The Muppets are liberal. No, they are communists. This, according to the Fox Business Network's Eric Bolling, who went on a spiel last month decrying the latest Muppet film's choice of villain — a greedy Texas oilman, a common stock villain in Hollywood motion pictures. And now the Muppets have publicly acknowledged their sharp commie biases, by making a joke about how terrible a television channel Fox News is.

So a Fox Business Network reporter went to say "hi" to the protester commies filling the Wisconsin State Capitol today, and you will not believe what happened! The uncivil crowd just chanted "Fox Lies! Fox Lies!" over and over. Why so rude? They must have a problem with the commission of brilliant investigative journalism. Who knows what goes on in the minds of these union thugs, really.

Doomed Sen. Joe Lieberman, after briefly praising CNN in a Don Imus interview today, quickly added, "But of course, really, Fox Business is my favorite and Fox generally, anything Rupert Murdoch owns." Jesus, even Murdoch doesn't like everything he owns.

During a Fox Business Network debate over the Postal Service's relevance last night, former New York Sen. Al D'Amato snapped at GOP strategist Jack Burkman, calling him a "nasty racist" for spreading "racist bullshit" about Postal Service workers. Completely hilarious.

What was on Fox Business when the biggest finance story in months—the civil lawsuit filed against Goldman Sachs by the SEC—broke this morning? An interview with Tila Tequila on "how she turned her fame into a business." [BI]

The Wall Street Journal uses an astounding 30 to 60 staffers to produce an underwhelming webcast knockoff of CNBC, says Business Insider. (Update: WSJ says closer to 10.) That would help explain the rumors that the newspaper is hemorrhaging money.

The Wall Street Journal's managing editor Robert Thomson is close to News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch, personally and professionally. But that doesn't mean the Aussie is above somehow roughhouse ribbing of his corporate siblings.

In your censorious Tuesday media column: A Russian journalist dies after an attack, Fox Business Network hires only the best financial experts, dumb high school censorship, and newspapers all dying as usual.

Here's Carol Bartz on Fox Business Network, explaining what sets Yahoo apart from Google. For one, the internet company is not all fancy sciencepants and "algothorithic" or "algomorthmic" or whatever. Indeed, it doesn't even know that word.

Nobody watches Fox Business Network, but that doesn't stop them from landing the best business journalists in the game. Like Liz Claman, who split from CNBC because they used too many fancy "business" words:

Fox Business Network is so happy for this whole Wall Street meltdown thing. Why just recently they finally got an audience that's actually big enough to measure! But even if you agree with many economic experts that Fox Business Network is the financial news equivalent of The Learning Annex, you have to admire their plucky use of ads to snipe at CNBC. They have a new one about how wrong Jim Cramer has been about everything involving money! Which is factually true. Here it is:

Fox Business Network ran ads in the Times and Wall Street Journal this week mocking rival CNBC for showing informercials during a heated weekend in the middle of the Wall Street meltdown. Fox concluded: "We own this story." Not quite. Financial panic did grow the year-old cable network's tiny audience to the point where it could be rated by Nielsen for the first time. But the results won't add any swagger to the step of Fox News chief Roger Ailes: Fox Business peaked at about 81,000 average viewers. During the same period, when Congress voted on the banking bailout Monday, CNBC averaged nearly 900,000 viewers, the Times reported this morning. It appears Fox will need to sweat it through many more weekend shifts to catch up — and pray for a bit more panic, for good measure.

John Layfield was not genetically engineered to be a talking head on Fox Business Network, but he might as well have been. He's a 6-foot-6 former professional wrestler who does some sort of investment work, the right combination of showmanship and plausible expertise for the attention-hungry network, whose gimmicks have included a segment on semen detectors and a failed ambush interview. Layfield got written up in the Times this morning for yet another sideline, a supposed "sexual endurance drink" called "Mamajuana," a non-alcoholic version of a Dominican rum-and-herb concoction. A doctor from NYU basically said the drink is useless, but Fox Business anchor Neil Cavuto is very interested in trying some:

Rupert Murdoch got all excited about his new business channel, Fox Business Network, which was totally going to crush CNBC after launching last Feruary. Murdoch goosed ratings by putting a Penthouse centerfold and also internet seductress Rachel Marsden on air, and within four months shared a very special Valentine's day semen story with viewers. But the doddering old media mogul, who has received so much worshipful praise for his well-timed acquisition of social networking website MySpace, forgot to register FoxBusinessNetwork.com before announcing the station to the world, and now a court just ruled he will never ever get the domain name back from a cybersquatter. Luckily, someone who knows something about the internet convinced the old bastard to shell out the $15 to reserve FoxBusiness.com, so expect the Fox Business Network to lose the "Network" part of its name in a hurry, or change its title to clownpenis.fart, the domain name used by a slow-to-the-Web bank in a 1999 Saturday Night Live commercial. Video of the SNL commercial after the jump.

Welcome to the club, Mike. Fox Business Network invited TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington onto its Happy Hour show yesterday. Arrington had been led to believe the topic would be his site's presidential primary endorsements, for which he interviewed the candidates and asked for positions on 10 tech-centric issues. Instead, host Cody Willard asked Arrington about Google versus Yahoo. This happens every election cycle: People who normally talk about tech switch gears and start making big political statements. The mainstream public ignores them. Might as well ask Barack Obama to blog about Apache server configuration.

The New York Times Co., News Corp, and Time Warner all saw their stocks fall to 52-week lows. The one winner amongst the pall? Lightly viewed upstart Fox Business Network, the only business channel politically incorrect enough to make staffers work on Martin Luther King Day, as Europe's stockmarkets careened. While, Bloomberg TV only had a brief live period Monday morning, and CNBC was on taped programming all day, Fox Biz was covering the crash live from the overseas markets. Dr. King did always believe in the redemptive power of work.

'Extra' host Mark McGrath has said that 27-year-old Fox Business Network anchor Jenna Lee "puts the babe in business news." But it seems that even she's not babe enough to score viewers, let alone a date. Fox's fledgling biz network is off to a meager start with an average of 6,000 weekday viewers in its first two months. Maybe Jenna's requirements for would-be suitors are just too stringent! "My perfect man has to be wicked smart," she tells 'Extra'. "A good sense of humor doesn't hurt, but at the end of the day you want a smart man." Presumably you wouldn't mind if he were also a well-educated 18-35-year-old influencer with a high household income and a weakness for luxury goods? Ladies, next time one of you FBN pinup-newswomen talks to Sugar Ray about what you're looking for in an audience, be more specific!

Early ratings for Rupert Murdoch's Fox Business Network have materialized, and the news isn't pretty. According to Nielsen Media Research, about 6,300 households on any given weekday are tuning in. Compare that to the 283,000 watching rival network CNBC. The number is so low you won't hear it officially from Nielsen researchers, because it doesn't meet their minimum standards for reporting. While it's still early going and Fox only reaches about 30 million households compared to CNBC's 90 million homes, the numbers aren't pretty.

If we're going to make fun of CNBC's inability to spell, we should probably poke fun at Fox Business News as well. In a screenshot from earlier today, the Dow Jones Inustrial Average must be an innovation from News Corp. TVNewser has an interesting quote from an ex-CNBCer: