Delaware's Betting Plan Ruled Out By Appeals Court (Gambling Compliance)

The state that already allows corporations to gamble like crazy with little regulation is eager to offer sports betting on single games, starting Sept. 1 (to plug budget gaps), but the Third Circuit Court of Appeals says no. The major sports leagues and the NCAA had sued Delaware to stop it. So for now, all bets are off: The sports gambling stays in Vegas and the rest of Nevada and nowhere else. (Las Vegas Review-Journal story here.)

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Global markets not surprised by Bernanke's reappointment (MarketWatch)

Did anyone really think that President Barack Obama wouldn't reappoint the Fed chairman? Especially now that Wall Street has declared that major combat operations against the Great Recession are over? The markets barely reacted to the news; they would have freaked if he weren't reappointed. Salon's "Ben Bernanke gets to clean up his mess" recalls Nouriel Roubini's nuanced assessment of Bernanke's performance. For harsher criticism of Bernanke, go back to Anna Jacobson Schwartz's "Man Without a Plan."

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Bureau of Prisons Denies Madoff Has Cancer (NYT)

Contradicts yesterday's NY Post story. We can agree, however, that his scheme was a cancer.

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RI$KY CHICKS' HORMONE LINK (NY Post)

Great headline by Post, but story's just a couple of paragraphs. See the actual story: the National Geographic's "Women With High Testosterone Take Financial Risks." Based on a highly spurious study of MBA students, but Wall Street's overwhelmingly male bankers can now claim that the meltdown was drug-induced and not really their fault.

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Jobs, Back at Apple, Focuses on New Tablet (WSJ)

Battling back from a liver transplant, Moses returns to scale the mountain and deliver a new tablet to the faithful. The touch-screen device he's working on could be as revolutionary as the laptop was.

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Chart Watchers Think This Bull Can Keep Running (WSJ)

Wall Street's wonks report that the strength of the market is "widespread." Times (U.K.): "Shares ride biggest rally for 50 years as investors bet on a rapid recovery."

MORE HEADLINES FOLLOW

Reluctant Shoppers Hold Back Recovery (WSJ)

You're blaming us for "casting a cloud over the durability of the U.S. recovery"? Give us our jobs back and stop the banks from foreclosing on our houses and extorting us with new fees. Then we'll talk about it.

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Can Twitter Be Saved? It's in danger of collapsing under its own weight. (The Big Money)

Mark Gimein's take: "[T]he volume of material that Twitter unleashes now puts impossible demands on its users' time and attention. The problem, in a nutshell, is information overload. The more Twitter grows and the more feeds Twitterers follow, the harder it gets to mine it for what is truly useful and engaging. Even as Twitter reaches a peak in the cultural cred cycle, it's time to start asking how it can be saved from itself." But don't tweet that question.

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Huffington Post + Facebook = the Future of Journalism: Should we be giddy or terrified? (The Big Money)

Chadwick Matlin: "I'm sharing my HuffPo distaste so you know that I don't take the following statement lightly: On Monday, Huffington Post unveiled the future of journalism."

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The Most Outrageous U.S. Lies About Global Healthcare (Foreign Policy)

Debunking the bunkum about how our health-care system is the best in the world.

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Don't get too giddy about the Dow's upward climb. Here are three signs that the economy is still hurting really bad:

1: Tim Geithner still can't sell his house, despite all this supposed good news about the housing market.

2: Radio Shack seems to be doing well, but nobody gives a shit. The least sexy electronics outlet reported quarterly earnings that beat estimates. No one cares, however, that the homely chain is cutting costs: Its share price is falling.

3: Still plagued by bad marketing moves, GM is rumored to be replacing its Saturn model with the Uranus. Without mentioning that rumor, AdAge's Al Ries hammers GM — the company you bailed out — for picking Bob Lutz as its new advertising and marketing czar, saying it "shows no respect for marketing." MLive notes that Lutz "crapped all over" GM's new ad campaigns (especially a Buick TV commercial) and then dashed off to the Caribbean for a vacation.

No new auto has ever been delivered more quickly to a customer than new automaker GM has been dropped off at our house. From bankruptcy court to Wall Street is geographically a short stretch in lower Manhattan, and with a jump start, a shove, and billions of dollars from the Obama administration, the new GM has gone from zero to sickly in record time.

After only 40 days wandering in the desert of bankruptcy court, GM "completed a major step in its turnaround," selling its good assets to something that lawyers call Vehicle Acquisition Co., soon to be renamed General Motors Co. The "bad" assets — not all of them are so bad, considering that legitimate, genuine claims for earned money, like pensions and unpaid bills, are among them — still rest on the scrap heap, compacted into something that lawyers call Motors Liquidation Co.

The only person guaranteed to squeeze sizable money from GM is disgraced ex-CEO Rick Wagoner, whose exit package is being negotiated with more respect being shown to him than to GM's creditors and employees.

Now the taxpayers own a new GM that's just a shell of the old one, so good luck competing on the world market. Inside the shell is a shriveled company that will sell you a Chevy or Caddy and little else, and it will do it without thousands of its old dealers.

"Leaner, more focused" — that's how the Wall Street Journal describes the new entity. The hype is extraordinary this morning, with wire services gushing that "a leaner and meaner automaker [is] ready to win back American consumers and pay back taxpayers." Yeah, and undercoating is worth paying extra for.

Time to return to the important business on the Street: the bonus recovery. "AIG Seeks Clearance For More Bonuses," reports the WashPost:

While figures finally show that China has sped ahead of the U.S. as the world's biggest automaker, GM's failed CEO Rick Wagoner is still hanging onto a job (raking in his full benefits, plus a token $1 salary), waiting for the government to figure out his pension plan.

A touchy subject, a "delicate issue," that pension plan. But the two big bankrupt U.S. automakers, GM and Chrysler, are both still saddled with bigger pension problems: having to fund them for thousands and thousands of other employees. CNN Money has good background here on the pension plights of GM's workers and the company itself.

As you prepare to hit the streets and fire your rifles into the air to celebrate the expected quick emergence of GM from bankruptcy, keep this in mind:

The "new GM" — to be known as "GM" — will still get off scot-free "from liability for consumer claims related to incidents that occurred before GM went into bankruptcy protection."

People who have already filed claims are shit out of luck; think of yourselves as crash-test dummies.

This morning's news that President Barack Obama is breaking his vow to cap Wall Street salaries and bonuses gives the kindest of spins, adding that bonuses will still be subject to limits imposed by Congress.

Yeah, right. Obama's retreat from his February pledge to cap salaries at $500,000 for bailed-out firms means a return to normalcy on Wall Street a lot sooner than on Main Street. For one thing, Congress is much more susceptible to Wall Street's intensive lobbying, so don't expect the bonus limits to amount to much, no matter how full of bluster various members of Congress will be. The bonuses will amount to a lot. And now the salaries are off-limits to government control.

"Big Ed" Whitacre, the incoming chairman of GM, won't face salary restrictions anyway when the big automaker emerges from bankruptcy, according to the deal already worked out. And his new Detroit neighbors whom Fiat will import to run Chrysler won't have to limit themselves. But now Wall Street's big-shot bankers can rest easier, knowing that they can resume their practice of paying one another at a level very near the recent past, no matter what investors and critics say.

Today's WSJ story is headlined "Salaries Safe, Bonuses Hit," but the real story is a few paragraphs down:

Coming soon: AT&T answers critics with this new version of the iPhone

Before smartphones radically change the way we live, there are dumbphones and dumb companies. Progress works like that — in hissy fits and starts. PCWorld gets right down to it with "Four Reasons Why iPhone Owners Hate AT&T." In semi-technical language that's worth wading through, Daniel Ionescu explains why Apple's "weaknesses" rest with its exclusive relationship with AT&T.

So, congratulations to former AT&T CEO Edward "Big Ed" Whitacre, who's going to be chairman of the post-bankruptcy GM. It's probably too bad for iPhone users, however, that Whitacre isn't returning to AT&T. Whitacre wound up as GM's new boss because of the widely praised job he did at AT&T, which he left it in 2005 when it was bought by SBC (which took AT&T's name). Why leave? Because SBC was still focused on landlines, the WSJ notes, while Whitacre — despite his relatively advanced age of 67, a "forward-thinking" guy — was more interested in cellphones and broadband (despite his own admission that he's not really computer-literate and, in 2007, at least, still didn't even use email). SBC took AT&T's name, but the big company still acts like an old-timey dial-phone outfit.

With that in mind, look at the PCWorld story, which rips AT&T on the issues of speed, hookups with the internet and multimedia messaging, high prices for early upgrades, and the "crippling" of new iPhone apps (like Skype and SlingPlayer). Once SlingPlayer's interface with the AT&T iPhone is smoothed out, for instance, you'll be able to easily watch TV on your phone. Oh yeah, you bet your life will change.

In the meantime, critics of the AT&T iPhone are compiling lists. Here's another: "4 Things Still Missing from Apple's iPhone," from Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer. He's not cribbing from Ionescu; in a less-technical piece, Frommer has his own list of whines about what's missing: more affordable Internet access, a mobile version of Flash (the multimedia Adobe app that's losing popularity but is still commonly used by marketers for their annoying animated ads), video chats (now still difficult on AT&T's currently slow network), and background app processing — so you can keep your IM open while you do a quick email check, for example.

AT&T's stock price is holding pretty steady in the 24-25 range, but the wrath index aimed at the world's communications behemoth is climbing. Apple's getting good press for its new iPhone, but competitor Palm (with its partner Sprint) are doing pretty well, too.

Market analysts, meanwhile, are dogging AT&T about this iPhone business, as the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday:

GM's cuddly "reinvention" ad blitz on its fellow Americans shows that love is ever and ever having to say you're sorry. But not forever. Only until the targets are either thoroughly brainwashed or just numbed out.

The agitprop may not really be aimed at easily duped American consumers, as Claire Beale points out in the Independent (U.K.). The ad agencies that serviced the "old GM" are among its biggest creditors in bankruptcy court (unless the Supreme Court, now reconsidering the Chrysler bankruptcy, says otherwise). After detailing the ad agencies that are lined up to get refunds, she writes:

Beale's not cynical; she says GM's "rebirth" is necessary for all of us, and for the global economy. But she nails the campaign, as only an overseas outsider can, by pointing out "the peculiarly American mix of contrition and chutzpah demonstrated by its reinvention ad campaign."

Before the ad blitz, headquartered at gmreinvention.com, reinvents your brain, see the spoof above, from gmretardation.com.

From the actual GM campaign:

From the spoof:

GM may need to use some of its bailout billions to hire Dr. Frankenstein's great-great-great-nephew and dig up Thomas Edison's corpse to actually reinvent this "new GM." Followed, of course, by a "re-animation" ad campaign.

In the meantime, here's the actual GM reinvention commercial:

In the announcement that GM sold its Hummer division to a Chinese company, happy Tengzhong CEO Yang Yi got it just right, saying that "the Hummer brand is synonymous with adventure, freedom, and exhilaration."

In other words, the opposite of the mood in Detroit.

Both the New York Times and the Times (U.K.) mention that Arnold Schwarzenegger was the guy who persuaded the Humvee's manufacturer to build a civilian version, the rights to which GM bought in 1999.

But the London paper gets the edge here by snarkily describing, in its second graf, the Hummer as "the gas-guzzling brand of sports utility vehicles popularised by Arnold Schwarzenegger before he embraced the environment."

Our hometown paper does say, on down in its story:

But the NYT makes it sound as if the Hummer will continue to be built in the U.S. way into the future. Not true, no matter what President Barack Obama and others say about how this saves American jobs. The question is: For how long? And the London paper answers it:

How will a Chinese company be able to market the militaristic Hummer as a symbol of U.S. patriotism, of our muscle abroad as the world's cop? Hmmm, that could be a problem.

On the other hand, maybe China could just take over our role as the world's cop. It might not save many jobs, but it would save us money and our soldiers' lives.