Also part of the Easongate.com team was La Shawn Barber, who writes a biweekly column for -- again, the name pops up -- GOPUSA and has written for AIM about "the Bush-bashing media." Working alongside Krempasky and Barber was another site, RedState.org, "a Republican community weblog" registered with the Federal Election Commission as a 527. Krempasky helped found that site along with Senate staffer Ben Domenech, the chief speechwriter for Bush ally and Texas Senator John Cornyn; and former U.S. Army officer Josh Trevino, a conservative blogger who used to write under the name "Tacitus." The goal of RedState.org? "[T]o unite ... voices from government, politics, activism, civil society, and journalism" in service of the "construction of a Republican majority."

Power Line, another conservative blog deeply involved in the Rather controversy, helped push the Jordan story as well. Described by Time magazine as "three amateur journalists working in a homegrown online medium [who] challenged a network news legend and won," Power Line was voted Time's "2004 Blog of the Year." In reality, its three writers are all fellows at the conservative Claremont Institute who attended Dartmouth College in the early 1970s and now work as attorneys; two of them have been writing articles as a team for conservative publications such as the National Review and The American Enterprise for more than 10 years.

Susan Gardner, 46, a mother of four and former editor of now-defunct community paper the Sun City News in Santa Barbara, California, read about Gannon on the liberal blogosphere, including a tip that Gannon was not the Talon reporter's real name. Gardner recalled seeing the Talon News name in a story about journalists subpoenaed in the Valerie Plame case. On January 28, writing online as "SusanG," she posted a question on the "Diaries" section of DailyKos, the widely read liberal blog run by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, now also a major Democratic fund-raiser.(...)

Brian Kelly, a 52-year-old actor in upstate New York best known for his starring role in a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial in the '90s, became Gardner's partner, writing as "NYBri."(...)

The narrative got pushed into sexual territory by John Aravosis, a gay-rights activist who worked as a legislative aide for Republican Senator Ted Stevens from 1989 to 1994.(...)

Meanwhile, another former Republican, Karl Frisch, 26 -- better known as "Carl with a K," his Internet handle while working for the Dean campaign in '03 -- pushed the story from Capitol Hill, where he works as a spokesman for Representative Louise Slaughter on the House Rules Committee.

But there's another a key difference between the effort against Gannon and conservative blog firestorms: The targets of the liberal blogosphere are conservative activists; the target of the conservative blogosphere is the free and independent press itself, just as it has been for conservative activists since the '60s. For the Republican Party, pseudo-journalism Internet sites and the blogosphere are just another way to get around "the filter," as Bush has dubbed the mainstream media.(...)

But unlike traditional news outlets, right-wing blogs openly shill, fund raise, plot, and organize massive activist campaigns on behalf of partisan institutions and constituencies; they also increasingly provide cover for professional operatives to conduct traditional politics by other means -- including campaigning against the established media. And instead of taking these bloggers for the political activists they are, all too often the established press has accepted their claims of being a new form of journalism.