Air America Radio co-founder Sheldon Drobny is a contributor to the Huffington Post, and he's posted several threads lately where he criticizes Bill Maher for apparently planning to have Ann Coulter on his show. In one post he called him a "sell out", and supposedly Arianna herself gave him a call. And, that was supposedly the first time that The Huff herself had called him.

There's no word on what prompted Arianna's call, but one can imagine that it followed a long, tearful conversation with Maher himself.

In the latest post, Drobny describes the Huffington Post "backstage" screen, which is apparently a blog posting screen provided to contributors. In case it disappears, here's the relevant bits:

...Besides having the tools to post, you get information about approved and unapproved comments. Unapproved comments eventually show up at an almost 100% rate...

Below is the status of comments from my recent posts all criticizing Maher and the Hollywood folks:

My Response To Some Comments On Recent Posts
(Comments: 14 approved, 73 unapproved)
Air America Complaint Department
(Comments: 58 approved, 9 unapproved)
Bill Maher: A Retraction Clarification
(Comments: 82 approved, 2 unapproved)
Bill Maher Retraction
(Comments: 11 approved, )
Bill Maher: Another Hollywood Sellout
(Comments: 103 approved, 1 unapproved)

As you can see, almost all of the comments were eventually approved. My latest post showing Hitchins fingering the Maher audience was posted 08.26.2006 at 03:51pm and yet 73 of the 87 posts have been held back for nearly 19 hours. The same thing happened with the other Maher/Hollywood posts. In the past, I have had many posts that got lots of comments that were all approved within a couple of hours. The whole point of getting comments posted on the various blogs is to keep the action going and increase the average time of each person on the blog...

...I need an explanation for the fact that Maher benefited from the unusual hold back delays of the commentors posts about Bill Maher. The blogosphere is supposed to be the highest form of free speech and with all the F words and C words I see on the Huffpo comments, it is hard for me to believe that Huffpo gives serious review of comments that need to be withheld. It is possible that Huffpo is having technical difficulties which need to be explained to its contributors. But, that aside, we don't want censorship or cronyism on the blogosphere...

I omitted the bits where he discussed his mad forensic accounting skillz.

Also, a few months ago I sent an email to another contributor about a comment I left that wasn't approved. That unnamed person, despite being a far-left loon, to his/her credit did write back with the news that he/she had no way to approve or disapprove comments. (OK, OK, it was Nora Ephron). That squares with what Sheldon says, but they didn't mention the count of approved comments; perhaps that was added later.

UPDATE: I should have seen this coming. His post has now been prepended with a seemingly acceptable explanation: two of their comment-approvers were on vacation and they were just backlogged with their discussion-stopping comments approval process.