Finally, someone on Fox got it and explained it about that upstate New York newspaper which published the names and addresses of gun owners. It’s a story that Fox has been harping on incessantly and almost entirely from a biased, distorted and definitely unbalanced perspective. But on Friday night’s O’Reilly Factor (1/4/13), Geraldo Rivera helped nudge the scales back a tad.

It started with some fresh outrage about this never-ending faux controversy (this time over the “outrageous” comments by a former New York City official named Mark Green). But within seconds, Rivera changed the subject:

I don’t really have a big problem with the newspaper doing that… I am the parent of a 7 year-old. I’d like to know what families own guns before I let my kid go over to play or a sleep over. I think that it’s legit. I think the newspaper under the law of New York has an absolute right to publish it.

As I wrote in my previous post, that's really the heart of why the paper did it. There are people who want to know - and have a right to know, at least under New York law - if there neighbor has a stash of weapons. Yet Fox News is so obsessed with the rights of gun owners, they never seem to care a fig about the rights of everyone else.

Of course, O’Reilly disagreed haughtily, saying it's a privacy issue. Still, he didn’t have much comeback for Rivera’s concerns about his child's safety. But any ruffled feathers were surely soothed as Rivera began slobbering over O’Reilly’s “getting” ex-Marine Jon Hammar out of prison in Mexico. “You are singularly responsible, I think, for his freedom,” Rivera gushed. “And I think you put enormous pressure on Mexico, as you should have, on the State Department, as you should have, and even on newspapers like the New York Times for not covering the story.”