27 thoughts on “Tikun Olam Banned at Daily Kos for Questioning Kos-Armando Conflicts of Interest – Tikun Olam תיקון עולם إصلاح العالم
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  1. 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.

  2. 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!

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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

  7. @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.

  8. 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

  9. I am still trying to get banned at DKos. But despite my valiant efforts, defending Greenwald, Nader, Cenk Uygur, Mizner, FDL, Tikkun-Olam, Openleft (especially Paul Rosenberg, one of my all time favorites, now too silent following OL’s closing) and, of course, MW, among others, all I ever got is a few lousy HR’s. And if you read what I write sometimes, you know that I don’t take too many prisoners (that on a good day).

    o what am I doing wrong? I wanna be a member of the Spinoza Society too – it’s quite an in-group, I hear.

    1. You will be invited as a charter member to the Spinoza Society. But since I’m banned by DK, I don’t know what I can advise in order to get you banned. My sin was criticizing Armando & Markos when they were accepting paid political ads at the site which I thought conflicted w. their political independence. I can’t remember now whether they were also taking campaign consulting fees as well & not revealing it on DK. I got flamed & banned for my impertinence. They don’t even answer you if you ask why you were banned.

  10. Phil Weiss just put up a brief note on his news blog, Mondoweiss, that Richard Silverstein was banned from Daily Kos, but he was corrected in the comments that it occurred in 2005. But as one of the banned, twice, apparently for being too prolific in the IP area, and a third time for sockpuppetry, I tried for a time to keep track of other pro-Palestinian (or liberal Israeli or Jewish) bloggers banned from Daily Kos for being, apparently, too critical of Israel. They numbered at least 30, perhaps as many as 40, since 2006. I lost track. Eventually, I was labeled anti-Semtic, as were some of the others, including Palestinians who came to the site. By contrast, in that same period, only two pro-Israel were banned, an acknowledged member of Little Green Footballs, and an alleged jazz singer from SF who outed somebody.

    Today, a team of pro-Israeli bloggers, numbering over 25 and calling themselves, Team Shalom, run the site as far as IP is concerned, and they are supported by a site moderator named Meteor Blades. Their latest target has been anyone who quotes or links to Mondoweiss, Phil Weiss’ blog.

    1. I told Phil about my banning when I read his post. In truth, I wasn’t banned for anything related to I-P. Rather I made the unpardonable sin of mentioning Armando’s real name in aDK thread. Plus I suggested they were being less than transparent by accepting paid ads fr candidates they endorsed. That got me banned.

      But the truth is that Markos hates I-P & thinks it detracts fr the goal of electing Dems, which is what DK exists to do.

      1. A fellow Black blogger convinced me successfully that we could do more on our own than by trying to fit in at 97%-white blogs like DK.

        A lot of people say MAMZ made a huge tactical error by banning me, because I then put considerable energy into researching and exposing him and his family, with startling results:

        http://truth-about-kos.blogspot.com/2007/08/indictment-of-markos-ca-moulitsas-ziga.html

        I never expected to find so much information showing, e.g that he is from a Salvadoran oligarchy family one member of which got a one million dollar loan guarantee from the Overseas Private Investment Council (OPIC) aimed at globalization of business in Central America. I didn’t know MAMZ’s family was for globalization, but now I do.

        I wonder if MAMZ will still be a advocate for Democratic constituencies (NOT), when his mother dies and he inherits a substantial portion of Club Joya del Pacífico, whose website says that they own the largest uninterupted stretch of beach in El Salvador and where they charge $140 US Dollars per night for a hotel room back in 2007.

        MAMZ just ain’t what he says he is. Getting banned from DK is like losing a job at a hotdog stand that is secretly, really selling cocaine. Banned is better.

  11. If you really want to expose Kos for what he is, then you might consider adding the Truth About Kos blog to your blogroll. Once you see who MAMZ (Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas ZÚÑIGA really is, the sting and sense of loss over being banned will be replaced by a determination to prevent him from continuing to infiltrate and undermine the American Left and the Democratic Party.

    If MAMZ is such a great tactician, then how did the Teabaggers grab hold of the momentum and take over the Congress last year? Why didn’t he see it coming and chart a counter-course? It seems to me that MAMZ proved pretty much irrelevant to the results of the 2010 election. And one of the Congressman he helped to elect was forced to step down in a massively bad PR re:sex scandal.

    In a 2010 Politico.com article, MAMZ said:

    “Your relevance is directly proportional to the amount of chatter you generate about yourself. Given that I’m trying to have an impact on the American political system, I’m more than happy to tolerate crazy CIA conspiracy theories about me. “

    http://www.politico.com/click/stories/1008/answer_this_moulitsas.html

    It seems to me that MAMZ’s “chatter” helps MAMZ more than anyone else and, in this case, the chatter was started on June 2, 2006, when MAMZ said that he had spent two years training at the CIA.

    http://truth-about-kos.blogspot.com/2011/08/moulitsas-acknowledges-that-many.html

    How can he call it a “crazy CIA conspiracy theory” when it is HE who asserted that he spend two years training at the CIA between 2001 and 2003? It makes me think that a lot of MAMZ’s reason for hating conspiracy theories is that he, himself, is involved in so many conspiracies that he doesn’t want to acknowledge. Who most hates conspiracy theories? The person with the most active conspiracies.

  12. Someone from here commented at the Truth About Kos blog that

    “But the truth is that Markos hates I-P & thinks it detracts fr the goal of electing Dems, which is what DK exists to do.

    Don’t kid yourself. Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas (MAMZ) told an audience that he was trained for two years at the CIA after being a lifelong Republican, until he says that he voted for Clinton in 1996 (but for George H.W. Bush in 1992).

    Incredibly, MAMZ says he moved away from the Republican Party when they stopped supporting state’s rights (like the right to discriminate against the disabled, the right to discriminate against women and Blacks). That’s why he was a Republican. The explanation strains credulity and adds insult to injury.

    MAMZ says he spent 2 years training at the CIA. Whatever the CIA trained him to do, I don’t believe that it was to elect more Democrats to the US Congress. I wonder if their goal was not to convince Democrats to elect pro-military “(veterans)” to the US Congress. Does anyone remember MAMZ’s push to get military veterans to run for office in the Democratic Party?

    Whatever the CIA trained MAMZ to do, I don’t think it was to help Democrats get elected. Perhaps it was to legitimize the CIA within liberal or leftist people. Maybe they just wanted him to steer the conversation away from Guantanamo Bay, the incredible official explanation of September 11, and other topics that make the CIA uncomfortable.

    Remember the Valerie (sp.?) Plame hysteria at DK and the outrage at the outing of a CIA agent? When did protecting the secrecy of CIA cover stories become a leftist goal? I think it was right around the time that ex-military and then-current CIA trainee Moulitsas started Daily Kos. That when we suddenly realized that leftist energies should be spent on a case where Republicans outed a secret CIA agent.

    And why all of the secrecy at DailyKos. Is anyone doing anything so important at DailyKos that their broken anonymity would threaten the Left? The secretive nature of DaiilyKos participants enables the MAMZ to hide the truth about CIA involvement in DailyKos.

    If we could Google the real names of DK members, we might decide that we didn’t want to be associated with such people. If the Civil Rights Movement was able to proceed with greater success as more people put their lives on the line, it’s hard to understand why a group of middle-aged white guys need anonymity.

    Either MAMZ lied about his CIA training, o . . . MAMZ lied about his CIA training.

  13. I’m glad I clicked the “notify me” for new updates years ago and I appreciate all this information.
    Personally, after being banned from Kos, I went on with life and worked on other things, including improving my journalism career and raising a family. While I miss many aspects of the viral political debate that historically occurred at that site – before Kos decided to change the focus to “electing Democrats” – other aspects of it, like attacking one as being anti-Semitic for not wanting tax dollars to flow to Israel’s military machine or questioning the official 9-11 story, as examples, I don’t miss at all (note that’s it’s OK to yell and scream about not wanting tax dollars to flow to Pakistan, Egypt, etc., something many of us do. That’s not being “anti-Muslim” or anything … that’s just being sensible and smart).
    Francis, you’ve done a great bit of work and research on your site. Thanks for spending the time to look into it. There might be a bit of wiggle room in there based on his own memory of things and seems to be putting together years of history in a few words. Sure, he could have said, On March Whatever, whatever year, I was recruited by the CIA … then, in April Whatever, I decided I didn’t want to live in D.C., so I joined the Dean campaign … or whatever. It does seem odd but I think it might just be that he was trying to gloss over the timeline quickly.
    I do know people who change positions on political issues over a 10 or 15 year period. It happens a lot with abortion, for example. I’ve see it happen with globalization. Since Kos was in the Army, he could have one position on gays in the military in 1993, and another position years later, after not being in the Army. I’m not going to defend the switched decision as right or wrong; I’m just saying that it happens. Changing one’s viewpoint after walking away from a situation or doing more research is not an anomaly.
    I like the aspect of the site using certain censorship strategies. It would be nice to delve into that a bit more. I would bet that it has more to do with the business model – keeping the rabble in line, keep the ad $$$ flowing in, stay focused on the mission, etc. I mean, after all, these guys are making tons of money for having a website, doing consulting, and writing books. They aren’t making cars or anything tangible. Life is good for them. Why rock the boat?
    Diehard “Democrats” – not political liberals, progressives, or whatever, but Democrats – will always support the party, its officials, and structure, no matter what they see, hear, or read. It’s been that way forever. It’s disappointing, since the political system and process is more difficult than blindly accepting things. But, that’s the way life is.

  14. Tony:

    I’m glad you’ve moved on, because most of what Moulitsas says doesn’t merit our time or attention. However, your expressed credulity for Moulitsas’ responses to the questions about his CIA involvement leads me to doubt your sanity and/or sincerity. I’m sorry to say that in such an unpleasant way, but it’s what I think.

    MAMZ has outright lied about the economic resources he had available when he started DailyKos. His family is among the upper crust of the Salvadoran oligarchy, with international influence and paid rolls in globalization. He has not commented on the fact that a family member received a one million dollar loan guarantee for globalization work from the Overseas Private Investment Council (OPIC), according to an OPIC press release.

    It’s possible that MAMZ is not a CIA agent, but the fact that he looks like one, even without his confession at the Commonwealth Club, troubles me. This is about the infiltration and manipulation of the American Left and the media’s refusal to cover real American leftists. MAMZ is important politically and negatively because he claims to the media and to politicians that he represents the American Left, which drowns out and distorts the voices of real leftists.

    And you’re telling me that we should ignore his admission to CIA contacts because he can’t remember when he entered the CIA orbit and when he left? If he doesn’t remember when he left, maybe it’s because he never left the CIA at all, or never stopped being a CIA asset.

    I believe that his Netroots Nation conferences and secret Townhouse Group (and undoubtedly many other secret engagements) are for the purpose of developing CIA assets and then misdirecting them. I was recently contacted by one of those assets, whose interaction with him is public knowledge, and this contact asked me to join a secret group that would make secret political decisions.

    I will not join any group until at least those within the group who are suspected of CIA connections have conclusively disproved their connections with the CIA. MAMZ cannot disprove his connections because he has already confessed to them. I will not be a CIA asset through MAMZ or a MAMZ asset, and Truth About Kos warns and discourages others from playing that role.

    I was also contacted by Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign’s e-mail guru (can’t remember his name right now), who told me, “We want you to work to elect Hillary Clinton . . . . You know that Markos and I are friends, right?)

    What was he trying to tell me that he didn’t come out and say? That if I wanted to be in the Clinton inner blogging circle then I would have to stop writing critically about MAMZ? Was this a back-channel communication from MAMZ himself?

    The reason you can’t get anyone to listen to your criticisms of Israel is that there is a massive program of misinformation and obliviousness going on in the United States to convince Americans to accept the relationship with Isreal and forget about the Palestinians. As you have come to realize, MAMZ participates, to the extent of his blog’s abilities, in that massive effort to forget about Israel’s cruel hegemony over the Palestinians and the Lebanese as well. MAMZ little part is the attempt to shut down discussions of Israel (and also shut down doubt of the incredible explanations of 9-11).

    I have been contacted by various people who tell me in a friendly way that I might as well stop criticizing MAMZ. One woman claimed to be MAMZ’s neighbor in California and said she didn’t care about him politically, but he was a nasty neighbor. I told her that if she was MAMZ’s neighbor then I wanted her to take his garbage from the curb, put it into a box, and mail it to me, so that I could review its contents. I never received any of MAMZ’s garbage, so I guess that contact’s story was garbage.

    The fact that MAMZ was compelled to acknowledge that a lot of people believe he is involved with the CIA is proof positive that the work of the Truth About Kos blog has had the desired effect: to discredit him in the eyes of the public. The media continues to cover him because they know that a lot of the people they cover are CIA agents, and it is an accepted rule that the media should not consider CIA contacts (or should favor them) when deciding whether to cover a media event or not.

    MAMZ’s 2% Black and 0% Latino participation at his blog is also an attempt to marginalize Blacks and Latinos as part of the American left. Black bloggers thought this didn’t matter until they found out that no Black or Latino bloggers would be allowed on the floor of the Democratic National Convention, because that privilege was held by MAMZ’s “state bloggers.” MAMZ was effectuating a plan to lock Blacks and Black bloggers out of contact and exposure, using the infrastructure of the Democratic Party. When MAMZ’s actions result in an all-white Democratic Party media floor blogging pool, the MAMZ has become to malignant to ignore.

    If he can convince the media that Black Kos represents Blacks, then why would or would the media need to contact us Black bloggers. Thankfully, Black Kos is such a transparent ruse that even the media won’t cover them. They don’t do anything or represent anyone worth covering.

    Most of the time I spend on The Truth About Kos is when I daily review the hits in order to see where Truth About Kos has been cited and quoted and used by others to prove that MAMZ is a liar whose views and concocted appearance of leftist leadership are fallacious.

    When people use the Truth About Kos to discredit Kos, simply by placing a link in the comments at another blog, I know that this part of my efforts has been well done, even if I don’t do anything more.

    It is a pleasure, though, that MAMZ acknowledges that he is widely suspected of being CIA. That suspicion started with Stu-Piddy and me and it limits the harm that MAMZ can cause to the American left and American politics in general.

    This I can tell you with certainty. MAMZ will never run for public office (although he once suggested that he wanted to) because his opponent would access the Truth about Kos blog and use reams of evidence to show that there is something very incredible about MAMZ and he can’t be trusted. I feel I’m doing the public a significant service, even if I never update Truth About Kos again.

    Francis

  15. I was banned at DK upon my very first comment. It wasn’t really very controversial either.

    It seems using that certain individual words alone may be all that it takes.

    Perhaps Zionism or a phrase such as “Palestinian resistance”.

  16. I haven’t been banned at Kos, but I rarely post there because it’s just too big.

    But I’ve been banned by left bloggers and right bloggers and big websites and small websites.

    I am not Atheo, but yes, the best bans are the ones where I can post one comment, and boom, immediate bannination.

    FARK hasn’t banned me. Jonathan Turley hasn’t banned me. The Volokh Conspiracy hasn’t banned me.

    I consider myself a mostly liberal Jew from LA grew up in the sixties, became an engineer, fill in your own stereotypes, you’re probably accurate.

    Anyway.

  17. I was just banned by Daily Kos after being critical of Israel (12/2018). A whole group of Jewish members accused me of anti-Semitism. The help desk didn’t even have the decency to respond to my numerous complaints and messages. This is the way it is rapidly becoming also on U.S. campuses and unfortunately, everywhere. If a person speaks out against the horrors that Israel is committing in Gaza/Palestine they are banned/ censored. Daily Kos is no friend of the first amendment, to be sure.

    1. @ Stephen: Welcome to the club of the excommunicated and dispossessed! I was booted out of Daily Kos over a decade ago for criticizing the paid political consulting work Markos did on the side. I never went back and generally shun the site now. The zio-bots are a plague. They control Wikipedia’s Israel-Palestine related content as well.

      1. @Richard I am not sure how you feel about BDS, but SB720 is absolutely scary and unconstitutional. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. State and municipal governments are passing laws outlawing boycotting of Israel. Thank you, Richard for you timely and much appreciated response. I don’t feel so alone now regarding Daily Kos.

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