while I'm on this, digby:

I hate to trivialize this by getting into a silly blogging prize fight, but this steams me.

It was Atrios back on November 30 who, in a felicitous bit of timing, began talking about "American Renaissance" magazine and the neoconfederate movement before Trent even uttered his most recent racist swill. The issue was pooh-poohed by conservobloggers who said in comments that Atrios was flogging a straw man because the GOP had purged it's Klan members years ago and moved to the "center."

A lively discussion of the GOP's ties to racist organizations was underway on this site, and Atrios was writing some extremely thoughtful commentary on the strange notion that anti-war protestors can be condemned as unAmerican while secessionists are considered patriots when the Lott story broke the issue wide open. And Atrios had it first.

In the media, the Washington Post wrote the only newspaper story on it on Saturday until Howie Kurtz' column on Tuesday. And the first politician to criticize Lott's comments was Al Gore on Monday. (Sisiphus Shrugged has a great post about how Judy Botox on Inside Politics cut some of the toughest comments--- like "If he wants to be the Haider of American Politics I guess he can be "--- and showed them later in the week when the story had some heat.)

I don't think there was even one blogger, one op-ed writer, one politician or one pundit from the right who said a word about this until it was waved in their face by Atrios and Josh Marshall soon after that the Majority Leader was once again showing his ugly, but heartfelt, racist beliefs.

Now, they want to take credit for the controversy? Bullshit.

Jim Lehrer was clearly puzzled tonight as to why this story took so long to find it's way into the media. Nobody seemed to know. But, I do. It's because this is a political story about "character" that didn't originate from the Mighty Wurlitzer with tidy talking points for a platoon of paid talkers to spew en masse on radio and TV. The press no longer even looks for this stuff on its own. It simply waits for it to come to them.

The Mighty Casio doesn't have a big ampliflier, but over the course of a few days it did push the story enough to find it's way into the mainstream.

Not much more to say here. Except that digby left out the part where Glenn was calling Atrios racist. Merciful gesture, I would guess.

Edit: oops, my apologies to Atrios and Glenn (sort of). It was Max Sawicky that Glenn was calling racist. Although, to be fair, I'm pretty sure that a googling of the site would bring up examples of Glenn calling "the left" racist. Atrios being on "the left".

Edit again: Nevermind! Check this out:

Perhaps Krugman will take on the race-baiting that has marked recent Democratic politicking in his next column.

No citation, no quotation, and I can't find any other links on the page about this supposed race baiting. Looks like we have a winner!