Daily Archives: June 15, 2004

Going, going, almost gone

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The Cubs scored three runs in the top of the ninth on Lance Berkman‘s two base error and Octavio Dotel‘s dubious pitching as the Cubs downed the fading Stros for the second straight night on Tuesday, 4-2.
The Stros wasted the second straight solid pitching performance by Wade Miller, who gave up only a run on four hits, one walk and struck out six in six and a third innings. The Cubs’ Carlos Zambrano was just as good, cuffing the Stros to two runs on six hits over six frames. Ensberg plated a couple of runs in the sixth to give the Stros a 2-1 lead, which they held to the fateful ninth when things quickly spiraled out of control.
Berkman’s two base error led off the frame, and then Dotel proceeded to give up three more hits and three runs (none earned because of the Berkman error) before the carnage was over.
Tim Redding, who is quickly fading from mediocrity to awful, takes the hill for the Stros in the Wednesday night game against Greg Maddux. The Stros are now 32-30 and in fifth place in the NL Central. A promising season is quickly fading away.

John C. Nabors, RIP

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Long-time Houston and more recently Dallas-based business litigation attorney John C. Nabors died on Monday. Mr. Nabors was recently diagnosed with cancer.
Mr. Nabors was well-known in both Houston and Dallas business law circles, and was perhaps best known for his long representation and friendship with the mercurial Jack Stanley, who is a legendary Texas promoter of highly-leveraged oil and gas deals and an aggressive utilizer of chapter 11 to restructure debt that he raised in those deals.
Update: Here is the Dallas Morning News obituary on Mr. Nabors:

Nabors, JOHN C., passed away on June 14 in Dallas, Texas after a brief illness.
John graduated with a B.B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1965. He then received a J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law with honors in 1967, where he was an associate editor of the Texas Law Review, a member of Chancellors, and a member of the Order of the Coif.
John Nabors was a Senior Partner at the law firm of Gardere Wynne Sewell LLP in Dallas, where he had practiced since 1989. He was a member of numerous committees and areas of service during his tenure there, including most recently being a Trial Team Leader in the firm’s Trial Section. Before joining the law firm of Gardere Wynne Sewell LLP, he was a partner at the law firm of Liddell Sapp Zivley Hill & Laboon in Houston where he began practicing in 1967. He maintained significant client and personal relationships in Houston after moving to Dallas in 1989.
John was admitted to practice before the US Supreme Court, Texas Supreme Court, US Court of Appeals for the Fifth and Eleventh Circuits, US Court of Claims, US District Courts for the Southern, Northern, Western and Eastern Districts of Texas, as well as the US District Court for the District of Nevada and the Superior Court for the State of California, County of Los Angeles. His professional memberships include the following: American Bar Association, American Bar Foundation (Life Member), Texas Bar Association, Dallas Bar Association, the Dallas Bar Foundation (Fellow), Houston Bar Association, and Texas Bar Foundation. Among his many other accomplishments, he was voted a Texas Super Lawyer in 2003 and 2004 by his peers, was featured in an article in the American Lawyer Magazine in 2002, and was a member of the Outstanding Lawyers of America.
He is survived by his wife of 22 years, Kathleen, and daughters Kathleen Nabors, Sarah Nabors, Carol Spiars and son-in-law Kevin Spiars, son John David Nabors, and grandchildren, John Nabors, Nicholas and Elijah Spiars, and sisters-in law Maureen Englishbey, Colleen McGlocklin, MaryEllen Raymond, Eileen Jacobson, and Tracy Sudan, and 10 nieces and nephews.
John was an avid outdoorsman who loved spending time on his operating cattle ranch in Hamilton, Texas. In 1978 John set a Guiness Book record by winning the longest canoe race in the world (419 miles). John was a member of The Houston Club, The Petroleum Club and the Brookhollow Golf Club. He will be dearly missed by his many friends and relatives. A private family burial service will be held on Wednesday in Hamilton, Tx. A memorial service will be held at 10:00 a.m. Friday, June 18 at Sparkman-Hillcrest Chapel, Northwest Highway, Dallas, Texas. Memorials may be made to Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Dignity Memorial Sparkman Hillcrest 7405 W. Northwest Hwy. Dallas (214) 363-5401

New trendy graduation present for girls

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I have a daughter graduating from high school next year. She will not be receiving this graduation present.

Saving Medicare

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Laurence Kotlikoff writes this rather ominous Tech Central Station piece regarding the financing debacle related to Medicare, in which he observes the following:

Buried deep in the bowels of the recently released Medicare Trustees’ Report is the first-ever official estimate of Medicare’s true long-run costs. Previous reports have considered only short- and medium-term costs. The new “infinite horizon” estimate adds up all future costs, telling us the amount of money we’d need today to cover Medicare’s commitments. This present value bill is unimaginably large — $73.6 trillion to be precise! It’s almost seven times GDP, twice the size of private net wealth, and 14 times official federal debt.
Can we pay this colossal sum? Medicare’s trust fund is a paltry $256 billion. And the present value of its future payroll taxes is only $12.0 trillion. Historically, we’ve used general revenues to cover the gap between Medicare’s expenditures and receipts. But continuing to do so will require a 50 percent immediate and permanent hike in federal income taxes! Alternatively, we can wait and raise taxes by an even larger percentage in the future.

Professor Kotlikoff’s solution is to limit benefit growth, and here is how he proposes to do it:

All Medicare participants would receive individual-specific vouchers on October 1st of each year to purchase insurance coverage for the following calendar year. The size of the voucher would be based on the participant’s current medical condition (an idea first suggested by Peter Ferrara of the Institute for Policy Innovation and John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis). A healthy 67 year-old might get a voucher for $7,500, whereas an 85 year old with pancreatic cancer might get a voucher for $85,000. The vouchers would take account of the participant’s age, region, sex, and other factors that affect health costs. Because those in the worst medical shape would get the largest vouchers, insurance carriers would be happy to sign them up.
All insurance carriers would have to cover a basic set of medical services and prescription drugs. But Medicare participants would be free to pay out of pocket for additional coverage. The government would keep up-to-date records about each participant’s health status, release this information to insurance companies at the participant’s request, and assign insurers for those who don’t sign up on their own.
The government would cap total MSS voucher expenditures so that expenditures per beneficiary grow no faster than wages. Medicare participants would see their real medical benefits rise, just not as fast as in the past. And they’d realize that no matter how sick they got, they’d always receive a voucher large enough to purchase insurance coverage for the following year.

Compare Professor Kotlikoff’s plan with the one that John Kerry is proposing. And then compare it to the one that the Bush Administration is proposing . . . er, except that the Bush Administration is not proposing any reform for this mess. Rather, the current administration’s idea of reform is its dubious Medicare prescription drug legislation of last year.

VDH on America’s odd relationship with the radical Islamic fascists

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Victor Davis Hanson’s latest is up at NRO and, as usual, his historical perspective is right on the money:

As long as the mythical Athenians were willing to send, every nine years, seven maidens and seven young men down to King Minos’s monster in the labyrinth, Athens was left alone by the Cretan fleet. The king rightly figured that harvesting just enough Athenians would remind them of their subservience without leading to open rebellion ? as long as somebody impetuous like a Theseus didn’t show up to wreck the arrangement.
Ever since the storming of the Tehran embassy in November 1979 we Americans have been paying the same sort of human tribute to grotesque Islamofascists. Over the last 25 years a few hundred of our own were cut down in Lebanon, East Africa, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Yemen, and New York on a semi-annual basis, even as the rules of the tribute to be paid ? never spoken, but always understood ? were rigorously followed.
In exchange for our not retaliating in any meaningful way against the killers ? addressing their sanctuaries in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, or Syria, or severing their financial links in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia ? Hezbollah, al Qaeda, and their various state-sanctioned kindred operatives agreed to keep the number killed to reasonable levels. They were to reap their lethal harvests abroad and confine them mostly to professional diplomats, soldiers, or bumbling tourists, whose disappearance we distracted Americans would predictably chalk up to the perils of foreign service and exotic travel.
Despite the occasional fiery rhetoric, both sides found the informal Minoan arrangement mutually beneficial. The terrorists believed that they were ever so incrementally, ever so insidiously eroding America’s commitment to a pro-Western Middle East. We offered our annual tribute so that over the decades we could go from Dallas to Extreme Makeover and Madonna to Britney without too much distraction or inconvenience.
But then a greedy, over-reaching bin Laden wrecked the agreement on September 11. Or did he?

Read the entire piece.

How not to run a golf telecast

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ABC’s coverage of golf tournaments is the worst of any television network, primarily because of commentator Steve Melnyk‘s compulsion to say something regardless of whether it makes any sense. However, on Sunday, ABC really outdid themselves in providing bad coverage when they switched from a three man playoff for the Buick Open Tournament to that television classic that simply cannot be delayed, “America’s Funniest Videos.” Absolutely incredible bad judgment.
I do hope that ABC on course commentator Billy Ray Brown can find a job with a real golf television crew, such as the CBS crew. Billy Ray is quite good.