This morning, MSNBC Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough mocked New York Times writer Paul Krugman and, because why not, took aim at bloggers as well.

The article that had Scarborough all riled up — “The Centrist Cop-Out” — was published yesterday and attempts to deconstruct what Krugman views as misleading rhetoric promoting balance and avoiding to lay blame on Republicans involved in ongoing debt discussions.

Researchers from U.C. Santa Barbara’s Carsey-Wolf Center developed a survey to find out just how individual Huffington Post bloggers feel about the site’s payment system – especially in light of its $ 315 million Aol deal.

Aol / HuffPost wants freelancers with professional journalism backgrounds to come on board as staffers. According to TechCrunch, the company does not view the ability to blog – not even about adorable kitten antics – as synonymous with journalism. Who’da thunk?

In a bizarre story with all the intrique and action of a (fairly boring) summer blockbuster, it appears that 20 prominent movie bloggers are now turning on one of their own by writing a letter to major Hollywood studios accusing FirstShowing.net’s Alex Billington of “blackmail.” The Wrap is reporting that the letter was written to persuade the studios to sever their ties to Billington and his site which, in the fast-paced and world of movie blogging, would probably lead to professional ruin. We can only assume that the film adaptation of this story (or HBO series adaptation) is being greenlit as we speak.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid delivered an address to the attendees at this year’s Netroots Nation progressive blogger conference to encourage writers to continue writing against the Republicans and thank them for their support, even though their relationship may be strained.

Something funny happened to political satire blog Wonkette on the way to their latest joke: the media took them seriously. After editor Ken Layne wrote a post pondering aloud the possibility of Sarah Palin getting breast implants, the New York Daily News, the Washington Examiner, the UK Telegraph, E!, and myriad others in the media began to ask the same thing. The investigation culminated in a courageous Greta van Susteren popping the question to Palin herself.

He is the head of a computer company that’s in conflict with Google and Adobe, has come out against porn, and now expressed fears that America will become a “nation of bloggers” at an All Things Digital conference yesterday. Does Apple CEO Steve Jobs understand the Internet?

After putting together one of the most impressive filmographies in history (Alexander notwithstanding), Oliver Stone has been working on a career shift from blockbuster storyteller to a less belligerent Michael Moore, having made films about 9/11 and the Bush administration and a favorable documentary on Cuban leader, Fidel Castro. He’s currently in Latin America promoting his pro-Hugo Chavez film South of the Border, and he has some friendly advice for the colorful dictator: stop spending so much time on TV!

Famous young internet journalist Michael Calderone has penned an in-depth analysis of famous young internet journalists and their newfound relevance in the media market– and what it means for the older, established class of print reporters. Needless to say, the people who spent most of their twenties reporting on lost puppies and local fires are not too happy about the success of people like Ezra Klein and Chris Cillizza.

Congratulations to Mediaite TV Editor Steve Krakauer on being profiled in this week’s New York Times Thursday Styles section as a rising blogger, even though we raised a wee brow at the notion that Steve’s reporting on ratings, personalities, trends and news on the TV beat counted as “gossip” any more than, say, MediaDecoder does. Steve was featured along with the Village Voice’s Foster Kamer, Media Takeout’s Fred Mwangaguhunga, Crushable’s Erin Carlson, Gawker’s Maureen O’Connor (whose shoes beat out Foster’s jaunty bag, it must be said), Fashionologie’s Tommye Fitzpatrick, The Gloss’ Lilit Marcus, Curbed’s Sara Polsky and Dealbreaker’s Bess Levin.

April 2nd is sometimes like the “morning after” scene in a big war movie, where you walk around the body-strewn battlefield and try to identify everyone who’s been killed. Or in this case, fooled. This year, one of the victims turned out to be that old veteren war horse, the New York Times, who got tricked by a prank pulled by the writer of a law blog. Yesterday, Eric Turkewitz, writer of New York Personal Injury Law Blog, wrote that he had been appointed as “official White House law blogger”. A few hours later, the Times published a reference to the appointment in their article “When Lawyers Blog”.

Some of the biggest names in the LGBT and progressive blog world participated Feb. 15 in a coordinated effort to encourage the Human Rights Campaign, the largest gay rights organization in the country and a frequent object of blogger scorn, to put its heft behind efforts to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

With the Supreme Court blocking a federal court in San Francisco from broadcasting the Proposition 8 trial on YouTube, two California men have done the next best thing to give the public a peak into the trial: re-enact it for YouTube, based on transcripts, liveblogging and tweets. Knowing people were clamoring to see expert testimony by economic experts and anti-gay ministers, John Ireland and John Ainsworth are giving the trial the “let’s put on a show” treatment.

When looking ahead at the next year, pundits turn into prognosticators. Bloggers covering all sorts of topics and industries are now giving their predictions for what’s to come in 2010. Conventional wisdom says to go the conservative route with these choices in order to avoid looking foolish when none of your projections pan out. At the same time, there’s a key difference between picking things that are realistically possible and those that are already on the road to happening. I’ve assembled my favorite predictions covering a variety of fields and what’s supposedly in store for the near future:

Following the news of the assault on Yoani Sánchez and other bloggers by security forces last Friday in Havana, the United States has decided to intervene. Late on Monday, the Department of State issued the following statement, openly denouncing the Cuban government and promising “inquiries” on the status of the bloggers:

Yoani Sánchez, one of the most notorious voices of Cuban dissidence, said she was kidnapped and beaten last Friday by state security agents. Mediaite spoke with Sánchez, who is resting at home — on medical orders — by phone from Havana last night.

Yoani Sanchez, a Cuban blogger known for her critical online missives about the communist government, was detained and beaten yesterday on her way to a march, CNN is reporting. Sanchez’s website Generation Y gets around 1 million hits per month, and the government says she’s “gone too far,” according to her account of Friday’s kidnapping.