Company behind GOP robocall election subversion operation pulls its own phone numbers down off its site.
It’s already pretty clear what the Republican response is going to be to their scam robocall operation.
Everybody does it. Everybody does robocalls.
Another lie.
We discussed this last night.
Both parties deliver millions of robocalls during election season. You’ve probably gotten the calls from both parties and many outside groups. It happens every cycle.
Only one party has a nationwide campaign to deliver millions of intentionally-harassing calls disguised to appear that they’re from the opposite party. That party is the Republican party. And the calls are funded by the NRCC — the House GOP election committee.
It’s the party of election subversion. Deal with it.
Atrios has this right. CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and Fox are each ignoring the GOP’s nationwide campaign of false-flag robocalls meant to harass voters and fool them into thinking the calls come from Democrats. If it were Dem on GOP, if it were on Drudge, the cable nets would be on it wall-to-wall. As it is, they’re content to ignore it.
That’s because the powers-that-be in the mainstream media are in the tow of the Republican party. The Halperins and Crowleys of the news biz are all part of the same corruption.
Like Halperin says, Drudge rules their world.
You have to understand that and absorb that before you can set about doing what’s necessary to change it.
Late Update: Are ABC and Halperin going to prove me wrong? I’ll believe it when I see it. But they did just put up a breaking news splash about the robocalls. Let’s wait to see the fine print. This guy tipped me to it.
Later Update: Blogger at the NYT can’t understand the concept.
We’re Up All Night Kinda Late Update: I’m told CNN did a short bit on the robocalls during the last hour.
Yep, Even Later: Here’s the CNN spot courtesy of Crooks & Liars.
After all the voting shenanigans in Florida I can understand to an extent why voting officials there might be a little defensive. But this column by Tom Lyons in the Sarasota paper shows how at least one local voting official’s defensiveness turns into attacks on those reporting problems with voting machines:
[Superviser of Elections Kathy] Dent has long been getting mad at anyone who raises any concern about her voting machines. No matter how reasonable or polite the people may be, they are assumed to be up to no good.
I was also struck by Dent’s claim to me on Thursday, after just a handful of reported problems and little or no press coverage.
“These reports of alleged problems with the voting machines have been blown out of proportion,” Dent said.
What? By whom? And how? Is mentioning a problem now bad judgment?
I asked Dent to explain, but got no answer.
Dent also insisted, in another e-mailed message, that the reports of problems actually indicate the machines are working properly, because all the accounts ended with successful votes.
That is quite a conclusion. It ignores the obvious fact that if some machines are sometimes losing ballot choices, anyone who didn’t notice the error would, of course, not be able to complain.
We posted yesterday about the problems during early voting in Sarasota. Read Lyons’ entire column here.
The emerging scam? We checked out the stories of false flag GOP robocalls pretty closely before we were comfortable that we understood what was happening, could confirm it and start reporting on it yesterday. Now, over the course of the day, we’ve been getting other reports of Democrats getting calls informing them their voting location has been changed to what turns about to be a fake voting location.
TPMmuckraker reported on this earlier today about reports in New Mexico. But it wasn’t clear whether or not it was an isolated incident.
Over the course of the day, though, we’ve been getting more reports of this from across the country — NM, MN, WI, NY and other states. Enough that I’m starting to suspect that this is some sort of coordinated effort. (If this is a coordinated effort, I suspect it’ll be much more carefully hidden than the false-flag robocalls, since I suspect this would tip the scales into prosecutable election tampering.)
Let me be crystal clear: in the case of the false flag robocalls, we’ve heard the calls; we know the company placing them; we know the GOP committee paying for them; we know the complaints surfacing around the country. This is different. These reports are still too sketchy to say whether this coordinated or being directed nationally. In some cases, it may not even be intentional. With two mammoth GOTV operations ramping up nationwide, some confusion is probably inevitable. But we’re hearing a sufficient number of reports from different parts of the country, to send up a flare, a virtual alert, if you will. So don’t treat this is a fact but rather as an advisory, to be on the look out.
If you’ve gotten these calls and you have specifics, or if you’ve seen press reports about calls like this, let us know.
Here’s a handy retrospective of Republican ‘uses’ of 9/11 imagery during the 2006 campaign.
Here’s CNN’s short spot on the robocall story.
Seems a couple of the major dailies (the Los Angeles Times being one of them, I’m told) were priming to write up the robocall story then got cold feet. Maybe they’ll run a considered analysis in a week, when the election is in the history books.
Indiana GOP fires the national Republican party’s false flag robocall firm for an unrelated bit of criminal conduct.
TPM Reader JS, one of our longtime readers, reports in from the circus …
Chris Matthews, Norah O’Donnell, Chuck Todd and Howard Fineman just now on Hardball all agreed wiht each other that the difference between the states where Bush’s approval is rock bottom and the states where “they love this guy” is — wait for it — that the states that don’t like him much “don’t like religion.”
Really. They really said that. People in New York, Vermont, Massachusetts (Massachusetts!), etc., “don’t like religion.”
Check out the trsnscript or the clip when it’s posted. This was the segment that started around 7:30.
Yep, no Catholicism in the Northeast. Thing of the past …
Someone send these bozos some false flag robo-calls.