JAWA Report investigates the Palin smear source(s)

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Hope, Change, & Lies: Orchestrated “Grassroots” Smear Campaigns & the People that Run Them

Our research suggests that a subdivision of one of the largest public relations firms in the world most likely started and promulgated rumors about Sarah Palin that were known to be false. These rumors were spread in a surreptitious manner to avoid exposure.

It is also likely that the PR firm was paid by outside sources to run the smear campaign. While not conclusive, evidence suggests a link to the Barack Obama campaign. Namely:

• Evidence suggests that a YouTube video with false claims about Palin was uploaded and promoted by members of a professional PR firm.
• The family that runs the PR firm has extensive ties to the Democratic Party, the netroots, and are staunch Obama supporters.

Evidence suggests that the firm engaged in a concerted effort to distribute the video in such a way that it would appear to have gone viral on its own. Yet this effort took place on company time.

• Evidence suggests that these distribution efforts included actions by at least one employee of the firm who is unconnected with the family running the company.
• The voice-over artist used in this supposedly amateur video is a professional.
• This same voice-over artist has worked extensively with David Axelrod’s firm, which has a history of engaging in phony grassroots efforts, otherwise known as “astroturfing.”
• David Axelrod is Barack Obama’s chief media strategist.
• The same voice-over artist has worked directly for the Barack Obama campaign.

This suggests that false rumors and outright lies about Sarah Palin and John McCain being spread on the internet are being orchestrated by political partisans and are not an organic grassroots phenomenon led by the left wing fringe.

You must read the entire report. Patterico adds,

One more fact that probably should have been added: a senior Obama advisor is one of barely over two dozen Facebook contacts for the alleged uploader. Many of the other contacts are his family members.

Wizbang:

As far as I’m concerned, the only unresolved question is how closely this comes to the Obama campaign itself. I’m convinced that Obama’s Chief Media Strategist, David Axelrod, had at least a part in the whole thing. And if that comes out, he’ll go under the bus in an attempt to distance Obama himself from this whole disgusting mess.

Ace tries to find the missing YouTubes. Dan‘s updating throughout the day.

More at Memeorandum.

Waiting for the MSM to pick up the story…

UPDATE
Three weeks ago, Doug Ross also noticed how a Palin slime chain mail posted in hundreds of forums.

Related: Shutting down opposition voices

How loud would be the howls of outrage if we got word that the Republicans were organizing gangs of callers to a local radio show to overwhelm a critic of George W. Bush who was being interviewed? And after that, the storm of anger would reach hellish proportions if we found out that Bush supporters were threatening an independent religious organization with an IRS investigation simply because it had invited Senator Obama and Senator McCain to speak and then, when McCain turned them down, still had the audacity to have Obama speak? We can all imagine the editorials and cartoons evoking the jack-booted thugs threatening the First Amendment that we would see in such an event.

But it turns out that, when it is Democrats creating this outrage, the response is just ho hum, move along, nothing of interest here. The Obama campaign first mobilized forces and provided them with talking points to call into WGN talk show host Milt Rosenberg when he had conservative writer Stanley Kurtz on to talk about his research into the Obama record. They did it again when David Freddoso, author of The Case Against Barack Obama, appeared on the show. Think of how many anti-Bush books have been published in the past seven years. And have we ever heard of a mass mobilization effort to shut down a radio station interview with one of the authors? Is this the change we can believe in?

And then there is this distressing farce of a story of how the Democrats sabotaged a Jewish protest against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as he appeared at the United Nations. First the Jewish organization invited both Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton. But when Clinton got word that she would have to appear on the same stage as Palin, she backed out. Apparently, she opposes Iranian nukes but not enough to risk showing up together with the Republican vice presidential candidate. The rally’s organizers then invited Joe Biden, but the Obama campaign put the kibosh on that. The Democrats mounted a full-court press against the Jewish groups organizing the rally and, as the local CBS station reports, even threatened them with an IRS investigation if they had Palin and no comparable Democrat, knowing that the Democrats were refusing to show up.

Coincidence?

Update 2
Who is Axelrod? Brian answers,

He’s Obama’s speechwriter and image crafter.
He’s the man who refuses to let the carefully-crafted image of Barack Obama be sullied by negative associations…

Read the rest.

False-flag smears:

In intelligence work, a false flag operation is a mission launched by one country against another, but made to look like a third party was responsible. If the operation is discovered, the third country takes the blame and the actual aggressor, if not wholly protected, at least has plausible deniability.

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