Blog Challenge Verdict: Huffington Post

I think I'm starting to catch on to the M.O. of the Huff Post after about 10 days of reading it.  There is no M.O.  Some articles are actually well-researched, some are just absolute opinion-backed crap with few to no facts.  It's the ultimate wheat and chaff bonanza.  I'm not sure if it is the former or latter that pays the bills, but for my money and time they could use a good editor to cut the volume in half and throw out the prodigious amount of editorial filler they publish.  For instance, Arianna herself posted this today on the front page: 

It's what people do when the only two ideas they have -- tax cuts and deregulation -- have been given full expression for the last 8 years and failed. Miserably.

That was the end of the point, in a 30-paragraph article.  That was assertion, argument, and conclusion #1.  It was followed by a 8-10 more un-backed, completely unassociated paragraph rants about Republicans, tea parties, socialism and fascism, and so on.  The post ends with a video that shows a bunch of white supremacists Heil Hitlering.  The other side's issues are twisted, the most radical statements are taken as typical, and perhaps worst of all, all the points are countered by burning down strawmen.  Reading those posts, one wonders if they should call it the Ad Hominem Post.  I just made that up right now.

On the other hand, there is this well-thought and well-argued article about fiscal problems caused by knee-jerk anti-deflationism.  Essentially, the Fed has now traded its formerly solid treasury assets for the worst of the toxic securities, and has basically lost control of its ability to re-shrink the money supply after the liquidity takes hold; it also lacks the political will to do so and the sheer chutzpah to crush the government and consumers under high interest rates.  The likely result will be large rate spreads and high inflation, since printing money is the only way to pay off debts you can't finance as interest rates rise.

The blog seems to fixate on certain things and churn out a bunch of poli-fluff, but at the same time it refutes its own hubris by attracting good writers who, for lack of a better theory, must sneak their press in under the radar.  It reads like a college newspaper: there's the one or two golden truth articles that the editor in chief worked her tail off for 3 years to get the freedom to write.  And then there's the filler.  It's a frustrating blog to visit.  You know you're going to get some very good writing, but you also know you're going to have to wade through sludge to find it.