Free Republic

If President Barack Obama escalates the “disastrous” war in Afghanistan, Arianna Huffington has some advice for Vice President Joe Biden: resign. Planting The Huffington Post, her popular news and aggregation site, in an ever firmer place to the left of the Obama administration, Huffington cited the arguments Biden has made in private against Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for 40,000 additional troops in Afghanistan, and wrote that “if the president does decide to escalate, Biden, for the good of the country, should escalate his willingness to act on those reservations.” Huffington’s attack on the escalation plans under consideration by the White...

Arianna Huffington’s liberal gossip site the Huffington Post has been vigorously defending green jobs czar and 9/11 “truther” Van Jones. It turns out that Jones was Huffington’s grassroots political director when she ran for governor in the 2003 recall election. In fact, Jones, a self-described “communist,” thought Huffington was so wonderful he was part of the effort to draft her to run for office. A San Francisco Chronicle article from Sept. 5, 2003 described Jones as Huffington’s “grassroots director.” A Miami Herald article from Aug. 3, 2003, described Jones as a ”Bay Area activist” and “director of the Ella Baker...

Arianna Huffington was on Olbermann lecturing the president on why he should give up his quest for bi-partisanship over healthcare and why Harry Reid should organize a senate censure of Charles Grassley the Republican who along with Olympia Snowe and another Republican whose name I forget represent the red team in the gang of six. (If only…!) Arianna’s reason? According to Arianna, Grassley has received more than $2 million from the drug companies over the last six years making him a pawn of the evil “interests” who don’t care about the People.

Arianna Huffington has proved herself in l'affaire Pitney to be both a hypocrite and so ignorant of journalism that she should not be allowed near a news-oriented website, even to read it... Pitney was given a press pass for the event, and was specifically called on, for one reason: to make it appear that Obama was taking "a question directly from an Iranian," in Pitney's own words. The nature or wording of the question didn't matter; Obama would give his carefully prepared response, no matter the details. It was a sham. A charade. Stagecraft, in which...

With a change in directions so sharp that it could give observers whiplash, Arianna Huffington is defending the carefully orchestrated question posed by a Huffington Post writer at the presidential news conference last week. After braying criticism during the Bush administration over perceived coziness between the press and the White House, she is now defending the HuffPo's hand in glove--or should I say, hand on keyboard--cooperation with....

She's been popping up in a lot of places lately to chime in on the economy. This time Huffington Post editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington appeared on ABC's April 5 "This Week," where she voiced her disapproval of the March 30 decision by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) relaxing mark-to-market accounting rules. "This week, we saw so many concessions to the banks," Huffington said. "We saw the suspension of mark-to-market, which is absolutely tragic. Japan, by not having mark-to-market, made it much harder for them to recover." But as Brian Wesbury and Robert Stein of First Trust Portfolios recently wrote for...

Both have loyal following, but their fans are on opposite sides of the political spectrum. CNBC's Rick Santelli rose to prominence earlier this year when he railed against President Barack Obama's policies on live TV from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He's a hit with conservatives staging tea parties to protest the bailout culture in Washington throughout the country. Arianna Huffington, who appeared as a guest host on CNBC's March 31 "Squawk Box" has following of left-wing readers and bloggers, as the editor of the very popular Huffington Post blog. The two faced off on "Squawk Box" about...

I don’t claim to have a sure-fire solution for the economy. But I’m pretty confident there’s something certain to prop up pay-per-view ratings: a steel cage match between Arianna Huffington and Mark Haines. The pair put in separate appearances on Morning Joe. After the never-shy Huffington called on the government to stop “protecting the equity holders” in banks, Haines came on and called Huffington “clueless” and suggested “in the future, you might want to get someone who knows what they’re talking about.” He pointed out that, contrary to Arianna’s claim, equity holders in the banks have been “destroyed.” As you’ll...

The MSM has been too reverential towards George W. Bush. Yeah, that's the ticket. The only thing more absurd than that assertion was Arianna Huffington's willingness to accept it as a fact in answering a question. Here was the exchange between Huffington and Choire Sicha, writing for the LA Times, in today's "Sunday Conversation" feature [emphasis added]: CHOIRE SICHA: It was only recently that this spell of reverence for Bush lifted. Why'd it take so long? ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: I think it took so long because there is something about the conventional wisdom that is very addictive to members of the...

The humor site The Onion, the offbeat weekly The Chicago Reader, and Time Out Chicago have discovered that some of their articles have appeared in total on Arianna Huffington's mega web outlet The Huffington Post. And they are none too happy about the wholesale lifting of their material, either. Wired.com has the full story about the Huffington Post's unwelcome lifting saying that Huffington Post is "being accused of slimy business practices by a handful of smaller publications who say the site is unfairly copying and publishing their content." And this wholesale stealing of others' work seems strange when the latest...

The Missing Dirt On Arianna Huffington The New Yorker published its profile of Arianna Huffington. Though disappointingly far from the juicy takedown we hoped for, it does contain a few interesting nuggets. We learn, for example, that the Republican-divorcée-turned-internet-publisher bizarrely "hides" all three of her BlackBerrys in her bathroom at night, even though she lives only with a housekeeper and her two daughters. Her gay ex-husband Michael Huffington elaborates on how she knew of his interest in men before their marriage, saying, "in my Houston town house I sat down with her and told her that I had dated women...

By definition, projection is revealing of what lurks in a person's heart and mind. Arianna Huffington projected tonight, and what she revealed wasn't pretty. So much so, that her liberal host hastened to diassociate herself from what the HuffPo editor said. Huffington, grossly misquoting Grover Norquist's famous line about doing away with government, added a grotesque infanticidal twist. Huffington, a guest on Rachel Maddow's show this evening, shed crocodile tears with her host about the diminished state of the Republican party. It was in suggesting that, of all things, she and Maddow should head up a Marshall Plan to save...

Conservatives complain that the media have a bias to the left. Do you believe that this is true? Mike Kovanda, DAVIS, ILL. The problem with the media is not that they're veering to the left or to the right but that they have an addiction to presenting two sides to every issue, even when the truth lies on one side or the other. I'd much rather we make our preferences and points of view transparent than pretend we don't have them. ---snip--- What can liberal politicians learn from Republican tactics? Jack Bini, NEW YORK CITY Go after your opponent's strengths....

Minneapolis: Dropping any pretense of objectivity and non-partisanship, the “National Conference for Media Reform” on Saturday night turned into a Barack Obama-for-President rally, as left-wing media figure Arianna Huffington denounced Senator and presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain as a “Trojan horse for the right” who had “sold his soul” to become president. Several speakers, including Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps, used the Obama campaign slogan, “Yes, we can,” as they urged the thousands of “progressives” in the audience to bring “change” to Washington, D.C. --------------------------------------------------------- Meanwhile, a Canadian, Naomi Klein, who writes for the British Guardian and The Nation...

Arianna Huffington's statement that John McCain did not vote for Bush in 2000 has kicked up a fuss, with McCain putting out a statement denying her account. "It's not true," McCain spokesperson Tucker Bounds, told the Washington Post, adding, "I ask you to consider the source." Huffington replied, "By all means!" Huffington is standing by her story, which she says she kept confidential for nearly eight years. At a reading and book-signing event Monday night at Washington's Politics & Prose Bookstore, Huffington told her audience that Senator McCain and his wife, Cindy, "divulged" their voting decision to her at a...

She was once the darling of conservatives like Newt Gingrich, but now you can't watch a television news-talk program without seeing her calling for more government and showing scorn for those who want less. She's Arianna Huffington, website impresario and author of "Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution and Made Us All Less Safe". I interviewed her for "20/20" last week because I was impressed by the success of the website she created. In just three years she made the Huffington Post a hot liberal opinion site. What happened to Huffington's beliefs? In 1994,...

Huffington's allegation about McCain's 2000 vote came in the midst of her book tour for "Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe." However, she claimed she revealed these allegations to "shed a light" on what she claimed is a transformation for power. "That's why I really decided to come out with it," Huffington said. "Because I thought maybe it would help shed a light on what has happened to McCain." Huffington said McCain's path to the GOP nomination was a tragic tale. "Because of his longing to be president,...

Neither did Glenn, neither did I. (I didn’t vote.) Granted, she’s a buffoon and a completely unreliable witness, but … do we maybe want to force ourselves to believe this one?"At a dinner party in Los Angeles not long after the 2000 election, I was talking to a man and his wife, both prominent Republicans. The conversation soon turned to the new president. “I didn’t vote for George Bush” the man confessed. “I didn’t either,” his wife added. Their names: John and Cindy McCain (Cindy told me she had cast a write-in vote for her husband). "The fact that this...

Arianna Huffington, a pioneer of and cheerleader for the new media has abandoned traditional media standards. Huffington, editor-in-chief and co-founder of The HuffingtonPost Web site, said that listening to both sides for a story isn’t the way to report the news. According to Huffington, it should be the role of the media to be the arbiter truth, even if there is a dissenting view. “What happens is that the media have the position to presenting two sides to every story, even if the truth is only on one side or the other,” Huffington said. “And then, the idea is if...

<p>Arianna Huffington claims that she was banished from NBC News shows because her new book, "Right is Wrong," blasted "Meet the Press" anchor Tim Russert.</p> <p>Aside from being the anchor, Russert is also the managing editor of the show, the Washington Bureau Chief of NBC News and a senior vice president of NBC News.</p>

For decades, Huffington has been a political gadfly and a perennial pundit on news shows. Now she's editor in chief of the popular news and opinion Web site The Huffington Post. Huffington's politics lean left, but that wasn't the case in the mid-'90s when she was a friend to Newt Gingrich and a card-carrying member of the Republican Party.

Over the last seven years, the lunatic fringe in control of the Republican Party -- the people who believe in torture but don't believe in evolution -- have hijacked our democracy, aided and abetted by the news media. The heart of the problem is not the bias of Fox News or the blowhards on AM talk radio but a mainstream media that has completely internalized how the right frames all political debate. The right-wing message has become a part of the news media's DNA. The latest confirmation came with this week's announcement that Tony Snow, formerly a host at Fox...

One of the main themes of my new book, Right Is Wrong, is the role the media have played in allowing the lunatic fringe now in control of the Republican Party -- the people who believe in torture but don't believe in evolution -- to hijack our democracy. I document how the real problem comes not from Fox News or the likes of Limbaugh and O'Reilly, but from a mainstream media that has so internalized the Right's framing and messages they have now become a part of its DNA. And the media seem intent on confirming this point again and...

CNN has fired producer Chez Pazienza after the network brass realized he had been blogging at his own left-wing site and several others over a period of years: In a phone interview this morning, Mr. Pazienza, 38, said he joined CNN as a senior producer in January 2004 and has consistently received positive performance evaluations of his work. He spent his first year at CNN at the network’s headquarters in Atlanta, then moved to New York to work on “CNN Daybreak,” which has since been canceled, then “American Morning,” which is shown Monday through Friday, from 6 to 9 a.m....

This is no surprise because Arianna Huffington, for some reason, has been very antagonistic towards Hillary Clinton for years. Why? Certainly not for strictly political reasons since they are both liberals. My guess is that there is some sort of personal female catfight sort of thing going on here. My advice to Arianna is to WATCH OUT because the Hildebeast has a long memory. I won't be surprised to soon find out some very sleazy details of Arianna's past marriage to Michael Huffington who spent a fortune to try to buy a Senate seat at the behest of his...

With Mike Huckabee's continuing surge, the Republican Party now has an Iowa front-runner whose religious beliefs are virtually identical to those of George Bush. He's anti-choice, born-again, against gay-marriage, and gets political advice directly from God. So why is the Republican establishment suddenly in a state of near-apoplexy about Mike Huckabee? Shouldn't they be happy? They've been cultivating evangelicals and fundamentalists for 30 years. Now they finally have a candidate who's truly part of the movement. So what's the problem? Actually, that is the problem. The evangelical crowd was fine when it was just a resource to be cynically exploited...

Ever since the Internet was invented, I’ve received e-mail from all sides of the political spectrum. It goes almost to the point of spontaneous combustion in my inbox. I leave most oddball senders on the list of what I continue to receive. There is general amusement value, and sometimes something to learn, from all that “diversity.” However, once any particular source shows itself to be a source of unmitigated drivel, I tell them to leave me alone. One source that has ignored my repeated requests to take me off their mailing list is the Huffington Post. Unfortunately, I’ve been receiving...

On Tuesday’s CBS "Early Show," host Hannah Storm exclaimed that Fred Thompson "has received a lot of criticism...for being underwhelming so far out on the campaign trail." This just hours before Thompson’s participation in his first GOP debate. The segment began with a report by Nancy Cordes who observed that Thompson’s "...been trying to keep expectations low."Storm then invited on guests Arianna Huffington and Michael Smerconish for political analysis, both of whom bashed Thompson. Smerconish began the attack: Well, unfortunately, I think the delivery probably matters over substance in this case because he is getting a reputation on the stump...

What can be more pathetic than someone in public life being rebuked by BOTH the Right and the Left? When it was announced that former CIA Director, George Tenet, would be speaking out against the Bush Administration, I figured he would be immediately embraced by the Leftwing types who always hail those who attack the EVIL Bush Regime. However, I completely underestimated how pathetic and whining Tenet would be. On top of that he has ZERO credibility in whatever he says. An example was Tenet's account of a supposed conversation he had with Richard Perle on the day after...

The MediaBistro job board posted this opening on Friday: Executive Assistant to Ariana Huffington. The requirements for the full-time job, which comes with health benefits and pays “under $100K,” are described as follows: LA based internet editor and author, Arianna Huffington seeks an experienced full-time executive assistant. Flexibility and adaptability a must! Looking for someone who does not need handholding and prides themselves on being able to easily navigate new and unfamiliar terrain. We are looking for someone with Microsoft Outlook scheduling experience as you must juggle a VERY BUSY and ever-changing schedule and support a very busy office. This...

What do you call it when a woman features two days in a row a photo in her blog of a barechested man in a bathing suit emerging from the water? I call it obsessed. And Arianna Huffington is absolutely obsessed with that photo of Barack Obama emerging from the water at the beach. Since Arianna featured two stories in two days this week at the HUffington Post about that story, we can now claim that Arianna is definitely stalking Obama. Mrs. Obama better watch out since Arianna has a record of going after prominent men as she is...

Paul Hipp once played Buddy Holly on Broadway. On Monday night, he sang and played a song in tribute to media star Arianna Huffington in a stage-worthy Pacific Heights mansion on outer Broadway. It was all part of singularly odd way to mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks -- a festive, A-list book-launch party for Huffington's "On Becoming Fearless." The oddness of the evening, hosted by Oracle Corp. founder and CEO Larry Ellison and his romance novelist wife Melanie Ellison, was intentional and carefully planned. Guests began gathering at the Ellison's city showplace with its floor-to-ceiling bay...

In these last days, the Bible says it will be a time of mass hybridization and the mixture and corruption of human DNA by fallen angels, also known as "Aliens." The government is and has been, conditioning the existence of aliens through Hollywood, science fiction, cartoons, and other sources. However, they are not telling you the whole truth. These Aliens are not ascended masters, or enlightened ones, or beings from galaxies millions of miles away, nor are they our forefathers or original creators. They are fallen angels who were kicked out of heaven for their rebellion against the headship...

Answering Arianna Huffingtons 20 Questions 1.) Last week, you insisted: "I didn't want war. To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong... it's simply not true." Yet source after source after source suggests otherwise, including your former Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neil, who has said that invading Iraq was a goal set out at your first National Security Council meeting, just ten days after your inauguration: "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this.'" Mr. President, is Paul O'Neil lying? Answer-...

In the rearview mirror, objects often look smaller than they did when we passed them. Lots of people were thrown--or threw themselves--into the spotlight this year, many of whom we will never see again, unless they have shrewd publicists or the reality shows get desperate. But they can always think with fondness or remorse of 2005, when, for a while, theirs were the names on everyone's lips. JENNIFER WILBANKS Runaway bride must repay the city--but did she keep the Crock-Pot?DAISY WRIGHT The nanny broke up Jude Law and Sienna Miller, at least for now. Her real impact? More jobs for...

Doug From Upland's siting Arianna Huggington and Al Gore exiting large vehicles at a conference on the environment in San Francisco has set the blogs afire. But there are legitimate uses for large vehicles. Really there are. The I just don't think one person driving the LA freeways in one because the want to win a collision contest at the expense of the unfortunate person they might collide with isn't one. Neither is having bigger, always spinning wheels than your neighbor. Neither is because you get a tax writeoff for a vehicle you use only for commuting and driving to...

1. Spending trillions on welfare leads to the “Great Society” “What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on...

Remember just a few months ago how many predicted that the HuffingtonPost website would equal or surpass the DrudgeReport? Most of it was FALSE advertising on the part of Arianna Huffington because she pretended that real celebs like Warren Beatty would Blog on her site and interact with posters. Instead the HuffingtonPost website turned out to be nothing more than a backwater in the Web noted mostly for crazed Blog postings as we shall see here where Arianna and her gang BLAME BUSH for Hurricane Katrina. And this IDIOCY is spreading. First we saw it, as expected, from the...

As I was flipping channels last night, I came across CNBC's "The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch." I might have been the only American watching the show but during my brief visit with Donny I was fortunate enough to hear a bit of wisdom (cough, cough) from Arianna Huffington. Ms. Huffington has concluded that Bush's idea of fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here in the U.S. had been totally destroyed by the London attacks. Huffington expands her idea in an article today called "London: Bush’s “Flypaper Theory” is Blown to Pieces" Not only...

Almost from the moment Arianna Huffington's blog (huffingtonpost.com) went live last week, it became the epicenter of digital snarkiness. Seemingly everyone with access to the Web—and more than a few spitballers from mainstream media—took a shot at the socialite pundit's site, a compendium of the views, opinions and random remarks of 350 actors, pundits, writers and politicos, ranging from genuine celebrities (Gwyneth Paltrow, Larry David, Walter Cronkite) to the niche-famous (wonky speechwriters, people cranking out television scripts for "Alias," Jon Corzine). Bloggers complained about its cluenessness, lack of focus and self-aggrandizement. One writer called it "the box-office equivalent of Gigli,...

I'm going to tell you a story that I've never told any reporter," stated Sean Treglia, a former program officer of the Pew Charitable Trusts, during a March 2004 conference at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. "Now that I'm several months away from Pew and we have campaign finance reform, I can tell this story." Speaking to an audience of the initiated, Treglia described how the crusade for campaign finance reform was “an immense scam perpetrated on the American people by a cadre of left-wing foundations and disguised as a ‘mass movement,’” wrote New...

[O]ne big loser was... McCain-Feingold campaign finance "reform".... Preliminary reports say a record $3.9 billion was spent on this year's Presidential and Congressional campaigns, 30% more than four years ago. Instead of severing the supposedly corrupting links between big money and politics, the reform's main effect has been merely to channel the cash through different political hands, and with less accountability. ...McCain-Feingold has succeeded in the narrow goal of staunching the flow of contributions from corporations, Big Labor and wealthy individuals to the two major political parties. Labor unions have turned more of their attention to voter registration and turnout....

<p>Senator John McCain's Reform Institute has suffered some bad press recently due to its involvement in an influence-peddling scandal with Cablevision. As usual, however, mainstream media have failed to go to the root of the matter.</p> <p>Founded on June 26, 2001, McCain's Reform Institute for Campaign and Election Issues has long served as a nerve center for the so-called "campaign finance reform"movement - a movement which has done nothing to clean up campaign finance, but has done a great deal to empower federal judges and government bureaucrats to regulate political speech, in defiance of the Bill of Rights.</p>

Judging from today’s horrific debut of the humongously pre-hyped celebrity blog the Huffington Post, the Madonna of the mediapolitic world has gone one reinvention too many. She has now made an online ass of herself. What Arianna Huffington's bizarre guru-cult association, 180-degree conservative-to-liberal conversion, and failed run in the California gubernatorial-recall race couldn’t accomplish, her blog has now done: She is finally played out publicly. This Web-site venture is the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable, because of all the advance publicity touting its success as inevitable. Her blog is such a bomb that it’s the box-office equivalent of...

Judging from today’s horrific debut of the humongously pre-hyped celebrity blog the Huffington Post, the Madonna of the mediapolitic world has gone one reinvention too many. She has now made an online ass of herself. What Arianna Huffington's bizarre guru-cult association, 180-degree conservative-to-liberal conversion, and failed run in the California gubernatorial-recall race couldn’t accomplish, her blog has now done: She is finally played out publicly. This Web-site venture is the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable, because of all the advance publicity touting its success as inevitable. Her blog is such a bomb that it’s the box-office equivalent of...

Pssst, did you hear? Arianna Huffington's new celebrity/grass-roots/pundit elite/progressive/whatever blog launches today. I'm informing you because, as the Huffers tell us, those evil, corporatist media meanies don't allow enough little voices to be heard. As Hollywood moonbat-turned-Huffington blogger Laurie David crowed: "The Huffington Post is going to balance the power out there that the media has had forever." Hmmm. Now, where did I read David's statement? Oh, yeah, in the forever right-wing-controlled Washington Post. Which devoted its Style front-page to The Huffington Post and covered it ad nauseam. Like a gazillion of those other evil right-wing media outlets who keep...

The essence of blogging has been the one-man band, the big mouth in the basement, the pajama-clad pontificator taking on the media establishment. Now Arianna Huffington, who knows something about seizing the spotlight, wants to change that. Today she launches a 300-person blog, the Huffington Post, featuring lots of her famous showbiz friends, that could redefine the nature of online commentary, or at least bring her another 15 minutes.

US socialite and journalist Arianna Huffington is to launch a super blog featuring contributions by a host of her celebrity chums, from Gwyneth Paltrow to Norman Mailer. Tim Dowling got a preview Wednesday April 27, 2005 The Guardian Welcome!!!!! posted by "Huff" on Mon May 9 2005 at 09:00 PDT Hi everybody! Allow me to introduce my innovative new publishing venture, a groundbreaking "group blog", where over 250 creative minds from every corner of my Rolodex weigh in on topics ranging from the political to the personal, and anything in between! Well, that's enough from me - let's blog! comments...

Andrew Breitbart – long the number two man at the Drudge Report – is rumored to be working behind the scenes with Arianna Huffington's new Webzine, the Huffington Report, according to Washington Times "Inside the Beltway" columnist John McCaslin. The Huffington Report is scheduled to launch sometime this month, and will cater to the radically chic. Its liveliest feature promises to be a group blog where movie stars, New York media mavens, Hollywood film moguls and other wealthy proponents of class struggle and proletarian solidarity can sound off on politics (see "Arianna Huffington Launches Group Blog for Celebrity Leftists"). In...

Senator John McCain's Reform Institute has suffered some bad press recently due to its involvement in an influence-peddling scandal with Cablevision. As usual, however, mainstream media have failed to go to the root of the matter. Founded on June 26, 2001, McCain's Reform Institute for Campaign and Election Issues has long served as a nerve center for the so-called "campaign finance reform" movement – a movement which has done nothing to clean up campaign finance, but has done a great deal to empower federal judges and government bureaucrats to regulate political speech, in defiance of the Bill of Rights. Now...