The bizarre 180 that Markos Moulitsas did on DLCer Mark Warner after the 2008 Presidential hopeful hired his mentor Jerome Armstrong has been raising quite a few eyebrows. With eyebrows comes scrutiny.

Chris Suellentrop @ the New York Times Opinionator blog has uncovered that Armstrong’s skills at hyping candidates comes from lessons learned hyping other things online. The Plank pulls out the money quote:

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. (The original S.E.C. complaint is here.) 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.

Without admitting or denying anything, Armstrong has agreed to a permanent injunction that forbids him from touting stocks in the future. The S.E.C. remains in litigation with him over the subject of potential monetary penalties.

It’s not possible to direct link to the TimesSelect article, but you can currently read it on its main page.

Suellentrop’s column ends with a warning:

Of course, just because a candidate busted once doesn’t mean the experience will repeat itself with the newest netroots darling, whether or not that darling turns out to be Mark Warner. Maybe Warner should be concerned only if he turns out to be a creation of real-estate speculators.

Candidates interested in trying to force the blogosphere by hiring such professionals as Armstrong need to look no further than to the barren landscape that is the opinion that many Ohio democrats have of Sherrod Brown online. Armstrong’s ham handed efforts at manipulating online opinion for Brown were a disaster, and dozens of Ohio netizens that should be Brown’s most fervent online supporters have written his campaign off entirely. Many blame Congressman Brown. Personally I see him as just another babe-in-the-woods investor lured into the flashing web of internet hucksters, and then systematically sucked dry. As a dot con veteran it’s something that I’ve seen many times before.

I generally avoid expressing my opinions of the concentrated liberal powersource that is the Daily Kos. There is so much good about it that I join in in celebrating Kos’s term at the helm. But it’s always been obvious to me that with such a concentration of power comes a tremendous potential for abuse. (To be honest with you, I see my own little domain as having a potential for abuse, although on a much smaller, if not totally insignificant, scale. I try to counter that by always offering every candidate or their chosen representative access to the site, and by trying to temper my vitriol with understanding for other people’s perspectives.)

Eventually the burden that is the effect of the natural dynamics of power will shatter this energy and scatter it to the four winds of the blogosphere where it belongs. Hopefully the event will happen organically through technological evolution, but my fear is that it will come from internal conflict and abuse resulting in islands of Kossack expatriates surviving on their own in the wild against a revitalized opposition. In the mean time those of us online in this great state will continue building a decentralized alternative to the tower of Kos as it continues its quest for the heavens.

UPDATE: This story has grown a few legs:

Obviously this has been the kind of red meat that the right has been looking for, and they will do everything they can to turn it into a blanket condemnation of the liberal blogosphere. As always, rovian tactics are the answer: Stay on offense. Their house is falling around them. They don’t have the time or the resources to wage an effective effort on this issue, even if the “liberal” media will eat it up because it attacks one of their enemies.