At least Froomkin will be around other ex-Posties. He joins former WaPo investigations editor Lawrence Roberts, who joined HuffPo's new investigative fund in May, and Thomas Edsall, the longtime WaPo reporter who joined as titular political editor two years ago. Then there's Nicholas Graham, a Huffington Post associate editor and member of the family that owns the Washington Post.

Froomkin, who many supporters believe was ousted over the aggressive tenor of his reporting, will head HuffPo's Washington bureau, overseeing four reporters and an assistant editor. He'll thus learn first hand how deeply involved Arianna Huffington is the publication of her website, from arranging the front page to spiking articles for running afoul of her preferred political paradigm. Get ready for some fun, long phone calls, Dan. Try not to break any desks or strain your vocal chords.

(Pic by yksin)

Sanctions have failed, Iran will nuke us all within days, and we (sorry, they! Only Israel has the balls to do what that commie fag Obama won't, because he loves the terrorists) will be greeted as liberators. No, seriously, John Bolton thinks the people of Iran would welcome a military invasion by Israel.

Significantly, the uprising in Iran also makes it more likely that an effective public diplomacy campaign could be waged in the country to explain to Iranians that such an attack is directed against the regime, not against the Iranian people. This was always true, but it has become even more important to make this case emphatically, when the gulf between the Islamic revolution of 1979 and the citizens of Iran has never been clearer or wider. Military action against Iran's nuclear program and the ultimate goal of regime change can be worked together consistently.

Hah. Ha ha ha.

Elsewhere, Dana Milbank reports on dumb messages on Obama's Facebook wall, David Broder wonders if there is maybe still racism anywhere (conclusion: probably!), and David Ignatius reports that those wacky Russians have loved strongmen for many years.

But how are these guys all doing traffic-wise? (Maybe we should stop linking to them!)

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The stories of Vibe's dead are trickling in. Here's a good/bad one: a photographer named David Anthony found out in the middle of a photo shoot for Vibe that the magazine was folding. He finished up, so as not to disappoint the subject, and will probably give the photos to the kid he was photographing. He seems like a nice guy so maybe toss him some work! Also The Root has a decent eulogy for the magazine.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The cheeky headline of Michael Wolff's column today: "Do You Use a Vibrator?" Quiet, Michael Wolff.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Fired Washington Post columnist/ blogger Dan Froomkin: "Not offending people is not a business model, you've got to have something to say." Right you are, Dan Froomkin. That's why you are more interesting than the Washington Post's editorial board.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.A tipster tells us that yesterday's layoffs at Spin comprised about 20% of the entire staff—more than ten people. The magazine's freelancers were all dropped, an editorial assistant and some sales staffers were fired, and the art department and the website were hit hard, we hear. If you're a former staffer who'd like to gripe, email us.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Sunny newspaper news of the day: McClatchy could default on its debt by the end of the year, meaning the company could face bankruptcy; MediaNews is facing an ugly credit picture; and a financial planning trade association wrote a PR column on planning for retirement and managed to place it in several different papers across the country, under different bylines. PR hit of the week!

City Paper editor Eric Wemple, a veteran Post Kremlinologist, has a lengthy reported story on the firing of Froomkin. It is very good! But it has its flaws. Wemple really, really wants to trash both the Post and the idiot liberals who trash the Post, so he quickly dispenses with the "it's because Froomkin was too liberal" theory, mocking the bloggers who've made that argument.

But, well, Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald are both terribly excitable and prone to hyperbole, demonization, and over-simplification—but they are sure as hell not idiots.

Still, we accept that ideology was not the reason! It was traffic! "'His traffic had gone way down,' says Fred Hiatt, the paper's editorial page editor. Froomkin himself uses the same talking point: 'Traffic definitely did go down.'" And why is that?

"'A chronic problem had been promotion of the column on the homepage. My readers complained that it was harder and harder to find all the time,' says Froomkin." But that might be because of the ideology thing we dismissed earlier! So we hedge: "Zero: The amount of sympathy Froomkin will get from other Posties on how visible and navigable his stories have been on washingtonpost.com-that's a common affliction at the paper."

And, meanwhile, the Greenwald/Sullivan argument that Froomkin bugged the shit out of everyone else at the paper by having bigger balls and calling them on their bullshit (this is what they mean by "liberal" btw)? Well it's true that they refused to let him print anything that too much resembled "media criticism," which was a lot of his work.

"Marisa Katz, the paper's Web opinions editor, says the dinner story 'read more like a Howie Kurtz media column, or one of Dan's Nieman Watchdog items, than a post focused on the Obama White House.'"

God, the day Howie writes anything as perceptive about the media as Froomkin we'll send him flowers.

But in the end, yes, we believe the "traffic" thing. We also happen to believe that "traffic" is a shitty reason for a newspaper to fire a reporter, and further we are pretty sure that his traffic would've been better if he'd been promoted better, and the reason he wasn't promoted better was maybe because he bugged people on the print side, and of course, at the end of the day, "traffic" is not actually a standard they'd apply to a print columnist. And most of their print columnists fucking suck.

So yeah, $100,000 a year is a lot for a struggling paper to pay a guy with falling page views, but how much do they pay Dana Milbank? Or Richard Cohen? And what's the ROI on those guys? (Actually, the traffic for those two is probably pretty good, because everyone on the internet fucking hates them.)

Today's op-ed page features Iraq architect and Reagan-era friend-to-dictators Paul Wolfowitz, who should never be heard from, ever, ever again, on any topic, because lost any and all foreign policy credibility he might've ever once been thought to possess even before he was forced to resign from the Wold Bank after giving his girlfriend a raise. He would like to talk about Iran. Specifically, the man who probably actually hoped Ahmadinejad would win so that we could go to war with Iran would like President Barack Obama to aid the oppressive regime's claims that the opposition is a foreign-sponsored threat to the nation's independence by making some sort of public statement about it, or something.

What he actually wants Obama to do is unclear. He would like him to be more like Reagan, who didn't know what to do when his buddy Ferdinand Marcos' regime collapsed, but who then eventually decided to let Marcos flee the nation after discouraging him from killing too many protesters. A real profile in courage.

That does not mean that we need to pick sides in an Iranian election or claim to know its result. Obama could send a powerful message simply by placing his enormous personal prestige behind the peaceful conduct of the demonstrators and their demand for reform — exactly the kind of peaceful, democratic change that he praised in his speech in Cairo.

Yes, abandon neutrality, Mr. President, and issue another statement that won't help anyone in Iran politely asking them not to kill any more demonstrators!

And oh, hey, what's this? It is an editorial from former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden! He is famous for things like illegal warrantless domestic wiretapping. He is very sad that Phil Mudd, "a career CIA analyst with superb credentials and extensive experience in the counterterrorism mission," was not allowed to be the undersecretary of homeland security for intelligence and analysis. Because of those damned BLOGGERS.

It will not be. Rather than go through the gantlet that we call the confirmation process, Phil decided to skip what he feared would be a "circus." The blogosphere had already begun to light up with commentary about his unsuitability for the post. His sin? Phil had been the deputy director of CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center and its chief analyst at the height of the agency's counterattack against al-Qaeda — those first years after Sept. 11, 2001, when the agency felt it had to use all the tools at its disposal to learn more about and eventually disrupt follow-on al-Qaeda attacks. Phil's personal involvement in the most controversial tactics was no more than "modest engagement," but he was conscientiously tasking all possible sources of information and faithfully connecting the dots as everyone expected him to do.

The fact that a guy who wanted to be a political appointee in the field of intelligence gathering and who was aware of and "modestly engaged" in fucking torture at the CIA refuses to have to explain to anyone in Congress what his definition of "torture" might be is proof, to Michael Hayden, that the confirmation process is broken, because of the bloggers. Boo hoo!

So yeah it is one thing to fire a perceptive and independent and ridiculously hard-working guy whom you've already ghettoized to your website because the precious print real estate belongs to million-year-old "centrists" and raging right-wingers, but it is actually way more annoying to fire him and then let discredited vile partisans guilty of various crimes against this nation pen viciously dishonest partisan op-eds on whatever pet topics they wish.

In conclusion, go to hell, Washington Post.

Froomkin wrote the "White House Watch" blog and he was extremely "Liberal" because he generally pointed out the Bush administration lied all the time. (While the rest of the paper's opinion page supported the Iraq War, etc, they really do suck). Here's the paper's shitty explanation:

I think the easiest way to put it is that our editors and research teams are constantly reviewing our columns, blogs and other content to make sure we're giving readers the most value when they are on our site while balancing the need to make the most of our resources. Unfortunately, this means that sometimes features must be eliminated, and this time it was the blog that Dan Froomkin freelanced for washingtonpost.com

Translation: the Washington Post has to be even more conservative now with Obama as president or else they won't be taken "Seriously," by assholes.

[Politico, Wonkette]