This entire article about the fresh Hell that is HuffPo is marvelous – marvelous enough that I’m forced to ignore the fact that it’s from Gawker, which is just as bad a site – but I had to stop halfway through to immediately post this.
Arianna has Google alerts for “HuffPost” or “Huffington Post” or “HuffPo” and loves to forward attacks on the site to editors, whose job is then to explain why they didn’t do whatever they’ve been accused of.
Isn’t that an interesting thing?
So, let me set the background, here. The Huffington Post decided last week to run a hit piece (the lack of link is deliberate, and meant as an insult) on the LIBRE Initiative, which is a Spanish-language activist group that is also big on small-government conservatism (full disclosure: my friend/former RedState colleague Brian Faughnan happens to works for them). This sort of thing infuriates the (largely white) progressive leadership cadre, mostly because said leadership cadre has written for themselves a wonderful narrative where they’ve selflessly taken up the White Enlightened Man’s Person’s Burden to ward and foster and nurture all those disadvantaged Persons of Color.
FOREVER. THERE CAN BE NO ESCAPE FROM THEIR LOVE. EMBRACE STASIS AS YOUR DESTINY. SO MOTE IT BE!
Continue reading LIBRE smacks HuffPo back on Latino outreach.
For the record: we all say goofy things. So I’m not going to mock Axelrod for this unfortunate statement:
“You know, you can see in the speech that [Obama’s] delivering that he, you know, that he, this is coming from his loins,” Axelrod said.
But the response is still funny:
The reporters gathered around Axelrod tittered, and he was visibly thrown off balance for a moment. He tried to recover quickly by joking about the comment.
“And uh — I just wanted to say loins. I wanted to see if I could get loins in the story,” he said.
Mission accomplished.
Poor David. This has not been a good election for the man; reporters never dared laugh at him before. Such a shame…
They went deep into the weeds to find that straw, too: an obscure rule that almost certainly won’t be invoked at the convention and that can be fixed in an afternoon if anybody at the RNC decides that it’s worth fixing. More fundamentally, the entire scheme revolves around the willingness of a certain Texas Representative to blow up the convention, even if it means that said Representative’s son’s Senate career gets blighted by association in the process.
(pause)
That will not happen. At this point, it suits nobody’s purposes in the GOP to have a contentious primary. That includes the people who were on the outside, last time: this time they’ve got a much better chance to get a seat at the table. To put it another way: what HuffPo is doing here is projecting its own desperate need to disrupt the Republican nomination process onto the rest of us. Which is funny, but not really valid.
Via Hot Air Headlines.
Moe Lane
PS: Best part of the article? “A Romney campaign adviser did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and neither did an RNC spokesman.”
…Good. Sarcastic, mocking laughter might have been personally satisfying, but it probably wouldn’t have been seen as being professional.
I’m rooting for Mutually Assured Destruction.
A strike called by unpaid Huffington Post contributors received a major boost Wednesday with a call to arms released by the national Newspaper Guild.
The industry association called on contributors not currently on strike to cease contributions and asked members to help by “shining a light on the unprofessional and unethical practices of this company.”
The Newspaper Guild boasts 26,000 members and is affiliated with the Communications Workers of America (CWA). The CWA is affiliated with the AFL-CIO.
Via Glenn Reynolds, who also reminds us that the CWA hits women. So, really, there’s no need to intervene in this particular cage match…
Moe Lane
Do tell, Dan Froomkin. Do tell. The aforementioned crazy 9/11 Troofer is one Paul Craig Roberts, who loves Ron Paul, loves Dennis Kuchinich, and hates the Jewcontrolledmilitaryindustrialcomplexoligarchyblahblahblah that openly runs the Republican party these days. But he was a “Reagan Republican,” which was apparently enough to have the metaphorical pants, ah, drop.
I have to say: it’s a shame that HuffPo realized its critical error so quickly. I would have loved to see this show up on AOL. The best part was this update (links to openly bigoted hate sites removed):
UPDATE: A reader notes that Roberts has also written several times that he does not believe the official explanations surrounding the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Roberts wrote an essay in 2006 espousing many of the so-called “Truther” beliefs, casting doubt on how the World Trade Center towers actually collapsed and raising the possibility of a military cover-up. Roberts defended those views in an email: “No real investigation has been done, and experts who raise points have simply been brushed aside or called ‘conspiracy theorists.’” He added that “until the ‘truthers’ are professionally answered, I will remain a 9/11 skeptic.” Roberts’ beliefs clearly raise questions about the soundness of his foreign policy views. He either should not have been cited in the piece or the article should have clearly noted his perspectives.
“Either?” Tsk, tsk, tsk. Also: note that without Roberts’ input there wasn’t a article in the first place; just a whine.
God, keep making my enemies ridiculous. Thanks!
Moe Lane
…Which they are, of course: just not to HuffPo. Which is why that the “strike” that some of them are invoking because they aren’t getting paid for their freely-provided content is so… well, it’s kind of cute. Diagnostic of a sad mass delusion of the relative worth of their provided free content, when contrasted against the difficulty in acquiring new free content of equal or greater value, but cute.
More seriously, when you have a site of HuffPo’s size, then you will get people who are happy to trade free content in exchange for free publicity. Some of those people will be good enough at what they do to be usable. You cannot compete with those people unless you first accept that they are in fact being compensated for their work, and adjust your pitch accordingly. Just the way it goes, folks.
Moe Lane
