The Workday Liberal

One of the must read sites for any self respecting, in touch lefty is Joshua Marshall's Talking Points Memo. TPM has been instrumental in following the Justice Department attorney firing scandal since it was just a tiny little non story. I've even heard talk about TPM getting a pulitzer for their coverage.

Well now TPM head honcho Joshua Marshall has issued a call for Alaskan insiders to contact TPM with any information they may have on the nefarious ways of the one and only Senator Ted -the internet is "a series of tubes"-Stevens. TPM has a proven knack for spotting major stories early, and they have started to focus on Stevens.

I find this development particularly ironic due to Stevens signature quote on internet affairs, and the fact that TPM is a (admittedly left leaning) net based investigative site. Actually, the quote from Stevens which has been the cause of so much mirth went like this:

I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
[...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material

Thus it was that a meme was born. Intertubes. This word also fits nicely with President Bush's much mocked "internets" observation in a debate in 2004.

Yet if TPM has their way, Stevens may find himself reconsidering the notion that the intertubes are not like a big truck. I have a feeling Marshall is going to be dumping all over Stevens, and the mechanism for the dumping will be that series of tubes...