Billmon
From dKosopedia
Categories: Blogs | DKos | Bloggers
Billmon is the pseudonym of a left-wing political blogger who ran the website Whiskey Bar ("Free Thinking in a Dirty Glass"). He was an influential voice in the leftwing political blogosphere, and retired from blogging at the end of 2006, though he has since posted over forty diaries on Daily Kos starting July 31, 2008. There is a Billmon entry on Wikipedia. A mid-2004 version of his dKosopedia page said he "does a marvelous job of conveying complex political, social and economic issues with deceptive ease, and a touch of wry humor." He is a former financial journalist who, as of April 2006, was working in corporate marketing.
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Billmon on Daily Kos
Billmon's first comment on Daily Kos was on the day of the 2002 mid-term elections, Tuesday, November 5, 2002, responding to Markos's diary Early numbers; the comment thread link is here, and it was signed "billmon". He made two comments to that diary.
Posted Comments
He commented prolifically that first week: two more that day, a total of thirty before Friday was over, and aside from a break in mid-November to early December, became a regular commenter. His comments were signed billmon, with a lower-case "b", except when he cut off the final letter. This led to a joke about "evil billmo" having written some of those comments.
A list of links to billmon's Daily Kos comments can be found on the Billmon Comments page; eventually, this page should have a complete list of all comment threads that billmon contributed to.
Guest Posting
On January 3, 2003, Markos announced that Billmon would be one of two guest posters, along with Steve Soto, while Markos was waist-deep in other projects, including the launch of the Political State Report website. Billmon wrote two posts that day, and he and Steve Soto shared guest blogging duties for two weeks. Steve Soto then did three solo guest blogger weekends in late January through mid February, after which he started his own blog and Billmon took over solo guest posting, starting with a weekend beginning the last day of February, and taking the reins twice more in March.
Billmon's final set of front-page posts were from early April, when he was teamed with new guest poster Steve Gilliard. The posts were all signed Billmon, with a capital "B". His final front-page post was on the morning of April 7, 2003, entitled Last Words, and he announced, as a postscript, that the Whiskey Bar was opening for business in the next day or so: "There's still lots of work to be done, but I hope to be posting there soon, like maybe tomorrow."
A list of links to all of Billmon's Daily Kos front-page posts can be found on the Billmon Posts page.
Diaries
On July 31, 2008, Billmon posted a diary on Daily Kos, the first article he'd written on the site in over five years, and posted a second one twelve hours later, on the following day. To see all of his Daily Kos diaries, use this search.
After posting three diaries on Wednesday, September 3, two more than the normal limit, Billmon revealed the next day that while he has not become a front pager, he nevertheless has been given permission to post as many diaries a day on Daily Kos as he wants. As of October 7, 2009, three of his 46 diaries have been front-paged.
Billmon's Other Writing
The vast majority of Billmon's writing was on the Whiskey Bar. Billmon took a number of breaks from writing his blog, some of them quite long, before shutting down for good on December 28, 2006 (starting that day, billmon.org would return an error). There is an archived repository of the Whiskey Bar that seems mostly complete, though without pictures and picture-based posts such as the final "that's all folks" graphic on December 26; the repository starts with the third numbered post from April 10, 2003, and includes posts up to number 2970 on December 21, 2006. The Whiskey Bar's original contents are also available through the internet archive Wayback Machine.
He won a number of Koufax awards for his blog writing.
He wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times on September 26, 2004, and four articles for the Huffington Post in 2006.
External Links
- http://billmon.org/ (Whiskey Bar, his now-defunct site; will display error)
- http://whiskeybar.org/ (a web archive of Whiskey Bar)
- "Bartender, I'll Have An Old-Fashioned" (April 12, 2006 article on Billmon from the Philadephia Inquirer's "Blinq" column by Daniel Rubin)
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