On Wednesday evening’s Hardball, host Chris Matthews convened an infuriatingly one-sided panel to discuss the Obama administration’s recent decision not to permit an exemption for some religious employers to the contraception mandate. The Washington Post‘s Melinda Henneberger and Melissa Rogers of the Brookings Institution took turns trashing the decision, and the point of view of doctors, nurses, teachers, etc., who would be marginalized by such an exemption was not represented.

The effects of AOL’s recent acquisition of The Huffington Post on the media landscape is a hotly-debated topic these days, and the ramifications are being felt by AOL’s flagship political blog, Politics Daily. Many current (and some former) PD writers have expressed anxiety about the site’s future under Arianna Huffington‘s control, so Politics Daily Executive Editor Carl Cannon, speaking directly with Mediaite, has responded to some of those concerns.

The national media have been much quicker to report on the National Enquirer-driven Al Gore sex scandal than they were the John Edwards story, both of which featured underpinnings of traditional journalism, such as named sources, documents, and in Edwards’ case, photographs. It may surprise some, then, that quick-to-lecture-on-journalism Politics Daily Chief Editor Melinda Henneberger is peddling a new rumor about Gore, with a single anonymous source. (h/t Drudge and Washington Examiner)

In what seems to have become an annual rite, there’s a new list out counting down the top 20 conservative hotties (new media edition), and while I have great appreciation for conservative new media hotties, and I love Countdown, I’m not a big fan of this effort.

On ABC’s This Week this morning, former Bush strategist and This Week fill-in host Matthew Dowd made an analogy so comically bad, it rivals the Vatican’s “Priests-as-persecuted-Jews” narrative (for which they’ve just apologized). Dowd’s response was to say that, from a PR standpoint, the Vatican has handled this worse than Toyota handled the Prius recall.

In today’s Washington Post, Howard Kurtz paints AOL’s Politics Daily as a fantastic wonderland of six-figure salaries, 5000-word articles, foreign correspondents who actually go overseas, and a distaste for the “hyperpartisan.” Sounds great, but can it turn a profit in an environment where traffic for articles like “Strippers Compete in Palin Look-alike Contest” is likely to dwarf Afghanistan coverage for the foreseeable future? If not, what is AOL trying to pull?