Bushies Screw Kansas Again

First it was the Air Force Tanker, now it looks like the Bush administration, aided and abetted by Roberts and Tiahrt, are rigging a government contract to go to their political allies. This time it's the contract for a biodefence lab. Manhattan (Ks.) is still in the running, but the fix may be in.

The Washington Post reports

The Homeland Security Department swept aside evaluations of government experts and named Mississippi - home to powerful U.S. lawmakers with sway over the agency - as a top location for a new $451 million national laboratory to study some of the world's most virulent biological threats, according to internal documents obtained by the Associated Press.

And more

The states where locations were eliminated despite earning scores higher than Mississippi include Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, Texas, Wisconsin and California, where a site in Tracy near the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had vied for the lab.

Government experts originally expressed concern that the proposed site in Flora, Miss., was far from existing biodefense research programs and lacked ready access to workers already familiar with highly contagious animal and human diseases, such as foot-and-mouth virus, that could devastate the U.S. livestock industry. They assigned the site a score that ranked it 14th among 17 candidate sites in the United States.