Huffington Post

How odd are the social liberals at The Huffington Post? They want you to know polyamorous relationships, they're just like monogamy. Sort of. Nice try, Rachel Kramer Bussel.

You can also read about a book called "The Ethical Slut."

A Huffington Post blog, "Hillary As An Agent of Change," authored by Derek Shearer was posted yesterday to reassure the "progressives" that Hillary Clinton is really one of their own. Despite the common view among the left that Hillary is a status quo type, Shearer lets us know that she is really quite liberal as you can see in these excerpts:

... Hillary would be a strong leader who manages change in the public interest-at home and abroad--in the manner of FDR or Harry Truman. She is, in fact, the true heir to the New Deal tradition of the Democratic Party, but for a new era.

I don't know... I don't feel that dangerous. But, gee, I guess I am? Well I might be, at least according to Helen Thomas, one of the most uncivil "reporters" in all of journalism. Apparently she has proclaimed that citizen journalists and bloggers are "dangerous" on a HuffPo blog of December 4. HuffPoster Seema Kalia reported an exchange with the equine visaged Thomas where she raised alarm over her fear of the common American citizen and that terribly annoying Internet thingie. Yes, folks she thinks that if you are a blogger or Internet writer you have no sense of "ethics" and you are "Dangerous." One wonders if she really knows any journalists at all if she thinks they show any sign of "ethics"?

Between her tirades against White House press secretary Dana Perino, Helen Thomas granted an interview to the Huffington Post about how she has never made a major mistake. "I don't have any mistakes to tell you about," she said. The Huffington Post’s Seema Kalia replied: "You don't have any recollection of any time you didn't do something well?" Thomas said: "No, not that I know of. I don't say I'm perfect, and I do say I've made mistakes, but nothing that's colossal." This is not the standard she’s used to judge President Bush, writing at least two columns that lamented his answers to list-your-mistakes questions from the White House press corps.

Former Time reporter Nina Burleigh is unhappy she was criticized on NewsBusters for her Clinton-defending review in The Washington Post of Sally Bedell Smith’s book For Love of Politics. She lamented on The Huffington Post on Saturday night that before many could even read the review, "an apparently insomniac internet goon named Tim Graham had penned a screed dissing The Washington Post for having me review the book. Graham is the lifetime College Republican running ‘Media Research Center,’ one of the most persistent groups to express shock and awe over what one of the newsweekly wags called my "quote of the century." Those unfamiliar with my sarcastic remark need only google my name and the word blowjob."

Other than Nina recalling her infamous quote about fellatio for abortion-rights presidents, just how much of this is wrong? I don’t "run" the MRC; I work several levels below the pinnacle. I was never a College Republican, although I did work at the RNC as a minimum-wage phone fundraiser in the late 1980s in my first years in Washington. I did post my critique at 6:35 in the morning, but I sleep like a rock, so that should at worst make me a "early-rising Internet goon." A longer look at Burleigh’s article also strangely calls me part of the "self-righteous and supposedly apolitical establishment" that rules Washington. What a strange passage, in which I am also a troll:

In the free-for-all that followed Tavis Smiley’s hostile GOP presidential debate in August, Michael Fauntroy was featured by Smiley’s show and several other liberal media outlets as an instant pundit on the subject, author of the book plainly titled Republicans and the Black Vote. But Sunday night on the Huffington Post, Fauntroy slammed a not-so-new documentary on blacks and the GOP as pathetic propaganda:

In arguing that the Dems were racist and that the GOP has been miscast by the liberal media as the enemy of Black people, Emancipation, Revelation, and Revolution completely overlooks the role of ideology in policymaking. Conservatives have long opposed Black progress. Conservatives opposed Reconstruction and civil rights. Conservatives pushed the "Lily-White" movement that purged Blacks from leadership of state Republican parties throughout the South. Conservatives have pushed for the maintenance of a racial status quo that held down Blacks and then blamed them for the lots in life.

Reading this HuffPo entry from "Inconvenient Truth" producer Laurie David and environmental activist Gene Karpinski, it's hard to not come up with the impression that these two are a bunch of whiners.

Both are outraged (!) that NBC host and former Democratic strategist Tim Russert is not as obsessed with global warming as they are.

What's even funnier (unintentionally of course) is that David and Karpinski frame their outrage around the recent NBC Universal PR campaign "Green Is Universal," which was nothing more than a corporate-driven shillfest designed to drum up interest in parent company General Electric's non-fossil fuel offerings. (So much for the left-wing lie about corporate "conservatism.")

Tim Russert's real sin was that he didn't parrot the company line like a good liberal media hack. The arrogance is stunning. A billion-dollar media empire devotes an entire week to promoting their pet issue and yet it's still not enough for David and Karpinski. Whine excerpt is past the jump:

Arianna Huffington trying to be funny. That's scary as a concept, in actual practice it's simply unfunny as you can see by visiting 23/6, her new comedy site. Ace pretty much sums it up:

Why 23/6? Because it's not 24/7, and see their motto is "Some of the news, most of the time."

Note that the 1/2 Hour News Hour took quite a shellacking for its uninspired time-based gag name. Arianna Huffington decided that that well wasn't quite dry, and tried her hand it.

Enjoy the ineptness. The next time a liberal claims that liberals are funny whereas conservatives are dour, just shoot him the 236.com url and collect your big pile of win.

Please also note the hugely outdated "SwiftKids for Truth" ads which are parodying something from the 2004 election. Guess no one forgot to tell them comedy does have a shelf-life.

In a Tuesday online posting on the New York Times website, Katharine Seelye enthused about "Campaign Coverage That Is Raw and Fresh" from two new journalism sites -- staffed almost exclusively by liberals.

"We're taking a look today at two new Web ventures that could help change how politics is covered. One, OffTheBus.net, is all of three months old, which these days makes it practically establishment. The other, Scoop08.com, is so new it hasn't even started yet. It's a national daily online newspaper by and for college and high school students and is preparing to go live on Sunday. That makes it the newest entry in the field and therefore the one with most of its ideals still intact."

But the two sites are staffed almost exclusively by liberal and Democratic activists -- what kind of change is that?

Here's the first clue of the political slant of the new ventures:

It doesn't take you a comprehensive Media Research Center study to know that the Huffington Post is a leftist site. Of course, MRC/NewsBusters' Tim Graham did such a study, but it's common knowledge in the media that HuffPo skews leftward. Yet New York Times staffer Bill Carter downplayed the liberal nature of the site in his October 2 story "CBSNews.com Chief to Lead a News and Blogs Site."

Carter kicked off his article by taking pains to avoid the ideological bent of HuffPo, instead painting HuffPo's new hire of a CBSNews.com staffer for chief executive as a sign that "new-media" outlets no longer have to sit at the MSM's version of the kids table:

The Huffington Post, a news Web site, plans to announce today the appointment of a new chief executive, Betsy Morgan, who will leave her job as the general manager of CBSNews.com.

Howard Kurtz, the longtime Washington Post media reporter and CNN media-show host, inadvertently defined exactly what’s wrong with our political culture when he was asked in an online chat about actress Sally Field blurting out in her Emmy victory speech that if women ruled the world, there’d be no [expletive deleted] wars. Kurtz said awards shows might not be the best slot for political analysis, "but she said it at a live news event, so in a way Fox was censoring the news."

This is "news"? Sally Field’s incoherent rant, delivered after a series of stammers, is somehow on par as newsworthy with what your average senior diplomat, military officer, professor, public policy expert or congressman has to say on the subject of war?

On the heels of mine from just a few hours ago, where the AP and ABC had to admit that one of their "news consultants" had lied his way through the MSM for several years, the HuffPost has had to pull a piece from one of their contributors. Turns out it was nearly a word for word theft of an article by The New Republic's James Kirchick.

THE HUFFINGTON PLAGIARIST:

Several months ago, I published an essay in Azure, the quarterly journal of Israel's Shalem Center, about South Africa's troubling foreign policies. You can read it here.

On Monday, a South African blogger with whom I regularly correspond informed me that an article published September 6 on The Huffington Post read almost exactly like my piece, only shorter. You can read that article, by a Norwegian journalist and former United Nations employee named Henning Andrè Søgaard, here. While my original essay was more than four thousand words and Søgaard's was op-ed length, nearly every sentence in "his" article was directly lifted from mine. Noah Pollak, an editor of Azure, shows just two of many examples. If for whatever reason you remain unconvinced, read the concluding paragraphs of both pieces.

The problem with writing politicized movie reviews is that often most of what is seen depends on the viewpoint of the reviewer. Such was the case of the dueling movie reviews of "3:10 to Yuma" in the Huffington Post. Bill Robinson saw this movie as an allegory about the Iraq war:

As the reviews will tell you, it's an exceptional film, with gorgeous photography, stunning action and hypnotic, sublime performances. But what I am surprised I have not read, are the all-too-real parallels to Iraq.

Since it is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's ground-breaking book, "On The Road," many are using the occasion to reminisce about the author. However, Tom Hayden is using this anniversary as a way to lament in the Huffington Post over the fact that Kerouac was too much of an iconoclast to buy into his collectivist leftwing agenda:

If you needed any more evidence as to how little actor Alec Baldwin actually knows about politics, it was provided Saturday evening in the second sentence of his article at the Huffington Post (emphasis added):

"Even though [then Rep. Larry] Craig voted to censor Barney Frank for Frank's tryst with a male prostitute."

To begin with, Alec, the term is censure.

Adding insult to injury, a vote on censuring Frank never happened, for as reported by the New York Times on July 20, 1990 (emphasis added):

Liberal journalist Nina Burleigh, famous for her 1998 statement that she'd happily fellate President Clinton for "keeping abortion legal," complained in an August 30 Huffington Post blog entry that conservative Republicans are sexually repressed, homophobic, and intolerant.

The rockier the rib, the more likely you'll find pink lingerie under the trousers or a bullwhip and manacles in the bedside drawer. You can bet those Beltway dominatrices, madams and escorts (gay and straight) have been able to buy second homes -- maybe even in Sun Valley! -- with their haul during W's reign.

Oh, it gets better. According to Burleigh, gay-baiting and the Amish vote were keys to Bush's 2004 re-election victory:

Storms! Floods! Riots! Looting! Blackouts! These are all the things that Laurie David is back to warning us about in her latest Huffington Post blog, "This is the Face of Global Warming":

As severe storms and the resultant flooding continue to batter the Midwest with deadly results, the media is filled with scary stories of the destruction and misery being inflicted. We see headlines about 300,000 Chicagoans without power, state of emergency declarations across four other states, dozens killed by storms from Texas to Minnesota, flooded interstates, and thousands of flooded homes and businesses. It's now commonplace to see news footage of people being rescued off their rooftops, many saying goodbye to their homes for good.

There have been some celebrities defending the dog killings by Michael Vick. However, none of the defenses of Vick are as bizarre as those put forward by Lawrence O'Donnell in his Huffington Post blog, What's Wrong with Killing Dogs?

What's wrong with what Michael Vick did? I have no inclination to do what he did with dogs, but I have no comprehension of what all the fuss is about. Most people who are upset about killing dogs or letting them attack each other have at some point in their lives caught a fish, which is as extreme a form of murderous torture of an animal as I can imagine.

It's hard to write a blog aimed at being both red meat for Fox News haters and Reagan conservatives. That didn't stop Keith Olbermann's staff from trying yesterday in a blog that highlighted Giuliani's friendship with Fox News chairman Roger Ailes.

Implying that Ronald Reagan would have something damning to say about Giuliani "from the grave," Keith Olbermann's "NewsHole" blog picked up an item run on HuffPo and American Spectator that cited one brief reference from the Gipper's diaries that called the then-federal prosecutor "crazy."

Here's the text of the August 2 post: