Will Tinkerbell hand Howard Stern a poison pill?

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The LA Times reports today that Disney has hired longtime mergers and acquisitions specialist, Martin Lipton, to advise the Disney Board regarding Comcast‘s recent bid. Mr. Lipton is credited in legal circles as being one of the lawyers who devised the poison pill strategy, which Professor Bainbridge explained recently here. However, my sense is that Disney will not be adopting a poison pill strategy in defending against the Comcast bid. The Board has already been heavily criticized for its unwavering support of CEO Michael Eisner despite Disney’s lagging stock price. A poison pill strategy would be widely viewed as the Board again supporting a strategy mainly benefitting Mr. Eisner and an unproductive management team at the expense of Disney’s shareholders. However, Mr. Lipton is a heavyweight in defending these matters, so Disney is clearly signaling to Comcast its willingness to rumble by retaining him.

Biggest email blunders of 2003

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Sound email policies are important for any business. If you don’t believe it (or even if you do), then you need to read this.

Explosive allegations about alleged infiltration of the FBI

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Paul Sperry of the Frontpage Magazine reports that a former FBI linguist has made potentially explosive allegations to the 9/11 Commission regarding the subversive actions of a key FBI Middle Eastern agent. Read the entire article, but here is tidbit:

When linguist Sibel Dinez Edmonds showed up for her first day of work at the FBI, a week after the 9-11 attacks, she expected to find a somber atmosphere. Instead, she was offered cookies filled with dates from party bowls set out in the room where other Middle Eastern linguists with top-secret security clearance translate terror-related communications.
She knew the dessert is customarily served in the Middle East at weddings, births and other celebrations, and asked what the happy occasion was. To her shock, she was told the Arab linguists were celebrating the terrorist attacks on America, as if they were some joyous event. Right in front of her supervisor, one translator cheered:
“It’s about time they got a taste of what they’ve been giving the Middle East.”
She found out later that it was her supervisor’s wife who helped organize the office party there at the bureau’s Washington field office, just four blocks from the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

The credibility of these allegations coming from a former (and presumably disgruntled) employee is still untested. However, given the U.S. intelligence failures documented in Gerald Posner‘s “Why America Slept,” Laurie Mylroie‘s “The War Against America” and “Bush vs. the Beltway,” and Robert Baer‘s “See No Evil,” these allegations need to be investigated carefully.
Meanwhile, in Policy Review, Richard L. Russell, professor of national security affairs at the National Defense University?s Near East-South Asia Center for Strategic Studies, provides an insightful analysis of the intrinsic problems in the U.S. intelligence apparatus and proposals for remedying them.

More on the indictment of Bonds’ personal trainer

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The NY Times has a good follow up article on the indictment of baseball star Barry Bonds’ personal trainer and three others for illegal distribution of steroids. The indictment and other information on this story can be reviewed here.

Army Intelligence agents investigate UT Islamic women’s conference

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The Austin American-Statesman (registration required) reports that University of Texas law students, lawyers and civil rights advocates are contending that Army Intelligence questioning of people on the UT campus in Austin was an unjustified attempt to dampen free speech on the campus. The agents visited the UT Law School this past Monday to request a list of participants in a Feb. 4 conference at the UT Law School on women’s issues in Muslim countries. When informed that the conference was open to all citizens and that no such list existed, the agents interviewed students and asked for the contact information of the female who organized the conference.
Although the investigation of this conference is perhaps a bit over the top, the self-righteous reaction of some UT students and faculty members is even more so. The United States is at war, and reasonable intrusions on U.S. citizens’ civil liberties during war time are legal. Denouncing intelligence agents publicly simply because they are doing their job reflects a widespread attitude in current American society that it is unnecessary to sacrifice for the war effort. I am quite glad that the parents and grandparents of these UT students and faculty members did not have the same attitude during WWII.

Interesting Death Penalty Analysis

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The NY Times reports today on an interesting study in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies that concludes that Texas, generally thought to be the death penalty capital of the U.S., actually sentences a smaller percentage of people convicted of murder to death than the national average because the conventional view fails to take into account the large number of murders in Texas.

“Texas’ reputation as a death-prone state should rest on its many murders and on its willingness to execute death-sentenced inmates,” wrote the authors of the study, “It should not rest on the false belief that Texas has a high rate of sentencing convicted murderers to death.”

As a percentage of murders, Nevada and Oklahoma impose the most death sentences, at 6 and 5.1 percent. In Texas, the percentage is 2 percent. The rate in Virginia, another state noted for its commitment to capital punishment, is 1.3 percent. The national average is 2.5 percent; the median is 2 percent.
Using the same analysis, the study concluded that blacks are actually underrepresented on the nation’s death row in that blacks commit 51.5 percent of all murders nationally, but only comprise 42 percent of death row inmates.

More on Impending Skilling Indictment

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The NY Times follows yesterday’s Houston Chronicle report with this article on the impending indictment of former Enron CEO, Jeff Skilling. Mr. Skilling and former Enron Chairman Ken Lay are the two highest ranking former Enron officers who have not been indicted by the U.S. Justice Department’s Enron Task Force. Messrs. Skilling and Lay are coming under intense scrutiny at this time because of the recent plea bargain that ex-Enron CFO Andy Fastow struck with the government last month, as noted in this earlier post. Here are links to the Fastow indictment and plea bargain agreement.

Armageddon, Southwest Freeway Style

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For the next three years, it would be a very good idea to avoid this area around the Spur 527 into downtown Houston from the Southwest Freeway as a major road renovation project gets underway this weekend. Frankly, it would be a good idea to avoid the entire stretch of the Southwest Freeway from Kirby or Shepard Drives on the west to the 288 Freeway on the east. Until drivers get used to this project and readjust driving routes, be scared. Very scared.

The Right Mistake to Make

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Jonathon Rauch senior writer for the National Journal states in this solid piece that the War in Iraq was a mistake, but the right kind of mistake to make. Mr. Rauch concludes as follows:

If reasonable people thought Saddam possessed forbidden weapons, that was because Saddam sought to give the impression that he possessed them. He may have believed he possessed them. (His fearful and corrupt scientists, Kay hypothesized, may have been running a sham weapons program.) For four years after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraq successfully hid its chemical weapons program. When a defector blew the whistle, weapons inspectors were stunned at the extent of Saddam’s deception. The Iraqis responded not by coming clean but by redoubling their efforts to obstruct and intimidate — for example, interfering with inspectors’ helicopter flights and, at one point, firing a grenade into their headquarters. No one could have failed to conclude that Saddam was hiding the truth.
The truth he hid, however, was not his weapons but his weakness. Or perhaps his minions were hiding his weakness from him. In either case, his power and prestige depended upon his fearsome reputation at home and his defiant posture abroad. He was contained but could not afford to let anyone know it, for fear of being invaded or overthrown. So he waved what looked like a gun and got shot.
Many people now demand to know why American intelligence was so badly fooled. The subject certainly merits investigating. Questions should be asked. Chins should be stroked. But even without an investigation, we know the most important reason we were fooled: Saddam Hussein did everything in his power to fool us, and by the time he stopped trying to fool us — if he stopped trying — it was too late for anyone ever to believe him.
The war was based on lies. Not Bush’s or the CIA’s; Saddam Hussein’s.

Speaking of golf, did you hear the one about . . .

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Tiger Woods cracked a good one yesterday during the opening round of the Buick Open in San Diego. While waiting to play a shot and watching a huge Navy vessel off the Pacific coast, Woods asked:
”Is that (Greg) Norman’s boat?”