It was Sunday, I was bored, I trespassed on Winnie the Pooh

[neomonkey]

It's been one of those days, a lazy Sunday, too much time on my hands. Anyways, earlier someone posted a link to www.georgewbush.com. This site is ostensibly the mouthpiece for Idiot King's campaign. I decided to do a trace on the website and discovered the following primary and secondary name servers:

NS1.CHA.SMARTECHCORP.NET 65.172.162.66
A.NS.TRESPASSERS-W.NET 209.61.172.168

Normally this dry stuff doesn't catch my eye. Hell, most of the time I don't even know what the hell any of it means. My understanding is that the secondary name server is there in case the primary takes a dump. But what catches my eye is that second one. Trespassers-w.net? WTF kinda name is that? So rather than rely on the name, I trace the IP address, 209.61.172.168. Comes back from Cross Computer Consulting in Chattanooga, the same city as www.georgewbush.com. A little further digging tells me Cross Computer Consulting is now Coptix Inc, a web hosting/design firm in Chattanooga. If you access www.trespassers-w.net on your browser, you'll get this peculiar illustrated page taken from a Winnie The Pooh novel. There is some strangeness with that name, but whatever.

Well, I decide to do a trace on coptix.com and here are the name servers that pop up:

A.NS.COPTIX.COM 209.61.172.168
B.NS.COPTIX.COM 68.152.85.90

Now these name servers make more sense. But now I don't trust names, I must check IP addresses...

Whoops, realize that 209.61.172.168 is in fact trespassers-w.net. Why do they call it coptix.com? I don't know enough of this to really answer that. OK, so I trace 68.152.85.90...

D'oh! Registrant here is something called Publius Press. Located in none other than Chattanooga. If you look up Publius Press, you'll see they seem to specialize in a right-wing conspiracist stuff. This website: http://syninfo.com/Epperson/index.htmlx seems to proclaim their slant... There are more prize entries at this site: http://patriotpetitions.us

Evidently Publius Press is proud to put forth the following websites: http://FederalistPatriot.US , http://PatriotPetitions.US and http://Reagan2020.com. You can probably tell by the names that they are no great lovers of people such as us on DU.

So now I'm curious about Coptix. When running traces on the aforementioned websites, SmartechCorp and trespassers-w.net (ie, Coptix) are the common denominators in each trace. At first, Coptix seem innocuous enough. Nothing really catches the eye, except I notice they have hosted and/or designed the website for Hamilton County, TN branch of the Democratic Party (http://www.hamdems.org).

A little research into SMARTech Corp reveals that this firm is an unabashedly right-wing hellhole.

http://www.smartechcorp.net/index.php?page=news⊂=story&id=68

Local company hosts GOP Internet sites

posted: 08-22-2004

By Andy Sher Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — It’s more than 700 miles from Madison Square Garden, but that won’t stop Chattanooga from "hosting" next week’s Republican National Convention in New York City.

Chattanooga based Smartech Corp. is serving as Web host for the convention, bringing the event to computer screens across the globe. The company will provide convention speeches, video-on-demand "streams" and live shots of events through powerful Web servers, most of which are at Smartech’s headquarters in downtown Chattanooga.

--snip...at the bottom, a photo of President and CEO, Jeff Averbeck. In addition, Smartech hosts www.gop.com & www.2004nycgop.com.

Perhaps the most eye-opening, if you look on opensecrets.org ( http://www.opensecrets.org/parties/expenddetail.asp?Cmte=RPC&txtName=SMARTECH+CORPORATION ), you'll find out Smartechcorp gave over a $1,000,000 to the Republican Party and ZERO to the Dems.

Disclaimer: I really am not familiar with the infrastructure of the internet and perhaps this is all perfectly normally, but I've come away from this idle Sunday afternoon with the following thought: the official George W. Bush website is sharing bedspace (and diskspace) with far right-wing militia types, and that the Hamilton County Democrats in Tennessee may be doing business with their rabid enemy.

For all it's worth...