Posted on Mon, Jun 29th 2009 at 08:06 PM by Bruce
“My 84 year-old mother’s house will be sold out from under her today, and it’s breaking my heart.”
Or so the e-mail claims. Irene Leary, son of Daniel Leary (who later refers to himself as Dennis Leary, in the same e-mail) implores the reader to “sign the petition now” to help keep some faceless Leviabank from tossing his mother out onto the street.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” the writer continues. “My mother will lose her home today unless we can convince OneWest not to sell her house. Please help her. Please sign the letter now. Click here.”
Man, this sounds pretty serious.
Now, according to the mass e-mailing, who exactly is advocating on behalf of dear Mrs. Leary? None other than everyone’s favorite shadowy activist group, ACORN.
It’s ACORN’s logo on the e-mail. It’s ACORN’s e-mail address in the header. But who’s really benefiting from this e-mail decrying Mrs. Leary’s plight?
Embedded links in the e-mail direct to the website of an activist group, “WiredForChange,” an offshoot of DemocracyInAction’s web-based software suite, “Salsa,” and registered to the founder and Chief Technology Officer for the firm, Chris Lundberg.
DemocracyInAction, according to its staff bio page, was launched in 2003, and serves as a “mission-oriented company providing online engagement tools to political campaigns, PACs, the DSCC [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee] and State Democratic parties.”
Their product, “Salsa,” is a software program which, according to the firm’s website, assists organizations in “building awareness and mobilizing donors, members and supporters”. And gathering that “mobilizing” data is exactly what they boast that their software is best at. Look no further than an entry on their SalsaCommons.org blog, promoting a name-gathering campaign for something called “WeWantThePublicOption.com”:
“Great stuff happens when you mix a tool kit like Salsa with a creative campaign concept. Case in point: WeWantThePublicOption.com. This custom-built petition page offers signers the prospect of their name appearing on an advertisement that will air in the D.C. area in favor of the public option. It’s a great way to show impact from an online petition as well as recognize the activists that sign it. And as you can see, it’s clearly all about the cause — not the sponsoring organization, which is practically invisible on the page.”
An “advertisement that will run in the D.C. area in favor of the public option?” Yikes, that sounds a little scary. All I wanted was to make sure Mrs. Leary didn’t have to sleep out in the rain tonight. Is Mrs. Leary simply a “creative campaign concept?” Who’d stoop so low? (The same people who claim that 76% of Americans are begging for socialization of the health care system? Perhaps.)
Are these the true pleadings of a loving son, desperately trying to help his mom from being tossed out of the house “she’s lived in for 34 years,” or the misleading manipulations of an activist group sniffing around for personal contact information which it can use in future marketing endeavors? Or both?
We may honestly never know. But ACORN’s scare tactics should be called into question, and anyone who submits their personal information to an off-site third party, in this case, DemocracyInAction, should ask themselves what will become of their personal information, and for what purpose it will be used.
We can only wonder if Mrs. Leary made it through the day without a Sheriff’s knock on her front door, and hope for the best outcome. But this e-mail reeks of psychological manipulation of the reader for the sole purpose of collecting data, the true intent of which, given ACORN’s dubious history, is highly suspect.
Perhaps a more effective ACORN tactic would have been a photograph of a kitten, shotgun to its head, with the caption: “Give us your personal information, to use in our future activism, or the fuzzy-wuzzy little kitten gets it. You WANT to save the cute kitten, right?”
Now that would be over the top, even for enlightened and compassionate liberal activists.
(Translation: There’s always next time.)
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In a shocking piece of breaking news, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin will announce in a news conference this afternoon, that she will not seek reelection, and will resign her position in the near future.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel brings us word that the Government Accountability Board has just paid $4,900 to a firm for a new logo… It’s a copy of the Anarchy symbol. That’s very fitting for the agency that is supposed to assure fair elections, isn’t it? Well, actually, they way they have actually been working the past few years, the Anarchy logo does fit in pretty well. 
