Say it ain’t so! That Dr. E.J. Pellman, MLB’s medical adviser who, testifying before the U.S. Congress, praised baseball’s steroids policy and dissed its critics has seen fit to exaggerate his educational and professional credentials isn’t nearly as bush-league as his attempts to blame everyone else for what appears to be a deliberate attempt to mislead. Maybe baseball has a bigger problem than steroids.
It used to be that nothing was certain in life but death and taxes. It seems taxes ain’t so certain any more, at least to a bunch of cheaters who annually short Uncle Sammy $300 billion plus. That’s twenty-five hundred apiece baby, and guess who’s going to get nicked for the shortfall. Note to Uncle Sammy: Put enough $300 billions together and soon you don’t have a Social Security crisis.
Mickey flips a finger and turns out the lights on Miramax. For years Disney’s been trying to throw the switch and now the brothers Weinstein, fed up with toiling in the deepening shadows, are riding off into the sunset to start a new production company. Disney and the Weinsteins will have their hands in each other’s pockets for years adding yet another layer of complexity to the ‘Black Art of Motion Picture Finance and Accounting’—the new reality flick about the movie investor who gets screwed. P.S. The Weinsteins hope to raise $500 million.
Great gas guzzlers, Batman, oil at $105 a barrel? A super spike in prices? Goldman Sachs seems to think so, yesterday adjusting their price range from 50-105 dollars per barrel from 50-80 dollars per barrel.
Barbarians at the Gate, AGAIN? KKR, that august LBO firm whose storied origins spring from the loony days filled with the likes of Peter Cohen and Ross Johnson and the $25 billion RJR Nabisco buyout, hasn’t, it seems, forgotten its taste for raw meat, shoveling $11.3 billion of other people’s money on the table for SunGard Data Systems, a company that specializes in data processing and backup, a long ways from Oreo cookies.
Calling Robert Campeau, eh. That tart Saks and her virgin sister, Nieman-Marcus, are putting on their Sunday best, hoping to catch the eye and pocketbook of a suitor with more dough than old man Federated with his $11 billion that plain sister May’s landed. Campeau must have a giant ache in his groin, thinking of the $11 billion that, in the late ‘80’s, those two floozies, Federated (yes, the same one) and Allied, wolfed down before sending him north of the 49th, tail between his legs, with a rather messy stop in divorce court along the way.
Ease off! Camilla might not be a raving beauty, but neither is HRH the fairest in the land.