Monthly Archives: January 2007

Messrs. Personality

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Bill%20Parcells012407.jpgBill Parcells and his former assistant, Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, are good football coaches. But, man, can’t they just take themselves a bit less seriously?
Parcells quit the other day as the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys after four mostly mediocre seasons. As this earlier post noted, Parcells is reasonably good at what he does, but is miserable doing it. This clever Onion piece from a couple of weeks ago picked up on that in predicting Parcells’ resignation.
Meanwhile, Belichick showed his sunny side after the Patriots’ loss to the Colts in the NFC Championship game this past Sunday, as this YouTube clip reflects:

By the way, aren’t Parcells and Belichick an interesting contrast to the two Super Bowl coaches this year, Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith? Michael Smith of ESPN.com describes the latter two:

Dungy and Smith are role models, not just for coaches who look like them or men who look like them, but for all coaches and all men. They live their lives the right way, and as a result they do their jobs the same way. Their priorities are, in order: faith, their families and football. The outcome of the Super Bowl or any game does not define them. They personify words such as class, grace, dignity, honor and integrity.

Horse sense at the Fifth Circuit

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cowboy%20on%20a%20horse.jpgThe Texas justice system may leave a lot to be desired in the area of capital punishment, but you can’t say that the Lone Star State doesn’t protect its horses.
A couple of Texas slaughterhouses recently learned that lesson when they began processing and selling horse meat for human consumption in several emerging foreign markets. The Attorney General’s office promptly informed the slaughterhouses that they were violating a 1949 law that bans processing of horse meat for human consumption and the slaughterhouses protested that the 1949 law had been repealed or was at least pre-empted by federal law. The AG’s office refused to back down, so the slaughterhouses sued to enjoin the AG from enforcing the law and the district court granted the injunction.
On appeal, a Fifth Circuit panel led by Judge Benvanides had some fun. In Empacadora de Carnes v. Curry, 05-11499 (5th Cir., Jan. 19, 2007), the Court held that “[t]he lone cowboy riding his horse on a Texas trail is a cinematic icon. Not once in memory did the cowboy eat his horse, but film is an imperfect mirror for reality.” The panel goes on to concede that horse thieves occasionally would eat horse meat, but holds that the Texas horse meat ban has not been repealed and is neither pre-empted by the Federal Meat Inspection Act nor violative of the Dormant Commerce Clause. As a result, the Fifth Circuit shut down the slaughterhouses’ horse meat processing operations, leaving those heartless folks in Illinois as the only current US exporters of horse meat for human consumption.
Woodrow Call and Gus McRae and the other members of the Hat Creek Cattle Company would be right proud of the Fifth Circuit. HT to Robert Loblaw.

A Wie bit of a problem

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Butch-Harmon.jpgSuffice it to say that former Houstonian and prominent professional golf instructor Butch Harmon won’t be receiving any holiday greeting cards from the family of female golfer, Michelle Wie after the following public remarks from over the weekend:

“The whole thing is absolutely ridiculous,” he says. “Michelle has regressed. She is worse now at 17 than she was at 14. To continue telling us that she is getting better by playing with the men is an insult. She says it’s a learning experience. What is she learning by finishing last? It’s hurting her mentally.”
“She should go play with the women and dominate that competition first. But the whole Michelle Wie camp is about money. The biggest difference between Earl [Woods, the father of Tiger] and BJ [Wie, Michelle’s dad] is that Earl didn’t worry about money. He knew it was more important for Tiger to learn to win and then the money would take care of itself. But Michelle Wie wins nothing.”
“You should invite her to the next member-guest competition at your home club and she might actually win something because what’s going on now is ridiculous. And it’s not good for the game of golf.”

Next time, Butch, tell us what you really think and don’t beat around the bush. HT Geoff Shackelford.

More on the new Prohibition

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internet-gambling.GIFOn the heels of this post from last week, the Justice Department is now turning on Wall Street in connection with the federal government’s jihad on internet gambling. We can now rest easier that the scoundrels who have been helped finance this threat to the public will now be brought to justice.
Meanwhile, as noted earlier here, the Justice Department’s campaign against legitimate businesses from other countries who run afoul of an anchronistic US law is not winning the US any friends. The broad latitude that federal prosecutors are being given to criminalize business interests is generating a wave of prosecutorial abuse and waste that is far more troubling than the problem that the prosecutors are attacking. Along those lines, Christine Hurt over at the Conglomerate blog is asking all the right questions about the ominous direction that this criminalization policy is taking us.

A first-rate health care finance proposal

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HealthInsurancetax.jpgThe Bush Administration announced over the weekend that President Bush will propose a common sense reform of the health care finance system during his upcoming State of the Union Address — extension of the tax deductibility of health coverage to everyone who acquires it outside of the workplace.
As has been noted many times in this blog, the federal government doesn’t currently tax employer-provided health insurance benefits but gives no tax breaks to most consumers who buy medical insurance outside the workplace. President Bush will propose to make it easier for consumers who do not have employer-provided health insurance to buy coverage on their own by making the tax incentive for doing similar so simlar to that of homeowners who deduct interest payments on their mortgages. The Bush Administration’s plan would also set a cap on the amount of employer-based health care benefit that an employee could receive tax-free.
The Bush Adminstration proposal is particularly sound because it addresses the mindset that has developed over the past couple of generations of Americans who are conditioned to employer-based health insurance — that is, that health care benefits are some sort of obligation from employers with regard to which employees have little incentive to care much about cost. The Bush plan treats employer-based insurance as compensation (which it is — such insurance arose as a loophole to get around wage and price controls during WWII), which provides a much sounder basis for assessment of the value of employer-based insurance. In so doing, it addresses the problem of medical “insulation” policies that Arnold Kling and others recently addressed over at Cato Unbound (see here and here).
By the way, this proposal addresses one of the issues that is a wonderful litmus test for political candidates. Although a politician could argue that removing the tax deductibility of all medical insurance makes even more sense than President Bush’s proposal, no reasonable argument can be made to support the current disparate tax treatment of employer-based versus individual policies. The Administration’s proposal is actually much more progressive than the current state of affairs because the wealthier employees currently benefit the most from not having to declare the value of their employer-based insurance as income.
Thus, if a politician opposes the Bush Administration’s proposal, then that politician is probably either ignorant about the issues involved or in the pocket of the large business interests that profit from the current employer-based insurance system. That’s a pretty clear indication that such a person should not be in a position of deciding one of the most important economic and social issues facing American society today.

The best character actor you never heard of

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Trey%20Wilson.jpgDon’t miss this fine piece by the Chronicle’s Andrew Dansby on the late Trey Wilson, the fine character actor from Houston who died tragically of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 40, just as he was hitting his stride in Hollywood.
The 20th anniversary of the Coen Brothers’ masterpiece comedy Raising Arizona prompted the look-back at Wilson, and Dansby begins his piece with one of Wilson’s most memorable scenes from that movie — playing unpainted furniture dealer Nathan Arizona Huffheins, Sr. facing the questions of investigating authorities after the kidnapping of one of the baby quintuplets he had fathered:

Raising Arizona, celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, is the kind of cult comedy that blossoms with repeated viewings. Its most memorable scene doesn’t involve leads Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter. Instead, it follows an unpainted-furniture salesman named Nathan Arizona; one of his quintuplets has been abducted.
And Nathan Arizona. Well, shoot. Y’all know who he is. Or maybe not. Years after his death, Houston-born character actor Trey Wilson, who brought proud, frenzied and compassionate life to that character, is a vaguely familiar face and an unknown name.
But on DVD, that marvelous scene remains vivid. “Was the child wearing anything when he was abducted?” asks a police officer, gathering information for an APB.
“Nobody sleeps naked in this house!” says Nathan. He’s unshaven and clad in a bathrobe, simultaneously tragic and comic. As Wilson played him, he’s both believably frantic and wildly funny.
An FBI agent joins the fray: “What was the child wearing?” “A dinner jacket,” snaps Nathan. “What do you think? He was wearing his damn jammies.” “What did the jammies look like?”
“Aw, I dunno,” says Nathan. His head rolls back in frustration, also reflected in his gruff voice. “They were jammies. They had Yodas and (expletive) on ’em.”

Heck, Dansby’s fine piece on Wilson doesn’t even include my favorite exchanges from the scene:

Policeman: “Do you have any disgruntled employees?”

Nathan Arizona Sr.: “Hell, they’re all disgruntled. I aint running no damn daisy farm. My motto is ‘Do it my way or watch your butt!'”

Policeman: “Well, do you think any of them could’ve done it?”

Nathan Arizona Sr.: “Oh, don’t make me laugh. Without my say-so they wouldn’t piss with their pants on fire.”

Or this one:

FBI Agent: “Sir, we discovered you were born ‘Nathan Huffheins.'”

Nathan Arizona Sr.: “Yeah, I changed my name. What of it?”

FBI Agent: “Can you give us an indication why?”

Nathan Arizona Sr.: “Would you shop at a store called ‘Unpainted Huffheins?'”

That scene was one of three remarkable scenes involving Wilson in that movie, the two others being Wilson’s negotiation scene with the frightful bounty hunter played by the former heavyweight boxer Randall “Tex” Cobb and the penultimate scene of the movie in which Wilson exhibited extraordinary depth in counseling the estranged kidnappers (played by Nicholas Cage and Holly Hunter). Dansby sums up Wilson’s talent well:

In Raising Arizona, Wilson was on screen no more than 12 minutes, and he lit up every one of them. “It’s an inspired piece, to play the comedy of it so vividly and at the same time to be this realistically harried father,” said Thomas Schlamme, a writer/producer (West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip) who was friends with Wilson. [. . .]
Robert Wuhl, who starred with Wilson in Bull Durham, said that had the actor lived another 10 years, “there’s no question he becomes a John C. Reilly or a Jerry Orbach. He was a funny man and a great actor. He made you feel like he was on the way to his best role.” “He was just turning a corner in his career,” said Blye Wilson, “Each project he got closer and closer to a very big character spot.”
Today Wilson’s great, small roles are easy to find and enjoy. He made an impression as he put it, something people could identify with sometimes in a matter of minutes.

What’s the big deal about a snowstorm?

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bobby_knight_intrvw1.jpgLegendary basketball coach Bobby Knight (prior posts here) is not everyone’s cup of tea, but he sure keeps things entertaining.
After coaching for most of his career at Indiana University where basketball is king, Coach Knight has never been all that comfortable playing out his coaching string at Texas Tech, where basketball is just a distraction between football and spring football.
On Saturday, Coach Knight was not impressed that only about 11,000 fans showed up to see Tech beat perennial Big 12 basketball powerhouse Kansas despite a snowstorm that dumped several inches of snow in the Lubbock area. Coach Knight is amazed that Texans make such a big deal about winter weather (just imagine if he had been in Houston last week!):

“People in Texas gotta understand that goddamn snow, you drive through it. Jesus!” Knight observed in his post-game remarks. “I mean, they’re selling out grocery stores.”

Not missing a beat, Coach Knight then turned entreprenurial:

“I think I’m going to buy a store and start rumors about snowfall.”

HT DMN College Sports blog.

Colbert v. O’Reilly

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colbert15.jpgo%27reillyhand9.jpgSteven Colbert and Bill O’Reilly recently agreed to be interviewed on each other’s show, and the interviews took place this past week. O’Reilly is the more popular pundit and Colbert overmatches O’Reilly humor-wise, but neither man went for the jugular in the interviews, which is common with such highly-anticipated showdowns,
Nevertheless, Colbert did get in a couple of good cracks. After O’Reilly admitted that his TV show persona was all “an act,” Colbert asked O’Reilly: “If you’re an act, what am I?”
Another came during O’Reilly’s interview of Colbert. “They criticize you for what you say,” observed Colbert about O’Reilly’s critics. “But they never give you credit for how loud you say it.”
Finally, when Colbert pitched O’Reilly’s new book, one of those large, red “30% Off” Barnes & Noble stickers blotted out a portion of O’Reilly’s head during the close-up of the book’s cover. O’Reilly did not appear pleased.
Here is the first interview, Colbert on O’Reilly:

And the second, O’Reilly on Colbert:

Sign of the Apocalypse?

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zero%20mostel.jpgZero Mostel seemed larger than life in defining the role of Max Bialystock, the lovable Ponzi-schemer in the original film version of The Producers.
And Nathan Lane was a worthy successor to Zero when The Producers was revived as a musical on Broadway.
But Tony Danza as Max?

The Price of Favorable Testimony

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In response to my recent lengthy posts on the injustice of the conviction and brutal sentencing of former Enron executive Jeff Skilling, many folks who have not followed the Enron criminal cases closely have observed to me that they did not realize that the Enron Task Force relied almost entirely on testimony from cooperating witnesses who had copped pleas with the Task Force in convicting Skilling.

That approach, coupled with the Task Force’s equally dubious tactic of freezing exculpatory testimony for Skilling and the late Ken Lay out of the trial, raises serious appellate issues regarding the legitimacy of the entire prosecution against Skilling and Lay.

Interestingly, the same dynamic is at play in the current prosecution of the Milberg Weiss law firm. Larry Ribstein has been at the forefront of pointing out the injustice of the prosecutorial tactic of “paying” witnesses and proposing a framework for addressing it.

Recently, Professor Ribstein posted the paper that he and Bruce Kobayashi are developing on this issue, The Hypocrisy of the Milberg Indictment: The Need for a Coherent Framework on Paying for Cooperation in Litigation, which includes in its abstract a wonderfully cogent sentence regarding the essence of the problem:

[T]he . . .important hypocrisy is that Milberg’s prosecutors are essentially paying the same witness . . . that Milberg is being prosecuted for paying.