Let's say you're Texas and you've run out of death drugs, how do you keep executing your death-row inmates?

Is it time to bring back the gas chamber (like San Quentin's old beauty, above), or maybe the electric chair? Death-penalty opponent Richard Dieter doesn't think so. "Those things just raise the spectacle level, and I don't think it's where states want to go."

by Ken

My friend Jon snagged this HuffPost Crime piece on his Facebook page, "Texas Execution Drug Shortage: State Running Out Of Pentobarbital." The problem facing the Texas Department of Criminal Justice is --

that its remaining supply of pentobarbital expires in September and that no alternatives have been found. It wasn't immediately clear whether two executions scheduled for next month would be delayed. The state has already executed 11 death-row inmates this year, and at least seven more have execution dates in coming months.

"We will be unable to use our current supply of pentobarbital after it expires," agency spokesman Jason Clark said. "We are exploring all options at this time."

Don't you just hate it when that happens? You're just humming along, executing away, right and left, and you glance at the expiration date on your remaining supply of death drugs and it's almost up! And apparently the "use by" date on your death drug is harder-and-faster than, say, the "best if used by" date on your can of ravioli.

Which brings me to the question Jon raised in circulating the post:

What's wrong with expired death penalty drugs? Expired drugs become too safe? Side effects now include not dying?

Because the HuffPost article, while it answers many interesting questions, most of which are questions I didn't know I had, it doesn't shed any light on this one.

Author Michael Graczyk explains, for example, that the Texas death-squad people got themselves into this fix by switching to pentobarbital as a single-drug offing agent after going through this same darned snafu last year with one of the drugs in its old three-drug cocktail -- their old supply expired and it was tough to score new product.

Another fascinating thing we learn in the article is that apparently drugmakers are becoming squeamish about having their products used in executions. HuffPost's Michael Graczyk quotes Richard Dieter, exec director of the Washington-based anti-death-penalty Death Penalty Information Center:

"The states really scramble to go all over to get drugs. Some went overseas, some got from each other. But these manufacturers, a number them are based in Europe, don't want to participate in our executions. So they've clamped down as much as they can."

They don't want to participate in our executions, eh? There don't seem to be any drugs you can buy off the shelf as execution drugs, even if you're officially authorized to be executing people, like Texas is, and the drugmakers seem to be developing thin skins about having products of theirs which are marketed as sedatives and such repurposed for executions. I guess it's not quite in step with Pharma World's general ethos of "better living through chemistry."

By the way, the Death Penalty Information Center's Richard Dieter says of the Texas situation: "When Texas raises a flag that it's having a problem, obviously numerically it's significant around the country because like they're doing half the executions in the country right now." (A statistic: Since 1982, six years after the Supreme Court reauthorized the death penaly in the U.S., "Texas has executed 503 inmates. Virginia is a distant second at 110." Go, Lone Stars!)

Michael Graczyk records some of the steps other states are exploring to deal with their death-drug deficit, including the suggestion by Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster that the state go back to the gas chamber, which is still allowed by state law, though as it happens the state doesn't happen to have one. (Richard Dieter, for one, doesn't think there's a widespread return to the gas chamber or electric chair in the offing. "Those things just raise the spectacle level, and I don't think it's where states want to go.")

Now you might think that, with Texas's pentobarbital supply expiring and all those executions piling up, there would be a rush to make the most of that existing supply. But according to Michael Graczyk's math, there may only be enough of the stuff left for three lucky winners.

As of May 2012, Texas had 46 of the 2.5-gram vials of pentobarbital, presumably enough to execute as many as 23 prisoners since each execution requires a 5-gram dose. The execution Wednesday of an inmate convicted in two road-rage killings was the 20th lethal injection since that disclosure.

On the plus side, at least the Texas death-drug inventory-control people won't have to see about dumping the expired stock abroad for Third World executions.

Which brings us back to Jon's original question, about how death drugs "go bad." Actually I think he's already nailed it. Expired death drugs probably just can't be counted on to produce, you know, death, and what good is a death drug that can't be counted on to kill the son of a bitch dead? It makes for lawsuits, not to mention embarrassing publicity, perhaps insinuating that your state's execution program has devolved into something resembling a Road Runner cartoon.

Just think, when you've got to execute your death-row inmate all over again and all you've got on hand is your unreliable expired death drugs, what do you do? Drop a safe on the poor bugger?

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

Guess What Blanche Lincoln Has Been Up To To Make Your Life Worse Since Being Kicked Out Of The Senate?

John Boozman (R-AR) isn't a better senator than Blanche Lincoln was. When she was a congresswoman and then a senator she was generally rated an "F." Boozman is actually worse, although when you get down that low, there's no grade worse than an "F." There's no such thing as an "F-minus" or a "G." Boozman's ProgressivePunch score since he replaced Lincoln is a ridiculous 3.16 (out of 100) and for the current year, he scores a zero. He's generally dismissed as an ineffective backbencher with no influence whatsoever. No one cares what he has to say on the Science Committee or the Agriculture Committee and his role as the ranking Republican on the Subcommittee on Green Jobs and the New Economy (part of the Environment Committee) is to obstruct progress. One senator told me that "unless he's talking about optometry, he doesn't have much credibility on anything. He's a pretty lazy guy and just goes along with his leadership. He's good on issues that relate to eye health... If we ever win that seat back, he could go back to being an optometrist." That isn't likely, though. The Democrats aren't going to take back that seat-- even with Hillary Clinton at the top of the ticket in 2016 when Boozman has to next face the voters. And if he does leave office, he'll probably do exactly what Blanche Lincoln did-- whore himself out as a lobbyist. It's what virtually all corrupt conservatives do after their time in Congress is up.

The reason a conservative numbskull like Boozman isn't much of a downgrade from Blanche Lincoln is because she was one of the two or three most Republican Democrats in the Senate. She was always agitating for more conservative, even reactionary, policies inside the caucus and always undermining progressive initiatives in committee (and especially when she was chair of the Agriculture Committee). She was a spokesperson for Big Business and for the wealthy within the Democratic caucus. And that's what she still is-- only as a slimy K Street lobbyist. In the Senate she was always referred to as the Senator from WalMart. She still works for them, now officially as a lobbyist. She also works for other retail groups and special interests looking for special treatment in the Senate-- and a way to plunder American taxpayers. One of her latest clients is the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB), which hired her to help them get out of having to obey regulations that put the good of society ahead of greed and avarice. She's heading up their anti-regulatory Small Businesses for Sensible Regulations project. Who needs a Republican when Blanche is still creeping around the Beltway? Her goal is to make sure Business has as much say as possible in the process.

Last cycle, the lobbying firm she works for, Alston & Bird, handed out $495,617 in legalistic bribes to congressional campaigns, including $30,000 each to the DCCC, NRCC, DSCC and NRSC. As far as individual politicians, they gave over twice as much to House Republicans as to House Democrats and over twice as much to Senate Democrats as to Senate Republicans. They know who makes the rules in each body. Many of their biggest investments were wasted as their most favored corrupt politicians were defeated, like Allen West (R-FL) and Charlie Bass (R-NH) who they gave $10,000 each. Other big losers they backed-- all conservatives of course-- were Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), Robert Dold (R-IL), Shelley Berkley (D-NV), and Cliff Stearns (R-FL). And, needless to say, they handed out checks to corrupt party leaders like John Boehner (R-OH), Eric Cantor (R-VA), Paul Ryan (R-WI), Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Joe Crowley (D-NY) and Miss McConnell (R-KY).

In a post she penned for HuffPo earlier this month, Lincoln claimed her employers are "the quiet engine of our economy." Disgracefully, HuffPo didn't identify her as a lobbyist, just as the head of a "coalition," It's My Business, "giving a voice to the millions of people who have chosen to be entrepreneurs and have the opportunity to build their own businesses." Not a word about how much she's being paid to or by whom. Shouldn't we expect more from Huffington Post, even if they are part of AOL? Meanwhile paid whores like Lincoln are free to come onto their pages and talk about the government "targeting," investigating and prosecuting these quiet engines of our economy. Pure propaganda:

Throughout my career, I have been a staunch proponent for small businesses and entrepreneurs and I fought hard for their rights during my time serving Arkansas in the U.S. Senate. Their contributions to virtually every aspect of our economy simply cannot be overlooked.

It's My Business is carrying that same torch today. We are committed to protecting the right of independent contractors to choose a way of life that works best for them, and the right of businessmen and women to pursue a business model that provides lifestyle flexibility for them and their families and creates jobs and competitiveness for America.

But we can't do it alone. We are asking you to get engaged and take a stand, too. Tell your elected state and federal bureaucrats to stop their attacks on independent contractors. They are the embodiment of the entrepreneurial spirit in this country, not to mention a powerful engine driving our economic recovery. They deserve our protection. This country can't afford to let them down.

Yesterday, The Hill pointed out that "[t]here are several bills now pending before Congress that would overhaul the rulemaking system, ranging from measures that would give lawmakers the power to veto major rules to a push to limit the regulatory authority of certain agencies." Lincoln is worried these Republican measures may not pass and she's hoping Obama will institute some of things her employers want even if Congress does try standing up for the public good and insists there's a "frequent disconnect between regulators and the people who must comply with the rules they write." Business always wants to dictate the rules under which they operate. That's why they pay sleazy people like Blanche Lincoln such huge salaries.

I Hope HuffPo's Merger With AOL Works Out Better Than The TimeWarner One Did

I've written about my experiences at Warner Bros Records when AOL bought TimeWarner several times in the past, particularly here and here. Had Arianna asked me, I would have suggested she read Nina Munk's incisive book, Fools Rush In, before making the deal with AOL. Of course HuffPo isn't TimeWarner and AOL is reputed to have changed a lot itself. Still, I can't imagine in my wildest dreams that the two corporate cultures have any chance whatsoever ever melding any more smoothly than the cultures at AOL and TimeWarner did.

That merger was an absolute catastrophe for all stakeholders except upper level management. I did well personally. Employees-- now reduced to about one-third of the number they were-- shareholders, artists, customers, society in general... were all ruthlessly ignored, if not preyed upon. Everyone got screwed except Case's smallish circle and a tiny handful of upper-level TimeWarner managers, almost all of whom, like myself, got out of Dodge at the first opportunity.

When the merger first started being discussed I was the only divisional president that I knew of who was actually enthusiastic-- very enthusiastic. I had identified digital downloads as the future of the music business-- one way or the other-- at a time when most top corporate managers in the music industry still considered computers something their secretaries typed on. (Some still do in 2012.) It was clear they/we were about to have our lunches eaten. My boss, the Chairman of Warner Bros Records, recognized the urgency as well. I had hired an aggressive young computer whiz kid as the very first Internet promo guy in the music biz. Everyone rolled their eyes-- except my boss. Now we asked him to come up with a system that would help us sell our artists' music.

He did. We brought it to AOL. I was sure they would love it. They stalled for months and finally told us... it's great and it's elegant but "we don't want to set any precedents." That was the end of Warner Music as a viable firm, and, to my thinking, the end of the Music Industry as it was. The kid who came up with the system went to work at Apple and was part of the team that developed iTunes. He's almost as rich as Hosni Mubarak.

As for HuffPo... I'm happy for my friends who are going to profit from this. And I hope their shared vision for what they've created will be in the future stays on course. Me... I'm looking forward to the comedy-oriented party I was invited to last week that I didn't know at the time was a celebration of the $315 million buy out that the NY Times called an "unlikely pairing."

The deal will allow AOL to greatly expand its news gathering and original content creation, areas that its chief executive, Tim Armstrong, views as vital to reversing a decade-long decline.

Arianna Huffington, the cable talk show pundit, author and doyenne of the political left, will take control of all of AOL’s editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group. The arrangement will give her oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone.

By handing so much control over to Ms. Huffington and making her a public face of the company, AOL, which has been seen as apolitical, risks losing its nonpartisan image. Ms. Huffington said her politics would have no bearing on how she ran the new business.

The deal has the potential to create an enterprise that could reach more than 100 million visitors in the United States each month. For The Huffington Post, which began as a liberal blog with a small staff but now draws some 25 million visitors every month, the sale represents an opportunity to reach new audiences. For AOL, which has been looking for ways to bring in new revenue as its dial-up Internet access business declines, the millions of Huffington Post readers represent millions in potential advertising dollars.

...The sale means a huge payout for Huffington Post investors and holders of its stock and options, who stand to profit earlier than if the company had waited to grow large enough for an initial public offering.

While Huffington Post has been growing-- it now employs more than 200 people, a threefold increase in just the last few years-- AOL has been shrinking. Last year it eliminated close to 2,500 positions, roughly a third of its staff. Although its most recent earnings estimates beat Wall Street expectations, revenues for the fourth quarter were down 26 percent from a year earlier as dial-up customers continued to disappear. Ad revenue, which is seen as the company’s main business going forward, was down 29 percent from the year before.

Since 2009, the company has untangled itself from its ill-fated merger with Time Warner, a legacy media company with print magazines, a film studio and television channels. AOL, not fully a media company, not fully a technology company, never melded with its corporate partner.

...“The reason AOL is acquiring The Huffington Post is because we are absolutely passionate, big believers in the future of the Internet, big believers in the future of content,” Mr. Armstrong said.

In that sense, the deal carries a risk for the Huffington Post, which has had none of AOL’s troubles and is widely viewed as a business success with its own unique voice and identity. Now that it is to become part of a large corporate entity, what becomes of that unique character is an open question.

“The potential is great; it’s almost overwhelming,” said Howard Fineman, the Huffington Post’s senior political editor. “But the key will be to engage people who really want to be engaged, and make it hospitable to them, draw them in and expand the sense of community without losing them at the same time.”

I'm drowning in Déjà vu.

The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell ponders the question: "Is free the future?"

“In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win."

"Information wants to be free, in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill."

-- Wired editor Chris Anderson, in his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, as quoted by Malcolm Gladwell (see below)

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"The digital age, Anderson [right] argues, is exerting an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things 'made of ideas.' Anderson does not consider this a passing trend. Rather, he seems to think of it as an iron law: 'In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.' To musicians who believe that their music is being pirated, Anderson is blunt. They should stop complaining, and capitalize on the added exposure that piracy provides by making money through touring, merchandise sales, and 'yes, the sale of some of [their] music to people who still want CDs or prefer to buy their music online.' . . .

"He goes on: 'There may be more [professional journalists], not fewer, as the ability to participate in journalism extends beyond the credentialed halls of traditional media. But they may be paid far less, and for many it won't be a full time job at all. Journalism as a profession will share the stage with journalism as an avocation. Meanwhile, others may use their skills to teach and organize amateurs to do a better job covering their own communities, becoming more editor/coach than writer. If so, leveraging the Free -- paying people to get other people to write for non-monetary rewards -- may not be the enemy of professional journalists. Instead, it may be their salvation.' . . .

"It would be nice to know . . . just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for 'non-monetary rewards.' Does [Anderson] mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels? Anderson's reference to people who 'prefer to buy their music online' carries the faint suggestion that refraining from theft should be considered a mere preference."

-- Malcolm Gladwell, in Priced to Sell: Is free the future?,
his July 6 New Yorker essay-review of the Anderson book

by Ken

Funny how these things come together. Just yesterday, in reporting Dan Froomkin's new gig as Washington bureau chief of the Huffington Post (following his unceremonious dumping by the lords of washingtonpost.com), we were glimpsing the future of journalism though the eyes of Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald. And that's going to lead us more or less directly into the remarkable essay-review by Malcolm Gladwell that I've sampled above.

I had been delighted to learn from Glenn's report that Dan Froomkin was in fact "inundated" with approaches regarding potential employment, and on that basis I was happy to quote Glenn's comment, "People are obviously hungry for the type of real journalism Froomkin practices." I wasn't so confident, though, about the rest of the paragraph from which that sentence was excised:

Clearly, journalism itself is not dying. What is dying -- and rightfully so -- is the staid, establishment-serving, passion-free, access-desperate, mindless stenographic model to which establishment journalism rigidly adheres. As The Post's Ombudsman reported from personal experience, Froomkin's firing left "an army of angry followers" and "an outcry from a loyal audience." People are obviously hungry for the type of real journalism Froomkin practices. The Huffington Post immediately capitalized on the Post's short-sighted and myopic decision to fire one of their most (and one of their very few) vibrant, passionate and innovative journalists. In this episode lies many insights about the real reasons establishment journalism is struggling severely.

I certainly agree that the Infotainment News Media have done themselves no favor by (a) shrinking and dumbing down their news coverage and (b) purging it of anything that might be felt as hurtful by people in positions of power. Newspapers might have a stronger claim on readers' interest and loyalty if they were actually attempting to, you know, report the news, without fear or favor. And certainly it's good to know that some alternatives are taking shape, even if it's happening almost exclusively online.

Where my optimism runs aground is in any suggestion that we have even glimpsed a workable alternative to the mainstream "news" media that are now in possibly irreversible decline, however well deserved that decline may be.

In good part, this is because of the developments that are described in Chris Anderson's book -- as represented in Malcolm Gladwell's essay-review, I should make clear. While it may be true that newspapers could have tried bolstering rather than diluting their journalistic commitment as a counter to their economic decline, that's pretty much irrelevant to the array of social and economic forces that brought on that decline.

And the reason I'm recommending the Gladwell piece to you as urgently as I possibly can is, I'm guessing, the same reason Gladwell himself was moved to devote so much time and energy to writing about the book: that the reality it represents really is to a good extent real, and has to be grappled with by anyone who cares about ideas, the quality of ideas, and indeed the concept of "values" in civilization.

In case it isn't already clear, I should note that Gladwell doesn't draw at all the same conclusions from the phenomena observed by Anderson, or share any of Anderson's near-giddy excitement over those phenomena. This giddiness is reflected in Anderson's habit (as you may have noticed) of capitalizing the word "free," or should I say "Free"? It may well be true that we are witnessing "an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things 'made of ideas.'” But is it really of no concern whether this is a good thing?

Here is Gladwell again:

The elaborate mechanisms we set up to monitor and judge the quality of content are, Anderson thinks, artifacts of an era of scarcity: we had to worry about how to allocate scarce resources like newsprint and shelf space and broadcast time. Not anymore. Look at YouTube, he says, the free video archive owned by Google. YouTube lets anyone post a video to its site free, and lets anyone watch a video on its site free, and it doesn’t have to pass judgment on the quality of the videos it archives. “Nobody is deciding whether a video is good enough to justify the scarce channel space it takes, because there is no scarce channel space,” he writes, and goes on:

Distribution is now close enough to free to round down. Today, it costs about $0.25 to stream one hour of video to one person. Next year, it will be $0.15. A year later it will be less than a dime. Which is why YouTube’s founders decided to give it away. . . . The result is both messy and runs counter to every instinct of a television professional, but this is what abundance both requires and demands.

Gladwell begins his piece by recounting a scene that I like to think will send a chill through most readers:

At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he'd just had with the online retailer Amazon. The idea was to license his newspaper's content to the Kindle, Amazon's new electronic reader. "They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue," Moroney testified. "I get thirty per cent, they get seventy per cent. On top of that, they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device." The idea was that if a Kindle subscription to the Dallas Morning News cost ten dollars a month, seven dollars of that belonged to Amazon, the provider of the gadget on which the news was read, and just three dollars belonged to the newspaper, the provider of an expensive and ever-changing variety of editorial content. The people at Amazon valued the newspaper's contribution so little, in fact, that they felt they ought then to be able to license it to anyone else they wanted. Another witness at the hearing, Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post, said that she thought the Kindle could provide a business model to save the beleaguered newspaper industry. Moroney disagreed. "I get thirty per cent and they get the right to license my content to any portable device -- not just ones made by Amazon?" He was incredulous. "That, to me, is not a model."

I suppose someone of Anderson's world-view might answer that it doesn't matter what the publisher thinks, since, after all, "Information wants to be free, in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill." (To which Gladwell replies: "But information can't actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle?")

I recognize that it may be difficult, perhaps extremely difficult, to resist this trend, but difficult isn't the same thing as impossible, and of course not remotely the same thing as undesirable. I imagine that back in the days before copyright laws, cranks who argued that the people who created the content of published materials ought to have some rights in their selling were told there was nothing that could be done. "What are we supposed to do," voices of reason might have said, "travel all over the world grabbing larcenous publishers by the lapel and saying, 'See here, you can't do that, my good man. Why, you've got to give those chaps money, like a percentage of every copy you sell'?" I imagine that argument sounded pretty ridiculous the first several thousand times it was advanced.

If nothing else, I'm grateful to Chris Anderson for raising these issues -- possibly even grateful enough to read his book. And I don't want you to think I've given you more than a sampling of either his arguments or Malcolm Gladwell's responses.

There's an awful lot to discuss here, once everyone has read the Gladwell piece. I myself have, if not exactly a personal stake, then at least an active interest, as someone who used to write for money and now writes for, well, free. (No, not Free.) But that will have to wait till another time. For now, let's just bring this back to the questions raised by Glenn Greenwald about the future of journalism.

"Clearly, journalism itself is not dying," he says, and I guess I understand what he means. It's true that if you look around the blogosphere, you'll find a healthy number of people ready and willing, even eager, to do real journalism. It's also true that hardly any of those people are able to do more than eke out a bare-subsistence living -- and those are the lucky ones.

Because it also remains true that, at least as far as I know, nobody has yet imagined even the foggiest outline of a new form of news-gathering or news-disseminating system to replace the rotting hulk of the decaying Infotainment News Media. In other words, however badly the New York Times and Washington Post may be doing their job, nobody I'm aware of has even a ghost of an idea what could take their place.

(To be continued, I think.)

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HuffPost puts Dan Froomkin in charge of its Washington coverage

Now that was journalism, more or less -- from Billy Wilder's 1974 film version of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's classic 1928 play The Front Page.

"People are obviously hungry for the type of real journalism [Dan] Froomkin practices."

-- Glenn Greenwald, on Salon.com (see below)

by Ken

Glenn Greenwald has the story of the Huffington Post's hiring of Dan Froomkin, whose shocking (but maybe not surprising) firing from his washingtonpost.com "White House Watch" column enraged me and a lot of other folks. Among those who responded similarly, apparently, was HuffPost editor-at-large Nora Ephron, who (Glenn reports) --

emailed Huffington with a one-line note: "I hope we're hiring him." Within hours, Huffington called Froomkin, met with him in Washington last week, and a deal was finalized this week.

According to Glenn, "Froomkin will oversee a staff of five reporters and an Assistant Editor, guide The Huffington Post's Washington reporting, and write at least two posts per week to be featured on its main page and Politics page."

Glenn has some interesting reflections on Dan's firing by the Post (for links, click through to the on-site version):

Though the precise reasons for Froomkin's firing by The Post remain unclear, there's no question that his penchant for aggressively criticizing establishment media behavior escalated tensions. In recent months, The Post spiked columns of his that contained pointed media critiques. In the wake of his firing, Post defenders misleadingly focused on (and then rebutted) the obvious strawman argument that Froomkin was fired for being "liberal." But that, in fact, was something virtually nobody claimed. Instead, it was Froomkin's practice of exposing the corrupt practices of establishment journalists (both by his words and deeds) that made him such a unique presence at The Post. Pioneering press critic Bob Somerby put it this way:

Dan Froomkin criticizes the press corps. In the press corps, if you’re a liberal, that just isn’t done. . . . If there’s one thing you’ll never see [E.J.] Dionne or [Eugene] Robinson do, it’s criticize their cohort—the coven, the clan. . . But in the mainstream press corps, liberals don’t discuss the mainstream press. That’s the price of getting those (very good) jobs. It’s also the price of holding them.

Indeed, nothing eliminates the possibility of establishment journalist jobs more quickly or decisively than criticizing the establishment media as being too sycophantic to political power, manipulated by the Right, and, in general, slothfully devoted to doing nothing other than uncritically repeating what "both sides" say (by stark contrast, the tired right-wing grievance about The Liberal Media is not just permitted but welcomed; Bill Kristol spent years depicting The New York Times as an anti-American, Terrorist-loving beacon of left-wing bias, only to be hired by them as a full-time columnist, while right-wing polemicists who voice similarly trite claims about the media -- Charles Krauthammer, Jonah Goldberg, Bill Bennett -- are routinely heard in the very venues they attack).

In all sorts of ways, this new position for Dan is a brilliant fit, and a win for all concerned, not least HuffPost readers, of which there will be, I suspect, many more, and many more serious ones. Still, with his customary thoroughness, Glenn voices concerns. Dan has had no hesitation in calling out the Obama administration where it calls for calling out, and Arianna Huffington herself has a network of people in high places whom she may not be happier to see slammend than, say, the editors of the Washington Post were. Having spoken to both parties, Glenn comments: "Both Huffington and Froomkin insist that he will have full editorial freedom, though that commitment is often more easily embraced in theory than in practice. "

The good news here is that Dan had a bunch of offers when the Post, instead of finding a way to integrate their best reporter into the newspaper itself, banished him from its website. Actually, "inundated" is the way Glenn describes the shower of "expressions of interest" and actual offers that came Dan's way. This tells us that a heckuva lot of people noticed the job he did at washingtonpost.com those six years. It also tells us, as Glenn writes, "People are obviously hungry for the type of real journalism Froomkin practices."

The bad news is that not just the Post, which is clearly determined to be a sort of newsletter of the Villagers, by the Villagers, and for the Villagers ("the house organ of the Village idiots" is how I put it, I believe), but the Infotainment News Media in general have little, and in fact apparently diminishing, appetite for "real journalism." It seems to give them indigestion.

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