KOS aka MARKOS MOULITSAS SLAMS SEN. CHAFEE
REALAUDIO - 9 min WINDOWS MEDIA
Providence, RI
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, proprietor of Daily Kos, the most popular liberal blog web site,
came to Providence May 22. The famous blogger,
who looks like John Cryer, was promoting
his book, Crashing the Gate (about how to effect progressive change
with the Internet), with coauthor Jerome
Armstrong, who hosts MY DD and helped set
up Howard Dean's Internet operation that
was emulated by Kerry and others. He spoke
at the Brown book store, and the Trinity
Brew House, attended by almost every top
Dem political campaign assistant for the
various RI campaigns. Daily Kos Site costs
$4000 a month to maintain, about $50K a year
to handle 1/2-1 million hits a day.
He slammed Senator Lincoln Chafee on his
enabling of the Republican agenda and environmental
groups endorsement of him, "They want
to destroy everything we stand for. NARAL, NOW, League of Conservation Voters,
and Sierra Club pretend that Lincoln Chafee isn't the corrosive
influence he is on their interests. He confirms
every single one of George Bush's judges,
and the ones that he didn't vote to confirm,
like Sam Alito, he voted for cloture, so
the vote that would matter, he voted the
wrong way. He's enabling the judges who are
going to make war on progressivism for the
next 30 to 50 years on the federal bench.*
There is no such thing, in today's landscape,
as a moderate Republican, who may be an alright
guy. His good votes have all been meaningless,
and the one that could have mattered, he
voted the wrong way."
Surprisingly, he wasn't that optimistic on the Dem's chances
to retake Congress, "Right now the only
way we're going to win is if the Republicans
keep screwing up enough- so if Hookergate
becomes a bigger deal, that's going to help...
I'm looking long term. I'm building a movement."
Chafee is opposed by the likeable former
AG Sheldon Whitehouse, who most observers give a very good chance
of knocking off the ambivalent legacy. Disgust
at the Republican war, corruption, malfeasance,
and dishonesty is simmering in this most
Democratic state (after Hawaii).
Moulitsas's parents were Greek and Salvadoran. The 34 year old lawyer grew up in El Salvador, served in
the US Army in Germany in 1989-92, and now
lives in Berkeley.
Jerome Armstrong said Kos was a blogger on
his site, MyDD, first.
The first major convention of liberal bloggers,
Yearly Kos, is taking place in Las Vegas June 8-11,
featuring speeches, workshops, and panels
by Barbara Boxer, Howard Dean, Harry Reid,
Joe Wilson, Ralph Neas, Arianna Huffington,
Robert Greenwald, Tom Vilsack, and Mark Warner.
* A federal appeals court sided with the Bush administration Friday on an electronic surveillance issue, making it easier to tap into Internet phone calls and broadband transmissions. On the 3 member court, impeachment plotter David Sentelle, and the venal Janice Rogers Brown.
Michael Hammerschlag's commentary and articles
(HAMMERNEWS.com) have appeared in the Seattle Times, Providence Journal, Columbia
Journalism Review, Hawaii Advertiser, Capital
Times, MediaChannel; and Moscow News, Tribune, Times, and
Guardian. He explored the Cheney shooting, broke the first comprehensive story on media mistakes in the 2000 election, spent 2 years in Russia
as the empire collapsed, and has covered
2 Presidential campaigns. In 1998-99 he helped
invent blogging in regular reports when the
anti-Impeachment org he founded, STOP THE MADNESS, spread from Maui to Dallas to RI to DC, and
successfully lobbied 22 Republican Senators.