Progressive nepotism!

Lefty blogger wannabes hoping to hustle a posh New Media gig get screwed over by Team Obama:

Ethan Axelrod is joining the Huffington Post, the liberal Web site that has been largely supportive of President Obama. His dad, now a White House senior adviser . . .
“I’ve been interested in journalism for a while,” the 22-year-old Axelrod said Tuesday. “I heard through my father that they were expanding, so I applied for it.”
The younger Axelrod started yesterday as editor of the Huffington Post’s new local edition in Denver, the third of a dozen planned sites that have already launched in New York and Chicago and will next target Los Angeles. He applied for the job, was interviewed by Arianna Huffington along with other candidates, and was tapped after submitting a mockup of the Denver home page. The site goes live in September. . . .

Attention, Denver-area activists in the progressive netroots community: Arianna says you suck.
Maybe she’s right. First time for everything, I guess . . .

(Hat-tip: Memeorandum.)

HuffPo scamming?

This might be nothing, or nothing much, but it is interesting:

Whet Moser, an editor at alternataive weekly Chicago Reader wants to know why The Huffington Post’s newly formed Chicago-focused venture is stealing their copyrighted concert reviews and reprinting them in whole in order to get search engine traffic. And he found other examples taken wholesale from The Onion and Time Out Chicago. . . . .
[Moser says] “If the future of journalism–which everyone keeps telling me The Huffington Post represents — is a bunch of search-engine optimization scams, we have bigger problems than Sam Zell’s bad investment strategies.”

(Via Memeorandum.) Warner Todd Huston writes:

[T]his wholesale stealing of others’ work seems strange when the latest news about Huff Post is that it was graced with a $25 million capital infusion by investors. With that kind of cash flow, you’d think they could hire a few out of work MSMers and give them a job, wouldn’t you?

That’s right — hire professional plagiarists!

Can we deport Arianna Huffington?

Just saw that idiotic woman on ABC’s “This Week,” and as always, it was like fingernails on a blackboard. George Will had just referenced the year 1937, when industrial production plummeted — eight years after the Crash and five years into the New Deal — as evidence that the New Deal did not actually solve economic problems. At which point Arianna cut in with, “Oh, George, zat’s vun of zee meeths of conservatives . . .”

No, Arianna, it’s not myth, it’s a fact. And I hope you invested all the ill-gotten gains of your divorce settlement in Citigroup, GM and Wachovia stock.

UPDATE: Here’s video:

Two books of particular relevance are Amity Shlae’s The Forgotten Man and Burt Folsom’s New Deal Or Raw Deal.