I've been doing a blog called The Sideshow since November of 2001. I'd been hanging out at Bartcop place's and met people like Atrios, who I badgered into starting his own blog and the liberal blogosphere really started to give the fake libertarian blogs some real competition.
In those days, the only way you could see clips from news shows was if you actually watched the shows on your TV or if someone made a clip and posted it to their website.
Crooks and Liars was invaluable when they finally started regularly posting clips - it was almost as if I still lived back home in Maryland and could watch stuff on TV.
But I live in England, now, and though there was a brief period when I could just click on a video link and see what was there, a lot of stupid intellectual property garbage now prevents me from seeing Hulu or Comedy Central, so I'm once again dependant on C&L for those Daily Show clips. (Don't talk to me about proxy servers. If you're an aggregator, you want links that your readers can see without having to set up a proxy.)
Like Susie Madrak, I'm part of the Virtually Speaking radio show gang, and I'm pretty proud of the work we all do there, despite the issues that getting a free transatlantic Skype connection often introduce. Of the ones I've been on, I think the one I'd most like people to hear is the time we had Glenn Ford of the Black Agenda Report on, because he not only had a lot to say about their early encounters with Obama, but he said some very insightful things about the impact of our prison-industrial complex and the impact it's had on the black community - and on black activism.
(The one I re-post a link to most often that didn't have me on it is Stuart Zechman's explanation of what a Democrat is and how it doesn't recognize what 20th century America learned about freedom from the Great Depression. Stuart is one of the great finds of the internet - he used to be a guitar player in a rock band and maybe because he never had anything to do with those people in Washington, he has been really smart at analyzing political policy and memes in ways that older activists don't. A few years ago it was hard going to make people understand Stuart's insight that the "centrists" were pushing their very own ideology, and that ideology had also become very popular among the supposedly "objective" (or, alternately, "liberal") media - and it wasn't anything like liberalism.
Today, even Brendan Nyhan acknowledges that.
In fact, as Stuart says, it's a radical ideology that opposes democracy and true progressive liberalism, even when they call themselves "progressives". More recently, Stuart and David Dayen (dday) were on the Sunday show last week talking about the CIA, Diane Feinstein, banksters and budgets - really worth your time to listen to.)
Tonight's panelists on Virtually Speaking Sundays will be Digby and Joan McCarter (McJoan), by the way. You can listen live or stream it later, or download the podcast.
A while back, Jay Ackroyd asked members of the Virtually Speaking gang to make a brief statement of what they believe. Here's my What I Believe.
I also believe we all need Good Lovin', that People Got to Be Free and that The Young Rascals (who grew up to be "The Rascals") were one of the greatest bands of all time.
