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White House: Axelrod spam? All because of outside agitators.

What is this, the Wilson administration?

By: Moe Lane (Diary)  |  August 18th, 2009 at 09:00 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

I just had this forwarded by one of my RS colleagues who doesn’t have time to hit this right now. Turns out that the Axelrod spam did happen, and it’s all because of all those awful “outside groups of all political stripes“:

After insisting no one was receiving unsolicited e-mails from the White House, officials reversed their story Monday night and blamed outside political groups for the unwanted messages from the tech-savvy operation.

White House online director Macon Phillips said in a blog posting that independent groups—he didn’t name them—had signed-up their members to receive regular updates about Obama’s projects, priorities and speeches.

The White House had consistently denied that anyone who hadn’t sought the e-mails had received them.

But we can believe them when they now tell us that it’s not their fault. Because nothing, of course, is ever this administration’s fault.

You can see (via Jake Tapper) the administration’s official response itself here, which by the way says that if you objected to this you’re probably a fear-mongerer defending the status quo. No, really:

An ironic development is that the launch of an online program meant to provide facts about health insurance reform has itself become the target of fear-mongering and online rumors that are the tactics of choice for the defenders of the status quo.

Charming post by Macon Phillips, that was; and not nearly as good at hiding his petulance at having to explain things to the common mob as he thinks he is.  Well, that’s DC for you – anyway, they’ve also rewritten the sign-up process to stop people from forwarding their spam folders en masse as an act of protest against this proto-Stasi operation fix the problem.  It looks like it’d work well enough, for its ostensible purpose: imagine if they had had the mother-wit to do this fifteen minutes of work in the first place. Imagine if the administration in general had the corporate inclination to demand more than a slapdash job. On anything…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

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COMMENTS

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  • pauly1620

    They are lying! I received the Axelrod email after submitting an email to the President via the Whitehouse.gov website. No third-parties were involved, they acquired my email address from my correspondence with “the One” and then used it to spam me. Although to be fair, I did turn around and forwarded Axelrod’s email to flag@whitehouse.gov informing them I received an email about health care reform that was rife with lies and untruths.

  • gator_hoo

    That is at least twice the effort that they ever put into preventing illegal campaign donations!

  • http://docweasel.wordpress.com docweasel

    The press always has to lump in the positive adjectives, even when they are at odds with the story in which they appear.

    In fact, Obama’s organization has shown a distinct _lack_ of tech savvy. The lowliest mailing list or net forum requires return email on attempted subscriptions. Of course, it wasn’t in their interest to in any way limit their list by forcing someone to verify their email address. But it certainly doesn’t show any “savvy”- it shows a distinct lack of savvy, of realization that people don’t like receiving unwanted emails, of the possibility that malicious agents could sign up people who didn’t want the emails as a way of taunting them, or just to gin up more addresses and help the things go “viral”.

    There’s a word for this: it’s called spamming. Spamming political emails is not “savvy”, it’s ignorant and stupid, because anyone with any apprehension would realize the possibility for backlash, which is what happened, turning a “tech savvy” tool into a negative: bad press, reverse reaction, absolute failure as a program, in which the White House had invested a lot of time, propaganda and money.

    When can we start admitting the plain truth: Obama is _not_ intelligent, he’s not a great politician, he’s not “savvy” in anything but leftist politics. He’s an arriviste of the first water, an opportunist who was there when the press wanted to pump up the ultimate in affirmative action: nominating and electing a man who is proving incredibly unready for the job into which he has been thrust, and he’s making a complete hash of it on every conceivable level. This is just one symptom.

    And in actuality, it will end up destroying the left’s window of power and reinvigorating and reinstating the right back into power.

  • misterh

    The Obama Administration Motto:

    “The Buck Stops…Over There!!”

    Mr. H
    http://www.allhands-ondeck.blogspot.com/

  • peg_c

    If only it were a circular firing squad.

  • proudgop

    Yet, media will give them free ride

    I didn’t see any mention of this story in my papers today. Hardly, any mention on news

  • bobojake

    They have no creditibility.

  • http://www.ssce.net/Web-Articles/Web-articles-indexed-authors.html#authors-l JLenardDetroit

    I reported one of my email addresses by using/sending through another one of my email addresses ;-) lol…. knowing that the Law required them to keep on file and wanting to see if they were still STUPID enough to still be adding people’s email addresses sent in to receive their unsolicited/unwanted SPAM (a, thanks for sending to flag@… blah, blah, blah, of course, would be an acceptable/reasonable COURTESY but anything beyond that) and (if no other reason) to have in their permanent files (if they are NOT just ignoring the law) my objections to the HC BS I sent my entire RS Diary (Democrat Health Care Townhall propaganda – a place to report the Dem’s Talking Points (read: Lies) and refute them with specifics) as inline text. They, it appears, stopped the practice of mining the email addresses of enemies at that point as I hadn’t received anything back as acknowledgement to the one email for writing into flag@wh or the other email address I was “reporting.”

    The trouble, of course, is we are still not getting the follow-up needed to pressure the questioning of whether they are obeying the law and maintaining the emails on file and getting to the real (obvious) truth that regardless of how the emails were sent/forwarded to flag@wh they violated so many other laws by mining the email addresses from those sent in and compiled to (whatever they want to call) a list we all know (through others experiencing it first hand unsolicited returns) they compiled.

    This story is NOT complete and pressure must be kept up to get the answers to those questions!!!!

    Regards from (an 20+ year IT guy) NoMoTown (the MOTORlessCITY)

  • http://www.ssce.net/Web-Articles/Web-articles-indexed-authors.html#authors-l JLenardDetroit

    REGARDLESS, of the BS excuses as to how the WH wishes to SPIN how the emails landed up at/on the Flag@wh email server…. HOW did (and who specifically did it – Campaign workers or Federal Govt employees or automated data-mining reader program) the email addresses get mined?!?!?!

    TO WHAT LIST were those email addresses mined added to?!?!? Specifically!!! What is the complete list, where/who maintains it, who has access to send propaganda out via it?!?!?!

    PROVE that the WH is obeying the Law that all correspondence sent to the WH, including via email (ON THIS OFFICIAL WH GOVT. SERVER) is being maintained!!!!! Provide access to all the emails for review!!!!! Let those who have been SPAMMED now be able to search/review (on their own or via FBI INVESTIGATION) in what manner their email address was “SHARED” with the WH?!?!?!

    Keep sending your “concerns” to FOX (the only Network challenging the ObamaBinBiden admin on their violations of Federal Law in these regards) to keep asking the unresolved questions. They cannot just be let off the hook now because they stopped SPAMMING, for now, and shutdown the site. LAWS HAVE BEEN BROKEN IN ONE SHAPE OR ANOTHER AND WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW — WHAT DID THEY KNOW AND WHEN DID THEY KNOW IT???

  • redneck_hippie

    continues in force, as per Sean’s radio show yesterday. (Good!)

    There are NO COINCIDENCES in this administration. No, not any more than the messiah’s campaign illegally allowed (and by allowing, encouraged) fraudulent donations to be made with NO ACCOUNTABILITY and not even a pretense of trying to correct the practice.

  • LeaveMeAlone

    Occam’s Razor is the operative principle here.

    According to the news last night, the White House claims they received the email addresses as uploaded lists from regularly-corresponding visitors to their sites, assumed they were legitimate subscribers, and it was through no fault of their own.

    The simplest explanation that takes into account the factors of the situation (the principle behind Occam’s Razor) would indicate that they simply harvested any and all email addresses, (even those that were a part of a forwarded message, and should have required an opt-in from the owners of those addresses), they received via their flag@… mailbox.

    Not only is this extremely offensive to the owners of the violated addresses, it is in some jurisdictions contrary to law. I am continuously astonished at the ongoing willingness of a large percentage of the press and the general public to believe the lies put forth by this administration.

  • gator_hoo

    “Because of Bush’s policies, I still don’t have the buck!”

  • bk

    The email is sent from an official WH email address, but they claim innocence as to whatever any 3rd party might have done along the way when it comes to forming the “to” list for the note.

    ON THE OTHER HAND…

    These are the same folks who believe that Bush and Cheney are personally responsible for any and all actions taken by any employee of Halliburton or Blackwater or of any subcontractor that they may have used anywhere in the world.

  • gensec

    It [new WH email "opt in"] looks like it?d work well enough, for its ostensible purpose: imagine if they had had the mother-wit to do this fifteen minutes of work in the first place.

    Moe, you’re just too ready to believe that some people have seen the error of their ways and now will do it right.

    Even after all this flack, the White House spam machine isn’t doing what any semi-ethical email list would do on the first try, much less the secon, which is send a confirmation email with a link to click if you want to receive future messages. Without that safeguard, anybody can enter your email address to get unwanted spam (or thousands of robot scooped email addresses with a simple script).

    After seeing a post on this issue at Ace of Spades HQ, I tried it myself. I punched in a a throwaway address at http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/ and sure enough they subscribed me without any confirmation that I was really the one who had asked to be subscribed.

    Obviously this administration’s talents are wasted on government, when their true calling is unsolicited marketing of penis enlargers and Nigerian inheritance deals.

  • michaeljmcfadden

    It all boils down to whether people feel they can trust President Obama. And unfortunately President Obama blew that trust out the window on July 21st when he told a blatant lie to a national TV audience on the Today Show. And to make it worse, it was a blatant lie that at least 40 million Americans knew instantly was a blatant lie:

    “In the six months I’ve been here, the only tax change I’ve made has been to cut taxes.”

    40,000,000 American smokers knew that one of Obama’s very first acts in office had been to raise their taxes by 150%. Another two million Americans, those so poor that they’d been forced to roll their own from shreds of tobacco and scraps of paper, knew that their taxes had been raised by an incredible 2,000%. There’s a very big difference between breaking campaign promises and bare-faced lying.

    See the clip and read the story yourself at:

    http://pro-choicesmokingdoctor.blogspot.com/2009/07/obama-in-bare-faced-lie.html

    and then ask yourself if you think he’s telling the truth THIS time.

    Michael J. McFadden
    Author of “Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains”