They Need a New Name: How About "Organizing for Identity Theft?"

Big Brother Democrats aren't just watching you, they're handing out your personal identification to their cronies in a massive invasion of personal privacy (h/t Instapundit).

The red boxes are around questions asking for the person's e-mail address and what time of day they plan to vote.

So, now yours truly, a perfect stranger from outside of New York's 23rd Congressional District, knows the Name, Phone Number, Age, and Gender of 25 residents of NY-23.

Because the e-mail I received is part of a large orchestrated campaign, an undetermined but far from small number of perfect strangers predominantly from outside of New York's 23rd Congressional District will know this information about hundreds — if not thousands — of residents of NY-23.

Additionally, if I were to carry out the calls (which I of course will not), I would have the cell phone number, e-mail address, and planned voting time of any person in the group of 25 who responds to my request for that information.

It doesn't take much imagination to see what could happen, but I guess I need to draw a picture for old Mitch:

• With a person's e-mail addy and cell number, a spammer can put them on every junk mail and calling list there is.
• Thanks to easily available Internet phone directories, criminals can learn where these people live. By asking a few additional questions, they can learn who lives alone. If they also learn when they won't be home (i.e., out voting) and live reasonably close, they can steal them blind while they're away.
• Even more scary, a violent criminal can use answers to OFA's official questions combined with other information they might learn through probing to commit violent acts when these people ARE home.

Not just organized, but organizing for crime... that's the Chicago Way.

On a more serious note, I've been following the NY-23 situation, but felt others in the media and blogosphere have covered it in sufficient detail that any additional "me, too" commentary was superfluous.

That said, it seems that the Conservative Party was right to run Doug Hoffman against RINO Dede Scuzafavor (or whatever her name is) and Democrat Bill Owens, which was clearly revealed when Scuzzy threw her support behind the Democratic candidate despite receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars (and perhaps as much a sa cool $1 million) in financial support from the Republican Party. Needless to say, I think she'll find the GOP's purse strings with be cut off in her next local election, and I suspect her official transition to the Democrat party will be coming soon (if not immediately, if rumors that she is doing robo-calls for the Democrat are true).

The effort of the national DNC and associated activist groups in this race is fascinating considering this is a race for a one-year term. Obviously, they are far more concerned about the trendsetting and symbolism of a very conservative candidate besting the squishy GOP moderates they would much rather prefer to face, not to mention the Democratic candidate that they want to win. And besting them handily he is: the most recent polls show the conservative Hoffman dominating the race over Owens 54%-38%.

If Hoffman wins in a dominating fashion as the polls are suggesting, it could potentially ignite a trend of conservative candidates to be fielded against Republican moderates in primaries, not with the expectation that the resulting conservative versus Democrat race would amount to a protest vote, but with the expectation that the conservative candidate may actually stand a far better chance of actually getting elected than the squishy RINO or the Democrat. That has to terrify not just an Obama White House worried that their brand is rapidly becoming an albatross, but status quo-invested moderate Republicans as well.

Such a turn of events would only embolden the grass roots conservative movement, but we'll have to see if the election is a bellwether of a momentum shift, or an endpoint. As Glenn Reynolds notes, it isn't just the election, but what happens afterward that matters.