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The Daily Show's Jon Stewart took the talking heads over at Fox to task for their freakout over the sale of Al Gore's Current TV to Al Jazeera and making attacking the network as anti-American and associated with terrorists. As Stewart rightfully pointed out, heaven forbid anyone over at Fox would ever associate themselves with someone who owns a network that produces anything that would be considered anti-American... like Rupert Murdoch.

As I write this on Thursday morning, there is a Congressional hearing called by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Manistan) protesting the intrusion of government into religion, sparked by Kathleen Sebelius' issuance of regulations requiring health insurers to provide contraception with no co-payments. Democratic women walked out on the hearing after their witnesses were not allowed to appear before the committee.

As is true of all congressional hearings, elected officials are posturing and chest-beating over religious freedoms and intrusive government. Their claim: requiring contraception without co-payments is excessive government intrusion into religious freedom.

Yet somehow, insertion of a probe into a woman which is mandatory and required by the government is not considered intrusive government. Rachel Maddow does a great job of explaining this insanity in the video above.

Conservatives are hypocrites. This isn't a surprise. Even so, it's shockingly cynical to hear them quote everyone from Stalin to Martin Luther King with the full nods of their chosen religious leaders sitting before them. This hearing deserves to be put alongside what they fully believe should be allowed to be done to women by the state. Very, very big government.

No birth control, ladies, but if you happen to get pregnant and want an abortion, we're going to shove a transvaginal probe in you before we "let you" have that abortion. There's some liberty for you.

This is 2012, right? Here, let me show you what Issa's panel looks like:

Here's some of the testimony they excluded, from Sandra Fluke, a third-year student at Georgetown Law, a Jesuit school:

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