Femme Fatale

The reason for the rejection? The person had to be "recognized by the media as a viable nationwide candidate; and be actively campaigning for the South Carolina primary."

Or is the Democratic establishment just trying to protect its cozy little monopoly?

Getting back to Hillary, one newspaper, The Hill, got a bit carried away with its Clinton criticism. Which is to say, its story turned out to be fiction.

Yesterday's piece by Alexander Bolton began:

"Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) skipped an Environment and Public Works Committee hearing Wednesday that she called for earlier this year.

"Clinton's absence drew a strong rebuke from Sen. James Inhofe (Okla.), ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee.

"Clinton, a member of the committee, praised Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) a few weeks ago for scheduling the hearing on the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, a project that many Nevada voters oppose fiercely . . .

"But if Clinton was seeking answers from administration officials, she was not doing it from the committee dais. She was nowhere to be seen at Wednesday's hearing."

Except -- oops! -- Clinton was there are after all. There are pictures. A Nevada paper wrote about it. And Inhofe's office said he never made those remarks at the hearing, and that the quote was taken from a July 24 press release.

The Hill's editor, Hugo Gurdon, told me: "Any mistake is regrettable, but it's more painful when it negates the story entirely. We'll certainly run a correction."

Speaking of corrections, the Huffington Post just ran one on an Iraq story. It came after the Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb-- who was the first blogger to take on the New Republic's Baghdad diarist -- raised questions about the piece.

Barry Sanders, an author and professor, wrote a story about pollution caused by the U.S. military in Iraq and its effect on global warming.

To its credit, the HuffPost investigated and ran this editor's note, even linking to Goldfarb's criticism:

Sanders "acknowledges three 'flat-out' inaccuracies: Apache helicopters fall under the auspices of the Army not the Air Force; the USS Independence was not, as claimed, headed to the Persian Gulf in 2002 (it was decommissioned in 1998); and Sanders left out the word 'battalion' in the sentence, 'a pair of Apache helicopter battalions can devour more than 60,000 gallons of fuel in a single night's attack.' These have been corrected in the post.

"Sanders also raises the issue of jet exhaust that results when 'a squadron of F-22s, say, fly sortie after sortie, at fairly low elevations, over a crowded neighborhood in Baghdad.' Goldfarb says 'an F-22 has never, ever, flown a sortie over Baghdad, let alone at low altitude and in squadron formation.' In his response, Sanders disputes this, but Air Force spokesperson Maj. Kristin Marposon told HuffPost that F-22s have not been used in Iraq.

"As for the other facts in dispute -- namely the number of jets stationed on aircraft-carrier groups in the Gulf, the number of stealth bombers and US planes in Saudi Arabia, and the number of aircraft carrier task forces stationed in the Gulf -- Sanders offers a detailed explanation of how he arrived at his figures. We'll leave it to you to decide the persuasiveness of his explanation. For us, it confuses as much as it clarifies."

That sure beats a robotic "we stand by our story."