Imagine August 2, 2007January 6, 2017 MY NET WORTH Kathi Derevan: ‘How odd! Yours is exactly the same as mine!’ . . . IS FALLING FAST Emerson Schwartzkopf: ‘Remember those days when your book, The Invisible Bankers, went for something like $600 a copy on eBay? It’s offered today as a Buy It Now item for $0.01, plus $3.50 for S&H. I don’t think that’s as painful, however, as a signed copy of Money Angles going for $0.99. Luckily, Fire and Ice (which is my favorite of yours) is still commanding $19.95 in hardback, although someone’s come up with a gimmick of including a tube of Revlon’s Fire and Ice lipstick in the deal.’ ☞ A penny for my thoughts. Plus shipping and handling. FMD HAS BEEN FALLING, TOO Dan Flikkema: ‘Has your guru had anything to say about First Marblehead lately?’ ☞ Still loves it, owns a ton. Hope he’s right. My guess is that he is . . . but all the usual caveats apply. This is risky. GLDD Steve Miller: ‘Another few million shares of GLDD hit the exchange in a secondary offering today, sending the stock down to $7.78. Is this a buying opportunity?’ ☞ I hope so – though not for me; I already have a ton of it. I think it’s a strong, reasonably conservative, three-year bet. Not on margin or with emergency money or any of that, obviously. But as one of ten stocks? Yes. Dredging isn’t sexy, but it needs to get done, and GLDD is arguably in the best position to do it. And while we’re at it . . . HAPNW and AII+ These warrants could prove worthless, but I continue to think they’re good speculations. SiCKO and the SiMPSONS Look at this! SiCKO is still steady at 8.5 stars, while The Simpsons has slipped to 8.4 –SiCKO is back on top as the most-liked movie out there. (That link happens to be to a theater in a liberal zip code, but the ratings are from IMDB.com users nationwide.) Get thee to a Cineplex. And now . . . IMAGINE Here is Brent Budowsky in The Hill yesterday: Gordon Brown for President By Brent Budowsky August 01, 2007 Effective [Tuesday], British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is the leader of the free world and the voice of hope and change that offers the first true answer of freedom to the heinous crimes of Sept. 11, 2001. In his brilliant and comprehensive comments at Camp David, Brown spoke to the aspirations of overwhelming majorities of Americans, Britons and other men and women throughout the democratic world. In Brown’s vision, Afghanistan, not Iraq, is the central military battleground in the fight against terrorism; and hope, not fear, is the central weapon in the great battle of ideas that will determine who prevails in the great conflict of our times. In Gordon Brown’s world, for the first time since Sept. 11, world leaders would lead, with an all-out attempt to seek a comprehensive peace in the Middle East that offers young men and women the aspiration of a life free from endless war, hunger, injustice, corruption, despotism and disease that are terrorism’s greatest allies. In Gordon Brown’s strategy, world leaders issue a global call to action to deal with poverty and AIDS, to protect the world from global warming and save the world from deadly dependence on oil, to take a moral and aggressive stand against genocide in Darfur and to mobilize what Thomas Jefferson would call the decent opinion of men and women everywhere. What a powerful contrast with the world of George W. Bush, in which Iraq is treated as our 51st state, the only nation in the world, and an obsession that deforms the force structures of our military, bitterly divides our people and thoroughly dominates our national life… Imagine what is possible with an America that is united and at the forefront of the causes that move humanity at the beginning of the 21st century. Imagine an America that is not all Iraq, all the time, debating timelines and torture, dealing with virtually no other global issue of our age, held hostage by a president who is obsessed with a war without end that he appears driven to continue in perpetuity, while he imprisons a great nation in a political torture chamber that has deformed our democracy and done grave damage to our national interest. Imagine: an American president who would speak as Gordon Brown speaks, and do what Gordon Brown proposes to do!… Budowsky was an aide to former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen and to Bill Alexander, then-chief deputy whip of the House. He is a contributing editor to Fighting Dems News Service. He can be read on The Hill’s Pundits Blog and reached at brentbbi@webtv.net.