Bulls, Bears, and Woodpeckers October 19, 2005January 17, 2017 So I was paging through the September 29, 2003 issue of the New Yorker (I never seem to catch up) and came to a cartoon with a big wooden ship sinking below the water line in a drenching rain. Couple of giraffe necks sticking up above the deck. Caption: ‘I knew the woodpeckers were a mistake.’ Point one: You can have this New Yorker cartoon – or any other – made into a box of custom note cards to give to someone you know who breeds woodpeckers. Or click here for some free stuff and ideas on what to get those on your holiday gift list who don’t breed woodpeckers. Like this one for a cat lover. Or this one to send those nice people whose beach house you visit. Or this one for your law student nephew (‘My fees are quite high, and yet you say you have little money. I think I’m seeing a conflict of interest.’) Point two: The woodpecker cartoon argued strongly for holding Borealis shares and Nitromed puts (if, in each case, they were bought with money you can truly afford to lose). Because at the end of the day, sometimes in a complicated situation (it was pouring! there were hundreds of species of animals on that ark! imagine the noise! the smells! the chaos!), one fact stands out as critical. This certainly isn’t always the case. But sometimes it is. In this case, it was the woodpeckers. In the case of Borealis, it is that the plane moved. This company, selling these days at an overall market valuation of around $70 million (5 million shares at $14 each), has a technology that allows an electric motor the size of a watermelon to drive a fully loaded 767 around the tarmac like a golf cart. Might a much smaller version one day drive much smaller things around like golf carts? (Like, say, golf carts?) And in the case of Nitromed, it is that the company makes a pill (and only this one pill) that is the combination of two readily available generics available for around $400 a year instead of $2,500. Now, I will grant you that the woodpeckers might have pecked only interior, non-load-bearing parts of the ark. (Indeed, as Noah survived, they probably did.) Or that Borealis may fail to turn what appear to be extraordinary, patented technologies (and a supposed $1 billion iron ore deposit) into a real business. Or that Nitromed may persuade insurers to pay the $2,500 instead of the $400, and doctors to prescribe BiDil more widely than my medical guru believes they will. That’s why I keep stressing these are not sure things and you should only hold them if you can afford to lose your money. But woodpeckers tend to peck. And the plane moved. And BiDil is composed of two readily available generics. (‘Cohn could not get what is known as a ‘combination of matter’ patent because the combined form of these two generic drugs did not act differently than using each separately,’ reads one of the key sentences in a lengthy article in the current Health Affairs.) I see no change in the case I made for BOREF a couple of months ago. And the 7-day rolling average for BiDil prescriptions was a modest 57.7 on October 16 . . . yet the maker, Nitromed, is valued at $550 million.
Priorities October 18, 2005March 2, 2017 PRIORITIES We are so deeply in the red now with Iraq and tax cuts and Katrina, even the Republican Congress is getting concerned. Their solution? Cut health care for the poor, food stamps, and student loan programs. It’s what Jesus would have done. PLAME It’s about way more than Scooter Libby and Valerie Plame, argues the author. ‘No one should forget the trips Cheney personally made to Langley in order to wring war-supporting evidence out of the analysts.’ Especially if you missed Frank Rich Sunday, this is one to read.
More of Your Wisdom for an October Monday October 17, 2005March 2, 2017 October can be a tough month for the stock market, which is lower now that it was five years ago and could be lower still a year or two from now. A five-year dip in the American market is rare. A six- or seven- year dip would be rarer still, especially considering how little stocks have paid out in dividends along the way. Between inflation, population growth, and productivity gains, stocks should generally go up, and one is more often right predicting market gains than losses. So my caution may prove unjustified (I have a good chunk of my own assets in TIPS and cash and even some puts) and I hope it does (because I also have a chunk in stocks). But either way, life is too short not to keep a smile on your face most of the time. To wit (pun intended), more of your input for a Monday morning: Jim G: ‘Never criticize anyone until you walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you do criticize them, you’ll be a mile away – and you’ll have their shoes.’ Jonathan Pond: ‘A guy and his dog seat themselves on a pair of bar stools and the bartender comes up to take their order. The guy says: ‘I’ll be you a drink that my dog can answer a question.’ The bartender agrees. The guy turns to the dog and asks: ‘What’s the highest part of a house?’ The dog replies: ‘Roof, roof.’ The bartender says: ‘That’s not bad’ and serves the drink. After the guy had finished, he calls the bartender over and says: ‘I’ll bet you another drink that my dog can answer another question.’ The bartender agrees, thinking he’s called the patron’s bluff. The guy turns to the dog: ‘Who’s the greatest player in the history of baseball?’ The dog replies: ‘Roof, roof,’ at which time the bartender physically throws them out of the bar. Owner and dog are sitting in the gutter. Dog turns to owner: ‘Should I have said DiMaggio?” ☞ Jonathan, a thinker of great thoughts, adds: ‘I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.’ Which is wordplay that calls to mind the new Bluth family attorney on ‘Arrested Development,’ Bob Loblaw. (No? Say it fast a couple of times.) Marilyn Perry: ‘A frog goes into a bank and approaches the teller. He can see from her nameplate that her name is Patricia Whack. ‘Miss Whack, I’d like to get a $30,000 loan to take a holiday.’ Patty looks at the frog in disbelief and asks his name. The frog says his name is Kermit Jagger, his dad is Mick Jagger, and that it’s okay, he knows the bank manager. Patty explains that he will need to secure the loan with some collateral. The frog says, ‘Sure. I have this,’ and produces a tiny porcelain elephant, about an inch tall, bright pink and perfectly formed. Very confused, Patty explains that she’ll have to consult with the bank manager and disappears into a back office. She finds the manager and says, ‘There’s a frog called Kermit Jagger out there who claims to know you and wants to borrow $30,000, and he wants to use this as collateral.’ She holds up the tiny pink elephant. ‘I mean, what in the world is this?’ (you’re gonna love this) (it’s a real treat) The bank manager looks back at her and says . . . ‘It’s a knickknack, Patty Whack. Give the frog a loan. His old man’s a Rolling Stone.’ (You’re singing it, aren’t you? Yeah, I know you are……..) Never take life too seriously! Come on now, you grinned, I know you did!!!’ ☞ Well, of course I did! John McCoy: ‘You might try this. I always seem to stumble across the Prairie Home Companion ‘Joke Show’ by accident while I’m driving with the car radio tuned to NPR – and usually end up laughing hard enough to be a safety hazard. Garrison Keillor’s delivery obviously helps, but some of the jokes are pretty funny even on the cold page.’ Don’t sell your puts. As of last Wednesday, Nitromed’s 7-day rolling average daily BiDil prescriptions was a very modest 67. Not the kind of exciting uptake that (I think) justifies a $600 million market valuation.
Tips, Dips, and Quips October 14, 2005March 2, 2017 CREDIT CARDS Doug Olson: ‘You ask, ‘How many columns can you write urging people to pay off their credit cards?’ One thing you could point out is that Warren Buffett became the world’s richest stock investor by earning an average 23% return over five decades. Since many people pay about that much interest on credit cards, they’re losing their money as fast as Warren Buffett made his.’ GOLD Jim: ‘Warren Buffett was asked about gold at his annual meeting. ‘See’s Candy is better. We prefer useful assets, that produce real dollar returns,’ he said. I would rather have 100 acres of farm land, or an apartment building, or an index fund. From 1900 to 2000 gold went from $20 to $400, but the Dow went from $66 to $12000, not including dividends and carrying charges. If you’re worried about paper money, there are better stores of value.’ ☞ Berkshire Hathaway stock could even be one of them. (I have never bought it, as regular readers know, because having missed the chance at $300 a share – thinking it was ahead of itself – I couldn’t bring myself to buy it at $3,000 or $30,000, either, let alone last night’s $84,800.) But October isn’t over yet (a tough month for the market) – let alone the Bush Administration (a tough five years for the market, with iffy prospects for the next three) – and gold certainly could do better than stocks for a while. Just not over the long run. HONEST TEA Georgia: ‘You might alert your readers that Honest Tea makes regular tea too…not just the bottled kind. I was surprised to see the tea bags in the coffee/tea section at Whole Foods. The green tea is very good!’ ☞ Green is good. NTMD It’s drifted down below $19 again. The fact that some state Medicaid plans have agreed to cover BiDil has not led to the explosion in pent-up sales some bulls had hoped. If you add up the IMS daily numbers for the week ending September 30, there were an estimated 772 BiDil prescriptions written (this is the week before several states put BiDil on the Medicaid formulary), while for the week ending October 7 (the week after these states started covering it), there were 732 – a small decrease. Meanwhile, new scrips on Tuesday were 47, down from 54 on Monday. For all of September, IMS reports 2,439 BiDil prescriptions written. The rolling 7-day average as of October 11 was 87. With annual expenses projected by the company at $120 million or so, breakeven would be around 70,000 patients at full price. (The company has estimated $1,800 a year from each patient.) It’s hard to see how they will get to 70,000 patients at this rate. Or why, long-term, insurers will go along with covering the two generic components of BiDil at six times the cost of the generics covered separately. If you own December or March puts (and, as always, if this is money you can afford to lose), I’d hold on. TIPS John Stockman: ‘Would this be a good time to buy Treasury Inflation Protected Securities? You haven’t mentioned them for several months.’ ☞ As a very safe core holding, maybe. I have about a quarter of my retirement plan in 20- and 30-year TIPS – but bought at par or a little below (99 or 100 cents on the dollar), so psychologically easier to hold at this price than to buy (even though holding amounts to much the same decision as buying). They’ve gotten a little cheaper in the last week or two, so better to buy today than a couple of weeks ago. Right now, the 20-year TIPS yield slightly over 2% on top of inflation and the 30-year TIPS (which actually have 27 years to run) yield slightly less. Click here (and then scroll down) for current prices. But remember several things. First, both the 2% you receive and the inflation accretion you do not receive until you sell are taxed as current income, so these are best owned within a tax-deferred retirement plan. (Otherwise, consider a TIPS mutual fund that pays out the full yield.) Second, the price you see quoted is not the price you pay, because these bonds, which, like most bonds, started out at a $1,000 face value, have been appreciating with inflation. To keep the numbers simple, figure that the 30-year bond is now a $1,100 bond, and because it’s selling for 129 or so – 129 cents on the dollar – each bond will cost you 129% of $1,100 (plus accrued interest and a little something for your broker). Also, if we should have deflation for a while, that $1,100 could fall back to $1,000 (though not below). My guess is that this would be a short-term situation – one way or another, we’re likely to have a fair amount of inflation over the next 27 years. But it could be a long and winding road. DIPS Three things the stock market has going for it right now are, first, the glimmer of hope that the Sunnis will vote and things will gradually begin to go better in Iraq than most of us expect. Second, that the Dow is lower today than it was five years ago – a rare feat in American history – which could be seen as an indication that valuations have had a chance to catch up with themselves. Third, a general level of pessimism (it often being better to buy when people are glum than when they’re optimistic). But the list of countervailing factors is at least as long. The housing boom that has fueled so much of the economy these last few years seems to have passed its peak. Huge gobs of dough will be taken from consumer pockets and sent abroad to fuel our cars and furnaces. And Detroit, still a source of significant employment, seems to have set itself up to be rolled over by Toyota – yet again. The Prius is just so much cooler and smarter than the Chevy. Add to this the neat trick by which we’ve turned the largest surpluses in history into the largest deficits . . . our increasing dependence on the goodwill of the Chinese and our other creditors . . . all the other debt consumers have racked up . . . and an environment in which a huge majority of the country feels we’re on the wrong track (being that, well, we are) – these are the kind of things that could throw the economy into a funk. Add to this Katrina, Rita, Pakistan, floods in New Hampshire – New Hampshire? – indictments and subpoenas flying in Washington, with Halliburton just getting richer and richer, not to mention threats of Avian flu and loose nukes, and you could have the stuff of a loss of confidence . . . a general ‘hunkering down.’ Or not. Maybe the market has discounted all this. But I don’t mind holding some TIPS. And it may not be dumb to have some cash on the sidelines, should opportunities present themselves. QUIPS Tom Knapp: ‘Did you hear about the woman who refused to pay the contractor who installed new windows?’ ☞ Yes. He said her bill was way overdue but she said the salesman had told her that the windows would pay for themselves in a year. David Bruce: ‘I wanted to become an atheist, but I gave it up – they have no holidays. – Henny Youngman.’ David D’Antonio: ‘A man goes into a bar, sits down and orders a beer. He’s sipping the beer when a beautiful woman sits down next to him. After a couple of minutes, she turns to him and says, ‘I’ll do anything you want for $100, provided you can say it in three words.’ The guy is taken aback by this but sits and thinks for a bit and replies . . . ‘Paint my house.” Matt Todaro: ‘Did you hear about the new pirate movie? It’s rated ARRRRRGH!’ Have a great weekend.
Trojan.Vundo, No Less October 13, 2005March 25, 2012 I have a lot to atone for, which may be why I have been stricken by a virus Norton helpfully tells me is HIGH RISK but that it cannot repair. (And, no, their “Download This to Fix the Problem” doesn’t yet work, either.) Back tomorrow. Don’t sell your puts.
A Minister, A Priest, and a Rabbi October 12, 2005March 2, 2017 Sorry I missed a day . . . today is the day a sailor aboard the Pinta sighted the Bahamas thinking it was China, so today is the day I should have skipped. CMM Jerry Minkoff: ‘For truly long-time holders of CMM, it’s been a long, strange trip. I bought it in the mid-1980s on the recommendation of a Merrill Lynch broker who touted it as a high-yield investment, at the time something like 10%. I think I was interested in zero-coupon bonds but I don’t exactly remember what I told him when I spoke to him at the Merrill Lynch booth in Grand Central Station. So for several years my $2,000 was throwing off about $200 a year. Then it became a stock, paying a high dividend, if I’m not mistaken, and that went on for a while, and then Merrill called some of the mortgage-backed securities CMM had parked with them and the company had to declare bankruptcy. Well, I stuck with them through thick and thin, and my current 27 shares, at twenty bucks each, are going to be worth $540. [The same money compounding at even 5% over those years would be worth $5,306.] Lessons of the story: Trusting brokers can be an expensive proposition. Buy-and-hold isn’t always the best idea. Index funds are your friends.’ Helene: ‘Every now and then you talk about stocks and when ‘we’ should sell and what is happening to ‘our’ profits. I feel left out as I am not sure what you are referring to. Do you have a recommended portfolio?’ ☞ No, but every so often over the last 2,380 columns, I’ve – gently! – suggested a stock or two. And every so often I update those suggestions. In the early years, there was much more about personal finance. But how many columns can you write urging people to pay off their credit cards? (Really: pay off your credit cards.) HONEST TEA Anne O’Connor: ‘My favorites were Peach Ooh-La-Long and Lori’s Lemon, but yesterday I tried Pearfect White Tea – a new favorite. I don’t buy sugar, so my own iced tea is always strong and harsh, and I would never dare serve it to anyone. Thank goodness for Honest Tea, which is forcing me to be more civilized towards myself and my guests. The labels are so simple and elegant that the bottles can hold flowers on your kitchen table.’ Mike Schumacher: ‘Our new supermarket has been offering Honest Tea on sale (8 for $10). I tried it and enjoyed it a lot. I looked to see if it was public and couldn’t find anything.’ ☞ It’s a private company started by a Yale B-school professor and one of his students. In hindsight, the valuation at which we invested was probably too high (the investors should probably have held out for a bigger slice of the pie). But we could still wind up doing nicely – and it’s fun, in any event, to be backing something with such good karma (and so few calories). JIM CRAMER’S CASE FOR GOLD Several of you sent me this, which I had clipped, too. I’m not a big fan of gold (its value derives from its scarcity – what good does it do the world to dig up more of it?), but the big picture Cramer paints rings all too true. MORE JOKES Linda Tam: ‘My son is 7 and here is the joke he told me: Him: Knock, knock. Me: Who’s there? Him: Interrupting Cow. Me: Interrupting Co– Him: MOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! ‘I’d never heard this one when I was knock-knock-joke age and it cracked me up.’ Gray Chang: ‘I liked the joke about the rabbi, but it could come across as anti-Semitic. You might have mentioned that you’re Jewish.’ Jonathan Levy (who is probably also Jewish): ‘A rabbi, a priest, and a minister are playing poker when the game gets raided by the police and they get hauled before the judge. The judge says, ‘I feel really bad about this and since you are men of the cloth, I don’t think we need a full trial. I am simply going to ask you whether you were gambling and accept your answers.’ He turns first to the priest and says, ‘Father, were you gambling?’ The priest replies, ‘Well, it depends on your definition of gambling. There was money on the table but it remained to be seen whether it would change hands at the end of the night or if it was just a convenient way to mark the progress of the game. So, no, I was not gambling.’ The judge says, ‘Ok, case dismissed.’ Turning to the minister, he says, ‘Reverend, were you gambling?’ The minister says, ‘Again, it depends on your definition of ‘gambling.’ Does the amount involved have to be enough to affect your life or is it otherwise just sort of a variable entrance fee into the game so, no, I was not gambling.’ ‘Ok, case dismissed,’ the judge says. ‘Rabbi, were you gambling?’ The rabbi looks to his left, then to his right, and says, ‘With whom?”
Profits and Corruption October 10, 2005March 2, 2017 VOTE FOR ME Well, not for me, exactly, but my prosperi-tea. Long-time readers of this column know that I have a small stake in Honest Tea. It continues to grow. Most recently, Whoopi Goldberg was on the Martha Stewart show describing the poker parties she hosts. Martha: “What do you serve to drink?” Whoopi: ‘Well, I have alcohol for folks who drink. I don’t drink, so I have something called Honest Tea. Which is what I drink these days. Which is kinda great. It comes in bottles. Very nice.’ Whoopee! Honest Tea is in the running to receive Co-op America’s People’s Choice Award for the Most Green Business. Please consider taking 15 seconds to vote for Honest Tea. (We are so green, even some of our teas are green.) CMM The twists and turns with this one over the years (preferred stock, reverse splits, and so on), have been almost too complicated to calculate, as those of you who bought it know. But the bottom line is that there’s an offer to acquire it at $20 a share – which might even get bid up a couple of bucks before the dust settles – and the story should soon be over. Depending on where you bought it (and assuming the deal gets done, as now seems likely), you will have made anywhere from a decent profit to a five-fold return on your money. If only they were all this good. NTMD This one could work out very well, also, but there’s no guarantee. I thought few insurers would cover the company’s sole product, BiDil, because it’s so expensive. (The FDA-approved label says to take two tablets three times a day – six in all. With the tablets priced at $1.80 to the wholesaler, that’s around $4,000 a year . . . yet BiDil is simply the combination of two generic ingredients which, if purchased separately, cost one-sixth as much.) Instead, some of the state Medicaid plans are covering it, and with low co-pays. At least for now. Supporters of the stock argue that there is no generic alternative to BiDil, because one BiDil tablet contains 37.5 milligrams of hydralazine and there is no generic hydralazine offered in that dosage. (And, for some reason, they can’t imagine a generic drug manufacturer ever offering one, either.) It’s available only in 25 mg and 50 mg doses. But hang on a second. You’re supposed to take two BiDil tablets at a time, which means a total of 75 mg of hydralazine. So why not just take one 25 mg and one 50 mg generic hydralazine pill for a total of 75 mg? Whether your body gets that 75 mg from two BiDil pills or from two generic pills, it’s still 75 mg. Those of us betting against the stock believe your body will not notice the difference. The other BiDil ingredient is 20 mg of isordil, which is available generically in exactly that dosage. So to replicate exactly the components of the two BiDil pills you’re supposed to take, you’d take two isordils and two hydralazines. It may sound wildly complicated – taking four pills instead of two. But if it saves $3,000 a year, perhaps it’s a complication worth enduring. Meanwhile, my guru writes, ‘by all rights there should be a significant increase in prescriptions based on the states that reimburse BiDil for Medicaid, and refills of prescriptions written in July and August. So far we have not seen prescriptions surge. I continue to expect sales to fall well short of analysts’ projections.’ CULTURE OF CORRUPTION The New York Times has begun charging for on-line access to its superb columnists, but it doesn’t charge much – nothing, if you subscribe to the print edition – and maybe the New York Times is worth supporting with a few bucks now and then, just as NPR and McDonald’s are (don’t tell me you’ve never tossed a few coins into McDonald’s’ coffer). I just now caught up with Frank Rich’s column from October 2. In part: . . . It’s not just Mr. DeLay, aka the Hammer, who is on life support, but a Washington establishment whose infatuation with power and money has contaminated nearly every limb of government and turned off a public that by two to one finds the country on the wrong track. But don’t take my word for it. . . . Listen instead to Andrew Ferguson, of the conservative Rupert Murdoch magazine, The Weekly Standard. As far back as last December in a cover article on the sleazy lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Mr. Ferguson was already declaring ”the end of the Republican Revolution.” He painted the big picture of the Abramoff ethos in vibrant strokes: the ill-gotten Indian gambling moolah snaking through the bank accounts of a network of DeLay cronies and former aides; the ”fact-finding” Congressional golfing trips to further the cause of sweatshop garment factories in the Marianas islands; the bogus ”think tank” in Rehoboth Beach, Del., where the two scholars in residence were a yoga instructor and a lifeguard (albeit a ”lifeguard of the year”). Certain names kept recurring in Mr. Ferguson’s epic narrative, most prominently Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist, Republican money-changers who are as tightly tied to President Bush and Karl Rove as they are to Mr. Abramoff and Mr. DeLay, if not more so. The bottom line, Mr. Ferguson wrote, was a culture antithetical to everything conservatives had stood for in the Gingrich revolution of 1994. Slaying a corrupt, bloated Democratic establishment was out, gluttony for the G.O.P. and its fat cats was in. Mr. Abramoff and his gang embodied the very enemy the ”Contract with America” Congress had supposedly come to Washington to smite: ”’Beltway Bandits,’ profiteers who manipulate the power of big government on behalf of well-heeled people who pay them tons of money to do so.” Those tons of Republican money were deposited in the favors bank of K Street, where, as The Washington Post reported this year, the number of lobbyists has more than doubled (to some 35,000) since the Bush era began in 2000. Conservatives who once aspired to cut government ”down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub” — as a famous Norquist maxim had it — merely outsourced government instead to the highest bidder. . . . The DeLay and Abramoff investigations are not to be confused with the many others percolating in the capital, including, most famously of late, the Justice Department and S.E.C. inquiries into the pious Bill Frist’s divine stock-sale windfall and the homeland security inspector general’s promised inquiry into possible fraud in the no-bid contracts doled out by FEMA for Hurricane Katrina. The mother of all investigations, of course, remains the prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s pursuit of whoever outed the C.I.A. agent Valerie Wilson to Robert Novak and whoever may have lied to cover it up. The denouement is on its way. But whatever the resolution of any of these individual dramas, they will not be the end of the story. Like the continuing revelations of detainee abuse emerging from Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo, this is a crisis in the governing culture, not the tale of a few bad apples. Every time you turn over a rock, you find more vermin. We’ve only just learned from The Los Angeles Times that Joseph Schmitz, until last month the inspector general in charge of policing waste, fraud and abuse at the Pentagon, is himself the focus of a Congressional inquiry. He is accused of blocking the investigation of another Bush appointee who is suspected of siphoning Iraq reconstruction contracts to business cronies. At the Justice Department, the F.B.I. is looking into why a career prosecutor was demoted after he started probing alleged Abramoff illegality in Guam. According to The Los Angeles Times, the demoted prosecutor was then replaced by a Rove-approved Republican pol who just happened to be a cousin of a major target of another corruption investigation in Guam. . . Power corrupts. The Republican Party has power in spades.
Take These Jokes – Please! You've Heard Them All Anyway October 7, 2005March 2, 2017 THE REJECTED ONES How many Republicans does it take to change a light bulb? Rejected – because you’ve heard it (ten: one to deny it needs changing, one to award the contract to Halliburton, etc.) and because I’m trying to get away from partisan comments, except where they’re substantive. (Eight trillion in accumulated debt under Reagan, Bush, and Bush is substantive). The little girl and the cat and the toy fire truck. Rejected – I told you: they need to be clean! ‘Look at that escargot!’ Rejected – puns are bad enough without their having to be tortured. (Though I have always loved the story about the visitor to a curio shop who bought a ‘rarey,’ only to find that, furry little ball that he was, he grew fatter and fatter until he was bursting out of the house, so they hauled him away to the dump – I am sparing you huge chunks of the story – but when they tilted the dump truck bin so he’d roll off . . . he didn’t roll off . . . and so in desperation they went back to the curio shop owner, who, upon hearing all this, marveled, ‘Don’t you know? Don’t you know? It’s the wrong way to tip a rarey.’ I actually do a pretty good 6-minute rendition of this, but it plays best if you served in World War I.) Thanks to all who sent in jokes, bad as they were, including these: THE FUR Hal Brunette: ‘A man and a woman walked into a posh Rodeo Drive furrier. ‘Show the lady your finest mink!’ the man ordered. So the furrier produced an absolutely gorgeous full-length coat. As the lady tried it on, the furrier sidled up to the guy and discreetly whispered, ‘Ah, sir, that particular fur goes for $142,000.’ ”No problem! I’ll write you a check!’ ”Very good, sir.’ said the shop owner. ‘Today is Saturday. You may come by on Monday to pick it up, after the check has cleared.’ ‘They left, and on Monday, the man returns. The store owner was outraged: ‘How dare you show your face in here?! There wasn’t a single penny in your checking account!’ ”I just had to come by,’ grinned the man, ‘to thank you for the most wonderful weekend of my life!” THE RABBI Allen Jones: ‘A rabbi, a priest, and a reverend were standing around talking of tithing and giving to their respective places of worship. The priest drew a circle in the dirt and said, ‘I am going to throw all my change in the air and whatever falls in the circle, God can have. Whatever falls outside, is mine.’ The reverend says, ‘I will throw up my change and whatever falls outside the circle, God can have. Whatever falls inside, is mine.’ The rabbi says, ‘I will throw all my change in the air and whatever God wants he can keep and I’ll keep whatever comes back.” THE KAISER Michael Axelrod: ‘Here is one that illustrates the Eastern European outlook on life as absurd. In World War I Berlin, a man stands on a street corner shouting, ‘The Kaiser is an idiot!’ Immediately two members of the secret police appear out of nowhere and pounce on the poor dissenter, proceeding to arrest him for high treason. ‘But I was shouting about the Austrian Kaiser, not our Kaiser!’ ‘You can’t fool us! We know who the idiot is.” THE TALKING DOG Larry: ‘A guy is driving around Tennessee and he sees a sign in front of a house: ‘Talking Dog For Sale.’ He rings the bell and the owner tells him the dog is in the backyard. The guy goes into the backyard and sees a Labrador retriever sitting there. ‘You talk?’ he asks. ‘Yep,’ replies the Lab. ‘So, what’s your story?’ the guy asks. ‘The Lab looks up and says, ‘Well, I discovered that I could talk when I was pretty young. I wanted to help the government, so I told the CIA about my gift, and in no time at all they had me jetting from country to country, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders, because no one figured a dog would be eavesdropping. I was one of their most valuable spies for eight years running. But the jetting around really tired me out, and I knew I wasn’t getting any younger so I decided to settle down. I signed up for a job at the airport to do some undercover security wandering near suspicious characters and listening in. I uncovered some incredible capers and was awarded a batch of medals. I got married, had a mess of puppies, and now I’m just retired.’ ‘The guy is amazed. He goes back in and asks the owner what he wants for the dog. ”Ten dollars,’ the owner says. ”Ten dollars? This dog is amazing. Why on earth are you selling him so cheap?’ ”Because he’s a liar. He never did any of that.” THE SIMPSONS Douglas Schneller: ‘Well not so much jokes as humor. You can never go wrong with The Simpsons. Following are some of Homer’s gems: ‘Marge, I can’t wear a pink shirt to work. Everybody wears white shirts. I’m not popular enough to be different.” “Marge, don’t discourage the boy! Weaseling out of things is important to know. It’s what separates us from the animals. Except the weasel.” “I want to share something with you – the three sentences that will get you through life. Number one, ‘cover for me.’ Number two, ‘oh, good idea boss.’ Number three, ‘it was like that when I got here.'” “Lisa, if you don’t like your job you don’t strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the American way.” MATH FASHION Catherine Lyons: ‘Q: What did zero say to the number 8? A: ‘Nice belt.” THE REFRIGERATOR Doug Simpkinson: ‘This is my favorite joke, and I tell it whenever joke telling is encouraged: ‘Three guys die and go to heaven. St. Peter says, ‘Listen – we’re having a really busy century, so we need to manage admissions tightly. Right now we can only admit people who have died in horrible fashions, and those who have died in a more mundane way will have to wait in limbo, and it could take a decade or two to work you in.’ ‘So St. Peter takes aside the first man, and asks him how he died. ‘Well, I’d been suspicious of my wife having an affair for some time now, so today I came home from work early. I just knew the guy was in my apartment, but I couldn’t find him. I looked everywhere and was just about to give up, when I went out on the balcony of my 23rd story apartment and there he was hanging over the edge! He was just barely hanging on, there was no way he could climb back onto the balcony. It was a really stupid place to try to hide. I was livid, so I started punching him and clawing at his fingers, but he held on. Finally I went to get a hammer and started pounding on his fingers, and he fell down. But he landed in some bushes and fell to the ground dazed, but basically OK! I was so mad I grabbed the refrigerator, threw it off the balcony and it landed on him. But I was so riled up by the incident I had a heart attack and died.’ St. Peter is taken aback, and, given that this was second degree murder, sends him off to purgatory. He then approached the second man and asked him how he had died. ‘I was riding my exercise bike on the balcony of my 24th story apartment, when the thing broke and threw me over the railing. I just managed to catch on the balcony below mine. I tried to climb up but it just wasn’t possible. I thought I was going to fall but then someone came out on the balcony. I thought he would help me, until he started hitting me! I held on as best I could, but then he got a hammer and hit me some more until I finally couldn’t hold on any longer and fell. Somehow, though, I fell in some bushes, dazed, but basically OK! Just as I’m coming to, I look up and – BAM! – this refrigerator lands on me. So here I am.’ St. Peter immediately admitted this second man to heaven, and pulled aside the third man and asked him for his story. ”Picture this,’ the third man begins. ‘I’m hiding naked in a refrigerator . . . ‘ OBSCURANTIST Jayson Smith: ‘Two snowmen are walking through the forest. One of them stops and asks the other, ‘Hey, do you smell that?’ The other says, ‘Yeah. Carrots?” AND FINALLY Eric: ‘Q: What do you get when you cross a dyslexic with an insomniac with an agnostic? A: Someone who lies in bed at night wondering if there is a dog.’ Sorry about all that. Next week, back to money and politics.
Send Me Some Jokes October 6, 2005March 2, 2017 UNCONCERNED A Republican friend in California: ‘The deficits have never really concerned me, and most of them were racked up under Democratically controlled Congresses.’ ☞ The President sets the agenda, has the veto – can even (I think) fail to spend appropriated money. Surely if my Republican friend were right about this, most of the National Debt would have been racked up in periods when Democrats controlled not just the Congress but the White House as well – no? Yet of the nearly $10 trillion our National Debt will be by January of 2009, nearly $8 trillion of that will have been racked up by just three of our 43 presidents: Reagan, Bush and Bush. Even at today’s low interest rates, and with the National Debt at ‘only’ $8 trillion, the interest on the debt already equals a hair less than 40% of all the money we pay in personal income tax. Not a concern? At what point would it concern my friend? At 80%? At 130%? And what of China’s and our other creditors’ increasing leverage over us, their debtor? This is only a vague concern, if that, to most people. But one day, I fear, it may be the stuff of painful headlines. And speaking (cheerfully) of catastrophes . . . AVIAN FLU If you missed ‘Nightline’ on this topic last week (Nightline is rarely to be missed – why do you think God invented TiVo?), click here for Dr. Osterholm’s article in Foreign Affairs. Summary: If an influenza pandemic struck today, borders would close, the global economy would shut down, international vaccine supplies and health-care systems would be overwhelmed, and panic would reign. To limit the fallout, the industrialized world must create a detailed response strategy involving the public and private sectors. ‘Nightline’ left me wondering why we didn’t start work on this a year or two ago? Much the same infrastructure for avian flu would be required for biological terrorism. Was 9/11 not enough to get our government in gear? LIGHTEN UP I clearly need to. Send me some jokes. Not the one about ‘how many IS a Brazilian,’ but nothing dirty, either.
A DeLay in Our NTMD Profit? October 5, 2005January 17, 2017 TOM DELAY Jonathan Alter in the current Newsweek: A decade ago, I paid a call on Tom DeLay in his ornate office in the Capitol. I had heard a rumor about him that I figured could not possibly be true. The rumor was that after the GOP took control of the House that year, DeLay had begun keeping a little black book with the names of Washington lobbyists who wanted to come see him. If the lobbyists were not Republicans and contributors to his power base, they didn’t get into “the people’s House.” DeLay not only confirmed the story, he showed me the book. His time was limited, DeLay explained with a genial smile. Why should he open his door to people who were not on the team? Thus began what historians will regard as the single most corrupt decade in the long and colorful history of the House of Representatives. Come on, you say. How about all those years when congressmen accepted cash in the House chamber and then staggered onto the floor drunk? Yes, special interests have bought off members of Congress at least since Daniel Webster took his seat while on the payroll of a bank. And yes, Congress over the years has seen dozens of sex scandals and dozens of members brought low by financial improprieties. But never before has the leadership of the House been hijacked by a small band of extremists bent on building a ruthless shakedown machine, lining the pockets of their richest constituents and rolling back popular protections for ordinary people. These folks borrow like banana republics and spend like Tip O’Neill on speed. I have no idea if DeLay has technically broken the law. What interests me is how this moderate, evenly divided nation came to be ruled on at least one side of Capitol Hill by a zealot. This is a man who calls the Environmental Protection Agency “the Gestapo of government” and favors repealing the Clean Air Act because “it’s never been proven that air toxins are hazardous to people”; who insists repeatedly that judges on the other side of issues “need to be intimidated” and rejects the idea of a separation of church and state; who claims there are no parents trying to raise families on the minimum wage-that “fortunately, such families do not exist” (at least Newt Gingrich was intrigued by the challenges of poverty); who once said: “A woman can’t take care of the family. It takes a man to provide structure.” I could go on all day. Congress has always had its share of extremists. But the DeLay era is the first time the fringe has ever been in charge. The only comparison to DeLay Co. might be the Radical Republicans of the 1860s. But the 19th-century Radical Republican agenda was to integrate and remake the South. The 21st-century Radical Republican agenda is to enact the wish list of the tobacco and gun lobbies, repeal health and safety regulations and spend billions on shameless pork-barrel projects to keep the GOP at the trough. Another analogy is to Republican Speaker Joe Cannon, who ran the House with an iron fist a century ago. But Cannon had to contend with Progressive Republicans who eventually stripped him of his power. DeLay’s ruling radical conservative claque remains united, at least for now. Comparisons with fellow Texan Sam Rayburn fall short, too. Rayburn was respected on both sides of the aisle for his rock-solid integrity. He and most other House speakers carefully balanced their support for corporate interests like the oil depletion allowance with at least some sense of the public good. And they had to share much of their power with committee chairmen. Today, seniority is much less important. Chairmen are term-limited (six years) or tossed if they displease DeLay. And this crowd views “the public interest” as strictly for liberal pantywaists. How have they succeeded? A new book, Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy, by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, explains how the GOP is simply better than the Democratic Party at the basic blocking and tackling of politics, including the exploitation of cultural and religious issues. The authors argue that even if DeLay goes down, the zealotry and corporate shilling will continue as long as the GOP controls the House. Consider DeLay’s temporary replacement, Missouri Rep. Roy Blunt. The Washington Post reported last week that Blunt is respected by Republican members in part because he has “strong ties to the Washington lobbying community.” That’s a qualification for office? The only reason the House hasn’t done even more damage is that the Senate often sands down the most noxious ideas, making the bills merely bad, not disastrous. What next for the House of Shame? If DeLay’s acquitted, he’ll be back in power. If he’s convicted, his proteges will continue his work. Reform efforts by fiscal conservatives determined to curb their borrow-and-spend colleagues are probably doomed. The only way to get rid of the termites eating away the people’s House is to stamp them out at the next election. © 2005 Newsweek, Inc. NTMD The stock is back up to $20.54, not much lower than where it was when first mentioned here. To my guru’s surprise, some significant state Medicaid programs are covering BiDil, despite its costing thousands a year more than the generic alternative.* In Georgia, it’s covered with just a 50-cent co-pay. In Maryland, North Carolina and South Carolina, with a $3 co-pay. It is not covered by Virginia or Pennsylvania. Florida Medicaid will only pay if you jump through lots of hoops. This is good news for Nitromed (and bad news for our puts), but the question is whether it’s good enough news to make the company profitable one day. And if not, whether our puts will reflect that in time. (I’m selling my December puts and buying March puts to give me more time – but only, let me stress, as always, with money I can truly afford to lose.) The latest UBS-released IMS prescription data, flaky though they may be, show the 7-day rolling average for BiDil prescriptions at 103 a day as of October 2, of which 76 were new prescriptions (as opposed to refills). The bulls on this stock hope that, as Medicaid in many states makes this drug all but ‘free,’ those numbers will continue to rise. But will they rise enough to reach the 60,000 or so full-price patients the company needs to break even? Queried in response to this new information, and in response to a UBS-commissioned survey of doctors, my guru writes: ‘Bottom line: the UBS survey shows that there will be a significant shortfall in revenue compared to analysts assumptions even under the most optimistic assessment. More importantly, revenue should not come anywhere close to supporting profitability. Hold the course – the shorts will win.’ He’s usually right and will likely be right this time, too. But no one is right all the time. If he is right, but the stock spikes up further, it could offer another interesting opportunity to buy puts – with money you can truly afford to lose. * I am not a doctor, obviously. Nitromed bulls say there is no generic alternative. To match the dosage in the BiDil formulation, you’d actually have to cut pills in half. Well, I cut pills in half to save a lot less than $2,500 a year. But are all patients really identical? Don’t big ones need a higher dose than small ones? Is there something magic about the precise BiDil dosage? Was it tested against every other possible combination of dosages? Is it impossible that a generic manufacturer, seeing the demand, might in a year or two come out with a dosage that requires no cutting? Is it possible that, trying desperately to cut costs, and seeing BiDil on worstpills.org, Georgia and others might at some point change their generous coverage? I truly don’t know the answers to any of these things. But to a layman, they all seem possible.