On Friday, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow accurately blamed a bill enacted in 1999 for today's financial crisis, but in so doing exclusively pointed accusatory fingers at its Republican sponsors while totally ignoring the overwhelming Democrat support it received in both Chambers of Congress.

Maybe even more egregious, she chose not to address it being signed into law by President Bill Clinton until a guest inconveniently brought it up.

Of course, NewsBusters has been apprising readers about the significance of the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 (aka Gramm-Leach-Bliley) for many months, including articles on the subject here and here.

With this in mind, despite Maddow's supposed intellectual prowess, she's not only extremely late to this party, but she also apparently thinks only the sponsors of a bill are responsible for its content and not those that vote for or eventually sign it into law (video part I embedded right, part II below the fold with partial transcript):

A former New York Times investigative journalist who wrote primarily on business and taxation will soon be speaking at a "progressive" gathering.

Further, in his inaugural column at a post-Times gig, he misrepresented the nature of the 1980 and 2000 tax-cut proposals by the Republican presidential candidates.

Finally, in another post-Times tax column, he used vitriolic class warfare-based language in analyzing matters relating to tax compliance.

Surprised? If you're familiar with the work of David Cay Johnston from when he toiled at the Times, probably not.

Last night, it occurred to me, as I was preparing an e-mail to notify New York Times business columnist David Cay Johnston about updates to yesterday's original posts (NewsBusters; BizzyBlog) about his "smaller average incomes" report and a new source data update post, that I should bring a festering Times-related business reporting matter to his attention.

So I did (links to previous NewsBusters, BizzyBlog and other posts not in the e-mail have been added by me; Mr. Johnston was advised that this portion of the e-mail would be posted):

David,

..... Until earlier this year, I really didn't have too adverse of an opinion on the hard business reporting at the Times (outside of Paul Krugman, but he's a commentator). I've usually seen AP as consistently worse on hard biz-econ news.

Then, in February, Times reporter David Leonhardt told readers that manufacturing was in a recession. Not heading towards one. Not on the verge of one. Nope -- IN one.