Daily Archives: June 2, 2004

Stros beat Cubs again

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The Rocket dominated the Cubs for seven innings in running his record to 8-0 as the Stros beat the Cubs on Wednesday afternoon at Wrigley Field, 5-1.
Clemens struck out five and gave up only five hits, a run, and two walks in his seven innings of work. His effort was was highlighted by his running discussion with home plate umpire Mike Fichter, which Clemens carried on in a relatively diplomatic manner throughout the game. But after the seventh inning, Clemens walked to the dugout yelling in anger while never looking at Fichter, and Fichter stared at the Rocket during his entire walk to the dugout. As they say in the bigs, Clemens “has a little turd in him.”
As usual, Lance Berkman drove in the lead run and reached base for the 33rd game in a row. Jeff Kent also had a triple and scored three runs, while Lidge and Dotel were dominating in the eighth and ninth innings for the second game in a row.
The Stros get a day to play golf in St. Louis on Thursday before opening a weekend series with the Redbirds on Friday night. Wade Miller, Tim Redding, and Roy O will pitch the series against the Cards.
In other news, the Stros announced the signing of Pete Munro, who has been with the Stros off and on over the past three seasons. Munro had been pitching with the Twins’ AAA club this season, but could opt out of that contract if he received an offer from an MLB club.
The odd man out is Brandon Backe — one of the two Brandons who stunk on Tuesday night in Chicago — who was optioned to AAA New Orleans. Backe has actually pitched better than the other Brandon (Duckworth), but the Stros still have options under Backe’s contract to send him to the minors. I suspect that the Stros do not have any options under Duckworth’s contract. Nevertheless, my sense is that the Stros will do something soon with Duckworth, probably either working out a deal to allow him to attempt to improve at AAA or simply grant him his unconditional release.

Holman Jenkins on the charade of “energy independence”

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This Wall Street Journal ($) Holman Jenkins, Jr. piece lays the wood to John Kerry’s “energy independence” blather that he has been using recently in various campaign speeches and working papers. The entire column is a brilliant expose of the demagogury that commonly revolves around the issue of energy policy and the alleged need for “energy independence” from Mideast, and here are a few choice tidbits:

[Kerry] puts himself in excellent company here, since the same shibboleth has been paid lip service by every president since Nixon. It’s also a favorite of prominent newspaper columnists who, throwing up their hands about the Middle East and finding Americans more tractable targets for castigation, cite the urgent need for a “Manhattan Project on energy.” The idea never fails to elicit applause from audiences of ordinary voters and focus groups too, in about the same way that Mom, apple pie and stopping foreigners from “stealing our jobs” are reliable applause lines.
That is to say, as a goal, energy independence is neither desirable nor practical and, were it otherwise, would still not solve any real problem. But it provides a useful service as a vehicle of escapism and an emblem of personal virtue.

In fact, Mr. Jenkins postulates that Kerry’s plan to reduce dependence on Mideast oil would likely have unexpected consequences:

Oil is oil: We’d still be bound by prices in the international marketplace with all their unsettling volatility. Mr. Kerry proposes nothing more than a symbolic slap at the Arabs, his target accounting for less than 10% of total consumption. In fact, were his plan to have any effect at all, the U.S. would likely become more dependent on imports as high-cost U.S. producers were squeezed out; and more dependent on Mideast oil, as high-cost foreign producers were squeezed out.

Then Mr. Jenkins deals with several of the unspoken assumptions that underlie the escapist fallacy of energy dependence on Mideast oil:

We’d be able to wash our hands of military and security entanglements in the Mideast. No, we wouldn’t. Oil would remain a commodity in global markets, so we’d still be exposed to the international price of oil, including all gyrations caused by Mideast politics. Even in the improbable and bizarre circumstance that the U.S. swore off oil consumption altogether, we’d still have to live in this world. Notice that we invest heavily in the security of Japan, South Korea, Israel and Western Europe, though none has oil.
Our dependence makes us beholden to Arab oil states. This is similar to the argument put to President Truman by the State Department when it vehemently opposed his recognition of Israel. Yet it’s hard to imagine how we could make ourselves more irritating to Arab states than by supporting Israel, which we’ve done for 50 years. Somehow we still manage to keep buying all the oil we want.
We’d be freer to press for democracy and human rights in the Mideast. Huh? The U.S. is going to engage in campaigns of destabilization against unattractive regimes in which we no longer have an interest? On the contrary, their co-optation by petrodollars and consequent integration in the world economy is the main inducement to the Arab oil states to eschew antisocial behavior.
The Saudis spend our oil money on religious schools preaching hate against the West. The Saudis would continue to receive billions for their oil even if the U.S. weren’t buying. In any case, their support for radical Islamists has nothing to do with oil and everything to do with the Saudi regime’s domestic insecurities. We can’t fix this problem with energy policy; let’s hope we’re not so feckless as to evade the real fight against terrorism in favor of a fantasy that all will be well if Congress is allowed to spend billions on a pork-barrel scheme to wean industrial society off hydrocarbons.

Mr. Jenkins concludes by noting that the problem of high energy prices is a different problem than reliance on Mideast oil:

None of the above means we don’t have a real, workaday concern for “energy security — more accurately stated as a concern about price, price, price, and even more importantly, volatility of price.
But this problem is steadily fixing itself as oil consumption becomes a smaller part of total consumption, leaving the economy better able to withstand price gyrations. Per unit of economic output, we burn 55% fewer petroleum Btus than we did 30 years ago. As is the case with most historical dilemmas, we will overcome our reliance on Mideast oil by surviving long enough for history to give the U.S. new and different problems.

As readers of this blog have heard before, your demagouge antenna should go up every time you hear a politician advocate a policy that means that we should pay more for a product such as oil.

Nigerian Barge case update: Justice won’t call Fastow

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As noted in this earlier post, the Enron Task Force‘s first trial in a case stemming from its over two year investigation into the collapse of Enron Corp. will begin next Monday in U.S. District Judge Ewing Werlein‘s court in Houston.
The case has been dubbed the “Nigerian Barge case” because it involves the actions of two former Enron executives and four Merrill Lynch executives in arranging Merrill’s purchase of an interest in a barge off the coast of Nigeria at the end of 1999. The Task Force alleges that the deal was a sham that was done merely to improve Enron’s financial condition artificially at the end of its fiscal year. The Task Force’s proof of the alleged sham is that former Enron CFO Andrew Fastow allegedly promised that Enron would broker a sale of the interest in the barges for Merrill the following year and that Merrill would not have done the deal but for Fastow’s promise. Thus, argues the government, the sale was not a “true sale” of the interest, and Enron’s accounting of the deal as a true sale was false.
An apparent weakness in the government’s theory is that, even if the government could prove that Fastow made the promise and that Merrill would not have done the deal but for that promise, Fastow’s promise was made before the parties entered into the final deal documents, which contain the typical provision that essentially provide that the parties are relying only on the written representations in the documents and that any oral promise made prior to the written agreements between the parties is not being relied upon. Thus, even if Fastow had made the promise to broker a deal for the interest in the barges to induce Merrill to buy it, that promise was not contained in the written agreements and, by signing them, Merrill confirmed that it was not relying on them. Stated simply, Merrill would not have been able to enforce Fastow’s oral promise to broker a deal for the barges.
In view of the foregoing and Fastow’s plea bargain with the government, it would seem that Fastow’s testimony that the deal was a sham would be of great importance to the government. However, this Chronicle article reports that the Task Force has decided not to call Fastow as a witness in presenting its case in chief during the trial.
Given the importance of Fastow’s allegedly fraudulent deal-making to the government’s case, this is good news for the defense. Moreover, in light of the written agreements between Enron and Merrill, is there really any way that the Task Force can sustain its burden that an oral side deal to broker a deal for the barges was an enforceable part of the deal? Stay tuned.

Two informative articles on radical Islamic fascists

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I’m on the road for a couple of days, so I don’t have much time for blogging. But I wanted to pass along two articles on radical Islamic fascists that are particularly insightful.
First, Daniel Pipes has this article that summarizes the evolution of the strange political climate that currently exists in Saudi Arabia. Mr. Pipes notes Bernard Lewis‘ analogy that helps understand the Saudi position among Muslims in general:

“Imagine that the Ku Klux Klan gets total control of the state of Texas. And the Ku Klux Klan has at its disposal all the oil rigs in Texas. And they use this money to set up a well-endowed network of colleges and schools throughout Christendom, peddling their peculiar brand of Christianity. You would then have an approximate equivalent of what has happened in the modern Muslim world.”

H’mm. In other words, Dr. Lewis, sort of like what happened with the Mormons, Utah and the United States? ;^)
The other article of note is this one from Richard Chesnoff, who has been reporting on the wars of the Middle East for over 30 years. I particularly like Richard because he is a real war reporter and does not mince words. An example:

Al Qaeda also has apparently infiltrated a number of nongovernmental agencies. Among them, the Yemen Women’s Rights Organization. My source explains: “Because of Islamic society’s strict taboo on body searches for women, Al Qaeda finds women ideal couriers.”
The situation in Saudi Arabia seems worse. Though Saudi officials frequently cloud or completely deny the facts, intelligence shows that two Saudi Air Force pilots, Lt. Safr al-Shahrani and Major Sayyaf al-Bishi, were arrested last year on suspicion of having Al Qaeda ties and of planting missiles in the Al Qawiza area south of Jeddah Port. Their reported plan: attack U.S. military vessels.
There are also reports that the Al Qaeda terrorists whose suicide bomb killed 35 people in Riyadh last year were secretly helped by members of the Saudi National Guard, the same force that supposedly protects the Saudi Royal Family. In Khobar this weekend, the terrorists reportedly wore Saudi Army fatigue uniforms. Did they steal them? Or were they supplied to them by somebody within the national guard?
There are similar reports of internal infiltration coming from Sudan and Pakistan.

The Islamic fascists remain a formidable threat to United States and world security, and this threat is far too serious to be just another political football during the upcoming Presidential campaign.