Now with Alex Wagner

On the April 30 edition of NOW with Alex Wagner, panelist Robert Traynham had the courage to confront the liberal panel on the Left's hypocrisy on a gender "pay gap" and the so-called War on Women.  The panel took off in typical liberal fashion with Wagner criticizing Mitt Romney and all Republicans for showing a lack of empathy about how women's median pay in America is about 77 percent of the median pay for men.

In response, Traynham called out Wagner for her liberal attacks by pointing out the hypocrisy of the Left on the subject.  Traynham skillfully reminded Wagner and his fellow panelists that former Obama staffers Anita Dunn and Christine Romer were quoted on the record in a book published last year criticizing the unequal pay women within the Obama White House receive. Romer also was quoted by liberal journalist Ron Suskind as having said she felt treated like a "piece of meat" by Obama staffers.  [Video follows page break  MP3 audio here.]   

On Thursday’s edition of her Now program, MSNBC host Alex Wagner and her colleague Lawrence O’Donnell along with The Nation’s Ari Melber took to the air to smear the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) on the subject of voter ID laws.  ALEC, a liberal blogger bogeyman, has become MSNBC’s new punching bag and the liberal guests took the opportunity to attack the organization from all sides.

In a discussion regarding the merits of showing an ID to vote, Wagner, an alumna of the liberal Center for American Progress, conspiratorially claimed that, “voter ID is cooked up by Republicans to disenfranchise minority voters.” In other words, it's the work of evil, racist Republicans!  [See video below.  MP3 audio here.]

On today's edition of MSNBC's Now with Alex Wagner, ObamaCare apologist and Rahm Emanuel sibling Zeke Emanuel insisted that the lack of a "severability clause" in the health care overhaul legislation was simply an "oversight, not an intention." Neither host Alex Wagner nor any panelist interjected to correct the record.

In fact, severability was not inserted into the ObamaCare legislation as part of a legislative strategy by the Democrats who shepherded it through Congress. Boston Globe's Noah Bierman explained as much in the March 29 paper (emphases mine):

After another bad day at the Supreme Court for the Obama administration's health care law, journalists on MSNBC and CNN marveled at how the President's signature legislation seemed to be unraveling. Appearing on MSNBC, HD Net reporter Brooks Silva-Braga compared the Solicitor General (who defended the law in front of the court) to an embarrassed child.

Silva-Braga mocked, "If you've ever been to a fifth grade play and looked into the eyes of a kid who is not sure if he's going to remember his lines, that's what Donald Verrilli looked like yesterday." [See video below. MP3 audio here.] On CNN, Jeffrey Toobin, who on Tuesday reversed a previous prediction of an easy win for Obama, sneered that Obamacare had become a "plane wreck." 

Taking the Constitution's limits on federal power seriously is just, well, backwards to liberal journalists. Take Ari Melber of The Nation. Sitting on the panel on the March 26 edition of Now with Alex Wagner, the MSNBC contributor dismissed as "retrograde" the notion that the ObamaCare individual mandate -- the provision forcing Americans to buy private health insurance or else pay a fine to the federal government -- violates the letter and spirit of the Constitution.

Melber, a former John Kerry presidential campaign staffer, made the remark in the midst of comments wherein he suggested the Obama administration could see a stunning victory before the high court, despite the conservative nature of the tribunal:

On Friday’s edition of MSNBC’s NOW with Alex Wagner, former DNC Communications Director Karen Finney (and occasional MSNBC host) used the tragic death of Trayvon Martin to viciously attack Republicans across the country.  The segment started out examining the role of gun laws in our society and quickly turned into an assault on Republicans, following comments made by liberal-host Wagner.

Wagner made the claim that, “We had a map of the 25, 26 states with stand your ground laws. You can actually overlay a map of the red states in this country.”  Such divisive rhetoric fed into the liberal talking point for Karen as she went on a tirade.  [See video below.  MP3 audio here.]

Today Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and House Republicans unveiled a budget and tax reform plan. But for Center for American Progress alumna Alex Wagner, it was Christmas morning, with the Ryan budget as a handy cudgel with which Democrats and MSNBC could bludgeon politically hapless Republicans.

"[S]ome Democrats are calling it Christmas in March," MSNBC anchor Wagner quipped on her March 20 Now program as she presented a quick overview of the "nuts and bolts" of the plan such as "repealing the Affordable Care Act," simplifying the federal individual income tax down to two brackets, 10 and 25 percent, and reducing the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent. 

With conservative friends like these, who needs liberals?

Okay, maybe that's a bit harsh, but token conservative S.E. Cupp on today's Now with Alex Wagner blurted out on air, unprompted, the sort of ignorant, bigoted view of conservative evangelicals that you'd expect from a liberal panelist.

After airing a clip of a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee ad featuring female Democratic candidates for key U.S. Senate races this November, MSNBC's Alex Wagner effusively praised the campaign ad as an excellent response to the "Republican assault on women's health." The ad "really isolates the guys in Congress who are voting for this" and the women that stand as bulwarks against this," Wagner gushed. Panelist Lynn Sweet, Washington bureau chief  for the Chicago Sun-Times agreed, adding, "The smartest line was said by Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, when he said that if there were 83 women in the Senate, not 83 men, they wouldn't  even have a debate on birth control and contraception."

Yet at no point in the segment on the March 2 Now with Alex Wagner did the host or anyone else bring up the fact that of the 17 women members of the U.S. Senate, four of them, all Republicans, voted for the Blunt Amendment, which would allow private employers to opt out of insurance coverage for procedures or drugs that violate their religious or moral convictions, such as contraception.

Former Obama chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel is infamous for counseling to "never let a serious crisis go to waste."

Well, self-confessed Second Amendment foe Alex Wagner seems determined to not let Monday's deadly school shooting go to waste. For a third day in a row, Wagner complained about the nation's political climate when it comes to gun control legislation, even as Wagner seems to concede that new legislation would do little if anything to prevent school shootings from actually happening.

In the past few days, Brown University-educated journalist Alex Wagner has shown a penchant for deliberately distorting a remark that former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) made on the campaign trail, wherein he slammed as a "snob" President Obama for, as Santorum believes it, Obama's having said every American should go to college.

Wagner repeated the distortion again on the Leap Day edition of Now with Alex Wagner. Fortunately for her viewers, a campaign staffer was on hand to address the distortion.

On the February 7 edition of MSNBC's Now with Alex Wagner, panelist John Heilemann, who writes for New York Magazine, thought it appropriate to equate the gay marriage debate in California to racial bigotry experienced by African-Americans in the 1960s. 

During an interview with openly gay former Lieutenant Dan Choi, Heilemann asked former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele the following bigoted and offensive question: “Michael I’m curious about whether you think it would be okay in modern America, for there to be some states where black men could not marry white women?  If local standards where that were unacceptable.” [MP3 audio here. See video below.]

The "moral argument" of the Occupy movement have been unfairly tarnished by violence and as well as frittered away by the group's lack of Tea Party-like political mobilization. That's the consensus of the liberal panelists on today's edition of MSNBC's Now with Alex Wagner.

The Nation magazine contributor Ari Melber kicked things off by blaming the recent violence and vandalism of the Occupy Oakland demonstrators on the "system" as it were, blaming police for excessive force against the well-meaning masses. [MP3 audio here; video coming shortly]

Alex Wagner made an eye-popping remark on her MSNBC program on Wednesday, as she hinted that she agreed with former Obama spokesman Bill Burton's assertion that Ronald Reagan would feel out of place in today's GOP. When Burton claimed that "Reagan wouldn't have a chance in this Republican primary right now," Wagner stunningly replied, "I think he'd be a Democrat probably" [audio available here; video below the jump].

The anchor, a former employee of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, also touted a quote from Thomas Mann of The Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of AEI, who claim in an upcoming book that the Republican Party has become "an insurgent outlier- ideologically extreme...scornful of compromise...and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

Yesterday MSNBC's Alex Wagner treated viewers of her noon Eastern Now program to a panel that featured Obama Super PAC staffer Bill Burton. Today the promotion of pro-Obama spin continued with Wagner herself attempting to help DNC chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz spin the Obama/Clinton State Department's decision to scrap the Keystone XL pipeline project.

"Is there a concern, though, that this, as he pushes a jobs message that this looks sort of counterintuitive for him to say, 'I know this may create some jobs but I'm not going to, I'm not going to pass it, I'm not going to give the permits'?" the former Center for American Progress staffer asked. [MP3 audio here; video update follows page break]

Update (17:05 EST): Williams tweets in protest: "Not once did I say GOP voters are racists" and has asked that I correct this post accordingly. I stand by my assertion given the context wherein Williams was describing why he believes Palmetto State Republicans, despite their reticence about Romney's Mormonism, could vote for Romney, whom they consider most likely to beat Obama in the November presidential election. At any rate, you can judge for yourself by watching the video below the page break.

Correction: Williams is a former lobbyist, having quit his lobbying work recently to work on Dylan Ratigan's "Get Money Out" campaign, a drive to amend the Constitution to overturn the implications of the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling. Williams is senior strategist for and co-founder of United Republic.

What better way is there, really, for MSNBC to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day than by leveling charges that Republican voters in general and Republican candidates in particular are racist? That's what Now with Alex Wagner panelists Jimmy Williams and Joy-Ann Reid charged respectively on today's program. [MP3 audio available here]

PBS host and leftist activist Tavis Smiley called out Republican candidates for their hostility to the poor in America, on Thursday morning on MSNBC. Appearing during the 7 a.m. hour of Morning Joe, he singled out four candidates by name and warned that "we're in a world of trouble" due to their campaign trail rhetoric.

As a PBS host, Smiley benefits from public funding. That has not stopped him in the past for making outrageous liberal remarks, and it didn't stop him on Thursday when he railed against a Congressional "bipartisan consensus that the poor just don't matter." [Video below the break. Click here for audio.]

With Mitt Romney winning the Iowa caucus and on track to do well in New Hampshire, conservatives should just give up and rally behind the former Massachusetts governor, MSNBC host Alex Wagner suggested at the open of today's Now with Alex Wagner.

Former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele was having none of that:

"I think every day that we take less oil out of the planet Earth is a win," MSNBC weekend host Chris Hayes pontificated at the conclusion of panel discussion on the December 9 Now with Alex Wagner regarding the shelved Keystone oil pipeline. "Good, Chris, the [Obama] administration liked that" quipped MSNBC host Alex Wagner.

At issue was how House Republicans are attempting to force President Obama to approve the job-creating project in exchange for agreement to extend this year's Social Security payroll tax cut.

Acting again as a video press release service for the Democratic National Committee (DNC), MSNBC today has repeatedly highlighted the DNC's complaints about new voter ID laws on several programs today.

In the 10 a.m. hour, Jansing & Co. anchor Chris Jansing gave a platform to the DNC's "director of voter protection" Will Crossley to plug he party's new website, protectingthevote.com. The segment was entitled onscreen, "War on Voters?" Jansing failed to bring on either a Republican Party official for a rebuttal nor a state secretary of state to defend voter ID measures.

To Alex Wagner, "the rhetoric around immigration in this country is as strident and as divisive as it has [ever] been." But immediately after saying that on the December 2 edition of Now with Alex Wagner, the MSNBC host's British-born colleague Martin Bashir went off the deep end, lumping Rick Perry and Herman Cain in with German neo-Nazis suspected in a string of immigrant murders (MP3 audio here; video update to be posted later):

In a panel discussion on today's Now with Alex Wagner about what "moral authority," if any, that the Occupy Wall Street movement has, MSNBC contributor Melissa Harris-Perry sought to defuse fellow panelist Meghan McCain's complaint that Occupy Wall Street has hurt the very folks it claims to represent by killing jobs at businesses nearby Zuccotti Park.

"If a Tea Party rally had shut down a business that had to let go of 21 workers, there would probably be a different reaction from a lot of people in the media," McCain observed.

Harris-Perry initially dismissed McCain's comment by noting the "deeply polarized media system," where conservatives and liberals gravitate to different news sources based on ideology. But a few minutes later the Tulane professor groused that we as a society don't view budget-related layoffs of public sector workers through a moral prism (emphases mine):

Feminist author Naomi Wolf insisted on today's Now with Alex Wagner that New Yorkers were not really all that inconvenienced by the Occupy Wall Street movement.

"Yesterday, commuters and small business owners couldn't get to work the Occupiers were blocking subway entrances, you [also] had the Brooklyn Bridge" pedestrian walkway crammed with Occupiers, conservative columnist S.E. Cupp complained in a panel segment on Occupy Wall Street's political objectives, if any.

"I didn't see any of that. There's no reporting about that, I follow the reporting very carefully," Wolf retorted (see video below page break).

Referring to immigrants who are in the United States illegally as "illegals" is "derogatory" and "coded" language, even if it is true, MSNBC's newest daytime host Alex Wagner complained in a panel discussion on her noon Eastern program Now with Alex Wagner.

The remark came in the middle of a discussion about former Gov. Mitt Romney's chances of defeating President Obama next year should Romney be the nominee. Liberal panelist Alicia Menendez had groused about Republican primary candidates' "crazy anti-immigrant comments," prompting Wagner to interrupt, "Illegals, I think the repetitive reference to illegals."

Brand new MSNBC host and Second Amendment critic Alex Wagner devoted a segment of her November 15 Now with Alex Wagner program to express her exasperation at the fact that she's far left of the American public on the issue of gun control. Wagner prefaced a panel discussion with footage of an ABC News interview with Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was critically injured in a January shooting.

"Support for handguns, or rather support for a handgun ban has gone down," Wagner noted as she opened her panel discussion, entitled onscreen "Out of Control?". "In October of 2011, it was at 26 percent. In 1959, it was at 60 percent."

"Gun violence increases and yet people still believe handgun bans are bad. What's the logic there?" the liberal Center for American Progress alumna demanded [MP3 audio here; video follows page break]:

Well, that didn't take long. It took about half an hour into her new noon Eastern program Now with Alex Wagner for the host to attack the Republican presidential field as insane. And true to MSNBC form, her panel of liberal journalists largely agreed with her.

"When I watched that waterboarding segment, all I could think of is these Republican candidates are putting another brick on the house of crazy that they are building for themselves," Wagner complained after airing a montage of  GOP presidential contenders in Saturday's CBS-National Journal foreign policy debate regarding their views on the controversial enhanced interrogation technique. [MP3 audio available here; video follows page break]