About Daily Kos |
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Publisher/Founder # Markos Moulitsas Zúniga
Executive Editor # Susan Gardner (aka SusanG)
Associate Editor # BarbinMD (Barbara Morrill)
Senior Policy Editor # Joan McCarter (aka mcjoan)
Director of Community # Meteor Blades (Timothy Lange)
Contributing Editors # Arjun Jaikumar (aka brownsox)
General Manager# Darksyde # DavidNYC # David Waldman (aka Kagro X) # DemFromCT (Greg Dworkin) # Georgia10 (Georgia Logothetis) # Hunter (Michael Lazzaro) # Jed Lewison # Kaili Joy Gray (aka Angry Mouse) # Laura Clawson (aka MissLaura) # Mark Sumner (aka Devilstower) # Scout Finch (Jennifer Bruenjes) # Steve Singiser # Trapper John (Jake McIntyre) # Will Rockafellow
Lead Developer# Jeremy Bingham
Featured Writers# Adam B (Adam Bonin) # Bill in Portland Maine (aka Bill Harnsberger) # Brooklynbadboy # Dante Atkins # exmearden # Laurence Lewis (aka Turkana) Founded in May 26, 2002, Daily Kos is the premier online political community with 2.5 million unique visitors per month and 250,000 registered users. It is at once a news organization, community, and activist hub. Among luminaries posting diaries on the site are President Jimmy Carter, Senator Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and dozens of other senators, congressmen, and governors. Even more exciting than that however, are the hundreds of thousands of regular Americans that have used Daily Kos to shape a political world once the exclusive domain of the rich, connected, and powerful.
Daily Kos has eight paid staffers and continues to ramp up its features, from top-tier independent polling (about 100 polls in 2008, double that scheduled for 2009) to its groundbreaking Electoral Scoreboard.
Markos Moulitsas Zúniga is founder and publisher of Daily Kos, the largest progressive community blog in the United States. Named "the single most successful entrepreneur of the progressive movement" by NY Times magazine writer and author Matt Bai, Moulitsas is also co-author of the critically acclaimed book Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, author of Taking on the System: Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era, a contributing columnist to Newsweek Magazine and a weekly columnist at The Hill newspaper. He was named one of the 100 Most Influential Hispanics in the world by People en Español, clocked in at third in Forbe's Web Celeb 25 rankings, and was listed 26th in PC World's list of the "Most Important People on the Web". Moulitsas was born on September 11, 1971, in Chicago, IL. The son of a Salvadoran mother and Greek father, Moulitsas spent his formative years in El Salvador (1976-1980), where he saw first-hand the ravages of civil war. His family fled threats on their lives by the communist guerillas and settled in the Chicago area.
Moulitsas earned two bachelor degrees at Northern Illinois University (1992-96), with majors in Philosophy, Journalism, and Political Science and a minor in German. He subsequently earned a J.D. at Boston University School of Law (1996-99) before deciding that it would be a cold day in hell before he ever worked as a lawyer. He headed West to the San Francisco Bay Area to make his dot.com millions but got nowhere. He worked as a project manager at a web development shop when, in 2002, he started Daily Kos. Moulitsas flirted with political consulting in 2003, but that didn't last long, and he has focused on Daily Kos full-time since early 2004. In addition to running Kos Media, LLC, which publishes Daily Kos, Moulitsas is also founder of venture-backed SB Nation network of sports blogs. He's an avid pianist and composer. Moulitsas has been happily married since 2000. He has a wonderful boy, Aristotle, born in November 2003 and a is ridiculously in love with his daughter, Elisandra, born in April 2007.
Susan Gardner is a native Southern Californian, born in 1958. She attended Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and returned to California to work for the Riverside Press-Enterprise Company as editor and publisher of one of its large community weekly newspapers during the 1980’s. After taking a decade and a half off to raise a family, she returned to politics and writing via Daily Kos several years ago and became a contributing editor in 2006. She’s also been a freelance editor and writer, general manager of a special education curriculum company and the exhausted mother of four children. She lives in Berkeley, California. In 2009 and 2010, she served as a Fellow in the Poynter Institute's Sense-Making project, a Ford Foundation-funded program that is studying the integration of new media and democratic values.
As Barbara entered her 40's, she was a stay-at-home mother of two who spent her time helping with school projects and chauffeuring kids to soccer or lacrosse. Soon after the 2000 selection of George W. Bush as POTUS, she got her first computer, discovered the internets and a shared outrage. Now she's a stay-at-home mother of two who spends her time helping with school projects, chauffeuring kids to soccer or lacrosse, and writing about politics and the media for Daily Kos from her Maryland home.
A displaced Idahoan, currently living in Washington State, Joan McCarter was raised on the family cattle ranch in Corral. Growing up in a political household, Joan's first political experience was going door-to-door with her mom for Senator Frank Church (her one and only political hero to this day) when she was four. Winning that one was probably why she stuck with Democratic politics all these years. And why she'll always be a Blue girl in a Red state in her heart. Joan has broad political experience, both on the campaign and the policy sides. She worked in both the district and Capitol Hill offices of then Congressman and now Senator Ron Wyden from 1987 until 1993, and worked on congressional campaigns in Oregon and Idaho. She left politics in 1995 to obtain a master’s degree in international studies from the University of Washington where she worked as a writer, editor, and instructional designer. She's been a contributing editor at Daily Kos since 2006, and became Senior Policy Editor in 2010.
Arjun Jaikumar is an actor and playwright by trade. He grew up in Newton, MA, the son of two loyal and wonderful Democrats, and his earliest political memory is waking up bright and early in 1988 to see if Governor Dukakis won. He holds a B.S. from Northwestern University, and is an avid fan of the Boston Red Sox, the New England Patriots, and Arsenal Football Club. Born on May 26, 1983, he shares a birthday with Daily Kos.
Stephen DarkSyde is a 40 something former stock and bond trader and one time moderate conservative. He grew up in the Southwest and has long been fascinated by science, particularly evolutionary biology, physics, and astronomy. As the scope of incompetence and malfeasance in the Bush Administration and the wider Neoconservative Republican Party became evident throughout 2003, Stephen began reading and writing on blogs. In short order, he rejected the existing incarnation of the GOP and joined forces with progressive bloggers. He still considers himself a political neophyte, and tends to write mostly about science and science policy, with only occasional forays into political commentary. Today, he lives in Florida near the Kennedy Space Center with his lovely wife Mrs. “DS,” a cat named Kali, and a dog named Darwin.
DavidNYC, a lifelong New Yorker and Democrat, is an attorney working in New York City. David, born in 1977, was first tapped as a contributing editor in 2004. He is a die-hard Mets fan and publisher of the Swing State Project, a blog devoted to horserace politics.
A participant in online communities since the early 80s, David found Daily Kos some time back in mid-2003 and has stuck around ever since. A non-practicing attorney, a former Capitol Hill aide and Hotline staff writer (back when Chuck Todd was an intern), David now works in marketing so that he will not be eligible to answer telephone surveys. He has developed a particular interest in lending to the discussion the procedural knowledge he gained from C-SPAN immersion therapy during his days on the Hill, and as a result holds the world record for Longest Online Series on Parliamentary Maneuvers that Didn't Happen, namely, the Senate's "nuclear option." David is married to a moderate Democrat who once helped launch FOX News, and worked for the parent company of Eagle/Regnery Publishing, though in fairness, she was young and needed the money. The children are being raised as Democrats, so there is no need to call the authorities.
Along with DHinMI, Trapper John and Meteor Blades, Greg Dworkin, M.D., 52, is a member of the class of 2004, although he’s been active on the site since pre-Scoop days. Areas of special interest include polling data, Iraq and bird flu. Dr. Dworkin is a founding editor of Flu Wiki (www.fluwiki.info) and its sister site, the Flu Wiki Forum (www.newfluwiki2.com). Since its inception in June 2005, Flu Wiki has grown into an international clearinghouse of pandemic influenza information and links, presented in four languages and accessed from six continents. One measure of the success of the site is the 2 million visits and 10 million page views recorded since its inception, indicating a robust visit depth by its viewers. Flu Wiki has been cited for excellence by diverse sources such as Science magazine and the Harvard Business Review, and linked by local public health departments, NGOs and media sources. Dr. Dworkin has lectured on the topic of Flu Wiki and the internet at the UCLA School of Public Health and been invited to present at the Seasonal and Pandemic Influenza Conference 2007 (jointly sponsored by the Infectious Disease Society of America and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) on Flu Wiki’s volunteer community projects. Dr. Dworkin is Chief of Pediatric Pulmonology and Medical Director of the Pediatric Inpatient Unit at Danbury Hospital in Danbury CT, where he has been in clinical practice for eighteen years. He serves on the Danbury city and school Pandemic Flu Task Forces. He holds academic appointments as Clinical Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at New York Medical College and Adjunct Assistant Clinical Professor of Allied Health Science at Quinnipiac College. His clinical areas of expertise include respiratory illness in the pediatric population, and the implementation of asthma education programs for the public and for health professionals. He has also served on Connecticut’s statewide asthma task force and authored articles on various aspects of pediatric asthma care. He is the Course Director for the American Heart Association’s Pediatric Advanced Life Support course administered through the Danbury Hospital Community Training Center. Dr. Dworkin received his S.B. in Life Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his medical degree from Albany Medical College. His internship, residency, chief residency and pulmonary fellowship were completed at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City.
Currently on leave. Georgia Logothetis is a 24-year-old political junkie living in Chicago. She first became addicted to politics at the tender age of 22 when she stumbled across the DailyKos.com. In the fall of 2005, she was selected to become a Contributing Editor on DailyKos.com. In the spring of 2006, she was profiled in the Chicago Reader as "one of the most influential bloggers on the Internet." An avid writer and poet all her life, she was first published at the age of nine in An Anthology of Poetry by Young Americans.
As a Daily Kos contributing editor, Michael Lazzaro, 38, —a.k.a. ”Hunter”—has gained a reputation for passionate, explorative, and offbeat progressive writing. His wide-ranging essays and editorials are alternately probing and combative, provide stirring defenses of progressive and liberal ideals, and frequently explore the underlying dynamics of the progressive and liberal online communities themselves. An Internet consultant who currently makes his home in rural Northern California with his wife, child, and a varying assortment of animals, Michael helped design and build some of the very first e-commerce sites on the emerging World Wide Web.
Kaili Joy Gray was born in 1978 in Santa Barbara. She worked on her first political campaign at six years old, as a doorknocker for her father’s City Council bid. Her first political act came in fifth grade when she successfully led a protest against the teacher for not calling on girls often enough. A graduate of UC Santa Cruz with a degree in women’s studies and a dean’s award in economics, her proudest academic achievement is that the state of California paid her to run her yap as the Opinion-Page Editor for City College. Kaili spent a year living in Virginia, where she learned that the most important issue in a gubernatorial race is who loves the death penalty more, and then lived in Washington, where she enjoyed the rain thirteen months a year. She now happily resides in the Bay Area, where the politics and the weather are pretty much perfect.
Laura Clawson, born at the very end of 1976, graduated from Wesleyan University, has a PhD in sociology from Princeton, and has taught at Dartmouth College and the Princeton Theological Seminary. She does not approve of academic PhD's being called "Dr." and in particular, "Dr. Laura" jokes will not go over well. Politics were always an important part of Laura's life - her early memories include a strike picket line, a gay pride march, and untold Democratic Socialists of America potluck dinners. She participated in the first AFL-CIO Union Summer and other political activities during college, but was not part of an active political community in 2003 when, with great relief, she discovered Daily Kos, which ultimately propelled her back into real-world political action. She is currently a senior writer at Working America, community affiliate of the AFL-CIO.
Mark Sumner is the author of 32 novels, including one called "Devil's Tower" (and for the record, the book title and the screen name are from fond memories of visits to the national monument of that name. They do not show an inclination toward the "dark side."). He's a past winner of Writers of the Future, and has been nominated for both the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. In addition to the books, he's written over fifty short stories and hundreds of articles. One series of his books was the inspiration for the short-lived television show "The Chronicle." In his 48 years, he's been a newspaper photographer, a coal miner, a software designer, a geologist, and a perpetual student. He lives with his wife in a log cabin at the end of a long gravel road south of St. Louis and practices hard at becoming a grouchy old hermit. He's worked on campaigns for thirty years, and has never risen higher than knocker on doors and maker of annoying phone calls.
Meteor Blades is the on-line moniker of Timothy Lange, born in 1946. He has been politically active since 1964 when he participated in voter registration in Mississippi with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee in Freedom Summer. He was involved as an organizer in Students for a Democratic Society and, for 16 years, as a member of the American Indian Movement. He was incarcerated at the Industrial School for Boys in Golden, Colorado, for 23 months and spent 13 months at a federal prison camp for refusing the draft. He has remained active as a foot-soldier in the antiwar and anti-intervention movement ever since. His most serious political campaign work was in third-tier paid positions for Pat Schroeder and Tim Wirth during their first election efforts in 1972 and 1974, respectively. In 1973, together with 14 other women and men, he co-founded and served on the board of the Boulder Valley Clinic, the nation's first nonprofit abortion provider. He has been a reporter, editor and publisher for both alternative and mainstream publications, including Front Range Publishing, Westword, the Associated Press, Rocky Mountain News, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and Los Angeles Times Syndicate. He lives with his wife and stepdaughter in northeast Los Angeles.
Scout Finch is a native Kansan in her mid-30's who bleeds Jayhawk Crimson & Blue. Frustrated by watching the unquestioned lead-up to the Iraq War, she set out on the Information Superhighway to find like-minded souls. Once there, she discovered that she was not alone. In fact, there was a whole underground movement afoot at Daily Kos that was aimed at restoring our Democracy. Soon, she became entrenched in the movement and began telling her friends that while she was a mild-mannered sales and marketing executive by day, she was a Democratic Superhero by night. Some speculate that she may privately wear a cape while she works. In 2007, she broke free of her corporate shackles and vowed never to return. When she's not online fighting for Democracy, she's chasing down every event consulting gig she can find. Although her adventures have taken her all over the world, Scout Finch resides in Kansas City with her beloved boxer --- whom she occasionally calls "Senator Boxer".
Steve Singiser, who now must own the fact that he is in his late 30s, was born and raised in suburban Los Angeles, California. Great social studies teachers in his youth led him to a love of both history and politics. After flirting with a career in broadcasting, Steve elected to join them as a teacher, instead. For over a decade, he has been a History and Government teacher at an LA-area high school, and served for a decade as the head coach of its award-winning track and field program. His specialty is elections and campaigns, and he once won a CNN-sponsored election predictions contest in 1998. He makes his home in southern California with his wife, Kristina, and their two children: Cody and Makenzie. When not discussing politics, he is an avid sports fan and music fan, who isn’t sure whether to be proud or ashamed to admit to having nearly 12,000 songs on his iPod.
Jake McIntyre was born in 1976 and raised in Buffalo, City of No Illusions. During the course of a generally undistinguished undergrad career at Cornell, Jake worked a number of dead-end jobs, which brought him to the realization that the labor movement was the only buffer between contemporary American society and Dickensian England. After Cornell, he moved to Honolulu, where he discovered love and the law. In 2001, he relocated to DC (along with fiancee and law degree), where he today works for a midsized labor union. He has a lovely wife, a beautiful son, and he is beginning to regain faith that the Bills just might win a Super Bowl in his lifetime.
Will was born a Midwestern river rat in 1973. He grew up on a steady diet of corn, fried catfish, and basketball. After getting a B.A. in journalism, he moved to Colorado, where he fell in love with full moon descents down Loveland Pass and finally discovered good American beer. His wife convinced him it was a good idea to move to the Bay Area. On his first visit, he knew she was right and took a mental note to listen to her always. His previous jobs include booking bands, working in record stores, selling advertising, accounting for very large numbers, and finally settling on a career in the book biz after relocating to Berkeley in 2000. In 2006, he helped usher Glenn Greenwald’s How Would a Patriot Act? on to the New York Times Best Sellers list. He then became a Kos Fellow and founded Vaster Books with Kos and Jane Hamsher. There he published Marcy Wheeler’s Anatomy of Deceit and began to handle some tasks on the business side of Daily Kos. He continues to connect authors with publishers, but now works full time as the General Manager of Daily Kos. He sits on the board of the Kos Fellowship Program, is an advisor to Netroots Nation, and served on the executive team of the The Big Tent Denver. He has a son, Jude, who has his father’s knack for ending up in the ER. Jeremy Bingham was born on January 21, 1977 and has lived in Olympia, Washington for the past twenty years, the more recent years being spent with his wife and three year old daughter. He handles the technical side of Daily Kos. Before coming to Daily Kos, he had been working as the computer guy at a local store, taking care of an extremely heterogeneous network of computers, while volunteering as a Scoop developer and Kuro5hin admin. After his daughter was born, he found that he had exhausted his possibilities at the store (despite liking working there), and was looking for more challenging and engaging work. A prospect for a state job had fallen through, so Rusty Foster, who was working with Markos Moulitsas in his consulting business, approached Bingham about working for them. Bingham accepted the position, and when the consulting business dissolved at the end of 2004, he continued working for Moulitsas on Daily Kos. In addition to his Daily Kos work, Jeremy Bingham is also a co-founder of the SB Nation network of sports blogs, overseeing the technical aspects of that venture. Beyond his interests in computers new and old, he is an avid amateur historian (particularly ancient Mesopotamian and classical history, WWI, and WWII, but will read up on any of it at least once) and enjoys old science fiction books. He also enjoys listening to punk, metal, and opera.
Adam Bonin, 37, is an attorney in private practice in his native Philadelphia. A participant in online communities since the mid-1980s, Adam represents this site in legal and regulatory matters, and in that capacity achieved a major victory before the Federal Election Commission in 2006, securing significant new rights for speakers on the Internet to engage in online political speech and advocacy. He contributes stories to the front page dealing with campaign finance matters and legal issues generally. Adam is a graduate of Amherst College and The University of Chicago Law School, where Barack Obama was his election law professor, and lives in Philadelphia with his wife Jennifer and daughters Lucy and Phoebe. Adam serves as chairman of the board of directors of Netroots Nation, and is co-chairman of the Philadelphia Lawyer chapter of the American Constitution Society, which seeks to promote rights and liberties, genuine equality, access to justice, democracy and the rule of law through a variety of events. In his spare time, he blogs about pop culture and miscellany at A List of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago.
Bill Harnsberger, 43, was born in Mount Vernon, Ohio, hometown of both the guy who wrote "Dixie" and the queeniest Hollywood Square ever, Paul Lynde. In 1975 he and his family fled the oppressive Ford regime by moving to Düsseldorf, Germany, where he spent his time stealing hood ornaments off of Mercedes. During his time in exile, two popes died in rapid succession. Harnsberger was not charged in the incidents but was forbidden from ever again throwing lawn darts on European soil. In 1980, sensing that Ronald Reagan was poised to make everything right with the world again, he moved back to Ohio, where he became an Eagle Scout and graduated Summa Cum Wanker from Otterbein College in Westerville. He then spent seven years announcing the time and weather for old people on "beautiful music" radio station WGER-FM in Saginaw, Michigan. He now lives with his partner of 15 years, Michael, in Portland, Maine, and recently became the only known person to have successfully auctioned off both of his kidneys on eBay (the secret: labeling them as "collectible figurines").
brooklynbadboy is 37 and proudly represents the Borough of Kings. Born and raised in Flatbush, he grew up in a traditional Protestant, Democratic, union family with its roots in the Carribean island of Trinidad. He credits the United States Marine Corps with saving his life from the streets. In 1990, his father and uncles took him to an armed forces recruiting station where he was awed by a Marine in dress uniform. He graduated high school and signed up the very next day. Politics has always been in his life since early memories abound of his father cursing at the TV about Reagan. A loyal, partisan Democrat of the old style, his father was a Democratic committeeman, church deacon, and shop steward. BBB credits "Pops" with shaping his political views. Although he wanted to be a professional boxer, bbb studied business and law after leaving the Corps. He now works on Wall Street and is married to a beautiful lady who cooks just like his mother. His favorite charitable causes are the Police Athletic League and Boys and Girls Clubs which he encourages you to support.
Dante Atkins was born in 1982 in Salt Lake City, but grew up in Riverside, CA. As an outgrowth of his homeschool education, Dante started learning Latin and Greek at age eight. His online moniker "hekebolos" is a Homeric epithet for the god Apollo--which happens to be Dante's middle name. It was shortly thereafter that Dante realized he would be a lifelong Democrat after the startling combination of watching Bill Clinton's 1992 DNC Convention and seeing the news about his Republican moral conservative Congressman Ken Calvert getting arrested for soliciting favors from a prostitute. After graduating from UCLA in 2003, Dante was originally intent on pursuing a graduate degree in Indo-European linguistics before being captivated by the candidacy of a certain Howard Dean. It was later during the Kerry campaign that Dante first found Daily Kos and MyDD while looking for the latest poll numbers, and he hasn't turned back since. In 2006, Dante took a cross-country car trip with longtime friend Gary Abramson (a href="http://www.dailykos.com/user/Reality Bites Back">Reality Bites Back) to visit over 20 different netroots-supported campaigns from Darcy Burner on the West Coast to Ned Lamont on the East, filming along the way. The documentary is still in post-production. Dante his also highly involved in his local and state Democratic Party infrastructure, where he holds all sorts of different titles and positions. Professionally, Dante co-owns a qualitative research firm with his brother David (thereisnospoon) and recently founded his own Latin tutoring company. Dante is also obsessed with spiders, and currently resides in the Miracle Mile region of Los Angeles with Emily, his pet tarantula.
exmearden, 51, is a writer, mother of three adult children, newly minted grandmother, and lifelong Pacific Northwesterner, aside from a brief habitation in LA and San Francisco in the early 1980's. Her first memories of politics are pegged to family dinner discussions at a certain yellow formica table in a small coastal Oregon motel owned and operated by her "Kennedy Democrat" parents in the 1960's. Once upon a time, exmearden had thoughts of becoming a professional golfer, a hermit driftwood sculptor, a CIA agent, a maritime attorney, or a civil war historian. Real life endeavors in advertising, property management, high school teaching, library research, a two-week stint as a an X-rated film projectionist, software trainer for the Air Force Reserve, and her subsequent two decades in the software industry persuaded her that alternative paths also offer a curious narrative. exmearden resides with most of the loves of her life - her two younger adult daughters, three pug-a-poos, and two pomeranians - in a suburb of the greater Seattle area, the city of her birth in 1958. Additionally, she lives with cardiac angiosarcoma and each month she goes on a five day "chemo" vacation hosted at the University of Washington Medical Center in liaison with Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.
Laurence Lewis is a native Oregonian, and recently returned after 25 years in California. A lifelong political activist, he first stuffed envelopes while in grade school, walked precincts for local candidates while in junior high, and his first paying job, in high school, was on a Congressional campaign. He was first paid for his writing when Rolling Stone gave him fifteen dollars for a five word poem. It remains the best rate he's ever received. He writes poetry, music, all manner of drama and fiction, and also spends a lot of time with cameras. |
Markos Moulitsas Zúniga
After high school, Moulitsas served in the U.S. Army (1989-92) as a 13P -- Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) Fire Direction Specialist. He trained at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma and served the remainder of his three-year enlistment in Bamberg, Germany. While he entered the Army as a Republican, he 
Joan McCarter (aka mcjoan)
Contributing Editor, 2004
Contributing Editor, 2005
Jed lives in southeast Louisiana near the Mississippi border where he tracks national politics for Daily Kos with an emphasis on video. In recent years, Jed has lived in San Diego, Las Vegas, and Washington, DC, but he's spent most of his life in the Seattle area and is a die-hard Seattle sports fan. He was born in North Carolina in 1973 and graduated from Yale University. Before getting involved with online media, Jed was a marketing executive at the Seattle-based software firm RealNetworks and was communications director for U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell.
Laura Clawson (aka Miss Laura)
Mark Sumner (aka Devistower)
Trapper John (Jake McIntyre)
Jeremy Bingham