Blog payola - Part 2

LaBelle sends this information from a couple more of the "big boys". First, Kevin Drum.

[T]his manufactured story about Markos and Jerome Armstrong consulting for Howard Dean is pretty idiotic even by conservative hack standards. Kos announced he was working for Dean and had a disclaimer on his site about this for quite a while. For his part, Jerome actually quit blogging completely while he worked for Dean.

In other words, there's nothing wrong with what they did. Nothing to explain. Period. It was all completely above board, and wingnut efforts to pretend that this is somehow a liberal version of the Armstrong Williams debacle are pathetic.

Indeed.

And from Pandagon:

The shorter version: the Dean campaign hired Armstrong-Zuniga for technical consultation. At no point were they hired to say anything for the campaign. From their prior blog postings, it was already evident that both were Dean supporters, making any payment to them superfluous. Months later, Zephyr Teachout comes along and says that she and the Dean campaign were hoping for a de facto quid pro quo where none existed.

As such, I have to wonder what the fuck Zephyr was thinking. She essentially created a liberal counterpart to the Armstrong Williams controversy that is in no way the same, or in fact even a controversy besides revealing the secret wishes of a few Dean staffers who never said anything until months later. Congrats.

The following are from comments to the Pandagon post:

I'm still wondering why this is a story. Everybody knew Kos was a Dean consultant. See, for example, this [year-old] story from the San Francisco Chronicle subtitled "Dean consultant in Berkeley builds 'blog' into influential tool" and reporting that the blog is "run by a man who is a paid consultant for Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean, although he will accept any Democrat instead of President Bush."

You know what's odd about this story?

That the WSJ and other right-wing media blur the difference between money we haven't paid in taxes -- say, pay made from individuals, as went to Markos -- and money we have paid in taxes -- money from the government, as went to Armstrong.

Another very big point. Normally you expect the company that wants our patronage to pay for it. The money going to Williams from government departments amounts to making us pay to watch advertisements. Pretty slick.

And, speaking of Armstrong Williams, The Poor Man is taking bets on which other news folk are on the WH payola.

Rules: Bets placed that a given media figure will have been found to have been the illegal recipient of taxpayer-funded bribes, including but not limited to: direct cash payments, direct payments to relatives or business associates, payments to business interests, tax breaks, "no-show" jobs, surplus military hardware, White House silverware, "fact-finding" cruises to Polynesian islands, coupon booklets for the Mustang Ranch, rides on Air Force One, rides on Air Force Two, rides on the Presidential Pony, rides on Dick Cheney, rides on Saddam Hussein's mustache, rides on UFOs from Area 51, secret CIA super-weed that makes you "trip balls", Executive Orders authorizing you to terminate Paul Reiser with extreme prejudice, Executive Orders authorizing you rebroadcast baseball games without the expressed written consent of Major League Baseball, or lollipops. The bribe must be for the expressed purpose of pimping an Administration policy, cheering Administration officials, or attacking Administration critics. Bets pay at the odds given.