Daily Kos

In his posts this past week on the shutdown/debt-ceiling uproar, Daily Kos founder and publisher Markos Moulitsas likened conservative Republicans to figures that included zombies, Charlie Sheen, and (of course) a terrorist. Let's plunge in. On Monday, Moulitsas alleged that tea-partiers are lashing out in a crazed, mindless anti-Obama rage:

You'd need a truck scale to measure all the weighing-in the Daily Kos gang has done regarding the partial federal shutdown, so for reasons of brevity let's focus on shutdown-related musings from the boss Kossack, site founder and publisher Markos Moulitsas. On Tuesday, day one of the shutdown, Moulitsas lectured congressional Republicans on legitimate and illegitimate means of halting…

Liberals like to say that conservatives are behind the times...but 3,000 years behind? In a way, that's what the Daily Kos blogger who calls himself "waterstreet2013" asserted on Wednesday. The starting point for "waterstreet2013" was a theory proposed in 1976 by psychologist Julian Jaynes, who argued that until about 1000 BC, people routinely experienced and acted on auditory hallucinations…

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas thinks conservatives live in a hermetically sealed bubble of Fox News and Breitbart commenters. On Thursday he mocked "reality-bending" Michael Walsh of National Review for suggesting the country would tilt away from Republican Tea Party-bashers like John McCain. “Conservatives love to quote the 'public', the 'country', the 'American people' without ever…

Sports analogies are a lot more illuminating when those who make them understand how the relevant sports are played. The Kossack known as "Helpless" failed that test on Friday. "Helpless" asserted that Democrats are far more ethical than Republicans, as demonstrated by the Dems' enthusiasm for registering voters contrasted with the GOP's alleged eagerness to suppress votes from heavily…

Egberto Willies at the Daily Kos is one of those reliable radicals that’s really upset with war in Syria, lamenting this is “something the John Kerry of 1971 would never advocate for” and “The only winners are the military industrial complex and a corporatocracy dependent on cheap oil.” Then it took a weird turn. “America must go to war alright,” Egberto declared, but with the war profiteers…

Daily Kos bloggers like to trash Fox News, even if some seem not to have ever watched the channel. (It's always amusing when one of them writes about Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity as if they were interchangeable. Uhhhh, no.)   Others, however, do at least a bit of content analysis. DKos featured writer "Hunter," for example, has long been especially contemptuous of FNC's morning program Fox…

Almost all of today's conservatives believe that their predecessors in the 1950s and '60s should not have opposed the civil-rights movement. Plenty of liberals counter that the right's wrongness on racial matters is by no means a thing of the past. This week, three Daily Kos writers advanced that idea. Laura Clawson asserted on Monday that "for a hundred years after the Civil War, white…

Sometimes liberals engage conservatives in a substantive debate about the issue at hand. Other times they just call them stupid. It happened twice on Daily Kos this past Sunday. That morning, Mark Sumner portrayed the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as an enabler of dumb (and lazy) Republicans:

It would be so refreshing if liberals simply came out and admitted their ardor for censoring conservative opinion. Instead, they hide behind transparent ploys such as pressuring companies that advertise with conservatives in media. Either way, their goal is to silence dissent, which they otherwise revere when bleated from them. Latest example -- the easily irritated kultural kommissars at…

Kossacks have long been divided over which is more contemptible: Fox News, or the Fox News audience? Two DKos bloggers came down on marginally different sides of the question this past week.   In a Wednesday post, Jesse LaGreca of Occupy Wall Street fame, whose nom de blog is "MinistryOfTruth," played up the network's supposed role as enabler and mainstreamer of violent racism:

Several Daily Kosmonauts were furious with CNN anchor Don Lemon for joining Bill O’Reilly in suggesting black kids could straighten up and hike up their saggy pants. “Vyan” even suggested that Don and Bill want all black kids to be “Steve Urkel” from the Nineties sitcom “Family Matters.” He hit Lemon because “He jumped right in the middle of cage match between O'Reilly and anyone serious…

The left often alleges that conservatives don't merely dislike government but deliberately undermine it for political or financial gain (and sometimes both). Daily Kos blogger Mark Sumner chimed in to that effect this past Sunday.   Sumner writes that conventional wisdom blames "rising incivility" and "simple intransigence" for Washington's failure to accomplish much of anything, but that in…

The Daily Kos gang reacted quickly, and kept reacting, to last Saturday night's verdict in the George Zimmerman trial. A frequent theme was that both Zimmerman and those who endorsed his acquittal were motivated by fear and loathing of blacks. "JPax" argued on Sunday that not only Zimmerman but also his diversity-hating sympathizers should have a certain candy repeatedly thrown at them: