Over at Talkingpointsmemo, Josh Marshall posted the following Letter to the Editor he received:

Mailbag:

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Soooo tired of bloggers jumping on the bash Clinton bandwagon.

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A loser...?

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If you'd stop for a moment, you would be exposed to the reality that Clinton is dominating the debates, dominating the polls. On the ground here in California, she has in place a growing organization that I guarantee you will crush any opposition - Democratic primary, or general election against the Repugs.

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It's time the blogosphere, and people like you, began to clean up your act. Stop acting so reactively. And perhaps realize that your unique hits aren't necessarily a measure of your credibility.

I am having a hard time figuring out how to unpack this. The first thought that springs to mind is that this is a false flag operation, and that an anti-Hillary person sent it in the hopes of generating reaction and anger against Senator Clinton.

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On the other hand, this statement is very typical of what I read from Hillary supporters - just a bit stronger. And it is the kind of thing that is starting to lead me to think that Senator Clinton would be a very bad choice as the Democratic nominee.

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So I am curious what Cafe'ers think: is this an actual pro-Hillary statement, a false flag operation, or something else?

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sPh

From time to time the question arises as to whether or not there are paid trolls working the liberal blogs. One argument against is always that there are no such things as paid trolls period, whether on political blogs or elsewhere.

Here is a flat-out advertisement on Craigslist for a paid trolling position.

Since this will disappear fairly soon, I have also captured a bit of it below:

$1000/month to blog! - top users on digg, technorati, reddit, etc

Reply to: job-xxxxx@craigslist.org

Date: 2007-08-21, 10:00AM PDT

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WE ARE LOOKING FOR AN EXPERT USER OF DIGG, TECHNORATI, DEL.ICIO.US, SLASHDOT, REDDIT, FURL, MYSPACE, FACEBOOK, ETC.

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ABOUT THIS PROJECT

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You will be working as an independent contractor for two companies: one is Public Interest. The other is Michael Franzini.

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For Public Interest, your task will be to build online "buzz" about The Knight News Challenge.

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For Michael Franzini, your task will be to build online buzz about his book, One Hundred Young Americans.

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Basically, we want to get as much attention as we can all over the Internet for both of these.

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When you Google terms relevant to either of these, we want to come up with a ton of (content-rich) relevant hits.

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And we want to rise to the top of the Google search rankings as a result of all the sites linking to us.

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Some of this work will just entail getting people to link to us. It could be as simple as getting people to put a link on their MySpace page (especially people with tons of friends).

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But it could also mean writing in-depth posts on all kinds of sites to draw people in.

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We are looking for someone who has a proven track record of getting attention in the blogosphere and beyond. For example, if you are a top user on Digg, that definitely qualifies you.

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The basic requirement will be 150 stories a month, some of which need to be in-depth. We'll pay a bonus for stories that get a lot of attention. We're also open to figuring out some combination of blog posts and MySpace/Facebook/etc links each month.