At my old local blog, we occasionally had paid trolls — from PR firms or Congressional offices — show up to say stuff about how awesome some bill was or candidate was. It always annoyed me and it’s why I’ve two or three times said I found some comment on BJ a little suspicious.
Here’s a comment we just got from some Americans Elect shill (too long to block quote so I’ll just paste it in after the dotted line):
——————————–
A unique opportunity has presented itself in the 2012 Presidential election for women to make known their political power. This opportunity has never been available before and may not ever be available again and we should not let this opportunity go by.
Americans Elect has acquired a spot on the national ballot for the November election and yet they have as of to date not been able to qualify a single candidate according to their own requirements. A seeded candidate must have 1000 support clicks in 10 different states for a total of 10,000 support clicks. A non-seeded would need 5000 from 10 different states for a total of 50,000 support clicks. They only have 3 weeks left to get someone qualified. As you know this is all done online at the Americans Elect web site http://www.americanselect.org. Signing up is simple and free and showing support is even easier. You can nominate anyone you wish and support as many as you choose.
They would like to have six qualified candidates to take to the AE online convention being held in June, from which a ticket will be selected for the November ballot spot.
With the organization and network of the various women’s groups and pac’s working together I can easily see them being able to inform and activate their memberships via the internet in the span of days or weeks and produce not just 1 woman candidate but have all 6 of the AE candidates be women candidates, each with the required support clicks. 1000 women or supporters of woman from each state showing support is a small number.
Now this does not mean that in November any one must vote for the AE candidate by any means. The point would not so much be about electing a President but rather to show the two parties and all others the power of the woman’s vote and the very real effect on government leadership that vote has.
I would recommend the following names as the quickest and easiest to put forward. Many already are on the leader boards at Americans Elect.
MICHEALENE RISLEY
ELIZABETH WARREN
HILLARY CLINTON
OLYMPIA SNOW
SHEILA LEE JACKSON
KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND
DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ
SHEILA BAIR
I am sure there are many others to suggest that would be as good or better but that is what I see at AE and is a starting point.
With the power of organization and the technology of the internet I could see Women across this country catapulting all 8 of these names overnight into nomination status and have press victories to share for parties and people to see all the way to November and beyond.
Ron
Ugh. I suspect that this is being done to try to siphon away left-leaning voters from Obama.
Steve
It’s nice of you to promote this nice commentor to front-page status!
The payday lending people used to employ this tactic a LOT. Every time there would be a blog post about payday lending, all of a sudden you’d have this swarm of commentors with perfect grammar talking about how useful payday lending was to their lives, blah blah blah.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
“Sheila Lee Jackson”?
If this is meant to stir up the PUMAs, somebody ought to tell Mr Van Susteren and Mark McKinnon that the PUMAs couldn’t fill the banquet room at the Tyson’s Corner Ramada three years ago, even Rotschild money
DougJ, Head of Infidelity
@Steve:
I feel like I’ve seen that too. It really annoys me.
David Koch
everyone they cited was female.
I wonder what made them think this was a female centric blog like pandagon.
srv
Why not spam this with Wasila woman?
SiubhanDuinne
Hunh. I don’t see Phyllis Schlafly’s name on that list.
Warren Terra
Uh huh. Secretary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Gillibrand, and several of the other notable Democrats on that list are just itching to siphon votes away from Obama in support of the plutocratic wankers behind the American Select. Itching, I tell you.
jl
If that were a custom written Balloon Juice comment, it could be long form dry snark.
And if not, the responses would soon make the commenter regret posting such a thing.
What percentage of readers would plow through such soporific sludge all the way to the end? Especially if showed up in the middle of fun comments full of bad words, bile, sulfur and damnation.
Smedley the uncertain
Gillibrand? Really????
JGabriel
I think Democrats should freep Americans Elect to put Sarah Palin on their ballot.
.
David Koch
I’m surprised and frankly bummed that Octomom and Kim Kardashian aren’t on the leader boards.
Egg Berry
Is this a chick fight?
mapaghimagsik
Isn’t this kind of a dumb strategy anyway, since most if not all of those ‘candidates’ would endorse Obama anyway?
Schlemizel
@Ron:
OH NO! WHO WOULD EVER SUSPECT THAT THIS WAS JUST A GIANT PLOT TO TAKE VOTES AWAY FROM OBAMA!!1!1!!
I’m afraid it will work as well as Ralphie did in 2k because too many voters are morons & 27% are morans
@mapaghimagsik:
I joined just for that purpose
JGabriel
@Smedley the uncertain:
Of course not. The only person on that list who is remotely in a position to run for president (though not successfully), and might want to do it, is Snowe.
The rest all have a life and/or another office they’re running for.
.
JoyfulA
@JGabriel: Yes, and Palin would accept the nomination, too! And then get all the Santorum-leaning voters away from Rmoney!
Hunter Gathers
I’m going to laugh when AE’s ‘on-line convention’ produces a LOLcat/Ron Paul ticket. I can haz cheezeburger for only a single silver coin.
the Conster (f/k/a Cat Lady)
Needs moar Harriet Christian.
cthulhu
It’s certainly not constructed as a blog comment, waaay obviously so (the first clear indication of first person is in the fourth paragraph?!). If this is ratfucking, I don’t get who would fall for it.
jl
@David Koch: Well, hey, it’s an online convention. If there are enough of us, we can make it so.
And the little ladies out there can delicately push those little old computer buttons to put George Clooney, the Brad part of Branjolina, and similar assorted quality hunk (I assume these soon to be fossils can still be considered quality hunk).
Only problem are the little ladies allowed on the American Elect grounds to actually look at the leader boards?
Edit: LOLcat/Ronald McDonald, or Ranald McPaulald, or whatever, ticket sounds good too.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
the only person I’ve never heard of is MICHEALENE RISLEY. Is this her spam? An attempt to build up her google hits? A fair number of crazy people run for president in all sincerity, not just Santorum.
Xecky Gilchrist
“Olympia Snow?”
Clearly a codename for that one lady from Alaska.
Emdee
What? No Cynthia McKinney?
But seriously, why does it have to pick off Obama votes? Why not start a grassroots surge for Michele Bachmann? They require a split ticket, so the Democratic running mate could be whoever the new Joe Lieberman is. Heath Shuler?
Calming Influence
tl:dr. Is this an open thread?
The Moar You Know
Not one “fuck”? Gotta learn to tailor that spam for your audience, son.
Oh yeah, forgot. Fuck Tom Friedman and his hamfisted attempt to install Romney in the White House.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Xecky Gilchrist: Lisa Murkowski?
GG
I hope Sheila Lee Jackson is smarter than Sheila Jackson Lee.
John - A Motley Moose
@JGabriel:
Absolutely. I thought from the first time I heard about AE that it was a poorly disguised attempt to take votes from Obama. The left should start a huge effort to push Palin or someone similar as their candidate. They want to game the election. Why not turn it around on them?
jl
On other hand maybe better forget spamming AE ‘leader boards’. And Kim Kardashian / George Clooney ticket (in either order) would effing destroy both Obama and Mitt.
No one would notice the the otherwise more likely Ollie ‘Snow’ / Yvonne Bayh ticket that no would notice. Though if AE can’t even get the names rights, but the mistakes are funny enough, the ticket might get a few votes.
On third hand, how about a Kim K /George C administration. Might be an improvement? Would produce plenty of WH social news, that’s for sure.
Pavonis
@JGabriel
I second (or third) nominating Sarah Palin! She doesn’t like Romney so it’d be really fun to stir things up on the right.
CT Voter
I’ll join Americans Elect if it means Sarah Palin is one of the candidates.
This is an obvious attempt to siphon votes from Dems, masquerading as a “grassroots” effort to rise above the two party dominance of politics. Only party that’ll be hurt by “Americans Elect” is the Democratic Party.
Thank you, DougJ (or whatever the hell you’re calling yourself) for keeping a focus on this.
Low Umbrage Threshold
I’m missing Little Michele Bachmann of the Church of Crazy Lady, and her bus tour to Irrelevancy.
Why should a marked inability to comprehend herself, or reality, stand in her way? It hasn’t stopped any of the other Rightist candidates.
That said, another ancient media reference: Ten Thousand Quatloos On The Newcomers!
Martin
I forget the rules – can we go for a Rachel Maddow/Phyllis Schlafly ticket? Because that’d be so awesome, it’s probably form its own free energy source.
bogdan
@Ron: Of course they are. I think that is about the only thing they are trying to do.
DougJ demonstrating his amazing reasoning abilities by determining that an obvious post from someone representing Americans Elect is (gasp) “suspicious” in that it might be from Americans Elect.
No shit Sherlock.
David Koch
@GG: GG Says:
Sheila E > Sheila Lee Jackson
jl
@bogdan: The thought occurred to me it was one of the most over elaborate and complicated DougJ troll posts in recorded history.
But, whatever. If it ends up inspiring bloggers to put zombie PT Barnum /Typhoid Mary on the AE ‘leader board’, it would do some good, despite all DougJ’s efforts.
David Koch
Obama’s cover has been blown. Turns out he’s a secret…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/6905951128/sizes/l/in/photostream/
GG
Hmmm, I’m pretty sure I’d remember posting comment 31. Complication of not requiring usernames to be registered, I guess. Is there a protocol if 2 ppl are using the same name?
Martin
@David Koch: HE’S A VULCAN ATHEJEWSLIM!
Xecky Gilchrist
1000 women or supporters of woman from each state showing support is a small number.
And yet, you can’t get the clicks.
This whole thing is pathetic.
Calouste
Whoever thinks women fall for that also thinks women fall for the chat up lines they have memorized from a book. It’s more transparent than a glass of distilled water.
Snarki, child of Loki
My AE vote is going for “Hank, the angry, drunken dwarf”, but that’s because I’m aware of all internet traditions.
Jon O
Callibg it now – if there’s an Americans Elect ballot line to speak of this November, it will include Olympia Snowe. Why else would she retire with a stated reason of “both sides do it”, and follow by saying Obama is the least bipartisan President in memory? The only way I see this happening is if public demand is so totally lacking as to make the party a farce. Luckily that seems to be the case.
maya
I’ m voting @ AE with the obvious – Minnie Mouse.
mclaren
There are a lot of highly paid thugs and sociopaths on this site too. Every time revelations about Obama torturing or murdering American citizens come out, these paid shills pop up and start explaining how Obama is the greatest preznit of the past hundred years, how he’s accomplished 57 different great attainments in the last 3.5 years and he can eat nails and shit solid gold, and so on and so forth.
Then when you scrutinize Obama’s supposed “accomplishments” over the last 3.5 years, it turns out they’re “amazing” “breakthrough” “astounding” “achiements” like…voting to bail out the banks when the world financial system collapsed.
That’s something anyone in the Oval Office would’ve done, even Sarah Palin if she’d been elected.
You can ID the paid shills pretty easily. The front-pagers who consistently attack the only people warning about America’s descent into totalitarianism…yeah, those are paid shills. People like Anti-Liberal Black Lady. She never utters a word against Karl Rove, but boy, oh boy! Does she ever attack and attack and attack and attack and attack and attack and attack and attack and attack and attack and attack Glenn Greenald. Anti-Liberal Black Lady has never dared criticize Grover Norquist or Rick Santorum…but wowie zowie! Does she ever attack and attack and attack and attack and attack and attack and attack and attack and attack and attack and attack and attack and attack and attack and attack and attack and attack and attack and attack and attack and attack and Naomi Wolf.
Yeah, Anti-Liberal Black Lady obviously gets weekly brown paper bags full of hundreds from Karl Rove. It’s interesting to see who else sucks the teat of the Kock/Murdoch/Rove disinformation machine on this site. The dead giveaway? When they lunge into a foaming frothing teeth-gnashing frenzy screaming smears at someone warning of America’s slide into tyranny and lawlessness: that’s a paid shill.
Alas, both political parties are now fully complicit into turning America into a sadistically brutal police state. The killing fields are not far in the future now: as Marcus Licinius Crassus intoned in the 1960 movie Spartacus:
Meanwhile, we get the rampant cancerous spread of suspicious activity reporting” (AKA parents snitching on their children, brothers turning in their sisters to Homeland Security, children informing on their parents to the FBI for a lollipop and a Citizen’s Loyalty Badge.
And does Anti-Liberal Black Lady utter a peep about this new descent into police-state paranoia? You bet your ass she doesn’t. None of the front-pagers will even touch this stuff.
Someone who lived through Stalin’s terror once wrote a memoir in which he lamented “If we had only waited for the KGB with axes and rebars and beaten and killed them when they came through the door, we could have been free. Instead, we cringed in cowardice while they dragged away our innocent neighbors to the gulag. And so the Russian people descended into terror and slavery.”
Steve
@mclaren: You’re probably right that a President other than Obama would have done the bank bailout too. The best evidence of this is that it was not President Obama who did the bank bailout, but President George W. Bush.
The prophet Nostradumbass
Someone’s in danger of having a stroke.
jprfrog
This was posted at Salon a few hours ago. I imagine it will be everywhere — robo-posting? Are these folks plumping for the Ralph Nader Award? As if 2000 wasn’t enough?
rageahol
so are all of you aware of how to use tor to skew the results of an online poll?
well, google it, fucknuts. you should know tor anyway.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@mclaren:
Paid by the word? Guess it’s a good thing they’re not paid by the read word, huh?
ABL 2.0
ORLY?
Rick Santorum’s Views on Church and State Make My Brain Vomit
Santorum Knows in His Heart that the Dutch Are Euthanized (w/ video)
Today in Rick Santorum: ‘Eat a Bag of Dicks’ Edition
Santorum Staffer Thinks Ladies Shouldn’t Be President…
Santorum Rides the Dog Whistle Express in South Carolina
Rick Santorum Amazed that Black People are Pro-Choice
Rick Santorum Cares About YOU, Black Person! [Updated] (I even quote DougJ in this one!)
Santorum’s Excuse: I didn’t say “black” people, I said “blah” people!
Rick Santorum’s Relationship with The Blahs™
Santorum: He didn’t say “blah people,” he said “plives.”
Paul Ryan: The First Rule About Income Inequality is “Don’t Talk About Income Inequality.”
Much to the Village’s frustration, President Obama isn’t giving up on job creation
Majority of Millionaires Want Their Doggone Taxes Raised
Human Banner in San Francisco Reads “Tax the 1%”
You were saying?
Three posts, dear. Three.
You might want to put a cold towel on your forehead and lie down before your brain explodes.
ETA: As for my Greenwald posts? Sure, there are probably 10, maybe 15. Let’s make it an even 25. I just checked the dashboard and I have 500 posts here. 25 out of 500? That’s a low percentage of attack attack attack etc, even if you subtract 50 open thread posts.
So yeah. Simmer down.
Citizen_X
How come we can have Shiela Lee Jackson but we can’t have Debbie Schultz Wasserman?
tweez
@John – A Motley Moose: Fvcking A! I’m gonna sign up and go there right now and nominate Sarah Palin. (yuck) ARE YOU WITH ME?!!!
General Stuck
Okay, who brought the net?
Mnemosyne
@mclaren:
I understand why you liked that Salon article so much: it was incoherent and used lots of scary buzzwords without citing any useful facts.
Oh noes! Muslims were investigated in 2007! That means we’re living in a police state right now, y’all!
Mnemosyne
@ABL 2.0:
mclaren’s in a manic cycle. It happens pretty regularly.
I used to bait her more, but I started to feel bad for taunting someone who was pretty clearly mentally ill and too paranoid to get help for it.
Anya
Wow. The obsession some people have with ABL is quite something. I wonder what’s behind it?
pete
@Steve: No fair confusicating the troll with dates and facts and stuff.
tweez
@tweez: What a big plastic hassle. Now I feel dirty
Anya
You know who’s missing from the list of female Dem candidates? Michelle Obama. And why not, since they have Obama’s SOS and the DNC chair.
ABL 2.0
@Mnemosyne: oh ok. good to know!
amk
@mclaren: fucking emoprog pl idjit.
Now that’s all you get for the $ 0.02 I got for doing this shite.
mclaren
@Mnemosyne:
I can understand why you and Anti-Liberal Black Lady don’t give a damn about Obama’s endless unwinnable wars (coming soon: Obama goes to war with Iran! New! Improved! Bush Term 4! Coming in Obama’s second term!) and Obama signing off on the prosecution of a guy who leaked America’s torture (the torturers go free! But the guy who revealed the torture to the press? Oh, he gets indicted and sent to prison by Obama’s DOJ!) and the NSA building a gigantic new complex to collect all data on every American, the better for a Grand Inquisition 2.0 (with enough of a person’s emails and phone calls and bank records, you can confect the illusion of guilt for one of Obama’s NDAA orders — especially with Obama’s secret trials with secret laws and “evidence” produced by torture, which no one outside the secret court is allowed to see).
You and Anti-Liberal Black Lady are paid shills.
Don’t know how much Karl Rove is paying both of you, but chances are it’s not enough.
Joseph Nobles
@mclaren:
Go fuck yourself!
Hee! That’s fun. I’d do that even if I weren’t getting paid to do it.
The prophet Nostradumbass
mclaren, before the dictation software cleaned it up:
daveNYC
@mclaren: You’re not even trying. How about “I don’t know how much Karl Rove is paying you, but given the quality of the output, it’s probably way too much.”
That would at least get you a good insult in among the batshit crazy.
Mnemosyne
@mclaren:
You mean torture apologist John Kiriakou?
Yeah, that mean ol’ Obama, prosecuting the guy who went on TV and said that we didn’t really torture people that badly, and it totally worked anyway.
But I’m not at all surprised that you would hitch your wagon to torture apologist John Kiriakou. You don’t care who you have to support as long as you think it makes Obama look bad. I look forward to your passionate defense of poor, persecuted Orly Taitz.
Tonal Crow
@jprfrog:
You’re kidding, right? This is pure Republican ratfucking, straight from the groin of, er, Shagrat himself.
Jay in Oregon
Is anyone else talking about how Americans Elect was funded by several unnamed millionaires who gave money to get the ball rolling, then AE changed the bylaws so that no one contributor could donate more than $10,000 and anyone who had would get the extra money returned to them—basically making AE yet another way to siphon money out of the pockets of hard-working Americans to line the pockets of the rich?
http://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpolitics/americans-elect-is-raising-money-to-repay-its-mill
I gotta say: suckering the American people into voting against their interests AND getting them to pay for the privilege is pretty fucking ballsy.
amk
@Jay in Oregon: Perfect scam. PT Barnum couldn’t have nailed the ‘murkans any better.
Brutusettu
Dougj lays down some territorial pissings because he doesn’t like paid shills posting on his blogs.
Eli Rabett
who is this anti-back lady?
Marc
@mclaren:
Not as easily as you can spot the volunteer trolls. They’re the ones who resort to name-calling while they wear out their copy and paste function.
kay
AE is worth looking at because they started with the premise that what’s wrong with our politics is political parties, and that idea is absolutely CHERISHED in certain circles. It’s sacred.
If we could just break the stranglehold of the Party system, it’d all be rainbows and lollypops.
But they did it. They bought ballot access in 50 states and they bought a platform for nominating a presidential candidate, and they quite literally can’t give it away.
Rather than re-examine the premise, rather than any discussion of the fact that they built it and no one came, so maybe the problem ISN’T political parties, they’re just going to ignore all this and shift to pressuring the two political parties.
AE goes a good ways toward disproving the cherished theory of “independents” that what’s holding them back is the two political parties, but I don’t think anyone will ever admit that, because it’s much, much easier to pretend that what’s wrong with our politics is political parties or “process barriers” when it’s really much bigger than that.
kay
AE could have been truly transformative, if they had taken the hard road rather than the easy one.
They could have targeted people who don’t participate in elections AT ALL rather than seeking to siphon off support from Obama.
50% of people don’t vote at all. If one is serious about “breaking the stranglehold of the two party system” and one has 20 million dollars and ballot access, why not target new voters instead of “slice and dice”, which is what unions call poaching members from other unions.
Why not actually create something rather than focusing on destroying something?
Create a political party. Take those 50% of non- voters and MAKE something of their own.
I personally think no one does this because those 50% of non-voters skew heavily POOR.
They’re poor people.
Lawnguylander
I had high hopes for this thread. Was hoping to see 500 or so comments with some of the more paranoid regulars slinging accusations back and forth at each other but only mclaren took the bait. What a pity because that would have been funny. And this was posted at a time when you would expect a lot of regulars to be drunk and up for a fight. Puzzling. I suggest you try again. It’s too good of a post idea not to. If you do, I promise to say something about Greenwald’s history of using sock puppets in order to fan the flames.
JR in WV
Being unable to give away a (pseudo) presidential nomination is pretty funny. It also points out how hard running for office really is, even if you don’t have to personally raise all the money for your race.
I have only voted for a Repugnant a couple of times, when the local race had a felon Democratic nominee running. In WV there isn’t much chance of any R winning in many counties. When a neighbor was elected Republican County Chairman, we couldn’t even get a load of road gravel or a grader run over the washboard.