Liberal Internet pranksters are having a field day with Newtgingrich.com, redirecting traffic to a score of pages that poke fun at and embarrass the Republican presidential candidate.
Go to the site and you'll instantly be taken to the homepage of Tiffany & Co., where Gingrich famously has a half-a-million-dollar line of credit, or Freddie Mac, which controversially paid the politician $1.6 million for providing "strategic advice."
Gingrich's official website is newt.org; he does not own newtgingrich.com. The official site is operating properly.
The namesake website also takes visitors to a 2009 Think Progress article titled, "Gingrich 'Inadvertently' Names Porn Company 'Entrepreneur of the Year' For Stimulating The Economy," or to some less-than-flattering articles about his campaign, including one from The Atlantic Wire titled, "Gingrich Campaign Still Looks an Awful Lot Like a Book Tour."
After a day of anonymity, the pranksters came forward yesterday (Dec. 21) to take credit for their work. American Bridge 21st Century, a liberal political action committee, issued a press release explaining that it's selling NewtGingrich.com to anyone willing to pony up the cash.
"We thought of giving it away, but we wouldn't want to be accused of being socialists," the group wrote. "So make your best offer. We're asking for $1 million, but we'd be happy to accept $500,000 in bling. Heck, in the spirit of Christmas we might even let it go for $10,000."
The liberal group is using a piece of JavaScript code to keep the newtgingrich.com prank alive. A post on Pastebin shows the source code for newtgingrich.com, with instructions on how to input the redirect code. The code can be placed to redirect newtgingrich.com to any site.