FiredUp Family Tree, Part IV

Last week was exhausting, trying to dig through the cesspool of slime to identify key players in the FiredUp stable of authors.  Part I gave you the background and asked if Jack Cardetti was Howard Beale, Part II worked at uncovering Jeff Mazur's relationship with General Content, and Part Three discussed the profile of and reasons behind hiring Sean Soendker Nicholson as a chief writer.  Now on with the show.

For those who care to read through the archives, you'll see my beef with FiredUp isn't that they're wacko progressives - I can carry on a barely civil conversation with ShowMeProgress without calling them names, but FiredUp is something different.   ShowMeProgress and others have some paid political folks, but they're low on the food chain.  They're a lot closer to grassroots, even if they do tend to think that a newspaper report or study by a left-wing think tank is "proof" of their worldview.  FiredUp pretends to be something they're not.  They pretend to be average citizens sharing their take on Missouri politics, when the truth is these are Missouri Democratic operatives using fake names, dual accounts, and in far too many cases, government computers to make political arguments.  That's quite a charge, and normally I'd be more careful about writing such information about a "for-profit" LLC, but FiredUp can't come after me, because in court, they'd have to air all of their dirty secrets, and there's not a chance they'll risk their careers.

I've spent far too many hours on this, but I waded into those user accounts and compared them, contrasted them, looked at font styles, grammatical errors, writing quirks, dates, and url structure to reach my conclusions.  This final part doesn't have names, but there are clear patterns identifying the anonymous bloggers.  I won't share everything (why give it away), but am happy to share information if people want to discuss individual authors or argue my conclusions.

One note before we begin - to look at an author's profile, simply type their name into the FiredUp search box, and their writing will come up.  Kind of them to make it so easy for me.

Let's start with patriot. MOPNS actually gets the credit for this one. Their post last week caught a strange anomaly where a letter addressed to Robin Carnahan and CC'd to Chris Koster was posted live to FiredUp's Scribd account and embedded live on the FiredUp site the same day.  MOPNS says it was 90 minutes (they don't cite the source), but however it was done, it was fast.  It was uploaded by FiredUp at 2:10 CST, and posted at 2:57 CST, which if MOPNS math is correct, means it was scanned and sent to someone with access to the FiredUp Admin account within 30 minutes of being received.  This is important because it shows collusion between FiredUp and Carnahan's office. The document wasn't uploaded to a personal account or directly to FiredUp's website files.  It was loaded to a document site (Scribd) which previously housed only information from Sean Nicholson.  Only someone directly tied to FiredUp could have uploaded that information, and only someone in Carnahan's office would have access to something that fast. 

The Scribd site is interesting, because it also has a copy of the freshly released 2Q fundraising information for Roy Blunt, filed July 21st, and uploaded to the site July 24th.You can't get that regularly.  I haven't seen Carnahan's fundraising anywhere.  Someone has to go to Washington and request it, which means someone requested the filing within three days of it being filed, sent it to Sean, or uploaded it with the FiredUp account.  It shouldn't be hard to figure out.  Someone in D.C. needs to go see who signed for that copy.  

So what about patriot?  Well, they're member number 1144, and have been posting since June 2005, with 112 entries.  This is a serious blogger, sharing a lot of information over the years before going mostly quiet at the end of January and posting only 5 entries from February to this latest document dump in July.  I don't know who they are, but they're connected to someone in government, and patriot is a good start for learning how FiredUp works, and how to crack that code.

Now is a good as time as any to lay out some statistics about FiredUp. There have been 4700 total unique members signed up since 2005 (both for blogs and to leave comments).  The first few were Roy Temple (2) and Jean Carnahan (5), followed by others, many of who are dormant.  Each has a unique identifier.  I started an account in about April, and I'm member 4265.  In addition, posts are categorized by terms, date, and node (which is the fancy name for a blogpost).  You can surf through the site primarily through this, but it also uncovers some important data. 

Anyone under 4700 is assumed to be a legitimate signup (though many times anonymous), because they signed up in numerical order.  But something funny happens early in the year.  4 authors appear, but their member numbers are wildly different.

Eddie M. comes in at 16410 ( one post dated February 17th).  Blunt Ed comes in at 16581 (1st post Feb 20th).  Eleanor Roosevelt comes in at 16309 (First post February 19).  And Sherman Potter comes in at 16173 (January 30th).  These names are fake accounts created by an admin, and separate from all of the other accounts.  Compare that to Sean Nicholson (.sean) who got member 30.

Someone deliberately created new accounts separate from typical user accounts and these are the most prolific writers on the site aside from Sean.  In other words, the mythical average citizen writing on FiredUp is never seen, but hundreds of posts have poured out of the site from special accounts created for some purpose.  5 accounts on the site account for almost 1000 posts, all promoted to the front page,  

That's enough for now, but my final post will show you how these new author names tie into older names on the site, and demonstrate how most of what FiredUp has done this year has been paid political operatives and government employees using a for-profit company for political messaging, personal attacks, and media manipulation. 

Comments

[Patrick Tuohey]

Wow. Impressive research. Should we be surprised that political staffers are blogging anonymously?

[Clark]

The only thing I have to say to this series is, "I am Jerome Armstrong."

[Jim Durbin]

Clark,

Notice I didn't write about ShowMeProgress, digging to identify the people - do you know why? It's because you guys may be wrong, and you may be anonymous, but you're actually grassroots, and not paid Democratic operatives rewarded with positions in state government.

Folks like you I'd prefer to argue with and defeat, or be defeated at the polls. I think you can agree. And my record's spotless - notice I don't link the Source or the Pulse, both of which were consultants who spin news, and not average citizens speaking out.

SMP knows which side is in the wrong - you should have been at the DNC, not FUM.