Liberal blogger Matt Yglesias likes to call his political opponents “dishonest,” but in a revealing exchange on the website Twitter Friday he advocated lying for political purposes. “Fighting dishonesty with dishonesty is sometimes the right thing for advocates to do, yes,” said Yglesias. -Jonathan Strong

“We didn’t trust the traditional progressive movement—labor, the issue orgs, the party—because of a record of failure and futility,” writes Markos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos, in an email.

When criticism on the blogs of the administration over their failure to push a public option in the health-care debate was reaching a crescendo, then–press secretary Robert Gibbs dismissed the “professional left.” Earlier this month, liberal websites lit up trying to drive a story that Mitt Romney had brought an illegal cheat sheet to the first debate. The White House dismissed them as “the tin foil hat crowd.”