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Apparently Dylan Ratigan inserting himself into the Occupy Wall Street has got the folks over at TeaNN terribly upset, since Howard Kurtz decided to spend a segment carping about it on his show that claims to report on media bias, Reliable Sources. And apparently Kurtz believes someone who was a former Trent Lott staffer and now an anchor on Glenn Beck's GBTV, Amy Holmes, qualifies as some sort of objective "journalist" to weigh in on Ratigan's advocacy of the #OWS protests.

Kurtz's panel also included The Washington Post's Dana Milbank and PBS' Terence Smith, who like Holmes thought it was just awful that someone who appears on a "news network" like Ratigan would openly show support for the Wall Street protesters, also defended the firing of Lisa Simeone from NPR for openly advocating for the protesters as well. So much for free speech. James Fallows at The Atlantic has more on that here as well.

They also discussed the AstroTurf "tea party" being openly supported by pundits over at Fox "News", but what was missing here was any mention whatsoever of the fact that CNN was every bit as big of a cheerleader for that "movement" as anyone at Fox was. They sent their reporters to be embedded on their buses and if you had twenty of these people showing up anywhere, there were CNN reporters there to cover it and make sure those protests or town hall meetings made it into the national spotlight.

And what other network besides CNN has allowed the "tea party" to co-host their presidential primary debates? None. But they're going to talk about Fox supporting them as though that happened in a vacuum and their network wasn't participating in propping up that Koch brothers, FreedomWorks, Dick Armey, and friends corporate sponsored fiasco of that as well.

Matt Taibbi responded to the recent dust-up over the hacked emails from himself, Ratigan and others at his Rolling Stone blog here -- Why Rush Limbaugh Is Freaking Out About Occupy Wall Street.

Full transcript below the fold.

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After Dylan Ratigan's fawning interview with Andrew Breitbart yesterday, he got some push-back from his buddy Cenk Uygur who he helped get on the air at MSNBC in the first place about allowing someone that fundamentally dishonest come on the air and pretend like he had any interest in muckraking or going after corporate America or Wall Street.

Cenk is exactly right. The only people Breitbart goes after are the powerless and minorities with his so-called "sting operations" and highly edited tapes. What he forgot to mention or didn't get a chance to get in edgewise between Ratigan and the other panel members interruptions was Breitbart's ties to the Koch Brothers and the fact that the so-called "tea party" is nothing but an astroturf rebranding effort by Republicans to get the Bush stink off of the word Republican and for them to try to erase how disastrous their governing policies were when they were driving the economy into a ditch from our memory banks.

Ratigan should be ashamed of himself for that interview with Breitbart yesterday, but it looks like he's going to dig in and defend his actions instead. You can try to revise history all you want Mr. Ratigan, but you in no way held Breitbart's feet to the fire on anything during that little love-fest you had with him yesterday afternoon.

Media Matters did a nice job of breaking down that atrocity of an interview by Ratigan at their blog here -- Dereliction Of Duty: Dylan Ratigan Demonstrates How Not To Interview Andrew Breitbart.

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Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy joined The Dylan Ratigan Show for his daily rant to explain why America should support the protests in Egypt.

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Our own Susie Madrak joined Dylan Ratigan to discuss the response to the Boxing Day Blizzard which she wrote about here -- Take A Good Look At Post-Blizzard New York City. This Is What Our 'New Austerity' Will Look Like.

And of course Republicans are using the complaints about worker slow downs during the blizzard to attack public sector unions, gladly aided and abetted by their allies in the media. More on that at her blog here.

Federal investigation:

So let me get this straight. We see no criminal charges against the banking masterminds who crashed the economy, or the mortgage company crooks who are still stealing people’s houses with impunity, but this is at the top of the priority list?

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have opened a preliminary investigation into allegations that disgruntled sanitation workers sabotaged the cleanup after the blizzard last week that left some neighborhoods snowbound for days, people who have been briefed on the inquiry said Tuesday.

The investigation is focusing on whether there was a work slowdown and, if so, whether it was an effort to pad overtime. If the actions took place, two of those people said, they could constitute wire fraud or wire fraud conspiracy, both federal crimes. Both people spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing.

The inquiry, which began last week, is being conducted by the Public Integrity Section in the office of United States Attorney Loretta E. Lynch, which will work with the city’s Department of Investigation, one of the people said. The city investigators also began looking into possible efforts to sabotage the cleanup last week.

“We’re taking a look at this,” one of the people said, adding that the inquiry was in its earliest stages. It was reported Monday night by WCBS-TV News.

Go read the rest for more. And as she also noted, they won't go after the banksters on Wall Street, but they're more than happy to go after those public pensions as well.

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Cenk breaks down a few polls for us that show most Americans are actually liberals or progressives when you look at how they feel about specific issues instead of how they self-identify since liberal has more or less been turned into a dirty word of late.

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Cenk Uygur with The Dylan Ratigan Show's Daily Rant on the Republican welfare queens. Looks like Cenk might have caught this article by NPR.

INSIDE WASHINGTON: Farm Subsidies' Staying Power:

"They are here to represent their districts, and if their district is clearly a strong agricultural district that uses the programs in the farm bill, it may be something where they have to break with what they campaigned on," says Chandler Goule, a lobbyist for the National Farmers Union.

For some deficit-cutting Republicans, it's a question that's close to home.

Consider Vicky Hartzler of Missouri, who courted tea party support and dethroned the chairman of the House Armed Service Committee, Democratic Rep. Ike Skelton.

Hartzler and her husband own a farm equipment business and a farm where they grow corn and soybeans. She received more than $770,000 in farm subsidies over the past 15 years, according to the Environmental Working Group, a Washington advocacy group that collects and analyzes farm subsidy data.

While promising to cut what she called wasteful spending, Hartzler says protecting farmers is a national security issue because the decline of farms could mean more imported food.

"There are fewer and fewer farmers today so it makes them more of an easy target than others," she says. "American consumers have a vested interest in making sure we have a safe and reliable food supply that is home grown."

Still, she believes some programs may need to be cut.

"There's a benefit to keeping that food safety net there, but we need to look at all discretionary spending and ask the hard questions," she says.

Crop insurance — it costs taxpayers billions of dollars a year — is an effective way to give farmers the security they need when weather ruins a harvest, Hartzler said. She suggests the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to idle environmentally sensitive land, may have to go.

GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, an outspoken critic of farm payments, listed between $15,000 and $50,000 in farm income as one source of revenue on her personal financial disclosure statement last year, citing a Bachmann family farm in Independence, Wis., as an asset.

That farm, which was owned by her father-in-law, received more than $250,000 in subsidies over the past 15 years, according to the Environmental Working Group. A Bachmann spokesman said she is not involved in any operational decisions.

South Dakota Republican Kristi Noem, who ousted Democratic Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, had partial ownership in a ranch that received more than $3 million in subsidies over 15 years, though her family bought her out last year.

Farmer and gospel singer Stephen Fincher won an open seat House race in Tennessee this year while both railing against federal spending and deflecting criticism that his family had received $3.2 million in federal farm subsidies in the past 10 years.

And then there's welfare queen, Cubs owner Joe Ricketts -- The Ricketts family is against “wasteful government spending” unless it helps make them rich:

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From The Dylan Ratigan Show, Cenk Uygur gave the daily rant where he gave his thoughts on George W. Bush's recent admission that he authorized waterboarding KSM.

UYGUR: That's always a wonderfully awkward moment. But apparently it really got to Bush. He said in his book, and I quote here, "I faced a lot of criticism as president. I didn't like hearing people claim that I lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all-time low."

So let me get this right. We went to Iraq based on false premises. Whether he lied about it or not, there were no weapons of mass destruction. That war was just wrong. And what happened in that war? 4,427 United States troops killed, but that wasn't an all-time low. There were 66,000 civilians killed at least – Iraqi civilians – but that wasn't an all-time low. There was 1,836 people killed in Hurricane Katrina, but that wasn't an all-time low. By the way, there was 8 million jobs lost because of the recession he created, the Great Recession, but that wasn't an all-time low. By the way also, there was a little thing called 9/11 on Bush's watch, and that wasn't an all-time low.

But Kanye dissed you and that was your all-time low? Oh no, Kanye doesn't like you! Did your feelings get hurt, George? You know what George Bush said when the CIA gave him a memo while he was on vacation, as usual, in Crawford? It said "we're going to get attacked by al-Qaeda in New York. He said "All right. You've covered your ass now." And he went back on vacation. And then we lost all those people on 9/11. But that wasn't an all-time low. Kanye dissed him, that was a low.

Now that isn't even the most startling part of the book. He also admits to a war crime. He said, when they asked him, "hey, should we waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?" He admits it. In the book, he says I told them "Damn right." Go ahead and torture him basically. Now is waterboarding really a war crime?

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Former Oklahoma Rep. J.C. Watts wants us to believe that the Koch brothers funded astroturf Republican re-branding effort is one, grass roots, and two, that it started with the followers of Ross Perot and Howard Dean. I don't think so J.C. If there's anyone you could say the "movement" was high jacked from, it's Ron Paul.

Sadly neither Dylan Ratigan or Ari Melber bothered to point out to Rep. Watts that it's pretty unlikely that there are very many of if any of Howard Dean's former supporters that are out there with those teabaggers protesting. The "Tea Party" protesters are the far right wing of the Republican party and some Libertarians. They're not liberals that supported Howard Dean.

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It looks like someone is pushing to get The Young Turks Cenk Uygur his own show on MSNBC. Cenk gave the daily rant segment on The Dylan Ratigan Show and went after "Tea Partiers" Ken Buck, Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle for their absurdly on the issue of separation of church and state.

As Cenk pointed out, these wingers are more than happy to push their version of Christianity on the rest of us and want their religion pushed into our politics, but none of them would be too happy if we had a state sponsored religion, and that religion turned out to be Islam or Mormonism.

Ratigan's show is all over the map with him going between ranting about, and rightfully so the mess that Wall Street has left this country in and the fact that our government hasn't done enough yet to reign them in to bringing on right wingers like Tom Coburn and pretending that he's some rational person that isn't part of the problem with the way our Senate has been functioning, or not functioning and obstructing would be a better description, that deserves to be listened to.

Ratigan almost made up for having on the extremely unfunny P.J. O'Rourke on to tell people not to come out and vote just before Cenk came on. I guess we'll find out before long if he does the same for Cenk Uygur as Keith Olbermann did for Rachel Maddow and helps him get a permanent spot on MSNBC.

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The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur takes on the "Tea Party" hypocrites who are trashing the government for helping others while themselves being more than willing to take those government handouts for their own, in The Dylan Ratigan show's daily rant segment.

There's Michele Bachmann and her farm subsidies. -- A guest poster followup: Michele Bachmann did vote to protect farm subsidies for wealthy recipients.

Joe Miller and his wife's unemployment benefits -- Despite Joe Miller Calling Federal Aid Unconstitutional, His Wife Received Unemployment Benefits.

Joe Miller and his farm subsidies -- Joe Miller Admits Reaping Federal Farm Subsidies Despite Railing Against Taking Government Funds.

Ron Johnson's HUD grant -- Ron Johnson's Latest Hypocrisy on Government Assistance: His Own Job Was Created by a Government Grant

And last but not least, Sharron Angle's government health care -- Sharron Angle And Her Husband Receive Government Health Care .