Posted on 12/07/2001 7:39:30 PM PST by GeneD
Edward Allred must be some kind of masochist. In his day job as a physician, he runs the nation's largest privately held chain of abortion clinics. His Family Planning Associates Medical Group generates $70 million in annual revenue and some $5 million in profit, as well as the occasional death threat from antiabortionists. For kicks, he owns the Los Alamitos Race Course in Orange County, Calif., which is part of a lame industry that has been stumbling for years. With a herd of 500, he's the nation's largest breeder and racer of quarter horses, the beefy stepsisters to the sleek Thoroughbreds.
But Allred, 65, knows how to make lemonade out of lemons. "I've been known as a scrapper," Allred smiles from his favorite Friday-night perch at his trackside club, where guests dine on blackened halibut and place bets from tabletop wagering terminals.
Unlike many other suffering horse tracks, Los Alamitos has seen its daily handle, or total betting, increase 3% to 5% a year to $1.3 million, despite the fact that attendance has slipped by 2% annually since 1996. Allred credits that to his decision to simulcast races to other tracks.
Next year his racetrack stands to gain a windfall when TVG, horse racing's equivalent of ESPN, extends its evening broadcast by two hours with the advent of phone wagering in California. Now viewers, anywhere it's legal, including out of state, can call in a bet. Los Alamitos' signal will get pumped into 7.6 million living rooms during West Coast prime time, giving Allred's track as much visibility on the fledgling channel as Kentucky's storied Churchill Downs, and providing some of the only late-night racing on the East Coast.
Allred is nothing if not an iconoclast. As a combat surgeon stationed at a cushy hospital in Saigon during the Vietnam War, he was shipped off to the front near the Cambodian border for daring to live in a house off base. Before that, he skirted expulsion from Seventh-day Adventist Loma Linda University medical school after buying his first racehorse while still in school.
More recently Allred sued one of the abortion rights movement's biggest nonprofit advocates, Planned Parenthood, for wooing the Kaiser Permanente HMO away from his abortion clinics. He lost the battle last year when California legislators intervened in the dispute.
His latest scrape is over getting slot machines into Los Alamitos. In the two years since his other partly owned track, Ruidoso Downs in New Mexico, added 300 slots, the track went from losing about $1 million a year to making a profit. But getting slots into Los Alamitos will mean fighting Indian tribes and Nevada interests to change the state constitution, which limits one-armed bandits to Indian casinos.
Allred is characteristically unfazed: "We're going to get into the fight."
He's not a scumbag. He's a mass murderer.
Life is good, atop a mountain of a million dead babies.
Afterlife, though, may not be so good.
The Republican Party has two main constituencies: the rich, and ordinary old-fashioned Americans (almost all of us Christians).
The first constituency (wealthy individuals and corporations) it takes very seriously. Rich individuals and corporations control the party.
The second constituency is little more than a necessary inconvenience. Without it, of course, Republicans couldn't get elected; so they have to PRETEND to take these people [us] seriously.
But they do little more than throw crumbs from the table to Prolifers-- for instance, We are appeased by symbolic actions and by a minor victory here and there. But even though they control the House and the White House and nearly control the Senate, they can't make any headway on defunding Planned Parenthood. That really ticks me off.
Unless the war keeps going until November 2002, I predict the Republicans will suffer big defeats in Congressional elections. When patriotic fervor cools down, voters will notice that the GOP has spent the last two years doing little more domestically than taking care of their rich friends and contributors. And then, with the liberals and Dems in control of Congress, the diet of crumbs that the prolife people have been subsisting on will be transformed into a diet of absolute starvation.
We're being played for suckers by the GOP.
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