For instance, I learned that basically everyone in Congress is demanding that Eric Holder retire because of something to do with Solyndra. Someone on a panel said that the people in Congress demanding Holder’s retirement were not very important members of Congress but that person was shouted down because every member of Congress is important, especially when they are providing grist for the Fox faux-scandal mill.

I also learned that there is a baby missing, named Baby Lisa, and that Baby Lisa’s mother almost certainly is responsible, because Baby Lisa’s mother had an online dating profile. I had literally never heard of Baby Lisa before Monday, but Fox covered Baby Lisa more than any other story save the Penn State situation. The Murdoch tabloid ethos still drives Fox as much as the Ailes political agenda.

And I learned that Megyn Kelly and her child take the subway, which I found slightly hard to believe.

But here’s what I learned about Occupy Wall Street and its related movements across the nation: They are gross.

On Monday, most Occupy movement coverage was handled by field correspondent Casey Stegall, a bland, sufficiently handsome local news veteran working out of Fox’s Los Angeles bureau. His noon report referenced “the squalor of the camps,” used quotes from city and police sources exclusively, and only featured anti-Occupy “man on the street” clips. (One lady was disgusted at the presence of a futon at Occupy Oakland.)

An hour later, Stegall returned for another report hitting the same notes: A “squalid mess,” “defecating, urinating, and vomiting all over the plaza,” and more clips of citizens grossed out by the dinginess of those squalid hippies in their squalor. Plus: Reports of violence! “Clearly the violence detracts from the message they’re trying to send,” Stegall said, though “the message they’re trying to send” was never once addressed.

Occupy wasn’t mentioned again until 3:45, when Shepard Smith had a brief but mostly objective report on Occupy Wall Street from Jonathan Hunt. Shep mentioned that the demonstrations are against “what they call corporate greed.” Hunt brought up reports of TB, because “crime and squalor” were clearly Fox’s talking points, but Smith’s segment was largely fair, if not particularly sympathetic.

Bret Baier’s “Special Report” led with a brief attack on Michael Moore for being fat attempting to “profit” off the movement, but then it was back to Baby Lisa.

So in a workday’s worth of news, there was not one actual interview with an occupier, or even someone remotely sympathetic to the Occupy movement. There was only one mention of what the Occupy movement is supposed to be about, in fact. The rest was filth and crime.

Much more time was spent dissecting President Obama’s ill-considered but essentially harmless statement about how America has become “lazy” about attracting foreign investment. “Obama calls Americans lazy” was the official attack line, and every show devoted at least one full segment to a lengthy discussion of Obama’s contempt for America.

On early Tuesday morning, Occupy Wall Street was forcibly evicted by the NYPD in a violent paramilitary raid. Hundreds of protesters and multiple members of the press were arrested. The police used tear gas and, reportedly, an anti-terror “acoustic” weapon. On Tuesday, though, Fox was still much more concerned with former Penn State coach and accused child abuser Jerry Sandusky than with the raid and eviction.

“Fox & Friends” did cheer the raid, putting a very Fox “GOOD RIDDANCE” chyron on footage of police in Zuccotti Park. But I didn’t hear more about the raid until 10:10 a.m., when Martha MacCallum teased an upcoming segment: After the break, Steve Forbes would be on to discuss the Occupy Wall Street eviction!

Yes, Steve Forbes, the millionaire media scion and flat-tax advocate. The Forbes segment was only half devoted to OWS, with Forbes offering pearls of wisdom like “I wish they’d go to Washington and start protesting at the Federal Reserve.” MacCallum and Forbes agreed that the Federal Housing Administration would also be a worthy target of an occupation, and then they began talking about Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich.

At 11, Julie Banderas did a routine cable news report on the eviction, though at no point was it mentioned that the city and the NYPD were in violation of a court order requiring them to allow protesters and their belongings back into the park until the judge had ruled on the legality of anti-occupation rules. They played video of Michael Bloomberg’s statement, and, obviously, did not counter it with any sort of statement from occupiers or their legal representatives.

The same, more or less, an hour later. “This is now a legal issue, and as we get more information we’ll pass it on to you.”

At 1:00, the vicious Megyn Kelly takes over, and all the news is delivered with an extra dose of sneering. “The party’s over,” she said of the OWS raid, bringing up “sanitary problems” again, and not mentioning reports of police brutality or the arrests of reporters.

OWS was ignored until, once again, Shepard Smith came on at 3 to actually treat the story with a bit of nuance and objectivity. He led by mentioning the court order the city was ignoring, then went back to Jonathan Hunt, who noted “a marked rise in tensions as we await the judge’s ruling.” Smith: “Protesters and some journalists, for that matter, are saying cops were heavy-handed here.” Hunt, trying very hard not to accuse the NYPD of what they did: “We cannot independently confirm any of that.” Though he did note that the police moved all cameras well away from the park.

Smith then hosted an annoying discussion of the legal issues with two Fox lawyers: Arthur Aidala and Randy Zelin. For two New York criminal defense attorneys, they’re both markedly pro-NYPD. Zelin in particular was excitedly scaremongering. OWS will “shut down the New York City Criminal Courts system” — and the city as a whole — if the judge rules against them, Zelin predicted, repeatedly calling the prospect of civil disobedience “scary.” Smith pointed out that widespread civil disobedience “is not a new concept in America.” “No, but it’s scary nonetheless,” Zelin responded. Smith brought up anti-Vietnam protests, and the segment ended with one of the lawyers “joking” that we should send all the protesters to Guantanamo Bay.

The “scary” prospect of widespread action was clearly the late-developing talking point du jour, as 4 p.m. host Neil Cavuto repeatedly seemed almost annoyed that occupiers weren’t violently rioting. He kept hyping the prospect of eventual riots, even as nothing of the sort materialized. “This might not go down well,” he said. “This might get dicey,” he prayed. (He also brought on South Dakota Rep. Kristi Noem, who said she thinks Occupiers should instead be Occupying the White House.)

At 4:18, Cavuto brought on libertarian commentator Andrew Napolitano, a man who is definitely a kook but who is at least a kook with principles beyond naked Republican partisanship. Napolitano declined to criticize OWS at all, instead attacking the city of New York for requiring private corporations to provide public (or semi-public) spaces. He correctly noted that the NYPD and the city were in violation of a court order ordering them to allow protesters in the park, and when Cavuto brought up his much-hoped-for riots (“this could get messy, legal argument notwithstanding”), Napolitano simply said that if the judge ruled against OWS, protesters attempting to Occupy Zuccotti could be charged with contempt of court.

After the judge ruled against allowing OWS to have tents and structures in the park, Cavuto bemoaned the “subdued response so far,” as everyone simply refused to riot. “Whether that remains the case, we’ll see.” Then legal anaylist Mercedes Colwin — another defense attorney — said “bravo for the judge,” because “it was really all about public safety.” (If OWS isn’t violent, it is at least still gross.) Cavuto prayed once more for mass arrests, and then it was on to Fox News’ “The Five,” a panel discussion show so deeply stupid and awful that I cannot bring myself to summarize a single thing anyone said on it.

So after two days of the supposedly “news”-based Fox News programming, I now know that the entire Occupy movement is mostly about their right to vomit and defecate wherever they like. And it threatens to become violent — deadly violent! — at literally any moment.

I imagine coverage of this sort — the “grossness” of the entire thing, with any discussion of the movement’s aims or goals entirely absent — is a large part of what made public opinion of the Occupy movement grow slightly sour.

The fact that the eviction was done in violation of a court order doesn’t bother them:

The amorphous agglomeration known as Occupy Wall Street had transformed a space intended for open community access into a round-the-clock shantytown — and they claimed that the First Amendment guaranteed their right to do as they pleased.

This is not constitutional wisdom. This is self-important, self-indulgent bilge. And a Manhattan Supreme Court justice who ordered a halt to the eviction pending a hearing needs to emphatically so state.

They seem totally uninterested in the NYPD’s excessively violent tactics, including the harassment, abuse and arrest of various reporters, which doesn’t get a mention in the editorial. Then a Daily News reporter was arrested, along with at least two other reporters.

Now, according to the Daily News Twitter feed, at least, the NYPD’s behavior is “alarming.” The newspaper has alerted its attorney.

The Daily News is owned and published by billionaire real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman.

The grandiloquent post in question requests either (it’s not entirely clear) that Israelis feed Shalit’s captors to sharks or that they feed his captors along with women and “their offspring” to sharks. (I imagine Abrams considers nearly every Palestinian in Gaza to be complicit in Shalit’s imprisonment, so this distinction may not amount to much.) Either way, the post makes liberal usage of unambiguous anti-Arab slurs (“devils’ spawn,” “savages,” “animals”) and, well, it’s a call for mass slaughter.

After various people, including Max Blumenthal, said it was perhaps inappropriate for a Washington Post blogger to endorse this sort of talk, Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton took the case. Pexton concluded that the retweet was in poor taste, but for him it was more of an issue of inappropriate Twitter usage than it was of Rubin being essentially an awful person who agrees with a virulent anti-Arab bigot.

To demonstrate that she essentially agrees with Abrams’ perspective, Rubin then tweeted a link to another Abrams post, calling it “chilling, sobering, eloquent.” This post puts the word “Palestinians” in scare quotes and places Mahmoud Abbas in a list of “blood-worshippers.”

Who is Rachel Abrams, besides a woman who writes like a teenager imitating Marty Peretz? She’s another talentless hack born into neocon royalty. Abrams is the daughter of Midge Decter, and apparently inherited her mother’s obsessive homophobia. Her stepfather is neoconservative founding father Norman Podhoretz, and she is married to Bush administration Middle East honcho Elliot Abrams. An intense hatred of Arabs is basically the one theme of her writings, repeated endlessly, in an infinite number of variations.

Here, for example, she tells the inspiring tale of literally screaming “Fuck you, Arabs” while driving past the Israeli West Bank barrier wall. This isn’t someone making any sort of controversial political argument. This is just someone who hates, intensely, a specific ethnic group.

So, with the ombudsman having weighed in more or less on the side of it being a bad idea for Jennifer Rubin to endorse this woman, we come to editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, who had this to say:

As a general matter I think it isn’t wise for me to comment on the work of the ombudsman, who is entitled to his views, and over whom I do not have editorial control.

However, I will say this: I think Jennifer is an excellent journalist and a relentless reporter. I think because she has strong views, and because she is as willing to take on her home team, as it were, as the visitors, she comes under more scrutiny than many and is often the target of unjustified criticism. I think she brings enormous value to the Post.

Yeah, Fred, people aren’t criticizing her for “strong views,” they’re criticizing her for endorsing what looks to be eliminationist anti-Arab rhetoric from a bigoted psycho.

In Hiatt’s world, “hating Arabs” is just a controversial opinion that “brings enormous value to the Post.” As Blumenthal says, if Rubin had supported a blog post with the exact same tone written about black people — or Jews! — she’d be out of job right now. Instead, she’s an “excellent journalist,” according to her boss.

That’s the state of the liberal media today.

So, this morning, were the lead stories on television that Nancy Pelosi, whose belittling and famous “Are you serious? Are you serious?” response to being asked about the challenge to the ObamaCare individual mandate, was the perfect illustration of her radical and out-of-touch mental state — and that she is as out of touch as former President Bush was when he expressed amazement at grocery store price scanners?

Uh, no. (The media’s obsession with the Penn State sex scandal can be explained by the fact they think it will hurt Herman Cain.)

Emphasis very much mine, because, wow.

Give Perrin the Nobel for his amazing work advancing the unified theory of liberal media bias. It turns out that the press only cares about the sexual assault of children by a prominent figure at a major college football program because that sexual assault can be used to somehow injure a conservative politician.

Erick Erickson, RedState’s proprietor and a paid CNN political analyst, promoted this diary to the front page of his site.

“Partisan gridlock” is to blame for the failure of “jobs bills” from each party.

Which partisans, exactly?

Senate Democrats on Thursday came up nine votes short of the 60 needed to advance their infrastructure bill past a key procedural hurdle. The vote was 51-49, with all Republicans and two members of the Democratic caucus — Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) — voting no.

What happened is that the big jobs bill “failed” in the Senate despite receiving more than 50 votes because of the Republican tactic of effectively filibustering everything. So Democrats split the big bill into smaller bills, which have also failed because every single Republican plus independent Sen. Joe Lieberman and conservative Democrat Ben Nelson joined Republicans in refusing to invoke cloture, thus preventing the bills from actually coming to a real vote. The Republican “jobs bill” is a “jobs bill” in name only, and was presented solely so that Republicans could claim to have a “jobs bill.” Also, Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman are trolls who hate the Democratic Party and constantly work against its interests.

The press has helpfully enabled Republican Senate obstructionism by reporting on it as if bills “losing” despite winning 51 percent of the vote is totally normal and acceptable.

The problem, basically, is that “Republicans continue now-normalized practice of abuse of Senate procedure to block popular jobs bills because they object to raising taxes on rich people and wish to deny the president legislative victories” does not sound as objective as “Both parties block jobs bills.”

But even by the sorry standards of the mainstream press, this story is ridiculous. Both parties have jobs bills, both parties block jobs bills, and the concept of “partisan gridlock” has somehow gained sentience and agency and now works to defeat popular legislation independent of the actions and desires of actual human legislators!