The only non internet person on Couric's list, in fact, is FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. The other people who control the media, according to the CBS Evening News anchor, are all Web heads:

• Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
  
• Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington.
  
• The founders of the women's blogging network BlogHer: Jory Des Jardins, Elisa Camahort Page and Lisa Stone. This is a big stretch but we're assuming Couric is trying to imagine the less sexist world she'd like to live in and lend some buzz to a feminist cause. Fair enough.
  
• Craig Newmark, Craigslist founder.
  
• Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone.
  
• Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Couric is obviously just trying to butter up people who might be able to help her ditch the old fuddy-duddies at CBS News and expand her promising sideline in lifecasting. Which is, frankly, brilliant. We know some other people who might be able to help you Katie, call us.

Oh, and the Jewish thing? Couric is no anti-Semite, but we couldn't help but notice that her list of people who supposedly control the media does contain a majority of people of Jewish descent: Brin, Page, Newmark, Zuckerberg, Genachowski and Camahort Page.

Of course, the pace of change in Silicon Valley has a way of leveling these old-world distinctions. Page's family was non-practicing; Zuckerberg has gone atheist and Camahort Page is "a total non-religious person."

[via Bay Newser via NBC Bay Area]

A note received by LA Observed reveals that in its local effort, the Huff Po is pretty much sticking with what they know: getting people to blog for free on the promise of fame, exposure and influence.

The email reads:

I am pleased to announce that the Huffington Post is coming to Los Angeles. We'll be launching a local edition of our news and opinion site in early December, and are hoping you would like to be part of it.

A key element of HuffPost LA will be a group blog where some of Southern California's most knowledgeable and creative minds weigh in on everything that makes Los Angeles such a diverse and unique city. Any subject is fair game, from state and city politics to cultural and business trends to the local sports teams. From the beaches to the desert, Michelin-starred restaurants to taco trucks, the Staples Center to Disneyland, the Lakers to the Dodgers, USC to UCLA, our bloggers will cover all aspects of life in Los Angeles.

We're hoping you'll add your voice to the mix, weighing in when you see something on the street that strikes you or find a worthy cause you feel isn' t getting the coverage it deserves. The HuffPost LA will let you react to the news or make some of your own.

There are no deadlines or commitments. You can blog as often or as infrequently as you like, in posts short or long. (We've generally found that between 400-800 words works best.) Its a great way to impact the local conversation.

The move creates a fabulous new ladder of ascent for aspiring young dreamers looking to scale the heights of the LA swanky cocktail party-centric web journalism.

The Grazer Cultural Attaché slot is one of Hollywood's most-fabled sinecures. The job as it, has been described, focuses around bringing in the great thinkers of the land to meet with the greatest producer of our times for a free-wheeling meeting of the minds. Past great minds wrangled over the years are said to include Jonas Salk, Edward Teller and author Malcolm Gladwell as well as less renowned professors and thinktank dwellers who've been wheedled into showing off their knowledge wares beneath Grazer's Beverly Hills throne.

While the responsibility of genius-wrangling has been traditionally assigned to a one (or in recent months, a couple) Imagine employees, former workers describe the process as consuming the entire office, with all employees brainstorming and submitting a list of names for Grazer himself to whittle down.

In May of last year, when Brad Grossman, Grazer's former CA stepped down, an email seeking his successor was widely circulated and reported on. The email contained the following job description:

This person would be responsible for keeping Brian abreast of everything that's going on in the world; politically, culturally, musically... They're also responsible for finding an interesting person for Brian to meet with every week... an astronaut, a journalist, a philosopher, a buddhist monk... There is LOTS of reading for this position! Grazer may ask you to read any book he's interested in. You'll probably get to read about 4 or 5 books a week and you may be required to travel with him on his private plane to Hawaii, New York, Europe-teaching him anything he asks you about along the way... You will also be provided with an assistant... Salary is around $150,000 a year... You will be to Grazer what Karl Rove was to Bush.

The task of finding his own "architect" however, finding a mind worthy of the being his personal Karl Rove, may have been too much for the The Klumps producer. Grazer gave an interview to, ironically, to the Huffington Post last December in which he claimed himself attaché-free. He said:

That was sort of a joke title. I've been out meeting different people, I have a record, for 24 years, of meeting someone every two weeks. It helps inform your filter and hopefully informs your taste. I don't have anyone that's doing that for me right now. I use a couple of my assistants and I just say 'hey, can I meet so-and-so' and then we work on it or I'll call them myself, but I don't have a person that does that any longer.

Considering to whom he was speaking, Grazer may just have been wanting to hide his attaché from Arianna's potentially poaching claws. Whether the title was formally bestowed upon him or not, sources tell us that Silverman, who had been Grazer's assistant, was in fact acting in the Karl Rovean role. For a cultural attaché to leap out of that heady role after little more than a year at most, seems a bit abrupt, but perhaps once you have tasted the air at those heights, it is hard not to climb ever higher, right into the eagle's nest of all showbiz self-congratulation, The Huffington Post.

Arianna Huffington has allowed her editors to run ultra-close ups of the aging body of Vogue's Anna Wintour ("what does she really look like?") and now actresses Lindsay Lohan ("unedited" and splotchy) and Elizabeth Hurley (a bit sweaty). It's a case of her unprofitable company's need for monetizable, non-political Web traffic (read: cheap celebrity clicks) running headlong into Huffington's need to suck up to celebs, who write for her site and come to her parties and help her seem very glamorous.

We won't lecture Huffington on her company's too-often-shoddy attempts to make money in the online publishing racket. At least, not in this post. But we will keep her honest: If Huffington is going to run unedited pictures of others, it's only fair there should be some unedited pictures of her out there.

Click any of the images below to pop-up large, hi-res versions. (Warning, this may slow down your web browser and ruin your lunch.) We've played by HuffPo rules: Posed, red carpet pictures with no editing. We've also excerpted a highlight, as Huffington did with Wintour.

UPDATE: Jessica Wakeman at The Frisky notes that the first chapter of Huffington's book On Becoming Fearless is about positive body image. Plastering someone's picture on HuffPo is certainly one way to nudge that person toward becoming "fearless."

It would seem, you see, that pundits on right-wing Fox News and lefty Huffington Post have arrived at the same place with regard to Swine Flu vaccines: They are dangerous and should be avoided!

Attached, find a clip of Fox's Glenn Beck riling up a studio audience against "this government's" flu shots, and saying the vaccines are kind of barbaric and backward.

And over here on HuffPo you can find "Dr. Frank Lipman" saying much the same thing: He advises "NO!" against swine flu vaccines (in bold and caps), due to an unholy alliance between the government and "the Pharmaceutical Industry" (again with the caps). But he does say "yes" to Vitamin D supplements, fish oil, "antiviral herbal supplements," "a probiotic daily... with 10-20 billion organisms," and a ready supply of "homeopathic Oscillococcinum."

Astronomer and former HuffPo contributor Phil Plait calls this "far-left New Age... antivax nonsense" over on Discover Magazine's website, advising, sensibly, that people consult their actual personal doctors on the matter. Controversy also dogged HuffPo's health coverage back in May, when another Living section writer suggested treating swine flu with colon cleanses. The writer, who just happened to be selling a cleanse book, was duly rebuked by a doctor writing for Salon.com.

At the time, we noted that the Living section, in which both these controversial swine flu articles have appeared, was stocked by writers recruited by Huffpo "Senior Editor At Large" Russell Bishop John Morton, a disciple of the Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness, to which HuffPo publisher Arianna Huffington belongs. At least one Living section editor has reportedly been forced by Huffington to attend an "Insight" seminar, organized by a group with close ties to MSIA.

Former members have called MSIA a cult of personality around leader John-Roger (pictured, left, with Huffington in 2004), who acolytes believe can heal the ill and who is said to eschew Western medicine. One ex-member described in his memoir John-Roger scolding him for using prescription drugs, rather than just a "natural... nutritionist," to rid himself of parasites contracted on a trip Africa (see the end of this post for more).

We'd hoped HuffPo's new medical editor Dr. Dean Ornish, who joined in August, could improve HuffPo's health coverage. It's not clear if he signed off on this latest article; we're curious what his thoughts are. Perhaps he'll leave a comment here as he did on our last post. In the meantime we'll enjoy observing the comical similarities between the people near the furthest edges of Fox News and HuffPo.

Today's appearance, which involved a discussion of corporate executive "narcissism" and excess spending (see attached clip), should have been jarring for anyone familiar with Huffington's lifestyle and spending habits. The Brentwood, California-based internet mogul might drive a Prius and engage in environmental posturing, but that doesn't keep her from hitching rides on David Geffen's jet; hopping on a private plane with Ari Emanuel and Larry David for the New Hampshire primaries; or cruising around the ocean on Larry Ellison's enormous yacht (partly owned by Geffen).

Such gallivanting must feel utterly natural to Huffington, a former socialite who started HuffPo from her mansion following an eight-year marriage to wealthy oil scion Michael Huffington. Her spending apparently strikes Huffington as something utterly different from what those evil Wall Street types did.

But Huffington's no penny pincher in the corporate suite, either. Her profligate ways became an issue with HuffPo's board, an insider told us. Huffington denied that charge. But there's no question she throws lavish parties, including HuffPo's A-list inaugural ball at the Newseum in January. And with HuffPo's editorial headquarters in New York, she's constantly racking up travel expenses, including that time, notorious internally, when she sent an assistant across the country and back to fetch her passport.

Also, rather than just rent a Gotham apartment, Huffington became a frequent guest at the Mercer Hotel luxury boutique. And her travel preferences are said to be exactingly cushy: First class, aisle, bulkhead seat on a three-class plane only, fully refundable and non-stop. Preferably American or United. (Huffington, to be fair, sometimes relaxes these requirements for a convenient Southwest Airlines hop to San Francisco or Vegas. Southwest has only one class of seating.)

But that's apparently small time, as far as Huffington is concerned, not to mention a royal pain in the neck to her and the editors she has used as personal secretaries. After one infusion of fresh capital, Huffington was heard internally telling staff that everyone's lives would be greatly improved "once we get the jet."

It would seem that was one spending spree that was never approved, and for good reason: It's an absurd idea. Even assuming Huffington Post is on track to more than double last year's purported revenues of $9 million, as one anonymous insider claims, that's not jet money. (Huffington and her spokesman did not answer repeated inquiries on revenue.) At the absolute low end, the cost would start at $3 million, before you get to operating costs which for jet aircraft are typically in the thousands of dollars per hour. Fractional ownership jets also cost in the multiple thousands of dollars per hour to operate, in addition to an upfront fee starting at several hundred thousand dollars.

Not to mention the fuel guzzled by one of these babies each year cancels out the moderate environmental savings produced by a few fleets of Priuses.

To grasp how absurd such a purchase would be for Huffington at this stage of her corporate career, consider that News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch flew commercial after he'd already assembled a global newspaper empire and bought the 20th Century Fox movie studio and started the Fox television network. He only switched to a private plane, biographer Michael Wolff has written, after then-underling Barry Diller got one first.

And yet Huffington is lecturing America on corporate excess. Luckily for her, being a hypocrite has never really kept the internet publisher from making her political points forcefully — and often quite effectively. The only question is whether it will keep her from building a real business out of her publication.

(Jet pic: A bargain basement Eclipse 500. By Geoff Collins.)

In a bizarre "blog" clearly written by one of her interns, Huffington has announced a new series of "blogs" by Marcus Buckingham, a poor-man's Tony Robbins who wrote a book called Find Your Strongest Life (and then what—end all your other, weaker lives?), aimed at combating the epidemic of ladysadness. Not clinical depression, not suicide, not deteriorating quality-of-life measures—just sadness:

According to study after study, women are becoming more and more unhappy. This drop in happiness is found in women across the social and economic landscape. It doesn't matter what their marital status is, how much money they make, whether or not they have children, their ethnic background, or the country they live in. Women around the world are in a funk.

Anyway, be-funked women of the world, don't fear. Marcus Buckingham, a man, knows what's wrong with you and how to fix it.

If you'd rather get your life-happiness advice from a woman, though, we've distilled some important steps to happiness by closely observing how Huffington herself achieved her beatific perch:

1) Marry a gay oil millionaire.

2) Join a cult.

3) Hang out with Newt Gingrich and write for the National Review.

4) Suck up to celebrities by telling them you are interested in their "ideas."

5) Ditch the gay dude and Gingrich, engage in a public and inexplicable ideological reversal, and start a web site where people write for free.

6) Have interns do everything for you, including write vague "blogs" about the latest shiftless guru you've met at party somewhere who will be writing for free on said blog.

Though it's garnered $25 million in venture investment, HuffPo in January was making about one fourth the revenue of content competitor Salon.com, valued at just $700,000 by the public markets. This might explain why Eric Hippeau, the investor CEO recently installed to fix HuffPo's finances, has hired former Yahoo ad chief Greg Coleman as president and chief revenue officer, as reported by Kara Swisher of All Things . Coleman shoves aside, then, current Chief Revenue Office James Smith, who has been at HuffPo for nearly three years after stints at AOL and IAC.

We can't say that's a terrible move, given Smith's track record, but it's by no means a given that Coleman can go much further selling HuffPo's notoriously sketchy pageviews. But then he, too, has worked at AOL, known as much for its dodgy accounting and traffic-goosing as for its wholesome oxfords-and-khaki corporate uniform (Coleman remains a fan). So there's some hope.

When it gets cropped as an internal ad, it looks even weirder:

There are plenty of other photos of him out there, many in the public domain. Get well soon, Jeff.

Ornish's appointment as HuffPo medical editor was first reported in Salon two weeks ago; HuffPo issued a formal announcement today. Ornish's practice of taking money from people who make terrible, unhealthy food is controversial but not unprecedented; Ornish's clients no doubt appreciate the title of his book Eat More, Weigh Less, if not the content, which says to avoid meat and simple sugars. The Harvard-trained medical professor is at least open about his deals; his latest HuffPo column openly admits taking money from Safeway, then quicky urges Congress — under lobbying by Safeway CEO Steve Burd — to emulate the grocery chain's health plan.

Safeway cut costs partly by incentivizing patients to exercise and quit smoking. But Ornish never mentioned its less pleasant side: the plan shifted costs to patients, spiking deductibles and requiring people to pay 20 percent "coinsurance" when they got sick. The net impact was to raise costs for many diseased people who, through no fault of their own, were not well enough to meet Safeway's incentives. These problems have all been outlined by one Dr. Don McCanne, who you might know from such websites as.... the Huffington Post. Let's see if the good doctor contributes there again.

(Pic: Huffington and Ornish at Huffington's 2004 book party. Getty Images.)

Arianna Huffington is famously aggressive about plucking bloggers from her personal life; in 48 hours last year she invited "someone at a book signing... a fifteen-year-old lecture attendee; a bookstore owner; the Asperger's-afflicted teen-age son of a radio d.j.; a woman... who was trying to stop insecticide spraying."

But the internet mogul doesn't pay the vast majority of her contributors; they must make the work pay elsewhere, and this is where HuffPo gets itself into trouble. Kim Evans, who wrote about treating swine flu with enemas, just happens to be the flacking author of a book called Cleaning Up! The Ultimate Body Cleanse. New York City's comptroller, William Thompson Jr., has used his HuffPo blog as an extension of his mayoral campaign. And so on

More alarming is the site's relationship with Russell Bishop, like Arianna Huffington a disciple of the culty Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness and its worshipped leader John-Roger. Bishop co-founded the employee development firm Insight Seminars with John-Roger; Insight shares a "Spiritual Director," John Morton, with the religious group and at one point its headquarters was monitored by John-Roger via widespread listening devices, according to a Los Angeles Times exposé.

Arianna Huffington has forced her staff to attend Insight retreats, according to insiders.

She's also installed Bishop as HuffPo "Senior Editor at Large." Bishop's role, an insider tells us, is mainly to recruit bloggers to the Living section and shape its tone; it's this same Living section that contains the pseudo-medical articles Salon's doctor, and a great many science bloggers, complain about. This, perhaps, explains why the section has so many MSIA true believers.

Indeed, Huffington's relationship with MSIA — she is an ordained "Minister of Light" in the group and loads her iPod with guided MSIA meditations — might also give a clue as to why her website has such a heavy focus on alternative treatments.

According to Life 102, a memoir by disaffected ex MSIA member Peter McWilliams, John-Roger discouraged traditional medical treatments, often "healing" people with his own spiritual powers. After McWilliams got sick in Africa, apparently from parasites, the guru advised him to go to a self-described "nutritionist" rather than a real doctor. When he did visit a real doctor, John-Roger admonished him:

When I told J-R about my rapid healing thanks to Western medicine... he told me it was just "a coincidence" that I started getting better within twenty-four hours of taking the prescription. "The natural way was working, and you would have gotten better at exactly the same time because what cured you was the natural medication. The prescription drug just polluted your system, now I've got to work on taking all the toxicity of it out of your system."

Now, thanks to the Huffington Post, we can all question Western medicine in this manner.

(Pic: Huffington and John-Roger at a 2004 book party.)

Arianna Huffington crowed after the 2008 presidential election that her website is "more participatory" than publications that practice journalism "the old way." But she's a favor-trading traditionalist when it comes to distributing money: Even the best contributing bloggers are unpaid, while paying gigs tend to go to VIPs.

Some have earned their status. Others were born into it.

Which isn't to say the well born are necessarily unqualified for their jobs: HuffPo is notoriously hard to work for, with famously high turnover; couple this with the site's national expansion and it's easy to see why HuffPo is hungry for young talent. But aren't there, like, some laid off journalists out there, with actual experience?

Here are some of the well-connected VIP spawn Arianna's taken on:

Ethan Axelrod

Ethan Axelrod is the son of Barack Obama's longtime adviser David Axelrod. The 22-year-old has written and edited for his student newspaper at Colorado College, according to the Washington Post, and apparently has no other professional journalism experience. He will edit HuffPo's Denver edition.

Mediaite quotes insiders saying he's modest about his killer genes:

"He's a very nice, unassuming guy," one staffer told Mediaite. "He's smart, obviously – he comes from good stock."

Funny that the Post's Howard Kurtz didn't mention his newspaper's own family connection to the HuffPo (see next).

(Photo via Axelrod's Facebook profile)

Nicholas Graham

Nicholas Graham is part of the same Graham family that owns the Washington Post. Formerly an Associate News Editor at HuffPo, Graham appears to have recently become Associate Video Editor. One insider tells us his predecessor, Patrick Waldo, was well liked inside of the company but was recently pushed out. (Pic via NCAA YouTube)

Elyssa Spitzer

It's hard to begrudge Elyssa Spitzer her HuffPo internship for at least two reasons. One, as the daughter of disgraced former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, she's been through a lot of family trauma in the past year and a half. Two, we're not even sure if her internship is paid. (Pic via Cityfile)

Liz Hanks

In 2007 and 2008, Liz Hanks worked as Associate Living Editor at HuffPo. We've heard actor Tom Hanks' daughter had two other jobs, as a news and blog editor, and that Arianna Huffington eagerly publicized her name and presence after she joined the staff (to a degree some on staff found unseemly).

We imagine working in the living section was scary: It was home to a wide array of true believers from Arianna Huffington's culty religious group, the Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness. Hanks' supervisor, Anya Strzemien, was, according to insiders, forced by Huffington to attend a seminar run by a group closely tied to MSIA.Despite the hubub around her, Hanks seems to have been generally well regarded within HuffPo for keeping a level head.

Matthew Palevsky

Matthew Palevsky is Arianna Huffington's godson. His father Max was a billionaire computer entrepreneur. Palevsky was in January appointed to oversee HuffPo's OffTheBus citizen journalism initiative. He hardly seemed qualified:

The effort was a crown jewel, breaking two major scoops during the 2008 presidential campaign. It was previously headed by big guns: a Howard Dean and John Kerry organizer who formed a Web volunteering institute at Harvard Law, and a Nation editor and longtime magazine writer who teaches journalism at USC. They were of no relation to Huffington; one was later hired by Pro Publica.

Katherine Zaleski

Katherine Zaleski's father is said to be close friends with Ken Lerer, Huffington Post's co-founder. Further, we're told she has her own apartment in the El Dorado luxury co-op at 300 Central Park West; her dad is said to live in a separate penthouse of his own and Lerer a few floors down.

For four years, Zaleski controlled the coveted front page of the Huffington Post — as much as anyone besides Arianna does — but later moved into a special projects role. She took over the New York section after Dan Collins abruptly quit (Huffington later claimed he was always supposed to leave the job just after launch, but that's not what she told us just before launch).

As show in the attached screenshot, the website billed the airport plan as crucial New York news. Combine HuffPo's hunger for traffic with its ugly habit of lifting content from other websites, and this is the amusing result; apparently the sarcasm in the original Curbed item was too subtle for the website's editors.

If the concept doesn't seem an obvious satire on its face, there's always the over-the-top website, which calls Central Park a "blighted urban space" that needs to be "reclaim[ed]" and assures that Tavern on the Green will "be given the option of applying for a franchisee lease in the concourse food court."

Then there's the fact that the Manhattan Airport Foundation's website supposedly dates to 2006 but did not register its domain name until April; that its Wikipedia page was created on July 16 of this year; and that it is located on the 58th floor of a building with 57 stories (hat tip to our own John Cook for digging up the last two).

We're sure Arianna Huffington, a notorious micromanager of her website's front page, will be thrilled.

Vargas covered "the marriage" of the Internet and politics at the Washington Post, but that doesn't mean he's a above some straying. He's going to oversee the Huffington Post's new tech section in the fall, reports the New York Times' Brian Stelter.

We can only imagine Arianna was breathy as she described for Stelter her "regular" emails with Vargas since the election. They apparently involved harnessing people for deep engagement, and were quite memorable:

I love his passion for communicating how technology impacts our lives, and exploring the many ways the Internet can be harnessed to reach new readers and engage existing ones more deeply - something we've been working on at HuffPost since the beginning.

Two weeks ago, Huffington hired newly-discharged Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin; a month and a half before that HuffPo poached WaPo investigations editor Lawrence Roberts. HuffPo's editors also include longtime WaPo reporter Thomas Edsall and Nicholas Graham, of the family that owns the DC newspaper.

The big impact of the Vargas hire, of course, is that it means yet another awkward goodbye party appearance for WaPo columnist Dana Millbank, who thinks HuffPo's DC bureau is basically a bag of craven dicks. Or rather was a bag of craven dicks. Use that at the party, Dana. Was.

(Pic via Philippines Embassy)

T. Boone gave up on wind power, which was a nice little land-grab scheme and PR boost, but the wind was always a front for his natural gas interests.

And you know, we could find some examples of Arianna Huffington and everyone else on that site decrying the Swift Boat attacks of 2004, or even just using "Swift Boat" as a shorthand for incredibly underhanded smear campaigns that are hurting America, and then we could point out that this man who is blogging about the Green-ness of his current attempt to have the federal government give him money is the same man who funded that Swift Boat campaign, but it's Friday, who has that kind of time?

Well, ok, we do.

After calling outsourcing "unpatriotic, un-American" on her website, Huffington is... outsourcing. Here's an item from her Huffington Post's current job listings:

After raising $15 million in funding in the fall, one would think Huffington could afford to hire some American programmers, especially with unemployment nearing 10 percent. After all, paying the technical guys might help deflect the criticism that HuffPo exploits its largely unpaid writers. As for the hypocrisy, we assume Huffington, a notorious political flip-flopper, will simply say her views have evolved. Or maybe she'll blame a flunkie.

(Pic: Roo Reynolds)

He's her uncle. Or so we're told.

Last week, Cityfile noticed a Blockshopper report that Lerer had gone in with Bartolomeo on $1,025,000 apartment in Carnegie Hill. They thought that was pretty weird—Huffington Post doesn't pay its own writers, but its co-founder buys real estate for People writers? The mystery deepened when Cityfile started digging, and found that Lerer helped Joey's sister Stephanie buy a $1.25 million apartment on the Upper West Side in March. What is it with Lerer and the Bartolomeo girls, Cityfile wondered. (Well, the Stephanie Bartolomeo connection makes some sense—she works in ad sales at Huffington Post and worked with Lerer when he was at AOL. But still.)

Do the Bartolomeo girls possess some horribly embarrassing secret that they've been using to blackmail Lerer? Is Lerer carrying on a tawdry affair with both sisters at the same time?

Things only got stranger when Cityfile put in calls to get an answer—first Joey stonewalled, then Lerer stonewalled, then a Huffington Post flack stonewalled. No one would answer the simple question: Why is Ken Lerer buying apartments for Joey and Stephanie Bartolomeo?

Anyway, the answer is: Because he's their uncle. Or so a source who knows them told us. Either their stepfather's brother or their mother's brother; our source isn't quite sure. So there's that. Mystery solved. We could use an uncle like that.

The only remaining mystery, of course, is why Bartolomeo and Lerer would insist on being so cagey about a mundane real estate transaction.

We e-mailed Joey to confirm, but haven't heard back yet.

UPDATE: "Yes, he's our uncle and he's the best uncle in the galaxy," writes Bartolomeo. We concur.

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)

The Huffington Post being called on at Obama pressers has been a great source of crunchiness! To the media, of course, because the general public could honestly give a shit. When the awesomely named young'un Nico Pitney got called on by Obama at a recent press conference, he was ready with a question from Real Live Iranians that he had asked for online previous to the press conference. Dana Milbank wrote a column calling out the dog-and-pony that was said presser as "The Obama Show." Arianna Huffington then weighed in, saying that Milbank's got his facts "all wrong."

Before defending the fact that it was choreographed (N.B. A win-win for Obama: they care about theater/the arts!) he goes out of his way to call Milbank "pathetic" for asking Obama about how he looks in a bathing suit or something. Then Milbank lays into Pitney for being such a phony. Howard Kurtz tries to moderate the table but mostly just tries not to laugh joyously at both of them. The entire thing is just awesome, because they're both right and they both just lay into each other. It's like watching a boxing match where every savage, brutal punch lands squarely in the face of its intended target. Oh, and Pitney basically calls Milbank a jealous bitch. And: as it turned out, Milbank supposedly called Pitney a "dick" shortly after the segment finished.

In other news, whenever I see people on TV yelling at each other, I can't help but think of this:

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Further reading: Michael Calderone at Politico goes all TEAM HUFFPO. Ben Smith at Politico was all TEAM HUFFNO.

Previously: Barack Obama Calls On Huffington Post Again.

[Awesome cat video via Videogum.]