Bill Clinton

The ignorance of HBO's Bill Maher was oozing from every nook and cranny of his being Friday night.

After telling his Real Time audience that the national debt has only gone up by $1.5 trillion under Obama, the host during the Overtime segment actually said, "Mitt Romney we found out made $27 million, only paid 11 percent in taxes” (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary, first relevant section at 4:00):

CBS's Nancy Giles on Sunday scolded women's groups for giving former President Bill Clinton a pass for his transgressions with White House aide Monica Lewinsky.

This strangely came during a Sunday Morning piece about Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich's troubles with the media over his own marital infidelity (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Next month's Esquire magazine has an interview with Bill Clinton wherein the former President said MSNBC "has become our version of Fox":

PBS will air a "harsh" documentary in Febuary heavily focusing on Bill Clinton's serial infidelities and scandal, according to Politico. The "American Experience" episode will devote 40 minutes to the Monica Lewinsky controversy and include lines such as this: "Millions had responded to his campaign message of change, but millions of others feared where the country was heading and didn’t trust their inexperienced new president to lead them through uncertain times."

However tough this documentary proves to be, will it equal the nasty assertions in the "American Experience" piece on Ronald Reagan? That particular program (which aired in 1998) attacked, "Cuts in social programs created a homeless population that grew to exceed that of Atlanta. AIDS became an epidemic in the 1980s, nearly 50,000 died. Reagan largely ignored it."

This week the Today show is celebrating 60 years of being on the air, and for over 20 of those years the MRC has been documenting the NBC morning show’s liberal agenda. From past anchors like Bryant Gumbel blaming “right wing” talk radio for the Oklahoma City bombing and  Katie Couric trashing Ronald Reagan as an “airhead,” up through current anchor Matt Lauer wondering how Barack Obama would “manage the expectations” of being called “The Messiah,”
MRC analysts have been documenting the worst the show has offered.

The following are 10 of the most obnoxiously liberal examples of Today show bias from the MRC’s archive; for even more bias from the Today show anchors please visit the Profile in Bias pages of Gumbel, Couric, Lauer, Meredith Vieira and Ann Curry. (Top 10 Video Countdown after the jump)

CNN’s Alina Cho touted “The man many Democrats call the best president in modern times” in her gushing interview of former President Clinton that aired multiple times Wednesday.  By the end of the interview, she sounded utterly enthralled by Clinton and his humanitarian work.

“150 countries, more than that,” Cho told Clinton of his travels, before taking a deep breath and tremulously asking “What keeps you going?” She praised the President’s efforts, gushing that Clinton is “Working tirelessly to make a difference. Traveling all over the world.” [Video of the segment below the break.]

Bill Clinton on Tuesday said the press favored Barack Obama over his wife for president in 2008.

Not surprisingly, he told Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly that he didn’t believe the media were biased towards him when he first ran for president in 1992 (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

During a fawning interview with Bill Clinton on Tuesday's NBC Today, co-host Ann Curry asked for the former President's thoughts on Newt Gingrich running for president: "You also, having worked with him, I'm wanting to know, putting aside politics, do you see Newt Gingrich as a man who has the temperament, the leadership qualities, to be President of the United States?"

Clinton took the opportunity to relish GOP infighting during the primary season: "That's what the presidential election is for....you find out a lot about people in the crucible of battle and they're all turning on him now and running all these negative ads. And basically, It's funny, they're basically doing to each other now, in a serial way, what they did to the Democrats in 2010."

It's always interesting to see how the several thousand readers who voted in the MRC's "public ballot" differed from the 48 media experts who selected our Best Notable Quotables of 2011 (a panel which included talk radio hosts Mark Levin and Neal Boortz, Human Events editor-in-chief Tom Winter and Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby). This year, there were six categories where our readers and the judges disagreed -- although sometimes the margins were extremely close.

Let's start with the biggest disagreement, in the "Media Millionaires for Higher Taxes Award." By a healthy margin (68 to 53), our judges chose an April 17 quote from CBS's Bob Schieffer, as he was questioning Rep. Paul Ryan on Face the Nation: "Why do these rich people need another tax cut? I mean, they’re already rich....Why cut their taxes some more?"

Appearing as a guest on Wednesday's Piers Morgan Tonight on CNN, former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw recounted some of the rationale behind why the Bush administration believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction before the invasion of Iraq, even noting that President Clinton had also believed in the presence of WMD. (Video below)

On the popular radio show A Prairie Home Companion this weekend, NPR star Garrison Keillor sang a different version of "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town." It had a slightly different melody, and mocked Newt Gingrich, without naming him. Keillor sang: "Don’t think a sense of style conceals your escapades / Don’t vote to impeach Bill Clinton while shacking up with Congressional aides." Gingrich was cheating on his second wife (with his eventual third wife) at that time in 1998.

Keillor also sang that Santa is watching for who is "beating up on" gays or minorities. There's nothing wrong with opposing physical violence or mean-spirited bullying -- but with NPR, you'd have to suspect Keillor is implying a broader argument about conservative arguments against gay marriage or "affirmative action." Keillor sang:

There was an astonishingly revealing moment on Sunday's 60 Minutes when President Obama said, "Some of the most damaging behavior on Wall Street, in some cases, some of the least ethical behavior on Wall Street, wasn't illegal."

For what should be obvious reasons, CBS's Steve Kroft didn't bother asking his guest who created, voted for or signed the pieces of legislation that allowed this "damaging behavior on Wall Street" to be legal (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Americans that spent their Saturday evening watching the Republican presidential debate witnessed the height of media hypocrisy.

Former Clinton adviser turned ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos actually asked attendees - with a straight face no less - if marital infidelity should be an issue in the campaign (video follows with highlights and commentary):

Sad to see Ed Schultz suffer such sudden memory loss on live national TV.  On his MSNBC show this evening, discussing Herman Cain's handling of the various allegations against him, Schultz: found it odd that Cain's wife had come to his defense; said he'd never "seen anything like this in American politics;" and claimed that by criticizing his accusers, Cain had hit "a new low in American politics."

Do any of the following sound an echo with Ed?:

For conservatives, one of the bright spots of the Occupy Wall Street protests was when millionaire investor Peter Schiff went down to Zuccotti Park with video camera and a sign reading "I Am The 1% - Let's Talk."

On Tuesday, I had the pleasure of speaking with Schiff by telephone in a sweeping interview about his experience at OWS, how the financial media are doing, and ending with his rather frightening view of the economy and the future of our nation (video follows with transcript):

After Politico hysterically named Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson its "Energy Policy Maker of the Year" Tuesday evening, NewsBusters sought the opinion of James Inhofe (R-Ok.), the ranking member on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

As readers would expect, this led to a lengthy discussion about the global warming myth, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, ClimateGate, and a host of related subjects guaranteed to inform and entertain skeptics across the fruited plain (audio follows with transcript):

You knew this was coming.

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman - might he finally be realizing that our budget deficits can't possibly be solved by just eliminating the Bush tax cuts? - is now calling for marginal rates even higher than when Bill Clinton was in office:

It appears the folks at the National Organization for Women can't defend a conservative woman without attacking Rush Limbaugh.

As Big Hollywood reported Thursday evening, NOW President Terry O'Neill finally responded to the offensive song Jimmy Fallon's band played as Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) walked onto the set of NBC's Late Night Monday:

Now that he's frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, Newt Gingrich must feel a sense of deja vu with all the attacks he's getting from liberal media members.

Keeping up his end Thursday was Vanity Fair's national editor Todd S. Purdum with a hit piece intelligently titled "Big Baby":

When it comes to the MSM, it's hard to get more mainstream than Jon Meacham.  Former Newsweek editor. Current Random House editor.  Picked for a Pulitzer Prize.

So when someone of Meacham's genteelly liberal ilk unloads on Barack Obama in such stark terms, it's newsworthy.  On today's Morning Joe, Meacham flatly stated his belief that President Obama "doesn't particularly like people and politicians who don't like people are kind of in the wrong business."  Video and more after the jump.

She hasn't accomplished a darned thing on television yet, but Chelsea Clinton is already being compared to the late Meet the Press host Tim Russert.

Such almost unthinkable praise emerged from NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams on CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight Monday (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Worrying that there are "[t]oo many lingering questions about his conduct with women," the Washington Post editorial board complained in the November 14 edition that GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain failed to satisfactorily answer reporter Maria Bartiromo's "legitimate question" at last week's CNBC debate: "Why should the American people hire a president if they feel there are character issues?"

"If the accusations are true, they depict a man who attempted to use his position of power to coerce sexual favors from subordinates or vulnerable women," the Post lectured, concluding that "[T]he public has a right to as much information as possible to weigh the competing accounts and to make a determination about Mr. Cain's fitness for office," even if, in fact, "The truth may be impossible to discern."

But in 1994, the Post's editorial board had a decidedly different take about Paula Jones's allegations of sexual misconduct by President Bill Clinton.

Former President Bill Clinton is making headlines again, this time touting his liberal prescriptions to fix the economy. Those remedies are laid out his new book Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy. The news media is doing their part to promote Clinton's work and his economic legacy, portraying him as the economic savior of America.

This should come as no surprise, since Clinton is still beloved by liberal journalists. New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani called Clinton's book "a lucid one-man rebuttal of the Tea Party's anti-government agenda." Kakutani also summarized Clinton's plan, saying "Mr. Clinton serves up a succinct common-sense argument, why both spending cuts and increased tax revenues are necessary for addressing the debt problem."

Bill Clinton appeared on Tuesday morning on NBC and MSNBC to promote his latest book, and neither asked the man – who paid an $850,000 settlement to Paula Jones and surrendered his law license for false testimony – to comment. The same pattern happened on National Public Radio. Morning Edition anchor Steve Inskeep gave Clinton more than seven minutes of air time to his thoughts on Obama and the economy, but no harassment inquiries.

This question was jaw-dropping in its ignorance. “Your administration was known politically for seeking to reposition the Democratic Party, not get stuck as being defined as tax-and-spend liberals,” Inskeep proclaimed. “President Obama also was seen as trying to take the party in a new [moderate] direction, but ended telling an interviewer last year that he had been tagged as another tax-and-spend liberal. How'd that happen to him?”

Does a former GOP congressman who voted to impeach President Bill Clinton now support a third term for him? MSNBC's Joe Scarborough lauded Clinton on Tuesday's Morning Joe and asked him why he shouldn't be able to run for office again.

However, he didn't once bring up Clinton's impeachment for lying under oath about his sexual misconduct while in office, during Tuesday's media firestorm over GOP candidate Herman Cain's accusations of misconduct.

Scarborough, a self-described "conservative," blamed Republicans for the 22nd Amendment – which enacts a two-term limit on every President – and touted that he would be "flooded" with requests from people wanting Clinton to run again. [Video below the break.]

Updated [12:35 ET]: More analysis and full transcript added.

In a fawning interview with Bill Clinton on Tuesday's NBC Today, co-host Ann Curry played an ad from the former president's 1992 campaign and remarked: "First of all, how cute were you and your hair hasn't changed. But number two, but number two, you talk about vision there and leadership. So what is President Obama's vision on the economy?" [Audio available here]

Moments later, Curry noted high disapproval of Obama's handling of the economy and wondered: "You know, you often speak of your wife's extraordinary gifts. Do you ever think that the country would be better off if she had won the presidency?" [View video after the jump]

Despite talking about the current presidential campaign with Clinton, Curry avoided asking him for comment about sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain.