Choi wins at Greensboro

Choi.jpgK.J. Choi of The Woodlands cruised to a two-shot victory on Sunday in the Chrysler Classic of Greensboro to win his first PGA Tour golf tournament in almost three years. The sweet-swinging South Korean native led the field during the tournament in both driving accuracy (83.9%) and putts per green in regulation (1.618), and shot 22 under par for the tournament. That’s a good prescription for winning golf tournaments.
Choi is an interesting fellow. His life story — which he recounted in this speech several years ago — is quite inspiring. Check it out.

Texas Genco turns power generating assets for huge profit

nrg_logo.gifLess than a year after a group of four private equity funds banded together to acquire Texas Genco Holdings, Inc. from CenterPoint Energy for $3.7 billion, the buyers are proposing to sell Texas Genco to NRG Energy Inc. for $5.8 billion in cash and stock in a deal that confirms the red-hot nature of the market for power generation assets.
Under the deal, NRG — which emerged from chapter 11 just two years ago — will pay $4 billion in cash and will give the sellers $1.8 billion in stock in NRG, which amounts to about a 25% stake in NRG. NRG also will assume an additional $2.5 billion in debt. As a result of the acquisition, NRG will become one of the country’s largest independent generators with more than 24,000 megawatts of capacity from plants in California, the Northeast, the Southeast and Texas.

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2005 Weekly local football review

Vince Young.gifBengals 16 Texans 10

The local media will likely view this game as a moral victory because the Texans (0-3) at least had a chance to win the game. However, the Texans passing game generated a measly 128 yards on a 4.9 yards per pass average. The rushing attack generated 126 yards for a slightly-better 5.5 per rush average. The bottom line is that 254 yards of total offense will not win many NFL games. The defense was decent, allowing less than 100 yards rushing and keeping the team in the game for the most part. But folks, this is shaping up as a very looong season for the Texans. The Texans better beat Tennessee at home next Sunday because they have Seattle on the road and Indianapolis at home the two weeks after that one. 0-6 is looking like a distinct possibility.

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Whew!

Clemens douses Drayton.jpgWell, as predicted, the Stros (89-73) didn’t get to celebrate winning the National League Wild Card Playoff berth until the last out of their weekend series with the Cubs (79-83) was recorded in the scorebook.
The Stros clinched on Sunday by pulling out a heart-stopping 6-4 victory over the Cubs after setting up that victory with a similarly tight 3-1 win over the Cubs on Saturday. Preceding those nerve-wracking victories were two even closer games that the Stros lost to the Cubs, 3-2 on Thursday and then 4-3 on Friday in which Stros closer Brad Lidge uncharacteristically blew a two-run lead in the ninth. Lidge came back to save both wins over the weekend.
So, the Stros make the playoffs for the sixth time in the past nine seasons as they close out the remarkably successful Biggio-Bagwell era. I was one of the few to predict that this light-hitting club could contend for yet another playoff berth, although even I wavered during the early part of the season and as recently as a month ago. But after a horrible 15-30 record in their first 45 games, the Stros were a remarkable 74-43 for the remainder of the season to lock up the playoff berth with only three less wins that last season’s club that came within a game of the World Series.
The Stros have a couple of days of rest before taking on their perennial playoff opponent, the Braves (90-72) in Atlanta on Wednesday. They will follow that game with another on Thursday in Atlanta and then games in Houston on Saturday and, if necessary on Sunday, and then a fifth game, if necessary, in Atlanta next Monday. I will post a thorough analysis of the Stros versus Braves series on Tuesday.

The real Republican deficit

deficit_express_card.gifFollowing on a theme addressed in this earlier post from last fall, this timely OpinionJournal op-ed points out that the real problem to the Republican Party represented by Tom DeLay is not his dubious ethics, but that he is devoid of ideas other than self-preservation:

The real danger for Republicans now isn’t ethics; it is that, like those 1994 Democrats, they seem to have grown more comfortable presiding over the government than changing it. No one typified this more than Mr. DeLay, who has always been more fiercely partisan than he is conservative. . .
. . . [T]he GOP Congress has become mostly about its money and muscle–and the incumbency it helps to sustain. The policy and intellectual fervor, such as it was, has all but vanished. Nothing typified that more than Mr. DeLay’s comments on September 13, when he declared post-Katrina that there was nothing left in the federal budget to cut. They had already trimmed all the fat. . .

Read the entire piece. As OpinionJournal points out, if voters come to the conclusion that the GOP’s primary ambition is simply to remain in power, then “no amount of money or muscle will save Republicans at the polls.”

Texas Medical Center players make nice

TMC7.jpgThe Chronicle’s Todd Ackerman, who has done a fine job over the past couple of years of covering the divisive split between former Texas Medical Center partners, Baylor College of Medicine and the Methodist Hospital — reports today that Baylor and Methodist have entered into a settlement brokered by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and that Baylor and its new teaching hospital — St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital — have decided to shelve their ongoing merger negotiations for the time being.
Whew! Never a dull moment in the Medical Center, eh?

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KPMG moves to settle tax shelter class action

kpmg logo26.jpgBattered and bruised after negotiating a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department that narrowly prevented a criminal indictment of the firm, accounting giant KPMG LLP took another baby step yesterday in its plan to attempt to preserve the firm as a going concern by agreeing to submit a proposed $225 million settlement to the federal court overseeing the class action lawsuit by about 275 former KPMG clients who bought illegal tax shelters promoted by the firm. The Sidley Austin Brown & Wood LLP law firm — another defendant with KPMG in the class action — is also included in the proposed settlement, which remains subject to the U.S. District Court’s approval in Newark, N.J. Here are the previous posts on the KMPG tax shelter fiasco.
Interestingly, lead plaintiffs’ counsel in the class action is Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman LLP, which has a few problems of its own.

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