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Last week Jon Stewart criticized FOX News for being hypocritical about the use of sweeping generalizations of people based on their political beliefs and party affiliations. 

He ended the segment with by showing a clip of Bernie Goldberg saying that a liberal would never allow a child with Downs Syndrome to even be born and then responded to Bernie’s flagrant generalization with, “Go fuck yourselves.”

Bernie Goldberg appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s show to respond to Jon Stewart’s attack, and last night, Jon Stewart responded in full force, complete with gospel choir backup.

It’s genius.

Jon accurately describes FOX News as:  “a terrible, cynical, disingenuous news organization.”  (Note to Websters:  Use this in your next edition.)

One of the things Goldberg said that I found particularly revealing was that Jon Stewart should try social commentary.  Of course that’s what he does every night – through comedy – something Goldberg doesn’t seem to grasp. 

And, since this video ping pong match started over the use of sweeping generalizations, I will use Goldberg’s remark to make one of my own. 

Remember a few years back when Fox had its own comedy news show?  You might have forgotten because it wasn’t on for very long.  It wasn’t’ on for long because it wasn’t funny, and it wasn’t funny because conservative pundits like Bernie Goldberg don’t understand satire and are therefore incapable of producing it.

You may have read a story last week about how nearly half of the 2009 tax filers will pay no federal income tax.  That of course got Fox News and all their ignorant viewers in a huff.  They cried foul because they think the temporary stimulus tax breaks benefited low income families to too great of a degree.  Funny… you never hear them complaining about the Bush tax cuts that lowered taxes for the richest 5% in the country by trillions of dollars.  Those tax cuts will expire this year, and Republicans want to see them extended or even lowered.

But, not all extremely rich people are lobbying to make the budget-busting Bush tax cuts permanent.  Many of them have organized to send a message to congress that asks for higher taxes.  The Seattle Times reports:

Judy Pigott, a Seattle author, philanthropist and an heir to the Paccar fortune, is among the group of wealthy individuals calling on Congress to end tax breaks that have enriched people like her.

They have signed a Tax Fairness Pledge to take the money they saved as part of tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush and donate it to groups working to overturn those policies.

The tax cuts were “based on the erroneous assumption that the trickle-down effect would somehow benefit everyone,” Pigott said. “What we have now is the greatest wealth disparity since the Great Depression.”

She is part of a group called Responsible Wealth Network, a project of the nonprofit United for a Fair Economy. The network of 700 people who are among the wealthiest 5 percent in the U.S. includes Jeffrey Hollender, the co-founder of Seventh Generation natural products, and Eric Schoenberg, an economist at Columbia University and former investment banker.

…

They want Congress to restore the 39.6 percent and 36 percent rates on the highest income earners and end special treatment of dividends and capital gains.

People in the top 5 percent received almost half of the Bush tax cuts, Pigott said, a figure that amounts to more than half of the current $1.5 billion deficit.

That’s right, the federal government is running huge deficits right now, and Fox News and their Tea Party audience are blaming it on the Democrats for the bank bailout (that was Bush not Obama) and Obama’s stimulus spending package. 

This chart tells the real story.

The real budget busters are Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy, two wars that were put on our national credit card, and an economic recession brought to you by Bush, Inc.  The temporary stimulus package designed to put money in people’s pockets to help jump start the economy has a negligible effect.

Of course the rich can choose to donate their trillions in tax savings to worthy causes, so why would they want to pay more taxes rather than direct their money to whomever they see fit?  Pigott explains: 

“I think it is the national government that can deal with clean air, water, national transportation systems, education,” she said. “I see those things are in trouble on a state level and on a national level because we don’t have the money. Yes, we can do a lot, but we can’t do what the federal government can do.”

And then there’s the guilt factor:

[Arul] Menezes said he has stepped up his charitable giving. But that won’t have the same effect as reworking the tax system, he said.

“It embarrasses me to go into a grocery store and know that the person at the checkout stand is paying a higher tax rate than I am,” he said.

So like I’ve said before, the super rich have benefited for way too long.  It’s time to raise their taxes.

Like Mr. Barnes, was sying, people don’t know what’s in the healthcare bill – they just know it’s “socialist” and it must be bad, ’cause they heard about it on the most watched noise network, FOX. 

Krugman tell it to his face:

A frame from the June 16th edition of This Modern World:

Ha that’s funny!  Because like even though some crazy conservatives might actually think that, they wouldn’t actually say it out loud, would they?

Michael Scheuer on Glenn Beck’s show last night:

Transcript:

Scheuer: The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. Because it’s going to take a grass-roots, bottom-up pressure. Because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans. It’s an absurd situation again. Only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary.

Beck: Which is why, I was thinking this weekend, if I were him, that would be the last thing I would do right now.

Why do conservatives hate America so much? Why do they think it must be destroyed before they can save it?

For a whole lot more of Michael Scheuer’s batshit crazy analysis, read this column he wrote for the Washington Post that ends with:

…The Republicans do not have the votes to stop Obama, and the world will not be safer for America because the president abandons interrogations to please his party’s left wing and the European pacifists it so admires. Both are incorrigibly anti-American, oppose the use of force in America’s defense and — like Obama — naively believe that the West’s Islamist foes can be sweet-talked into a future alive with the sound of kumbaya.

So if the above worst-case scenario ever comes to pass, Americans will have at least two things from which to take solace, even after the loss of major cities and tens of thousands of countrymen. First, they will know that their president believes that those losses are a small price to pay for stopping interrogations and making foreign peoples like us more. And second, they will see Osama bin Laden’s shy smile turn into a calm and beautiful God-is-Great grin.

Michael Scheuer is an ex CIA man and he worked again as Special Advisor to the Chief of the bin Laden unit from September 2001 to November 2004.   He now works as a news analyst for CBS News.  I wonder how much longer he’ll have that job…

UPDATE:  Daily Show coverage of this story here.

From Roger Ebert’s blog post, “The O’Reilly Procedure“:

Bill O’Reilly has been brought low by the same process that afflicted Jerry Springer. Once respected journalists, they sold their souls for higher ratings, and follow their siren song. Springer is honest about it: “I’m going to Hell for what I do, and I know it,” he’s likes to say. O’Reilly insists he is dealing only with the truth. When his guests disagree with him, he shouts at them, calls them liars, talks over them, and behaves like a schoolyard bully.

I am not interested in discussing O’Reilly’s politics here. That would open a hornet’s nest. I am more concerned about the danger he and others like him represent to a civil and peaceful society. He sets a harmful example of acceptable public behavior. He has been an influence on the most worrying trend in the field of news: The polarization of opinion, the elevation of emotional temperature, the predictability of two of the leading cable news channels. A majority of cable news viewers now get their news slanted one way or the other by angry men.

I never knew Bill O’Reilly was a “respected journalist.”  If Ebert says so, well then maybe he was…

Anyway, read the whole post and watch the videos of how O’Reilly works.  He really is an awful man.

Last night I watched the rerun of the Monday night Daily Show during which Jon Stewart went after Fox News twice.  First he rebutted Joe Scarborough’s rebuttal of a Daily Show piece from last week that ridiculed “Morning Joe” for bringing on Starbucks as a sponsor, using Starbucks product placement in their show, and inviting Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz on as a guest.

Next he goes after Gretchen Carlson who was deeply offended by Brüno’s (Sacha Baron Cohen) performance during the MTV Movie Awards.  Watch to see how Jon portrays Gretchen as an ass-hating, ass-loving hypocrite.

The whole show was excellent.  Just watch the whole thing.

I just finished watching this video on Crooks and Liars of Paul Krugman’s appearance on the Fox News show, Your World with Neil Cavuto.  During the segment, Krugman discusses his article in Rolling Stone titled “The Great Wealth Transfer.”

I haven’t read the article yet, but I will.  I am, however, quite familiar with Krugman’s writings on this topic for The New York Times, so I was pretty sure of what he was trying to tell Cavuto on his show.  Only problem was that Cavuto constantly interrupted him and barely let him speak for more that twenty seconds at a time.  I didn’t have a stop watch handy to measure how many minutes of the six-minute video segment were of just Krugman talking, but I would estimate total Krugman time to be just slightly over one minute.  The rest of the time was all Cavuto.  It seemed to me that the whole point of Cavuto having Krugman on his show was to belittle him and ultimately call him a liar.

After watching the segment, I went to Cavuto’s site on Fox News, and there next to Cavuto’s photo was a link to a very short Cavuto opinion piece titled Common Sense, with the subtitle, and I kid you not, “Has our entire culture forgotten what it means to listen?”

Answer:  Not most people, just those who host “fair and balanced” shows on Fox News.

Fox News reported yesterday that, “Comedy Central’s fake news stars have no intention of making a run for the White House.”  Oh really?  Did Fox ever really think they would make a run?  It’s news that they’re not running?

Jon Stewart said this about the shirt: 

Nothing says “I am ashamed of you my government” more than “Stewart/Colbert ‘08.”

And ashamed we are.

Stewart had more to say about reports of people actually getting their news from The Daily Show: 

“There’s no way you could get the news from us,” he said. “I’ve seen the show. It couldn’t happen.”

Funny… That’s what Daily Show viewers say about Fox News.

Here’s what Keith Olbermann had to say about it:

Bill Clinton did what almost none of us have done in five years.

He has spoken the truth about 9/11, and the current presidential
administration.

“At least I tried,” he said of his own efforts to capture or kill Osama bin
Laden. “That’s the difference in me and some, including all of the
right-wingers who are attacking me now. They had eight months to try; they
did not try. I tried.”

Thus in his supposed emeritus years has Mr. Clinton taken forceful and
triumphant action for honesty, and for us; action as vital and as courageous
as any of his presidency; action as startling and as liberating, as any, by
any one, in these last five long years.

The Bush Administration did not try to get Osama bin Laden before 9/11.

The Bush Administration ignored all the evidence gathered by its
predecessors.

The Bush Administration did not understand the Daily Briefing entitled “Bin
Laden Determined To Strike in U.S.”

The Bush Administration did not try.

….

After five years of skirting even the most inarguable of facts-that he was
president on 9/11 and he must bear some responsibility for his, and our,
unreadiness, Mr. Bush has now moved, unmistakably and without conscience or
shame, towards re-writing history, and attempting to make the
responsibility, entirely Mr. Clinton’s.

Of course he is not honest enough to do that directly.

As with all the other nefariousness and slime of this, our worst presidency
since James Buchanan, he is having it done for him, by proxy.

Thus, the sandbag effort by Fox News Friday afternoon.

….

The basic plot-line was this: because he was distracted by the Monica
Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton failed to prevent 9/11.

The most curious and in some ways the most infuriating aspect of this
slapdash theory, is that the Right Wingers who have advocated it-who try to
sneak it into our collective consciousness through entertainment, or who
sandbag Mr. Clinton with it at news interviews-have simply skipped past its
most glaring flaw.

Had it been true that Clinton had been distracted from the hunt for bin
Laden in 1998 because of the Monica Lewinsky nonsense, why did these same
people not applaud him for having bombed bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan
and Sudan on Aug. 20, of that year? For mentioning bin Laden by name as he
did so?

That day, Republican Senator Grams of Minnesota invoked the movie “Wag The
Dog.”

Republican Senator Coats of Indiana questioned Mr. Clinton’s judgment.

Republican Senator Ashcroft of Missouri-the future attorney general-echoed
Coats.

Even Republican Senator Arlen Specter questioned the timing.

And of course, were it true Clinton had been “distracted” by the Lewinsky
witch-hunt, who on earth conducted the Lewinsky witch-hunt?

Who turned the political discourse of this nation on its head for two years?

Who corrupted the political media?

….

Thus was it left for the previous president to say what so many of us have
felt; what so many of us have given you a pass for in the months and even
the years after the attack:

You did not try.

You ignored the evidence gathered by your predecessor.

You ignored the evidence gathered by your own people.

Then, you blamed your predecessor.

That would be a textbook definition, Mr. Bush, of cowardice.

To enforce the lies of the present, it is necessary to erase the truths of
the past.

That was one of the great mechanical realities Eric Blair-writing as George
Orwell-gave us in the book “1984.”

The great philosophical reality he gave us, Mr. Bush, may sound as familiar
to you, as it has lately begun to sound familiar to me.

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in
the good of others; we are interested solely in power…

“Power is not a means; it is an end.

….

The “free pass” has been withdrawn, Mr. Bush.

You did not act to prevent 9/11.

We do not know what you have done to prevent another 9/11.

You have failed us-then leveraged that failure, to justify a purposeless war
in Iraq which will have, all too soon, claimed more American lives than did
9/11.

You have failed us anew in Afghanistan.

And you have now tried to hide your failures, by blaming your predecessor.

And now you exploit your failure, to rationalize brazen torture which
doesn’t work anyway; which only condemns our soldiers to water-boarding;
which only humiliates our country further in the world; and which no true
American would ever condone, let alone advocate.

And there it is, Mr. Bush:

Are yours the actions of a true American?

There’s more here.  Watch it here.

Bill Clinton was interviewed last Sunday on Fox News by Chris Wallace.  Clinton was in no mood to take accusations of him not doing enough to stop Osama bin Laden during his presidency.  His response was emotional and factual.  That’s something Fox News is unfamiliar with… A Democrat with facts and spine.  Clinton had the upper hand during the exchange because he knew Wallace was not being truthful.  Wallace was caught by surprise and, when he wasn’t sputtering, he could only try and bullshit his way through the rest of the interview.

Here’s how it was reported in the Progress Report on Monday:

Clinton pressed Wallace on why he had never asked the Bush administration why it demoted Clarke.  Wallace claimed “we asked” and shot back, “Do you ever watch Fox News Sunday, sir?”  In fact, a Progress Report analysis found that, since 2001, Wallace has interviewed the top national security officials from the Bush administration – Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Hadley – 42 times.  According to a Lexis-Nexis database search, he never asked any of them why Clarke was demoted, nor did he ask why they failed to respond to the USS Cole attack.  Days after it was revealed that President Bush had received a President’s Daily Brief that said “Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S.,” Wallace did not even bring it up in an interview with former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.