Cubs Owner Bankrolls Tea Party Senate Upset Winner in Nebraska

Artie60438 wrote:

I never made a claim that people were boycotting,did I?

Really?
Can you explain what you meant when you wrote this paragraph, which encompasses both the "stain on the Cubs" and a reference to the low attendance?

Artie60438 wrote:

You can keep attempting to spin it all you want but the stain on the Cubs is there and isn't going away anytime soon. Tomorrows front page of the Sun-Times has Tom also desperately trying to spin his way out of this. Btw,yesterday's Sox-Cubs game was the lowest in attendance since the series started despite picture perfect weather.

Artie60438 wrote:

You of course immediately decided to claim it was because of NATO despite you not having any proof of that theory whatsoever.

And I quite promptly admitted that my theory was incorrect.
But what would you know about such a thing as acknowledging oneself as being wrong, something of which you are utterly incapable?

happy jack wrote:

Artie60438 wrote:

I never made a claim that people were boycotting,did I?

Really?
Can you explain what you meant when you wrote this paragraph, which encompasses both the "stain on the Cubs" and a reference to the low attendance?

Artie60438 wrote:

You can keep attempting to spin it all you want but the stain on the Cubs is there and isn't going away anytime soon. Tomorrows front page of the Sun-Times has Tom also desperately trying to spin his way out of this. Btw,yesterday's Sox-Cubs game was the lowest in attendance since the series started despite picture perfect weather.

Certainly As you can plainly see I prefaced my remark about the attendance with "Btw" a common abbreviation that stands for "By the way". The term "Btw" is defined as "incidentally". "Incidentally" is defined as "apart or aside from the main subject of attention, discussion, etc.;".
Nowhere did I suggest that people were planning on boycotting the Cubs or that a boycott was taking place.

I hope this clears things up for you but feel free to verify my sources if you have any doubt http://www.thefreedictionary.com/by+the+way
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/incidentally

While I do suspect that Artie has his tongue planted in his cheek on this one, it does appear that he covered himself semantically, Jack.

happy jack wrote:

Scorpion wrote:

While I do suspect that Artie has his tongue planted in his cheek on this one, it does appear that he covered himself semantically, Jack.

[b]Yes, he truly is a master of the weasel-word, isn't he?

How is pointing out the fact that you attempted to put words in my mouth weaseling out?
The only thing I'm guilty of is never missing an opportunity to post something negative about the Cubs

happy jack wrote:

Artie60438 wrote:

How is pointing out the fact that you attempted to put words in my mouth weaseling out?

You keep pretending that that is what I did, and I'll pretend to believe you.
Deal?

Your exact words were

Quote :

"Yes, Artie - thousands upon thousands of people decided to boycott the Cubs on Friday night"

The problem with that statement is that I never claimed that people were boycotting the Cubs or that the low attendance was a result of the Ricketts political ad controversy. You were the one who introduced the term "boycott" to the discussion in a now failed attempt to try to falsely claim that was my position.

Never satisfied until you dig a deeper hole for yourself,are you?

Good piece on the Joe Ricketts fiasco.
Bernstein: Tom Ricketts Thinks We’re Fools
By Dan Bernstein-
CBSChicago.com Senior Columnist

Quote :

(CBS) Tom Ricketts is counting on us being stupid, or us not having access to a computer. Maybe both.

He’s hiding right now, hunkered down behind spokespeople, spinning madly to extricate himself from the political doings of his father and brothers.

After initially repudiating the “Ricketts Plan” to smear Barack Obama with racially-tinged attack ads, his statement Thursday included, “I shall have no further comment on this.”

Interestingly, “further comment” appeared in the Sun Times Saturday. Ricketts decided he probably needed to try to get ahead of the story by finding a sympathetic ear, or someone advising the family decided it for him.

The same day, Laura Ricketts stepped from the background into the limelight, representing ownership at the Kerry Wood retirement festivities. Nothing makes a better human shield in times of PR crisis than the readily-available Obama supporter. In case of emergency, break glass – contains one liberal lesbian.

>snipped for brevity<
Here's Pappy Joe Ricketts himself explaining in his own words exactly how the Cubs were purchased. After watching the video it's pretty clear to me that Tom Ricketts was pretty much nothing more than the front man,sorta like the Fredo Corleone of the Ricketts family.

happy jack wrote:

Artie60438 wrote:

.... the “Ricketts Plan” to smear Barack Obama with racially-tinged attack ads ....

I'm still waiting for an explanation as to how the ads are "racially-tinged" and, if they are, "racially-tinged" by whom?

I see this is way over your head too Please take notes so we won't have to waste time over this in the future.....

Quote :

May 17 (Bloomberg) -- Mitt Romney denounced a plan drafted by Republican strategists to run a racially tinged advertising campaign against President Barack Obama focusing on his former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr.

"I want to make it very clear I repudiate that effort," Romney told reporters today after a campaign event in Jacksonville, Florida. "I hope that our campaigns can respectively be about the future and about issues and about a vision for America."

Romney was responding to a report in today's editions of the New York Times on a proposal for a super-political action committee backed by billionaire Joe Ricketts, the founder of what is now TD Ameritrade, to finance ads featuring Wright, whose racially incendiary sermons became an issue in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/05/17/bloomberg_articlesM4683T6JTSEC01-M46U3.DTL&ao=all#ixzz1vqDZcZPA

happy jack wrote:

[b]As I see it, the "racially-tinged" aspect of all this stems from Wright himself, not from the Republican strategists.
Is that how you see it, too?

The wingnut strategists are the ones who came up with the proposal to try and smear Obama. It fell flat on it's face in 2008 and it's not working this time either.

Artie60438 wrote:

happy jack wrote:

[b]As I see it, the "racially-tinged" aspect of all this stems from Wright himself, not from the Republican strategists.
Is that how you see it, too?

The wingnut strategists are the ones who came up with the proposal to try and smear Obama. It fell flat on it's face in 2008 and it's not working this time either.

But nothing the strategists did appears to be even remotely"racially-tinged". Throwing out the accusation is easy enough; backing the accusation up seems to be an entirely different animal.

happy jack wrote:

As I see it, the "racially-tinged" aspect of all this stems from Wright himself, not from the Republican strategists.
Is that how you see it, too?

No
But I can see how you can given the fact that you fail to see blatant racism in a blatant racist joke.
That's why it's no surprise that you think what the republican strategists tried was not "racially-tinged." Of course not.
I bet a guy in pointy white hood wouldn't either.

So why did Rickets repudiate the "return to racially divisive issues"?
Why did Mittens "repudiate that effort"? What did your boy Mitt Romney denounce?

So tell us, WTF did they repudiate and denounce and why?

Oh that's right, you have no idea, never mind.

happy jack wrote:

But nothing the strategists did appears to be even remotely"racially-tinged". Throwing out the accusation is easy enough; backing the accusation up seems to be an entirely different animal.

Trying to resurrect the Rev Wright issue is another disgusting attempt to smear Obama via the Angry Black Man stereotype. That's when it becomes "racially tinged".

Michelle Obama has also been a target. Here's Fox news back in 2008 employing the same tactic.
Fox News Smears Michelle Obama as "The Angry Black Woman"

More trouble on the horizon for Pappy Ricketts. Looks like he may have to send out fanboy Tom,AKA Fredo Ricketts,to try and do some more damage control....
Billionaire Finds New Role in Effort to Defeat Obama

Quote :

When news broke last week that the billionaire investor Joe Ricketts had considered financing a $10 million advertising effort linking President Obama with the fiery race-based rhetoric of his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Mr. Ricketts quickly distanced himself from the proposal and Mitt Romney’s campaign denounced it.

But Mr. Ricketts is continuing to play a provocative role in the effort to defeat Mr. Obama.

He is involved in another effort slated for this summer, a documentary film based on a widely criticized book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage” by Dinesh D’Souza, which asserts that Mr. Obama is carrying out the “anticolonial” agenda of his Kenyan father.

Mr. Ricketts’s aides said he was one of roughly two dozen investors, providing only 5 percent of the film’s budget. But his involvement shows how the more strident attacks against Mr. Obama, which Mr. Romney’s aides view as counterproductive, continue to find backing even as the Republican Party and the Romney campaign seek to keep the focus on the economy.

The episode involving the proposed Wright advertisement put new attention on the ability of wealthy donors, working with groups independent of the candidates, to shape the presidential race, and stoked further debate about whether outside groups were driving politics to become increasingly negative.

It also made Mr. Ricketts, who founded TD Ameritrade and is the patriarch of the family that owns the Chicago Cubs, the subject of intensive scrutiny and left his family’s business empire exposed to political backlash. He has refused several interview requests since The New York Times obtained a copy of the proposed Wright campaign. He is not affiliated with the Romney campaign, although he shares a legal adviser with Mr. Romney in Ben Ginsberg, the prominent Republican lawyer in Washington.

But interviews with friends and associates over the past week, along with a review of Mr. Ricketts’s own publicly expressed views, show why he is willing to put millions of dollars behind an effort to defeat the president.

An early glimpse of his views on Mr. Obama can be found in a June 2010 graduation speech he gave at Bellevue University in Nebraska, for which he is a leading benefactor. Lamenting the banking and auto bailouts, he declared, “Our Republic is under assault from our government,” adding the historical note that “most of the past threats have come from outside our borders.”

He called this “a most dangerous time,” when “people begin to second-guess the American experiment” and “flirt with dead-ends like socialism.” It was in that climate, he said, that he had decided to become more personally involved in politics.

Mr. Ricketts’s aides said he was primarily motivated by his concern for the budget deficit and government spending. And he has developed a reputation for supporting Democrats as well as Republicans when he believes they will act on his calls to rein in the deficit.

His political action group Ending Spending is financing a book by the husband and wife economists Ayse and Selahattin Imrohoroglu that in effect argues for an embrace of the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson debt reduction plan. (Called “The Fiscal Cliff: How America Can Avoid a Fall and Stay On Top” and due out late next month, it has a clinical, academic approach.)

In explaining the rejection of the Wright proposal questioning Mr. Obama’s character, which was drafted after Mr. Ricketts held two meetings with the strategists behind it, a top aide said that it reflected “an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects” and that his role this year would “be focused entirely on questions of fiscal policy, not attacks that seek to divide us socially or culturally.”

Yet the film Mr. Ricketts is helping to finance, called “2016: Obama’s America,” is built on the premise that “Obama has a dream, a dream from his father, that the sins of colonialism be set right and America be downsized,” according to a trailer.

Mr. Ricketts’s aides also said that he had helped pay for newspaper and Internet advertisements promoting Mr. D’Souza’s book in late 2010, one of which called it “the book the White House doesn’t want you to read,” and warned, “The real Barack Obama is even worse than you think.”

Some of Mr. D’Souza’s theories have been widely criticized by prominent conservative and Republican Party leaders. The columnist George F. Will urged Republicans to “recoil” from such views, and wrote last year: “To the notion that Obama has a Kenyan, anticolonial worldview, the sensible response is: If only.”

A review of “The Roots of Obama’s Rage” in The Weekly Standard criticized it for “misstatements of fact, leaps in logic, and pointlessly elaborate argumentation.”

A spokesman for Mr. Ricketts said that he had supported the book and the movie only because of his friendship with Mr. D’Souza, whom he has known for several years. The two men became acquainted through the American Enterprise Institute, a spokesman said, when Mr. D’Souza, now president of the King’s College in New York, was a scholar there and Mr. Ricketts was on its board of trustees.

In response to questions about Mr. D’Souza, Mr. Ricketts said in a statement that he had long been a “proud supporter of his scholarship” and shared his fiscal conservatism, and that he was deeply inspired by his personal story. “As an immigrant from India who built a life for himself in the United States, becoming a respected scholar, a best-selling author, and the president of the King’s College in New York, he embodies to me what American opportunity is all about,” he said.

He also said Mr. D’Souza and he had spent hours together “exploring ideas for my Opportunity Education foundation,” which provides textbooks, televisions, curriculums and advice to schools in developing nations including Ghana, India and what its Web site calls “Palestine.”

Mr. D’Souza did not return calls seeking comment about the film, which he describes on his Web site as “one of my biggest projects ever.” It is produced by Gerald R. Molen, the producer of the Academy Award-winning “Schindler’s List.”

The Web site promoting the film says it is “opening in theaters this June” and warns, “Love him, hate him, you don’t know him.”