Now, This Is Just Sad: Obama Has a Ministry of Propaganda, and They're a Bunch of Racist Spammers (Updated!)

They're probably convicted felons, too. Remember a couple of days ago when Glenn Beck pondered just when the "opposition to socialism is racist" propaganda seemed to inundate us, so he ran a Lexis Nexis search on it? (From the last 10 seconds of the first vid on).

Well, the NEA scandal is just the tip of the iceberg. The White House has an army of leftist trolls who spew DNC talking points on conservative blogs.

A Ministry of Propaganda? Aren't a doting press and the liberal double standard enough without having to resort to KGB methods to sell your ideas?

DOJ Blog Squad mission. The DOJ has hired a team of bloggers to influence the blogosphere and online media. Tracy Russo, a partisan campaign blogger for John Edwards, the DNC and Obama Campaign is leading the Blog Squad at the Department of Justice. So much for a non-political Department of Justice. That dream is dead. The Muffled Oar has learned from Department sources that Russo is spending a great deal of time keeping angry gay and transgender partisans quiet and in line regarding the Department’s Defense of Marriage Act. Russo is primarily tasked with spinning the blogosphere about Obama and Holder policies by whatever means necessary. Russo’s mission is to babysit the left and get them energized, or get them quiet, depending on the issue and circumstances.

Isn't this what Nutroots is?

Today the Washington Post demonstrates that the effort to propagandize to the blogosphere is a government-wide campaign.

The essential function of this effort involves government employees spinning bloggers and keeping the left wing net-roots as a vehicle for dissemination of government spin. Direct contact with the left wing blogosphere allows the Obama administration to preserve the left leaning blog community as an activist base to support Obama policies. Engagement with the centrist media and right wing online community allows government officials to rebut stories they disagree with directly. Who is paying for this government-wide effort?: you are.

So Kos et al are actually on the government dole, and are an arm of the DNC. How is that cool again?

Anyway, here's where the story hits home. Remember all those trolls a couple of weeks back over at TAB, all of them from Greenwood, Indiana and somewhere in Illinois?

Not only is the Department of Justice Blog Squad going to reach out to nontraditional media like TPM Muckraker or the Muffled Oar, but they are also tasked with fostering anonymous comments at conservative leaning blogs such as the Free Republic. They are also tasked with fostering anonymous comments, or comments under pseudonyms, at newspaper websites with stories critical of the Department of Justice, Holder and President Obama. One conservative editor recently told the Muffled Oar that they have noticed a significant increase in the number and aggressiveness of comments to stories critical of the Holder Justice Department. “There is clearly a designed effort to rebut stories that are exposing the Holder Justice Department as more political than the last. We’ve seen a change in the pattern of anonymous emails we receive and comments posted at our paper’s webpage.”

One shivers at the thought of a team of Department of Justice Bloggers anonymously trolling the web to spin the message of a President. It is particularly terrifying when those same anonymous government employees at the Department attack media outlets and newspapers anonymously. How much longer before the Blog Squad operates in the open to intimidate political opponents and critics?

They pretty much do, and we have their IPs.

Update -- The DoJ responds: They're soooo going to turn out to be ACORN workers with criminal records.

Political hatchet man turned nonpartisan Department press spokesman Matt Miller denied the existence of the Blog Squad to the Washington Times. What Miller did NOT deny is that the Blog Squad aka Russo and others, "foster" netroots postings supporting the President and attacking media critics. They denied that the blog squad exist and that nameless postings are made. But they did not deny what everyone knows Axelrod is best at - astroturfing and farming out your dirty work. The failure to deny is a virtual admission.

And that's why all the IPs come from only a couple of ISPs in a couple of towns: they're proxy servers which anonymize the trolls' actual IPs and locations. Like they're even using DOJ computers for this, let alone from one central location. The Office of Public Affairs (the press office, aka Ministry of Information) handles this on behalf of the DoJ and the rest of the administration, for that matter.

Remember, this is the same White House which was caught spamming people using a third party. Would you put that past the DoJ?

Kerry Picket at the Watercooler adds:

This story seems far from over. Should it be surprising web users are suspicious of a Democrat political partisan former campaign blogger who has the power of the Justice Department behind her now? Apparently this administration still has not learned much from their past mistakes.

First the Black Panthers and now incompetent, racist Nutroots trolls.

The real questions are (1) why didn't the DoJ hire reasonably good trolls to spam conservative blogs, like people with a working 4th-grade knowledge of 20th century American history?, and (2) is Kilgore Trout one of their trolls?