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 week—and 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 sites—including 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?
WTF are you talking about?
"National Field Director, DCI Group, Public Affairs (2005)"
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=DCI_Group
the following is there
Los Angeles Times staff reporters Noam N. Levey and Chuck Neubauer, report in their October 2, 2006 story, "Foley Enters Alcohol Rehab Center,"[11] (http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-100206foley,0,5979987,print.story?coll=la-home-headlines) that "Kirk Fordham, a veteran Republican legislative staffer who has worked on Capitol Hill for much of the last 17 years, served as Foley's chief of staff from 1995 to 2004. Fordham also managed Foley's first campaign for Congress, in 1994.
"In 2005, Fordham went to work for DCI Group, a leading GOP political strategy group. The same year, he became Reynolds' chief of staff." Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (R-N.Y.), to whom the story refers, is chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, which leads the effort to maintain the GOP majority in the House. He hired Forham October 4, 2005. according to a press release of that date.[12] (http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:PB5-bv5kjhUJ:www.house.gov/reynolds/oct4b-2005.htm+Kirk+Fordham&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=4)
Ross is not Foley. Check your original post.
me, too!
ping
Sure she does...and with some level of potential that she's right. I don't think that she is though. The story is unravelling with respect to what the Dims knew and when they knew it, plus the sheer hypocrisy of their behavior given their support for Dims who have done far worse than Foley OR Hastert etc. I'm sure some new revelation will emerge in an attempt to regain traction on the whole republicans are pervs issue....and those too will fail. Republicans will keep the House and Senate....and the Dims will STILL claim victory in some way, manner, or form.
There's a cache.
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:NFuT-CBhL0IJ:stopsexpredators.blogspot.com/+stopsexpredators.com&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1
I hope you are right.
Maybe this 18 old man and former page was hitting on Foley
Since when can the Senate investigate the House and *why* would that be more trust worthy than the AG, from an actual different branch of gov't, doing an investigation? McCain is a *moron*.
i tracked down what i saw...
That Leopold owned the stopsexpredators web site.
and, you're right...too speculative
nevermind.
Yahoo maps shows that address here in the 97236-5235 zip code
Oops, sorry ma'am,
I'm just so used to the men doing a lot of the web related unearthing dirty work that I just assumed!
Sarah
When does he ever...our side, that is?
Totally agree.
Before last week, Hastert only knew that Foley had written some e-mails to a former page, and the page got annoyed. The e-mails were not of a sexual nature, but the young man and his parents wanted Foley to quit writing, so they asked Hastert's office to intervene, Hastert told Foley to cut it out, and as far as he knew, Foley did.
Hastert didn't know about the Instant Messages which were apprarently from 2003, and which WERE explicit. When he learned of them, he talked again to Foley and Foley resigned.
Hastert is not the dorm mother for those men. He is not responsible for what they do in their private lives, but he did the right thing by asking Foley to resign, when he did find out what Foley had done, because it involved young men who had served in the Page program in the House.
The only info for the owner of the blog is his or her user id. Google hids everything else. Looking up his user id didn't show anything. If you read his blog, he does say his was lurking here on the Freep one day.
read later
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