On this afternoon's episode of Fox News' Journal Editorial Report, Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger said Chief Justice John Roberts' majority opinion upholding the health care reform legislation's individual mandate under Congress' taxing power rewrote the statute, because the taxing-power argument had "virtually not been made in the oral arguments before the court."

This is untrue. It may have been subordinate to the (ultimately unsuccessful) argument that the mandate was justified under the Commerce Clause, but Solicitor General Donald Verrilli devoted significant time to the taxing-power argument.

Here's Henninger on the Journal Editorial Report:

And here's NPR's transcript of the March 27 oral arguments before the Supreme Court -- specifically the portion dealing with the tax argument that Henninger said had "virtually not been made."

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Fox News host Greg Gutfeld hyped a Daily Mail article that smears end-of-life care in Britain as "euthanasia," repeating the article's false claim that "130,000 elderly patients are euthanized prematurely" because of the health care system there. In fact, the kind of care that these patients receive is offered only after their doctors "agree that all reversible causes for their condition have been considered."

Gutfeld made his claim while the show he co-hosts, The Five, was hosting Fox News contributor Sarah Palin to discuss the Supreme Court ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act. Palin again peddled the long-debunked claim that the Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Board is a "death panel" that "will tell you ... whether your level of productivity in society is worthy of receiving the rationed care that will be the result of Obamacare."

Gutfeld agreed with Palin and responded: "To your point, the Daily Mail in the U.K. reported that 130,000 elderly patients are euthanized prematurely because they don't have enough room for beds. Which goes to your point -- inevitably, this is what happens."

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Lines in the sand have been drawn at Fox.

Discussing the Supreme Court's opinion upholding health care reform legislation, Fox White House correspondent Wendell Goler reported today that a fee for individuals who don't have health insurance would only affect one percent of the population. Goler's report is in marked contrast to his Fox News colleagues, who are claiming the fee is a massive tax on all Americans. 

In contrast to Goler's report, Fox has been aggressively claiming that the fee would amount to a massive tax on all Americans.

For instance, Fox News contributor Monica Crowley said that the ruling will lead to "one of the biggest tax increases in American history and a highly regressive tax that is going to hit the poor and the middle class," and Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy claimed it creates a tax that is "going to hit everybody."

Likewise, Fox host Sean Hannity claimed that it is "a tax on every single American" and "the largest tax increase in American history," and Fox News Radio's Todd Starnes said it "will force a massive new tax on the American people."  

In fact, Goler's reporting is backed up by the facts. In April 2010, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that only 4 million people will face a fine for not having insurance in 2016.

A March 2012 report by the nonpartisan Urban Institute found that 94 percent of Americans "would not face a requirement to newly purchase insurance or pay a fine."

Following the announced bankruptcy of Abound Solar, which borrowed about $70 million against a $400 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, the Associated Press is giving oxygen to attacks from Republicans saying the clean energy program shows the Obama administration "wasting taxpayer dollars." While passing along GOP talking points, AP forgot to report these key facts:

1. Abound Solar was one of the few higher-risk loan guarantees. Over 87 percent of the funds for the Department of Energy's 1705 loan guarantee program went to low-risk power generation projects, which are required to secure contracts with power purchasers before receiving a loan guarantee, virtually eliminating the risk of default. Like Solyndra, Abound Solar built solar panels and struggled to compete with Chinese manufacturers.

2. Congress set aside $2.47 billion to cover defaults. For a loan guarantee, the DOE is only on the hook if the company defaults on the loan, and the DOE is not able to recover the funds during the bankruptcy process. Even if all of the higher-risk (non-generation) projects defaulted on the full amount of their loan guarantees and "no assets were to be recovered, the DOE would still have $446 million remaining to cover additional project losses," according to a Bloomberg Government analysis. Here is a chart comparing the amount that Congress budgeted for the 1705 program versus the current losses:

Current losses were measured as $9 million for Beacon Power, $535 million for Solyndra and $60 million for Abound Solar. *Graphic has been updated.

3. Four Indiana Republicans pressed the Energy Department to support Abound. In addition to the four Indiana Republican Congressmen who urged DOE to grant the loan guarantee to Abound, Mitch Daniels supported a tax credit for the company and two major Republican donors were Abound investors.

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Drudge, Fox Nation and Breitbart distorted comments made by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to claim she "trashed the uninsured" by calling them "free riders." Pelosi's comments were not directed toward all uninsured Americans, but were specifically referring to health care consumers who remain uninsured until they have a health care need, overburdening the market and increasing health care costs. This is a claim almost identical to policy recommendations made by Mitt Romney in a 2009 op-ed.

In a recent interview with San Francisco's KQED radio, Pelosi pointed out that Thursday's Supreme Court decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act in its entirety meant "goodbye to the free riders." In the comments that followed, Pelosi made it clear that she was referring to people who "just decide you're not going to apply for health insurance" and then when "[y]ou get sick or in an accident, your health care costs are a burden to everybody else." 

Breitbart's Joel Pollak acknowledged that Pelosi defended the penalty as " necessary because some (many?) of the uninsured actively choose not to buy health insurance, even though they can afford it." But these were the very people Pelosi was talking about when she discussed free riders - not everybody without insurance. That fact is obscured by the Breitbart headline, which was highlighted by Drudge and Fox Nation.

The difference between Pelosi's comments and Pollak's suggested interpretation is significant. Pelosi was not referring to people who currently have no ability to access or afford health care coverage, but to those who have the resources to purchase insurance but choose not to, making their eventual care a liability for themselves and to taxpayers. Because the low-income premium subsidies in the Affordable Care Act make health insurance affordable for millions more people, and the group previously labeled "free riders" will largely consist of those who refuse to pay for health care instead of being simply uninsured due to a lack of affordability.

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CNN's Erin Burnett cherry-picked numbers to claim that the health care reform law was "a massive fail" because medical costs are expected to grow more in 2014 than they did in 2010. 

But the massive fail here is on Burnett: health care costs in 2010 grew at historically low rates as the country emerged from a deep recession, making it an inappropriate point of comparison.

Discussing the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act on Thursday, Burnett claimed that "we're all losers" under the health care reform law because it will not reduce health care spending. Burnett explained:

According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, health spending in 2010 grew about 3.9 percent from the year before. But in 2014, when the president's health care law takes full effect, spending will jump 7.4 percent.

But the very research that Burnett cited, a June report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, explains that unusually slow cost increases in 2010 was a historic anomaly explained by the recession:

[T]he continuing impact of losses in employment and health insurance coverage associated with the recession helped to limit growth in private spending. Private health insurance spending growth is estimated to have been just 2.6 percent in 2010 as the number of people enrolled in private plans fell by roughly 5 million. Moreover, out-of-pocket spending climbed just 1.8 percent (after 0.4 percent growth in 2009) as many people continued to restrain their use of health care goods and services.

A June 12 Wall Street Journal article reporting on the CMS estimates explained that the 2010 figures were "a short-term trend" tied to the recession:

Consumers have been cutting back on doctors' visits and employers have trimmed insurance since the U.S. first fell into a recession. National health-care spending growth was 3.8% in 2009, the smallest increase on record, and was followed by a similar 3.9% in 2010.

Burnett's massive failure only begins with her cherry picking 2010 for her point of comparison. Her second point of comparison is 2014, which is when CMS researchers said the "largest impact on the growth of health spending is expected to occur."

So Burnett took one of the lowest rates of health spending growth on record and compared it to the year that will bring the largest impact on growth, and declared that everybody loses.

CNN's viewers most certainly did. 

The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza does his turn at distilling conventional wisdom this morning by asking of the Supreme Court's health care ruling yesterday: "Did Republicans lose the health care battle but win the health care war?" It's a loaded question, born of utterly predictable spin, that assumes a Republican victory regardless of the outcome. But it looks even more ridiculous when you think about the question that should be asked in its stead: We know now what Obama will run on, so what exactly is the Republican health care plan?

After the ruling was issued yesterday, Mitt Romney stood behind a podium and promised that, were he to be elected, he would repeal the law on his first day as president. The Republican National Committee blasted out talking points announcing their intention to repeat the word "tax" ad nauseam from here to November. And everyone seems very impressed that Romney claims to have raised $2 million yesterday off the ruling.

That's all well and good, but as the Post's Ezra Klein pointed out a couple of weeks ago, we're less than five months from Election Day and the presumptive Republican nominee still has not articulated a specific health care policy. That's a remarkable thing, particularly when you consider that at this point in the 2008 election cycle, then-candidate Barack Obama's detailed health care proposal had been a matter of public record for more than a year.

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Make no mistake, Rupert Murdoch's decision to split his News Corp. media empire into two separate entities is being viewed as an attempt to protect his most lucrative assets from the seemingly never-ending fallout connected to the hacking scandal - focused primarily on Murdoch's British publishing titltes - that's been raging for nearly one year.

For years, founder and CEO Murdoch resisted the idea of splitting up News Corp. But this week, the board, with Murdoch's approval, okayed the deal.

By next year, two separate companies will house News Corp.'s sprawling media properties. One will operate as a newspaper, coupon, and book publishing firm, with newspapers published in Australia, Britain and the United States. The other will be an entertainment company made up of the Fox TV network, Fox News, and the 20th Century Fox movie studio.

Analysts cheered the move as a way to "quarantine" the "toxic element" within News Corp. Namely, "U.K. newspaper assets."

The publishing division will be much smaller, valued at $5 billion, compared to $54 billion for the entertainment company. That's because News Corp's television and, to a lesser degree, movie divisions have long been the revenue engines that drive the company. Even though Murdoch began his career as a newspaper publisher and still sees himself as something of a print press baron, his newspaper business, in the grand scheme of things, is basically a non-starter.

In fact, many of his high-profile dailies lose money. But none has lost more than the right-wing New York Post, which has been impervious to profits since Murdoch re-purchased the daily in 1993. (He had previously owned it from 1976 to 1988.)

The paper's chronic losses have only escalated over time. The figures aren't made public, but the Post's annual estimated losses have been pegged at $30 million in 2005, $70 million in 2009, and most recently $110 million. That, according to analyst Brett Harriss.

In the past, News Corp.'s vast entertainment profits helped paper over the constant losses at the openly partisan Post, which serves as a key media megaphone for the GOP Noise Machine.

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Bill O'Reilly promised in March that he would "apologize for being an idiot" if the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act. But after the historic ruling upholding the law, O'Reilly called into his Fox News show, which was being guest-hosted by Laura Ingraham, and didn't mention his previous pledge to apologize or his prediction that it would be overturned.

Instead of addressing his promise, O'Reilly chose to push a number of debunked falsehoods about the health care law.

On the March 26 broadcast of his show, O'Reilly hosted Caroline Fredrickson, president of the American Constitution Society, who said the legislation "doesn't actually require people to buy health insurance" but "imposes a penalty" on those who don't. She described this as "a tax power," and indeed, the Supreme Court would later rule that the mandate is "authorized by Congress's power to levy taxes."

O'Reilly concluded the segment by saying, "Miss Fredrickson, you're going to lose, and your arguments are specious. ... And if I'm wrong, I will come on, and I will play your clip, and I will apologize for being an idiot."

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In response to the Supreme Court's ruling in favor of health care reform, the Drudge Report is smearing Chief Justice John Roberts over the possibility that he might use epilepsy medication and suggesting that it affected his judgment.

Drudge linked to a Real Clear Politics post that contains a clip of right-wing radio host Michael Savage claiming that "if you look at Roberts' writings you can see the cognitive disassociation in what he is saying."

Roberts had a seizure in 2007, after suffering one 14 years earlier. The Washington Post reported this month that Roberts has not publicly addressed whether he has epilepsy.

Drudge also linked to a 2007 New York Times report that discussed Roberts' medical options. The article described the side effects of epilepsy drugs, but it has never been reported that Roberts actually takes such medication.

Among Savage's numerous outrageous remarks, he said in 2008 that autism is a "fraud, a racket" and called it "a phony disease."

While discussing the walkout of House Democrats in protest of the contempt vote against Attorney General Eric Holder, Fox News' Eric Bolling claimed on The Five: "I don't think I've ever seen that before. I don't think I've ever seen people vacating the House like that before -- over a vote."

Obviously Bolling hasn't been paying attention. In February of 2008, House Republicans walked out during a vote that held two Bush aides (Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers) in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify about the politically motivated firings of U.S. attorneys.

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Mike Vanderboegh, the ex-militia blogger who calls himself one of the "midwives" of the Operation Fast and Furious scandal, recently predicted that if the Supreme Court declared the health care reform bill to be constitutional, it would lead to violent insurrection against "government tyranny."

The blogger posted the statements, which come from a recent unpublished interview, the same day the House of Representatives voted to find Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt over his unwillingness to release documents related to Fast and Furious.

In the excerpts Vanderboegh posted on his blog "which deal with the decision today," he says of a then-potential decision upholding the health care law, "You may call tyranny a mandate or you may call it a tax, but it still is tyranny and invites the same response." He further predicts the response of his ilk: "If we refuse to obey, we will be fined. If we refuse to pay the fine, we will in time be jailed. If we refuse to report meekly to jail, we will be sent for by armed men. And if we refuse their violent invitation at the doorsteps of our own homes we will be killed -- unless we kill them first. ... I am on record as advocating the right of defensive violence against a tyrannical regime."

Vanderboegh gained fame in 2010 when he urged his readers to respond to the passage of health care reform by breaking the windows of Democratic offices, then took credit after vandals struck several such offices. The Alabama-based blogger has previously been part of the militia and Minuteman movements, and leads the Three Percenters, a group which claims to represent the three percent of gun owners who "who will not disarm, will not compromise and will no longer back up at the passage of the next gun control act" but will instead, "if forced by any would-be oppressor, ... kill in the defense of ourselves and the Constitution."

Vanderboegh was one of the first to break the story that ATF whistleblowers said that they had been ordered to knowingly allow gun trafficking suspects to take weapons across the border into Mexico. The operation was intended to allow law enforcement to identify other members of the trafficking network that for years has directed assault weapons into the hands of Mexican cartels, with the goal of bringing those cartels down. He has said that he and a fellow blogger were the "midwives of the scandal"  who introduced the whistleblowers to congressional investigators. He has theorized that the operation was part of a secret plot against the Second Amendment directed from the highest levels of government.

Last year Fox repeatedly hosted Vanderboegh on their air to provide expert commentary on the story. Then in November, four Georgia men were arrested in connection with an alleged plot to kill federal employees and civilians using explosives and the biological agent ricin. According to the criminal complaint against him, one of the alleged domestic terrorists repeatedly cited Vanderboegh'snovel Absolved as the inspiration for their plot. Media subsequently noted that Vanderboegh had, in the words of the Associated Press, "appeared as a commentator on Fox News Channel." He has not done so since.

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Right-wing media figures are heaping harsh criticism on Chief Justice John Roberts for his opinion upholding the Affordable Care Act as constitutional.  These critics ignore Roberts' record as Chief Justice, which is very conservative. But even this conservative justice recognized that the Constitution gives Congress the power to address the nation's health care crisis with the Affordable Care Act.

Breitbart.com editor-at-large Ben Shapiro blasted the Chief Justice:

I knew that Roberts was a bad pick because he didn't have a proven track record of adherence to the Constitution. He was picked by President Bush because Bush knew he didn't have a track record - and he knew that Roberts would sail through the confirmation process without a hitch.

That should have been an indicator that Roberts was a rotten pick. Nobody doubted Robert Bork's originalist credentials. Nobody doubted Clarence Thomas'. Nobody doubts Judge Janice Rogers Brown's. But nobody had any reason to buy into Roberts as an originalist. Yet they did.

Dan Gainor, Media Research Center's vice president for Business and Culture called the decision to nominate Roberts "awful."

Fox News Radio's Todd Starnes applied the "L word" to Roberts.

This attempt to paint Chief Justice Roberts as a closet liberal is absurd. Experts have called the Supreme Court under Roberts the "most conservative in modern history." As the leader of a five justice conservative majority, Roberts has played a leading role in decisions like Citizens United (empowering corporations and wealthy individuals to spend unlimited money in political campaigns); Wal-Mart (preventing women alleging sex discrimination from joining together to seek justice); Concepcion (allowing corporations to manipulate fine print in contracts to keep ripped off consumers from joining together in court); and Ledbetter (preventing a woman who was paid less than men from going to court).

Also, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce enjoyed a perfect year with the Roberts Court this term, winning every case in which the Court ruled on the position the Chamber took, according to a study by the Constitutional Accountability Center. (The Chamber took no position on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, but merely argued that if the mandate were struck down, the entire Act should be invalidated). According to the study, the Chamber has not won every case in a term since at least 1994.

Rather than calling John Roberts names or trying to make the absurd case that he is a closet liberal, the right should simply acknowledge that their crusade to kill the Affordable Care Act failed because they lost the vote of the deeply conservative, Republican-appointed Chief Justice who heads one of the most conservative and pro-corporate courts in history.

After erstwhile team player Chief Justice John Roberts led the Supreme Court in upholding the Affordable Care Act, Fox News has spent the day trying to convince themselves, if not the rest of us, that this is excellent news for Republicans and Mitt Romney -- to the point of arguing that President Obama's "cynical" political team would have preferred the law be struck down entirely so the whole issue would just "go away."

A little while ago, Megyn Kelly sat down to talk with Chris Stirewalt, Fox News digital politics editor, about the electoral implications of the Supreme Court ruling. Stirewalt argued -- in all seriousness -- that President Obama's re-election team in Chicago were pulling for a full repeal.

STIREWALT: I can sum it up this way: at the White House, it's a good day. The president's probably very happy that he was vindicated by the Supreme Court. But out in Chicago, at the president's campaign headquarters, this can not have been the happiest news. I'm sure, from a cynical political perspective, they much rather would have had this issue go away and the Supreme Court take it down so the president could go rally the troops. Instead, it's Romney's troops who are rallied.

This is a real stretch, and here's Nate Silver of the New York Times explaining why:

It is not as though, if the law had been struck down, Republicans would have stopped talking about the folly of the legislation. Members of the public, in mostly opposing the law, had not been objecting to its technical details, some of which they actually supported when quizzed about the specific aspects of the health care overhaul.

Instead, it was to the impression that it represented an overreach on behalf of Mr. Obama -- at a time when there is profound skepticism about the direction of government and the efficacy of its policy -- that left him vulnerable.

When the dust settles, it seems implausible that Mr. Obama would be have been better off politically had his signature reform been nullified by the court. Then Mr. Obama's perceived overreach would have had the stench of being unconstitutional.

Stirewalt's analysis is, thus far, the absurd apex of Fox News' health care coverage today. It was preceded by a parade of GOP officials chest-thumping about how they're so angry and energized now, fond reminiscence of the heady days of 2010 when shaky-cam videos of barely coherent tea partiers screaming at Democrats were all the rage, and endless repetitions of the word "tax" (in accordance with Republican messaging).

But I suppose we can forgive Fox News for acting a bit irrationally. They clearly expected the ruling to go the other way and no one really handles betrayal all that well.

Both CNN and Fox, in a race to get the story on-air first, inaccurately reported that the individual mandate had been found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

In fact, the court affirmed the constitutionality of the individual mandate, under congress' authority to tax.

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Today, the Supreme Court upheld the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as constitutional. Right-wing media figures immediately began venting on Twitter. Here is an hour's worth of the worst right-wing ranting about the Supreme Court decision after it was announced:

Right-wing author and columnist David Limbaugh

Media Research Center VP of Business and Culture Dan Gainor

Fox News Radio reporter Todd Starnes

Breitbart.com editor Ben Shapiro

Fox News contributor Sarah Palin

Right-wing author and blogger Matt Vadum

Right-wing talk radio host and Fox regular Neal Boortz