Let’s Go Shopping

Oops. Besides having no money, it is beginning to look like there is no place, except Wal-Mart, to shop any more.

bluegal at C&L has the rundown:

The Centre for Research on Globalization (Canada) has some very un-pretty numbers.  I’ll be watching for another announcement from the President that we’d all better go shopping.  But where, Mr. President?

Ann Taylor closing 117 stores nationwide.

Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug, Catherines closing 150 stores nationwide

Talbots will close all 78 of its kids and men’s stores plus another 22 underperforming stores.

Gap Inc. closing 85 stores

Foot Locker to close 140 stores

Wickes Furniture is going out of business and closing all of its stores. The 37-year-old retailer that targets middle-income customers, filed for bankruptcy protection last month.

Levitz - the furniture retailer, announced it was going out of business and closing all 76 of its stores in December. The retailer dates back to 1910.

Home Depot store closings 15 of them amid a slumping US economy and housing market. The move will affect 1,300 employees. It is the first time the world’s largest home improvement store chain has ever closed a flagship store.

Movie Gallery – video rental company plans to close 400 of 3,500 Movie Gallery and Hollywood Video stores in addition to the 520 locations the video rental chain closed last fall as part of bankruptcy.

Sprint Nextel – 125 retail locations to close with 4,000 employees following 5,000 layoffs last year.

Wilsons the Leather Experts – closing 158 stores

Bombay Company: to close all 384 U.S.-based Bombay Company stores.

KB Toys closing 356 stores around the United States as part of its bankruptcy reorganization.

CompUSA (CLOSED).

Free Darfur, Free Tibet, Free Iraq… Free EVERYONE!

I am boycotting the olympics…

I am mailing letters and making calls to my reprsentatives…

I am voting this year.

I am doing something, and I know you are too!!!

Ivin’s continued— Twisted Tale for sure!

Spent a few hours researching this, this AM. It is more twisted than I realized. But it will give you all a bigger picture. Hang on for the ride!!!!!!!!!!!!—-

In 2001 there was on factory that made the vaccine, called Bioport.The vaccine was approved the FDA, but the (new) machinery to make it was not. In come the lobbyists…
Bioport supplied over 500,000 vaccines to the troops during the Gulf War, there were a small fraction of them that suffered side effects. One death is attributed to the vaccine, and that case is still in the courts.
Biocorp started as a small lab started by the state of Michigan, the lab was then sold to bioport in 1998. This vaccine was a series of 6 shots over an 18 month period, with an annual booster after that.

BioPort was founded in 1998 by Ibrahim El-Hibri, a Lebanese financier. Along with Fuad, his U.S.-educated son, El-Hibri formed BioPort by purchasing vaccine-making facilities of the state of Michigan for $24.75 million. The company’s only product was the anthrax vaccine, called BioThrax, which it sold chiefly to the U.S. military. In mid-2004, the company reorganized as Emergent BioSolutions.
Bruce Ivins worked at the ARMY”S biological warfare lab for 35 years, his job was to develop vaccines and cures for anthrax. The Army let a known homicidal maniac, a person who his therapist all of a sudden claims he is a “revenge” killer work at in a high security lab like that for 35 YEARS?? He worked at the lab until July 10 2008.

The FBI’s suggests Ivins motive for the anthrax mailing is that he wanted human test subjects to test his vaccine on.
Immediately after the anthrax mailings, Ivins allegedly started testing anthrax spores in unauthorized areas outside the main lab. They caught him doing this, but not removing the anthrax from the lab completely? Those actions did not make him suspicious to the FBI then? No it was Hatfill they went after. Makes no sense to

Ivins developed a vaccine that would work on more than 1 type of anthrax. That made it better than the other vaccine, that would only work with 1 type of anthrax. He was Listed as co-inventor of the vaccine and was going to make a good chunk of change when it was He also developed an additive to exsisting vaccines that that would boost their capabilities against bio-terrorism. That most likely would have earned him millions.

The contract to produce these to vaccines were awarded to VaxGen. Who later lost the contract because they could not fill the governments order on time. VaxGen’s defense against those charges were the government was slow to pay and they would not specify how many vaccines were needed or when. They also had to toss out a large amount of the vaccine because of contamination. Most companies would have just delivered it anyhow. Vaxgen sold the vaccine to Bioport. The termination of the contract meant no one got paid.This is also alluded to as a motive for Ivins. I don’t see that either, as the anthrax mailings were several years BEFORE the contract was issued orcancelled. After that Ivins along with two other colleagues worked with BioPort to get the vaccines made. For their efforts they received the Decoration of Exceptional Civilian Service, the highest honor given to nonmilitary employees of the Defense Department. Not bad for a “homicidal maniac” a “sociopath” a “revenge killer”.After losing the contract Vaxgen almost goes broke.Its chief competitor for the contract, buys the vaccine, Bioport,now named Emergent. Who now has labs in Maryland instaed of Michigan,

It cost VaxGen 175 million, to get the vaccine ready, they sold it for 2 million, a percentage of sales. Bioport/Emergent have lobbied heavily in DC, even the WH to get this contract. They now have it at the expense of VioGen. When VaxGen received the contract, Emergent sent no fewer than 50 lobbyists to Dc, some former aides to Cheney. Even though top government scientist supported VaxGen to continue working on the vaccine, lawmakers abruptly ended their contract and turned it over to Emergent.
During this time Vaxgen spent $720,000 on lobbyists
Emergent $1.41 mill, they threatened to stop making the only vaccine currently available, unless they got the contract to make the new vaccine. The government never paid VaxGen for any work done on the vaccine after Emergents lobbyists went to Washington.Placing VaxGen in a dire financial situation.

So only one person owns all the companies that manufacturres the Anthrax vaccine. He went through hoops to get it, even becoming a citizen of the USA. In order to make the vaccine, you need to have the Anthrax, they did. habri also sold anthrax to the Saudi government, after the Us government refused. He is an associate of the Bin Laden family and the Bush family.
Who would profit from the mailing of anthrax? Since the mailing the government has significantly increased it stockpiles of the vaccine. before the mailing the vaccine was sold at about 4.50 a dose. Afterwards it was sold for about $10.00 a dose. When the threat of a new and better vaccine was about to hit the market, that company was sabotaged and had its contract dropped abruptly.
Backdrop this against the patriot act that demolished civil liberties was being debated on in congress and in the senate. It was not looking good for passage unless some major changes were made. Then anthrax hit the hill and it passed as is.

 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3067486/

 http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gH1f … QD929R1O80

 http://www.latimes.com/news/printeditio … 8967.story

 The UK’s Health Protection Agency manufactures another anthrax vaccine at its facilities in Porton Down.
 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3652385.stm

 Lawsuits associated with the claims Vaxgen made about the vaccine:

 http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/ca … fraud.html

 http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jan/06 … fi-vaxgen6

 http://www.fiercebiotech.com/story/stru … 2008-05-05

 http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld … full.story

                     Bin Laden Profits from US Anthrax Vaccine Manufacture?

                                                      By Ian Gurney.

                                 Author of “The Cassandra Prophecy.”

   www.caspro.com

It’s a story straight off the pages of a John Le Carre or Robet Ludlum thriller. A mysterious Lebanese millionaire, who already owns telecoms companies in Venezuela and El Salvador, uses his influence to take over the sole manufacture, production and distribution of one of Americas most sought after defence products. Meanwhile, the world’s most wanted terrorist appears to be profiting from his family’s investment in the self same manufacturing process, assisted by no less a personage than the father of the President of the United States. Sounds fanciful?
Well, on December 1st. last year the Pakistan News Service announced that documents belonging to a United States company called BioPort Corporation were found in the possession of the al-Qaeda in Kabul, Afghanistan. Seven weeks later, on January 16th, the United States Food and Drug Administration, which had, since 1999 prohibited BioPort from manufacture and production at its Michigan laboratories, announced that it had given its conditional approval for BioPort to begin the manufacture, production and shipping of its product to the US military. On February 1st. the US government gave BioPort Corp a green light on to resume production that had been shut down by the Food and Drug Administration for three years.

So, exactly what is BioPort, what do they produce and who runs the company? Well, BioPort, based in North Lansing, Michigan, is the only corporation in the United States with a license to make the Anthrax vaccine. Except that BioPort doesn’t actually make the vaccine, BioPort simply bought the laboratory that does make the vaccine, Michigan Biologic Products Institute, from the State of Michigan in 1998.

Less than a month after it took over the business, BioPort acquired Michigan Biologic Products Institute’s sole and exclusive customer for the Anthrax vaccine, the US Department of Defence, and an exclusive $29 million contract with the Department of Defence to “manufacture, test, bottle and store the anthrax vaccine.” The Pentagon agreed to pay BioPort $4.70 per shot and each member of the armed forces, that’s 2.4 million soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, is supposed to get six shots over an 18-month period. That’s a huge, guaranteed market for BioPort’s product. Indeed, according to former Central Intelligence Agency military analyst Patrick Eddington, the estimated $60 million worth of anthrax vaccine BioPort is expected to produce for the Defence Department over the next five years could just be the beginning.

“The Pentagon has a $322 million, 10-year programme to develop at least three, and perhaps as many as a dozen additional biological warfare vaccines, making BioPort a huge profit.” Eddington told ABCNews. However, since acquiring Michigan Biologic Products Institute, BioPort has only delivered a small amount of the anthrax vaccine to the US Defence Department. In fact, just 4% of the vaccine contracted for has so far been delivered because Food and Drug Administration audits uncovered suspicious record keeping as well as security and contamination problems at BioPort’s laboratories, causing the FDA to ban delivery of the product until a few days ago.

So now lets look at who owns and runs BioPort Corporation. Let’s begin with Admiral William J. Crowe Jr. former Head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former US ambassador to Great Britain. It seems that back when President George H. W. Bush was setting up Osama Bin Laden as a “freedom fighter” (Afghanistan’s “freedom fighters” were credited with shooting down more than 270 Soviet aircraft using American made Stinger missiles in the 1980’s) the good Admiral and his associates on the Joint Chiefs of Staff were, according to some reports, selling American made weapons-grade Anthrax to Saddam Hussein in the hopes that he would use it against Iran. These days Admiral Crowe sits on the Board of Directors and owns 13% of BioPort Corp.

According to ABC News reporter Howard L. Rosenberg: “BioPort Corp. was created solely to take over the assets of Michigan Biologic Products Institute by Admiral Crowe, his partners in a company called Intervac L.L.C. and a group of former managers of the Michigan-based institute.”

It is Intervac that has the most interesting history here. According to Crowe’s associate and spokesman, Jay Coupe, Crowe owns 22.5 percent of Intervac shares, although he hasn’t “invested a penny” in the venture. Another 30 percent of Intervac shares are owned by Nancy El-Hibri, a mother and homemaker in suburban Maryland and the rest of the company is in the hands of “I&F Holdings,” a company directed by Nancy El-Hibri’s father-in-law, Ibrahim El-Hibri, a Venezuelan citizen, and her husband, Fuad El-Hibri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent. According to Coupe, when Crowe returned from England in 1997, he was approached by Fuad El-Hibri’s father, Ibrahim El-Hibri. The elder El-Hibri, whom the admiral had met a decade before, invited Crowe to serve on the board of Intervac.

Fuad El-Hibri appears to be the real day-to-day director of Intervac and is listed by Dun & Bradstreet as the “chief executive” of Bioport. The reclusive Ibrahim El Hibri, who grants no interviews, has homes in Caracas, Maryland, Paris and Beirut, which he visits all year around, being careful of avoiding tax residence in any of them. Where he got his millions is a mystery. He invested in Porton International, a British pharmaceutical firm where his son worked, in the early 90’s and according to a US Congressional review, Porton International sold anthrax vaccines to the Saudi Arabian Government. In Venezuela, Ibrahim El Hibri runs the country’s third largest cell phone operator Digitel, despite having sold control of the company to Telecom Italia Mobile. Meanwhile in El Salvador, his son Fuad El Hibri, finds the time to run Digicel, a cellular telephone concession which the family bought two years ago.

After the attacks of September 11th. President Bush placed BioPort’s North Lansing laboratory under protection, invoking the national interest. Interestingly enough, the Italian magazine Il Manifesto reported, in its October issue, that this happened at the same time that the FBI also placed the El Hibri’s at the top of their list of suspects for sending anthrax spores through the mail system.

So, it seems that Admiral Crowe, the El-Hibris and their fellow investors in BioPort are set to make a nice profit from the Anthrax scare. And who are those fellow investors? Reports in the US media, denied by BioPort, have suggested that one major investor in the company is the Carlyle Group, one of America’s most successful investment companies, well known for generating “extraordinary returns” for its customers through investments in the US defence industry. Because the Carlyle Group remains privately held, it is not required to disclose details of its investments or business activities, it has, however, an impressive array of board members. Former President George Bush Sr. and former UK Prime Minister John Major are directors of The Carlyle Group, as are other top US Republicans including former Secretary of State James A. Baker, and former Defence Secretary and deputy CIA Director Frank Carlucci.

Now comes the interesting part of this story. According to reports in the US media, until October last year a major investor with The Carlyle Group was (and you had better sit down before you read this) the bin Laden family! For many years The Carlyle Group has maintained financial ties with the family of Osama bin Laden, but those links were supposedly severed after September 11th. when it was agreed that the relationship was becoming a tad embarrassing for all concerned.

The story behind the Carlyle Group and the links between George Bush Sr. and the bin Ladens is fascinating to say the least.

In the 1970’s, Salem Bin Laden, the eldest of Osama Bin Laden’s 55 brothers and sisters, invested heavily in George H. W. Bush’s first business venture, Arbusto Energy. Salem became Bush’s business partner through James Bath, a close friend of the future American president. Salem appointed Bath as his representative in Houston, Texas. It was Bath who invested $50,000 in Bush’s company Arbusto and also bought Houston Gulf Airport on behalf of Osama’s elder brother. Since then business links between Bush Sr. and the Bin Laden family have flourished, particularly since Bush Sr. joined the Carlyle Group. On September 27th. last year The Wall Street Journal reported that:

“George H.W. Bush, the father of President Bush, works for the bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, an international investment consulting firm. The senior Bush has met with the bin Laden family at least twice.

Osama bin Laden has supposedly been “disowned” by his family, which runs the Saudi Bin Laden Group, a multi-billion dollar construction business in Saudi Arabia. However, Osama’s sister-in-law, in a recent interview with America’s ABC News, said that she believed that members of her family still supported Osama bin Laden.

If the rumours are correct about the Carlyle Group’s investment in BioPort, then it’s quite possible the bin Laden family is an investor in the only company able to make Anthrax vaccine in the United States, and because their beloved Osama might have some of the stuff, the family will make a fortune. In fact, the shortage of vaccine created by the now withdrawn FDA ban will make all those involved in BioPort extremely wealthy, as market forces drive the price of the vaccine up. A very cosy arrangement. The Bushes, El Hibri’s and bin Ladens (and the occasional complicit Admiral) could all be making money off the fear and death of Americans. Is it any wonder, then, that documents relating to BioPort were found in the possession of bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network in Kabul?

 http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/binladenprofits.html?q=binladenprofits.html

There is also more connections to Habri, like Hamilton (of the Lee, Hamilton, baker report) and their banking connections. But I have spent enough time on just these connections.

Ibrahim El-Hibri

Fuad El-Hibri is Chairman and CEO of the Bioport Corporation and son of Ibrahim El-Hibri. According to the corporation’s web site, El-Hibri “served as a director and a member of the senior management team of Speywood Holdings Ltd., in the United Kingdom. Mr. El-Hibri has over 10 years of experience in the bio-pharmaceutical industry.”[1]

In his June 30, 1999, testimony before “The Subcommittee on National Security, Veterans Affairs, and International Relations of the House Committee on Government Reform,” El-Hibri stated that:[2]

“Three companies currently hold voting equity in BioPort: Intervac LLC and Intervac Management LLC, which are both Maryland limited liability companies, and Michigan Biologic Products, Inc., a Michigan corporation. Intervac LLC is the controlling shareholder. Intervac LLC is owned by Admiral William J. Crowe, Jr., my wife Nancy and me, and I and F Holdings N.V., a Netherlands Antilles investment company owned by my father Ibrahim El-Hibri. As mentioned earlier, I and F Holdings is an investment company in biotech operations, which previously had invested in the management buy-out of Porton Products Ltd. Admiral Crowe and I are the controlling members of Intervac LLC.”
Suber says that, “While Fuad El-Hibri was [sic] needed no financing to take over the State of Michigan biologic lab, he did need a front man to reassure the military with respect to their Anthrax contract. He already had the perfect front man in former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. William J. Crowe Jr. Adm. Crowe had a long history of involvement with the El-Hibri family. Crowe owns 22.5 percent of Intervac shares, although he hasn’t invested a penny in the venture.”

 http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?ti … d_El-Hibri

 this is scary folks….

El-Hibri, owns Emergent, which bought biocorp. He also owns Porton the UK biodefense firm. also in this witch’s brew… VNeogen Corp., “a Lansing (Michigan) -based food safety research and development company,”. Interestingly, Neogen has not been referenced subsequently in connection with BioPort.
In short, the precise ownership of BioPort is unclear.

 http://www.forensic-intelligence.org/Crowe.PDF

Hibri went though hoops to make sure he was owner of the few companies that make bio defense vaccines. Mostly anthrax.

B’Man’s Patriot Watch: Ron Suskind

B’Man: From Common Dreams, an article provided by MSNBC on Ron’s new book and a video of the interview he conducted with Meredith Vieira on the Today Show this morning.

WASHINGTON – President Bush committed an impeachable offense by ordering the CIA to to manufacture a false pretense for the Iraq war in the form of a backdated, handwritten document linking Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, an explosive new book claims.

The charge is made in “The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism” by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind, released today.

Suskind says he spoke on the record with U.S. intelligence officials who stated that Bush was informed unequivocally in January 2003 that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. Nonetheless, his book relates, Bush decided to invade Iraq three months later – with the forged letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam bolstering the U.S. rationale to go into war.

“It was a dark day for the CIA,” Suskind told TODAY co-host Meredith Vieira on Tuesday. “It was the kind of thing where [the CIA] said, ‘Look, this is not our charge. We’re not here to carry forth a political mandate – which is clearly what this was – to solve a political problem in America.’ And it was a cause of great grievance inside of the agency.”

The author writes that Bush’s action is “one of the greatest lies in modern American political history” and suggests it is a crime of greater impact than Watergate. But the White House is denying the allegations, calling the book “absurd” and charging that Suskind practices “gutter journalism.”

Former CIA director George Tenet also released a statement in which he ridicules the credibility of Suskind’s sources and calls the White House’s supposed directive to forge the document as “a complete fabrication.”

But Suskind stands by his work. “It’s not off the record,” he says. “It’s on the record. It’s in the book and people can read it for themselves.”

Prelude to war
Suskind reports that the head of Iraqi intelligence, Tahir Jalil Habbush, met secretly with British intelligence in Jordan in the early days of 2003. In weekly meetings with Michael Shipster, the British director of Iraqi operations, Habbush conveyed that Iraq had no active nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programs and no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

When Tenet was informed of the findings in early February, he said, “They’re not going to like this downtown,” Suskind wrote, meaning the White House. Suskind says that Bush’s reaction to the report was: “Why don’t they ask him to give us something we can use to help make our case?”

Suskind quotes Rob Richer, the CIA’s Near East division head, as saying that the White House simply ignored the Habbush report and informed British intelligence that they no longer wanted Habbush as an informant.

“Bush wanted to go to war in Iraq from the very first days he was in office. Nothing was going to stop that,” Richer is quoted in the book.

Suskind also writes that Habbush was “resettled” in Jordan with help from the CIA and was paid $5 million in hush money.

Vieira questioned Suskind’s contentions, pointing out that a number of intelligence figures eventually wrote Habbush off as unreliable.

“No, that’s not exactly the way it worked,” Suskind countered. “In the book, you’ll see people who are involved and talking about the debate, and it was quite a fierce debate at the highest levels of the government: ‘Is Habbush reliable? What’s he saying? How can we check it?’

“And a lot of people, at the end of the day, said it was hard for him to prove the negative, that what he said was no weapons were actually not there. That’s hard to do.”

The letter
On page 371 of “The Way of the World,” Suskind describes the White House’s concoction of a forged letter purportedly from the hand of Habbush to Saddam Hussein to justify the United States’ decision to go to war.

Suskind writes: “The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001. It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operation link between Saddam and al-Qaeda, something the Vice President’s office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade.”

He continues: “A handwritten letter, with Habbush’s name on it, would be fashioned by CIA and then hand-carried by a CIA agent to Baghdad for dissemination.”

CIA officers Richer and John Maguire, who oversaw the Iraq Operations Group, are both on the record in Suskind’s book confirming the existence of the fake Habbush letter.

When asked by Vieira for further proof of the letter, Suskind said: “Well, the CIA folks involved in the book and others talk about George Tenet coming back from the White House with the assignment on White House stationery, and turning to the CIA operatives, who are professionals, and saying, ‘You may not like this, but here is our next mission.’

“And they carried it through step by step, all the way to the finish.”

The London Sunday Telegraph first published a story about the letter in December 2003, on the same day that Saddam Hussein was captured in Iraq. Reported as genuine, the letter made an immediate impact upon the media in terms of justifying the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Suskind relates how NBC reported the letter, with journalist Con Coughlin telling Tom Brokaw that the letter “is really concrete proof that al-Qaeda was working with Saddam.”

Suskind also quotes Alan Foley, head of WMD analysis for the CIA, as saying, “It is, in my opinion, true that the administration, for whatever reason, was determined to have a showdown with Iraq that predated this whole WMD stuff.”

In support of that theory, Foley says that Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, passed along information that Iraq had no WMD to a Lebanese journalist who served as an intermediary on behalf of the CIA in 2002.

That intelligence, Suskind writes, was dismissed as “disinformation.”

Suskind’s credentials

So why, Vieira asked, are Suskind’s sources finally speaking out now, more than five years after the war began?

“Well, you know, a lot of them have been walking around with this lump in their chest for a couple of years – five years now,” Suskind replied. “And because they’re essentially free – they’re not the original source – they said, ‘Look, why hide now? Let’s trust the truth.’ ”

Suskind said it took about seven months to get his storied “nailed.” “I’d done this sort of thing for a while, and the way it worked was there were off-the-record sources who played out the story, and then I went to people actually involved,” he told Vieira.

“They were freed up because they’re not the original source, if you will … to sort of talk about the context, what they felt, what they did [and] the people actually involved. And of course they’re all, through the book, on the record talking about how it all worked.”

Suskind, who reported for The Wall Street Journal from 1993 to 2000, won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1995 for stories of inner-city honors students in Washington, D.C. His reports spawned book-club favorite “A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League” in 1998.

Two stories Suskind wrote for Esquire in 2002 gave readers an inside account of the Bush White House. The second, which ran in the December 2002 issue, raised eyebrows as John DiIulio, the former head of the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives, described a presidency driven by politics over policy – “the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”

“The Price of Loyalty,” Suskind’s 2004 book on former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill, said that the U.S. occupation of Iraq and subsequent overthrow of Saddam Hussein were planned in January 2001 – nine months before the Sept. 11 attacks.

His most recent book, 2006’s “The One Percent Doctrine,” also described the Bush administration’s willingness to let its post-Sept. 11 foreign policy be driven by suspicion over proof of weapons of mass destruction. It also claimed al-Qaeda leaders were plotting to attack the New York City subway system in 2003.

In “The Way of the World,” Suskind describes President Bush as “a guy who needs to make things personal” and someone who “doesn’t think in large strategic terms.” He also says the president has “always been a bit of a bully.”

HarperCollins Publishers is printing 500,000 copies of the book and HCP executive editor Tim Duggan was quoted in Monday’s Wall Street Journal as saying Suskind “wrote it as fast as possible and we’re publishing it as fast as possible because there is news in the book and we don’t want to sit on it.”\

© 2008 MSNBC Interactive

Drug Dealer Cindy McCain

B’Man: From SNAFU-ed:

Pro-Marijuana Group Launches “Drug Dealer Cindy” (McCain) Campaign

SaferChoice.org, which says that

Marijuana is safer than alcohol. It’s time we treat it that way.

has launched the “Drug Dealer Cindy” campaign, which targets John McCain’s wife Cindy’s position as chair of her father’s Hensley & Co. (one of the United State’s largest Anheuser-Busch beer distributors). The site, and SaferChoice.org, argue that alcohol is more toxic, addictive and prone to inspire violence than marijuana, and thus they say:

We are not attacking Cindy McCain or her business as an alcohol distributor. Rather, we are highlighting the hypocrisy of laws that allow her to sell alcohol (a drug) while criminalizing those who prefer to use marijuana (a less harmful drug).

There’s even a reward posted, but the amount, sad to say, is only $420.

Watch a video the group posted to YouTube.

B’Man: There simply is no disputing the fact that alcohol is a far more dangerous drup than marijuana is. Although it is possible to get addicted to weed, one has to work extremely hard at it. Even if one does become addicted, however, the withdrawals are nothing compared to alcohol, or god forbid, crack, coke or heroin (etc).

People can argue if marijuana may intoxicate you, but compared to the effects of alcohol, it is uncomparable. The effects are totally different.

Yet, alcohol is accepted… even embraced by most everyone except the most religious (and many of the religious just sneak it).

I have never understood the hypocrisy and can only assume that these people don’t know any better. Simply fall for the line of shit they are given by the government, as usual.

McCain Girl and The Enchanted Republican Forest

“Now get away from my house, you faggots.”

Mississippi’s Pride and Joy: Governor Haley Barbour

Nice post by Jeff at CottonMouth in which he points out the hypocrisy in the governor’s financial system. Mississippians can be swayed by the most vile and corrupt criminals. Like little kids to a hand full of candy.

No transparency in the Haley Barbour administration

Haley Barbour wants to defy our state legislature and withhold financial documents related to his blind trust. A new that has passed but not taken effect requires transparency on such documents. Haley Barbour is the only political figure in Mississippi who has a blind trust. A blind trust allows the Governor to hold on to his financial assets, while relinquishing direct access.

From the Clarion Ledger:

“I don’t know of any legal authority to (deny public access), but the commission asked the attorneys to come back and look for legal authority to support their position, and we’ll consider it,” Tom Hood, the commission’s executive director, said after the meeting.

A lawyer for Griffin Norquist, a banker in Yazoo City who manages Barbour’s trust, also attended the meeting.

Barbour, a Republican and former Washington lobbyist whose client list included tobacco companies, created a blind trust when he took office in 2004. The tools are used mostly by politicians at the federal level and are supposed to prevent conflicts of interest by shielding them from their assets.

When will Mississippians realize the fact that we have a crook for a governor who operates under the guidance of the Bush-Cheney political playbook on a state level? Just like Cheney refusing to sell his financial interests before taking power, Barbour has insisted on keeping his ability to profit from his term in office. We have a lobbyist who serves as a part-time governor. When the numbers are released, Mississippians will see the truth. W

Trusting Engineers– Example of engineering & capitolism

My opinion is “This better be for more than this!”– it’s cool BUT what a waste!