Boy, that was a long hiatus.

So I'm reading tomorrow's Seattle PI when I come across this interesting article. A college organization apparently got CostCo to deliver them some wine by mail without checking their ids.

Bear with me, this gets interesting. Here's my thought process as I'm flipping through it:

• Ok, that's not good.


• Then again, underage college students willing to wait a week for booze to show up in the mail are a ridiculously penne-ante thing to worry about. I can't imagine why'd they bother, when it's so much easier to just have an older friend buy it for them.


• Who the hell are the college students worried about this? This seems remarkably out of character, to put it mildly.


• CostCo says they require id and adult signature and use special delivery people. It seems unlikely that they would deliver to someone underage, considering the process they set up for this.


• Wait a minute - the name of the college student organization claiming this smells like conservative astroturf. "Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow?" Extremely vague, ludicrously aspirational title? Check.


• Hey, here's their webpage. Will you look at that, they talk like a Four Sisters think tank. Some headlines from their page:
  

  
  "What the world needs now is DDT:
  "Mad Cow is a bovine disease - link to humans is unproven"
  "Greens cause death of millions in the world"
  



• Oh, and they're using this article to attack Christine Gregory, one of the Democratic primary candidates for Governor here in Washington.
  

  "Armed with full bottles and delivery receipts, the students are demanding that state Attorney General Christine Gregoire investigate several online companies selling and delivering alcohol to minors.



• I do a bit more digging and guess what - they’re the college offshoot of CFACT, a libertarian think tank funded by Richard Mellon Scaife.

The penetration of the media by the propaganda organs of the right is starting to scare me.
- posted by Jason @ 2:44 AM