Arianna Huffington's new blog launched on Monday and it is already being called a flop. L.A. Weekly says we shouldn't blame the B-list of celebrities who are group blogging. Instead we should blame Huffington for convincing them that they have something to say.

I implore you: Forgive them, because they know not what they do. Not Seinfeld has-been Julia Louis-Dreyfus and her untalented TV-hyphenate husband, Brad Hall, making unfunny shtick of the anti-gay-marriage movement. Not has-been director Mike Nichols, using the forum to parade his high school grasp of U.S. history by mentioning "de Tocqueville" and "Dr. King" in the same paragraph. Not has-been brat-packer John Cusack, penning the 459,308th remembrance of Hunter Thompson for the sole purpose of letting the world know that the actor scored an invite to the writer's intimate memorial service.

For instance Jim Lampley. Now I used to have nothing but respect for Lampley. I love HBO boxing, and he's a good "Real Sports" reporter too. But this diatribe is laughable as well as absurd. He contends that Kerry actually won the election, and as proof points to not only exit poll data (which has been analyzed time and time again and shown to be defective), but to the Las Vegas oddsmakers who relied on that to set odds for the election.

At 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on Election Day, I checked the sportsbook odds in Las Vegas and via the offshore bookmakers to see the odds as of that moment on the Presidential election. John Kerry was a two-to-one favorite. You can look it up.

People who have lived in the sports world as I have, bettors in particular, have a feel for what I am about to say about this: these people are extremely scientific in their assessments. These people understand which information to trust and which indicators to consult in determining where to place a dividing line to influence bets, and they are not in the business of being completely wrong. Oddsmakers consulted exit polling and knew what it meant and acknowledged in their oddsmaking at that moment that John Kerry was winning the election.

Has Lampley forgotten Buster Douglas already? Douglas was a 42-1 longshot for beating Mike Tyson, the undefeated - undisputed - Heavyweight Champion of the World. Tyson wasn't just undefeated, he routinely savaged opponents. Only four of his 37 fights had ever gone the distance. Many of his fights never made it out of the first round. Douglas meanwhile wasn't even viewed as a contender. He was meat for the lion. Spectators thought it would take a miracle for him to win.

What's more, Lampley doesn't seem to even grasp the concept of giving odds. Odds have little to do with the actual chance of winning. Bookies give odds in order to even out the bets on each side of the event. You see, bookies don't care if you win or lose. They live off the vig; which is the price people pay to place bets. Odds are put into place so that the payout for bets on one side equals the payout for bets on the other. If the odds were 1-1, nobody would bet on Douglas. But a 42-1 payoff entices people to bet on the underdog so that the bets for the favorite are covered should he walk away with it as expected. So odds have more to do with people's perception of who is going to win more than the actual chance of winning. You would think that a boxing sportscaster would know that.

But even if odds accurately represent the chance of winning, so what. Would Lampley have them not even bother fighting? If the contest goes 12 rounds should they look at the score cards or just trust the Vegas oddsmakers and Harold Lederman's prediction of the score? Last time I checked they actually counted the votes of the judges to see who wins. You would think Lampley would know that, and give George Bush the same courtesy.