Tornado Alley (PROG)

[arizona1]

REVEALED: Mysterious anti-Obama text spam was sent by VA GOP politician (UPDATED x4)

"Obama believes killing children is a right until the umbilical cord is cut." "VP Biden mocks a fallen Navy Seal during memorial." "Obama denies protection to babies who survive abortions." "Stop Obama from forcing gay marriage on the states."

That's just a sampling of totally unsolicited text message spam that furious recipients http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/30/barack-obama-hate-text-messages_n_2047136.html said lit up their phones yesterday. It was all sent from anonymously-registered email domains hosted by GoDaddy.

Well, that anonymity didn't last long.

I don't see any news stories about this yet, so perhaps this is a Daily Kos exclusive, but GoDaddy has now taken down those domains, such as obamaliesett.com, votegopett.com, and gopmessage.com, and has removed the privacy screen that shielded the registrant's identity.

We can now clearly see that the registrant for all of these domains is Jason Flanary of Centreville, Virginia, who has a @ccadvertising.com email address. And it turns out that the COO of ccAdvertising is erstwhile Virginia GOP state senate candidate Jason Flanary http://who.godaddy.com/whois.aspx?domain=obamaliesett.com.

And this isn't the first time Flanary has spammed people with text messages http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/anti-democratic-text-messages-in-northern-va-prompt-lawsuit-complaints/2011/10/31/gIQA0cVdaM_story.html a week before election day. It even resulted in a lawsuit last time.

Fortunately, Flanary lost his election in 2011.

UPDATE: If you recieved this spam, file a complaint with the FCC. And anyone can support the official FCC petition to end political text message spam.

UPDATE: ccAdvertising has a long, long, long history of pumping spam out of every telecommunications orifice, and even boasting of voter suppression. I don't know why such a notorious operation still exists.

UPDATE: We were warned.

UPDATE: The "WHOIS" contact info for the domains in question has changed once again. It now points to "G Joseph," presumably Gabriel S. Joseph III, who, as of this NY Times piece from 2006, was the president of ccAdvertising.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/31/1152950/-REVEALED-Mysterious-anti-Obama-text-spam-was-sent-by-VA-GOP-politician