Update: 6/26. Armstrong has posted on MyDD saying, yeah, I used to be an astrologer.

To continue on the three posts below the cartoon, Joe Hartley asks, why isn’t astroworld.mydd.com cached in Google? A good enough question, except that a webmaster can request that Google remove a site from the index. In which case, maybe it’ll be in Yahoo, right?

And it is. (You may have to search for ‘astroworld.mydd.com’, depending on where it is on the page)

A server log from liberaloasis lists astroworld.mydd.com

Two chat room links ask, what happened to astroworld.mydd.com.

But, ta dum, here’s a post about astrology on astro.com in Jan. 2003 by Jerome Armstrong himself, mentioning astroworld.mydd.com. So, ok folks, he’s an astrologer, deal with it.

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And would that necessarily be a bad thing??

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From the Press-Enterprise, an Riverside CA newspaper, quoting a article from the Providence Journal (RI), dated 11/05/2002

MyDD, a liberal political blog that’s heavy on polls and polling, doesn’t link its affiliated Astroworld political astrology index from the homepage, but this offers its own sorts of odds.

That’s what Astrologer Jerome Armstrong says we’ll see today, a surprise that’s been brewing below the radar: that women voters will pour out to the polls today, while men will be inclined to stay home, for reasons only an astrologer might understand (so I’ve edited them out here)

Unlike some of the other links, this one links directly to astroworld.mydd.com (a dead link, as mentioned, as astroworld is no longer there.) Thus, I think it’s increasingly clear Armstrong is an astrologer, and not the victim of right wing deception.

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Continuing from the previous post, the lively comments got me searching more.

Could it be a right-wing trick, is the Wikipedia entry faked, as well as the astro.com post (just one post in a site with hundreds of page by an apparently well-known astrologer), as well as the other ancedotal evidence?

So I poked around more, and found this astrology link referencing Armstrong. I suppose it could be faked, but it looks like an old entry that hasn’t been updated in ages. The url is dead of course, that’s because astroworld is no longer on mydd servers.

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Yes, astrology. Jerome Armstrong, co-author of Crashing the Gate with Markos Moulisas used to be (and who know, maybe still is) a Looney Tunes astrologer. I’m not sure if this was before or after the SEC spanked him for touting garbage stocks.

Astrologer Jerome Armstrong notes that Ixion and Quaoar are following close in Pluto’s wake in early Sagittarius, and connects the rise of the political version of religious fundamentalism with the astronomical exploration of the Kuiper Belt in 1992…[The author wishes to acknowledge the help and inspiration provided by astrologer and author Jerome Armstrong of AstroWorld.mydd.com for information and links regarding Varuna and Trans-Neptunians which have been vital to the preparation of this article.]

Ooo-kay…

Right wing blogs are having a whooping good time with this. Liberal blogs are probably too embarrassed to say anything. Me, I wonder how much longer mainstream politicians like Mark Warner will permit themselves to be linked to Armstrong/Kos.

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Ok, now the pieces are starting to fall into place. Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong apparently help run an advertising network where many other liberal blogs get the bulk of their advertising money from.

Along with Armstrong and MyDD’s Chris Bowers, Kos runs a BlogAds advertising network called Advertising Liberally, to which a number of “Townhouse” members belong.

From Rogers Cadenhead, Nov. 15 2005, one of the founding members of BlogAds, who later parted ways with them.

The Drudge Retort [that's ReTort, not RePort) has been kicked out of the Liberal Blog Advertising Network, a group of 75 liberal sites organized by Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos and Chris Bowers and Jerome Armstrong of MyDD under the guidance of BlogPAC, a political action committee that Moulitsas and Armstrong began in 2004.

Bowers personally invited me to join the network in May 2005, sending several e-mails until I agreed to become one of its founding members. I thought it was a good way to bring liberal blogs closer together and make some money in the 2006 election year, so I've been working on it for six months, running the network's "Advertise Liberally" ad on the Retort 6.5 million times during that span and setting up a private blog for members.

I think the moral of this story is simple: Practice due diligence before getting into business with Moulitsas, Armstrong and Bowers. A trait that makes them entertaining bloggers -- a talent for getting into fights they don't need to have -- doesn't translate well to making a network of weblogs advertiser friendly.

I realized this a few weeks ago when Moulitsas used the Daily Kos front page to threaten potential advertisers.

[Kos] charges $1,400 a week for ads [as of Nov 15, 2005] and regularly sells 6-8 of them. [Kos ads are now $4200 a week for the top spot]

For the rest of the 75-minus-me members in the liberal ad network, “don’t pull an ad or we’ll hurt you” is a bit of a tough sell.

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More from Rogers Cadenhead

I think the 85 bloggers in the Liberal Blog Advertising Network and popular Kos diarists need to take a hard look at these guys and how closely they want to be associated with them.

Politics has a tendency to attract people who put their own interests above party or principle when the money starts rolling in, as Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff have ably demonstrated. I’d hate to see well-respected liberal bloggers like Joshua Marshall and Atrios burn too much capital in defense of More-Kash Moulitsas.

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