WATCH The Plane Move May 21, 2007March 6, 2017 THE BEST POSSIBLE HOTEL PRICE I can’t believe there are still people who book hotel rooms without ‘naming their own price’ at Priceline.com – ah, the profligate traveler. (The two exceptions: if you need a specific hotel, not just a specific neighborhood; or if plans might change, as the Priceline charge is nonrefundable.) Well, for us Priceline enthusiasts, there’s a way to beat Priceline at its own game, as detailed here. Basically, the notion is to start your bidding way low, then gradually increase it (he uses $1 increments, but it would be a lot faster, at little extra cost, to jump $5 at a time). Normally, Priceline makes you wait a day to re-bid. Those of us who use it regularly have figured out the obvious way around that – add a neighborhood, so it’s not an identical search, and you can re-bid right away. But all hail Matt Markovich of KOMO-TV (or whoever he learned this from) for taking this to a whole new level. WHAT THE PROSECUTOR SCANDAL REALLY IS Writes Marie Cocco: It is time to stop referring to the “fired U.S attorneys scandal” by that misnomer, and call it what it is: a White House-coordinated effort to use the vast powers of the Justice Department to swing elections to Republicans. FALWELL ‘I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!’ – the late Reverend Falwell, as quoted in Bill Press’s column. Bill goes on to write: In 2000, Falwell even said that Christians had a moral duty to vote for George W. Bush over fellow Christian Al Gore. . . . In the end, that was Jerry Falwell’s undoing. He tied his faith so closely to politics that he cheapened religion and made all evangelicals look like puppets of the Republican party. Falwell, in fact, redefined Christianity so narrowly and so politically, that if Jesus Christ himself came back today, he wouldn’t qualify for membership. ☞ And then there is this pitch-perfect column from the Miami Herald, about Jerry Falwell’s finest hour (a day in 1999) – but noting, in broader context, that ‘[Reverend Falwell] had an uncanny ability to miss the moment. Time after time when great issues of the day demanded moral leadership, the founder of the Moral Majority proved himself bereft of same.’ (As when he supported Apartheid.) AND WHILE I AM GOING STRAIGHT TO HELL . . . You will not find a more blunt assessment than Christopher Hitchens’s, in this Anderson Cooper interview. BUT IF GOD HATES ME, WHY DOES GLDD KEEP GOING UP? The stock and warrants gained another half buck Friday. Maybe something’s going on, or maybe the stock is up simply in the wake of its first quarterly report filed last week. Revenues were up 16% from the prior year’s first quarter, the prior year’s loss was flipped to a modest profit, and the backlog of business jumped 30%. All this before the hoped-for return to normalcy in U.S. dredging activity (cut by 50% the last several years because of budget constraints from the Iraq war). So something specific may be happening, or maybe it’s nothing more than some mutual fund manager, with billions to invest, picking up a couple million shares – pocket change. I’m not selling any of my warrants that haven’t gone long-term (and in hindsight, of course, I’m sorry to have sold even those) . . . although we need now to pay attention to the terms of the warrant, which allow forced conversion if the stock stays above $8.50 for 20 consecutive business days (as outlined here). I’ll try to make sense of that in the coming days and offer suggestions. BOREF Well, for what it’s worth, you can now watch the plane move, on YouTube. I doubt you will be able to judge from the video whether this is really viable. I certainly couldn’t. But Delta may have that competence – and they seem enthusiastic about the prospects.