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I generally don't watch Fox News; it's bad for my blood pressure and health. Further, my husband got tired of me looking for something to throw at the TV. So I leave the Fox viewings to other members of the team. But I happened to be flipping channels and caught this exchange on The O'Reilly Factor and it had me reeling from the Wonderland topsy-turvy nature of it. Dave already discussed this clip a little.) In contemplating Rush Limbaugh being dropped from the group looking to purchase the St. Louis Rams. Juan Williams, for whom no conservative can do wrong, predictably defends Limbaugh, saying that all of Rush's statements do not constitute racism, but comedy. Seriously.

But then it took a turn into weirdness:

The Washington Times reports on the entire back-and-forth that continues this afternoon. While discussing “Barack The Magic Negro” song that Rush Limbaugh played, Williams and Ballentine, both African American, disagreed on whether that was “racial”.

Just before the end of the segment, Ballentine said, “You can go back to the porch, Juan. You can go back. It’s ok.”

He was almost gleeful while bragging about it on Twitter: “ok howd i do u hear me tell jaun back to the porch lmao” he wrote, among several other comments. Today, he wrote, “You gotta love how now Iam the racist LMAO gotta love the washington post and the GOP.”

The Times also has a clip of his web radio show, and he wasn’t remorseful in any way:

Now if you want to take what I said about Juan Williams as racial, you go right ahead. All I said was he could go back to the porch. I didn’t call him a house negro. I said he could go back to the porch. Now if you took it as such, that means you took it as such.

I think we've gotten to a weird, non-reality-based place when two African-American men on Fox News Channel look at and/or trade racial slurs and then argue they're not racial.

But then again, weirdness and non-reality is par for course for FNC. After all, the media channel that operates as a propaganda arm for the GOP, hires Glenn Beck and keeps him on no matter how embarrassingly stupid and wrong he is and yet fires a liberal commentator for "having a reputation of defending cop-killers and racists"m, apparently for defending Van Jones. Or for example, publishing the results of the internal poll they took of an imagined mano a mano between FNC and the White House.

From the internals of the new Fox poll:

The Obama administration is criticizing FOX News Channel for its coverage of the administration. If the disagreement between the Obama administration and FOX News Channel continues, who do you think will come out on top?

Administration 39%

Fox News 43%

Breaking: Fox finds more think Fox will defeat the White House! I wonder if this will persuade the White House communications team to drop its crusade.

I don't think Fox can even convince themselves they're a credible news organization anymore.

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What would the poor little old insurance companies do without the likes of Sean Hannity and his panel to rush to their defense? After claiming that the protests at these town halls are a grass roots movement, and not one being fueled by groups taking money from the insurance and health care industries, Hannity and Carlson staunchly defend the insurance industry.

HANNITY: And tonight we're launching a new Friday night panel that we call "The Sleep-in Sunday Panel." And we're going to give you all the hard-hitting political news on Friday night so you can enjoy the weekend, get a few more hours sleep Sunday morning.

And joining us tonight, he has been a campaign consultant for over 30 years. Democratic pollster Doug Schoen is back.

He is a FOX News contributor. The one and only Tucker Carlson is here, without a bowtie.

And she's the national security and Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Times. Sarah Carter is with us.

And you gave up the bowtie a couple years ago.

TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: Many years ago. I joined the mainstream.

HANNITY: OK. Is that right?

Well, guys, good to see you. Thank you for being with us.

All right. Let's start with the president's town hall. By the way, if they would have had the confetti and the balloons, it would have been, you know, a convention. I mean, everybody standing. One guy mentions the NRA. Three people clapped in Montana.

But let's watch him, again, attack -- attack FOX News.

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You have to believe things are really getting foul out there in cable land when Howard Kurtz -- whose willingness to look the other way when it comes to all kinds of vile and kooky wingnuttery is the stuff of legend -- finally reaches his threshold, as he apparently did Sunday on his 'Reliable Sources' program:

It's getting ugly out there. And by out there, I mean the great cable echo chamber. Six months after Barack Obama took office, the vitriol that often marked the Bush years when Iraq and terror were the driving issues is now being directed at his successor. And apparently, you can say just about anything about the president of the United States and still stay on the air. The national outrage meter doesn't even seem to move very much, so accustomed have we become about incendiary. My personal needle has hit the maximum.

What really pushed Kurtz over the line -- in addition to the Lou Dobbs 'Birther' controversy -- was Glenn Beck's charge that President Obama is a 'racist':

KURTZ: So, is some of this cable commentary getting out of control? Should there be a line you can't cross without getting fired? And why are we still debating the Skip Gates arrest?

Joining us now, Michel Martin, host of "Tell Me More" on National Public Radio; Amanda Carpenter, reporter and columnist for "The Washington Times"; and Michelle Cottle, senior editor of "The New Republic." Michel Martin, is calling the president a racist, not saying that he made a racist statement, but that he hates White people, is that simply out of bounds?

MARTIN: Yes.

KURTZ: And yet, there doesn't seem to be any great uproar about it.

MARTIN: I don't know. That's the part that surprises me a little. But there's a lot -- I guess it would be funny if it weren't so -- and here's a word that we've heard a lot of lately -- stupid.

I mean, here is a man who has a white mother, here is a man who was raised by two white grandparents who obviously adored him and who he adores. Here's a man who's better at so-called "white culture" than Glenn Beck is, and yet we have to hear this kind of commentary. It's quite remarkable.

Kurtz goes on to wonder how Beck and the rest of the inflammatory right-wing pundit class gets away this:

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Ohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohplease....

From her own PAC:
Palin Hints At Independent Conservative Movement

Excerpts from TammyBruce.com

Enter now Sarah Palin with very encouraging comments that lead one to believe that she is indeed planning to do what she must: build an independent conservative movement and take this nation back from the liberals which now control both parties.Thanks liberals, for provoking Sarah into the national scene while vetting that family at the same time.

One thing I will say, the Washington Times with their headline for this exclusive interview reveal an anti-Palin stance. She is, don’t doubt, a threat to every existing political status quo.

Oh holy FSM, there is so much funny to be had with this perfect example of Republican syllogism, I don't know where to begin.

Palin is planning to do what she must???? Apparently, she mustn't finish the job she was elected to do. Nor must she actually read up and learn about the issues as many mainstream Republicans have begged her to do.

And when did we become controlled by liberals in both parties? What in the hell is Bruce on about? Does she really suggest that Boehner, Cantor, Coburn, Kyl, Inhofe, etc are liberals???? When you start with that ridiculous a premise, then you're just asking to be laughed out of the room.

And then, after blaming liberals for vetting Palin's family (erm...huh?), she then launches into an attack against the Washington Times--hardly a bastion of liberal thought--for being anti-Palin and then holds it as a banner of pride of somehow being proof of her bona fides.

The mind reels.

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Such a dick, indeed.

So Dana Milbank is outraged, outraged we tell you, that the White House prearranged a list of journalists it intended to call upon at last week's press conference -- as though this were not something, as we just noted, that's been going on for years, and which reached its zenith with the Bush White House using a fake reporter named "Jeff Gannon" to raise questions favorable to its talking points.

Of course, what Pitney did was precisely the opposite: He actually asked an extremely tough question that President Obama had a difficult time answering (and in fact failed to answer). Yet this is what the Village folk are all waving their Gucci torches and Armani pitchforks about.

Moreover, as Eric Boehlert observes at Media Matters, Milbank never bothered to even write about this on the pages of the Washington Post, either while it was happening or afterward.

However, he did in fact appear on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann on Feb. 9, 2005, to talk about Gannon. And while he was happy to kick Gannon around a little, this was his rationale about the whole affair:

MILBANK: Let's call him Mr. G. He did get to ask a question of the president whether that was deliberate or not.

You know, what it really comes down to here is that it is not the type of question he was asking. I find that funny, it was a brief break, it was an amusement. The fact is he was representing a phony media company that doesn't really have any such thing as circulation or readership, it's affiliated with something called GOP USA. So there are many people, Fox News, Washington Times, they are conservative but they are legitimate organizations. So this guy is not a real journalist. And he was hanging out there wasting everybody's time in the press room.

Now, Milbank can't possibly object to Pitney's presence or inclusion in the press conference on the grounds that Huffington Post "doesn't really have any such thing as circulation or readership" -- it in fact has one of the largest readerships of any entity on the Internet, dwarfing even the Washington Post's.

So he's left to cling to the thin fiction that Pitney's preselection by the White House was some kind of massive transgression of the unwritten rules of White House press conferences. And in a way it was: It proved that the old unwritten rule -- that Beltway hacks like Dana Milbank will be permitted to dominate our national conversation by trivializing press conferences with dumbass questions about baseball and swimming suits -- is no longer quite so operative.

Indeed, no one seems to have asked the really relevant question here: Why did the White House feel compelled to ensure that someone asked an Iran question? Answer: Because they almost certainly feared the usual onslaught of swimsuit, baseball and Michael Jackson questions.

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Trotta: ...and now we have what some are reading---as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama, umm, ah... Obama, well both, if we could...haha...

She was forced to apologize on the air by the liberal blogosphere shortly after. In March, she maintained another lie:

Fox analysts: Obama is manipulating the librul press in a 'historic' way?

Greg Mitchell tweeted this and we grabbed it.

Liz Trotta on Fox just now bashing NBC coverage of Obama -- one year after she seemingly endorsed killing him "if we could."

I guess working for the Washington Times as she did in the past sure does seem to cause a severe "pundit insanity" syndrome. In this segment, she is furious with the media's coverage of President Obama's Middle East trip.

Trotta: It's the Obama glut and if you add that, another couple of hours of Brian Williams on NBC doing inside the Obama White House. I mean he's now up for the prize for Pet poodle in the Obama media kennel. Just unbelievable sycophancy.

Who, Brian Williams?

Oh, my goodness. The softball questions and the running up and down the hallways. Somebody compared the scenes of running up and down the hallways it to a scene from Goodfellows where one of the gangsters takes his girlfriend back through the kitchen in order to get to the secret night club.

Brian Williams, I've known him for 15 years. He's a decent, I think objective professional.

You're wrong, you're wrong. This is a network that has totally cast it's lot with the Obama White House.

We've heard that.

Trotta: They're of course the ugly rumors and reports about how Jeffrey Immelt, the chairman and CEO of G.E., the parent company, has sent the word down that we're going to be nice to Obama, because we want some of the government contracts.

Eric: do you really believe that? do you really believe that?

Trotta: I believe it's perfectly possible. I'm not saying it's so, but this is widely reported on the Internet. And then we have the stockholders meetings in which, where the questions were -- where people tried to ask can these questions and, of course, everybody's mic was cut. That aside, no, there wasn't even coverage of Obama. Again, he commanded the airwaves all week. And again, the press, which is his personal, you know, fan book, just play ball.

I always find it silly when FOX News people complain about other networks being propagandists when that's been their entire role for the GOP since its inception. I assume they know the FOX audience will bite, but it's still strange to see FOX complain about another network about this subject matter. And then they wrapped up the segment by attacking Williams because he gave a little bow to the president as he left him.

There it is. I mean it's just a little head nod.

Grovel, grovel, grovel.

No, it's a little thank you. It's a sign of respect. Thank you, Mr. President.

Did you see the entire thing? It was a grovel.

Listen, I'm no fan of Williams overall, but this is just creepy coverage of NBC and Obama by Trotta. I'm sure she's trying to get booked on Bill O'Reilly's show this week with this performance.

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Rachel Maddow uses a baseball analogy to debunk the talking points the media is using coming from a Washington Times article on Sonia Sotomayor's reversal rate. Media Matters has the breakdown as well.

Wash. Times, CQ uncritically report criticism that Sotomayor's Supreme Court reversal rate is "high" From the article:

In a May 27 article headlined "Sotomayor reversed 60% by high court," The Washington Times uncritically quoted Conservative Women for America president Wendy Wright saying that Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor's Supreme Court reversals -- which the Times reported as three of five cases, or 60 percent -- were "high." Similarly, on May 26, Congressional Quarterly Today uncritically quoted (subscription required) Wendy Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network, claiming that Sotomayor "has an extremely high rate of her decisions being reversed, indicating that she is far more of a liberal activist than even the current liberal activist Supreme Court." In fact, contrary to the claim that a reversal rate of 60 percent is "high," data compiled by SCOTUSblog since 2004 show that the Supreme Court has reversed more than 60 percent of the federal appeals court cases it considered each year.

The Times reported that "[t]hree of the five majority opinions written by Judge Sotomayor for the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals and reviewed by the Supreme Court were reversed, providing a potent line of attack raised by opponents." The article then quoted Wright's assertion that Sotomayor's "high reversal rate alone could be enough for us to pause and take a good look at her record." But according to data compiled by SCOTUSblog, Sotomayor's reported 60 percent reversal rate is lower than the overall Supreme Court reversal rate for all lower court decisions from the 2004 term through the present -- both overall and for each individual Supreme Court term.