Mashed-up mascara'd Olbermann.

Ha.

"It’s interesting to watch Katie Couric drop her pretense of impartiality..."

"... as with JournoList, it’s nice to have solid confirmation of what we’ve long suspected."

Oh, ridiculous. In private, who didn't have a laugh at the names of Sarah and Bristol Palin's kids? I bet the Palin family members themselves laugh about it. "Solid confirmation"?! Spare me.

Are we going to read The Daily Caller — which is supposed to be the conservative answer to The Huffington Post?

What entitles a website to be perceived as important from Day 1? Arianna Huffington pulled it off, though I certainly resisted it at first. The success of HuffPo presumably created the opening for a conservative counterpart, but who can simply announce that they've got it?  And didn't Pajamas Media already do that?

Howard Kurtz tells us about this Tucker Carlson project, The Daily Caller, which begins today:

[Carlson's] $3 million in funding comes from Wyoming financier Foster Friess, a big-time GOP donor.

But Carlson insists this won't be a right-wing site: "I don't feel guilty about or ashamed in any way of saying we'll cover the people in power," he says, dismissing the capital's Republicans as "totally powerless."

"Our goal is not to get Republicans elected. Our goal is to explain what your government is doing. We're not going to suck up to people in power, the way so many have. There's been an enormous amount of throne-sniffing," he says, a sly grin beneath the mop of brown hair. It's disgusting."...

The focus will be on the White House and Congress; early stories will examine Medicare fraud and wasteful stimulus projects, along with a Carlson piece on the latest White House party-crasher, Carlos Allen....

So I go to the website and here's the teaser for the top story:

That's what you decided to throw in my face on the morning of your first day?! I guess I'm way out of your target audience. Jeesh. That's lurid. And Carlos Allen means nothing to me. You've got an unknown black man posing with 3 breast-wielders, for no obviously apparent reason, making me reflexively assume you're trying to attract childish men and... uh... racists?

And the whole look of the place is old-fashioned and tabloid. HuffPo had a really great aesthetic from the start. Why did they make it look like that? Everyone on the staff must be design-blind. Or there's just something impossible about using Wyoming financier money to hire a great graphic designer.

Much as I like Jim Treacher — who has a blog over there — his logo is so atrocious I feel like...

... well, let's just say it makes the Pajamas Media bathrobe look chic.

Why is Ta-Nehisi Coates shouting an obscenity at me?

He writes:

Ta-Nahesi Coates. Fuckin' Althouse. My name's at the top of the blog and I still can't get Ann's respect.

The link on "Fuckin' Althouse" goes to this post of mine:

Hey! That's sexism against Sarah Palin!

When Glenn Beck says it.

My post links to Coates calling out Glenn Beck for sounding like a sexist. It's phrased to imply that Coates probably wouldn't call out a liberal for sexism, but now that there's an opportunity to slam Beck, he's up for defending Palin. Now, explain what set Coates off in this new post where he curses me. Maybe he didn't understand my post and thinks I didn't realize I was reading his blog (since I didn't use his name in my post — I just linked). I'm not really sure. Perhaps he's so ready to hate me that he didn't pick up my bloggerly comic concision. But — wow! — there he is on The Atlantic website spewing an obscenity at me for...  nothing.

As if to cover up his brutishness, he combed through my comments section and found something offensive that one person said. He quotes someone named "grapp" — with no available profile— who said "I might respect Ta-Nehisi Coates more if he has less of a jackass ghetto name and was more of a serious thinker." Grapp — who claims to be a black woman — wrote at the end of a long thread, and 2 of the 4 comments left on the thread take Grapp to task. Nevertheless, Coates goes on to say "She'd respect me more if I "has less of a jackass ghetto name." He says he finds the comment hilarious — presumably because of the typo/grammar error. Because of the way he began his post by weirdly accusing me of some sort of disrespect related to his name, he's cued his commenters to trash me, which they basically do.

I guess to be like him I should select the nastiest comment to make him look even worse than he made himself look. But I'm not going to do that. I'm going to quote a sensible commenter there:

Come on, TNC, just a couple of days ago you rightfully chided people for talking at strawmen, and here you're writing as if Althouse herself, and not a commenter, made the crack about the name. It looks as if a number of the commenters here have not realized it wasn't Althouse herself who wrote it. The commenter is not the blogger.

There's no rule that says a blogger has to police her comment section and delete offensive posts; some like an open comments policy and some like a moderated comments policy. Althouse has an open comments policy and as a direct result attracts some odious commenters as well as some very good ones.

Come on, Ta-Nehisi Coates. A very serious apology is in order.

ADDED: Now, I see that the problem was that I had a tag for his name and I misspelled it. That brought an obscenity... and a connection to a commenter who took a racial point of view. What a jerk.

IN THE COMMENTS:  AC245 said:

I was curious to see how many other places on the net misspelled his name in the same way (as "Nahesi") that Althouse did.

1. Salon's Glenn Greenwald has it spelled that way on his blogroll.

2. Here's a post by "Bitch Ph.D." praising him as wise.

3. Mark Hemmingway has a post on The Corner mentioning Coates, Obama, and hip-hop.

4. This post on Pandagon "corrects" Coates that one cannot be both a feminist and a PUMA.

5. It's also spelled "Nahesi" on the blogroll of The New Yorker.

6. There's a post by Enchanting Juno who says "Ta-Nahesi Coates - who may just be my favorite blogger of all time..."

And that's when I got bored, after browsing through just the first 3 pages of the over 20,000 Bing results for "Nahesi".

I didn't go through any of the 256 instances of "fuckin'" on ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com that Bing found, so it's possible that he's also hurled the vulgarity he graced Althouse with at every other person on the internet who's dared to dis him by unintentionally misspelling his name when linking to his blog. But for some reason, I rather doubt it.

The New Yorker, eh? Ha ha. Apparently, the topic of sexism is like the topic of having your name misspelled for Coates. (AC245 provides links for his 6 items. Go inside if you want that.)

And grapp came back and said:

Althouse, I apologize for leaving a comment that caused Ta-Nehisi Coates to cuss you out.

Yes, I am a black woman. Really. Moreover, I'm heartily sick of names that no one can pronounce, and fed up of people in the community who get angry cuz they seem to think that ALL blacks automatically know how to pronounce the crazy names.

Coates has demonstrated to you why I have no respect for him as a thinker. Ah, there I go, marching out of lockstep again!

And:

I had a typo with 'has' which should've been 'had', I think. Coates, that great mental giant, seems to think that a typo is worth crowing over. Lame.

I assume he found it funny because it gave you the appearance of speaking like a stereotypical black person while you were making fun of his name for being stereotypically black. It's like correcting spelling while making a spelling error.

AND: My own first name is also hard to spell, even as it is easy to spell.

IN THE COMMENTS, PART 2: Susan said:

I'm a TNC reader, but what a weird issue for him to flip out over, given that his grammar and spelling are atrocious.

[Link.]

[Link]

Jim Treacher said:

Ann, I can't believe you showed such fuckin' disrespect to Ta-Tasilly Coat.

"OMG, can you believe Obama changed his mind about going to Copenhagen after all this stuff came out? It's like sprinting to board your ship at the last minute, and it's the Titanic."

"You're the Titanic. You are."

Jim Treacher has a dialogue with the global warming evangelist who lives in his head.