"Astro Turfers" Email the House

You've heard all the pundits that claim that these town hall debate participants are really just stooges for some nefarious group. One group often cited is Freedom Works. That's run by former Congressman Dick Armey. The pundits, that make this assertion, claim that folks like Armey's group organize and bus these people in and then feed them talking points when at the meetings. Now, what are the pundits going to say about this?

Amid a boisterous debate on health care reform, people flooded members of Congress on Thursday with so many e-mails that they overloaded the House's primary Web site.

Technical support issued a warning to congressional staff that the site, www.house.gov, may be slow or unresponsive because of the large volume of e-mail being sent to members.

Jeff Ventura, a spokesman for the House's chief administrative officer, which maintains the Web site, said traffic data was not available and could not be released without the lawmakers' consent."It is clearly health care reform," Ventura said. "There's no doubt about it."

Is Armey's group behind this as well? Is Dick Armey paying people to email the House members in order to get their systems to crash? Talk about an effective "astro turfing" strategy. Not only did Armey's group organize and bus millions of people to hundreds of town hall meetings, they also organized emailing parties so that the system crashed.

I think we can put to rest the idea that the folks at the town hall meetings are "astro turf" unless someone can show that people are emailing into the House website in massive numbers on the behest of other nefarious groups as well.