Skimble, I live in [Chicago zip code] and today received the same letter as you did back in January of 2003. Initially I pitched it, but a few minutes ago I dug it back out of the shredding pile, did some googling and found your blog. (I'm sure you get plenty of crack-pot email, to illustrate the validity of my claim; the only piece of my letter that is different from yours is that the month is hand written in the top right but the year is not.) The "men in black" have not visited as of yet, and the name of my "Assigned Field Agent" is female so I doubt it will be your tall man. It is interesting that this study is still ongoing, I guess it takes a bit of time to "interview" 200,000 people. I did find some governmental information that seems to support your conclusion. If you're still curious just google, "0930-0110" omb, and a bunch of info will be at your fingers. I want to give a preemptive Thank You for preventing me from even opening the door for these g-men/women.
Best regards, [signed]
You're welcome, Anonymous, that's why we bother with the damn blog — because the press won't tell you what you need to know.
The fact that this all happened back in 2003, long before we learned about the NSA spying and secret renditions and all the rest of the neo-Soviet nonsense that characterizes American life nowadays, only proves the point once again: J. Edgar Hoover is alive and well and living in Washington DC.
Kids, if you don't know who Hoover is, go ahead and google the bastard (special Martin Luther King Day search terms).
A case like this highlights a point seen in a number of white collar crime prosecutions when a high-level, and well-paid, executive or professional engages in misconduct that involves seemingly trivial amounts. Is it worth it? Wal-Mart's 2004 proxy statement (here) discloses that for 2004 Coughlin earned $983,894 in salary, an incentive payment of $2.8 million, a restricted stock award of $2 million, and other compensation (i.e., perks not including the ones he stole) of $252,082, which in addition to his ownership of 948,832 shares, which are worth over $40 million. The annual dividends on his stock holdings alone probably exceed the amount of the fraud he will admit, so in the end it's not the money. Instead, I think it is a sense of entitlement, and a belief that one is not doing anything wrong because the person is not a criminal like those people who rob a 7-11.
It's true. A half-million dollars is petty cash for a jamoke like Coughlin, but because he didn't actually hold up a liquor store and get caught on the surveillance camera, he somehow feels he's better than the common criminal.
This, in a nutshell, is what's wrong with the American zeitgeist in the power elites today — the sense of entitlement felt by the Skillings, Lays, Abramoffs, Lesars, and all the other white collar crooks whose hubris will someday become their ticket to infamy.
Is it even necessary to point out that Thomas Coughlin was a Bush contributor? Not including Wal-Mart's Republican PAC, of course.
New details have emerged of how the growing number of prisoners on hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay are being tied down and force-fed through tubes pushed down their nasal passages into their stomachs to keep them alive.
Where is Pat Robertson's reflex condemnation of this unholy behavior?
The very existence of the official insanity at Guantánamo Bay is further proof that Jesus Christ is not God — because if he were, he would strike down the entire Bush dynasty-administration for crimes against his Creation.
