The Liberal Blogger 'Kos' of 'The Daily Kos' Was Once a Republican (Includes Information on His Political Background and My Political Background)

by Eric Jaffa

December 18, 2004

Markos Moulitsas

The most popular political blog on the internet is "The Daily Kos."

Unless you count "The Drudge Report" as a blog, which I don't.

I consider "Drudge" a news-portal.

It's a matter of format.

For me, a blog is when stories are written on top of the page and the newest pushes down the previous (the format of this website, The Daily Kos, and millions of other websites), and a news-portal is when there are headline-links all over the homepage (the format of "The Drudge Report," "The Drudge Retort," and "The Raw Story.")

Anyway, Markos "Kos" Moulitsas' liberal blog "The Daily Kos" gets the most visitors of any blog, and a recent article reveals that he was a Republican when he entered the army ("Party Central " by Kara Platoni, East Bay Express, December 15, 2004).

Markos Moulitsas' was born in Chicago to a Greek father and Salvadoran mother. They lived in El Salvador when he was age four to age nine. Then they returned to Chicago. Markos entered the US Army at age seventeen (ibid.)

"In the Army, he also underwent a political transformation. He went in a hawkish Republican because of Ronald Reagan's support for the Salvadoran government. He came out a Democrat, having served with people of different races and social classes from all over the United States" (ibid.)

After the army, he went to college at Northern Illinois University, and law school at Boston University. He worked as a legislative aide for a state legislator during law school. While in law school, he also...

started his first blog, the Hispanic-Latino News Service -- although back in 1996, nobody called them blogs and the technology really wasn't there to make them very manageable. He'd spend three hours before class combing the news for headlines and hand-coding the site. His blog attracted a job offer from short-lived Latino portal site PicoSito.com, so Moulitsas moved to San Francisco during the dot-com boom. When PicoSito went belly-up, the Web development company across the hall offered him a job, where he learned more about the new technologies that were making blogging easier.

By early 2002, Moulitsas had become a regular reader of early political blog MyDD.com, and soon cemented a friendship with the blog's owner Jerome Armstrong, whom he refers to as his "blogfather." Inspired by MyDD and his distress over the 2002 midterm election results, Moulitsas launched Daily Kos.

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My Political Background (Eric Jaffa's Political Background)

As for me, I've always been a liberal.

I've never been a Republican.

I grew up in a Democratic household.

In the Clinton years, I was to the left of the Clinton Administration, and so I didn't regard myself as a Democrat at that time, but I was probably registered as a Democrat.

I disagreed with Bill Clinton and Al Gore on jobs issues: their support of NAFTA and the WTO, which sent manufacturing jobs abroad; and raising the number of temporary technology visas (H1-B visas), which caused American computer programmers to be replaced here by foreign computer programmers.

I also disagreed with Bill Clinton about deregualtion which made the FDA less cautious.

Since George W. Bush took office, I've considered myself a Democrat.

Democrats are better in dozens of ways, but it's mostly Bush's horrible record on civil liberties and human rights which made me a Democratic activist.

This includes Bush having. military tribunals for people who aren't in the military, Bush declaring that he can have us imprisoned for the rest of our lives by declaring us "enemy combatants" (the Jose Padilla case), the bombing of Iraq, the torture memos, and more.