Fox News produced its own 4 minute attack video disguised as a retrospective of President Obama’s first term in office and aired it as a “Fox & Friends Presents” special. The ad opens with images of cheering voters during the 2008 election, before devolving into a wildly misleading juxtaposition of then-candidate Barack Obama promising change with rising unemployment rates and national debt. Watch it:

At the conclusion of the video, Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy thanked one of the show’s producers for editing together the segment “for weeks.” But it only took hours for network brass to perhaps recognize the implications of Fox News producing and airing its own attack ads, because they quickly pulled from the Fox News website with no explanation. Even conservative sites balked at the idea of Fox News producing its own political attack ads.

Fox News CEO Roger Ailes has long defended his network from charges of bias, explaining–incorrectly–that only the network’s primetime hosts are explicitly partisan. But as this ad clearly demonstrates, the network’s collusion with the Republican party runs much deeper than the 5pm to 10 pm time slots.

Roger Ailes

During the event, titled “FOX News: Past, Present and Future,” Ailes argued that U.S. voters still don’t know anything about Barack Obama — a line commonly repeated by conservative commentators and far-right legislators:

“Tiger Woods gets hit with a 4 iron and we know every girlfriend within 12 miles. We still don’t know anything about Obama” #AilesOU

— Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) May 22, 2012

Still, Ailes criticized the New York Times, the AP, and MSNBC for being unbalanced left-leaning news sources:

“I would love for the AP to go back to being a neutral news source” — Roger Ailes #AilesOU

— Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) May 22, 2012

He also knocked comedian Jon Stewart, whose news parody show The Daily Show often mocks Fox News:

“They’re not news programs…Jon Stewart would go out of business w/o Fox News” – Ailes, on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert #AilesOU

— Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) May 22, 2012

Ailes: Jon Stewart is a comedian. He wouldn’t do well without Fox. And he basically has admitted to me, in a bar, that he’s a socialist.

— Jonathan Peters (@jonathanwpeters) May 22, 2012

At Ailes’ request, no audio or video was allowed at the event. According to Wesley Lowery, a reporter who was in attendance, “Moderator Andy Alexander asked him specifically about that, and whether it showed a lack of transparency. Ailes responded that OU asked him to speak, so OU has to play by his rules. ‘To be honest, I don’t give a damn about being here,’” Ailes said.

Graham offered his curious take on what it means to negotiate — demanding that Iran accept all U.S. demands prior to negotiation — in a conversation with Fox News host Greta Van Susteren, who indicated that his negotiating tactic was probably a non starter. Graham first emphasized his hawkish bent by noting that the “only way” for an agreement to be reached between the sides was for the U.S. to threaten “a strike by the United States.” He went on:

GRAHAM: Here’s what we should do. We should tell the Iranians, no negotiations, stop enriching, open up the site on the bottom of the mountain, a secret site. Then we will talk about lifting sanctions. You are not going to get to enrich uranium any more, period.

VAN SUSTEREN: I think they will probably stay “go fish” on that one.

Watch the video:

Leave aside that the Fordow site is not “secret” (it’s under U.N. inspections and monitored by camera) and that reports on U.S. and Israeli estimates state that these intelligence agencies don’t believe Iran has made a decision to build nuclear weapons (Graham doubts the intelligence), Graham’s position prompts one to ask: What’s the alternative to negotiations, since Graham is proposing pre-conditions that Iran would never meet? The Senator from South Carolina’s been busy on that front, too — and falsely citing the Obama administration to back himself up. The House yesterday passed a resolution that seeks to shift U.S. “red line” for an attack to an Iranian “nuclear capability” — something Graham mentioned on Fox News — from an Iranian push for nuclear weapons.

While the CIA has laid out a specific definition, the “nuclear capability” language is a complex issue. The word “capability” has a special meaning in the non-proliferation context, but it’s not always clear exactly what. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), one of the Sentae’s most vociferous Iran hawks, said this year, “I guess everybody will determine for themselves what that means.”

Before the House version passed, co-sponsor Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) clarified what he meant by “capability,” defining it as Iran mastering all elements of a weapon and kicking out U.N. inspectors. (The move allayed the fears of some critics that the measure could be interpreted as taking Graham’s hard-line on “no enrichment.”) House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) forthrightly noted that the “capability” language was a shift in U.S. policy that stood in contrast to “decision to develop nuclear weapons.” But Graham was most circumspect in defending his version of the bill on the Senate floor yesterday, conflating “capability” with the Obama administration red line of “weaponization.”

But Graham is wrong that blocking an Iranian nuclear “capability” is, as he said, an “echo (of) a policy statement made by President Obama.” In March, Obama committed (again) to “preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon” and that it was “unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon” — not a “capability.” He added, “I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” Earlier this year, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said: “The United States… does not want Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. That’s a red line for us.”

While a potential Iranian nuclear weapon is widely considered a threat to both the security of the U.S. and its allies in the region, as well as the nuclear non-proliferation regime. The intelligence estimates give the West time to pursue a dual-track approach of pressure and diplomacy to resolve the crisis. Questions about the efficacy and consequences of a strike have led U.S. officials to declare that diplomacy is the “best and most permanent way” to resolve the crisis.

A majority of voters don’t support allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally, yet at the same time a majority also opposes a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

According to a Fox News poll released Wednesday, 37 percent of voters believe gays and lesbians should be allowed to get married legally. While that’s unchanged from 2010, when the question was most recently asked, it’s nearly double the 20 percent who felt that way in March 2004, the first time it was asked.

There is actually nothing in the data that supports this conclusion. What the Fox News article doesn’t mention until its fourth paragraph is that it asked its question the same way the CBS/NYT poll did: forcing a choice between same-sex marriage, legal unions not called marriage, or no legal recognition. The true result of this poll is that 70 percent believe there should be legal recognition for same-sex couples, which was actually 8 points higher than what Monday’s CBS/NYT poll found.

But the problem with both polls is that they never force respondents to choose between same-sex marriage and nothing, creating an incomplete picture of where voters stand. Consider the recent polling from Colorado, which found that 62 percent support civil unions, but that 53 support full marriage equality as well. Forcing respondents to make an either/or choice about marriage and civil unions instead of allowing consideration for both separately creates a distorted view of where voters actually stand.

The Times’ Ross Douthat attempts to spin the interpretation the other way, suggesting that because so many “prefer” civil unions, their support for  marriage equality when not provided with an alternative is “reluctant.” And it’s because of that reluctance, he believes, that the results of ballot measures don’t match the polling. This, of course, is a conclusion that can only be drawn from the strange construction of the question in these polls, and it also ignores the reality that many complex factors impact these plebiscites. In North Carolina, the most current example, polling showed that voters were largely uninformed (or misinformed) about the actual impact of Amendment One, and thus did not realize they were voting to ban civil unions and domestic partnerships in addition to marriage — against their wishes. Plus, as Nathaniel Frank points out, polls on social issues are simply “notoriously bad at predicting [voter] behavior.”

Fox News wants to be able to claim it has data opposing the conclusion that a majority of Americans support the freedom to marry, despite consistent national polling over the past two years that shows otherwise. Any poll can be structured and framed to deliver a certain bias to the results, but the true momentum for marriage equality cannot be disregarded so easily.

Slide from a presentation titled: "Sharia And The Constitution"

Not all of the material in the course, however, was anti-Muslim. Materials from reputable sources such as the Brookings Institution and RAND corporation also appeared among the readings, and only some of the presenters to the class used blatantly Islamophobic material. (The public affairs officer of the Joint Forces Staff College didn’t respond to repeated inquiries by press time.)

But the “Islamophobia network,” discussed in the Center for American Progress’ “Fear, Inc.” report, played a prominent role in many of the 266 documents acquired by ThinkProgress. Islamophobic “misinformation experts” — as they’re defined in “Fear, Inc.” — cited in Army teaching materials included:

Robert Spencer – 34 mentions across 8 documents (his blog, JihadWatch.org, was cited 11 times across 7 documents)

Spencer is the co-founder of Stop Islamization of America and the director of JihadWatch.org. He has argued that “traditional Islam itself is not moderate or peaceful. Spencer is prominent pseudo-intellectual in the “counter jihad” blogging community who argues that Islam is inherently violent. He says “It is the only major world religion with a developed doctrine and tradition of warfare against unbelievers.”

Steven Emerson – 16 mentions across 4 documents

Emerson is the founder of the Investigative Project on Terrorism and a former journalist at U.S. News & World Report and CNN. His greatest notoriety came from prematurely declaring that Oklahoma City bombing was committed by Muslims. The actual culprit was right-wing anti-government militant Timothy McVeigh. Emerson tells his followers that “Nearly all of the Islamic organizations in the United States that define themselves as religiously or culturally Muslim in character have, today, been totally captured or dominated by radical fundamentalist elements.”

Center for Security Policy (CSP) – 60 mentions across 3 documents

CSP is led by notorious Islamophobe Frank Gaffney and produced the report, “Shariah: The Threat to America” which has served as the blueprint for “anti-Shariah” legislation across the country.

David Yerushalmi – 9 mentions across 3 documents

Yerushalmi is general counsel for CSP, a co-author of “Shariah: The Threat to America” and the founder of Society of Americans for National Existence. The Anti-Defamation League concluded that he has a “record of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black bigotry.”

Daniel Pipes – 50 mentions across 10 documents (his organization, Middle East Forum, was cited 39 times across 10 documents)

Pipes, the director of Middle East Forum, is increasingly strident about the supposed threat posed by Islam and Muslims in America. He argues, “All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.”

Finally, right-wing news publications were frequently cited in the training materials acquired by ThinkProgress. The Washington Times was cited 76 times across 16 documents; The National Review 130 times across 6 documents and Fox News 130 times across six documents.

Instructors’ reliance on far-right thinktanks and experts adds to the increasingly disturbing portrait of counter-terrorism instruction at the Joint Forces Staff College, potraying the West as at war with Islam and Muslims. The sheer frequency of citations in the course materials raises questions that hopefully will be answered by an investigation launched at the behest of Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, who admirably said the questionable course material was “totally objectionable, against our values, and it wasn’t academically sound.”

Caddell, who worked in the Jimmy Carter administration, has become a regular guest on the network. Though Fox News identifies him as a “former Democratic pollster”, Caddell rarely offers anything approaching a spirited defense of Democrats and/or liberals, choosing instead to reinforce conservative views on issues ranging from health care to the environment to national security.

On Friday night, Caddell was at it again, ripping the Democrats’ recall efforts in Wisconsin on a Tea Party Patriots tele-town hall. As detailed in the group’s Twitter feed, Caddell was on a tirade against “the left”, telling listeners to “stop the anarchy before it spreads.” He called the recall election “senseless” and told listeners to “organize, go door2door now” in order to “defeat the left in WI:”

Caddell claims he’s “still a Democrat,” but he spent much of the last few elections attacking Democratic presidential and congressional nominees, as well as progressive legislative priorities. In 2004, he claimed Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry had “raised more money from financial and special interests and telecommunications special interests, and done their bidding, than anybody in the Senate.” On President Obama, Caddell asked last year, “does this guy have any idea what he is doing?” Of environmentalists, Caddell said their mission is to “basically deconstruct capitalism.”

In other words, Cadell is the perfect Fox News Democrat. As a “Democrat,” he seemingly has the credibility to assure viewers that, yes, all their conservative views are actually correct.

Pat Caddell is no Democrat, he just plays one on TV.

Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson

“Look at every place where a women is in control,” said Peterson. “You see nothing but confusion. There’s no good in it at all, none.”

Peterson’s sermon began with comments about Sandra Fluke, doubling down on Rush Limbaugh’s slut remarks. But halfway through his speech, he kicked the hate into another gear:

PETERSON: “I think that one of the greatest mistakes that America made was to allow women the opportunity to vote. We should have never turned that over to women.”

“It was a big mistake…these women are voting in the wrong people. They’re voting in people who are evil, who agree with them…Men in the good old days understood the nature of the women, they were not afraid to deal with them.”

“Wherever women are taking over, evil reigns.”

Amazingly, just last week, Sean Hannity, who sits on the board of Peterson’s group BOND: Brotherhood Organization for a New Destiny, invited him to sit on his Great American Panel once again to discuss the president’s comments on the one-year anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden.

But the conversation never quite made it that far. Fellow panelist Kirsten Powers, a Fox News columnist and political analyst, abandoned the segment to hit back against Peterson and his anti-women views, over the objections of Hannity who wanted to spend his time attacking President Obama.

For two minutes, Powers and Peterson exchanged barbs while Hannity and the third panelist, Indiana state Treasurer Richard Mourdock (R), sat quietly on the sidelines. Powers told Hannity that she had no idea Peterson would be a guest on the show alongside her, and invited him to repudiate Peterson’s remarks (he declined).

Peterson has made appearances on Fox News for years, fielding frequent invites from Hannity in particular despite Peterson’s history of hateful comments. And it’s not like Hannity had no warning. Peterson has previously said he “thank[s] God for slavery, because had it not, the blacks that are here would have been stuck in Africa.” He also called the victims of Hurricane Katrina “welfare-pampered,” “lazy,” and “immoral.”

And while Powers was rightfully outraged at Fox News’ decision to offer Lee a national platform, Hannity was unapologetic, quickly shutting down the spat and pivoting to his usual agenda of attacking the president.

A recent study of satellite data found that nighttime land temperatures in the immediate vicinity of wind turbines in Texas have increased relative to nearby areas without turbines. Conservative media outlets, including Fox Nation, Rush Limbaugh and Jim Hoft, are distorting the research to claim that wind farms “cause global warming” and Fox News’ morning show concluded “wind ain’t working.” But the study’s lead author said via email that this coverage is “misleading.”

The researchers, led by Liming Zhou, said it is “[v]ery likely” that “wind turbines do not create a net warming of the air and instead only re-distribute the air’s heat near the surface, which is fundamentally different from the large-scale warming effect caused by increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.” The turbines pull down warm air, increasing land surface temperatures, which already have “a larger day-night variation” than the surface air temperatures featured in daily weather reports.

The authors further noted that “this analysis is from a short period,” from 2003 to 2011, and is “over a region with rapid growth of wind farms,” west-central Texas, so it is likely that their estimate of a “nighttime warming effect” is higher than “in other locations and over longer periods.”

This piece was originally published at Media Matters for America and was republished with permission.

See also the Washington Post’s “No, wind farms are not causing global warming,” which quotes Stanford’s Mark Jacobson on the subject:

To get a sense for what scientists know about this topic, I called Mark Jacobson, an environmental engineer at Stanford who has done a fair bit of modeling work in this area. The key thing to note is that, for now, humanity doesn’t use anywhere near enough wind power to make a big difference to global wind patterns. Jacobson’s earlier research suggested that there’s somewhere around 72 terawatts of wind power that could feasibly be harnessed worldwide. At the end of 2011, the world’s wind power generation capacity was still just 0.2 terawatts. (Human beings use about 16 terawatts of energy, all told.)

And scientists dispute what would happen if we did start blanketing the globe with wind turbines. One 2004 study led by the University of Calgary’s David Keith found that getting just 2 terawatts of electricity from wind could produce “non-negligible climactic change at continental scales” — including shifts in rainfall patterns. (That much wind power would not, however, change the overall temperature of the planet.) But, says Jacobson, the effects that Keith’s group modeled don’t appear to be distinguishable from random fluctuations in the Earth’s climate. “To me,” says Jacobson, “that’s a meaningless result.”

Jacobson himself is working on a more in-depth effort to model the effects of a very large ramp-up in wind — those results could be published later this year. He says it’s possible that a massive expansion of wind turbines over both land and sea could even cool the planet somewhat, by slowing the rate at which water evaporates from the soil and enters the atmosphere. But his study is still under review.

For any of these effects to be noticeable, however, the wind industry would have to be several orders of magnitude larger than it is now. As far as the present day is concerned, there’s no evidence that wind power is having a major effect on the world’s climate, while there’s plenty of evidence that the greenhouse gases we’re pumping into the air are doing quite a bit to heat the Earth.

Fox News Contributor Monica Crowley

To a man?”Sandra Fluke Announces Engagement”

— Monica Crowley (@MonicaCrowley) April 26, 2012

Crowley’s fake surprise that Fluke is not, in fact, a lesbian is especially ironic given the attacks that her network leveled against Fluke in February. For weeks, Fluke was criticized ceaselessly by the conservative media for demanding that health insurance providers cover contraception, ridiculed by Fox News hosts like Bill O’Reilly for not simply buying her birth control at Target for $9, and mocked endlessly by Limbaugh for having too much sex.

The vitriol that accompanied Fluke for weeks even rubbed off onto her new fiancé. Adam Mutterperl, a comedy writer and producer, was criticized by conservative websites like the Daily Caller for his family’s ties to Democratic politics. Today’s comments are just the latest controversy the Fox News host has found herself in. Back in 2008, Crowley was caught plagiarizing (again) someone else’s parody of progressive advocacy group MoveOn, and last year she called DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz “she of the angry perm.”

CARLSON: Here we go again, pandering to .3% of the American population that considers themselves transgender. Now I get to explain this to my 8-year-old, if i want her to see a nice family show with some nice music.

O’Reilly then added that by including unique characters and controversies in the show, it encourages teens to “experiment” with “alternative lifestyles”:

O’REILLY: If children hear it, unsupervised children who don’t have parents watching, they might go out and experiment with this stuff… When I was a teenager and I saw James Dean smoking, it made me want to smoke…

CARLSON: I don’t think that watching Glee is going to suddenly make kids transgender, but experimentation… I wholeheartedly believe in today’s society that kids are experimenting with homosexuality. [...]

O’REILLY: A lot of these dopey kids are confused about who they are. They’re confused.

To her credit, Jeanine Pirro defended LGBT teens, saying “you can’t parent sexuality.” Watch it:

By trying to “protect” young people from understanding gender and sexual orientation, the Fox News crew is ensuring that those topics remain taboo and that people who identify as LGBT continue to be stigmatized. As Pirro pointed out, students who identify with Glee characters are empowered by that visibility, a positive message Carlson shouldn’t have to explain to her daughter.

Between June 2011 and February of this year, 70 percent of all one-on-one interviewees on the four biggest political talk shows — NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday — were Republicans. The numbers were even more lopsided in favor of men and white guests:

As FAIR notes, the bias in favor of Republicans is not entirely attributable to the presidential elections. While the lean towards the right is more pronounced than in years past thanks to the contentious Republican nomination contest, the heavy favor that Sunday show bookers have towards Republicans is not new. In 2004, a mirror image of 2012 in that Democrats were looking to unseat a Republican incumbent in the White House, Republicans still held a 57-43 percent edge in 2003, and a 56-44 percent advantage in 2004.

Compared to other metrics though, the imbalance of political ideology seems almost insignificant. Across all four shows over the eight month period, there were just 36 appearances by women during one-on-one interviews compared to 228 men. And of those 36, 17 were Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN). Meanwhile, there 242 appearances by white guests, compared to just 15 by African-Americans (seven of those being Hermain Cain), four by Arab-Americans, and three by Latinos.

ROMNEY: In a network that is fair and balanced, our network gets a good, fair play. But there are some networks that do not give us the fair play. We’ve gotta put some of our people there.

Listen here:

“Fair and balanced” is, of course, Fox’s slogan, but most watchers would likely agree that the network — the least trusted on TV — is anything but.

Even fellow Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has charged that the conservative network is in the tank for Romney. “I assume it’s because Murdoch at some point said, ‘I want Romney,’ and so ‘fair and balanced’ became ‘Romney,’” Gingrich said last week. “Callista and I both believe CNN is less biased than Fox this year,” Gingrich said of he and his wife.

Rick Santorum agreed, saying of Romney earlier this year, “He has Fox News shilling for him every day.”

As an analysis conducted by the Columbia Journalism Review before Santorum dropped out noted that the non-Romney candidates were “hard to find” on Fox. “Judging from the lopsided tenor of most of the coverage during the broadcast day on Fox News…Mitt Romney already had been anointed as the GOP nominee,” CJR noted.

The show’s official Twitter account posed a question for its 150,000+ followers:

romney has hired an advisor to do his VP search.who should we choose?

— fox & friends (@foxandfriends) April 17, 2012

Fox News has been criticized for years as being nothing more than an arm of the Republican Party. It’s a charge that Fox News head Roger Ailes disputes vociferously, but when his employees make statements like these, it’s not hard to imagine from where these criticisms emerge. And this isn’t the first time that Fox & Friends has run into trouble while trying to maintain any semblance of separation between themselves and the Republican Party. Last month, with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) on as a guest, Steve Doocy urged his audience to “vote Republican” if they wanted a party prepared to make hard choices.

As of publication, the tweet is still accessible on the Fox & Friends Twitter page, so it’s unclear if anyone realizes exactly what the hosts are implying.

Bob Lutz doesn't like what he hears from GOP pundits about the Volt

GM’s Former Vice Chairman, Bob Lutz, slammed GOP media pundits yesterday for spreading “pure fiction” about the Chevy Volt and other electric vehicles.

Conservative commentators — led by Rush Limbaugh and Fox News — have taken every opportunity to tear down the Chevy Volt, calling it “crappy,” a “Fred Flinstone car,” and an “exploding Obamamobile.” They’ve even called Volt drivers “dorks.”

The attacks have gotten so intense, hardcore Republicans are now slamming the onslaught of ludicrous comments. Lutz, a Republican who once called climate change a “total crock of shit,” has become increasingly critical of fellow conservatives who have undertaken a vicious media campaign against the Volt.

Speaking yesterday at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think thank, Lutz called out the “knee-jerk” pundits who have tried to turn the Volt into a political joke. E&E News reported on his comments:

“The unfortunate thing is that because electric cars are very associated with the left-wing environmental green movement to combat global warming and reduce [carbon dioxide], the idea of vehicle electrification triggers this visceral reaction on the part of conservatives — which is, if it’s electric it must be a product of the left-wing, Democratic enviro-political machine, therefore we hate it,” said Lutz, a self-described conservative.

“This is an unfortunate, knee-jerk reaction because what the Volt and other vehicles like it are about is … shifting portions of the American mobile sector onto a more efficient and domestically produced power source,” he said.

“No electric vehicle has ever caught fire [in use], and yet the right is constantly talking about the flammability, overheating, fire hazard of the electric vehicle,” he told the conservative audience. “Folks, it’s pure fiction. Please get it out of your heads.”

Last month, Lutz wrote a column in Forbes lamenting that “all the icons of conservatism are (shock, horror!) deliberately not telling the truth” about the Volt.

Lutz called Charles Krauthammer — his former “hero-figure on the Right” — a member of the “the list of right-wing pundits I no longer take seriously” for claiming that the Volt was an example of Obama’s “interventionist policies.”

In fact, the Volt has been in development since 2006 — two years before Obama was even elected.

Lutz isn’t the only conservative who is roiled by the GOP punditocracy’s campaign against electric vehicles. Last month, Lee Speckerman, another self-professed lover of Fox News, went on the network’s morning show to bash its commentators’ “fetish for demonizing the Volt.” Speckerman argued the Volt was “the iPhone of the American automobile industry.”

Despite the continued attacks and a cycle of very sluggish sales, March was GM’s best sales month ever for the Volt.

Related Post:

• Fox News Argued Getting Off Of OPEC Oil With Alternative Fuels and Electric Cars Was ‘A National Security Issue’. Then Obama Won.

The New York Post ran one photo on its front page under the banner headline “Swillary,” apparently upset that she imbibes the same liquid as much of the rest of humanity.

But perhaps the best reaction to the shocking news that Hillary Clinton can have a good time goes to Nile Gardiner from the Heritage Foundation, who appeared on the Fox News show Your World with Neil Cavuto to attack Clinton for “embarrassing” herself:

Hillary Clinton is a public servant, she’s out to serve the American people, to advance US interests. And I think that conducting herself in this way, as a senior US official on the world stage, doesn’t advance American interests in any way. In fact its downright embarrassing. It’s as though she’s auditioning for the sixth series of Jersey Shore rather than representing America on the world stage as the Secretary of State.

Watch it:

Gardiner’s remarks stunned even guest host Stuart Varney, who was filling in for Cavuto. Varney asked Gardiner if he would support a rule stating that no senior public official must ever be seen in a bar with a drink and/or dancing, to which Gardiner responded that he thought it was “a pretty good idea.”

Fortunately, Varney promised to give his viewers “both sides” of Hillary Clinton drinking a beer, so he invited on GOP strategist Dee Dee Benkie. To her credit, she defended Clinton, saying that “she deserves a few beers.”

But if you’re Hillary Clinton, you can be attacked by conservatives for both being too uptight and for having too much fun.

Real Clear Politics was granted access to the event, and flagged Gingrich’s remarks:

“I think FOX has been for Romney all the way through,” Gingrich said during the private meeting — to which RealClearPolitics was granted access — at Wesley College. “In our experience, Callista and I both believe CNN is less biased than FOX this year. We are more likely to get neutral coverage out of CNN than we are of FOX, and we’re more likely to get distortion out of FOX. That’s just a fact.” [...]

“I assume it’s because Murdoch at some point [who] said, ‘I want Romney,’ and so ‘fair and balanced’ became ‘Romney,’ ” Gingrich said. “And there’s no question that Fox had a lot to do with stopping my campaign because such a high percentage of our base watches FOX.”

Fox News ended its contract with Gingrich last spring as it became clear that the former Speaker intended to launch a presidential campaign.

The decision to admonish Fox News is a departure from other recent unsuccessful Republican presidential candidates, several of whom have converted their elevated prominence on the national stage into lucrative contracts with the network. Former Alaska Governor and Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin signed a deal with the network, and 2008 candidate Mike Huckabee now has his own weekend show.

The conservative Daily Caller, a purportedly reported and fact-based news outlet, published parts of Martin’s life on social media, but only “selected [items that] reinforce the argument that the victim of the fatal shooting was a menacing figure who might plausibly have been mistaken for a criminal,” the New York Times’ Robert Mackey noted. They skipped over pictures from prom night or of Martin’s friends, cherry-picking shots of Martin flipping the bird or wearing fake gold teeth.

Former Republican congressman and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough called the posthumous vilification of Martin “beneath contempt” and “disgusting.” “I guess it’s because the President actually said something to comfort the parents, and I guess they just can’t handle that,” he said this morning.

Meanwhile, the Daily Caller did their best to defend Zimmerman’s account that Martin had beat him up, even when new surveillance footage cast doubt on that claim. But perhaps one shouldn’t expect better from an outlet whose top editors stood by a blatantly false report it published last year.

At the late Andrew Breitbart’s website attacked Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) for wearing a hoodie on the House floor in solidarity with Trayvon, writing a cynical story today headlined, “HOODIE-WEARING GUNMEN KILL 1, WOUND 5 IN BOBBY RUSH’S CHICAGO DISTRICT.”

On Fox News, host Sean Hannity and conservative media critic Brent Bozell, like many in the conservative echo chamber, have dwelled on the fact that the fringe New Black Panthers, who have been condemned by everyone, offered a “bounty” on Zimmerman’s head. And Hannity and Bozell found the real scandal here — that NBC News edited a 911 tape in a way that portrayed Zimmerman in a poor light.

Overall, the message seems to be, as Fox contributor Tamara Holder told Hannity: “The blacks are also making this more of a racial issue than it should be.” Watch it:

If one believes professional provocateur Ann Coulter, we may soon see black “lynch mobs” on the streets out to get “random white people.”

This morning on Fox and Frends, Fox contributor Geraldo Rivera remarked, “I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman (his killer).” While he agreed that Zimmerman “should be prosecuted,” Rivera also blamed Trayvon’s parents for letting him go outside wearing a hooded sweatshirt. Media Matters flagged the exchange:

BRIAN KILMEADE KILMEADE (co-host): Let’s talk about the Trayvon Martin case and what’s going on in Florida right now.

GERALDO RIVERA: I believe that George Zimmerman, the overzealous neighborhood watch captain should be investigated to the fullest extent of the law and if he is criminally liable, he should be prosecuted. But I am urging the parents of black and Latino youngsters particularly to not let their children go out wearing hoodies. I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was.

JULIET HUDDY (guest-host): What do you mean?

RIVERA: When you, when you see a kid walking — Juliet — when you see a kid walking down the street, particularly a dark skinned kid like my son Cruz, who I constantly yelled at when he was going out wearing a damn hoodie or those pants around his ankles. Take that hood off, people look at you and they — what do they think? What’s the instant identification, what’s the instant association?

STEVE DOOCY (co-host): Uh-oh.

RIVERA: It’s those crime scene surveillance tapes. Every time you see someone sticking up a 7-11, the kid is wearing a hoodie. [...] When you see a black or Latino youngster, particularly on the street, you walk to the other side of the street. You try to avoid that confrontation.

Watch it:

Rivera’s comments suggesting that Martin’s attire was responsible for his death are offensive and repugnant. One of the reasons Martin may have been wearing a hood is that it was raining on the day he was shot. As Rivera himself has experienced, a hood can be helpful in a rainstorm (photo credit: Flickr user Extreme WX Photographer).

Activists have organized around Martin’s hoodie, holding a “Million hoodie march” in New York City and other events.