Fight back against the man using minimal effort! I'll show you how!

I'm pretty mad. Maybe it's because I'm such a fan of letters to the editor. I love the wild rants, the outlandish views, and the occasional snide remark. I love seeing the community interact with one another, and seeing people take enough pride in their opinions to print them in thousands of newspapers for all to see. The opinion pages are one of the last ways an ordinary person can feel like a small celebrity for a day. They are truly the heart and soul of newspapers.

So when "the man" started messing with the process, I got mad.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) is the proud sponsor of gopteamleader.com, a website for Republicans who want to increase support for their political party. That's perfectly fine, except for one thing: two weeks ago, there were 75 identical letters printed in 75 different newspapers. Guess where they came from? That's right, gopteamleader.com.

It's not a Republican thing, though. Most political parties have used this technique, called "astroturfing". It was invented by public relations people, and first used by corporations to fake public concern for political issues. Soon after, lobbyists and individual political candidates began astroturfing newspapers.

Sadly, this raping of free speech and democracy is perfectly legal. But the RNC is taking it to a sickening new level. They're now using average people as pawns, making it hard for newspapers to tell astroturfing from legitimate letter-writing.

Registered users at gopteamleader.com just print out the pre-written letter on their computer's printer, add their signature, and send it to the local newspaper. They don't even have to read it. Most of them probably don't read it. The RNC even goes so far as to encourage people to send these fake letters to multiple newspapers. With five minutes of time, someone can send a pre-written letter to 15 different newspapers. And because the users printed out the letters themselves, it looks like a real letter to the editor.

But wait! There's more! These users can also earn points for their unethical behavior, to spend on prizes. Every fake letter a user gets printed in a newspaper is worth seven points. A call into a talk-radio show to push GOP issues brings five points. Forwarding GOP literature to the e-mail addresses of unsuspecting friends nets five points for each piece of spam sent.

But hey, it's all worth it. Look at the lovely GOP tote bag you can get. It's only 295 points. For 395 points, you can get that leather cover for your PDA. Unfortunately, John Ashcroft's barber shop quartet CD isn't available as a prize. Sorry.

Don't you wish you could get back at this scumbag RNC group? Fear not, reader. Your favorite columnist is here to the rescue. You know all those cheesy movies and TV shows where the cool kids need help, and some nerd saves the day by using some nerdy talent to foil the enemy's plans? Well, you're the cool kids, and I?m the nerd. And soon the RNC will hate me with a fiery passion.

I went to their website and hijacked some of their HTML code, creating an exact replica of the webpage and automatic mailer they use to send those pre-written letters to newspapers. But I changed the code a little, so now the pro-GOP letter is an anti-astroturfing letter, and the mailer has been set to automatically send everything to the RNC's e-mail address.

The great part is, this e-mail sender is the RNC's creation, so it's primed for ultimate harassment. They make it incredibly easy for their users to harass newspaper editors, which means it's now just as easy for you to harass the RNC. And best of all, it's perfectly legal. It's an e-mail protest against astroturfing, and it's the easiest thing you'll ever do. It only took me one minute to send the RNC 30 complaint e-mails. You can do like I did, and use your own name and e-mail for all the complaints you send (recommended, to show it's a protest and not just a prank), or you can make up fake names and e-mail addresses. Since everything's sent through this website, you can choose your identity. Just click the link below, read the complaint letter I've created (Or don't. Ha!), and click the button to send. Then press the back button on your browser and do it again.

So go ahead and stick it to the man! And make sure to tell all your friends about this page, no matter what their political views may be. This isn't a Democrat or Republican thing, it's a preservation of democracy thing.