Starbucks coupon and Police warnings

In an article from February of 2006, Police in Lawrence, Kansas were said to have issued a warning about fake coupons:

In general, the fake coupons offer large discounts or a free item with no required purchase.

Hmmm, like the Starbucks coupon? In this case, again, the retailers have a hard time knowing whether the coupons are legitimately created by a manufacturer.

Employees at Checkers called police this week after they received an e-mail from one of their saleswomen warning of the scam. They checked their records and found that three of the coupons had been recently accepted, Smith said — two of them by the same woman who came to the store twice and each time used a coupon offering $5 off a bottle of Advil.

So and Advil coupon is very different than a Checker’s coupon being redeemed at Checkers, from a security perspective, but it nonetheless highlights the changing landscape for retailers.

Virgin Alternative Energy

Richard Branson is diving into the Ethanol market by promising $400 million in investments for alternative energy, according to Bloomberg. Let’s hope he also supports biodiesel and hybrid/electric technology for vehicles, but so far it looks like just more of the same Ethanol hype:

Cilion, which was formed in 2006, builds and runs factories producing ethanol, an alcohol derived from plants. The company plans to build as many as seven plants with capacity to produce as much as 440 million gallons a day of ethanol by 2009. The first three units will be built in California, Branson said.

Branson plans to expand the investment program, which will also target other forms of alternative energy, into the U.K., Europe and other parts of the world, he said.

Olbermann on the hole in Bush’s logic

Keith Obermann referenced an interesting episode of the Twilight Zone, in his harsh critique of President Bush:

In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm. Suddenly his car — and only his car — starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man’s lights go on. As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced. An “alien” is shot — but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help. The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there’s no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, “they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it’s themselves.”

I thought this section was also worth noting:

Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.

The President — and those around him — did that.

They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them, “bi-partisanship” meant that their party would rule and the rest would have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectually confused, as appeasers, as those who, in the Vice President’s words yesterday, “validate the strategy of the terrorists.”

They promised protection, and then showed that to them “protection” meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken, a despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hated al-Qaida as much as we did.

The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on the false premise that it had ‘something to do’ with 9/11 is “lying by implication.”

The impolite phrase is “impeachable offense.”