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Daily Kos ( in an American accent) is an American political weblog aimed at Democrats and liberals/progressives. Run by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, (Kos from the last syllable of his first name, often mispronounced) a United States Army veteran, it has an average weekday traffic of 463,000 visits*, and often reaches over 4 million unique visits in one week.
General
Features
Daily Kos is not a standard blog, but an interactive site powered by the collaborative media application Scoop, which allows all registered members to maintain blogs within the site. Moulitsas and a small group of selected users post entries directly to the front page; other users can post "diaries," whose titles appear on the front page in reverse chronological order. These are identical in format to the main posts, and can advance to "recommended diary" status by user vote, or can be promoted to the front page by the primary contributors. The recommended diaries appear above the main diary listing.
Daily Kos also contains permanent articles, glossaries, and other content. In April 2004, it started dKosopedia, a collaborative information clearinghouse available for open editing as a wiki, with its contents licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. The site is sustained by advertising, mostly for activists, political candidates and books.
Daily Kos is the largest Scoop site, having surpassed Kuro5hin. The creator of Scoop, Rusty Foster, was a technology consultant for Moulitsas's former company, Armstrong Zúniga. Armstrong Zuniga was dissolved at the end of 2004.
DailyKos coexists happily with other liberal blogs like Democratic Underground, even to the point of helping compile progressive blogs by region on its site.
Campaign fundraising
During the 2004 U.S. Election, Daily Kos readers gave approximately $500,000 in user donations to fifteen Democratic candidates denoted as most needing of funds. The candidates were Tony Miller, Ben Konop, Dan Mongiardo, Richard Romero, Samara Barend, Jeff Seemann, Nancy Farmer, Ginny Schrader, Jan Schneider, Lois Murphy, Jim Newberry, Brad Carson, Tony Knowles, Stan Matsunaka and Richard Morrison. All of these candidates lost. However, Moulitsas had stated that he was deliberately selecting candidates who were not receiving significant financial support from other sources; candidates who were expected to win — or even be competitive — were, by and large, already being funded by the DNC, DCCC, and other national and regional organizations. Thus, the selection of candidates reflected his belief that every seat should be contested, even the ones that were not expected to be competitive.
He also argued that the campaign was successful in that it forced several Republican incumbents to spend time and money defending "safe" seats that they had never had to defend before. For example, between Tom DeLay in Texas and Marilyn Musgrave in Colorado, Moulitsas calculates that the seed money provided by the blog's fundraising tied up well over ten times as much GOP money in return, and kept two of the GOP's most prolific fundraisers back home campaigning in their own districts for several weeks each, rather than roaming the country raising money for other candidates, as they had in past elections. At least two of his candidates came exceptionally close to winning what would have been significant upsets.
Convention
Moulitsas attended the California State Democratic convention in Sacramento in March, 2003 with Jerome Armstrong of MyDD. According to Instapundit, they may have been the first bloggers to be officially accredited at a political convention.Controversies
Dean campaign consultancy
In 2003, Moulitsas was retained by the Howard Dean campaign as a technical advisor, an arrangement he disclosed on the site the next day. A year and a half later, when Daily Kos criticized Armstrong Williams for accepting money to promote George W. Bush's education agenda (including the No Child Left Behind Act), The Wall Street Journal reported on the payment to Moulitsas as well as a similar payment to Jerome Armstrong. Zephyr Teachout, Director of Internet Organizing for Dean's campaign, who posted on the subject in her blog. [http://zonkette.blogspot.com/2005/01/financially-interested-blogging.html" target="_blank" >* Teachout said,- On Dean’s campaign, we paid Markos and Jerome Armstrong as consultants, largely in order to ensure that they said positive things about Dean. We paid them over twice as much as we paid two staffers of similar backgrounds, and they had several other clients.
- While they ended up also providing useful advice, the initial reason for our outreach was explicitly to buy their airtime. To be very clear, they never committed to supporting Dean for the payment -- but it was very clearly, internally, our goal.
The Journal reporters have been criticized for equating the two events (Moulitsas and Armstrong were not journalists) and for "burying" deep in the article the information that Moulitsas had promptly — and prominently — disclosed the payment, and that Armstrong had stopped blogging entirely while working for Dean. In addition, Joe Trippi and other prominent former Dean campaign officials have disputed Zephyr Teachout's statements. *
Meanwhile, Chris Suellentrop of Slate criticized Moulitsas not for taking money from the Dean campaign — something he told his readers about — but for working as a political consultant for candidates for whom he raised money on his site. Moulitsas has refused to disclose the names of his clients, citing non-disclosure agreements signed with the candidates in question; on the other hand, neither his name nor that of Armstrong Zúniga LLC has been reported in the Federal Election Commission financial disclosure forms of any of the "Kos Dozen" candidates. In addition, Jerome Armstrong has specifically denied that Armstrong Zúniga did any consulting work for those candidates [http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=555, and Suellentrop has provided no evidence to back his claim.
Fallujah Comments
Daily Kos attracted some controversy in April 2004 by publishing comments about the killings of four private military contractors in Fallujah, Iraq that many considered to be insensitive:
- Let the people see what war is like. This isn’t an Xbox game. There are real repercussions to Bush’s folly. That said, I feel nothing over the death of merceneries. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them. *
The post was widely criticized on a number of conservative and liberal blogs John Kerry's official blog removed a link to his blog in response Blackwater employees in Fallujah were given more attention than the five marines who were killed on the same day, as well as to childhood memories of warfare in El Salvador. [http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/4/2/175739/8203" target="_blank" >*
Prominent contributors
Prominent contributors to Daily Kos include various individuals such as current and former politicians:
Notable contributors
Beginning in 2003, as his blog expanded to a community, Kos has appointed four or five "guest bloggers" (also called "front page diarists" and "contributing editors") who are selected from the community and tasked with regular contributions on the front page (without needing to have their articles recommended or promoted).
- 2003: Billmon; Melanie; Steve Gilliard; RonK; Steve Soto
- 2004: DemFromCT; DHinMI; Meteor Blades; Theoria; Trapper John
- 2005: Armando; DavidNYC; Hunter; Kid Oakland; Plutonium Page *
- 2006: Georgia10; SusanG; Superrible; Darksyde; McJoan *
Additionally, while on the promotional tour for Crashing the Gate, Kos turned over much of the day-to-day management to the 2006 guest bloggers. Emeritus guest bloggers have frequently retained some privileges depending on circumstances, but are not expected to post as often.
Bill in Portland Maine
Bill in Portland Maine is a front page regular, best known for his recurring Cheers & Jeers feature, in which he bestows plaudits and brickbats on various newsmakers. Cheers & Jeers, which first appeared on Daily Kos on 9 December 2003, has evolved into a mini-community within the larger Daily Kos community, in which members post announcements about weddings, engagements, births, deaths, pet news, and other personal items, as well as sharing their own particular plaudits and brickbats.Little is known about Bill in Portland Maine (or BiPM as he is known to his fellow Kossacks) other than his first name and approximate location, which seems to be somewhere in or near the city of Portland, Maine. He lives with his partner Michael (known as "Common Sense Mainer"), a cat named Vegas, and his beloved chocolate lab, Molly.
The Scotty Show
In December 2005 a Daily Kos poster known as karateexplosions began fisking White House spokesman Scott McClellan's daily press briefings under the general title The Scotty Show. Reporters questions and comments were rendered in italics, McClellan's responses appeared in bold, and KE's "English translations" of McClellan's responses followed in plain text. The Scotty Show was also cross-posted to KE's blog, "The KE Report". Although the Scotty Show attracted little attention at first, in late December the feature suddenly began to appear among the Recommended Diaries, and has continued to do so ever since. Like Bill in Portland Maine's "Cheers and Jeers" feature, the Scotty Show has attracted its own mini-community among Daily Kos readers, who look forward to continuing to follow the New Scotty Show - Featuring Tony Snow.DarkSyde
DarkSyde is the 'nome de net' of another contributor who posts anonymously on the front page of Daily Kos and a skeptics blog called Unscrewing the Inscrutable. He is best known as a science writer with specific attention paid to biology, astronomy, and political issues such as creationism or climate change. In particular, DarkSyde's Hurricane Katrina diaries were widely read during the storm and in the immediate aftermath. They are included in a collection of science articles in the e-book Kosmos: You Are Here, co-written with science fiction novelist Mark Sumner and illustrated by paleowildlife artist Carl Buell. All the contributors to Kosmos donated the proceeds to fund a blogging convention called YearlyKos.Armando
Armando was a front-page diarist at Daily Kos who took a prominent role during Moulitsas' book hiatus in 2005 and was well known for his foreign policy and legal analysis. He also had his own political blogging website, Swords Crossed, and was a guest political commentator in a wide variety of media outlets, including The Majority Report and Talking Points Memo Cafe. After his identity and details of his legal career were made widely known, he announced his departure from Daily Kos in June 2006, citing loss of anonymity. However, his new tagline states that he will begin blogging again in December, 2006.Related sites
Street Prophets is a "Daily Kos Community" focusing on the intersection of faith and politics, launched in 2005 by Moulitsas and Rev. Daniel Schultz (known by his username "pastordan"), a United Church of Christ minister from Pennsylvania.
Mothertalkers is another "Daily Kos Community" focusing on the intersection of motherhood and politics.
See also
External links
"Daily Kos"