“While we are disappointed the decision does not provide the flexibility we had hoped for, Delaware is still the only state east of the Rocky Mountains that can offer a legal sports lottery on NFL football,” says Gov. Jack Markell, after federal appeals court judges limited Delaware sports betting to two-game NFL "parlay" bets.

“We continue to believe this is an opportunity to create jobs and generate revenue to help us keep teachers in the classroom, police on the street and maintain other core commitments of state government. The state’s attorneys are reviewing today’s written opinion from the Court of Appeals and we will be discussing our legal options with them." 

Also, Delaware gambling halls have been racing to accomodate sports bettors since the state voted to boost pro and college game gambling, but high-powered legal opposition by NFL and other leagues has made that increasingly unlikely. Suzette Parmley's Inquirer story here.

Marvel Entertainment has agreed to sell to Walt Disney for $4 billion, or $50 a share.

Marvel owns Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Captain America, Iron Man, and other 1950s-era comic book titles turned mass-market licensing bonanzas, which have been resurrected as thinly-plotted but brightly-colored action films by the creatively-challenged Hollywood movie studios.

The sale ends a long, wild ride for Marvel that included a litigious stint as part of Philadelphia-bred dealmaker Ron Perelman's complex business holdings in the 1990s.

Marvel was for a time owner of Philadelphia baseball card maker Fleer Corp., later Fleer/Sky Box International of Mount Laurel. Later the Grass family (of Rite Aid) bought Fleer; they ran it into bankruptcy, and shut Fleer in 2005; the brand was bought by Upper Deck Co., Carlsbad, Calif., the last surviving competitor of New York's Topps Inc., which earlier this month signed an exclusive deal with Major League Baseball, marginalizing Upper Deck.

Which brings us full circle: Topps is run by former Disney CEO Michael Eisner..

Home finance lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have each topped $2 in recent New York Stock Exchange trading. That's the highest they've been since share prices collapsed last September.

"There is no fundamental value remaining in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, particularly since the government owns 80% of each company," writes analyst Paul J. Miller Jr. and his colleagues at brokerage Friedman Billings Ramsey. "We expect more government capital injections" on top of the $96 billion already invested. "This capital must be repaid" if Fannie and Freddie are to survive. Otherwise the stocks are dead anyway.

Fannie and Freddie each have less than one-third the capital they need to cover their loan losses. And loan losses are rising. If they were banks they'd probably be shut by regulators.

What will happen? "The Administration is keeping discussion about (these government-sponsoerd enterprises) behind closed doors... The most likely scenario is that the GSEs operations will be split up, and Fannie and Freddie will be spun out of the government as mortgage insurers with small portfolios." The government will "manage" their mortgage portfolios. 

How'll that work? "Obama's team will not (deal with) the issue until after the fiscal year 2011 budget is delivered on Feburary 1, at the earliest."

Bidding starts at $25,000 (it's tax-deductible!) to get Your Name (or your love one's, or your company's) on a fellowship to be awarded by the Philadelphia- and Siena, Italy-based Sbarro Health Research Organization - that's right, it's backed by the pizza people - to "support a year-long fellowship for a brilliant young scientist to study under Antonio Giordano MD PhD," a Neapolitan scholar who founded the cancer and therapeutic scientific research center at Temple University and the U of Siena in 1993.

Sponsor-A-Scientist!  went up on eBay this morning. No bids yet, but Sbarro is hopeful, says spokeswoman Ilene Rush.

The trading value of shares in little Safeguard Scientifics, the Wayne company that invests in small bio and tech companies, has risen 50% on the New York Stock Exchange over the past difficult year. A stake in the company is now worth about what it was in 2007.

Safeguard's price is up a lot more, thanks to today's 6-for-1 reverse stock split, which drove Safeguard shares above $10 for the first time since 2003, at the tail end of the dot.com collapse.

Yesterday, Safeguard raised $53 million by selling some of its stock in California-based cancer fighter Clarient at $3.50/share. Its remaining Clarient stake is worth roughly half of Safeguard's market value, down from two-thirds before the sale, which is good, according to today's report to clients by analysts William Sutherland and Bill DiTullio at Boenning and Scattergood.

They figure Safeguard's net asset value at around $13 a share - a premium on today's trading price - and they're telling clients it ought to go to $18, "based on the net realizable value of portfolio companies" - the stuff Safeguard owns -  discounted back an average of 3 years." That includes a hopeful $1 premium for Safeguard's remaining Clarient stock. 

Asking why cable company stocks like Comcast trade at an "illogical" discount to phone companies like Verizon - despite the fact cable has higher growth and fatter profit margins and lower debt trends than wireless phones - Sanford Bernstein research analyst Craig Moffett blames the fear that Comcast ceo Brian Roberts will use the billions he's extracting from video, Internet and phone consumers to buy something big and unexpected.

"Ever since its aborted 2004 bid for Disney," investors worry Comcast "will use its free cash flow and substantial balance sheet capacity to acquire [Internet, programming, or wireless] assets, destroying value" by paying too much, or distracting management, or delaying profitability, Moffett told investors in a note yesterday.

"Comcast almost courts M&A skepticism" as it hoards cash while "waxing poetic" about spending millions for Web services like Daily Candy. "These fears translate into a significant (share price) discount" for Comcast, Moffett writes.

So unfair. "AT&T and Verizon, which trade at a premium to cable stocks, have similiarly long histories of destroying shareholder value" through mergers. Earlier this summer, Verizon chief executive Ivan Seidenberg told TV's Charlie Rose he wants to be "one of the biggest carriers of Internet traffic on the planet," and "serve any business customer in any major city on the planet," which to Moffett means Verizon shareholders "ought to be terrified" of which strange costly foreign company Seidenberg's going to buy next.

But, Moffett adds, at least the phone companies have "adult supervision," in the form of influential shareholders (some of them unionized employees and retirees) who demand big dividends. By contrast, investors worry Comcast, with its disproportionate Roberts-centric voting structure, has "no built-in mechanism for cash discipline." So "they'll probably just blow the money on something."

What does Moffett want the cable companies to do with all their cash? Give it to shareholders, of course. He predicts Time Warner Cable will start paying a dividend, while Comcast will re-institute big share buybacks. The company spent almost $10 billion buying back shares in 2005-08 before the market crashed.

Over at Gimme Credit, bond analyst Dave Novosel is less worried about Verizon. Sure, the company owes $65 billion, nearly twice its earnings (ebitda), partly because it "overpaid" for Alltel. And yes, it needs to spend another $6 billion building out FiOS video. But leverage will drop nearly one-third by the end of next year, Seidenberg has promised, as the company generates $7 billion in free cash flow a year and uses "virtually all" to pay down debt.

A Maryland-based dry-cleaning chain is expanding in suburban Philadelphia, offering cheap prices and state-of-the-art automation and hoping to make it up on volume.

Zips Dry Cleaning, based in Greenbelt, Md., and owned by a group of its early franchisees, opened in Warminster last year and plans a second store in Bensalem in October. Local franchisee John Casiello, whose brother Bart owns three Zips in Maryland, advertises all garments at $1.99 ("get it to us by 9 a.m., we can get it done by 5.")

 That's cheaper than the $4 to $6 per sports coat I was quoted at places I called in Northeast and South Philly, Center City and Bucks County. (This Saturday, the Warminster store is running a 99 cent promotion, no commercial customers allowed. Casiello says he serves unemployed people for free, up to three garments a week.)

 "To make any bottom line" at $1.99 per garment, "he'll have to make a lot of work," and it becomes a challenge for cleaners to take the time that "quality" shops put in to fix garments that need repair, said Mark Pollock, owner of Signature Cleaners over in Doylestown.

How's Zips work for less? 1) Cash up front. "In a lot of drycleaners the receivables are up on the conveyors," in the form of clean but unpaid-for garments, Casiello told me. 2) "The system this franchise has developed has streamlined the process. Everything's computerized. It doesn't eliminate labor, we have about eight people here, we do a lot of training. But the system does lower the number of people and, so, the cost." 3) High volume. "We do in a day what most drycleaners do in a week," 1,800 to 2,500 garments.

At that level Casiello's covering his costs. His goal is to boost volume above 700,000 garments a year; at that level Casiello expects a gross profit margin of 20-25%. 

At Zips, shirts, skirts and jackets are bar-coded, tagged, identified, and moved from station to station. It's open-air and under glass, so customers can watch. There's a pre-treatment area to pull off stains. Then through the chemicals, then "on to the pressing station," back to the center of the store and to the customers. "The whole store is our plant. Nothing's sent to third parties." The goal is "an open floor plan and a nice lobby, like down the Shore where you can see them make the fudge," not the more familiar "mom and pop operation" behind the counter.

Casiello used to run video production stores in Yardley and Feasterville. The Warminster store is in a former Washington Mutual home loan office on the busy corner of York and Street Roads.

The Securities and Exchange Commission's plan to ban "pay-for-play" campaign donations by private firms that manage public money, and to stop private "placement agents" from lobbying governments to hire their investor clients, has been collecting comments on a federal Web site since last month.

Read the proposal and comments here - heck, add your own.

What's interesting is the split in the commentary, to date. Some money managers like the ban on donations; wouldn't it be great to end that obnoxious cost of doing business, of having to either pick winners, or spread the money around? 

But they're less pleased by the idea of banning placement agents: Small firms may not want to buy public officials outright, but they depend on being able to lobby them. How else can they stand out in a tough competitive environment?

Toll Bros. has been selling more homes, but at lower prices, notes Merrill H. Ross, homebuilder analyst at BGB Securities in Washington, DC. ADD: Toll sold a net 837 units, worth $448 million, in the quarter, vs 812 units, worth $470 million, a year ago. Quarterly report here.

By pricing homes at realistically lower rates, Toll "is capturing market share of luxury home buyers," but they're still "few and far between," added Ross. "We believe that sales will continue to be depressed through 2010." ("We are reducing incentives and raising prices at selected communities," ceo Bruce Toll said in the report.)

Maybe Toll "can build luxury homes at a profit at some point in 2010" if orders keep rising, Ross added. But she adds there's still a lot of unsold homes to unload before Toll can boost prices enough to make a priofit.

Her conclusion: "Buy a Home, Not the Stock for Now." Toll stock at $23 a share "is unsustainable," Ross writes, because, once you discount land-impairment charges and deferred-tax credits, "Toll is building homes at break-even profits". She recommends buying the stock if it falls to $17.