When Brit Hume played tennis with the Bushes during the time he was also the White House correspondent for a major network, was he wearing his "White House correspondent" hat or his "tennis player" hat?

And hat hat is Roger Ailes wearing right now?

Howard Kurtz: If John Harris, Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roger Simon are longtime Republican operatives, somehow it's escaped my notice.

-- GlennGreenwald

I have to wonder if it also somehow escaped Howie's notice that he's married to a longtime Republican operative.

...a liberal enterprise--in the 18th Century/Enlightenment/free speech/consent of the governed sense of the term...

I.e., Conservatism would/could not have given us the American Revolution, nor our version of Democracy, but just more of King George (the earlier one).

Only a liberal mindset could have created the conditions for our form of government... the same one that neo-conservatives say Democrats and liberals love to hate.

Glenn:

Valentinian

The questioner said nothing about the staff of thePolitico.com, but about its ownership.

Amazing, isn't it? In his defense, maybe he doesn't know about the Politico ownership piece I wrote, so I am going to send it to him and ask that he clarify what he said in response to that questioner.

But note--he is so conditioned by the rightwing focus on journalists, rather than owners and management, that he doesn't even notice what the actual question is.

The journalistically optimal response in such a situtation would be saying something like, "What do you know about the ownership? And where did you learn it?"

But you have to actually hear the question first, in order to realize it assumes evidence you're not familiar with.

Instead: "Aark! Aark!"

GlennGreenwald:

Could someone identify any specific views that Keith Olbermann has that demonstrates he is a "liberal" in the sense that it's meant (i.e., in the left-wing Democratic Party sense, rather than the classical 18th Century sense Paul Rosenberg described earlier)? I'm not saying he has none, but I honestly don't know of any.

This is a serious stretch, but it doesn't seem to take much stretching to qualify as "liberal" these days, so...

Keith made fun of the fact that most of the Republican presidential candidates don't believe in evolution. Though he did not come out and state, "I believe in evolution," the implication was fairly obvious. It's in his Countdown blog. If you need a URL, just ping.

(It's painful beyond imagining to wonder whether belief in evolution now qualifies as a liberal view in our country...)

I should note for the record that I'm not a mind-reader, but I can't help but visualise the internal turmoil I imagine Kurtz and his ilk must go through when they see the phrase "Republican operative." Like the chamberlains in Hans Christian Andersen's tale, they know their job is to carry the invisible train with great dignity.

It's gotta sting, though...

"I have to wonder if it also somehow escaped Howie's notice that he's married to a longtime Republican operative."

Sheri Annis

http://www.fourthestatestrategies.com/html/biography.html

For his part, Kurtz has declined to state his political affiliation, leaving it to others to divine what his political views are.

In 2007, Kurtz referred to critics of the Iraq War as "journalists of questionable patriotism".

I think it's fairly obvious.

Olbermann: "I'm not a liberal, I'm an American."

Does your right to do what you want to yourself medically preclude my right to remain healthy? At what point is libertarianism just an excuse for ignorance and selfishness?

Did you read Glenn's post a few weeks back attacking the Prescription Drug system? I did -- and I liked it so well I added it as an update to a post I had just written, which I will largely reproduce in whole since link embeds do not work here. That should make my position clear. Please take particular note that I, and Glenn, factor communicable diseases into our positions:

Today, Rick Perlstein is ridiculing Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan for aspiring to contract the size of the federal government, and holding up contaminated foods as a reason to mock “E. coli Conservatives.” Sayeth the breathless Perlstein:

George Bush’s Food and Drug Administration—and our other major food-inspection arm, the U.S. Department of Agriculture—are Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan’s noble words made flesh. But don’t let your family get too close to the flesh. They might get sick and die.

Now I ask you, how may libertarians here oppose The Pure Food and Drug Act (for purposes of accurate labeling and inspections for contaminants, as opposed to criminalizing/prohibiting substances) or The Meat Inspection Act, in principle regardless of any possible quibbles over execution? As I recall Reagan’s (broken) pledge, it was to abolish the Department of Education — which would have spared us “No Child Left behind.” So, contaminated edibles (and Bush Administration incompetence in that regard) has nothing to do with Goldwater/Reagan “noble words made flesh.”

I don’t oppose safety inspections on food, because the potential harm is larger than tort actions could reasonably compensate for. Nor do I oppose truth in labeling — fraud is Not Good. Opposition to Leviathan at the federal level is not about the freedom to poison children’s peanut butter, or to sell them tuna that is actually horse meat.

Duh.

Here, Mr., Perlstein. This is how Big Brother almost kills people [link to recent story about entire family that almost died before FDA approved a milk-thistle based antidote for poisonous mushrooms approved in Germany but not here to enter country] — in this case the FDA is the culprit. In fact, the FDA has killed people, by not expeditiously approving drugs or procedures, nor letting people assume the risk of medical means to treat terminal conditions before approval. (Commenters please send me links to support for that fact and I’ll update with it.) Thus we see Progressives’ noble word made dead human flesh, ‘n all.

Funny how that “my body, my choice” thing goes out the window when the Progressives’ Great and Good Government” is “protecting” me.

******

Update:

Glenn Greenwald — who is my kind of “progressive” — gets it, casting the issue in terms of physicians rather than the FDA who controls them:

…it seems absolutely unjustifiable for the government to prevent adult citizens from deciding for themselves which pharmaceutical products they want to use. Put another way, it seems unfathomable that competent adults are first required to obtain the “permission” of a doctor before being “allowed” to obtain and consume the medications they think they need — and that they are committing crimes if they do not first obtain that permission (or, worse, if they try to obtain that permission and are unable to do so)…

And he poses this hypothetical question to a physician:

I come into your office (I’m a mentally competent adult — at least in our hypothetical) and tell you that I want to take a Schedule II drug (or Schedule III or IV) for Medical Problem X (or even just for garden-variety insomnia, depression, or anxiety). You tell me that I shouldn’t, that there is a high risk of addiction, that the problem doesn’t warrant that treatment. I tell you that, after listening carefully to everything you have said, I disagree with you and I want to take it anyway.

Why should your judgment prevail over mine for what I take? Why, as a competent adult, should I need your permission before I can take the substance I decide is best for me?

Further, he makes the very point I do about excepting antibiotics, my emphasis:

What is the difference between the attorney-client and doctor-patient relationship, where the former is purely advisory but the latter becomes parental? And other than consumption of medicine which can actually affect the public health (such as excessive consumption of antibiotics), why should an adult be deemed a criminal for using a particular medicine all because a doctor (for whatever reasons, including self-interest) will not give permission?