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Jon Stewart had a field day with Fox "news" and their phony "war on Christmas" which just keeps coming earlier and earlier, and getting more ridiculous by the year. Stewart mocked Fox & Friends Gretchen Carlson, who actually asked if they were "were nuts" for their feigned outrage, with a predictable answer from Stewart.

And he took on angry old Bill O'Reilly for his assertion that Christianity isn't really a religion, therefore Christmas displays are okay.

Fox & Friend's Gretchen Carlson is a lunatic. Or as the Daily Show put it: "The holiday season wouldn't feel the same without people going out of their way to be offended by nothing."

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As Steve Benen noted this is a better answer than the "I didn't campaign on the public option" nonsense which I thought was silly and insulting. People who've been following the process understand the difference between what you'd like to get passed and what's achievable with this Congress. President Obama said he got 95% of the reform he wanted in the health care bill. Whether you can call this 'reform' or not and whether he actually got what he wanted as opposed to what he campaigned on is something all of us will be debating for some time to come. There are some good things in the bill but I personally don't think they outweigh the bad without some meaningful regulation on the insurance companies.

This type of clarity in the beginning of the debate might have been helpful since we could have been pushing harder for meaningful regulations to keep prices down instead of a public option, but who knows. Maybe the public option was nothing but a shiny object so Joe Lieberman could have his ego stroked and feel like he got his evens with the progressive blogosphere and keep him focused on that instead of him attacking things the administration did actually care about keeping in the bill. Lieberman gets to give the progressive community a kick in the teeth to make him feel better without hurting what they actually cared about having passed in the legislation. It's that or Lieberman gladly played boogie-man to give them exactly what they wanted, or maybe a little of both.

I don’t know of anyone who is satisfied with what’s in this bill so far and no one knows what we’re going to end up with once it comes out of the conference committee. I do know we’re going to keep fighting to fix whatever mess gets heaped upon us and that John is talking to House members to keep the pressure on to try to improve whatever comes out of the committee. Next moves will come after the holidays.

You can watch the entire interview on PBS's site here.

On a personal note, I hope everyone who is celebrating had a wonderful holiday out there. We did ours a bit early because of conflicts with my brothers seeing their families and people going out of town. Everyone dealing with this terrible weather be safe out there and drive carefully.

Transcript below the fold.

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Happy holidays from Glenn Beck everybody! Beck in another one of his phony populist rants asks his audience to imagine a terrorist attack on the United States where we’re as lucky as we were when the World Trade Center was hit. Just when I think this clown can't get much worse, he manages to one up himself again. I will be thankful when he finally is no longer polluting our airways.

Beck: You know everything is too big to fail, but nobody talks about the little guy. Nobody talks about the individual. Let me ask you this question. Please ponder this over the holiday season. Heaven forbid anything happens. God help us if al Qaeda would come but imagine if somebody could succeed in blowing up any of our great American icons. If they destroyed all of Washington, let’s just pretend that we would be as lucky as we were with the World Trade Center where everybody was gone or most people were gone—and they destroyed the Washington Monument and everything else—all of our enduring symbols, all the monuments we’ve always treasured—would it matter?

I don’t think so. The monuments are meaningless. The monuments are there to remind us who we are. But we have forgotten. We have become about the structure. We are the people that defeated the most powerful empire on earth as a group of rag-tag farming colonists. We were the people that explored. We mapped. We tamed the west. We crossed the mountains in wagons. We stunned the world with technical marvels and defeated the Nazis. We defeated the communists. We walked on the moon.

Nobody else has ever done that. We are Americans—rich or poor. We have always believed in the rugged individualism and self-actualization. We are not the people I think the people in Washington think we are. We are not fearful people. We are not people that give in or give up. We’re not about to give into some new whiney mentality where “Ooh, somebody help me”. That’s not who we are.

The only one that is too big to fail is you. And the only one that will, the only one that will create your failure is you. The only way the United States government, or the United States of America, or we fail as a collective is if we fail as individuals. And the only way guaranteed we as individuals will fail is to depend on the government to prop us up. That is just not who we are. And for me I am thankful for that.

From Sen. Chris Dodd--Republicans Block Dodd’s Effort to Immediately Stop Credit Card Rate Hikes:

Senate Republicans blocked Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodds (D-CT) attempt to pass legislation to stop credit card interest rate hikes.

Dodd went to the Senate floor to ask for consent for the Senate to take up and pass his Credit Card Rate Freeze Act, which would prevent credit card companies from hiking interest rates, fees and finance charges on customers existing balances until Credit CARD Act protections take effect in February. Regrettably, Republican Senator Thad Cochran (R-MS) objected to Dodds request, blocking the bill from Senate passage.

Consumers obviously have a responsibility to spend within our means and to pay what we owe. We bear that responsibility. But the credit card industry as well has a responsibility to deal with their customers honorably. There is nothing honorable about whats happened with these significant rate increases and fees. Most importantly, they dont have a right to rip off American families, especially when the Congress has already gone on record opposing the very actions they're engaging in, Dodd said on the Senate floor.

Happy Holidays from the GOP.

John Amato:

This is outrageous. The Republicans are actually blocking freezes on credit card rate hikes as the holidays approach us? What would Santa say? Where's the outrage from the Democrats and the Villagers? Will David Broder write a juicy article showing his disdain for the treatment of the American people by republicans? I mean he's the ultimate bipartisan scold. I bet if you asked the teabaggers waiting to see Sarah Palin at a book signing, they would say that it's un-American and Socialist to stop credit card companies from raising their rates. "That's their right as Americans if you support freedom and the Constitution." Maybe Palin will write something about it on her Facebook page for the media to lap up. You know, the Democrats are trying to use death panels on the poor credit card companies in a down economy. That's can't be good, right Katie?

Digby writes:

These people are sticking up for credit card companies who are gouging their customers during the holidays in the middle of a recession! What do they have to do to provoke some outrage from the Democrats, gun down Tiny Tim? (Of course, the Republicans would simply say they were defending their constitutional right to bear arms.)

Honestly, this should provoke a Democratic outcry of epic proportions because it's good policy and it's good politics. They missed the boat by failing to draw attention to the fact that the Republicans blocked the unemployment insurance extension for over a month but this issue is hitting both the employed and the unemployed, all across the country.

From The Colbert Report:

Karim Sadjadpour describes a math superstar's unprecedented act of challenging Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini.