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Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert had a field day this Wednesday evening with The Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz and her op-ed ranting against NYC's Citi-Bike program.

For anyone who would like to see how this was handled over in wingnut world at Fox, here's the final segment from this Saturday's Journal Editorial Report, where the her cohort Joseph Rago called her op-ed "a hit" and wrote off the criticism from "the left" as being from people who don't have a sense of humor. So I guess they're trying to pretend it was satire now rather than defend it.

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President George W. Bush's former chief strategist Matthew Dowd is slamming the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) for snubbing New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) while inviting former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R), who he asserts "wasn't competent enough to keep a Fox News contract."

Wall Street Journal editor Paul Gigot on Sunday told an ABC News panel that CPAC had made a mistake by not inviting Christie after he pushed Congress for Hurricane Sandy relief funds and backed some gun-control legislation following last year's mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

"If I were CPAC, I would have invited Christie and let him say what he wanted on guns or anything else," Gigot insisted. "And if you disagree with him, boo him or what have you. But this is a time that the Republican Party needs to have a debate, and a pretty raucous debate."

"CPAC, to me, has totally diminished its credibility as an organization," Dowd agreed. "And you invite Sarah Palin, who wasn't competent enough to keep a Fox News contract? But she's invited to CPAC meeting?"

Democratic strategist James Carville, however, welcomed the CPAC move as something that could help Democrats by elevating fringe elements in the Republican Party.

"Any day that you have more Sarah Palin and less Chris Christie is a good day for James Carville," he quipped. "I'm all for it!"

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From this Saturday's The Journal Editorial Report on Fox, host Paul Gigot asks his panel what they expect from President Obama during his second term, and after the initial response from Jason Riley, saying that the president is going to be looking to fund his first term agenda, because "socialized medicine is expensive," fellow panelist Daniel Henninger threw out this stink bomb:

GIGOT: Dan, what about this theory from liberals, which is -- and they're cheering it -- no more mister nice guy. The president is going to take on Republicans. He was way to compromising in the first term -- not that I recognize that president -- but that's the line that they're taking. And so, you know... look, he's going to put them in their place. He's going to demonize them, stigmatize them. Is that what we're going to see? What is that...

HENNINGER: We are going to see it. I mean, the left has been looking for years for an answer to right wing talk radio and they've got one -- the President of the United States. He's like a left wing talk show host.

Uh.... in a word Dan... NO. We've got plenty of "left wing" talk show hosts out there and they're mostly way to the left of President Obama. They went on to complain that President Obama is to blame for making the Republicans look bad and that he's causing them to fight among themselves, as though they needed an ounce of help in that department.

And the Republican health care plan he helped get passed that you all loved until a Democrat proposed it isn't "socialism." These wingnuts just keep pushing that Overton window further and further to the right.

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After watching the media obsess over this story all day long, all I can say is thank you Jon Stewart for bringing a little humor and sanity to the matter. Stewart dismantles the Gen. David Petraeus, Paula Broadwell scandal as only he can. Thankfully Eric Cantor was not spared and neither were the conspiracy theorists in the media and over at Fox.

After bemoaning the fact that it was “Captain America” who was found to be having an affair, Stewart went through a portion of his interview from earlier this year with Broadwell and said this about not realizing at the time the affair was going on:

STEWART: The whole thing was like innuendo after innuendo and the whole time, I was like... daaaahhh! I didn't pick up at... I had her right there talking about how thick of a coat of awesome sauce Petraeus is bathed in. The thing never crossed my f**king mind! The whole time, I was just staring at how defined her arms were and trying to think of another version of one of my classic “I'm an asthmatic old Jew” jokes. I am the worst journalist in the world! For God's sake, the title of her book was All In!

Stewart then moved on to the media and the way they covered the story, starting with The Today Show deciding that serial adulterer Newt Gingrich should be the one they turn to for an interview on the the topic. He then moved onto the various conspiracy theories being bantered about.

STEWART: Conspiracy number one: The FBI held back the Petraeus story to prevent Obama from losing the election. […] If only a Republican had known about this on election day.

Cue failure number one and Eric Cantor being informed about the scandal before President Obama. Conspiracy number two, the timing is suspicious and now Petraeus is not going to testify about Benghazi. Or maybe not.

STEWART: They jacked him. Right before he was about to testify on Benghazi. Conspiracy number two: Now we'll never know what Petraeus knew... unless quitting is different from dying and has no bearing on whether Petraeus will have to testify. […] Or will he? Oh, he will. […]

Conspiracy number three: Either the President of the United States blackmailed the head of the CIA, forcing him to agree with the administration's lie, or that theory is stupid. Can't be both!

Cue clueless Peggy Noonan comparing the scandal to Homeland and Stewart rightfully pointing out that the details right now look a lot more like an episode of Melrose Place.

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From this Sunday's This Week on ABC, The Nation's Katrina Vanden Heuvel was the one voice of reason, pushing back against the idea that austerity and budget cuts are going to somehow solve our country's economic problems, or the notion that the debt and deficit should be our biggest concern.

VANDEN HEUVEL: I agree with Paul Gigot. Americans voted decisively for fair share taxes on the richest, for protecting Social Security and Medicare, but also for growth and investment. You cannot get growth and investment with the spending cuts as they are laid out in the grand bargain.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And certainly not the sequester.

VANDEN HEUVEL: Certainly not the sequester. So I think part of the problem we're having, George, is the fundamental assumptions overriding this entire discussion. Senator Murray said that we have a big debt and deficit problem -- no, we don't. We have a big public investment and jobs problem.

(CROSSTALK)

VANDEN HEUVEL: Last point. We're not Greece. Austerity, if you believe in evidence-based politics and economics, you look at what's going on in Europe, and austerity, which we may have American-style in this country if we proceed the way we are doing, has led to economic pain, has led to killing growth. Killing growth.

(CROSSTALK)

VANDEN HEUVEL: And debt and deficit.

Amen to that sister. This needs to be repeated as often as possible whenever we hear the fearmongering about falling off of the "fiscal cliff" and the real danger to our economy that austerity measures pose. As she pointed out, the deficit can be taken care of later, but we've got to get the unemployment numbers down first and Americans back to work.

Full transcript of the segment above below the fold.

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From this Saturday's Journal Editorial Report, Peggy Noonan, like a lot of other Republicans, are trying to figure out what the GOP should do to keep from suffering the kind of losses they did during this presidential election. Needless to say, like most of them, she doesn't seem to understand that they're going to need to do more than just change their rhetoric.

Peggy Noonan: "Republican Party Has Much To Think About":

"This was a solid win for the president and I think that the Republican party has much to think about here going into the future," Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan said on FOX News' "Journal Editorial Report" this weekend.

Noonan, however, says Republicans don't need to rethink their principles such as limited government, but how to present such ideas.

"The way the party goes forward sometimes, it is a way that unnecessarily, I think, occasionally turns people off," Noonan opined. "I also think, a big lesson for the Republican party in this election is to look at America, look at the Republican base -- the famous Republican base -- and see that this is not expanding anymore; this is where it is, maybe it is beginning to detract." [...]

"One of the things I think the party will have to do now is listen to certain voices, such as up here in New York, Heather Higgins of IWF (Independent Women's Forum). She has been some time to party political professionals the answer is not to drill deep into the base; the answer is to expand the base. And that is through going to people, that is through conversation, that is through talking to them about the issues that they case about. It is not operating from 'up here' with big ads that just press people's buttons; it's operating in a way like the Obama campaign did. It's going down on to the ground and talking to people. It's labor intensive, but it's a way of growing. It's a wake of persuading people, which I think Republicans have gotten kind of bad at," she said.

Here's more on that from Laura Clawson at Daily KOS -- Stunned Republicans try to figure out what went wrong and repackage for the future:

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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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From ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Peggy Noonan manages to downright embarrass herself with this ridiculous statement, but what else is new? Nooners apparently thinks that if Mittens new running mate Paul Ryan just gets out there and does some interviews, stat, Democrats won't have a chance to define him in campaign ads. And he'd never do anything to hurt grandma. How could he when he looks like such a nice young man?

NOONAN: What Ryan ought to be doing is going out there, I think now, and showing himself in very long and thoughtful interviews and talking about exactly what he thinks and why and what his intentions are. [...] Let the American people look at him literally over the next few days so that when the Dems come with Demiscare and he'll take -- Grandma is being thrown off the train or off the sled or whatever the metaphor is [...] think, my goodness, he doesn't look like the type of young man who would throw Grandma off the sled.

I guess Noonan thinks that one, he's going to say anything different than what he's already been saying in interview after interview for the last fourteen years or so now. And two, that if he does, it would matter since we've got, you know, these modern day things called recording devices.

I'm not sure what they're paying Noonan in wingnut welfare to appear on these shows, but if it's more than a penny, it's too much.

Full transcript of the clip above below the fold.

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The Obama campaign has a new ad out titled "Worried" which points out that Mitt Romney would like to return us to the policies we had under George W. Bush, and naturally the panel members on Fox's the Journal Editorial Report did their best to try to pretend that wasn't true.

While it may be true that Bush is not on the ballot now, and the economy is still in bad shape, that's not due to the policies of the Obama administration as the talking heads on Fox claimed and they completely ignored Republican governors and state legislatures around the country doing their part to lay off as many government workers as possible, or the Republicans in the Congress and the amount of obstruction we've seen from them.

They did do their best to pretend that Romney doesn't want to privatize Social Security, just like George W. Bush did and that there's a dime's worth of difference between the two there. And they criticized Bush for the prescription drug giveaway he passed, as though Republicans really care about government taking care of their allies in big pharma or any of the rest of their campaign donors for that matter. That's their standard excuse to try to pretend Bush wasn't a real Republican and was just like those tax and spend liberals they all hate so much. And even though they acknowledged that Mitt Romney would like to pass Paul Ryan's budget plan, there was no admission that his plan would just be a return to what we had under Bush, only on steroids.

Here's more from Jon Perr from back in June on exactly why Romney would just be a return to the Bush years and why that ad is correct: Mitt Romney is Running for Bush's Third Term:

In Las Vegas last week, Mitt Romney looked to his own biography in proposing a new requirement for anyone seeking the presidency:

"In addition to the age of the president and the citizenship of the president and the birthplace of the president being set by the Constitution, I'd like it also to say that the president has to spend at least three years working in business before becoming president of the United States."

Of course, if Mitt Romney had his way, the President should also have an MBA from the prestigious Harvard Business School. He ought to have made millions in the private sector and earned notoriety for running a high-profile sports enterprise. A scion of a proud Republican family, the occupant of the White House should promise massive, Treasury-draining tax cuts which would deliver the lion's share of their benefits to the very richest Americans, himself and his family included. The President should also nevertheless pledge to balance the budget even while boosting defense spending. And in his ideal America, he would like to privatize Social Security and leave Americans to fend for themselves in the private health insurance marketplace.

If that profile sounds like Mitt Romney, that's because it is. Then again, the same description also applies to America's First MBA President*, George W. Bush. And we all know how well that worked out.

(Click a link to jump to the details for each below the fold):

• Big Tax Cuts and Bigger Debt
• Another Windfall for the Wealthy
• Social Security Privatization
• The Bush Health Plan on Steroids
• Defense Spending and National Security
• Of and For the Haves - and the Have Mores

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From this Saturday's The Journal Editorial Report on Fox, the panel from Uncle Rupert's Wall Street Journal really doesn't like the idea of several counties in California using "eminent domain to seize underwater mortgages from investors and restructure them to help borrowers keep the homes." Funny, I don't ever recall anyone on Fox complaining about the use of eminent domain by people like George W. Bush so he could build his stadium in Texas, but if it's to help underwater home owners, well, that's just terrible.

Here's more from the L.A. Times on the story: San Bernardino County weighs eminent domain to fight foreclosures:

A plan by San Bernardino County to seize mortgages and restructure them for underwater homeowners using eminent domain is perhaps the most aggressive example of how local governments are seeking new ways to combat foreclosure.

The cities of Ontario and Fontana are partnering with the county to create a Homeownership Protection Program that would use private funds to acquire underwater mortgages from investors. The county and the two cities have created a joint authority to explore and possibly enact the plan, and the first public meeting of that authority will be held next week.

David Wert, a spokesman for the county, said the program is worth exploring because it could offer a solution to one of the region's most entrenched problems: the vast number of loans that are stuck underwater, with more money owed than the property is worth. If the program were to go countywide, it could benefit 20,000 to 30,000 homeowners, he said.

"The only thing we are doing at this point is conducting a conversation," Wert said. "But the reason the county is interested in talking about this is because this is a proposal that could — if everything checks out — address the problem on a fairly large scale."

Although still in its initial stages, the aggressive proposal has attracted controversy. A number of banking, financial and business groups oppose it, contending that seizing mortgages would raise constitutional issues and could increase lending costs in those cities.

The California Mortgage Bankers Assn., the American Bankers Assn. and the American Securitziation Forum, along with several other financial groups, sent a letter of opposition to the county and the two cities.

"We believe that the contemplated use of eminent domain raises very serious legal and constitutional issues," the letter read. "It would also be immensely destructive to U.S. mortgage markets by undermining the sanctity of the contractual relationship between a borrower and creditor, and similarly undermining existing securitization transactions."

Dustin Hobbs, a spokesman for the California Mortgage Bankers Assn., said the program also could hurt the local housing market.

"It could be devastating," Hobbs said. "If investors are unsure as to the disposition of mortgages in San Bernardino County and in Fontana and Ontario, it could really curtail lending in the area, and if not curtail, certainly increase costs for new loans."

San Bernardino County's plan is the latest of several measures by local governments to fight foreclosures and the problems often associated with resulting neglect: crime and blight. Read on...