Sunday, June 05, 2011

What took so long? White House website now an official advertising arm of the Obama campaign

For a president whose administration has already been held in contempt of court by a federal judge and whose 2008 campaign openly accepted illegal foreign contributions, transforming the White House website into a voter outreach platform shouldn't come as much of a surprise.

Visitors to WhiteHouse.gov are now confronted with an email collection script.

It is entirely possible, and perhaps extremely likely, that collection of these emails crosses the line into an illegal use of government property for partisan purposes. The Clinton administration's Justice Department issued a 1999 memo that outlined prohibited behavior.

...activities in the workplace directed toward the success or failure of a political party, a candidate for partisan political office, or partisan political group, would violate the Hatch Act and also would violate the [DOJ]'s rules. For example, inviting individuals to attend a political event, recruiting campaign volunteers or dispersing campaign literature over the Internet is prohibited...

There is only one reason that the White House is collecting email addresses.

It is to promote, directly or indirectly, the reelection campaign of Barack Obama.

Not that legacy media will scrutinize this behavior -- no Weiner involved -- but a few questions spring to mind:

• Why are these email addresses being collected?
• With whom will they be shared?
• Who initiated the redesign of the White House website?
• What kinds of communications will be sent to these email addresses?

The musky scent of David Axelrod is all over this.



Hat tips: JTT, Granny Jan and Jihad Kitty. Linked by: Protein Wisdom and Publius Forum. Thanks!

8 comments:

Janice Sue G. said...

Godd explaining, Doug.
I made a video of it,too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u3AK1TkZbs

The Learn More button and the No Thanks button take you to the same place one of the four front pages of whitehouse.gov. In the meanwhile they collected your email and put a cookie on your computer.

Anonymous said...

Face it: He's a Black Stalin.

Katielee4211 said...

Unbelievable, I don't even know what to say. There is no getting into this site without supplying your email. Granny Jan----doesn't just visiting the page out a cookie on your computer?

Katielee4211 said...

OK Just FYI, The first time I went into Whitehouse.gov, I got the attached screen, now when I did, it went to the more open site. I did not supply my email address..

Janice Sue G. said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Janice Sue G. said...

Katie, If you watch the video it will explain why. You can bypass the email by pressing the No Thanks button. To see the regular Whitehouse.gov website a second time you have to delete your cookies. I don't know if ordinarliy they put a cookie on your computer. I don't think they are suppose to and wouldn't know why they would need to.

They need to put a cookie on your computer to collect the email because otherwise everytime you went to WH.gov you would get the sign in page.

Anonymous said...

When I went to the site, I saw Weiner's sweet tweet.

DEWEY FROM DETROIT said...

Whitehouse.gov is all propaganda, all day, every day. Imagine if the Bush Whitehouse had tried to pull this crap.