ON THE COVER: JIM NEWBERRY (GEORGIA10), PAUL DOLAN … · 2009. 7. 17. · April 28, 2006 SectionOne Letters 3 Columns Hot Type 4 Where fake news comes from The Straight Dope 5 The

April 28, 2006

Section One Letters 3ColumnsHot Type 4Where fake news comes from

The Straight Dope 5The extra-long pinkie nail

The Works 8Berny Stone has a challenger.

Chicago Antisocial 10Squishy carpet is always a good sign.

Our Town 12Adventurous art dealer Larry Kolton; unlikely teddy bear maker Patricia Klayman; and the return of Ian Belknap’s Wide OpenBeaver Shot of My Heart

Q&A 24Doug Litowitz, author of TheDestruction of Young Lawyers

ReviewsMusic 32Mecca Normal, The Observer

Books 34Old Masters and Young Geniusesby David Galenson

PlusFree Shit 20You can get more than books with a library card.Boutique of the Week 23Wolfbait & B-girls in Logan Square

Ink Well 35This week’s crossword: Open Letters

The woman who might be Chicago’s most-read political writer doesn’t have an office. On most daysGeorgia Logothetis, 23, is either at home in the

same Rogers Park three-flat where she lives with her parents or at DePaul University’s downtown campus.About four or five times a day, taking a break from constitutional law homework or prepping for a moot-court trial, she’ll type a righteously indignant rant clob-bering the Republican Party on Iraq, warrantless spying,and the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. Then she’ll postit, under the screen name Georgia10, on the front page of liberal blog Daily Kos (dailykos.com), which getsbetween 400,000 and 800,000 unique visitors daily.The Tribune’s daily circulation, just for some context, isabout 586,000; its Web site gets a little over three mil-lion unique visitors per month, which averages out toaround 100,000 a day. (The Tribune won’t release statson how many visitors its blogs or news columnists get.)

Those numbers have made Daily Kos an influential forcein Democratic politics. The site has helped raise hundredsof thousands of dollars for candidates, and Democraticsenators, congressmen, and governors looking to curryfavor with the party’s most active supporters regularlywrite guest posts explaining their votes or responding tocritics. “We read it all the time,” one aide to a Democraticsenator told me. “If Democratic staffers are going to readone political blog, it’s going to be Daily Kos.”

That’s given Logothetis the kind of access that’s usu-ally reserved for Beltway journalists. Last week she wasscheduled to take part in what she called an “intimate”conference call with Senator Edward Kennedy, whoarranged it partly to plug his new book but also to dis-cuss his party’s agenda for the midterm elections. Shewas one of just four bloggers invited on the call, whichshe called “a great opportunity to ask more questions,have a true conversation.”

The site can claim some influence outside the self-contained world of liberal politics as well. In May 2005Logothetis and other Daily Kos denizens launcheddowningstreetmemo.com, which brought renewed atten-tion to a leaked British government memo from 2002 inwhich an official wrote that “intelligence and facts werebeing fixed” by the Bush administration to support itscase for invading Iraq. New York Times columnist PaulKrugman mentioned the site, bringing it to the attentionof a larger audience; Logothetis was continued on page 28Georgia Logothetis

ON THE COVER: JIM NEWBERRY (GEORGIA10), PAUL DOLAN (HOT TYPE), PAUL L. MERIDETH (BEAR), JON RANDOLPH (MASK)

Who Is Georgia10?One of the stars of Daily Kos, the biggest political blog on the Internet,

is a 23-year-old DePaullaw student who liveswith her parents.By Christopher Hayes

JIM

NEW

BERR

Y

28 CHICAGO READER | APRIL 28, 2006 | SECTION ONE

quoted by the Sun-Times’s LynnSweet and the Washington Post’sHoward Kurtz.

Despite her sizable reader-ship—her posts inspire dozens ofresponses and she receives asmany as 100 e-mails daily—onlyher parents and a few friendsknow that Logothetis isGeorgia10. “I’ll be in a class witha hundred people with laptopsand I see people pulling up thesite and reading my work,” shesays. “And they don’t know I’mthe one who wrote the article.”

“We’ve been friends for acouple years now and I had noidea,” says Anastasia Xinos, aclassmate who learned about herblogging life only shortly beforebeing interviewed for this article.“She’s actually a pretty quietperson,” Xinos says. “When she’snot arguing something.”

Logothetis doesn’t tell peopleabout her life as a blogger

because she tends to think of it asa dorky hobby—being a DailyKos celebrity, to her mind, is likebeing the best origami artist inthe midwest or an internationallyrenowned collector of 50s lunchboxes. “I don’t shout it from the

rooftops,” she says. “To tell youthe truth, not a lot of people areinterested in politics. If they don’tcheck the site or aren’t interestedin politics, I don’t go out of myway to say, ‘Look, I’m a front-pager on Daily Kos.’”

Logothetis grew up in a close-knit household with her parents,both Greek immigrants, and hertwo older sisters. Her familydidn’t take a strong interest inpolitics, but soon after shestarted college at NortheasternIllinois University she becameinvolved in student government.Campus politics, she says, weredominated by a political machinethat was using money allocatedto student groups to fund expen-sive parties for itself; in 2002, inher second year of classes,Logothetis ran for vice presidentas part of a reform slate. Basedon the initial tally, her party wonthe election, but the incumbentsweren’t having it. “They createdfraudulent election complaints,”she says. “It was actually likeBush versus Gore.”

An ugly battle played out overseveral months in the pages of thestudent paper, the Independent;Logothetis and her allies bonedup on the school’s constitution

and election procedures beforemaking their case before the stu-dent supreme court. “Back then itseemed like the most importantthing in the world,” she says.

Her party eventually prevailed.“That definitely taught me that therule of law is paramount,” she says.“Especially in times of chaos.”

Logothetis graduated in 2003with a degree in English. In thespring of ’04, shortly after shestarted law school at DePaul, shewas following news about thepresidential election, which ledher to Daily Kos. The site wasenjoying tremendous growth atthe time, thanks in part to thefervor among liberals to oustPresident George W. Bush. But itssuccess was also due in part to theforesight of the site’s proprietor,Chicago native Markos MoulitsasZuniga, in leveraging its users.

Not long after launching DailyKos in 2002, Moulitsas distin-guished his blog from others bygiving it a social networking ele-ment. Users could create theirown blogs, called “diaries,” andwere encouraged to link to oneanother’s posts. Particularlynoteworthy posts might get“bumped” to the front page ofthe site by Moulitsas or one ofhis handpicked “front-pagers,”where tens of thousands of visi-tors would read them. All ofwhich gave members strongincentives to post regularly andcommunicate with other users.

By the time Logothetis discov-ered Daily Kos, it had approxi-mately 20,000 registered usersand just under 100,000 dailyreaders and had morphed from aplatform for Moulitsas’s views onpolitics to a full-fledged commu-

nity. Logothetis was initiallyintimidated: the site is hard for anewcomer to navigate, and users’responses can be brutal. But shequickly grew addicted to DailyKos’s culture. “There were otherpeople out there who liked poli-tics as much as I did,” she says.

She didn’t start posting, how-ever, until she was “devastated” bythe presidential election results. “Iloved John Kerry,” she says. “Iknow you don’t hear that everyday. But I could relate to him alot.” When stories about allegedvoter suppression and votingirregularities began emergingfrom Ohio, she paid close atten-tion, having gone through a con-tested election herself. Twice a dayshe was posting updates about, asshe puts it, “all the voter suppres-sion in Ohio, and documenting all

Georgia10

continued from page 1

continued on page 30

“How can we lobby for election reform unless we havea comprehensive record of what needs to be reformed?”she asked. Answering her own question, she pointedusers to a 57-page Word document she’d written during finals and winter break titled “Eye on Ohio: The Informed Citizen’s Guide to the 2004 Elections.”

CHICAGO READER | APRIL 28, 2006 | SECTION ONE 29

Find one in the Reader!

Need an expert?

Services, Section 4

Open all year.Drop in anytime.

NEED KNOWS NOSEASON.

30 CHICAGO READER | APRIL 28, 2006 | SECTION ONE

the connections between theBush-Cheney campaign and theelected politicians there.”

This was an especially pricklytopic in the Daily Kos commu-nity. After the election, users splitinto two camps: those whowanted to accept Kerry’s defeatand try to draw lessons from itfor the future and self-described“fraudsters” who felt that Kerry’sloss in Ohio was the result ofdirty tricks on the part ofRepublicans. The debate grewincreasingly heated, and fraud-sters began complaining thatMoulitsas was ignoring them andrefusing to bump their posts tothe front page. In January 2005Moulitsas shot back, writing that“wacked out conspiracy theorieshijacked the issue. . . . [A]ftermyriad diaries crying wolf,claiming that this was the evi-dence to seal the deal, well, it gotold. Then it got counterproduc-tive, then it got embarrassing.”

But a couple of days later,Logothetis emerged as the fraud-sters’ voice of reason. “How canwe lobby for election reformunless we have a comprehensiverecord of what needs to be

reformed?” she asked. Answeringher own question, she pointedusers to a 57-page Word docu-ment she’d written during finalsand winter break titled “Eye onOhio: The Informed Citizen’sGuide to the 2004 Elections.” Theexhaustive work discussed everyconceivable claim for the illegiti-macy of the Ohio vote, includingthe two Sequoia Voting Systemsexecutives who were indicted onbribery charges, the flyers distrib-uted to black neighborhoods inCleveland telling residents to voteon November 3 (the day after theelection), and overcounts ofabsentee ballots. Her post waspromoted by one of Daily Kos’sfront-pagers and roundly praisedsoon after; users mirrored thedocument on their own sites tohelp satisfy the demand for it.

Throughout 2005 Logothetisweighed in on the biggest politicalstories of the year—Gitmo, TomDeLay, Harriet Miers, and more.In August she announced she wastaking a break, but Katrinabrought her back a few weekslater. “There is something aboutwatching a woman guide her hus-band’s corpse downriver thatmakes you realize that what’s

going on in your life, well, it reallypales in comparison,” she wrote.

At the end of every yearMoulitsas selects a handful ofusers to become front-pageposters. For the lucky few who areselected, it’s like getting picked toplay in their favorite band. “I wishI could pay them,” Moulitsas says.“But it’s a hell of a soapbox.”

In December he started an“open thread” inviting readers tonominate their favorite posters.Georgia10 received an avalanche ofsupport. “Yes, yes, hell yes,” wroteone user. “Georgia10 is fuckingbrilliant.” Another wrote: “Shealways has her finger on the pulseof Daily Kos, and her intellectual(not to mention good-natured) dis-position always shines through.”

Moulitsas wasn’t surprised.“Certain people get a followingonline because they do standout,” he says. “[Logothetis] was ano-brainer; she was one of theeasy calls.”

Logothetis says she wasnervous at first about living

up to the legacy of previousfront-pagers like Hunter andArmando—names she utterswith the kind of reverence

Elizabethan scholars reserve forShakespeare. But she got overher trepidation quickly: polem-ical and indignant but legallyprecise, her posts reflect the zealof a stickler for the rules. Likemany users on Daily Kos, she’sdriven by the feeling that thosein power are cheating. But she’suniquely skilled at setting thedetails of their actions againstthe letter of the law. In JanuaryNational Security Agencydirector Michael Hayden, in adiscussion with a reporter aboutthe agency’s domestic-spyingprogram, argued that the FourthAmendment didn’t include aprovision for probable cause.“Someone needed to tattoo theBill of Rights on his chest, back-wards, so he could read it everytime he looked in the mirror,”Logothetis wrote. She then laidout a detailed commentary aboutthe distinctions between “prob-able cause” and “reasonable sus-picion,” including relevantsnippets of Senate IntelligenceCommittee transcripts.

More than a deft prose styleand an outraged disposition, thetrait held in the highest regard inthe lefty blogosphere is prodi-

giousness. The more you post,the more readers you attract, andon this front, Georgia10 is thesite’s workhorse. That maychange starting this summer. Shewon’t be able to attend YearlyKos, a Daily Kos convention inLas Vegas in June featuring akeynote address by Senateminority leader Harry Reid,because she’ll be studying for thebar exam. She’ll also startworking at a local corporate lawfirm. “Did she tell you if she wasgoing to keep blogging?”Moulitsas asked me at a recentbook reading. “I hope she does.”

In the meantime, Logothetis’sblogging has proved useful for heracademically. She’s researchedwarrantless spying so thoroughlythat she decided to write about itfor her final paper in a seniorseminar on the legal challengespresented by the war on terror. “Iwrote so much on FISA [theForeign Intelligence SurveillanceAct] and the NSA scandals thatwhen they do Google searches,it’s my work that comes up,” shesays. “I wanted to tell my pro-fessor that if anything other stu-dents write looks like somethingI write, I got there first.” v

Georgia10

continued from page 28

CHICAGO READER | APRIL 28, 2006 | SECTION ONE 31