The Florida Marlins Baseball Club is making the rounds of potential relocation sites, and the first stop was in San Antonio. Other contenders for the club are Las Vegas, Portland, Oregon, and Charlotte, North Carolina. A move could come as soon as the 2008 baseball season, and such a move could also be impacted by the fact that the current MLB Labor Agreement allows the MLB owners to delete up to two clubs after the 2006 season, so stay tuned.
Interestingly, the potential move of the two-time World Series champion Marlins from Miami is being met with a collective yawn by South Floridians. Craig Depken explains why:

In the end, Miami-Dade County residents will survive just fine without baseball. Although their team won two World Series in their first ten years of existence, in comparison to the sights and sounds of Miami, WS rings are a yawner. In this sense, if the good folks of Miami don’t care one way or the other if the Marlins are in town, why should the rest of us?

Bill O’Reilly is a popular Fox News show host and author, but he is really nothing more than a fleetingly entertaining demagogue. Case in point is the following exchange between O’Reilly and Neil Cavuto, another Fox News host:

CAVUTO: Okay. Gas prices are down a lot. Why do you think that is?
OíREILLY: Because theyíre afraid theyíll go to jail. And those C.E.O.s who manipulated themñ
CAVUTO: Why are you sure that they manipulated them?
OíREILLY: I have guys that are inside the five major oil companies – my father used to work for one of those oil companies, by the way – who have told me that in those meetings they look for every way to jack up oil prices after Katrina, every way. When they didnít have to. And they got scared because in my reporting and some other reporting, they said ñ

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Following on this post from last week regarding this year’s compromise over the dubious Wright Amendment, this Fort Worth Star-Telegram article reports that American Airlines will move some of its planes to Love Field to compete with Southwest Airlines’ new flights to St. Louis and Kansas City. Those are the two new interstate destinations that can now be flown to out of Love Field as a result of this year’s modification of the Wright Amendment.
According to the article, American rationalizes the move by noting that many of its best customers in Dallas prefer Loveís closer-in location. But how many of those Highland Park-types are going to be going to Kansas City and St. Louis? I could understand American’s move if Love Field had been opened up to fly into New York or Los Angeles, but not St. Louis and Kansas City. This appears to be a money-losing move for the indirect purpose of keeping the Wright Amendment in place and, from my vantage point, that is the type of decision that has had American tailing Southwest financially over the past several years.
Update: Virginia Postrel, who has written extensively on the folly of the Wright Amendment, weighs in here.

Boston Scientific Corp made a bid to become the largest heart device maker in the U.S. by making a $25 billion competing offer for Guidant Corp yesterday in an attempt to derail a troubled lower-price agreement between Guidant and Johnson & Johnson (earlier posts on the J&J bid for Guidant are here).
Boston Scientific’s offer consists of $12.5 billion in cash and $12.5 billion in stock, values Guidant stock at $72 per share and would have Boston Scientific’s shareholders owning 65% of the combined company. That represents a premium of 14% over the J&J offer, which values Guidant at $63.43 a share. The theory behind the Boston Scientific proposal is that a combined Boston Scientific and Guidant would become the leading U.S. company specializing in cardiac rhythm management (“CRM”) equipment, which includes pacemakers and heart defibrillators that control rapid and potentially deadly heartbeats. In so doing, the Boston Scientific-Guidant alliance would attempt to become the primary company that doctors would look to for equipment and products to treat a wide range of cardiovascular ailments. Guidant’s board is expected to evaluate in the next day or two whether Boston Scientific’s proposal could lead to an offer superior to J&J’s, which includes a $625 million breakup fee that Boston Scientific would have to pay J&J if Guidant accepts the Boston Scientific bid.

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Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with all the muddled thinking that is passed off as keen economic insight in much of the mainstream media.
My thoughts along these lines started last week with this David Ignatius/Washington Post op-ed in which Ignatius extols the virtues of undertaking a “fundamental national mission, equivalent to President John F. Kennedyís call to put a man on the moon” to solve everything from General Motors’ current problems to dependence on foreign oil, Americansí high living, and the decline of manufacturing in America. Ignatius’ enthusiasm is fueled by Amory Lovins recent book, Winning the Oil Endgame: Innovation for Profits, Jobs and Security (RM Institute 2004), which calls for a big government plan of higher taxes and government subsidies to facilitate fundamental change in the materials used to build such big things as automobiles and buildings. Although Ignatius admits that he knows nothing about the financial viability of Lovins’ big plan, that doesn’t stop him from endorsing it enthusiastically:

I’m no technologist, so I can’t evaluate the technical details of Lovins’s proposal. What I like is that it’s big, bold and visionary. It would shake an America that is sitting on its duff as foreign competitors clobber our industrial giants, and it would send a new message: Get moving, start innovating, turn this ship around before it really hits the rocks.

Of course, Ignatius ignores the little detail of what happens if those carbon-fiber composite automobiles that are created as a result of the government money don’t sell all that well. I guess we’ll just have to work around that later.

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