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Indymacs Michael Perry Has the Toughest Job in America
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Elvis Costello Plans Tv Variety Show
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Chesapeake Energy and Aubrey Mcclendon Masters of the Power Play
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Boone Pickens, like Ross Perot, has a plan to save America (Muckety)
Maybe there is something in the Dallas water that makes Big D billionaires want to save the country from itself.
Today, T. Boone Pickens launched his campaign — Pickensplan.com — to wean the U.S. from foreign oil. Last month, Ross Perot gave us Perotcharts.com to warn about impending doom from massive government budget deficits. On their Web sites, both go on camera to sell their ideas.
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MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.Pickens, essentially, wants to use more wind to generate electricity, thereby freeing natural gas to use as a transportation fuel. He has business interests in both wind and natural gas vehicle fuels.
He says the energy switchover can be accomplished with the right leadership. Neither presidential candidate has addressed the problem yet, he says. He intends to put the topic in play.
He ran full-page ads in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and other newspapers today, touting his plan. Bloomberg reported that he has spent $10 million on the campaign launch.
USA Today said Pickens’ effort “will be the biggest public policy ad campaign ever.” A Pickens’ aide told the paper that Pickens will be on TV this fall almost as much as Barack Obama and John McCain.
Pickens told The Dallas Morning News that his effort is not about personal gain, but about patriotism and getting something done that needs to be done.
“I’m 80 years old,” he said. “I’m worth $4 billion. I don’t need to make any more money.”
Pickens and Perot live less than two miles apart in Dallas.
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Ka-Pow! Thwap! Marvel faces ownership fight for Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk
Marvel Comics’ transformation from a bankrupt company with a dusty library of 5,000 superheroes in 1998 into a booming entertainment conglomerate that produced its first self-made movies this year was a real-life metamorphosis.
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MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.After last month’s release of “The Incredible Hulk,” a gushing story in Portfolio asked, “Is Marvel the next Magic Kingdom?”
The Wall Street Journal trumpeted the $500-million-plus receipts from “The Iron Man,” starring Robert Downey Jr. as the first sign of “the company’s transition from a licenser of its comic-book superheroes to an independent film studio that can build its characters into full-fledged franchises.”
Adding to the buzz was news of the first-ever Marvel Theme Park slated to open in 2011, a $1-billion project undertaken in Dubai in partnership with the Al Ahli Group, a developer in the United Arab Emirates.
“Creating their own studio is the best idea Marvel has had since the creation of Spider-Man,” Jeff Bock of Exhibitor Relations, which tracks box office receipts, told Portfolio. “They have thousands of characters that fans would love to see on the big screen.”
But just when everything seemed golden came a plot complication that seemed ripped from one of Marvel’s own comics.
A three-time felon named Peter F. Paul, a former partner of Marvel creator Stan Lee, helped bring a lawsuit against the company, and a complaint with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, contending that a now-bankrupt company named Stan Lee Media, which Lee had co-owned with Paul, had co-ownership of Marvel characters like Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk.
Barron’s wrote about the 2007 lawsuit and complaint last week, predicting that a bitter legal fight could undermine investor confidence in the company regardless of its outcome. The price of Marvel stock began falling that very day – despite Marvel’s insistence that the claims were baseless.
The story may have hit some Marvel investors hard since the company had made a spectacular comeback after years of poor performance and, then, bankruptcy, under financier Ronald Perelman. In 1998, the new controlling shareholder, Isaac Perlmutter, used bankruptcy procedures to end Marvel’s $1 million-a-year lifetime contract with Lee, who had spent more than 60 years at the company and who had helped create The Incredible Hulk, the X-Men and Spider-Man, among other characters.
The abrogation of that contract was what freed Lee, in October, 1998, to start a new company, an Internet animation studio called Stan Lee Media, along with his then-friend Peter Paul. Paul put $500,000 into the new company, while Lee assigned it all his intellectual property rights. The new dot-com rode the bubble market for a while, then went bankrupt in 2001.
The lawsuit and the SEC complaint, filed by self-described whistleblower James L. Nesfield (once a star witness for former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer) on behalf of the shareholders of Stan Lee Media, alleges that Marvel had agreed to sign over Lee’s ownership rights of his superhero characters to Stan Lee Media, but in fact, never did so.
But Marvel spokesman Richard Land denied such an agreement and insisted Lee had no ownership rights.
In written agreements, “Mr. Lee acknowledged and confirmed that all the work he did for Marvel from the beginning of his employment (in 1940) was as an employee,” Land said.
“. . .Since he never owned them, he could never have transferred them to anybody. Mr. Lee himself has always acknowledged that the Marvel characters belong and always belonged to Marvel.”
Lee, now 85, has written shareholders of Stan Lee Media that Paul is behind the lawsuit and SEC filing, and blamed him for the bankruptcy of Stan Lee Media. He has also made statements concurring with Marvel’s ”work for hire” characterization of his work.
The complaint was brought after Paul was extradited back to this country from Brazil, and he now awaits sentencing on his most-recent felony conviction for the manipulation of Stan Lee Media’s stock. He has two prior felony convictions, one for attempting to sell Cuba $8.75 million worth of coffee that never existed, and a second for cocaine possession.
“His history speaks for itself,” Land said of Paul.
Not everyone is convinced the suit lacks merit, however.
In his story for Barron’s, Alpert contends that documents attached to Marvel’s filings with the SEC “show contradictory assignments by Stan Lee of his rights to all these characters.”
Alpert notes that in 2002, after Stan Lee Media went bankrupt, Lee sued Marvel Entertainment on a previously undisclosed contract.
“It turned out that in November 1998 . . .Lee had gone to Marvel claiming half-ownership of Spider-Man, the X-Men and other characters, since Marvel had cancelled his previous rights assignment in its bankruptcy,” according to Alpert. That claim was made a month after he had signed over his intellectual property rights to Stan Lee Media.
“Lee got a new contract for up to $1 million in annual salary and 10% of movie and TV profits, assigning Marvel his rights in those characters,” Alpert wrote. “So, come 2002, Spider-Man: The Movie had grossed more than $1 billion and Lee invoked that contract and sued. Their 2005 settlement was sealed, but Marvel later reported a $10 million charge for it.”
At the very least, the case will surely bring forth a crop of superhero lawyers.
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Howard Wolfson Joins Fox News
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Ka Pow Thwap Marvel Faces Ownership Fight for Spider Man and the Incredible Hulk
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Boone Pickens Like Ross Perot Has a Plan to Save America
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Microsoft confirms it could renew its effort to buy all of Yahoo!
As dissident shareholder Carl Icahn warned that Yahoo! is “moving toward a precipice” and “it is time for a change,” Microsoft said today it could renew its effort to buy Yahoo! The catch: First Yahoo! shareholders must vote in a new slate of directors at their Aug. 1 meeting.
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MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.Icahn is offering his own slate of directors at that meeting.
In its statement today, Microsoft said it concluded there was no possibility of doing a deal with the current Yahoo! board members.
“We confirm, however, that after the shareholder election Microsoft would be interested in discussing with a new board a major transaction with Yahoo!, such as either a transaction to purchase the “Search” function with large financial guarantees or, in the alternative, purchasing the whole company,” the statement said.
Henry Blodget, writing at Alleyinsider.com, said if there is a new offer for all of Yahoo! it won’t be near the previous offer of $33. “There’s no reason in the world they should pay more than $27,” he wrote.
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In an Absolut World, you can be Kanye West (Muckety)
Absolut Vodka and Kanye West are testing the power of viral marketing by releasing a spoof infomercial online.
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MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.BeKanyeNow.com, the website for Absolut’s newest celebrity endorsement campaign, features West starring in an ad for “Be Kanye,” a fictional pill that the rapper says will turn you into him.
The concept is that “In an Absolut World,” anyone could become Kanye West. However, the tablet is a goof; the ad plugs Absolut, even though the campaign slogan “In an Absolut World” is only mentioned once in the video.
The website is hosted by Absolut, and requires legal age verification to enter.
Absolut is also a sponsor of West’s Glow in the Dark Tour, currently in progress, to support his Grammy-winning album, Graduation.
The “In an Absolute World” campaign features other celebrity endorsers, including Zach Galifianakis, a comedian who also spoofed Kanye West’s video “Can’t Tell Me Nothing.”
Galifianakis, who did the Funny or Die Comedy Tour with Will Ferrell, teamed up with comedy duo Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim of the Adult Swim program Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! for his Absolut commercial.
Absolut also features “In an Absolut World” slogans by the websites Thrillist (”In an Absolut World all your spam would be true” and TreeHugger (”In an Absolut World everything would be downloadable”) and the nonprofit organization Live Earth Concerts for the Climate Crisis (”In an Absolut World none of these films would be necessary”).
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Copied passages cloud judicial nomination of Michael E. O’Neill
On paper, the nomination by President Bush of Michael E. O’Neill to be a federal judge would seem to have a good chance of being confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
But O’Neill’s prospects of serving on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia cannot have been helped by a story in Friday’s New York Times.
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Liptak reports that some of O’Neill’s writing contains unacknowledged, nearly verbatim, passages of other scholars’ work.
In an interview with Liptak, O’Neill, 43, blamed the echoes on “a poor work method.” He said that his writing and the writing of others might have gotten mixed together as he put them into a single computer file.
“I didn’t keep appropriate track of things,” O’Neill said. “I frankly did a poor and negligent job.”
The Times looks longest at an article O’Neill published in 2004 in the Supreme Court Economic Review.
Passages in the article are similar to those in a book review by Anne C. Dailey, a professor at the University of Connecticut. Her review appeared in the Virginia Law Review in 2000.
O’Neill includes extensive footnotes in his article entitled “Irrationality and the Criminal Sanction.” However, he does not acknowledge Dailey’s review even though some of her language appears in his article word-for-word.
Dailey called the apparent plagiarism to the attention of the editors of the Economic Review. They, in turn, retracted the article saying that “substantial portions” had been “appropriated without attribution.”
Daniel D. Polsby, the editor of the review and the dean of the George Mason Law School, told Liptak that he considered the copying to be “negligent behavior.”
“The idea of O’Neill committing a theft is just impossible,” he said. “It’s just impossible.”
In an interview, Sen. Arlen Specter, the ranking Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee that will consider O’Neill’s nomination, told Liptak that he knew of the concerns about O’Neill’s writings.
“I’ve heard him out on it and put it in the balance of everything else I knew about him,” Specter said. “I believe he is an excellent prospect for the district court.”
Specter was chair of the judiciary committee from 2005 to 2007. O’Neill served as the committee’s chief counsel and staff director.
At the time, some argued that Specter, a political moderator who needed conservative support to head the Judiciary Committee, appointed O’Neill chief counsel because of O’Neill’s conservative credentials.
After Yale Law School, O’Neill first clerked for David B. Sentelle, a conservative, who was then a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and is now the chief judge.
O’Neill then went on to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, also a conservative.
During his time as counsel to the Judiciary Committee, O’Neill helped guide the nomination of John G. Roberts Jr. to be chief justice of the Supreme Court to confirmation.
Similarly, he watched over the successful confirmation of Samuel A. Alito Jr. as an associate justice of the Supreme Court.
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Microsoft Confirms it Could Renew Its Effort to Buy All of Yahoo
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Landmark Hopes to Complete Divestment by End of Year
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In an Absolut World You Can Be Kanye West
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Copied Passages Cloud Judicial Nomination of Michael E Oneill
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After Failed Buyout Penn National Gaming Focuses on Growth
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Madonna, Lenny Kravitz, A-Rod love triangle
The rumors about Madonna and New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez beg for a Muckety map.
A-Rod and his wife, Cynthia Rodriguez, are separating, according to the New York Daily News. The split comes amidst infidelity rumors concerning both parties.
A-Rod was linked to Madonna, who has been working hard to combat reports that her marriage to Guy Ritchie was ending, after the Times of London reported that she had retained famed divorce lawyer Fiona Shackleton.
Madonna’s publicist explained that both Madonna and Rodriguez are managed by Guy Oseary, and that was the only connection between the two.
Madonna was once linked to singer Lenny Kravitz, who co-wrote her 1990 hit Justify My Love. Kravitz is currently on tour in Europe, where he met up with Cynthia Rodriguez, sparking additional rumors that the two are having an affair.
Kravitz has released a statement that he is strictly friends with Cynthia Rodriguez. Madonna’s publicist has also issued a statement confirming her client’s happy marriage and denying an affair between Madonna and Alex Rodriguez.
Alex and Cynthia Rodriguez were married in 2002 and have two daughters, Natasha, 3, and Ella, who was born on April 21.
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GateHouse Media, Lee Enterprises top newspaper ‘misery index’
Rapidly shriveling stock prices have produced a new misery index for the nation’s beleaguered newspaper industry: sky-high stock dividend yields. So high, some observers speculate, that some cash-strapped companies will soon have to cut dividends, putting even more pressure on their stock prices.
Examples of the Newspaper Misery Index (the higher the yield the greater the company’s financial misery), from Google Finance over the holiday weekend:
GateHouse Media 32.3%
Lee Enterprises 23.31%
E.W. Scripps 19.11%
A.H. Belo 18.35%
McClatchy 13.16%
Gannett 8.16%
Media General 8.12%
New York Times 6.04%
Washington Post 1.46%
News Corp. .82%Historically, yields on established newspaper company stocks have generally been in the 1% to 2% range.
One Wall Street commentator wrote an open letter last month to GateHouse CEO Michael Reed, saying it’s time to eliminate the company’s dividend. The current annual payout is 80 cents a share on a stock that closed last week at $2.47.
Gatehouse, which went public in 2006, built much of its strategy on a relatively high yield, but not 30%. Wesley Edens, the chairman and CEO of Fortress Investment Group, is also chairman of GateHouse.