THE KEN LAY LEFT:

SHILL TO HACK: CELEBRATED LIB STRATEGIST HAS SHADY MARKET PAST (RODDY BOYD, June 18, 2006, NY Post)

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. [...]

Considered an authority on political blogging and 'Net campaigning, Armstrong's MyDD.com is a trendsetter in liberal circles.

TROUBLE IN KOSISTAN? (Jason Zengerle , 6/18/06, New Republic)

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 (behind the TimesSelect wall, alas). 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.

We can also reveal, in a Brothers Judd exclusive, that Daily Kos invested tens of millions of dollars in aluminum futures just before their recent Reynolds-wrapped Konklave.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 18, 2006 4:11 PM