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Ted Turner may not be the most generous billionaire of them all, but he's certainly the loudest.
The CNN founder, who more often than not lives up to his "Mouth of the South" nickname, a sobriquet normally bestowed upon garrulous pugilists, has urged those who can to "give until it hurts". He told fellow philanthropists at the Clinton Presidential Library in Arkansas on Monday to give all they could but keep some spare change in case things got tough.
"Keep a few hundred million at least, because you never know," Turner told a crowd of about 300 people, his tongue possibly wedged firmly in cheek.
While not championing women's rights or re-popularizing buffalo meat, the sexagenarian businessman has long been a counterweight to what he perceives as staid and supine tendencies in others as well as a professional harrier of the U.S. government. He took the opportunity at the stand to snipe at President Bush and called for more private-sector help in nuclear disarmament.
"I'd rather be here than with a bunch of Nazis planning to kill people or at the Pentagon figuring who they're going to bomb next, Afghanistan or Iraq," Turner said during his talk.
"I go around making friends with everybody through CNN and China and North Korea and Russia and the United States and this administration goes around making enemies with everybody we've worked ... to make friends with," Turner added. "It seems like we're going backwards."
Turner let his mouth run away too far south at one stage. When he said he wished last week's midterm election had been a presidential election, he had to be reminded he was addressing a "nonpartisan gathering."
Turner, who said he was happy to be surrounded by fellow philanthropists, contributed $1 billion to the U.N. in 1997 to launch the United Nations Foundation to further global peace. He also co-chairs the Nuclear Threat Initiative with former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, and counts an environmental protection group, the Turner Foundation, amongst his philanthropic endeavors.