IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Perez ally secretly wrote 2013 endorsement.

Tom Perez, the labor secretary who is bidding to head the Democratic National Committee, received a crucial boost in 2013 when he was seeking Senate confirmation to be in President Obama’s Cabinet after the Maryland Chamber of Commerce wrote a letter endorsing him.

Perez was a controversial choice to be labor secretary. The letter, which was widely cited by Perez’s defenders to refute criticism against him, was part of a secret arrangement between Maryland Chamber President Kathleen Snyder and a close Perez ally, Scott R. Jensen. Jensen was assistant secretary at the Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation, the agency that monitors state businesses and labor issues.

Jensen, who was also coordinating a Senate lobbying campaign on Perez’s behalf, actually wrote the Chamber’s endorsement. Snyder attached her name to it without making any substantial changes, emails show.

Emails sure have shown a lot this season.

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Did ‘Everytown’ Anti-Gun Group Pen ‘Hawaii Five-O’ Mass Shooting Episode?

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Be Suspicious Of Online Movie Ratings, Especially Fandango’s. “Several sites have built popular rating systems: Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic and IMDb each have their own way of aggregating film reviews. And while the sites have different criteria for picking and combining reviews, they have all built systems with similar values: They use the full continuum of their ratings scale, try to maintain consistency, and attempt to limit deliberate interference in their ratings. These rating systems aren’t perfect, but they’re sound enough to be useful. All that cannot be said of Fandango, a NBCUniversal subsidiary that uses a five-star rating system in which almost no movie gets fewer than three stars.”

Do not trust content from NBC Universal.

POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Katrina Now a Metaphor For the Liberal Project.

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Turns Out the EPA Didn’t Come Up with the Talking Points for Its Controversial Power Plant Program. “Newly-surfaced emails revealed that a prominent left-wing group played a large role in the creation of the talking points for the Environmental Protection Agency’s controversial new power plant regulations.”

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: TWO PEOPLE Have Filed OVER 1,700 Sex Discrimination Complaints With Dept. Of Education. “Exactly two people are responsible for filing over 1,700 sex discrimination complaints with the federal Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in the last few years. Catherine E. Lhamon, the Education Department’s secretary for civil rights, won’t identify these two highly litigious individuals. . . . Under the Obama administration, the growth in the Department of Education’s sex discrimination complaints has been astounding. In 2010, Lhamon’s office saw just 391 such complaints. In 2014, the number was 2,354.”

Sounds sketchy. This story’s from March, but I just ran across it. I don’t think anything has improved.

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Ousted Bill de Blasio aide Rachel Noerdlinger provided insider info and ‘talking points’ to Al Sharpton.

A former top aide to Mayor de Blasio’s wife served as a backchannel messenger to both the mayor and the Rev. Al Sharpton, emails released to the Daily News Thursday reveal.

Rachel Noerdlinger provided Sharpton, her former boss, with insider info and delivered “talking points” to Sharpton to have him attack unfavorable stories on de Blasio, the emails, provided to the News as part of a Freedom of Information request, show.

She also got Sharpton to lend a hand when de Blasio was under fire for interceding on behalf of a supporter, the Rev. Orlando Findlayter, who’d been arrested for outstanding warrants related to traffic violations and a civil disobedience arrest.

Al doesn’t speak truth to power. He speaks for power against truth.

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Data Faked In Study About Gay Canvassers Changing Minds: A researcher apparently made up the results of the much-publicized study, as revealed Tuesday by scientists trying to replicate it. “Vavreck asked LaCour for the contact information of the survey respondents. He didn’t have it, and apparently confessed that he hadn’t used any of the study’s grant money to conduct any of the surveys.” You can pretty much figure that research that supports The Narrative too neatly has a high chance of being bogus.

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Clinton Email Case Gets Nutty: Clinton Offers Faux Support For Faster Release… That She Could Have Done Herself.

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN (CONT’D): BuzzFeed: Hillary Invented “Immigrant” Grandparents. Well, to be fair, maybe she just uses the same genealogist as Elizabeth Warren.

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Campaign staff DROVE ‘ordinary’ Iowans to Hillary’s first campaign stop – including health care ‘lobbyist in training’ who was an Obama campaign intern and Biden chauffeur.

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: More than 2 MILLION of Hillary Clinton’s Twitter followers are fake or never tweet – and she’s already under fire for ‘buying’ fake Facebook fans.

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Woman Showcased by Obama in SOTU is a Former Democratic Campaign Staffer; Woman apparently the only economic success story in Obama’s America.

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Half of Doctors Listed as Serving Medicaid Patients Are Unavailable, Investigation Finds.

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Report: White House secretly counted dental plans in Obamacare enrollment numbers; Without counting dental plans, Obamacare would have missed its goal. When your Potemkin Village is so unconvincing that even Vox is pointing out the papier-mache and chickenwire. . . .

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Woman from “drunk girl in public” video apologizes, says she was also duped.

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN (CONT’D): Obamacare Facebook page comments mostly from small group of supporters: 60 percent of site’s 226,838 comments attributed to fewer than 100 unique profiles.

Organizing for Action declined to comment to The Times when asked whether it hired paid commentators to post on the site during high-traffic days or tried to spur online conversation through volunteers.

Organizing for Action also handles the president’s Twitter feed. This summer, it was found that nearly half of the president’s 43 million followers at the time appeared to be fake, according to researchers at Barracuda, a computer security company in Campbell, California. Organizing for Action also declined to comment at that time.

I expect we’ll eventually find that this is the tip of the iceberg in Obama campaign social-media fakery. An interesting question is whether Facebook and Twitter knew.

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: A lot of the celebrities who appeared in the midterm Rock The Vote PSA didn’t actually vote in the last midterm.

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Fact checking Mark Warner and a ‘completely made up’ Obamacare claim.

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Report: Green Party Candidate In Tennessee Hiring People To Infiltrate Social Media, Pose As Average Users, Push Agenda.

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Leaked Memo Gives Away Dems’ “Extreme Weather” Talking Points.

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: The Strange Leak of the New Exposé ‘Clinton, Inc.’ “Sure, hotly anticipated books leak all the time. But 10 days early? And by a tipster who seems to be posing as a Tea Partier—but who one source suspects is affiliated with the Clintons?”

POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN, TWITTER EDITION: Politico: “The @BarackObama account, now managed by Organizing for Action, leads the political pack in fake followers, according to Barracuda’s analysis. In fact, of the more than 43 million followers when the data were studied last month, just 36.6 percent were deemed ‘good’ under its metrics, while 46.8 percent count as ‘fake.’ An additional 16.6 percent of the @BarackObama followers are labeled ‘uncertain.'”

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: The Hill: GOP again accuses Sebelius of misleading ObamaCare testimony.

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Wendy Davis autobiography underwent some … revisions. “Other missing details have included: her second husband paid her way through law school and she divorced him the day after the last payment was made; her ex-husband accused her in initial court filings of adultery, and was awarded custody of their two daughters; and she first ran for city council in Fort Worth as a Republican.”

Related: Wendy Davis Gave A Different Story About Her Divorce Under Oath In 2012.

Meanwhile, Emily Zanotti is not amused. “At the core, she’s a woman in power because she used a man’s money and influence to get her there.”