The Last Word's Lawrence O'Donnell got his shots in at Fox and their joke of a business channel and the likes of Stuart Varney, who was previously claiming that the election of President Obama was responsible for the dip in the stock market the day after the election. With the markets reaching a record high this week, as O'Donnell rightfully noted here, those talking heads are just as clueless now about why the market went up as they were when it went down last year.
I'm not sure who actually watches the Fox Business Channel, but sometimes I wonder if they exist solely as an attempt to make CNBC look respectable in comparison.
Lou Dobbs continues to prove that his move from CNN to Fox Business Channel was not good for him or for anyone still watching him if they would like to be presented with some semblance of the truth instead of perpetual fearmongering. In the wake of the Aurora massacre, one of the topics on this Friday's show was gun control, whether it be the possibility of new gun control laws being passed in America, or one of the right's favorite conspiracy theories, which is that the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty is going to take away everyone's guns.
And who better to bring in to weigh in on the topic, than discredited gun "researcher" John Lott. Media Matters has a long list of posts on Lott which you can read here. And Digby wrote about this nut back in 2006 here: Resurrection.
Negotiators at the United Nations worked to complete a treaty to regulate the global arms trade by a Friday night deadline but faced resistance from some nations, including Iran, Syria and North Korea, and a request for more time from the United States.
The treaty aims to halt the cross-border flow of weapons and ammunition that has fueled violent conflicts around the world.
But some countries made clear their unhappiness with the restrictions in the treaty, which requires approval from all 193 United Nations members. And the Obama administration said it needed to study the text, which has gone through a series of revisions in a four-week negotiating process.
Complicating the politics of the negotiation, 51 U.S. senators have joined gun rights advocates in opposing the treaty, which they fear would infringe 2nd Amendment rights to bear arms.
The senators, in letters to President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, expressed "grave concern" that the treaty could affect Americans’ ability to buy arms. Arms-control advocates contend that the worry is groundless. [...]
[Updated 5:24 p.m. Friday July 27: U.N. members ultimately failed to reach agreement by the Friday deadline. The conference chairman, Ambassador Roberto Garcia Moritan, said that despite the stalemate,“we certainly are going to have a treaty in 2012,” the Associated Press reported.]
As Media Matters reported, Fox's John Stossell went on Fox & Friends to discuss his special Rich Man, Poor Man which aired on both of their networks, and made some dubious claims about what's happened to income growth for those who are living in poverty:
Fox's John Stossel claimed that it's a "myth" that "the poor are getting poorer" and that they are actually getting "richer." In fact, incomes for the bottom fifth have shown almost no growth in recent decades, and the numbers Stossel used to support his argument were cherry-picked.
Incomes At The Bottom Have Shown Almost No Growth In Decades; Stossel Calls It "Getting Richer"
Stossel: "The Rich Have Gotten Richer, But So Have The Poor." From Fox News' Fox & Friends:
STOSSEL: There are just two myths. One is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. And the truth is yes, over time the rich have gotten richer, but so have the poor -- 20 percent richer since I was in college. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 5/24/12]
CBPP: "The Era Of Shared Prosperity Ended In The 1970s." From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report:
Census family income data show that the era of shared prosperity ended in the 1970s and illustrate the divergence in income that has emerged since that time. CBO data allow us to look at what has happened to comprehensive income since 1979 -- both before and after taxes -- and offer a better view of what has happened at the top of the distribution.
As Figure 2 shows, between 1979 and 2007, average income after taxes in the top 1 percent of the distribution rose 277 percent, meaning that it nearly quadrupled. That compares with increases of about 40 percent in the middle 60 percent of the distribution and 18 percent in the bottom fifth.
Media Matters has a lot more charts and information in their post along with debunking more of what Stossel said on the air.
Here's the promo for Stossel's special which you can watch the very beginning of in the clip above from Fox Business Channel where it originally aired this week: Rich Man, Poor Man:
While discussing President Obama's remarks on Romney's experience at Bain Capital, former Reagan Office of Management and Budget Director David Stockman stepped all over Romney's claims that his experience in the leveraged buyout business taught him anything at all about "job creation."
During a press conference Monday afternoon, President Obama hit back against critics — including surrogate and Newark Mayor Cory Booker — who have expressed disappointment over his campaign’s effort to attack Mitt Romney’s record of job creation at Bain Capital, a leveraged buyout firm the former Massachusetts governor headed from 1984 to 1999.
“The reason this is relevant to the campaign is because my opponent, Governor Romney, his main calling card for why he thinks he should be president, is his business experience,” Obama said. “He is not going out there touting his experience in Massachusetts. He’s saying, ‘I’m a business guy, I know how to fix it.’” Obama explained that while private equity is “set up to maximize profits” for shareholders, the president is responsible for the health of the economy as a whole and fostering job creation.
Much to the chagrin of the two anchors on Fox Business, Stockman went off message when he responded to Asman's question about whose economic model the public is going to support:
ASMAN: So you have these two economic models. You have one exemplified by Bain Capital, which fails sometimes, but I think it has a success rate of about 70 percent and you have one of the federal government involvement in the economy. Which one do you think the American public is going to support?
STOCKMAN: Well, I don't know. I think the current federal model is a disaster. We know where we are on the debt. We're going to have a debt ceiling that expires in December and I don't know where the votes are going to come to increase it. But if they don't, then we'll have this huge sequester and we'll have all these tax cuts expiring. It is going to be really a thundering mess. So clearly what we're doing with fiscal policy and monetary policy at present, isn't working.
On the other hand, I don’t think Mitt Romney can legitimately say that he learned anything about how to create jobs in the LBO business. The LBO business is about how to strip cash out of old, long-in-the-tooth companies and how to make short-term profits.
Cue David Asman and his co-host Melissa Francis heads simultaneously exploding at the same time.
During his Fox Business special, Bad Speech which reaired on their sister network, Fox News this Saturday, John Stossel highlighted several incidences which he called "assaults on speech," the first of which was the firing of Pat Buchanan from MSNBC.
Apparently both Buchanan and Stossel are terribly upset with Van Jones' organization, Color of Change, for exercising their own free speech in protesting the kind of hatred Pat Buchanan had been peddling for ages now. Here's their petition which Stossel read part of to Buchanan:
Below is the message we'll send to MSNBC President Phil Griffin and NBC News President Steve Capus on your behalf. You can add a personal message using the box on the right.
I'm writing to demand that you fire Pat Buchanan immediately. Buchanan has a long and consistent history of peddling white supremacist ideology as legitimate political commentary, on your network and elsewhere. He recently went on a white supremacist radio show to promote his new book -- which argues that increasing racial diversity is a threat to this country and will mean the "End of White America."
Pat Buchanan has the right to express his views, but he's not entitled to a platform that lets him broadcast bigotry and hate to millions. If MSNBC and NBC want to be seen as trusted, mainstream sources of news and commentary, you need to fire Buchanan now.
Stossel only read the portion where they said he peddled white supremacist ideology and his response was to say he didn't know what that means. Stossel also read part of the list from this post by Think Progress: Why MSNBC Dumped Pat Buchanan: His 10 Most Outrageous Statements:
3. Claimed Jerry Sandusky’s atrocities are because of “Homosexual marriage.” Buchanan appeared on a right-wing radio show on November 15 to make some convoluted comparisons: “Let’s take this Penn State thing…these horrors, there’s an organization that marches in the gay pride parade in New York called—used to—called the North American Man Boy Love Association, which advocated voluntary sex along the lines of exactly what was going on at Penn State. Many of our political icons have marched in that parade right behind that NAMBLA float […] This is now, homosexual marriage is now the civil rights cause of the decade.”
Buchanan's response was to just start laughing and deny he made the statement. Stossel didn't bother to point out that the link goes to a Media Matters post with the audio of the interview, so people could go listen for themselves and hear what he said.
Lou Dobbs regularly looked like he'd come close to losing his mind when he was still raging on about illegal immigrants day after day on CNN. It appears he's well past that point now with this bit of insanity from his show on the Fox Business Channel from this Tuesday.
Beloved icons of childhood entertainment in America, or subtle forms of anti-business indoctrination that brainwash your kids into hating capitalism?
Thank goodness we have Fox to ask these questions.
Lou Dobbs sounded the alarm again tonight on his Fox Business show:
DOBBS: Now, an "Unmentionable" -- a story you won't hear anywhere in the liberal national media, or nearly all of the national liberal media. Hollywood is once again trying to indoctrinate our children. Two new films out this year, plainly with an agenda, plainly demonizing the so-called "1 percent" and espousing the virtue of green-energy policies, come what may.
The first, Dobbs said, is an animated film called The Secret World of Arrietty, and the second is Universal Pictures' computer-animated version of the 1971 Dr. Seuss classic The Lorax. Read on...
Tom Hartmann blasts Sen. Ron Wyden for teaming up with Paul Ryan to partially privatize Medicare and for allowing Fox to use him to claim that Democrats are for privatizing Medicare. As Hartmann pointed out here, he knew as soon as he heard about the Wyden-Ryan proposal that segments like the one he had with Fox Business Channel's David Asman were coming.
Over three-quarters of the guests featured on nine television networks have expressed opposition to an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) mandate to regulate greenhouse gasses (GHG), according to a new report.
On April 2, 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the Clean Air Act gave the EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gasses. It wasn't until December 2009, after President George W. Bush left office, that the EPA began to move toward regulation by issuing a GHG scientific endangerment finding.
The report released by the liberal watchdog group Media Matters Tuesday concluded that over the 17 months since that EPA finding, 152 of the 199 guests -- or more than 76 percent -- opposed regulation. Only 17 percent of the guests spoke in favor of climate regulations.
The report said that Fox News, Fox Business and CNBC were the worst offenders.
More than 81 percent of Fox News guests and 83 percent of Fox Business guests criticized the EPA's effort to reign in climate change. CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS featured primarily straight news stories that did not rely on opinionated guests. Of all the broadcast networks, Fox's Sunday news show Fox News Sunday had the most opponents of EPA regulations.
MSNBC was the exception with four times as many proponents of EPA greenhouse gas regulations.
Media Matters also found that Republicans outnumbered Democrats six to one during cable news channel discussions. Again, the worst offenders were Fox News, Fox Business and CNBC. Only MSNBC had more Democrats than Republicans.
Both Fox News and Fox Business hosted one Democrat each, but those Democrats were both against greenhouse gas regulations. Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) appeared on Fox News and then-Gov. Joe Manchin (D-WV) appeared on Fox Business. For its part, CNBC hosted no Democrats. In every case, Republicans invited to appear were against the EPA regulations.
An analysis by the liberal watchdog group determined that the elected officials appearing on news shows had received more than $3 million from fossil fuel interests.
The Cato Insitutes's Patrick Michaels -- the only climate scientist to appear on any news show -- was also opposed to EPA regulations. He appeared twice on Fox News' Your World with Neil Cavuto. In a 2010 interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria, Michaels admitted that 40 percent of his funding came from the petroleum industry.
Polls taken over the 17 months period covered in the report showed that the views depicted Fox News, Fox Business, the Fox broadcast network and CNBC were at odds with public opinion.
A June 2010 survey (PDF) by Stanford University found that 76 percent favored limiting greenhouse gasses created by U.S. businesses. That same month, ABC News reported (PDF) that 71 percent thought the government should limit greenhouse gasses created by "from sources like power plants, cars and factories."
I'm still waiting for the good Judge to explain to the rest of us what he said to his mom after he told her that he was buying into Ayn Rand's Libertarian B.S. "philosophy" of "I've got mine and the hell with anyone else" after, as he admitted here, reading Rand's book several times during his younger years in college and his mom freaking out about what sort of philosophy he was buying into. Apparently like a lot of people who were young and impressionable and read that book, Andrew Napolitano never figured out that it was a myth propagated by people who really just don't want to pay their fair share for participating in our civilized society, to hold up their end of the social contract.
Like most Libertarians and this current "Tea Party" crowd, they basically believe that you're "on your own" and that we have no shared responsibility to each other in maintaining a civil society. And like the good little cheerleader for Rand's philosophy that Napolitano is, he brought on the producer of the new movie version of Atlas Shrugged coming out on Tax Day this month, John Aglialoro, to push the latest propaganda effort by the right to fool Americans into thinking that being selfish and greedy and telling everyone else I've got mine and screw you is somehow a virtue.
And if anyone wonders why Fox's sorry excuse for a "business channel" that was supposed to compete with the other not-quite-as-sorry example of a business channel, CNBC, and why their ratings are in the tank, I'd just cite this as one of the many examples. CNBC pushes corporate America's agenda with their reporting; but Fox's alternative has stuff like this Libertarian crap as a regular feature.
So if you're looking for news on how the market's doing, you can choose between the mouthpieces for the upper 1 % at CNBC, or you can watch the wingnuts over at Fox tell you that you should take Ayn Rand's horribly written novel seriously.
I thought Fox News was bad until I had the unfortunate circumstance of turning on the Fox Business Channel this Labor Day weekend and catching some of Eric Bolling's Money Rocks show on that network. Apparently the highly trained investigative reporters working for his show managed to find three union workers sleeping on the job working for the New York MTA and they're really not happy that some of them made too much overtime for the year.
I would argue that maybe if some of them weren't working that much overtime, and they hired enough workers to fill those positions and cover all the shifts, maybe those evil union workers would not be falling asleep on the job since they would not be dead tired. Given the numbers they laid out here, I'm surprised it is only three of them they found falling asleep.
And since when is it the worker's fault that they are under staffed and they have the need to be paying that much overtime in the first place? Yeah, it's the evil union worker's fault for accepting the overtime, not the fault of the department that is offering it in the first place. Look at all the money they're making! The horror! Give me a break. I wonder if any of these people have ever worked a job where there was overtime required in their life and understand what kind of toll that takes on your health and your family life. Those workers are putting a whole lot of hours for a whole lot of days during the year to be making that much in overtime. Do these "pundits", and that's about the nicest thing I can think of to call most of them think they should be working all of those extra hours for straight time, or volunteering their lives away out of the goodness of their hearts?
I don't know about anyone else but this show reminded me of a cross between an NFL Sunday show and an episode of the Sopranos with bad actors replacing the regulars.
