Arianna Huffington

In the spring of 2005, when asked about Arianna Huffington’s plan to launch a news-aggregating blog to compete with the Drudge Report, Matthew Drudge did not seem too impressed.

“I don’t think that need is there,” he told The Observer. “I think I fill that need.”

And while he allowed that Ms. Huffington had “tons of charm and humor,” he questioned whether she and her coterie of boldface names had the stamina to compete.  read more »

It seems that most urban sophisticates these days, from politicians and celebrities to coworkers, have a profile on Facebook, the social networking Web site. The C.I.A., I.R.S., Time Inc., even MySpace, Facebook’s ostensible competition, have job networks there. To the site’s enthusiasts—and there are many; the site has 60 million users so far, with 200 million projected by the end of the year—there is no reason not to partake.  read more »

Back in September, The Observer wrote about how Hillary Clinton's campaign had forged a surprisingly friendly relationship with the Democratic netroots by carefully feeding them scoops and nuggets of information. That strategy, we reported, was masterminded largely by Peter Daou, who runs the campaign's internet outreach.

Today comes perhaps the apotheosis of that phenomenon, as Mr. Daou takes to The Huffington Post to promote a new Web video and Web site on behalf of the Clinton campaign...

Remember all that outrage a couple weeks back about the fact that The Huffington Post doesn't plan on paying its bloggers? Well, it looks like something good might actually come out of it.

In an interview with Portfolio.com, Arianna Huffington said that she's considering a revenue-sharing model which would allow her contributors to direct a portion of the ad revenue generated by their stories to a cause of their choice.

The Portfolio.com story also reveals the fact that Ms. Huffington appears to use the single word "blog" to refer to a blog post, as if she were your mother.  read more »

Last night at a party for The Atlantic Monthly's 150th anniversary, held on the stage of the NYU student center auditorium, the aging cable-access porn star Robin Byrd was looking around the room. She saw Robert DeNiro, and locked in.

"Hello!" she said, touching his right arm.

"Hi" he replied.

"Hi," she said, curling a smile.

"Hi, hi," he replied, holding his look for an extra second and turned away.

"I guess he recognized me and doesn't wanna talk," Ms. Byrd concluded. "Look at him! He's got a clavicle problem, you know. A clavicle problem."

Mr. DeNiro's left arm and shoulder were in a sling.

"Because his arm is not in a cast, just a sling! He has a clavicle problem, poor guy."

"I don't really know what The Atlantic is," she continued. "Is it something political?"  read more »

David Lauren and girlfriend Lauren Bush were just a few among the green movement's good-looking rear-guard to sip martinis and muse passionately if not altogether scientifically about the dangers of environmental degradation and the magnificence of the planet beyond Central Park.

 

“They really showed how beautiful our world is,” said the young Mr. Lauren. “It just overshadowed whatever beauty is in this room.”  read more »

First, Ned Lamont is falling behind Joe Lieberman in fund-raising. Lamont has $330,000 on hand, compared to Lieberman's $4.7 million.

And now, Arianna Huffington is writing a theoretical obituary for him, blaming the consultants Lamont brought on board for dulling down a once-exciting campaign.

"The addition to the Lamont campaign after the primary of Democratic insiders Howard Wolfson, Doug Schoen, and Stephanie Cutter has been part of the problem. According to their poll-driven culture, one must move to the center and appeal to those in the middle. And, as a result, once-promising politicians are insidiously encouraged to lose their moral bearing -- and the authenticity that made them so compelling in the first place."

I'm not sure Arianna Huffington defines "compelling" in the same way as the average Connecticut general election voter. But still, it's surely not good news for such a prominent Lamont sympathizer to be engaging in recrminations -- even hypothetical ones -- three weeks before the election.

-- Azi Paybarah

Word-of-Mouth  read more »

Word-of-Mouth    read more »

What's Next for Tom Freston? Arianna Huffington turns on abrasive bloggers! Gotham’s Very Gay Bachelor List. 27 out of 101? Really? Mrs. Tobey McGuire Does Lunch. In L.A., everyone can hear you talk about therapy and baby names at lunch. Meeting Prince Charles. Royal protocol at Asprey. Chris Meloni Rocks the Globe. The celebs continue to convene for the Globe Theater that as of yet isn't....

You'd think the day after Bill Clinton goes on Fox News and tells his interviewer, "You did Fox's bidding -- you did your nice little conservative hit job on me," the liberal netroots would be ecstatic. But some of them are considerably less impressed with the way Clinton's performance looks the morning after.

Ariana Huffington said that instead "of popping champagne corks, let's make use of this moment by stepping back and giving it some context. What can we learn from what happened? More specifically, what can Bill Clinton learn? That the bipartisan love-in he's been engaged in over the last several years has resulted in jack-squat."

Matt Stoller of MyDD said it's worse than jack-squat -- and is not going to help his wife either.

Bill Clinton's "bipartisan above-the-fray attitude which excuses his wife's fundraising events with the likes of Rupert Murdoch is going to slam head-on into the reality of the right-wing extremism that people like Murdoch put forward. Clinton stopped fighting the right when he left office, but they didn't stop fighting him."

-- Azi Paybarah

"Arianna Huffington, among others, has grown besotted with Gore's newfound 'authenticity,' and contrasts it with Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton's 'triangulation' and 'phoniness.' New York magazine slapped Gore's face on the cover and dubbed him 'The Anti-Hillary.'" –THE GORE MOMENT, by John Podhoretz, The New York Post, May 26, 2006.  read more »

A crowd of nearly 500 in the Library Theater in Park City, Utah, stayed on through a standing ovatio  read more »

The "plantation" remark seems mostly forgotten, but Arianna Huffington piles on Hillary nonetheless, countering what she sees as the conventional wisdom that Hillary is a lock. I think there may be a new "Hillary: Not Such a Lock?" bit of conventional wisdom emerging actually...and there's a lot of time for yet more conventional wisdom between now and 2007. Huffington loves the (overstated) notion that Hillary's success upstate has no bearing on national politics, and offers a usuful compendium of anti-Hillary polemics, ranging from Molly Ivins to Andrew Sullivan.  read more »

** Exclusive! **SOURCES: WARREN BEATTY TO BLOG!  read more »

Not everyone stuffed into MTV Networks chairman Tom Freston's East 66th Street townhouse on April 12  read more »

It was 10:15 on a soupy Philadelphia night and Arianna Huffington was already running behind in gett  read more »