"[6] The Rag featured the writing of major New Left figures like Gary Thiher, Jeff Shero, Robert Pardun, and Greg Calvert.

"[8] The Rag would become virtually indistinguishable from the community it served, helping to coalesce and mobilize the movement in Austin, both as a news source and as a direct agent of change.

An all-volunteer group of self-taught editors and copy writers debated the sexism and violence in pornography, the corporate influence in utility policies, and the CIA's involvement in Chile.

David Richards, attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, successfully defended The Rag's First Amendment rights before the U.S. Supreme Court.

[12] The Rag was credited with being the first underground paper to successfully combine the radical politics of the New Left with the spirit of the burgeoning alternative culture.

"[13] The Austin Chronicle's Kevin Brass called the paper "a firebrand little troublemaker" that was "a seminal influence in the national underground press movement.

Founded in 2006 by Richard D. Jehn, The Rag Blog is edited by Thorne Webb Dreyer and is published by the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

The editorial core group includes editor Thorne Dreyer, who was the original "Funnel" of The Rag in 1966; Sarito Carol Neiman, who co-edited The Rag and later was a major figure in SDS and editor of New Left Notes; former Rag staffers Mariann Wizard and Alice Embree (who also worked with New York's Rat and was active in the Women's liberation movement); filmmaker and writer William Michael Hanks; and art director James Retherford, who edited The Spectator, a Sixties underground paper published in Bloomington, Indiana, and was active with the Yippies.

Among The Rag Blog's regular contributors are prominent alternative journalists and activists like Paul Krassner, Robert Jensen, Mike Davis, Harvey Wasserman, Jonah Raskin, Judy Gumbo Albert, Tom Hayden, Carl Davidson, David P. Hamilton, and Harry Targ, and The Rag Blog served as a primary outlet for the late poet/journalist John Ross' reporting from Mexico.

Other contributors include Roger Baker on economics and transportation, Bruce Melton on climate change and the environment, and retired physician Dr. Stephen R. Keister on health care reform, plus Texas bloggers Ted McLaughlin and Lamar W. Hankins.

[16] The article revealed a previously unreported and highly controversial strategy for fighting dissension and "extremism" that had originated with Obama friend and appointee Cass Sunstein, writing in a 2008 scholarly journal.

The Rag Blog has also been a target of right wing bloggers and conspiracists, including Trevor Loudon, Cliff Kincaid, and WorldNetDaily, who characterize The Rag Blog as "radical leftists" and as a media arm of "former Weatherman terrorists," and suggest that it is connected to President Obama through the groups Progressives for Obama and Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS).

The show is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (Central) on KOOP 91-7 FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively run community radio station in Austin, and is rebroadcast every Sunday at 10 a.m. (Eastern) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt.