Dean campaign paid two bloggers

On the heels of the uproar over government payments to Armstrong Williams, the former chief of Howard Dean's internet operation, Zephyr Teachout, [what a name!] disclosed some interesting tidbits about paying two prominent liberal bloggers to shill for the Dean campaign.

Specifically:

On Dean’s campaign, we paid Markos and Jerome Armstrong as consultants, largely in order to ensure that they said positive things about Dean. We paid them over twice as much as we paid two staffers of similar backgrounds, and they had several other clients.While they ended up also providing useful advice, the initial reason for our outreach was explicitly to buy their airtime. To be very clear, they never committed to supporting Dean for the payment -- but it was very clearly, internally, our goal.

See the entire post here.

"Markos" is Markos Zuniga who runs the DailyKos blog. DailyKos is one the most popular and virulently liberal blogs in the 'sphere. Zuniga disclosed his relationship with the Dean campaign:

But for the record, I will not discuss my role within the Dean campaign, other than to say it's technical, not message or strategy.

Bear in mind his comment after the Armstrong Williams' revelation:

Until names are named, we can assume every conservative pundit is on the White House’s payola rolls. [courtesy LGF]

Technical indeed.