Click here for the complete "Con Games with Michael Conniff" for Wednesday March 26, 2008.
Mike McGarry, co-founder of the Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform (CAIR) returns to "Con Games" to debunk Bill Gates and his high-tech visas. Then the Con Man turns his attention to the surge of the Mahdi Army in Basra, Iraq.
Add comment March 26th, 2008
As if the third-party blindsiding of a Presidential contender isn’t nasty enough, the subsequent drill requires the candidate to personally denounce what that particular person has said as if it were his or her own. Crazy, you say? You said it. The only reason this is happening is because partisan fart-blowers need fresh ammunition the way sharks need chum.
Where does it end?
It won’t in our lifetimes. At some point, Kevin Bacon will say something that embarrasses his chosen candidate, and the candidate will have to repudiate what Kevin Bacon says, return his contribution, and then profusely apologize for what the inseparable actor thinks out loud.
Continue Reading 9 comments March 26th, 2008
When Microsoft's Bill Gates appeared this month before a congressional committee demanding a doubling of the current (65,000) caps on high-tech H-1B visas, you might have thought the committee members were celebrating the Return of the Messiah the way they fell all over themselves singing praise, adoration and love for the mega-billionaire. Of course, those of us who know those very members are beneficiaries of the hundreds-of-millions of dollars spread around the congress by IT industry lobbyists, it make sense the "law makers" would be Gates' slobbering adorers.
To hear Gates tell it, the U.S. has a "shortage crisis" in IT workers and if he had his way, there would be no limit on the number of the coveted H-1B visas.
Continue Reading Add comment March 26th, 2008
The Con Man continues his prescient dissertation on 4,000 dead American soldiers and John McCain, then segues at the end of the show into a discussion of the "King Kong" cover of Vogue featuring LeBron James and Giselle Bundchen.
The complete discussion of the five-year anniversary of the Iraq invasion, followed by a discussion of short films and Aspen Shortsfest by Filmfest executive director Laura Thielen.
Continue Reading 8 comments March 25th, 2008
If you should see this amazing floating pile of plastic in the Pacific Ocean, it’s called “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” It features three million tons of plastic debris floating in an area larger than Texas. An eye-popping 46,000 pieces of plastic float on every square mile of ocean! Humans toss another 2.5 million pieces into our oceans hourly.
Continue Reading 1 comment March 25th, 2008
Last summer I started receiving a CSA (community supported agriculture) box from Paonia. I had never even heard of this before I became involved. You pay the farmers up front for future produce so they have money to grow the food. I paid for ten weeks of locally grown food and received whatever was abundant and in season. I received vegetables I had never eaten, or prepared, and a few I even had to look up their name! Always making the box of produce a little surprise.
Continue Reading 1 comment March 24th, 2008
Sue Gray--AKA reckless G--appears on "Con Games" to promote the Roaring Fork Peace Coalition and her controversial views on Israel and Palestine.
Continue Reading 4 comments March 24th, 2008
There was a time there, oh, along about 1980, when my Dad and I were just bachelors. My mom took off with some rich doctor to Florida, never to be heard of again until 12 years later (another story.) My dad and I were close, very close. We hunted and fished and played football and baseball, drove trucks and tractors and worked cattle, etc., etc. He wasn't even my real Dad. I'd find that fact out about six years later.
Continue Reading 1 comment March 24th, 2008
We had entered the “practice” portion of the “Women’s Health Conference: From Theory To Practice”—and that meant a group of us was walking in the woods to the Rio Grande Trail and thence into Clark’s Market in Aspen with Dr. Bob Vogel, the University of Maryland professor of medicine who doubles as chief of medicine for the Pritikin Longevity Center and Pritikin Research Foundation.
The idea of the conference, sponsored by the forward-thinking Aspen Center for Integral Health (acih.org) was to dig down deep into what goes down in the real world. Thus: the walk, a moveable lecture about what remains for us to feast upon in the healthiest of worlds.
Continue Reading 1 comment March 24th, 2008
Ordinarily, I don’t give a whole lot of credence to a presidential candidate’s religion. I didn’t do so with Mitt Romney, and I was prepared to do the same for everyone else in the race. Then I heard Barack Obama’s preacher, Reverend Dr. Jeremiah Wright, say things that polarize people on the basis of race. For example, Wright once said, referring to the injustice of slavery, “All of America’s wealth today could not adequately compensate for centuries of exploitation and humiliation.” He’s right. How do you analyze human indignity in monetary terms? Of course you can't. But exactly where is Wright taking this?...
Continue Reading 11 comments March 24th, 2008
