Why did CNN cut the length of the Democratic candidates' debate from 3 hours to 2 hours?

No reason is given.

Meade speculates: "Bernie and Hillary are too old to stand for 3 hours."

Me: "We can't sit through 3 hours."

From my 36-point live-blog of the 3-hour GOP debate:

26. How long is this darned thing? I thought 2 hours. Then I thought 2 and a half. Now, I'm thinking it's going to go on for 3 hours. This is madness!...

35. After the debate, in an interview, Trump says what he learned is that he can stand for 3 hours. Yeah, that was a severe challenge — having to stand there for 3 hours. It was hard enough to sit through!

And the woman has to do the standing in heels, as HuffPo pointed out after the 3-hour GOP debate:

"I watched eagerly when Carly Fiorina first walked on stage to see how high her heels were," said our very own Arianna Huffington. "I immediately recognized the heels she was wearing, as I have the same Manolo Blahnik pumps in black. They're high -- 3 1/2 inches! I personally wear them when I know I'm sitting down! I love them and completely understand why she chose them, in terms of style. But, as the debate dragged on, I wondered how uncomfortable she must have been, especially since she didn't just have to stand there looking elegant but being alert and firing on all cylinders...."

But the height of the heel aside, it reminds us of what was once said about actor/dancer Fred Astaire and his legendary dance partner: "Sure he was great, but don't forget Ginger Rogers did everything he did backwards ... and in high heels!"

Who originated that Ginger Rogers line? Ann Richards? No. Frank and Ernest:

Arianna Huffington calls Obama's bin Laden ad "despicable."

She said:

"I don't think there should be an ad about that... It's the same thing Hillary Clinton did with the 3 a.m. call. 'You're not ready to be commander-in-chief.' It's also what makes politicians and political leaders act irrationally when it comes to matters of war because they're so afraid to be called wimps, that they make decisions, which are incredible destructive for the country. I'm sure the president would not have escalated in Afghanistan if he was not as concerned, as Democrats are, that Republicans are going to use not escalating against him in a campaign."

"I'm delighted to announce the launch of HuffPost Good News..."

"... a new section that will shine a much-needed spotlight on what's inspiring, what's positive, what's working -- and what's missing from what most of the media chooses to cover."

How perfectly insipid. It's like Martha Stewart, but for news. Is it bad of me to feel like this is meant to work as news for women? Relatedly, my father used to insist that the news should be entirely about people who died. Dying being such a profoundly important matter. As long as anyone has died — and there's never a day when no one dies (if there was, would we notice?) — that's what the news should focus on. I tried to say, but wouldn't that be monotonous? It's banal, isn't it? Why not report that people are breathing? The real question is: What are people doing that's different and important now, not who did something in the past that makes it seem significant that he has now died? It's that thing, that for the newly dead makes us care that he has now died, that we should be learning about now. No, whatever that thing was, death is bigger. Death is the news. The news for men.

AND: Here's HuffPo's news for men: Weird News.

We enjoyed the tasty new blood that was Sarah Palin's, but now her blood is just as vile as the old blood we were drinking.

Everybody at Arianna Huffington's blood-swilling party is sick of Sarah Palin now, says the hostess, reapplying her lipstick.


Photo by 96dpi.

"Why are the major Democratic presidential candidates standing on the sidelines when it comes to ending the war and zero tolerance for torture?"

Asks Arianna Huffington in a column titled "Dems Are Addicted to Backing Down."

She excludes the possibility that the Democrats might actually be supporting the policies they believe are best or at least acting politically by choosing policies they think the majority of voters want. No, for Arianna, since she doesn't like what they are doing, she perceives a mental disorder:

It's like AA — they first need to admit they have a severe problem, do a serious and fearless political inventory, and then commit to making a change.

Memo to Oprah: while you're on the campaign trail, maybe you can facilitate an intervention. How about you and Dr. Phil show up at the next debate and haul the Democratic frontrunners and the Congressional leadership off to spinal rehab.

Because you just can't imagine that the spine they have is used to stand up to you.

"What most people do when they see a law being broken: go get a cop."

That's a line from a piece by Arianna Huffington, which complains about the sting that got Larry Craig arrested in an airport men's room.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not wild about walking into a public restroom and seeing a couple using the a stall for something other than, as Sgt. Dave Karsnia, the arresting officer in the Craig case put it, "its intended use."

But that is not what Larry Craig did. If he had, someone in the restroom could have done what most people do when they see a law being broken: go get a cop.

So -- in Arianna's world -- if you have an airport bathroom that's become a notorious place for gay sex, you don't need to station an undercover cop inside to catch anybody and deter the behavior, you can just hang back and wait for the bathroom-goers to see the sexual beharior and to do what "most people do." These busy travelers will officiously run around the airport looking for a cop. That doesn't sound to me like the way "most people" react to sleazy quality-of-life crimes. I think most people would be disgusted, immediately leave the bathroom and plan to avoid that bathroom -- and maybe that airport -- in the future.

Even assuming that men going to the Minneapolis airport bathroom would go searching for a cop, the cops in the airport should be a paying attention to other things, not dealing with a very particular problem that has nothing to do with airport security. Yet Arianna says:

And as it happens, since Craig was arrested in an airport, presumably there were plenty of law enforcement officers nearby looking for, you know, real threats -- like explosives or folks on a Watch List.

And you want to take them off that task to go after some guys having sex in the bathroom (who'd probably be gone by the time he arrived)? How on earth is that better than using a police officer like Karsnia who is trained for a specialized task?

But Huffington thinks Karsnia's job is simply ridiculous:

It's unsettling that more people here in the land of the free aren't at all discomfited at leaving it up to the prognostication skills of Sgt. Karsnia and his crack team of B-men to determine what crimes people might have committed if not for the mind-reading and daring-do [sic] of Minneapolis' Special Forces Bathroom Unit.

What other public servants with difficult jobs -- imagine training to be a cop and then getting assigned to sit on a toilet all day -- does the imperious Arianna Huffington think deserving of her mockery?

Is sending Sgt. Karsnia into the men's room to spend all day trying to get other men to look at him and tap his foot really the best way to use our limited law enforcement resources?

And just how much money is Minneapolis/St. Paul spending on sting operations like this one? Just since May, 40 men have been arrested on allegations of illegal sexual activity at the same airport. And how much taxpayer money in total is being allocated across the country by local police to protect us from people whom the Sgt. Karsnias of the world think might, at some point, commit a crime?

I'm not an economist, but it seems to me that the sting is cost effective. One police officer, carrying out very few arrests, ruins the reputation of this bathroom as a place for sex encounters. That bathroom is in the state's most important airport, a hub of commercial activity. Minnesotans have a huge interest in maintaining the quality of their international airport, and travelers have endless opportunities to choose other routes when they dislike an airport. I would speculate that Karsnia's work probably produced a large net benefit to taxpayers.

"Like, I really -- what I want to do is experience the whole entertainment business because, I mean, I'm not just a musician, I'm an entertainer."

So says Sanjaya Malakar, a darling boy who deserves his own sitcom. Perhaps the story of a someone who wants to be a star, has a lot of heart, but isn't any good at all. (It worked for Lucy!)

Sanjaya was on Letterman last night, doing the Top Ten.



And look, here's Arianna Huffington gushing about sitting near Sanjaya on the plane to the White House Correspondents' Dinner:

[T]he woman across the aisle from me leaned over and asked if I was flying in for the dinner. I told her that I was and asked if she was too. "Yes," she said. "I'm Sanjaya's mom!" I glanced back, and there was the fallen-but-radiant Idol, seated next to a bodyguard hired to protect him from the mobs of well-wishers that now follow him wherever he goes (It was a good hire: Sanjaya's table was a hot destination throughout the Correspondents' dinner). Mrs. Malakar was a very charming woman. Our conversation ranged from the black-beaded dress she had bought for the occasion to her less than rosy assessment of the Bush administration. My mind flashed on how Simon Cowell might have assessed Alberto Gonzales' off-key testimony, and whether the AG would have won over Arlen Specter if he'd done his hair in a pony-hawk.

Eh, my mind just flashed on what a dull writer Arianna Huffington is. She's sitting with Sanjaya and mother and all she gives us is the insinuation that "Mrs. Malakar" agrees with Arianna's boring politics? It's an unsupported insinuation, of course, because who has a "rosy assessment of the Bush administration"? Probably not even Bush himself!

And, Arianna, not every woman latches on to her husband's name. You ought to know better than to call a woman by her child's last name with a "Mrs." in front of it! Just as my name isn't "Mrs. Cohen," Sanjaya's mother is not Mrs. Malakar, she's Jillian Recchi. (And Sanjaya is just as Italian as he is Indian.)

"I find this very much akin to what we did with C-SPAN about 25-30 years ago."

HuffPo has a piece about Bloggingheads.tv — including the news that C-SPAN founding chairman Bob Rosencrans is putting money into it:

Rosencrans said he was instantly charmed by Bloggingheads TV when longtime friend Wright introduced him to it last November. "It got better and better as I watched it, and seemed like something really unique," said Rosencrans... Though contributors will continue to vlog for free, [Bob] Wright says he hopes to someday be able to pay them (and points out that he himself draws no salary, and has invested his own capital.) So far Heads like Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, our own Arianna Huffington, Spencer Ackerman, Jonathan Chait, Joshua Marshall, Glenn Reynolds and the Alts — Eric Alterman, Ann Althouse and Jonathan Alter — don't seem to mind, nor does the still-ubiquitous and generously-browed [Mickey] Kaus.

The Alts!

Though obviously enthusiastic about the venture, Rosencrans said he has no plans to meddle in its success. "Bob has control - it's important that it's done based on his integrity and his vision," he said. "I find this very much akin to what we did with C-SPAN about 25-30 years ago — let it run, let it develop and the right people will take it on. Their integrity is the key to developing a very solid business." Also reminiscent of C-SPAN is its emphasis on substance over flash: "I love the civility of the discussion," he said. "That's unique on television." (That could just be because it's very difficult to imagine yelling at the mild-mannered and highly-respected Wright.)

I guess he didn't see the one with Byron York and David Corn. And I think Mickey kind of yells at Bob sometimes, doesn't he? It's not all that mild-mannered -- at least not all the time, isn't it? And there's some flash. Like that time Bob put a pencil in his ear.

The "bipartisan love-in" Bill Clinton's "been engaged in over the last several years has resulted in jack-squat."

Says Arianna Huffington interposing deep thoughts for what might otherwise be "popping champagne corks" after Clinton's performance on "Fox New Sunday."

Huh?

Okay, I've got my bearings. You see, Clinton fans thought Clinton ruled. He stuck it to Fox News, you know. They're celebrating. And Arianna's the nerd at the party who wants everyone to sit down and have a serious conversation about what it all means. She begins with the assumption that Bill's been in a "bipartisan love-in," which I take to mean that he's been circumspect and presidential.

I'm glad the Chris Wallace interview is flying all over the internet, but I really hope that one person who will watch it over and over again is Bill Clinton. And that on the fifth or sixth viewing it might occur to him that the more cover he gives Bush and his cronies, the more they're able to increase and entrench their power.

Isn't it disturbing to picture Clinton watching himself on TV over and over again and becoming more and more convinced that he played it just right? Arianna assumes he lacks the intellectual complexity to see in it what people who aren't predisposed to love him find offputting, even shocking. He'd just replay and replay and chortle I rule.

Now that I've seen the reaction on the left, I'm convinced that Clinton went on the show planning to act the way he did. It wasn't Chris Wallace's specific question that set him off. He decided in advance to go on Fox News and unleash an attack on Fox News as soon as when he saw an opening. But he jumped too eagerly at what wasn't really an opening and he jumped weirdly. That he thought he was doing well suggests that he has surrounded himself with people who are pulling him out of the calm, rational center -- what Arianna mocks as a "bipartisan love-in."

But this country is full of people who aren't hotly partisan, who are put off by that strong stuff, and who need to see a demonstration of calm rationality. Now his over-the-top performance is being praised by those people who crowd around him -- that's the real love-in -- and he may succumb to their fawning inducements to hardcore partisanship.

And where is Hillary in all of this? Will she fall into the open arms of the hot partisans too? I'd like to think she's less susceptible to seduction. But it won't help in the long run if her husband inanely cozies up to the kind of people who watched him on Fox News and thought he was just great.

Recycling the leftovers from the "Person of the Year" analysis.

Time Magazine has another one of its lists: 100 People Who Shape Our World. It always seems as though they're just begging us to bitch about the three or four people who least belong on the list. I'm not going to Technorati this list and see all the bloggers who are exclaiming about Matt Drudge and Arianna Huffington.

Re Drudge: "With 10 million readers daily, Drudge, 39, has paved a generous path for the blogs; without his example, semipro scribes might not have unearthed 'Rathergate.'" Does that sound like irksome, backward Time-ese writing? Actually, Ana Marie Cox wrote that.

The writer of the post on Arianna eschewed Time-ese:

No doubt because of my (persuasive) prowess and Arianna's intellectual openness, she switched, becoming a lefty. With her indefatigable persistence, resourcefulness and good humor, Arianna, 55, has gone from ambitious project to ambitious project with varying degrees of success, finding herself the proprietor of the widely read, hugely influential liberal blog Huffington Post. None of this would have happened were it not for me. And it seems oddly ironic that it is Arianna, not I, who has been named one of TIME's 100 most annoying (sorry, influential) people. Arianna should be writing about me.

Me, Al Franken.

"I'm not going to be threatened by Arianna Huffington!"

Says George Clooney:

Yesterday, Clooney released an angry statement calling Huffington's methods "purposefully misleading," and she acknowledged that his so-called blog - slamming Dems who voted for the war in Iraq for fear of being labeled "liberal" - was actually compiled from Clooney's recent interviews with the UK's Guardian and CNN's Larry King.

But Huffington insisted (and forwarded me E-mails that seemed to back her up) that she believed she had explicit permission from one of Clooney's PR reps to publish his disparate quotes as a single piece of writing. "This was a misunderstanding," she told me yesterday, as the disputed blog was removed from her Web site.

Clooney told me: "Nobody has ever written an op-ed piece for me. If I say I've written something, I've written it. When I go to the Oscars, I write everything I say...I stand by what I do, but I'm very cautious not to take giant steps onto soapboxes because I think they're polarizing."

Clooney said that when he demanded a disclaimer from Huffington, she refused. "She told me that it's a big no-no in the blogosphere, where people are supposed to write their own pieces."

There's a minor and boring problem here: Who speaks for George Clooney? He has PR people, and if they agree to things on his behalf, and afterwards he decides he doesn't like it, it seems a bit unfair for him to portray the other party to the agreement as underhanded.

The interesting thing is that Clooney's willingness to embarrass Huffington over what his PR people did throws light on how The Huffington Post operates. Now, the celebrity blog part of the Huffington Post looks like just a PR outlet, a place for assorted quotes and press releases to assemble in the form of a blog. Why looking like a blog works as a way to win readers is something of a mystery, of course. But there are all sorts of blog-looking things out there trying to get your attention. Do they detract from real blogs? Do you know the difference between a real blog and a fake one?

Do you know the difference between a real book and a fake one?

UPDATE: Here is Arianna Huffington's explanation of her interaction with Clooney, along with various assertions about how The Huffington Posts generally gets blog posts from celebrities. The claim is that 99% of the bloggers (which includes a lot of journalists and other non-stars) type directly into the blog software, and only 1% email, fax, or phone in their material. Presumably, the big name celebrities are in the 1%.

Very, very rarely (in 10 months, it's fewer times than you can count on your hand), we will work with a first-time blogger the way editors do in other, traditional media -- suggesting ideas and offering direction on what makes a blog different from, say, a New York Times op-ed. Part of what we've always tried to do with HuffPost is bring to the blogosphere some of the most interesting voices of our time that are not already there. This is the first time there was no back and forth with the writer -- our sample was approved 'as is' -- which is where the misunderstanding occurred.

I read this as an open invitation to bloggers to find other HuffPo posts there that are cobbled together from various sources the way Clooney's was -- though we won't have any way to know if the star was involved in the approval process. I find it hard to believe that it only happened this way once and just by chance this was a person who would choose to make a public stink about it and embarrass Huffington.

MORE: An emailer writes:

I work for a Public Relations/Marketing firm.

The basic rule is that NOTHING goes out without the expressed approval of the client. When you write a statement for the client the person whose name appears on the statement personally reads and approves it. If you ghost an article for the client, the client reads and approves said article.

It is not uncommon for releases. etc. to go through 10 to 20 revisions before the client gives approval.

If things happened as described by Huffington, Clooney’s PR people did a very unprofessional job.

Yeah, it doesn't make any sense why he's pissed at her and not his own people.

"And I'll do a little live blogging with Arianna Huffington, if you know what I mean..."

"... What do I mean?" -- Steve Colbert, on last night's "Colbert Report."

The mystery of a TimesSelect blog... and whether Hillary should run.

"Link to this" it says at the bottom of a post by "The Opinionator" by Chris Suellentrop. It looks like a blog, but it's in TimesSelect. I just don't understand the concept. Link so some small fraction of your readers can go there? Or did the link function to pierce the wall, allowing me to let my readers see the thing? Let me know if by chance that link worked some magic, but I'm going to talk about the post anyway. It's titled "Hillary, Don't Run."

In a bitterly divided and partisan nation, is there anything conservatives and liberals can agree on? Yes: Hillary Clinton, please don’t run for president. Lone Star liberal Molly Ivins kicked off a wave of anti-Hillary commentary with a column last week that began, “I’d like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president.”

Sen. Clinton’s primary shortcoming? Ivins believes she isn’t liberal enough: “Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone. This is not a Dick Morris election. Sen. Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and that alone is enough to disqualify her. Her failure to speak out on Terri Schiavo, not to mention that gross pandering on flag-burning, are just contemptible little dodges.”...

Conservatives are delighted about liberals’ newfound anti-Hillary animus. National Review’s Jonah Goldberg attributes the sentiment to Sen. Clinton’s recent moves to the right. “To be honest, I never understood what they saw in her in the first place,” he wrote in his weekly Los Angeles Times column. “[T]here’s something oddly satisfying in the possibility that Clinton being herself is politically disastrous. And, if she’s really just playing one more role according to some classically Clintonian political triangulation, there’s something equally satisfying to the prospect that even her fans aren’t falling for it anymore.”

Oh, wait, Suellentrop didn't take a position anyway. He's really only collecting links -- to Ivins and Goldberg and also to Arianna Huffington and Josh Marshall. I guess I should just copy his links and talk about the same subject myself. If so, should I put a "via Suellentrop" link? It's kind of screwy to do that if it doesn't get people to the post but just gives them a little experience of exclusion. And the main reason you do a "via" link is to send a fellow blogger some traffic. How can I be guilty of denying a blog something it's already denying itself?

A TimesSelect blog doesn't function in the blogosphere, but maybe that makes some sense for TimesSelect folks. They aren't really ready to read blogs, and it's nice to have a trusted voice to categorize and summarize what's being said by various commentators on the web, some of whom might actually even be bloggers. Look, I found Josh Marshall and Arianna Huffington for you!

Anyway, what do I think of these voices on the left and the right who are saying Hillary shouldn't run? Is the opinion trustworthy because it's on both sides? Not at all!

Those on the left don't like her -- as Suellentrop acknowledges -- because she's not far enough to the left. They ought to know that an excessively left candidate is doomed, but they don't want to face that horrible reality. These people were against Bill Clinton too, back before he actually did that thing that Democrats seem almost never to be able to do, win a presidential election. On the right, you've got folks who've loathed Hillary all along and who, of course, don't want the Democrats to win an election.

So how should Hillary hear these voices on the left and right who don't want her to run? As strong encouragement! But she's got to find a way to keep her hawkish credentials, or we'll be stuck once again with a Democratic candiate with an incomprehensible attitude toward national security who will push those of us who vote almost entirely on that ground to go with the Republican again.

But maybe it's already too late for Clinton. She's already lost too much credibility catering to the Ivins crowd. Being the front runner, she's got them at her all the time, making demands -- demands that she sacrifice all her potential to win in the end. Poor Hillary! If she finds a way through this ordeal, maybe she is good enough to be President.

What could be more personal?

Let's check out The Huffington Post again. There's Arianna, tucked away, as usual in the upper left hand corner. She's effusing:

One of the things I’m loving about our inaugural week is the variety of subject matter and tone that we’re getting from our bloggers. From the unabashedly political to the deeply personal -- such as the new postings by Bruce Cohen and Cheryl Saban (after all, what could be more personal than witnessing your daughter give birth, then blogging about it?).

What could be more personal than witnessing your daughter give birth, then blogging about it?

How about: witnessing your daughter give birth and not blogging about it.

Watching my baby have her baby was like being a sous chef for GOD -- there was nothing I could do but observe in humility and awe.

Fabulous metaphor! Because you know how a sous chef just does nothing but stand there.

[ADDED: Yes, it's a simile, not a metaphor....]

I scrolled through all the current blog posts just now. Nothing caught my eye. Just a lot of dreary pedestrian blather. Laurie David's concerned about global warming. Gary Hart is concerned about security, not just "traditional military security" but "security of livelihood, security of community, security of the environment, security of energy, and the security of thoughtful politics."

And don't forget the security of knowing you don't really need to click over to the HuffPo, because it's going to be boooorrrrriiinnggggggg.

It's so much more fun over here.

UPDATE: N.Z. Bear is making fun of the eminently risible HuffPo User Service Agreement. That and their refusal to join the Ecosystem. And show us their Site Meter.

"Cool, creative stuff"?

Here is a "featured post" on The Huffington Post today:

The grave urgencies facing us do not simply lie in fighting terrorism abroad but also in ensuring that our children - all of our children - can grow strong, talented, and hopeful in this land that we love.

That garbled syntax, that graduation-speech glop, is a front page teaser that's supposed to get you to click for more. And there's Arianna, permanently parked in the upper left hand corner, chirping: "There is some cool, creative stuff showing up on The Blog."

I wonder what it would take for me to start feeling sorry for her.

UPDATE: Hey, this is pretty funny. I can't get a permalink for the post I want you to read but it's called "I Got Here Before That Bitch Winer." So just scroll down. MORE: Here's the link.

Arriving on the computer blog site of the Internet blogosphere.

Walter Cronkite is posting:

Arianna Huffington has exercised her renowned wisdom to give journalism another boost along the ever busier Internet. Her blog site promises to be an interesting challenge for those of us lucky enough to be invited to participate with our occasional contributions. Hopefully the product will be at least as interesting.

I'll launch my first contribution right here: Arianna, I offer this first editorial opinion that you settle for "interesting" and recognize that it is not a synonym for "entertaining."

And, moreover, I offer this addendum as well to this my first editorial opinion, Arianna, to be merged into your already formidable wisdom, wisdom celebrated across the continents, that you recognize that by "interesting" I mean insufferably tedious.

The big, foaming mass-o'-celebrities blog.

Arianna Huffington thinks she's discovered something new in blogging: the group blog with famous people, a lot of famous people. If you've got 250 people -- famous people -- able to post on one big, foaming mass-o'-celebrities blog, that's got to be exciting, right?

When I think of blogging and celebrities, I think of bloggers tweaking and slamming celebrities. When I think of a big mass of celebrities, I think of pretty people murmuring self-congratulatory banalities -- like at the Oscars -- barely able to say anything interesting to go with the pretty pictures.

Among those signed up to contribute are Walter Cronkite, David Mamet, Nora Ephron, Warren Beatty, James Fallows, Vernon E. Jordan Jr., Maggie Gyllenhaal, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Diane Keaton, Norman Mailer and Mortimer B. Zuckerman.

Well, now my picture isn't so pretty. But they'll be writing, so it doesn't really matter that they are not really telegenic. Of course, if they're writing, how do we know it's really them and not some assistant or P.R. person or joke-writer?

UPDATE: This post was talked about on an MSNBC TV segment today. Political Teen has the video clip here.

Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft, who does the segment, pronounces my name funny. It's "alt" as in "salt" without the "s," and then "house" as in "house" -- just plain old "house is not a home" "house." It means: old house.

Unrelated observation: The "v" key on my keyboard suddenly only works if I hit it twice. What could possibly cause that? This problem just started when I first tried to type MSNBC TV. Do you think I should hold Bill Gates responsible?

"She asks excitedly."

David Wallace-Wells (in Slate) quotes me like this:

"Celebrity-suckling gadfly and Bill Maher Thursday hump Arianna Huffington to launch political web site," writes hard-to-please Jeff Goldstein at protein wisdom. At NIF, Virginia-based TJ thinks the move shows Huffington has "more dollars than sense." At first, the news turned off law professor Ann Althouse, as well. "But then I noticed Larry David was on the list, and I was interested. Is he really going to blog?" she asks excitedly. "I mean really blog?"

Maybe I need to blog with emoticons. "Skeptically" would have been the right adverb. To really blog means a lot more -- to me -- than to just to set up a page in blog form. Hmmm... I wonder how Jerry Brown's blog is doing? Ten posts in a month and a half. Maybe that's a website, but it's not a blog. I say excitedly.

Larry David blogging?

This is the sort of thing I read about and instantly hope fails:

In a move unlikely only because it's taken this long to happen, pundit-about-town Arianna Huffington is extending her hosting largess to the blogosphere.

This month the wannabe California governor is launching a Slate-like Web site where a cast of bigwigs, including Sen. Jon Corzine (D-N.J.), David Geffen, Barry Diller, Larry David, Tom Freston, Ari Emanuel, Jim Wiatt Tina Brown and Harold Evans will each have their own blog from which to spout Big Thoughts about politics.

Huffington wouldn't comment, but it was confirmed that a soft-launch of the Huffington Report would be up and running before the end of April.

But then I noticed Larry David was on the list, and I was interested. Is he really going to blog? I mean really blog?