Author: A.T.

I was about to sell my dreadful little shares in ETRM for a tax loss* — they were down from 90 cents where I had suggested them to you, to 11 cents — when it occurred to me that everyone else was doing the same thing, to nail down their tax losses, which was one reason, perhaps, the shares were so cheap.

So I bought a bunch instead.  No tax loss for me from ETRM this year; but Guru says, “Well, the company has a real product and they ‘should’ be able to sell the company for something like a triple from here.”  That’s still a far cry from where he first liked it.  And the quotation marks around “should” are not to be taken lightly.  But a triple is a triple, whether it’s from 90 cents to $2.70 or 11 cents to 33.  So we’ll see.  Only with money we can truly afford to lose — as evidenced by the severe paper losses already suffered on this stock.  (Unless you were smarter than me and sold when it hit $2.24 less than a year after I suggested it.)

The larger point is that this a good week to take a look at losers in your portfolio and possibly “harvest” losses to lower your 2015 tax bill . . .

. . . yet also an interesting time to look for bargains that tax-selling may have created.

Or sell some of the former to switch into some of the latter.

It’s no sure way to make money — stocks beaten down by tax selling can get further beaten down by whatever ailed them in the first place; and then disappear altogether.  (From what I read on the chat boards, about the only truly impressive thing ETRM management does well is: overpay themselves.)  Indeed, “disappear altogether” seems to be exactly what will happen to our SIGA shares in the wake of last week’s long-awaited Delaware Supreme Court ruling.  To think that we could have sold at $14 for a quick double years ago is almost enough to make me crazy.  It is at times like these I have to remind myself, as I used to remind Charles: We have hot water.  As much as we want!  Any time we want it!!   What a time to be alive.  And still:  What a disaster.  “I’m so sorry for your loss!” takes on a whole new meaning in this context.  But I am.

All that said, would this be a time to buy a little GLDD?  A little PRMRF?  A little BOREF?  Each under $5?  Check back with me in a year or two and we’ll know.

*Capital losses cancel out capital gains; and to the extent they exceed gains cancel up to $3,000 a year in ordinary income, with any further excess carried over to future years. But beware the “wash sale” rule: if you bought the same shares within 30 days — before or after — you sold them for a loss, the loss is deferred until you sell the newer shares.  (By contrast, there is no wash sale rule on gains.  Sell at a profit, buy back even moments later: the gain is fully taxable.) 

Here is the Air Force band reprising 1940s Jingle Bells in Union Station.  So fun.  (Thanks, Mel!)

This one is lively and gay, Out of the Blue, from Oxford: “Santa Baby!”  Too much?  Come on — don’t be a grinch.

And here you can teach your dogs to play the piano.  I hope they’re better than these two.

But if you really want some holiday cheer this holiday weekend, watch last Friday’s press conference, in which it becomes clear that the world has not gone to hell over the last seven years.  Quite the contrary.

There is so much here that is calm, steady, thoughtful, civil, and rational.

All I want for Christmas is another year of such leadership — and then eight more.

Whatever your faith or lack thereof . . . have a wonderfully Merry Christmas.

Cheers!

The Republican front-runner is undeniably crude and vulgar — not merely in private as LBJ, say, or Nixon were, but on TV, 24/7, everywhere.

And it matters, because it cheapens the presidency, coarsens the discourse, erodes civility, feeds resentment, stokes prejudice, and seemingly rewards a bully.  (His numbers are yuuuuge!)

What’s more, according to Politifact, he is a colossal liar.

PolitiFact has been documenting Trump’s statements on our Truth-O-Meter, where we’ve rated 76 percent of them Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire, out of 77 statements checked. . . . In considering our annual Lie of the Year, we found our only real contenders were Trump’s . . .

He won’t win, but the damage he’s doing won’t be quickly undone.

(And, yes, while ISIS may or may not ever themselves produce a specific Trump recruitment video, it strains credulity to think they would not be pointing to Trump videos available on every network and cable channel that covers the news.  Especially here in the U.S., where they would most like to radicalize young people and where we’d most urgently like to see them not.  What young Muslim American likely hasn’t seen Trump nonstop?)

It won’t be Trump, but if it were . . . well, this Politico piece is completely fascinating.  (Thanks, Pete!)  It predicts a GOP-led third-party run against him.

(And by the way?  Senator Cruz, I’m sorry to say, is just as bad.  Just differently.)

Star Wars?  Eh.  Harrison Ford was good — especially as a sequel to this bit you probably saw with Stephen Colbert — but a seventh one of these?  Really?  OK.  I’ve only spoken to two other (much younger) friends who’ve seen it but both felt about the same way.

The Big Short, by contrast, is so so so so so so good.  And important!  Everyone involved in the disaster — especially the bankers and rating agency executives and mortgage brokers and non-bank bankers — should be forced to see it with their children, wearing hoodies emblazoned: I DID THIS AND ESCAPED PROSECUTION.

This short piece by David Ignatius — though in some ways critical of the President — nails it.

President Obama gave a speech Tuesday at the National Archives that stood in almost perfect counterpoint to the Republican[s]: Against the rising GOP tide of anger toward immigrants, Obama anchored himself among the historical documents that define American tolerance.

. . .

Certainly this was a year in which the president delivered on the rationalist’s agenda, against intense emotional opposition. He achieved an Iran nuclear deal that was bitterly opposed by Israel and the GOP; a Trans-Pacific Partnership on trade rejected by much of his own party; a normalization of relations with Cuba that broke a national political taboo; and a climate change agreement that triumphed over a right-wing cult of rejecting scientific evidence.

This was a good year, you might conclude, for fact-based governance.. . . It’s a paradox that Obama can have so many successes, and yet be seen by some at home and abroad as weak.

. . .

From his first year in office, Obama encountered a raw rejectionism from the Republican right; it wasn’t just criticism of his policies but a challenge to the very legitimacy of his presidency. Many details were fabricated, such as the allegation that he was secretly a Muslim, or that he had been born outside the United States. Yet these themes were repeated so often on conservative talk radio and cable news that they began to constitute an alternative reality.

. . .

Obama has a year remaining in which to craft his message better, so that it reassures and galvanizes a frightened country. That’s his biggest challenge — governing in the age of anxiety.

Worth reading the whole thing.

And here is the President’s own Top Ten List for 2015 — with reason to be hopeful for 2016.  Not to be missed.

In its battle to shift ever more wealth and power to the top tenth of one percent,* the right now has a new case pending before the Supreme Court: Evenwel v. Abbott, as explained here in the New York Times.  Way more important, even, than Citizens United.

In small part:

The court’s decision in the case, expected by June, has the potential to shift political power from urban areas to rural ones, a move that would provide a big boost to Republican voters in state legislative races in large parts of the nation.

The basic question in the case, Evenwel v. Abbott, No. 14-940, is who must be counted in creating voting districts: all residents or just eligible voters? Right now, all states and most localities count everyone.

The difference matters because people who are not eligible to vote — children, immigrants here legally who are not citizens, unauthorized immigrants, people disenfranchised for committing felonies, prisoners — are not spread evenly across the country. With the exception of prisoners, they tend to be concentrated in urban areas.

Their presence amplifies the voting power of eligible voters in those areas, usually helping Democrats. Rural areas that lean Republican, by contrast, usually have higher percentages of eligible voters.

Why should children be counted in determining the population of a district?  They are so small!  Maybe, at most, count them as three-fifths of a person?

And that’s the point: when the Founding Fathers drew up the Constitution, they excluded women and children and guys without property from the vote — but said that any free person (including indentured servants but not including untaxed native Americans) — and three-fifths of each slave — should be represented: i.e., counted in determining the size of a Congressional district.

Now — at least for the purposes of determining state legislative districts — comes Sue Evenwel before the Supreme Court to argue that, no, only eligible voters should be counted.  Which in a state like Florida, for example, would exclude about a quarter of all African Americans, who are currently ineligible because they had felony convictions at some point in their lives.  (A 2016 ballot initiative could conceivably change that.)

What’s more, if the Court were to decide that states could count only eligible voters when apportioning representatives, might Republican legislators at some point not try to apportion state and federal funds (for highways, schools, etc.) equally among districts?  Which would mean less money per capita for poorer districts than for wealthy ones?**

It’s a rotten piece of work, but just the kind of thing you can imagine some of this Court’s Justices — like the ones who gutted the Voting Rights Act or who gave the Presidency to George W. Bush or who blew up campaign finance law with Citizens United and McCutcheon — cottoning to.

As Supreme Court Justices are generally assumed to take popular sentiment into account, we need to spend the next several months going crazy.

Hue!  Cry!

Spread the word!

*Dropping the top rate on dividends from 90% under Eisenhower to 15% under Bush; pushing to eliminate Reagan’s 55% estate tax on billionheirs, empowering corporations with Citizens United; gutting the Voting Rights Act; multiplying by 50 what the rich can give in federal campaign contributions.

**The Fourteenth Amendment: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” Certainly, children and those who’ve been convicted of a marijuana possession, etc., are  citizens.  Not counting them as legislative districts are drawn gives them (and the others in their district) less power.  By way of illustration, imagine a state that provided one representative per 30,000 eligible voters. One district is comprised entirely of seniors living on golf courses (whose folks had been able to buy them out of felony marijuana-possession charges when they were at Dartmouth) . . . so there are 30,000 of them with one representative. And another has 90,000 people, 60,000 of them children and felons. They, too, get just one representative — a third the political representation per capita of their neighbors. A third is not equal. Neither is three-fifths.

Here’s the story, posted a couple of hours ago by DNC executive director Amy Dacey.

It’s important to stress that Senator Sanders had nothing to do with the misconduct and was doubtless as shocked and dismayed as everyone else once it came to light.  But the DNC did just what it should have in this situation.

After all, can you imagine how loudly — and justifiably — Sanders supporters would have howled if it had been the Clinton team who’d done this to them instead of vice versa?

I love this story: a family of elephants who literally come walk through a Zambian hotel lobby each year.  How they’ve forgiven us humans I’ll never know.  (Thanks, Mel!)

Get plenty of sleep, plenty of moderate exercise — walk a lot! — don’t eat much (saves time, money, and the planet), but do eat loads of raw fruit and vegetables . . . avoid stress, even as you engage in mankind’s struggle . . . but as to the rest?  The vitamin supplements, anti-oxidants and all that?  Consider The Science Myths That Will Not Die, from Nature, The International Weekly Journal of Science.  It may save you money.  (Thanks, Jim!)

Peter: “WheelTug would have prevented this gruesome tragedy yesterday: Man Dies After Being Sucked Into Aircraft Engine At Mumbai Airport.”

☞ Yikes.

I botched yesterday’s link to the family of elephants who, quite wonderfully, show up in a Zambian hotel lobby each year; but the estimable Paul Lerman had no trouble accessing it anyway — and reports that it brought immediately to mind an Elizabeth Taylor film in which elephants walk through a different lobby, and in a decidedly less affable way.  Trailer here.

Have a great weekend,

Monday: Evenwel.

. . . filled with sand, laid on their side like bricks . . . look! . . . fire-proof, bullet-proof and allegedly 20 times as strong as brick.  All at a quarter the cost of regular homes.

Waste not, want not.

Long-time readers know the WheelTug story and may even have bet — with money they can truly afford to lose — on a few shares of its grandparent, Borealis.

As usual, “the project inches along.”  And, I like to think, attracts ever broader interest.

Toward which end, whether at the Paris Air Show this past summer or the e-taxi conference I attended last spring, or wherever else, they’re always looking for clever ways to demonstrate their value proposition: saving airlines and their passengers what could ultimately be 20 minutes per flight.

And so I share herewith “As the Aircraft Turns” — a presentation made to considerable applause at Marketforce two weeks ago.

To quote the producers — tongues firmly in cheek — “As the Aircraft Turns is ultimately a tale of redemption. However, like all great epics, there is uncommon pleasure in the journey, not just the destination.”