’ve been racking up over the years? Just re-finance your house and pull some cash out. Home values have been climbing steadily since the Great Depression, so there’s no way your house won’t appreciate.

It was that last one that caused the economic crisis we now find ourselves in. With a lame-duck Congress about to break for Christmas recess in December of 2000, Senate Banking Committee Chairman (and fellow free marketeer) Phil Gramm pushed through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which prohibited the federal government from regulating “banking products” like mortgages.

At the time, there was $5.5 trillion in outstanding mortgage debt.With the tech bubble bursting and investors looking to put their money into something "safe" like real estate, that number doubled to $11 trillion by 2006.

Lenders unbound by federal regulation were writing bad loans, bundling them, and selling them as securities to investors as fast as they could, with the whole process divorced from any risk because companies like AIG were insuring the
transactions.

Being a Kool Aid-drinking disciple of the semi-delusional Ayn Rand, Greenspan figured markets would regulate themselves, so he never saw this crisis coming.

He confessed that, "those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself especially, are in a state of shocked disbelief...I still do not fully understand why it happened."

He also admitted he "found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works." That "model," of course, is American capitalism, and that "flaw" has proven to be fatal.

When you’re an academic, it can be tough to see what’s really going on — even for a smart guy like Greenspan. So I’ll explain it: Since the Reagan Revolution, senior management hasn’t really cared about shareholders’ equity. They only care about booking profits (not actually making profits) to meet their quarterly numbers and earn their bonuses. If a person has the chance to make $80 million in bonus checks in a single year, you shouldn’t be surprised when that person doesn’t care about the long-term health of the company cutting those checks.

These people are corporate raiders. They invented the concepts of "F-you money" and "F-everybody money" and I find it hard to believe that the brightest economist of our time didn’t see them coming. Oliver Stone laid it out perfectly in "Wall Street" when Gordon Gekko said, "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works."

If only Greenspan didn’t have his head up Dagny Taggart’s butt for half a century, the concept of greed wouldn’t be such a "shock" to him.

Then he could have aborted this capitalist spawn of Satan (Phil Gramm’s CFMA) in the womb before it had the chance to grow up and swallow our economy at a rate of 10,000 foreclosed homes every day.

Why the gimmicks? David Duchovny's unnecessary fake porn addiction

HBO's Sunday night shows are the stuff of TV legend: "The Sopranos," "The Wire," "Six Feet Under," "Rome," and "Deadwood." But HBO hasn’t broadcast anything nearly as good since "The Wire" ended. "True Blood" has potential, though I’ll be really disappointed if the vampires, as they appear to be, are simply a metaphor for people who are open about sex and sexuality.

Showtime stepped into the void with "The L Word" and "Dexter," but I resisted watching either one; the former because I can’t identify with being gay in WeHo (not that there’s anything wrong with it), the latter because a CSI show is a CSI show — even if the main character is a criminologist serial killer — and I’ve had enough of crime scene investigations and their "ghosts in the machine." Showtime did get me with the first season of "Californication," but they just might lose me because of the way they promoted the current season.

The premise has promise. It’s about a writer transplanted from New York, living on the Westside of L.A., and tortured by his quest to re-claim his lost love; finding his failure to deserve her reflected back at him from the bottom of empty glasses of booze and in the eyes of an endless string of attractive, enthusiastic, yet somehow unsatisfying sexual partners.

His first name comes from L.A.’s original Dirty Old Man, Charles Bukowski (known to his friends as "Hank"), so I didn’t mind that they gave him the hacky last name "Moody." I wasn’t even mad that the over/under for good speaking black roles is 1.5 (and the under, as always, is a safe bet), I got sucked in anyway.

But in an attempt to boost the new season’s ratings, Showtime insulted the audience by getting the show’s star, David Duchovny, into the news in a Moody-esque way. It’s a classic Hollywood trick and it’s never believable.

Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn conveniently started an on-set romance, then broke up around the time "The Break Up" came out (as if Jennifer Aniston, who favors the square-jawed white guy, would ever seriously date Vince Vaughn and his chins). Showtime’s Duchovny trick was even lamer. A few weeks before the season premiere, they had him check into rehab — reportedly for addiction to porn. That’s right, porn.

I have a few problems with this story. First, porn isn’t something you "watch," it’s something you "use," and only for a few minutes at a time. I’m sure there are guys who actually sit and watch porn, but none of them played Fox Mulder on "The X Files." Second, David Duchovny has been married to the gorgeous Tea Leoni since 1997.

I know the saying goes that no matter how hot a woman is, somewhere some guy is tired of sleeping with her - but not Tea Leoni.

Duchovny has also reportedly been getting his serve in with a tennis instructor, comparing headshots with a model, sampling the goods of a grocery store clerk, and getting retail therapy from a couple of Rodeo Drive’s finest.

The point being that if you can’t shop, eat, or play tennis without falling into some "strange," you don’t need to use porn, much less watch porn, because you’re getting plenty of the real thing.

The story completely falls apart after he checked out and came home. Was there a joyous reunion with David and Tea re-committing to each other and their family? No. Did they take Madelaine and Kyd to pick out pumpkins at the pumpkin patch? No. Instead, they announced that they’ve been separated for months. To top it all off, it comes out that Tea spent a good part of the summer following Billy Bob Thornton’s band around the country from Memphis to New York City — and it’s just a matter of time before she’s wearing a vial of his blood around her neck.

So what was the point of rehab? The marriage was over. Tea had become a groupie for Billy Bob, so it wasn’t to save his family. With all the women willing to make house calls (or perform iSight shows) for him, there is no way Dave needed porn. The only answer is because Hank Moody and Vincent Chase are competing for the same eyeballs on Sunday nights, and Showtime wanted to give their 40-something writer an edge over HBO’s young, pretty boy actor.

Ironically, there was no need. "Entourage" has turned into a juvenile wish-fulfillment fantasy, while "Californication" still has a chance to skewer showbiz from the inside.

Letting the clock run out - I hope John McCain doesn't get himself hurt

My friend Carlos has been a basketball referee and baseball umpire around New York City for the last 25 years. Among the things he taught me (besides the fact that Manny Ramirez has been a slugging freak of nature since he was a teenager) was there comes a moment in any game when one team doesn’t want to compete any more.

"You can tell by the body language when they just give up," he’d say. When that happened, he saw his job as making sure nobody got hurt.

The presidential campaign reached that point last Friday. It was John McCain’s "I’m honored to be here with Barack Obama" moment and it was the beginning of the end of his White House run.

I’ve been following presidential politics since 1980 when my dad took me to cast a (pretend) vote for John Anderson and I’ve never seen anything like this campaign. It might be that the two major parties basically have their own cable networks or that those networks run on a six-hour news cycle, but the end result is that in this go-round, a week seems like a year and a month seems like a lifetime. So if you have forgotten what happened last week on the campaign trail, the wind-up doll John McCain picked as his running mate was going around the country claiming that Barack Obama was "palling around with terrorists."

The person she was referring to, William Ayers, was never convicted of any crime. His main connection to Barack Obama comes through Illinois State Sen. Alice Palmer who, over coffee in Ayers’ living room back in 1995, announced she was planning to run for Congress and wanted Barack to be her successor.

Last week the stock market was in a free fall. The Dow was seeing record-breaking losses on just about a daily basis.World leaders were meeting to figure out how to prevent the carnage from spreading around the globe and a McCain strategist said, "If we keep talking about the economic crisis, we’re going to lose." So they decided to try to scare people by asking the question, "Who is Barack Obama?"

Of course, anyone who cares already knows who this man is. He’s been on the cover of Vanity Fair, GQ, People, Men’s Vogue, Vibe, Wired, The Atlantic, Ebony, Tiger Beat, Newsweek, and has landed no fewer than seven Time Magazine covers this year alone. He’s been interviewed everywhere from "60 Minutes" to "Access Hollywood," he’s campaigned tirelessly from coast to coast, kicked Bill and Hillary Clinton square in their lying asses, and he’s killing John McCain in national and battleground state polls. Who is Barack Obama? Where have you been for the last year and a half? Alaska?

John McCain has been reduced to asking a question that even kids at Roosevelt Elementary School know the answer to because running on fear is all he has left. In the last month, he’s said the economy is fundamentally strong when we’re in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, pulled out of the state of Michigan and basically conceded 17 Electoral College votes, suspended his campaign and tried to back out of a debate, then attended the debate and re-started his campaign like nothing ever happened.

He’s seen his unfavorable ratings rise and any lead he’s had in any battleground states evaporate. He’s now gotten to the point where he needs to carry Colorado, Nevada, Missouri, Indiana, Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida to have a chance to win the election — and he’s trailing in all of them.

Which brings us to last Friday. John McCain was at a rally in Minnesota speaking to his supporters in his favorite "town hall" setting where he could wander around waving his arms and talking to his shoes like he loves to do. A guy stood up and said that he and his family were "scared" of an Obama presidency. Sen. McCain’s response was, "I have to tell you he is a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared (of) as president of the United States."

Then an elderly woman took the mic and said, "I can’t trust Obama...he’s an Arab." John McCain took it right back and said, "No, Ma’am. He’s a decent family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues." With that, it was over.

I haven’t spoken to Carlos in a while because he’s a Yankee fan and a Republican (and both his teams are really struggling right now), but I’m pretty sure that if tonight’s debate was a basketball game he was working, he’d just be trying to run the clock out before John McCain gets hurt.

Bad Barack choice - "SNL" can do better than Fred Armisen

By now, readers of this column should know I was the first person to go on the record predicting an Obama presidency back in April of 2007. When he’s elected, it’s only natural that I’ll assume the title of America’s Smartest Columnist. But this isn’t about me patting myself on the back for being so in touch with the people This is about me questioning how Lorne Michaels, creator and executive producer of "Saturday Night Live," could be so clueless as to stand by his decision to cast Fred Armisen to play soon-to-be President Obama on the show - ostensibly for the next eight years.

In his defense, Lorne Michaels isn’t as smart as I am. Like everyone else who doesn’t live in Illinois and hasn’t been a Democratic Party activist, he didn’t see Barack coming. Making things even more complicated was the fact that the WGA strike was in full swing when Obama won the Iowa Caucuses back in January, so "SNL" was dark at the time. Behind the scenes, however, Michaels was scrambling to find someone to play the role and was reportedly looking "both inside and outside the current cast" before settling on Fred Armisen — or, more accurately, settling for Fred Armisen.

Armisen is funny, he’s just not that good. His main talents are mugging (like his Prince impression), overacting (like his Dov Charney), and a combination of both (like his Larry King). His unconvincing Obama wouldn’t be such an issue if he wasn’t in the same cast as the premier political impressionist of the last 20 years, Darrell Hammond — whose Jesse Jackson is so good I don’t even mind that he does it in blackface — and if the role was anything short of a dream job for a black actor. A dream job that Lorne Michaels, once again, isn’t giving to a black actor.

This is the same Lorne Michaels that created the position of the "Other Black Guy" who isn’t in any sketches (unless he’s in a dress), almost never speaks, and only existed so the show could claim two black cast members.

This is the same repertory company that hasn’t had two black players at the same time since 2005, and even then the "OBG" was the totally forgettable Finesse Mitchell. I guess Michaels figured that the gifted Kenan Thompson has enough size, range, and talent to qualify as two people, so there was no need to cast another black guy.

Like a dummy, I went into the summer hiatus thinking that Lorne would be searching high and low for a better Barack. After all, political humor is “SNL’s” bread and butter and Armisen as Obama on screen with Hammond as Bill Clinton or Al Gore would be like Linda McCartney trying to keep up with Paul McCartney on stage when they were in Wings.

Michaels didn’t get the memo that Obama was coming, so casting a new "OBG" didn’t happen because he had Amy Poehler and her (adequate) Hillary Clinton impression. Hillary was "inevitable" back then, so everything was going to be fine. When the show starts with the cold open, "live from New York, it’s Saturday night!" there is, literally, only one place in New York City you can go and not see at least two black people and that’s backstage at Studio 8H in the G.E. Building at Rockefeller Center where "SNL" is taped.

As for the new cast, it turns out there is no room for a new "OBG" because Lorne Michaels took the revolutionary step of reaching all the way out to the Upright Citizens Brigade (again) and his own production company (the same one that gave us "A Night at the Roxbury" and "Stuart Saves His Family") to find Bobby Moynihan. Bobby Moynihan? At this historic moment in our culture and our politics when a black man is poised to become the icon of a generation, the executive producer and grand poobah of the definitive satire showcase of the last 30 years didn’t cast a black comic actor to play the role because he simply had to make room for the transcendent talent of Bobby Moynihan? Really?

Lorne Michaels has been passed by. His 90-minute show is too long by a third, its sketches end with a whimper instead of a bang, and a better version of the best part ("Weekend Update") is available on "the Daily Show."

As a content provider, there is a silver lining in this cloud of comic mediocrity for me. If, for some insane reason, no syndication services ever pick up my column and no publishers ever release my books, I can take comfort in the fact that a coattail-rider like Lorne Michaels still has a show on network TV, but a comedic genius like Dave Chapelle doesn’t.

Ain’t showbiz a bitch?

TV's big 9021-no - Saying hello and goodbye to Brenda Walsh

I shouldn't care. That's what I keep telling myself. But having been with them for almost 10 years, I'm personally invested in their future. They left me for eight years back in 2000 (one of them left me six years earlier), but I stayed loyal. Somehow, I knew they'd both be back.

And I was right. But the joy that came with the reunion of myself, Kelly Taylor, and Brenda Walsh was so short-lived that it almost wasn't worth it. Almost.

I know what you're thinking, "90210 doesn't seem like your kind of show, Kenny." That's not far from the truth. It isn't my kind of show - partly because I like to handicap the number of good speaking black parts on any given TV show or movie and, notwithstanding productions by the Wayans and Tyler Perry, the number is usually between 1.5 and 2.5 - and the under is almost always a safe bet.

If it had premiered this season, the new "90210" would join "Gossip Girl" and "Smallville" and everything else the CW broadcasts on my permanent ignore list. And please don't e-mail me to point out that "America's Next Top Model" features a black host because, I'm sorry, models are not supposed to talk. For proof, check out Cindy Crawford in "Fair Game."

But it didn't premier this season. It premiered in 1990 when I was doing a two-year bid in a small suburb of Albany, NY just trying to fit in with my new friends at Shenendehowa Central High School.

On some level, I identified with Brandon and Brenda Walsh as they tried to fit in with their new friends at West Beverly High (I identified with Brandon, I just wanted to have sex with Brenda). I don't remember any good speaking black parts on the original show (because there weren't any), but I suppressed my inner Chuck D just long enough to get hooked.

Imagine my happiness when the show not only returned, but they had trimmed the fat off the old cast (that's not a shot at Tiffani-Amber Thiessen, who, I'm sure, will be hot again some day). Jason Priestly and Luke Perry haven't aged well enough, Tori Spelling is going to keep doing her reality show because her dad isn't signing the checks, and Brian Austin Green is going to keep doing Megan Fox as long as she lets him.

But Jenny Garth and Shannen Doherty were coming back. Kelly and Brenda back together again for the first time in 14 years? Be still my beating heart.

Then I read the fine print. Kelly Taylor was only signed on for 11 episodes, Brenda Walsh for four. I literally did a double take. Four episodes out of a 22-episode season? That's barely 20 percent.

How can the triumphant return of Brenda Walsh to the world's most famous zip code only merit four shows? She's been gone for almost a decade-and-a-half. It will take at least two shows to get caught up on where she's been, what she's been up to, and how she's going to patch things up with Kelly. Then, of course, we'll need some Brenda stories. Four episodes just isn't going to cut it.

I figured it was just part of the negotiation. Shannen was saying she couldn't commit to more than four shows because she's in the process of pitching another project (which is code for "screw you, pay me").

So the network would focus group the first couple of shows, check the ratings, and see if they should make an investment. Apparently, they've decided it's not worth it. So I'm preparing myself for the idea that last night's episode was the last time I'll ever see Brenda Walsh. Four episodes. It's not a lot, but I guess it will have to be enough and I'll have to be grateful.

As far as the new show is concerned, I'm not sure if I'll be there for the rest of the way. It was hard enough to buy a teenager who lived alone in his own beach house and drove a vintage Porsche Spyder to school, much less one who drives a Bentley convertible and has access to a private jet. And to be totally honest, Annie and Naomi are no Brenda and Kelly.

But there were two minutes that made it all worth it for me when I saw two things I never let myself believe I would see. It started at four hours and fifty minutes into the season with Brenda and Kelly walking through the halls of West Beverly High looking all grown up and MILFy and ended with Kelly's little sister, Silver, planting a kiss on the new Brandon, who is black. That's progress.

And if I never see Brenda again, at least I'll know exactly when the new 90210 jumped the shark.