Kos’ Kulture of Korruption
Uh oh. The rumblings about “Kosola” (i.e. Kos’s and his friend and collaborator Jerome Armstrong’s financial relationships with certain politicians) have migrated from various blog comments sections to Salon to, now, The New York Times, where the Opinionator formerly known as Chris Suellentrop lays them all out.
Most significantly, Suellentrop links the work Kos and Armstrong have done hyping Howard Dean, Sherrod Brown, and now Mark Warner (while one or both were on said pol’s payroll) to an episode from Armstrong’s past. Sullentrop notes that:
some people . . . compare the blog boomlet they helped create for Dean to the work of online bulletin-board posters who touted dodgy Internet stocks during the boom market without disclosing that they were being paid for their words.
Which, interestingly, is precisely what the Securities and Exchange Commission, in court documents filed last August, alleges that Jerome Armstrong did in 2000. In a subsequent filing, the S.E.C. alleges that “there is sufficient evidence to infer that the defendants secretly agreed to pay Armstrong for his touting efforts” on the financial Web site Raging Bull.
There’s another aspect to this. Mark Warner employs Kos’ Krony Jerome Armstrong, and then, surprise, surprise, Governor Warner gets preferential treatment at Yearly Kos, and Markos begins talking him up.
Time to start playing track 9.
Here’s the New York Post’s take: SHILL TO HACK By RODDY BOYD
Jerome Armstrong, the political strategist who followed a famous Internet fundraising effort for Howard Dean in 2004 with a book on “people-powered politics,” has a sordid past as a shill for a worthless dot-com stock.Armstrong, 42, touted a dubious Chinese software company, BluePoint, beginning in 1999, without disclosing that he accepted “below-market” shares in exchange for the glowing reports he posted on a site called Raging Bull, according to a 2003 civil suit that named him as a defendant.
“Armstrong posted over 80 times on the BluePoint message board located on the Raging Bull Web site in the first three weeks [it traded],” reads the complaint, filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
At no point in any of the 80 posts did Armstrong disclose he was paid for the service, the suit alleged. In fact, The Post has uncovered hundreds of Armstrong posts from 1999 to 2003, many supporting now virtually or entirely worthless stocks.
Yep, crank the volume on that track, to eleven.
More here:
Donkey Cons: Kos pay-for-play scam
Do the Kos Kool-Aid Kidz realize what it means that (a) Kos and MyDD are paid professional consultants, and (b) there might be an agent-client relationship between the uber-bloggers of the Left and the candidates they are promoting? Certainly this was not obvious to me until last week.A former Kossack — who caught Kos and MyDD in the act of coordinating their Ohio Senate primary allegiances — knows the score:
It became obvious to me some time ago … that it was a scam, perpetrated on people desperate for change and leadership. Instead the stewards, kos and Armstrong sold them out — and continue to do so.
And here are further details on how the Kos/MyDD Axis operates.
Read the rest of Donkey Cons.
Don Surber weighs in.
Clenched fist salute on this story to Instapundit.
Bill at INDC is a little more restrained:
I’m not sure if Kos’s status as a paid consultant for certain Democrats constitutes actual corruption, unless he’s backing a candidate that he wouldn’t otherwise touch. For as much rightful criticism as that distasteful being receives, backing Mark Warner is one of the few smart political moves I’ve seen him make. That said, the lack of candor seems shady, and it’s interesting to watch these charges of “Kosola” play out among the nutroots. And fun.
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