MARIETTA, GA - Today, the Political Vine ("PV") faces its toughest threat to its existence to date: an investigation by the Securities & Exchange Commission for alleged stock fraud.

This story began about a year ago when the investment banking firm of Dewey, Cheatham & Howe ("Cheatham") approached the owner of the PV with a proposition: Take the Vine PUBLIC!

Cheatham whipped-out a PowerPoint presentation showing a multi-dimensional financial model that analyzed the time series regressive analysis of the subscribership of the PV when compared to inflation, the value of the yen and the LIBOR rate.

According to our inside information from a disgruntled PV intern who left the operation 4 months ago, Bill Simon, the PV's owner, reportedly took one look at all of those number-crunching formulas and interdependent, multiple integral math "what-if?" scenarios and said "GO FOR IT," all without bothering to check to see if the financial model actually supported the concept of taking the Vine public (similar, in some respects, to exactly what Fulton County Sheriff Jackie Barrett did with $7 million of government money when she gave it to some crook she met at a conference in Florida).

Cheatham reportedly handed Simon a form to help him figure out the value of the PV operation. That form was as follows:

1) Estimate how many subscribers you have now.
2) Take the result of #1 and multiply that number by 10,000.
3) Take the result of #2 and square it. Square it a 2nd time to make sure you've squared it enough.
4) Take the result of #3 and divide that number by Avogadro's Number.
5) Take the result of #4 and multiply by Pi.

The result of #5 will be the most probable market value of your stock.

When Simon questioned Cheatham on its valuation formula, Cheatham replied "Look, this is exactly what Henry Blodgett of Merrill Lynch used in his valuations of all those other dot-com stocks a few years back. Do you know how much those initial investors won...errr, we mean EARNED on their first day of trading on those IPOs? Don't go against the grain here."

According to the former PV intern, Simon not only bought Cheatham's argument, but reportedly estimated his subscribership at something like 85,000 recipients.

Then, Simon prepared the PV's own prospectus and used a worksheet he bought off of eBay that contained the financial modeling of an Enron subsidiary to prepare pro forma statements for PV's upcoming IPO. It was this move that the SEC tracked from eBay which ultimately snared him.

Speaking from an undisclosed location, Simon answered the charges levied against him by the SEC: "All I wanted to ever do was have a little fun and enrich the lives of all the little people stuck in their dead-end jobs with the opportunity to invest a little bit of money into something that could really go sky-high quickly and easily..."

Donations for the Legal Defense Fund of The Political Vine can be sent to:

Political Vine
c/o Bill Simon
P.O. Box 73098
Marietta, GA 30007-3098