Right Wing Nut House

GLENN REYNOLDS SAYS: I’D RATHER LINK TO ANDREW SULLIVAN THAN THIS DORK.

Sometime early this evening, my sitemeter will turn over and register the one millionth visitor to enter The House.

Thems a lot of right wing nuts.

Of course, many of you are nothing of the sort. Some of you are spambots. Some of you are lefties. And when I can figure out the difference, I’ll let you know.

Come to think of it…there really isn’t that much difference between them. Both are annoying. Both are full of gibberish. And both make grandiose claims without supplying a shred of proof. I suppose one could detect a difference between a spam trackback that promises me a satisfying sexual experience with a young, nubile golden haired woman covered from head to toe in olive oil and a comment by some liberal about Shrub. But you’d have to look real hard and suspend belief equally between the two.

(C’Mon fellas. You had to expect a little dig in honor of this milestone. You know I really don’t mean everything I say about liberals.)

In all seriousness, I am in awe. There are so many people who have helped along the way with advice and encouragement that I know if I start a long list, I will forget some important people.

Let me just say that without my blogmama Cao and all my friends at Wideawakes Blog and now Wideawakes Radio, I never would have gotten into blogging in the first place.

Pat Curley was the one of the first bloggers to link to me and put me on the Kerryhaters blogroll.

The Watcher honored me by picking me for the prestigious Watchers Council whose alumni include some of the best bloggers around. The Council has given my writing a wide distribution among other bloggers and allowed me the privilege of making friends with bloggers like Dymphna and Dave Schuler.

Tom Lifson at American Thinker has been a friend as well as being very supportive of my writing by editing and publishing my articles in his E-Zine.

The Commissar has been enormously helpful and has shared his love and fascination of science with me on more than one occasion.

Scott Johnson at Powerline has linked me many times and offered his advice and encouragement with a generous spirit.

Ed Morrissey - a true Christian gentleman - has been a supporter of this blog almost from the beginning. I’m not the only one who has found inspiration at Captains Quarters.

Allahpundit is another long time supporter of this site whose good humor and generosity is always much appreciated.

Michelle Malkin has always taken the time to read anything I’ve sent her and has been generous in her support of this site.

To those I’ve mentioned and those I haven’t, thanks from the bottom of my heart for everything you do to make blogging so much fun and fulfilling.

This is unbelievable.

A Reuters photograph of smoke rising from buildings in Beirut has been withdrawn after coming under attack by American web logs. The blogs accused Reuters of distorting the photograph to include more smoke and damage.

The photograph showed two very heavy plumes of black smoke billowing from buildings in Beirut after an Air Force attack on the Lebanese capital. Reuters has since withdrawn the photograph from its website, along a message admitting that the image was distorted, and an apology to editors.

DISTORTED! HOW ABOUT “FAKED?” HOW ABOUT “MANIPULATED?” HOW ABOUT “PROPAGANDIZED?”

It appears that someone emailed Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs with some compelling evidence that a Reuters photograph showing smoke billowing from buildings in Beirut was heavily altered. After Charles posted the original story, the blogosphere went to work with a vengeance.

Several bloggers weighed in with their own evidence, including a photographer’s blog who determined that the photo indeed had been altered. From there, the blog frenzy continued with one blogger finding a probable match for the photo that was undoctored. Others weighed in that the photo really was an awful photoshop image, an obvious fake.

The rest is familiar. As more and more evidence piled up, it became obvious that Reuters had screwed the pooch. And the final bit of evidence that sealed the fate of this photo was the photographer in question, one Adnan Hajj, who just happened by Qana at the moment the “rescue worker” in the green helmet was holding aloft a dead child.

Coincidence or collusion between the photographer and Hizbullah?

It certainly raises some interesting questions about how the Qana story has been reported. First the drastically lower casualty figure of 28 instead of 56 and now we have Mr. Hajj and his travelling propaganda show revealed as a liar and perhaps even an agent of Hizbullah.

Read the entire story at LGF and see the genesis of a Blog Strike. It should probably go without saying that the lefty blogs sat this one out, never dreaming that the international media could be playing them for fools. And it should be interesting to see what they’ll be saying about this as the day wears on. Perhaps I’ll post reaction - if there is any.

Kudos to LGF, Charles, and all the bloggers who participated in this exercise in people power at its best.

It appears that whatever demons were bedeviling Jeff Goldstein have been exorcised and he has returned to blogging. Let’s hope all is well and that Eugene, Oregon has been cleared of all moonbat droppings.

I think…Yes, I really believe the little guy needs to be trotted out and given some space because if this isn’t cause for a celebratory reel I don’t know what is…

How about a solo there, Tex?

Welcome back, Jeff.

Evidently not satisfied with simply being made into an internet verb, noted child molesting humor mongerer and thorn in the side of human decency Deb Frisch is back - with a vengeance.

Employing poorly disguised sock puppets, Frisch (a woman defended by some on the left despite her unhinged attacks on Jeff Goldstein and his two year old son) commented at Ace’s site thusly:

Do you think Jeff sux Satchel’s dick or just plays with it?

Of course, she didn’t use her true name. But the IP address on the comment - as well as the IP address on similar comments made at Goldstein’ site - traces back to Eugene, Oregon where Frisch currently resides. The comments left at Jeff’s site are so sickening that I’ve decided not to publish them here. Patterico has a screenshot of them if you feel the need to see depravity in the flesh.

That’s not all. According to Patterico, the IP address is eerily similar to one used by Deb Frisch herself in comments left at Aces, Goldstein’s, and Patterico’s websites in the past.

Patterico sums up the evidence:

Frisch previously left comments on my site, Ace’s site, and Jeff’s site using a slightly different Qwest IP address that traced back to Eugene, Oregon. That previous Frisch IP address was Qwest IP address 71.34.252.228, which also traces to Eugene, Oregon.

I long ago deleted the content of comment she left on my site, under the moniker “WW” (”Word Warrior”); it’s still linked here. I preserved the original text in a Notepad file.

Ace confirms that Frisch previously posted comments under her own name on his site, under that same Qwest IP address. And Jeff tells me she had previously used two Qwest IP’s on his site. One was the same as was left on my site: 71.34.252.228. The other was 71.32.126.27. That is also a Qwest IP address that traces to Eugene, Oregon, the city where Frisch lives.

In the meantime, Jeff Goldstein has felt compelled to stop posting until he can resolve his problems - “once and for all” - either through the legal system or, my recommendation, by using law enforcement if indeed any laws have been broken.

Couple this with the ongoing drama involving Seixon, Larry Johnson, Jason Leopold, and God knows who else and you have an extraordinarily disturbing picture. And I would say to my friends on the sane left who I know visit here from time to time and are kind enough to disagree with me rationally that the time has come for larger lefty blogs to stand up and be placed in the decency column by using some of that vitriol they hurl at the right and at the President with such practiced ease and send some of it in the direction of the guttersnipes, the bullies, and the dirty necked galoots who are making the internet a sewer and a place of dread.

I don’t like the direction that the blogosphere is going at all. All the great hopes for this new communications medium engendered in the lead up to and following the 2004 election are being subsumed in an avalanche of filth and threats that have gone far beyond bad jokes, inappropriate humor, or simple flame wars. It is no longer enough to “fisk” a post by a rival blogger. Now you must destroy the blogger himself, lay him low with withering personal invective of a kind that borders on threats to his person or even more disturbing, to his family.

I mentioned in my Seixon post that these tactics are a kind of hardball politics not seen on the internet before but not unfamiliar to those who have been involved in politics on the national level. Whispering campaigns of a vile nature carried out against opponents, the call in the middle of the night, siccing friendly reporters on rivals by rumormongering, digging up dirt on people’s personal lives, even veiled threats have all been part of The Big Game in Washington for decades. Somehow, you would think that the citizen journalists who inhabit the blogosphere could have immunized themselves from that kind of nastiness.

Alas, the stakes are considered so high by most that the old saw “The ends justifies the means” becomes a battle cry for those who seek the brass ring of power and the prestige that comes to those invited into the outer rings of the Councils of State. It is the politics of Court transmogrified to 20th century America. It is a game played for keeps. The victims are those who see politics as something less than life or death. And in that kind of contest, those most determined to prevail generally do.

Unless the blogosphere as one rises up in righteous anger and condemns without equivocation, without qualification, and without regard to ideology or party affiliation those who seek to sully this medium with the poisonous tactics of bullying, or threatening, or crossing over from the virtual world into the physical world in order to carry out vendettas against opponents, we will become a sideshow, a gaggle of carping, sniping, irrelevancies who deserved to be laughed at rather than taken seriously for our ideas or beliefs.

It’s not to late to take a stand. And I urge everyone that reads this to take that stand with me.

I almost feel like starting with the old saw “Once upon a time” except there’s nothing remotely amusing about what I’m going to write about. The facts in this matter are so outrageous, so bizarre that if they weren’t true, the story would almost certainly be considered for inclusion in Aesop or Kipling’s Just So Stories.

What is happening in the blogosphere today is the ugliest, most frightening display of political hardball I can ever remember. And the target is not some big time politician, bureaucrat, or reporter. The target doesn’t even reside in this country.

The target is a blogger who runs a small, well-written site. He goes by the nom de blog Seixon. He lives in Norway. And he is under attack from some of the left’s most hateful and spiteful mouthbreathers over his defense of one of his commenters who himself got into trouble for (to use one of the left’s favorite phrases) “speaking truth to power.”

The story is a convoluted one best told by Sexion himself. Here’s the short version, condensed quite nicely. You need to read that post in order to understand what else has been happening in the 24 hours since Seixon began to tell his story.

Ace has the super short version:

Long story short: AnonymousArmy is a poster on DailyKos. He objected to Leopold’s claim of proof of the “Rove indictment,” and pointed out stuff like, oh, the docket number he kept citing as being on the indictment wasn’t even assigned until several days after Leopold claims to have seen it.

Or have been told it existed by someone who’d seen it. Whatever the hell his claim was.

AnonymousArmy, as I understand it, believed the left was putting too much faith in the claims of Joe Wilson and his pimp Larry Johnson.

Leopold began harrassing AnonymousArmy, and escalating that harrassment, and, of course, escalating that harrassment via sock-puppets.

Some of these sock-puppets were exposed, and the story was picked up by Seixon, who also began getting abused by sock-puppets.

The players on the left are both familiar and unfamiliar. Jason Leopold, the left-wing fantasist that every decent liberal in the blogosphere no longer holds in any regard whatsoever. And Larry Johnson, former CIA and State Department Counter-Terrorism official, frequent guest on cable talk shows, defender of Valerie Plame, and an internet bully.

A bully? Well, the thinly veiled threats against Sexion’s well being are among the sleaziest things I’ve ever seen posted on a blog:

Perhaps most haunting was the email I received from Larry Johnson last night. He claimed I defamed him and called him a liar. I did not defame him and he did lie to me when he said that he had answered my questions when he had in fact not done so. This was not part of the story I wrote yesterday, calling him a liar for that, I simply stated the fact that he declined to answer a set of yes/no questions I posed to him, as he responded that he had already answered them, which was false.

Johnson laced the email, to a personal account of mine which I do not usually give out and which is not available through Google, with personal details about my family and me. Just like Leopold had done, Johnson repeated my mother’s name, my parents’ address, and even my birth month and year. Obviously Johnson thought this would freak me out and scare me into retracting everything. He concluded the email with:

I am willing to accept a written apology and move on. If you refuse to retract your statements about me I am prepared to ratchet this up several levels. I have not spent the last twenty years working with the U.S. military and the intelligence community to accept this kind of nonsense from a wet-nosed 24 year old coward, who is an armchair warrior but does not have the courage to enlist in the military when his country is at war.

Is that a threat, Mr. Johnson? After I responded, he fired back with this:

I know where you are living. You forget that I do work for the European Union and friends in Interpol. I’ve offered you a mature way to deal with this situation. You’re obviously too immature and inexperienced to recognize the offer for what it is. Too bad.

Seixon asks “Is Larry Johnson using his law enforcement contacts to dig up information on me to intimidate me into retracting uncomfortable facts about his involvement with peddling false allegations against a commenter at my blog?”

In addition, some commenter named John Dean who had been defending Leopold actually called Seixon’s parents at their home:

Mr. Dean called my parents home in the United States (I live in Norway). He passed himself off as someone doing research for an article, got my father to confirm some things, and also divulged that he had researched my mother and father’s activities to do with a “liberal” cause.

On June 26th and June 27th, personal details about me were disclosed at Think Progress where I had been commenting frequently for the past few weeks. Think Progress management declined to remove the comments, citing the fact that the details could be found on the Internet, although this still violated their Terms of Use.

The story gets nuttier and even more bizarre with the addition of several sock puppets who have been making the rounds of the blogosphere posting on anyone’s site who comes to Seixon’s defense. I personally do not have the information to ascertain exactly who these sock puppets really are. But Sexion does.

In addition to sock puppets, there are falsified portions of emails used to “prove” Seixon’s “threats” and, most disturbing of all, there was this:

At approximately 7:00 AM Central European Time I received a phone call from a blocked number. The person on the phone told me I had written naughty things on my blog, and then laughed when I asked them who they were.

“You’re a dead man.”

This is what the person on the line told me right before hanging up.

The sock puppets have also made an appearance on Ace’s site, using both Seixon and Leopold/Johnson target Anonymousarmy’s names to post outrageous comments smearing the two out of control leftists:

Whoever is sock-puppeting for Leopold just happens to share Leopold’s obsessiveness in searching for references to his name on Technorati. (Have you heard this story before?)

As readers of this site know, someone calling himself “Seixon” posted all of the real Seixon’s personal information in a post. And then, tonight, someone attempting to discredit AnonymousArmy posted as “AnonymousArmy” and posted this hateful screed about “Jason Jew Leopold,” outing his personal information (supposedly) with a big helping of extremely crude, KKK-level Jew-hatred.

A nasty post. But one cannot help but suspect the post was designed to aid Jason Leopold, not hurt him, by discrediting an enemy, and drawing sympathy for Leopold’s supposedly thuggish treatment by his critics.

Death threats, sock puppets, falsifying emails, more subtle threats, publishing personal information, calling one’s family - I’ve never heard or seen anything like it.

These are tactics honed during the Clinton years and were used to terrify potential witnesses in the Paula Jones case. Journalists knew about these women who were receiving phone calls in the middle of the night, whose families were being contacted, and who many reported were being followed. Jennifer Flowers had her place broken into several times. Kathleen Willey reported all kinds of harassment and veiled threats.

Journalists knew - and never reported it. They didn’t want to receive the same “treatment” from the minions of the most powerful man on earth.

In the case of Seixon, he has aroused the fury of people whose house of cards in the Plame Affair is in danger of crashing down around them. It is now clear to any fair minded observer who has been following the investigation of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that while there was definitely White House pushback against Wilson for his lies about his trip to Niger, there was never any intent for “revenge” against his campaign to discredit the President of the United States nor was their a deliberate effort to out Valerie Plame who, after all, was not a covert agent in any way, shape, or form.

In Seixon’s case, he has come up against practitioners of a special kind of sleaze - the kind that is common inside the beltway but never before seen in the blogosphere. It is a campaign of whispering, of innuendo, of threats, of casual utterances made to chill the bones. It is hardball politics of the worst sort and the cockroaches who are practicing it should have as much light shone upon them as is possible. Hence the reason for this post.

I urge you to drop by Seixons blog and show him your support by leaving him a comment. I think if I were him right about now, I’d feel awfully alone. I’m sure he’d appreciate a word from everyone.

And to the trolls, the sock puppets, the leftist lickspittles who grub around in the muck and the filth, bottom feeding with the rest of the scavengers and eaters of carrion …

Get stuffed.

UPDATE

Patterico is also disturbed:

Christ on a popsicle stick.

a troubled young reporter with a history of drug addiction whose aggressive disregard for the rules ended up embroiling me in a bizarre escapade and raised serious questions about journalistic ethics.

The Anchoress is also troubled, seeing it as I do; unprecedented:

That, along with a few other cases of blog sock-puppetry and other things has more than made the case for me that certain parties within the blogosphere are beginning to whirrrr out of control. And that’s cause for concern, for several reasons, but mostly because when blogs become discredited, the whole “blogging community” suffers for it, and because, frankly - if this stuff doesn’t stop, someone is going to get hurt.

Too many people are beginning to fall into an “I have a blog and I’m not afraid to use it,” mentality, and that thought is morphing into an “I know where you live and where your children sleep” mentality.

She assures us that there are probably right wingers doing this kind of “off-blog” stuff but frankly, what makes the Seixon case so disturbing is the prominence of the leftists carrying it out. And I can’t see any righties of comparable standing doing the same thing.

UPDATE II 7/27

Goodnight, Larry. It was nice but I’m very happy you have to leave now. Your 6 year run as “terrorism expert” (after writing in the NYT two months before 9/11 of the “declining terrorist threat”) is over. Any news outlet that touches you with a 10 foot pole now should be called out as a facilitator of bullies.

Maybe you could join Dan Rather on Mark Cubans HDTV network?

It was a close one.

The universe hung in the balance there for a little while as my site was down from 5:15 AM - 10:50 AM central time this morning. I understand that there were several mass suicides and not a few riots (especially in Bangkok where the sex trade depends heavily on my site judging from the number of Google searches that end up here for “gay boy massages”). But all is well now. God is in his heaven. The universe is still spinning counterclockwise. And Glenn Greenwald is still a douchebag.

I apologize for any inconvenience.

Dan Riehl is singlehandedly trying to change my mind about bloggers replacing the mainstream press.

In a series of stunning posts that deserve a helluva lot more attention than they seem to be getting, Mr. Riehl raises some troubling questions about Jerome Armstrong and MyDD, the political blog that Mr Armstrong created originally as a stock analyzing site that used astrology to help investors pick the winners.

If that were the only problem with MyDD, we could simply have some fun at the expense of the “reality based community” by gently pointing out that astrology hasn’t been considered a science since Newton got whacked on the noggin by a falling apple, which, given the prominence of Mr. Armstrong among the netnuts, sorta puts the kibosh on any claims liberals have to the rationalist high ground.

The real story here is not “Astrologer Jerome” or Armstrong’s problems with the SEC. What Mr. Riehl has uncovered with his sleuthing is what appears to be an elaborate flim flam involving a liberal PAC called BlogPac (that Markos Moulitsis transferred administration to MyDD just 10 days ago) and an apparent working relationship between Armstrong and MyDD’s Chris Bowers.

What makes that relationship significant is that BlogPac has decided not to disburse money to political candidates any longer. Instead, Blogpac’s mission “will be primarily to defend the netroots and improve the quality of online activism…”

Who then has benefited from this change in focus? Mr. Riehl:

If you look at the BlogPAC disclosure records, you’ll see that from Jan - Mar of 2005 - their only disbursements were to another blogger / consultant - Bob Bingham - from the Swing State Blog. According to slate, he was a one time employee of Armstrong, as well as a leading force behind BlogPAC. Interesting. They’ve been collecting money on line and paying it to … themselves for consulting?? I don’t know. But those filings could prove interesting, either now, or in the future.

And Riehl adds this disclaimer:

Without alleging any illegality, or malfeasance, which I am not - given Armstrong’s display of bad judgment in both political candidates and stocks, on top of his trouble with the SEC, it seems fair to at least broach the question: will the decision to turn Blog PAC over to MyDD end up helping blogs, or being a classic example of how a fool and his money can be soon parted?

Of course, assuming one thinks most liberals are fools to begin with, I suppose you could make the argument that its stupid money right from the start.

I would also like to add that there is nothing illegal in paying themselves for running the PAC. But one would think that contributors would like to be clear on the relationships at play before coughing up any money. And the relationship between Bowers and Armstrong appears to be one of employer and employee, which makes the BlogPac money a potential godsend to someone who can disburse it to bloggers who could then be employed to write paeans to Armstrong clients.

There’s no evidence for this except past history. Chris Bowers, for instance, has acknowledged being paid to consult for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The SEIU paid a company called Political Technologies LLC for which Armstrong is the Registered Agent $162,000 in 2005 for “Consulting”, “Professional Services,” and $5,000 for “Website Support.” Mr. Riehl points out that the SEIU received some glowing coverage in Armstrong’s book co-authored with Markos Moulitsis as well as many glowing references on Moulitsis’ own site, Daily Kos.

Is there more of this “pay for play” on blogs (perhaps conservative blogs as well) than anyone has guessed? For the record, I can categorically state that the only monies I have received because of this site (besides donations from readers) is the quarterly payment I get from Pajamas Media for hosting their ads - ads I have no control over as far as content or placement.

Read Dan’s entire post for some more complete background on the issues he raises.

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

There are many observers of the New Media who believe that blogs or other on-line communities will one day replace the mainstream media as the best way to transmit news and information to the American public. The rationale behind this revolution is that collectively speaking, bloggers are wiser, less prone to error, and when that error is discovered, ruthless in correcting the mistake.

The key, as new media herald Jeff Jarvis preaches, is content. With millions of on-line participants in the process, content will cease to be of paramount importance and instead, the community itself will emerge as both arbiter and disseminator of what we now consider “news.” No more gatekeepers. No more “reporters.” In this brave new world, the act of sharing information itself through “linking” and other technological innovations will supplant the old paradigm of a small elite who writes, edits, and prints (or broadcasts) the news.

I have tremendous respect for Jarvis and others of his ilk who have devoted considerable thought to the new media and where it might be headed. And in the end, he may be proved a true prophet of the new age, a voice in the wilderness who pointed the way toward a bright future of citizen participation in the political conversation of the nation as we’ve never seen before.

Frankly, I don’t buy it. And judging by the burgeoning controversy surrounding Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos, the biggest liberal blogger on the planet, we may in fact be witnessing something of an earthquake that will alter the blogging landscape, changing the public’s perception of these on-line journals from fiercely partisan, independent voices to little more than pale echoes of the political parties they support.

More than 50 million Americans get most of their news and information from the internet with 13 million people counting themselves as readers of blogs. What makes politicians salivate about bloggers and blog readers is simple; they are comparatively rich. Surveys show that 43% of this group make over $90,000, with almost 70% enjoying annual incomes in excess of $50,000.With that kind of money to be had for the taking, insiders from both parties have begun to reach out to bloggers in earnest. And it isn’t just politicians. Adapting the adage “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” mainstream media outlets have begun to cater to bloggers as well. Most on-line editions of major newspapers now feature one or more blogs of their own as well as blog friendly features like tags for articles that help with identifying issues as well as listings on blog aggregators like Technorati.

The result of all this attention has been a phenomenal increase in advertising revenues for bloggers from a variety of sources. Herein lies the makings of controversy for Kos and I suspect other influential bloggers. All of that ad revenue has brought increased scrutiny of the Daily Kos universe by the mainstream press. And what they are beginning to uncover smacks of influence peddling, “pay for play” by politicians on the Kos website, and perhaps most interestingly, a network made up of the biggest, most influential liberal blogs with Moulitsis himself cracking the whip and ruthlessly enforcing a kind of orthodoxy of thought thanks to his control of a liberal ad network to which bloggers subscribe.

As with any media story, one must look at the sources and motivations of the people and outlets digging up this kind of dirt. If these revelations came only from right wing media outlets or talk radio, they could be more easily dismissed as just part of the normal background noise indicative of the usual partisan bickering. But some of what is being reported comes from the nominally liberal New Republic and the New York Times – hardly bastions of the right wing noise machine. And the details that are emerging, while revealing nothing illegal, certainly call into question Mr. Moulitsas’ ethics and thus, the ethics of all bloggers.

The controversy centers mostly around Moulitsas’ relationship with his friend, business partner, and recent co-author Jerome Armstrong. As the conservative site RedState has reported, there appears to be a correlation between candidates who hire Armstrong to work on their campaigns and favorable attention paid to those candidates on Daily Kos, a blog that garners more than 500,000 readers a day. Normally, this wouldn’t raise many eyebrows. Kos himself worked for the Howard Dean campaign and fully disclosed the fact that he was being compensated by the candidate. But what has some tongues wagging is Kos’s apparent support for the Presidential aspirations of Virginia Governor Mark Warner, a moderate Democrat who recently hired Armstrong as an internet consultant.

Further, during the recent YearlyKos convention in Las Vegas, Governor Warner spent a reported $50,000 on an open bar reception for attendees while delivering a rousing speech denouncing President Bush and the Republicans. Moulitsas, whose support of far left candidates have included other Armstrong clients like Representative Sherrod Brown who is running against Senator Mike DeWine in Ohio, has recently said that the moderate Governor Warner “bears watching” while praising his electability for President.

There is no evidence that any money changed hands between Armstrong and Moulitsas as a quid pro quo for pimping Brown, Warner, or any other politician’s candidacy on the Daily Kos website. But the appearance of impropriety is there. And legitimate questions arise in this regard when examining the background of Jerome Armstrong and his history with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In a complex stock touting scheme, Armstrong was paid $20,000 to push a stock on investment message boards without disclosing he was being paid to do so. The SEC got Armstrong to cease his activities on behalf of the stock and had him agree to a permanent injunction that forbade him from touting stocks in the future. In addition, the SEC is still considering whether or not to levy monetary penalties against him.

The connection between Armstrong’s stock touting and Kos’s candidate pimping is made by RedState:

It’s hard to say that Armstrong’s conduct in the BluePoint case can be separated from his employment by the Warner campaign – if anything, what he did in 2000 bears a striking resemblance to what numerous people have noted in the netroots with candidates: money goes to Armstrong, and hype emerges around his favored candidates, and – if the Howard Dean campaign is any indication – what’s left at the end is a bunch of promoters and consultants who made a bunch of money and an audience of true believers who got left with nothing. In other words, it appears that Warner may be using Armstrong for a function similar to one which ran Armstrong afoul of the law in the first place.

If this were Moulitsas’ only problem, he could probably brush it off as a media campaign carried out by conservatives to discredit him. But the revelations about an email list of top liberal bloggers with Moulitsas as putative leader, as well as his board membership on the top liberal blogad network, could really have an impact on his credibility outside of his leftist readership.

The New Republic’s Jason Zengerle has uncovered a network of liberal bloggers who keep in touch through an email list known as “Townhouse” and who, according to Zengerle, coordinate their blog activities. He quotes from an email sent by Kos about the Armstrong controversy where Kos asks the group to keep quiet about it:

My request to you guys is that you ignore this for now. It would make my life easier if we can confine the story. Then, once Jerome can speak and defend himself, then I’ll go on the offensive (which is when I would file any lawsuits) and anyone can pile on. If any of us blog on this right now, we fuel the story. Let’s starve it of oxygen. And without the “he said, she said” element to the story, you know political journalists are paralyzed into inaction.

Thanks, markos

This kind of coordination in and of itself is not shocking. What is apparently out of the ordinary is the fact that Moulitsas sits on the board of directors of an blog advertising group known as Advertising Liberally, a group that pays liberal bloggers for ads.

Along with Armstrong and MyDD’s Chris Bowers, Kos runs a BlogAds advertising network called Advertising Liberally, to which a number of “Townhouse” members belong. (If you want a fuller understanding of how BlogAds advertising networks operate, and how they allow lower-traffic blogs to gain more clout with advertisers by combining their traffic, read this piece.) Therefore, Kos (along with Armstrong and Bowers) gets to decide which blogs belong—and don’t belong—to Advertising Liberally, which means a lot of these blogs’ financial health hinges upon staying in Kos’s good graces. Is it any wonder they’re so obedient?

That may be true, although from my own personal experience, very, very few people are going to get rich by featuring advertising on their blogs. That said, it is the appearance of control that is the issue here. And even though there may be some bloggers on the Townhouse list who have criticized Moulitsas in the past and not suffered any consequences, there is the very real possibility that many of the smaller liberal blogs would feel compelled not to upset their blog patron lest they lose whatever meager earnings they squeeze out of their websites, or their imaginative dreams of future success as a major blogger.

In short, this is not so much Kos cracking the whip to keep people in line but rather the reluctance of many on the left to challenge his position and authority.

From my own perspective as a blogger, I think that while appearances are important, Moulitsas has done nothing wrong nor has he operated in an unethical manner. The email list is titillating but hardly the stuff of conspiracy. And as far as the blogad controversy, unless your blog has a fairly large presence, your remuneration will be so small that most bloggers wouldn’t think twice about speaking their mind if they believed Kos was wrong. The threat of Moulitsas pulling their ads is therefore not credible.

What all of this does point to is the imminent demise of blogs as we have come to know and love them. Blogs are about ready to hit the big time. It is expected that most competitive campaigns will spend tens of millions of dollars on internet advertising before the November elections, a large chunk of that on political blogs. What will all of this money do to Blogland?

We will probably see a stratification process as money flows to larger blogs and smaller websites scrambling for the remainder while the owners harbor dreams of making it big. And this presents a whole series of problems with blogs themselves and what we who write them are becoming.

In order to get a nice chunk of that ad money, smaller sites must grow. And the surest way to grow one’s blog is by being a good writer and participating in controversy. I don’t deny that one of my motivations for writing this piece is that people who read this site and others are interested in the Kos case. But what this kind of thinking reveals on my part and on the part of political bloggers in general is a thirst for the controversies and scandals that rock politics on a regular basis and appeal to the lowest common denominator in readership.

In this respect, we are little better than the “old” media in that the drive for readership and notoriety is becoming paramount. Gone are the days when many of us simply blogged for the sake of writing and sharing information. And while there are still thousands of bloggers who enjoy blogging for its own sake, for many of us, it has become a competitive enterprise, a stepping stone to bigger and better things.

Will success spoil the blog and the blogger? Even if it does, there will be someone and something to take its place. The only thing we can be certain of is that the pace of change in this on-line world is greater than in any other mass medium in history. Where it will be five years from now is anyone’s guess.

blog posts on Kos at The Truth Laid Bear

I can’t begin to tell you all how overwhelmed with gratitude I am for the support so many of you have shown by donating to this website.

The response was astounding. I honestly didn’t know what to expect when I asked for donations. The dozens of you who responded so generously have allowed me a little breathing room in the bills department while building up some funds for the redesign of the site that I am planning for later this summer.

I have emailed my thanks to many of you and will try to send out more today. If I miss you somehow, please accept my personal thanks for showing your support.

As we head into this summer of discontent, where our enemies overseas and here at home will be redoubling their efforts to defeat the United States in Iraq and elsewhere, it is going to be up to all of us who care what happens to this country to stand firm and not allow the faint of heart, the misguided, and the “useful idiots” to triumph. To prevent that catastrophe, we must all stand together in solidarity with our troops and the Commander in Chief. I have a feeling he’s going to need our help now more than ever.

In closing, a poem of thanks by one of my favorite poets, Walt Whitman:

Thanks in old age–thanks ere I go,
For health, the midday sun, the impalpable air–for life, mere life,
For precious ever-lingering memories, (of you my mother dear–you, father–you, brothers, sisters, friends,)
For all my days–not those of peace alone–the days of war the same,
For gentle words, caresses, gifts from foreign lands,
For shelter, wine and meat–for sweet appreciation,
(You distant, dim unknown–or young or old–countless, unspecified,
readers belov’d,
We never met, and neer shall meet–and yet our souls embrace, long,
close and long;)
For beings, groups, love, deeds, words, books–for colors, forms,
For all the brave strong men–devoted, hardy men–who’ve forward
sprung in freedom’s help, all years, all lands
For braver, stronger, more devoted men–(a special laurel ere I go,
to life’s war’s chosen ones,
The cannoneers of song and thought–the great artillerists–the
foremost leaders, captains of the soul:)
As soldier from an ended war return’d–As traveler out of myriads,
to the long procession retrospective,
Thanks–joyful thanks!–a soldier’s, traveler’s thanks.

**NOTE: THIS POST WILL REMAIN ON TOP UNTIL MONDAY MORNING**

This is the second in a series of humiliating requests that you send me some of your hard earned money.

Just because I’m nominally a Republican, doesn’t mean I’m rich. In fact, Zsu Zsu and I are people of modest means with decidedly unextravagant tastes. However, I crave the encouragement that a huge response to this bleg can bring. I promise to spend it wisely - most likely on a site redesign and some other improvements. Or, I may piss it all away on a wild night of drinking and carousing (except I don’t drink and I consider it a “wild night” in my advancing years if I can manage to stay up past 10:00 PM).

So if you like what you see on this site and wish to show your appreciation for all the thought provoking essays and analysis you find here, please drop a few pennies in the bucket.

I’ve added a PayPal button if you wish to donate using your PayPal account:

Thanking you in advance for your continued kindness and generosity, I remain,

Rick Moran
Proprietor