Monthly Archives: November 2005

Richard Justice said what?

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justice6.gifChronicle sportswriter Richard Justice says some of the darndest things. Take the following quotes from today’s column on the current state of the hapless Houston Texans:

“The Texans are respectable. They’re coming close. They’ve got four 2-7 teams left on their schedule. They almost won in Jacksonville, and they made a run at the Indianapolis Colts before losing 31-17 Sunday.”

The Texans are respectable? In nine games this season, the Texans have been in only three games that they had a reasonable chance to win, albeit two of those have been in the last three games. As for making “a run” against the Colts, when the Texans closed to 21-14 in the third quarter, Peyton Manning and the Colts offense reeled off a five play, 75 yard march for a touchdown that made the Texans defense look as if it would have a difficult time stopping a hard-chargin’ marching band. If that’s respectable, then I would hate to see what Justice considers just plain bad.

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Rationalizing a bad system

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Scales_of_justice.jpgBeing independent politically, I tend to look for political issues where the right position is so clear that advocacy of the opposing view is an indication of a politician who is interested in something other than improving government. This Chronicle article addresses one such issue — Texas’ utterly unsupportable system of electing judges. This earlier Daily Texan article does the same.
Texas’ system of judicial elections is, at best, not a good way to choose judges and, at its worst, a corrupt one. Along with former Texas Attorney General and state Supreme Court Justice John Hill, former state Supreme Court Justice Tom Phillips and many others, I have been supporting for over 20 years a new system for appointing judges in the Texas state courts similar to the appointment process that is used in the federal judicial system. This is not to say that the system in which federal judges is selected is perfect and does not generate a bad judge from time to time. But the risk of a bad judge reaching the bench in the federal system is far less than it currently is under the Texas system of judicial selection.

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2005 Weekly local football review

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Rice Owls celebrate.jpgRice 42 Tulane 34

The Owls (1-8) get the top spot on the local football review this week as they finally broke their 14 game losing streak (the longest in major college football) in beating Tulane at Rice Stadium. The win was a relief for the Rice program, which could attract a “crowd” of less than 10,000 for homecoming on a mild Texas autumn afternoon. Rumors continue to swirl that this will be head coach Ken Hatfield’s last season, and — despite the problems that the program has endured over the past two seasons — he is going to be a tough act to replace. While Rice’s new affiliation with Conference USA renews its traditional rivalries with Houston, SMU, and Tulane, it’s reasonably clear that those rivalries will not be enough to revive the lagging Owl football program. The Owls have a tough game next Saturday at Central Florida before ending the season on the Saturday after Thanksgiving against Houston.

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NYT versus WaPo on the Windfall Profits Tax

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pumps closed.jpgA couple of days ago, this NY Times editorial dusted off about every archaic economic theory of the Carter Administration to promote a windfall profits tax on energy companies. So, I was thinking about doing an Econ 101 post pointing out how the Times’ position would actually make things much worse than they already are, which is really not all that bad (have you noticed what’s been happening to the price of oil and natural gas over the past week or so?).
Then, somewhat surprisingly to me, I came across this Washington Post editorial that does the job for me.
I don’t know about you, but I find it quite refreshing that the Washington Post editorial page has come to understand that the market is much more effective than government in dealing with energy supply reductions.

Troubles at Patterson-UTI

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pattersonutilogo.jpgSnyder, Texas (between Abilene and Lubbock)-based Patterson-UTI Energy, Inc., one of the largest land-based drilling contractors in the U.S., raised a few eyebrows on Friday with the announcement that it is investigating the possible embezzlement of $70 million by a former undisclosed official who apparently arranged for payments to a shell company for assets that were never delivered over a five year period (Chronicle story is here). Although it is not known whether he is the Patterson employee under investigation, Patterson’s chief financial officer, Jonathan D. “Jody” Nelson, resigned on Nov. 3 for “personal reasons” and, a day later, he made a regulatory filing of his intent to unload about $13 million of Patterson stock.

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Getting up for the OU-A&M game

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1B2 Mac chats with Fran.JPGAs we hope that the next installment of Texas A&M football coach Dennis Franchione‘s Friday with Fran will be as entertaining as last week’s installment, the following are ways in which more than a few Aggie fans are getting up for this Saturday’s clash in Norman, Oklahoma between the Aggies and the Oklahoma Sooners:

FireDennisFranchione.com
FireFranPetition.com
FranUnderFire.com, which includes this handy list of embarrassments.

Are the WaPo editors reading Clear Thinkers?

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washington_post_logo.jpgOn the heels of yesterday’s post regarding General Motors’ Enronesque experience, the Washington Post business section leads with this article today that links General Motors and the “b word” in the same headline, and includes the following tidbit of information:

In a research note yesterday, Ronald A. Tadross, an auto analyst at Banc of America Securities LLC, called a bankruptcy filing “inevitable” and put the risk over the next two years at 40 percent, an increase from a previous estimate of 30 percent. Tadross said he thought GM management could be held responsible for the accounting errors and, if the management team is shaken up, the option of a bankruptcy reorganization would become more likely.

The London Daily Telegraph chimes in with the bankruptcy theme, too.

The David Carr dilemma

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david carr4.jpgThe Houston Texans face a vexing decision with regard to quarterback David Carr, the team’s first draft pick in its existence — whether to pick up an $8 million option to retain Carr’s services over the next four seasons?
In what has become his typically superficial manner, the Chronicle’s main NFL beat writer, John McClain (previous posts on McClain here), weighs in with this column in which he contends that the Texans will and should pick up the option to retain Carr’s services. McClain reasons that the Texans should retain Carr because “every team in the NFL that needed a quarterback would line up to give him a signing bonus of a lot more than $8 million,” although McClain provides no supporting analysis for that conclusion.

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Need a job? Try New Orleans

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help wanted.jpgTwo and a half months after Hurricane Katrina and the resulting flood hammered New Orleans, this NY Times article notes that the rebuilding of the city is being hampered by a scarcity of labor, a condition that was noted in this earlier post.
Given the massive exodus of people from New Orleans and the relunctance of many former residents to return, my sense is that we are experiencing uncharted waters with regard to the rebuilding of New Orleans. The tremendous loss of jobs almost overnight — particularly from small businesses that were destroyed by the damage from the flood — is unprecedented in the modern United States for an area this large. Inasmuch as most of the jobs that are arising as a result of the reconstruction effort are of a different nature from the ones that were lost, many of the people who left New Orleans are not attracted to return by those new jobs. Consequently, my sense is that the key to real rebirth in the area is the re-creation of small businesses, which is a tricky and slow task.

Refco’s Phillip Bennett indicted

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Refco Logo6.jpgOn a lively Thursday in New York, Phillip R. Bennett, the former CEO of the big commodities broker Refco Inc., was indicted on multiple counts of securities fraud, wire fraud and of making false regulatory filings with the SEC at the same time as creditors in Refco’s pending chapter 11 case fought over the price to be paid for the company’s key regulated futures business. Previous posts about Mr. Bennett and the Refco saga are here and a copy of the indictment is here.
Refco filed a chapter 11 case on Oct. 17 a week after the company announced that a $430 million debt owed to the company by a firm controlled by Mr. Bennett had been concealed and then repaid by Mr. Bennett. Refco’s board placed Mr. Bennett on indefinite leave Oct. 10 and he was arrested on federal securities fraud charges shortly thereafter.

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