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In case you missed it, Fox and the right-wing have their knickers in a twist over Columbia University’s hiring of former 60s radical Kathy Boudin as a professor of social work. Never mind that Boudin has served more than two decades in jail for her involvement with the notorious Brinks robbery by the Weather Underground. Never mind that she has been rehabilitated and dedicated herself to social issues surrounding women and incarceration. And never mind what her current views, activities or teachings have been. Fox has seized on this issue and used it to paint Columbia as an incubator of radical liberalism and terrorism.

The Columbia Spectator wrote in 2003, when Boudin was asked to establish a women's HIV/AIDS program at New York's St. Luke's Hospital:

As a member of various radical militant groups during the 1960s and 1970s, Boudin advocated extreme measures to combat what she saw as racism, sexism, and American imperialism. And then, in 1981, she participated in the armed robbery of a Brinks security truck--and although she carried no weapon nor directly caused any injuries, she was, in her own words, "morally responsible for all the tragic consequences that resulted." Nobody pretends to justify Boudin's actions--they were repugnant.

However, in the years that followed, Boudin tried to make amends. At Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, where she was incarcerated, Boudin founded AIDS Counseling and Education, a women's group that provided support for HIV-infected women, combated stigmatism and harassment in the prison, and made sure that women had access to needed medication. She organized programs for teenagers with incarcerated mothers, taught classes on parenting, and helped Columbia Law School teach inmates about the rights and responsibilities of incarcerated parents. She published scholarship about her work in--among other places--the Harvard Educational Review.

The Spectator goes on to note, “Although Boudin destroyed lives 22 years ago, she has since made many others better.”

None of that was discussed this morning on “fair and balanced” Fox & Friends as they trotted out the son of someone killed in a completely different incident – the bombing of New York City’s Fraunces Tavern by the FALN, a Puerto Rican separatist group. Sadly, Mr. Connor also lost a godson in the World Trade Center on 9/11 and was there when the planes hit. Connor is certainly an expert on personal tragedy and the impact of extrremism on everyday lives. But on radicals and terror in general? Not so much. His bio in a 2009 editorial in the Los Angeles Times merely reads, “Joseph F. Connor works in finance in New York.” Still, Connor has made a name for himself in right-wing circles. He has testified and written against the confirmation of Eric Holder (as he did in the LA Times), appeared on right-wing radio and blogged for RedState.

But Connor had something better than credentials for Fox News: a willingness to suggest that Columbia is in bed with radical liberalism and Islamic terrorism. Tying Boudin to Bill Ayers at another academic institution, Connor indicated he had no knowledge of either of their curricula when he said:

There’s no doubt about it, there’s a connection between (Boudin’s) left-wing background, her radicalism, and the people at Columbia wanted that kind of celebrity, that kind of person in their school.

...(Boudin and Ayers) moved from an active terrorist role to the academic world to politics and even into the media. …It’s a dangerous involvement of these people to mold people’s minds and whitewash their background, really. And it’s a trend. It’s undeniable.

...Some of the same things that went on in the 70s are happening now with the Islamic terrorists, CAIR and all these other groups are becoming respected parts of our society. But you’re never quite sure where they’re going with this.

Any smart Fox-watcher knows where they’re going with this. It’s nothing more than their latest attempt to undermine universities. Because if Fox really cared about not presenting former criminals as experts, they wouldn’t have the likes of Oliver North and Mark Fuhrman on their payroll as credible news sources.

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The city of Stockton, California officially went bankrupt yesterday. Instead of concern for what that might mean for its residents in terms of services and their quality of life, Fox predictably focused on one thing: public pensions. And, instead of doing any kind of real analysis of the pension issues, or delving into the pushy behavior of the Wall Street creditors, Stuart Varney suggested the whole problem is due to slacker public employees living high on the hog for decades after just a brief stint of work. He looked forward to pensioners taking the hit and expressed hope that the same would happen in other California cities, too.

Varney was nearly ecstatic over the federal bankruptcy judge’s ruling that allowed Stockton to go into Chapter 9 bankruptcy, and receive protection from its creditors. “Yes, I do, I do,” he crowed when asked if he liked it.

This ruling by this judge opens the door for Stockton to cut the payments that it makes to its pension fund. That opens the door for other cities in California to get out of their pension mess in the same kind of way. And it means, just a little way down the road, maybe existing pensioners will take a haircut.

Varney acknowledged to a less enthusiastic Brian Kilmeade that cities have “a moral responsibility to pay up on a contract” but he swiftly moved on to “the other side of the coin” which was to suggest that most pensioners are moochers. “Take for example a firefighter in the City of Stockton," he said. "They can retire at the age of 50 and they get 90% of their best year’s salary for the rest of their lives. You can work for just six months for the City of Stockton – just six months, that’s all it is – and you get lifetime health benefits. That’s all.”

And how many of those pensioners have worked for decades educating and protecting the public based on the promise of a comfortable retirement? While retiring at 50 may seem young to the 60ish Varney, I’d like to see him start hauling firefighter equipment and running into burning buildings before he sneers about retirement ages again.

Meanwhile, neither Varney nor Kilmeade said a word about the Wall Street creditors who are very much players in the Stockton bankruptcy. In fact, you could make an argument that they are gaming the system. From the New York Times:

In the ruling, issued on Monday in Sacramento, which affirmed the legal status of Stockton’s bankruptcy, Judge Christopher M. Klein said he could see battle lines being drawn between Calpers — formally the California Public Employees’ Retirement System — and the city’s other major creditors, including several Wall Street companies that either bought Stockton’s bonds or insured them. But he ruled that it was still too early in the case for that battle to be joined.

...The judge also said that California statute required all Chapter 9 candidates to go through a 60-day mediation period before declaring bankruptcy, and creditors were supposed to help pay the cost. But the capital markets creditors dropped out of mediation, he said, when they learned Stockton was not seeking any concessions from Calpers. That left the city to pay the whole bill.

"The capital markets creditors contend that the city gave them a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, and that that is not negotiation,” Judge Klein said. “I’m sorry. I’m not persuaded. Negotiation is a two-way street. You can’t negotiate with a stone wall. You cannot do it. It cannot be done. It is a contradiction in terms.”

In other words, this is shaping up as a battle between Wall Street and the public employees.

Varney continued, “On one side, you’ve got the moral obligation to pay on a contract that you signed. And on the other, the reality is, you can’t afford this. And for years, Stockton and other cities have been laying off young people so that they can pay the older retirees. What’s the morality here? Which side of the coin are you gonna choose on the moral compass here?”

It’s pretty clear Varney chose the Wall Street side of his “moral compass.”

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Michelle Malkin and her Fox News Friends demonstrated a stunning hostility to democracy as they didn't just whine about legally-mandated voter registration opportunities in Obamacare applications but thought there should be a lawsuit to prevent them.

Malkin and her Fox Friends joined in Republican outrage over a provision in Obamacare application that allows an applicant to register to vote. There is nothing in the application that suggests people should register as Democrats or vote Democratically and a similar provision has existed for years on federal Medicare applications. In fact, it’s part of the so-called “Motor Voter Law” which requires public agencies that provide public assistance to offer voter registration opportunities.

But to Malkin and her like-minded Fox friends this is an effort to buy or coerce votes.

STEVE DOOCY: You think, “OK, If I want Obamacare, I’m going to have to register to vote,” right?

MICHELLE MALKIN: The new Hippocratic oath is no longer “First do no harm,” it’s “First get them registered to vote.” …We all knew that it was transparent that Obamacare was just another vehicle to recruit the next generation of Democrats. Now that has been confirmed.

GRETCHEN CARLSON: Is that legal for them to put it in there?

MALKIN: It sounds like a potential lawsuit or certainly a question that should be raised by some public interest law firm.

BRIAN KILMEADE: If Punxsutawney Phil can get sued for not having spring start on time, why not sue them for putting this voting thing in there?

For most people, passing legislation designed to be popular with the electorate and then encouraging them to vote would be considered the American way of governing. Laudable even. Only on Fox News – which embraces GOP voter suppression efforts - would such activity be presented as something evil that must be prevented.

The latest Pew Research Center’s State of the News Media report is out and there are very troubling indicators for Fox News in it. While Fox remains “by far” the ratings leader among cable news networks, its prime time viewership remained flat, even though 2012 was an election year. Pew reports:

Fox News Channel, which still has higher ratings than CNN and MSNBC combined, experienced weaker ratings gains than MSNBC. That comparatively small growth was striking given that 2012 was an election year, playing to Fox’s near singular focus on political news. During daytime hours, Fox was up 4%. Across the total 24-hour day, Fox was up just 2%. And in prime time, Fox was basically flat (with a loss just under 1% compared to its 2011 median viewership).

This follows two years of small but real prime-time declines for the top cable news channel and may suggest that the challenge of growing an audience on cable can extend beyond CNN and HLN. Robert Thompson, a television expert at Syracuse University, argues that cable news has reached a saturation point. “Fox figured out how to get a core set of viewers to watch their programs on a nightly basis, as opposed to tuning in to cable when there was breaking news,” Thompson told the Pew Research Center. “But it may be that those numbers are settling in to what will be the general size of the audience. They can’t expect constant growth.”

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Fox News continued its war on poor people today when it hyped Herman Cain’s highly dubious claim that people are using food stamps to pay for "fitness training," which he “learned” via a caller to his radio show.

It was not very surprising that Cain would repeat a thing like this without bothering to verify it. He isn’t exactly known for having a thirst for knowledge. But what’s Fox's excuse? Apparently, the “fair and balanced” network was so eager to re-air Cain’s characterization of food stamp recipients as moochers being exploited by a government that wants to make them dependent that nobody cared enough to verify whether Cain was telling the truth.

As banners on the screen screamed ON THE DOLE and then FOOD STAMP NATION, Steve Doocy announced that on Friday, “a document dump” from the federal government revealed a rise in Americans’ use of food stamps, the “biggest number in history,” he said. “47,791,996 Americans had to get these SNAP cards to put food on their table – they say," he said with a sneer.

Gretchen Carlson added, “So some people are concerned at the fact that this number has continued to escalate dramatically over the last couple of years.”

The concern was not that people are hungry or are not earning enough money to feed their families adequately. For example, as the Working Poor Families Project reported, "the number of low-income working families is increasing and nearly one third of all working families—32 percent—may not have enough money to meet basic needs." Also not mentioned: 55% of all food stamp recipients are children under 18 or the elderly, over 65.

And speaking of the working poor, let’s not forget that Cain bears a hefty chunk of responsibility for their plight:

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Just in time for Jeb Bush’s candidacy to get going – and to help deal with that pesky “Bush baggage” problem, Fox News has found a way to help the cause: recast ex-president George W. Bush as a great painter. Of dogs.

On this morning’s Fox & Friends Weekend, Alisyn Camerota chirped, “For the first time, we’re hearing from George W. Bush’s teacher, Bonnie Flood.” Only on Fox News would the painting teacher of one of the least popular presidents ever be received with such excitement.

Camerota played a clip of Flood saying:

He picked it up so quick. He just was amazing, actually. His whole heart is in it. 43, I mean, he has such a passion for painting. It’s Amazing. He’s gonna go down in the history books as a great artist.

Which is nice because he surely won’t go down as a great president. Except, probably, on Fox News. Camerota chirped on:

For one month, Flood spent six hours a day teaching the former president the ups and downs of her craft. She reveals he painted around 50 dog portraits and scenes from his Texas ranch.

No word about Bush’s proclivity to paint himself in the shower or bath!

Instead, the three hosts effervesced with words such as, “Incredible!” and “Beautiful!” and “So cool!”

But Clayton Morris gave the ultimate in Fox News blessings: Didn’t Ronald Reagan, wasn’t he a doodler? He has pretty good artwork, too, didn’t he?"

The conservatives in this country will not be happy until the entire country has turned into the fabled days of the Wild West, a literal and figurative Tombstone (like most of their nostalgia, it is rarely based in fact). It is an odd psychology, this need to blame victims. It's the poor's fault that they haven't succeeded. Those who suffer from chronic diseases and want to rely on universal health care are purposely not taking care of themselves. Those seniors should have planned better for their retirement so that Social Security benefits can be cut, for the betterment of future generations. And rape victims should most definitely be armed to prevent sexual assault.

And so it was in this looking glass world that Democratic strategist and rape survivor Zerlina Maxwell entered this week, appearing on the Hannity show with a radical notion: rather than tell women to avoid being raped, how about we teach men not to rape?

This is not without precedent. In Vancouver, an anti-rape campaign, Don't Be That Guy, actually saw number of sexual assaults drop the following year by 10%. And for a party that claims to be all about "personal responsibility," this would seem to be the most logical tactic to take. But then, when has Hannity been about logic?

Absolutely, sometimes the rapist is the guy with a ski mask who jumps out of an alley. And no, he doesn’t care about learning to be a better person. But Hannity’s offhand remark that “evil exists in the world” reduces the experience of rape to one particular type – the violent stranger attack. Absolutely, we need to continue to empower women to avoid high-risk situations, to get themselves out of them when they’re in them and to defend themselves however they best see fit. But when rape is overwhelmingly an act perpetrated by men upon women, we also sure as hell need to stop thinking of it exclusively in terms of what women have to do to prevent it. We need to involve men and boys. We need to remember, as a revealing Reddit thread last year proved, that a rapist can be your friend or your boyfriend or your co-worker. We need to acknowledge that a rapist can be your husband. That, as chilling as it is to admit, as Maxwell says, “Those kids in Steubenville were average guys.”

Maxwell says, “I don’t want anybody to lecture a rape survivor about anything. And I don’t want anybody telling women that if you don’t wear a skirt or don’t drink at all you’re going to be safe. That is a lie.” What she wants instead is more training, more dialogue and a process that is much longer and harder, and infinitely subtler, than just telling women to get a gun or not wear high heels. Maxwell says, “I knew that [doing "Hannity"] was going to be hard, but I did it because I knew that I wasn’t speaking just for myself. I’m not alone. Clearly, what we’ve been doing isn’t working. We’re telling women to be afraid of the person in the bushes when it’s the person in your house. We need a reality check. We’re talking about the wrong things. We’re asking the wrong questions.”

And if you're a Fox News viewer (or a reader of Glenn Beck's The Blaze, which did an article as well), you are apparently also internalizing the wrong message, because what happened to Maxwell after this appearance just proves how far we have yet to go:

In the wake of her appearance, Maxwell was bombarded with harassing messages calling for her to be raped or murdered, often in explicitly racist terms.

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Fox host Alisyn Camerota made a deliberate point of linking firefighter flunkies to race when she reported that “as many as 30” New York City firefighter recruits are too obese for the job. Without bothering to point out that obesity rates among firefighters are causing concerns all over the country or that women are also part of the FDNY recruitment efforts, Camerota highlighted increased minority recruitment as the only factor to consider:

Well, they sued for the right to become New York City firefighters but now they’re flunking out. As many as 30 trainees have already dropped out because they’re too overweight to meet the physical demands of the job. And more are expected to go. The first recruited class since 2008 was formed after a judge ordered the department to become more racially diverse. But now veteran firefighters are fuming, saying the candidates are oversized and underperforming and need to be cut breaks to pass their tests.

Do you think anyone in the Fox audience failed to connect the dots?

Apparently, this “news” was based on a similar report from sister company NY Post that also linked the problem to minorities. However, the Post pointed out what Camerota didn’t: the class was not made up of applicants from the general population:

FDNY Commissioner Salvatore Cassano excluded applicants from the general population for this Academy class, limiting the pool to medics, whose ranks include a higher percentage of minorities than is found in firehouses.

…But they were rated only on a written exam. In years past, applicants had to score high on both a written and a physical test.

… The department’s own EMS Academy head, Lt. David Russell, admitted in a 2011 report that even when FDNY recruits from EMS got extra help, “the overall fitness of these recruits is still poor.”

In other words, it's quite likely that the population of medics, whose work, as the article also pointed out, is mostly sedentary, has a lower fitness rate than the general population. But Camerota misleadingly gave the impression that the same people who sued (a black fraternal firefighters organization) are the same people now flunking out.

By the way, those “fuming” “veteran firefighters” Camerota cited in her report seem to be anonymous ranters on a bulletin board not associated with the FDNY. The Post also wrote that “Veteran firefighters are fuming over the quality of the new recruits” and backed that up with comments from a few posters on a site called FDNY Rant.

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Fox has been fanning the flames of fear lately that dangerous criminal immigrants have been let loose by the Obama administration as a response to pending sequester spending cuts. But the propaganda took a new turn for the worse as Fox & Friends presented anti-immigrant extremist Lou Barletta (R-PA) as an unquestioned authority to discuss what is in reality ICE's supervised release of some undocumented immigrants. As he made the McCarthy-esque warning that he had "been told" dangerous criminals were now on the loose, he also accused the Obama administration of preferring to endanger Americans rather than to lay off any federal employees.

It started with Steve Doocy making the unsubstantiated announcement in his introduction, “Hundreds of illegal immigrants charged with big crimes freed from jail.”

After playing a clip of Jay Carney saying the decision to release the detainees was made by “career officials at ICE without any input from the White House,” Gretchen Carlson asked, “So are we to believe the White House now?” For the answer, she brought on Barletta who, she said, “I know is skeptical.” She forgot to tell her viewers that Barletta, was described by Right Wing Watch as a “one-issue firebrand,” a “hero to anti-immigrant and nativist groups,” and one of the Ten Scariest Republicans Heading To Congress in 2010.

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NSFW, turn the volume down.

Probably observing Black History Month in their own special way, Fox News hosts Brian Kilmeade, Martha MacCallum and Bill Hemmer mocked a 102-year-old black woman who stood in line for three hours and made two trips to the polls in order to vote last November.

Centanarian Desiline Victor was honored by President Obama during his State of the Union address Tuesday night not just for her indomitable efforts to vote, but for inspiring others to do the same.

But awesome feats of citizenship take a far back seat to partisan politics on Fox. So does good taste and racial sensitivity. On Fox News Radio’s Kilmeade & Friends yesterday, Hemmer and MacCallum suggested that Victor had either faked her wait or exaggerated the difficulties.

Hemmer asked skeptically, “How long was she on line?”

MacCallum asked, “What’s the big deal? She was happy she waited on line. She voted, she was happy that she was there to vote. …I mean, this is such a non-issue.”

Hemmer said, “They held her up as a victim. What is she a victim of?”

Hmm. What other famous sociopaths do Fox yakkers remind us of?

This was while they all yukked it up at Victor’s expense with such jokes as, “Can you hear (the other people on line) whispering, ‘Did she try to hit you with, ‘I’m 102, I’ve been on line five hours?’ Did she try to give you that one again?’”

Media Matters, which recorded this gem, also noted that earlier on their own show, America’s Newsroom, Hemmer and MacCallum had glossed over Republicans’ role in exacerbating long lines to vote.

If anyone is wondering why Fox’s already minuscule African American audience has been shrinking, you can point to this jaw-dropping conversation as a case in point.