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While others in the media are finally acknowledging that the Benghazi "scandal" which Fox has been pushing for months on end is nothing but a witch hunt and that ABC's big "scoop" on White House emails just left egg on their face and was nothing but lies being fed to them by Republicans, what are they doing over at Fox?

You guessed it... still scandal-mongering over Benghazi. And of course there was no acknowledgement by anyone on the panel of Fox News Watch this Saturday that the Republicans were caught feeding lies to ABC News. In Fox-land, the talking points by Susan Rice are still supposedly a scandal. They're carping that the White House doesn't treat the press nicely enough to suit them and that they don't know how to handle their messaging properly -- because we all know if they were better at messaging and nicer to the press, Fox would then give them a fair shake, right? They haven't managed to make this fake scandal of theirs stick, but they're still grasping at straws to be outraged about.

I thought that maybe they would just move on, since they've got themselves a couple of new drummed up "scandals" to chase after as well, but apparently they're not ready to let this witch hunt go any time soon.

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On this Saturday's Fox News Watch, the fake outrage that's been going on for months on end on the network over the embassy bombings in Libya continued, with the talking heads on the panel of course doing their best to hype Darrell Issa's upcoming hearings this week. When host Jon Scott asked his guests why the other networks weren't giving this story the same type of media of coverage as Fox, hilarity ensued.

The National Review's Rich Lowry claimed there's some conspiracy with the rest of the media to do the administration's bidding and help stonewall the issue and then later call it old news and say “let's move on.” Regular and Fox token “liberal” Ellen Ratner claimed that the other networks were just “jealous” after quoting someone saying anything that comes from Fox “ought to be taken with a grain of salt.”

Scooter Libby stenographer Judith Miller called the administration refusing to answer all of her network's questions “chutzpah” and Fox's Jim Pinkerton criticized the Washington Post for running a story about protests at a nuclear facility and how dare they write that story while ignoring Fox and their fake Benghazi outrage.

Judith Miller wrapped things up by having the “chutzpah” to actually claim it's “lamentable” that this story has become “politicized.” Well, there's one thing I agree with that was said here, but it's been the Republicans and her network that are responsible for it.

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They just can't stop themselves. This is what a panel discussion on Saturday's Fox News Watch over Chuck Todd trying to monopolize the press pool time in Israel devolves into when regular Jim Pinkerton opens his mouth. Forget the dog whistles, they've just gone straight for the blow horns again.

h/t Media Matters

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Fresh off of the heels of the media complaining about their lack of access to President Obama and his golf outing with Tiger Woods and with Chris Wallace complaining that his was the only Sunday show where the new White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough refused to make an appearance last week, the panel on their Saturday joke of a media watchdog show, Fox News Watch, decided to continue on with the carping with a good portion of the jeering done by one of their faux Democrats, Kirsten Powers.

It appears that this is just a rerun of the what the viewers were treated to on the same show last week, where, as News Corpse took note of, we were hearing some very similar complaints out of the same culprits:

Fox earned a ninth place showing by having been called on for questions fourteen times. That is only two fewer nods than CNN and the New York Times received. And if Fox can be described as having been shunned, then the Washington Post, USA Today, and NPR were victims of blatant and deliberate neglect since they came in even lower than Fox at tenth, eleventh, and thirteenth.

Nevertheless, Fox seems to be the only news outlet that is complaining about their treatment by the President. They devoted a segment of their Fox News Watch program to whining that they aren’t getting enough attention, poor things. Host Jon Scott started the bitch session by crying “Why does the president not like to call on us?” Jumping in without being recognized was Fox’s fake Democrat Kirsten Powers who shot back “Because he doesn’t want to be embarrassed. When Ed Henry asks questions to Jay Carney, inevitably Jay Carney ends up looking stupid because he doesn’t know how to answer the question. He’s used to pushing people around.” And she’s supposed to be the voice of the left on Fox’s fair and balanced roster.

With friends like Kirsten Powers who needs enemas? And that is a perfect illustration of why Obama ought to start shunning Fox News. It has never been a credible journalistic operation. It is an unabashed agent of the Republican Party whose only purpose is to bash the President and support the right-wing agenda.

Meanwhile, over at Dan Abrams' rag, Mediaite, Fox and Politico, or as Charlie Pierce calls Politico, The Tiger Beat on the Potomac, were being treated as though they actually have any legitimate complaints about lack of access to the White House and that somehow preventing them from acting like journalists, if that's what either of those organizations actually decided to do one of these days.

Fox’s Kirsten Powers To Panel: Chris Wallace ‘Should Be Proud’ Obama Won’t Go On His Show:

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You've gotta' just love it. From the network that did nothing but hammer on the drummed up fake Benghazi debacle and that has done nothing but attack President Obama ever since he became the Democratic nominee years ago, comes complaints about supposed "media bias" and favorable coverage received by President Obama during the last week prior to the election.

Host Jon Scott asked his panel on Fox News Watch (their so-called media watchdog show which almost makes Howard Kurtz's Sunday show look respectable... almost) what they thought about the poll by Pew Research, which showed President Obama receiving 29 percent positive coverage, and 19 percent negative, compared to Mitt Romney getting 16 percent positive and 33 percent negative.

What they failed to discuss was the fact that the study from Pew also stated that "The final week of the campaign marked only the second time in which positive stories about Obama outnumbered negative dating back to late August," or the fact that most of that positive coverage was due to his handling of the response to Hurricane Sandy. Mitt Romney was running around still campaigning and pretending to hold a "storm relief event," while President Obama was just doing his job. So heaven forbid that Mitt Romney might have actually deserved that negative coverage.

But the hacks at Fox can't believe everyone else didn't follow their lead with being the one organization that the study looked at, which still had much higher negative coverage for President Obama and positive for Romney during that final week. It's always rich watching the pundits over at GOPTV complaining about "media bias" from the other networks and media outlets and pretending that the rest of them are all liberal.

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From this Saturday's joke of a media "watchdog" show over at Faux News, the panel members of Fox News Watch spent one of their segments again perpetuating the myth of the so-called "liberal media" and complaining that those "elitists" haven't shown hatchet-man Dinesh D'Souza enough respect. And we got treated to the false equivalency of them comparing D'Souza to the way Michael Moore has been treated by the media and the awards he's won, as opposed to them generally ignoring D'Souza.

Nonny already went through D'Souza's god-awful movie for us here, so just go read the post if you haven't already -- Doing the Right Wing Limbo – How Low Can They Go?. And judging from his terrible interview with Piers Morgan, which was featured in Nonny's post, and with Bill Maher and Cenk Uygur who both just took him apart, I think the best thing D'Souza could do for himself is to avoid doing any more interviews -- unless of course they're at Fox where he's just going to get softballs lobbed at him.

I hate to break it to the hacks at Fox, but D'Souza is being treated with disdain by the media because he deserves to be, not because of some supposed bias against conservatives. Once again rather than having an iota of concern for the truth, the talking heads at Fox are playing the poor, aggrieved victim-card for D'Souza, who supposedly just can't get a break from those liberal snobs who just want to keep him down. Break out the waaammmbulance. There are a whole lot more talented and truthful people out there all over the country who would love to have the money behind them that D'Souza's had to fund his hit pieces on President Obama. Sadly most of them will never be receiving the national attention or the money that D'Souza has been for cranking out his garbage to poison our public and political discourse.

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Another Saturday, another segment on Fox News Watch where they're supposed "media watchdog" show proves they can be just as terrible at any "fair and balanced" reporting as Howard Kurtz's similar joke of a show on CNN. This week, they were discussing Mitt Romney's appearance at the NAACP, where he was booed during his speech. And of course they all tried to pretend there was no race baiting involved.

But they conveniently left out a couple of items during this segment. One, is what Mitt Romney said during a fundraiser which I wrote about here: Romney on NAACP Booing: If They Want More Free Stuff, Tell Them to Go Vote for the Other Guy.

They also failed to mention that Romney bussed in his own cheering section when they were discussing how Romney was treated by the crowd there, although I do agree with Judith Miller and the applause at the end was probably out of respect for the fact that Romney bothered to show up there at all. Ultimately they all ended up admitting who showing up there was actually going to help him with and that's his base, who think it's a good thing that he drew the boos from the crowd there.

Included in the panel this week was Richard Grenell, who the Romney campaign ousted after right wingers started going crazy because he's openly gay. Color me not shocked that there was no mention of that at any time during the show as well.

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From this Monday evening's The Rachel Maddow Show, guest host Ezra Klein does a recap of the column he wrote earlier that same day, debunking the right wing's latest talking point that the Affordable Care Act is “the largest tax increase in the history of the world.”

No, ‘Obamacare’ isn’t ‘the largest tax increase in the history of the world’ (in one chart):

Since the Supreme Court decision, Republicans have been calling the Affordable Care Act “the largest tax increase in the history of the world.” Politifact rates this false. Kevin Drum’s got a table of the 15 significant tax increases since 1950, and the Affordable Care Act, which amounts to a tax increase of 0.49 percent of GDP, comes in 10th. Austin Frakt took Drum’s table and made a chart: [...]

So no, the Affordable Care Act isn’t the “biggest tax hike in history.” It’s not even the biggest tax hike in the past 60 years. Or 50 years. Or 30 years. Or 20 years.

But it does include a number of tax hikes. The individual mandate, however, isn’t one of the big ones. It’s only expected to raise $27 billion during the next decade. The largest tax increase in the law is on high earners, who will see their Medicare payroll taxes increase by 0.9 percentage point and who will also pay a slightly higher rate on investment income. That raises more than $200 billion. There’s also the tax on unusually expensive health insurance plans, which raises $30 billion in the first decade, and much more in the second. There’s a $60 billion tax on insurance companies. You can find the whole list here.

And as Derek Thompson at The Atlantic rightfully pointed out: 2 of the Last 3 GOP Presidents Signed Larger Tax Increases Than Obamacare.

And as Klein noted in the clip above, President Obama has also cut taxes as he did in the stimulus, by extending the Bush tax cuts for two years and as he's promising to do with extending most of the Bush tax cuts for the lower and middle class permanently. None of those facts seem to matter to Republicans much, who are just desperate to paint Democrats as tax and spend liberals and make paying taxes of any sort a dirty word rather than all of our duty to make sure our government functions and that we protect the most vulnerable in our society and our society and democracy as a whole.

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm really just exhausted from watching and listening to this Libertarian wing and bunch of extremists that have taken over the Republican Party and the media's unwillingness to call them out as the dangerous ideologues that they are. Klein did a good job of calling out their lies and the fact that they want to demagogue the issue of paying taxes here. Sadly segments like this one have been the exception when it comes to Republicans and their reaction to the Supreme Court's ruling on the Affordable Care Act. For the most part they've been aided and abetted by our corporate media, and not just Fox.

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Completely ignoring Cal Thomas' very ugly remarks about Rachel Maddow at CPAC, where he said that "she is the best argument in favor of her parents using contraception" Fox News Watch host Jon Scott asked the panel this week if there really is a "war on women" or if it's just a ploy created by the left.

The segment opened with some video of Hillary Clinton weighing in on the matter at the Women of the World Summit and the best Jim Pinkerton could come up with was to say it proved she's running for president in 2016, because she dared to weigh in on "political" matters instead of staying above the fray in her position as Secretary of State.

Judith Miller shot back and talked about all the sorts of sexist attacks Hillary Clinton has had to endure over the years and applauded her for speaking out. Cal Thomas responded by citing some poll that was supposedly quoted by The New York Times, saying that 46-44 percent of women agreed it was alright for employers to opt out of contraceptive coverage and that you don't see enough conservative women having a chance to speak out on the matter (I guess he doesn't watch his own network) as proof that somehow conservative women aren't being given the same treatment as liberal women in the media.

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About the only thing more ridiculous than the decision by the producers on Morning Joe to bring on Franklin Graham to throw flames on whether President Obama is a Christian or not, or whether he's supposedly "more concerned about Muslims than Christians that are being murdered in Muslim countries" was this bit of concern trolling for Graham by the panel on Fox News Watch, where host Jon Scott asked if Graham was "ambushed."

He wasn't "ambushed" or forced to participate in any flame throwing during that segment any more than he was when CNN had him back on again for more of the Obama is a secret Muslim ridiculousness. What's really pathetic here is the panel in the Fox segment tried to claim Graham's agenda and he wanted to talk about got sidelined by questioning him on whether he thought he was a Christian or not, when what they claim he came on there to discuss was raising the exact same sort of drummed up concerns, which is that he supposedly more concerned about Muslims and making them angry than he is Christians being murdered in Muslim countries.

Apparently they're really upset that one line of calling President Obama a secret Muslim that's not really a Christian got highjacked by the crowd over at MSNBC and didn't allow him to make another attack on pretty much the exact same issue. And just ignore the fact that Graham got ample opportunity to discuss exactly what they claim he did not during that same interview.

Anyone watching this debacle with Graham every time he shows up on television knows what his game is about, which is painting the President as "the other" who is not really one of us, and somehow foreign, and playing to the birther nonsense that Graham has already made himself notorious for.

It's a really sad state of events when you've got one network slamming a really horrible interview where the producers should have known better than to bring Graham on in the first place because they knew what they were going to get and being upset because it wasn't more horrible yet and trying to pretend Graham's agenda got highjacked somehow. It wasn't. MSNBC should be ashamed for putting this birther who's just out to line his pocket and push a right wing agenda on the air and so should Fox for carrying water for him.