Glenn Reynolds (rightist Tennessee Law Professor and Billy Frist supporter):

ANOTHER EVANGELIST SEX SCANDAL: I don’t think I’d ever even heard of this Haggard guy, but you’d think the picture would be enough to tip people off about the gay part. . . . (November 3)

In June, Deadspin, the sports blog, put Chris Mihlfeld’s reputation on the line with a false accusation about drugs. MSNBC picked up the story and reported it as true. Here’s how Ben Paynter reported the situation in the Kansas City Pitch in a long feature article on Mihlfeld the following month:

In April of this year, Grimsley admitted to federal investigators that he’d used amphetamines, steroids and human growth hormone. Grimsley’s confession became public on June 6, when federal agents filed excerpts of it in court papers. In the confession, Grimsley identifies a personal fitness trainer, whose name is blacked out in the document, as someone who once referred him to a source for speed.

On June 8, the popular sports blog Deadspin.com claimed to know the name of that trainer.

“His name is Chris Mihlfeld,” the site reported.

A day after the blog post, MSNBC’s Countdown With Keith Olbermann flashed a mug-shot-like picture of Mihlfeld on the screen. Olbermann spun the initial Web report into a theory that Mihlfeld was baseball’s new bad boy.

“Chris Mihlfeld is suddenly one of the biggest names in baseball,” Olbermann declared. “He’s the personal fitness trainer of baseball pitcher Jason Grimsley, and Grimsley is the man who admitted to federal agents that he used amphetamines, steroids and human growth hormone as part of his training.”

Yesterday the LA Times published a story that shredded the Deadspin accusations. Today Deadspin issued an apology to Mihlfeld.

Next up: Keith Olbermann. Be a man Keith. We love you when you’re ripping W. a new one, now give this young man in Kansas City the apology you owe him.

Looks like the score today is Paynter at The Pitch, one — Leitch and Olbermann at Gawkermedia and MSNBC, zero.

Hey! Here’s a link to a very good paper on libel in the blogosphere by Glenn Harlan Reynolds, Law Professor at the University of Tennessee. I wonder if Mihlfeld could use it?

Stowe Boyd points to the Attention Profiling Mark-up Language experiment and Josh Marshall gathers information on Republican Mark Foley’s homoerotic email advances toward an underage congressional page boy. Until his resignation Foley was Chair of the Republican House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children. These people give irony a bad name.

As fun as it is to watch the likes of Reynolds and Hinderaker acknowledge the shame of it all while pinching their noses and ignoring the stink of corruption that rises from their party like a dead mouse rotting in the forced air vent, I’m more interested in this APML thing and how we might have used that to head off the Republican child abuse. What if public servants provided attention logs so the public could review their interests, their foibles? At worst this would keep them on the job and away from the Internet. At best it might provide a correlation between inner lives and outer lives of political figures, a way to cut through the public relations bullshit and see the real people. I guess we’d need some kind of RFID authentication so we could be sure the keyboarding wasn’t passed off to an intern. Or a page.

Foley was returned to office six times, a remarkable record that shows the public makes little connection between private behavior and public utterance. APML could give us the data we need to make that connection.