Beside speculating on why Bill Clinton isn't showing his full support for Barack Obama — one theory says it's because the Democratic nominee wouldn't guarantee Hillary a Supreme Court seat — another favorite game of the MSM is figuring out how much money those pesky bloggers make. Are they raking in the cash like a lobbyist without a soul, or are they in the poorhouse and typing away on an ancient Brother typewriter? To the fuzzy math!

Who better to sic on the money trail than Slate's senior editor Michael Agger, who readily admits he comes "from the perspective of someone who doesn't blog." Well then he's an expert then, right? Surely he did his research to conclude the stats he cites — like "bloggers such as Jason Kottke ($5,300/month) and the Fug girls ($6,240/month) pursue what naturally interests them without many constraints on length or style" and "the LOLcat empire rakes in $5,600 per month; Overheard in New York gets $8,100 per month; and Perez Hilton, gossip king, scoops up $111,000 per month" — and such, right?

Of course not. He turned to last year's Business Week article which guestimated blogger revenues — and was summarily laughed at by anyone actually cashing the cheques.

Smartly, Agger's piece, "Blogging for Dollars: How do bloggers make money?" was filed neither under Slate's excellent "The Explainer" column, nor its sister site The Big Money, which makes tackling issues of finance its foremost authority.