As IF Times

link AOL and Huffington Post sued by unpaid bloggers | Reuters.

You knew this was coming, it was just a matter of time.  A few months back, America Online decided that the best way to spend their cash horde was to buy the far left wing graffiti, er I mean blog site, The Huffington Post for $315 million dollars.

Kudos to Arianna Huffington for being shrewd enough to create and promote her website as the repository for deranged ideologues.  The Post became the place to be seen for written opinions of the lefty persuasion and included scribblings from noted entertainment personalities which served to even more embellish the Post’s reputation.   For many bloggers who contributed to the opinions, having Huffington Post credentials conferred, to them at least, legitimacy, as if it were some kind of literary achievement.   In reality, most of the content could be found spray painted on the side of buildings as nonsensical diatribe.  The Post however gave voice and a stage to the raving ideologues.

Now that Arianna has gone mainstream, those same bloggers are clamoring for their share of the loot from AOL.  Good luck.  If their logic held any water, Hugh Hefner would have to share his profits with all the girls who had ever graced the pages of Playboy, since it can be argued it was their contributions that really drove the magazine.  These prototypical geeks writing pieces in their mother’s basement in their underwear may feel betrayed by Arianna, since they were supposed to be united against ‘the man’, ie the ‘establishment’.  Now it turns out, she is one of them.  So much for ideology and comrades in arms.

Bloggers write and pontificate on all sorts of things.  In general, nobody really cares unless you happen to have some previous notoriety from real life.  Then, you can spit out all kinds of flotsam and people will drink in your every word.  Think Charlie Sheen.  In America, it’s what sells, not what’s neccessarily good.  So the bottom line is, these shut out bloggers had better start writing something legitimate because their graffiti wall is gone.  Maybe it’s back to the spray can for most of them.

link The Caligulan court of Silvio Berlusconi laid bare – Telegraph.

On the other hand, you don’t have to worry about this guy being influenced by graft.  Regarded as one of the richest men in Italy, Berlusconi is presumably paying for all of this ‘amusement’ from his own pockets.  Usually, the politician is caught diverting the public’s  funds for personal gain.  Dictators like Yasser Arafat, Ferdinand Marcos and the recently deposed Zine Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia come to mind.   All of these statesmen made off with billions of dollars of their citizen’s money and lived in relative dignity, right until the jig was up.

Of course, I risk falling into the trap of moral relativism, the typical liberal technique, but with all of the incompetent and corrupt personalities running nations today, Berlusconi is comparatively saint like.  He is not starving his people and lobbing missiles into South Korea like Kim Jong Il.   He is not robbing the nation, confiscating key industries and placing his family and cronies in their place like Ben Ali.  He is not hoarding the nation’s resource wealth and spreading it only to the extended “royal family’ while leaving the nation impoverished, like Saudi Arabia and most arab nations.  He is not financing antagonists who would bomb and harass the Western world who happen to disagree with his religion, again like some Arab rulers.  He is not allowing his sadistic sons to run around terrorizing the population as did Saddam Hussein during his happier days.   He is not ruling by decree and nationalizing state assets like Hugo Chavez.   He is not trying to transform the most successful nation state in the history of man to become a flaccid socialist one,  apparently the goal of the current U.S. president.

Compared to some of the illustrious statesmen running other countries today, Silvio’s peccadilloes are rather pedestrian.  No one can deny he is narcissistic like many men of wealth. He lives like Hugh Hefner without the campy trappings and oily personna. At least Silvio has the decency to put on a suit.   How quaint that running after girls is viewed with such distaste when the world is full of other self important egomaniacs with much more vile and sinister intents.  The Italians don’t know how good they have it.  His detractors look to hang him, but the people of Italy still appear to embrace him.  And he embraces them right back….well at least the women.