This is a post I put up a while back that I decided to dust off and share with you all again in light of the completion of Arianna’s Scam, AOL paying her $315 Million dollars for her Huffington Post website (don’t go there). The original headline read “The Huffington Post, A Stolen Idea!.” I’ve also put links to other posts I’ve done about her below.
Arianna with her buddy Newt Gingrich
Politico has a long piece up about a lawsuit brought by two Democratic consultants, Peter Daou and James Boyce which claims that the idea for The Huffington Post was stolen from them. A while back, I did some research into Arianna Huffington and came across some rather revealing things about Arianna and her MO. The most glaring of these was her teaming up with Newt Gingrich in the early 90’s to help bring about Gingrich’s Republican Revolution, oh and apparently she’s still hanging with him. I’m old enough to remember that bullshit and have always been skeptical of Huffington and see her as an opportunist. Her new book, no plug here, attempts to play on people’s fears about the economic crisis. I hope to find time to write about that soon, she’s been not so subtly appealing to the angry people in the country….there’s money to be made on that anger, you know? From the Politico piece…
The complaint is a direct challenge to the left’s most important media property from two stalwarts of the progressive movement. And it challenges Huffington’s own oft-told story of coming up with the idea in conversation with Lerer and other friends.
“Huffington has styled herself as a ‘new media’ maven and an expert on the effective deployment of news and celebrity on the Internet in the service of political ends,” says the complaint. “As will be shown at trial, Huffington’s and Lerer’s image with respect to the Huffington Post is founded on false impressions and inaccuracies: They presented the ‘new media’ ideas and plans of Peter Daou and James Boyce as their own in order to raise money for the website and enhance their image, and breached their promises to work with Peter and James to develop the site together.”
It certainly doesn’t surprise me to read this, that’s what Republicans are all about, making money on the backs of other people. It completely fits with her opportunistic MO. She is the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Every time I hear her introduced as a liberal, I do a spit take with my coffee or Lipton Diet Green Tea…and we all know how painful that can be. She is no liberal, she just shifted her “mark” to liberals. She saw the pendulum swinging away from conservatism with the election of George W. Bush and saw a great opportunity to capitalize on it. Recently, it seems she is jealous of all the money Glenn Beck and his sorts are making off the anger on the right. I see her book as a blatant appeal to those people, she want’s some of that money too. More from Politico…
Lerer, a former AOL executive who once worked as a spokesman for junk bond king Michael Milken, later involved other Internet gurus – the marketing expert Jonah Perretti, and Drudge collaborator Andrew Breitbart – in their launch, and Daou and Boyce aren’t the first to contest the Huffington Post’s lineage.
“I created the Huffington Post,” Breitbart told Wired in March, prompting Huffington to reply that he “wasn’t present” for the initial 2004 meeting.
Can you even fucking believe it, Breitbart was there at the start of The Huffington Post. Now that speaks volumes in my mind. Andrew Fucking Breitbart working with Arianna, and of course this is after she supposedly saw the light and became more progressive….cough, spit. I remember seeing her talk on C-SPAN in the early 2000’s and thinking, wow, a conservative who’s seen the light and grown. As I continued to watch her speak, I had a sense about her that she was slippery. She talked around a lot of issues, was very slick in her appeal to liberals, playing on their dislike for George W. Bush, using clever put downs of him to gain acceptance. I have to admit, I was digging what she was saying, I disliked ole’ W. about as much as anyone. But even then, I was cautious because of her slickness. It was only after I started getting pissed off at the misleading headlines on her site that I started doing some digging and discovered the above links.
Booman, who was the source of the Politico link above, wonders why The Huffington Post is considered left…
Is the Huffington Post the “left’s most important media property”? Really? Because I have never opened the Huffington Post unless directed there by someone else. I have almost never linked to them (probably less than a dozen times in six years). I don’t think I’ve ever been to their home-page. I think if they were really so important, I’d find I couldn’t blog effectively without knowing what was going on there. But, for the most part, the Huffington Post doesn’t even exist for me. It’s like the Drudge Report. I know it exists, and occasionally someone points out to me that they have some interesting material, but that’s it. And why is the Huffington Post considered a left-leaning site? I don’t consider Arianna Huffington to be left-leaning. She’s a critic of President Bush and the current brand of know-nothing politics of the right. But she’s certainly no liberal. Above all, she’s a business woman and a celebrity. She’s not a part of any movement I am aware of. I’m not knocking her, but I just don’t get why her site is supposed to be important to the left. For what?
I used to frequent her website until I noticed a change in course and their turning on the President. I was often sucked into the misleading headlines which many times didn’t reflect was in the actual article, a blatant bait and switch of sorts. She is very good at making money off people’s emotions, I suspect she will continue to do well in that regard. I just won’t be a part of it.
Here are some links to other posts I’ve done about The Huffington Post, Arianna inspired me. There is something about a conservative trying to act like a liberal that pisses me off, for some reason.
Ouch, Mark Halperin Shuts Sam (Huffpo) Stein Up!
More Misleading Headlines That Trash Our President!
Boycott The Huffington Post Now!
Extreme Liberal's Blog 
No doubt all this is true. I just looked up Andrew Breitbart and found a lot of stuff about this guy that alarmed me. However I don’t think I’m going to go so far as to completely boycott huffington post. I don’t just boycott people if I disagree with their political opinions. I’ve boycotted Fixed News but I haven’t seen anything yet on huffington post that makes me want to completely jump ship with them.
For example they are way better than MSNBC and I still watch MSNBC mainly Rachel Maddow and I still watch CNN. I don’t trust any of them for what its worth but that isn’t going to stop me from looking at what they have to say. I just take it with a grain of salt and mostly just stop watching it all together for awhile if they just bash and bash president Obama. As I said before though presidential bashing comes with the territory and trust me when I say many have had it far worse.
How do I know? Because I’ve read about many of our former presidents and have found that many have had to deal with more than their fair share of bashing. Maybe not as condensed though.
Arianna Stassinopoulos was known in Houston social circles back in the 1990’s when she was a right-winger and married to Michael Huffington, son of local Houston oil billionaire, Roy M. Huffington, who was a major financial donor to good friend George H.W. Bush, which then got him named Ambassador to Austria.
Arianna has been a real political chameleon, dating and reportedly wanting to marry California Gov. Jerry Brown back in the early 1980’s, then writing articles for Bill Buckley’s National Review! She was a big supporter of her husband Michael’s successful run as a Republican congressman from California. Arianna helped in the campaign by courting religious conservatives, arguing for smaller government and reduced welfare. In 1994, Michael narrowly lost the race for the U.S. Senate seat from California to incumbent Dianne Feinstein. Besides supporting the Gingrich “revolution” she supported Bob Dole for president against Bill Clinton. She ran for Governor of California in 2003 as an Independent but came in 5th behind Schwarzenegger.
When she “discovered” Michael was gay in 1998, she promptly divorced him but sources who know her have said she always knew he was gay, even before the marriage. According to the right-wing blog, American Thinker, there is also rumor that she had a “dalliance” with George Soros who as “Sugar Daddy” gave her a few million to inaugurate the Huffington Post. Arianna seems “to know how to latch onto prominent, rich men and persuade them to bankroll her penchant for lavish living. Her relationship with Soros, as with other men in her littered past, has proven quite lucrative.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/03/soros_another_golden_match_for_1.html
Great link, Grant. She is something else, isn’t she? I wonder if she will get ANY scrutiny with this new merger? I could be cynical and start an all out campaign to expose her, get a bunch of clicks, make a bunch of money, become a Republican (joking), sell off the blog to some big corporation and take a long vacation.
Of course, I might have to actually start running ads on the site if I wanted to make those clicks pay off.
Arianna’s new business partner, Timothy Armstrong, CEO of AOL, is a most conservative donor to Republicans. But Business Insider says that progressives at HuffPo need not worry…
http://www.businessinsider.com/huffpos-new-aol-overlord-is-a-republican-donor-one-of-the-most-conservative-people-around-2011-2
Take a look at Maureen Orth’s 1994 Vanity Fair piece on he, or the current VF (2/11) issue with an article on this lawsuit. Huffington’s got a looong history of claiming others’s work as her own and not compensating those who provide her “creations”. By the way, just for clarification, Breibart wasn’t in on the creation according to all of those dozen or so folks who were at the initial HuffPost meetings; he was hired on later (then fired).
Thanks for the tip….but I have read that too. I actually have a lot of research on her that I dug up from various sources. I’ve been saving it for this type of occasion.
I’m torn on whether to bother trying to expose her ways, is it worth it? Will it even have an impact? I don’t despise Arianna nearly as much as I do Jane Hamsher, she’s kind of like Arianna on crack.
Arianna is a lying, thieving bitch. She steals other peoples work, doesnt pay for it, and then claims it as her own. Someone should expose Arianna for the narcissistic conaristic, no talent, flaky opportunist that she is.
Welcome to Extreme Liberal’s Blog….I’m trying my hardest to expose her for what she is.
Love your name. :)