This is an eye-catching post (with video), over at Crooks and Liars: Tiny Town Crushes Blackwater. It seems that our favorite tyrannical government mercenary business attempted to move a mercenary base into a tiny, very conservative Southern California town (near the Mexico border) — and the people crushed them at the polls. Snip:
Blackwater has been working this little town of 509 registered voters (which went for Bush over Kerry by 25.8%) hard. They deployed Brian Bonfiglio, a Vice-President at Blackwater out to San Diego County to regularly show up to town meetings in Potrero. They sent out propaganda mailers and generally tried to ingratiate themselves with residents of the community. In short, Blackwater has invested a great deal of resources into P.R. within Potrero and cares very much what the residents feel about the company. Naturally, Bonfiglio and Blackwater are trying to downplay this huge loss, even trying to claim that they couldn’t give a crap about the town. (…)
The results of this election should send a loud and clear statement to Blackwater and the San Diego County Board of Supervisors (which has final jurisdiction over this proposal): Potrero does not want Blackwater to move into their town. They don’t want to ruin their quality of life. They don’t want to risk their sole source aquifer. They don’t want an increased fire risk in a very fire prone area. They don’t want a massive increase in traffic. They don’t want guns firing from 15 ranges for hours on end. And they don’t want a company who employs a band of mercenaries, who kill innocent civilians to be their neighbors.
Link.