Welcome to the Web, Tom DeLay!

Dear Tom,

First let me say, welcome to the blogosphere -- always nice to have a new voice in the mix. So good to know you have access to a computer in jail (oh, sorry, you dodged that bullet). And thanks for the link.

But since you're a newbie blogger, I want to give you a hand by pointing out some rookie mistakes your site made in its diatribe about me and the Huffington Post today.

For starters, you seem to have missed the class on the difference between linking to a news story and offering an opinion on said news story. You claim that I was "in quite a tizzy" and that I'd "acquired sound intel" that there are Christians in the Defense Dept.

Acquired sound intel? That sounds so cloak and dagger, like a secret fact-finding golf mission to Scotland. You make it seem like I'm skulking around in a trench coat and fedora -- oh wait, that's your pal Jack Abramoff. Far from skulking or acquiring intel, what we actually did was "link" (a key term you should know as a blogger) to a story written by a reporter for "Reuters," which is a news wire service (a handy place to get "facts." Here's a link.)

As for my being in "a tizzy" over the story: trust me, linking, while fun, isn't that big a deal -- we do it at HuffPost dozens of times a day.

In this case, we linked to the story and headlined it "Senior Officers Accused of Coercing Soldiers to Adopt Evangelical Christianity." Which, if you read the story, is precisely what happened. You see, we don't make up the news. You're thinking of Fox.

One more thing: the Internet is a pretty fast moving place. So if you want to draw blood, you might want to try using a fresher zinger than saying I'm "the long lost 4th Gabor sister." No one LOLs at that one anymore. (I realize you may not understand what LOL means -- it's only 10 years out of date. Once you figure out the difference between a link and an opinion, let me know and I'll explain it. ; )

Welcome to the Internets!

Arianna