Friday, July 28th, 2006...11:58 am
Oh, Come On!
Dan Nowicki and Greg Patterson may have caught Janet Napolitano’s campaign doing something horribly underhanded that may be the single worst abuse of the democratic process since the death of Niccolò di dei Machiavelli.
Let’s say instead of typing in goldwater4governor.org, you have a sudden spasm and type in dongoldwater.org. You are then presented with, of all things, Napolitano’s home page.
Shocking. Will these atrocities ever stop? Who will rid us of this accursed Governor?
This is definitely “mountain out of a molehill” territory. Maybe even Kilimanjaro out of an anthill.
On the scale of political dirty tricks, 1 being sending unordered pizzas to your opponent’s headquarters and 10 being, I dunno, being actively engaged in voter supression, this rates about .368, which is the reciprocal of the natural base e.
If you were to look up Don Goldwater in Google you will find his website address, goldwater4governor.org. The website on his literature is goldwater4governor.org. The web address on Politics1 is goldwater4governor.org. I’m assuming that most people poking around for the website will be able to find it at the right address. I’m not sure what actual damage, aside from irritating a few poor typists looking for Goldwater’s page, this actually does. If someone used one of these domain names to put up a fraudulent Goldwater page, I would see the gripe.
This sort of thing is why many campaigns reserve several doman names. You can check out the web page of Patty Weiss, for example at patty2006.com or pattyweiss.com. Goldwater could have obviated this problem by reserving a couple of other domain names, at least by reserving the .com and .org versions of the name.
In his usual hyperbole (yeah, it’s our job as bloggers), Patterson counts this as one of the worst dirty tricks in Arizona political history. He also says something that is just plain silly:
That’s a pretty sophisticated and expensive practical joke.
This person, who may not even be affiliated with Napolitano’s campaign, did not need a set of degrees from MIT to pull this off, or even a BA from ASU. GoDaddy.com will reserve a domain name and set you up for around $25 bucks. After that, setting up a “re-direct” is pretty easy, easier than actually setting up a website.
Frankly, the Republicans in this state, who after all keep Nathan Sproul employed, have a lot of nerve accusing Napolitano of “dirty tricks.”
NB - Patterson compares Napolitano with Richard Nixon. Here’s something I don’t get. Republicans will tell me that Nixon was a great president and that what he did was no big deal, but then in the next breath tell me that whatever made up scandal they find out about a Democrat makes them “as bad as Nixon.” Which is it, guys?
Also, Patterson complains that the media “let this slide.” I would buy that one if he didn’t learn about it from, and link it to, an article on the Arizona Republic’s website.
CORRECTION: In the original post, I refered to e as the natural logarithm. It is actually the natural base.
13 Comments
July 28th, 2006 at 1:21 pm
Tedski,
I agree it is not a big issue, except with clean elections it might be.
Does it constitute an in kind contribution? The redirect does result in additional exposure for Janet. Is the person behind this required under CCEC rules to disclose? Maybe.
Clean elections is checking in to every other nickel and dime issue in the state why not this one as well.
July 28th, 2006 at 3:16 pm
Ten bucks a year for a domain. Another — MAYBE 15 to register it privately.
Sounds to me like Patterson had a little too much caffeine before he wrote that post.
I love that in the one before he critize the Republic for piling on Munsil and Montgomery for their “Janet and Terry have created these serial killers” press conference. The one where they were asked why they weren’t attacking Arpaio and Maricopa County Attorney Thomas for the same thing - especially since it was their jurisdiction.
A friend who saw the video of the event said Montgomery’s answer was something like “well, I’m not running against them”.
July 28th, 2006 at 3:18 pm
I don’t think it’s all that big an issue either, but I am curious.
Who really set this up? It’s sort of a ham-handed move, and while many words have been used to describe the Governor (particularly by Republicans) ‘ham-handed’ isn’t on the list.
In fact, it reeks of a two-fer dirty trick - Goldwater gets zinged, and Governor Napolitano gets blamed.
July 28th, 2006 at 3:49 pm
cpmaz,
you thinking Munsil, Tupper or Harris? Kinda makes sense to me.
What reason would someone in Janet’s campaign want to tie her to Goldwater? A regular Joe looking into Goldwater to decide if he wants to vote for Donnie is going to be a Republican, most likely (since we’re still pre-primary). So what good would it do to redirect someone who is probably an “Anybody But Janet” voter to Janet’s site? It doesn’t help her because by surfing the net, he’s already looking for an alternative to the incumbent.
It does, however, help the others in the GOP primary to lump Janet with her former Admin Dept party planner.
But who amongst the GOP candidates is savvy in the ways of the world wide web? Which of these fine fellas has shown mad skillz in utilizing this new technology to reach out to voters????
What a mystery!
July 28th, 2006 at 5:47 pm
Well, a quick whois lookup shows the dongoldwater.org domain was registered July 10 through GoDaddy.
Registrant information is given as:
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, AZ 85260
480-624-2599
Of course, this could be anyone registeringthe domain anonymously. I suppose if someone is feeling motivated, they could call the Domains By Proxy number and see if they could dig up more info.
July 28th, 2006 at 7:20 pm
This post has been removed by the author.
July 28th, 2006 at 7:21 pm
Boredinaz,
Sounds like something Nathan Sproul would do.
http://arizona.typepad.com/blog/2006/07/nathan_sprouls_.html
July 28th, 2006 at 11:42 pm
dongoldwater.com… hehheh, you said ‘dong’. Dong Old Water….! hilarious…
Seriously though, Domains by Proxy is the equivalent of a dead drop. The Goldwater people could have easily ginned this up themselves to get some ink and smear the Gov.
Domain by Proxy’s EULA has a caveat: they won’t protect your privacy if their services are used to “Engage in morally objectionable activities, including but not limited to those which are child pornographic, defamatory, abusive, harassing, obscene, racist, or otherwise objectionable.” This could be considered harrassment. If Dong, er… Don’s people are so concerned, they should complain to Domain by Proxy and demand the registrant’s info.
That they don’t and won’t should tell you exactly who is responsible. I know for a fact how easy this is to do. I once redirected www.NetworkForEvil.com to GOP.com. Worked great until the GOP figured it out somehow and blocked their servers from responding to that domain. To this day I wonder what the heck that staffer was looking for at NetworkForEvil.com… looking to sell what was left of his soul, perhaps?
July 29th, 2006 at 8:24 am
I do wonder what Munsil and Montgomery are doing attacking hard-working police officers and detectives?
I mean these guys are trying and to hold a press conference just to attack them by proxy. When you say AG and the Guv suck, you really mean the work the police are doing. One is saying that the detectives are too stupid to solve this crime and THAT my friends is a fucking scandal.
I’d love to see those two spoiled brats hold that press conference downtown near the police center and say that shit in front of a squad of officers… off duty.
July 30th, 2006 at 1:16 am
OUCH!!!
The number e is the natural BASE for exponential functions. A LOGARITHM is properly defined as an exponent itself, or if taken as a function, is the INVERSE of an exponential function. Hence the natural logarithm is the power that you would raise the base e to in order to obtain the argument of the logarithm. What you have is indeed e ^ -1, which is however not a logarithm at all.
Can’t argue with your deep political insights, but I’ve got an argument with your math.
July 30th, 2006 at 10:49 am
Darn…it’s now fixed, Eli.
July 30th, 2006 at 3:39 pm
chris,
Exactly! And who is Nathan Spawn working for??…..
July 30th, 2006 at 9:39 pm
Sproul is working for Len Munsil among others.
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