I think I found something I wasn’t supposed to find.
Many of you have probably read about Dr. James Dobson’s criticism of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Late tonight I was reading an AP story titled “Obama dismisses Dobson criticism about Bible.”
In the article AP reports: “The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell… said Tuesday he belongs to a group of religious leaders who, working independently of Obama’s campaign, launched a Web site to counter Dobson at http://www.jamesdobsondoesntspeakforme.com. The site highlights statements from Obama and Dobson and asks visitors to compare them.”
The key clause here is “working independently of Obama’s campaign.”
Really?
Less than 24 hours seemed, to me, like a remarkable turn-around time to get a site registered, operative, and in the press. So I did a little research. Everybody that registers a domain name, according to law, must include with that registration their name, address, contact info, etc. This information can easily be accessed through a whois search (go ahead, try it–plug in your favorite domain name).
So I did a whois search of www.jamesdobsondoesntspeakforme.com. Turns out the site is registered not to Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, but to one:
Alyssa Martin
alyssa.p.martin@gmail.com
3424 Old Dominion Road
Lincoln, Nebraska 68516
United States
(402) 304-1489
Fine.
But a quick Google search reveals Alyssa Martin actually works for the Obama campaign as an intern in the Religious Affairs department. In fact, she just started five days ago. So it appears, counter to the AP report that a pastor “working independently of Obama’s campaign, launched a Web site to counter Dobson,” that the Obama campaign is, in fact, directly linked to the creation of this site.
It gets better, of course, because later on during the evening of the 24th, after I had sent some emails out to AP reporters/Drudge, the whois changed. Now the registrant is:
Kirbyjon Caldwell
400 Milam Suite 200
Houston, Texas 77006
United States
Kirbyjon Caldwell, you’ll recall, is the unaffiliated reverend. Why this sudden change? It makes me feel like something is fishy. Luckily, I thought the Obama campaign would catch on to this eventually so I made .pdf copies of the whois search before they updated the information. Observe:
Original whois early evening June 24th
Revised whois late evening June 24th
Why would you change your whois registration unless you were trying to hide something? Does this seems at all strange to anyone else or am I just blowing this out of proportion? Comments welcome.