Via email, a diligent colleague at Salon pointed out, “My investigation has shown the following text on the site: 'lingerie; spread legs; cleavage; unbuttoned braless; naked with wife; best breasts; nudity & vodka; star nude; best chest; bond girl nude; hottie; bare butt; bikini pictures.'" As a point of comparison, today’s front page of the Gawker porn site Fleshbot has the words “sexy, butt, asses, submission, footjob, burlesque, boobs.” Separated at birth?

It’s not that we require hard-hitting analysis behind every nip slip. We understand HuffPo is grabbing eyeballs (and whatever other body parts the audience will provide), and that no one clicks on something called “Celebrity Skin” with the expectation of C-Span’s Book TV. We further give props to the HuffPo for offering dozens and dozens of similar "Big News" pages, on subjects ranging from Pirates to Sleep to Women's Rights.

However: For a site founded by an ambitious, intelligent woman (albeit one who made her early reputation calling the women's movement "repulsive" and an attack "on the very nature of woman"), for a site that has attracted a stellar roster of contributors and is an admirable model of innovative social media experimentation, it’s a bummer to watch HuffPo lazily relying on a steady diet of T & A and crotch grabby headlines. It’s just so ... Old Media.

Yes, there are a few males on display here, too. Care to see Faizon Love’s ample posterior? Dying to know that “Rick Springfield To Bare Butt On 'Californication'”? Didn’t think so. Nope, mostly, Celebrity Skin is getting its page views on the backs – and formidable fronts – of women. Women who are more than their hooters, though you might not get that impression looking around HuffPo. If the 838 comments regarding Jennifer Connelly’s see-through dress or the 755 debating the best chest in Hollywood don't make you consider changing the name of your own site to allboobiesallthetime.com, you are far less cynical than I.

The fact that there's currently a counterpoint story from Susan Harrow, author of "Sell Yourself Without Selling Your Soul," stating that,  "I know flashing your flesh sells magazine covers and gets people involved in polls, but I find it discouraging at best" doesn't offer much solace. "If you'd rather people notice your insights than the size and shape of your breasts," she says, " then keep them under wraps -- or at least don't make them front and center." See, it's the stars' fault! They go around waving those things -- what are we supposed to do?

Maybe attracting readers is just a matter of putting together the right magnetic poetry collection of dirty words and a few soft-core photos of starlets. And one could argue that visitors come for the "Shauna Sand's SEX TAPE: Lorenzo Lamas' Ex's Explicit VIDEO" but they stay for the "Abortion Activists Reach Rural Tanzania." Why, then, does it feel desperate enough to tip over into downright aggressive, in a trying-too-hard, in-your-face, girls gone wild way? Whooooo-hoooooooo! By the way, butt, nipple, naked, spread, blow, moan, young, threesome, nude, naked naked naked!

HuffPo, please, we love you. Now put on your shirt and stop trying to make out with us.

Turns out there's a good reason no one knew Scalia is so far to the right on the issue -- he's not. He does, in fact, believe that Brown was correctly decided. The newspaper reporter that said Scalia had criticized the decision got his facts wrong. But that didn't stop more than a few people from picking up the story before legal blogger and constitutional law professor Jack Balkin found video of the event and showed that Scalia had been misquoted.

There's plenty of unfair criticism about blogs out there, but this is one area where the critics are absolutely right. Because of the nature of the medium and the pace of the blogosphere's news cycle, too many bloggers prioritize speed over quality, and they get burned on stories like this one as a result. In this case outlets like Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, New York Magazine's Daily Intel blog and Political Wire, among others, all accepted the newspaper account uncritically and posted it.

Everyone gets a story wrong sometimes, there's no avoiding that. But in this instance, the bloggers who picked up the article could and should have avoided the situation. Scalia was never directly quoted saying something like, "I think Brown v. Board of Education was wrongly decided." The article, or at least this part of it, relied on paraphrasing. On a big story like this one, the lack of a direct quote demands, even more than usual, some stringent fact-checking. Before posting, it's just good practice to look for a primary source -- video, audio or a transcript from the event -- not to mention to check against Scalia's previous statements and even call the court for comment. It may mean you have to wait a few minutes, even a few hours, before posting what others already have, but it's better to be right than to be fast.

The crowd includes investor Jeffrey Epstein, who was indicted in 2006 on charges of soliciting prositution. Federal officials also investigated Epstein after allegations surfaced that he hired under-age girls for massages and other activities. In 2002, Clinton flew to Africa on Epstein's private jet for an anti-AIDS and economic development mission. Clinton also collected $3 million in consulting fees from InfoUSA, a data mining company that has allegedly sold senior’s consumer data to predatory telemarketers.

Although Purdum found no hard evidence of new Clinton dalliances, he reports one former Clinton advisor grew so concerned that Clinton was "apparently seeing a lot of women on the road" that he attempted to confront the former President, but was rebuffed.

"There is reason to believe that Clinton, who never made more than $35,000 a year as governor of Arkansas and left the White House about $12 million in debt, has had his head turned by his ability to enjoy his post-presidential status," Purdum writes, "that the world of rich friends, adoring fans, and borrowed jets in which he travels has skewed his judgment or, at a minimum, created uncomfortable appearances of impropriety."

Purdum also accuses Clinton of "unapologetic stonewalling" that has obfuscated the former President's business dealings, most of the investors in his presidential library, and even the role Clinton has played in his wife's campaign for the presidency.

In response to Purdum's tome, Clinton aide Jay Carson dashed off a more than 2,700 word memo. Carson calls the article a "tawdry, anonymous quote-filled attack piece."

"Most revealing is one simple fact: President Clinton has helped save the lives of 1,300,000 people in his post-presidency, and Vanity Fair couldn't find time to talk to even one of them for comment," Carson complained.

There's also some question about the reporting that led to the disclosure of Clinton's attack against Purdum. Mayhill Fowler, who writes for the Huffington Post's Off the Bus project, got the quotes from Clinton after she told him she thought it was a "hatchet job," and never identified herself as a reporter. Most journalists wouldn't consider that sort of thing ethically pure, and it's not the first time Fowler has gotten a good story in a similar fashion -- it was Fowler's who reported Obama's now infamous "bitter" comments after a fundraiser she attended in San Francisco. Responding to questions about Fowler's tactics, OffTheBus co-publisher and co-founder Jay Rosen, a professor at NYU, told Politico's Michael Calderone:

This wasn't an interview where the former president sat for questions with Mayhill Fowler. It was a shouted question at a rope line with lots of people trying to get his attention, one that Clinton answered... and answered. I'm sure most professional reporters have thrown out a question in a "scrum" situation without first identifying themselves and their employer. This was akin to that, although not exactly the same...

Would it have been better if she said, "Mr. President, I'm Mayhill Fowler, a blogger for OffTheBus and I write about the campaign. What did you think of that Vanity Fair article...?" In the interest of full disclosure, I guess it would be. But in the press of the moment I can understand why she didn't.

I (and this is Alex speaking now, and my opinions here do not necessarily reflect Justin's) like Rosen, he and I recently appeared together on a panel about ethics in new media and I came away impressed, but I'm not sure I buy his explanation here.

Obviously, Clinton was steamed about the story, but he's still a very savvy politician, and I just can't see him saying what he did if he thought he was on the record with a reporter -- indeed, he didn't say it to any other reporter. You can argue that in the age of the Internet, the ability of so-called "citizen journalists" to report these kinds of guarded moments is a good thing, and that's an argument I tend to sympathize with, but the lines become really murky when that "citizen journalist" is someone like Fowler, working with an organization like the Huffington Post.

In this case, I think Fowler probably crossed those lines. That's especially true because of the way Fowler prefaced her question, which made her sound like a supporter, not a reporter. I agree with Calderone, who wrote, "I do find it disingenuous of Fowler to knock down another reporter's work as a 'hatchet job,' while at the same time not informing a story subject that she's a reporter working on her own story (while taping that subject). Was the 'hatchet job' comment what she really felt about Purdum's work or an attempt to get in Clinton's good graces?"

If this were a more sane campaign, those mundane messages would be of little interest to anyone else. But now Peter Dreier, blogging on the Huffington Post, has suggested that Blumenthal crossed a line by sending out negative articles about Sen. Barack Obama that have appeared in the right-wing media. And Dreier, along with several other bloggers, also seems to believe that the recipients of those e-mails, especially the journalists, ought to have "exposed" Blumenthal for "spreading" the calumnies and criticisms that appeared in those articles -- which included some far-fetched smears of Obama and his associates.

Dreier cannot cite any specific instance that shows Blumenthal's e-mails influenced the coverage of Obama by anyone, let alone the writers who received them or the publications where they work. In fact, at least one of the regular recipients of those messages was an outspoken Obama supporter, and others were at least sympathetic to Obama. For my part, Blumenthal certainly knows that I have sharply criticized both Clintons and the Clinton campaign and haven't endorsed any primary candidate.

No doubt Sid assumed that his friends would keep his correspondence private, but he is also far too experienced to imagine that something sent out to a dozen people or more will remain "secret" for long. I cannot claim to know why he sent any particular article to any reporter he happens to know, but I can say that he never pushed or pressured me to write about any of that material. Although Dreier attempted to make a couple of tenuous connections between Blumenthal and material published by Joe Klein and Jake Tapper, the truth is that neither Tapper nor Klein was on his e-mail list, neither of them could be considered his friend, and neither of them communicates with him on any regular basis.

The clear assumption behind Dreier's blog post is that Blumenthal somehow endorsed the specific content of every negative story he sent out. But that assumption is logically flawed because among the items he has regularly sent out is a daily blogosphere roundup authored by Clinton staffer Peter Daou -- which invariably included negative posts about Clinton herself, her husband, her staff, her campaign, her finances and so on, as well as upbeat posts.

Aside from the fact that I considered Blumenthal's e-mails to be private communications from a friend, I never thought it newsworthy that he sent out material supporting his view of Obama as an untested candidate with vulnerabilities in his background. He didn't have to agree with what the right-wing media was saying in order to think those potential problems were worthy of attention. Whether that is a legitimate argument -- and how far to go in making it -- can be debated. It is certainly an argument that the Obama campaign and its supporters have used to warn against the polarizing Clintons on many occasions.

Glancing over the assortment of people on Sid's list, some of whom are well known, it should be clear that none of them was likely to credit or repeat the scurrilous nonsense spread by Accuracy in Media, to take one of Dreier's examples. Nobody on that list would believe that Obama shares the political views of an alleged communist whom he knew as a child -- or for that matter that he approves of the Weather Underground bombings carried out by Bill Ayers, which took place when the Democratic front-runner was 8 years old.

It is worth noting that Blumenthal's list includes Thomas Edsall, a distinguished journalist and author who has known him since they worked together at the Washington Post. Apparently Edsall, who now serves as political editor of the Huffington Post, where the Dreier article screams across the front page, never considered Sid's e-mails to be worthy of news coverage.

Occasionally some of Blumenthal's friends expressed objections to the items he sent out, and I sometimes replied to him with a mocking jab myself. But those were all private exchanges. I reject the idea that I am obliged to report on my conversations, whether electronic or verbal, with a campaign aide, even on the most controversial matters.

When the Clinton campaign distributed stories from discredited right-wing publications to attack an Obama advisor in March, I wrote a column noting that it had crossed a line and that Clinton herself was coming perilously close to imitating her old enemies. But in that case, her campaign aides were openly endorsing nasty, inaccurate attacks on Gen. Merrill McPeak in the American Spectator and World Net Daily. As I said then, I believe the excesses of nitpicking negative campaigning have diminished both candidates, but especially Hillary Clinton. (I doubt Sid liked that column much -- or many of the columns I've written about this campaign and his candidate, for that matter. But he still sends me clips, links and polls, many of them quite useful to anybody covering this campaign.)

Recitations of fact won't dissuade people who are determined, for their own opportunistic reasons, to promote conspiracy theories about Blumenthal and to impute some kind of "guilt" to anyone associated with him. I know because I've been through all this before on a much larger scale.

It is easy to pretend that Obama's political problems are somehow Blumenthal's fault or the fault of a dozen people who received his e-mails. The only problem is it's not true -- and the accusations won't help Obama.