WARNING To every editorial page editor in Minnesota. Spot Astroturf when it crosses your desk.

There are people wanting to generate and exploit a herd mentality, and the first step is initiating the belief that a bad idea is held on a widespread basis. Weak people, without much thought, will then go with the flow, or that is the apparent hope.

As an integral part of the effort of Newton Gingrich and his fellow-travelers at americansolutions.com, which I suspect also is a bucks-for-Newt venture, there is an effort to saturate editorial page desks with phony Letters to the Editor, touting Newt's worldview, and that of his financial backers who we can guess about, even while not seeing any payment stubs.

There is this specific Gingrich webpage soliciting exactly such an attack, a hoped-for flood of Astroturf-Instead-of-Grassroot letters [and in case that webpage gets pulled or reworked, I did a screenshot, you can click the screenshot capture to enlarge it and read].


So, the saturation campaign to suggest a false herd effect is in full gear.

Editorial page editors of Minnesota, you have nothing to lose but credibility. Beware or be square, so you don't get hoodwinked into this false agenda to show a false groundswell of belief that pump price will magically go down via any such simplistic and ill-thought-out mischief.