There's really a strange duality at work when Arianna Huffington is appearing regularly on thoughtful public radio news-debate programs and speaking at all kinds of important grassroots political events, yet her site has a whole section that would make the editors of TMZ blush.

I think there's a certain amount of Jerry Springer-esque savvy behind her efforts; she knows what will attract eyeballs and exploits that strategy to the full. Even HuffPo's political coverage often veers toward rabid sensationalism in its headlines. What's clear to me based on all this is that Huffington doesn't want to be another Daily Kos or Eschaton; she wants to be another Drudge Report, at least in terms of numbers. And she's willing to give up a certain amount of integrity to get there.

Can there be any doubt?

And let's hear it for his rousing, "We're too big to fail and PROUD OF IT!" cheer. That article just sold about ten million DVD pre-orders of "Capitalism: A Love Story."

And here's their case: Well, you know, this just shows the failure of the tea party. Okay. Let's just go through this. Let's just go through this. If I heard that one more time last night, I was going to blow my head off.

Why, oh why, couldn't he have heard it one last time????

Madden says that the Dems' strategy for 2010 is to paint Republicans as acolytes of Glenn Beck.

Brilliant, right? The party of the so-called Left now only has to prove that they're more liberal than an anti-government psychopath. Hell, the Democrats can run on the 1994 Republican "Contract with America" platform and still come out as progressive by comparison. Their constant support of war spending, opposition to real healthcare reform, and embracing of Joe Lieberman can all be swept under the rug quite easily when you're campaigning against an ex-druggie shock jock who bursts into tears over the power of his own words.

And no doubt, in another several years, when the party of FDR and LBJ has become so conservative that even Beck doesn't have a problem with them anymore, Fox News will have given the ghost of Tim McVeigh a daily pulpit and the DNC can use him as their new straw man.

It seems odd that the LW would focus on his gender identity rather than the fact that she was so afraid of Derek that she had to call the police on him.

...actually made me reconsider my ethical stance on food, for the first time in 15 years. I've been a vegetarian all that time, and still am, but Pollan's book forced me to recognize that making one simplistic, binary decision about one's diet is not the end-all and be-all of food ethics. Factory farming goes far beyond feedlots and slaughterhouses; the way we produce soy and corn in this country isn't exactly sustainable either. For the moment, until I figure out a way to live and eat in a manner that really IS most beneficial to the world (and my own health), I have to accept that my diet is based more on habit than on ethics. And if Portman's honest with herself, I think she'd realize that hers is, too.

He never said that any of what Bashir was saying was false. He said it was "offensive." I assume that's because the stories Bashir was talking about are privileged information that's only disclosed to high-level, high-paying members, and it's offensive to Scientology to spread the word to those who haven't been indoctrinated and shelled out thousands upon thousands of dollars.

As cynical as I may be about many things, I really see this as a window into the future of our country, and not just an overly hopeful anomaly.

Saying she's overweight or plus-sized or whatever just gives that idiot more ammunition to say "See, people, like, underestimate me or whatever but I'm actually, like, smart, or something?" And she isn't smart or insightful or really anything other than a glorified Hilton, so let's not criticize her in superficial terms when there are plenty of substantive faults to point out.

It doesn't matter if he's sorry or not. (My guess? He's sort of sorry, but mostly embarrassed that he got caught.) Prior to appearing on that show, we all know that he was coached by a dozen highly-paid PR execs, his lawyer, his manager, his agent, who knows who else. That was a performance. These appearances always are. They're ratings boosts for Larry King and the other cable news outlets that greedily repurpose his clips and serve no real purpose other than that.

It has some kinks to be worked out, true, but even at this early stage it already has tons of advantages over the very "latest" version of Final Draft, which is still stuck in the distant past. I can seamlessly edit the same document on Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu; store my work in the cloud; and easily output to PDF. (Yes, FD technically has PDF output, but when I last tried it it produced something like a 5 meg file, which is unacceptable.)

Hopefully CeltX will spur FD's developers to be more creative and productive, so their $200 software can catch up to a free program.

If you're implying that you're going to die of autoerotic asphyxiation, please tell us something we DON'T know.

Kthxbye.