Since Tuesday, Santorum’s polling numbers jumped up 6 points. On Tuesday he was at 16 percent and now he’s at 22 percent. Over the same time period, Mitt Romney’s and Gingrich’s numbers have dropped. Romney went from 37 percent to 34 percent, Gingrich has gone from 22 percent to just 18 percent, pushing him down to third place.

We can talk about official malfeasance or conservative demonization but a lot of this has to do with the fact that the traditional media, the sources where most people get their news, don’t understand pretty much anything about housing. I mean not even the most basic stuff.

For most of its history America has had a two party political system. It now appears we also have a two realities system, illustrated by our perceptions and trust of Fox News versus other major media. Democrats and Independents tend to trust versions of the facts other than those presented by Fox News; Republicans tend to trust only Fox News’ version.

The information coming out of Fox News is often misleading or clearly incorrect. People ask me, “Spocko, is there anything we can do about this? Can’t the FCC do anything? What about the FTC and truth in advertising laws?”

How can Fox employees get away with calling themselves journalists when they are acting more like lobbyists or employees of a PR firm?

Are there every any negative consequences for people who intentionally lie while calling themselves journalists?

I wonder if O’Reilly and his foodie friend would be as brave as this young lad.

Friday, as the News Corp. Board of Directors held their annual shareholders meeting, close to two hundred demonstrators from Good Jobs LA, Brave New Foundation, NABET-CWA, Media and Democracy Coalition, Media Alliance, and Media Action Center joined with Occupy LA, AAVAZ.org, Free Press and Common Cause to protest the media giant’s behavior -including having politicians on their payroll as media commentators and authors, phone hacking and bribery, one-sided reporting, use of faulty statistics, bad governance, and most especially, not acting in the public interest.

Media activist Sue Wilson rallied the crowd when she told them that a local Fox channel in Florida went to court and received a ruling that a news broadcast over our public airwaves does not have to be true.

Tonight the Republican candidates are back at it in Orlando for the Fox News/Google debate. For some reason the shunned former governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson, gets to participate but you won’t find that info in the article touting the debate at Fox News, go figure.

On Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, I was living in Springfield, IL. I had been laid off from my previous employer back at the end of July so my usual routine was to get up, make the coffee, check my email and the various job hunting sites for anything within my skills and career field to apply to, then surf the news sites. That routine stayed pretty much the same, even the week before when I had visited my best friend in Jacksonville, FL for a week, having returned to Springfield on Saturday, September 8.

It was a sunny morning and my then feline companion had joined me at the computer when I saw the first news article about a plane hitting the World Trade Center.

My stepfather, Fred Karger was a film composer and musical supervisor at Columbia, MGM, for Elvis Presley’s goofball oeuvres (Harum Scarum, Kissin’ Cousins, Frankie and Johnny, etc.) and later for a series of campy independent films like Riot on Sunset Strip. He’s best known for the theme songs he wrote: From Here to Eternity, Magnificent Obsession, Gidget, Gidget Goes Hawaiian, and for his love life: He dated Marilyn Monroe for a number of years and was married twice to Jane Wyman. And once to my mom. Fred, who died in 1979, was super cool and a great stepfather. Every day I give thanks for having him in my life, for all the amazing people I met through him, and for showing me you can live life by following your creative dreams.

So when the name Fred Karger first popped up in my inbox during the Proposition 8 campaign, I did a huge double take, it’s a pretty unusual name.

It’s been fun watching FOX News twist themselves into a pretzel to exclude gay presidential candidate Fred Karger from the debates they’ve broadcast: they’ve changed their criteria, and then simply ignored them when Karger met the bar even as it was raised. Now FOX has a Federal Election Commission complaint on its hands.