Congrats Glenn and to Digg User "yugandhar" who submitted this post, because it has hit the big time as far as Digg goes. Currently at 744 Diggs.

Actually, this post and the prior one (about the Weekly Standard and its fondness for "near dictator powers") both made it to the front page of Digg and stayed there a good part of the day.

Would you consider sharing some of the readership figures for this blog? Do things like Digg spikes show up noticably in the figures?

Can you give us some idea how much more readership you get at salon versus what you had at Unclaimed Territory?

Average daily readership pretty much doubled the first full month I was here (March) as compared to the last couple months at the old blog.

At this point, no one link can really noticeably spike traffic for a day. I'd say, in terms of sheer quantity, an Atrios link actually delivers more than even the Digg feature did today. But Digg traffic was substantial.

More than the numbers, though, having a post featured in a place like that brings new readers, which is more important. An Atrios or Kos links sends people here who already know the blog, but Digg and other non-blog sources that promote a post here generate new readers, which I think is more important than one-day traffic spikes (that was the primary anticipated benefit of moving the blog to Salon - the doubling of the traffic is all from Salon readers who don't read blogs and therefore weren't that familiar, or familiar at all, with what I was writing).

As it's turned out, the biggest benefit of moving -- which I anticipated somewhat but nowhere near to the extent it has happened -- is that people (especially media and political types) just take much more seriously what is written at a place they know than an independent blog they don't know. That's stupid, but that's how it is. And that is what has enabled much more visibility for these posts, totally independent of the traffic. I can write a post here that, had I written it before, the targets would feel comfortable ignoring it or not responding. Now, they feel compelled to respond, and that only feeds the visibility and impact of what gets written still further.

Mind you, I'm on my first cup of coffee, and likely can't write a coherent sentence before noon (let alone post a blog article)--but...

I think that's one of those lawyer words that has not yet been purged. But it is a word:

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Impliedly

I often agree with Glenn's criticisms of the Bush administration, but as a journalism critic he is often all wet. The post above about the O'Donnell/Leahy interview is one of those times. I say this even though I am much more sympathetic to Leahy's case here than to that of the White House.

You can interpret O'Donnell's meaning in that interview however you want. Since it's subjective, there is no way to prove or disprove what her intent.

But she was the leading participant in the discussion I wrote about a few weeks ago on The Chris Matthews Show, where several leading media stars sat around making clear that they found the attempt to question Karl Rove under oath to be abusrd, unnecessary, politically motivated, and with no purpose other than to satisfy the Democrats' obsession with getting Rove.

She expressed that view, scoffed at the need to question Rove, and cackled throughout most of the discussion at the Democrats' efforts to get to the bottom of the U.S. attorney scandal.

So feel free to defend her questioning as nothing more than devil's advocacy -- a role which, I agree, is proper for a journalist in an interview. But O'Donnell -- in her individual opinion-spouting pundit role -- has made her views on the U.S. attorney scandal generally and the attempt to question Rove specifically as clear as can be -- with clear declarative sentences -- and those views are exactly what I said they were in this post - and exactly the opposite of what you claimed them to be.

And being aware of what her views actually are on this matter informed how I understood her behavior during the Leahy interview.