You Buy It, You Own It

Fox News clearly has latched onto this tea party thing in a way that no responsible news network would do to cover a future event. They used graphics like "FNC Tax Tea Parties," dispatched their top talent to speak at the events, and generally covered it like the Berlin airlift. Media Matters is right, they now own any extremist rhetoric and Birch Society nonsense that will inevitably come out of these things. And this from Neil Cavuto is the biggest FAIL in the history of FAILs.

Anyway, what Cavuto shouldn't be allowed to do is, you know ... make stuff up, and yet there he was, this past Saturday, saying the following:

CAVUTO: Just a reminder, we are going to be right in the middle of these protests because at FOX we do not pick and choose these rallies and protests. We were there for the Million Man March, even though, as I pointed out, it turned out to be well shy of a million men. We were there for the Iraq War protest, and the protest against the Iraq War protest. So see, we really don't decide what populist causes matter. Just that when a whole lot of people gather, in a whole lot of towns and cities across America, it is indeed worth checking out, not just shutting down. Which is why we are in Sacramento on April 15 for the one of the biggest of these, at 4:00 p.m. Eastern time.

Unfortunately for Cavuto, the people at NewsHounds did one of those things where you go and you "look up" the available facts and "verify" them for "accuracy."

Neil Cavuto has been defending FOX News' coverage of the upcoming tax day tea parties by repeatedly suggesting that FOX News gave similar coverage to the Million Man March. But the Million Man March occurred October 16, 1995 whereas FOX News was not operating until October 7, 1996, nearly a year later.

Meanwhile, Blue Texan has finally figured out what the teabaggers' grievance is:

What's the Teabaggers' main gripe? What do they hope to accomplish? Putz's op-ed in today's New York Post finally answers that question.

"In the short run, this is likely to provide at least a bit of resistance to the borrow-and-spend-like-there's-no-tomorrow approach that now governs Washington."

Ah-ha! So it's deficits the Teabaggers object to. Good. Let's take a look at the biggest borrowers-and-spenders over the past 40 years.

I hate to give this tiny fraction of the population the space they don't deserve. And yes, they are astroturf groups pretending to invent a grassroots movement.