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Almost a year ago, I received a juicy anonymous email tip regarding a piece I wrote about George Merwin aka George Merwyn. As you may recall, Merwin is the Florida Viagra spammer who eluded MicrosoAlmost a year ago, I received a juicy anonymous email tip regarding a piece I wrote about George Merwin (aka George Merwyn). As you may recall, Merwin is the Florida Viagra spammer who eluded Microsoft’s lawyers for years, before getting nailed last year. The tipster informed me that Merwin had branched out from pill spamming and now is into online loan sharking. The source claimed the lucrative business enabled Merwin to purchase “a $400,000 Ferrari, over 20 houses, including precontruction houses, a $150,000 Porsche, a 7 series BMW, a 60 foot boat, a multi million dollar home, a business jet, and the list goes on.” At the time, a Boca Raton paper had just published an article noting that Merwin lived in a $2.5M home at 777 Marine Drive, along with his current wife, whom neighbors identified as Rachel. That house in the tony Blue Inlet subdivision, it turns out, is a key bit of corroboration that Merwin may indeed have moved into Internet credit services. But I never would have connected the dots if it weren’t for Sean E. Brooks. Recently, I blogged that Brooks (aka m3rk) was believed by spammers to have acted as a confidential informant for the U.S. Secret Service. Rumors swirled last month that Brooks snitched on the recently arrested “g00dfellas” spammers Adam Vitale and Todd Moeller. While researching Brooks, I noticed that he once listed his address as 10939 Bal Harbor Drive in Boca Raton. A check of Palm Beach County property records shows that Debora (Brooks) Merwin and George (Anthony) Merwin were co-owners of the five bedroom home at that address until 2003. Lots of possible Peyton Place scenarios seem possible here. (George married Debora, who had a son, Sean, by a previous marriage. George introduced Sean to the world of spam entrepreneurship. George and Debora were later divorced and George married Rachel. Etc.) After mulling over these possibilities, I belatedly got around to checking the property records for the Merwin’s palace at 777 Marine. Turns out the deed actually belongs to a Chantilly, Virginia company called Tres Hombres LLC, which bought the house in January 2005 from a Kathy (Merwin) Devivo. Why would an alleged multimillionaire like Merwin be living in a house owned by someone else — unless perhaps George is one of the hombres? Tres Hombres LLC is run by a Lonnie D. Gaddy III, who is also chief operating officer for a financial services company in Virginia called Universal Debit & Credit (UDCC), with Carlos Gavidia as CEO/President. Tres Hombres and UDCC share the same 3901 Centerview Drive address in Chantilly as several other firms — all apparently connected to Gaddy. The firms include Quick Process, LLC and Prove-It Partners, LLC, which provide “no turndown” credit cards as well as short-term loans, and an apparently defunct merchant fraud protection service. Ding ding ding. I realize there’s usually less than six degrees of separation between any two spammers. That’s especially true when you’re dealing with bulk emailers in Boca Raton, Florida, the spam capital of the USA. But who would have expected such a close connection between a kid rumored to be a confidential informant in a spam case, and an elusive Internet drugstore king turned loan shark?
{ Shortly before Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his followers to desist from attacking Iraqi forces, his militia stormed this TV facility in Basra on Sunday, forcing Iraqi troops to flee ). BAGHDAD - In a possible turning point in the recent upsurge in violence, Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his Shiite militiamen off the streets but called on the government to stop its raids against his followers. The government welcomed the move Sunday, which followed intense negotiations by Shiite officials, including two lawmakers who reportedly traveled to Iran to ask religious authorities there to intervene. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose offensive that began Tuesday in the oil-rich southern city in Basra sparked the crisis, called al-Sadr’s statement “a step in the right direction.” align=”justify”>But fighting continued in the Basra area after the announcement. Seven people also were killed when a mortar struck a residential district in Baghdad’s Karradah district, and witnesses reported clashes in the Shula area in a northern section of the capital. A U.S. air strike Martyred 25 militants after American ground forces came under heavy fire during a combat patrol in predominantly Shiite eastern Baghdad, where the fiercest clashes in the capital have occurred. The nine-point statement by the anti-American cleric, which was broadcast through Shiite mosques in Baghdad and across the south, called for an end to the “armed presence” in Basra and other cities and urged followers “to cooperate with the government to achieve security.” Website Admin.
I have many friends and relatives who are liberals. It is so important not only to heal the Republican Party, but also to reach out to our liberal American friends and try to find what common ground we can. This is my attempt to find our common ground and to have an open and respectful dialogue. If one studies socialism and compares their doctrines to many of the liberal positions, a direct correlation is obvious. But this does not mean that all liberals are socialists. I do not believe that and I know many Democrats who are opposed to socialism. So when I refer to the liberal socialists, I am talking about those leaders in the party who are trying to deliberately tug the country into socialism. Many prominent Mormons have been Democrats. I’m sure our Protestant, Catholic and Jewish readers also have friends and relatives of that political persuasion. So do we want to disenfranchise them and accept a permanent divide? I hear conservative talk show hosts saying we won’t give up until we convince everyone to be conservatives. Until then we will consider the other side to be enemies. I do not agree with that attitude. It is unrealistic. Those who believe in freedom must also uphold the freedoms of liberals. It so often comes down to a matter of the pendulum swinging too far one way or another and this is what we should be careful of. The only real answer is for us to encourage respect and tolerance for people even if we disagree with their positions. Tolerating people does not mean we tolerate their positions that we feel are wrong. There are actually a few areas where I have sympathies to what are considered liberal views now but I consider them age old wisdom, some of what were held by our Founding Fathers. Free Trade is one of these. Instead of making sure we are staying with every single point of our party’s platform, hopefully we can use our own brains and make personal decisions about which issues most closely conform to an inspired Constitution. On issues such as free trade, there are compromises that can be reached that will even the playing field, and also allow free trade that will not hurt American jobs by encouraging through tax breaks and incentives, the flood of companies moving factories off-shore. This does not come under the rubric of a personal value and should not be seen as sacred, so therefore, compromise is possible. Another area where I agree with liberalism is environmentalism. I don’t believe man made global warming is the problem that some scientists and many politicians say it is. I believe the environmental pendulum has swung so far that it makes most conservatives recoil at the extremism of the issue and thus pull back to hard the other way. I also believe that most farmers and ranchers are better environmentalists than anyone in government. Honest dialogue that isn’t reactionary can help bridge some of these gaps. We cannot heal America until we stop looking at our neighbors as enemies. Let’s love liberals, not in a condescending way but with real kindness. The Lord has asked us to love our neighbor as ourself. He didn’t say only the neighbor who is a Christian or a Republican.
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