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It was Bill O'Reilly and Jim DeMint's turn to pretend like no one has ever cut a Senator's time on the floor short tonight on the O'Reilly Factor. Bill-O and 'PrayerCast' member Jim DeMint do a little bit of history revision and pretend like Grandpa McCain hasn't done the exact same thing himself. So nice of them to show such concern for Joe Lie-berman while ignoring that McCain himself has acted a whole lot worse. Little wonder that O'Reilly would lash out at Franken since he's been mocking Bill-O since his days at Air America Radio.

Franken's spot where he panned O'Reilly for pretending like he served in battle on his radio show and his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them had to have gotten under O'Reilly's skin. If anyone out there has the recording of that segment on Air America, let the site know. I'd love to post it if I could find it.

As Think Progress noted, McCain was more than happy to cut off a Democratic Senator's time during the Iraq war debate. Now he's got memory lapse. Apparently it's too much to ask O'Reilly or DeMint to tell the truth about that in this segment. Fox News... unfair and unbalanced.

I'm still trying to figure out why the staff at Hardball could find footage of John McCain from back in 2002 cutting off another member of the Senate when the Rachel Maddow Show said they couldn't find it in the C-SPAN archives. Very strange.

UPDATE: My mistake on the Hardball/Rachel Maddow show segments. Matthews showed a different clip and not the one Rachel's staff could not find. At least both of those shows, unlike O'Reilly, bothered to point out that McCain is a huge hypocrite with his feigned outrage towards Franken "picking on" his buddy Lieberman when all Al was doing is following the directions given to him by Harry Reid.

h/t to David who sent on the O'Reilly in combat segment. I had thought this might have been Mike Stark but it wasn't. The one thing this is missing is the Franken show's mockery of it, not that it needs it to be funny as hell. Enjoy.

David also sent on what looks to be some of Franken's show footage and where to find it. I'll check that out as well and thank you for the tip.

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The new talking point by Fox News and conservatives who are attacking health care reform is to complain about the size of the bill. Last night on Greta Van Susteren's show, for instance, Sen. Orrin Hatch tried to tell us that the very size of the bill ensured that it would be a bad thing. Of course, most appropriations bills are bigger than this thing, and Hatch has not only voted for but sponsored his share of those. Maybe he'd find it acceptable if it were printed on golden tablets or something.

How desperate are they? Very f*&king desperate. The Democrats made a smart move by comparing it to Sarah Palin's book:

There are a lot of analogies floating around about how the Senate health care bill compares in size to other notable writings. Republicans have been hyping them all day.

Here's a new one from the Democratic arsenal: Sarah Palin's book, which runs 413 pages.

"This bill if you put in regular type style is about the same size as Sarah Palin's book," said Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska). "So it is not that big. There is a lot of show and tell and razzmatazz."

Which would be a better read?

"Depends if you want substance or not," he said.

Looks like the Palin line is a Democratic talking point. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) told a gaggle of reporters the same thing Wednesday night.

Conservatives were running around trying to wrap the entire bill around DC or something during the House debate.

Fox News jumped in with their usual conservative spin.

Today, Fox News' Live Desk continued the House Republican caucus and Politico's silly obsession with the length and size of the House health care reform bill. During a span of less than 45 minutes, co-host Trace Gallagher repeatedly told viewers the health care reform bill is so long, it makes the Russian novel War and Peace "look like a short story."

This is the time of the day where Rupert Murdoch says Fox News is in its actual "news cycle." If that's true, then why are they actively attacking the length of health care bill? Why does the page count matter to a news organization? Would they rather have a three-page bill handed over to them the way Paulsen did when he asked for $700 billion for Bush?

And Sen. Tom Coburn won't read the health care bill on the floor Saturday.

Republican Senator Tom Coburn is backing off his threat to require that the Senate read the 2,074-page health care bill because some GOP colleagues aren't supporting the effort.

The Oklahoma lawmaker said there's uncertainty about whether reading the bill during Thanksgiving week would be productive. He also said that if the Republicans do decide to tie up the Senate for the dozens of hours it would take, six GOP colleagues have committed to pitching in on reading duty.

Journalists are often surprised when they see themselves criticized because they think that they are above it all, but when you see something like this come up in print it makes you just shake your head. Howard Kurtz' newest column portrays Paul Krugman as an Obama cheerleader now being lost over his handling of the health care debate.

A president is going to be smacked around from the moment he takes office and the uplifting rhetoric of campaign rallies meets the gritty reality of governing.

But the criticism of Barack Obama has turned strikingly personal as some of his liberal media allies have gone wobbly on him. After playing a cheer-leading role during the campaign, some are bluntly questioning whether he's up to the job.

If Obama is losing Paul Krugman, can the rest of the left be far behind?

Really, this is who he picks as a cheerleader? Paul Krugman has been analyzing President Obama's choices ever since the primaries began and he was often critical of the then Senator all the way through to his winning the election. Krugman took a lot of heat when he criticized Obama's initial health care plan and he's been outspoken ever since on all issues economic including writing that he thought the stimulus wasn't big enough, but Howard makes it seem like Krugman was an Obama cheerleader right from the start.

Dean Baker caught this earlier today.

Those of you who remember Paul Krugman's often harsh criticisms of Obama during the election campaign might be surprised to read Howard Kurtz's media column which puts him first among the disappointed former Obama cheerleaders. Krugman has certainly been critical of Obama's performance in office, but this is only news for Kurtz, not people familiar with Krugman's writings.

All Villagers aren't wrong in everything they write obviously, certainly not Kurtz, but this latest error is laughable. I can understand if it was a matter of interpretation, but come on Howard, this one wasn't even close to being on the mark. (h/t Atrios)

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Here's a little preview of the B.S. we can expect FreedomWorks' Dick Armey to be spouting on Meet the Press this weekend. He faced off against Health Care for America Now's Richard Kirsch on The PBS Newshour Thursday night. Armey uses people buying into his disinformation campaign as proof that there must be something wrong with the health care bills making their way through Congress. I agree there are problems, but for the opposite reason Dick Armey does, and somehow pursuit of the truth doesn't look like it's at the top of his organization's agenda. Protecting the insurance and health care industries' profits are.

JUDY WOODRUFF: As the fight over reforming health care spreads from here in Washington, D.C., across the rest of the nation, we hear now from advocates on both sides of the issue.

Former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey is chair of FreedomWorks, a conservative group that has rallied protestors at health care town hall meetings.

And Richard Kirsch is the national campaign manager of Health Care for America Now, a liberal group which has urged its supporters to turn out at the meetings.

Thank you both for being here. We thank you for being part of this discussion.

And, Dick Armey, I'm going to come straight to you on the basics. You believe that there should be some form of reform of health care, health insurance, but a more limited form than what the president favors.

DICK ARMEY, FreedomWorks: Yes, I do. And we go back to things I've argued for, tort reform is -- estimates now as much as $100 billion of just sheer abject waste, which, by the way, is a hardship...

JUDY WOODRUFF: Tort reform, for those people who don't know the legal term, means...

DICK ARMEY: Well, lawyers suing doctors and that which causes doctors to order up extra procedures on behalf of patients that are not needed medically, but they need them in case they end up in a courtroom.

I watch this process. The thing that breaks your heart about that is, especially with older folks, to be subjected to extra procedures that are not medically necessary is a very difficult burden for them to carry when they're already oftentimes quite fragile and the procedures themselves can be quite a stressful experience for them.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So tort reform would be an important change for the system?

DICK ARMEY: That would be a good place to start.

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Hold back the jello. Jay Rockefeller was on this morning with Andrea Mitchell and complained about the Kent Conrad "co-op" plan which he said was basically unworkable. He then went on The Ed show and hit it even harder. Jay is a supporter of the public option and was pissed that the co-op proposal was inserted in the Baucus bill since it was never even talked about during the general election. Isn't it nice that Baucus has killed the public option just to work with Republicans? Conservatives don't even have to win elections to get what they want. That's some deal they have.

Ed: It's not going to work. There's really no successful model out there to support the basis of signing on to a co-op. Would you sign on to a co-op or is that unacceptable?

Rockefeller: That's unacceptable and I can almost prove it. We've been in touch with all the folks that oversee, represent all the co-ops in the country on all subjects and they point out that there are probably less than twenty health co-ops in the country. There are only two that really work that well. One in Puget Sound, one in Minnesota, except for those two, they are all unlicensed. All present health co-ops are all unlicensed, they're unregulated. Nobody knows anything about them, nobody has any control over them and nobody has ever said, which is stunning to me, no government organization or private organization has ever done a study to what effect they might have in terms of bringing down the insurance prices.

They are untested, they are unlicensed, they are unregulated, they are unstudied. Why would we even think about putting them in as a control on this massive insurance industry instead of the public option?

There aren't any co-ops throughout much of the country, but to appease the conservative Dems we're supposed to throw six billion dollars around and hope that the states will try to make them workable. Is this insane? Watch the whole clip, but you get the idea from this one statement. Kent Conrad's big proposal is a complete sham, but President Baucus is trying to cram that down the throats of the country, which will render all health-care reform useless. All hail bipartisanship!

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