This Guardian article profiles Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart, who reveals that his real name is Jonathan Stewart Leibowitz and why he dropped his last name for show business purposes:
“I’m not a self-hating Jew. Actually, to borrow a line from Lenny Bruce, I just thought Leibowitz was too Hollywood.”
In the meantime, while discussing celebrities, the Onion reports that Lance Armstrong recently confronted an endurance test that almost overwhelmed him.
President Bush has nominated White House counsel and Dallas-based attorney Harriet Miers to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court of the United States. Ms. Miers has never been a judge before, the first such non-judge nomination since that of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
Ms. Miers was the first woman to be president of the State Bar of Texas and, for a time during the President’s stint as a businessman, she was his personal lawyer.
Howard Bashman has an extensive list of developing links on Ms. Miers. And Professor Bainbridge asks very reasonable questions and makes challeging observations regarding the nomination here. And Tom Goldstein and Lyle Denniston over at SCOTUSBlog are already expressing skepticism that the Senate will approve the nomination. On the other hand, William Dyer provides an impassioned defense of a nomination of a non-jurist to the Supreme Court.
A fair bit of chatter was generated in the locker rooms of many golf clubs over the past weekend by this Wall Street Journal ($) article on Friday that detailed the rather embarrassing use of corporate aircraft as airborne limousines to fly CEOs and other executives to golf dates or to vacation homes where they have golf-club memberships. In the article, Charles Elson, director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, calls it “disgusting” for a company to guarantee its CEO numerous hours of free personal flight time in order for the exec to make his tee times:
“A corporate aircraft isn’t supposed to be a shuttle to a vacation home. We pay CEOs enough. They can afford to pay to fly to their vacation homes.”
Is nothing sacred anymore? The hard-earned right to jet off to a golf game has been a savored executive perk for years. In this post-Enron era of demonizing business executives, is not there anyone who will stand up and defend the beleaguered executives in retaining this hallowed perk?
You bet there is. Just call Professor Bainbridge.
I’m betting that the Professor gets some major consulting work out of his work in this area. ;^)
Houston’s light rail system is a depressing black hole that gobbles huge amounts of money, so we are reduced to feeling somewhat better about that waste by stories such as this one that portend an even bigger urban boondoggle:
A decade ago, local leaders [in the Raleigh-Durham Research Triangle area of North Carolina] started planning a regional rail system, hoping to avoid a future of clogged highways and frustrated commuters. . .
The Triangle Transit Authority wants to build the $759 million system. But TTA is struggling to answer rigorous questions from federal officials about predictions of how many people will ride.
No dirt has yet been turned, although TTA has spent nearly $43 million acquiring land and access to an existing railroad corridor.
The project’s cost has ballooned from a 1994 estimate of about $100 million to a new estimate of $759 million.
K.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.
Less 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.