Gateway Pundit is reporting that a source is naming the data mining business “Catalist” as the source of the mysterious “Women of the 99%” illegal robocalls this past week. Although it is no more than an unnamed source at this time, keep an eye on this one. Catalist has quite a history.
The president of Catalist happens to be Harold Ickes, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff under Clinton. According to Wikipedia:
Ickes is a graduate of Stanford University (1964, AB, Economics) and Columbia Law School. Ickes was a student civil rights activist in the 1960s and took part in Freedom Summer.
Discover the Networks has a few more tidbits on Mr. Ickes:
- Co-founder and unofficial director of the Democrat Shadow Party
- Sought chairmanship of the Democratic Party in February 2005
- Ran Hillary Clinton’s successful Senate campaign in 1999-2000
- Former Deputy Chief of Staff for the Clinton White House
- In his law practice, he represented Mob-run labor unions with ties to the Lucchese, Colombo, Genovese, Gambino and other major crime families.
We can expect Catalist to be very busy in this election year, as they were back in 2008. Why, as recently as Feb. of this year, The Blaze posted a story about their involvement about a need to upgrade our voter registration system. The Blaze noted that Catalist might just not be the most unbiased source in this case, quoting the Atlantic’s piece entitled “How the Democrats Won the Data War in 2008.” :
Get-out-the-vote operations mounted by the Obama campaign, the Democratic Party and progressive organizations mobilized more than one million dedicated volunteers on Election Day. But it was buttressed by a year-long, psychographic voter targeting and contact operation, the likes of which Democrats had never before participated in. In 2008, the principal repository of Democratic data was Catalist, a for-profit company that acted as the conductor for a data-driven symphony of more than 90 liberal groups, like the Service Employees Union—and the DNC—and the Obama campaign.
Indeed, Bloomberg also wrote about Catalist’s huge part in the 2008 election:
It may be the money that he is spending on a database, though, that helps determine whether the Democrat wins the race for the White House this year. And he may have one of Hillary Clinton’s top supporters, Harold Ickes, to thank for it.
Ickes, a Democratic media consultant and former Clinton adviser, has spent four years and $15 million building Catalist, a database that scores 200 million Americans according to their likelihood to vote for party candidates. Illinois Senator Obama, 47, is one of his biggest clients.
You’d have to wonder how George Soros could stay out of this, since he has such a keen eye for successful ventures. According to this Muckety Map, he is very closely connected. In fact, the Washington Times reported that Soros has directly funded Catalist:
Mr. Soros also has funded Catalist, which was created by Harold Ickes, the deputy White House chief of staff for Mr. Clinton who chaired Mr. Clinton’s presidential campaign in New York in 1992, was a senior adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign and worked as a political strategist for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.
So, is Catalist indeed behind these robocalls? And if so, exactly who funded this project? Considering who we are working with here, it looks like something we need to know.
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