The Huff and Puffington Blog

Today, new webmistress, Arianna Huffington, is launching a 300-person blog, the Huffington Post, mostly featuring her famous liberal friends, including Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, David Geffen, Rob Reiner, Albert Brooks, Bill Maher, Larry David, David Mamet, Norman Lear, Mike Nichols, Ellen DeGeneres, John Cusack, Laurie David, Walter Shapiro, Aaron Sorkin, Walter Cronkite, Gary Hart, Arthur Schlesinger, Mort Zuckerman, Vernon Jordan and Bobby Kennedy Jr. She is also tauting a few conservatives such as John Fund, Tony Blankley and David Frum. She has even lined up some college kids and an 11-year-old. "My dream is that we'll create new blogging stars," she says, according to Blogstyles of the Rich and Famous by Howard Kurtz.

Huffingtonpost.com enters the blogoshere with a dozen investors and seven paid staffers. It will sell advertising and syndicate weekly highlights. Radio host and "Simpsons" voice Harry Shearer moderates an "Eat the Press" section. "M*A*S*H" creator Larry Gelbart contributes. What a way to begin blogging!

The Huff and Puffington Blog has a respectable blogroll, however, it does not link Kerfuffles. Who cares? The rest of us, can count and taut the number of pajama sets we own. Perhaps that will mean something, to someone, somewhere in the ever expanding blogoshere.

Dirty Harry at Jackson's Junction thinks Mistress Huffington's blog will succeed. He writes: "But blogs don't cost much, celebrities love to make fools of themselves ...".

Michelle Malkin is recommending "Laurence Simon's monitoring of all the Huffers' puffing so you don't have to."

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."

The Anchoress writes:

"I think I will miss that untamed, unpredictable blogosphere. ... I am and will always remain, alone…but the writing on the wall seems to suggest to me that blogs will begin to coalesce (or congeal) into larger entities kept up and running by these 'collectives. What began as a daring and free-wheeling experiment will - it is inevitable - become mainstream. Actually, with the opening of Huffington’s place, that has already happened."

UPDATE: Arianna's Hollywood buds seem none too happy with her blog, declaring it a miserable failure already, in this piece from "LA Weekly" by Nikki Finke:

"Arianna's Blog Blows: It almost seems like some sick hoax. Perhaps Huffington is no longer a card-carrying progressive but now a conservative mole. Because she served up liberal celebs like red meat on a silver platter for the salivating and Hollywood-hating right wing to chew up and spit out."

blog, huffingtonpost.com