Via TheUptake, a truly astounding story today from MNPublius, a local political blog.
Norm Coleman faked a crash of his own website, to make it appear that he was being "flooded" with uncounted zillions of requests from supporters to know if those dirty Democrats were trying to disenfranchise them.
For those who don't know, the nuttiest wingnuts in the land of 10,000 lakes are surely the denizens of Minnesota Democrats Exposed, our very own homegrown Freeper wannabe. Ealier today, MDE put up a new page entitled: 'Coleman Campaign unveils new website: "Is the Franken Campaign preventing your vote from being counted?" '. Said website purports to have a list of rejected absentee ballots.
"Al Franken says he wants to represent you in the Senate, but he does not necessarily want your vote to count," said Cullen Sheehan, campaign manager. "We created this website so that Minnesotans can see if they may be one of the thousands of voters who Al Franken wants to ignore in order to maintain his temporary and artificial lead."
A few hours (or minutes?) later, MDE put up a second breathless announcement. It seems that there was so much traffic on Norm Coleman's new webpage, the servers all crashed!!!!!!! YES!!!!!!! Really!!!!!!. There were "thousands" of hits. Thousands! Yup, that would be enough to crash any server. Sure.
To quote a great American: Lies, and the lying liars who tell them.
It turns out that the "new webpage" was deliberately pointed to the nonexistent IP address 1.1.1.1, making it appear as though the site had crashed. Hmmmmmmmmmmm.
"Minnesotans and folks across the country are fed up with Al Franken’s efforts to disenfranchise thousands of Minnesota voters, and the overwhelming response we received to making this information public is proof positive of that fact," said Campaign Manager Cullen Sheehan.
The link on MDE's page points to a redirect to Norm Coleman's campaign site, like this:
http://65.121.0.101/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.colemanforsenate.com
According to MNPublius, the IP address 65.121.0.101 is owned by FLS Connect, a GOP web-services provider.
UPDATE:
The Minnesota Independent is now on the case, having called the Coleman campaign and gotten stonewalled on every front -- including new lies and coverups.
Tony Webster, a Minneapolis web developer, explained to me that the IP address the Coleman campaign used prior to today’s "crash" (208.42.168.197) is responsive. Translation: "If the site was truly down, that IP wouldn’t be responsive.
Even creepier:
I called Tim Barsness listed as the technical contact for the site. The provided phone number rang to Coleman’s campaign office; while Barsness was not available, the unidentified man who answered the phone would say little, except to inform me that the problem was being worked on as we spoke — and to correct me: "The crash happened yesterday." That assertion sets off a red flag for Tony Webster: If that’s true, why does he see two entries dated today? He took a screen grab of the Coleman site’s HTML code, taken directly from the site’s server.