I guess the highly-politicized George W. Bush CIA background check wasn't able to discover that the applicant had become a leftist right after being a rightist.
Either that or the CIA totally approved of and encouraged Markos C. Alberto Zúñiga's (MAMZ's) metamorphosis, because the CIA was no longer content to infiltrate the anti-war Left; through MAMZ and his highly secretive Townhouse Group, the CIA may have hoped to own outright a significant part of the Left, while using psy-ops techniques to silence critical thinkers within the blogs and outside of them, like those of us who know with utter certainty that the Twin Towers building that imploded and was utterly destroyed at 5:00 PM did not do so because of jets that hit other buildings eight hours earlier.
! ! ! !
Today, Markos Moulitsas, is the doctrinaire leftist publisher of the DailyKos “progressive†anti-war blog, railing against the moderation of candidates like Hillary Rodham Clinton and Harold Ford. But in the 1980’s, Mr. Moulitsas was an unabashed Reagan Democrat, even working as a campaign aid to George H.W. Bush in the 1992 Presidential election. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0601.wallace-wells.html http://francislholland.blogspot.com/2007/01/markos-was-republican-states...
Last year, in a piece Markos wrote for the Cato (libertarian) Institute, Markos acknowledged that the spent the 1980's as a Reagan Republican. http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/10/02/markos-moulitsas/the-case-for-the...
http://francislholland.blogspot.com/2007/01/yes-progessive-markos-of-dai...How did Markos achieve this stunning metamorphosis in just a few short years? Actually, nobody knows and Markos isn’t telling. He has told interviewers, improbably, that he last voted for the Republicans in 1992, because he suddenly realized that they didn’t support “states rights†as strongly as he would have liked. (See articles above.)
"We can fondly look back to a time [during the 1980's Reagan Administration] when Republicans spoke a good game on libertarian issues . . .[including] fealty to state rights . . ." The Case for the Libertarian Democrat (by Markos Moulitsas)
No, the Left cannot be allowed to doubt official stories, hence the rule at DailyKos that we must not discuss conspiracies like the outrageously speculative, outlandish and irresponsible suggestion that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the government invented that excuse for an invasion that was already in the planning stages before GWB became president, when his foreign policy was little more than a twinkle (or a blood clot) in Dick Cheney's eye.
Tikun Olam Banned at Daily Kos
for Questioning Kos-Armando Conflicts of Interest
They finally did it. The folks at Daily Kos have sunk so low it’s downright embarrassing. You see, I published a post here and at Dkos a month ago or so saying that Kos and all political bloggers should maintain higher standards of disclosure in their blogs. They should inform their readers of any financial or other type of material relationship (including political advertising) with political campaigns. Man, were the Kossites hoppin’ mad. There was a tempest in a teapot that was even picked up by the right blog world to posit the ridiculous notion that my treatment signaled the demise of DKos as a political force.
Then I wrote a post questioning how Armando dealt with his own potential conflicts of interest in both his professional life as a lawyer and political blogger. This too made the Kossites hoppin’ mad. Scores of them were clamoring for me to be put in what religious Jews call “herem” or excommunicated. And that appears to be what’s happened. One of the supposed crimes I’d committed was to use Armando’s real first name in my diary title (“Armando, Political Blogging & Conflict of Interest”). You see, it’s supposedly against the rules to use a Dkos’ member’s real name in any comment, diary or story. The problem with this rule is that the very same day both Chris Bowers of MyDD (co-founded by Kos’ partner, Jerome Armstrong) and Armando had referred to me in print at DKos with my ENTIRE NAME, Richard Silverstein. So if that’s the rule I violated which caused my banishment, it’s being applied very selectively. And applied to favor the inner circle and ban the dissidents (like me). It used to be that you’d be banned in Boston if you crossed the line of decency. Now, I’ve been banned at Dkos for having the chutzpah to question the lackadaisical ethical notions of the Kos elite.
How do I know I’ve been banned? When I visit the site I no longer see a “Write New Diary Entry” link which would allow me to publish a diary. When I visit a diary or story I no longer see a “Write a comment” link allowing me to comment. I’ve written to the site administrator asking whether I’ve been banned and if so why. No answer yet.
I take my banishment as a badge of honor. I can’t think of any group from which I’d be prouder being excommunicated. Because of my progressive/dovish politics on the Israeli-Palestinians conflict I don’t often make many friends among my fellow Jews. So I jokingly refer to myself as a founding member of the Spinoza Society, an imagined group of Jewish intellectuals banned from polite society because of their free-thinking views. I’m a proud, card-carrying member of the Spinoza Society. Doubtless Armando and Kos would’ve banned the great Spinoza himself if he’d deigned to write a diary entry claiming that Moses did not come down from Sinai carrying the Democratic Party platform inscribed on those two little tablets.
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Tags: armando, banned-at-daily-kos, chris-bowers, markos-moulitsas, mydd, tikun-olam-blog
Congratulations. Free of Dkos… and more importantly, free to say what you wish. LOL.
I was banned end of August 2005, after posting since Nov 2002. I inquired if a poster was an operaive from the Schumer office.
They are campaign OPERATIVES – nothing more. They have banned all sorts of people, liberals, left, centrists, progressives, Naderites, Greens… you name it.
To build a tabloid yellow sheet to support campaigns.
But Kos and the KosKidz still push “liberal”… for their businesses: They are not.
Enjoy being banned. And if C-span every runs their tapes of Spasm in the Desert, catch the Meta-Kos panel.
Be relieved. Blissed out nutters. Too many of them.
PAID OPERATIVES.
it is an honor to be banned now as the smug kos and his crew of 20-something blogofascists attempt to silence every bit of discourse on a subject 6 of them don’t want to discuss.
if you cry foul, they call you a troll or a repub in disguise using hilarious logic. kos enjoys this policing since he’s encouraged it with the ridiculous troll-hunters he uses to enforce democratic law.
i hope that the politicos who have been using kos take a second look as the hate on that site can only be use against democrats. the self-righteous snark of some kossacks is appaling; you can only imagine how sad their human relationships are. what’s funny is that based on their own logic, somnebody like armando who shills for wal-mart would be considered the worst kind of sell-out hypocrite. instead, kos apoints him as a moderator to further ban people.
oh, i was banned for asking people to whoa down on the kill joe lieberman hate speech.
keep up the good work tikun!
I too have been banned by Kos for a) defending Ralph Nader, b) calling John Kerry a flip-flopper, and c) another reason which is slipping my mind at the moment. I like Mascriat’s comments here. I think he nails it right on the head.
Hey, we all should start a club, say, the Banned by Kos Club. Membership requires merely that you’ve been banned by those ninnies. Some savage attacks against yr integrity in the DK comments threads would earn extra membership points.
I was banned for Conspiracy Theory violations today.
I too take it as a badge of honor.
The Political Spinroom on Yahoo is a genuinely free site.
KOS apparently has computers programmed to look for forbidden topics, then his little Brownshirt Thought Police descend. If they can’t silence by threatening expulsion, then they ban you.
Those policies will only hurt the Democrats over the long run.
If you can’t stand Markos Moulitsas, you should definitely read the new research about him: The Secret “Family Business” of Markos Moulitsas Zúñiga is Uncovered.
If you never knew that Markos’ family received millions from the US Government and is connected to international environmental polluters, then you might want to post a diary about this at your blog.
B”H
Wow, Richard I am impressed being banned for standing up for truth.
I was at various time banned from some blogs but in most cases they recognized their mistakes and allowed me to post again in other cases I started logging in from dynamic IP adresses till they realized that unless they want to take this to court (which they were unwilling to do) they can’t ban me so they gave up. If however they’d continue to delete my comments I’d post under other screename and sometimes change my writing style to continue to speak up for what I believe in in those forums.
Come to think of it there was like 5 blogs or a bit more even that banned or tried to ban me.)
So now you’ll probably will not be able to sleep realizing that
even without starting to wear yarmolka , tzitzit and growing a beard you already have things in common with me and risk being mistaken for me in some places.
Scary, huh?:-)
So now yo
@Ariel: I’m scratching my head trying to figure out what you’re talking about. As far as I can tell, I never said anything about banning you. THere was another commenter whose comment caused me to threaten banning. But it wasn’t you as far as I can recall.
I don’t threaten banning lightly. You have to write something especially vile or insulting either about me or about Israelis or Palestinians. You haven’t done so. So before you gear up for Armageddon & fire up yr dynamic IP addresses, reread that comment & note it wasn’t about you.
Huffington Post has umpteen times the traffic of Daily Kos, and it still deletes certain ’sensitive’ subjects.
All I can say, as the editor of the Truth About Kos Blog is:
The Indictment of Markos C.A. Moulitsas ZÚÑIGA by Justice and History (Updated with Additional Information and Counts)
Also, have a look at this letter that MAMZ wrote to his college newspaper, opposing ALL gay service in the US military. Northern Illinois University “Northern Star”
I guess this discussion took place before it became common knowledge that MAMZ had publicly admitted at the Commonwealth Club on June 2, 2006 that he spent two years working and training at the Central Intelligence Agency simultaneously with starting DailyKos.
http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/06/06-06zuniga-audio.html