Daily Kos is booming.

With an average of 810,234 visits and 937,537 pageviews every day now (according to SiteMeter) Daily Kos has undoubtedly become the anchorweight for the national progressive blogosphere. It is a thriving community, home to thousands upon thousands of caring, patriotic Americans. [And we shouldn't forget that MyDD was the original inspiration for Daily Kos].

Kos has served its national audience well. But there is one huge area of the blogopshere that Kos does not serve very well - and that is politics at a local level.

Just nine months ago, a team of people, including myself, realized that we in the Pacific Northwest needed some kind of progressive counterbalance to local conservative megasites like Sound Politics (great name, bad logic).

We set out a vision and a blueprint to create an entirely new website to serve the regional progressive community. After just two or three weeks of development, we launched Pacific Northwest Portal, and announced its debut on Kos and a couple other sites, not knowing what to expect.

Every day, I am reminded of the difficult struggle that lies before us: the challenge of taking our country back from the people who currently sit in the halls of power, destroying our democratic traditions.

But I'm also reminded that a new power has emerged in America - the power of the netroots. The power of the Daily Kos community and the larger community as a whole. What we can achieve by working together.

The county accepted 565 of the 732 additional ballots as having valid signatures -- 311 went for Gregoire and 191 for Rossi. The others either went for Ruth Bennett or didn't have a vote for governor or the person marked multiple candidates.

Election officials from Seattle's King County convened Thursday to begin counting 732 mistakenly discarded ballots that have widened Democrat Christine Gregoire's lead in Washington's incredibly tight race for governor.

more....