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Via Media Matters, via rightwing site Newsbusters.org.

The above video exchange was first highlighted by NewsBusters.org, who approvingly cited Burnett's observations as noting "a teachable moment," which "reflects how secret ballots could end up in an election as to whether or not unionize a company."

Oil is not going up because...

"North Korea, Syria - I mean these are places when they always have elections, there's always a couple of people who don't vote for the right guy," Cramer said. "But I think the price of oil is going to tell you exactly how everything is going to play out in Iran, which is it's much ado about nothing."

and for Newsbusters, "a teachable moment", as Media Matters points out.

However, as Jim Cramer's colleague, "Street Signs" host Erin Burnett pointed out - this is a teachable moment. It reflects how secret ballots could end up in an election as to whether or not unionize a company:

CRAMER: I mean obviously, you were able to vote against this guy, but the idea you thought there was going to be a fair count.

BURNETT: And it wasn't a secret ballot. I think that's important. They're going to know - they know everybody and how they voted.

CRAMER: Absolutely.

BURNETT: It makes a strong point for this whole union conversation we're having in this country.

CRAMER: The card check, the card check.

BURNETT: But, we'll leave that debate ...

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Erin Burnett states the obvious when it comes to one of the reasons that people in this country are pissed off right now which is the huge disparity between the salaries of those at the top and every day working people. My question is why in the hell are she and Tom Brokaw the ones Gregory brings in to discuss the economy on Meet the Press?

MR. GREGORY: It leads me so perfectly to a question about what happened this week. Why was this week a kind of tipping point? Here's the cover of Newsweek magazine. You've got an angry mob with pitchforks and the headline, "The Thinking Man's Guide to Populist Rage." Editor Jon Meacham writes this: "It was, in a way, overdue. Beginning last September, when the financial sector of the economy collapsed and the markets melted down, a resurgence of American populism seemed inevitable. ... And yet the temper of the time, shaped in large measure by Barack Obama's own coolness, remained calm. ... You might think of the period between September 2008 and March 2009, then, as a kind of economic phony war, the term historians use to describe the months that elapsed between Hitler's invasion of Poland in September 1939 to the broader outrake of--outbreak, rather--of hostilities in late April and early May of 1940. In this analogy, the AIG bonuses that were revealed last week are rather like the battle for France--the point after which nothing would be the same."

Your take, Tom, on what happened this week.

MR. BROKAW: Well, I--my take, I think it's understandable. One of the things that I've been saying is that for a year now, for a full year nothing that the American people have been told about the financial condition of this country has proved to be true. And very good people--Jamie Dimon from JPMorgan Chase said last June, after Bear Stearns collapsed, "Well, we think we've seen the worst for Wall Street now. We still have the housing crisis to go."

MR. GREGORY: Mm-hmm.

MR. BROKAW: Well, we hadn't seen the worst from Wall Street. And this AIG bonus thing exploded in everyone's faces. Meanwhile, across the country car dealers are going under as they watch GM get bailouts and GMAC come and clear off their lots of the vehicles that they owe money on. Mom and pop and regional retail stores are closing up or cutting back severely. I know one banker who was dealing with a client who got in some credit card difficulty and, as he said, the day that Citibank got 5 percent money from the government this client, a single mom, had her penalty bumped up 2 points on her credit card late payments. And he said, "How do you explain that?" That would ricochet up and down any Main Street. So there has been this steady building. And I think that not just the administration, but the political culture in Washington has been insufficiently attentive to what's going on on Wall--on Main Street, at the other end of the pipeline. They need to hear from those people, make them feel like they're part of the process and make them understand how we can all go forward and we not just feel your pain, but we hear what you're saying.

MR. GREGORY: And I just feel like, Erin, there's been a, a breaking of contracts. If there was a social contract between American investors and Wall Street, it was, "Look, we don't really get a lot of what you do..."

MR. BROKAW: Yeah, right.

MR. GREGORY: "...but we count on you for the long-term wealth." And all of the sudden that evaporates. And when it comes to government, hey, government's got to be looking out for us, protecting us. That seems not to have happened. It's that loss of faith that I brought up with the leaders in the earlier discussion.

MS. BURNETT: I think you, you put it in a great way when you said it's a breaking of a contract; which does, in a sense, sort of explain why there is such public support for breaking formal legal contracts...

MR. GREGORY: Hm.

MS. BURNETT: ...when people feel they've been so let down, as you're talking about. Because the irony of this is that even though it seems it's about the money when it comes to these bonuses, it really isn't. When you look at the bonuses paid last year, the $18.6 billion number from Wall Street that so shocked people, if you taxed that at the, at the House bill rate, that's only .6 percent of the tax revenue that the United States government took in a year ago. It's an infant--it's incredibly small. So in a sense it really isn't about the money, it's about this broader shift. The average executive in this country of a publicly traded company, not just Wall Street, makes 400 times the average worker. And that has been a dramatic shift over the past two decades. That is something that is causing some of the anger here. In a sense it's been building, and this is the moment where it breaks.

Really Erin? Aren't we the observant one? I don't know about everyone else but in my world where I have to go work one of those things called...you know...a job, and not one surrounded by inside the beltway and Wall Street talking heads, this is not something new. People have actually been pissed off about the over the top executive pay in the United States for a long time. I'm so glad you finally bothered to notice. You finally put enough of them out of their homes and guess what? They're going to start beating down someone's door because on top of being pissed off, they now also have nothing more to lose.

Erin Burnett's been too busy talking about how great it is for a company's stock when they lay a bunch of their workers off or snuggling up to the Wall Street CEO's that got us into this mess to have taken much notice before the villagers were marching with pitchforks in the streets. Now she's going to share her vast wisdom on populist outrage with us.

Via the Daily Bail, this fantastic showdown between Rep. Brad Sherman, Mark Haynes and Erin Burnett over the taxes on AIG bonus payments. Daily Jail enthuses:

Guess who wins this contest of wit and intelligence. If you thought brunette bimbette, then you are you asked to leave the site.

I have been trying to restrain myself in descriptions, but this video is terrific. You will enjoy it.

Some of the Sherminator's great lines: "I want all bailouts to stop. I want capitalism. Bailouts are not capitalism. TARP is not capitalism. We should have AIG in receivership. It should have been in receivership for months now. We don't have to hunt the witches, we know who they are. What do AIG executives know about running a financial services company? They only know how to destroy one. We need some limitations on salary and bonus. The goal is to get them off the TARP system entirely. Give back the money and run your companies. This is about people who think they are really important but work at bailed out companies. I'm against bailing out Wall Street, period. If they want capitalism, let them have capitalism and give the money back."

Watch it.

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Chris Matthews frames his question for this week's panel around the GOP talking point that President Obama is letting Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Rahm Emanuel run the show and that he's ceding his power to "tax and spend" liberal Democrats. Our favorite little concern troll Erin Burnett tries to say that this is going to hurt Obama because Congress' ratings are so bad. Even Tweety gets forced to call her out for it and reminds her that their ratings are actually going up, not down. Her lame response is that their poll numbers are still lower than Obama's.

Andrew Ross Sorkin tries to say that President Obama has been on the road campaigning for his ideas so much that he isn't actually making any decisions and letting Rahm Emanuel make them for him.

There are a ton of other things that could be picked apart from this segment but here's what gets my goat after watching it. When did we ever hear any criticism of Bush and just who his "brain trust" was? When did we hear any criticism of how the Republicans spent money when they were in charge?

We just went from a guy who spent the first two months of his presidency on vacation and clearing brush at the ranch to one who could potentially be one of the most intelligent and hands-on presidents in the history of the country. As an outside observer, what I see is a President who is highly involved in the decisions that are being made and who knows how to bring in all parties, listen to what they have to say and then makes a decision.

So what do we get from the Villagers? Obama is taking orders from Nancy Pelosi and he's not running anything. Really?

The other thing is I wonder is if any of these people would ever care to remind viewers of something they should have learned in a third grade civics class. We have three co-equal branches of government. President Obama is not ceding anything. He does not write the laws. The Congress does. He can sign them or veto them but he alone cannot get anything done. What in the hell do they think he's supposed to do?

I know we had a President who thought he was some sort of dictator and a compliant Congress willing to rubber stamp anything he wanted, but that's not the case now. We've got a hair-slim majority in the Senate and if President Obama does not work with them, absolutely nothing will get done. Tweety and his panel need to lay off the Republican Kool-Aid.

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Erin Burnett hides behind a viewer email to question whether or not the United States should be extending unemployment benefits for workers who have lost their jobs since so many people are "asking about it". I guess in Burnett's world, our country would be better off if we were more like China.

I'd like to know if Burnett has ever questioned whether these overpaid Wall Street a-holes she sucks up to every day deserve the golden parachutes they're walking away with - after destroying our economy. How about that for a random thought to come out of that head of yours?

And of course Scar can't help himself, trying to one-up her for the day's biggest "compassionate conservative" - he even manages to get a shot in at single mothers before the segment is over. These people have no souls.

Adam Green wrote Burnett an open letter over at the HuffPo. As he noted you can let her know how you feel about this at: SquawkOnTheStreet@cnbc.com.

Cenk takes Erin Burnett to task for her appearance on Bill Maher's Real Time last Friday and her defense of Wall Street.

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The panel on Meet the Press of Erin Burnett, Mark Zandi and Steve Forbes responding to the statements made about Wall Street bonuses by President Obama and Sen. Clair McCaskill. Apparently Erin Burnett thinks the silly populists out there just need the shell game Wall Street played with the bonus money explained to them.

MR. GREGORY: In, in just a couple of minutes left, I want to talk about something about everybody understands, and that is bonuses on Wall Street. And we find out this week from the New York comptroller's office that Wall Street allocated $20 billion in bonus money, the same amount as 2004. It created some pretty strong reaction from the White House to Capitol Hill. Watch.

PRES. OBAMA: It is shameful, and part of what we're going to need is for the folks on Wall Street who are asking for help to show some restraint and show some discipline and show some sense of responsibility. You know, the American people understand that we've got a big hole that we've got to dig ourselves out of, but they don't like the idea that people are digging a bigger hole even as they're being asked to fill it up.

SEN. CLAIRE McCASKILL (D-MO): We have a bunch of idiots on Wall Street that are kicking sand in the face of the American taxpayer. They don't get it. These people are idiots. You can't use taxpayer money to pay out $18 billion in bonuses. What planet are these people on?

MR. GREGORY: Fair question, Erin?

MS. BURNETT: I understand the outrage, and you understand the populism. There are, though--well, how should we say this? The taxpayer money is not being used to pay the bonuses. I think people could understand if you work for a company--right? If the three us worked for a company, your guests, and I lost $10 billion but Steve over there, he made a billion dollars. So overall the company actually loses money, but Steve went and did his very darndest for that company and he made money. So should he be paid for his work? That's essentially what we're talking about here. And reasonable people could argue about this, but many reasonable people would conclude, yes, he should be paid for that. And I think, David, you've raised a fair point, which is maybe it's the whole use of the word "bonus."

MR. GREGORY: Mm-hmm.

MS. BURNETT: If you explained to people this is how they are compensated, that might make a difference. But there is also a fundamental misunderstanding. The taxpayer money isn't being taken and paid out in the form of bonuses. It goes in a, a separate pool, shall we say, a separate account for banks. So maybe people don't care about that distinction, but it is there.

MR. ZANDI: Well, this, this highlights a very significant risk...

MS. BURNETT: Mm-hmm.

MR. ZANDI: ...of the government coming in and giving this money to the banking system, that we're effectively nationally the system in one form or another. And by doing that, then taxpayers, rightfully so, are saying, "Well, I want some control of what you do with this money." So now we're talking about compensation, which I think is a reasonable thing to do, but it is a slippery slope. And one thing I do worry about is that maybe the next thing is that we start making strictures on what kind of loans they can make or what kinds of deals they can fund or can I, can I fund a bank that's going to produce a factory in, in Mexico? I mean, these are decisions that are very difficult for government to make and can't make wisely.

MR. FORBES: And this gets to the danger of what you might call financial protectionism; that is, a return for these new monies, new capital, banks won't be able to lend overseas, which is a form of protectionism and gets in the way of the system.

MR. GREGORY: But as--does Wall Street need to absorb the fact that if they need lots of taxpayer help, they have to find a way to speak directly to the American people about what they do...

MR. FORBES: Yes.

MR. GREGORY: ...and the importance of what they do, if they want $1 trillion, $2 trillion worth of taxpayer money?

MR. FORBES: Yes. Well, Wall--yes. Wall Street has to learn the golden rule: He who has the money makes the rules. And in Washington, they have the money so they're going to make the rules. Get used to it. You want the help, you pay the price for it. And I think they've been slow in doing that.

MS. BURNETT: The rise in populism, though, has been amazing. I mean, just the rhetoric out of Barack Obama and Joe Biden this week, that they talk--used the word shameful and outrageous to refer to Wall Street practices. You know, and I'm hearing that that's much more they know that they're going to have to bail them out and they don't want to look like they're doing it because they want to, as opposed to a real shift of populism.

MR. GREGORY: All right, we are going to leave it there.

There has been a lot of talk with the pundits and wingnuts over this very issue. Well this morning Erin Burnett tried to answer that on Morning Joe with an interview she had with Mohamed Ali Alabbar, one of the most powerful business men in the Middle East.

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His answer is what I have always suspected - they don't care. They have enough problems of their own that they don't need to sit around and worry about us.

It also reminded me of the countless times there would be an Iraq debate in Congress and the Republicans would take the floor and start going on about "our enemies hear this and think it's retreat". The world don't care what is happening in Congress or who becomes President, just so long as the next President isn't George W. Bush.