But McTaggert does not do nearly as well in rating Stros pitchers, getting just one of the top four all-time correct:

Larry Dierker: Although his career has been over for 30 years, he still ranks first on Astros' career charts in games started (320), complete games (106), innings pitched (2,294 1/3) and shutouts (25).

Joe Niekro: The knuckleballer who died in October is the club's all-time leader in victories (144), ranks second in complete games (82), innings (2,270) and shutouts (21) and is third in starts (301).

Roy Oswalt: Still 29 years old, he's on pace to become the club's all-time winningest pitcher. With a 98-47 record (.676), he has the highest winning percentage in franchise history of pitchers with 100 or more decisions.

Nolan Ryan: The Texas legend spent one-third of his 27-year career with the Astros and was 106-94 with a 3.13 ERA and threw a no-hitter. He still ranks third in starts (282), innings (1,854 2/3) and is first in strikeouts (1,855).

Oswalt is the best pitcher in Stros history, but of the other three, only Ryan is even in the top 10 Stros pitchers of all-time. The most reliable measure for comparing pitchers is the Lee Sinins-created statistic, runs saved against average ("RSAA," explained here). Based on how many runs they saved in comparison to an average National League pitcher during the time that they played, the following are the top ten Stros pitchers of all-time along with their RSAA score:

Dierker, Niekro and Ryan were all popular with Stros fans while they played for club, but popularity doesn't make them among the top four pitchers in Stros history. Dierker was the best manager in Stros history, though.

Posted by Tom at 4:45 AM | Comments (6) |

Ben Stein's blinders

This earlier post noted that the NY Times financial columnist Ben Stein has some rather odd notions about private equity buyouts. Amidst criticizing rich folks for spending their money in a different way than Stein would if he had their money, Stein in this column continues to strap his blinders on closely regarding private equity-backed, management-led buyouts of publicly-owned companies:

"I saw an article about the chairman of Herbalife leading a private equity firm’s offer to take the company private. He must be trying to underpay his shareholders for it — otherwise there’s no built-in profit for him. Of course, he’s a fiduciary for those same shareholders, obliged to put their interests ahead of his in every situation. Never mind. This is about money."

Well, yes, it is about money and the private equity buyers could be wrong in their bet. Stein ignores that Herbalife's stock price could go down below the price that the chairman and his private equity partners are willing to pay for it, which means that they would absorb the loss rather than the Herbalife public shareholders. Isn't the more mature analysis here the assessment of the relative risk that Herbalife's stock price will rise above or below the price that the private equity buyers are willing to pay for it?

But Stein isn't finished with his blather:

Then I read an article about the head of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Isadore Sharp, taking that company private. His family owns the supervoting shares that control the Four Seasons, and Mr. Sharp says he wants to simplify succession issues with his children. (Don’t we all?) Several people have been quoted as saying he’s underpaying for the company. Why does he have to do the deal at all? The potential for conflicts of interest is simply overwhelming.

Four Seasons declined to comment when I called to ask, but I assume Mr. Sharp wants to buy the company on the cheap. Every buyer does. The shareholders for whom Mr. Sharp is a fiduciary want — and by all legal history, deserve — the highest possible price. Again, why do the deal at all? If he controls the votes of the company, can’t he work out succession issues by parceling out those super shares in his will or a living will? Something does not smell quite right here. At least, not to me.

And, hey, lookie here who’s investing along with Mr. Sharp. Why, it’s the richest man in the world, Bill Gates. See, he’s not rich enough now. He has to get into this ethically dodgy deal to get even richer. Very nice. I guess he’ll use that money to do ethical things.

Let's assume for a moment that the risk is greater that the Four Seasons stock price will fall below the price that Mr. Sharp is willing to pay for it than it is that stock price will rise above it. However, Mr. Sharp disagrees with that risk assessment and is willing to put his money up to back up his belief. Hasn't Mr. Sharp done precisely the ethical thing for Four Seasons shareholders? I don't know if the foregoing risk analysis is right or wrong, but it occurs to me that it is at least as likely a scenario as the "ethically dodgy" deal that Stein suggests.

If not for Gretchen Morgenson, I would be amazed that the Times editors would allow Stein's shallow analysis to pass as a business column in the paper.

Posted by Tom at 4:10 AM | Comments (0) |

Big Weekend Deals

O.K., so the offer of private-equity firms Texas Pacific Group and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. to acquire Dallas-based utility TXU Corp for about $45 billion was the big deal that was buzzing around financial circles over the weekend. As the NY Times' Landon Thomas reports, it's always fun when one of the original barbarians arrives at the gate.

But also catching my eye was that Houston-based Marble Slab Creamery -- a longtime success story in the premium ice-cream parlor wars -- announced on Friday that it was selling out New York-based NexCen Brands Inc. for $16 million. As noted earlier here, Marble Slab is well-positioned to make a run at becoming the Starbucks of premium ice-cream and NexCen -- a brand acquisition and management company that is focused on assembling a portfolio of companies in the consumer branded products and franchise industries -- has the capital to pull it off. Bully for the Hankamer family, the owners of Marble Slab.

Posted by Tom at 4:01 AM | Comments (0) |

February 25, 2007

Larry Ribstein's big day

Great teachers are a popular topic on this blog (see here and here), so I would be remiss if I didn't note that the University of Illinois College of Law conducted the investiture ceremony earlier this week honoring Clear Thinkers favorite Larry Ribstein as the holder of the Mildred Van Voorhis Jones Chair at the school.

The blawgosphere has undergone such explosive growth over the past several years that we are still too close to it to realize the full extent of the seismic shift that it has caused in the area of legal research and analysis. But make no mistake about it, Professor Ribstein has been at the forefront of this sea change, literally pushing legal scholarship from what had been mostly closed conversations between fellow academics into a hugely valuable resource that is now readily available to millions over the Web. Already the leading expert in the U.S. in the area of unincorporated business associations, Professor Ribstein has become one of the blawgosphere's most insightful thinkers on corporate governance issues and the effects of regulation on markets and business. His Ideoblog blog has contributed at least as much to the understanding and appreciation of business law issues over the past three years as any Web resource of which I am aware.

The video of Larry's investiture ceremony is here. Larry's acceptance speech begins at about the 14 and a half minute mark of the program and is essentially a review of the impact that the study of markets has had on his marvelous career. Having the opportunity to watch a top notch academic at the top of his game is always an enjoyable experience, so pull up a chair and watch Larry's speech. Besides, unless you watch the video, how else are you going to learn the story of how Larry's blog is really the result of failed entrepreneurial ventures involving hamsters and an animal cemetery?

Posted by Tom at 4:07 AM | Comments (0) |

February 24, 2007

Don't sweat the small stuff

Dr. Nortin M. Hadler is a professor of medicine and microbiology/immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and attending rheumatologist at the University of North Carolina Hospitals in Chapel Hill. He also sounds in this ABC News op-ed a lot like my father:

To be well is not the same as to feel well.

Being well requires some sense of invincibility. No one is spared symptoms for long.

It's abnormal to go one year without upper respiratory symptoms or pain.

Lurking in our future are heartache and heartburn, shoulder and knee pain, headache, rashes and skipped heartbeats -- not to mention bothersome fatigue, sore muscles, bowel irregularity, insomnia and so much else to challenge our sense of well-being.

Nearly all of these predicaments can go away as mysteriously as they come about. To be well requires the wherewithal to cope with these ailments for as long as that takes -- and it can take weeks. [. . .]

We all need to get beyond the traditional complaint of "what's wrong with me, Doc, that I have this symptom?" and move on to more rational discourse, such as "is there any important disease that is causing my symptom? If so, can it be treated? If not, can we discern why I can't cope with this episode?"

Read the entire piece. And then get on with coping!

Posted by Tom at 4:21 AM | Comments (0) |

February 23, 2007

Fulbright's tough week

It has not been a week to remember for the venerable Houston law firm, Fulbright & Jaworski.

First, the firm's expected public relations coup in hiring Harris County Judge Robert Eckels as a lobbyist with the firm was met with more than a little grumbling locally, forcing Eckels to address the question of why on earth he didn't resign before last November's election so that the voters could elect his successor? Eckels proceeded to sound oddly out of sorts in his subsequent public attempts to answer that quite reasonable question.

But that letdown was peanuts compared to the potential public relations disaster reported in this AboveTheLaw post:

Breaking: Fulbright & Jaworski Partner Drops the N-Bomb During A Recruiting Interview!

The email reprinted below, from Dean Katharine T. Bartlett, just went out to everyone at Duke Law School. It was forwarded to us by a source at the school.

Yes, we know: the partner who pulled a Michael Richards used "the n word" in the context of telling a story, in which the racial epithet was uttered by a character in the story. He didn't use "the n word" to refer to any student or interviewee.

We don't know the nature of the story being told by the partner. But unless the story was about, say, the partner's pro bono representation, in a civil action for damages, of a hate crime or police brutality victim who was attacked and called "the n word," it was hugely inappropriate for the partner to use a racial slur in this context (or, for that matter, any other context).

The post goes on to quote the Duke Law Dean's entire email about the incident in its humiliating entirety, which is now all over the blogosphere. And the extensive comments to the post are interesting, to say the least.

But wait a minute. It turns out that there is more than a little context to the story. The above post was followed by this explanation from the Fulbright executive committee:

Dear Colleagues:

Because you may hear about or be asked about a recent situation at a law school where attorneys participated in training interviews of students, we want to bring it to your attention. One of our lawyers recounted a story about Leon Jaworski’s defense of an African-American man in a murder trial in Waco, Texas in the 1920s. During the retelling, in an effort to display the depth of racial hostility that Jaworski and his client faced, the attorney used a racial term that characterized what the district attorney in the case said about the defendant. After review of the situation, all involved concluded that such terms, although recounted without ill intentions, are inappropriate for our firm, which values diversity and strives for inclusiveness.

We are addressing the situation, and Steve Pfeiffer and other senior partners are en route to meet with the students. One of the other attorneys who participated in the training session acted immediately when the incident was called to his attention and responded with an electronic letter of explanation and appropriate apology. Any inquiries should be directed to the firm's Hiring Partner, Gerry Lowry.

Executive Committee

And to make matters even more interesting, it appears that some members of the Duke Law School Faculty were stoking the fires. AboveTheLaw.com received the following email from a current law student at Duke:

This partner was relating what another person said in the context of telling a story. Now everyone is piling on him. The student [who voiced the complaint] has been goaded on by some super liberal professors.

H'mm. I wonder if any of those Duke law professors were the same ones who also supported the lynch mob in the Duke lacrosse team case?

My sense is that this all blows over quickly for Fulbright because, in the end, the Duke Law School Dean made a mountain out of molehill. But man, what a way to end a week that I'm sure the firm expected to be a public relations bonanza. Such is life in the big city.

Update: The Texas Lawyer ($) posted this online article on the incident today.

Posted by Tom at 4:38 AM | Comments (0) |

Dan Jenkins on Darrell Royal

The Chronicle's David Barron uses last night's Texas Children's Hospital fund-raising dinner to honor legendary former University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal as a Texas Legend to pen this fun article on two Clear Thinkers favorites -- Coach Royal and Dan Jenkins. Barron includes the following gem from Jenkins comparing how Longhorn fans felt about Coach Royal versus how fans of two other top programs felt about their coaches of that era:

As a writer for newspapers in Fort Worth and Dallas and later for Sports Illustrated, Dan Jenkins, got to see all of the great coaches at work. Royal, Jenkins said, had a unique relationship to Texas and Texans, especially when compared to contemporaries like Woody Hayes at Ohio State or John McKay at USC.

"Darrell's association with the Longhorn fans was more intimate," Jenkins wrote in a recent e-mail. "Darrell had good buddies in all the other towns. Woody was standoffish, gruff, and stayed out of the public eye. Most Buckeyes respected him but never got to know him.

"McKay once told me he wasn't revered by USC alums. They expected him to win. When McKay won his first national championship for the Trojans in '62, I asked him how he was rewarded, and he said some people got together and bought him a new set of tires."

Barron also passes along the following Jenkins anecdote about the UT sports information director during the Royal era, Jones Ramsey:

Royal was particularly gifted in the care and feeding of the Fourth Estate, with a little help from the Longhorns' sports information director — the late Jones Ramsey, the self-styled "World's Tallest Fat Man."

"I fondly recall the first time Jones took two or three of us to El Rancho for lunch," Jenkins said. "Somebody asked him if it was any good, and Jones said, 'Is it good? You go in the front and eat the dinner and go out the back and eat the garbage.' It was the kind of thing Darrell probably said first."

However, for my money, the best anecdote about Coach Royal was the one that UT women's basketball coach Jody Conradt told several years ago during another fund-raising dinner. Former Chronicle sportswriter Mickey Herskowitz was there and passed along Conradt's story:

But the [speaker] who stole the show was Jody Conradt, the Hall of Famer who gave the Longhorns a national championship in women's basketball.

"They built the Erwin Center 21 years ago," she said, "and obviously it never occurred to anyone that the women would need a separate locker room. So every room in this place had urinals in it.

"Now we have one of our own. Before one of our games, coach Darrell Royal was kind enough to speak to my team. Before he left, someone asked what the biggest difference was between our locker room and all the ones he knew from all his years of coaching. Coach Royal said:

'Offhand, I can't remember anyone ironing anything before a game in one of our locker rooms.' "

Update: Barron follows up his article with this blog post on the dinner.

Posted by Tom at 4:33 AM | Comments (0) |

February 22, 2007

Off to the Advanced Business Bankruptcy Conference

I'm buzzing up to downtown Dallas for the day to participate in the State Bar of Texas CLE's 25th Annual Advanced Business Bankruptcy Conference at the Adolphus Hotel. If you happen to be in downtown Dallas today and have some free time, then come on by and say hello and perhaps even take in a part of the conference. This is consistently one of the State Bar's best prepared and most informative continuing legal education programs.

The conference brochure is here, and the updated outline for my talk -- Business Bankruptcy Blogs -- is here.

Posted by Tom at 4:56 AM | Comments (0) |

Observations of the Week

Two observations from earlier in the week resonated with me.

First, in this post, Jane Galt made the following pithy observation about the fallacy of reliance on governmental regulation:

"The post below also applies to behavioural economics, which the left seems to believe is a magical proof of the benevolence of government intervention, because after all, people are stupid, so they need the government to protect them from themselves. My take is a little subtler than that:

1) People are often stupid

2) Bureaucrats are the same stupid people, with bad incentives."

Then, during his monologue on Tuesday night's Tonight Show, Jay Leno observed the following about the cable television news networks' fascination (obsession?) with certain recent news events:

"Well, the big story in the news is that Britney Spears shaved her head. Can you believe this? Legitimate news organizations are actually breaking into their Anna Nicole Smith coverage to tell you this."

Posted by Tom at 4:34 AM | Comments (0) |

Cancer Diva

"My name is Terry, and I'm dying of cancer. Welcome to the adventure."

That is the welcome to the Houston Chronicle's newest blog -- CancerDiva. Terry Hayes, the author of the blog, describes herself as follows:

I'm a single, 40-year-old woman living in Houston with my sister and her two dogs. I have a kitty cat named Sasha. I love to shop, read, watch movies and listen to music. I enjoy a challenging jigsaw puzzle, "This American Life" and "Prairie Home Companion". I like plays, traveling, and art cars. I love my job and my co-workers. I can't get enough of "CSI," "Law & Order," or "The Closer," and I'll watch anything on BRAVO. My favorite color is pink.

Oh, and I'm dying of cancer.

No use sugarcoating it. When my oncologist told me in April 2006 that I have metastatic colon cancer, I nodded my head and said, "Okay." When she told me I had about 24 months to live, "give or take a few," I nodded my head and said, "Okay."

My cancer had spread from my colon to distant sites in my body, namely my ovaries, liver and abdominal wall. Last week, I thought I might have a brain tumor. Luckily, my MRI was normal (normal for now anyway).

Only 5-8% of patients with Stage IV/Duke's D colon cancer make it five years after diagnosis. The usual course, from diagnosis to death, takes about 24 months, "give or take a few".

I'm not sure why I took the news quite so casually. My oncologist, a wonderful woman named Dr. Glover, said I was "eerily calm."

I have a few theories. One of the many, many issues I'll be discussing in this blog.

You can bet I'll be reading this one.

Posted by Tom at 4:31 AM | Comments (1) |

February 21, 2007

Cool graphs

From the latest report of the Congressional Budget Office. HT to Greg Mankiw.

Robert Samuelson on the Stubborn Welfare State and the shifting priorities of the federal budget.

Finally, Nielson Media Research's television ratings for the post-season college football games from this past season. HT to Wizard of Odds.

Posted by Tom at 4:20 AM | Comments (1) |

The dark world of binge eating

Jane Brody is the longtime New York Times fitness and nutrition writer and I have admired her writing for many years. Her column from yesterday -- titled "Out of Control: A True Story of Binge Eating" -- is a must-read not only because it addresses an important health problem, but also because it has a compelling personal touch:

It was 1964, I was 23 and working at my first newspaper job in Minneapolis, 1,250 miles from my New York home. My love life was in disarray, my work was boring, my boss was a misogynist. And I, having been raised to associate love and happiness with food, turned to eating for solace.

Of course, I began to gain weight and, of course, I periodically went on various diets to try to lose what I’d gained, only to relapse and regain all I’d lost and then some.

My many failed attempts included the Drinking Man’s Diet, popular at the time, which at least enabled me to stay connected with my hard-partying colleagues.

Before long, desperation set in. When I found myself unable to stop eating once I’d started, I resolved not to eat during the day. Then, after work and out of sight, the bingeing began.

I learned where the few all-night mom-and-pop shops were located so I could pick up the evening’s supply on my way home from work. Then I would spend the night eating nonstop, first something sweet, then something salty, then back to sweet, and so on. A half-gallon of ice cream was only the beginning. I was capable of consuming 3,000 calories at a sitting. Many mornings I awakened to find partly chewed food still in my mouth.

And, as you might expect, because I didn’t purge (never even heard of it then), I got fatter and fatter until I had gained a third more than my normal body weight, even though I was physically active.

My despair was profound, and one night in the midst of a binge I became suicidal. I had lost control of my eating; it was controlling me, and I couldn’t go on living that way.

Fortunately, I was still rational enough to reach out for help, and at 2 a.m. I called a psychologist I knew at his home. His willingness to see me in the morning got me through the night.

Read the entire column. Brody's honest and forthright story of how she finally came to terms with her obsession and addressed it -- abandoning diets and embracing sound nutritional principles for her life -- provides a hopeful and practical guide for those who are afflicted with this disorder. It is a stark reflection of the state of nutrition in the U.S. today that most of us know someone who is currently grappling with the same problem that Brody overcame.

Posted by Tom at 4:17 AM | Comments (0) |

Knight on the regulation of basketball players

Say what you will about Texas Tech basketball coach Bobby Knight, but he knows what he is talking about in regard to making college basketball a true intercollegiate sport:

While most college basketball coaches would jump at the chance for a one-year player like Texas freshman sensation Kevin Durant, Texas Tech coach Bob Knight said Monday he would not do so.

In fact, the coach said Monday that he thinks the NBA's mandate of at least a year of college for high school graduates is bad for the college game.

"I think it's the worst thing that's happened to college basketball since I've been coaching," Knight said Monday.

A year ago, the NBA made the decision that players have to attend college for at least one year after graduation from high school. That decision has exposed players such as Ohio State freshman center Greg Oden and Durant — two players who would have been lottery picks last year and will likely be the first two players chosen in this year's draft if they decide to leave after one year — to the college game for what seems to be just one year.

Knight's primary concern seems to be that the NBA's mandate allows student-athletes to get around being true students in college.

"Because now you can have a kid come to school for a year, play basketball and he doesn't even have to go to class," Knight said. "He certainly doesn't have to go to class the second semester. I'm not exactly positive about the first semester, but he would not have to attend a single class the second semester to play through the whole second semester of basketball.

"That I think has a tremendous effect on the integrity of college sports. I think what should happen is a kid can come out of high school and go to the NBA and if they chose to put him in the developmental league, fine. But if he goes to college there has to be an agreement that he is not eligible for the draft until after two years of college. That way the kid has to obtain eligibility and then he has to retain eligibility and at least for those two years he is a college student. Now the kid is simply like a hired player."

Knight said there would never be a scenario where he would knowingly recruit a player who intended to play college basketball for one year.

Again, the "rent-a-player" situation that Coach Knight is talking about is the result of the NBA's needless regulation, which once again foists upon the universities the risk of subsidizing the NBA's minor league farm system. As noted here, the colleges have a model already established in baseball that would create the free choice for players that would transform college basketball into a truer form of intercollegiate competition. With the proliferation of minor professional basketball leagues overseas, there really is no legitimate reason to restrict a young player's access to professional basketball or to force him to fake being a college student while playing a year of minor league ball in the U.S. Let basketball players make the same choice that baseball players have coming out of high school -- either play in a professional league or accept the benefits of a college education for a few years in return for competing intercollegiately. Not only will it make Coach Knight much happier, but it is the right thing to do for the players.

Posted by Tom at 4:01 AM | Comments (0) |

February 20, 2007

Is Jose de Jesus Ortiz Brad Ausmus' press agent?

We already know that the Chronicle's beat writer for the Stros -- Jose de Jesus Ortiz -- is not very good at evaluating baseball players. But this puff piece out of the box this year on the Stros' chronic albatross -- Brad Ausmus -- is lacking in objectivity even by de Jesus Ortiz's dubious standards:

With two spots up for grabs at the back end of the rotation, the Astros will need Ausmus to help those pitchers settle into the majors.[. . .]

Ausmus was just as valuable to veteran stars such as Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte when they switched over to the NL after spending their careers in the American League. [. . .]

Ausmus may be many things, but idiot is not one of them. He's witty, a voracious reader and a charismatic leader.

He's likely the most respected person in the clubhouse, riding both sides of the divide that usually separates position players from the pitchers.

"He does a great job behind the plate," said Garner. "He's another one of the veteran guys that adds stability on the field for us. But he really runs the pitching staff real well. Pitchers have confidence in him. They trust him. [. . .]

Some fans are critical of Ausmus' production at the plate. A career .253 hitter, he hit .230 with 16 doubles, one triple, two home runs and 39 RBIs last season.

If the middle of the Astros' offense had been more productive, Ausmus' batting average would hardly have been an issue. The catcher's position isn't generally an offensive one.

Nonetheless, Ausmus takes pride in his hitting. He's prone to let off steam throughout the year after a poor at-bat. His value to the team, however, was recognized when opposing coaches and managers voted him the 2006 National League Rawlings Gold Glove.

"I'm not really sure what my role is, per se," he said. "I know that a catcher has the most dramatic effect on the team on the defensive side of the ball as opposed to the offensive side of the ball."

The Astros know that, too. It's why they appreciate Ausmus so much.

So, it's the fault of the Stros hitters batting in the middle of the lineup that Ausmus' horrible hitting is so evident? And what is this about the catcher position not being "an offensive one?" Last time I looked, the rules of baseball still required the catcher to hit. Only the Stros' inexplicable attachment to "catch and throw" catchers such as Ausmus has rendered the position the black hole of outs in the Stros' lineup.

Ausmus may be the baseball equivalent of Peyton Manning calling a game from behind the plate, but that doesn't change the fact that Ausmus is the worst hitter in Stros franchise history. As I noted in my evaluation of Stros players after last season:

Brad Ausmus: F Ausmus (-38 RCAA/.308 OBA/.285 SLG/.593 OPS) took his level of poor play to new depths during the 2006 season as he had the worst season of hitting in Stros history:

Ausmus is also far and away the worst hitter in Stros history:

Given that Ausmus is not even a particularly good defensive player anymore (his arm is no longer strong enough to throw out basestealers consistently), there is no justification for Ausmus remaining a regular Major League player. The only reason he received an F rather than an F- is that he blocks pitches well.

There is really no valid reason for the Stros to maintain a roster spot for Ausmus at this point; he is far worse than a replacement-level player. If he is such a good influence to have around the clubhouse, then the Stros should hire him as a bullpen coach. But paying the worst hitter in Stros history $4 million smackeroos this season to cost the club runs does not make any sense. No matter how hard de Jesus Ortiz tries to make sense of it.

Update: The Chronicle's Richard Justice expresses an opinion of me shared by my teenage daughters.

Posted by Tom at 4:25 AM | Comments (0) |

What's that point again, Ms. Morgenson?

The NY Times' Gretchen Morgenson's column ($) this past Sunday is entitled "Will Other Mortgage Dominoes Fall?", in which Morgenson explores the current downturn in the subprime mortgage market.

As a result of the increasing default rate in subprime mortgages, Morgenson observes that the mortgage-backed securities that many institutional investors purchased may be riskier than they seemed at the time that the investors bought them. Consequently, she notes that those securities may not be worth as much as the investors want them to be worth and that they may sell them. If that happens, Morgenson rightly points out that the market for new mortgage-backed securities may get tougher and there may not be as much cheap mortgage money around for homebuyers, particularly low-income ones.

What I'm trying to figure out is what's wrong with any of that? Isn't that precisely the way markets work? Isn't it good that many low-income or high-credit risk folks have been able to enjoy the benefits of home ownership? Yes, it's too bad for those low-income folks who weren't able to take advantage of the cheap subprime mortagages, but isn't it good that investment vehicles that securitized subprime mortgages with pools of higher grade mortgages shifted part of the risk of those low-grade mortgages to investors who can better absorb the risk? And isn't it more likely that the downturn in subprime mortgages will be less severe as a result of the hedging of risk that occurs through such securitization?

In other words, what's Morgenson's point in the article? Perhaps Larry Ribstein knows?

Posted by Tom at 4:03 AM | Comments (1) |

It's Black Rhino by a nose!

Although I find the NBA All-Star game and related activities excrutiatingly boring, I must admit that the challenge race (see video below) between former NBA great Charles Barkley and 67 year old, veteran NBA referee Dick Bavetta was pretty darn funny. Barkley -- who weighed in at a stout 325 lbs. -- had a classic line upon regaining his breath after winning the race. Checking out the $50,000 oversized check that signified the contribution being made to the Las Vegas Boys and Girls Club as a result of the race, Barkley -- who has been known to spend some time at the Vegas betting tables -- exclaimed proudly:

"We're giving two blackjack hands to charity!"

Unfortunately, the video clip below doesn't include the clever scene that TNT showed earlier in the evening of the stout Barkley "training" for the race by doing "situps" (moving only his head) while eating Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

Posted by Tom at 4:01 AM | Comments (0) |

February 19, 2007

Mississippi channels Venezuela

We all knew that it was just a matter of time before this would occur in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez's dubious economic leadership.

But, as Ted Frank explains, how were we to know that Mississippi AG Jim Hood, plaintiff's lawyer Dickie Scruggs and Senator Trent Lott would accomplish much the same thing in regard to insurance for the citizens of Mississippi? Or that AG Hood would take the preposterous position that the state can force State Farm Insurance Co. to continue to underwrite policies in the state (Larry Ribstein has more)?

Maybe Hood could persuade Chavez to underwrite some cheap insurance for Mississippi consumers?

Posted by Tom at 4:30 AM | Comments (0) |

Let's not be too proud of ourselves

The Conglomerate's Lisa Fairfax notes that the Chinese government has handed a death sentence to a businessman who apparently was running a sort of Ponzi scheme making wine, tea and medical potions from black ants, which are widely believed in China to have medicinal value in the treatment of such ailments as arthritis.

On the other hand, the U.S. government goes after two businessmen who pioneered the enormously valuable risk management of natural gas prices for producers and industrial consumers and prosecutes one to death and sentences the other to an effective life sentence.

Who would have ever imagined that Russian government would look the most reasonable in its sentencing of alleged business wrongdoers?

Posted by Tom at 4:15 AM | Comments (0) |

More on the outrage that is the Harris County Jail

Even as things change in Harris County government, the chronic problems of the Harris County Jail remain the same.

A Houston Chronicle review of state and county records reveals that from January 2001 through December 2006, at least 101 inmates — an average of about 17 a year — have died while in the custody of the Harris County Jail. In 2006 alone, after three consecutive years of failing to be in compliance with state standards, the jail recorded 22 in-custody deaths.

At the time of their deaths, at least 72 of the inmates — more than 70 percent — were awaiting court hearings and had yet to be convicted of the crimes that led to their incarceration.

Records and interviews show that almost one-third of the deaths involve questions of inadequate responses from guards and staff, failure by jail officials to provide inmates with essential medical and psychiatric care and medications, unsanitary conditions, and two allegations of physical abuse by guards.

In at least 13 cases, relatives or documents raise questions over whether inmates received needed medications prior to their deaths. Additionally, 11 of the deaths involve infections and illnesses suggesting sanitation problems. In 10 other cases, death reports suggest possible neglect, . . . [ . . .]

Prisoners also claim they have been forced to sleep on mattresses on cellblock floors — sometimes next to toilets. They maintain that the crowded living conditions at the jail are ripe for disease and bacteria, particularly methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or staph, a potentially lethal blood infection.

As a result, numerous inmates contend they have contracted staph infections while incarcerated. Jail records show that between January 2001 and April 2005, there were 60 medical quarantines at the jail. The records show at least two of the quarantines were related to staph infections. The causes of 11 other quarantines are not listed.

Apparently with the exception of the Harris County Commissioners, most everyone agrees that something needs to be done about the Harris County Jail. Yet, as has been the case for the almost 30 years now that I've been practicing law in Houston, while most everyone agrees, nothing ever gets done.

Government generally -- and Harris County government in particular -- is responsive to those constituencies that wield political power. Prisoners have no political power and are generally unpopular with those who do. Inasmuch as most voters never set foot in a jail and have no first-hand experience of the abysmal conditions, it is easy to understand why nothing is ever done about this outrage, at least from a political standpoint.

But that doesn't make the condition of the Harris County Jail any easier to stomach. At a time when Governor Perry is bowing to the powerful political forces that want to build even more prisons, it's high time that voters realize the scam that state and local politicians have foisted on them in bowing to the powerful political forces that support the endless cycle of building more and more prisons. The problem with the Harris County Jail is largely the result of too many non-violent or petty criminals being locked up there for too long. Until the politicians do the hard work necessary to reform the barbaric policies that have caused that condition, the jail problem is unlikely to change. Kudos to the Chronicle for keeping this problem on the frontburner. Charles Kuffner and Burnt Orange Report have more.

Posted by Tom at 4:03 AM | Comments (2) |

February 18, 2007

Missing in Baghdad

If there is only one newspaper article that you read this weekend, then make it this fascinating Wall Street Journal ($) article written by Sarmad Ali, an Iraqi-born student reporter for the Journal who somehow made his way from Iraq to Columbia University two years ago to study journalism. Ali had taught himself English while growing up in Baghdad during the turbulent period that included the Iraq-Iran War, Desert Storm in 1991 and the present Iraqi War.

The subject of the article is the desperate search of Ali's family for their father, a car mechanic who was recently reported missing after a bombing in Baghdad. The story is not only a riveting first-hand account of how a normal Iraqi family deals with the civil strife that has become commonplace in Baghdad, but also an excellent example of why the U.S. should always keep its arms open for immigrants who seek to improve their lives. Columbia and the WSJ should be proud for helping make that happen for Ali.

Posted by Tom at 6:49 AM | Comments (0) |

February 17, 2007

Stros start playing pitch and catch

The Stros' pitchers and catchers went through their first workout of Spring Training yesterday at the Stros' complex in Kissimmee, Florida, so we had to endure the first article of the spring that suggests the horrifying reality that the eminently forgettable Wandy Rodriguez, arguably the worst starting pitcher in the National League over the past two seasons, may be in the Stros' starting rotation come Opening Day. And it doesn't help that Stros manager Phil Garner, who is not particularly astute in his job, rationalizes that Rodriguez has done well over the past couple of seasons because he has won more games that he should have given how poorly he has pitched.

At any rate, such disturbing thoughts provoke one to wonder whether future Hall of Famer Roger Clemens has one more partial season in his tank for the hometown club (Alyson Footer updates us on the current status)? The clever ESPN commercial below (which includes a quite young Keith Olbermann) reminds us that the same question was being asked about the remarkable Rocket over a decade ago. I suspect that he would answer the question much the same way today. Enjoy.

Posted by Tom at 5:54 AM | Comments (0) |

February 16, 2007

DOJ throws in the towel on appealing the Fifth Circuit's Nigerian Barge decision

The Chronicle's Kristen Hays reports on the news that was bubbling through the Houston legal community on Thursday afternoon -- the Department of Justice has decided not to mount an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals' decision vacating the convictions (see also here) of the four Merrill Lynch executives in the travesty known as the Nigerian Barge case.

Although expected, the DOJ's decision in the Nigerian Barge case reverberates through several other pending Enron-related cases. The DOJ can retry three of the four former Merrill Lynch executives, but that would be petty by even the DOJ's standards given the eviscerated nature of the original charges and the fact that each of the defendants has already spent a year of their lives in prison based on a prosecution that was based more on resentment than on true criminal conduct. The Fifth Circuit's now final decision in the barge case casts doubt (see also here) on a substantial number of the charges upon which former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling was convicted, and dispositively blows away over 80% of the case against former Enron Broadband executive Kevin Howard. In addition, the re-trials of Howard's former co-defendants from the disaster that was the first Enron Broadband case are now in various states of disarray, as is the pressured plea deal of former mid-level Enron executive, Chris Calger. And don't forget the mess that is the DOJ's case against the NatWest Three (see also here).

And this is the product of what the Wall Street Journal called "a good record overall?"

Look, this mess is what happens when government is allowed to bastardize charges (in this case, the honest services charge that is supposed to pertain to bribery or kickback cases) against merely questionable business transactions and then appeal to juror resentment against wealthy businesspeople to procure politically popular convictions. The damage to the defendants, their careers and their families that this abuse of power has caused is bad enough. But the carnage to justice and respect for the rule of law is even more ominous. Does anyone really think that they could stand upright in the winds of such abusive governmental power if those winds turned toward them?

Posted by Tom at 4:54 AM | Comments (1) |

Criminalizing divorce

One of the areas of practice that I have developed over the years is defending parties in contempt of court proceedings. Those are never easy cases (don't believe me? Read about this one), but some of the ugliest occur in the family courts where judges often will hold an ex-husband in contempt of court and jail him for failure to fulfill a support obligation.

According to this NY Times article, New York is experiencing a similar problem as family court judges in a number of cases there have used this supposedly rare sanction to punish ex-husbands. Although information on the number of these debtor prison-type cases is mostly anecdotal, it's reasonably clear that the use of the contempt sanction in financial-inability-to-pay cases is a more widespread practice than it should be. As I've mentioned to more than a few divorce lawyers and family law court judges over the years, it's particularly difficult for an ex-husband to generate income to pay his support or alimony obligations while he is cooling his heels in a local jail cell.

Posted by Tom at 4:31 AM | Comments (0) |

Tracking federal cases

Justia, the company that developed the popular Blawgsearch engine, has just introduced another outstanding search vehicle -- a website that allows the user to track federal court cases in a number of different ways, including by date, state or party name.

The website taps into a database of recently filed federal district court civil cases and starts with a list of all of the cases, which then can be broken down by State/Court/Practice/Sub-Practice. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of all of the new cases that meet these criteria, or you can do a search and subscribe to an RSS fee of the search results. For example, you could track all of the federal court cases filed against a particular company as an RSS feed, or you could subscribe to just those that are filed in Texas. Whatever the search criteria, you can track new cases with an RSS feed.

Each case has an individual page with a link to the Pacer info page (you do need a subscription to access these documents at 8 cents per page) as well as Blog, News, Finance and Web searches on the party names. Not a bad way of picking up some quick informal discovery on the parties to litigation.

Justia has inputted over 300,000 case titles since January 1, 2006 and are now updating the database daily. The website is still in beta and Justia plans to add more functionality and editorial groupings of parties. But it's pretty darn useful already. Give it a look.

Posted by Tom at 4:15 AM | Comments (0) |

February 15, 2007

The Tiger Chasm

The rumblings from the last week's decision to discontinue the popular International PGA Tour event at Castle Pines are still reverberating through the golf world, and Golf Digest's John Hawkins isn't pulling any punches:

The death of the International last week, however, was a big deal for a bunch of reasons. If no longer a marquee non-major, this was a solid mid-level tour stop in a major metropolitan market--not some CVS Charity Classic or B.C. Open. It is by far the most notable tournament loss in Tim Finchem's 13 years as commissioner. Ten months ago Denver was on the short list of potential hosts for a FedEx Cup playoff tilt. Now the Mile High City is six feet under. "Players aren't going to react well to this," says eight-year veteran Joe Ogilvie, a member of the tour's policy board. "You can't do a better job of running an event than Jack Vickers and the people at Castle Pines."[ . . .]

The International's demise is a dangerous sign as to the widening chasm between Tiger events and the non-Tigers. Never have the haves and have-nots been so easily defined or so mindlessly categorized by the presence of a single player--it's the frightening downside of Woods' competitive dictatorship. When he doubles the size of a viewing audience in a strong golf economy, the rich get richer. When he does it in lean times, the poor get really poor.

Along the same lines, ESPN.com's Bob Harig discusses the increasing risk of putting on a non-Tiger tour event:

Sponsoring a regular PGA Tour event costs in the neighborhood of $7 million per year. That money covers a portion of the purse, a television advertising commitment, a fee to the PGA Tour and to the tournament. Spread that out over the six-year length of the network contracts, and you're talking about $42 million or more.

It is a hefty price, especially given the modest television ratings. Those small numbers -- usually in the 2 million-to-3 million range for a weekend network telecast -- were always justified because they were reaching the "right" kind of people … i.e. those with disposable income. With golf, less meant more.

But as the price has kept going up, those company executives began looking at the numbers more closely. And some of them have started to say that enough is enough -- especially if Woods doesn't play.

And guess what side of that chasm the Shell Houston Open is on?

Posted by Tom at 4:29 AM | Comments (0) |

Evaluating jock broadcasting

Charlie Pallilo passes along this clever Chuck Klosterman/Esquire article that compares the playing careers of various former professional athletes with their current careers as broadcasters. Klosterman is on target with most of his comparisons, including this one on Bill Walton:

Bill Walton: A megalomaniac whose insights often seem wholly unrelated to the game he's actively watching, Walton has an on-air persona that can be akin to Jerry Garcia vomiting through a version of "Sugar Magnolia." That said, the Red Rocker is fearless and unpredictable, and the fact that Walton overcame a childhood stutter makes his loquaciousness something of a marvel. Still, this guy (when healthy) was probably the most complete post player who ever lived; he'll never argue with Snapper Jones as efficiently as he threw outlet passes to Larry Steele. Better as a player.

Klosterman also nails it in pointing out that Bill Rafferty puts fellow basketball analysts Billy Packer and Dick Vitale to shame. Here is the entire piece.

Posted by Tom at 4:13 AM | Comments (0) |

Baby talk on energy?

So, I think it's safe to say that, after this blog post, Cato's Jerry Taylor is not going to be asked to contribute a piece to the Wall Street Journal's ($) next special section on alternative energy:

One could spend a lifetime slamming dross in the news pages of the Wall Street Journal - particularly when it comes to energy. Only the driving need to be more productive with my time keeps me from doing so on a daily basis. But when something as bad as this insert comes along, something must be said.

Taylor is not impressed with Houston-based Peak Oil advocate, Matt Simmons, either:

Moving right along, page two features recommended readings from Matthew Simmons, the most prominent proponent of the idea that the world’s oil fields are about to run dry. This, to put it charitably, is a minority perspective among oil analysts. That the Journal turns to someone like Simmons - and only Simmons - to lay in print the groundwork for readers interested in knowing more about the oil industry speaks volumes. Much more intelligent conversations about oil with Daniel Yergin and Robert Mabro are briefly referenced as on-line supplements.

Then, Taylor takes off on the John Biers article about Houston's leadership in promoting alternative energy initiatives:

Reporter John Biers mails in a vacuous piece titled “Texas’ New Tea” about how Houston is poised to become the center of the renewable energy biz, transforming the former oil town into the international headquarters of Big Green, Inc.. While his article might as well have been written by the city’s Chamber of Commerce, it would be nice to provide some perspective. For example, how much capital is flowing in to Houston to underwrite renewable energy investments versus how much capital is glowing in to Houston to underwrite fossil energy investments? I can guarantee you that the dollars associated with the latter are light years beyond those associated with the former and that rising oil prices are doing far more for the city’s economic health than anything else. He might have also asked how much of that venture capital is being driven by government regulation and subsidies. The answer would be “all of it” - which speaks volumes about how precarious those investments might be.

Here is Taylor's entire piece. Enjoy.

Posted by Tom at 4:11 AM | Comments (0) |

February 14, 2007

The depravity of prison

Regular readers of this blog know that I frequently criticize the deplorable condition of Houston's local jail facilities. Also, it will surprise no one that I don't agree with the governmental policy of throwing wealthy businesspeople in prison for engaging in merely questionable business transactions, and I also am not supportive of the largely futile policy of locking up thousands of citizens for nothing more than a personal drug problem. Not to mention the absurdity of locking up legitimate businesspeople who simply facilitate bettors engaging in online gambling.

One of the primary reasons for my opposition to needless imprisonment of citizens is the deplorable state of many American prisons. Inasmuch as I visit jails and prisons from time to time, I am not surprised by the foreboding nature of this Christopher Hayes post (HT Ezra Klein) excerpting a part of this Human Rights Watch report on prison rape. The story reinforces graphically why imprisonment is a horrifically overused remedy in America's criminal justice system.

Not all prisons in the United States are like the one described in the report. But many -- particularly in the widely inconsistent state systems -- are every bit as bad. And don't think for a minute that all public officials are particularly interested in changing the status quo. Remember when the attorney general of California once suggested a similar fate to the one described above for the late Ken Lay? The deeply ingrained inhumanity of many American prison systems is one of the primary reasons to be vigilant in opposing the demagogues in our society who advocate increasing criminalization and imprisonment of American citizens.

In this timely National Journal op-ed,, Stuart Taylor examines the brutality of America's sentencing laws, noting that a "world-record 2.2 million people [populate] our nation's prisons and jails. Justice aside, there are better ways to spend scarce tax dollars." Meanwhile, Scott Henson reports on the status of current legislative efforts to bring sanity to the Texas prison system.

Posted by Tom at 4:32 AM | Comments (0) |

The fading allure of the "Superstar Cities"

Urban economics expert Joel Kotkin (previous posts here) reports on the myth of the "superstar cities" in this WSJ ($) article and he sums up the bullish prospects of cities such as Houston in comparison to supposed superstar cities such as New York, San Francisco and Boston:

Economic and demographic trends suggest that the future of American urbanism lies not in the elite cities but in younger, more affordable and less self-regarding places.

Over the past 15 years, it has been opportunistic newcomers -- Houston, Charlotte, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Dallas, Riverside -- that have created the most new jobs and gained the most net domestic migration. In contrast there has been virtually negligible long-term net growth in jobs or positive domestic migration to places like New York, Los Angeles, Boston or the San Francisco Bay Area.

What as much as anything distinguishes elite places -- what Wharton real-estate professor Joe Gyourko calls "the superstar cities" -- are their absurdly high real-estate prices. New York, Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles have long been more expensive than, say, Dallas, Houston or Phoenix -- but in recent years the difference in price, he calculates, has increased beyond all reason. San Francisco prices since 1950, for example, have grown at twice the national rate for the 50 largest metropolitan areas.[. . .]

This perhaps explains why the largest companies -- with the notable exception of Silicon Valley -- have continued to move toward the more opportunistic cities. New York and its environs, for example, had 140 such firms in 1960; in 2006 the number had dropped to less than half that, some of those running with only skeleton top management. Houston, in contrast, had only one Fortune 500 company in 1960; today it is home to over 20. Houston companies tend to staff heavily locally; this is one reason the city was able to replace New York and other high-cost locales as the nation's unchallenged energy capital. Another example of this trend is Charlotte's rise as the nation's second-ranked banking center in terms of assets, surpassing San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles, indeed all superstar cities except New York.

Houston's own urban policy wonk, Tory Gattis, has more of the Kotkin article and provides his own series of posts on why young cities such as Houston are well-positioned to take advantage of opportunities that are not rich enough for the superstar cities. Not a bad position to be in, folks.

Posted by Tom at 4:15 AM | Comments (0) |

Five big health care issues

EconLog's Arnold Kling, who is doing some of the best thinking these days on reforming America's dysfunctional health care finance system, identifies in this TCS Daily op-ed the five big questions in health care:

1. What will we do about the large projected deficit in Medicare?

2. What can we do to reduce government subsidies for extravagant use of medical procedures with high costs and low benefits?

3. What should we do about the health care needs of the very poor?

4. What should we do about the health care needs of the very sick?

5. What should we do about a scenario in which both income inequality and the share of average income devoted to health care rise sharply?

Kling goes on to discuss our social fetish with health insurance, which is really not insurance at all:

If you ask me what kind of health insurance I would like for my family, my instinct is to answer, "None." The only reason we have health insurance now is to avoid the stigma of being called "uninsured."

Somehow, health insurance has become a social fetish. I could travel to the far reaches of the globe, and almost everywhere I would find merchants where my credit is good and my dollars are welcome. But here at home, trying to enter a local hospital with nothing but a wad of cash and a credit card would be like urinating on the sidewalk.

Read Kling's entire piece. As the WSJ's ($) Holman Jenkins pointed out awhile back, government policy has exacerbated these issues and is unlikely to solve them through greater involvement in the system:

The tax code is the original hectoring mommy behind our health-care neuroses. It gives the biggest subsidy to those who need it least. It pays the affluent to buy more medical care than they would if they were spending their own money. It prompts them to launder our health spending through an insurance bureaucracy, creating endless paperwork. It prices millions of less-favored taxpayers out of the market for health insurance. It fosters a misconception that health care is free even as workers are perplexed over the failure of their wages to rise.

Posted by Tom at 4:13 AM | Comments (0) |

February 13, 2007

The legend of Pistol Pete

Pistol Pete Maravich was a paradox, an incredible basketball player blessed with a talent on the level of a Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Michael Jordan, but cursed with a celebrity that ultimately made him the Elvis of basketball. During a remarkable brief period in the late 1960's, Maravich, Rick Mount at Purdue and Calvin Murphy at Niagara put on a shooting and scoring competition in college basketball that had never been seen before and will likely never be seen again. Maravich was the best all-around player of the three, a veritable Jerry West clone with a touch of Bob Cousy, Steve Nash and Harlem Globetrotter thrown in for good measure. It is no stretch to say that Pistol Pete is responsible for introducing professional basketball to the entertaining way in which such top flight NBA teams as the Phoenix Suns and the Dallas Mavericks play the game today.

I didn't have an opportunity to watch Maravich play in person while he was in college and basketball wasn't on television anywhere near as much back then as it is now, so Maravich's brilliance while playing at LSU wasn't see much outside of Louisiana and the SEC college towns. But after moving to Houston in the early 1970's, I saw Maravich play the Rockets many times and he was clearly way ahead of his time. This NY Times Sunday Book Review reviews a couple of new biographies of Maravich, inluding "Pistol" by former New York Daily News sports columnist Mark Kriegel. I picked up a copy of "Pistol" at the bookstore last week and it was like reading a Maravich-led fast break -- you can breeze through it no time.

The book is as much about Pistol Pete's father Press as it is about Pete. Press was an excellent basketball player in his day and went on to become a well-regarded high school and college coach. However, as Press became obsessed with making Pistol the best player ever, his coaching and fathering became compromised. Although that part of the story is sad in many respects, it's still interesting to learn how Press trained young Pete to become a basketball phenom. In one drill, Press would make young Pete lie prone in the backseat of a moving car and dribble a basketball out the door while Press sped the car up or slowed it down, testing Pete's reflexes and ability to control the ball. Press would proudly show his son off to other coaches and players, almost like a circus act.

Press' obsession produced a remarkable basketball talent. Maravich averaged an NCAA record 44.2 points a game in his three seasons at LSU before basketball adopted the three-point line. Given Pistol's shooting range, he certainly would have averaged over 50 points a game during his collegiate career had the three-point line been in effect. He was named the college basketball player of the year in 1970 and and was signed by the Atlanta Hawks after a bidding war between the Hawks and the Carolina franchise of the old ABA.

But there was also a huge toll to what Press had created. Pistol was already a heavy drinker and quite likely an alcoholic. Pistol needed the ball in hands most of the time to be effective, which some pro players resented. And Press wasn't around in Atlanta as the coach to coddle his basketball creation (Press was LSU's coach while Pistol played there).

So, after four mostly disappointing seasons in Atlanta, Maravich was traded to the expansion New Orleans Jazz, which was just the NBA's ticket to fill the then new Superdome. Back home, Pistol won his first NBA scoring title in 1977, averaging 31.1 points a game. In one memorable game at the Superdome, Maravich torched the Knicks for 68 points in a game that many longtime NBA fans still consider the best individual performance in NBA history.

But Bourbon Street was not a good training table for Maravich, who also suffered a serious knee injury in New Orleans that undermined the quickness that had made his floor game so extraordinary. After kicking around the NBA for a few more seasons, the bright flame of Pistol Pete's basketball genius flared out.

However, in a fascinating twist, Pistol Pete's life became even more interesting after he quit playing basketball for a living. Pete watched Press raise a grandaughter the way he should have raised Pete and, spurred by an embrace of evangelical Christianity, Pistol cared for his ailing father lovingly during his dying days. Then, as quick as one of his no-look passes, Pete was gone, too, felled by a congenital heart defect at the age of 40 while playing a pick-up game in a church gym.

Sadly, much of the video of Maravich during his salad days at LSU was stolen years ago and has never been recovered. So, much of the legacy of this remarkable talent must be passed along by those of us who were blessed to see him play. Thus, as you watch Steve Nash put together a third straight MVP-caliber season this year for the Phoenix Suns, recognize that, in many respects, you are watching the modern version of Pistol Pete Maravich.

Posted by Tom at 4:18 AM | Comments (0) |

The Razorback Soap Opera

Last week, it was the institutionalized fanaticism of signing day in minor league professional football. Following on that drama, this Hog News post is dispositive evidence that there is not enough to do in Arkansas:

So many people desperately want someone to come forward and tell the truth. The problem with that is many of the key players in the latest Arkansas football saga have to move forward and continue their lives. They have to protect their futures. Anyone who has attempted to tell the truth this past year has had their character, reputations and even their careers attacked by those who believe it is in the best interest of the program to prevent it. But the facts related in these writings are true and have been verified.

Read the entire piece, at your own risk. ;^)

Posted by Tom at 4:06 AM | Comments (1) |

Judging the Judges

This is an intriguing idea -- a website with anonymous comments about federal judges around the country.

Many considerations go into assessing litigation risk -- strength of legal case, quality of witnesses, timing, relative financial strength of the parties, etc. However, a good understanding of the judge's tendencies is sometimes the most valuable nugget of information.

There are not all that many comments on the website, yet. But it could develop into a valuable market device to assist parties and lawyers measure litigation risk. It will be interesting to see whether this catches on. Frankly, it should.

Posted by Tom at 4:06 AM | Comments (0) |

February 12, 2007

"It's nice to have a train car to myself"

About a year ago, this post noted the boondoggle status of Las Vegas' then new $650 million, 4.4 mile monorail project. As is typical with such boondoggles, passage of time does not make the problem any better:

Donna Washington loves riding the Las Vegas Monorail, but not for a reason that would cheer its owners.

“In my town, the trains are always jam-packed, so it’s nice to have a train car to myself here,” said Ms. Washington, 44, a Chicagoan vacationing here. “I do wonder, though, where all the people are.”[. . .]

. . . ridership numbers for the Disney-inspired system, which stops at nine hotel-casinos and the Las Vegas Convention Center, are falling amid a lackluster marketing campaign, technical problems and revenues so far below projections that Wall Street fears that a default on its bonds could occur by the end of the decade.

December was the monorail’s worst month, with 18,197 riders per day, far below the 53,000 predicted by studies used to sell the bonds to investors and to persuade public officials to give up public right of way. Despite a management shakeup in mid-2005 that purged the company of its founding executives, the system’s average ridership plunged 31 percent in 2006, to 19,219 per day.

The company’s new chief executive, Curtis L. Myles III, said that drop was somewhat anticipated after fares were raised in December 2005 to $5 a ride from $3. That move increased revenues by 4 percent, to $31.4 million for the year, still far short of the $44.9 million needed to break even. The total cost of the system per year is about $61 million; the monorail receives about $16 million in advertising revenues from companies like Sprint, which is about to start providing wireless Internet access on the trains and has a 15,000-square-foot store at the convention center stop.

Mr. Myles acknowledged in an interview that the company’s cash reserves, estimated by Fitch at about $89 million, would run dry by 2010 if revenues did not improve. To break even, he said, the monorail would need to increase ridership by about 50 percent.

And can you guess the Las Vegas Monorail Company's proposed solution? Of course, double-down on the monorail bet -- a $500 million expansion!

Read the entire article. And yes, a similar thing could happen here.

Posted by Tom at 4:43 AM | Comments (6) |

The new Prohibition run amok

I swear, you can't make this stuff up.

A couple of weeks ago, the government was moving in on Wall Street in connection with its overwrought jihad on internet gambling interests. But now, Radley Balko notes that authorities are racheting down on an even more insidious gambling problem -- great-grandmothers who run betting pools on NFL games at the local Elks Lodge!:

A volunteer waitress and a widowed great-grandmother who tends bar at the Lake Elsinore Elks Lodge are due in court later this month after pleading not guilty to misdemeanor charges of operating an illegal gambling operation.

Margaret Hamblin, 73, and 39-year-old Cari Gardner, who donates her time as a waitress at the lodge, face up to one year in jail and a $5,000 fine for allegedly running a $50 football pool at the facility, the Press-Enterprise reported.

The charges stem from a Nov. 20 investigation by state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control agents into an anonymous tip that lodge members bet on NFL games.

Behind the bar, the armed agents found an envelope with $5 from each of the 10 members taking part in the pool. The person who came closest to guessing the combined score of the Jacksonville Jaguars and the New York Giants was to pocket the contents, according to the Press-Enterprise.

"It was just regular 'Monday Night Football,' " said Hamblin, who has tended bar for 40 years, six of them at the lodge. "We were sitting at the bar, and the gang wanted to do something," she said, according to the newspaper.

Timothy Clark, who heads the department's Riverside district, which issued the citations, said football pools "are a violation of the law, and we will take whatever we feel is appropriate action to ensure compliance by our licensees," the newspaper reported.

Clark said he has recommended a one-year probationary period during which the lodge could host no gambling activities, or it would face a 10-day license suspension, according to the Press-Enterprise.

That means the end of events such as a "50-50" raffle in which proceeds typically go to scholarship funds and local charities for disabled children and veterans, Hamblin told the newspaper.

Hamblin and Gardner, who are represented on a pro bono basis, must return to court Feb. 28 for a preliminary hearing, at which a judge will determine if there are grounds to order them to stand trial.

In the meantime, beverage control officials are reviewing the Elks Lodge license, according to the newspaper.

Feel safer?

Posted by Tom at 4:24 AM | Comments (0) |

Nice commute

Phil Mickelson won his first PGA Tour event of the new season this weekend by five strokes at the Crosby at Pebble Beach (I know, I know, it's really the ATT Pebble Beach Pro-Am, but I'm old school).

Meanwhile, Geoff Shackelford notes that Mickelson committed to playing in next weekend's event -- the Nissan Open at Riviera in L.A. -- where he will deploy a rather unique commuting strategy in regard to Southern California traffic:

After suggesting Thursday that he might, Mickelson did enter next week's Nissan Open before yesterday's deadline. He will play at Riviera for the first time since 2001.[. . .]

Mickelson said he would attempt to commute to L.A. each day from his home in Rancho Santa Fe by using his private jet, flying from Palomar Airport to Santa Monica Airport.

By the way, if you have any question that Mickelson is a good guy or that the NFL isn't particularly appreciative of its former players, read this.

Posted by Tom at 4:11 AM | Comments (0) |

February 11, 2007

Jamie Olis finally gets a ticket to Bastrop

Jamie Olis, the former Dynegy mid-level executive whose prosecution and sentencing represents one of the most brutal examples of the federal government's criminalization of business since the bursting of the stock market bubble earlier this decade, has finally received a small measure of relief in the latest stage of his ordeal. Yesterday, the Bureau of Prisons finally transferred Olis from the downtown Houston Federal Detention Center to the Bastrop, Texas federal prison unit. The Bastrop unit is the original prison that Olis was assigned to when he began serving his sentence almost three years ago and is thankfully the most convenient location for Olis' family members to visit him.

As noted in previous posts here and here, Olis spent over a year in the Detention Center in Houston -- a facility that is meant to house prisoners for only short periods -- because of prosecution foot-dragging in regard to his resentencing and then a four-month delay in assigning him to a permanent facility after he was re-sentenced. Here's hoping that Bastrop will be Olis' final prison destination before his release, probably in late 2009 or early 2010.

Posted by Tom at 6:43 AM | Comments (0) |

February 10, 2007

Shelby Metcalf, RIP

One of the true characters in the basketball culture of Texas -- former Texas A&M coach Shelby Metcalf -- died this past Thursday in College Station at the age of 76. Anyone who has lived in Texas and followed basketball knows about Metcalf, who coached at A&M when basketball was truly just a diversion between football and spring football. But Metcalf's teams were always competitive against teams of superior personnel and the Texas A&M administration learned just how special a coach Metcalf was after they unceremoniously fired him in 1990 after 26 and a half seasons at the helm of Aggie basketball. The Aggie program promptly went into a tailspin for the next 15 years until current coach Billy Gillespie was hired three seasons ago and transformed the Aggie program into a national power.

But as good a coach as Metcalf was, he was an even better storyteller and comedian. Metcalf's dry wit and calm demeanor are legendary in Texas coaching circles, where his observation that one of his players who had 4 F's and a D was "concentrating too hard on one class" is probably his best-known crack. Metcalf was my one of my favorite coaches to listen to during an interview, so here are a some of my favorite Metcalf observations from over the years:

After a tough game in Lubbock, a reporter asked Metcalf in the post-game press conference about what he told his players after Tech fans resorted to throwing coins at the Aggies. Metcalf replied: "I told my players to show some class, and not pick up anything less than a quarter."

In talking about how dramatically recruiting had changed during the course of his long career, Metcalf recalled how he had recruited a player in the mid-1960's by taking him fishing and observed ruefully: "You just can’t get real good players with catfish anymore."

When a number of A&M players were having trouble academically, Metcalf arranged to have them enrolled in a basket weaving so that they could increase their grade point average. "Problem was," Metcalf later admitted. "A couple of them were American-Indians, and they set such a high curve that they flunked the others out."

Commenting on the notoriously fickle A&M fans, Metcalf observed: "The only happy Aggie is an unhappy Aggie."

Metcalf loved nicknames. So, after recruiting a player out of Louisiana named Smart, Metcalf nicknamed him "Plenty." After reviewing first semester grades, Metcalf changed Smart's nickname to "Nottoo."

After former Aggie football coach R.C. Slocum resigned under pressure during the A&M administration led by former CIA Chief and current Defense Secretary William Gates, Metcalf commented: "R.C.'s lucky. He could have just disappeared, you know."

Metcalf always had the same pre-season observation about the keys to a successful season: "Stay happy, healthy and out of foul trouble."

During a particularly turbulent airline flight, an A&M player was feeling quite nauseous.

“Son, what's wrong with you?” inquired Metcalf.

“Coach," replied the player. "I am dizzy, sweaty, and nauseous. I think I might throw up."

"Well now," Metcalf shot back. "Now you know how I feel every time I have to put you in a game!"

Update: Chronicle sports columnist John Lopez, an A&M grad who knew Metcalf for over 25 years, passes along this heartfelt tribute.

Posted by Tom at 4:11 AM | Comments (0) |

February 9, 2007

Was Manning really the Super Bowl MVP?

I was glad that Colts QB Peyton Manning finally was on a Super Bowl winner because he is truly one of the NFL's greatest QB's of all-time. But I thought it was a tad absurd that Manning was named the Super Bowl's Most Valuable Player when he didn't even play particularly well. How about one of those fellows in the trenches where the Colts dominated the Bears throughout the game?

Dave Berri agrees, but makes the salient point that it is much more difficult to evaluate the performance of football players than the performance of players in other sports (i.e., baseball) that do not require the same degree of reliance on teammates as football. After pointing out that Manning actually was statistically worse during this season's successful playoff run than he had been in each of the Colts' playoff failures over the past three seasons, Berri observes the following:

So what lesson has Manning learned? For his team to win, he must play bad?

No, that’s not the lesson.

There are actually two lessons. First, playoffs are a small sample and luck plays a substantial role in determining the outcome (a point made last Sunday in The New York Times). Secondly, teammates matter in football. Quarterbacks do not win or lose games all by themselves. This was true when Manning’s team failed in the playoffs. And it’s true this year as well.

So we should stop judging quarterbacks strictly in terms of whether their teams happen to win. Manning was not less of a quarterback when his team failed to win its last game. And he’s not finally a success because his team happened to win its last game.

Berri also makes an interesting point about Bears QB Rex Grossman. Read the entire piece.

Posted by Tom at 4:59 AM | Comments (0) |

Milton Friedman's introduction to economics

James Hamilton passes along Stanford University Professor John Taylor's touching tribute to Milton Friedman, which includes this anecdote about Friedman's participation in an entry level economics class:

[Professor Friedman] was always willing to be a guest lecturer in my Economics 1 course, speaking to hundreds of Stanford students. He would start off telling the undergraduates that two major things the government is involved in are a mess -- education and drugs -- and that would set off a lively round of questions with his memorable answers impressing both those on the left and the right.

Along those same lines, Professor Friedman would agree with this cogent this Jacob Sullum/Reason op-ed that cogently explores the dubious nature of the government's Prohibition on internet gambling and the recent governmental assault on a legitimate foreign business, Neteller PLC.

Posted by Tom at 4:54 AM | Comments (0) |

Trying to get in shape the hard way

Sandy Szwarc makes sense while expressing skepticism about the FDA's decision to approve an over-the-counter version of Xenical (orlistat) for sale, the first prescription weight loss drug to be available without a prescription:

Even the FTC’s scientific expert panel reviewing the evidence for weight loss advertisements, . . . determined that any claims that a weight loss product will cause weight loss by blocking the absorption of fat or calories were false and fraudulent advertising. . . . [E]ven with the prescription strength Xenical, people can’t malabsorb enough fat a day to lose a pound a week and there are limits beyond which significant gastrointestinal problems occur. The panel’s scientific analysis stated: “The biological facts do not support the possibility that sufficient malabsorption of fat or calories can occur to cause substantial weight loss.”

Meanwhile, this NY Times article reports that one of the formerly most popular ways to attempt to lose weight has fallen out of favor:

[I]f current trends continue, aerobics will be as rare as, . . . those vibrating belts that were supposed to jiggle away fatty hips and gravity boots that were supposed to — what was it they were supposed to do? For now, the popularity of aerobics is sharply down from when it was “the mainstay of fitness in America,” said Mike May, a spokesman for the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association.

It’s why you may have noticed — if you have shown up at your gym attired in your best leg warmers with a sweatshirt off one shoulder — the lack of aerobics classes on the menu. Fewer than half of the 300 gyms and health clubs recently surveyed by IDEA offered aerobics classes, a number that is “continuing to decline,” according to the summation of the report.

At its peak in the mid-’80s, an estimated 17 million to 20 million did aerobics, Mr. May said. But only five million did in 2005, according to a report by the sporting goods association. “We expect the 2006 numbers to be significantly lower,” Mr. May said. “Aerobics are increasingly out of favor.”

The legacy of injuries is one reason. Many of the original instructors like Mr. Blahnik won’t teach aerobics — because they can’t. “Those hardest hit by all those aerobics were often the teachers, because they were pushing harder than anyone else and doing the classes a dozen times a week,” Dr. Metzl said. “Our bodies just weren’t meant to withstand all that pounding.”

By the way, Art DeVany has compiled this category of blog posts that explores the damaging physical effects of distance running and endurance training. More exercise does not always equate with better health.

Posted by Tom at 4:31 AM | Comments (0) |

February 8, 2007

Lamar Muse, RIP

Former Houstonian M. Lamar Muse, one of the founders of Southwest Airlines and a pioneer of airline deregulation, died earlier this week in Dallas. He was 86 at the time of death.

Muse was legendary in the airline industry for taking over Southwest when the airline had no planes, piles of startup debt, and nominal liquidity. He parleyed that into three 737s from Boeing so that Southwest could begin flying the planes between Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, taking advantage of close-in and underused Hobby Airport in Houston and Love Field in Dallas. Inasmuch as Southwest was flying entirely intrastate, the airline was lightly regulated in comparison to the legacy airlines of the time and, thus, slashed fares to capture the Texas market. When I moved to Texas in the early 1970's, I could buy a ticket to Dallas or San Antonio for about $30, $50 round trip. And, yes, those orange hot pants on the flight attendants were not bad, either.

Muse left Southwest in the late 1970's over a dispute about the rate of expansion and he was never able to regain the mojo that he displayed at Southwest. In 1982, he started Muse Air, which was sort of a luxury version of Southwest, but the timing was bad as the oil and gas business in Texas was just beginning to enter a long and deep tailspin at the time. After never generating a profit, Muse sold out to Southwest in 1985, which renamed the airline TranStar. By 1987, Southwest had had enough of the airline's losses and shut it down.

Muse was a true character to the end, reportedly participating in internet chat rooms regarding airlines up until recently. Probably his most endearing business legacy is his championing of a company stock-based, profit-sharing plan for Southwest employees, who didn't have pensions at the time. That plan eventually turned many longtime Southwest employees into millionaires as Southwest's value grew over the years. A fine legacy for any businessperson, indeed.

Posted by Tom at 4:49 AM | Comments (1) |

The International is kaput

The International -- the idiosyncratic PGA Tour event at Castle Pines GC in Colorado that used a modified Stableford scoring system rather than the traditional stoke play format -- will shut down for good after this year's tournament, another casualty of the increasing stratification of tournaments on the PGA Tour. John Hawkins has the story.

But for the support of Shell Oil, the same thing could happen to the Houston Open, for the reasons noted here and here. The prospects for the other Texas tournaments are not all that rosy, either. PGA Tour, are you listening?

Meanwhile, Doug Ferguson reports that several cities are vying to replace the International:

The cancellation [of the International] leaves a hole in the PGA Tour schedule on July 5-8, but tour officials have been working on a contingency plan over the last month and are expected to announce a replacement by April.

The leading candidate is Washington, the largest U.S. market without a PGA Tour event. The nation's capital had a tour event since 1968, but that presumably ended when title sponsor Booz Allen bailed out last year because it was not part of the FedExCup portion of the PGA Tour schedule.

Other markets under consideration are Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Kansas City.

Posted by Tom at 4:23 AM | Comments (0) |

EGL deal hits turbulence

Looks as if Jim Crane's proposed private equity-backed buyout of EGL is on the rocks already. That news probably makes Ben Stein happy, but what about EGL shareholders?

Crane commented that he will resubmit another bid, but the market certainly didn't receive his first with gusto. After an initial run-up in price upon the announcement of the proposed buyout, the stock is now trading at close to its 52-week low. Interestingly, Crane's failed offer -- something that folks such as Stein would make illegal -- may end up inducing more bidders to get into play for EGL than otherwise would be the case, thus increasing EGL's value for shareholders. Stay tuned.

Posted by Tom at 4:05 AM | Comments (0) |

February 7, 2007

Judge Robinson hands Westar's Wittig another excessive sentence

On the heels of the 10th Circuit's scathing decision last month setting aside the convictions of former Westar Energy executives David Wittig and Douglas Lake, this Greg Burns/Chicago Tribune article reports that the legal tug-of-war between U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson and the appellate court over her handling of the criminal cases against Wittig continues.

As Burns reports, Judge Robinson re-sentenced Wittig earlier in the week to 24 months in prison on a bank fraud conviction that was not related to the larger prosecution of Wittig and Lake in regard to Westar. Judge Robinson handed down that sentence despite the fact that the 10th Circuit had already struck down two of her previous sentences on that charge, the most recent of which suggested that the sentence on the charge should be a maximum of six months. Wittig has already served over a year in prison.

Beyond his reporting on Wittig and the Westar-related criminal cases, Burns' article is well worth reading simply for the depth of his analysis of how the prosecutions reflect the questionable nature of the regulation-of-business-through-criminalization policy that the federal government and state actors such as Eliot Spitzer adopted after the bursting of the stock market bubble at the beginning of this decade. As Burns notes, the Westar prosecutions have played more on widespread resentment of wealthy businesspersons than on clear lines of criminal liability. Such analysis is a refreshing change of perspective from what much of the mainstream media serves up about prosecutions of business interests.

Posted by Tom at 4:46 AM | Comments (0) |

Regulating private equity buyouts

Matthew Bishop over at The Economist.com makes the salient point that the concern over private equity buyouts is getting a bit hysterical:

THE backlash against the private-equity boom is becoming a tad hysterical. Take yesterday's Financial Times (of February 5th), in which John Gapper issues a “wake up call” about what he says may be the next big financial scandal, “management buy-outs of public companies by executives backed by private-equity firms.”

What is the problem, exactly? According to Mr Gapper: “To state the obvious, any chief executive who plans to buy the company that he or she leads faces a huge conflict of interest with its shareholders. The job of an executive is to make a company as valuable as possible so that its shares fetch the highest possible price. But any director who bids for a company is eager to pay as little as possible so that he or she can reap the maximum reward in the future.”

Still, Mr Gapper concedes that not every management buyout is “inherently flawed”. That makes him a moderate compared with another financial writer, Ben Stein, who wants them to be made illegal.

As Mr Stein claimed not long ago in the New York Times, “management buyouts are great for management. But by every standard I can see, they are yet another sad sign of how our corporate trustees have lost their moral compass. The time for them to stop is long overdue. If the stockholders have hired you and pay your wage to manage their assets, your job is to do that for them—not to buy them out at fire-sale prices and turn around and make billions that rightfully belong to them. The management buyout is a sad and infuriating avatar of a decadent age.”

Whoa, Nellie, says Bishop:

Mr Gapper and Mr Stein talk as though the mere existence of a potential conflict of interest will lead directly to wrongdoing. But one of the great strengths of capitalism is its ability to develop efficient mechanisms to manage conflicts of interest. When a boss considers selling his firm to private equity, the check on him is particularly simple: the shareholders of his firm must approve any sale. In a few recent cases, such as a bid for CableVision, shareholders have considered the offer inadequate and blocked the sale. That is evidence, not of a brewing scandal, but of market forces at work.

Indeed. My anecdotal experience is that a good sign to hold on to one's pocketbook firmly is when someone tells you that it is better to have fewer bidders competing to purchase something. Indeed, my sense is that a management-led, private equity-financed play for a public company is usually just as likely to spur competing offers for the company as it is an attempt to lowball the public company's shareholders. When the folks who know the most about a company's business show that kind of confidence in the value of the company, that sends a strong signal to the market that more value can be made. Such confidence tends to be contagious.

Posted by Tom at 4:32 AM | Comments (0) |

Institutionalized fanaticism

If your friends or co-workers who follow college football closely are acting a bit stressed out today, then it's quite likely that the source of their anxiety is a 17 or 18 year old who they have never met.

Yes, today is that day of the absurd dubbed "National Signing Day" when we are deluged with the rather odd spectacle of grown men fawning over high school football players to induce them to come take advantage of their university's resort facilities rather than their competition's resort facilities. And, oh yeah, if they can earn a few "tips" from well-heeled alums while enjoying those resort facilities, then that's alright, too.

Indeed, this NY Times article already suggests that the University of Illinois' inexplicably strong recruiting class this year may be the result of cheating. With the proliferation of the blogosphere over the past couple of years, a host of blogs follow the recruiting wars closely and often with keen wit. The following are a few of the interesting posts on this year's recruiting season that I've stumbled across:

The Wizard of Odds explains why all of this competition over the quality of recruiting classes is largely meaningless;

The Sunday Morning QB examines the strange system in which all of this has evolved;

The House that Rock Built explores the ripple effect of recruiting decisions;

Every Day Should Be a Saturday reveals how recruiting foretold Rex Grossman's mediocre Super Bowl performance (just kidding);

A widget that displays a map reflecting where a school's recruits are coming from; and

The College Football Resource page has more information than you should ever want to know about this year's top recruits and where they are going.

Meanwhile, as university presidents continue to dither over this fundamentally flawed system of regulating rents, this post from a couple of years ago suggests that a better system is readily available so long as the colleges forsake being the NFL's free minor league system, a position with which Malcolm Gladwell agrees. As noted earlier here, big-time college football as presently structured is hopelessly corrupt, but it's a pretty darn entertaining form of corruption. Adopting a structure much closer to college baseball would likely minimize the corruptive elements of college football while not affecting the entertainment value of the sport much. But it's going to take leadership and courage from the top of the universities to promote and implement such a reform.

What are the chances of such leadership emerging? Probably about the same as Rice knocking off Texas next season in Austin.

Posted by Tom at 4:25 AM | Comments (0) |

February 6, 2007

Reflecting on the aftermath of Barbaro

Now that the hyperbole from the unfortunate death of Barbaro is dying down, some much-needed perspective is beginning to appear in the articles about horse racing.

In this NY Times piece, Gina Rarick compares the European style of horse training and racing, and posits that the injuries that Barbaro suffered are the inevitable result of the more extreme training regimen that thoroughbreds endure in an American racing system focused primarily on speed.

Meanwhile, this Bill Finley/NY Times article introduces us to Barbaro's kid brother, a yet-unnamed yearling still frolicking in the fields of Kentucky. Will the young colt develop as well as his big brother? As they say in the horse-racing business, "you never know, but that's part of the charm."

Posted by Tom at 4:32 AM | Comments (0) |

But do they have WiFi?

It was a tough day for yuppies yesterday as this Consumer Reports analysis concluded that good ol' fashioned McDonald's coffee was superior to Starbuck's in taste testing. But both McDonald's and Starbucks are going to have a hard time competing with the new coffee franchise described in this LA Times article:

On a quick break from his job as a trash hauler, Rob Chapman was in the mood for some coffee. So he pulled his truck into the Sweet Spot Cafe, a drive-through espresso stand on busy Aurora Avenue here in the Seattle suburbs.

"Do you want a Wet Dream or the Sexual Mix today, honey?" asked barista Edie Smith, dressed in a tight-fitting yellow blouse that did a less than fully effective job of covering her cleavage. She leaned down in the window, perhaps all the closer to hear his order. He chose the first option: a coffee with white chocolate, milk and caramel sauce.

It is possible, of course, that Chapman and the dozens of other drive-by customers at the parking lot stand one recent morning stopped by only for the coffee.

But, as Chapman dryly observed, "I do enjoy coming here more than Starbucks."

In a way, it is perhaps stunning that it took so long for entrepreneurs here to figure out that coffee, the fabled Seattle obsession, mixes very well with sex, the fabled human obsession.

But apparently it does, to judge from the growing number of steamy espresso stands that have popped up around the region in the last year or so.

At the Sweet Spot here in Shoreline, the Natte Latte in Port Orchard and the Bikini Espresso in Renton, not to mention the multi-stand Cowgirls Espresso, the term "hot coffee" has clearly taken on a whole new meaning.

It's safe to say that it's only a matter of time before this type of coffee shop catches on in Houston.

Posted by Tom at 4:05 AM | Comments (0) |

One of the Chron's good guys retires

I don't fish much and hunt even less, but I have enjoyed enjoyed the writing of Houston Chronicle Outdoors columnist Joe Doggett for the past 35 years. Over that time, Doggett has cogently addressed a wide variety of subjects and issues that impact hunting and fishing in a manner that made them equally interesting to the avid and casual outdoorsman alike. This past Sunday, Doggett wrote his final column for the Chronicle before heading toward a retirement for which his occupation prepared him particularly well. He will be missed.

By the way, Doggett's last column gave me an excuse to pass along the specially-made YouTube commercial below with a hilarious hunting theme. Enjoy.

Posted by Tom at 4:02 AM | Comments (1) |

February 5, 2007

Update on the case of Dr. Pou

Speaking of prosecutorial excess, the case of Dr. Anna Pou -- the former University of Texas Health Science Center professor and physician who was arrested last year in Louisiana on wrongful death charges for her actions in attempting to save lives during the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina -- was back in the news last week. The New Orleans coronor announced that he had not found evidence that would show that the cases were homicides, although he noted that he was continuing to gather evidence and had reached no final conclusion.

Dr. Pou's case was transferred to Orleans Parish after Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti had labeled her and two nurses who were assisting her during the chaos as murderers. Just to make sure he got the most publicity possible for his lack of prosecutorial discretion, Foti repeated those charges on 60 Minutes several months ago. Ultimately, the decision on whether to prosecute will come down to Eddie Jordan, the District Attorney of New Orleans, who is still planning on presenting evidence to a grand jury. With the the coroner’s current classification, what on earth is there to present to a grand jury?

Posted by Tom at 5:21 AM | Comments (0) |

"Mike Nifong would approve?"

In criminal law appellate circles, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is known as a black hole into which appeals of convictions go and reversals rarely occur.

However, about a year ago, the Fifth Circuit vacated a criminal conviction of one Humberto Cuellar, who had been convicted of international money laundering after he was found with $83,000 hidden in his VW Beetle as he headed to Mexico via Del Rio, Texas. The prosecution needed to show that Cuellar’s transportation of the money was designed to conceal its source and that Cuellar knew of the concealment. Inasmuch as the prosecution focused solely on the fact that the money was hidden in Cuellar’s car to establish these elements, a Fifth Circuit panel concluded that the evidence was insufficient to support conviction and that money laundering requires some showing that the defendant tried to pass off the money as legitimate. In short, simply attempting to smuggle the money to Mexico does not equate with money laundering.

But not so fast. The Fifth Circuit decided to rehear the appeal en banc and, in this decision, reverses the panel decision and affirms the original conviction by a 13-3 vote. In a stinging dissent, Judge Jerry Smith of Houston notes that the majority's decision facilitates prosecutorial misconduct by allowing the government to charge Cuellar with the crime of money laundering -- which carries a sentence of up to 20 years -- rather than his true crime of currency smuggling, which has a sentence of only up to five years. In arguing that the prosecution didn't come close to making a money laundering case, Judge Smith observes that "this is a case of a prosecution run amok" and that Mike Nifong -- the disgraced former prosecutor in the Duke lacrosse team case -- "most surely would approve." Ouch!

Hat tip to Robert Loblaw.

Posted by Tom at 4:42 AM | Comments (0) |

Remembering Chocolate Thunder

Given the Rockets mediocrity over the last decade or so, it's hard to get too enthusiastic about professional basketball in Houston. This season's Rockets team is not bad, but it hasn't had all of its working parts playing at the same time yet and, even with all those components working, probably isn't as good as the NBA Western Conference powers Dallas, Phoenix and San Antonio. By the way, the best way to keep up with the Rockets is through Jonathan Feigen's blog, which is excellent.

About 30 years ago, the Rockets also had a pretty good team, but they were beaten in the Eastern Conference playoffs by the Philadelphia 76ers, who were led by Julius Erving and. one of the true characters of NBA history, 20 year-old center Darryl Dawkins, he of the "Chocolate Thunder-flying, Robinzine-crying, teeth-shaking, glass-breaking, rump-roasting, bun-toasting, wham-bam I am jam." The NY Times checks in with the always entertaining Chocolate Thunder, who, among other things, used to claim to be an alien from planet Lovetron where he spent off-season practicing "interplanetary funkmanship" with his girlfriend Juicy Lucy.

Posted by Tom at 4:17 AM | Comments (1) |

February 4, 2007

The brains behind the Bears' previous Super Bowl team

With the Chicago Bears playing in Super Bowl XLI, it was only a matter of time before the NY Times caught up with Buddy Ryan, the architect of the suffocating Bears defense that dominated the game the last time the Bears played in the Super Bowl (1985).

Ryan holds a special place in the hearts of Houston football fans. During the 1993 season, while passing through Houston as the defensive coordinator for a pretty good Oilers team, Ryan hauled off and slugged fellow Oilers assistant coach, Kevin Gilbride, on the sidelines during a nationally televised game. The reason for the outburst was Ryan's frustration over Gilbride's dubious coordination of the Oilers' mercurial Run 'n Shoot offense in that particular game. Local sports wags still shake their heads over that incident.

Although volatile, Ryan was a superb defensive football coach and certainly one of the best in NFL history. He was most well-known for that fine defense on the 1985 Bears Super Bowl championship team, but he may have done an even better job in coordinating the defense on the 1969 New York Jets team that upset the mighty Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. Most people remember Joe Namath's famous prediction from that game, but the the Jets’ offense only scored 16 points. On the other hand, Ryan's Jets defense held the high-powered Baltimore offense to 7 points after Vince Lombardi's Packers had put up 35 and 33 points in the first two Super Bowls. Most folks before Super Bowl III thought that the AFL teams were chronically overmatched in playing against the established NFL powers, but the Jets and the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl IV changed that perception forever.

Ryan's genius was the unmitigated aggressiveness with which his defenses played. Focusing on sacking the QB ("We're trying to find out the identity of the opposition's second team QB," Ryan would quip with a wink), forcing turnovers and and stopping the offense on third-down, Ryan ushered in the era of bringing zone blitzes from everywhere on the field to disrupt the offense. Interestingly, the underdog Bears' chances of winning today are largely dependent on whether the Bears' defense can effectively pressure Colts QB Peyton Manning. Ron Rivera, who played for Ryan on the 1985 Bears championship team, is the Bears' defensive coordinator trying to figure out how to do that.

As with many top notch coordinators in football, Ryan was not a particularly effective head coach. He was fired from NFL head coaching jobs at Philly and Arizona before retiring to his Kentucky horse farm in 1995 after 34 years of coaching in the NFL. He continues to raise horses there while caring for his Alzheimer’s-ridden wife of 36 years and following the careers of his two sons, both of whom followed him into coaching.

Posted by Tom at 6:09 AM | Comments (1) |

February 3, 2007

Will Dell be saved by the Apple Rule?

It's been anything but a smooth ride for Austin-based Dell, Inc. since founder Micheal Dell announced that he was stepping aside as CEO almost three years ago. The saga came full circle this week as the company announced that Dell was replacing his replacement as CEO, Kevin Rollins.

Unfortunately for Dell investors, it's far from clear that Mr. Dell's return as CEO will have the same effect on Dell as the return of Steve Jobs had on Apple, Inc. Dell has several serious systemic problems with its business model that will be difficult and expensive to overhaul. Was Jobs prophetic last January?

Meanwhile, a class action shareholder's lawsuit this week hammered Dell, Mr. Dell and others with allegations of potential criminal wrongdoing. The lawsuit alleges that Dell's profits were inflated by hundreds of millions of dollars in quarterly rebates from Intel that Dell did not properly account for and disclose (sound familiar?). The lawsuit contends that Dell was receiving as much as $1 billion a year in what are characterized as "secret and likely illegal" kickbacks by Intel to ensure that Dell would use no other chip supplier. Of course, as these stories go, all of this was supposedly going on as Dell executives sold billions of dollars in Dell shares. Dell has already disclosed that the U.S. Attorney's office in New York has undertaken an investigation of its financial reporting, as has the SEC.

Intel paid these "e-Cap payments" -- standing for "exception to corporate average pricing" -- to induce Dell not to do business with Intel competitor, AMD. Dell spread out the approximately $1 billion a year received in such payments over the four quarters to reduce the company's cost of goods sold. The lawsuit alleges that Dell became so dependent upon these payments -- knowledge of which was apparently limited to about 15 senior people at Dell -- that Intel made the payments near the end of the Dell's quarters so that the funds would have a "direct, material impact" on Dell's reported operating and profit margins.

And, oh yes, the company's stock, which was trading in late 2005 at more than $40 a share, has fallen to $23.52 as of the close of Nasdaq Stock Market trading yesterday.

Gosh, haven't we seen this syndrome before? Can Dell avoid it's own Enronesque experience by offering up a few sacrificial lambs? And will those sacrificial lambs include Mr. Dell? Or will he be exempted from criminal liability by what Larry Ribstein has characterized as "the Apple Rule," which was not around to save another Texas business visionary who created wealth and jobs on par with Mr. Dell?

Stay tuned.

Update: Don't miss Larry Ribstein's comparison of the Apple Rule with the Enron Rule.

Posted by Tom at 7:02 AM | Comments (1) |

February 2, 2007

Make sure they serve coffee

Norm Pattis over at Crime & Federalism isn't impressed with the following offering by the University of Connecticut School of Law this semester:

Seminar: Therapeutic Jurisprudence 692

Professor: Robert G. Madden, LCSW, JD

Course Description: Therapeutic Jurisprudence is an interdisciplinary approach to law that focuses on the impact of legal rules, processes and institutions on people's emotional lives and psychological well-being. Using this perspective, the course examines recent developments in several areas, including collaborative divorce law; creative problem solving; the establishment of drug treatment, domestic violence, mental health and other specialized courts; preventive law; procedural and restorative justice; and alternative dispute resolution. Readings include materials from psychology, criminology, social work, and other disciplines. The course is designed to emphasize how therapeutic jurisprudence may enrich the practice of law through the integration of interdisciplinary, non-adversarial, nontraditional, creative, collaborative, and psychologically-beneficial legal experiences.

Imagine the implications for courtroom exchanges during courtroom testimony:

"Objection, your honor."

"What's your objection?"

"Contrary to sound social policy."

Posted by Tom at 5:20 AM | Comments (1) |

Expensive target practice

Last July, Shiraz Syed Qazi -- a 29 year-old Pakistani national attending Houston Community College on a student visa -- went camping for a couple of days with a couple of friends in Willis north of Houston. While camping, Qazi engaged in some target practice with an Armalite M-15, .223 caliber semi-automatic rifle and his friends took some photographs of him doing so. A good time was apparently had by all.

In late November, Qazi was indicted and arrested in Houston on federal charges of unlawfully possessing a firearm as a non-immigrant student visa holder. Qazi was denied bail and so he has stewed in jail ever since his arrest. Earlier this week, Qazi was convicted of the crime after a bench trial and now awaits a May 17th sentencing hearing in which he faces a maximum 10-year prison sentence and a $250,000 fine. Qazi remains in jail pending his sentencing hearing.

Remarkably, from the only meaningful pleadings filed by Qazi's public defender and the prosecution in the case (see here and here), it is undisputed that Qazi did not know that he was committing a crime by engaging in a little target practice during his camping trip. But that hasn't stopped the feds from putting him away for a couple of months already and threatening him with a ten year prison sentence.

Welcome to the USA, 2007.

Posted by Tom at 4:43 AM | Comments (1) |

The DOJ exodus

Radley Balko examines the reasons why the Department of Justice demanded the resignations of seven U.S. Attorneys across the last month. He concludes that it's all about priorities and questions the Bush Administration's emphasis on enforcing new forms of prohibition. And he doesn't even mention the extraordinary abuses of prosecutorial power (see also here and here) that have occurred during the Bush Administration Justice Department's campaign against business interests. Check Balko's piece out.

Posted by Tom at 4:02 AM | Comments (0) |

February 1, 2007

Romanticizing boondoggles

This recent NY Times article caught my attention because it extols the virtues of Portland, Oregon's pretty new Aerial Tram mass transit project despite the fact that it's quite expensive relative to the number of folks who will regularly use it. These fatuous media reports that ignore the dubious underlying economics of such projects are a consistent element of urban boondoggles.

Turns out that some other folks noticed the Times story, too. Wendell Cox wrote the following letter to the NY Times editor about the article:

Re: City that Loves Mass Transit Looks to the Sky for More (January 28)

Now The New York Times has been taken in by the Portland transit hype. The “city that loves mass transit” shows it by not using riding very much. Today, the share of workers using transit to get to work is less than before the first light rail line was built. Today, little more than two percent of travel in the Portland area is on transit and 98 percent of motorized travel is by car. That is really not much different than automobile champion Kansas City, where the figure is above 99.5 percent. The kind of cheerleading in this article may warm the hearts of urban elites, but only serves to muddle and mislead.

Meanwhile, Houston's own urban policy wonk -- Tory Gattis -- provides a balanced analysis of the Portland mass transit system in this post about a recent lecture that he attended by a fellow who was instrumental in the planning of the Portland system. The NY Times report on the Portland system reads like an advertisement in comparison to Tory's post.

Posted by Tom at 5:17 AM | Comments (5) |

Has the BOP forgotten about Jamie Olis?

Earlier this week, Michael Kopper, one of the few true crooks in the Enron affair, traipsed off to a federal prison in west Texas to begin serving the 37 month sentence that he received in return for his testimony that helped place four ex-Merrill Lynch executives in prison for a year in connection with the sordid Nigerian Barge case.

Meanwhile, former Dynegy executive Jamie Olis -- whose only "crime" may have been some faulty judgment in doing what his bosses told him to do in attempting to bolster Dynegy's finances -- continues to sit in a dank, cramped jail cell in downtown Houston's Federal Detention Center awaiting reassignment to a federal prison. As this earlier post notes, it's now been over four months since Olis had his absurd original 24-year sentence reduced to a still egregious six years, which is the same length of sentence that Kopper's boss, Andrew Fastow, is serving. Kopper has now been in the Federal Detention Center -- essentially a holding tank for federal prisoners -- for going on 14 months since the Fifth Circuit tossed out his 24-year sentence. Olis has now served over 40% of the time that he has been in prison in a jail facility not meant or equipped to hold prisoners serving lengthy sentences. The Chronicle's Tom Fowler follows up with this story about Olis' ordeal, in which a governmental official observes that Olis' reassignment has been "slowed because of the holidays and the recent spate of bad weather."

Uh, Olis was re-sentenced over two months before the holidays. And I don't recall the weather being all that bad over that period.

It's understandable if Olis and his family are reluctant to request that the federal court examine what on earth is going on at the Bureau of Prisons that it can't manage to assign Olis to an appropriate federal prison. Hell, the way this ordeal is going, the BOP in response to such a request might just throw away the keys to Olis' cramped cell. But the delay in reassigning Olis has now moved well beyond the realm of reason and is beginning to resemble the brutal nature of his original sentence. Is the BOP simply impervious to such matters?

Posted by Tom at 4:13 AM | Comments (0) |