The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), which has been running nasty, negative attacks on Al Franken has been operating a site called “Frankly Franken,” a disgusting site that Norm Coleman’s campaign can legally coordinate with. Much like the NRSC “tracker dump site” MNpublius has mentioned before, “Frankly Franken” is a clearinghouse of photos, quotes, news clippings, tracker video and links to television spots that are primarily anti-Franken and sometimes pro-Coleman.
“Frankly Franken” exists on the side of the NRSC that is legal for campaigns to coordinate with, unlike the the Independent Expenditure (IE) side which controls the development of television ads, for example, which Coleman’s campaign cannot legally control nor coordinate with.
When Coleman made his fishy announcement about “suspending” negative campaign ads, he said:
I have directed my campaign this morning to begin the process of immediately pulling any negative ad that I am personally responsible for approving- I am also issuing a press release today calling on those who chose to weigh in on this race to honor my call for only positive ads.
The fact is, there may be ads in the pipeline- fundraising letters- direct mail—YouTube or Web videos or other campaign messages that will filter out into the public over the next several days.
I raise this because I want to avoid being caught up on a technicality while the good faith effort is being made to pull these ads down.
It’s almost been a week and “Frankly Franken” is still up and has been continually been updated with links to negative ads from third parties pushing negative ads on Coleman’s behalf. At any time, Coleman’s campaign could call NRSC Chairman John Ensign and ask him to disable the “Frankly Franken” site.
Here’s the kicker: Yesterday afternoon, “Frankly Franken” had its broken YouTube links to Coleman’s negative ads replaced with new links where you can now download versions of all of those spots.
Point being, “Frankly Franken,” a site operated by the NRSC that Norm Coleman legally coordinates with, as of yesterday afternoon is now redistributing all of Norm Coleman’s negative ads.
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All bet’s in now on how long it is before Brodkorb calls Aaron a lier!
I bet he won’t. He only likes to be the first one to comment.
The “FranklyFranken” site is using “http://domainsbyproxy.com/” to hide the owner of the domain “franklyfranken.com”. The owner has done this to hide the identity of the owner. As stated on the “domainsbyproxy” site, “The law requires that the personal information you provide with every domain you register be made public in the “WHOIS” database.”
“Whois” is “http://whois.bw.org/” and will show the information of about the owner of the registered domain name.
“domainsbyproxy” gets around this by putting them into the registery rather than the “real” owner.