That's what I've always hated about that town: too many vampires!!!


"Oscar_Lives" wrote in message
news:IolYe.355783$x96.189358@attbi_s72...

"Dan J.S." wrote in message
...

"Cereus-validus......." wrote in message
. ..
I bet you are one of those fascist republikooks that voted for the
"****ing idiot".

His next brilliant idea is to invade Alaska for their oil!!!

The only way the local government "****ed up" was for not having any
relatives of the president in office and by being democrats.


And what about the 3000 or so buses that were not used to evacuate
anyone? that ended up under water? no wonder you liberals keep losing.
You are ****ing dumb!
We Failed You?


Anne Rice blames America, not local officials.

"To my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You
looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want
our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our
music.

Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying
on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your backs."

Novelist and New Orleans resident, Anne Rice.


The answer...

Let me get this straight

Ms. Rice, you live in (what was) a very attractive city which lies below
sea level. On one side you have a giant lake; on the other side you have
the Gulf of Mexico. Running through the middle is the Mississippi River.
All of which are above you.

Preventing those giant bodies of water from flooding and drowning you are
levees. These levees are described as "century-old." People have been
warning about the devastating effects of a direct hit from a hurricane for
decades.

I've heard a great deal of complaint in recent days that the federal
government may not have allocated enough money to speed up the upgrades to
those levees. This does, however, raise the question of why city and state
residents were waiting around for the federal government to send enough
money to upgrade this, instead of paying for it themselves. I mean, it was
only your homes, businesses, and lives at stake. Perhaps these upgrades
would have been expensive. If only this city had some sort of events to
attract tourists, from which to collect taxes.

Anyway, your state and local officials decided to spend your tax dollars
on something else that they (and presumably you) found more important, and
then they waited for the rest of the country to pay for these
life-preserving necessities.

Your beloved city and region has a colorful political history, in which
there is, oh, a wee bit of corruption. I'm from New Jersey, so I can't
throw stones at that glass house. But you guys have managed to pick
leaders who give you the worst of both worlds - they're scandal ridden and
incompetent in a crisis. Look, Rudy Giuliani might have run around with
Judith Nathan before his divorce, but he was a hell of a leader in our
darkest hours.

You know the National Review crowd isn't a fan of Pataki, but the man was
a rock after 9/11 compared to Governor Weepy I'll-Evacuate-Eventually and
Mayor It's-Everybody's-Fault-Except-Mine. Nobody's throwing around the
adjective "Churchillian" about any of your officials these days. We didn't
pick your local officials; you guys did.

Rice asks, "how many times did Gov. Kathleen Blanco have to say that the
situation was desperate? How many times did Mayor Ray Nagin have to call
for aid?"

Ahem... What about those buses left unused, less than a mile from the
Superdome? JunkYardBlog notes that it's written in the Southeast Louisiana
Evacuation Plan that buses are supposed to be used for evacuation of those
who don't have personal vehicles.

As JYB observes, "there is something very peculiar about a city and a
state that have a plan on the books for years that outlines what to do
when a hurricane is about to strike, yet when a hurricane comes roaring
in, the responsible officials just chuck the plan and try winging it.
Delaying and then winging it in the face of a monstrous Cat 4/5 hurricane
is never, ever a good idea, especially for New Orleans."

Ironically, Nagin told CNN, "I need buses, man," when he had plenty
sitting around unused before the storm hit. Now they're flooded and
useless.

But it's not like state and local officials could have seen this coming
(tongue in cheek). They have never had a hurricane bearing down on them
before and... oh, wait, there was Hurricane Ivan just last year. And after
that dodged bullet, Blanco and Nagin both acknowledged they needed a
better evacuation plan.

I would note that we've seen some pretty intense disasters in other parts
of the country, like planes crashing into skyscrapers and subsequently
collapsing, earthquakes, tornadoes, blizzards, and yet somehow, none of
these disasters had the total breakdown of law and order, civil society,
etc. Jonah Goldberg's early joke about a Mad-Max style post-apocalyptic
tribal anarchy may have been in poor taste, but it has turned out to be
nightmarishly prescient.

We failed you? No, oh brilliant creator of Exit to Eden, you failed. You
might not think of it this way, but: Your leaders failed to upgrade the
levees. You elected a bunch of weepers and blame-shifters who lost their
head in a crisis.

Over the past decades, your elected officials have let a criminal element
incubate and grow until they ruled the streets, instead of the forces of
law and order. In pop culture, a New Orleans thief is always a charming
rogue with a devilish smile. In reality, they're a bunch of thugs.

If the number of residents who are looting thugs were such a "tiny
minority," we wouldn't have seen this widespread, relentless anarchy.

Madam, a noticeable number of your neighbors saw this disaster as an
opportunity to smash a window and run away with a television, an act that
reveals much about the inadequacies of the local school system, since that
thief won't be enjoying that television with any electricity anytime soon.

I would also note that this is one hell of a police force your local
officials hired and that you and your neighbors tolerated. 50 percent
turned in their badges during the crisis and quit. Your police
superintendent is conceding that some cops were looting.

Just want to refresh your memory -
four years ago, New York and Washington, planes falling out of the sky,
thousands dead, no idea what the hell is coming next. and the cops, among
others, showed up to work.

To save you guys now, I - and a lot of other Americans - will pitch in.

We are witnessing the biggest mobilization of civilian and military rescue
and relief crews in history. But I have a sneaking suspicion you're going
to want the rest of us to pay for the rebuilding of your city. (In the
near future, we're going to have to have a little chat about the wisdom of
building below sea level, directly next to large bodies of water.)

And if you're going to come to the rest of us hat in hand, demanding the
rest of us clean up after your poor judgment, I'd appreciate a little less
"you failed us" and a little more "we've learned our lesson."

Linda Joyce McAnally

"Cereus-validus......." wrote in message
.. .
It never happened, you gullible minion of the antichrist.

Next you are going to tell me the price gauging of gasoline is the result
of too many people getting fueled up for the labor day weekend.


I happen to work with futures, so I know the dynamics of prices of crude.
Believe it or not, a lot of it is driven by oil industries and not the
market (as some may have you believe)

Anne Rice blames America, not local officials.

"To my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You
looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want
our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our
music.

Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying
on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your backs."

Novelist and New Orleans resident, Anne Rice.


The answer...

Let me get this straight

Ms. Rice, you live in (what was) a very attractive city which lies below
sea level. On one side you have a giant lake; on the other side you have
the Gulf of Mexico. Running through the middle is the Mississippi River.
All of which are above you.

Preventing those giant bodies of water from flooding and drowning you are
levees. These levees are described as "century-old." People have been
warning about the devastating effects of a direct hit from a hurricane for
decades.

I've heard a great deal of complaint in recent days that the federal
government may not have allocated enough money to speed up the upgrades to
those levees. This does, however, raise the question of why city and state
residents were waiting around for the federal government to send enough
money to upgrade this, instead of paying for it themselves. I mean, it was
only your homes, businesses, and lives at stake. Perhaps these upgrades
would have been expensive. If only this city had some sort of events to
attract tourists, from which to collect taxes.

Anyway, your state and local officials decided to spend your tax dollars
on something else that they (and presumably you) found more important, and
then they waited for the rest of the country to pay for these
life-preserving necessities.

Your beloved city and region has a colorful political history, in which
there is, oh, a wee bit of corruption. I'm from New Jersey, so I can't
throw stones at that glass house. But you guys have managed to pick
leaders who give you the worst of both worlds - they're scandal ridden and
incompetent in a crisis. Look, Rudy Giuliani might have run around with
Judith Nathan before his divorce, but he was a hell of a leader in our
darkest hours.

You know the National Review crowd isn't a fan of Pataki, but the man was
a rock after 9/11 compared to Governor Weepy I'll-Evacuate-Eventually and
Mayor It's-Everybody's-Fault-Except-Mine. Nobody's throwing around the
adjective "Churchillian" about any of your officials these days. We didn't
pick your local officials; you guys did.

Rice asks, "how many times did Gov. Kathleen Blanco have to say that the
situation was desperate? How many times did Mayor Ray Nagin have to call
for aid?"

Ahem... What about those buses left unused, less than a mile from the
Superdome? JunkYardBlog notes that it's written in the Southeast Louisiana
Evacuation Plan that buses are supposed to be used for evacuation of those
who don't have personal vehicles.

As JYB observes, "there is something very peculiar about a city and a
state that have a plan on the books for years that outlines what to do
when a hurricane is about to strike, yet when a hurricane comes roaring
in, the responsible officials just chuck the plan and try winging it.
Delaying and then winging it in the face of a monstrous Cat 4/5 hurricane
is never, ever a good idea, especially for New Orleans."

Ironically, Nagin told CNN, "I need buses, man," when he had plenty
sitting around unused before the storm hit. Now they're flooded and
useless.

But it's not like state and local officials could have seen this coming
(tongue in cheek). They have never had a hurricane bearing down on them
before and... oh, wait, there was Hurricane Ivan just last year. And after
that dodged bullet, Blanco and Nagin both acknowledged they needed a
better evacuation plan.

I would note that we've seen some pretty intense disasters in other parts
of the country, like planes crashing into skyscrapers and subsequently
collapsing, earthquakes, tornadoes, blizzards, and yet somehow, none of
these disasters had the total breakdown of law and order, civil society,
etc. Jonah Goldberg's early joke about a Mad-Max style post-apocalyptic
tribal anarchy may have been in poor taste, but it has turned out to be
nightmarishly prescient.

We failed you? No, oh brilliant creator of Exit to Eden, you failed. You
might not think of it this way, but: Your leaders failed to upgrade the
levees. You elected a bunch of weepers and blame-shifters who lost their
head in a crisis.

Over the past decades, your elected officials have let a criminal element
incubate and grow until they ruled the streets, instead of the forces of
law and order. In pop culture, a New Orleans thief is always a charming
rogue with a devilish smile. In reality, they're a bunch of thugs.

If the number of residents who are looting thugs were such a "tiny
minority," we wouldn't have seen this widespread, relentless anarchy.

Madam, a noticeable number of your neighbors saw this disaster as an
opportunity to smash a window and run away with a television, an act that
reveals much about the inadequacies of the local school system, since that
thief won't be enjoying that television with any electricity anytime soon.

I would also note that this is one hell of a police force your local
officials hired and that you and your neighbors tolerated. 50 percent
turned in their badges during the crisis and quit. Your police
superintendent is conceding that some cops were looting.

Just want to refresh your memory -
four years ago, New York and Washington, planes falling out of the sky,
thousands dead, no idea what the hell is coming next. and the cops, among
others, showed up to work.

To save you guys now, I - and a lot of other Americans - will pitch in.

We are witnessing the biggest mobilization of civilian and military rescue
and relief crews in history. But I have a sneaking suspicion you're going
to want the rest of us to pay for the rebuilding of your city. (In the
near future, we're going to have to have a little chat about the wisdom of
building below sea level, directly next to large bodies of water.)

And if you're going to come to the rest of us hat in hand, demanding the
rest of us clean up after your poor judgment, I'd appreciate a little less
"you failed us" and a little more "we've learned our lesson."

Linda Joyce McAnally


I love it!

"Rice, who now lives in the San Diego area, believes New Orleans will be
rebuilt"

I lived there and HATED it.

Anne Rice - for all her great 'love' of the city moved out too... It is
a dirty, violent and nasty place to live.

For all she says that:
"You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking
and our music," she continued. "Then when you saw us in real trouble,
when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us
'Sin City,' and turned your backs."

Hello - San Diego??? US??

The fact is that the city lives on tourism (talk about vampires) - none
of the above was ever GIVEN away to anybody. It has been tourist dollars
that have supported that city for years...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9209643/

Cereus-validus....... wrote:
That's what I've always hated about that town: too many vampires!!!

On Wed, 21 Sep 2005 15:05:15 GMT, "Cereus-validus......."
wrote:

It never happened, you gullible minion of the antichrist.

Next you are going to tell me the price gauging of gasoline is the result of
too many people getting fueled up for the labor day weekend.


Hi Steve, Here's a real downer for us all. We use about 22 percent
more gasoline than we can refine so we buy from europe, who are and
have been converting to diesel. Now hurricane Rita is bearing down on
the Coast of Texas where we have 10 refineries. Damage or no damage
to the refineries any bets on what will be the price of fuel in a
week.

zhan

Cereus-validus spouted:

I bet you are one of those fascist republikooks that voted for
the "****ing idiot".

==========

I love hearing all you folks with your GED's ranting about
the stupidity of the president with his Harvard degree and
his Yale master's degree.

"Oscar_Lives" wrote in message
Let me get this straight

Ms. Rice, you live in (what was) a very attractive city which lies below
sea level. On one side you have a giant lake; on the other side you have
the Gulf of Mexico. Running through the middle is the Mississippi River.
All of which are above you.

Preventing those giant bodies of water from flooding and drowning you are
levees. These levees are described as "century-old." People have been
warning about the devastating effects of a direct hit from a hurricane for
decades.

I've heard a great deal of complaint in recent days that the federal
government may not have allocated enough money to speed up the upgrades to
those levees. This does, however, raise the question of why city and state
residents were waiting around for the federal government to send enough
money to upgrade this, instead of paying for it themselves. I mean, it was
only your homes, businesses, and lives at stake. Perhaps these upgrades
would have been expensive. If only this city had some sort of events to
attract tourists, from which to collect taxes.

The Army Corps of Engineers TOOK AWAY the right of local communities to
build and control levees along the Mississippi River all the way from
Illinois to Louisiana after the devastating floods in the 1920's. Not that
I'd expect anyone writing a rant like this one to have done one iota of
basic research.

Second point - do you benefit from agricultural products grown in the
Midwest ? Manufactured goods from the Midwest? Oil, gasoline, and other
petroleum products produced and refined in southern Louisiana? Seems like
you've had a HUGE stake in having a deep water port on the mouth of the
Mississippi your entire life, sweetie. How much have YOU paid for that
convenience, or to protect the port there?

Anyway, your state and local officials decided to spend your tax dollars
on something else that they (and presumably you) found more important, and
then they waited for the rest of the country to pay for these
life-preserving necessities.

Your beloved city and region has a colorful political history, in which
there is, oh, a wee bit of corruption. I'm from New Jersey, so I can't
throw stones at that glass house. But you guys have managed to pick
leaders who give you the worst of both worlds - they're scandal ridden and
incompetent in a crisis. Look, Rudy Giuliani might have run around with
Judith Nathan before his divorce, but he was a hell of a leader in our
darkest hours.

You know the National Review crowd

What a surprise that the author of this rant is part of it.....

isn't a fan of Pataki, but the man was a
rock after 9/11 compared to Governor Weepy I'll-Evacuate-Eventually and
Mayor It's-Everybody's-Fault-Except-Mine. Nobody's throwing around the
adjective "Churchillian" about any of your officials these days. We didn't
pick your local officials; you guys did.

Rice asks, "how many times did Gov. Kathleen Blanco have to say that the
situation was desperate? How many times did Mayor Ray Nagin have to call
for aid?"

Ahem... What about those buses left unused, less than a mile from the
Superdome? JunkYardBlog notes that it's written in the Southeast Louisiana
Evacuation Plan that buses are supposed to be used for evacuation of those
who don't have personal vehicles.

The buses that were left unused were school buses - not under the
jurisdiction of the mayor, unless you know of someplace in the US where the
mayor controls the budgets and the employees of the school districts,
including school buses. (He certainly doesn't in my town). That means that
you're expecting someone who is NOT the employer, to know where the drivers
were on a SUNDAY, or had to know where to find 200 +people who were trained
to drive them, had to know where the keys to the buses were, had to have a
dedicated fuel source for those buses, since all local gas stations were out
of fuel, and had to know if and where there were open shelters in upstate
Louisiana - since by 4 pm on Sunday, all shelters up there were FULL of the
people who had the money and the ability to evacuate by car. City buses ran
all day evacuating people from their homes to the Superdome, until curfew at
6 pm, when wind and rain were already making the streets too dangerous to
travel on. How do you spell RED HERRING?

As JYB observes, "there is something very peculiar about a city and a
state that have a plan on the books for years that outlines what to do
when a hurricane is about to strike, yet when a hurricane comes roaring
in, the responsible officials just chuck the plan and try winging it.
Delaying and then winging it in the face of a monstrous Cat 4/5 hurricane
is never, ever a good idea, especially for New Orleans."

Ironically, Nagin told CNN, "I need buses, man," when he had plenty
sitting around unused before the storm hit. Now they're flooded and
useless.

See above. The plan was to use buses to evacuate WITHIN the city. Do you
know any city in the US which has adequate mass transit to evacuate 100,000
people without cars in a 10 hour window to locales 75 miles or more distant
on roads that are gridlocked with evacuees? RED HERRING

But it's not like state and local officials could have seen this coming
(tongue in cheek). They have never had a hurricane bearing down on them
before and... oh, wait, there was Hurricane Ivan just last year. And after
that dodged bullet, Blanco and Nagin both acknowledged they needed a
better evacuation plan.

It's one thing to have a plan, another to have the MONEY and resources to
implement it. Blanco and Nagin have both acknowledged having made serious
errors, which they undeniably had made - how long did it take our President
to half-heartedly admit that he had - including putting an inept lawyer at
the head of FEMA?

I would note that we've seen some pretty intense disasters in other parts
of the country, like planes crashing into skyscrapers and subsequently
collapsing, earthquakes, tornadoes, blizzards, and yet somehow, none of
these disasters had the total breakdown of law and order, civil society,
etc. Jonah Goldberg's early joke about a Mad-Max style post-apocalyptic
tribal anarchy may have been in poor taste, but it has turned out to be
nightmarishly prescient.

There has NEVER been a disaster on this scale in the US. An entire city of
over 1,000,000 in the metropolitan area nearly completely destroyed. Search
any archive. After EVERY hurricane in EVERY locale on the PLANET, there is
massive looting. At which point, in the US, the National Guard is called in
immediately - not 4 days later. RED HERRING

We failed you? No, oh brilliant creator of Exit to Eden, you failed. You
might not think of it this way, but: Your leaders failed to upgrade the
levees. You elected a bunch of weepers and blame-shifters who lost their
head in a crisis.

Over the past decades, your elected officials have let a criminal element
incubate and grow until they ruled the streets, instead of the forces of
law and order. In pop culture, a New Orleans thief is always a charming
rogue with a devilish smile. In reality, they're a bunch of thugs.

See above.

If the number of residents who are looting thugs were such a "tiny
minority," we wouldn't have seen this widespread, relentless anarchy.

Where did you see it? Fox TV, replaying the same footage over and over and
over again? At this point every report of large numbers of roving bands of
gangs has been discredited. Individual acts of violence and brutality, yes,
undeniably present and relatively common, but relentless - no.....But again,
objective research is not your forte, is it sweetie?

Madam, a noticeable number of your neighbors saw this disaster as an
opportunity to smash a window and run away with a television, an act that
reveals much about the inadequacies of the local school system, since that
thief won't be enjoying that television with any electricity anytime soon.

I would also note that this is one hell of a police force your local
officials hired and that you and your neighbors tolerated. 50 percent
turned in their badges during the crisis and quit. Your police
superintendent is conceding that some cops were looting.

Just want to refresh your memory -
four years ago, New York and Washington, planes falling out of the sky,
thousands dead, no idea what the hell is coming next. and the cops, among
others, showed up to work.

Cops who knew by hour 5 or 6 that their homes and their families had
survived........... RED HERRING

To save you guys now, I - and a lot of other Americans - will pitch in.

We are witnessing the biggest mobilization of civilian and military rescue
and relief crews in history. But I have a sneaking suspicion you're going
to want the rest of us to pay for the rebuilding of your city. (In the
near future, we're going to have to have a little chat about the wisdom of
building below sea level, directly next to large bodies of water.)

This is the only point on this rant with which I can agree.

And if you're going to come to the rest of us hat in hand, demanding the
rest of us clean up after your poor judgment, I'd appreciate a little less
"you failed us" and a little more "we've learned our lesson."

Linda Joyce McAnally

"Paul E. Lehmann" expounded:

I guess you haven't heard - the 3000 buses is an exaggeration originally
started by Newt Gingrich which was picked up by the press and perpetuated
without their checking the accuracy.

I guess you didn't see the pictures, while 3000 is an exaggeration
there were 500 in one lot shown with just their roofs poking out of
the water. The mayor and the governor had plenty of warning. They
didn't do much.
--
Ann, gardening in Zone 6a
South of Boston, Massachusetts
e-mail address is not checked
******************************

"Gideon" expounded:

I love hearing all you folks with your GED's ranting about
the stupidity of the president with his Harvard degree and
his Yale master's degree.


You know something, Gideon? Me thinks thou dost protest too much.
Disparging peoples' intelligence is usually the hallmark of an
insecure mind. As is well known in rec.gardens, I'm no liberal - so
don't go there. Stop trying to use the intelligence card, it makes
you look pretty pathetic.
--
Ann, gardening in Zone 6a
South of Boston, Massachusetts
e-mail address is not checked
******************************

Gideon wrote:
Cereus-validus spouted:

I bet you are one of those fascist republikooks that voted for
the "****ing idiot".

==========

I love hearing all you folks with your GED's ranting about
the stupidity of the president with his Harvard degree and
his Yale master's degree.

University degrees are no guarantee of either competence or wisdom.

Dubya has the best college degrees his daddy could buy!!!

If only the rest of us had their money and political connections.


"Ann" wrote in message
...
"Gideon" expounded:

I love hearing all you folks with your GED's ranting about
the stupidity of the president with his Harvard degree and
his Yale master's degree.


You know something, Gideon? Me thinks thou dost protest too much.
Disparging peoples' intelligence is usually the hallmark of an
insecure mind. As is well known in rec.gardens, I'm no liberal - so
don't go there. Stop trying to use the intelligence card, it makes
you look pretty pathetic.
--
Ann, gardening in Zone 6a
South of Boston, Massachusetts
e-mail address is not checked
******************************

Amen to that, brother.

Dubya has the best college degrees his daddy could buy!!!

If only the rest of us had their money and political connections. We could
get college degrees for Forrest Gump and Rainman too!!!!


"Wolf Kirchmeir" wrote in message
...
Gideon wrote:
Cereus-validus spouted:

I bet you are one of those fascist republikooks that voted for
the "****ing idiot".

==========

I love hearing all you folks with your GED's ranting about
the stupidity of the president with his Harvard degree and
his Yale master's degree.

University degrees are no guarantee of either competence or wisdom.

Gideon said:

Cereus-validus spouted:

I bet you are one of those fascist republikooks that voted for
the "****ing idiot".

==========

I love hearing all you folks with your GED's ranting about
the stupidity of the president with his Harvard degree and
his Yale master's degree.

First of all, you got that backwards. Yale first, then Harvard. (You've really
got to try harder if you are going to cast aspersions at others intellectual
credentials.)

Secondly, while Cereus is usually prickly and overly sarcastic (and sometimes
smutt) he does have my respect for his expertise in things botanical.

Now let's look at Bush's undergraduate scholarship and his vaunted MBA.
(And I'll throw in a little about me, the amateur horticulturalist. I did have
a few elective classes in horticulture at college, just for fun, but my major
was mathematics.)

I went to a college that recruited me, with a merit scholarship and
as a member of the honors college. Bush got into Yale as a legacy.

I graduated with high honors in an intellectually challenging field.
Bush majored in history and racked up a large number of
"gentleman's Cs." (A coach at my high school taught history; he
*told* me that he found it the easiest subject to major in and he
needed to major in *something* in college because what he really
wanted to teach high school and coach a sport.)

Bush did poorly as a freshman in Political Science, Sociology and
Economics. (I am not surprised.) Bush's transcripts put him in the 21st
percentile of his class in his freshman year. He played a *lot* of intramural
sports. He did post some better grades a senior, when he travelled in a
very well-connected circles (Skull and Bones.)

After graduation,I got married and built a life (still married, 30 years next
June). I've had what help my family could give but that's not much more
than any typical middle-class family could do. Moral guidance. A good
undergraduate education. A loan (since repaid) to help buy my first
house. And I *know* I'm lucky to have had that; I had a leg up and I do
appreciate that *not everyone does.* I didn't have a trust fund. No grad
school.

Bush entered the Texas Air National Guard and did some political work. He
applied to the UT Law School and was rejected. He took a management
trainee position. He did some more political work. He then left the TANG
early, to enter the MBA program at Harvard. Reasonable suspicion suggests
behind-the-scenes rigging of the TANG gig, both the going in and getting
out. (But nothing direct and obvious, because that isn't neccessary when you
move in certain circles. You don't *have* to ask.)

Bush certainly didn't have the undergraduate credentials for Harvard
Business School. What he did have was an educational trust fund and a
father who was chairman of the Republican National Committee (and soon
after the Ambassador to China). He may have been let in under the guise
of what was referred to as a 'poets' program--a small, experimental group
of people who wouldn't normally be considered for admission. And he
would certainly have an easy time building a study group to work with
through the program. (What a *great* guy to know once you've got
your MBA!!!) He certainly learned some business lingo--'metrics' being
a favorite with Bush, thus the long lists of how much of this or that in some
of recent his speeches.

(The MBA degree in general has certainly lost a quite bit of its luster in
the wake of a series of huge corporate scandals. So perhaps having
earned one isn't sucha great intellectual acheivement, or the 'science of
management' isn't as well developed as it could be, or there is a dearth
of ethics training--even at Harvard.)

Bush learned so much at Harvard that he went on to run some businesses
rather unsuccessfully. He was bailed out by family friends and contacts
--though he managed to cash out of one at an opportune time, receiving
only a cursory investigation for insider trading.

Then he became the front man (schmoozer) and minor partner in a baseball
team which was ginned up in value when a new stadium was built with
public assistance (to the tune of $200 million in subsidies). That also
included low-balling 'immanent domain' seizures of land around the
stadium (which added much to the value of the team). "He had a
well-known name, and that created interest in the franchise," according
Tom Schieffer, the Rangers' former president. It was all a very cozy deal.
Not the sort opportunity open to Harvard MBAs not named George W. Bush.
Nor quite the rugged 'self-made man' sort of thing either (nor an example
of the purest of ethics, in my opinion). Name-brand connection and
influence were at the core of this, Bush's one real business success.

Bush has lived and breathed cronyism all his life. Is anyone who paid
attention to Bush's past surprised that a barely-was lawyer and disgraced
horse-show overseer with friends in high places (and no experience in
disaster management) ended up as the head of FEMA? There's reams
more that can be, has been, and will be written about the Bush
administration's preference for political credentials and connections over
competence and relevant experience (the Coalition Provisional Authority
staff in Iraq being a prime example) but this isn't the place and I'm not
the person to do it.

Let's get back to gardening, people.

--
Pat K. ('someplace.net' is comcast)

Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
(attributed to Don Marti)

Pat Kiewicz wrote:
[...]

the Bush
administration's preference for political credentials and connections over
competence and relevant experience

Hey, that's how it worked in the good ol' USSR, so why shouldn't it work
in the good ol' US of A????

[...]

Let's get back to gardening, people.

Right.

How awful. The joke is on all of us.

After beating the bushes looking for a gem, all that we found was a turd!!!
Maybe Stephen King was wrong after all? It seems you can polish a turd!!!

Who put that stinker in charge anyway?
Twice yet!!!!

How much does it cost to get phony degrees from Yale and Harvard anyway? We
may never know!!!


"Pat Kiewicz" wrote in message
...
Gideon said:

Cereus-validus spouted:

I bet you are one of those fascist republikooks that voted for
the "****ing idiot".

==========

I love hearing all you folks with your GED's ranting about
the stupidity of the president with his Harvard degree and
his Yale master's degree.

First of all, you got that backwards. Yale first, then Harvard. (You've
really
got to try harder if you are going to cast aspersions at others
intellectual
credentials.)

Secondly, while Cereus is usually prickly and overly sarcastic (and
sometimes
smutt) he does have my respect for his expertise in things botanical.

Now let's look at Bush's undergraduate scholarship and his vaunted MBA.
(And I'll throw in a little about me, the amateur horticulturalist. I did
have
a few elective classes in horticulture at college, just for fun, but my
major
was mathematics.)

I went to a college that recruited me, with a merit scholarship and
as a member of the honors college. Bush got into Yale as a legacy.

I graduated with high honors in an intellectually challenging field.
Bush majored in history and racked up a large number of
"gentleman's Cs." (A coach at my high school taught history; he
*told* me that he found it the easiest subject to major in and he
needed to major in *something* in college because what he really
wanted to teach high school and coach a sport.)

Bush did poorly as a freshman in Political Science, Sociology and
Economics. (I am not surprised.) Bush's transcripts put him in the 21st
percentile of his class in his freshman year. He played a *lot* of
intramural
sports. He did post some better grades a senior, when he travelled in a
very well-connected circles (Skull and Bones.)

After graduation,I got married and built a life (still married, 30 years
next
June). I've had what help my family could give but that's not much more
than any typical middle-class family could do. Moral guidance. A good
undergraduate education. A loan (since repaid) to help buy my first
house. And I *know* I'm lucky to have had that; I had a leg up and I do
appreciate that *not everyone does.* I didn't have a trust fund. No grad
school.

Bush entered the Texas Air National Guard and did some political work. He
applied to the UT Law School and was rejected. He took a management
trainee position. He did some more political work. He then left the TANG
early, to enter the MBA program at Harvard. Reasonable suspicion suggests
behind-the-scenes rigging of the TANG gig, both the going in and getting
out. (But nothing direct and obvious, because that isn't neccessary when
you
move in certain circles. You don't *have* to ask.)

Bush certainly didn't have the undergraduate credentials for Harvard
Business School. What he did have was an educational trust fund and a
father who was chairman of the Republican National Committee (and soon
after the Ambassador to China). He may have been let in under the guise
of what was referred to as a 'poets' program--a small, experimental group
of people who wouldn't normally be considered for admission. And he
would certainly have an easy time building a study group to work with
through the program. (What a *great* guy to know once you've got
your MBA!!!) He certainly learned some business lingo--'metrics' being
a favorite with Bush, thus the long lists of how much of this or that in
some
of recent his speeches.

(The MBA degree in general has certainly lost a quite bit of its luster in
the wake of a series of huge corporate scandals. So perhaps having
earned one isn't sucha great intellectual acheivement, or the 'science of
management' isn't as well developed as it could be, or there is a dearth
of ethics training--even at Harvard.)

Bush learned so much at Harvard that he went on to run some businesses
rather unsuccessfully. He was bailed out by family friends and contacts
--though he managed to cash out of one at an opportune time, receiving
only a cursory investigation for insider trading.

Then he became the front man (schmoozer) and minor partner in a baseball
team which was ginned up in value when a new stadium was built with
public assistance (to the tune of $200 million in subsidies). That also
included low-balling 'immanent domain' seizures of land around the
stadium (which added much to the value of the team). "He had a
well-known name, and that created interest in the franchise," according
Tom Schieffer, the Rangers' former president. It was all a very cozy
deal.
Not the sort opportunity open to Harvard MBAs not named George W. Bush.
Nor quite the rugged 'self-made man' sort of thing either (nor an example
of the purest of ethics, in my opinion). Name-brand connection and
influence were at the core of this, Bush's one real business success.

Bush has lived and breathed cronyism all his life. Is anyone who paid
attention to Bush's past surprised that a barely-was lawyer and disgraced
horse-show overseer with friends in high places (and no experience in
disaster management) ended up as the head of FEMA? There's reams
more that can be, has been, and will be written about the Bush
administration's preference for political credentials and connections over
competence and relevant experience (the Coalition Provisional Authority
staff in Iraq being a prime example) but this isn't the place and I'm not
the person to do it.

Let's get back to gardening, people.

--
Pat K. ('someplace.net' is comcast)

Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
(attributed to Don Marti)