Toot Toot! PolitiZoom Turns Five Today, Happy Birthday To Us All!

Great oaks from tiny acorns grow. And great blogs get there one click at a time. I am so pleased to share with you that today, March 6, 2023, this blog has been on the internet for five solid years.

If you are new here, I’ll share with you our history. We are all bloggers who initially published on Daily Kos. That’s where we met. We have six regular bloggers on this site, myself, Murf, Durrati, Jason, Michelle (whom I call Mopsy) and Mina. We also had Michael Tuck aka Black Max, publishing here until shortly before his death in 2021 from cancer. God rest his soul. Denis is our moderator and admin and he is worth his weight in gold. He also posts pieces from time to time.

I began reading DK in the spring of 2016. I was very ill. I had been mis-prescribed Xanax and I decided to detox from it, realizing it to be the poison that it is. Had I known then what I know now, about what the detox would entail, I would never have attempted it without a hospital program. It was brutal. My hearing became fuzzy, like my head was wrapped in layers of cotton swaddling. Noises affected me. The garbage truck coming at 5:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning was like an invasion from space, between the flashing lights and the clanging of the truck. Everything was insanely exaggerated. Barking dogs and church bells in the distance drove me mad. I found myself hallucinating intermittently and it was only through dint of spiritual grounding and an act of will that I kept from calling 911 and checking into a hospital.

In this condition of mental and bodily anguish, it filtered through to my consciousness that Donald Trump was most likely going to get the GOP nomination. I began reading Murfster35 on DK. He was my guru. I became a Murfster groupie. Murfster laughs at this but it’s the truth. Half crazed, I read his daily work, (Murf was the King of the Rec or Wreck, take your pick, list back in those days. Today they call it the Trending list.) Then I went in and read his backlog of stories as I continued to recuperate.

Through them all, Murf had a theme, starting soon after Trump descended the escalator, which is that he was going to get the GOP nomination. Murf said he wasn’t psychic, he said it was plain arithmetic. So for six weeks or so in bed, I read everything Murf every wrote and pondered his words and I said to myself, “Oh my God, this guy is right.”

He was right.

I spent the summer glued to Daily Kos. I didn’t actually become a member there until fall of 2016 and I thought, of course, that Hillary would win. I posted a few articles on the cult of Trump, Steve Bannon breaking campaign finance laws, all that and then along came November 8 and you know what happened that night.

With a grim determination I decided that anything I could do to expose this fraud and the Trojan horse of subversives that entered the White House with him, I would. There began a life changing journey.

Come January of 2017 a website developer launched a blog called the Trump Impeachment, later changed to Daily Sound and Fury. I became aware that my work was being republished on that site, via a Creative Commons license, and didn’t think too much about it. At one point I had occasion to contact the developer to ask about a similarly named blog, Impeach Trump and in the course of our conversation I was asked if I wanted to be a featured writer on DSF and make a few dollars, and he literally meant a few dollars, by being a featured writer.

I said, “Hell, yes. I’m posting pieces anyhow, might as well make a few bob for doing it.” Then the other writers here followed me and in 2018 a new blog, PolitiZoom, consisting of only original content, no scraped articles from Daily Kos, came into being.

We were grass roots and folks, I mean grassroots. I mean that in the beginning we were lucky if we had 25 views on a piece, which is maybe 12 cents income, depending upon which quarter you’re in and how the ad revenues are shaking down.

The pennies grew into dollars, the dollars grew into tens, and then hundreds and then thousands of dollars. We are not a big site or a wealthy site, by no means. And there are incredible ups and downs, due to seasonal variations and the vagueries of the news cycle. But we are a growing site. That’s all that matters. We have grown phenomenally in our five years up at bat.

And that is due to you. We are nothing without our readers. As Ursula K. LeGuin put it, (I’m paraphrasing) “A story is like a circuit. It’s only black marks on wood pulp [or illuminated pixels] until the reader comes along and reads. The experience is communicated from one mind to another. Then the circuit is complete. ” The internet is a vast ocean and our posts are like messages in a bottle. Sometimes only a few people open the bottle, other times tens of thousands do.

We are the Little Political Blog That Could. We started out in the deep space of the internet and from there we have worked up enough speed to gain the recognition of some cultural and political luminaries. Posts on this site have been boosted on Twitter by Lincoln Project, Meidas Touch, Laurence Tribe, Jill Wine-Banks, Garry Kasparov, Richard Painter and others. We’ve been publicly trashed by the likes of Mike Lindell and Ric Grenell. Our posts have been reblogged by Bill Moyers, Alternet, and Crooks & Liars. Jimmy Kimmel talked about us in his monologue.

On a comical note, our sister site, Daily Sound and Fury, split off from us in late 2020 and has since gone under. If that sounds mean spirited, you would have to know the entire story. In a nutshell, the new DSF owners told me that they didn’t have to pay me, or my writers, anymore but that we were welcome to post for free and they would allow us the courtesy of a hot link (which is a tool to drive traffic.)

Right. We’re going to give away our work because we are widdle, toopid people and these guys were big powerful smart ones — who got these ideas reading articles on Google and hadn’t one day of practical experience either writing for or managing a political blog before they bought DSF.

When I was done laughing, I said, “You’re going to plummet like a rock in the search engines without breaking news and original content. PZ is the unique part of your blog. Without us, you are scraping stories off of Daily Kos, and putting ads on them, nothing more. We are the engine driving the DSF train and that’s been the case for two years.”

They didn’t believe me and so they plummeted like a rock. We went on to thrive.

The new owners were interested in money only, which is never the way to run a business, any business. You have to believe in your product or service, or those who do will run you out of the market. I told one of the new owners, “Every great cause starts out as a movement, turns into a business and eventually devolves into a racket. You, Sir, are about to take DSF into stage three.” That was considered abusive on my part at the time. The owner never spoke to me again and turned me over to his accountant. Two years later history has proven me right.

The moral of the story is stay close to the great cause. Never lose sight of your roots, what drew you to this work and how important this business is. We are in the vanguard in the fight to defend democracy. That is what brought us here and that is what keeps us here.

You’ve probably seen my posts on the anti-First Amendment madness in Florida, where the State Senate and Ron DeSantis seek to pass bills which would lower the bar for journalists to be sued and compel bloggers to register with the state and be tracked as subversives. This is the madhouse of politics in the year 2023 and it’s only going to get worse. The 2024 GOP primary is going to be a classic, all signs point to that inescapable eventuality. At the end of the day, we will either see a budding fascist, Ron DeSantis on the top of the Republican ticket, or the twice impeached former guy, who has announced he’ll keep running for president even under indictment.

On behalf of Murf, Durrati, Jason, Mopsy, Denis, Mina and our late friend Mike, we thank you from the bottom of our heart for having partnered with us in this great adventure. We will continue to bring you breaking news and commentary.

If you’re new here to PolitiZoom, come get on board. We are riding shotgun on Washington politics and we’re gaining ground and momentum every day.

Toot toot.