If you are interested in college football, then don’t miss the well-done series of articles in the by Mark Wangrin in today’s San Antonio Express-News, The Great Texas Football Rebellion.
Mr. Wangrin does a nice job of recounting the details and intrigue behind the creation of the Big 12 Conference, including the parochial Texas politics that kept TCU and the University of Houston out of the conference and perennial doormat Baylor in.
One of my favorite professional golfers is fellow Houstonian and University of Houston alum Steve Elkington. Elk is just two shots out of the lead going into the final round of the PGA Golf Championship this weekend, and he noted one big advantage of living in Houston while responding to a media question on how he dealt with the stifling 109 degree heat index during his Saturday round at Baltusrol Golf Club in Springfield, New Jersey:
“Being Australian and living in Houston, I thought it was quite cool.”
Earlier posts (here and here) have addressed the chronically abysmal condition of Houston’s Harris County Jail. As noted in the posts, local politicians have an amazing propensity for blaming others rather than addressing the causes for an unpopular problem and resolving them in a responsible manner. Recently, the County Commissioners voted to throw some money at one of the symptoms of the jail’s problems (i.e., serious overcrowding), but there still appears to be no meaningful action being taken on addressing why the jail’s problems have continued to fester for decades.
Into that vacuum of action, Scott Henson over at Grits for Breakfast files this first in a series of posts that analyzes Harris County bail policies and their contribution to the jail’s overcrowding. As Scott notes:
According to a recent consultant’s report (download pdf), a major reason is clear: A shift in bail policy over the last decade to require cash bond in more cases instead of personal bond, or releasing defendants on their promise to later appear in court. Half of all inmates presently in the Harris County Jail are awaiting trial; a large proportion couldn’t make bail.
Though other factors are also at play, much of the Harris County Jail’s overincarceration crisis can be explained by this shift in policy. In other words, Harris County’s jail overcrowding crisis is a self-inflicted wound.
Read Scott’s entire piece, and his future posts on this issue will be noted. As noted in the previous posts, the horrid condition of the Harris County Jail is an embarrassing reflection of our community’s values. This is a problem for which all Houstonians should unite and demand resolution once and for all.
The KPMG tax shelter saga has been a common topic on this blog over the past year or so, and this recent post observed that — even if KPMG fades a criminal indictment — it is by no means clear that the firm will be able to survive the after-effects of entering into a deferred prosecution agreement to settle the criminal probe.
Along those lines, Peter Henning passes along this extraordinary open memorandum that nine anonymous (and frustrated) current and former KPMG partners recently sent to several media outlets, the Justice Department and the KPMG board. The memo describes in detail the demoralizing effects of KPMG management’s moves to avoid a criminal indictment at all costs and the devastating impact that the Justice Department’s criminalization of agency costs has had on KPMG. Indeed, the memo outlines a number of the adverse effects of criminalizing agency costs that have been noted here, such as the following:
Bludgeoning employees into plea bargains;
Criminalization of conduct that is not even clearly improper in a civil context — much less criminal — through “indictment via media” (also here);
Serving up sacrificial lambs and firing key partners who were simply doing their jobs;
The cost to owners of rolling over in the face of the investigation as opposed to standing up and fighting it; and
The high price of “cooperation” and the illusory attorney-client privilege.
Interestingly, the authors of the memo believe that KPMG can absorb the financial impact of a hefty fine and damage awards resulting from civil litigation over the tax shelters, but are less sanguine about the prospects for KPMG’s survival because of the damage to partner morale resulting from management’s handling of the tax shelter probe.