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As The Daily Show's Jon Stewart noted in his show's opening this Wednesday evening, it wasn't the Chicago teachers' union strike, or workers rioting at the Foxconn factory in China that piqued the interest of Americans concerned about ongoing labor disputes. No, it was the NFL referees strike lockout and some really horrible calls by the replacement refs that got the nation's attention.

Stewart went on to mock Paul Ryan and his absolutely ridiculous analogy, where he tried to compare the Obama administration to the problems with the replacement referees. And they wrapped things up with Patrick Stewart showing up as a replacement worker for Daily Show regular John Oliver, who Stewart wanted to hire in his place and permanently replace him -- only to have his plans dashed when Oliver showed up to explain that the strike was a joke and with Patrick Stewart calling for a wildcat strike when he found out what Oliver was being paid.

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I would really love to see Sam Seder get his own show at either MSNBC or Current TV. He did a fine job filling in for Chris Hayes on Up this weekend, and here's his opening from Sunday's show -- How Republicans are using the crisis of poverty... against Obama:

At the Values Voters Summit on Friday, Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan whose budget was approved by the House with sweeping cuts to aid for the poor responded to new figures from the Census Bureau this week showing that 46.2 million Americans were living below the poverty line last year—a rate basically unchanged from the year before—but a rate not seen in this country in nearly 20 years.

Here's what Ryan had to say about Obama's record on poverty:

"The Obama economic agenda failed, not because it was stopped, but because it was passed. And here is what we got: Prolonged joblessness across the country. Twenty-three million Americans struggling to find work. Family income in decline. Fifteen percent of Americans living in poverty. Here we are, after four years of economic stewardship under these self-proclaimed advocates of the poor, and what do they have to show for it? More people in poverty, and less upward mobility wherever you look."

It's not the first time this election cycle that we've seen the right raise the specter of the poor. But poverty is raised not to offer prescriptions or remedies but to be used as a cudgel, as a means of playing on middle class fears of losing ground by suggesting not so much that they, too, could become impoverished but that the threat to their economic stability is the poor themselves, who are taking that ground from them.

Calling President Obama the "food stamp President" is not bemoaning the plight of those Americans who, in the wake of a devastating financial crisis have lost the means to put food on the table for their families, but rather, to imply that some "other" is living large, while the rest of "us" struggle. That said, we do know something about the people Romney relies on and what they believe about poverty.

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