Monthly Archives: August 2008

The best Gulf Coast hurricane information source

Posted on by
Reply

Gustav.A2008243.1605.2km Hurricane Gustav is another powerful hurricane bearing down on the Gulf Coast, so I wanted to recommend Chron science reporter Eric Berger’s SciGuy blog as the best source of hurricane information for the Gulf Coast region.

Eric and I got to know each other over the fateful weekend of August 27-28, 2005 when we each posted one of the first blog posts in the blogosphere noting the dreaded turn of Hurricane Katrina toward New Orleans during the early morning hours of Saturday, August 27. Although we both recommended that New Orleans residents seriously consider immediate evacuation, local governmental officials in New Orleans did not do so until much later. We now know the result of that misjudgment. With that disaster in mind, at least I doubt that such misjudgments will be a problem this go-around, as New Orleans lawyer Ernie Svenson explains.

Since that time, Eric has developed his blog into the go-to source in the blogosphere for information on hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. Bookmark it and check it regularly for updates on Gustav.

At this time, it looks as if Gustav will make landfall along the Louisiana coast just west of the New Orleans metropolitan area (check out this cool WSJ map that compares the projected path of Gustav with those of the deadly 2005 storms, Katrina and Rita, and this slick new MSNBC hurricane tracker). That track would put much of New Orleans in the storm’s northeastern quandrant, which is the most damaging part of the storm.

If that path holds, then post-landfall rainfall next week will be the main problem for the Houston area. The storm is expected to slow down somewhat after making landfall and become a tropical storm or depression in northwestern Louisiana and then northeastern Texas. The Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex has been in the throes of a drought for the past several months (as was Houston until the past couple of weeks or so), but that should end next week if Gustav continues its current course.

"Darrell, I don’t think we could go through that again"

Posted on by
1

bellard-emory_photo With the beginning of the college football season this week, it just feels right to pass along this OU Insider interview of one of Texas’ legendary college football coaches — Emory Bellard, the inventor of the Wishbone offense.

Numerous National Championship teams from Texas, Alabama and Oklahoma used the Wishbone during the two decades after Bellard implemented the formation as an assistant coach with the Texas Longhorns during the 1968 season. Although Bellard went on to a mercurial tenure as the head coach at Texas A&M in the 1970’s, he is best remembered for developing the Wishbone, which was a devastatingly effective triple-option offense (Paul Johnson at Navy and now at Georgia Tech runs a variation of the Wishbone today). OU Insider interview focuses on Bellard’s memories and thoughts about the Wishbone, which include the following pearls:

On the criticism that the Wishbone was an ineffective passing offense:

".   .   . The biggest mistake I made in the passing game was assuming that we needed something short, but we didn’t. We just needed to throw deep. We did not need to throw short because everybody was coming up this way trying to stop the run. So as long as we kept out deep threats, post patterns and the streak patterns — that’s what we should have been placing the emphasis on."

Continue reading →

The shoe drops on Judge Kent

Posted on by
2

Judge Kent 082908_3 Here is the Chronicle article on the unusual federal aggravated sexual harassment abuse and contact indictment against U.S. District Judge Sam Kent. The previous posts on this matter are here. Here are the public statements of Judge Kent and his main accuser, and a related article (see also here) on Judge Kent.

Judge Kent will apparently defend himself by what amounts to confession and avoidance — that is, conceding that sexual advances were made, but that they were consensual in nature. In my view, that will be an extremely difficult defense for a defendant-judge to sustain in front of a jury.

This one has the potential to be very ugly indeed.

Update: Serious questions (see also here) are already being raised about the Fifth Circuit Judicial Council’s handling of the investigation and sanctioning of Judge Kent.

Justice Fumbles Leach

Posted on by
2

Even when chronically-wrong Chronicle sports columnist Richard Justice gets something right, he immediately follows it with more poorly-reasoned blather.

In this blog post, Justice pays tribute to former Texas Tech football coach Spike Dykes, who is truly one of the nicest men ever to be a successful head coach in the big-time college football.

But rather than leave well enough alone, Justice proceeds to engage in more myth-making about current Tech head coach, Mike Leach:

Not many Division I schools would have hired Mike Leach, either. Not many Division I coaches look or sound like him. He’s funny, arrogant, off-the-wall and occasionally infuriating.

He’s also a great coach. He wins games and graduates his players. His ninth season begins with high hopes on the South Plains. The Red Raiders are 12th in the AP poll, the highest they’ve been at the start of a season in 31 years.

Tech has sold every season ticket for the first time in the 84-year history of the program. The Red Raiders have 18 starters back, including WR Michael Crabtree and QB Graham Harrell. There’s depth all over the place on offense, and if Ruffin McNeill’s defense plays the way it did after he took over last season, Texas Tech could be in the BCS mix.

Where to begin?

In his eight years at Tech, Leach has a 65-37-0 record, which works out to a 63.7% winning percentage. Although that is the best mark of any long-time coach at Tech over the past 70 years, a substantial component of Leach’s success has been his 25-5 (83.3%) record against non-Big 12 opponents, which have been mostly sacrificial lambs.

In fact, of those 30 non-conference games, only five have been against other BCS-conference teams — Ohio State (loss), Mississippi (2 wins) and North Carolina State (2 losses). Moreover, the last time that Tech even played a non-conference game against a BCS-conference opponent was five years ago in 2003.

Meanwhile, Tech under Leach has feasted on cupcakes such as Division 1-AA teams Stephen F. Austin, Sam Houston State, Indiana State, Southeastern Louisiana and Northwestern State and undermanned Division I outfits such as SMU and New Mexico. Heck, ten of Tech’s non-conference games under Leach have been against SMU and New Mexico. That Tech wins over 80% of such games is certainly no feather in Leach’s cap.

On the other hand, Tech’s Big 12 conference record under Leach is another story — 35-29 (a 54.6% winning percentage). Leach-coached Tech teams are only 3-13 against Texas and Oklahoma and his teams have had only a 4-4 Big 12 conference record in four of Leach’s eight seasons at Tech, including the last two.

Finally, Leach has used extremely poor judgment in some of his public remarks about assistant coaches on his staff.

In short, objective evaluation of Leach’s career at Tech reveals that his teams run up big numbers, but they don’t often beat teams with comparable or better talent because those teams can control the ball enough to keep Tech’s offense from scoring a winning number.

And despite what Justice suggests, Tech’s defense under Leach has never stopped any good offensive team.

Tech is rated highly this season in pre-season polls (14th in the USA Today Coaches Poll), but their non-conference schedule is again largely a joke — two D-1AA teams (Eastern Washington and UMass) and a rebuilding SMU should again be easy wins for the Red Raiders. In an unusual twist, Tech will have a reasonably difficult non-conference game this season when they travel to Reno on September 6 to play a well-seasoned Nevada Wolfpack team from the Western Athletic Conference.

But I’ll wait to see how Tech fares in the Big 12 before conceding that the Red Raiders have reached a new level under Leach. So far, Leach’s success at Tech looks more like good public relations to gullible sportswriters such as Justice than any major elevation of the program.

The genesis of a mortgage fraud hotspot

Posted on by
Reply

Florida Dealbreaker’s essential Opening Bell yesterday included the following note about the connection between the state of Florida and mortgage fraud:

Florida tops 1Q mortgage fraud list (AP)

This is not surprising… Florida is already a key location of the housing bubble. What’s more, Florida tops every fraud list. Hello, Boca Raton? Clearwater? These cities are to fraud what Hungary is to Paprika. It’s an industry. Plus, doesn’t Florida have really lax mortgage/bankruptcy laws as it is?

However, what’s most interesting about Florida is how relatively well the state has turned out given its checkered history. In his fine Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877 (HarperCollins 2008) (earlier blog post here), Walter A. McDougall provides the following colorful overview of Florida’s evolution from the epitome of a backwater port:

From the day of the of the pirates to our day of offshore bank accounts, hedonistic resorts, and drug smuggling, Americans have found in the Caribbean an escape from their own laws and morals. The sand spit that Juan Ponce de Leon baptized La Florida was no exception.

Continue reading →

Glass Houses

Posted on by
Reply

Dan Slater of the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog notes the Kremlin’s recent refusal to grant parole to former OAO Yukos CEO Michael Khodorkovsky, who is serving an eight-year prison sentence in Siberia for tax evasion and fraud.

Khodorkovsky’s conviction and prison sentence are widely viewed within the U.S. as evidence that the Russian business and judicial systems remain largely corrupt and not conducive to honest commercial investment.

Maybe so, but what does the same reasoning conclude about a system that produces barbaric injustices such as these, to name just a recent few?

People who live in glass houses .  .  .

Joe Cocker, captioned for the clear-headed

Posted on by
Reply

Come to think of it, I always have wondered what lyrics Joe Cocker was singing during his famous rendition of "With a Little Help from My Friends" at Woodstock in 1969 (H/T Craig Newmark).

The Quad reviews UT and LSU

Posted on by
Reply

LSU Athletics Primary texas-longhorns The Quad — the NY Times’ excellent college sports blog that has been the subject of these previous posts — continues its excellent review of each of the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision ("FBS") football programs by profiling the two best football programs in this neck of the woods, the 8th-ranked University of Texas Longhorns and the defending BCS National Champion, the Louisiana State University Bengal Tigers.

Stros 2008 Season Review, Part Four

Posted on by
Reply

Carlos Lee After falling apart during the third fifth of the 2008 season, the Stros (64-64) made an unexpected rebound during the fourth fifth of the season, going 20-13 over that stretch.

Although the Stros’ recent play was more fulfilling to watch than if the club had mailed it for the rest of the season, the risk is that the good result from a small sample size of games deludes Stros management into thinking that the Stros are close to regaining true contender status in the National League. They are not and here’s is a simple reason whey they aren’t.

Despite their relatively good play of late, the Stros remain 14 games behind the NL Central-leading Cubs (77-49) and 9.5 games behind the NL Wildcard-leading Brewers (73-55). Inasmuch as that is even further behind than the Stros stood after their worst stretch of play of the season during the third fifth of the season, the Stros actually lost ground in the race for a playoff spot while playing their best stretch of baseball of the season.

Continue reading →

Metro’s sleight-of-hand

Posted on by
1

Metrorail car-Houston 082108 Kevin Whited passes along this Bellaire Examiner article that reports on Metropolitan Transit Authority CEO Frank Wilson bragging to a couple of local Chambers of Commerce about the economic impact that Metro’s new light rail projects will have on Houston:

The Metropolitan Transit Authority’s construction of nearly $2 billion in light rail projects will be an economic boon to the entire Houston area, Metro Executive Director Frank Wilson said recently.

The light rail projects will create 10,000 jobs in the next four years, in addition to having a “secondary and tertiary economic impact,” Wilson told members of the Greater Southwest and Asian Chambers of Commerce on Wednesday.

When Metro spends that much, there is a ripple effect of about $300 million that he said will end up in the hands of small businesses.

“Our effort is to spend it sooner, rather than later,” Wilson said. “By this time next year, all five (rail) lines — $2 billion — is going to be in play,” Wilson said.

The economic benefit will happen as 10,000 people go to work on Metro’s rail projects, he said.

“When 10,000 people go to work, what else do they need? They are going to spend whatever money we give them to spend, and spend it again,” Wilson said. “If you’re an economist, and you look at that — the economic impact is going to be immense.”

Wilson is engaging in a common political sleight-of-hand in which transfers of wealth are promoted (distorted?) as wealth creation. For example, building a new highway creates economic wealth only to the extent that it enhances economic productivity, not because of the jobs that are involved in building it. Creating jobs to construct the highway is really no such thing — the state is simply transferring the jobs from other sectors of the economy.

Moreover, the government-created jobs aren’t even as good in terms of wealth creation as the jobs they replace. That’s because it costs taxpayers more when government agencies are spending the money. This Heritage Foundation report  recently made this point in response to a recent Department of Transportation assertion regarding the alleged "job creation" benefit of highway spending.

Thus, when you hear bureaucrats such as Wilson talk about "secondary and tertiary economic impact," hold on to your wallet. Unless productivity enhancement is substantial, these types of government investments are generally boondoggles. Inasmuch as taxpayers have to pay $1.50 (or more) for the government agency to spend a dollar, it’s easy to understand why that is the case.