ABLOW: He’s a dangerous man, because having followers and waging war… this isn’t accidental language. It’s about violence, destruction, and he feels destroyed in himself. [...] This is an adopted boy who needs to plumb the depths of his psyche. He was adopted. Many adopted children are tremendously well-adjusted, but for some reason, this man feels he’s unloved and unloveable, shunted to the side, and that’s the antidote he feels: unlimited power. Guess what? It never ever works.

Watch it:

This is not the first time Ablow has attacked Brock for being adopted. He made similar claims last summer, suggesting Brock is “looking for any way he can get narcissistic reinforcement to tell him he’s a decent person.”

Ablow notes that he has never actually evaluated Brock, but his generalizations and extrapolation about adoption are likely offensive to anyone who was adopted, and suggest how low Fox is willing to stoop in attacking enemies. Of course, Ablow has a long history portraying non-heterosexual people and others as crazy while apologizing for the misdeeds of ideological allies, like Newt Gingrich.

Liz Trotta

Now, Trotta is facing some backlash. Kayla Williams, a former sergeant and Arabic linguist in the 101st Airborne Division who also served in Iraq, told ThinkProgress that the “level of ignorance” in Trotta’s comments is “astounding”:

Trotta’s implication that women “in close contact” with men should “expect” to be sexually assaulted is breathtakingly offensive, as is her baffling reference to women “who are now being raped too much.” Frankly, I don’t even know how to respond to someone who holds such a low opinion of those who risk their lives in defense of our country every day.

And Anu Bhagwati, Executive Director of the Service Women’s Action Network and herself a former Marine captain, also issued this statement, noting that Trotta’s disturbing comments are based on a series of myths about men and women serving together in the military:

It has become a desperate but popular myth among commentators recently that women’s presence in the military necessarily means they will get raped. First, the mere presence of women in the workplace does not turn men into rapists. Second, the majority of victims of military rape over time have been men. In fact, half of the Military Sexual Trauma patients being treated at Veterans Affairs hospitals today are men.

Bhagwati adds that the issue isn’t men and women serving together, it’s the “broken” U.S. military justice system which currently offers “few deterrents to rapists or the commanders who protect them. Serial predators can largely expect to enjoy full military careers without ever being punished for the violent crimes they commit.”

Media Matters reports that Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) called Trotta’s comments “shameful” and “abhorrent.” “Contrary to Trotta’s comments, being a victim of rape or sexual assault is not in the job description of a US Service Member,” Speier said.

Fox News contributor Liz Trotta

But Fox News contributor Liz Trotta’s commentary on the matter took the issue to a whole other level. She’s not really concerned about the “controversy” surrounding the Pentagon’s announcement. For Trotta, the issue is having “women once more, the feminist, going, wanting to be warriors and victims at the same time.” She cited a recent Pentagon report that violent sex crimes in the military have increased over the last 6 years and said women should “expect” it, decrying more levels of bureaucracy to support women who have been “raped too much“:

TROTTA: But while all of this is going on, just a few weeks ago, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta commented on a new Pentagon report on sexual abuse in the military. I think they have actually discovered there is a difference between men and women. And the sexual abuse report says that there has been, since 2006, a 64% increase in violent sexual assaults. Now, what did they expect? These people are in close contact, the whole airing of this issue has never been done by Congress, it’s strictly been a question of pressure from the feminist.

And the feminists have also directed them, really, to spend a lot of money. They have sexual counselors all over the place, victims’ advocates, sexual response coordinators. … So, you have this whole bureaucracy upon bureaucracy being built up with all kinds of levels of people to support women in the military who are now being raped too much.

To his credit, Fox host Eric Shawn tried to talk Trotta down a bit. “You certainly want the people fighting the war to be protected from anything that could be illegal,” he said. But Trotta wouldn’t have it. “Nice try Eric,” she said, “This whole question of women in the military has not been aired properly, and it’s the great sleeping giant.” Watch the clip via Media Matters:

Just to clarify, Trotta complained about government supporting women who have been “raped too much,” a statement seeming to imply that there is an acceptable amount of rape one can or should endure in order to prevent more layers of bureaucracy from swooping in to help out.

O’Reilly’s guest Sandy Rios defended the boycott and explained that since DeGeneres has “chosen to act out her lesbian lifestyle and marry her partner…people that believe that marriage is between a man and woman and children should not be exposed to propagandized in homosexuality have a moral problem with that.” “It’s disturbing to them. They are trying to say to JC Penney please don’t do that,” she added.

JC Penney has said that it has no plans to break ties with DeGeneres and has issued a statement emphasizing, “we share the same values as Ellen.”

Hosts Eric Bolling, Steve Doocy, and Gretchen Carlson went beyond merely downplaying the numbers to contriving a conspiracy theory to explain them away:

BOLLING: So are they playing around with the numbers? Look, it’s the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it’s supposed to be non-partisan, but that’s the Department of Labor. Hilda Solis heads the Department of Labor, Hilda Solis works directly to Obama. I’m — you know.

DOOCY: Are you saying they’re cooking the books?

BOLLING: I’m saying there’s room for error. There’s room — when you’re talking about 4 million people, how do you know?

DOOCY: How do you know?

CARLSON: I don’t think anyone should surprised that in an election year — [...] So it’s interpretation, I think is the way in which we’d describe it.

Watch it, via Media Matters:

If it weren’t improper to psychologically analyse strangers, one might think the Fox hosts are displaying a textbook example of cognitive dissonance here, a psychological phenomena in which people who hold a strong belief about something invent (sometimes far fetched) explanations for new evidence that conflicts with their existing views. Obama is bad for the economy, the jobs numbers show the economy is doing better, so there must be something wrong with the jobs numbers. Needless to say, this is hardly the behavior one expects from fair and balanced journalists Fox hosts claim to be.

Meanwhile, some conservatives have developed a more sophisticated excuse for the jobs report, saying the drop in unemployment rate is only due to decreasing participation in the jobs market. Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman and others have refuted this claim.

In recent years, politics has largely been the way that news channels have defined themselves. Fox News’ brand is built on being a conservative attack machine; MSNBC’s become the home of wonky, enthusiastic liberalism; while Current TV is trying to market itself to a new generation of viewers as an aggressively progressive alternative to MSNBC and CNN worth seeking out affirmatively. If Huffington Post went progressive, it might be smart: it could snag those viewers that Current TV thinks is theirs, but in a model that acknowledges that those same young viewers are also the cord-cutters whose reluctance to pay for cable has an entire industry jittery. Politics could also be a wedge, a way to attract a certain core of viewers who are looking for something specific in their news coverage while HuffPo Streaming Network builds out its strength in other market areas.

But Huffington Post may not actually have to do that, at this point. Now that it’s done consolidating its channels with AOL, Huffington Post has a ton of disparate reader streams in place, reading about everything from the 2012 election cycle, to divorce, to celebrity crotch shots. HPSN can embed relevant programming on the relevant Huffington Post channels, pulling those readers seamlessly over to the programs that their reading habits suggest they’ll like, and hoping those reader/viewers will stick around for the next hour of programming as well. If they didn’t have to explicitly establish a political point of view, that could be a strength in terms of audience development. But it would be too bad from a progressive thinking point of view. If Current TV is going to be tied to the airwaves, it would be great to have progressives working on a new kind of cable news for an audience more dedicated the cords into their routers than the ones into their televisions.

Meanwhile, on air, the network has largely avoided the jobs news. A ThinkProgress analysis of the cable networks (via Critical Mention) shows that Fox only mentioned the new unemployment rate 9 times through 2:30 this afternoon, far less often than its competitors. Notably, Fox’s less-ideological sister network Fox Business mentioned the rate three times more often:

Fox News — 9 mentions
MSNBC –18 mentions
CNN –17 mentions
CNBC –12 mentions
Fox Business — 27 mentions

In December, after another good jobs report, Fox displayed a misleading and inaccurate graph that downplayed the drop in the jobless rate.

In his “closing argument” yesterday on Fox Business’ Freedom Watch, host Andrew Napolitano lambasted the Supreme Court for deciding that a fetus is “not a person” and that the right to privacy protects a woman’s decision. Equating the ruling to the high court’s Dred Scott decision “in which it ruled that blacks were not persons,” Napolitano later declared the it’s reasoning to be “the philosophical argument underlying the Holocaust“:

NAPOLITANO: How scary is this? The Supreme Court declares a class of humanity not to be persons, and then permits people to destroy members of that class. That’s what happened to blacks during slavery. That was the philosophical argument underlying the Holocaust. That’s what’s happening to babies in the womb, even as I speak. And that might become the basis for the government killing persons it hates or fears in the future.

Watch it:

Napolitano’s outlandish and unrelenting hyperbole was, unfortunately, not an outlier, but more the general tone of Republican remarks this week. Here are four GOP lawmakers who felt inclined to make ridiculous comparisons to belittle a woman’s right to choose:

– Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ): Smith urged a room of anti-abortion activists at the Family Research Council to “unite” under one Republican presidential candidate because “Obama is the enemy of life, as is his people.”

– Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX): Speaking at the March for Life rally on Capitol Hill, Gohmert blasted pro-choice advocates for opposing further restrictions on abortion and somehow managed to equate it with the national debt. “My dear friends for life, the same selfish arrogance and reckless disregard that would allow lives to be taken and one generation to take life after life after life from a future generation will also allow a generation to forge chains made of mountains of debt to set on those they do allow to be born,” he said.

– Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN): While no longer in the running, Bachmann said in her first public appearance since dropping out that this year’s presidential elections will end all abortions, ever. “Next year we will gather in a day of celebration when we have finally ended abortion in this all important election,” she foretold.

– Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH): Also speaking at the March for Life event, Jordan insisted that the “vast majority of Americans share the values” of the anti-choice activists. After all, “Our Founders articulated their vision for a pro-life America” and thus it’s only natural that they would detest a decision made hundreds of years later to protect a right derived from the very constitution that they wrote.

But conservatives are offering more than words. Just one month into the new year, House Republicans have already introduced three new anti-choice bills to severely restrict abortion rights. One requires doctors to perform an abortion no less than 24 hours after they receive written certification from a woman seeking an abortion; another prevents women in Washington, DC from seeking abortion after 20 weeks; and the last requires women to view an ultrasound of the fetus before they can go through with the abortion procedure.

J.D. Gordon

But the White House’s efforts to explore a negotiated settlement to the 10-year war in Afghanistan haven’t been welcomed by the administration’s hawkish critics. J.D. Gordon, a Fox News contributor and former Herman Cain foreign policy adviser said to Fox News’ Jonathan Hunt last Friday that negotiating with the Taliban was akin to doing business with Nazis:

JONATHAN HUNT: The Taliban are still trying to kill us on pretty much a daily if not hourly basis and now we’re going to talk to the Taliban. Where’s the logic in that?

J.D. Gordon: I don’t really think there’s a lot of logic other than the administration’s desire to get out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible, which I could understand. [...] But I think negotiating with the Taliban is a mistake because, number one, they’re terrorists. And number two, they’re a lot like the Nazis. Instead of being supremacists for race though, they’re supremacists for their tribe and supremacists for their religion.

Watch it:

Gordon, whose foreign policy background includes serving as a public affairs officer at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and working at various right-wing pressure groups, continued his simplistic explanation of Afghanistan’s tribal politics with the observation, “If you look at Afghanistan you see it’s so much of a different country than the West.”

Gordon’s less than insightful analysis might offer some explanation for Herman Cain’s inability to lay out a cohesive foreign policy vision.

But while Gordon and Fox News choose to portray the U.S.’s involvement in Afghanistan as analogous to the European theater of World War II, Stephen Hadley of the U.S. Institute of Peace and John Podesta, chair of the Center for American Progress, argued in a ForeignPolicy.com column last week that the war in Afghanistan “will not end by military means alone.” Hadley, a George W. Bush administration adviser, and Podesta, chief of staff in the Clinton White House, concluded that “Efforts to reach a settlement should include an approach to Taliban elements that are ready to give up the fight and become part of the political process.”

The authors pushed back at critics, such as Gordon, writing, “Such an approach would not — as some have suggested — constitute ‘surrender’ to America’s enemies. Rather, convincing combatants to leave the insurgency and enter into the political process is the hallmark of a successful counterinsurgency effort.”

“On July 1, 2009, his top health care adviser, Nancy-Ann DeParle, submitted a detailed nine-page policy memo asking whether the White House should consider including medical-malpractice reform in the legislation. Most Democrats opposed the idea, but the American Medical Association was pushing for it. ‘Obviously, we shouldn’t do anything that weighs down the overall effort,’ Obama wrote back, in his characteristically cautious and reasonable style, ‘but if this helps the AMA stay on board, we should explore it.”

Ultimately, none of this mattered very much. The Affordable Care Act contains funding for tort reform demonstration projects — as well as a multitude of other Republican-backed initiatives — that the GOP ignored because they were more interested in preventing Obama from signing one of the most sweeping social reforms in a generation than addressing the nation’s health care crisis.

What the administration learned all to late is that the details of the policy had absolutely no bearing on the tone of the opposition. Republicans relied on the same “big government” talking points to combat reform even as the measure became more conservative and Democratic lawmakers stripped out initiatives like the public option, end-of-life counseling and a host of other provisions that Republicans found repugnant. But no matter how much the bill changed to resemble the Heritage-backed Romneycare solution that relied on private competition and private enterprise, the GOP still claimed that the government was taking over health care and rationing services to seniors.

Lizza reports that Obama still believed that he could win over the opposition and rejected good policy in order to make the bill more acceptable to conservative opinion makers. One memo reveals, for instance, that Obama turned down a pilot program “to study the most effective treatments for patients” within the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan (FEHBP) because it was not “politically viable” and could prove a target for Fox News. The president wrote at the end of the memo, almost apologetically, “Unfortunately I think the political guys are right about how it would be characterized. Let’s go back at it in future years, when the temperature on health care and the economy has gone down.”

Almost two years later, the temperature is still at a boiling point and the GOP presidential candidates are crisscrossing the country accusing Obama and the law of everything from ending private enterprise to jeopardizing the livelihood of seniors. Given the partisan divide of modern American politics, Republicans and their supporters in the media will invent controversy where none exists and so it’s foolhardy to abandon good policy out of fear of inflaming the critics. They’ll burn you anyway, while you’ll have a harder time defending a decision that was made on political, rather than policy merits.

But this phenomenon was not balanced on both sides of the ideological spectrum. While Democrats trust most news outlets, to varying degrees, Republicans trust only a single one — Fox News. While a massive 73 percent of Republicans trust Fox, the next highest rating among any major TV news outlet is PBS, which just 30 percent of GOPers trust, according to the PPP poll.

The numbers show just how powerful Fox can be in setting the agenda and influencing the world view of conservatives, with virtually no competition or accountability from the outside world. This monopoly on news penetration for an entire half of the electorate would be bad no matter the network, but it’s especially troubling considering Fox’s shoddy, and often agenda-driven “reporting.” And unlike an openly-ideological news outlet like ThinkProgress or the National Review, which freely advertise their perspectives, Fox insists it’s a traditional “fair and balanced” news outlet.

“It is a little disingenuous,” he said. “Here we are at Fox, complaining that Newsweek may be a little partisan.” Noting that magazines and other media outlets often take — or sell — opinions, Springer pointed out that Carlson’s outrage might be misplaced considering that “you guys, every single day, bash President Obama”:

SPRINGER: If the point of this discussion is to be upset with a magazine that — even if it took the position that they’re pro-Obama — again, everybody in the media is doing things like that. We’re here on Fox News. Every single day, in fairness, you guys, every single day, bash President Obama.

CARLSON: I’m going to take you to task on that because on this panel right here, we have a fair and balanced panel right here. And I’m the independent.

SPRINGER: But, what’s the rest of the show? The rest of the show, every single morning, you guys are slamming Obama. You know you are. I’m not saying you don’t have a right to. But every single conversation is something bad about Obama.

Watch the segment:

Carlson’s “independence” must be seconds old. After all, Fox and Friends has never missed an opportunity to blast Obama, be it over the Iraq War, recess appointments, terrorism, income inequality, Christmas, or for generally existing.

The fair and balanced Carlson herself has unloaded on Obama, claiming he is putting “politics ahead of jobs for the American People,” or that he is “grinching 15 cents out of your pocket,” or that he is “working overtime now to raise taxes.” She’s even offered advice to GOP candidates on exactly how to campaign against the president. But Carlson insisted to Springer, “you obviously don’t watch our show.” “Quite frankly, we present both sides of the story and leave it up to our viewers to decide where they fall,” she said. (HT: TVNewser)

In a segment discussing the case (which features a constitutional attorney very familiar to the readers of this blog), Fox host Shep Smith described the lawsuit as a “real long shot.” Fox legal analyst Stacy Schneider said that she thinks “the president is going to win in this case,” and another Fox legal analyst, Randy Zelin, launched into an rant about the Senate Republicans’ tactic of pretending the Senate is not in recess because it occasionally holds a sham session:

If you watched coverage of the [Senate] floor, there was nobody there! It was ridiculous. So I think this is the president’s way of saying “you ain’t going to play nice in my sandbox? I ain’t going to play nice in yours.” And it’s this kind of thing — because at the end of the day, how does it help us, the citizens? It doesn’t.

Watch it:

Fox’s unexpected defense of President Obama is just another sign of the weakness of the case against Obama’s actions. As two of the Bush Administration’s top constitutional attorneys explained in a 2010 op-ed, the Senate is in recess when it is “not capable of acting on the president’s nominations.” Moreover, when the president announced his recess appointments, the Senate was adjourned under an order stating that there will be “no business conducted” for weeks. So the Senate was in no shape to confirm a nominee until it returned to Washington, and the president acted entirely within his legal rights in making recess appointments.

Hopefully, the fact that the case against these recess appointments is so weak that even Fox is skeptical of it will deter any of the more ideologically rigid members of the federal bench from ignoring the law and blocking these appointments.

His chief example of this theory? “Our instincts say that everybody should vote, but some people are dumb or don’t pay attention, and they shouldn’t vote,” he said. A naturally concerned Cavuto asked him who exactly qualified as “dumb,” to which Stossell replied, essentially, “kids.” Thus, he prescribed that we end the Get Out The Vote campaign because kids don’t pay attention so they don’t deserve to vote:

STOSSEL: I’m not saying we should have a test or something. But this endless cheerleading — let’s go to the rock concerts and register the kids. And the kids aren’t paying attention. And it’s important in a democracy, it’s important to vote. And these are important issues. The people who participate ought to be the ones who pay attention…I’m just saying we shouldn’t have these “Get Out The Vote” campaigns and make these statements: “Everyone has to vote. It’s your patriotic duty!” Well if you’re not paying attention, I think it’s your patriotic duty not to vote.

Watch it via Media Matters:

Stossel apparently likes to time his antipathy for democratic participation with the election cycle. In 2008, he insisted that “some people” — specifically young Americans — should just stay home. In 2010, he believed young people should just “stay in the mall.” After all, “Brain surgery, we don’t want everyone doing brain surgery. And voting is difficult and important too.”

Of course, young voters were very informed on salient issues that matter to them in 2008. And, according to seven separate polls, Fox News viewers — whose average age is in the mid-60s — appear perpetually misinformed. So unless he’s advocating for his own audience stay away from the polls, perhaps it’s Stossel who should just stay away from democracy entirely.

ERIC BOLLING: Let’s talk about these drastic cuts in military [sic]. Weigh in on that. Do we become a much more vulnerable nation?

LIZ CHENEY: There’s no question. I think in fact what President Obama is doing is something that America’s enemies — the Taliban and Al Qaeda — have been unable to do, which is to decimate the fighting capability of this nation.

Cheney went on to conflate Iraq and Iran — asserting that “Iraq is months, not years, away” from enriching the uranium required for a nuclear weapon — and claimed that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin E. Dempsey hadn’t clearly stated that the U.S. would respond militarily if Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz. Watch it:

Indeed, Obama proposed a $487 billion cut to military spending, but Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin E. Dempsey told a Duke University audience yesterday, “This is something we the Joint Chiefs have endorsed as best for America.” He did not comment on whether the cuts in defense spending would serve the interests of the Taliban and al Qaeda but he also said last week that the military’s leadership is supportive of Obama’s plan and, not as Liz Cheney suggests, suffering a “decimat[ion]” of their fighting capability.

Cheney also got it wrong on the statements issued by Dempsey about the Strait of Hormuz. Yesterday, the New York Times reported:

Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this past weekend that the United States would “take action and reopen the strait,” which could be accomplished only by military means, including minesweepers, warship escorts and potentially airstrikes. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta told troops in Texas on Thursday that the United States would not tolerate Iran’s closing of the strait.

While Cheney is broadening her professional credentials, her debut appearance as a Fox News contributor showed her as a commentator who pays very little attention to the administration and the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s actual positions on the issues she covers.

O’REILLY: To rescind — rescind it after a licenses already given. That’s a big deal.

SANTORUM: The federal government would have to pass a constitutional amendment and if the Constitution says that marriage is between a man and woman, then things that are inconsistent with that would not — would be inconsistent with the Constitution so –

O’REILLY: Would you be doing that if you were elected president? Would you be campaigning for a constitutional amendment in that way?

SANTORUM: I would — well, if you pass a constitutional amendment that says marriage –

O’REILLY: So would you — would that be — would that be in the forefront of your — of your administration?

SANTORUM: As you know, Bill, if you’ve been following me out on the trail, I haven’t been talking a lot about this. Although I strongly believe in it. What I’ve been talking about as I did last night on my acceptance speech where didn’t talk about this issue, I talked about the importance of getting this economy going and talked about my grandfather and coming here for freedom. And this is the fundamental issue in this campaign is whether government is going to be big and obtrusive and telling people how to manage their — their lives or — and are they going to support the basic values of faith and family that allow government to be limited and allow our economy to be strong. Those are the things I talked about and did across Iowa. I’ll be talking about those things here in New Hampshire.

Watch it:

Santorum may have failed to mention LGBT issues in every one of his 350 Iowa town halls, but as ThinkProgress has chronicled, he did spend ample time arguing that gay couples “destabilize” society and comparing same-sex relationships to inanimate objects like trees, basketballs, beer, and paper towels and even tried to blame the economic crisis on gay people. As Santorum explained back in August, religious people have a constitutional right to discriminate against gays: “We have a right the Constitution of religious liberty but now the courts have created a super-right that’s above a right that’s actually in the Constitution, and that’s of sexual liberty. And I think that’s a wrong, that’s a destructive element.”

Santorum also slipped in a coded reference to marriage in his Iowa acceptance speech Tuesday night, saying, “Those are the same people that President Obama talked about who cling to their guns and their Bibles. Thank God they do. They share our values about faith and family. They understand that when the family breaks down, the economy struggles.” In de-emphasizing the issue in New Hampshire, Santorum is acknowledging that Granite State voters are less driven by social issues than economic concerns — and that’s particularly true when it comes to the state’s own marriage equality law.

O’REILLY: You say that the states should have the right to ban some contraception. That’s right off the bat going to be a big one.

SANTORUM: Well, the states have a right to do a lot of things. That doesn’t mean they should do it. Someone asked me if the states have the right to do it? Yes. They have the right to do it, they shouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t vote for it if they did. It doesn’t mean they don’t have the right to do it. As you know, Bill, you’re a Catholic, Catholic Church teaches contraceptive is something you shouldn’t do. So when I was asked the question on contraception I said I didn’t support it.

Watch it:

Santorum is trying to distinguish his religious beliefs from his governing philosophy to suggest to moderate voters that while he personally opposes contraception, he would do little to limit women’s access to it. But that’s not entirely honest and here is why: Santorum does disagree with the Supreme Court’s 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut ruling (which struck down a law that criminalized the use of contraceptives by married couples) and believes that the question should be left to the states. At the same time, however, he has also pledged to defund federal funding for contraception if elected president and publicly address the “dangers of contraception in this country.” “It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be,” the former Pennsylvania senator explained during one interview in Iowa. In other words, Santorum would not sit on his religiously-inspired anti-contraception beliefs — he would work to move federal policies and public beliefs against it.