This really is Jon Stewart at his best. Responding to the Right’s call for the poor to pay more taxes, Stewart calculates the net worth of the 50% of Americans who pay no tax at all (they own around $1.45 trillion, or 2.5% of the nation’s wealth), then asks what taking half of their wealth away  would do. The answer is of course around $700 billion – the same amount of money that would be generated if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire – and the same amount Republicans have been saying won’t make any difference to the deficit:

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Other than promoting America's foreign wars and attacking minorities, one of the most disgusting things Fox News engages in is non-stop propaganda for crony capitalism. In fact, you could argue that the entire point of the news network is to convince poor white Americans that they should vote against their own interests. One of the (many) ways they do this is to deify the rich. Fox news promotes millionaires and billionaires as true American heroes – self made pionneers, job creators and evil socialist fighters. Laughably, they attempt to rationalize tax cuts for the mega wealthy arguing it would't make a dent in the national debt. In this hilarious video, Jon Stewart takes the network and their claims to task, ridiculing their stomach turning pleas to end Left wing 'class warfare' and dismantling the claims that billionaires cannot help reduce the deficit:

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If it wasn't clear before that Fox News is not a news organization and acts only as a mouthpiece for the GOP and Rupert Murdoch's financial interest, after the phone hacking scandal, it really should be. Fox News's coverage of the scandal has been, to put it mildly, hilarious. Just wait till the end of this brilliant Daily Show clip when a Fox News journalist tries to ask Murdoch about the News of the World closure – it's almost poetic:

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by Ari Rutenberg

I'm hoping Jim Cramer lives up to his word.  During last nights Jon Stewart shellacking Cramer agreed to get serious in his commentary.  He is a well-known voice and has a deep insiders knowledge of the financial system.  And if he actually gave us all that insight and used his connections and experience to expose Corporate America's BS it would be a great service to our country.  And the effectiveness could be tenfold if he gets other anchors for CNBC to do the same.

Jim Cramer has played a stupid game and deserves every cirticism lobbed his way.  But he seems like a good guy who got sucked in to a gilded echo chamber and forgot that it was his job to challenge the business leaders whose practices he knew to be corrupt and dangerous, not to pass on their word as if it was devine.

But Cramer took his licks like a man.  He stood up to Jon Stewart a few times, but it seemed to me that he knew he had done wrong and that he had not done his best. 

In a few hours he's gonna be on Morning Joe.  If he stands up straight and tells Joe and Mika how it really is, this could be a tranformative event for Cramer and the financial press.  It could also be a moment of weakness where he caves to the conventional wisdom and dismisses Stewart's points.  But if he supports Stewart and makes it clear that the comedian was right, that could really start something amazing.

And that's why I'm rooting for Jim Cramer.

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