The Stros dropped their third straight game on Friday night as the Mets smoked them, 8-3. Roy O gave up his first career grand salami to the Mets’ Cliff Floyd, and that’s about all she wrote on this one. The Stros continue to slump at the plate, and now have averaged just three runs a game over their last six. The Stros try to get back on track in the Saturday evening game against the Mets behind Andy Pettitte, as the Rocket prepares for a Sunday afternoon matinee.
This Chronicle article reports on the resignation of SBC Communications Inc. President William Daley.
San Antonio-based SBC appointed 51-year-old Forrest Miller, a long-time telecom industry veteran, to succeed Mr. Daley as head of the company’s public affairs and corporate planning functions. However, SBC announced that it is not planning to appoint a new president.
A former Commerce Secretary under President Clinton, chairman of Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, and the son of the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, Mr. Daley, 55, had been hired in 2001 to advance SBC’s regulatory agenda and was part of a campaign to improve the company’s strained relations with Midwest regulators.
Mr. Daley’s resignation comes as SBC and other local phone giants are in the middle of a volatile period of political activity over the future of access to local phone systems. SBC officials have been trying to free themselves from federal regulations that force them to lease access to their networks to rivals such as AT&T Corp. and MCI Inc. at artificially low rates. Competitors of SBC and other regional telecoms say the federal rules are fair and provide the only method of ensuring competition in local phone markets.
SBC and the other Bells suffered a serious regulatory defeat late last year when the Federal Communications Commission decided to leave wholesale leasing regulations essentially unchanged. Mr. Daley had led SBC’s regulatory lobbying effort in regard to that FCC matter.
State District Judge Joseph “Tad” Halbach, Jr was hospitalized at St. Lukes Episcopal Hospital in the Medical Center on Friday morning after suffering chest pains in his courtroom. Judge Halbach, 47, was undergoing tests this afternoon to determine the cause of the chest pains.
David Ignatius of the Washington Post (free online subscription required) has some interesting observations in this piece titled “Reassembling Iraq” based on his recent trip to Iraq. The entire piece is well worth reading, and the folloiwng will give you a flavor for it:
After each visit to Iraq over the past year, I’ve tried to weigh how things are going. At the end of a trip last week, one answer was that it depends on where you live. Even in the wilds of Mesopotamia, all politics is local.
Overall, Iraq is a mess. . .
Yet this disarray on the macro level masks local pockets of stability. Southern Iraq, where I traveled for a week with British troops, is surprisingly calm — thanks to a quiet alliance of tribal sheiks and Shiite religious leaders with the British occupiers. The British have been wise enough to let the Iraqis find their own solutions to problems. Their motto, says the British chief of staff in the south, Col. Jim Tanner, is that “one size doesn’t fit all.”
The Kurdish north is also relatively calm and stable. Kurdish political leaders know they’ve got a good thing going in their quasi-autonomy from the Arabs to the south. Their troops and clan leaders are maintaining order, and while they may pay lip service to the notion of the Iraqi state, they’re quite happy to be running their own show.
The nightmare area is the U.S.-controlled zone in the center of the country. This was always going to be the toughest piece of the puzzle. Where the Shiite south and Kurdish north are each relatively homogenous, central Iraq is an ethnic, religious and political jumble.
But even in the center, temporary pockets of stability have emerged over the past month, as the United States steps back from the brink of all-out urban warfare. Much like the British in the south, the U.S. occupiers now seem ready to accept some Iraqi solutions that are backed by the nation’s traditional power bases, such as the tribes, religious leaders and semi-respectable remnants of the old army.
Sometimes we’ll have to hold our noses at these local solutions, as when a former Republican Guard general restores order in Fallujah. But that kind of pragmatic approach seems preferable to waging a bitter war of occupation.
Unfortunately, the checkerboard Iraq that I’m describing isn’t any longer a single nation. It’s a country in the process of de facto partition — with the north and the south going their own ways and the center in a bloody state of ferment.
Baseball fans can now print Houston Astros tickets directly from their own office or home computer, under a new system that the club just launched.
The newly announced delivery option — called TicketFast — allows fans to print tickets that are purchased on www.astros.com. Such tickets can be printed using home or office computers, then they can be used to attend Astros games at the Juice Box. TicketFast works by printing a unique bar code that is used in conjunction with the latest Minute Maid Park entry system.
Professor Sauer over at the Sports Economist analyzes this interesting David Henderson article and points us to this Pejman Yousefzadeh Tech Central Station article that address the benefits of generating information about terrorist attacks from decentralized sources.
In particular, Mr. Yousefzadeh’s article re-examines the use of futures markets as a predictor of terrorist attacks, which is a creative idea that was scuttled earlier based on emotional, rather than objective, reactions. As Professor Sauer and Mr. Henderson explain, such decentralized sources will often generate more reliable information than our increasingly centralized intelligence agencies are likely to produce. Check it out.
Also, for a fascinating story about a remarkable young man and his family, check out Mr. Yousefzadeh’s biography here. Pejmanesque is his blog.
David Wessels over at the Wall Street Journal ($) has this column in yesterday’s edition that focuses on John Kerry’s health care finance plan. The entire column is well worth reading, and here are a few snippets:
But Mr. Kerry knows that for many American workers and businesses, the big worry is cost. So he has added another dish to his health-care table. He proposes that the federal government shoulder most of the cost when someone gets really sick. It would pay 75% of medical bills over $50,000 a year for any person covered by an eligible (more on that later) private employer. He says this would cut premiums for employers and employees by 10% or, as he boasts on the stump, by $1,000 per family.
The notion is so old it sounds novel. The Kerry campaign credits Stuart Altman, a veteran health-policy wonk at Brandeis University, for the plan. Mr. Altman drew it from memories of his years as a Nixon administration bureaucrat. A similar scheme was written into an ultimately unsuccessful bill in 1974 by Wilbur Mills, then chairman of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee.
The concept is simple: Government becomes the ultimate reinsurance company, spreading the risk of expensive illness among taxpayers instead of sticking it with an unlucky employer. “We’re always worried that insurers will dump sick people,” notes David Cutler, a Harvard University health economist. “So the idea is that we won’t make them pay for really sick people.”
If Mr. Kerry wants to spend money so employers and insured workers pay less, then subsidizing firms that employ sicker and, often, older workers is reasonable.
But …
It’s expensive: $257 billion over 10 years, estimates Kenneth Thorpe, a former Clinton administration health economist now at Emory University.
It doesn’t save society any money and does nothing to restrain the American appetite for more drugs, more tests and more exams, whether or not they’re worthwhile. It simply shifts some costs now paid by employers and employees to taxpayers.
Mr. Wessels then closes by focusing in on one of the key issues, one that is sadly not a part of the usual public debate on health care finance:
If the proposal becomes law, Mr. Kerry and his advisers may discover it could do something they haven’t anticipated: provoke a broad public debate over how much health care is enough.
If the government starts picking up the tab for the one-half of 1% of privately insured Americans whose medical bills exceed $50,000, it will open the door to questions — and possibly rules — about whether such care is wise in every case. Should stomach-stapling surgery be covered? How about bypass surgery in 90-year-olds? Who decides when to pull the plug?
As The Wall Street Journal illustrated in articles last year, decisions in the U.S. on who gets expensive care and who doesn’t are made quietly and differently by intensive-care coordinators, transplant schedulers, and insurance bureaucrats. This Kerry proposal could break that debate wide open.
As Brad DeLong points out in this insightful post and as noted in this earlier post here on Health Savings Accounts, this key issue and others relating to the overhaul of America’s flawed health care finance system desperately need to be addressed in this campaign season. Although I have reservations about the Kerry plan’s reliance on third party payor systems as the primary mechanism for controlling health care costs, I agree with Professor DeLong that Kerry should be complimented for facilitating the debate of these key issues that the Bush Administration has largely ignored.
Victor Davis Hanson’s latest NRO column is up and, as usual, he places the calls for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation or firing in the proper perspective:
The idea that anyone would suggest that Donald Rumsfeld — and now Richard Meyers! — should step down, in the midst of a global war, for the excesses and criminality of a handful of miscreant guards and their lax immediate superiors in the cauldron of Iraq is absurd and depressing all at once.
What would we think now if George Marshall had been forced out on news that 3,000 miles away George S. Patton’s men had shot some Italian prisoners, or Gen. Hodges’s soldiers summarily executed German commandoes out of uniform, or drivers of the Red Ball express had raped French women? Should Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell have been relieved from his command for the February 12-13, 1991, nocturnal bombing of the Al Firdos compound in Baghdad, in which hundreds of women and children of Baathist loyalists were tragically incinerated and pictures of their corpses broadcast around the world, prompting the United States to cease all further pre-planned and approved attacks on the elite in Saddam’s bunkers throughout Baghdad? Of course not.
Rumsfeld and Meyers have presided over two amazingly successful wars. In an aggregate of 11 weeks, and at the tragic cost of 700 combat dead, the American military defeated the two worst regimes in the Middle East and stayed on to implant democratic change where no such idea has ever existed. Had anyone envisioned, say in 1999, that the United States could do such a thing — that Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar would both be out of power, and that governing councils would be there in their place — he would have been dismissed as unhinged. What they are attempting to do is not to keep some psychopath “in his box” or lob over cruise missiles. The latter are palliative but ultimately solely punitive measures that kill a few hundred or thousand anonymous Middle Easterners and keep the nasty business off the evening news, thus in the long term inciting rather than solving the problem.
As noted earlier here, I’m not much of an NBA fan anymore, but I must recommend that, if you did not see it last night, try to catch a replay today of the final moments of the Spurs-Lakers playoff game last night. Simply incredible.
The Marlins beat the Stros on Thursday for the second straight time, 3-2, behind a top of the ninth rally that included one of the strangest plays you will see this season.
The situation was this. Dotel had already blown the save opportunity by giving up a lead off walk and then a triple to Juan Pierre that plated the tying run with no outs. The Stros walked the next two batters to set up the force at any base and pulled the infield in. Dotel got Miguel Cabrera to hit a hard chopper to third, Viz leaped to stab the ball, came down on the bag and threw home. Ausmus — acting instinctively and not comprehending that Viz’s touching the bag at third had removed the force play at the plate — simply tagged the plate (the plate ump made the out call), and threw to first to attempt to complete an inning-ending triple play (the throw was just a tad late). After an umpire crew discussion, Pierre was ruled safe at home (the correct call), the Marlins took the lead, and Ausmus tried to find a place to hide.
All three of the games in this series were close, but the Marlins proved that their starting pitching is better than the Stros’ strong set of starters. Carl Pavano dominated the Stros in this game, just like Willis and Penny did in the prior two games. Although each team’s best pitcher — the Marlins’ Josh Beckett (from Spring High School on the northside of Houston) and the Stros’ Roy O — did not pitch in this series, my sense is that the Marlins set of starting pitchers is the best in baseball.
The Stros try to get back on the winning track tonight at the Juice Box by sending Andy Pettitte to the hill against the Mets. Roy O follows him in the Saturday game of the series, and the Rocket takes on the Mets’ Al Leiter in what should be an entertaining Sunday game.