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While discussing the GOP's newest frontrunner, Newt Gingrich's latest rise in the polls, even the better part of the panel on Fox News Sunday didn't think much of his prospects for winning the GOP presidential nomination once voters start paying more attention to his lobbying work and flip-flopping on issues at every turn just as Mitt Romney has.

When even the pundits over at Fox are throwing cold water on your campaign's prospects and feel they don't have much choice but to discuss your baggage, I'd say that probably doesn't bode well for the kind of media coverage you can expect in the near future from any of the other networks as well, although I'm sure Hannity will still be doing his best to help Newt out.

WALLACE: So, Brit, how do you account for Newt's rise, particularly after the dismal start, million dollars in debt, his staff firing him, and now he's the co-frontrunner?

HUME: Well, in a sense, it was his turn. And he now occupies the single most dangerous place to be in American politics, which is the non-Romney leader in the Republican field, the position that has been occupied by everybody from Donald Trump to most recently Herman Cain, with a couple others in between who have fallen by the wayside.

Everybody who has occupied that spot has entered almost immediately a slide. It remains to be seen, of course, if Gingrich will. I think he has some vulnerabilities, and the explaining you saw him do on Greta van Susteren's show just now is a sign of that. One of those companies that he represented to the tune of a considerable sum of money, represented, or worked for, advised, was, of course, Freddie Mac, which was a big player in the mortgage meltdown.

So he has some vulnerabilities. And he has a long tract record. And he's got books. And he's got many public statements on many issues. In fact, if you look -- you know, he's had about every position you can have on -- on every issue. Not all of those positions were conservative. So we will hear all about that in the weeks ahead.

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On this week's Fox News Sunday, Bill Kristol suggests that the Occupy Wall Street protesters need to have an "electoral strategy" and help to defeat Democratic legislators in primary races, just like their AstroTurf "tea party" so heavily promoted by Fox did. Naturally no one else on the panel reminded him that the people out there in the OWS movement protesting, don't have any of that Koch brothers money funding them.

This was also yet another example of the very derisive type of coverage of the OWS movement we've seen from Fox in general, and where most of them were dismissive of the idea that anyone on the Democratic side of the aisle either will or should pay attention to the protesters concerns, or just more or less mocking them as Kristol was doing here. It really is just night and day from their fawning promotion of the "tea party" protests and whether or not Republican legislators should have paid attention to them.

WALLACE: What do you think of how the two parties are playing this?

KRISTOL: I think Republicans should be quiet. I mean, these are demonstrations against the party in power, which last I looked, was the Obama administration. They hate the current regulation of Wall Street which is being governed by a law called Dodd-Frank. Last I looked, Dodd was a Democratic senator and Frank was a Democratic congressman.

Wall Street is represented by a Democratic congressman, Jerrold Nadler. So I'd say Republicans and conservatives should step aside and let the left fight this out. I mean, who knew the left was suffering from such Tea Party envy? That's what strikes me.

They want their own Tea Party. You read these leftist columnists, they need the energy.

Weren't we being told a year ago or even a few months ago that the Tea Party was the worst thing that could have happened to the Republican Party, it's a bunch of extremists, it's going to destroy the Republican Party? And now they realize that, because the Tea Party strengthened conservatism, and they wish they had their own version of it.

But, what did the Tea Party do? This is A.B. -- what did the Tea Party actually do in 2009 and 2010? They defeated a whole bunch of Republicans in primaries, right? They elected people, or, in some cases, defeated people that didn't win in the general.

They had real electoral clout. And if I were running Occupy Wall Street, they need to defeat. They need to defeat Senator Gillibrand in the Democratic primary in New York, or Congressman Nadler in the Democratic primary in lower Manhattan, or someone.

WALLACE: And move the party to the left?

KRISTOL: Yes, they can't -- otherwise, it's just talk. I mean, they need to have an electoral strategy.

Full transcript available here.

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A panel of conservative pundits on Fox News savaged Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry Sunday after the candidate had a rough week.

The Texas governor followed a poor debate performance with a loss to Herman Cain in the Florida straw poll Saturday, a defeat made even worse by the fact that he had actively campaigned there.

"Perry really did throw up on himself in the debate at a time when he needed to raise his game," Fox News' Brit Hume told Chris Wallace. "Perry is about one half a step away from almost total collapse as a candidate."

"This is a much more closed straw poll than the one in Ames, and these are discerning voters, very loyal Republican, they've been paying attention to this process all along," The Hill's A.B. Stoddard noted. "It was a real slap towards Perry and Mitt Romney. And you really got a sense when I spoke to Republicans on Friday -- as many as I could after the debate -- the sense was not only that Perry had given a dismal performance and, of course, Romney had won, but that they don't like their choices at all."

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While discussing President Obama's push to get the rich to pay their fair share in taxes, and whether or not that's going to help his bid for reelection or not, Fox News Sunday panel members Brit Hume, Bill Kristol and The Hill's A.B. Stoddard all apparently agreed that the best way for President Obama to get reelected would be to commit political suicide and work with Republicans on some "grand bargain" to "reform" "entitlements."

Somehow the topic of how well that worked out for George W. Bush when he was out there pushing to privatize Social Security and the public turning on him never came up during this discussion. Nor did how well going after Medicare worked in the NY-26 race where Democrats were running ads showing Paul Ryan throwing grandma off a cliff in a wheelchair.

Republicans have been completely unwilling to do anything that benefits the working class or the poor and are interested in nothing else than doing everything they can to make sure President Obama is a one-term president. If there's any interest in some "bipartisanship" when it comes to making changes to Social Security or Medicare, there's no reason to think their goal there would not be the same. But never mind that over in upside-down land on Fox.

Transcript via Fox:

WALLACE: Brit -- and I know you don't agree with what a lot of what Juan said, but I think you will agree with this -- the markets both in the U.S. and worldwide are a mess. Growth has stalled, unemployment is high. As we say, we saw the worst week in the stock market since October of 2008.

If the president is all about 2012, what happens in the meantime?

HUME: Well, the truth is, what would help him more than anything else is better results.

Now, you can look at the economy and say, God, it's so much in the doldrums, that it's not going to come out enough to put a big dent in the jobless rate in time for his election, and that's a huge problem. He can't overcome that problem simply by rallying his base. It is a testament to the political weakness he senses that he is working so hard to do that both with the plans that he's outlined and the kind of speech that we saw last night to what ought to have been a drop-dead great audience for him.

He's telling them to get off their butts. I mean, that's an unusual message for somebody at this stage to be saying to the core of his base.

But what I would say is the president could benefit, however, if there were a big, successful deal on the deficit. That would take an issue off the table, it would please Independents, and it would be a bipartisan achievement, all things that would help him with the people -- the swing voters he needs to have a chance to win.

If he can't do any of that, I think his reelection gets to the point of being almost hopeless unless the Republicans nominate some freak.

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Another Sunday, another week where Bloody Bill Kristol proves himself to be wrong about everything. After some discussion on whether President Obama is going to have trouble being reelected and The Hill's A.B. Stoddard pointing out that he might unless he ends up being fortunate enough to run against someone who voted for Paul Ryan's budget plan, Bret Baier asks Kristol if the GOP would make make "reforming" "entitlements" into an asset. Kristol of course thinks that would be a winning issue for them.

And naturally he and Stephen Hayes refuse to admit that privatizing Medicare would be putting an end to the program as we know it and no one on the Fox News Sunday panel bothered to point out that Social Security is not responsible for any of the problems we have now with our deficit.

Jon Perr has been writing a lot about what was in Paul Ryan's budget for some time now and lays out very plainly why Hayes is not telling the truth on what his plan would do to Medicare and Social Security in one of the earlier posts he wrote on it here -- GOP Budget Proposes to Ration Medicare, Privatize Social Security.

Transcript:

BAIER: Bill, can you imagine any scenario where entitlement reform could be an asset to Republicans in 2012?

KRISTOL: Sure, because people understand, I think, and certainly the right candidate can help the American public further understand, that we need to fundamentally reform entitlements. We're $1.5 trillion in debt. Where's that debt coming from? It's coming from entitlements, which are 60 percent of the federal budget and which are going up much more quickly than the rest of the federal budget.

Despite President Obama's irresponsible domestic discretionary spending, it's entitlements that are at the core of the problem. So of course Republicans are going to run on entitlement reform, as they should, and I think they can do so successfully.

BAIER: Now, you have spoken out in favor of Congressman Paul Ryan getting in this race.Is there any development on that? Do you really believe that he's getting in?

KRISTOL: Well, the main development -- and maybe I can hold this up -- is I get sent this in the mail, a Ryan/Rubio 2012 button, which shows huge grassroots support for this effort. You know? People all over the country are having these buttons produced at their own expense.

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Howard Kurtz and his panel on CNN's Reliable Sources had high praise for Mark Halperin Sunday, but they did not endorse his use of an expletive to describe President Barack Obama.

"Having seen the clip, I'm struck by the fact, if I'm Mark Halperin sitting there, I think the hosts are telling me to speak my mind," The Weekly Standard's Matthew Continetti told Kurtz. "I didn't see any sarcasm in Mika or Joe... I'm on Mark Halperin's side here. They were egging him on."

"Now the indictment is being expanded to saying Mark Halperin is the epitome superficial theater criticism and, you know, empty beltway conventional wisdom," Kurtz noted.

"Mark Halperin has earned his reputation as a serious journalist," The Hill's A.B. Stoddard insisted. "I worked with him at ABC News. He is tireless. He's devoted and he's also as a commentator, I always find him quite measured and cautious. So, it is a surprising episode but I don't think there's anything to criticize in Mark's past."

"Halperin had been on this program a number of times," Kurtz said. "He's a substantive guy. The show that he was on, Morning Joe, three hours a day of guests sitting around talking about policy and politics may be the most substantive show on cable news so it seems to me this indictment that -- yes, they do the theater of politics like everybody does, like we do here on CNN -- but it seems to me that he is now the poster boy for superficiality strikes me as a bit unfair."

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Rachel reports on the crumbling state of America's infrastructure which is in dire need of repair and the Obama administration's plans to use infrastructure projects as a way to stimulate the economy. A.B. Stoddard weighs in on whether the Republicans will actually block the projects or not. If they listen to Karl Rove they will. Stoddard feels that if they keep the projects free of earmarks and pork they'll get them though. It is pretty astounding to see these Republicans finally finding religion on spending when they've had no qualms about a bottomless pit called Iraq for the entire Bush Presidency.