Hoffman's loss to Democrat Bill Owens, was embarrassing for all concerned: he was the first poster boy for the Teabaggers and 9/12 nuts, and only ran because said nuts felt that the Republican, a moderate called Dede Scozzafava, was too nice and normal.

Politico report that:

Even as he faces near-impossible odds of pulling ahead in the count, Doug Hoffman announced Wednesday night that he is officially revoking his concession from Election Night, and is accusing labor unions and ACORN of stealing the election for Rep. Bill Owens (D-N.Y.).

Hoffman posted a message on his campaign site Wednesday alleging dirty tricks by Democrats, and is asking for additional campaign contributions to fund a legal challenge to the election results.

Maybe he's doing it to save Glenn Beck's health - as soon as Hoffman lost Beck's appendix exploded with rage. Or maybe it's a clever political tactic that we're all underestimating. On Hardball last night, when asked about Sarah Palin's potential strengths as a presidential candidate, 538.com's Nate Silver genuinely cited her perpetual victim status and frequent faux-outrage as a factor that makes her difficult to run against.

So ends Jon Stewart V. Sean Hannity. This was by far the wackiest denouement of a Jon Stewart Takes on the Media episode. (You remember the post-Crossfire show? It was sort of smarmy. And the Jim Cramer interview? So uncomfortable!) I identified with the Jon Stewart character in that first bit because I, too, had to watch an entire episode of "Hannity" for the ten second apology at the end and it was, outside of a half-dozen pregnancy scares, the single worst experience of my life. Can't wait to see how Hannity deals with this one on his show tomorrow!

(apologies for the out-of-sync video.)

...that last line sort of creeped me out: "Mr. Stewart, you were right, we apologize—but by the way, I want to thank you, and all your writers, for watching." It creeped me out because Hannity wasn't just talking to Stewart and the "TDS" writing team, here: He was also sending a winking, smartass shout-out to everyone who tuned in tonight solely for the satisfaction of seeing him eat crow. Team Jon Stewart.

I am a member of Team Jon Stewart, and you probably are too. Jon Stewart always seems to be on "my side" in whichever cultural/intellectual/economic battle he's mocking on that night's program. That is: nobody's side. As plenty of Times Arts Section pieces have reminded us: He is the sticker-upper-for-the-little-guy, the speaker of truth to power. His sharpened blade of sarcasm cuts clean through the half-truths of politicians to reveal that the emperor has no clothes, while his under-staffed but plucky researchers reveal mainstream media for the impotent court jester it is via embarrassing video montages.

Sometimes Jon Stewart does something like take on a conservative talk-show host (or an inept financial channel personality, or a terrible debate show) and team Jon Stewart goes crazy. Boo yah: We scored a point! When Stewart showed Hannity's show to be the steaming crapfest it is, a lot of people on Team Jon Stewart jumped up and down and waved big pom poms, in blog post form. The only thing keeping everyone from high-fiving Jon Stewart harder in the blogosphere was that one hand was fully engaged in patting themselves on the back.

But then you think about Hannity's smugness: "I want to thank you, and all your writers, for watching our show." Hannity probably will get a ratings boost from all this! And you think about how Comedy Central is owned by Viacom, which is a massive corporation that not only depends on and reproduces the economic inequity of American capitalism but is also directly responsible for giving Carlos Mencia his own comedy program. (CREATIVE UNDERCLASS RAGE ALERT) And since Jon Stewart probably got a ratings boost, too, Viacom will now have more money to control the world and create more shows starring Carlos Mencia.

And you begin to suspect, if you are paranoid and have a half-assed Sociology degree like me, that Jon Stewart's trick isn't actually being on "our side," but keeping up appearances. It's like the liberal What's the Matter with Kansas: After recording his show, where he earns big claps for calling bankers "assholes," he gets in his Prius and drives around the corner, where Sean Hannity is waiting—beaming and freshly scrubbed—to take him in his stretch Hummer to his mansion, where together they drink Old Fashioned's while watching an enormous bank of television screens which display live readouts of their ratings and their bank accounts, and everything is way up.

(Oh, also, Jon Stewart likes Freakonomics.)

According to Dylan Stableford: "A rep for Fox says that Hannity will address the issue on his show tonight."

Seriously, what will he say? The video evidence is obvious, and Hannity is heard babbling about how it is "Thursday" over footage from a Saturday in September, thus making some sort of "we didn't intend to deceive we just used rally file footage" argument a nonstarter.

But, you know, this is Sean Hannity, who does not care about "the truth" or "honesty" or "not booking insane antisemites on the show and not mentioning that they are insane antisemites," so who cares what he will say.

It will probably just be something like "the Jews sneaked in that other footage and tricked me into airing it, because I, Sean Hannity, am an antisemite who hates the Jews."

When the news broke that TMZ had a Carrie Prejean sex tape, but was making the magnanimous editorial decision not to air the "racy" video, the only possible explanations were either

• 1. The sex tape did not really exist.
• 2. The sex tape depicted an act so inhumanly depraved and unimaginably lewd that viewing it would turn you into a stone.
• 3. The act depicted in the sex tape was perfectly normal as far as amateur porn goes, but some stringent legal matter involving the creation and/or acquisition of the tape (say, the lead actress' age) had TMZ's hands tied.

Turns out it was the third. Hannity—who wrote the foreword to Prejean's new memoir, which will either sell far worse or far better than anticipated—asks about the sex tape first, and Prejean repeats several times that she was "all by myself," filming a sexy masturbatory gift for her boyfriend at a disconcertingly young age. It was "the biggest mistake of my life." The former Miss California explains that she is taking responsibility for her actions, and that she learned an important lesson from the debacle:

I've learned a lot about people and what they'll do to make extra money.

Murdoch and his Fox News Channel monsters like Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly love to frame their fight with Olbermann and his network MSNBC as petty personal bickering. Of course they do; that creates a false equivalency between the two sides. Here's what Murdoch said on a conference call for Fox parent News Corp. the other day, according to the New York Times' Brian Stelter:

Mr. Murdoch pointed a finger at MSNBC, saying "we did not start this abuse." But he said the fighting became "personal" and "finally we had to allow people to retaliate... The moment they stop, we'll stop... We don't believe in it. We don't think it's good business."

So, let's review this supposedly "personal" fighting.

Olbermann has:

• Built a profitable career on taunting Fox News for various falsehoods spread by the right-leaning cable network, in statements made by Fox News staffers on actual television broadcasts;
• Sometimes, in the course of doing this, labeled people "The Worst Person in the World" on his show.

Fox and its corporate siblings have, as part of this feud:

• Suddenly accused the CEO of MSNBC parent GE of being personally at fault for the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq, since GE sold medical equipment to Iran (legally), and Iran later supplied Iraqi insurgents;
• Ambushed said CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, for an interview over this invented issue, in Fox's infamous, stalkery manner;
• Ran stale and obviously retaliatory gossip stories that Olbermann mistreats his colleagues and might leave his network;
• Gossiped that Olbermann disrespected his dead colleague's funeral;
• Wrote that people in gyms throughout New York City have complained that "TVs tuned to... Keith Olbemrann" are as disgusting as "pooping in the pool" and "sex in the showers."

Having responded to a debate about the quality of its television news broadcast with trumped up and/or utterly petty unrelated personal assertions, Fox News is now trying to make the narrative about how the whole fight is about petty personal bickering by TV anchors with overgrown egos. And it's actually succeeding, on days when said anchors don't carefully document, with pictures, that they have no personal beef. It doesn't help Olbermann's case that he does in fact, have a hugely overgrown ego, regularly put on display. So he might just end up getting muzzled by his GE overlords, for the terrible "personal" fight he started.

Why, it's this Lou Dobbs fellow, a famous host on the CNN network!

Kevin Jennings holds a Bush administration-created post overseeing a Reagan administration-created department dedicated to keeping schools safe. This makes him one of Obama's unconstitutional Czars. Whereas Reagan wanted to keep them safe from drugs and Bush wanted to keep them safe from, uh, terror or something, Obama's hire would like to keep them safe from harassment and bullying. Also—did we mention?—he's a gay.

Noted execrable piece of shit Dobbs is not even creative enough to come up with his own smears. The immigration hysteria he stoked for a brief period of attention has died down, so he's reduced to borrowing Sean Heannity's crusade, which was itself stolen from Beck.

Here is the case against Jennings, again:

• He is a gay.
• He got mad at God, once, because he was a gay teenager.
• He got stoned.
• He is a gay.
• He thinks gay kids—and kids who aren't gay but who are called gay slurs—should not be beaten, murdered, or driven to suicide.
• He tries to educate kids on the importance of not abusing one another.
• He is a gay.
• This one time this troubled, suicidal, closeted teenager told him he met an older man and maybe had sex with him and Jennings sympathized with him and then said "I hope you know to use a condom."

It is that last story, of a troubled student confiding in a sympathetic teacher and receiving sensible and important advice that allowed that problem student to grow into a satisfied and happy adult, that has made right-wingers apoplectic. In order to make their rage at that successful show of liberal compassion sound less like hysterical homophobia, they have been saying that Jennings "failed to report" "statutory rape." Even though Jennings never explicitly said the kid had had sex with anyone yet and also, much more importantly, the kid was sixteen years old, which is the age of consent in Massachusetts.

Does that seem like a problem? That they can't spin this into a horrible act because no crime was committed? So in fact they're just mad that Jennings didn't destroy this kid's life by telling his parents or something about the kid's gross gay sex with a gross old gay guy? Here's what you do: you repeatedly and shamelessly lie, even when the reporters on your own network correct your lying with "reporting."

On October 2, Lou Dobbs repeated the "statutory rape" thing. He was corrected by Joe Conason. And if he watched his own network he would've seen Jessica Yellin correcting Fox's reports the same day!

Which means, of course, that yesterday Dobbs repeated a thing he knew to be untrue because Gay Immigrants Are Going to Turn Your Children Into Well-Dressed Mexicans.

Jennings once lived life as a closeted school teacher. And, at the time — 1988 — a student told Jennings that he had consensual sex with an "older man" in a public bathroom. Jennings told the student to use a condom and later wrote in his book, that the student "left my office with a smile on his face that I would see every time I saw him on the campus for the next two years, until he graduated."

Now, perhaps inspired by all the hoopla over Roman Polanski's arrest, the right's throwing it all back in Jennings' face. The Washington Times editorialized this week:

In this one case in which Mr. Jennings had a real chance to protect a young boy from a sexual predator, he not only failed to do what the law required but actually encouraged the relationship.
...
His job in the Obama administration is to ensure student safety, and this scandal directly calls into question his ability to perform that job. Mr. Jennings and Obama administration officials refuse to answer any questions about this newly discovered evidence. A lot of Americans want answers about this guy and how he was approved for a job in the White House.

The paper also claims that Jennings "has made extremely radical statements promoting homosexuality in schools," an allusion to Jennings work as the founder of Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, which tries to teach America's little punks that gay folk and straight folk are the same. How radical.

Sensing backlash on the horizon, Jennings released a statement today expressing his regret over the situation:

Twenty one years later I can see how I should have handled this situation differently. I should have asked for more information and consulted legal or medical authorities. Teachers back then had little training or guidance about this kind of thing. All teachers should have a basic level of preparedness. I would like to see the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools play a bigger role in helping to prepare teachers.

As we all know, though, White House critics are not that easily deterred. Sean Hannity tonight used his show to claim that Jennings "covered up a statutory rape" and called for him to be fired:

Now, as The Washington Times said, 'At the very least, statutory rape occurred,' and he didn't report it. Now he's saying that he made a mistake, only because it's been reported on. My question is, where's the vetting process? Why was he even put in this position?

Duh! Because Obama's a socialist who wants to destroy this once-great nation by working with anarchists and fags and all sorts of other bad people. Why do people even have to ask?

But, seriously, if all these people are so concerned about the nation's youth, focus your energies on examining why a gay kid would feel the only sexual outlet he can find comes from anonymous sex in a bathroom. Demonizing Jennings — and his gayness — will only teach younger readers and viewers that same-sex loving's nothing but trouble.

Fox News wants to make out with Barack Obama. Get off the internet if you're gonna keep hitting the white wine, Kilmeade!

Update: Oh, it was a fake Twitter account to begin with.

Hedrick gained a bit of notoriety after yelling at Congressman Brian Baird for describing the protesters as the aforementioned "brown shirts." He then reminded everyone about how the Nazis took control of Germany's industries — just like the Democrats!

Well, it didn't take too long for Fox News to bring him on, and tonight, while talking with Hannity, Hedrick used the opportunity to go all out and suggest that politicians "better be careful about that conversation because they might find that the swastika is on their own arm."

Because that's how it happens: one day you just wake up with a swastika. Didn't you read The Wave? Where's Barney Frank when you need him?

Competing for the crown were three Gawker favorites—Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs and, of course, Glenn Beck. As you can probably imagine, this was indeed a contest for the ages, but alas, only one Douche King was left standing in the end. Long live the Douche King.

Well, he did have a second teleprompter to fall back on just in case, so the seance involving Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin that probably made the thing fall and break failed after all! Regardless, Jake Tapper, a man who knows Drudge link bait when he sees it, reports:

Midway through his speech on urban and metropolitan policy in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building this afternoon, one of his two small glass prompters came crashing down, hitting the wood floor and crashing in many pieces. It made quite a ruckus.

"Oh, goodness," a startled President Obama said. "Sorry about that, guys."

He then proceeded on with his remarks, "To pull our economy back from the brink, including the largest and most sweeping economic recovery plan in our nation's history…"

For the rest of the speech the president relied on the one remaining teleprompter, to his right, and notes on his podium to finish his speech.

Shards of glass remained near the president's feet for the duration of his speech.

And here's video of the incident from CNN:

How does he, this man, Obama, do it? He must be the Antichrist! It's the only plausible explanation at this point.

If a teleprompter falls in the White House does it make a sound? [Jake Tapper/ABC]
Video via YouTube

Writes Graham:

Rumsfeld has ascribed much of the negative perception of him and the Bush administration to distorted media coverage. "The intellectual dishonesty on the part of the press is serious," he asserted. He groused about "a strong incentive to be negative and dramatic" that had infused much of the coverage. "It's a formula that works. It gets Pulitzers; it gets promotions; it gets name identification on the front page above the fold."

Part of the formula, Rumsfeld added, involved pillorying him along with Bush and Cheney but sparing Powell and Rice. As an example, he noted accusations that Bush and Cheney had lied about Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction in making the case for the invasion of Iraq. "They never say Colin Powell lied," Rumsfeld asserted. "They don't say Condi lied."

Graham also notes that Rumsfeld was so eager to prove that he wasn't the ass everyone thinks he is, that he showed off all sorts of letters from people telling him how great he was, also noting how people treated him like a rock star when he goes out in public.

Rumsfeld wanted to be sure I saw the many letters of praise and kind words he had received following the announcement of his resignation. He had sorted the letters according to source - members of Congress, foreign dignitaries, U.S. military personnel, former associates, friends - and filed them in large, three-ring binders. The correspondence noted Rumsfeld's contributions to the war on terrorism, commended him for his drive to transform the U.S. military, and expressed thanks for his public service.

Such letters seemed to give Rumsfeld some solace amid media commentary that tended to focus on all that had gone wrong - the mistakes made in the Iraq War, the difficult relations with the military chiefs, the tensions with Congress, the quarrels with other NSC members. As low as his popularity was when he left office - Gallup/Harris polls showed him at 34% - Rumsfeld still found that when he dined out at a restaurant or walked along a street, people approached him eager to shake his hand.

Unfortunately, Graham doesn't provide any names of people who wrote letters commending Rumsfeld, but we guess that among them were the names Limbaugh, Bachmann, Cheney and Hannity. Too easy, right?

Donald Rumsfeld in Repose [Time]

Yes, Sarah tried to warn you America, but you all refused to listen to her, probably because you didn't understand what the hell kind of jibberish was coming out of her mouth, but still, you didn't listen. Communist China is taking over America RIGHT NOW, just as Barack Hussein Allah Lucifer Obama planned all along, which SARAH TRIED TO WARN YOU ABOUT, but of course, you were too busy shopping at the Gap and eating Hot Pockets while watching The Biggest Loser and whatnot, and you just didn't get the message.

Yes, just stop and take a look around yourselves and the horrible, wretched, pathetic lives you find yourselves currently mired in and you'll see how truly awful things are in this country, much worse than when Bush was president you see, and 10,000,000 times worse than if Sarah and the mean old man with the funny arms had been named King and Queen of America. As Sarah emphatically points out in the interview, "We're borrowing from China!!!" If we didn't know any better, we'd swear that Sarah is completely oblivious to the fact that we've been doing this for years, and of course Hannity doesn't raise a finger to point that out either, but whatever, it's probably just an oversight on both of their parts. Either way, you should probably get online and order your Rosetta Stone Chinese software. We suppose the only question is whether you should learn Mandarin or Cantonese? Better learn them both just to be safe.

Finally, regarding Sean Hannity's wooded interview with Sarah Palin, we think that this exchange pretty much sums the whole thing up rather well.

Sarah: "Our country could evolve into something we do not even recognize..."

Sean: "Socialism?"

Sarah: "Well, that's where we are headed."

Yep, that about sums it all up perfectly. Consider yourselves warned.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Sean Hannity Interviews Sarah Palin [Fox News and YouTube]

Hannity has a terribly newsworthy interview with the always-reclusive Queen of the Frontier. And Mr. Drudge has a scintillating excerpt! Here are the probing questions our man Hannity asked:

HANNITY: What do you make of – look at the state of the economy now...
HANNITY: You know but it goes back - It does go back a little to the campaign. I mean, ‘spread the wealth, patriotic duty…'
HANNITY: Well, is that how you feel?
HANNITY: Socialism?

You can probably just make up all the answers yourself, and make more sense and be less enraging than Palin. The 2012 campaign is coming along nicely!

It's a fine bit of economic analysis on Limbaugh's part: The ad recession is killing the news media, so they all need loans from banks, and since Obama runs the banks (he doesn't!), he will wield that influence to bail media companies out and bring them all to heel.

Which Obama would absolutely do, because he's getting such shitty coverage these days.

We suppose it'd be easy to mock and ridicule "Mancow" here, as he does seem to be an extraordinarily massive tool, not even taking into consideration that he was one of the main guys spreading the "Obama is a closet Muslim" rumors during the election, but there's something truly admirable in a) being sufficiently curious and willing to undergo the procedure personally to truly see what it was like to be on the receiving end of a waterboarding, and b) appearing on the air with arguably the most unabashedly liberal host on television to profess how horribly wrong he'd been previously. So yeah, despite being a tool, "Mancow" deserves a tip of the cap, as does Olbermann for donating $10,000 to a support group for veterans in return for Muller going through with the waterboarding and then appearing on his show to discuss it.

During his appearance Muller said that his good friend Sean Hannity called him recently to hold fast to his belief that waterboarding is "still not torture," despite Muller's argument that it was "absolutely torture" and that he "would have confessed to anything to make it stop." He added, "I was willing to prove, and ready to prove, that this was a joke, and I was wrong. It was horrific. It was instantaneous. And look, I felt the effects for two days."

Again, we admire Muller for being a man and doing what he did, something his buddy Hannity promised to do a few weeks back but has yet to follow through on. And sadly we doubt he ever will.

What sparked Hannity's righteous ire was a recent front page story in the Times on the rise of atheism (Bill Maher noticed it!), so he invited noted liberal media bias chronicler Bernard Goldberg (A New York Times bestselling author notes Hannity, the irony completely lost on him) on as his guest. Goldberg, to his credit, called the Times piece a "perfectly legitimate journalism story," but then turned around and blasted the them for putting it on the front page of the paper, claiming that the only reason they did it is because atheism is "hip in places like Manhattan."

Yes, the ole "run a front page story about atheism to be cool at cocktail parties" trick. That one works every time. Look, New York Times editors needs to get laid too, okay Bernie? Geez!

Thanks to the lovely and gracious Soup for alerting us to the clip.

Obama didn't want good-old-fashioned American ketchup. No, Mr. "Common Man" over here wanted his hamburger with "spicy mustard"—or, horror of horrors, "dijon." Dijon! Real Americans don't like things that actually make things taste like things, Princess OBambi!

Then Sean Hannity plays the old "Grey Poupon" commercial, as if having seen that commercial 20 years ago is the only reason an adult man who lives in Chicago (where ketchup is not considered an acceptable condiment for a hot dog, btw, Mr. Hannity) would want "spicy mustard." Then he literally says this: "I hope you enjoyed that fancy burger, Mr. President."

If Barack Obama had actually said "Grey Poupon" instead of just asking for any mustard with a bit of kick to it we would admit that that would be kind of tone-deaf and funny, but no. The man just wanted some spicy mustard for his goddamn burnt hamburger, Sean. AT LONG LAST, SIR, HAVE YOU NO DECENCY?

Actually, at this point, doesn't Hannity's grasping populism just seem kinda quaint? He's doing his best to fear-monger and rabble-rouse, but this is just pathetic. Hell, on the same network you've got Glenn Beck weeping about how the Illuminati controls the Federal Reserve or whatever the fuck he's on about these days.

Anyway after this commercial happened, in like 1993 or something, it is no longer appropriate to consider "dijon" a high-faluntin' condiment.

Hannity almost certainly has no idea who Kardashian is. He told her some girls look up to her because, unlike Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, Kardashian doesn't drink. Then he asked her about her Playboy spread in a concerned, fatherly way: "Why Playboy? That's the only thing I didn't understand in your bio. That didn't make sense to me."

So that must mean the part of her bio where she taped herself having dirty naked sex with a man [NSFW], and the tape was fairly well-produced and well-lit—almost professionally so!—and then the tape was sold for $1 million? That part made perfect sense to you, Sean. Sean Hannity's America is sounding like a better place to live every day.