the P word

I apologize for being insensitive in my use of the P word.

Katrina and Country Music

No comment on this news item:

The Wal-Mart store in uptown New Orleans, built within the last year, survived the storm but was destroyed by looters.

"They took everything - all the electronics, the food, the bikes," said John Stonaker, a Wal-Mart security officer. "People left their old clothes on the floor when they took new ones. The only thing left are the country-and-western CDs. You can still get a Shania Twain album."

On Lawyers as Commodities

In the September 2005 issue of Corporate Legal Times, a piece called "Bidding Wars" profiles GE's recent move to reduce the number of outside law firms it uses from 500 down to 94. The first cut was based on quality; this reduced the number of law firms to 200. Then they cut based on RFPs and references from other clients, leaving them with 142 firms. Then they cut down to 94 firms based on cost--they made the law firms place bids in an auction type process. The reaction from the law firms was a bit amusing:

"An auction is a great way to buy pencils," says John Marzulli, a partner at Shearman & Sterling, one of GE's preferred M&A counsel. "It doesn't seem to me to be the best way to select your counsel for a complex multibillion-dollar acquisition. We like being part of their network, but we didn't enjoy the selection process."

I bet not.

Interesting Hurricane Katrina Comments and Links

• An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State, Objectivist Robert Tracinski
• Katrina and the End of Illusions, Justin Raimondo
  
• Interdictor: Survival of New Orleans Blog, Michael Barnett
  
• Good Morning from Ground 'Minus One'
• Web Firm keeps going in storm zone
  
• A Dismal Reality: It Wasn't Supposed To Be This Way, Fred Reed
  
• Africa in our Midst: Lessons from Katrina, Jared Taylor

New Rouge

As I previously noted on the LewRockwell.com blog, an emerging nickname for Baton Rouge is "New Rouge," because of the huge number of New Orleans residents moving there in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. See, e.g., Capital city struggling with inflow (Sept. 3, 2005, Houston Chronicle).

So, Daddy has registered www.newrouge.org and am temporarily pointing it to www.kinsellalaw.com/newrouge. Of course, I apologize for this shameless action.