[acid-jazz] bling bling!!! the true hip hop candidate!!!

From: Steve (scatanzaro4_at_cox.net)
Date: 2004-10-10 18:34:10

  • Next message: John Book: "Re: [acid-jazz] bling bling!!! the true hip hop candidate!!!"

    yah yah, you’re tired of george bush and his connections buyin him that
    Harvard mba, the honorable discharge, the baseball team, and the
    presidency. you want the realness, right?
     
    then look to john kerry, the first true hip hop candidate… I mean, he
    did tell mtv that hip hop was his favorite music, remember? (“ya better
    listen to hip hop, ya heard” or words to that effect?)
     
    you’re skeptical? take a lesson, son. john kerry doesn’t just LISTEN to
    hip hop… he LIVES it.
     
    while puffy, snoop dogg, fity cent and the rest had to make their
    millions slinging samples and rhymes, kerry did it in true hip hop
    stylee;
     
    he gives new meaning to the term:: BIG PIMPIN’ ::
     
    from today’s NY Times…
     
    In winter, he goes helicopter skiing while staying at his wife's Idaho
    retreat, a 15th-century farmhouse transported from England and
    reassembled on the banks of the Big Wood River in Sun Valley. In summer,
    he windsurfs and sails off the coast of Nantucket, where she has another
    home. The couple have an 18th-century town house in Boston where the
    kitchen is two stories high. There is a 23-room town house in
    Washington, an 88-acre Pittsburgh area estate, a private Gulfstream jet
    and a personal staff of six, including caretakers and a cook.
    If Mr. Kerry is elected, he and his wife will be the richest couple ever
    to live in the White House, said Kevin Phillips, a political commentator
    and the author of "Wealth and Democracy.''
    Even adjusting for inflation, their net worth far surpasses that of such
    wealthy predecessors as John F. Kennedy and his wife. In an election
    driven in large part by the candidates' personalities, that
    extraordinary wealth and the air of privilege Mr. Kerry seems to carry
    with him have often been a stumbling block, exacerbating the perception
    that he is an aloof man whose elite tastes separate him from the
    concerns of ordinary people.
    Mr. Kerry and his wife are also cursed with the kind of good taste that
    suggests old money. On the walls of their Boston and Washington town
    houses hang a collection of Dutch and Flemish still lifes mostly from
    the 17th century, so precious that the insurance company asks that the
    artwork not be photographed. Visitors comment on the restrained
    stylishness of the couple's homes, at least two of which were decorated
    by Mark Hampton, the New York designer who counted Jacqueline Kennedy
    Onassis, Estée Lauder and Pamela Harriman among his clients.
    After college, Mr. Kerry continued to orbit a world of unusual
    privilege, thanks in part to his first wife, Julia Thorne, who came from
    a very wealthy family with Colonial origins. When the couple divorced in
    1988, Mr. Kerry went through some lean years, relying on his government
    salary as he shuttled back and forth from Washington to Boston, where he
    was busy helping to raise two young daughters. This was the time later
    dubbed his "gypsy period" by his second wife - when he sometimes lacked
    a place to live in one city or another, and had to rely on friends or
    supporters for help. But all that came to a decisive end in May 1995,
    when he married Teresa Heinz.
    About 100 close friends and relatives attended the ceremony, which took
    place during a chilly spring afternoon on the lawn outside her Nantucket
    home. Afterward, the wedding party took over a highly regarded island
    restaurant, the Chanticleer Inn, where every place setting was decorated
    with a tiny bottle of Heinz ketchup. At one point, the bride's son,
    Chris Heinz, teasingly daubed Mr. Kerry on the forehead with ketchup, to
    welcome him into the family and its tomato-based fortune, recalled Mr.
    Sanders, one of the guests. Later, the guests danced to a band called -
    inauspiciously, perhaps - the French Millionaires.
    Mr. Kerry's life changed at that point, and not just because the
    marriage made him happier. The couple bought and renovated a five-story
    18th-century town house on Louisburg Square in Beacon Hill, giving the
    senator a permanent home in his home state at last. He also gained a
    Washington home, Ms. Heinz Kerry's 23-room town house in Georgetown, and
    the two vacation homes in Idaho and Nantucket.

     
     

     
    Seen from the outside, those houses are not especially ostentatious. The
    Sun Valley house, for instance, at the end of a 100-yard driveway about
    a mile north of town, is smaller than many of its neighbors, and
    rendered invisible from the road by landscaping. The Nantucket house is
    set on a small lot, with a screened-in porch, and a green and white
    loveseat swing on the front lawn.
    It is the neighbors who are unusual. In Idaho, the billionaire financier
    George Soros lives next door. Just across the river is Steve Wynn, the
    billionaire Las Vegas casino executive; also nearby are the actor Tom
    Hanks and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California. The Nantucket house
    is on Brant Point, an area so sought after that a vacant lot there sold
    last year for $8 million after the house on it burned down, said Dalton
    Frazier, an island real estate agent.
    Mr. Kerry and his wife also have at least eight cars, including three
    sport utility vehicles at the Idaho house. He also has a Harley-Davidson
    motorcycle.
    Another area where Ms. Heinz Kerry's wealth has left a visible imprint
    is sports. Mr. Kerry had always been an outdoorsman and a superb athlete
    who went skiing, biking and boating whenever he could.
    "Now he carries those on in more places," Cameron Kerry said.
    The senator owns two bicycles made by Serotta, including an Otrott
    model, which usually sells for about $8,000. In summer, he goes
    windsurfing and kite-boarding off the coast of Nantucket. He has had a
    number of boats over the years, but about three years ago he bought a
    more opulent one: a 42-foot Little Harbor powerboat, purchased for about
    $500,000. The boat has sleeping berths for two, and Mr. Kerry mostly
    uses it to cruise along the Massachusetts coast, or to ride with friends
    out to Nantucket.
    It is on the water, Mr. Kerry's friends and relatives all say, that he
    is most at ease. Seven or eight years ago, Mr. Sanders recalled, Mr.
    Kerry invited him to Cape Cod, where the two men got into Mr. Kerry's
    boat to ride out to Nantucket. As the boat reached open water, Mr. Kerry
    took the throttle up to full speed. Flicking on the boat's stereo
    system, he shouted, "Check it out!" and a broad grin lit up his face.
    The music blasting from the speakers was Wagner's "The Ride of the
    Valkyries," the same sequence played by Robert Duvall's character in the
    Vietnam movie "Apocalypse Now."

    Last month, Mr. Kerry visited his old windsurfing pal John Chao, founder
    of American Windsurfer magazine, near the Columbia River Gorge in
    Oregon. The weather was calm, forcing them to cancel their windsurfing
    jaunt, and Mr. Kerry said he would fly back in a few days if the breeze
    picked up. Mr. Chao, sensing that a flight across country just to go
    windsurfing might play into the rich sportsman stereotype, advised him
    against it.
    Mr. Kerry agreed not to fly back, but added that he did not want to
    change his lifestyle for the sake of appearances. Mr. Chao recalled, "He
    said: 'I'm not going to live my life in fear. I'm going to be who I am.'
    ''
     
    u go john kerry! a playa’s gotta play!!!