Even though Congress is likely to pass a bill to raise the nation’s debt limit and avert default, the U.S. still faces the very real possibility that credit rating agencies will downgrade our debt for the first time in history. S&P and Moody’s both indicated that the framework offered by John Boehner (R-OH) would be inadequate to prevent a downgrade from our current AAA rating. A downgrade will likely cost $100 billion a year, wiping out Congress’ deficit reduction efforts and making it more costly for consumers to borrow money. Both Republicans and Democrats have decried the possibility of downgrade as seriously damaging to the U.S. economy.

Yet Fox News’ vice president of business news Neil Cavuto recently said during an interview with John Stossel that he “would welcome a downgrade” because it would serve as a wake-up call to the American people:

CAVUTO: I would welcome a downgrade. I really would. I think it would be the pain from which we have a gain.

STOSSEL: Maybe that would wake people up.

Watch it:

Stossel had said earlier in the interview that a downgrade would not be good for the economy. Yahoo News notes that the markets are seriously spooked about the global ramifications of a downgrade and many on Wall Street “have moved into gold, silver and other commodities, or are building short dollar positions in the case of an eventual downgrade.”

S&P has been the most hard line about cuts, insisting on $4 trillion in cuts to keep the country’s AAA rating intact. Under that yardstick, the current deal will fail to preserve the U.S.’s rating. While the major credit rating agencies have rightly faced criticism for exploiting the debt crisis to push their own agenda, it’s disturbing that Cavuto is rooting for an event that would be so costly and damaging to his own country’s economy.

As Americans and the world are gripped by the ongoing crisis in Egypt, news organizations have devoted wall-to-wall coverage to the protests — that is, except for Fox News, which interrupted its news programing to bring viewers what amounted to an infomerical for a new product from Fox’s parent company, News Corp. This came at a critical moment in Egypt situation, as the protests in Cairo turned deadly.

But at 11:00 AM Eastern Time, while MSNBC and CNN ran breaking news alerts and reported live from Cairo, Fox and Fox Business reported live from the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan to bring viewers the unveiling ceremony for News Corp latest product, an iPad newspaper called “The Daily.” Fox News aired a full half hour of the promotional event, featuring NewsCorp chairman Rupert Murdoch giving a hard sell of his latest media foray.

At 11:30, Fox returned to its news coverage of the winter storm devastating the Midwest, only to interrupt its programming once again a half hour later for a lengthy interview with Murdoch. Viewers were treated to Fox host Neil Cavuto tossing up softball questions about Murdoch’s business acumen and his bold new product for nearly 20 minutes before the news network finally returned to the news.

Watch a compilation of host Bill Hemmer awkwardly transitioning from the “historic” winter storm to the “history [making]” NewsCorp event, the event, and the interview:

A screen grab of MSNBC, CNN, and Fox at 11:12:

Even Cavuto couldn’t ignore the obvious conflict of interest of his “news” network pimping its parent company’s new product, but nonetheless, Cavuto reliably defended Fox and Murdoch:

We are continuing to monitor [Egypt] and I am already getting emails and bloggers saying ‘you are only covering this because your boss is Rupert Murdoch.’ That might have something to do with it, but this is a big event in and of itself how you look at news. I may remind those in news organizations that whenever Apple comes out with a product, whether they get top executives there or not, they seem to go full throttle on that product announcement because these tend to be cultural events that go beyond a given company.

Last November, the Washington Post’s ombudsman questioned whether the Post was “being aggressive enough in reporting on troubles confronting Kaplan,” a subsidiary of the Post’s parent company. The mere question of a conflict of interest was enough to earn criticism from the Post’s internal watchdog, as it should for any legitimate news organization.

Fox, however, is happy to run nearly an hour of explicit promotional programing with little news value for its parent company, anchored by its senior vice president for business news, while major events unfold at home and abroad — all without any hint of serious self-reflection.

On Fox News yesterday, Neil Cavuto argued that Democrats want to get health care reform done before the Easter break because “they sure as heck don’t want to see those town hallers.” Cavuto, who was interviewing Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), then claimed that Democrats “agree the polls are increasingly looking worse for health care support.” Watch it:

In fact, Democrats — and the polls — don’t agree. Joel Benenson, the White House’s pollster of choice, argues in a new polling memo that “support for President Barack Obama’s health care plan has been building in the wake of his State of the Union speech in late January.” According to Benenson, since February 1, “44 percent of those tested in national surveys support the bill while 45 percent oppose it — a sea change from the 38 percent favor/52 percent oppose average of polls conducted in the three months prior.”

It isn’t just Obama’s pollster who has identified this shift. As Matt Yglesias pointed out yesterday, Pollster.com’s average of polls shows public opinion trending more favorably towards passing health care reform.

After examining the data, polling expert Mark Blumenthal concluded that “any way you slice it, there does appear to be a real tightening of opinion on health reform although as always, these results are snapshots and subject to change.”

In recent days, conservatives have seized on the cold snap gripping the southeast region of the country to cast doubt on global warming. “Hey Al Gore: we want our global warming, and we want it now,” said Newsbusters’ Mark Finkelstein. In his newsletter today, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich wondered about “Al Gore’s explanation for this miserable, persistent chill,” and the National Review’s Mona Charen claimed that the “cold snap has spurred the ‘warmists’ to spin control.”

For the past week, Fox News host Neil Cavuto has been giving a daily “Fox News global warming alert,” which consists of him telling viewers how cold it is. “It is still cold,” Cavuto said yesterday, adding that it’s “not your recent garden variety global warming.” “It’s freezing across the entire globe,” Cavuto shouted on Saturday. Former Nixon speechwriter and actor Ben Stein responded, “Maybe somebody in the government will wake up and say, ‘Hey, it’s colder. It’s not hotter.’ Maybe all this talk about global warming needs to be rethought.” Watch a compilation:

Of course, a short-term cold snap in a few isolated regions does not disprove global climate change. In fact, the cold snap appears unrelated to climate change. As the AP reported, “experts interviewed…did not connect the current frigid blast to climate change,” instead pointing to “arctic oscillation”:

In the atmosphere, large rivers of air travel roughly west to east around the globe between the Arctic and the tropics. This air flow acts like a fence to keep Arctic air confined. But recently, this air flow has become bent into a pronounced zigzag pattern, meandering north and south. If you live in a place where it brings air up from the south, you get warm weather. In fact, record highs were reported this week in Washington state and Alaska. But in the eastern United States, like some other unlucky parts of the globe, Arctic air is swooping down from the north.

Temperatures in “most places” are actually “above average for this time of year.” Record high and low temperatures are set every year, but there have been consistently more highs than lows in recent decades, as the National Center for Atmospheric Research demonstrates:

The last decade was the hottest decade on record by far, and 2009 was also one of the hottest years on record. Climate Progress’ Joe Romm notes that this decade will likely have even higher temperatures.