Fox News is suing Al Franken for using the phrase "fair and balanced" in his book. Fox has trademarked this extremely common phrase. In support of Al, Charlie takes a Fair and Balanced look at the world.

Trade: Our current trade policies are not fair and balanced. Our trade deficit is approaching $550 billion this year. That's like having an entire second auto industry's worth of jobs and business in the US. Instead, those jobs are somewhere else. That doesn't sound fair and balanced to me. We need Fair Trade, because Free Trade just isn't working for most of America.

Media: The media is frequently slammed for being too liberal, whatever that means. Yet over 50% of newspapers have conservative editors, and media giants like FOX and MSNBC are owned and run by conservatives with a deliberate anti-liberal bias. That just doesn't seem fair and balanced to me. Increasingly, Media is controlled by the few, and that's just not good for the many. A fair and balanced approach would be to restrict, in some way, ownership of multiple media outlets in order to break down the media monopolies that prevent the public from getting a range of perspectives from a wide range of sources.

Bill O'Reilly: Bill seems neither fair or balanced. I don't know Bill, but I've watched his show. I've also watched his behavior on C-Span recently, listening to him say that he doesn't call people names, he doesn't say someone's an idiot, he's just telling it like it is. Then Al gave a fair and balanced perspective about Bill's loose relationship with the truth and Bill reacted by calling Al an idiot.

Politics in this country is getting more divisive, and more shrill than it's been since the Contract on America. I'd like to see a positive politics where we focus on solutions informed by democratic principles and the principles of economic and social justice. We need to embrace civility and stop looking at each other as the enemy. We are neighbors and should start acting as neighbors. It's not hard to be nice--we can smile even as we disagree with our political opponents.

Yes, we need to fight hard to win back America from those who would see us divided, who attack our communities and undermine the social fabric we've built up over the past 50 years. But we need not hate. And that is my fair and balanced opinion for tonight.