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Daily Kos (IPA: [koʊs]) is an American political weblog aimed at Democrats, liberals, and progressives. Run by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (Kos from the last syllable of his first name, often mispronounced), it has an average weekday traffic of over 700,000 visits^[1], and has between 14 million and 24 million visits per month.^[2]

The website attracted controversy in 2004 for Moulitsas's comments about the killings of four private military contractors in Fallujah, Iraq and in 2005 for Moulitsas's earlier work as an advisor for Howard Dean's presidential campaign.

Daily Kos is not a standard blog, but an interactive site powered by the collaborative media application Scoop, which allows all registered members to maintain blogs within the site. Moulitsas and a small group of selected users post entries directly to the front page; other users can post "diaries," whose titles appear on the front page in reverse chronological order. These are identical in format to the main posts, and can advance to "recommended diary" status by user vote, or can be promoted to the front page by the primary contributors. The recommended diaries appear above the main diary listing. Each member can follow preferred diaries by setting up a "hotlist" and can also search the accumulated diaries by subject-matter tags. [1]

Daily Kos also contains permanent articles, glossaries, and other content. The site is sustained by advertising, mostly for activists, political candidates and books.

In April 2004, Daily Kos started dKosopedia.com, a political wiki to compile relevant information for netroots efforts, with its contents licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It applies open politics methods from George Lakoff's book Moral Politics. Its initial impetus was the compilation of FOIA records for the ACLU case against alleged Geneva Convention violations at the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp. Some of its conventions are copied from Wikipedia and other projects in the GFDL corpus, including article names for neutral or non-controversial concepts like the names of elections.

Notable DailyKos diaries are often adapted into dKosopedia articles. Compilation of timelines and profiles on political rivals are other major projects.

Daily Kos is the largest Scoop site, having surpassed Kuro5hin. The creator of Scoop, Rusty Foster, was a technology consultant for Moulitsas's former company, Armstrong Zúniga. Armstrong Zuniga was dissolved at the end of 2004.

Daily Kos coexists happily with other liberal blogs like Democratic Underground, even to the point of helping compile progressive blogs by region on its site. However, DailyKos is definitely run by one person.

During the 2004 U.S. election campaign, Daily Kos readers gave approximately $500,000 in user donations to fifteen Democratic candidates denoted as most needing funds. The candidates were Tony Miller, Ben Konop, Dan Mongiardo, Richard Romero, Samara Barend, Jeff Seemann, Nancy Farmer, Ginny Schrader, Jan Schneider, Lois Murphy, Jim Newberry, Brad Carson, Tony Knowles, Stan Matsunaka and Richard Morrison. All of these candidates lost. However, Moulitsas had stated that he was deliberately selecting candidates who were not receiving significant financial support from other sources; candidates who were expected to win — or even be competitive — were, by and large, already being funded by the DNC, DCCC, and other national and regional organizations.^{[citation needed]}

He also argued that the campaign was successful in that it forced several Republican incumbents to spend time and money defending "safe" seats that they had never had to defend before. For example, between Tom DeLay in Texas and Marilyn Musgrave in Colorado, Moulitsas calculates that the seed money provided by the blog's fundraising tied up well over ten times as much GOP money in return, and kept two of the GOP's most prolific fundraisers back home campaigning in their own districts for several weeks each, rather than roaming the country raising money for other candidates, as they had in past elections. At least two of his candidates came exceptionally close to winning what would have been significant upsets.

Daily Kos led a fundraising campaign again in the 2006 midterm election campaign in conjunction with MyDD and Swing State Project. This time around, out of 19 "Netroots Candidates," 8 were victorious: Jim Webb (VA-Sen), Jon Tester (MT-Sen), Tim Walz (MN-01), Joe Sestak (PA-07), Patrick Murphy (PA-08), Jerry McNerney (CA-11), Paul Hodes (NH-02), and Ciro Rodriguez (TX-23). Furthermore, the race of Kos-endorsed candidate Larry Kissell (NC-08) has yet to be decided: Kissell's race against Rep. Robin Hayes awaits a recount. The success of this candidate can be simultaneously considered a cause and effect of the Democratic wave in the 2006 election: fundraising on Daily Kos and other progressive blogs/websites contributed heavily to this and other races, boosting recognition of Democratic candidates across the board; on the other hand, the general anti-Bush, anti-incumbency sentiment across the country helped boost these candidates and others on the Democratic side.

In June 2006, members of Daily Kos organized the first ever political blogger convention, called YearlyKos, in Las Vegas, Nevada. The event was attended by approximately 1000^[3] bloggers and featured appearances by prominent Democrats such as Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, California Senator Barbara Boxer, General Wesley Clark, Governors Mark Warner, Bill Richardson, Tom Vilsack and DNC Chair Howard Dean. The event was widely covered in the traditional media including Capitol Hill Blue^[4], The Boston Globe^[5] and MSNBC^[6]. C-Span also carried portions of the convention^[7].

The event was generally^[8] considered a success by the Daily Kos membership. YearlyKos 2007 has been announced for Chicago in August 2007.^[9]

In 2003, Moulitsas was retained by the Howard Dean campaign as a technical advisor, an arrangement he disclosed on the site the next day.^[10] A year and a half later, when Daily Kos criticized Armstrong Williams for accepting money to promote George W. Bush's education agenda (including the No Child Left Behind Act), The Wall Street Journal reported on the payment to Moulitsas as well as a similar payment to Jerome Armstrong.[2] Zephyr Teachout said,

On Dean’s campaign, we paid Markos and Jerome Armstrong as consultants, largely in order to ensure that they said positive things about Dean. We paid them over twice as much as we paid two staffers of similar backgrounds, and they had several other clients.

While they ended up also providing useful advice, the initial reason for our outreach was explicitly to buy their airtime. To be very clear, they never committed to supporting Dean for the payment -- but it was very clearly, internally, our goal.

The Journal reporters have been criticized for equating the two events (Moulitsas and Armstrong were not journalists) and for "burying" deep in the article the information that Moulitsas had promptly — and prominently — disclosed the payment, and that Armstrong had stopped blogging entirely while working for Dean.^[11] Trippi explained in an interview with Dave Winer that he wanted Kos so that Kos wouldn't go work for Clark or anyone else.^[12]

Meanwhile, Chris Suellentrop of Slate criticized Moulitsas not for taking money from the Dean campaign — something he told his readers about — but for working as a political consultant for candidates for whom he raised money on his site.^[13] Moulitsas has refused to disclose the names of his clients, citing non-disclosure agreements signed with the candidates in question; on the other hand, neither his name nor that of Armstrong Zúniga LLC has been reported in the Federal Election Commission financial disclosure forms of any of the "Kos Dozen" candidates.

Daily Kos attracted some controversy in April 2004 by publishing comments (written by Moulitsas) about the killings of four private military contractors in Fallujah, Iraq that many considered to be insensitive:

Let the people see what war is like. This isn’t an Xbox game. There are real repercussions to Bush’s folly. That said, I feel nothing over the death of merceneries. [sic] They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.^[14]

The post was widely criticized on a number of blogs.^{[citation needed]} John Kerry's official blog removed a link to his blog in response.^[15] Moulitsas later apologized, attributing his remarks to anger that the Blackwater employees in Fallujah were given more attention than the five marines who were killed on the same day, as well as to childhood memories of warfare in El Salvador.^[16]

Numerous political figures including consultants, candidates, and sitting members of Congress use Daily Kos to publish frequent or occasional content:

Beginning in 2003, as his blog expanded to a community, Kos has appointed four or five "guest bloggers" (also called "front page diarists," "contributing editors," "front-pagers," and simply "FPers") who are selected from the community and tasked with regular contributions on the front page (without needing to have their articles recommended or promoted).

• 2003: Billmon; Melanie; Steve Gilliard; RonK; Steve Soto
• 2004: DemFromCT; DHinMI; Meteor Blades; Theoria; Trapper John
• 2005: Armando; DavidNYC; Hunter; kid oakland; Plutonium Page^[17]
• 2006: georgia10; SusanG; Superribbie (announced as a front-pager, but backed out soon after, citing time constraints); Darksyde; mcjoan^[18]
• 2007: BarbinMD; Kagro X; MissLaura; Devilstower

Additionally, while on the promotional tour for Crashing the Gate, Kos turned over much of the day-to-day management to the 2006 guest bloggers. Emeritus guest bloggers have frequently retained some privileges depending on circumstances, but are not expected to post as often.

Armando was a front-page diarist at Daily Kos who took a prominent role during Moulitsas' book hiatus in 2005 and was well known for his foreign policy and legal analysis. He also had his own political blogging website, Swords Crossed, and was a guest political commentator in a wide variety of media outlets, including The Majority Report and Talking Points Memo Cafe. After his identity and details of his legal career were made widely known, he announced his departure from Daily Kos in June 2006, citing loss of anonymity.^[19] For several months, Armando would resurface periodically, and all of his comments were accompanied by a signature line stating that he would be returning to blogging in December 2006. Armando did indeed resurface, albeit under a user ID, "Big Tent Democrat," in late November 2006.

DarkSyde is the "nom de net" of another contributor who posts anonymously on the front page of Daily Kos and a blog called "Unscrewing the Inscrutable". He is best known as a science writer with specific attention paid to biology, astronomy, and political issues such as creationism or climate change. In particular, DarkSyde's Hurricane Katrina diaries were widely read during the storm and in the immediate aftermath. They are included in a collection of science articles in the e-book Kosmos: You Are Here, co-written with science fiction novelist Mark Sumner and illustrated by paleowildlife artist Carl Buell. All the contributors to Kosmos donated the proceeds to fund a blogging convention called YearlyKos.

Bill in Portland Maine is a front page regular, best known for his recurring Cheers & Jeers feature, in which he bestows plaudits and brickbats on various newsmakers. Cheers & Jeers, which first appeared on Daily Kos on 9 December 2003, has evolved into a mini-community within the larger Daily Kos community, in which members post announcements about weddings, engagements, births, deaths, pet news, and other personal items, as well as sharing their own particular plaudits and brickbats.

Little is known about Bill in Portland Maine (or BiPM as he is known to his fellow Kossacks) other than his first name and approximate location, which seems to be somewhere in or near the city of Portland, Maine. He lives with his partner Michael (known as "Common Sense Mainer"), a cat named Vegas, and his beloved chocolate lab, Molly.

In December 2005, a Daily Kos poster known as karateexplosions began fisking White House spokesman Scott McClellan's daily press briefings under the general title The Scotty Show. Reporters' questions and comments were rendered in italics, McClellan's responses appeared in bold, and KE's "English translations" of McClellan's responses followed in plain text. The Scotty Show was also cross-posted to KE's blog, "The KE Report". Although the Scotty Show attracted little attention at first, in late December the feature suddenly began to appear among the Recommended Diaries, and has continued to do so ever since. Like Bill in Portland Maine's "Cheers and Jeers" feature, the Scotty Show has attracted its own mini-community among Daily Kos readers, who look forward to continuing to follow the New Scotty Show - Featuring Tony Snow.

Maryscott O'Connor is a Daily Kos member who crossposts to her own community, My Left Wing. In April 2006 she was profiled in the Washington Post as "one of the angriest" of the "Angry Left".^[20] Though O'Connor was satisfied with the article, other bloggers objected to her portrayal.^[21][22]

• Street Prophets is a "Daily Kos Community" focusing on the intersection of faith and politics, launched in 2005 by Moulitsas and Rev. Daniel Schultz (known by his username "pastordan"), a United Church of Christ minister from Wisconsin.

• MotherTalkers is another "Daily Kos Community" focusing on the intersection of motherhood and politics.

• MyDD
• Fitzmas
• YearlyKos

• Daily Kos
• dKosopedia - Daily Kos Wiki
• The Kos Dozen, with donation totals, from the ActBlue clearing house
• YearlyKos - the annual convention of the DailyKos community
• Who is Georgia10? - profile from the Chicago Reader
• The Left, Online and Outraged, profile from the Washington Post
• Keynote Address delivered by Howard Dean at Yearly Kos on June 10, 2006