As long as Fox News continues to present itself as “fair and balanced,” Jon Stewart will have plenty of material to work with.

I stopped watching MSNBC in the mornings because Dylan Ratigan is incredibly annoying. He has some good points at times, but he’s only interested in repeating his own opinion . . . over and over again.

Here’s a clip of Ratigan at his worst with Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Even Chris Matthews rarely gets this annoying.

If he wanted a real discussion, he could have gotten an answer. Insurance stock went up after the public option was dropped for very obvious reasons – yes, the public option would have resulted in real competition. Fine. End of story. That does not mean, however, that the bill is a “giveway” to the insurance companies as he implied, because as the Congresswoman tried to explain, the bill does include robust regulation of the insurance companies.

Is this perfect? Of course not. Would a public option be better? Of course. But Ratigan just wanted to yell and scream about his simple point that the insurance companies are now better off than if the public option had stayed in the bill.

Of course, a child could probably figure that out as well, but Ratigan thought he was making a big point, so he acted like an ass.

Fox News took umbrage at the White House’s assertion that the network is oftentimes a research and propaganda arm for the Republican Party. “The Daily Show” reveals the relationship between FNC’s supposedly non-partisan news anchors and the opinion people like Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly.

FNC apologists like to point at MSNBC and say that they’re just as biased the other way, but I’ve personally heard Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews be highly critical of Obama’s WH on a number of issues (torture, GITMO, the public option, etc.) over the past few months. Can Beck, O’Reilly and the hosts of “Fox & Friends” say they did the same thing when Bush was in office? And what about the hypocrisy of complaining about Obama’s WH treatment of Fox News when the same people were saying that the Bush WH should hang MSNBC out to dry? (Bush Press Secretary Dana Perino admitted in an interview on Fox that the Bush WH didn’t do anything with MSNBC late in his second term.)

Do these people realize that people are recording everything they say on television?

I’m not suggesting that Obama policies alone are driving the stock market. Many factors, particularly earnings, drive the overall market.

But, many conservatives were quick to blame Obama when the market slipped in the spring, implying he was to blame as opposed to the economic crisis he inherited. Melissa Francis and some of the other conservative market worshipers at CNBC were just a few of the examples. Well, the market is now up, and we’re not hearing conservatives talk about it much any more.

“The Daily Show” calls out the Fox News crowd for doing the same things they used to complain about when Bush was in office.

Classic. That Craig T. Nelson bit was fantastic.

Jon Stewart calls out Beck for grossly flip-flopping on the quality of U.S. health care. Beck has either lost his mind or is a total hypocrite. You be the judge.

The bit starts at the 0:30 mark.

I’m all for the debate, but when you have loons like Beck running around stoking the fears of the ignorant, it’s a recipe for chaos.

Maybe that’s what the anti-reform people want.

Since Barack Obama announced his candidacy for President, we’ve seen the lunatic fringe on the right push the limits of idiocy. Since his election, the levels of insanity on the right have grown exponentially.

The “birther” movement has set a new standard, even by the standards of the loony right wing. They make the teabaggers looks like sober economic scholars.

Naturally, Jon Stewart, the most trusted newsman in America following the death of Cronkite, has a field day with this one.

Pay particular attention to his smackdown of Lou Dobbs, who brings up “questions” surrounding Obama’s place of birth several days after a guest host ON HIS OWN SHOW completely debunks the asinine story. Further proof that Lou Dobbs is a complete buffoon. Why is this clown still on CNN?

MSNBC is touting their new high-def studios and graphics, but they can’t seem to get the market quotes right. Futures are up big this morning, as reported by CNBC, but MSNBC has red down arrows everywhere showing a down opening.

It’s been up there all morning. Wake up!

I’m watching the Sotomayor hearings on MSNBC, and of course they need to break from the actual hearing so Chris Matthews and the other talking heads can pontificate about the hearings. It’s annoying as hell, since we’re missing the continuation of the hearings, but Matthews doesn’t have a lawyer as part of his panel. As a result, Matthews can say idiotic things about her testimony without having a lawyer correct him on the air. What a joke.

Rush Limbaugh wants MSNBC to stop shining a light on his inane commentary. Keith Olbermann had this to say:

I love the bit with the music playing in the background. Classic.

I recently got into a somewhat heated argument with a conservative friend of mine about Fox News and whether it was more or less misleading than the other mainstream media outlets. I pointed to the two or three Pew polls that show that Fox News viewers on average were the least likely of all the major news outlets to have a clear understanding of the facts. I argued that MSNBC may on the whole be liberal, but at least they “deal in facts” (i.e. they cite their sources and don’t just make stuff up as they go along, like Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity do). The following video is a great example. Bill O’Reilly attempts to debunk Obama’s assertion that Winston Churchill was anti-torture, even when he was under the most dire of circumstances. Notice how O’Reilly makes statements as if they were fact, with no supporting documentation, and how he distracts his audience by going on tangents that have nothing to do with the torture question. Then watch as Olbermann counters Bill O’s argument with facts and actually cites his sources.

It’s amazing to me that anyone still believes that Fox News is “fair and balanced.” What’s even more amazing is that the same conservative friend watched the documentary “Outfoxed” on my suggestion and agreed with much of what it had to say. Three or four years later, now that Obama is in the White House, that objectivity has vanished.

Don’t bother reconciling the two…it’s impossible.

I have a couple of conservative friends who say that they find “The Colbert Report” funny, which always struck me as odd since his whole shtick is that he’s an uneducated, close-minded conservative pundit. (The show started off as a bit spoof of Bill O’Reilly that Colbert put together for “The Daily Show.”) I never pursued the issue with them, but it’s apparent now with the release of a study conducted by Ohio State University that many conservatives think that Colbert is actually conservative. They realize that his show utilizes satire, but while the rest of us realize that 80-90% of his time is spent making Republicans and Republican policy look foolish, conservatives think that there is sincerity beneath his satire. Here is a segment on “Countdown,” where Keith Olbermann interviews the lead writer of the study.

I always wondered who was dumb enough to schedule Colbert to speak at the White House Press Corps Dinner a few years ago, but I guess if conservatives really think he’s a conservative, then it makes sense. If you haven’t watched his roast of George W. Bush, it’s definitely worth a look.

I may have spoken too soon several weeks ago when I called Melissa Francis the “dumbest person on CNBC.” Dennis Kneale has thrown his hat in the ring.

Dennis Kneale rarely provides any real analysis, and that’s the biggest problem on CNBC. Too many of the CNBC hosts use each piece of news to regurgitate their political views, and Kneale is one of the worst offenders.

Today he was outraged that the Obama administration would ask Rick Wagoner to step down. He talked about it on the air, and he even managed to write a column about it.

He starts with a rational statement, but he quickly lets his anger get the best of him.

Yes, it’s about time. Wagoner had been in denial about the auto industry’s woes for far too long. He just wasn’t scared enough. But if this IS the right move, um, then why didn’t the REAL shareholders of GM—the big pension funds and mutual funds in particular—demand it long ago? Maybe because they felt Wagoner was doing as good a job as anyone could under impossible difficulties.

So, he starts by admitting this might be a good move, but he’s concerned that the “shareholders” didn’t ask Wagoner to leave. Of course, the stockholders really don’t have that power (GM is a Delaware corporation, so it’s “stockholders,” not “shareholders”). The board of directors has the power to fire the CEO, not the stockholders. The stockholders can elect a new board, but elections usually happen once per year. The stockholders of course HAVE weighed in by hammering the stock from about $40 to under $5 in just six months. Do you think they’re happy with Wagoner? He also doesn’t mention that the Obama administration also wiped out most of the Board of Directors as well.

Also, at this point, who gives a damn what the stockholders think? This company would be bankrupt without the help of the federal government and the stockholders would lose everything. As the most senior lender, and as the ONLY entity or person on the planet capable of saving this mess of a company, the government has every right, AND the obligation, to put in place a management team of its choosing.

In the next paragraph, we see his real agenda – using this incident to take cheap shots at the Obama administration.

The bigger worry is this summary execution betrays a deep antipathy toward Big Business on the part of the Obama Administration. Lamentably, the president’s henchmen may have imposed this coup mainly for reasons of image and example-setting. No wonder stocks are down big today.

Here we go again. Anyone who uses the phrase “the president’s henchmen” in this context shows he’s not serious about analyzing the issue. Can’t he just explain why he disagrees with the decision? Does he have to use this kind of language? Is someone at CNBC asking him to act like an asshole so he gets more page views for his articles? We’re in the middle of a huge financial crisis that has produced real anger among the American people, and reasonable people will disagree about how we should address these political problems, so is it really necessary for CNBC hacks to ratchet up rhetoric in this case?

Then he goes on to slam Fritz Henderson.

Otherwise, how is it that GM . . . is any better off run by Wagoner’s doppelganger—Frederick “Fritz” Henderson, like Wagoner a GM lifer who helped preside over the automaker’s years-long decline?

Naturally, he doesn’t answer his own question. That might require some actual reporting that would compromise the pissy tone he has worked so hard to establish. He probably spent at least five minutes coming up with the “doppelganger” crack. If he had done a little digging, he might find that some people actually think Henderson could do a good job.

Then again, Henderson is no Wagoner. Where the boss is measured and aloof, Henderson is fast-talking and direct. He attacks problems with gusto, which is why GM sent him to trouble spots on three continents. “Fritz has a real sense of urgency,” says Joseph Phillippi, principal of firm Auto Trends Consulting. “His intensity would be a big plus.”

Earlier this decade, Henderson shored up GM’s flailing European operations. He needed to cut jobs and came out swinging—announcing 12,000 layoffs even before inking a deal with union bosses. The move sparked a wildcat strike in Germany, but Henderson got his way. He also helped introduce the Chevrolet brand to Eastern Europe. After years of losses, GM Europe made $357 million in 2006 and a small profit last year. (Those gains have deteriorated along with the global economy.)

During a two-year stint in Asia, Henderson simplified GM’s brand strategy. The company used to sell Saturn, Chevrolet, and cars from former partners Isuzu, Suzuki, and Subaru in Japan. Henderson focused solely on Chevy. He can’t take all the credit, but Chevy is now GM’s global brand.

Since returning to Detroit nearly three years ago, Henderson has spent much of his time negotiating with the United Auto Workers. The deal he cut with the union will save GM billions a year. “If it weren’t for Fritz and his team,” said UAW President Ron Gettelfinger at the time, “this deal would never have come about.”

Now, we don’t know if Henderson is the right choice. One could argue he was too easy on the UAW in the last round of negotiations. But we certainly didn’t learn anything about this important move from Kneale.

The future of one of the most iconic companies in American history hangs in the balance, and all of his comments on the subject were simplistic and useless. He was more concerned with insults and politics as opposed to analysis. What a joke.

If you like vintage photos, you’ll love Shorpy.com.

I enjoy reading Peggy Noonan because she’s never shy about her point of view. She also writes beautifully.

That said, for every great column, she produces at least two clunkers. Today’s column, with the subtitle of “The unbearable lightness of Obama’s administration,” is particularly bizarre. Here’s the introduction.

He is willowy when people yearn for solid, reed-like where they hope for substantial, a bright older brother when they want Papa, cool where they probably prefer warmth. All of which may or may not hurt Barack Obama in time. Lincoln was rawboned, prone to the blues and freakishly tall, with a new-grown beard that refused to become an assertion and remained, for four years, a mere and constant follicular attempt. And he did OK.

Such impressions—coolness, slightness—can come to matter only if they capture or express some larger or more meaningful truth. At the moment they connect, for me, to something insubstantial and weightless in the administration’s economic pronouncements and policies. The president seems everywhere and nowhere, not fully focused on the matters at hand. He’s trying to keep up with the news cycle with less and less to say. “I am angry” about AIG’s bonuses. The administration seems buffeted, ad hoc. Policy seems makeshift, provisional. James K. Galbraith captures some of this in The Washington Monthly: “The president has an economic program. But there is, so far, no clear statement of the thinking behind the program.”

What a jumbled mess. She sounds like all those journalists who were lecturing Obama early in the campaign that he had no chance of winning if he stayed calm and refused to go negative on Hillary.

She asserts there’s “something insubstantial and weightless in the administration’s economic pronouncements and policies,” when liberals and conservatives recognize that Barack Obama has proposed the most daring and ambitious budget of our generation. Conservatives hate the budget for that very reason – Obama wants to fundamentally change how we meet the challenges of health care, energy and education. Somehow, Peggy Noonan has missed all that, getting distracted by the daily Washington soap opera that plays out on cable TV.

Barack Obama is trying to put out a bonfire cause by years of irresponsible behavior in Washington and on Wall Street. His critics are howling that he hasn’t snapped his fingers and slayed this economic monster with a silver bullet. The bottom line is this – Obama and Bernanke have put together a sensible package of programs that just might get us out of this mess. Of course, Ms. Noonan has nothing to say about the actual substance.

She isn’t comfortable with Obama’s style, probably because she’s been in Washington so long she can’t process anything other than the scripted nonsense of previous administrations. She shouldn’t confuse message discipline with sound policy. Obama is selling his policies on his terms, and he refuses to treat the American people like idiots. Critics might quip that he comes across as “professorial,” but many Americans appreciate a President who doesn’t try to turn every policy proposal into a dumbed-down soundbite.

More like incompetent media if you ask me.

Liberals bloggers are having a field day ripping John King for his terrible interview of Dick Cheney. Naturally, Arianna Huffington skewered King with her usual flair.

Jon Stewart’s Jim Cramer interview was a pivotal moment — not just for Stewart, Cramer, and CNBC but also for journalism. It was a bracing reminder of what great research and a journalist more committed to getting to the truth than to landing the big get — and keeping the big get happy, and ensuring future big gets — can accomplish.

Stewart kept popping into my head as I watched John King interview Dick Cheney on Sunday. Each time King let Cheney get away with spouting gross inaccuracies and revisionist history, I kept thinking how different things would have been had Stewart been asking the questions. Stewart without the comedy and without the outrage — just armed with the facts and the willingness to ask tough questions.

King consistently refused to challenge anything Cheney said by asking tough follow-up questions. Also, when citing problematic facts, he would always couch them with timid qualifiers.

“There are people…” “They would say…” “And they have some numbers to back up their case.”

These are not some numbers that belong to some people being trotted to make their case. These numbers are actual data — empirical evidence. It would be as if King were interviewing a flat-earther and asked him: “There are people on this planet, watching this interview right now, who would say that the earth is round. And they have some pictures taken from outer space to back up their case. So what would you say to someone out there who is saying that?”

King’s desperate attempt to distance himself from the question would be laughable if it weren’t so repellent. It’s not him asking Cheney why we should listen to him. It’s not him putting forward objective data. It’s some strawman viewers, so please don’t hold it against him. And please, please come back. And tell your friends.

This is the problem with King and too many in the Pontius Pilot traditional media: They are so caught up in the obsolete notion that the truth always lies in the middle, they have to pretend that there are two sides to every issue — and even two sides to straightforward data.

Someone needs to kidnap King and take him to a deprogramming center — preferably one run by Jon Stewart and his team.

If CNN can’t use John Stewart, then perhaps they can have Fareed Zakaria handle all important interviews. The executives at CNN should be commended for putting Zakaria’s excellent GPS program on the air, and to some extent that makes up for spineless hacks like John King.

In 2004, Jon Stewart went on “Crossfire” and said what most of us thought – the show sucked and the cable media was destroying journalism.

“Crossfire” was canceled several months later.

Naturally, Tucker Carlson wasn’t impressed with Stewart’s takedown of Jim Cramer.

“Jim Cramer may be sweaty and pathetic—he certainly was last night—but he’s not responsible for the current recession,” Carlson told POLITICO. “His real sin was attacking Obama’s economic policies. If he hadn’t done that, Stewart never would have gone after him. Stewart’s doing Obama’s bidding. It’s that simple.”

Begala said that “as an Overpaid TV Guy myself, I hate to see the Overpaid TV Community ripped apart in this time of crisis.”

As to whether Stewart’s takedown could again impact cable punditry, Begala said he had “no clue.”

Things seem to be getting worse for Jim Cramer.

Friday brought more tumult for CNBC anchor Jim Cramer, when the chief executive of his online financial news site, The Street.com, resigned.

The company announced Friday that Thomas Clarke, TheStreet.com’s CEO for the past decade, would be leaving, effective immediately. He’s been temporarily replaced by Daryl Otte, a longtime director on the company’s board, who will serve as chief until the search committee, which he is leading, finds a new CEO.

Who knows the reasons behind Clarke’s decision, but the timing suggests that Cramer’s flameout is not going over well in the financial community.

This is pretty pathetic, and it highlights how bad Jim Cramer’s appearance was on The Daily Show.

A TVNewser tipster tells us MSNBC producers were asked not to incorporate the Jim Cramer/Jon Stewart interview into their shows today. In fact, the only time it came up on MSNBC was during the White House briefing, when a member of the press corps asked Press Secretary Robert Gibbs if Pres. Obama watched. Gibbs wasn’t sure if the president had, but Gibbs did. “I enjoyed it thoroughly,” the Press Secretary said.

On Cramer’s network, CNBC, the subject has only come up twice today, including when master marketer/CNBC personality Donny Deutsch brought it up briefly around 1pm on “Power Lunch.” “I’m a huge Jon Stewart fan,” said Deutsch, “He does what he does he does his job. But I’m also a huge Jim Cramer fan. He sticks up for the little guy, he cares, he puts his neck out, and I respect that. I respect both those guys.”

How embarrassing. In effect, Stewart destroyed Cramer’s credibility and painted CNBC as a bunch of fools, but MSNBC honchos decided not to respond. This suggests that there might be serious consequences.