Yes, I know, there is practically nothing that a Fox News person can say or do that's vile enough to cost them their job. Bill O'Reilly is still batting cleanup even after being exposed as a creepy sexual harasser, and Glenn Beck just keeps on catering to the right wing's most paranoid and dangerous elements while shedding advertisers like a leaky centrifuge. But I think Shep Smith has really gone beyond the pale here:

The number 65 intrigues me. If the Democrats can pick off just one Republican, then Nelson and his Magical Bipartisan Threshold become irrelevant... unless he has at least four friends in the Democratic caucus who will go along with his noble Broderian crusade. It would explain his choice of such an arbitrary-sounding number - it's actually defined by the size of his secret anti-reform coalition.

After months of trying to entice Republicans with increasingly awful compromises, one of the three Democrats involved has finally recognized that maybe, just maybe, the Republicans aren't negotiating in good faith, and will not vote for any bill that doesn't give the healthcare lobbyists everything they want and nothing they don't.

The Republican position in a nutshell: Most of them know there's a crisis, and they just don't care. It doesn't matter what's best for the country, only what's best for the Republican Party, their wealthy friends, and their corporate donors. It doesn't matter if 20,000 people die every year, as long as the victims' families are so pissed off that they start voting Republican.

Keeping Joe in the caucus, letting him keep his seniority and committee memberships: Magnanimous.

Letting Joe keep the chairmanship of a pivotal oversight committee where he's done absolutely nothing to hold the Bush administration accountable on Katrina or anything else; making a mockery of party discipline by not imposing any consequences at all for actively slandering and campaigning against Democrats: Foolish.