Knee-jerk response to his description of himself as a small-l libertarian Republican: but isn't spam both an expression of free speech and an exercise of the marketplace?
Free advice: If what he's running is supported by it, Akismet will take care of all his comment-spam woes. (I don't know whether it handles trackback spam.)
I found that forcing commenters to preview their comment before posting it almost completely eliminated comment spam. Annoying, I've been told, but very effective.
Much less annoying than those distorted-text Turing tests. I hate those a lot.
I am another vat-brain who prefers being forced to preview its comments to being forced to read and type out mangled characters.
(Anybody know if you can configure a Blogger blog to force comment preview?)
Akismet does work with MT and it is a relatively easy install.
There is also a modification you can do to detect whether or not someone is manually typing the comment (MT_Keystrokes, I think), and you can also set it up to manually trust users without using typekey. It's none of it tricky to do, even for a clueless person like me.
Notice how there hasn't been much spam around here? Yeah, me too.
I'm not sharing it, though, until Drezner beats a path to my door. (Notwithstanding that others have done it too.)
He'll be fine, there's no need to get crazy with the sharing.
w-lfs-nwerk wants to be free, ogged.