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In an attempt to play Main Street against Wall Street, Rachel Maddow mocked and criticized the rate at which Goldman Sachs was taxed this year.

The MSNBC host of "The Rachel Maddow Show" lamented that the investment bank Goldman Sachs, which reported a $2.12 billion dollar loss for the fourth quarter ending Nov. 28, paid only 1 percent in taxes for the entire year during her Dec. 18 show.

"Five pages into Goldman's earnings report this week, Bloomberg News noticed Goldman's very subtle announcement that the firm's effective tax rate this year was 1 percent," Maddow said. "One percent - they paid 1 percent in taxes. Even though they were down this last quarter, they made $2.3 billion in profit this year."

"The way they wrote this story... it's an embarrassment. If you go to the Obama for President site, you won't see the kind of language that Time magazine put in a news story," Media Research Center president Brent Bozell told viewers of the December 17 "Hannity & Colmes." [audio available here]

Appearing live via satellite from the MRC's new state-of-the-art studio, Bozell scoffed at writer David Von Drehle's syrupy write-up:

Look at this quote. I mean, [Democratic strategist] Kirsten [Powers] says that they're flowery. Get this: "We are all accustomed to that Obi-wan Kenobi calm, though we may never entirely understand it." What they hell are they talking about?!

The first of just three questions asked of Barack Obama at his December 17 press conference [audio available here]:

CYNTHIA BOWERS, CBS News Chicago correspondent: I have a question. You ran on a platform of transparency. How difficult is all this having to wait to release your inquiry business when the American people expect transparency?

Yes, you read that correctly. Bowers prompts Obama for an answer wherein he can lament having to wait to answer questions about the nature of his interaction with indicted Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D-Ill.).

Perhaps the lap dog media are cowering in the corner after Obama yesterday swatted Chicago Tribune's John McCormick on the proverbial nose for his Blagojevich question. Bowers has covered Chicago for CBS News since 1999 and hence seen the president-elect rise from relative obscurity to the highest office in the land.

A better question might have been:

Appearing live in the D.C. studio of Fox News this morning, MRC President Brent Bozell talked with the "Fox & Friends" gang about the media's lack of concern about Caroline Kennedy's lack of experience in elected office [audio excerpt here]:

Caroline Kennedy, God love her, has zero public experience, and I'm putting every single one of my liberal friends out there who spent the last four months trashing Sarah Palin, I'm putting them on notice that they better have something to say about this woman.

Bozell noted that some Democrats in New York have raised concerns about assigning the Clinton Senate seat to Kennedy, but scoffed at media outlets acting as dutiful Kennedy stenographers:

What a difference an administration makes. During the Bush years, if a spokesman or the president himself attempted to dodge a tough question, the media would go into their Sam Donaldson impressions and pundits would see a conspiracy of silence.

But now that it's Obama, the dodging that was once denounced is suddenly celebrated.  Thus, appearing on today's Morning Joe, Larry O'Donnell declared "impressive" Pres.-elect Obama's stiff-arming yesterday of a reporter who dared asked Blago-related questions.

The video clip also includes a gratuitous bit of nastiness from Obama adviser David Axelrod aimed at Mika Brzezinski.

Rupert Murdoch has his critics - from those who think his papers are too tabloid-ish - The Sun, The New York Post - to those who find his cable television networks too right-leaning for their tastes. And back in 2007, there was a fear that his purchase of The Wall Street Journal would result in a hybrid of his newspapers and his cable news channels.

However, a year after Murdoch's acquisition, Newsweek senior editor and financial columnist Daniel Gross said he thought Murdoch has actually improved the Journal.

"I think it's worked out quite well for him," Gross said on CNBC's "Power Lunch" Dec. 16. "He owns one of the best newspapers around. They remade the Journal. The front section is a great kind of political, global coverage."

Gross also said it doesn't look like such a bad deal for the journalists employed at financial newspaper, especially in a time of print newspaper hardships - which have resulted in layoffs and cutbacks - like The New York Times and the Tribune newspapers owned by billionaire Sam Zell.

"I think the journalists - I never thought I would say this - the journalists are quite lucky to be working for Murdoch in this type of environment. You could be working for a company that was owned by Sam Zell or one of his publicly held newspapers."

It's times like this that make me wonder whether I inhabit a universe different from that occupied by the MSM.  This morning, discussing Pres. Bush's reaction to the flying shoe incident, I wrote:

Short of going full Ninja hero and snatching the shoes in mid-air, it's hard to see how Pres. Bush could have been any cooler in his handling of the Hush Puppy Hurler.

But on MSNBC this afternoon, host Tamron Hall claimed that in discussing the matter with the press, the president looked "unnerved" and embarrassed.  Here's a clip of Pres. Bush discussing the incident with ABC's Martha Raddatz just after it happened.  Does this look like an "unnerved" man to you?

The proposed automaker bailout has a big stamp on it that says "union-built," but the news media hasn't noticed.

Over the past month, accusations have been flying against several Southern senators who oppose a $14 billion bailout for the beleaguered big three automakers and support the the alternative of Chapter 11 bankruptcy. These senators, critics say, are representing the interests of foreign automakers that donate heavily to their campaigns. But what has been largely ignored is the other side of the equation - the influence of the United Auto Workers (UAW) on the members of Congress that voted for the bailout. 

According to campaign finance data from the Center for Responsive Politics Web site OpenSecrets.org, when broken down by how members of Congress voted, for the 2008 election cycle the UAW gave more than eight times as much in campaign cash to members that voted for the bailout than those that voted against it -- $1.14 million to proponents versus just $136,500 that voted against it.

Must have been that full moon. Or "fool full moon" as Rachel Maddow stumbled in referring to it.

If the Newseum is accepting suggestions for exhibits, a possibility comes to mind -- the Pantheon of Unfortunate Punditry. First submission -- Maddow's hilarious revisionism of Herbert Hoover on her MSNBC show Friday. I've watched the segment several times, each time in awe at Maddow's supreme confidence, unrivalled since Ted Baxter in his heyday. I plan to preserve it for posterity, to share with my children as a cautionary tale -- This is what happens when a person makes an utter fool of herself in public.

Maddow told of Vice President Dick Cheney visiting Capitol Hill earlier in the week and warning congressional Republicans that if the GOP blocks the auto bailout, "... We will be known as the party of Herbert Hoover forever," according to the Los Angeles Times.

An environmentalist's dream might be a businessman's nightmare. But when it came to describing the the environmental team Pres.-elect Obama has assembled, it was sugar plum fairies for GMA this morning.  Rachel Martin, who came to ABC from NPR, narrated the segment.

RACHEL MARTIN:  They are calling it the "Green Dream Team." 

Which invites the obvious question: who's "they," kimosabe?  Running down the team line-up, Martin viewed things from an environmentalist perspective.

To the extent the MSM has been willing to report on the disadvantage under which the Big Three automakers operate compared to their non-union competitors, the focus has been on the huge wage differential.

On this evening's Fox News Watch, conservative columnist Jim Pinkerton highlighted another issue which has gone largely unreported in the liberal media: the onerous union work rules that add literally thousands of positions to the job rolls compared to those of the foreign transplants.

View video here.

We're going to change this up tonight, and stick with a consistent theme: political humor.

Here are the rules: suggested videos should be tasteful, unoffensive, and sent this evening to both Noel and Warner via PM or EM (nsheppard@newsbusters.org, igcolonel@hotmail.com). Please don't link videos in the comments section, for we want all content to be filtered.

The phone lines are open!

Our first entrant is one YouTuber's 10 Most Awkward Political Gaffes (embedded right, more below the fold).

Though there's not a ruble's worth of difference between their politics, I normally find Rachel Maddow a kinder, gentler, smarter version of Keith Olbermann.  Not tonight.  Granted, the Countdown host was on hiatus.  But even if Olby had been around, he would have been hard-pressed to outdo Maddow for sheer silliness.

The preposterous proposition Rachel propounded?  Republicans just don't want Americans to make good wages. That's how Maddow in part explained the decision of Senate Republicans to oppose the Big Three bailout.

View video here.

Which would be the safer place to be for a political figure who's received death threats?:

a. A school concert in a public venue.
b. A press conference in the company of the President-elect of the United States of America.

If you answered 'b,' you're thinking like me and presumably most people. If you answered 'a,' you're A.B. Stoddard.  The associate editor of "The Hill" offered up the strange excuse that death threats are preventing Rahm Emanuel from attending press conferences in the course of an MSNBC appearance this afternoon during which she also claimed that "President-elect Obama is taking steps to be as forthcoming and as open and as transparent as he promised he would be."   

View video here.

This whole Blago-Obama business. Really, it's just too ineffably tedious for someone of Mike Barnicle's stature. Can't we just move on? So seemed the Morning Joe panelist's attitude today.

Mika Brzezinski received Barnicle's blasé response to her question about possible interactions between Blago and Rahm Emanuel. [H/t tip reader Ray R.]

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Mike Barnicle, does it matter if there were interactions between Rahm Emanuel and Blagojevich if they were above-board, and they blew him off?

All is fair in love and war ... and environmentalism.

A Greenpeace advertisement attacking the fishing industry that was posted on YouTube Dec. 3 spells out doom and gloom for a type of Pollock if action isn't taken soon.

"Alaskan Pollock are being overfished," the voice in the TV spot said. "They're the source of everything from fish sandwiches to fish sticks. Overfishing of Canadian cod resulted in 40,000 lost jobs." The YouTube ad encouraged viewers to visit Greenpeace.org to "help defend our oceans from overfishing."

But, according to a video rebuttal of the Greenpeace ad by the National Fisheries Institute, the Greenpeace "solution" would cost the fishing industry $400 million and not do anything to improve the quantity of Alaskan Pollock in the oceans.

Let's hope we haven't seen the last of economist Peter Morici on CBS.  The University of Maryland business professor, appearing on the Early Show this morning, put the blame for the failure of Big Three bailout squarely on the shoulders of the UAW for its refusal to accept pay cuts putting its members on par with non-union workers at US plants owned by foreign car manufacturers.  The Early Show did manage to balance things with some Dem demagoguery from the mayor of a Michigan city.

Morici singled out UAW president Ron Gettelfinger, calling him "unrealistic" and "selfish." Comic relief was later provided by Virg Bernero, mayor of Lansing, Michigan, who seemed to confuse South Carolina with South Korea.

How about Sean Hannity as editor of the New York Times op-ed page?  Maybe O'Reilly and Cavuto in place of Dowd and Krugman as Times columnists?  It might not be as far-fetched as it sounds.  At least, not if Michael Wolff is right.  The Vanity Fair media maven, appearing on CNBC this afternoon, not only said that Rupert Murdoch wants the Gray Lady, but predicted he would get her.  [H/t Gat.]

View video here [via CNBC].

MICHAEL WOLFF: I think that everybody is looking at [the NYT] and waiting for it to kind of go over a brink, to run out of cash, which they're in the process of doing. Or to find itself in a situation where actually, and this is really the key thing, they go looking for a buyer.

A bit later, Wolff, author of a book on Murdoch, mentioned his name as a likely buyer . . .

President-elect Barack Obama named Carol Browner the "czar" of climate and energy policy for the White House, but CNBC's Joe Kernen was wary of her appointment.

"You can see that even in Europe, some of the climate concerns, given this, this once in a lifetime recession, John - to put someone that, an advocate of such strong measures," Kernen said on "Squawk Box" Dec. 11. "Really I've seen her called Brownies or Brownistas. Um. That's a little scary with what's happening right now."

Earlier Kernen was discussing cabinet appoints with CNBC Washington correspondent John Harwood and pointed to new regulations Browner could institute:

NBC News went out of its way this time to show how the American public relies on government Dec. 10 by focusing on the public library in it's "Hard Times" series.

The broadcast examined the hardships public libraries are facing in the economic downturn - at a time when people are flocking to libraries instead of the local bookstore.

"These tough economic times, as we have been saying, have forced a lot of people to find new ways of doing things to save money," "Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams said. "And listen to this next one - with money so tight, the costs of books has people turning to a place where you can actually get books free, then return them for the next user. The library business, it seems, is booming. But now they could use some help in this economy."

NBC correspondent Chris Jansing interviewed a librarian that detected an uptick in "wild" behavior at one library - which Jansing deemed a result of the economic downturn.

If naiveté were a crime, Jesse Jackson Jr. could be looking at a life sentence.  Either that, or Senate candidate 5 wasn't being completely candid in his press conference this afternoon.

Jackson professed shock that Rod Blagojevich—a man who long before this week's arrest had a Katrina-sized cloud over his head—might have been conducting his Senate-seat search in accordance with anything but the most Mother Teresa-worthy standards.

Excerpts from Jackson's statement:

"This is a pattern we've seen for many years, especially when it comes to scandal. We call it drop the (D). You see stories like this [Blagojevich]," all the time NewsBusters Senior Editor Tim Graham told FNC's Neil Cavuto. While some print outlets just bury the Democratic label deep within an article, "a lot of times on television we're not seeing that [the party label] at all. We've seen that in the Blagojevich coverage. You could have watched CBS today and not found a single mention," that the indicted Illinois Governor is a Democrat, Graham added. [download video here] [audio here]

Graham, the MRC's Director of Media Analysis, appeared on the December 10 "Your World" program to discuss the stark contrast between how the media ignore or downplay party labels for Democrats in trouble with the law, while trumpeting the Republican party affiliation of GOPers in legal or ethical hot water.

This is just too perfect.  Earlier today, noting that none of the network morning shows explicitly identified Rod Blagojevich as a Democrat, I wondered out loud how the MSM would treat a Republican in like circumstances.   It's taken less than three hours to get our answer.

Let's preface this by saying that Norm Coleman is not, repeat not, the target of an investigation.  To mention him anywhere within a million miles of Blago is unfair.  I'm citing the MSNBC coverage just for purposes of illustrating the double standard.  At about 11:20 AM ET, here's how Contessa Brewer threw it to Norah O'Donnell.

CONTESSA BREWER: Let's head over to Norah now, live at the politics desk, with more on a potential problem for GOP Senator, and the incumbent here in Minnesota, Norm Coleman. Norah.

Vice President for the Business & Media Institute, Dan Gainor, spoke with Gretchen Carlson, host of "America's News HQ," about the decline of media and particularly newspapers.

"The model for media in general is not working. We had a great model for a long time for networks, great model for print, nobody's been able to come up with a way to deal with the internet and make a ton of cash just yet," Gainor said on the Fox News broadcast Dec. 9.

Gainor noted the advertising troubles of print media in particular -- advertising is down 9 percent.

"So you've got newspapers around the country shedding jobs. They predicted 43,000 newspaper jobs lost in the last couple years. That's devastating an industry," Gainor said.

Rachel Maddow is on a mission -- to stop what she perceives as egregious revisionism when it comes to the war in Iraq. And if Maddow has to engage in the real thing to indulge her outrage, all while airbrushing away the ominous decade between the Persian Gulf war and 9/11, so be it.

The media's fave lefty mouthpiece of the moment has been in high dudgeon, her indignation initiated by Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard describing the so-called "Bush Legacy Project."

On her MSNBC show Dec. 3, Maddow showed a clip of Bush's interview with Charles Gibson of ABC News where Bush said "the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq." Many people "put their reputations on the line" that Saddam Hussein's suspected possession of WMD justified an invasion, Bush said, and "it wasn't just people in my administration." This is "not a do-over," Bush added, but "I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess."

Sure, the sitting Democratic governor of Illinois has been arrested and charged with attempting to sell Barack Obama's Senate seat.  But enough about that.  Jay Leno is starting his show 90 minutes earlier!!  

Yes, a bit after 1 PM today, MSNBC actually pre-empted its Blago coverage to go to a news conference at which NBC honchos, with Leno present, announced that the Tonight show host would be moving from 11:30 to 10 PM.

Andrea Mitchell was in the midst of a serious dialogue with Pete Williams, when someone apparently whispered in the NBC justice correspondent's ear . . .

"I don't know why he's attacking Time magazine," a puzzled Seton Motley told "Fox & Friends" host Steve Doocy this morning, referring to the president-elect's former longtime pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. On Sunday the retired minister -- who married the Obamas and baptized their children -- issued a fiery screed against the media -- calling the mainstream media the "gates of hell" -- from the pulpit of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ.

"They [Time magazine] were certainly much nicer to him than a lot of journalistic outlets were, and by nicer I mean hiding him and preventing him from being a bigger player in the presidential race," the MRC director of communications added. "Look, the media's not going to cover this guy in the way that they should because of his 20-year relationship with Barack Obama." [audio available here]

Doocy and Motley also discussed the media's reticence on reporting on Obama's Bill Ayers connection during the campaign. To see the full appearance, click the play button on the embedded video to your right.

Contessa Brewer has suggested that Pres. Bush should be ashamed of his administration's decision to exempt the chemical perchlorate from federal regulation.   Speaking with a Republican guest this afternoon, the MNSBC host analogized the decision to Bill Clinton's scandalous last-minute pardons.

Did Brewer ever read the official EPA explanation of its ruling, or had she only looked at articles like this one, "subtly" featuring a huge photo of a baby drinking from its bottle?

View video here.

If print is becoming journalism's dying backwater, Paul Krugman isn't showing it.

In a Dec. 6 interview in Stockholm, Sweden, the Nobel Prize-winning New York Times columnist told the ironically named Adam Smith, editor-in-chief of Nobelprize.org, that he found himself more effective in his role at the Times lately He said he was more influential in shaping policy as a journalist than he would be in a high-ranking position on the Obama economic team.

"I like to think I'm a good analyst," Krugman said. "But, I don't think I'm a good bureaucrat of any kind. I might think differently if I wasn't at the Times, but as it is I have a mouthpiece, people are listening. I probably can have as much influence, as say on the shape of this upcoming economic stimulus package from where I am as I could if I were, you know, the third-ranking member of the Obama economics team - something like that, so I think it's probably as good of position as any."

Given the flap that ensued when he famously told Joe the Plumber that he wanted to "spread the wealth," I figured Barack Obama wouldn't be making such a suggestion again anytime soon.  I figured wrong.

Pres.-elect Obama to Tom Brokaw on today's Meet The Press:

I think the important principle, because sometimes when we start talking about taxes, and I say I want a more balanced tax code, people think, well, that's class warfare. No.  It turns out that our economy grows best when the benefits of the economy are most widely spread.  And that has been true historically.