Leave it to Jon Stewart, and the writers of the Daily Show, to put the Rush Limbaugh 3-week national brouhaha into its proper perspective.  While he starts with “Radio shock blob Rush Limbaugh” and his “daily noon to 3 afternoon mouth dump,” it’s not very long before he’s onto one of his (and our) favorite topics: Fox “News” Channel.  Stewart was clearly having fun with this segment until one point where it appeared he allowed some real life anger to show through. 

Rick Santorum made some news earlier yesterday when he declared that he thought Fox News has been shilling for Mitt Romney. Later in the evening – after he won the Alabama and Mississippi primaries – he appeared on On The Record and explained to host Greta Van Susteren that she and Sean Hannity are “fair and balanced” but Fox’s news coverage is not. That’s pretty funny because according to Fox, it’s the news coverage that’s objective and the evening opinion shows such as Van Susteren’s and Hannity’s are likened to an editorial page. 

Sean Hannity is still using the widely-ridiculed Professor Derrick Bell video to paint President Obama as a racist. Never mind that Hannity sits on the advisory board of a charity run by “Thank God for slavery” and “slave ships are like flying coach” Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson. Obama hugged tenured Harvard Law Professor Bell in 1990 during a student protest so he must be a closeted racist! To assist with the attacks (and inoculate himself from looking like a bigot), Hannity trotted out two of his like-minded African American pals – David Webb and Michael Meyers. Each overlooked Hannity’s own very disturbing record on race in order to use this flimsy pretext to accuse Obama of racial demagoguery.

The rabid right wing hasn't changed much from their glory days of Joe McCarthy red baiting. Much of "Tailgunner Joe's" ire was focused on Hollywood which, according to McCarthy, was a hotbed of communism. The term, "Hollywood Jews," was popular amongst those who felt that the Hollywood community was anti-American. Flash forward to 2012 and the right still hates Hollywood. While the aforementioned anti-Semitic term has been replaced by "Hollywood liberals, they are still hated by the right wing whose animosity is further fueled by Hollywood's support of President Obama. In addition to their liberal views, the right bashes Hollywood figures for their supposed hypocrisy. This meme was advanced on this morning's Fox & Friends by Jason Mattera, another nice Christian heterosexual lad who bashed the mother of a young man murdered by homophobes, attacked diversity during a 2010 CPAC speech in which he "joked" that President Obama snorts cocaine, and tried to set up a whites only scholarship while he was in college to protest minority scholarships - despite his having received one himself. So the lesson, folks, is that Obama, in addition to palling around with scary black men, pals around with "Hollywood hypocrites." Seriously, is that all they've got?

Scotland Yard has arrested six people—including former-News International CEO Rebekah Brooks and her husband Charles Brooks—on “suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice,” according to The Guardian.  Police have not named those charged but confirmed that among those arrested were a 43-year old woman and 49-year old man.  These charges most likely involve alleged bribes of “hundreds of thousands” of dollars paid to British police, military, and government officials, for which they may have been paid to look the other way.  This is just the latest legal problem for Rupert Murdoch, News Corp, and by extension the Fox “News” Channel, as investigations continue into sordid practices on several continents.

Chalk up Laura Ingraham as another Fox Newsy to echo Rush Limbaugh by painting those who advocate for contraception coverage as sluts. Ingraham didn’t use any vile language or say anything as repulsive as Limbaugh did but the sentiment was pretty much the same.

FoxNews.com has a report today about the Justice Department challenging a Texas voter ID law. The report is reasonably balanced but one of our readers found some very disturbing comments about our president.

On The Huckabee show this weekend (3/10 and 3/11), host Mike Huckabee made a blatant ploy to rehabilitate Rick Santorum's image with women and to offset the heat he took for calling President Obama “a snob.” Huckabee’s first question to Santorum was about the “snob” comment and asked if there was “anything out there that you would love to walk back.” Yes, there was. Instead of calling President Obama “a snob,” Santorum wished he had used the word “snobbish.”

A recent memo reveals that 98 major corporations have decided that they do not want to advertise on radio programs "deemed to be offensive or controversial" and specifically names Sean Hannity's show as one of the examples.

There's nothing I love more (politically speaking) than a feisty liberal standing up to and demolishing right-wing attacks. It's even more delicious if the feisty liberal is standing up to a right-wing bully like Sean Hannity. In a discussion last week (3/9/12), Hannity hosted Fox News contributor and former student of Derrick Bell, Sally Kohn, to defend President Obama in Hannity's "race tape." The video has been widely ridiculed but Hannity is sticking to his racial guns that Obama's warm introduction of a tenured Harvard Law professor and a hug in 1990 proves that Obama shares what Hannity describes as Bell's anti-white radicalism. Kohn demolished every bit of Hannity's argument as "much ado about hugging" and finished him off by saying, “You and I have hugged, that doesn’t mean we agree on everything!"