It's good to be the king: Arianna's Huffington Post may have won the unique pageviews for the election, but it's going to be the post-Bush climate that the liberal blog really reaps in the rewards. The political blog just received a $25 million partnership with California venture firm, Oak Investment Partners, that will allow the empire of liberal elite bloggers to fan out into a regional setting, like the Huffpost Chicago that launched earlier this year.

Lets just hope that a firm gambling in new media won't be a repeat of the story last summer, where Goldman Sachs and Oak Investment gave $62 million to iSearch, an online marketing search engine, the cash of which Sachs probably could have used back when the housing market collapsed faster than the 2001 Internet bubble.

Tim Robbin's self-righteousness is quickly becoming the only reason I'd ever vote Republican. You know, just to piss him off.

This Huffpost rant is naturally in regards to Tim Robbins having his constitutional right to vote taken away from him…because he showed up at the wrong polling place and made such a scene that the police where called. Of course he could apologize and admit a mistake, but nope. Shawshank Redemption here is going to dig himself in a little deeper.

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See? There isn't much difference between traditional journalism and web blogging: A study done by an ex-Huffington Poster showed that the Arianna-owned site actually favored male bloggers for the front page-selected stories. Only 23% of the 1,125 posts featured during that period were women bloggers, and 57 of those 255 women posts were written by Huffington herself.

So, gender bias? Or just an elaborate form of payback by a disgruntled ex-employee?

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JOSSIP IN-DEPTH — Election Day is almost over! Let's all vote multiple times and then drink a shot for every state that Obama wins, or something.

But on the darkest night before the dawn, what will become of the old media guards come November 5th? More likely than not, there will be a spike in conservative programming and a drop in liberal ones, because people always like to whine against whoever is in charge.

But the problem is not merely a political one: with the print industry dying out like white tigers before we had an endangered species list, and not even blogs safe from eminent demise, there needs to be a radical overhaul in how news can be presented, for the cheap.

So: Not like the question hasn't been asked a trillion times already, but let's take a comprehensive (read: radio!) look again at what tomorrow might bring for your favorite news makers.

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Just because Brian Kilmeade is 1/3 of the "friends" part of Fox and Friends, doesn't mean FNC owes the guy any favors. Truth be told, you watch that show for fifteen minutes and see who the most replaceable anchor is. Steve Doocy? No way man, he's the closest thing Fox has to a level-headed conservative. And Gretchen Carlson is the pretty face, much to Kilmeade's ire.

No, finding another whiny, giggly, preening Republican wouldn't be too hard for Fox to find, especially since at least a couple people are still pulling for Elisabeth Hasselbeck to join the dark side.

So when word hit the street that Brian tried playing hardball with Fox execs for a contract re-up and got shot down, exactly nobody was surprised. Kilmeade is a diva, and the only unexpected outcome of his theatrics was that he didn't get fired on the spot.

But now Brian is backtracking and sending angry voicemails to Huffpost saying that he never asked for any special treatment at Fox. Well, except for one, small, absurd request.

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While other commercially-viable mediums like television are battening down the hatches in preparation for the day after Nov. 4th, when the loss of campaign ad dollars will mean a hit in budget (because whoops, automakers and other traditional commercial-takers don't have as much money for ads as they used to!), the guys and gals over at Huffington Post are not worried a bit.

And even though magazines like Radar and CosmoGirl! are closing left and right, and newspapers are laying off half their workforces in order to stay afloat (like those 75 at LA Times), HuffPost CEO Betsy Morgan says they aren't sweating layoffs over at Arianna's blogger farm.

Why not? Well for starters, it helps to have a bunch of writers who really put the free in freelance.

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A lot of comparison has been made of the similarities between the blogger free-for-all, The Huffington Post, and newly minted "political salon" of The Daily Beast. And you can see why: both are run by similarly-aged, blonde (one strawberry) editrixes, who were friends back in London town, both appeal to that elite liberal media sensibilities that John McCain and the GOP rails against so frequently, and both (the women and the sites) market in the type of smug, self-selection of writers who enjoy adding the word "blogger" after their already myriad of other job titles. Oh, and they are indebted to Barry Diller: Brown, because he helped finance TDB, and Huffington because she and Barry partnered together under some weird arrangement to get the political humor site 23/6 off the ground and into semi-funny territory.

But given all their similarities, surely there is some line to draw in the sand.

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Saturday Night Live is becoming a Kuafman-esque Ouroboros, with pretend feuds leaking out onto the stages of Jimmy Kimmel and the like, so you can no longer tell who is actually mad about their SNL caricatures, and who is just pretending to be mad so they can show up for a cameo. And that is totally fine, according to Alec Baldwin, who took out some space at Huffpost to declare his support of Lorne's decision to have VP nominee Sarah Palin drop-in for a cameo this week.

Except, no one said it was a bad idea Alec. So just chill out

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Everyone's a'speculating that only three months after giving birth to her daughter, Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant again. And so far it seems to good to be true: The Spears faithful rep (god that man must be tired) already squelched the rumors.

But as they say, a story is only as true as you make it (that's not something anyone says), so Bonnie Fuller and The Huffington Post are going to continue on this Lynn pregnancy lead, because it allows them to keep drawing comparisons to Bristol Palin:

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Just like it is weird, but increasingly common, to get your political analysis on television from The View, so is it to see former Us Weekly and Star editor Bonnie Fuller giving debate feedback, but that is just the crazy world we live in, so let's run with it.

After she finished Twittering about how Sarah Palin is Annie Oakley (Annie Oakley is now the de facto reference to any woman candidate), the former editrix moved over to Huffpost to give her 2 cents on why John McCain should be worried about Sarah Palin slipping him poison or removing his oxygen tank while he sleeps:

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Arianna Huffington must have a deal with the chick mags or something, because it's really inexcusable how they started elbowing in on OK!'s home turf over at Huffpost. Do we really care if Sarah Palin's lipliner is cosmetically enhanced? How does that determine the woman's qualifications for VP?

And now this whole business with Kelly Ripa's bellybutton and whether or not fitness magazines have been airbrushing her outie into an innie. Thank god the Huffington Post is here to distract us from this untimely economic crisis and looming election: hate to think of the boring publications that are still saddled with that responsibility in reporting.

After the jump evidence, if you can call it that, of airbrushing. Sorry folks, some days the news just writes itself and you just do your best to report it:

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There's been a lot of press recently (and okay, not so recently) about the deluge of the nouveau-razzi; those underage shutterbugs that freelance for Star and Esquire, berating their subjects and telling them to go eat a sandwich.

But with the rise of photo sites like Last Night's Party and Cobrasnake, as well as the recent profiles of the paparazzi themselves, the once faceless mob is now entering its own era in the spotlight. Suffice to say, once Adrien Grenier makes a documentary about you, you're officially your own subgenre of alt-celebrity. At heart though, still just terrible:

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Liberal dartboard The Huffington Post posts a gallery of close-up shots of Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Unfair criticism, or completely acceptable revenge against a woman who perpetrates unrealistic beauty ideals?

So much for Rock the Vote: A new study by Northwestern shows young adults are overwhelmed by the amount of news thrown at them regarding the election. The report found that students are confused "because they feel news sites bombard them with too much information and too many choices," which is literally the most pathetic statement ever made about this generation.

Come on dudes, time to rally, this is supposedly the year where the collegiate influences the election! Plus, no one else can figure out the Internet so if you guys can't, they might as well pull the plug on this whole 2.0 experiment.

New Ultimatum: No more YouTube salvia videos until till you kids learn how to navigate Huffpost, k?

Either Ian Parker was giving Alex Baldwin a really long back-handed compliment, or the 8,500 words he used to describe his interview with the actor is an accurate description of how depressing it is to be a Baldwin.

Baldwin, 50, has had a long career in films, is currently winning awards for his role of Tina Fey's boss on 30 Rock, and is the most successful of his tribe. Yet the man just can't seem to catch a break, at least in his own mind. And he's going to tell you allllllll about it:

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"I feel weirdly more comfortable and relaxed when I'm out of the studio, which is a sanitized environment. You pick up on the energy of your surroundings. . . . It's much more like my old job. I can really loosen up." (That's here, there, on the right doing yoga at HuffPo's Oasis in Denver.) [WaPo, HuffPo]

Remember a couple months ago when everyone agreed that John McCain would never win a Teen Choice Award the election because he was old and computer illiterate? And Barack Obama was (relatively) young and knew how to text message people? Welp, those days are over:

B&C received its e-mail from the Obama camp Saturday morning at 4:56 a.m. announcing the pick, but the McCain campaign had already sent its e-mail two hours earlier pointing to Biden's campaign comments about OBama's inexperience.

Okay, so Team McCain beats Team Obama in emails. Not that bad, it just means the GOP is finally catching up to late twentieth century technology. But it only gets worse:

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David Perel, editor-in-chief of the National Enquirer, sung his victory song over at Huffington Post yesterday. And, well, he should: His John Edwards coup at the National Enquirer left the MSM hanging because of their hang-ups in writing up a scandal. (A liberal scandal, at that.)

Who would have thought, then, that it'd be the cynical bloggers rallying behind Perel. But it does make a twisted sort of logic — the Internet, filled with its salacious half-truths and Photoshopped celebrity obsessions, bears more of a resemblance to NE than more reputable publications.

So here's Perel getting smug:

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'Phil Rosenthal's story on Arianna Huffington's foray into the local blogging market included this line: "Writers work pro bono." "Pro bono" means "for the public good." What Rosenthal should've said is that Huffington wants writers to work for free so she can sell ads around their work. That ain't the public good. That ain't good, period.' [Romenesko]

CNN has plans to supplement their staff with non-traditional (read: not real) reporters, who will gather all their newsiest news armed only with a laptop and their bookmarks to The Drudge Report. Typically we call these people bloggers, but what do we know, we would never have called Richard Quest a reporter either and apparently he is.

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