Archive for September 22nd, 2008
Backup of an advertisement claiming that Sarah Palin is an anti-American radical.
Dr. Rusty Shackleford of My Pet Jawa dissects the anatomy of an organized grassroots effort to spread false information about Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.
Rusty’s post: Hope, Change, & Lies: Orchestrated “Grassroots” Smear Campaigns & the People that Run Them is a MUST read this morning.
In short:
- Evidence suggests that a YouTube video with false claims about Palin was uploaded and promoted by members of a professional PR firm.
- The family that runs the PR firm has extensive ties to the Democratic Party, the netroots, and are staunch Obama supporters.
- Evidence suggests that the firm engaged in a concerted effort to distribute the video in such a way that it would appear to have gone viral on its own. Yet this effort took place on company time.
- Evidence suggests that these distribution efforts included actions by at least one employee of the firm who is unconnected with the family running the company.
- The voice-over artist used in this supposedly amateur video is a professional.
- This same voice-over artist has worked extensively with David Axelrod’s firm, which has a history of engaging in phony grassroots efforts, otherwise known as “astroturfing.”
- David Axelrod is Barack Obama’s chief media strategist.
- The same voice-over artist has worked directly for the Barack Obama campaign.
Here is the You Tube voice over artist (with links to David Axelroad and hence the Barack Obama campaign) comparison.
Audio of YouTube video compared to official Obama campaign ad suggests that YouTube video was professionally made and possibly linked to Obama camp.
The piece by Rusty takes some time to peruse but well worth the time to explore the inner workings of media in the internet age which is not what it seems.
Fancy that……
Michelle Malkin, now, has more on the apparent cover-up.
Now, here’s the juicy part. Within an hour of publication of the Jawa
Report’s investigation, “eswinner†deleted the smear video that he had
uploaded several times on September 11. Here’s a screenshot of the cached copy:
Let me underline that: At some point between approx. 12 midnight – 2am
Eastern, “eswinner†logged into his account and tried to erase all
traces of the deceitful, Palin-bashing ad.
Stay tuned….
Update:
ACE has more about why this story is important and why the MSM most probably will NOT run with it:
1) It’s calculatedly dishonest to attempt to scam the public with videos by “concerned citizens” which are in fact professional electioneering communications put out at the behest of a supposedly new-politics politician. People trust average “neutral” and “independent” citizens more than someone known to be an interested party. It was a scandal when it was revealed that stockbrokers were pimping their own stocks on day-trader sites, pretending to be just average investors with hot tips. Same deal here.
2) Such ads don’t get fact-checked, as they’re supposedly from regular schnooks. No one fact-checks a regular schnook. So Axelrod and Obama can spread lies about Palin, completely refuted and debunked 11 days before the ad was posted, and not worry about media busy-bodies calling foul.
The plan in this case was to tap into the massive traffic of the Daily Kos and have each reader send the video, under the radar, to ten friends, and have them send it to ten friends, etc. The post in question was written by someone who just happens to share a name with a Winner & Associates employee. YouTube ads are big business — and this one was so stinking of outdated lies it had to be done under the table, in the shadows. Where no one would take much notice of it; certainly not the media’s fact-checkers. But, if successful, it would go viral and a huge number of people would end up seeing it.
And no one would know where this ad came from.
The plan didn’t quite work — the lies being pushed were already utterly rubbished, and there were new, exciting smears the netroots were more interested in. But it didn’t fail for lack of trying.
3) This is just the tip of the iceberg. David Axelrod is known as “the Master of Astroturfing,” and this is just his sloppiest and most brazen effort (thusfar detected). You know what also doesn’t get fact checked? The tens of thousands of coordinated comments smearing McCain and Palin posted every day on media and blog threads, many of which are being written by “concerned Christian conservative commenters” who are in fact agents of David Axelrod and the DNC — either directly, as in on-the-payroll sockpuppets, or indirectly, as in big internet groups determined to do “the dirty stuff Obama can’t do himsef.”
Obama can’t cast doubt on Palin’s fitness as a mother without risking electoral debacle.
But his legions of busy, busy, busy internet sockpuppets can. He gets the benefit of the smear without having to accept any of the responsibility for it. (Emphasis Flap’s)
Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, David Axelrod
Tags: Barack Obama, David Axelrod
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Day By Day by Chris Muir
You mean the source of some of the Sarah Palin smears has been linked to a public relations firm with ties to the Barack Obama campaign and the Democrat Party?
Extensive research was conducted by the Jawa Report to determine the source of smears directed toward Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Those smears included false allegations that she belonged to a secessionist political party and that she has radical anti-American views.
Our research suggests that a subdivision of one of the largest public relations firms in the world most likely started and promulgated rumors about Sarah Palin that were known to be false. These rumors were spread in a surreptitious manner to avoid exposure.
Astroturfing (phony grassroots efforts) orchestrated by political partisans and not organic grassroots efforts by the radical left fringe to deliberately disseminate false information about Sarah Palin, you say?
Fancy that.
But, is ANYONE surprised?
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The Day By Day Archive
Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, Day By Day
Tags: Barack Obama, Day By Day
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Republican incumbents in close races have the easiest vote of their lives coming up this week: No on the Bush-Pelosi Wall Street bailout.
God Himself couldn't have given rank-and-file Republicans a better opportunity to create political space between themselves and the Administration. That's why I want to see 40 Republican No votes in the Senate, and 150+ in the House. If a bailout is to pass, let it be with Democratic votes. Let this be the political establishment (Bush Republicans in the White House + Democrats in Congress) saddling the taxpayers with hundreds of billions in debt (more than the Iraq War, conjured up in a single weekend, and enabled by Pelosi, btw), while principled Republicans say "No" and go to the country with a stinging indictment of the majority in Congress.
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Up to 10,000 staff at the New York office of the bankrupt investment bank Lehman Brothers will share a bonus pool set aside for them that is worth $2.5bn (£1.4bn), Barclays Bank, which is buying the business, confirmed last night.
The revelation sparked fury among the workers' former colleagues, Lehman's 5,000 staff based in London, who currently have no idea how long they will go on receiving even their basic salaries, let alone any bonus payments. It also prompted a renewed backlash over the compensation culture in global finance, with critics claiming that many bankers receive pay and rewards that bore no relation to the job they had done.
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Republican White House hopeful John McCain Sunday accused his Democratic foe Barack Obama of showing a "lack of leadership" and foresight on the US financial meltdown and the Iraq war.
The Arizona senator equated Obama's response to the financial turbulence rocking American and global markets with his initial opposition to the "surge" of US troops into Iraq last year.
"Whether it's a reversal in war, or an economic emergency, he reacts as a politician and not as a leader, seeking an advantage for himself instead of a solution for his country," McCain said.
McCain told the National Guard Association that he had offered a plan to resolve the debt meltdown which triggered the crisis, while the Democratic presidential candidate had not.
"Senator Obama has declined to put forth a plan of his own. At a time of crisis, when leadership is needed, Senator Obama has simply not provided it," McCain said.
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For these reasons I hope Congress will slow down and have an open debate.
And in the course of that debate, I hope someone will introduce an economic recovery act that makes America a better place to grow jobs. I hope the details will be made public before the vote.
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Flap agrees with Newt: If Washington wants our money, then it owes us some answers.
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Everyone should read the actual text of the proposed bailout plan the administration is sending to Congress. It’s clearly not a final version (the part about only purchasing from financial institutions headquartered in the US has already been changed, as Kathryn notes below), but it’s the essential shape of the proposal. See if you can read through the whole of it without concluding that everyone in Washington has lost their minds.
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Too much power in the hands of the Treasury Secretary and inadequate oversight. Don't these moronic bureaucrats ever learn?
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Had the Treasury and Fed not quickly stepped into the fray that morning with a quick $105 billion injection of liquidity, the Dow could have collapsed to the 8,300-level – a 22 percent decline! – while the clang of the opening bell was still echoing around the cavernous exchange floor.
According to traders, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, money market funds were inundated with $500 billion in sell orders prior to the opening. The total money-market capitalization was roughly $4 trillion that morning.
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Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) says he’s seen this movie before: The Bush administration, citing an unprecedented national threat, puts the hammer on Congress to ram through gargantuan legislation with a minimum of review — and the murkiest of repercussions.
“We will do something this week — but if we learned anything from right after 9/11, it’s that the biggest mistake is to pass anything they ask for just because it’s an emergency,†Leahy says.
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The White House is pressuring congressional Democrats “to send a clear signal†before the markets open Monday that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s bailout plan will be approved quickly and essentially as written, a senior Democratic aide tells Politico.
The warning: If investors don’t believe help is coming quickly, the markets could spiral downward all over again.
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In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.
The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets — including the New York metropolitan region — will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.
Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.
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They list greed and Greenspan among the culprits, and there are comparisons to . . . Albania. But amid the gloating, there is fear for financial systems in Britain, Spain, Italy and elsewhere.
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America should let European and Asian banks sink and NOT bail them out. About time for some America first economics.
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In a change from the original proposal sent to Capitol Hill, foreign-based banks with big U.S. operations could qualify for the Treasury Department’s mortgage bailout, according to the fine print of an administration statement Saturday night.
The theory, according to a participant in the negotiations, is that if the goal is to solve a liquidity crisis, it makes no sense to exclude banks that do a lot of lending in the United States.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson confirmed the change on ABC's "This Week," telling George Stephanopoulos that coverage of foreign-based banks is "a distinction without a difference to the American people."
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