"Astro-Turf Trolls for the Blogosphere"

Great. Organized, paid blog trolls:

Make no mistake: GOP is paying trolls to "blog attack", by Politics and Technology: This is unbelievable. We always knew that there were right-wing political hacks trolling the blogosphere, but this is a new low.

There's a company called Advantage Consultants that's offering up "professional blog warriors" to "flood the zone" with comments. In short, astro-turf trolls for the blogosphere.

Click to zoom on their ad..., but here's the text:

Are you ready for a blog attack?

Get ahead of your opponent with Professional Blog Warriors.

Be prepared to "flood the zone" with comments from professionals who are ready to put your talking points on the blogosphere 24/7.

Whether it's defense or offense, Advantage Consultants has a dedicated team of experienced blog warriors ready to advance your candidate or campaign.

Why wait for the attack? Launch your attack with a battery of blog and forum comments aimed at all media and blog sites in your district.

Contact us today and let us show you the Advantage in professional blog warfare.

 ...Incidentally, who are these people? Who is Advantage Consultants? Their president is Doug Guetzloe, a right-wing radio host and anti-tax activist in Florida.

The marketplace of ideas is far from ideal. This goes on in a variety of different formats, people are paid to call into radio shows, to write letters to the editor at local papers, to attend public meetings, if there's a public forum on an important issue you can bet someone, somewhere is doing their best to figure out how to manipulate the discussion in their favor. This is just the extension of an old technique to a new format (e.g. here's the same consulting group explaining how to manipulate talk radio).

But the basic dishonesty of it all bugs me.