Back when Pete Hoekstra was running against Rick Snyder for governor, Ben Padnos registered PeteHoekstra.com and proceeded to use it to support Hoekstra’s opponents in his gubernatorial and Senate campaigns. Padnos explained why he was doing it in January of 2010:
Here’s the ranking Republican Member of the House Intelligence Committee failing to do something as simple as registering his own .com domain name. It makes you think….you have to have some empathy for the Obama Administration and the Department of Homeland Security on how daunting the job of dealing with hundreds or thousands of terrorist threats every day…..you can see how one lunatic getting on a plane in another country can slip through the cracks…The domain name, PeteHoekstra.com, has been available for a long time. I own thousands of domains and follow the industry closely. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t reserved his over the years. And when Pete Hoekstra sent a letter out to his constituents raising money on the backs of a terrorist attack, I found it SO grotesquely distasteful, I decided to register the domain — 6 days ago — and do something with it.
The following year he offered to sell the domain for a $10,000 donation to the Boys & Girls Club of Holland. Hoekstra never took him up on his offer and he was the laughing stock of the country because of it.
At 12:09 a.m this morning, Texas Senator Ted Cruz announced his candidacy for president. As it turns out, like Hoekstra, Cruz neglected to register TedCruz.com. So, now when you go to that site, you see this:
Oops.
And I’ll just leave it at that.
UPDATE: Okay, one more thing: TedCruzForAmerica.com redirects to Healthcare.gov.
Oops, part II.
Also, too, for those who don’t know how to spell Senator Cruz’s last name, our very own Charles Gabe has registered the following URLs and redirects them to his site ACASignups.net:
http://tedcruze.org
http://tedcruze.com
http://tedcruze.net
http://tedcruze.info
http://tedcruze.biz
http://tedcruze.us
lol.
UPDATE 2: Mother Jones actually covered this issue last year and noted that TedCruz2016 is another site Cruz doesn’t control. The owner of TedCruz.com is an Arizona attorney who has had this sort of fun with his website in the past.
Also, Chris Christie doesn’t own ChrisChristie.com, Rand Paul doesn’t own RandPaul.com, and Paul Ryan doesn’t own PaulRyan.com. JebBush.com has been owned by someone (maybe Jeb Bush) since 1997 but currently isn’t a site you can load.
These guys really need to start thinking ahead, don’t you think?
[CC image credit: jbouie | Flickr]
