Posted on 10/04/2006 2:56:10 PM PDT by blogblogginaway
ABCNews.com brought Mark Foley's boy-chasing to national attention, but it wasn't the first website to flog the story. That dubious honor belongs to StopSexPredators, a pseudo-vigilante blog filled with plagiarized, hastily-assembled posts, which no one seems to have heard of, visited, or linked to before last weekand whose operator has a suspiciously savvy grasp of the news cycle. In other words, a blog whose sole raison d'etre seems to have been to get the Foley ball rolling.
If its time/date stamps are to be trusted (like most free blogware, Blogger allows its users to backdate posts), the pervert-outing anony-site was set up on July 28 as a "clearing house for the public to report sex predators and as a resource for concerned citizens."
One early post, headlined The Sickening Six, naming and shaming the "kinds of sick people who hunt minors for their own sick purposes," is basically an amalgam of plagiarized entries from Crimelibrary, Wikipedia, and Answers.com. (Click here, here, and here, for examples.)
After running just six posts over the summer, the site picked up steam on September 21 when its author wrote, "the blog has been noticed and some shocking emails have been received!!!!" and posted four emails purportedly from "interns" outraged by the heretofore unmentioned Foley and his penchant for teenage boys.
(Of course, if these emails are legit, it means the "interns" somehow stumbled upon the blog, despite the fact that it had not yet been linked to by any other sites, and was virtually indetectible to Google, which ranks sites according to the number of incoming links.)
One "intern" wrote:
"...I came to Washington because I care about the future of America. I wanted to be around good and decent men like President George Bush. Instead, I feel like a piece of meat. The worst part of it for me is there appear to be plenty of my fellow interns who don't mind Foley's particular 'path to power.'"
Three days later, the blogger posted the now infamous "Emails from Congressman Foley to 16 Year Old Page!!!!", claiming they'd been sent in by a reader (despite the fact that they appeared to be scans of faxed printouts). Persons unknown then seeded the link to various political sitesincluding Wonkette, which promptly dismissed them as fakes. ABC, of course, took them more seriously.
Whoever promoted the story on DailyKos did so only 12 minutes after the fateful post went live at 11:06 a.m.:
Six minutes later, the same person, again writing under the handle WHinternNOW posted the following:
Back on Sept. 5, however, that very same WHinternNOW posted a suspiciously more informed-sounding take on the congressman:
Whoever is behind the blog hasn't responded to emails from Radar or any other outlets, and seems to have lost interest in the site.
"I'm thrilled that so many folks are looking at this simple blog...." the author wrote on October 2, the last day the site was updated. "If you have any ideas that I should post, please let me know. I'm happy to pass along information about the current situation, but would much prefer to keep marching toward the large goal or stopping sex predators. I don't think we'll see it in the Congress anytime soon, so let's focus our energy elsewhere."
What, leaving the party so soon?
What this gay activist doesn't get...is that all this stuff he's doing to "out" republican gays in the most negative light possible is doing nothing but destroying the very thing one would assume his ultimate goal is....equal rights for homosexuals/lesbians including the right to legally get married. Indeed, the negative and hateful tone of his actions do a great deal to support the notion that gays are unstable, hateful, and unworthy of a respected place in todays society. I personally know and work with serveral gay and lesbian people...all of them are ok people....not like this jerk at all. BUT...this blogger activist and those like him are putting a face on gay culture that they absolutely can't afford to have if they want the respect and dignity they seek.
This guy and the Dims that are egging him on are going to reap a bitter harvest from the animosity they are sewing...
Chances are this was a Media Matters project.
And following your theory, IM's which were saved and passed around for laughs could have fallen into democrat hands quite easily.
I do not think Foley needs to do more than face up to whatever criminal charges he may face and return to the Church, do penance, and live a celibate life.
Offing himself is not required.
Google's cache pages usually give the date that the web crawler recorded it. I don't see a date on there. I tried using "view source" in case it was obscured, but it wouldn't work. Odd.
Looks like an unihabited farm/industrial building in a rural area. The ZipCode is all wrong, boistering the total fake nature of the blog's appearance.
I think that it is too late, the damage has been done. The rabid gay activist has done his job, he's proven that gays cannot be trusted in a position of authority, especially not with kids.
The scis are also fond of crist.
Where are the conservatives in the GOP? They need to step up and get back in charge!
Remember Lisa MacPherson. She wasn't a movie star.
This was the episode after South Park criticized Tom Cruise. Issac Hayes quit South Park over the previous episode so they killed his character off in the cartoon.
If they dropped Foley, holy cow.
...."Corn said "The List," as it's called, includes nine chiefs of staffs, two press secretaries and two directors of communications. Among the Republican lawmakers for whom they work are Rep. Katherine Harris, Rep. Henry Hyde, Sen. Bill Frist, Sen. George Allen, Sen. Mitch McConnell and Sen. Rick Santorum.
Corn says he has a copy of the list but won't publish it.
"For one, I don't know for a fact that the men on the list are gay," he writes. "And generally I don't fancy outing people though I have not objected when others have outed gay Republicans, who, after all, work for a party that tries to limit the rights of gays and lesbians and that welcomes the support of those who demonize same-sexers."
Here's interesting info on the radaronline.com itself, it's somewhat different from most other WHOIS profiles (notice it was "modified" just few months before Foley's IMs leak after 5 years in existence - ownership change? or putting a "Transfer-Lock"?, no IP, domain) :
Whois - Domain Information Lookup
Connecting to COM.whois-servers.net...
Connecting to whois.pairnic.com...
Integrity Multimedia Co. LLC
1101 W. Lake Street
Chicago, IL 60607
US
PhilB@radaronline.com
+1.3123372337
Domain Name: RADARONLINE.COM
Technical Contact:
Mike Martin
Onsite Technology Solutions
1555 Sherman Ave. #232
Evanston, IL 60201
US
Mike.Martin@onsite-ts.com
+1.6302908736
Administrative Contact:
Phil Birnbaum
Integrity Multimedia Co. LLC
1101 W. Lake Street
Chicago, IL 60607
US
PhilB@radaronline.com
+1.3123372337
Domain Name Servers:
NS1.PAIRNIC.COM
NS2.PAIRNIC.COM
Transfer-Lock Status: ENABLED
Created: June 12, 2001
Modified: June 13, 2006
Expires: June 12, 2007
David Corn sounds like a phony.
See post #138. Doesn't directly answer your question, but a good first step in that direction. "Modified: June 13, 2006" item certainly should be of interest to investigators...
Sorry, didn't see your post and ping you (just starting on FR)
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