Delaware Chancellor Leo Strine has a bright future in blogging if chancelling doesn't work out for him. Here's how he describes Kinder Morgan's negotiations to buy El Paso, specifically KMI CEO Rich Kinder's price retrade with EP CEO Doug Foshee: Kinder said “oops, we made a mistake. We relied on a bullish set of analyst projections in order to make our bid. Our bad. Although we were tough enough to threaten going hostile, we just can’t stand by our bid.” Instead of telling Kinder where to put his drilling equipment, Foshee backed down. I umm ... I'm pretty sure that that quote from Kinder is approximate. Anyway, this is from Strine's opinion refusing to block the KMI-EP merger from proceeding even though he is pretty pissed about some of the apparent conflicts of interest in the deal, including that Goldman Sachs owns almost 20% of KMI while also advising EP, that the lead GS banker owned some KMI stock that he didn't disclose, and that Foshee negotiated the merger single-handed while also maybe thinking about possibly LBOing EP's E&P business for his own self. Lucrative though my current pseudoprofession is, I suspect that if Strine ever leaves the chancelling racket he'd probably prefer to try his hand at merging and/or acquiring. Certainly he is fond of dispensing tactical advice: