By Chris Powers

My identity is revealed above for the sake of transparency and also because I decided to call Rachel Sklar's bluff.

Rachel, one of the bigwig bloggers at Huffington Post, served up a horribly knee-jerk attack on Barack Obama with a piece today that accused him of engaging in retribution by "banning" The New Yorker's reporter from his plane now touring the other side of the world.

You can read the email exchange I had today with Rachel in my post "With Friends Like This, Who Needs Enemas."

Apparently, she didn't like my TPM post about her HuffPo ethics. So she wrote me again with the lame rebuttal below and the challenge I have accepted. But allow me to correct in advance the errors she makes in her response.

As anyone can read in the original exchange linked above, my first sentence identified me as having been a lifelong journalist. I am no longer a journalist, however, as I retired from the profession over a year ago.

However, Rachel thinks I was bound by professional journalistic ethics to not use our email exchange publicly. Nothing could be further from the truth. Once she understood — from the outset — that I might report her comments and that I had given no assurance of confidentiality, it was up to her to respond or not. A good journalist isn't afraid to report the facts when there has been no waiver of "on the record" granted or implied.

Here is Rachel's insistent response:

Let me get this straight: You've been a journalist most of your life, and yet you publish private correspondence without asking the permission of the person with whom you are corresponding? When that person is a journalist, with a specific "off the record" tagline to the email exchange? After you have self-identified as a journalist, indicating that you are opening up a professional discussion on the basis of professional ethics? Wow. That's shady beyond belief, my friend.

There was no "agreeing" to abide by the off the rec request subsequently, because it came in the first email simultaneously with my reply. If I had sent a follow-up email I'd be outta luck, like Sam Power, but in my first response to you I made it clear that my correspondence was private and not meant for publication. You published that and subsequent correspondence, and clearly noted that you were aware of your breach. And who, exactly, is calling whom a hack?

Either way, it's a non-issue - I stand by all my points, including my final email, where I said that there was plausible deniability. Of course there is. It's in Allen's original quote, where he notes that the Obama campaign cited space constraints. I took all the information available, built and argument, and arrived at a conclusion. All the building blocks were there. Agree - disagree - my reasoning is transparent. In fact, I have been transparent throughout this entire process. Unlike some.

Go ahead and publish this -- if you don't mind having this on the record, Chris Powers.

I think I'll still use Ripper here, if you don't mind, Rachel. But nice try at intimidating me and avoiding responsibility for your own leap of ethics.