Brad Stine, fresh from his appearance at CPAC [all 15 minutes of which can be found here, if you like your comedy unfunny] made his weekly appearance on Fox and Friends.  Readers would be right to suspect he’d disappeared from the Fox and Friends rotation, since his last several appearances have not been documented by News Hounds.  No, he simply had nothing new to say and started to repeat himself.  That messed with my perfectly crafted conceit that former-carney Stine was an expert on everything, because that’s how the Curvy Couch seemed to use him.  It turns out that Stine is a maven on two things only: “Wussification” and “Political Correctness.”  No matter the topic, Stine is able to twist his response into some variation of “The Politically Correct Wussification of [fill in the blank].”  Wash, rinse, and repeat—like all the best propaganda. This week Stine didn’t disappoint in that regard, the jumping off point being teachers’ unions and so-called rubber rooms. 

Fox News contributor Liz Trotta appeared on America’s News HQ on Sunday (2/12/12) and suggested that if women want to serve in the military they should expect to be raped and not make a big deal out of it. Even Host Eric Shawn seemed to be offended by her.

Bill O’Reilly as good as admitted last night that Fox News’ war on President Obama’s contraception has failed. He noted that cable news ratings on the segments were “not good” and that Obama’s approval rating is “holding steady at 50%” despite “getting hammered by the Catholic Church and Republicans over the contraception situation.” O’Reilly asked, “Did the controversy hurt the president at all?” In a word, no. So O’Reilly attacked the contraception mandate as some kind of welfare for women.

Given its discussion of the HHS mandate, Fox News appears to be the mouthpiece for the US Council of Catholic Bishops, of which Fox pal, the conservative NY Archbishop Timothy Dolan, is the head, Fox News has been very dutiful in articulating, through many of its hosts and guests, the talking points of the Catholic Church. Not surprisingly, the one true clergy person from the one true Fox church, Fr. Jonathan Morris, is continues to use his Fox Sunday pulpit to preach the bishops' talking points. He also articulated the same points on Hannity's show which was a venue for right wing males, some of them clergy, to express their anger at the Obama administration over this issue. Despite the approval of the Catholic Hospital Association's Sister Carol Keehan, who said that the HHS "accommodation" is "sensible and solid," the bishops ain't happy and when the bishops ain't happy, neither is Fox. But gloria in excelsis dei, Fr. Jonathan Morris is there to sort it all out for us.

Recently, alleged straight news host Bill Hemmer interviewed the head of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, GOP Rep. Randy Forbes about how the military is waging war on Christianity. The reality is that many military Christians are attempting to impose their brand of evangelical Christianity on those whose beliefs are different - but you probably won't see Michael Weinstein, from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, on Fox News anytime soon. Anyway, at the end of the piece, Bill Hemmer gushed to Rep. Forbes that he wanted to make his audience aware that Forbes "introduced a piece of legislation to get the National Motto to read 'In God We Trust'." I don't know if this comment was the result of plain, old misinformation or if Hemmer, one of many committed Christians in Ailes' stable, was deliberately lying in order to pander to Forbes - cuz what Hemmer said isn't true.

As part of his unhinged “special” Friday night (2/10/12), Sean Hannity purported to discuss the legal angle of the Obama administration’s contraception mandate. In Hannity’s typically fair and balanced way, the two guests had the same mindset as he did. But Fox News contributor Peter Johnson took the segment's cake for overheated rhetoric. First, Johnson accused President Obama of thinking the Constitution is “unimportant.” Then he described the right-wing hissy fit over a measure that has already been existence in 28 states and many Catholic institutions – and which the majority of Americans and Catholic Americans support – as a “Rosa Parks moment.”

It looks like business news consumers are - excuse the pun - not buying the Fox News brand of political partisanship repackaged as Fox Business Network. In a move that was a stunning admission of its epic failure last week, Fox Business canceled its entire prime time lineup of programming in favor of re-airing programing from earlier in the day.

On yesterday’s Cashin’ In, the panel discussed the all male boardroom at Facebook. Host Cheryl Casone announced that the nation’s second largest pension fund is pressuring Mark Zuckerberg to add women to the board. Panelist Tracy Byrnes not only didn’t want to help her female brethren, she suggested it was an insult. Regular panelist Jonathan Hoenig said so overtly.

Move over Brad Stine. There's a new polymath in Fox town. While Stephen Baldwin is nowhere near as talented and famous as his "30 Rock" brother Alec, Stephen Baldwin is quite the expert on Catholic theology. In 2009, Baldwin provided Fox & Friends with cosmological commentary on Obama's Notre Dame speech while entertaining the audience with a snippet of the Bee Gee's "Jive Talking." Baldwin, who promised to leave the country if Obama was elected, proclaimed, ex-cathedra, that "there is no common ground on abortion." The scholarly Baldwin, who is speaking (appropriately) at CPAC about educating youth, educated yesterday's Fox & Friends audience to a careful exegesis of Catholic dogma as it related to the HHS contraception mandate. It was truly an intellectual masterpiece of epic proportion!

On Friday’s Your World (2/10/12), Charles Gasparino attacked discussed President Obama’s $26 billion mortgage settlement. As Media Matters wrote, “Right-wing media have responded to the $25 billion foreclosure settlement between banks and government authorities by attacking struggling homeowners who could potentially benefit from the deal—calling it a 'deadbeat bailout'—and by whitewashing banks’ alleged foreclosure malpractice.” Gasparino wrote the column called “deadbeat bailout” in the New York Post (a sister company to Fox). In a typical bit of media and conservative messaging synergy, Cavuto hosted Gasparino to discuss his column.