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Daily Kos, the pre-eminent liberal blog, is planning to launch its own site focused on Congress this September. “We’re looking to democratize congressional oversight,” said Markos Moulitsas, Daily Kos’s founder. The site, which hasn’t been named, will draw on the resources of its editors and its thousands of readers, who write their own blogs that appear on Daily Kos, Moulitsas said.Moulitsas has traditionally focused on elections. He was one of Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) strongest advocates online during the presidential primaries. He and other Daily Kos bloggers raised money and campaigned for Ned Lamont (D-Conn.) during his 2006 Senate bid. “We've seen with Daily Kos and other blogs like it that we can accomplish a great deal when we empower regular Americans to take charge of their own politics, and we have high hopes that we can accomplish the same by giving our readers insight into what happens in the congressional sausage factory,” said Moulitsas, who also writes a weekly column for The Hill. Recently, bloggers on Daily Kos and other liberal sites have pushed back against granting immunity for telecommunications companies that aided the Bush administration’s wiretapping program, a provision included in the recent overhaul of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Moulitsas said he hopes to compete with subscription-based news services that track legislation, such as Congressional Quarterly, but would provide his content for free. “We want regular people to be able to keep tabs on what's happening in their Congress,” he said.
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