Kerry -- Looser in Gender Gap

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-17-2004
Kerry -- Looser in Gender Gap
38
Fri, 09-17-2004 - 11:50pm

"By 49 percent to 42 percent, women are supporting Bush over Kerry..."


http://instapundit.com/archives/017891.php

Renee ~~~

Renee ~~~

Pages

Avatar for momeebear
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-25-2003
Thu, 09-23-2004 - 12:14am
<> I was reading somewhere that he named the company Arbusto because he thought it meant "bush" in Spanish, but it actually meant "shrub"----hence his nickname? And wasn't there a whiff of possible insider trading in the Harken deal? (a la Martha Stewart----dumping stock before the company tanked?) Not sure, that's why I'm asking, you seem to be fairly knowledgeable on the subject....
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Thu, 09-23-2004 - 12:52am
It's one thing if you take some seed money, invest it wisely and your business grows and grows. It's another thing if you take some seed money, fail repeatedly, and yet somehow, mysteriously continue to succeed thanks to strangely overgenerous "buyers" and investors with ties to your dad.

http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Arbusto_Energy

The Rangers may be the one thing Bush didn't screw up. He made a 2400% profit! He borrowed $600,000 (from a bank where he was once director) to buy his 2% stake in the team. He was later able to repay that loan with money he got through an illegal insider trade of his Harken stock. (what good luck!) When the team sold for a boatload, Bush was entitled to $2.3 million dollars, but since his partners had given him 10% more of the pie as a bonus he made $14.9 million on the deal. Did he earn the bonus with his hard work? Or was it his family name and connections? "“He had a well-known name, and that created interest in the franchise,” Tom Schieffer, the Rangers’ former president, said last year. “It gave us a little celebrity.” Oh.

Here's more on the Texas Rangers deals:

http://www.angelfire.com/ok5/pearly/htmls/bush-sec5.html



iVillage Member
Registered: 08-05-2004
Thu, 09-23-2004 - 11:45pm
Just out of my curiosity: does Bush work closely with any dems or just reps? XOXO.
iVillage Member
Registered: 06-17-2004
Fri, 09-24-2004 - 4:37pm

Succeeding in the oil

Renee ~~~

Avatar for momeebear
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-25-2003
Fri, 09-24-2004 - 6:03pm
<>

Not sure what you meant by this statement? Not only is it a huge blanket generalization of what you think women want, but how does that make one want to vote Bush over Kerry? As a woman who has worked since high school, supported myself and even sometimes my household single-handedly (when my spouse has lost a job and/or been attending school) I was all set to be very insulted; but thought maybe I was missing what you're trying to say? No women I know want to be "taken care of." This is, after all, 2004, not 1894.....

Just looking for a little clarification is all......

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-01-2004
Fri, 09-24-2004 - 9:45pm
"I was reading somewhere that he named the company Arbusto because he thought it meant "bush" in Spanish, but it actually meant "shrub"----hence his nickname?" Right. Both of us must have done our homework in 2000. There were several newspapers in Texas who kept articles filed on Bush back till the time he became governor. There were several books too. I must have read them all.

As for the SEC thing, Bush was investigated by the SEC for failure to file the sale of his Harken stock with the SEC, but what was gonna happen to the president's kid? Exactly! Nothing. Bush used to say he was exonerated, but he wasn't. The SEC headed by Daddy Bush's appointees just dropped the investigation. Bush did receive a letter from a deputy director, I think it was, that said in effect that he was in no way exonerated just because they were dropping the investigation. Now poor Martha is going to jail for much the same thing. Only she didn't make anywhere near as much as Bush. Too bad her daddy's not the president.

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-01-2004
Fri, 09-24-2004 - 9:46pm
I can't think of any. Can you?
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Sun, 09-26-2004 - 12:16pm
Of course I'm not saying that succeeding in business is a "cake walk". The fact that you think that I, and Democrats in general, denigrate hard work is laughable. You wouldn't believe the triple whammy I just went through with my career, but I'm rolling up my sleeves, manning the phones and hustling my butt off. You write: "You work; you try to get ahead; you deal with setbacks and failures; you pick yourself up again and keep trying until you succeed." Believe me...I know.

The difference between me and George W. Bush is that if I fail at this, I take my lumps and move on. Bush never had to take his lumps because people wanted to save his hide every time, to get in with his powerful father.

<>

I'm surprised that you think women put important issues like the WOT, jobs, healthcare and education on the backburner because what they're really looking for is a sugardaddy.

<>

Too funny. Apparently you skipped the 6th in the series, entitled "Bush Name Helps Fuel Oil Dealing." It's written by the same two reporters at the WAPO.


BUSH NAME HELPS FUEL OIL DEALINGS

By George Lardner Jr. and Lois Romano

Washington Post Staff Writers

Friday, July 30, 1999; Page A1

Sixth of seven articles

As world oil prices plummeted in the winter of 1985-86, George W. Bush faced the most serious crisis of his 11-year career as a West Texas oilman.

Spectrum 7, his exploration and development company, had reported a net loss of $1.6 million in 1985, due to the fast-deteriorating value of its holdings. As the price of oil fell from $25 to $9 a barrel, the firm was on its way to losing another $402,000 by mid-1986. Bush's company owed more than $3 million in bank loans and other debts with no hope of paying them off in time. His investors had disappeared.

On the cusp of his 40th birthday, Bush had two choices: Cut his staff to the bone, hunker down and pray for oil prices to climb before the banks foreclosed; or find a bigger company that was willing to scoop him up, debts and all. "I'm all name and no money," the son of the then-vice president used to say.

Bush's name, however, was to help rescue him, just as it had attracted investors and helped revive his flagging fortunes throughout his years in the dusty plains city of Midland. A big Dallas-based firm, Harken Oil and Gas, was looking to buy up troubled oil companies. After finding Spectrum, Harken's executives saw a bonus in their target's CEO, despite his spotty track record.

By the end of September 1986, the deal was done. Harken assumed $3.1 million in debts and swapped $2.2 million of its stock for a company that was hemorrhaging money, though it had oil and gas reserves projected to produce $4 million in future net revenue. Harken, a firm that liked to attach itself to stars, had also acquired Bush, whom it used not as an operating manager but as a high-profile board member.

"One of the reasons Harken was so interested in merging was because of George," said Paul Rea, a geologist who had been president of Spectrum 7. "They believed having George's name there would be a big help to them. They wanted him on their board."

The buyout not only rescued Bush financially but gave him the collateral for an investment a few years later in the Texas Rangers baseball team that eventually made him a millionaire. In addition to the seat on the board, he received more than $300,000 of Harken stock, options to buy more, and a consulting contract that paid him as much as $120,000 a year in the late '80s, when he was working full time on his father's presidential campaign.

It was one of the biggest breaks of Bush's life. Still, the Harken deal completed a disappointing reprise of what was becoming a familiar pattern. As an oilman, Bush always worked hard, winning a reputation as a straight-shooter and a good boss who was witty, warm and immensely likable. Even the investors who lost money in his ventures remained admirers, and some of them are now raising money for his presidential campaign.

But the story of Bush's career in oil, which began following his graduation from Harvard Business School in the summer of 1975 and ended when he sold out to Harken and headed for Washington, is mostly about his failure to succeed, despite the sterling connections his lineage and Ivy League education brought him.

Thanks to his and his family's ties to wealthy investors around the country, including prominent Republicans, Bush was repeatedly able to raise money to invest in oil drilling, especially when prices were booming and tax breaks were inviting in the late 1970s. But connections could not help with the tricky business of picking profitable holes to drill, and Bush never made a big score.

In fact, Bush lost money for most of his well-connected investors. At the same time, the management fees and other expenses he collected from them kept him in business and enabled him to buy oil reserves for his company's own account, including the reserves that eventually attracted Harken's attention.

Three times during his years in Midland, Bush was saved from financial trouble or stagnation by the appearance of new partners or financial angels who gave him a fresh start. One was a Princeton classmate and friend of James A. Baker III, who was to serve as his father's secretary of state; another was a fellow Yale man who shared Bush's love for baseball.

The third was Harken, which was to save Bush from humiliating failure but also create a target for later criticism. Reporters would scrutinize the deal as early as 1990. Led by then-Texas Gov. Ann Richards, Bush's opponent in the 1994 gubernatorial election, his political critics have asked whether Harken used Bush's name to obtain oil business. Even now, questions linger about a 1990 sale of Harken stock by Bush that was the subject of a probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

When it was over, Bush's oil career had merely perpetuated the nagging pattern that marked his life until past the age of 40: Once again, he had followed his father's path but failed to achieve his father's success.

much more of the article continued at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/wh2000/stories/bush073099.htm

Pages