YKos '07: 3 People Who Changed The Congress

I'm in a session with S.R. Siddarth (a.k.a. "Macaca"), Lane Hudson (who broke the Mark Foley story) and Mike Stark (provocateur, George Allen bugbear, and blogger). One moment was EXTREMELY revelatory. A traditional media guy asked a question, claiming that the Ryan Lizza article in The New Republic set the table for the George Allen incidents (the Lizza article was great, but it wasn't exactly front-page news to most Americans). The reporter then said, "Well you can't just go up to George Allen and ask him about his racist past," when that's EXACTLY what Stark did throughout the campaign. There's this risk aversion by reporters to "make" news through holding elected officials accountable, that bloggers simply don't have. Until that moment, the "Daou triangle" will never be closed. Instead, the media wants to play "he said/she said" rather than refereeing on the side of truth.

Lane Hudson also mentioned something about the NSA using National Security letters to investigate Democratic donors. I didn't know about that, but we did learn yesterday that the IRS is tracking political information.

WASHINGTON – As it hunted down tax scofflaws, the Internal Revenue Service collected information on the political party affiliations of taxpayers in 20 states.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a member of an appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the IRS, said the practice was an “outrageous violation of the public trust” that could undermine the agency’s credibility.

IRS officials acknowledged that party affiliation information was routinely collected by a vendor for several months. They told the vendor last month to screen the information out.

“The bottom line is that we have never used this information,” said John Lipold, an IRS spokesman. “There are strict laws in place that forbid it.”

Oh, that settles it. There are LAWS in place. We've never seen this Administration break LAWS.

Hudson's point is well-made, though. So many stories slip through the cracks unless they are pushed forward by the blogs.