From the Daily Kos Community Quilt
There is only one Daily Kos --- and it lies at the very center of the Netroots and the progressive movement.
In the early days of the Bush administration, internet liberals were all still reeling from the one-two punch of the impeachment and stolen election. We congregated in a few online communities and licked our wounds, argued about Nader and tried to figure out how we were going to exploit the best bumper sticker in the world "Re-elect Gore in 2004." Then 9/11 hit and online opinion writing exploded --- with warbloggers. And a more blood-thirsty group of armchair warriors you have never seen. If online liberals had been largely marginalized before, they were ghettoized now. Andrew Sullivan with his "liberal 5th column" and Instapundit and his macho libertarianism totally dominated what would come to be called the blogosphere.
I was commenting on message boards and blog comment sections at the time, like everyone else trying to make sense of what had happened and seeing that we had a potential disaster developing with the Bush administration's bizarre fixation on Iraq. And Daily Kos became a constant source of a very particular kind of information. As is obvious from the logo (which has comfortingly changed little from that time) it was a liberal site with a military perspective. This was unique among us --- a place where you could go to get a different kind of commentary about the various national security issues everyone was talking about, but without all the ostentatious uhm... sword swinging. It became a daily read for me and has continued to be so every day since then.
Obviously, it changed dramatically from being what I thought of as a liberal military blog almost immediately as Markos and his other great writers weighed in on every matter of public concern. Soon he'd created the first blog community and the rest is history.
But despite all the success of this site and his own career, Markos has never lost sight of the larger blogging community. He is always a huge supporter, both publicly and privately, of the activism and writers that make up the blogosphere. He has personally told me many times how important he believes maintaining the Netroots and community of progressive writers that he --- and I ---grew up in over the past decade. And he's put his money and clout where his mouth is.
This site is a thriving community unto itself but it also remains at the very center of the Netroots at large. Markos and his amazingly creative team continue to build new institutions, mechanisms and methods to help build not just their own community but a strong and lasting progressive movement. Supporting Daily Kos by subscribing or donating is to support all of us who are laboring to change the way politics work in America. It is indispensable.
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