Global Crossing. Is it Enron part II? Well, there's at least one key difference: The chairman of the GOP didn't clean up on Enron, but Terry McAuliffe, the man who always had a few more bucks for WJC, seems to have gotten some of those bucks out of a company that recently admitted that oops, the profit picture isn't quite what we'd telegraphed and by the way, our books are under review too.

But enough about the DNC. The bottom line is that we're living in an era where money are politics intersect closely. The parties should therefore eschew cheap shots at one another, knowing that sooner or later their turn will come on the hot seat. Let's forget the posturing and focus on a really important question: Are our legislators formulating policies that will maximize wealth creation and give us all a shot at the wealth, or are they manipulating the economic scene to pick winners and losers? If it's the first, bravo. If it's the second, we should be upset regardless of which party is on top because 1) we all get our turn on the bottom sooner or later and more importantly 2) such fiddling constrains real growth and thus the size of the pie we're fighting over. Some people mocked W for saying we should make the pie higher. What's really stupid is shrinking the pie so the other guy won't get as much - even if you don't either.

Will BMY be rescued from its own incompetence? CNBC reporting that a little more info is forthcoming. Questions:

• If the news is important, why did the stock open before all the news was released?
• If it's potentially important, why did the brokerages change their ratings before it hit the wires?
• Why didn't BMY give the markets a heads-up on what was happening either way?

That we're waiting to see and have no idea tells us already that BMY has handled this badly. At the very least BMY and those who follow it have shown that they don't have a good relationship (consequence of reg FD?). The brokerages have thus shown that they can't offer much more than CNBC in the way of guidance - why do people pay them the big bucks again? At the same time, BMY has shown that whatever its medical competence, it has a pretty screwed-up notion of how to manage a major component of their business - communicating with those who provide its capital. Whatever the report shows - and it should be up soon - unless they've found a way to turn lead into gold, BMY looks like a good stock to get out of until they get a management team that can explain their business better. So far the market agrees with me on this.

Oh no! No penguins! Afficianadoes of CNBC Squawkbox know that when a bunch of brokerage firms belatedly change their ratings of a stock all at once, David Faber and Joe Kernen show a video of Emperor penguins jumping in the water and name them for the brokerage firms in question. It's a charming display, really. But alas, even after BMY admitted how many problems they had, the brokerages still had to wait until the stock actually opened at noon to change their ratings, and by then the show was Midday Call.

This shows 1) that the brokerages are clueless (did they really think the market would blow off being held in suspense for a letdown?) and 2) BMY is worse for not realizing how much attention they were calling to an announcement that really should have been snuck out when the drug stocks were tanking anyway.

Bristol-Myers. A case study in bad information management. It is by now a truism in corporate crisis management that you must get your information out as quickly as you can, explaining your position and the direction you plan to go to deal with whatever the crisis is. This morning, Wall Street waited with baited breath to find out that their new hypertension drug:

• is no more effective for congestive heart failure than an established competitor
• has too many side-effects to achieve widespread adoption by sufferers of high blood pressure

The stock opened about noon. For 2 1/2 hours information trickled out about a study whose results BMY has had a month. They couldn't have done a better job of highlighting their failures - a) to improve the drug, b) to play straight with the medical community, c) to play straight with shareholders - if they'd bought radio ads saying sell BMY, MRK's a better value.

BMY should have announced the problems with the drug as soon as they knew, while announcing what they planned to do about it - more tailoring and research? dropping the program? Drug companies fail to get their dream drugs to work all the time; it's a fact of life in the pharmaceutical business. But most don't go to a drug conference to announce that they don't really have a drug.

BMY's drubbing today is well-earned.