Earlier tonight, Phil of The Albany Project called, practically bursting at the seams.

"Dude, dude, the tattoo! Isn't it hilarious!"

Say what?

"The tattoo! Roger Stone's tattoo! Hahaha!"

Realizing something must be up, I clicked on over to TAP, and found this:

After Roger Stone's forced resignation, it seems that the last pieces of the republican dirty tricks campaign are being cleaned up. Here's another piece of the puzzle.

In Caputo and Stone are Liars, we asserted that the origin of Roger Stone's email list itself was a blast email by Ben Smith, which the latter had mistakenly sent in a way that let every recipient see every other recipient.

In short, [Ben] inadvertently produced a media contact list. That list seems to be the one that the Caputo/Stone emails are going to; it contains my non-Daily Gotham email, and features several people whom we know to be getting these messages - Matt Stoller, Phillip Anderson, Yoda of Room 8, myself, Azi Paybarah, and others. It notably does not contain the people who are not getting the emails, but logically should be. Such as, say, Liza [Sabater].

Ben just confirmed that we were right. Various members of his family are also getting the Stone NYFacts.net emails, for which there is no other realistic explanation. Ben previously confirmed that Roger Stone himself was copied on that email.

Soon after The Albany Project and Daily Gotham revealed that Michael Caputo's smear campaign against Eliot Spitzer came directly from Roger Stone in Joe Bruno's office, revealing that Caputo and Stone were liars when they claimed they weren't working together, Roger Stone allegedly took his anger out on Eliot Spitzer's elderly father.

The threatening call made to Bernard Spitzer, Eliot's 83-year-old father, undeniably came from Roger Stone's own apartment. But Roger Stone has sworn that he wasn't there, blaming a one-armed man...[Correction...he blames Dale Hemmerdinger explicitly]...for making the phone call using a tape of Roger Stone's voice spliced together to say all those horrible things to Spitzer, Sr. Stone's proof that it couldn't have been him was that on the night in question he was at the theater watching, appropriately enough, Frost/Nixon.

Roger Stone, Republican astroturfer and Joe Bruno surrogate, is a nasty piece of work:

Lawyers representing Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s father, Bernard Spitzer, say a prominent political consultant who has been working for State Senate Republicans threatened the elder Mr. Spitzer this month in an anonymous, invective-laced phone message.

The allegations against the consultant, Roger J. Stone Jr., were laid out in a letter sent Tuesday to Senator George H. Winner Jr., an upstate Republican who is chairman of the Senate Committee on Investigations and Government Operations. A copy of the letter was obtained by The New York Times.

What kind of man is Stone? The kind who would say these things to an 83-year-old man:

In the message, the caller says, referring to a potential subpoena: “There is not a goddamn thing your phony, psycho, piece-of-shit son can do about it. Bernie, your phony loans are about to catch up with you. You will be forced to tell the truth and the fact that your son’s a pathological liar will be known to all.”

What does he say in his defense? That, obviously, Spitzer's people infiltrated his apartment and simulated his voice to make the calls. Seriously, that's what he's claiming. I'm surprised he didn't try to pin the blame on the CIA, the Trilateral Commission, and the World Wildlife Fund.

A letter to the editor in the Albany Times-Union makes an astute observation widely applicable to coverage of the Bruno-inspired drama in Albany:

Most of the New York media has been self-indulgent and lazy, choosing to focus obsessively on the childish feud between Gov. Eliot Spitzer and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno.

Indeed. The laziness extends to media coverage of Emailgate, in which New York Progressive blogs conclusively proved that the so-called grassroots campaign of NYFacts.net and SpitzerFile.com is an astroturf operation launched and maintained by Joe Bruno's consultant Roger Stone. The evidence is startlingly clear, so let's take another look at it.

(X-Posted @ TAP)

The strange case of the Stone/Caputo Spitzer-bashing, Joe-Bruno-lauding emails has been exercising us of late, because there are some things that simply do not add up.

Unless, of course, there's a missing piece of information, one which we may have now found. Actually, make that two.

First of all, Michael Caputo is getting email addresses from Roger Stone, and we have proof. Phil Anderson of The Albany Project signed up for Roger Stone's web site, StoneZone -

and guess what,

he's now getting emails from SpitzerFile.com,

which Michael Caputo runs. Wait, here's the screenshot of the email from Spitzerfile.com...

and here's Phil's confirmation email from StoneZone...

Here's Michael Caputo denying the connection to Stone:

Look, folks - I am not being paid. Not by Sen. Bruno, not by Roger Stone, not by anyone. I am just a conservative activist and I take orders - and money - from nobody on this.

Really? Because you're definitely taking email addresses.

Unfortunately, I have nobody taking orders from me on this, either. I'm doing it all myself. If I can do it, any dope can - but it does take some time out of my day.

Honest to God, I wouldn't know Sen. Bruno if he boarded my boat. But I graduated from SUNY, I've been in the arena nearly 30 years, I read the news, and I have computers. So why is it so impossible for the media and bloggers to believe I can handle NYFacts and SpitzerFile on my own?

In short, Caputo and Stone are lying about their association. They are working together; and of course, Stone is working openly for Joe Bruno, which ties the Majority Leader directly to NYFacts.net and SpitzerFiles.com. Check out Phil's piece on TAP, as well.

The question is why the association is being kept secret; and we may have the answer to that as well, after the break.

You may have heard of the monicker, "netroots". It's used to define bloggers who emerged "organically" online --without any intervention of mainstream media or political institutions-- and have been transformed into a powerhouse of meshed political interests. That may be a bit debatable in some cases, yet it's clear that many digital grassroots movements have indeed started without the intervention of corporate or political interests.

Which is why the word astroturfing was invented. Originally it was used to define how a company or interest group would deliberately open up webiste or blog to make make it look as if a random citizen is advocating their cause. Nowadays you can find such activity in forums, discussion lists and in the recent astroturfing scandal, tampering with Wikipedia.

Now we have the potential astroturfing shenanigans of a certain Mr. Caputo. To say that there's more than a few things I love about this whole drama, is to put it mildly.

The Albany Project and Daily Gotham have been all over the tangled tale of Joe Bruno's little helpers, Roger Stone and Michael Caputo; now, it looks as if we need to add another chapter to the saga of the tripartite Axis of Weasel, because there's more preposterousness to report.

Since Thursday at 2:15 PM Eastern, four emails have gone out to the same group of recipients that also receive the Stone/Caputo emails. These bear the imprimatur of the W. J. Mahoney GOP Club of Buffalo.

The problem is that there is no such club. A Google search produces no evidence of this club's actual existence. W.J. Mahoney did indeed exist, and was a republican to boot; he was a co-founder of the New York State Young republicans in 1932. Per Political Graveyard, he was a member of the State Senate and still alive in 1964. In short, this is astroturf.

The newest email after the flip, and some interesting stuff about this web site.

(X-Posted @ TAP)

Phil is absolutely right when he describes the ongoing saga of the anti-Spitzer emails as weird - here and here.

So let's take a look at what we know, in the hope of clearing up some of the weirdness. There are three people whose names come to mind in this case. One is Michael Caputo, reputedly of Buffalo and/or Florida. The other is Roger Stone, a GOP consultant. The third is Joe Bruno.

I received my first email blast from Roger Stone on March 28th. This email went to an account not traceable from The Daily Gotham. My initial thought was that these emails originated with Jon Stone, a friend and a director with the Capitol D Group. That impression soon faltered, and Jon confirmed today by phone that he has nothing to do with his namesake.

On June 13th, Daily Politics quotes Roger Stone as having 'always been a Joe Bruno Republican'. The occasion was a fundraiser hosted in his apartment on Central Park South, billed as a 'skinny-cat' protest against a high-dollar fundraiser held in his condo building in a rented room by the Spitzer campaign. This is interesting, because Stone had previously been persona non grata with Albany republicans for his support of Tom Golisano, whom he advised in his three campaigns.

On July 2nd, Fred Dicker wrote his first piece on Brunogate, titled 'GOV PLAYS DIRTY POOL VS. BRUNO'. He followed up on July 5th with GOV'S TROOPER SNOOP JOB ON BRUNO and, on July 9th, with GOV AIDES FISHED FOR BRUNO BUSTERS.

On July 9th, NYFacts.net was registered, with the identity of the registrant masked by an anonymity service.