Santa is here to deliver coal to the entire news station. (Fox News)

For all their talk about how "confusing" it is for children to see gay characters on television (lest they grow up thinking that was normal), Fox & Friends had no qualms about bringing a very busy Santa Claus all the way down from the North Pole to explain why the liberal media is waging a war against Christmas.

Which just makes you wonder ... who is this shtick for? (Besides Brian Kilmeade, of course.)

Santa transcript:

You know, I never had a problem being Santa Claus, but there was a time a few years back when suddenly I started showing up at Christmas parties and was told that they were having holiday parties. So therefore, they didn’t need a Santa anymore. And it was about that time, that was the time when I think the Surgeon General said Santa should lay off the cookies and start picking up more carrots and broccoli. I heard Santa in Australia said ‘ha, ha, ha,’ so as not to offend certain gals and Santas in England couldn’t have children on their laps anymore.

Wait what? There is more than one Santa? Each country has a Santa? Forgetting everything else, destroying the childhood fantasy that Kris Kringle is a supernatural being who can visit all the good Christian children in the world in one night is actually MORE blasphemous than having an office "holiday party." Because children don't go to holiday parties. They do, however, listen to Santa Claus when he detonates his own myth on-air with Gretchen Carlson.

And you know what, why does Santa care about going to some drunk, depressing office party? It's a week before Christmas, and you are under-employed as it is. ObamaCare is probably the only kind of insurance you can get. So what are you doing on Fox News? Get to work, Santa!

Ms. Banderas sticks with Manhattan.

Tonight we bring you breaking news from 200 Central Park South, where a certain Fox News personality has purchased a two-bedroom, 2.5-bath co-op. Go to live shot: We're standing outside this 35-story tower famous for its wrap-around balconies and views of Central Park, which news correspondent and Fox & Friends First host Julie Banderas will enjoy from her apartment on a high-level floor.

Update: Although the sale only hit city records yesterday, a source tells us that Ms. Banderas purchased the unit some time ago. Additionally, the purchase price listed in the original story was incorrect. We regret the error.

Yes, according to city records, Ms. Banderas has purchased the unit for $2.38 million under her birth/married name, Julie Bidwell Sansome. Unlike some Fox & Friends personalities, Ms. Banderas has indicated with this most recent buy, that she is not quite ready for the suburbs yet. Moreover, she hails from Farmington, Conn., so perhaps her escape from the Nutmeg state is still fresh in Ms. Banderas' mind.

Robert A. M. Stern's book described the building as "a kind of aggressive, self-referential Modernism that had hitherto been largely absent from Manhattan."

The apartment was not listed publicly, but we suppose Ms. Banderas used her investigative skills to suss out the truth—that it was for sale, or that owner Marilyn Carr was willing to sell. Ms. Carr had listed the place for $2.79 million back in 2009, then dropped the price six months later to $2.65 million.

Was $2.65 million a good deal? Apparently, Ms. Banderas didn't think so as she was said to have bargained down the price to $2.38 million. And who wouldn't be won over by that odd news anchor patois—so self-assured and authoritative, anxiety-producing and soothing all at the same time?

We assume that Ms. Banderas will be living in the apartment with her husband of three years and young daughter. There's a large living room with a sizable balcony, great views and huge closets—super important for a woman whose wardrobe is judged by conservatives across the country every morning.

kvelsey@observer.com

Taran Killam as Steve Doocy on 'Saturday Night Live' (NBC)

How good was Eli Manning on Saturday Night Live this weekend? Better than we expected, right? In general, we don't hold up much hope for sports celebrities making it through an entire show without fumbling over the teleprompter while the imminent smell of fear wafts out of our flat screen, and yet Lorne Michaels seems determined to keep bringing them back. (Which reminds us: Charles Barkley, please don't return next season!)

But the younger Manning brother was actually pretty good: what he lacked in verbal dexterity, he made up for in physical comedy. (We loved the video game/Tebowing sketch for this very reason.)

However, it wasn't any of the sketches, or even Tanning Mom on Weekend Update that had us grabbing our remote to rewind again and again...it was the Fox & Friends cold open with Fred Armisen as Rupert Murdoch. Were you able to catch the Trayvon Martin references hiding in the "corrections" part of the credits?

- Sour Patch Kids are a snack food and therefore incapable of pulling a knife on someone

- John Wilkes Booth was not wearing a hooded sweatshirt when he shot President Lincoln, nor were the Lincolns attending a staged reading of The Vagina Monologues

We've compiled screenshots of the entire 'Corrections' portion of the segment as best we could:

Mr. Rivera admitted that the protestors are "sincere," to the complete shock of Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade, but said Brookfield is nonetheless correct in postponing the clean-up because the freezing rain could drive protesters away sooner. He compared those at the protest to the people waiting in line for the new iPhone at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store--or, as he puts it, "basically young people in their mid-twenties on their parents' payroll."

Mr. Rivera said he'd return to cover the protest for his show on Sunday and that Occupy Wall Street "lied" when they said he was driven out of Zuccotti Park. Apparently his show was done filming.

After the smartest man on Wall Street, Jesse LaGreca, made a Fox News producer look stupid, it's not hard to see where the enmity comes from.

Donald Trump has a message for the protesters.

(Disclosure: Donald Trump is the father in law of Jared Kushner, the owner of Observer Media Group)

It took a lot of effort for the hosts of Fox & Friends to go on pretending that last week's Hank William Jr. "Hitler" comment on their show didn't make for an entire Saturday Night Live sketch. Yet somehow they managed (despite Mr. Williams Jr. wrote a whole mean song about them). There are just so many bigger things in the world to worry about, people! Like have you heard about this Occupy Wall Street business? Gretchen Carlson has, because she reads the New York Post, and is now aware of the bizarro drug economy of Zuccotti Park. Very scary stuff.

Here to calm her fears is the soothing baritone of Donald Trump, who has a few choice words for the protesters. Mainly that they should get out of New York (and away from his hotels) and start protesting in Washington D.C., where of course they have been for the past 10 days.

We just hope that despite being on opposite lines of this whole debate, Mr. Trump and Russell Simmons can soon go back to being best friends.

On Sunday morning, Jesse Jackson helped keep the momentum going. While waiting to make a live appearance on Fox & Friends, Mr. Jackson—apparently thinking his microphone was turned off—leaned over to a fellow guest and suggested that he would like to turn Barack Obama into a, um, late-in-life castrato.  

Mr. Jackson has since apologized.

Last night, Bill O’Reilly aired some of the footage on the O’Reilly Factor. And the clip—like other Fox & Friends-related controversies before it—is now spreading rapidly across the Web.

(via The Huffington Post.)

Steve Doocy, Gretchen Carlson and Brian Kilmeade were talking about Barack Obama’s recent characterization of his grandmother on a Philadelphia radio show: She was a “typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, there’s a reaction that’s been bred into our experiences that don’t go away and that sometimes comes out in the wrong way.”

“Can you say ‘typical white person’ if you’re white?” asked Mr. Doocy. Of course not, noted Ms. Carlson. There’s no way that Senator Hillary Clinton could use the phrase “typical black person,” they noted. “So there is a certain double standard in society,” said Ms. Carlson. And also: “I sort of take offense at that line: ‘typical white.’”

Mr. Wallace was getting a little bit annoyed.

“I didn’t think it was fair. I didn’t think it allowed Obama to make his point,” Mr. Wallace later told The Observer in a telephone interview. “I thought it made it sound like he was just engaging in a racial stereotype, which I think he was. But it was in an interview, not in a speech. I thought that as he went on and finished the thought over the next sentence or two, he softened that kind of harsh phrase. And saying, listen, a typical white person who has grown up and had a certain set of experiences, and reacts in that way. I thought he was softening it. I didn’t think we were providing the full context of what he was saying.”

After breakfast, Mr. Wallace went to work and began his usual Friday routine, patching into sister programs to promote the lineup of guests he is expecting on the next broadcast of Fox News Sunday.

Between “hits” with affiliates around the country, he kept an eye on the Friends. “Typical white person,” “typical white person,” “typical white person,” he heard over and over again.

“I think I was especially disturbed by the fact that the clip as they played it—which cut off after ‘typical white person’ without Obama’s elaboration—did not do justice to his explanation,” he said.

Soon it would be time for him to pop in on Fox & Friends to do his shtick; he made a snap decision.

“Hey, listen, I love you guys but I want to take you to task, if I may, respectfully, for a moment,” said Mr. Wallace on air. “I have been watching the show since six o’clock this morning when I got up, and it seems to me that two hours of Obama bashing on this ‘typical white person’ remark is somewhat excessive, and frankly, I think you’re somewhat distorting what Obama had to say.”

Over the years, Mr. Wallace’s brusque manner has raised the hackles of many a subject. According to Time magazine, Mr. Wallace, during a press conference in March 1987, asked Ronald Reagan a particularly tough question about Israel’s involvement in arms sales to Iran. Famously, in September 2006, during an interview with President Bill Clinton, Mr. Wallace referenced the reporting in Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower, and asked Mr. Clinton, “Why didn’t you do more to put bin Laden and Al Qaeda out of business when you were president?” A red-faced Mr. Clinton responded, in part, by accusing Mr. Wallace of a “conservative hit job.” This past November, during an interview on his Sunday show, Mr. Wallace asked Fred Thompson, then a presidential candidate, about all the “buzz” about his “disappointing” campaign. A visibly angry Mr. Thompson responded by accusing Fox News of being biased against him.

Back in the studio, the members of the Fox & Friends crew seemed similarly miffed to find themselves on the receiving end of their colleague’s bluntness. (Mr. Wallace is the son of Captain Confrontation himself, CBS’s Mike Wallace.) In response, Mr. Doocy and company defended their analysis. Mr. Wallace stuck to his point. “I still love you,” Mr. Wallace said in conclusion. “Yup, okay,” replied Mr. Doocy. “An odd way of showing it.”

On Monday afternoon—with clips of the confrontation having seemingly ricocheted to every far-flung corner of the Web and with everyone from official Obama bloggers to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews rushing to pat Mr. Wallace on the back—NYTV caught up with Mr. Wallace via phone. The longtime newsman said that in retrospect he had mixed feelings about making the remarks.

“I didn’t have any second thoughts about the substance because I still believe what I said was right,” said Mr. Wallace. “But after the fact, you do think to yourself—on a professional level with colleagues I very much like and respect—should I have done that off camera?”

“It’s a close call,” said Mr. Wallace. “I’m not sure I’d do it again.”

“I know a lot of liberal critics like to snicker at the slogan ‘fair and balanced,’ but, in fact, we take it very seriously,” he added. “My feeling is that a lot of time ‘fair and balanced’ means giving the conservative point of view because that doesn’t get reflected in the mainstream media. In this particular case, I thought ‘fair and balanced’ meant giving more of an explanation of Obama’s point of view.”

During Fox & Friends, Mr. Kilmeade had also defended Mr. Obama and argued that Mr. Doocy and Ms. Carlson should look at the quote in a broader context. At one point, he had even jokingly walked off the set. Later that day, Mr. Wallace appeared on Mr. Kilmeade’s talk radio show, where they continued to chew over the issue. Along the way, Mr. Kilmeade acknowledged that Mr. Doocy was genuinely ticked off. Mr. Wallace joked that so, too, were their bosses at Fox.

Mr. Wallace later told The Observer that in fact he had received one e-mail from a Fox News executive (he declined to name names). “It was not at all in the sense of, you know, how dare you defend Obama,” said Mr. Wallace. “It was in the sense that, isn’t this the kind of thing we should be talking about off camera, not on camera? I e-mailed him back and said, ‘I think you’re generally right, and I’m not going to make a habit of it.’ He wrote me right back and said, ‘Fine, forget about it. Have a good Easter.’”

To date, over this prolonged primary season, Mr. Obama has yet to appear on Mr. Wallace’s Sunday program. In response, several weeks ago, Mr. Wallace introduced “Obama Watch”—essentially a running clock adding up the amount of time that has elapsed since Mr. Obama had failed to make good on his apparent promise to appear on the show.

Mr. Wallace said that in the wake of his Friday comments, he received two supportive e-mails from members of the Obama campaign. “But nobody offered to put Obama on the air,” said Mr. Wallace, chuckling. He hastened to add, “Which wasn’t the point of this whole thing in the first place.”

Mr. Wallace said that perhaps in part because he has yet to interview Mr. Obama, he has spent a bunch of time recently “trying to understand who he is and what he believes in.” Recently, while on vacation in Jamaica, Mr. Wallace read cover-to-cover Mr. Obama’s first autobiography, Dreams From My Father, which delves at length into the senator’s thoughts on race and history and identity in America.

The book was fascinating, said Mr. Wallace. “He is a very interesting figure,” he said. “He comes from a very different background than the typical politician who runs for president, and was remarkably open about the conflicts that he’s felt and the journey that’s he undertaken.”

In a few days, Mr. Wallace’s own journey will take him back on the air with Fox & Friends. Since the dust-up, Mr. Wallace has yet to speak with Mr. Doocy or Ms. Carlson. He said he could understand if they were still a bit steamed. “Would I like it if Steve Doocy came on my show and started second-guessing on the air what I was doing?” said Mr. Wallace. “I probably wouldn’t appreciate it too much.”

“One of the great things about Fox is that people disagree with each other,” he said. “We certainly disagree vociferously with each other in private, and occasionally it does spill out on the air. I don’t think that’s a bad thing for us within Fox. And I certainly don’t think it’s a bad thing for the viewer.”