Monthly Archives: March 2004

Qualities of a good football coach

Posted on by
Reply

Houston Chronicle sportswriter Mickey Herskowitz passes along this story about those two NFL coaching icons, George Halas and Vince Lombardi:

One recalls the story of George Allen, who was hired off the staff of George Halas in Chicago to coach the Los Angeles Rams.
Halas was furious that the Rams failed to ask for his permission and threatened to take Allen to court. At a league meeting after the issue was resolved, Halas used the occasion to vent his anger at his former defensive coach.
“George Allen,” Halas said, “is a man with no conscience. He is dishonest, deceptive, ruthless, consumed with his own ambition.”
At that point, Vince Lombardi leaned over to the owner of the Rams and whispered, “Sounds to me like you’ve got yourself a helluva football coach.”

An evening with John Dowd regarding Pete Rose

Posted on by
Reply

In this interesting piece, Will Young relates his evening with John Dowd, the Washington, D.C. lawyer who is the author of the report for the Commissioner of Major League Baseball that concluded that Pete Rose had bet on baseball games while managing the Cincinnati Reds. Nothing earth shattering here, but interesting reading nonetheless. Mr. Dowd’s opinion that Commissioner Selig is attempting to find a way to reinstate Rose is, if correct, highly troubling.

The intersection of drug policy and prison policy

Posted on by
2

This Brent Staples’ NY Times Review of Books article that reviews “Life on the Outside, The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett,” Jennifer Gonnerman’s new book about how the government’s criminalization of its drug policy has led to a large and growing portion of society that is chronically disenfranchised, at enormous societal cost. Ms. Gonnerman, who has wrote extensively about drug policy as a staff writer for the Village Voice, tells the story through the family of Elaine Bartlett, a young mother of four who received a sentence of 20 to life for her selling cocaine to an undercover cop in a motel near Albany, her first offense. As Ms. Gonnerman notes:

The United States is transforming itself into a nation of ex-convicts. This country imprisons people at 14 times the rate of Japan, eight times the rate of France and six times the rate of Canada. The American prison system disgorges 600,000 angry, unskilled people each year — more than the populations of Boston, Milwaukee or Washington . . .
Ex-cons are marooned in the poor inner-city neighborhoods where legitimate jobs do not exist and the enterprises that led them to prison in the first place are ever present. These men and women are further cut off from the mainstream by sanctions that are largely invisible to those of us who have never been to prison. They are commonly denied the right to vote, parental rights, drivers’ licenses, student loans and residency in public housing — the only housing that marginal, jobless people can afford. The most severe sanctions are reserved for former drug offenders, who have been treated worse than murderers since the start of the so-called war on drugs. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996, for example, imposed a lifetime ban on food stamp and welfare eligibility for people convicted of even a single drug felony. The states can opt out of the prohibition, but where it remains intact it cannot be lifted even for ex-prisoners who live model, crime-free lives.
* * *
Mass imprisonment has not hindered the drug trade. Indeed, drugs are cheaper and more plentiful today than ever. In addition, many of the addicts who are held in jail for years at a cost of more than $20,000 per inmate per year could be more cheaply and effectively dealt with in treatment. What jumps out at you from ”Life on the Outside” is the extent to which imprisonment has been normalized, not just for adults from poor communities but for children who visit their parents in prison. Spending holidays and birthdays behind bars for years on end, these children come to think of prison as a natural next step in the process of growing up.

Although both major political parties share blame for failing to address America’s drug policy in a responsible manner, the Bush Administration’s failure in this area — coupled with its failure to address such major issues as health care finance reform, income tax reform, and environmental policy reform — provides a solid basis for the Democrats to attack the Bush Administration in the upcoming election. Although the Bush Administration has performed admirably under difficult circumstances in prosecuting the war against Islamic fascists, its performance on domestic issues such as those mentioned above has been abysmal. If President Bush loses the election this November, that lack of leadership on those key issues will likely be the reason why.

Rethinking how best to prevent heart attacks

Posted on by
4

This NY Times article reports on new studies that increasingly indicate that coronary bypass opearations and angioplasty procedures are not as effective in preventing heart attacks in high risk patients than non-invasive treatments such as giving up smoking and taking drugs to control blood pressure, reduce cholesterol levels, and prevent blood clotting. The research reflects that that just one of those treatments — lowering cholesterol to what guidelines suggest — can reduce the risk of heart attack by a third. However, only 20% of heart patients follow that approach. As the Times article notes:

But, researchers say, most heart attacks do not occur because an artery is narrowed by plaque. Instead, they say, heart attacks occur when an area of plaque bursts, a clot forms over the area and blood flow is abruptly blocked. In 75 to 80 percent of cases, the plaque that erupts was not obstructing an artery and would not be stented or bypassed. The dangerous plaque is soft and fragile, produces no symptoms and would not be seen as an obstruction to blood flow.
That is why, heart experts say, so many heart attacks are unexpected ? a person will be out jogging one day, feeling fine, and struck with a heart attack the next. If a narrowed artery were the culprit, exercise would have caused severe chest pain.
Heart patients may have hundreds of vulnerable plaques, so preventing heart attacks means going after all their arteries, not one narrowed section, by attacking the disease itself. That is what happens when patients take drugs to aggressively lower their cholesterol levels, to get their blood pressure under control and to prevent blood clots.
Yet, researchers say, old notions persist.
“There is just this embedded belief that fixing an artery is a good thing,” said Dr. Eric Topol, an interventional cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.

Q&A with Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on by
Reply

Victor Davis Hanson is accepting email questions on his new website and answering them when he has the time. The following is an insightful answer to one of the current questions:

Question: The wealth and power that Rome accumulated within a couple of generations, it seems, led to two civil wars and the destruction of the Republic. I feel as though our political situation is becoming as partisan and could very well end in some type of civil strife within another generation. Am I way off base here?
Hanson: I can?t quite adjudicate all your comparisons, but I share your worry about polarization and think this next campaign will be the nastiest in some time. I didn?t really dislike personally Bill Clinton, although I felt he weakened the United States abroad. But there were many on the Right who did?and gave him no fair hearing, especially about his commendable though belated attack on Milosevic. Yet, their animus has been trumped by Bush-haters. And we are now in a spiral whose logical end is sort of frightening.

David Warren: One Year Later

Posted on by
Reply

David Warren’s latest is “One Year Later.”

Great article on the Martha Stewart saga

Posted on by
Reply

One of the most important — yet most difficult — things for an attorney to do in private practice is to advise a valuable client not to do something that the client really wants to do. As Jeffrey Toobin brilliantly relates in this New Yorker article on the downfall and trial of Martha Stewart, that dilemma was one of the primary reasons that Ms. Stewart’s case went awry. Mr. Toobin details the questionable representation that Ms. Stewart received from Wachtell Lipton during, and in preparation for, her initial interview with the Justice Department, and the disastrous effects of her co-defendant attorney’s cross-examination of the prosecution’s main witness during trial:

On the scale of highly publicized misdeeds in the past decade, Stewart’s trade must rank among the most trivial. She netted only about fifty thousand dollars more on the deal than if she’d held the stock for another day, and, as she told me, her ImClone holding constituted .03 per cent of her assets. It seems almost implausible that such a misstep could send Stewart to prison and lead her company to ruin, and that this happened with the help of the best and most loyal people that money could buy.
* * *
On February 4th, . . . [Wachtell Lipton partner John] Savarese and an inexperienced associate at Wachtell, Lipton accompanied Stewart to her interview at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan. Confident that she could truthfully refute the charge that Waksal himself had tipped her, Stewart told investigators the fabricated story about the pre-existing agreement to sell ImClone at sixty. Worse, Savarese allowed a second interrogation, on April 10th, during which Stewart again lied about the sixty-dollar agreement and asserted, falsely, that she couldn’t remember whether she was told on December 27th that the Waksals were selling. To be sure, it was Stewart, not her lawyer, who lied to the investigators, but Savarese had allowed his client to take an immense legal risk
* * *
Through the early part of the trial, Peter Bacanovic’s lawyers generally deferred to Morvillo, much as their client did to Stewart. Bacanovic’s lead lawyer, Richard Strassberg, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, who is now with the firm of Goodwin Procter, presented Bacanovic’s opening statement, but he shared substantial responsibility for the defense with David Apfel, a Boston-based partner at the firm. Apfel, who is fifty-one, had a distinguished career as a federal prosecutor in Massachusetts, where in 1997 he won the John Marshall Award, the Justice Department’s highest award for trial work. In the late nineties, he turned to private practice, and, at the lectern on February 4th, he proceeded to give life to the courtroom adage that the best prosecutors do not always make the best defense lawyers.
Apfel organized his notes, stared down Faneuil on the witness stand, and snarled at him, “Mr. Faneuil, let’s get a few things straight right away.”
Thus began a catastrophically ineffective cross-examination. . .

I continue to agree with Professor Bainbridge that prosecutorial discretion should have mitigated against a prosecution of Ms. Stewart in this case. But as this article points out, Ms. Stewart and her advisers’ failure to address her actions in selling the ImClone stock in a forthright and honest manner bears much of the responsibility for Martha’s demise.
Thanks to Evan Shaeffer for the link to the New Yorker article.

The Latest Coup

Posted on by
Reply

The New York Times has its faults, but it continues to be one of the best sources of international news reporting. Today, Times foreign correspondence Michael Wines writes this incredible story about the latest coup attempt in Equitorial Guinea, the poor Western African country that has been the site of an oil and gas drilling boom over the past decade. The entire story is the stuff from which entertaining movies are made, and the following will give you a flavor for it:

This malarial West African dictatorship quashed another coup attempt this month, which is like saying the corner 7-Eleven served up another Slurpee. Quashed coups (five since 1996) are a political staple here, so routine that some say the government stages and then quashes them to burnish its image of invincibility.
But the coup this month was different. Nobody could make this coup up.
The coup attempt of 2004 features a dysfunctional ruling family, a Lamborghini-driving, rap-music-producing heir apparent and a bitter political opponent in exile who insists that Equatorial Guinea is run by a gonad-eating cannibal. It is said to involve a Lebanese front company, a British financier, an opposition figure living in exile in Spain and some 80 mercenaries from South Africa, Germany, Armenia and Kazakhstan.
With such a polyglot cast, this whodunit has become almost a parlor game among Africa watchers. Not since Christmas 1975, when Moroccan palace guards shot 150 suspected plotters in the city soccer stadium to a band’s rendition of “Those Were the Days, My Friend” has a botched takeover set tongues wagging so briskly.
* * *
. . . [t]oppling Equatorial Guinea’s government would be no mean feat, because removing the president would barely scratch the surface. The military is peppered with Mr. Obiang’s cousins and nephews. One of his sons is the natural resources minister. A brother-in-law is ambassador to Washington.
A brother, Armengol Ondo Nguema, is a top internal security official and, according to a 1999 State Department report, a torturer whose minions urinated on their victims, sliced their ears and rubbed oil on their bodies to lure stinging ants.
Finally, a second son, Teodoro Nguemo Obiang, is the infrastructure minister and his father’s anointed successor. To the dismay of some relatives, he also is a rap music entrepreneur and bon vivant, fond of Lamborghinis and long trips to Hollywood and Rio de Janeiro, who shows few signs of following his father’s iron-fisted tradition.
* * *
The entire plot, he said, was hatched by Severo Moto, an Equatorial Guinean opposition figure and longtime fomenter of quashed coups who lives in exile in Madrid. Mr. Moto’s coup was said to be financed by $5 million from a British businessman, washed through a front company in Lebanon.
Mr. Moto makes no secret of his hatred of President Obiang: on Spanish radio this month, he called him a demon who “systematically eats his political rivals.”
“He has just devoured a police commissioner. I say `devoured,’ as this commissioner was buried without his testicles and brain,” he said, adding that Mr. Obiang hungered for his body parts as well.
“We are in the hands of a cannibal,” he warned.

Putting with Tiger Woods

Posted on by
Reply

Tiger Woods is the best golfer in the world, has won 40 professional golf tournaments, and is worth several hundred million. Chris Riley is one of the best putters in professional golf, but has won only once on the PGA Tour and is worth several hundred thousand. Riley was asked this week about his bets with Tiger during their putting contests that they often engage in before rounds:

“When me and Tiger putt, I say, ‘How much we putting for?’ Tiger says, ‘Whatever makes you nervous.’ So, that’s usually like $5.”

And when Tiger Woods says “whatever makes you nervous,” he means whatever.
Thanks to Mr. Poon for the link to Riley’s quote.

Can’t say that I ever really thought about that question

Posted on by
Reply

Why is Fleetwood Mac the least influential great band of all time?