Dicey DCTH Uh, oh. April 13, 2011March 24, 2017 ROW ROW ROW HER BOAT Susie Slanina: “In about 15 minutes [Susie wrote me last night], Roz Savage will start her row across the Indian Ocean. You can watch her travels live here.” ☞ Long-time readers may remember her last solo row, chronicled here exactly a year ago. Amazing. DELCATH Well, the real world is a lot messier than my fantasy world, where everything turns out right. Guru writes: “I’m afraid this one looks dicier and dicier. They had a conference call Monday night to discuss the FDA’s refuse-to-file letter. The issue is that the company appears to have understated the safety concerns with the procedure – a lot. The FDA is asking for a thorough analysis of every patient who has been in a trial of the product – 186 in total for Phase I, II, III – to get a comprehensive understanding of the risk/benefit. In the presentation at ASCO in 2010, there was efficacy data on 44/44 treated patients, but safety on only 40/44 treated patients. Meanwhile, there was no safety data reported for 27 placebo patients who crossed over. I hadn’t really noticed this ‘missing’ safety data, but it certainly appears the FDA HAS noticed it. . . . A review of earlier trials shows that the procedure often could result in complications because of where the catheters were placed (especially if not done correctly). The big problem for the company is that the design of the trial did not allow them to show a survival benefit, leaving them only with a claim for a delay in progression, while at the same time, the FDA is clearly seeing that there are lots of potentially serious safety issues with the procedure. . . . In February, DCTH said they would file their response at the end of the 3Q. Now they are saying at the end of the 4Q. DCTH continues to insist they will get CE Mark clearance to market the product in Europe. I’m having a conference call with a consultant on Wednesday, but it doesn’t make intuitive sense that the Europeans would overlook these issues. . . . Finally, the FDA approval of Yervoy, a therapy that has shown improvement in survival in melanoma, from Bristol Myers, will impact the potential market size for DCTH. . . . At this point, I’m not really sure if DCTH will get an FDA approval. I’m afraid I was much too bullish on this one last year. Very sorry about that.” ☞ So what to do? The stock was actually up yesterday, in a falling market, so not everyone on that conference call saw the nuances Guru did. But who knows? The risk is now greater than we thought – so I cut way back on my position yesterday. But if DCTH can find ways to satisfy the FDA, and perhaps improve training procedures for its technique, there could still be great potential. So I kept a little. THAT REPUBLICAN Fred Karger, the Republican presidential candidate I told you about Monday was interviewed on MSNBC yesterday morning and gave Mitt Romney a bit of a hard time. But that was nothing compared with what he wrote about Mike Huckabee: Does the name Willie Horton ring a bell? Sure, the murderer of a 16-year-old boy who then Governor Michael Dukakis let out of prison on a weekend furlough. While furloughed, Horton left Massachusetts and went to Maryland where he brutally attacked an innocent young couple in their home. Rape and torture went on 12 hours until Cliff Barnes, who was stabbed 22 times, managed to escape and called police. Horton was captured, went back to prison and two more lives were forever changed. I am very familiar with the case. I ran Committee for the Presidency on behalf of George HW Bush in 1988. We helped the victims of Willie Horton tell their stories. Now, 23 years later, former Governor Mike Huckabee finds himself in a similar situation, only worse. While governor of Arkansas, 11 years ago, Huckabee commuted the 108-year prison sentence of Maurice Clemmons. Clemmons then went on a crime spree and ended up in Seattle, Washington, where on 19 November 2010, he casually walked into a coffee shop early one morning and shot and killed four police officers while they were eating breakfast. He fired at point blank range, killing all four instantly. . . . ☞ Obviously, Fred Karger is not going to win the Republican nomination. But he could sure shake up the debates.
Tom Tommorow and the Spread of Terrible Ideas April 12, 2011March 24, 2017 PROCESSING YOUR GRANDMOTHER INTO A SNACK CRACKER Exaggerated for effect, but this really is how it works. (Click the cartoon to make it bigger.) It’s a Tom Tomorrow “occasional look at the ways in which really terrible ideas infect mainstream political discourse.” (I’ve got an idea! Why don’t we break the unions, cut taxes for the rich even MORE, end the minimum wage, and bring back child labor!) JOB CREATORS How is it conceivable that Apple and Fed Ex and Starbucks were founded – and created all those jobs – when tax rates were high? Why did Steve Jobs and the others even bother? Why would anyone start a new business, or hire a new worker, knowing that a slice of every additional $1 million in profits will get taxed away? What’s the point? Why even get up in the morning? It defies everything the Republicans insist is true. Did anyone work or start a new business or hire anyone in the Fifties, when the top tax bracket was 90%? In the Sixties and Seventies when it was 70%? How is it conceivable that 22 million jobs were added even as Bill Clinton was raising taxes on the wealthy? Not a single Republican voted for those tax hikes, because, they told us, taxing the wealthy would kill the economy and cause unemployment. They were spectacularly wrong; the Bush years totally sucked; the Clinton years brought unprecedented prosperity at all income levels. And yet the Republicans just keep coming. The way to cut our deficit, they say, is to tax the wealthy even more lightly than Bush did – Bush, who racked up trillions of dollars in new debt and handed Obama a baked-in $1.5 trillion budget deficit. Let me tell you what will happen if Congressman Paul Ryan succeeds in cutting my taxes $50,000: I will pay $50,000 less in taxes. (It’s not rocket science.) So a further $50,000 will be added to our National Debt. (Alternatively, $50,000 in benefits to the worst off will be cut, so I can grow richer while they struggle even more desperately; or $50,000 will be cut from our budget to secure loose nukes or our budget to keep our bridges from collapsing or our budget to keep our food supply safe.) I will not be hiring a new worker with that $50,000. What I might do with it is buy U.S. Treasury bonds – namely, the U.S. debt that giving-me-my-tax-cut created. (Well, somebody’s got to finance it.) So my balance sheet will be yet $50,000 more happily in the black, and Uncle Sam’s will be yet $50,000 more miserably in the red. Why would anyone listen to the Republicans when it comes to cutting taxes for the wealthy? It was a good idea when the top rate was 90% or 70% or even 50%, but they have long since overshot the mark, jumped the shark, shrunk the middle class, crippled our nation. Hello? See Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon, referenced above.
The Republican and the Penny Stock April 11, 2011March 24, 2017 THE FIRST DECLARED REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE If I were going to vote Republican in 2012 (I am so not going to), my candidate would be Fred Karger, a long-time Republican strategist who last month became the first challenger to file with the F.E.C. What’s cool about his candidacy is that he may well be included in the debates – and he would be the first openly gay candidate ever to attract that kind of national attention. It might make it harder for Republicans to continue to oppose his equal rights once he can respectfully challenge their rationale on national TV. THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL DEBT Joel Grow: “Another way to look at [your comment last Tuesday] . . . In just 20 years of Supply-Side under Reagan/Bush/Bush, they ran up 75% of the debt for our entire 233-year history. George W. ran up over 50% of our 233-year debt all on his own, and with a GOP Congress for 6 of his 8 years. Where were the deficit hawks then?*” ☞ Where indeed. The general notion of cutting taxes for the wealthy – even now! when we’re so deep in the hole! and when they’ve already been cut so far! – at the same time as they push to reduce home heating aid to the poor, defund environmental regulation, and cut funds for securing loose nukes . . . well, the Republicans have a strange set of priorities. *“Further,” Joel writes, “though very slowly raising the age for full Social Security benefits, and also very slowly raising the cap on income subject to Social Security taxes, are not outrageous ideas, the notion of including Social Security in the deficit reduction discussion is absurd. Social Security, an entity totally separate from all other government agencies, has run in the black and not contributed to the national debt. It has only very recently had to dip into its own huge surpluses because of the economic downturn. The US government has borrowed more from Social Security than from China (nearly twice as much, in fact) and the debt owed to Social Security is just as real as the debt owed to China, or to Wall Street bond investors.” MYLGF Guru told me about this one a few days ago, at 25 cents, but asked me not to tell you until he had established his fund’s full position, which he did at the end of last week. (Somehow, he feels his investors need to come before my readers – where does he get off?) By Friday, it had climbed to 37 cents. Needless to say, I would have preferred to tell you about it at 25 cents. Still, it’s worth passing on Guru’s view: “Target is $1 to $2 based on data at ASCO (abstracts out early May; full data in June) in lung and gastric cancer and an update in prostate cancer perhaps by the end of June. They have the same kind of molecule as EXEL, but the side-effect profile looks much better. About 360 million shares outstanding and a piggybank of $35 million in cash, so not as cheap as before but still a bargain.” ☞ As an MYLGF owner myself, I hope so. (Remember, if you buy penny stocks like, this to do so at a broker like Ameritrade or Fidelity, that will charge $8 to fill the order – even if you buy 100,000 shares – not some broker that charges 2 cents a share. And remember this, too: only speculate with money you can truly afford to lose.)
They Chose WHO to Look Out for the Water Your Children Drink and the Air They Breathe? Really??? April 8, 2011March 24, 2017 This clip is less than three minutes. In the specific, it tells the story of a 27-year-old college drop-out with two DUIs who beat out two other candidates to head up ‘environmental and regulatory affairs’ for an entire state – despite the fact that one of the other candidates for the $81,500 job has a doctorate, two masters degrees and 8 years’ direct relevant experience, while the other is a chemical engineer who has actually been doing the job for the last 8 years. But there is a much larger and crucially relevant point made in this elegant video essay – so I urge you to find two minutes and forty-one seconds to watch. Perhaps even right now. Indeed, I am so eager not to divert attention from this elegant video essay that I will put off to Monday telling you who my favored Republican candidate for President is . . . and some other stuff that will just have to wait. Have a great weekend. (And, yes, I know it should be ‘whom.’ But doesn’t knowing make it okay to flout the rules?)
I’m In April 7, 2011March 24, 2017 CBRX Two months ago: “Guru thinks it could be $5 within a year, so I bought a bunch yesterday at $2.55. Guru is often but not always right. So only with money you can truly afford to lose.” Last night, with CBRX closing at $4.10 in after-hours trading, Guru writes: “The data they presented look great.” PROCHIEVE, he thinks, will cut health care costs for some premature births. And it “reduced the incidence of respiratory distress syndrome by 60% – a huge finding, as this is a major source of morbidity and mortality among pre-term babies.” So despite the allure of a 60% two-month gain, I’m in no rush to sell. HE’S IN — RELUCTANTLY Ralph M.: “I’ll vote for Obama in 2012. What choice do I have? Yes, the GOP deserves all the bashing we can deliver. Especially, the new flim flam man, Paul Ryan. But good God, that doesn’t mean Alan Simpson and Erksine Bowles are a happy compromise. And you can’t bash Reagan and then ignore what Obama himself said during the campaign: I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. They felt like with all the excesses of the 60s and the 70s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think he tapped into what people were already feeling. Which is we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing. “Is there an implied criticism of Reagan in there somewhere that I missed?” ☞ I think his analysis of Reagan is accurate. I don’t think Senator Obama was saying he voted for Reagan himself or that he thought the path Reagan put us on has led us to a good place. And I also think it was not a bad idea, running for President, to show folks who did vote for Reagan (perhaps they thought the 70% top tax bracket was too high?) that you understand why they did and have some level of respect for their concerns. I think the President has been incredibly effective, given the necessity for 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate and the reality of an opposition party truly – and openly – dedicated to his failure. Which is why I’m in – 110%. HE’S NOT Abe: “Faced with grasping Republicans and scavenging Democrats, it matters little to the oligarchs that control them and hold them in thrall. I was taught to renounce evil and fight it in all of its forms. I will not now and never have voted for the ‘lesser’ of two evils. I will write myself in before I follow these folks into the pit of despair they offer. Go out and look up the song ‘Mercy Now’ on you tube and listen carefully.” ☞ Love the song, but (it won’t surprise you to know) I don’t see Obama as evil, I see him as a hero. A leader of exceptional intelligence, level-headedness, dignity, and determination. Fighting to provide health insurance to everyone in that song (for example), not to take it away. (Under the new Paul Ryan plan to privatize Medicare, “A typical 65-year-old with a private health-insurance plan covering standard Medicare benefits,” Time quotes the CBO, “could be liable for 61% of his or her total health care costs in 2022.”) I don’t think of Abraham Lincoln as having been evil, either, even though he took three years to free the slaves, and then only some of them. By requiring the perfect rather than the possible, we squander the opportunity to do good. The perfect is the enemy of the good. And, as it’s often said, all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men – like Abe – to do nothing. Which is why, I say again, I’m in – 110%. RALPH AGAIN Ralph M.: “Look, I’m not a fire-breathing Chomskyite out on the left fringe, I am just a liberal. And I have to say that many of us liberals are very suspicious of President Obama, not because he isn’t up against the craziest party of modern times, but because it’s never clear just what it is he would want to see happen if he weren’t up against recalcitrant wingnuts.” ☞ If so, we need to communicate better. (And, yes, I do think we need to communicate better.) But to a lot of us, it IS pretty clear what he would like to see happen. For example, he said that, if we were starting from scratch, he would want a single-payer health insurance system. That’s a clear statement. (Equally clear is that we were not starting from scratch.) He also clearly favored the public option. But, again, you really, really, really need 60 Senate votes to pass laws – and the other party would not allow a public option. He wanted to see the wealthy pay more tax on their investment income in order to provide health insurance to 30+ million uninsured without adding to the deficit – and got that. He wanted to see Guantanamo closed – but on that one, he couldn’t get more than 6 Senate votes. He wanted to save the American auto industry – and did, at what may ultimately be a profit to the American taxpayer. He wanted to avert a Depression, and did. He wants innovation and infrastructure and an educational race to the top – an emphasis on smart investments to rejuvenate our economy for the challenges ahead. He wanted a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and wanted Elizabeth Warren to shape it – and got them. And credit card reform. And more affordable college loans, cutting out the financial intermediary. And got them. He wanted the victims of the BP oil spill to get compensated without having to wait years and incur legal fees. He wanted to sign the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law. And to end combat operations in Iraq. And only to go into Libya with the support of virtually the entire world. And got all that done. He wanted to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell – and did. He wanted two more women on the Supreme Court – Justices likely to vote against corporate-skewed decisions like Citizens United, that he openly (and clearly) deplored. And on and on. If the President could do anything he wanted, I think he’d do almost all the things you’d like to see done. Starting with campaign finance reform. think it’s actually not all that hard to know what the President would like to get done if he didn’t face an opposition party openly dedicated to assuring his failure. To my mind, he’s doing a phenomenal job and deserves our enthusiastic support. If only we had known how high the stakes were when (with all due respect to those who believe George W. Bush gave us peace and prosperity and raised our stature in the world) we didn’t fight quite hard enough for Al Gore. We can’t let that happen again, which is why I’m in – 110%.
Are You In? April 6, 2011March 24, 2017 The Republicans have offered a plan to weaken our social safety net while slashing taxes on the last few million dollars that you earn (from 35% to 25%) – even lower than Reagan’s top rate. When Reagan took office, our National Debt had, over 35 years of fiscal discipline, been whittled down from the 121% of GDP it had been following World War II to just 30%. Largely through reckless tax policy, Reagan and the two Bushes allowed it to ramp back up to 100% of GDP – and soaring – by the time they handed the reins to Obama. This despite the fact that Clinton put the brakes on the Debt, restored prosperity, and handed Bush 43 “surpluses as far as the eye could see.” Abandon the poor, squeeze the middle class, oppose the minimum wage, break the unions, bring back child labor, help the rich. If those are your priorities – along with crumbling infrastructure and unrestricted gun-show machine-gun sales – the G.O.P. has your name on it. My jaw drops at your world view, but all the best to you. My view is that Democrats have a better, more balanced vision . . . and that our President has shown himself to be a heroically steady, thoughtful leader who – against intractable opposition from across the aisle (and no shortage of challenges abroad) – has set the country on a dramatically better course than the one he inherited. I am unabashedly enthusiastic about his newly-announced candidacy for 2012. In short . . . I’m in. Are you? Click the link and pass it on.
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert And Climate Change Deniers April 5, 2011March 24, 2017 WHEN PUSH COMES TO GLEE Ralph Sierra: “I admit to having a less sunny outlook on the future of mankind than you, but we both watch ‘60 Minutes’ (which is a good thing), so I assume you saw “Gospel for Teens” Parts 1 and 2 Sunday night. I thought you might comment on them because they were the most uplifting shows I have seen in a long time.” ☞ Uplifting indeed. Push (later made into the movie “Precious”) meets “Glee.” GREEN IT. MEAN IT. That “Glee” hyperlink led me to Glee Earth Day Tips. (Did you know that 90% of washing-machine energy consumption goes to heating the water? Using the WARM or even the COLD setting when appropriate can save most of that.) And that link led me to Fox’s Green It, Mean It video. Can you believe it? Fox? It is downright bizarre for Newscorp to be working so hard simultaneously to save and destroy the environment. (Here’s Paul Krugman on the climate-change deniers. In tiny part: “. . . Just a few weeks ago Anthony Watts, who runs a prominent climate denialist Web site, praised the Berkeley project and piously declared himself ‘prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.’ But never mind: once he knew that [their result did prove his premise wrong], Mr. Watts dismissed the hearing as ‘post normal science political theater.’ . . . [I]t’s worth stepping back for a moment and thinking not just about the science here, but about the morality . . .”) GLEE NOT GAY ENOUGH FOR YOU? They’ve turned “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” into a Broadway musical of the same name so over the top I decided to just get over my masculinity issues and cheer for the drag queens along with everybody else. “Performed with GLEAMING VERVE! Every conceivable surface has been decked with SEQUINS, spattered with COLORED LIGHTS, or trimmed in FEATHERS and FRINGE.” – So said the New York Times . . . or so the show’s producers were able to excerpt a generally downbeat review. But let’s face it: the Times has a higher brow than I do. There should be a little footnote with each Times review: “inexplicably, the audience was hugely entertained” or (in the case of one masterpiece I saw on the strength of the Times’ rave years ago): “inexplicably, its genius seemed entirely lost on the audience.” (When I found out that the play was not over after the second excruciating act – that this was merely an intermission before what was to be a third act – I got the first and only migraine of my life.) Variety (which knows a little about Broadway, too): Priscilla, a tricked-up tour bus with a shoe on the roof, rolls onto the stage of the Palace Theater to roars from the audience, and proceeds to turn, twist and light up pink and purple. And then does it again (and again and again). So goes the brashly good-natured Aussie musical to which the bus lends its name, ‘Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,’ which, born from Stephan Elliott’s 1994 film, seems destined to follow the path of ‘Mamma Mia!’ Inartful here, crass there, this rollicking crowd pleaser in sequins nonetheless packs enough heart to leave the masses enthralled. . . . Show arrives as an international hit, following stints in Australia, New Zealand, London and Toronto; one can easily anticipate “Priscilla” rolling into major capitals across the world as quickly as they can procure enough feathers. For all the glitz, though — and there is a lot of glitz — there’s a heart ticking true beneath it all, and that should earn “Priscilla” a long and profitable run at the Palace, with the merchandise stand doing big business in purple boas. ☞ Full disclosure: I have no stake in the merchandise stand but a friend is one of the producers.
User Friendly Technology April 4, 2011March 24, 2017 “SOURCE CODE” It’s not “The King’s Speech” – but this is one good movie! ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER So I got the HTC Thunderbolt, as previously boasted, and that meant I needed to sync it with my Outlook contacts, which is not a particularly easy thing to find out how to do (why?), which meant having to buy CompanionLink for Outlook, which told me that – because I have more than 5,000 contacts to sync – it could corrupt the data on my PC so I should definitely make a fresh backup of my .pst file (which of course I do try regularly to do), but Outlook is not easy to back up if your .pst file has grown over 4GB because – although the error message doesn’t tell you this (and certainly doesn’t tell you how to solve it) – you can’t copy files over 4GB to hard drives that come in FAT32 format (as all do) until you reformat them in NTFS format (which is easy to do once you know that you need to and someone tells you how, but which also means wiping out all your other data on that drive so you may as well blow $50 on a new 16GB flash drive, because if you have more than 5,000 Outlook contacts you probably also have more than $50 – guilty as charged). Are you with me so far? So now, having reformatted the 16GB flash drive to NTFS, you actually can back up your over-large .pst file, but it would never have grown to exceed 4GB if you had compacted your file from time to time, which Outlook never urges you to do (even when it knows you are nearing the 4GB limit), let alone does for you automatically (as in, why on earth would you not want to compact your data?). I could swear I’ve written about this before but Googling my own web site produces no results, so let me tell you again: when you delete stuff in Outlook – spam, for example – it does not shrink your file. Indeed, even when you go to the “Deleted Items” folder and delete them there, permanently, for real, it doesn’t shrink the file. The file has holes where all these thousands of items used to be, but unless you compact the file, it will not shrink in size. So the thousands of emails I had deleted since the last time I remembered to compact my Outlook file? Still taking up space. But it seems you can’t compact a file once it gets above 4GB – or at least it wouldn’t let me do that – so I Googled this question: “How do I shrink a .pst file over 4GB?” and was presented with an answer – but was told that to actually get that answer I would have to join Experts Exchange for $12.95 a month, although I could cancel without obligation within 30 days. So I signed up (the user testimonials are glowing, and its structure is interesting) and my expert suggested I get this software for $79 – do you hear the patter of light rain on your roof? it’s actually the sound of hundreds of fingers tapping their keyboards: Get a Mac! – and even that was not so easy, because first it downloads a demo and then when you pay the $79 it tells you need to completely uninstall the demo before downloading the real version (they couldn’t figure out a way to do that for you?), and then the real version asks for your PayPal transaction number – which it will reject if, in cutting and pasting it, a blank space gets appended – and then it promises to send you the authentication code without which you can’t proceed (and which Outlook will probably divert to your spam folder, so keep an eye out for it). So you run that program and it strips the “attachments” from your zillion emails and puts them in a separate file – the software, it turns out, doesn’t actually compact your file by filling the holes, only Outlook can do that – and that attachment-stripping shrinks your 4.06GB .pst file by more than 90%, so you are finally ready to make your back up (which you actually already did with the reformatted flash drive, but it’s easy to lose track) and to sync your contacts with your HTC Thunderbolt (bet you had forgotten all about that!) . . . which you decide to do in the morning, because you’ve had enough for one night, and when you return in the morning you discover that Outlook has gone and downloaded (from where?) more than 50,000 messages you had previously dealt with over the past year or two, and they are now all marked “unread” (so you can’t tell the recent ones you need to deal with from the ones you already had dealt with) and your .pst file had now grown to be more than five gigabytes. And that, my friends, is why there will be no column today.
Child Labor You Gotta Love Those Republican Governors April 1, 2011March 24, 2017 I was going to give us the day off (in honor of fools everywhere), but then I saw this Rachel Maddow clip. One way to increase investor wealth is to bring back child labor. Another forward-looking Republican initiative. Watch.
Crocs Now, Too? March 31, 2011March 22, 2017 Kathy Thatte: ‘It’s hard to tell without being able to see the rest of the tree, but your friends’ ‘happy tree‘ looks like some type of Calliandra.’ Robert Merrill: ‘I suspect I am about the hundredth person to come up with Powder Puff as the Happy Tree’s more common (but not necessarily better) name. [Meanwhile], just around the corner (relatively speaking) from your friends’ farm is Everglades National Park. When visitors want to see the beauty of South Florida beyond the beach, I usually suggest the park. The $10 entry fee is a great value, and the park is one of the few places in the US where crocodiles live. I think the dry season (winter) is best because the more common alligators congregate in good numbers around water near the trails. The alligators are literally right at your feet. I like to see what famous last words visitors can come up with standing next to an alligator. ‘They’re more afraid of you than you are of them.’ ‘Get in closer; it’s sleeping.’ You get the idea.’ 9 MINUTES WITH RACHEL So Republicans hope to deal with joblessness by cutting unemployment benefits. And to pay for corporate tax cuts by cutting food stamps. Rachel Maddow and Dean Baker argue that these are not good ideas. Watch.