I don’t know the history of Marisacat and Daily Kos. She was a front-pager there at some point before I started reading it.
Update [2007-2-1 23:35:23 by BooMan]: Marisacat says she was never a front-pager. I’ll take her word for it.
And I know she got banned for some reason but I am not clear on why or even when that happened. I do know that she runs a blog that focuses heavily on what goes on on Daily Kos. To a lesser extent she also critiques the writings of MyDD, Atrios, Booman Tribune, and probably a few other blogging communities. I’ve noticed that she likes to call us all collectively the Boyz Club. There is supposedly some kind of collusion between us or something.
I want to clear a few things up. I’ve met Markos and Jerome Armstrong once. They set up a meeting for Philadelphia bloggers and Mark Warner. While everyone was in town we did a little sit down for a British film maker and talked about blogging. Other than that the only time I ever ran into Markos was at Yearly Kos and that was just a couple of brief hellos.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about how this alleged Boyz Club operates. I see Atrios about once a week when we meet up at the local Philadelphia chapter of Drinking Liberally. Sometimes we sit at the same table and talk. More often we sit at different tables and do not talk. Every once in a while Atrios links to this site. That is the extent of our collusion.
I see Chris Bowers approximately once every two months. He occassionally shows up at Drinking Liberally. More often I see him at events at the Constitution Center or something. Chris and I met with Russ Feingold at the Constitution Center last year. That is the extent of our collusion.
Philadelphia has a lot of bloggers. I guess the biggest Philadelphia affiliated sites are Eschaton, MyDD, and Booman Tribune. We all know each other and we all like each other, but we don’t interact all that much. Atrios, Chris Bowers, and I all supported Chuck Pennacchio in his primary bid against Bob Casey Jr. We all supported Joe Sestak, Patrick Murphy, and Lois Murphy in their congressional campaigns in 2006.
When it comes to politics, we all opposed the war in Iraq, oppose any war in Iran, and seem to share basically progressive positions. If we were to fit into a caucus in Washington, it would be the Progressive caucus. I think we all supported Russ Feingold for President. We don’t see everything the same way and we do not coordinate what we write at all. And if you want to compare us to Daily Kos, I would say that none of us were very impressed with Mark Warner’s positions on foreign policy and that we didn’t agree with several of the editorial stances of Markos over the years.
Maybe there is some kind of Boyz Club collusion but it is pretty much limited to knowing and respecting each other.
As for me, I have friends from Daily Kos and I have enemies. I really dislike DHinMI and MissLaura. I really like Armando and Delaware Dem, even though I find a lot of what they do deplorable. I think Meteor Blades, Kid Oakland, and Hunter are the most talented bloggers out there. I have tremendous respect for Georgia10 and SusanG’s work. I think BillinPortlandMaine is one of the cleverest most gifted people in the universe.
Most of all, I think all this meta stuff is boring. But there is one thing that should be clear. No one sends money my way, there is no coordination of message, there is no organization behind the so-called Boyz Club. And I find this whole concept that left-wing bloggers are really pushing for some kind of centrist agenda to be nothing more than a bad conspiracy theory.
