Letters to the Editor
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Come on now, charles.
Dishonest, Glenn. When Hume said those words about Murtha, it was on Fox News Sunday and he was in the role of commentator. On Special Report, he puts on the anchor hat. Olbermann's show is an hour-long opinion piece.
-- Charles Bird
You've never heard Hume express a negative opinion about Democrats or even, specifically, Murtha while not hiding behind his "commentator" role? Come on Charles.
By the way, Olberman's one hour show is about half just silly stuff. Not a "one-hour long opinion piece" by a long shot.
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Can-you-really-be-that-dumb department
"Adversarial" to the exclusion of all else is partisanship. --shooter242
No need for comment on this gem, I think.
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Those Evil Regulators
It's obvious from the examples of lupus and rheumatoid arthritis that the human body's immune response system is an evil regulatory agency and should be abolished.
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You can't excise all the bias, be it left or right,
but Hume's role on Special Report is anchor and moderator. Glenn is being plain dishonest (which is a not a rare thing) in his characterization of Hume by not telling you that Hume said those things in a pundit roundtable. But give Glenn credit for providing the necessary links, which is a step up for him. Olbermann makes no pretense that his show is anything other than Olbermann's Opinion Ollapalooza.
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Greenwald/Olbermann '08
I'd walk precincts until I'd worn out all of my shoes...
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Interesting Kurtz video
But why is Howard Kurtz giving us pundit expertise from Amy Holmes, someone who is so expert she is still too young to serve as president? Can we at least have our so-called pundits be as expert as the basic level required by the Constitution for the office?
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Sean Hannity during Katrina
Sean Hannity ran Fox News's Katrina coverage from an anchor desk. The entire week he pretended to be a "journalist" even while he blasted Mayor Nagin and excused the FEMA failures.
How do basic facts about Fox News like this get ignored by these pundit hacks?
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Stating The Obvious... Plus, The Mothra In The Libertarian Ointment
One doesn't have to believe something is perfect to use it to refute absurdities.
Paul R defends the prison-industrial complex and killing people via paternalism
Just as abolishing the FDA is the way to protect public health. Because it seriously impairs the freedom of those whose lives it saves.
Actually, the FDA has killed people. It does this by not permitting them -- even when they are terminally ill and have nothing to lose -- from using drugs or techniques not yet approved by Their Protectors.
This is what's known as a red herring. It has nothing at all to do with the point I made. Of course the FDA could be improved. And yes, it certainly has killed some people, while protecting many more. (The same is true of vaccines, btw. And every so often someone dies because they were wearing a seatbelt. It's called "trade-offs." Mature, informed people know about trade-offs as a matter of course.) Advocates of sensible regulation have no problem at all with the notion that regulation can be done better. It's the ideological enemies of regulation who can't tolerate discussion of how markets can be improved by sensible regulation.
The FDA also is directly implicated in the prison-industrial system fueled by the War on (some) Drugs, and the corollary war on doctors who deal with patients in severe and intractable pain.
With hundreds of thousands of inner city blacks imprisoned in the war on drugs, the FDA's role is tertiary, at best. It's certainly wrong-headed. But Mona's overhyping the FDA's role is simply ludicrous. The point of such hyperbole is to distract attention from sensible solutions, such as changing the FDA regulations and how they are implemented.
Odd how the "my body, my choice" mantra flies out the window for some leftists when one of their beloved regulatory agencies is at issue.
I have no problem criticizing the FDA. Nor does any other leftist I've ever talked to about it. Your hyperbolic--and, in this case, downright false--accusations simply underscore my point: your opposition to regulation is ideologically blind and heedless of facts. You defend abstractions regardless of the human cost. The human cost only matters to you as a means to argue for your abstractions.
As with the FDA, so with the FCC, or the courts. Media monopolization is a direct result of unregulated markets. This is one of the larger flies in the libertarian argument--one might even call it the Mothra in the libertarian argument: free markets give rise to monopolies which in turn destroy free markets. That's why we need anti-trust laws and other regulations to prevent anti-competetive practices and promote healthy competition.
Going back to Mona's earlier post (I passed over this the first time round):
Moreover, the reality is that this kewl Internet thingie -- unregulated and free -- is becoming, and will continue to become, the corrective. Unless, of course, The Regulators put a stop to it.
The internet, of course, was created by the government. Let me say that again: The internet, of course, was created by the government.
And not just the internet, but virtually everything that underpins it. Massive government investment is what made the computer revolution possible, every step of the way. Either through direct investment in R&D, or through creating the original market for the products developed, or through subsidies for early entrants--the list goes on and on and on.
Fast-forward to now:
It's the monopolies who want to constrain that freedom by charging those who can afford to pay for first class data delivery and penalizing everyone else. And it's the would-be regulators, under the banner of "net nuetrality," who want to preserve that freedom.
In short, Mona: everything you "know" is wrong. That's what happens when an ideology has you, rather than you having an ideology.
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Sean Hannity as Katrina "News Anchor" YouTube
Here's Sean Hannity running Fox "News" spin as a live anchor during Katrina. Watch Hannity spin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPswpqB73SA
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Praise for GG
Since my last few letters to Glenn were critical, I should make it clear I'm a big fan which agrees with most of what he writes.
For example, this is another great essay about the double standards in how pundits are labeled. This is so important because opinion and commentary has increased weight in news, especially on TV, radio and the web.
While there's never been a bias free era of news, the power of pundits to set the terms for real reporting of events has greatly increased. Real research and field observation is expensive or ideologically inconvenient or someting. Pundits gained this clout because they fill the hole in the news cycle left by the (at best) stagnant level of actual journalism.
Too much time is spent on analyzing and speculation about what events mean, and not enough on the events themselves. Thus we get more reportage on what the Iraq funding bill might mean than coverage of the war dead.
It also leads the media to treat a story as old or overdone, instead of realizing an ongoing story is not passe just because pundits are tired of discussing it.