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From this Monday's America Live on Fox, it seems regular Stuart Varney is just begging for another tongue lashing from Stephen Colbert. He just can't seem to stop himself from worshiping the British series Downton Abbey and the good old days where we didn't have any of that messy "ultra-democracy" where those poor "fat cats" are asked to do things like pay their taxes, or have the food they're selling inspected, or do their part to make sure we live in a civil society.

It looks like Varney has been beating this drum for about a month or so now, but apparently hasn't gotten tired of it yet. He was also continuing his attacks on "goodies" such as universal preschool, which he was attacking last week. Who wants their kids going to school when they could be waiting on some benevolent aristocrat instead?

Here's part of Varney's exchange with Megyn Kelly:

VARNEY: What other TV show have you ever seen in modern TV shows where the rich are made to look generous, honest, classy and looking after people with their money and their power? Where else do you see this?

KELLY: Yeah.

VARNEY: You are taught in America today these people, the rich, well they are evil, they are unscrupulous, they're abusers, they are as the President says "fat cats" and they should pay their fair share. The President wants to demonize the rich and make them pay for all the goodies which are showered upon our democracy. [...]

Let me throw something else at you. Where else in modern American television, do you see profit and the pursuit of profit to be good. That's what you see in Downton Abbey. They introduced profit into the running of the Earl's estate to save the estate. Profit is good. It keeps people in jobs. When do you see that today in modern television? [...]

Well, we're taught that rich people, the aristocrats, they treat people badly and to be governed by these people is a very bad system. Juxtapose that with the way we are governed today in this ultra-democracy. Are you happy to be pushed around by the bureaucracy? Are you happy to have people from the government tell you what to do, where to go, what to have inspected, how much to pay in taxes and have money taken off you? It's a ultra-democracy. It doesn't look quite so good with a critical eye.

As I said, Varney is just begging for Colbert to do round two of a segment like this one.

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From this Saturday's Journal Editorial Report, after the Fox panel members spent some time weighing in on the latest polls and doing their best to get the audience pumped up about Mitt Romney's so-called "momentum" in the national poll and playing a portion of the President talking about Willard's "Romesia," the WSJ's Dorothy Rabinowitz decided to play the "angry black man" card to attack President Obama.

FREEMAN: But the other issue is, look, this is a well known incumbent late in the race. He's probably persuaded most of the people he's going to persuade and I think his campaign speeches now are telling you that, because it is a very fiercely partisan, ideological message that he's delivering as he travels to these swing states. He is not talking to independents.

GIGOT: Let's get a clip of that. We want to give an illustration of what James just pointed out.

(VIDEO)

OBAMA: It turns out it's not a five-point plan Governor Romney has got, it's a one-point plan:  Folks at the very top get to play by their own rules -- pay lower tax rates than you do, outsource more jobs, let Wall Street run wild.  And if this plan sounds familiar, it's because we tried it. […]

Now, Governor Romney knows this.  He knows his plan isn't any different than the policies that led to the Great Recession.  So in the final weeks of his election, he's counting on you forgetting what he stands for.  He's hoping that you, too, will come down with a case of what we like to call Romnesia.

(END VIDEO)

GIGOT: Romnesia. I've got it. You've got it, so what's ahhh... what do you think of that?

RABINOWITZ: Well, what we think of it is, what are we looking at here? We have to acknowledge, the President is a very angry man. That has been there evidently in the past, since that debate, all along...

GIGOT: But you know what Dorothy, here's the thing, he's always been such a cool customer. That's been his great appeal to so many people. It helped him in 2008 with John McCain. […] You're saying this is a different Obama we're seeing?

RABINOWITZ: Yes. When the sun is shining, reality is very different. What happened is that we heard the mantra for a long time now, we always knew this was going to be a close race. Well, maybe his handlers did, but Obama never did. You have to believe inside that you always thought that, but now, came Denver, he began to understand, this is reality. He is in danger of losing and everything that supported him, all of that sense of vast crowds – imagine what happened yesterday in Colorado.

If you took a look at Mitt Romney's immense crowds, that evokes the same, tremendous passion that Obama had, only it was Mitt Romney winning. So you have this enraged President and it comes out he can't stop, just as Biden could not stop, he cannot stop behaving inappropriately.

Ah yes, that "enraged President." Doesn't everyone see just how "unhinged" he is on the campaign trail, waging "class warfare" by daring to point out what Mitt Romney's policies are? The nerve of him. Par for the course, it's another day of upside down land and major projection of Romney's worst traits onto President Obama in Fox GOPTV land.

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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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The world's most wealthy woman is warning that firms are in danger of having to abandon iron-ore mining in Australia if wages are not cut, pointing out that African miners are "willing to work for less than $2 per day."

In a video recently posted on the Sydney Mining Club website, 58-year-old Gina Rinehart -- who has amassed a $18 billion fortune through iron-ore prospecting -- said that Australia could be more competitive by emulating Africa.

"We must be realistic, not just promote class warfare," the billionaire explained. "Indeed, if we competed at the Olympic games as sluggishly as we compete economically, there would be an outcry."

"The evidence is unarguable that Australia is indeed becoming too expensive and too uncompetitive to do export- orientated business," she insisted, adding that "Africans want to work. Its workers are willing to work for less than $2 per day."

Under current exchange rates, $2 a day in Australia is worth about $2.04 in U.S. dollars.

"It's not the Australian way to toss people $2, to toss them a $2 gold coin and then ask them to work for a day," Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard told reporters on Wednesday. "We support proper Australian wages and decent working conditions for Australian people."

Rinehart came under fire last week after she wrote a column urging those "jealous" of the wealthy to "spend less time drinking or smoking and socializing, and more time working."

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Former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum says that Vice President Joe Biden and President Barack Obama are "dividing this country" by playing the race card and using words like "y'all."

CNN host Jim Acosta on Sunday asked if it was fair for Romney to complain about the tone of the campaign when he had run negative ads during the primary that called Santorum a "lightweight" and suggested that the former Pennsylvania senator was not "ready to be president."

"I think what he's talking about is the tone of the Obama campaign, which is divisive," Santorum explained. "To go out and do what [Obama's] doing and divide this country, and he is, and it's class warfare at its worst."

"And then you saw Vice President Biden play the race card in Virginia," the former candidate added, referring to Biden's assertion to a group, which included many African Americans, that Romney's pro-Wall Street policies would "put y'all back in chains."

"Y'all?" Santorum exclaimed. "Y'all is y'all. And in a group -- you know, I've been in groups like that and, you know, it's very easy when you're in a group of people that, you know, when you're in the South, when you're up in different areas of the country with different groups of people, you develop an affinity with the groups you're speaking in front of. That's what Vice President [Biden] was doing. He was trying to develop that affinity. And he did so in a very horrendous way, and he should apologize for it."

"But it is exactly the tone of this campaign. Gov. Romney is like any other candidate: 'You want to go after my record, you want to go after things I've said and done, fine.' That's not the complaint of the Romney campaign. The complaint of the Romney campaign -- the legitimate complaint is that President Obama is trying to divide this country to win this election."

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Fox's Neil Cavuto spent the two opening segments of his show this Thursday evening doing damage control for the Romney campaign, after the Boston Globe among others have been reporting on his time at Bain Capital and whether he profited personally from seeing jobs shipped overseas and a race to the bottom for America, when he's running on knowing how to manage our economy and as a "job creator."

First Cavuto brought in The Daily Caller's Jamie Weinstein, who we just previously got this crack reporting from on how Jon Stewart is a terrible person for making a lot of money during his appearance on Fox & Friends earlier this month. Weinstein and Cavuto's latest defense for Mitt Romney -- those in glass houses can't throw stones and that evil Nancy Pelosi made money off of foreign investments. Therefore she is exactly like Mitt Romney and no one can ever say anything bad about him.

Sorry Scooter, but Nancy Pelosi is not running for president. She is not going out there and claiming to be a "job creator" as the reason she's qualified to be president. And investing in foreign companies does not equal buying up U.S. companies, busting their unions, raiding their pension funds, telling everyone they're fired and can reapply for their jobs at half their previous wages and lining your pocket whether that investment went bad or went well and what Mitt Romney did during his time at Bain. You can play the false equivalency game all you want, but whether we think both things are good or bad or just business as usual in a global economy, they're not equal. And if Pelosi were running for president, you can bet Republicans would be using this against her in political ads, just at The Daily Caller is attacking her for it now.

Cavuto then moved on to discussing a recent Gallup poll that showed one in five voters being less likely to vote for him because of his wealth. If we had a more educated public as to how he attained that wealth, or who were paying attention to this election yet, I've got to wonder what those numbers might be. I'm not sure how you ever spin just the fact that he's wealthy being a negative with one in five into a good thing.

Cavuto wrapped things up with bringing in Suffolk University Political Research Center's David Paleologos who did his best to muddy the waters on the poll and Romney's problems with average voters as well. We've had a lot of rich presidents, so why is Romney being rich such a bad thing? Voters don't really care that Romney is rich and what "his balance sheet is," they care about "their own balance sheets." Barack Obama made a lot of money selling his books as well.

The last bit of this interview and the verbal gymnastics it took to get to their conclusions is pretty astounding.

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While continuing their conversation about whether government workers' salaries and whether the states can afford to be making good on their pension funds or not when a lot of them are facing huge problems with their budgets, AFL-CIO deputy chief of staff Thea Lee made the point that there's no reason we should not be raising taxes on the wealthiest among us who can afford it rather than cutting services or going after workers' pension funds.

And as NEA president Dennis Van Roekel noted in the follow up to Fox's Chris Wallace, it's not your average worker out there that's a problem when it comes to who is being overpaid:

VAN ROEKEL: You know, the last 29 years, productivity up 80 percent, hourly wages up eight. The lowest one-fifth, their wages up 18 percent. But the top one percent, their wages go up 275 percent.

We have got to find a way to lift all citizens, not just a few. Not a 1 percent, not just the wealthy few.

He's right of course, but it's a message I'm sure Fox would prefer most of their viewers don't hear too often. CEO pay and executive compensation have been out of whack compared to average your average worker's salary for decades now, but as soon as anyone says we should do something about it, Republicans start screaming about "class warfare," as though most people aren't aware of who it's actually being waged on.

Full transcript below the fold.

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On CNN's Your Money, host Ali Velshi brought in the Wall Street Journal's resident hack, Stephen Moore so he could pollute not just one, but two segments in a row on his show, because heaven forbid the viewers could be allowed to hear what either of the other two guest had to say without someone like Moore talking over them, lying, obfuscating and muddying up the waters or filibustering when he had the chance so the other guest doesn't get a chance to talk.

CNN always seems to do this to liberals or anyone that even leans to the center-left and makes sure they've got a right-winger like Moore on there for "balance," especially if that person is going to talk about something they don't want to allow a clear message on. In this case, it was the AFL-CIO's Richard Trumka talking about income disparity and the fact that we shouldn't be going after workers' pensions and benefits when those at the top are making hundreds of times more than their employees.

Trumka also did a good job talking about the record income disparity we've got in the United States and the fact that as union membership has declined, that disparity has gone up and for his part, he refused to allow Moore to dominate the conversation or for Velshi to get him off point by interrupting him when he wasn't done talking yet.

And then we had Norm Ornstein, who has a new book out talking about the fact that Republicans are the problem with the gridlock we're seeing in our government right now, which doesn't fit into CNN's game of "both sides" are equally terrible and to blame for not cooperating with each other. So heaven forbid he can't be allowed to speak without Moore hogging up the better portion of the entire interview.

Moore sadly is a regular guest on this show week after week and brings nothing but intellectual dishonesty week after week as he did here. His presence on this show is just another example of CNN doing their best to be Fox-lite. Stephen Moore, we let him lie, you decide.

Ornstein's segment below the fold.

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In case anyone did not already know, Rush Limbaugh is not the only blowhard, lying wingnut in his family. His brother, David Limbaugh was a guest on C-SPAN's Washington Journal this Saturday morning. Apparently he is not getting quite enough help from World Net Daily and Fox News to promote his book “The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama’s War on the Republic,” and C-SPAN thought they'd give him a hand as well.

Limbaugh was asked by a caller how Republicans claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility when all of the Republican presidents in his lifetime ran up the deficit and the fact that they only seem to care about tax cuts while calling for cuts to “entitlements.”

Limbaugh's response was to blame the Democrats for what happened under St. Ronnie, start talking about Bill Clinton and give Gingrich credit for his budget and then say no one should care what they've done in the past, but look to the future instead. And hey, let's adopt Paul Ryan's budget plan, which he pretends would do something to fix the problems with the deficit instead of what it really does, which is to give more tax cuts to the rich, take it out of the hides of the working class, privatize our social safety nets and increase the deficit, not lower it.

A little later in the show, another called rightfully called him out for what he is, which is the lunatic fringe of the Republican party and that we've been living with the results of thirty years of Reaganomics and the fact that Republicans' solutions for everything is tax cuts for the rich. The caller also talked about the bank bailouts at the expense of the working class and the fact that businesses are sitting on trillions of dollars instead of investing while they hope to see another Republican make their way into the White House.

Limbaugh's response was to claim that the tax cuts are not responsible for our deficits, blame it on “entitlements,” by which I'm sure he's lumping Social Security in with our other social safety nets, and claim that there's no way anyone should be asking anyone to pay higher rates for investment income and that those rates should be lower than those paid for their actual labor.

This guy's a piece of work. C-SPAN should be forced to fact-check these guys when they come on this show and lie like a rug, preferably in real time with rebuttals running in the chryon just below their face on the screen.

He was recently on Fox getting a Hannity-job while promoting this book as well, which you can read more about from our friends at News Hounds here: Fox Promotes Obama As "Great Destroyer" Meme In Concert With Limbaugh.

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As Media Matters reported, Fox's John Stossell went on Fox & Friends to discuss his special Rich Man, Poor Man which aired on both of their networks, and made some dubious claims about what's happened to income growth for those who are living in poverty:

Fox Mangles Data To Claim "The Poor" Are Getting "Richer":

Fox's John Stossel claimed that it's a "myth" that "the poor are getting poorer" and that they are actually getting "richer." In fact, incomes for the bottom fifth have shown almost no growth in recent decades, and the numbers Stossel used to support his argument were cherry-picked.

Incomes At The Bottom Have Shown Almost No Growth In Decades; Stossel Calls It "Getting Richer"

Stossel: "The Rich Have Gotten Richer, But So Have The Poor." From Fox News' Fox & Friends:

STOSSEL: There are just two myths. One is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. And the truth is yes, over time the rich have gotten richer, but so have the poor -- 20 percent richer since I was in college. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 5/24/12]

CBPP: "The Era Of Shared Prosperity Ended In The 1970s." From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report:

Census family income data show that the era of shared prosperity ended in the 1970s and illustrate the divergence in income that has emerged since that time. CBO data allow us to look at what has happened to comprehensive income since 1979 -- both before and after taxes -- and offer a better view of what has happened at the top of the distribution.

As Figure 2 shows, between 1979 and 2007, average income after taxes in the top 1 percent of the distribution rose 277 percent, meaning that it nearly quadrupled. That compares with increases of about 40 percent in the middle 60 percent of the distribution and 18 percent in the bottom fifth.

The report included this graph:

[Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 3/5/12]

Media Matters has a lot more charts and information in their post along with debunking more of what Stossel said on the air.

Here's the promo for Stossel's special which you can watch the very beginning of in the clip above from Fox Business Channel where it originally aired this week: Rich Man, Poor Man:

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