Daily Archives: April 3, 2004

VDH on General Patton

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George C. Scott’s magnificent performance in the 1970 film “Patton” triggered a generation of interest and scholarship in this fascinating hero of the Second World War. In this Claremont Review of Books review of a new biography of Patton, Victor Davis Hanson provides an interesting and valuable overview of the previous biographies of General Patton. My brother Matt — who reads everything on General Patton — prefers Carlo D’Este’s “Patton: a Genius for War,” of which VDH writes:

In fact, we owe D’Este a great deal for his evenhandedness: although an Omar Bradley or Eisenhower might better appeal to his own sense of decorum, D’Este was too much the scholar not to see that beneath Patton’s repugnant crudity there was both talent and, in the end, humanity?and a tactical genius that simply overshadowed Eisenhower’s and Bradley’s combined.

Read the entire review for an interesting analysis of one of America’s great generals of the 20th century.

Get ready to rumble – another residential real estate case

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The residential real estate business is one brutal business.
This interesting First Circuit Court of Appeals decision involves a breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing claim in connection with the sale of a Nantucket Island summer home.
The Zachars put up $205,000 in earnest money to purchase the home from the Lees for total consideration of $2,050,000. Prior to closing, the Zachars plans changed and they decided not to close on the home. In an effort not to lose all of their $205,000 in earnest money, the Zachars persuaded the Lees to enter into another agreement in which the Lees agreed to list the property for another six month period. If the Lees sold it during that period, then the Lees would pay the Zachars any excess that they received over the original $2,050,000 purchase price up to a total of $205,000.
Inasmuch as the Lees’ real estate company was the sole broker of the property, the Zachars were fortunate to have a contractual provision in their favor that the Lees would use reasonable and commercial means to sell the property. I say that was fortunate because the Lees proceeded to jack up the asking price for the property to $2,475,000 and then refused to reduce the asking price during the term of their agreement with the Zachars. Not surprisingly, the home did not sell and the Lees claimed entitlement to the entire $205,000.
Those were fightin’ words. The Zachars sued the Lees for the $205,000 under the theory that the Lees’ conduct in jacking up the asking price and refusing to lower it was a breach of their implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. The jury agreed, and awarded the Zachars $205,000 in damages from the Lees.
Undaunted, the Lees appealed, a part of which contended that the District Court should have granted the Lees’ Daubert challenge to the Zachars’ real estate appraiser’s expert opinion on the reasonable length of time necessary to sell the property. The First Circuit upheld the District Court’s overruling of the Lees’ Daubert challenge, reasoning that the expert’s opinion on that particular issue was not important to the expert’s overall opinion or the trial issues, and that the District Court’s decision, even if wrong, amounted to harmless error.
Seems to me that everyone involved in this debacle could have saved a lot of time and effort by simply splitting the earnest money at the outset. But my experience is that parties to residential real estate transactions rarely act rationally. Hat tip to Blog 702 for the link to this interesting decision.

Laurie Mylroie on Richard Clarke

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Readers of this blog know of my high regard for Laurie Mylroie, an advisor on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton campaign, and author of “The War Against America” (HarperCollins, 2001). Her views are noted in two of my previous posts on the Richard Clarke affair, here and here.
In this Opinion Journal op-ed, Ms. Mylroie takes Mr. Clarke to the woodshed for his refusal to acknowledge clear signs of Iraqi support and involvement in terrorism against the United States:

Mr. Clarke is a man famously intolerant of those who disagree with him. When he cannot win the argument, he cheats. And that is what he has done again in the pages of his book. In order to explain why he opposed the war with Iraq, Mr. Clarke mischaracterizes the arguments of those of us who favored it. The key mischaracterization turns on an important intelligence debate about the identity of the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. This mastermind goes by the name of “Ramzi Yousef.” But who was “Ramzi Yousef”?

As she does persuasively in her book, Ms. Mylroie sets forth a strong factual basis for the position that Ms. Yousef uses a false identify and that, whoever he really is, he has close connections with Iraq’s security services under Saddam Hussein. She then concludes by bringing home why these issues are important:

The fingerprint card in Mr. Karim’s file had to have been switched. The original card bearing his prints was replaced with one bearing Yousef’s. The only party that reasonably could have done so is Iraq, while it occupied Kuwait, for the evident purpose of creating a “legend” for one of its terrorist agents.
The debate over Yousef’s identity has enormous implications for the 9/11 strikes. U.S. authorities now understand that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed masterminded those attacks. But Mohammed’s identity, too, is based on Kuwaiti documents that predate Kuwait’s liberation from Iraq. According to these documents, Mohammed is Ramzi Yousef’s “uncle,” and two other al Qaeda masterminds are Yousef’s “brothers.”
A former deputy chief of Israeli Military Intelligence, Amos Gilboa, has observed that “it’s obvious” that these identities are fabricated. A family is not at the core of the most ambitious, most lethal series of terrorist assaults in U.S. history. These are Iraqi agents, given “legends,” on the basis of Kuwait’s files, while Iraq occupied the country.
When Mr. Clarke reported, six days after the 9/11 strikes, that no evidence existed linking them to Iraq, or Iraq to al Qaeda, he was reiterating the position he and others had taken throughout the Clinton years. They systematically turned a blind eye to such evidence and failed to pursue leads that might result in a conclusion of Iraqi culpability. These officials were charged with defending us “against all enemies.” Their own prejudices blinded them to at least one of our enemies and left the nation vulnerable.

Profiles of the Fallujah victims

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This NY Times article profiles the four victims of the Fallujah mob earlier this week in Iraq.
One can only hope that the blogger of questionable judgment described in this post reads the article and repents. Hat tip to the fine folks at Southern Appeal for calling out this appalling post.

Enterprise status for public universities

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Skip over at The Sports Economist posts this interesting story about how the scandal involving the University of Colorado football team is emboldening the economist-president of the University to push the University’s Board of Regents and the Colorado State Legislature to grant the University “enterprise status,” which would make it a semiprivate institution with more independence over financial matters such as raising money and setting tuition rates.
Skip comments insightfully on this development as follows:

This issue is not unique to Colorado. The University of Virginia is a well known example where state funding has become a small percentage of operating expenditure. Clemson has the same problem. The issue is not just “managing finances,” but having the freedom to make autonomous decisions on numerous margins which affect the university. Given the dry well in public funding, schools want to be released from regulatory constraints on what they do. Increasingly, good state universities are obtaining a more private character. Schools that do not move in this direction will surely suffer in the national competition for quality students and faculty.

This is a development in public school financing that we Texans should be watching closely. Public financing of universities in Texas has long been a controversial issue, with the University of Texas and Texas A&M University long enjoying an absurdly and unjustifiable favored financing status over all other public universities in Texas. As a result, leaders of Texas public universities in areas of great fund-raising potential (three examples would be the University of Houston, North Texas State University, and Texas Tech University) would be well-advised to follow the “enterprise status” initiative at the University of Colorado. It may well be a way for those universities to break out of the politically imposed financial limitations that have constrained their overall advancement for many years.

Bull market for oil prices?

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That’s the case made in this article.
On the other hand, many folks in the Houston business community are asking themselves: “How many times have I heard THAT before?”

Legislating stereotypes

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This NY Times article reports on author David Horowitz‘s efforts is spearheading a campaign to end what he calls discrimination against conservative faculty and students in America’s universities. Mr. Horowitz has written an “academic bill of rights” that asks universities, among other things, to include both conservative and liberal viewpoints in their selection of campus speakers and syllabuses for courses and to choose faculty members “with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives.”
This strikes me as an incredibly bad idea. First, can you imagine the difficulty that universities would have in defining what are “conservative” and “liberal” viewpoints? For example, my various viewpoints are regularly categorized as either conservative or liberal to the point that it is virtually impossible for me to determine with any degree of reasonable precision what constitutes a conservative or liberal viewpoint.
Similarly, Mr. Horowitz’s latter recommendation sounds good in theory (“fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives”), but attempting to enforce such a guideline fails miserably in reality. Any speaker or teacher with good judgment who desires to persuade will necessarily incude different perspectives to his or her position. On the other hand, a speaker or teacher who does not have such good judgment may not. Should a university attempt to control the free flow of ideas within its community simply because the advocate of a certain position does not possess good judgment? Sometimes, even people who possess poor judgment have very good ideas.
Mr. Horowitz would be much better served in his efforts to begin an endowment program at various universities that would attract professors who would teach and perform research along the lines that he desires to promote. That would be putting his money where his mouth currently is. His “academic bill of rights” smacks of attempting to legislate good judgment, which is usually an abysmal failure.

Houston Proud

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Houston’s outstanding medical community comes through again.