Huff & Puff

Controversial segment in which Dennis Miller goes after Barney Frank while talking with O'Reilly.

The Huffington Post is upset.

Dennis Miller appeared on The O'Reilly Factor tonight (Miller is a frequent guest on Bill O'Reilly's show) and went on a rant regarding what Barack Obama should do to the executives of AIG when he takes office, namely, that Obama "should flatten these punks" and "come down hard on them." After Miller finished his rant, O'Reilly chimed in that Obama's next move should be "to arrest Barney Frank, correct?" Miller replies, "Eh, Barney might want to be arrested."

It seems that Frank, the most prominent openly-gay member of the House of Representatives, is being slurred by Miller for his homosexuality. The reactions of O'Reilly and Miller confirm that Miller's joke was inappropriate, to say the least. Watch and judge for yourself.

O'Reilly Gets Frank

Great theater from Bill O'Reilly yesterday with Barney Frank, and his anger over Barney's attempt to gloss over his statements in July indicating that everything was fine with Freddie and Fannie is justified. But if he'd spent more time talking and less ranting, perhaps he could have pinned Barney down about how he justified the lack of a warning that the two companies were headed for trouble.

Fox #1

Barack made his debut on the "No Spin Zone" last night, taking some more wind out of the sails of those Democrats who want to pretend that it is the National Enquirer of news/talk. O'Reilly does the best political talk show on news TV, and candidates who want to reach out to voters can't ignore the audience.

The New York Times wasn't all that impressed, but admitted that Barack adjusted his normal cautious, slow delivery to match O'Reilly's pace.

Mr. O’Reilly then demanded that his guest admit that he was wrong to oppose the military surge. Mr. Obama didn’t give in; he repeated previous qualifications but did go farther, and less equivocally, than before in acknowledging that the surge had worked. “It’s succeeded beyond our wildest dreams,” he said. Mr. Obama is known for the subtlety and nuance of his answers; Mr. O’Reilly has no patience for either.

Meanwhile, Fox does it again!

Fox News Channel led the way Wednesday, with 9.2 million people watching Palin's speech on the cable channel. It was the third-largest audience in its history, behind only President Bush's speech on Iraq in March 2003 and a Bush-Kerry presidential debate in 2004.

It's easy to understand why the Democrats hate Fox so much when you realize the impact it has.

For each night of the GOP convention so far, Fox's audience has been bigger than any of the other cable or broadcast networks. That duplicates a feat accomplished at the 2004 Republican convention for Fox, the first time a cable network had outdrawn broadcasters for a major news event.

By the way...

The audiences for the Obama and Palin speeches were bigger than the ones this year for the Academy Awards, the finale of "American Idol" or the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing.

Obama O'Reilly

Barack will try to distract from John McCain's acceptance speech Thursday night by appearing, for the first time, on The Factor with Bill O'Reilly. The two parties reached agreement on a detente after a personal meeting between Obama and Fox News Chief Roger Ailes. 

During the sit-down in a Waldorf-Astoria hotel suite in Manhattan that included Rupert Murdoch, the network's owner, Obama expressed concern about the way Fox was covering him. "I just wanted to know if I'm going to get a fair shake from Fox News Channel," Ailes recalled him saying.