You've got to love the consistency of message. Even when Roger Ailes complains about "selfish complaining" and "petty whining" at his cable network, Fox News, the Murdoch henchman manages to work in a patriotic theme. From a memo leaked to TV Newser: "We make a decent living. Many of us are quite comfortable. Some of us are famous. We work for a great company. We contribute to the most exciting profession in the world and we live in America. If that is not enough, you should note that there are no locks on the outside of the doors keeping us here."

Shep Smith's explosion at Naomi Wolf yesterday was, in retrospect, inevitable. There was the pressure of a big-league $7 million contract with Fox News. There was his strange desire to "perform" for Fox News chief Roger Ailes "in the way a kid wants to perform for his dad." There was the inevitable bloodlust that comes from not having violently attacked anyone for seven years. And there was a sense that Shep had something bottled up inside, something he was dying to let out. His victim, liberal author Wolf, was selected after she had the audacity to insult John Kerry and Bill Clinton, an act that never goes unpunished at Fox. In the terrible aftermath, we are left only to ponder Shepard's plaintive wail, "Don't you Fox on me, ever!" Be Shep's Thursday morning quarterback, after the jump.

A young woman wept hysterical Tears of Change tonight during the endless speech of ecstasy by Barack Obama, the President of North Dakota, Utah and the Yukon Territory. Even crusty old Brit Hume at Fox News was touched, in the place where his soul used to be, and where he thought there was no hope. He saw, for the first time in forever, someone fervently "enchanted with" and "rhapsodic about" an American politician. Either that or a chance to make idealistic Democrats look crazy and emotional. Either way, it's true; the lady idolized Obama and really was losing her shit. After the jump, the footage as captured and enhanced by Gawker video bot Richard Blakeley .

As Super Tuesday drags to a middle, it's worthwhile to look at the rising and occasionally falling fortunes of New York Senator Hillary Clinton, our next, cryingest president, among our nation's most unfortunately influential lunatic opinion-makers.

"Hollywood director Robert Greenwald" and the Daily News's Rush & Molloy made Bill O'Reilly very sad when they send some homeless vets over to Fox News's New York headquarters to deliver a petition to Bill O'Reilly about how they actually do exist. O'Reilly's ambush producer exclusively revealed that most of the picketing homeless vets don't even watch Fox. Then Bill played a clip from Xanadu. A Rush & Molloy stringer was also sort of abused, amusingly. Clip after the jump!

Back when John Edwards was running for president of America's Liberal White Men, he'd mention, at every opportunity, that there are 200,000 homeless veterans across our glorious nation. Hearing this upset Bill O'Reilly, who decided then that such a thing is impossible. Bill first insisted that there was no such thing as a homeless vet, then eventually ceded that there might be some, but probably not that many. He's right! There are only 196,000 homeless vets. Some of them protested outside Fox's headquarters yesterday, with the intention of providing Bill with a petition. Press coverage of the protest was minimal, though an O'Reilly producer showed up. The producer, Jesse Watters, is O'Reilly's official "ambush" man, and probably the smarmiest fuck on the planet. According to Radar, he spent a great deal of time accusing vets of, uh, calling our troops "baby-killers." The Culture War no longer even follows its own internal logic, does it? Anyway—there's video from the organizers. It's after the jump. [NYDN, Radar]

So—Karl Rove is going to be a Fox News contributer! What an exciting and unexpected move. We hope it goes well for them! It probably won't, though. Because Karl Rove, that Machiavellian Boy Genius, is terrible on-air and also not even particularly adept at analyzing politics. He's a great smear campaigner, sure! But he's not even Lee Atwater's equal in that dubious regard. The man micromanaged one of the least popular presidencies of the last hundred years, parlayed untold goodwill and love into worldwide scorn, and also lost two of Bush's most important elections. Namely the 2006 midterms and, oh right, Bush's initial election itself. The only people who still think Karl Rove is some sort of brilliant political mind are semi-literate Kos commenters. And Roger Ailes, apparently. Even Keith Olbermann thinks Karl is only the third worst person in the world! See for yourself, after the jump.

Oh, well, why the hell not. Karl Rove is the newest contributor at Fox News, according to Drudge, who says the former Bush advisor will be "likely used throughout Super Tuesday coverage." We can't wait for his dispassionate and not at all demonic insights.

Eric Boehlert predicts that Fox News is basically fucked. While the liberal Media Matters senior fellow's job is to criticize and decry Fox News, that network's continued relevence will ensure that he keeps that job. So it is presumably with both glee and secret dismay that Boehlert presents a portrait of an epochal force in news presentation on its sad decline.

Heavens knows why, but Heath Ledger's impostor dad bet that local TV journalists (from Fox no less) would be as gullible as Scientologst movie stars, and called Fox 5 New York to "dispel... myths and rumors" by saying "mistakes happen," and explaining Ledger would never take his own life. Then he asked for the phone number of Ledger's ex-girlfriend, Naomi Watts (left). Clever, this guy. There's MP3 audio of some of the call. [TMZ]

Judith Regan, the maverick publisher fired from Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation after she pressed ahead with a book by O.J. Simpson, has settled with her former employer. Regan is not an anti-Semite; Murdoch henchman, Roger Ailes, did not pressure her to keep quiet about her former lover, dodgy Giuliani aide Bernie Kerik; and O.J. is not guilty. Whatever. The only question: how much did Rupert Murdoch pay to make the increasingly deranged Regan Books founder shut up? Answer: not as much as she would would have received before the primaries began. Rudy Giuliani's campaign is faltering and, with it, Regan's leverage. It's moot whether Fox News creator and former Nixon aide, Ailes, pressured Regan to save the Giuliani's presidential bid. It's now beyond saving. Update: A newspaper source says Regan's settlement is $25m. Pah, nothing!

Memo to John Gibson, the Fox News shockjock who found so much humor in Heath Ledger's death. Yes, you might have had some mildly homophobic fun with the Brokeback Mountain star's famous line in the gay cowboy movie, "I wish I knew how to quit you." Unwise to continue with the line after Ledger died, or "quit" life, as you joked. And even more idiotic to bluster so unrepentantly, in this more recent clip, when the gays are coming after you with their tire-irons. "I'm not giving that up," Gibson says of his Brokeback banter. Let him sacrifice something else instead, like his job.

You know what really cracks up Fox News host John Gibson? The untimely death of Heath Ledger! The one thing John Gibson knows about Heath Ledger is that Heath Ledger kissed a boy in a gay movie for gay gays, and therefore, he was probably a total gay himself, in real life. Therefore, his death is hilarious! On his radio program the other day, the hero journalist mocked Ledger's death something like half a dozen times, opening his show with a hilarious quip about Ledger quitting us and wondering if perhaps the actor killed himself after witnessing the poor performace of John Edwards in the last presidential debate. It's funny 'cause the authorities no longer suspect suicide! Even the guests joined in, with funnyman Tom Sullivan calling him "Keith Bledger" and the lady cohost whose name we didn't catch wondering, mockingly, if Keith was perhaps a "deep thinker." Can you believe that wacky morning zoo crew went there? They're saying what we're not really thinking, because what the fuck? Listen and sputter! [Think Progress, MSNBC, Previously]

People, use the bcc field of an email window so recipients can't see everybody else's address. Unless, like Susan Estrich, one of Fox News' token liberal commentators, you need to display connections. She just sent out a personal press release to about 200 friends, TV pundits, celebrities, and neglected to hide their email addresses. Ah, I get it now: this is the old people's version of a showy friends list on Facebook. Sycophantic touch, by the way, putting Roger Ailes, her boss at Fox News, at the top of the list. Does Estrich have any idea of the contempt with which the former Nixon aide regards those crippled liberals he puts up to debate to their death the cable news network's right-wing gladiators?

Because deciding who leads America is a little too boring to take straight or because football is a little too repetitive to take uncut, Fox News has decided to meld its football and political coverage into one large undifferentiated goulash. On February 3rd, FOX anchor (top/vers, we think) Shepard Smith, who looks more and more like a young Frank Sinatra, will kick-off a three-hour broadcast from Arizona all about the Superbowl and how super it is whilst FOX News anchor Bill Hemmer chimes in from New York about Super Tuesday which is February 5th. Roger Ailes is clearly onto something here. We can't wait for their coverage of the Russian presidential elections melded with the Canadian men's curling championship in early March! [NYO]

It's not exactly news that Roger Ailes, News Corporation's brilliant but amoral Goebbels, is vindictive. Kurt Andersen mentioned, almost casually, that the Fox News founder had threatened to trail his 3 and 5-year-old kids in pre-emptive retaliation for an article the New York Magazine columnist was writing. But Dan Cooper, a colleague of Ailes during the early days of Fox News, has had even more lurid encounters with the irascible TV newsman, now posted to a personal blog.

Yesterday, Fox News reported, repeatedly, that former Democratic consultant and current CNN talking head Paul Begala was going to join the Hillary Clinton campaign. He wasn't going to do this thing, but they reported it anyway. Begala emailed his "friend" Major "Square-Jawed" Garrett to correct the story. Garrett promised to take Begala's denial "under advisement." Then continued reporting it, only with a few extra made-up details. Then Hillary won the election and everyone forgot about it except Paul Begala, who angrily wrote a "blog" about it at the HuffPo. Their email exchange, below. [HuffPo]

Major Garrett on Fox at Barack's headquarters is wearing like five of those plastic bracelets. Yellow, green whatever.

The gall of it! An aide to Barack Obama dared get in the way of Fox News' camera on a rope line in New Hampshire. Bill O'Reilly, the cable network's irascible star, was so incensed that he ended up in a shoving match with an aide to the Democratic presidential candidate, stopped only when the Secret Service told the right-wing news anchor to restrain himself. Bill O'Reilly's used to being treated with more respect, at least by the current administration. Welcome to life on the wrong side of the rope line! (After the jump, O'Reilly spins the incident on Fox News.)

An email sent to one News Corp.-adjacent building on Sixth Avenue says that the FDNY is reporting a possible reaction of "approximately 30 gallons of hazardous chemicals" as the cause of this morning's 10:39 a.m. explosion at the News Corp. building. There aren't any offices on the floors affected, which house the heating, cooling and utilities systems for the building. Fox News (whose offices are in the basement, insert satanic crack here), just wants everyone to know that "The explosion on the 45th floor has not interrupted the Fox News channel's broadcast," according to its website. New York Post offices are on the 10th floor. According to WNBC, a spokesperson for the FDNY says "We have some sort of reaction between two chemicals that caused a slight explosion." No word on which chemicals might be the culprits here, but um... 30 gallons of hazardous chemicals? Seriously? So far, the cops have closed "48th Street from 7th Avenue to Broadway and 6th Avenue from W. 47th St."