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Another Saturday, another segment on Faux News where they're attacking the poor and food stamp recipients, which, other than attacking union members, seems to be one of their favorite pastimes during their so-called "business block," From Cavuto on Business, after Cavuto opens the segment dismayed about all of the people "on the dole" still receiving food stamps and guest Dagen McDowell carrying on about how this is proof that "big government" is out of control, we got this bit of nastiness out of regular, Charles Payne:

CAVUTO: The argument, Charles Payne, is that once you get them, it's hard to stop them, so the benefit is there and it's hard to take the benefit of it away and the more people that are getting them, then it's just exponentially grows.

PAYNE: Yeah, well there's absolutely no doubt about that, that there's this idea that, you know, between the food stamps and the welfare and the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit and the local programs, you know, it gets a little comfortable to be in poverty, you know... and I know people are going to.... listen. No. Listen, I've lived it first hand. I've seen where people don't go to work because they get everything paid for them. The incentive is not there.

Yeah, all of those lucky ducky poor people who are just living the high life out there. Charlie Gasparino attempted to assert himself as somewhat of the voice of reason in the segment and a number of the members of the panel admitted that unemployment numbers are still terrible and people are hurting out there, but it really didn't get much better from there. Ben Stein made the ridiculous remark that "the war on hunger" appears to have been won, ignoring the fact that we've got millions of children in this country who don't know where their next meal is coming from -- and ignoring that lack of access to nutritious food and eating cheap junk that is bad for you instead is contributing to the problem with obesity, not that poor people out there have too much money to spend on food.

What we were treated to here is yet another example of Fox and their war on anti-poverty measures:

Not content to shame food stamps recipients and bully them into silence, Fox News is now targeting efforts to raise awareness of poverty and food insecurity.

The latest front in the Fox News war on anti-poverty measures takes aim at chef Mario Batali as he highlights the difficulties of living on food stamps -- problems that are routinely dismissed on Fox while the network pushes for drastic cuts to nutritional aid and other anti-poverty measures.

h/t Media Matters

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So much for all of that rhetoric about small businesses being the engine of our economy and job growth. After the news this week that Wal-Mart has decided to pull back its efforts to open a store in Brooklyn, New York amidst protests and political pressure, the talking heads on Fox's "business block" decided this was a perfect opportunity for another round of union bashing -- which is pretty much their favorite thing to do on Saturday mornings. However, panel member Dagen McDowell may have let one slip when she decided to attack "mom and pa" stores as well.

When it was pointed out by her fellow guest, Adam Lashinsky on Fox' Cavuto on Business this Saturday, that how many small businesses are going to end up being shut down if Wal-Mart is allowed in ought to be part of the debate, McDowell wound up the segment by saying that "mom and pa need to get over it."

And of course even though all of them had plenty of time to complain about how terrible those evil union thugs were for keeping that wonderful "job creator" Wal-Mart out of Brooklyn and for stomping on the hopes of all of those poor people out there just dying to get one of those minimum wage jobs, the true cost of the way Wal-Mart does business with shoving their costs onto the taxpayers never came up.

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It wouldn't be a Saturday on Fox's so-called "business block" without several rounds of union bashing and this week was no exception with the panel on Neil Cavuto's show continuing to attack the labor union, rather than management and the hedge fund managers, for the demise of Hostess -- Fox Ignores Hostess' Array Of Troubles To Scapegoat Union For Liquidation:

Fox News placed the blame for the planned liquidation of Hostess Brands squarely on a labor dispute with one of the company's unions. In fact, Hostess' unions had previously made significant concessions when the company went through a failed bankruptcy, and Hostess had many problems beyond labor costs, including an inability to adjust to changes in consumer tastes, which contributed to its bankruptcy. Read on...

And here's more from Daily KOS Labor -- 'Hostess Brands is a microcosm of what’s wrong with America':

As Hostess Brands announces its liquidation, the company's management is blaming a strike by members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union—those damn workers wouldn't accept having their pay and pensions cut and their health care contributions increased just a few years after they made similar concessions in Hostess' previous, mishandled bankruptcy. "The forces most responsible" for the liquidation, CNBC's John Carney writes, "were two hedge funds that control hundreds of millions of Hostess debt and which have finally decided they won't squeeze any more filling into the Twinkie."

Only Silver Point and Monarch could have kept Hostess out of liquidation and kept the Twinkie bakery ovens firing. But they were, ultimately, unable to reach a deal with the unions that represents the workers who make and deliver products like Twinkies, Wonderbread and Ding Dongs. Without large union concessions—what some would say, total union capitulation—the hedge funds decided Hostess would have to die.

Hostess has clearly been mismanaged in recent years after having grown through the previous decades in ways that make its structure, including its labor force, especially complicated. But the end game is that private equity firms came in to do what they do: squeeze profits for their own multimillionaire investors at whatever cost to workers and to the company itself. Who cares if tens of thousands of workers are left unemployed and without the means to retire? Not Silver Point or Monarch, as long as they get their money. Who cares if Hostess exists tomorrow? Not Silver Point or Monarch, as long as they get their money.

These union members had faced a slow bleed for years. The only question for them was whether to accept an accelerated bleed and hope it would stop in a few years—but hope that in the knowledge that that was not a priority or even necessarily a desirable outcome to Hostess' private equity owners—or to fight for what they earned. We're hearing, and can expect to keep hearing, a lot about how it's so unreasonable of union members to expect to get the pay and benefits they negotiated and worked for, the pensions they've planned their retirements around. Because this is coming after a generation-long war on pensions and unions and middle-class wages. As AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement, "What’s happening with Hostess Brands is a microcosm of what’s wrong with America, as Bain-style Wall Street vultures make themselves rich by making America poor." Read on...

And from Think Progress -- Hostess Blames Union For Bankruptcy After Tripling CEO’s Pay:

Today, Hostess Brands inc. — the company famed for its sickly sweet desert snacks like Twinkies and Sno Balls — announced they’d be shuttering after more than eighty years of production.

But while headlines have been quick to blame unions for the downfall of the company there’s actually more to the story: While the company was filing for bankruptcy, for the second time, earlier this year, it actually tripled its CEO’s pay, and increased other executives’ compensation by as much as 80 percent. [...]

Certainly, the company agreed to an out-sized pension debt, but the decision to pay executives more while scorning employee contracts during a bankruptcy reflects a lack of good managerial judgement.

It also follows a trend of rising CEO pay in times of economic difficulty. At the manufacturing company Caterpillar, for example, they froze workers’ pay while boosting their CEO’s pay to $17 million. And at Citigroup, CEO Vikram Pandit received $6.7 million for crashing his company, walking off with $260 million after the business lost 88 percent of its value.

Don't expect to hear that reported on Fox though. In Fox-land, it's always the greedy overpaid union thugs that are the heart of all of our problems.

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Conservative economist Ben Stein on Thursday seemed to know that he had wandered off message when he joked that the hosts of Fox & Friends might murder him for saying that it was not possible to balance the budget without raising taxes.

"I hate to say this on Fox -- and I hope I'll be allowed to leave here alive -- but I don't think there is anyway we can cut spending enough to make a meaningful difference," Stein told the three shocked co-hosts. "We going to have to raise taxes on very rich people, people with incomes of like say, 2, 3 million a year and up, and then slowly move it down."

"You do not think Washington just has a spending problem?" Steve Doocy wondered.

"I do not think they just have a spending problem," Stein explained. "I think they also have a too-low taxes problem. And while all due respect to Fox, whom I love like brothers and sisters, the taxes are too low."

The economist noted that even more revenue could have been brought in during President George W. Bush's presidency if taxes had not been cut.

"The evidence is that there is no connection between the level of taxation and the level of economic activity," he pointed out. "The biggest growth we've ever had in this country was roughly 1941 to roughly 1973, that was the best years we ever had and those were years of much, much higher taxes than we have now, during war time and during peace time. So, the economy can grow very fast, even with much higher taxes. And we're going to have to do something."

"Taxes were like 70, 80 percent!" Doocy exclaimed.

"I know," Stein agreed. "And yet, we were very prosperous, we were extremely prosperous. I mean, the highest rate was in the 90s during parts of the 50s and, yet, we were very prosperous."

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On this Wednesday's The O'Reilly Factor, after guest host Laura Ingraham and Ben Stein did their best to spin the Fox talking point that raising taxes on the upper one percent has not damaged most of the working class in America and decrying anyone who dares to say the the wealthiest among us haven't paid their fair share in taxes, they had the unfortunate circumstance of running into a liberal that I suspect will not be invited back on Fox News any time soon.

Most of the time the only Democrats or liberals Fox allows on the air are feckless ones who don't do a very good job of pushing back at the right wing talking points being spewed while they're on the air. That wasn't the case here. David Callahan of Demos did a very good job shooting down Ingraham and Stein's talking points on taxation and income disparity.

INGRAHAM: And David, an interesting statistic that I hadn't heard before, but Stephen Moore just shared it with me. In 2003 after the Bush tax cuts, the big tax cuts kicked in, for those next four years, the income coming into the federal treasury was the highest in any four year period in our government's history. So tax revenues went up after that tax cut. So the idea that if we only raise taxes on the rich, things will begin to even out and there will be lollipops on the Bushes and rainbows in the sky. I mean it seems to me it doesn't really fly man.

CALLAHAN: Well, actually, Steve has that statistic wrong. As a percentage of GDP taxes were lower under Bush than Clinton. They peeked in 2000 as 20% of GDP. But just going to Ben Stein's point, there is a causal connection between the pain of the middle class and how the rich are making out like bandits, which is that, you know, we're seeing cuts for student aid, cuts for all sorts of social programs, because there's not enough tax revenues and one of the reason there's not enough tax revenues is because taxes on the rich are at the lowest level they've been in sixty years. Look, that is unsustainable.

After which both Stein and Ingraham's heads both exploded, with both of them defending the one percent, and Stein complaining that they pay an unfair amount of the overall percentage of taxes, ignoring the fact that is only true because they also control most of the wealth, so of course they pay a large percent of the taxes, and Ingraham using it as an opportunity to attack the health care law. Callahan countered them fairly well again when given a chance to speak.

CALLAHAN: Well, that Obama program hasn't even gone, isn't even being gone into effect fully...

INGRAHAM: But the taxes haven't fully gone into effect in 2013. We're going to start seeing the taxes.

CALLAHAN: But let's get back to the class warfare issue. I would agree with what Warren Buffet said which is yeah, there's class warfare in this country. It's been waged from the top down. You know, politics is about who gets what and we all know that the way to get what you want in politics is to hire lobbyists and make campaign donations. And the wealthy have the money to do that.

They have taken over our politics and the middle class don't have the means to compete. We see all this money for lobbying, all this money for campaign donations and it shouldn't be a surprise that there are all of these loopholes in the tax code and that a lot of corporations pay no taxes. That a lot of wealthy people pay no taxes. There was a study recently released that found a quarter of all millionaires paid lower taxes than your typical middle class family. That is not right.

The best Ben Stein could manage to come up with to try to counter him there was to claim that most millionaires are Democrats. I've never seen any statistics to prove or disprove what Stein said, but I have a feeling he hasn't either. I have a feeling he just pulled that one out of his posterior.

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If Jon Stewart and his staff need more material for segments like the one he did this week -- slamming Fox for attacking Warren Buffett for saying the rich should pay more in taxes and attacking the poor as a bunch of freeloaders who just want to suck off the government teet and for daring to have things like refrigerators and air conditioning -- you need not look any further than their "business block" that airs on Fox "News" every Saturday morning.

Here's how Cavuto opened up the segment in the clip above:

CAVUTO: Sock it to the rich! But what if I told you there aren't as many rich folks to sock?

Oh my god! We can't have that now can we? Naturally that means we can never raise taxes on anyone that's still in those upper income brackets. Cavuto goes on to quote some statistics from the IRS showing that there were 13% fewer people earning $200,000 and above from 2007-2009 and 55% less making $10 million and above during that same period and tells Ben Stein that that's not a good trend.

Ben Stein was actually the voice of reason here with his response to Cavuto and pointing out that that doesn't mean there still aren't plenty of rich people around and it wouldn't kill them to pay more in taxes. Cavuto responds by asking him if he thinks those making over $200.000 are rich and out there buying jet airplanes. Stein got a pretty good shot in on Cavuto by telling him, no, he was talking about people like him, who have incomes of $10 million a year or more.

Cavuto and his panel end up spending the rest of the segment pretending that the poor don't pay any taxes because many of them don't pay federal income tax and having another pity party for the rich if anyone like Warren Buffett dares to say they should pay higher taxes.

UPDATE: And surprise, surprise, it appears those stats are cherry-picked to suit their new meme over at the Wall Street Journal and now Fox "News." Here's more from Media Matters breaking that down -- "Millionaires Go Missing?" WSJ And Fox Cherry-Pick Stats To Claim Number Of Millionaires Shrinking.

(Post title updated as well.)

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Fox's Neil Cavuto and his weekend show panel were terribly upset that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said that seniors may die sooner under Rep. Paul Ryan and the GOP's budget plan during testimony before the House Education and the Workforce Committee this week.

Apparently their vote for Ryan's budget has got a lot of Republicans on edge and as Steve Benen noted, some of them are using the same talking points as the Fox pundits did here.

When Rep. Chris Lee (R) resigned in disgrace in February, few expected his seat to change party hands. His Buffalo-area district has been represented by Republicans for a long while, and national Democrats didn’t expect the special election to replace Lee to be competitive at all.

In March, the New York GOP rallied behind Jane Corwin, a well-liked state assemblywoman, and the race in the 26th congressional district appeared to be largely over.

And then a Siena College poll was published, showing Corwin’s lead at just five points over Democrat Kathy Hochul. What happened?

Part of the competitiveness is the result of Jack Davis, an odd millionaire, running as an independent and splitting the right. And the other part is Paul Ryan’s House Republican budget plan. [...]

At this point, the best the Republican campaign can come up with is the charge that Democrats “are trying to scare seniors.” But that’s awfully weak — it’s not demagoguery if it’s true, and if accurate descriptions of the GOP plan end up scaring people, that’s certainly not Democrats’ fault.

During this segment on Cavuto's show they were a bit long on fearmongering themselves and short on just what the details of Ryan's plan are, even though all of them continually maintained that the people attacking it don't know what's in it and need to go read it. And Steve is exactly right on the "scare tactic" talking point; that's a terribly weak argument. Seniors are afraid and upset because once they get a look at the GOP's budget plan and the details, they don't like it, not because they don't realize fully what it means for Medicare - privatizing it.

Of course the panel here just repeated the tired talking point that Medicare needs to be and handed over to the private insurance industry in order to "save it."

Well it looks like Bill Maher isn't the only one taking Ben Stein to task this week for whining about the Bush tax cuts expiring.

h/t The Political Carnival -- CBS News Sunday Morning – Linda McGibney rebuts Ben Stein op-ed re tax on rich

Good for Linda! It's nice to hear the Ben Stein's of the world getting a little push back.

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Bill Maher had a pretty good New Rules segment where he hit the WATB mega-rich who are complaining about their tax cuts possibly expiring. Good on Bill for that. I've got a New Rule right back for Bill Maher though when it comes to his show tonight. I"m curious if any fellow HBO subscribers who watched it agree with me.

New Rule, do not allow Andrew Breitbart and Amy Holmes back on your show EVER again to ruin it. Or if you're going to allow them on, bring on a liberal that follows what the hell is going on well enough to at least call bulls**t on the Kenneth Gladney story.

Bill Maher allowed the two of them to basically filibuster the entire first half of his panel segment. It was pitiful. And when they lied, he didn't know enough about the issues to call them on their lies. Bill, if you want a fair and balanced show that lets both sides get their points out there and there's an actual debate between liberal policies and right wing talking points, then bring on some actual liberals who follow what the hell is going on to call these liars out that you decide to bring on your show. I've got about a mile long list of names I could give you if you'd like any recommendations.

Maybe if you want to make some amends next week for giving Breitbart a pass you can go back and read this post on Breitbart's Kenneth Gladney lie if that's not too much trouble for you to spend some of your precious time doing some research.

Faking victimhood: Just how hurt was that supposed victim of SEIU 'thuggery'?

The bigger issue is why you think it's necessary to keep bringing these liars back on your show who you don't agree with and don't follow issues well enough to counter their lies. You're as bad as Jon Stewart as much as I love him as well with falling for the false equivalency game where you pretend you're being fair by giving the liars on the right a format to present their views as somehow a balance to those on the left. There's telling the truth and then there's lying to the American people.

You gave Andrew Breitbart and Amy Holmes a huge format to try to appear sane, balanced and let them lie to your audience and your viewers with way too many of those lies going unchallenged. I think that's just shameful. I don't mind a real debate where they get called on their B.S. and it's debated. You didn't do that on your show tonight and you let them talk over your guests that tried like Carl Sagan's wife Ann Druyan who was lucky to get a word in edgewise without being interrupted. And I don't know what the hell was wrong with Seth McFarlane tonight but apparently someone tied his tongue. I know he didn't agree with what Breitbart and Holmes were saying for the better part of the show but instead of attempting to call them out he sat there and let them rail on instead and just looked disgusted. Pitiful.

The transcript of Bill's rant is up at the HuffPo for anyone that can't watch the video.

New Rule: Rich People Who Complain About Being Vilified Should Be Vilified

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Oh my, Ben Stein is apparently upset that the Republicans weren't being treated respectfully enough during the health care summit by the President. Heaven forbid... he called them by their first names. Gasp... the horror Ben. Yeah, those poor little defenseless Republicans who never attack anyone just had to fight back here because big bad Obama was being mean to them. And CNN thinks we're supposed to take anything this clown says seriously. I'm surprised Stein didn't just come straight out and call the President "uppity" because he came pretty close here.

BLITZER: Let's bring in Donna Brazile and Ben Stein, because I want them to weigh in. First to you, Ben. This whole issue of costs, premiums going up, a trillion dollars in extra cost to US taxpayers. Some of it might be offset by some cuts in projected Medicare spending. Where do you come down on this?

STEIN: Well, the 57 percent who are going to get subsidies, where is that money going to come from? That money is going to come from taxpayers. That money is not going to just magically appear. So the costs for everyone is going to go up.

Obviously, the insurance companies are going to cover more people, cover people with preexisting conditions, cover people who have very expensive treatment options involved, without having to charge more to somebody. So, somebody's going to be paying more.

I'm also sort of floored by the whole thing that's going on here, where the president is calling the senators by their first names, as if they were kids in a third grade class. And they're all calling him Mr. President.

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