David’s post about Scott Brown’s comments regarding “CrazyKhazei” (Scott Brown still playing the victim on CrazyKhazei) served as a reminder to go check if Scott Brown’s consultants had created anymore Mass Senate related websites. I did a search through my Whois.sc account, and it showed me that QueenElizabethWarren.com had been registered on August 26, 2011 through 1&1 Internet, Inc.
It’s hosted on the same server as the rest of well-paid Brown consultant Rob Willington’s websites. Same server as SwiftCurrentStrategies.com and WillingtonGroup.com. Same server as CrazyKhazei.com was on, same server that SettiMayorPothole.com and SettiSpeaks.com remain on.
So another glance into the Brown campaign, and we see he’s planning on going negative against both Warrens and continuing the elitism shtick against Elizabeth. How long until master puppeteer Eric Fehrnstrom registers the Twitter account?
A more in-depth explanation after the flip.
QueenElizabethWarren.com whois information via DomainTools.com
QueenElizabethWarren.com domain was regsitered on August 28, 2011 through 1&1 Internet, Inc. and used what is called a “private registration” which allows the owner of the domain name to conceal their identity. Most websites are registered publicly, which allows anyone to go to a website like http://whois.sc and lookup the name, address, email, and phone number of the website owner.
In the image above, you can see that the IP address of the server that hosts QueenElizabethWarren.com also hosts 215 other websites. When that report is populated, it shows a wide variety of Massachusetts politics-related websites.
Here are a selection of those websites, showing Q to S:
Note RetireBarney.com, ReadySettiGo.com, RobertWillington.com, ScottBrown3Envelopes.com, ScottBrownChristmas.com, ScottBrownEssay.com, SettiMayorPotHole.com and SettiSpeaks.com share the same server.
All are currently under private registration in the exact same manner as QueenElizabethWarren.com. Some of the sites can easily be traced back to Rob Willington because he had originally registered them under his own name. Take ScottBrownChristmas.com for example:
ScottBrownChristmas.com registered to Rob Willington, as it appeared 5/25/11
ScottBrownChristmas.com registration as it appears today.
IP Address History for CrazyKhazei.com showing same IP as other Willington/Brown sites
CrazyKhazei.com registration before the domain was un-registered.
Willington’s personal website, RobertWillington.com is hosted on this server, as are his business websites SwiftCurrentStrategies.com, WillingtonMedia.com, WillingtonGroup.com. A few Scott Brown websites, and until a week or so ago, CrazyKhazei.com.
Here is a complete list of the websites hosted on the 74.208.165.140 server, not all owned by Willington;
Nope, it’s still up. I think that is the $4 Million he is talking about, and I think that is the “non-factual” thing he’s talking about too:
I don’t care about the negative campaign sites, etc. Have at it. All part of the game. We’ll see who wins that battle.
Bobblehead Brown looks like it has been financed by organized labor. JSK Group appears to be a publicity group that does campaign stuff. Its principal is the head of the Wisconsin Democratic Party.
QueenElizabethWarren.com website looks like its registered by Brown’s campaign. I’m not making any sort of moral argument here, just saying that the MassDems have plausible deniability.
between an attack site that spreads a blatant lie and is promoted with $4M of advertising, and an unadvertised empty domain that gives a 403 Access Forbidden error when someone browses to it, because the site doesn’t exist.
I was going to post about it, the entire basis was Dodd-Frank, they kept on going back to the same bill as their evidence. Kudos to Brown on voting for the bill, but these clowns seems to think that no matter what else he does he’s in the clear because Republicans filibuster everything. That means crap, every bill is important and the ad specifically points to bills that he voted against. Sorry, this BS doesn’t fly, we are not in Alabama, hey look our Republican Senator voted for a bill sponsored by Democrats once.
That this kind of thing wouldn’t happen again? It seems like it just happened again. I remember quite vividly you talking about how Brown was putting his foot down and reining in his rogue consultants. But here’s another hack working for Brown and apparently “injecting levity” in a sneaky and deceptive way.
What’s the story now?
Didn’t you watch the vid? He told Eric to stop the anonymous twittering, to identify himself and stop the anonymous twitter stuff. He didn’t tell anyone to stop registering domain names, and he doesn’t have the power to tell people to stop registering domain names anyhow. But that’s irrelevant anyhow, because there would be nothing wrong if Scott Brown himself registered QueenElizabethWarren.com site and filled it full of distortions and lies, to correspond to the BobbleheadBrown website. Say what? He’s not allowed to make attack sites, because he complained about attack sites against him, so from now on he has to just take it without being able to retaliate? Again, you must think he’s a Democrat or something.
you really don’t get it.
Brown can make all the childish attack sites he wants. He just can’t continously whine about them under the simple doctrine of English legal theory:
-W. S. Gilbert
for the Mikado reference! 😀
Um, yeah, he does. The guy who’s creating them is under his employee. If someone under someone else’s employ does things they’re told not to do, they get consequences, up to and including firing. QueenElizabethWarren.com was created just days after Brown publicly said he wouldn’t tolerate any more shenanigans or they’d be out of a job. Either he was a liar to his staff or voters.
He doesn’t have the power to tell anyone not to buy WarrenGoneWild or whatever. Sure he can fire people, but he can’t stop people from mocking people and making attack web sites.
It would be ridiculous to blame Brown if some random person, with no ties to his staff, bought it. Even if that person was an avid Brown supporter, Brown would have no responsibility.
The problem is that the person who bought it is on his staff and he bought it right after Brown said a similar incident was not good and would not happen again. The problem is that there are two possibilities – neither good. One is that a staff member ignored a Brown directive against this type of action. The other is that, though Brown said it would not happen again to the media, no just directive, oral or written was issued and the campaign people had the idea that Brown’s statement to the media meant nothing.
If it were the former, you would expect the employee to be fired. After all, with CrazyKarzei, he embarrassed his boss forcing him to answer questions on this. Then after his boss to defuse that crisis says it will never happen again, he sets up the possibility of doing pretty mush the same thing – extending this trivial negative for Brown story.
You might also consider that this could hurt Brown more than it would many other candidates. A large part of his image is that he is a “nice guy”. Negative campaigning calls this into question.
“While it’s clear Eric was seeking to inject a little levity into politics on his own time, I wasn’t aware of what he was doing. I’ve made clear to everyone on or associated with my team that this type of thing is not to happen again.”
Domain names like BobbleheadBrown or QueenElizabethWarren are a different type of thing than anonymous fake twitter accounts, which are more of a joke than an attack site is. Some say that they are a permanent part of our politics and aren’t going to come down. And, so far, no one has done anything with QueenElizabethWarren anyhow, unlike the bobbleheadbrown site, which remain up and remains full of nonfactual information and lies. It’s entirely possible that Brown could get it up and running, and ditch that “nice guy” image that haunts him and holds him back.
attacking someone’s character, rather than the issues.
You’re the only one I’ve seen try to make this distinction. It’s bizarre. His implication was clear. These sorts of incidents were to end, otherwise he would have been more specific and said twitter. The twitter account and the website were a part of the same story.
Someone doing a reverse IP lookup and invading someone’s privacy? Publishing it on a popular political blog? Those seem like incidents. Registering a domain name is not an “incident.” There is nothing public about it, chrismatt had to pay for a reverse IP lookup (or did he use someone else’s account?) and though a free whois lookup by default includes information on the registrant, people often pay to hide that information to avoid spam and harassment. I think this constitutes just that sort of harassment, snooping into someone’s business. If they had created a site there about Elizabeth Warren’s elitism or whatever, then you could complain about it. But there is no site!!
Everything I used is publicly available information. I paid for an account because it’s the easiest way to get the information quickly, and it also allowed me to see a cached history of past names used to register the site.
I’d recommend knowing what you’re talking about before accusing someone of harassment next time… If I was a reactionary like you, I’d probably be screaming libel.
between “publicly available information” and a $4 Million advertising campaign?
I didn’t mean to imply what you did qualifies as criminal-level harassment, I meant it in a more general way. I said that the sort of thing you did is the sort of harassment that people pay extra money to get “domain privacy” to avoid. Willington paid for it, which is why you had to do a reverse IP lookup and see what other domains were hosted at the same IP, and couldn’t just do a whois lookup. But yes, that kind of sleuthing can reveal who is behind domains, or who might be. It could be said to be an invasion of privacy and a form of harassment too. I’ll let you guys argue about it.
But the point remains – merely registering a domain does not constitute negative campaigning. For all you know, they are just squatting on it, to keep other people from using it. It is not a public act that anyone even knows about, much less is forced to watch like a $4 Million dollar ad campaign is. Actually, it is probably the best $10 a campaign has ever spent, now that you have gone and spread the meme around.
Good instincts, great job!
Paying for an insulting domain name was a flagrant violation of the “policy” Scott Brown announced days before this took place.
The information published is PUBLIC INFORMATION. You have turned yourself into a pretzel in concluding that “this constitutes just that sort of harassment, snooping into someone’s business”.
Anybody who wants to can do a reverse IP lookup, they simply need shell access to a linux system connected to the web. It’s easy as “> nslookup 1.2.3.4” or “dig -x 1.2.3.4”. It doesn’t cost anything. That reverse lookup will tell you what server hosts the IP address (if it is properly configured, which many are not).
The whole point of these mechanisms is that they are free, public, and open. I really don’t understand how you EVER got the idea that doing a reverse lookup is some kind of invasion of privacy.
This is clear evidence that the Scott Brown campaign is:
a) Juvenile: They are reduced to grade-school name-calling
b) Dishonest: Either Scott Brown clearly told the public one thing and his staff something else, or
c) Incompetent: Scott Brown told his staff the same thing he told the public and can’t make it stick for less than a week
d) Illegal: This sort of activity probably violates the federal disclosure laws, since it is done by paid staffers of a sitting Senator.
If you have to do a reverse IP lookup to find out the domain was registered, that’s not a flagrant violation of anything, and certainly not a violation of Brown’s instruction to his staff not to operate Twitter parody accounts.
I see. So, when (if ever) in your world, does an act like this become “flagrant”? The fact that an adult, paid staffer registered this offensive domain name days after Mr. Brown’s public appearance forbidding such acts is apparently not “flagrant” in your world. In your world, offensively-named accounts on Twitter are forbidden, but offensively-named websites are just fine.
I have run companies with employees. I have given instructions to my employees about the values of my company and about acts that nobody in my company will ever do. I have instructed my employees that they are NEVER to pose as employees or customers of a competitor for any purpose. I have instructed my employees that they are NEVER to publicly insult or demean a competitor.
If any employee of mine did a stunt like this days after I made such an announcement — especially if I made that announcement in a public forum — I assure you I would consider it a “flagrant” violation of my policy as well as a betrayal of me and what I stand for, and I assure you that that employee would be IMMEDIATELY dismissed and escorted out the door.
I certainly get where you’re coming from. I’ve competed with the likes of you and I’ve watched the Republican Party behave this way my entire adult life (since Richard Nixon).
I think your exchanges in this thread — specifically, your apparent eagerness to defend the indefensible — illustrate the fundamental reality about the nature of the Scott Brown campaign and the GOP that the original poster strove to reveal.
You aren’t dumb and clearly understand the issue here: the fact that Scott Brown’s people are registering domains like this directly contradicts Brown’s claim to be against cheap negative attacks. There is absolutely no reason to register such a site unless one intends to use it to launch cheap attacks. He clearly is only against such tactics when he feels they are directed against him.
Frankly, I think that such tactics are counterproductive regardless of whether they can be traced back to the perpetrators, so I don’t really care if Brown wastes his campaign resources on this kind of crap. I just don’t think he is entitled to claim the that he is above this kind of stuff any more. He clearly is not.
So you’d agree that BobbleheadBrown.com is “such a site” and the only reason it exists is to launch cheap attacks? Well, at least we are getting somewhere now.
But it seems that you want him to unilaterally hold himself above that kind of stuff, while unidentified opponents spend $4 Million promoting a site that has been called out by factcheck.org as “largely unsupported.” I think he is right to denounce that kind of negative campaigning and to keep his campaign clean from that kind of attack site. But if those sites continue to be used against him in that way, he would be right to join the battle with one of his own. And so it makes sense to buy the site just in case they need it.
BobbleheadBrown.com is a site attacking Scott Brown’s record. Issues based.
CrazyKhazei.com attacks Alan Khazei’s sanity in it’s name. Not issues based.
QueenElizabethWarren.com sounds like something to attack Elizabeth Warren with the elitism charge. Not issues based.
See the difference?
Oh, and by the way:
You can’t have it both ways. “If you can’t beat ’em, join em” is just a fancy way of saying “I AM A HYPOCRITE” – which Scott Brown has already made clear by saying it wouldn’t happen again and then doing it a few days later.
“I think he is right to denounce that kind of negative campaigning and to keep his campaign clean from that kind of attack site. But if those sites continue to be used against him in that way, he would be right to join the battle with one of his own.” is a quote from dont-get-cute, not me. Never ever. Not sure why blockquote didn’t work.
1and1 hosts a lot of websites, including actondems.org.
Just sayin’.
Many of the websites on this specific server are owned by Willington, many related to Brown.
Peter P. used the term “queen” yesterday in a comment. A curious strategy to use against an academic consumer affairs expert. Maybe they thought they’d be running against Kate Middleton?
who was a model.
They read my stuff, don’t give me credit…
No, I did NOT comunicate that to Brown’s staff, or Rob, or anybody but here.
‘Arriveth our queen’ is a line from John Updike’s novel, “Bech: A Book”, and is used snarkily about a half-dead, elderly literary diva (think Willa Cather, Carson McCuller) taking the stage at a literary convention.
So JOHN UPDIKE is a Willington minion as well….
Eric was caught doing CrazyKhazei on August 23rd, Chris’ post early on August 24th then Eric’s admitted to the dirty tricks campaign on the 24th. David’s post today had Scott Brown himself stating that he spoke to Eric told him to admit it and cut the crap, no staff member will ever do this again. So we can pin point that conversation to August 24th. Then 4 days later Wellington goes out and registers QueenElizabethWarren.com.
Scotto, you got a problem, and you are going to need to explain yourself!!!
I hope the Globe and then the national media pick this up. The timing of this makes the flagrant lies of the Brown campaign about the Khazei episode even more obvious.
This is both egregiously stupid and incredibly dishonest. The connections between the Scott Brown campaign and the various national organizations, like the Mitt Romney campaign, are obvious.
The GOP is populated by thugs, liars and bullies and those who both encourage and pay them.
Woot.
However the link in your promotion comment does not.
nt
Both work for me now too.
The Globe is confirming that the Brown camp admits to being behind Queen Elizabeth.
The debate about whether or not it is Willington is over. Brown’s camp is behind the SAME dirty trick as before. As the Globe points out, “Such opposition websites are nothing new, though they are often aimed more at policy positions than personal qualities.”
They use the BigDig sites used against Charlie Baker. This refers to an issue held against Baker, not an attribute like mania or elitism.
The Bigger problem than the preciously named anti-Dems sites is the victimhood Brown expresses when his record is questioned, but the cavalier attitude he has when actual negative attacks are levied against his opponents.
of the Republican Party: making the powerful into victims.
While I appreciate your ironic understatement, I fear you are too kind to the Republican Party.
Yes, it is a “challenge”. More accurately, it is a lie.
I’m still unhappy that comment section of the Globe deletes any comment I post that describes the GOP or Senator Brown as dishonest or as liars. We seem to have degenerated to the point where the fact that a statement was knowingly false no longer matters: an observation that a public figure lies is “edited”.
All these euphemisms hide the central reality of the GOP: they are powerful wealthy racists who flagrantly lie, and who use their dominance of the mainstream media and the government to propagate and reinforce those lies in American culture.
the right word, particularly because they don’t seem to have a hard time doing it.
Scratch the psyche of many conservatives, however, and their is a powerful feeling a victimhood.
I don’t know that I can go as far as to call all Republicans racist–there’s a large streak of racism in the party and its tactics (maybe that’s what you’re saying).
Certainly, major portions of the party and its representatives lie and manipulate the media–particularly their propaganda arm, Fox News.