At the Stoneking/Simmon wedding last Sunday, I had a brief conversation with the Carpetbagger, Steve Benen.

I mentioned that it was great meeting and talking with him at the Blogger BBQ this summer because - although I have conversations with people in the comment sections of blogs - being able to discuss my political and media obsessions with someone who is similarly addicted is a rare treat.

Steve said that it was the same for him, though he had just gotten back from hanging out with some bloggers (like Duncan Black) in New York.

End of story…

Except that today, I clicked on MSNBC’s “Clicked” headline “You can’t do that with breasts” (I would have clicked it no matter what the headline was… Really) and was taken to an odd story about how the odd blogger, Ann Althouse, was oddly upset about the breasts of one of the women in a group picture taken at a meeting between prominent bloggers and Bill Clinton on September 12th.

For some reason, I wasn’t aware of this meeting until yesterday when I read of Micah Sifry’s different, but also somewhat odd, criticism of perhaps the same photo on MyDD. Sifry was upset that the bloggers looked so cheery in the company of the Great Triangulator.

So, I clicked the link to see what all the fuss was about, and wouldn’t you know it? There’s Steve Benen standing, half-hidden, right next to Bill Clinton, and dangerously close to the offensive breasts. Now, that is some kind of blogger hang out scene.

I guess there’s one more part to my conversation with the Carpetbagger.

I had jokingly asked Steve if he and Black (aka Atrios) had spent their time cursing the sometimes odd Brendan Nyhan — Nyhan had just gotten into a flame war with Atrios during his recent contentious guest blogging stint on Horse’s Mouth — and that I had thought about converting this blog to a progressive blogger gossip column.

So, Steve, consider this my first (and perhaps last) attempt.

Ah, the tangled Internet we weave.

SOMEWHAT TANGENTIAL UPDATE: I’ve just noticed (as a result of a google blog search that linked to this post) that Brendan Nyhan has written a piece on Ana Marie Cox’s Political Bite at Time.com about his ouster from Horse’s Mouth.

There were no comments on the post, but I left one of my own. Though, after two days with zero comments, I get the sense that the “vitriol” of most of the submissions means that mine will also not see the light of day. We’ll see.

Basically, I made the obvious suggestion that Nyhan’s somewhat forced critique of Atrios and other posts were designed to create controversy and attention.