Posted on 01/24/2010 2:45:52 PM PST by Painesright
Now that people are paying attention, the Astroturfers are coming out of the woodwork:
Jan Chen of Seattle writes to the Northwest Asian Weekly (a small Asian paper serving the Seattle area):
As one listens to the Republican anger over health care reform, one can imagine an anti-government protester cheerfully paying premiums on insurance policies that drop you after you make a claim, or happily sauntering out of an emergency room that denied them treatment because of a coverage problem. One can imagine a town hall sign-waver enthusiastically forking over most of their pay to bill collectors after suffering a catastrophic injury, thinking, Wow, the free market system is great.
Meanwhile, Gloria Elle writes to the Baltimore Chronicle on the same page as Mark Spivey and Ellie Light:
As one listens to the Republican anger over health care reform, one can imagine an anti-government protester cheerfully paying premiums on insurance policies that cancel you for making a claim, or happily sauntering out of an emergency room that denied them treatment because of a coverage problem. One can imagine a town-hall sign-waver enthusiastically forking over most of their pay to bill collectors after suffering a catastrophic injury, thinking, Wow, the free market system is great.
Jan Chen and Gloria Elle certainly have a similar writing style, dont they?
To the word. Thanks to liberrocky on Twitter for the find.
Freepers discovered another one: Janet Leigh. (Cute.) This one is explained here. [UPDATE: To make it clear and explicit, the link shows that the very same pro-Obama letter was written by Janet Leigh to NewburgGraphic.com, and by Earnest Gardner to the Memphis Flyer. She also finds Janet Leigh next to Mark Spivey in the Santa Barbara Independent.]
The story is exploding. There is Astroturf everywhere...
(Excerpt) Read more at patterico.com ...
there was a period back there when facebook users were all posting duplicate messages about healthcare — I think urged on by NPR. It was easy to spot since they all posted identical messages. Pretty stupid.
Stupid?? It’s sophomoric - worthy of the deep thinkers that populate the opposition. Morons.
Mainstream Media Newspapers are really digging a deep hole for themselves and Obama on this one.
From my own experience of sending letters to the editor, the newspaper calls to determine that I am who I say I am.
For some reason it appears the newspapers are not making these calls to these fictious writers of letters to the editor.
Could the reason for the newspapers failure to follow their own rules is their love for the ObaMao?????
Yes, yes they are (this stupid). It doesn’t sound like this little stunt was all that difficult to discover (Lexus-Nexus, anyone?) A search engine search on a string of words from the text would work also; this is how I catch the occasional plagiarized paper.
If I remember correctly, Janet Leigh also starred in the film Psycho. So that would be appropriate for these letter writers, I supposed.
I wonder if there are any “gifted” freepers out there with the tech savvy to screen future letters for duplicates posted in other papers. I would love for these manipulators to realize that even if the MSM is complicit/lazy, there are others who are wise to their ways and have no hesitation in spotlighting their tactics.
We may not have the MSM, but we have this site and Drudge has a huge following.
Yep. More Alinsky rules.
Here — I just found two more with “surtax on the wealthiest Americans,” almost verbatim identical.
http://www.starbulletin.com/editorials/letters/20100105_Letters_to_the_editor.html
and
http://www.delcotimes.com/articles/2010/01/12/opinion/doc4b4be8d5ca9b1499413922.txt
Wonderful finds!
Good find.
And if things turn out like they want them to, they will be dead morons. And never realize why.
I have done google searches using a sentence from this letter to the editor. I was just thinking if there was some tracking matrix that could be set up to post similar letters and find patterns that could be highlighted and publicized.
Freepmail
I’m looking for phrases that sound to me like they might come from talking points and searching those.
Here’s the type of people Obama hired. Kal Penn is leaving the show “House” to work in the White House (or at least, in the Old Executive Office building next door). Now, what would the talents of a Hollywood Actor be used for? It might not be him, but I’ll bet deep in the bowels of Obama’s administration this is all being worked on. Remember the telephone call months ago to the “artists” asking them to use their talents for propaganda.
Yeah, add a homosexual to make the writers more “diverse” yet still making an ass out of himself
Most papers require that letters-to-the-editor be accompanied by a local address and phone number for verification purposes. You can fake the name, but you can’t fake the phone number, if the papers actually follow through and verify the letters. So the papers are in possession of info that would allow them to find out - if they are interested - who these people really are, based on their phone numbers.
Wonder if this will lead back to the Whitehouse. Not a Watergate scandal, to be sure, but, if the story got any traction, it would make a lot of people even more doubtful of everything 0 says.
Paid misinformation to deceive the voting public? High crimes and misdemeanors? Get enough evidence of this crap and we can force the papers to give up the IP addresses or scans of the “letters” to keep up the search for these enemies of our free nation.
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