Talking Points Memo.  What, you thought this was some Academy Awards post?  Like I care about that (or even know about that).  Nope, this is about how a blog beat the big boys.  That’s right.  Boys.  Big Media.  Big Government. 

The  New York Times reports that Joshua Marshall of talkingpointsmemo.com won the George Polk Award for Legal Reporting.  Winning the Polk is big.  Huge.  It’s the sort of thing that reporters tell their agents to start renegotiating the contract over when they win it.  They stand taller, their voice gets deeper and they cock their head to a more dashing angle when they look deeply into the camera.  They won a Polk.  They’re entitled.

Except this time they didn’t.  Marshall did.  A blogger, for God’s sake.  A BLOGGER! 

If you ever needed encouragement to blawg, look no further.  TPM proves it’s for real.

But it’s not over yet.  Oh no.  Not by a long shot.

You may recall that talkingpointsmemo  was dropped by our very own Department of Justice from its email list.

It seems that the government is just a tad short [on bandwidth], and is forced to cut  Talking Points Memo from its press release distribution list.  Darn, if only they could scrape up an extra kilobyte.  But alas, the last one is all used up and none left for TPM.

Well, it would appear that the government has decided to reallocate scarce resources to squeak out a few bytes for TPM.

Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey asking about the Justice Department’s treatment of the Web site.

Talking Points Memo “revealed that it has recently been removed from D.O.J.’s press release e-mail distribution list,” the letter said.

“Who made this decision and why, and was there a change in policy in press release distribution after you became attorney general?” The next section of the letter addressed “Waterboarding and Torture.”

In a hearing on Feb. 7, Mr. Mukasey said he “was not aware of” the removal of the site from the mailing list, and last week it was restored. In an e-mail message on Friday, the Justice Department said the issue was simply about whether Talking Points Memo was “credentialed.”

Glad our government cleared that up.

Congratulations to Joshua Marshall, on both counts.