Barack Obama's chief strategist David Axelrod owns an astroturfing company.

And, during the campaign the comments at many major sites (WaPo, Politico, Digg, etc.) were chock full of sockpuppets posting lame jokes, comments insulting McCain and/or Palin, and comments extolling the virtues of The One.

Could those two things have something to do with each other? I think it's extremely likely that the BHO campaign was paying people to comment on sites, but I can't prove it.

However, after the recent "Palin doesn't know Africa isn't a country" smear there's another possible culprit: the Mitt Romney campaign. After all, smearing Palin serves his interests, as does four disastrous years under Obama.

The only way to possibly find out who was involved would be if those sites that have received such comments (which, unfortunately, doesn't include this one) would look into the IP addresses of their sockpuppet commenters. Considering that most of those sites are partisan and those that aren't are corrupt and not interested in real reporting (*cough* Politico), we may never know.