It's unfortunate that your quote leaves off the most significant and problematic part of what Palmieri posted: the very first line. This is what it looks like now, though originally it was slightly more informally phrased:

This is Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

This opening was necessary because posts on this blog don't have any bylines. The reason being that nothing there is expected to be written by anyone other than Yglesias, so inserting another post by someone else requires some sort of odd contortions to differentiate it from Matt's writing.

So if you want to compare it to an editorial page or other sorts of writing, excellent. My local, the Washington Post, writes all their editorials as a committee and offers them up unsigned. What would be the appearance if, at the header of today's opinion on interrogation methods there was a brief aside from the publisher? "Katharine Weymouth here - the Washington Post company will always support the efforts of the office of the President to keep American safe, whether or not their chosen actions go beyond what's specified by the Army field manual."

That would be odd, and call into question exactly what the Post company was looking to accomplish, both in that instance and in general. Why do you have an independent editorial voice if you don't trust what it says? Why don't you trust us, as readers, to understand the difference between what the editorial board says and what you as an organization say?

Palmieri's note may or may not impact what Yglesias says in the future. To some extent we have to take it for granted that all editorial writers are always making the decision whether or not they're willing to take the heat for what they say, and I think that's fine. The questions that don't seem to be asked here are, in my mind, the more important ones.

If Yglesias' writing is meant to be completely independent of CAP's positions, why isn't there already some sort of sidebar information about what's contained there? If this is only suddenly coming to the forefront now, when Yglesias expresses an opinion that Palmieri considers completely out of step with CAP? What does that say about the organization's judgment in creating this venue, or in general?

Beyond that, Yglesias' information page linked from the blog states "Matthew Yglesias is a Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund." So what does that mean, in general and in the context of his writings on the site?

Everyone knows what the overall point is of the editorial page of a daily newspaper and we realize that things that appear under the names of individuals may not intersect with the beliefs or missions of the paper they're printed in. CAP apparently didn't consider what it meant to them to host an opinion writer on their site and link themselves to him until something happened to surprise them.

That reflection on their judgment is the real story here.

I would personally prefer to see the left continue its role as the sort of conscience of our politics. Progressives have done a really great job in being that voice of reason and sanity as well as having the more forward looking vision of the country. Under President Obama, my expectation is that more of that forward looking perspective will become public policy and a lot of the so-called "intolerable" things we fight about (gay marriage, universal health care, living wages, respect for the earth)now with the Right will become more embedded in our culture. The so-called "far" left will be drawn increasingly to the center which is where Mr. Obama seems to be as things like justice, economic and otherwise become more pragmatic and commonsense. So the left will need to keep doing what it's doing, which is to be always at the leading edge of the best and most forward thinking out there. Note how President Clinton and Vice President Gore went further left when they ended their time in the White House, Clinton with his global fight against AIDS and poverty, and Gore with his work on climate change. They moved the country farther "left" towards an embracing of these issues by even people on the right as human issues, not just liberal or conservative ones. This will continue. What was once radical becomes tolerable and then even mainstream and possibly, God help me, conservative. But in this case better for us all.

Indeed, I would probably claim that the vast majority of "things" are not amenable to a socialist/fascist analysis unless one wishes to accept that the tortured logic of the sort we were treated to by both the old Union of Soviet Sociable Republics and the US during the Cold War was a valid analysis. I don't. I could practically hear Aristotle scream in pain.

I read blogs not for the opinions expressed because, as they say, opinions are like assholes - everybody's got one but rather, I'm looking for facts and/or facets of a topic with which I had not been previously familiar (nobody gives you "Just the facts, ma'am."). When it comes to opinions, I'll roll my own, thank you very much. So if you're talking about pro/anti establishmentarianism, I'll probably come down on the side of the antis since they're more likely to be pointing out facts and facets that are being ignored by the "mainstream" because they don't fit their rubric.

Coming down to the specific issue of the CWIC (chief weenie in charge) sticking a post-it note on Mr. Yglesias' post, I think the issue is different. I once got an English paper back with an A- on the top and when I flipped through the paper I found at the end that my teacher had written almost as much as I had disagreeing with what I had said but since it was well written and well structured and well argued, I got the grade I did. But that was a student-teacher relationship. Does the CWIC of CAP think she has that relationship with the bloggers on her site (or does/should she want it)? I, of course, don't know but if she does want that kind of a relationship, she should be putting post-it notes on all the posts she disagrees with. As long as these sorts of things are ex post facto that should be fine. After all, I've never let some fool disagreeing with me slow me down.