Monica Crowley apparently didn't get the news brief that ACORN doesn't exist any more, since the hack took to attacking them on this Saturday's edition of Fox News Watch, which is Fox's sorry excuse for a media "watchdog" show.

I rank it right up there with Howard Kurtz's Reliable Sources for anything we could consider a show that actually monitors and reports fairly on the lies repeated daily on either CNN or Fox, or any of the rest of their cohorts in what is sadly labeled the "mainstream media."

Both shows look like they're more content to give The Onion more material for their writers than actually doing the job of fact checking which as members of our sorry excuse for a corporate media, they're both a part of. Here's host Jon Scott from Fox News Watch with his question that led to Crowley's apparent memory lapse that ACORN isn't around any more.

SCOTT: Let's take a look at this. The scene Tuesday night in Oakland, CA, when Occupy protesters clashed with police. An Iraq war veteran was hit and seriously hit by some kind of projectile which fractured his skull. His name is Scott Olsen and according to the Associated Press, he has become the symbol of of the anti-Wall Street movement.

It's not entirely clear though Jim under what circumstances he was hit or who threw the rocks or whatever.

Okay, first off, sorry Jon Scott and Jim Pinkerton, but I think it was pretty clear that the police threw the “projectile” that fractured his skull as anyone can see from this video among others that are out there. And it wasn't a “rock or whatever.”

After being asked to follow up on this Monica Crowley decided to play the unions and now defunct ACORN are organizing the movement card, ignoring the fact that the movement doesn't have any real leadership regardless of whether the unions in America have decided to support the protesters or not and they did not organize these protests starting up. Support does not equal having started the movement to begin with. And she ignores the fact that ACORN doesn't even exist any more thanks to the likes of conservatives in the Congress and a bunch of lame ass Democrats who didn't have the spine to stand up for one of the organizations out there actually trying to make sure that the poor and minorities in the United States have the opportunity to vote.

Someone needs to remind Crowley that just because someone previously associated with ACORN now supports the Occupy Wall Street movement, it doesn't mean they organized it. It's a sad day when Fox and the likes of Crowley has to resort to pretending an organization that doesn't even exist any more is behind thousands of people showing up in the streets, but apparently that's one of their new attack lines and no matter how much the facts fly in the face of their propaganda, they're sticking to their story.

Chris Hayes decided to revisit his Welcome to Inequalistan segment which we featured from the second week of his his new series on MSNBC as his “story of the week” on this Saturday's show. Hayes opened up the segment by showing a scene from Annie Hall where Marshall McLuhan made a cameo appearance to correct one of the characters in the movie who was misrepresenting his work, telling him “You know nothing of my work” and Woody Allen addressing the camera directly in the movie, saying “If life was only like this.”

HAYES: Well, this week, we had kind of the wonk version of exactly that scene because for over a month, the Occupy Wall Street movement around the country has been growing and occupying the nation's attention with the same simple rallying cry... “We are the ninety nine percent.” And though there are no concrete demands or agenda, the one complaint, the central complaint is clear. The top one percent have managed to rig the game in their favor and capture a shocking percentage of the nation's total wealth.

And then amidst dismissals from the establishment and attacks from conservatives aimed at the wooly headed, naive, drum-circling hippies, comes a new report from the Congressional Budget Office that says to Occupy Wall Street critics, “You know nothing of my work.”

Hayes showed this chart from the recent CBO report which shows the shares of market income for the different income groups in 1979 compared to 2007 and as he noted, the only group that increased their share of the national income was the upper one percent of the country's wealthiest individuals.

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What would the United States look like if it were divided according to wealth? The Congressional Budget Office confirms that the top one percent has tripled its income since 1979, while the upper middle class has increased its wealth much more modestly, and the rest of the country has seen only a small gain.

[Photo via Flickr]

Yes, that's the majority of us there in that little strip along the bottom of the map. And remember, there are a whole lot more of us in that little strip than there are in the top portions.

I haven't seen many reactions to the arrogant Baum Halloween party photos that argue for full-throated support of their horrible business practices and their even more horrible attitudes. At least, until I visited Oliver Willis' blog and found this comment from Moonbat Monitor:

If the people can’t pay their mortgage, and the investor will not agree to modify the loan, or the mortgagor doesn’t qualify for anything…..what do you expect to happen? Free houses for everyone? Yay!!! Banks don’t *want* to foreclose on homes. It costs them on average about $40,000 to do so. But at some point, the people that just can not afford these houses need to GTFO, or this market will NEVER recover. If I can’t afford my car, it will get repossessed. That’s the way the real world operates. I’m not very inclined to argue with anyone here about this, because you’re all ignorant in regards to this subject and how this works, where as I am an expert.

Anyway, we make fun of these losers where I work too. It’s awesomely hilarious. Especially when I get an escalation, and I jokingly act like Commodus from Gladiator, and give the thumbs down, thus making another putz that never should’ve had the house in the first place homeless. Go rent an apartment. Losers. A lot of these people have been sitting in these houses for years without paying a damn thing, or bothering to contact their mortgage servicer.(particularly in judicial states) We can’t go to their houses and FORCE them to fill out paperwork. Then foreclosure time finally comes, and THEN they want to complain about getting kicked out. Sorry, that isn’t the way it works. And I see it every day.

Sad that so many here are completely ignorant of the ins/outs of this industry.

Oh, isn't that all so personal responsibility-ish and everything? Only, the first condition in that commenter's sentence ignores people like this homeowner, who tried to catch up on her mortgage payments but was refused, told to modify her loan, and when that didn't work, One West foreclosed on her. Foreclosed on her, even though she had the money to catch up the loan payments. I wonder what Moonbat's explanation is for that?

Just to refresh our memories, here's a good description of what foreclosure mills like Baum do.

Foreclosure mills cut costs for banks by cutting corners—when they can’t compile the documentation needed to push families out of their homes right now, they simply fabricate the documents. Still worse, these guys illegally withhold documentation from borrowers seeking to negotiate loan modifications with their banks—effectively forcing borrowers out of their homes instead of allowing them to cut a deal with the bank. When borrowers actually do straighten things out with foreclosure mills, the scumbags slap them with huge illegal fees. Kroll details a foreclosure mill that erroneously tried to evict a Florida couple who had been paying their mortgage on time. When it became clear that the couple could not be kicked out of their home, the foreclosure mill tried to charge them $18,500 in fees for mistakes committed by the foreclosure mill and the bank. The foreclosure mill even invented two new people who it said lived in the home in order to demand four sets of legal processing fees instead of two.

Maybe this is just me, but I wouldn't be out on blogs bragging about being an expert in these things.

Back to 1977 this weekend with a live concert from the Paris Theater in London featuring The Jack Bruce Band. Recorded by the BBC in April 1977, this was the Jack Bruce Band from the How's Tricks period which featured Hughie Burns, Tony Hymas and Simon Philips and was part of the tour promoting that album.

Play loud and enjoy.

Back when mainstream Media had a certain amount of Public Interest attached to it, the airwaves were filled with shows asking questions, looking for answers, prodding and probing.

One such show ran on CBS Radio in the mid-late 1950's called The Great Challenge. Usually hosted by a member of CBS News, this panel program posed a warehouse full of pertinent questions over what was going on with our society.

This episode, subtitled "Individual Relationships In A Mass Society" played host to a number of distinguished figures in the psychiatric and sociological professions, including Dr. Brock Chisholm, Dr Lawrence Kubie, Dr. Ralph W. Tyler, Dr. Erich Fromme, Dr. Lionel Trilling and Dr. William Foote Whyte, all pondering what was going wrong with America and why were we going so . . .well . . .crazy.

Dr. Ralph Tyler: “The point is, that you cannot be as an individual, free and able to express all the potentialities you have, to think and act in various ways, unless you have an opportunity to get stimulation from other people. We want variety in our society because it makes society interesting. If you have to sit with Joe and you know fifteen minutes ahead of time exactly what Joe’s going to say and how he’s going to say it, and many people at their homes or at work find just that relationship that there’s nothing novel, nothing exciting, nothing interesting. Other people bore you and you bore other people. And our concern here is that it’s through human relations of an individual sort an original, a creative sort, that life itself becomes interesting, it’s worth living.”

Dr. Brock Chisholm: “I suppose that there’s a lot wrong with this generation as there has been a lot wrong with all previous generations. But it’s more important now that it used to be. Because even while a lot of people in the past couldn’t get along together at all, and fought each other as they did, the results were usually fairly local. Only a few thousand or occasionally larger numbers of people were killed, but the human race was itself never threatened. In this generation there is required a whole new attitude that is appropriate to a new kind of world about which our ancestors knew nothing, and the requirements for adjustment to that changed world will probably, I would say I believe quite certainly, produce more neurosis, or at least liberate or motivate more neurosis or provide channels for the neurosis that is there already and encourage it to show.”

Bear in mind we're talking about a period of time, smack in the middle of the Cold War, where visions of obliteration were almost daily ruminations brought on by media and the practitioners of fear at the time. No wonder the 1950's were often considered "the dawn of Miltown".

At any rate, CBS Radio assembled a group of the best minds at the time and kicked it around. Maybe not offering solutions, but certainly letting everyone know they weren't alone in this - some comfort for sure.

Here is the April 22, 1956 installment of The Great Challenge, hosted by Howard K. Smith.

BTW - the "youth" they are referring to are in fact your parents and in some cases, your grandparents. Remember that, and perhaps giggle.

Even after Wall Street blew up our economy and Americans got to experience their 401K's and pension funds taking massive hits due to their maleficence, some of the panel members of this Saturday's Forbes on Fox were still pushing for Social Security privatization.

Host David Asman started out the segment by touting Max Baucus' proposal as part of the "super committee" to limit pay increases for Social Security benefits, followed by Rick Perry's push for privatization of the system and him asking his panel for their input. All of them other than panelist Mark Tatge thought either total or partial privatization of the system, or at least raising the retirement age would be a wonderful way to "reform" Social Security. And only Tatge bothered to remind any of them that after what he saw happen to his 401K after the recent financial meltdown, maybe turning over the country's retirement security to Wall Street might not be such a good idea.

Despite the fact that we've got thousands of people out protesting and taking to the streets in the Occupy Wall Street movement because they're fed up with the greed and inequality and what the financial industry has done to the American economy, this is the kind of tripe that Fox is feeding their audience on a daily basis. Let's follow the Chilean model as we've seen GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain pushing for, or if we don't do that, let's just let everyone work until they drop dead instead.

Anything other than asking the richest one percent to pay more in taxes, because god knows we can't have that, now can we?

Time for your weekly podcast with the Professional Left, otherwise known as our own Driftglass and Bluegal.

You can listen to the archives at The Professional Left and you can make a donation there if you'd like to help keep these going. And you can follow them on Facebook at The Professional Left Podcast with Driftglass and Blue Gal. Have a great weekend everyone and enjoy the podcast.

One more day until the wickedest of them all. What would Halloween be without some Iron Maiden?

Another incisive documentary by Al Jazeera. The Kochs combined wealth is estimated by Forbes magazine to be around $35 billion USD.

Al Jazeera English narrator: Money has always played a key role in American politics. But is it now distorting the democractic process? That is the charge made against Charles and David Koch. With a year to go until the presidential election, could the Koch brother's fortune put a radical right [winger] into the White House?