Despite what I may believe about the positions of die hard conservatives, I generally read what they have to say before disparaging it. I read all of the tripe Coulter wrote in "Treason" just so that I could make the informed comment that it is a bunch of hooey. Thank God I didn't pay for that piece of crap (library, not Kazaa).
no, i haven't commented on the article one bit. i don't even know what it's about, glynch. i commented on dismissing articles simply because you know who the author is. i was forced into doing that a few times in law school, though! that's always fun! and uncomfortable! what do you do, glynch?? i don't think i've ever heard you say.
i wouldn't waste my time reading an entire book from Coulter. i know what she has to say....closed-minded of me, to be sure. but i don't have infinite time to read.
Actually, Max, I see you didn't even comment on the article exactly. I still found his first comment funny.
Oddly enough, I tend to read more from the conservative side than the liberal. I haven't read any fiction in years (since I started reading technical manuals) but I may start again (Clancy put out another Jack Ryan novel).
honestly...just being honest and not trying to be a jackass, though sometimes those go hand-in-hand...yes. I thought, I know what this guy thinks about this issue...I sorta deem it to be your "pet" issue...and I largely agree with you for the most part on that stuff.
No Andy, it is you who needs to read what I wrote. I never commented on this article, so I did not dismiss it. I made a comment about Conason's standing in the op/ed grand scheme of things. If you included my first comments in this thread, it would be clear to you. I never dismiss an idea because of it's source, ever.
It is kind of my "pet" issue, but I would still like to hear what you think about the specifics of my plan. BTW, I was just yanking your chain about the reading issue. I know as well as anyone about lack of time to read. John, that goes for you, too. I personally think that they would come to blows in about 90 seconds.
Coulter: Liberal Traitor!!! Conason: Conservative Fascist!!! Brawl ensues. I would pay to see that, but I would bring my own popcorn.
in spite of her evil ways, every time I see her, I start thinking ooooooooooooo, I need a dirty woman. oooooooooo, I need a dirty girl.
She claimed on Real Time with Bill Maher that conservatives have better sex lives than liberals and I thought that was way, WAY over the top.
...Demonizing liberals is a conscious strategy of the Republican right, ... As a conservative media analyst boasted on Fox TV not long ago, their aim is to make Democrat and liberal synonymous with socialist, Communist and Marxist.. The right prefers to demonize liberals and set up fights with "politically correct" straw men rather than debate with real progressives. (That is why, for example, the bully boys and girls of the right-wing media almost never confront a labor leader on television; such a debate would instantly destroy the stereotype of the liberal "elitist … ... Do liberals despise the work ethic? No. Liberals defend the interests of working Americans against the fake populism of corporate conservatism. .. Don't liberals always tax and spend the economy into ruin? No. The numbers prove that liberal Democrats have been the most competent, fiscally trustworthy stewards of the economy for the past seven decades. Aren't liberals determined to restrict freedom in the name of political correctness? No. In fact, liberals have been the most consistent defenders of the Bill of Rights for the past century. Is "liberal" a synonym for "immoral"? No. Liberals do preach less about "family values," but they're just as likely as conservatives to honor those values. Part II. ________________ Aug. 19, 2003 | "Tax-cutting Republicans are friends of the common man, while liberals are snobbish elitists who despise the work ethic." ...For that job, George W. Bush possesses excellent qualifications of personality and temperament. He's a rich guy who enjoys masquerading as a regular guy, and he honestly hates the clever types from New York, Washington and Los Angeles who consider him dumb and vulgar. Ignorant but certainly not stupid, he's an unusually talented politician. He schmoozes and chats at county fairs and fat-cat feasts with an ease that always eluded his father… Bush is a modern master of pseudopopulist style. What that style blurs is the profound Republican cynicism toward the same people he embraces and cajoles. Bush belongs to the real elite. Yet he appears far more comfortable playing the role of commoner than his father, … … There is a meaningful way to calculate the average effects of the Bush plan: The fortunate 1 percent at the top will receive an average annual tax cut of about $45,000. The less fortunate 20 percent in the middle of the income distribution will have their taxes cut by an average of $265. The least fortunate 60 percent at the bottom will get an average annual tax cut of $95. … ... While conservatives may demur, the empirical evidence is beyond serious dispute. The stratification of America's political economy in recent decades has been mapped by three distinguished political scientists: Princeton's Nolan McCarty and Howard Rosenthal, and their colleague Keith T. Poole of the University of Houston (who holds a chair endowed in the name of former Enron CEO Kenneth L. Lay… .. . Using a complex computerized map graphing congressional voting patterns over the past century, the three professors have found precisely the same polarization between the parties on Capitol Hill. With increasing consistency, Democrats support legislation that helps the middle class and the poor, while Republicans protect their affluent constituency. … To deflect attention from this plutocratic elite, the right deploys a barrage of abusive verbiage ..."limousine liberals" and "Hollywood liberals" and "Eastern establishment liberals" and "liberal eggheads" ... The essential fraudulence of such right-wing populism could be glimpsed in Cigar Aficionado's profile of Rush Limbaugh. Interviewed for the luxury magazine by a fellow epicure, the radio talker felt free to drop any pretense of resembling the middle-class "ditto-heads" who worship him…., He informed Cigar Aficionado that his favorite Bordeaux is Chateau Haut Brion '61, although he allowed that he would settle for the '82 vintage. (...1961 Haut Brion retails for around $2,000. That isn't much to a "regular guy" who earns upward of $20 million a year.) ..whenever he pops over to London, he stays at the Connaught, one of the oldest, priciest, snootiest joints in town. Part III. ______________ Male cheerleaders and chicken hawks Republicans smear Democrats as unpatriotic,… In an earlier era there were Republican statesmen, such as the senators who initiated the censure of Joseph McCarthy, who considered such smear tactics contemptible. Since Sept. 11, 2001, rhetorical bullying by the self-appointed sentinels has become shrill and continuous: Ann Coulter snarls that liberals must be threatened with execution to deter them from becoming "outright traitors." Andrew Sullivan warns against the "decadent enclaves" of East and West Coast liberals "mounting a fifth column" -- The conservative hit squad went after Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. ..Newspapers all over his home state suddenly published full-page advertisements with photos of Daschle and Saddam Hussein and a headline shrieking "What do these two men have in common?"… "chicken hawks... Ushered into the Texas Air National Guard ahead of hundreds of other young men on the waiting list for a few coveted places, George W. Bush later insisted that he had never received any "special favoritism. Having made a six-year commitment to the Guard, …for failing to take a mandated annual physical. In a more candid mood in 1998, Bush had told a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: "I don't want to play like I was somebody out there marching to war when I wasn't. It was either Canada or the service and I was headed into the service." … Retired Gen. William Turnipseed, the unit's former commander, said he was certain that Bush did not report to him, ... The next time Bush strapped himself into a fighter cockpit would be 30 years later, when he was flown to the deck of the USS Lincoln for a triumphal speech marking the American victory over Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. Privately, Republican media advisers admitted that they were likely to use the "Top Gun" videotape of the president strutting across the carrier deck in his flight suit for campaign commercials in 2004. … Yet the startling fact is that liberal Democratic politicians are at least as likely to have done military service as their Republican opponents and critics. … Understanding the political dynasty that's made crony capitalism a way of life. Part 4 of "Big Lies." Aug. 21, 2003 | For the Bush dynasty, crony capitalism is rite of passage, way of life, and family business. President Bush, his father, his three brothers, and sundry other relatives all have joined (and sometimes hastily abandoned) enterprises where their chief contribution was the perception of political influence at home and abroad ... Time after time, Bush family members or their business associates have sidled up to the very edge of legality, and perhaps over it -- without being held accountable. Until the ascendancy of George W. Bush, the most notorious example of that syndrome was his younger brother Neil. He too ran a failed oil company, like those once operated by George W. -- and his oil company, too, was awarded exploration rights from a foreign government while their father was in the White House. Neil's best-known venture, however, was in the savings-and-loan business. For the benefit of those who don't remember the name Silverado, that was the romantic moniker of the Denver savings-and-loan whose board Neil graced during the eighties. In the gigantic federal bailout overseen by Neil's father's administration, Silverado's failure eventually cost taxpayers about a billion dollars. Jeb earned much of his fortune in partnership with Armando Codina, a Miami real estate baron and politically active Cuban exile. They eventually got in trouble with a savings-and-loan, Around this time, Jeb also got involved in a deal with Miguel Recarey, the strange character who ran International Medical Centers, a Miami-based health maintenance organization. IMC and Recarey were eventually indicted for the largest Medicare fraud in history, costing the U.S. government hundreds of millions of dollars. Four years later, when his father was president, Jeb visited Nigeria as chief salesman and partner of Bush-El, a firm marketing water pumps to the notoriously corrupt African dictatorship. The water-pump sale went through, conveniently financed by a $74.3 million loan from the U.S. government. ...He did, however, earn $650,000 from Bush-El. In a 1998 letter to the Herald, Jeb responded with the smirking insouciance of the crony capitalist: "Is favorable name recognition helpful in business, as it is in almost every other aspect of life? Perhaps. Is it an 'unfair advantage'? No. It is just a fact of life." Three months after he left the White House, the first President Bush flew to Kuwait on the emir's private plane to be decorated with the monarchy's highest honors for commanding the Gulf War. Accompanying the former President were his two youngest sons and his former Secretary of State James Baker III. Several months later, the New Yorker magazine revealed that Baker went to Kuwait as a consultant to Enron, which was seeking contracts to rebuild the sheikdom's damaged power plants. Neil Bush was also seeking a share of the fees to operate Enron's power plants. And Marvin Bush was working for a Washington firm that wanted to build an electronic security system for the Kuwaitis. In the eyes of many people there and at home, the grasping conduct of Baker and the Bush sons soiled American honor. … Dubya's amazing dealings require another post.
We could have an informal poll here on the site... Are you a male? Are you a conservative or a liberal? Do you rarely/sometimes/frequently/always have orgasms when you have sex with your partner or spouse? Something tells me there is no correlation w/ political party, that every male on this site frequently or always has an o when having intercourse w/ his spouse. I guess people that practice tantra are considered 'liberal'. Maybe their lack of orgasms count against us. Something also tells me that Coulter is an idiot that uses her loud voice and her looks to keep herself on tv. Her replies to Maher's questions re: Bush's 'service' were weaker than weak will ever be.
I am a male who is a very conservative liberal or an unbelievably liberal conservative. I have only faked one orgasm in my life and I wasn't married at the time. No kidding. Whenever she is asked a pointed question, she sloughs it off with some nonsense about the liberal media.
Final summation: Dubya's crony capitalism dealings. A summary of the summary. Dubya gets government money for a stadium and this increaes the values of the Rangers. He gets an incredible sweet heart deal from the Mayor of Arlington who is let off mysteriously light on a S and L by the Feds on an lawsuit at the same time Dubya gets the sweet heart deal. Dubya takes $25,000 campaign contirbution from Tom Hicks who he then lets privatize and run the the UT investments for mega bucks. Tom makes $hundreds of millions on which Tom Hicks lets in lots of other Texas big shots who are massive contributors to Dubya's campaigns. Eventually the same Tom Hicks buys the Rangers for three times what Bush and partners paid for it. Dubya pockets $15 mil off his original $106,000. Sweet. The series of bail outs from Arabs of Dubya's various oil companies and his uspsicious insider sale of Harken shares before they collapsed are chronicled. ************From Conason. From the outset, the opportunities that eventually led to Bush's eventual baseball bonanza intertwined politics and business, crony capitalist style. The limited partnership that financed Arbusto, his first oil firm, included George W.'s grandmother Dorothy Bush; Rite Aid drugstores chairman Lewis Lehrman, then a rising force in New York Republican politics; William Draper III, a corporate executive and family friend who was later appointed by his father to head the Export-Import Bank; and James Bath, a mysterious Houston aircraft broker who served as a front man for several Saudi Arabian sheiks. About $3 million poured into Arbusto, producing little oil and no profits but expansive tax shelters. In 1982 George W. changed the infelicitous name Arbusto to Bush Exploration Oil Company. His father by then was Vice President of the United States, but the new company name didn't improve matters. More than once, George W.'s venture was near ruin when wealthy benefactors suddenly appeared with fresh cash. … That September, Harken Energy Corporation, a midsized firm, stepped in to acquire Spectrum 7. For his worthless company, Harken gave Bush $600,000 worth of its publicly traded stock, plus a seat on its board of directors and a consultancy that paid him up to $120,000 a year. His partners understood perfectly what had happened. As Spectrum 7's former President Paul Rea later recalled, the Harken management "believed having George's name there would be a big help to them." ... To make a successful bid, DeWitt would need Texas backers, and the son of the incoming President was perfectly situated to find them… , Rainwater took effective control of the deal, bringing along Edward "Rusty" Rose, a well-known Dallas investor, to oversee the franchise. Under an agreement worked out by Betts and Rainwater, the President's son would serve as the new ownership's public face while Rose ran the business. Bush's stake in the team, just under 2 percent, was among the smallest. He purchased his shares with a $500,000 loan from a Midland bank of which he had been a director and eventually scraped together $106,000 more to buy out two other limited partners. Two months after his father's inauguration, George W. Bush called a press conference in Arlington to announce that the Rangers sale had been successfully completed for a price that was later reported to be $86 million. While Rainwater, Rose, Betts, and all the other partners remained in the background, George W. greeted the public as if he were "the owner" of the Rangers. He attended every home game and even printed baseball cards bearing his own picture to hand out from his box. Meanwhile, he maintained a financial interest in Harken Energy. He had been granted enough additional stock options, at a generous discount, to increase his holdings by more than half. By 1989, however, those shares were falling in value. A series of questionable decisions by Chairman Alan Quasha had jeopardized the company's future, and its losses reached $40 million in 1990. Even the company's CEO admitted that its financial statements were "a mess." Once more, however, the Bush name provided sudden deliverance -- in the form of a contract with the emirate of Bahrain. Until 1989 the Bahraini oil minister had been negotiating an agreement for offshore drilling with Amoco, a huge energy conglomerate with decades of worldwide experience. Those talks were abruptly broken off. Then, through a former Mobil executive working on retainer for the State Department, Bahraini officials were put in touch with Harken. Industry analysts were astonished by the announcement in January 1990 that Bahrain had awarded exclusive offshore exploration rights to Harken, a debt-ridden company that had never drilled a well anywhere but Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, and had never drilled undersea at all. … George W. denied any part in Harken's bid. "Ask the Bahrainis," he replied flippantly when journalists asked whether the emirate had been enticed by his name. … On June 22, 1990, six months after the Bahrain contract was announced, George W. quietly sold off 212,140 Harken shares, which grossed $848,560. He used most of the proceeds to pay off the bank loan he had taken a year earlier to finance his portion of the Texas Rangers deal. In early August, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein sent his troops and tanks across the southern border into Kuwait. Saddam's aggression drove down the stock price of every oil company doing business in the Gulf, including Harken, whose shares fell to $3.12. ... he certainly had reason to know about Harken's other troubles. He served on the company's three-member audit committee and also on a special "fairness committee" appointed that spring to consider how a corporate restructuring would affect share value. When Bush's stock dumping was first reported by the Houston Post in October 1990, there were no accusations of insider trading. Then in April 1991, the Wall Street Journal revealed that the Securities and Exchange Commission had not been notified of his timely trade until eight months after the legal deadline. The regulatory agency commenced an investigation that concluded in 1991 with no action against George W. That outcome was hardly a surprise. The SEC chairman at the time, Richard Breeden, was an especially ardent Bush loyalist, and the agency's general counsel, James Doty, was the same Texas attorney who had handled the sale of the Rangers What he didn't say -- and what his lawyers didn't tell the SEC until the day after its investigation officially closed -- was that Harken's lawyers had explicitly warned Bush and other directors against insider trading in a memo issued just before he sold his shares. … All the information Bush had about Harken's prospects at that point was negative. The firm was near bankruptcy. A year earlier, the Harken management had created a phony profit of $10 million by selling some of the company's assets, at an inflated price, to Aloha Petroleum, a front company owned by company insiders. That maneuver, similar to what Enron did on a much larger scale a decade later, had preserved the Harken stock price for a while by concealing most of the company's losses. Two months after Bush sold the bulk of his Harken holdings, the company posted losses for the second quarter of well over $20 million and its shares fell another 24 percent; by year's end, Harken was trading at $1.25. (The current price of Harken shares is around 20 cents -- equivalent to 2 cents a share in 1990, before a reverse stock split that later gave investors one new share for every ten held previously.) … The Rangers partnership needed a new stadium or they would never make any money. Backed by Rainwater's billions they could have built a new stadium themselves, of course, but that would have violated the crony capitalist methods of the major leagues. In the sports business it's the taxpayers, not the club owners, who pay the construction costs of new facilities. … Even by baseball monopoly standards, the capitulation of Arlington Mayor Richard Greene was abject. In October 1990, Mayor Greene signed a contract that guaranteed $135 million toward the stadium's estimated price of $190 million. The city would earn a maximum of $5 million annually in rent, no matter how much the Rangers reaped from ticket sales and television (a sum that eventually rose to $100 million a year). Amazingly, the Rangers could buy the stadium after the accumulated rental payments reached a mere $60 million -- and the property acquired so cheaply would include not just a fancy new stadium with a seating capacity of 49,000, but an additional 270 acres of valuable land. When Mayor Greene signed on to this giveaway deal, he was simultaneously negotiating with federal authorities to settle a massive lawsuit against him, in yet another savings-and-loan bust. Greene had formerly been president of the Arlington branch of Sunbelt Savings Association, described by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram as "one of the most notorious failures of the S&L scandal." Sunbelt had lost an estimated $2 billion, and cleaning up the mess there cost the feds about $297 million. Around the same time that Greene signed the deal enriching the Rangers syndicate, federal officials agreed to let him pay $40,000 to settle the Sunbelt case -- scarcely enough to cover the costs of the negotiation -- and walk away. "George had no knowledge of my problems; there is no connection," he assured the New York Times in September 2000. … On December 6, 1994, George W. received a belated $25,000 campaign contribution from Thomas O. Hicks, whose support Bush had unsuccessfully solicited at the beginning of his campaign. Hicks was easily one of the wealthiest men in Texas, and, more specifically, he was the chief executive of Hicks , Muse, Tate & Furst, a highly diversified investment partnership. Bush took his donation and supported the investor's ambitious plan to take control of the financial assets of the University of Texas, then worth about $13 billion. As a UT grad, Tom Hicks frankly believed that his alma mater's investment strategy had been far too cautious. He wanted to move billions out of equities and into "alternative" investments of the kind managed by his firm. From Hicks 's point of view, the chief obstacle in tapping such repositories of public treasure was that their activities were subject to scrutiny from a variety of interested parties, including legislators, newspaper reporters, and public interest organizations. So in 1995 Hicks brought a radical innovation to the UT endowment: privatization. He even paid for his own lobbyist to ensure that the legislature passed his plan to transfer all the university's diverse holdings into a new nonprofit corporation known as the University of Texas Investment Management Company, or UTIMCO. ... With Bush's support and the sponsorship of legislators associated with the Governor, the UTIMCO bill flew through the capitol in 1995 with very few questions asked. The new outfit would not be subject to state laws that mandate open meetings and public records. After UTIMCO officially took over from the regents' investment committees in early 1996, with Hicks as its first chairman, all its business was done behind closed doors. The directors often gathered for their monthly board meetings at the lavish offices of Hicks , Muse, Tate & Furst in downtown Dallas. Largely freed from public accountability, UTIMCO embarked on a series of deals that raised serious questions about conflict of interest and political favoritism. Friends and longtime associates of Thomas Hicks, and his firm's past and future business partners -- as well as major Republican contributors and political supporters of the Bush family -- received hundreds of millions of dollars from the University of Texas investment funds. There was nothing unlawful about these decisions, all of which were vetted by the powerhouse law firm of Vinson & Elkins, another of Bush's largest lifetime donors. Named by the Governor to oversee the entire UTIMCO operation, as chairman of the university regents, was oilman Donald Evans. He has raised money for all George W.'s political campaigns, beginning with an unsuccessful congressional race in 1978. For the presidential campaign in 2000, Evans ran the Bush "Pioneers," the team of heavy funders who raised more than $100,000 each. (He is currently serving as Secretary of Commerce.) Following that first $25,000 contribution to George W. in December 1994, Tom Hicks and his brother Steven eventually gave another $146,000 to the Governor's election war chests. His partners have donated tens of thousands more. Together they are among the biggest donors to George W. Bush since 1995. Total contributions to Republican candidates and causes from Hicks , his family members, and his firm are well over half a million dollars. In 1996, UTIMCO directors made an investment of $50 million with Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. …Two years later, UTIMCO invested $20 million in a deal with Bass Brothers Enterprises. As Republican donors, the Bass clan in Fort Worth rivals Kravis and his partners in generosity. Lee Bass raised $78,000 as a Bush Pioneer in 2000. UTIMCO also placed $96 million with Maverick Capital, a relatively new partnership in Dallas. Among Maverick's main investors and general partners are members of the Wyly family, the principal stockholders in Sterling Software -- and, again, longtime friends of the Bushes. Between 1993 and 1998, various Wyly family members gave well over $300,000 to Republican candidates and committees. But investor Sam Wyly is best known for funding a series of harsh attack ads against John McCain during the 2000 Republican primaries. … Did George W. Bush understand what his appointee Tom Hicks was doing? "I swear I didn't get into politics to feather my nest or feather my friends' nests," Bush told the Houston Chronicle in August 1998. "Any insinuation that I have used my office to help my friends is simply not true." On completion of the Rangers deal in 1998, Hicks paid about $250 million for the team ...The then governor made about $15 million on the sale. __________________
