I stopped going to that website because they seemed obsessed with Sarah Palin. Granted Palin is deeply flawed, but she does not deserve the disproportionate trashing she is getting, particularly its focus on her personal life instead of her policies and record.

And their coverage of Hillary Clinton was extremely biased. Arianna should be ashamed.

In 1980 when our Navy family arrived in Fairfax County, VA, we immediately subscribed to The Washington Post. I was so excited to have a "real" newspaper as our local paper.

When the Washington Times appeared on the scene in the mid-80's, we subscribed to it because we felt we needed to know first hand what the "other side" was saying. Now the editorial staff of the Post has moved so far to the right that it out does the Times as an organ for the Neocons and the former Bush White House staff.

So we dropped our Washington Times subscription - we've already got a Right Wing newspaper delivered to our door step - WashPost!

And I'll read Froomkin in the HuffPost.com after I read Salon.com and nytimes.com.

I concur, heartily, with Bystander, T3 and others that the Huffpo site is crap-filled at times, but it's a damn good place to get an admittedly sprawling overview of what the MSM's up to at the moment, often with a surprisingly good news sense. In some way, the very presence of the BS helps show why things I think are important are languishing way out in the weeds.

Like it or not, I now have multiple reasons for going to Huffington Post regularly, while my reasons for going to WaPo have diminished to those occasions on which Walter Pincus or Dana Priest or Amy Goldstein write investigative pieces, which they do only every several months.

But there is great reason for hope. Although Dan Froomkin is going to focus on Washington, he was among the crew that put together the Washington Post online site, which for a couple of years was the best of the online newspaper sites in terms of layout, clarity, and editorial choices. So if any of that rubs off at HuffPo, the site may become something quite special.

I'm sure Froomkin will have something to say about the utter fascination shown by all the media -- including "New Media" -- over the events in Xinjiang, events that may well have been misinterpreted and/or misunderstood, or at the very least, events that were filtered through a lens darkly so as to reflect badly on Our Enemy of the Future, Red (and very Han) China.

I'm sure he'll say something about the fascination of the entire media -- including "New Media" -- for events very far away in a remote area of China that doesn't usually have a western news bureau. And I'm sure he'll say something about this fascination with Chinese perfidy, while in our own backyard, as it were, in Honduras, a bloody coup is being consolidated. Our State Department and all of Latin America's presidents are telling the coupsters to back off, but there is no sign yet that they are about to do so. The President of Costa Rica, therefore, is assigned to mediate the crisis.

But the "News" is all about the Uighers and how Muslim they are, and how oppressed they are under the heavy hand of the Han colonists, et cetera, et cetera,

A bloody coup has occurred in our own backyard, and if someone in the media bothers to investigate rather than simply parrotting the lines of interested parties, they might find out all sorts of uncomfortable information about how this coup came about, who was involved, and what their connections with Washington DC are.

Who is Hugo Llorens, for example, and what are his connections (if any) with John Negroponte? What, if anything, did Llorens have to do with the coup and what are his relationships with the coupsters and with President Zelaya? To what extent, if any, does this coup presage reversion to oligarchic dictatorship in Central America and potentially throughout Latin America, and what would such a reversion mean to the people of the region and to Americans so safe behind their virtual walls?

I'm sure Froomkin will have something to say about this very interesting shift of focus by our media, from events just down the road -- in a manner of speaking -- to very murky events half a world away that still defy facile characteriszation, except for the fact that a brutal and repressive regime is once again being brutal and repressive.

I'm delighted to announce that starting later this month, I'll be taking on the duties of Washington Bureau Chief and Blogger for The Huffington Post...

http://busharchive.froomkin.com/goodbye.htm

His final column at WaPo is over 400 comments, unfortunately, the comments appear to be disabled... ergo, no opportunity to rub a bit of salt in the wounds at washingtonpost.com.

Probably the most shocking thing to come out of it is that the administration apparently intends to continue to hold detainees who are acquitted in trials (either normal Article III courts or military commissions). Shades of Himmler's SS taking defendants acquitted at trial into "protective custody" in concentration camps!

Since they apparently intend to continue to hold in detention some of these detainees anyway, why would they bother to set up military commissions and hold these trials anyway? What's the point of having the military commissions in the first place, if the motivator is the fear of having to release some of the detainees because the evidence against them is tainted? If they could be held preventively anyway, what's the point of the trial?

in⋅cho⋅ate
–adjective
1. not yet completed or fully developed; rudimentary.
2. just begun; incipient.
3. not organized; lacking order: an inchoate mass of ideas on the subject.

I has two thoughts when I read that sentence over at Cocktailhag's blog. One was related to the wonderful writing that the Hag does all the time. The other was related to the law.

First, a click on my signature will whisk you to the essay that ends with him/her using inchoate rage. I can not recomend the Hag's place more highly; and he would tell you that we have disagreements on many things. He is just the most wonderful writer --- worth a look to see, eh?

Second, there is the idea of the Inchoate offense in American law. This is the crime of preparing to commit another crime. Please note, this is a crime of the mind. Some acts are criminal because you might, or might not, actually do harm in the future. Think about that for a moment and then think about picking up potential terrorists and locking them up forever. I hope you see how one horrible, but accepted, area of the law leads to other, more terrible, abuses.

Remember, if you support the governmental goring of the other man's ox; yours is not safe either.