Rachel Maddow

President Obama met with a group of prominent liberal commentators on Thursday to discuss the Gulf oil spill and the administration's response. The meeting came in the midst of a rare firestorm of criticism from the left over the president's response to the spill.

It was surely not coincidence that the journalists seen leaving the White House that afternoon--the New York Times's Gail Collins, the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, and the Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib--were some of the more prominent critics of the president's Oval Office address on Tuesday.

The meeting demonstrates two facts: the White House is trying furiously to spin media coverage of the federal response to the spill in the administration's favor, and the old White House double standard towards the news media persists.

There are lies, damned lies and statistics, so the saying goes. Add Rachel Maddow's lies of omission to the list.

Maddow is doing her best to shield MSNBC viewers from awkward facts about political support for offshore drilling. Here's how she began her show on Monday, with an announcement from July 2008 by then-President George W. Bush -- 

BUSH: For years my administration has been calling on Congress to expand domestic oil production. Unfortunately, Democrats on Capitol Hill have rejected virtually every proposal. ... One of the most important steps we can take to expand American oil production is to increase access to offshore exploration on the Outer Continental Shelf, or what's called the OCS. ... Today I've issued a memorandum to lift the executive prohibition on oil exploration in the OCS.

MADDOW: That was President George W. Bush in July 2008 lifting the presidential ban on offshore oil drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf. It was a presidential ban that had been first put in place by President Bush's dad in 1990 after the big Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska. Here was why Bush the second said he was lifting the drilling ban of Bush the first --

BUSH: New advances in technology have made it possible to conduct oil exploration in the OCS that is out of sight, protects coral reefs and habitats, and protects against oil spills.

It's not often I see something on The Huffington Post I look forward to reading. Here's an exception.

In a post ungrammatically titled "Why Has the New York Times and Rachel Maddow Misled Us?", novelist and essayist Richard Greener on Thursday wrote a stinging rebuke of a Times' June 8 editorial and Maddow's coverage on her show the following day of the Supreme Court emergency order intervening in Arizona's political matching funds law.

The specifics of Greener's criticism of the Times and Maddow can be found by following this link to his post. (A video clip of the Maddow segment in question can be found here).

Greener laid it on thick when it came to Maddow, initially describing her as "always intelligent, smart and savvy and usually 100 percent credible" before going after her assertions about the court's action.

It wasn't us who said this. Instead, it's one of their own - an outspoken openly liberal talk show with a cynical view of the mainstream media.

On the June 11 Web portion of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" called "Overtime," Newsweek editor Jon Meacham offered the argument there is not a pro-Israel bias in the media, which is often alleged.

"The idea that there is a pro-Israeli bias in the broad media - whatever ‘the media' means at this point, I strongly disagree with," Meacham said. "I think if anything you run into a very strong feeling on the Palestinian side."

That led another panelist on Maher's show, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow to protest by asking who is pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel in politics or media.

Do you live near wetlands? Worse still, in a subdivision near wetlands? If so, please hold your head in shame and make Rachel Maddow's day. 

Reporting on the BP spill from Louisiana last week, MSNBC's self-proclaimed geek spent considerable time talking about the importance of wetlands. "Land like this is life or death, not only for the wildlife that lives there, and boy howdy do they have some wildlife, but land like this is life or death in a much bigger way," Maddow told her viewers on June 2 (1:01 in this clip). "It means life or death for all the other land that's not like this around here."

Maddow elaborated by describing a hurricane's storm surge, akin to "a high tide from hell." Wetlands buffer the coast from the impact of storm surges, Maddow said. "They say that every 2.7 square miles of wetlands that a storm passes over brings the storm surge for communities behind those wetlands down by one foot," marking the difference between "destruction" and "biblical destruction."

After falsely claiming that oil companies pay no federal royalties for offshore drilling, an assertion later undermined by one of her own guests, Rachel Maddow rewrites the history of the oil industry's last 40 years.  

"We've had a lot of response to the NBC News archival footage that we played this week showing just how much hasn't changed in the past 30 years of oil drilling disasters," told her MSNBC viewers May 28. "You may recall that we played news coverage this week of the 1979 Ixtoc oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. And that footage made clear that from failed blowout preventers, to junk shots, to top kills, to booms, to dispersants, to undersea plumes of oil, oil disasters and oil disaster response looks the same now as it did 30 years ago."

"The only real technological progress the oil industry has made in the past 30 years is figuring out how to drill in ever deeper water," Maddow claimed. "It was unsafe in 200 feet of water 30 years ago. Now the progress is that today it's unsafe in 5,000 feet of water. ... No one in the oil industry wants to say it and no one in America wants to believe that it is true and I include myself in this. But honestly, we have no idea how to drill safely offshore. We know how to drill offshore, but we do not know how to drill safely offshore. Because the oil companies have never been made to care too much about that before."

Not only that, I would hasten to add, we have "no idea" how to send human beings safely into space. Even after losing three astronauts in the Apollo 1 fire of January 1967, seven more perished nearly 20 years later on the shuttle Challenger, followed by another seven fatalities on the Columbia in 2003.

Journalists, never known to shy from giving each other awards, will always make room for one more. How about this for a possibility?

... And our final nominee for gratuitous reference to race in cable-show polemic, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, shown here on May 26 --

MADDOW: Today in Alaska, crude oil production was all but stopped on the North Slope. Oil companies operating there were told to cut their production by more than 80 percent after thousands of barrels of crude oil spilled from the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline. The 800-mile Trans-Alaska oil pipeline, at least for right now, is shut down. That spill in Alaska is happening, of course, in the shadow of a much larger spill in the Gulf of Mexico. (Maddow pauses for effect)

And, uh, actually, you know what, if it's OK with you guys in the control room, I think we should just probably just have me stop doing this now and let the gravitas white guy anchor do this part. Let's do that.

Yes -- "the gravitas white guy anchor." Worth nominating, don't you think?

What is it about oil spills that make liberals so slippery?

Come to think of it, this isn't fair. What is it about oil spills that make liberals more slippery than usual? There, that's better.

The fact that oil companies receive federal subsidies doesn't sit well with Chris Hayes, Washington editor of The Nation magazine and occasional guest host on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show. Sitting in for Maddow on May 21, Hayes lambasted libertarian GOP Senate candidate Rand Paul for not condemning subsidies to the fossil-fuels industry --

HAYES: The very idea of government subsidies runs counter to the libertarian governing philosophy. And yet when they're in power, when conservatives are in power, reflexively pro-business conservatives have no problem with them. They chuck their supposedly principled free-market ideals right under the wagon the first time BP comes calling.

Sarah Palin on Sunday said that she sees similarities between how the media are treating Kentucky senatorial candidate Rand Paul and the way the press tried to "get" her before the elections in 2008.

Appearing on "Fox News Sunday" with Chris Wallace, the former Alaska governor said, "I think there is certainly a double standard at play here."

"One thing that we can learn in this lesson that I have learned and Rand Paul is learning now is don't assume that you can engage in a hypothetical discussion about constitutional impacts with a reporter or a media personality who has an agenda."

She continued, "They are looking for the gotcha moment, and that's what evidently appears to be that they did with Rand Paul" (video follows with partial transcript and commentary): 

Although Sam Donaldson wouldn't go so far as calling senatorial candidate Rand Paul a racist, he did say that he'd be shocked if enough people in Kentucky voted for the Tea Party candidate in November to send him to Congress.

As the Roundtable discussion of Sunday's "This Week" moved to Paul's primary victory on Tuesday, Donaldson said that comments the Tea Partier made about the Civil Rights Act on "The Rachel Maddow Show" were "stupid."

"So who is going to win in Kentucky? I can't predict," he said adding, "But I would be shocked -- I'll say that now -- if Rand Paul gets most of Kentucky's votes and becomes the senator" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Kentucky senatorial candidate Rand Paul has struck back at MSNBC for its continuous implications that he is a racist.

In an interview with WHAS-TV in Louisville, Paul said, "I need to be very careful about going on certain networks that seem to have a bias."

He continued, "They went on a whole day repeating something over and over again, and it makes me less inclined to go on a network" (video follows with partial transcript and commentary, relevant section at 2:50, h/t HotAirPundit):

Stop the presses: a fill-in for Rachel Maddow on Friday actually busted the New York Times for misquoting Rand Paul in its article about the Tea Party senatorial candidate published earlier in the day.

As most readers are aware, Paul made some rather controversial statements on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show" Wednesday.

Two days later, Adam Nagourney and Carl Hulse of the Times wrote: "Asked by Ms. Maddow if a private business had the right to refuse to serve black people, Mr. Paul replied, 'Yes.'"

As the Nation's Chris Hayes amazingly pointed out Friday, that's not what Paul said (video follows with transcript and commentary, h/t Daily Paul via NB reader Russell Davis):

On this weekend's Fox News Watch, panelist Jim Pinkerton cited this NewsBusters item in which Joe Scarborough passed along the comment from an unnamed conservative insider questioning "what the hell was [Rand Paul] doing on MSNBC?", a reference to Paul's appearance on the Rachel Maddow show in which he made comments on the 1964 Civil Rights Act that have caused controversy.  The irony of course is that Scarborough is himself an MSNBC host. H/t NB reader Gat New York.

Pinkerton and his fellow News Watch panelists got a chuckle out of this NewsBuster's fond wish which concluded the item: "Oh to be an olive when Joe and Rachel sip martinis together at the MSNBC TGIF."

Joe Scarborough might not have won any brownie points with his employer, but he gets credit for candor . . .

Commenting on the Rand Paul matter, Scarborough passed along the comments of an unidentified conservative insider who asked "what the hell was he [Paul] doing on MSNBC?" That of course was a reference to Paul's appearance on the Rachel Maddow show in which he made comments on the 1964 Civil Rights Act that have caused controversy.

Following up on Brian Williams offering a Bush-bashing commencement address at Notre Dame, the liberal all-female Smith College naturally invited MSNBC host Rachel Maddow for her own Bush-bashing graduation speech on Sunday.

Maddow, whose every profile seems to boast of her bartending talents, began her address by expressing horror at Carry Nation, the bar-smashing temperance activist of the early 1900s, which spurred Prohibition, which spurred Maddow to bash Bush:  

With the massive surge of profits flowing through that criminal underworld, this country reached whole new levels of government corruption that puts anything we've got today to shame -- except for maybe the Interior Department of the Bush administration.

... Sure looks like it, based on what Maddow said on her MSNBC program during separate shows last week.

Here's Maddow on May 12 talking about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, congressional hearings on the disaster, and "climate change legislation" --

MADDOW: In the shadow of the BP oil disaster, jaw-dropping hearings, senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman introduced climate change legislation in the Senate today, the American Power Act. Among other things it includes subsidies for offshore oil drilling. Subsidies, taxpayer subsidies. These oil companies already don't pay federal royalties on anything that they drill out there. But how about expanded taxpayer subsidies for them to do it too, to do it more? This is, not to put too fine a point on it, our oil. And yet we're paying them to drill it and then we're not collecting a percentage from it, even though it's ours and even though we bear the environmental disaster risk whenever anything goes wrong.

All of a day later, Maddow's dubious assertion about oil companies not paying royalties to the federal government for offshore drilling was undermined by an unlikely source, one of her guests Thursday night, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.

Handy rule of thumb when watching MSNBC's Rachel Maddow -- the more earnest her claim, the less likely it's true. Hardly ever fails.

Most recent example -- Maddow on Wednesday talking about congressional hearings on the Deepwater  Horizon oil spill coinciding with senators Kerry and Lieberman introducing so-called "climate change" legislation (formerly known as cap and trade, formally called the American Power Act, more accurately described as American Disempowerment) --

MADDOW: In the shadow of the BP oil disaster, jaw-dropping hearings, senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman introduced climate change legislation in the Senate today, the American Power Act. Among other things it includes subsidies for offshore oil drilling. Subsidies, taxpayer subsidies. These oil companies already don't pay federal royalties on anything that they drill out there. But how about expanded taxpayer subsidies for them to do it too, to do it more? This is, not to put too fine a point on it, our oil. And yet we're paying them to drill it and then we're not collecting a percentage from it, even though it's ours and even though we bear the environmental disaster risk whenever anything goes wrong.

It's the American way, right? It is patriotic to exercise the 1st Amendment by petitioning the government for a redress of grievances - unless of course your effort has a tie to some corporation or lobbying interest. Then regardless of its size, it's phony baloney Astroturf activism.

While groups like the George Soros-funded MoveOn.org have managed to elude the "Astroturf" moniker, from its inception, the Tea Party movement has taken shots from its critics. One of the most popular left-wing charges was to call it "Astroturf," meaning it was presented as a grassroots efforts, but wasn't really grassroots. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi labeled the Tea Party movement "Astroturf" back during the original Tax Day Tea Party protest on April 15, 2009.

"This initiative is funded by the high end - we call it Astroturf," Pelosi said. "It's not really a grassroots movement. It's Astroturf by some of the wealthiest people in America to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich instead of for the great middle class."

That attitude has been widely echoed in media coverage of the Tea Party, as if it were a corporate effort to subvert the U.S. government's ability to collect revenue and redistribute wealth through public works and social program. Meanwhile, environmental causes, like Earth Day or global warming with their own corporate sponsorship - are rarely labeled Astroturf.

When it comes to Miranda, Rachel Maddow would do wise to remain silent.

On her MSNBC show Tuesday night, Maddow falsely implied that Times Square bomb plot suspect Faisal Shahzad spilled his guts to authorities only after he was read his Miranda rights. Here's Maddow's slippery take, preceded by remarks from Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Deputy Director John Pistole at a press conference after Shahzad was arrested --

HOLDER: He has been and continues to be questioned by federal agents. As a result of those communications, Shahzad has provided useful information to authorities.

PISTOLE: Joint terrorism task force agents and officers from NYPD interviewed Mr. Shahzad last night and early this morning under the public safety exception to the Miranda rule. He was, as the Attorney General noted, cooperative and provided valuable intelligence and evidence. He was eventually transported to another location, mirandized and continued talking.

There's a cynical theme growing in the media that Faisal Shahzad, the man accused of attempting to set off a car bomb in New York's Times Square Saturday, was driven to violence by the loss of his job, the loss of his house, and his anger towards former President George W. Bush.

In all of this theorizing -- or what some might call psychobabble -- those making the assertion have yet to ponder if six years of Bush Derangement Syndrome might also be involved.

For over a year, Americans have been warned that so-called "hate speech" directed at Barack Obama and Democrats by conservative talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity, as well as others at Fox News, is going to manifest itself in violent acts against elected officials and/or our nation.

With this in mind mightn't years of "hate speech" directed at Bush and Republicans by liberal talk radio hosts and MSNBC in particular have incited Shahzad's anger to such an extent that he decided to become a domestic terrorist?

Consider what the Wall Street Journal wrote Wednesday (h/t Jennifer Rubin, photo courtesy AP):

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that so-called payday loans probably aren't the most reasonable option when it comes to short-term borrowing. But according to MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, it takes the federal government to let you know.

On her April 28 program, Maddow charged that these lenders engage in unscrupulous practices, despite offering a service that their clientele is willing to buy.

"Last week we did our best to explain payday lenders - who they are and who they are, who they - what they do and who they are, excuse me," Maddow said. "Payday lenders are basically loan sharks with nice store fronts. They specialize in turning what look like short-term loans into ongoing obligations that rollover every two weeks, piling up fees until they're ultimately collecting 400 percent annual interest."

Sam Tanenhaus, editor of “The New York Times Book Review” and “Week in Review,” and the author of the book, “The Death of Conservatism,” went on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC talk show Monday night to discuss her being featured in a  fundraising letter from the right-wing John Birch Society. But the friendly chat soon veered off into a comparison of the nationalist John Birch Society to the Tea Party movement, with Tanenhaus confidently proclaiming “there are no serious ideas left on the right.”

Tanenhaus is pretty assured, for a man who published a book called “The Death of Conservatism” months before a conservative resurgence. At least he didn't refer to Tea Party protesters as “tea baggers,” as he did in an exchange on Slate last October. (Watch a clip of Tanenhaus chatting with Maddow at Times Watch).

SAM TANENHAUS: But there were many on the right who actually supported  [John Birch Society president Robert] Welch on the principle we're seeing in action today -- no enemies on the right. If they can be useful, you keep them in the tent. Then, by the mid-'60s, as you said before, they'd gotten so far off the grid that Buckley, a guy who kind of trafficked in intellectual circles, particularly in New York, and had a lot of smart liberal friends, like Murray Kempton and John Kenneth Galbraith, got a little embarrassed by them. At the same time, though, as you said, they were forceful. They were useful. In the Goldwater campaign in ‘64, they were the foot soldiers. In some sense, they're the precursor to the tea partiers we're seeing now, so the right is always nervous about evicting people like that.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow interviewed bisexual radical folksinger Sinead O’Connor on her Friday night show. Maddow treated O’Connor like a dignitary, letting her spill out answers/speeches – two lasted almost two minutes. Maddow just let O’Connor spout bizarre theories about how Pope Benedict doesn’t believe in God, with no “excuse me?” requests for elaboration.

When Maddow asked a softball question about how the Vatican was "sort of a country," but it was important for child sexual abuse to be handled by secular authorities, she uncorked O’Connor’s smash-the-hierarchy lecture:

And yes, the thing is I think that, you know, the Vatican is – it’s a 15th century organization. It’s a medieval organization. And what we`re seeing is the battle between medieval thinking and 21st century thinking.

If they want to survive into the 21st century, they’re going to have to become a 21st century business, which means that they are, first of all, those who have brought the Holy Spirit and Catholicism into total disrepute should be fired.

So you do your part and pay your taxes to the federal government. However, you feel you pay too much and you don't like how that same government uses that money. Do you have the right to petition and protest that government?

If it's on federal land that your tax dollars paid for, then your protest is hypocritical nonsense, according to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. To her, the tea partiers, who protested on the government land of the National Mall, are hypocrites. Worse,  they're getting unwarranted media coverage.

"In the case of the tea partiers, though, mainstream media coverage has been willing to almost assume that they're making sense, even in the face of evidence to the contrary," Maddow said on her April 21 program. "Because the idea of being in favor of smaller government, the idea that government is inherently wasteful and incompetent and should be shrunk, because that idea has shifted from a conservative movement talking point 30 years ago to centrist Beltway common wisdom today, sometimes we don't recognize the hypocrisy when it's right in our face. The conservative movement won the framing fight. It doesn't sound crazy anymore to rail against the federal government while standing in a national park until you really think about it."

Occasionally a lefty gets it right. Then a conservative says much the same thing. Followed by liberals denouncing him for it.

Latest example -- Bill O'Reilly's remarks on race at the Sharpton-organized National Action Network conference on April 14 in New York City. Speaking after O'Reilly was liberal action hero Ed Schultz, who spun what was said at the conference on MSNBC's "The Ed Show" that night --

SCHULTZ: You would think that at a serious event to promote equality and civil rights that Bill would rein in the psycho talk. Well, no such luck. He showed zero comprehension of the venue and came out swinging, defending the tea partiers.

O'REILLY: The tea party is a largely white phenomenon, there's no doubt about that, because African-Americans overwhelmingly support President Obama. But it is an overwhelmingly white movement. And now we are seeing that it's being demonized as a racist thing too and the best example was that Capitol display where the African-American congresspeople walked through this gauntlet of protest and there were charges the n-word was used and spitting happened and this, that and the other thing. ... Even if the n-word was used, and it absolutely could have been, you don't demonize a whole group by the actions of one or two people. ... It's a much more interesting country, America, if we stop with the race business, I think. I mean, I'm not black so I don't know your struggle, and you don't know my struggle, all right, because you're not white. ...

How do you know when laws are working as intended? When liberals want to rewrite them.

On her MSNBC show Friday night, Rachel Maddow compared the alleged Goldman Sachs fraud to a "mean old man" in "Tiny Town, US" bribing the owner of "Ye Olde Donut Shoppe" to serve his customers chlorine in their coffee instead of non-dairy creamer, because "mean old man" had taken out life insurance policies on the shop's customers.

Here's Maddow and Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson talking about the SEC filing suit against Goldman Sachs and GOP opposition to proposed financial overhaul legislation --

MADDOW: Republicans today announced that they are standing in unified opposition to Wall Street reform. We all live in Tiny Town now. Don't use the non-dairy creamer. Joining us now is Eugene Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and associate editor for the Washington Post and an MSNBC political analyst. Gene, thank you for bearing with me through that murderous analogy. (laughs)

For weeks, MSNBC has advertised Rachel Maddow's two-hour special broadcast about the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building. This special, aired on the 15-year anniversary of that bombing, was billed as a way for viewers to see what can happen if anti-government sentiment gets out of control.

"So tonight, exactly 15 years later, this special edition of ‘The Rachel Maddow Show' brings you the inside story of the Oklahoma City bombing," Maddow said on her April 19 broadcast. "MSNBC obtained 45 hours of audio tape interviews in which Timothy McVeigh describes the planning and the executions and the motivations behind his horrific attack. This is a detailed account as it has never before been heard, told to us by the terrorist himself."

However, there's an opportunity for viewers to reflect the status quo as they view this documentary, Maddow explained.

Today marks the 15th anniversary of the horrific Oklahoma City bombing, and The Washington Post's Hank Stuever promoted MSNBC on the front page of the Style section -- because Rachel Maddow "has been having 1990s flashbacks with the anti-government vitriol that most recently accompanied the health-care reform debate."

Stuever offered a preview of the left-wing propaganda to be unveiled tonight in the Maddow hour:

"Nine years after his execution, we are left worrying that Timothy McVeigh's voice from the grave echoes in the new rising tide of American anti-government extremism," Maddow says at the outset of her MSNBC special Monday night called "The McVeigh Tapes: Confessions of an American Terrorist."

Liberal MSNBC host Rachel Maddow appeared on the Daily Show, Tuesday, to promote her new Timothy McVeigh special and to compare, "The dark side of it is that [McVeigh] really did see himself as part of an anti-government movement in the United States...And, right now, I think we are experiencing an upswing again in sort of anti-government extremism."

Maddow didn't go into detail about who, exactly, is encouraging this upswing. Ads for her April 19 special, The McVeigh Tapes, have touted that it will put "into perspective the threat posed by anti-government extremism." In a commercial for the spot, Maddow lectured, "We ignore this, our own very recent history of anti-government violence and the dangers of domestic terrorism, at our peril."

Painting conservatives as racists is a favorite pastime of the mainstream media and a recent move by Republican Virginia governor Bob McDonnell gave them more ammunition to do just that.

McDonnell issued a proclamation on April 2 stating April would be Confederate History Month, but failed to note the role slavery played in the U.S. Civil War that lasted from 1861-1865. Commentators and journalists seized upon McDonnell's omission as proof that conservatives are inherent racists, despite an apology and later inclusion in the proclamation of a strong statement condemning slavery.

In his apology, McDonnell called slavery an "abomination" and explained that the proclamation was "solely intended to promote the study of our history, encourage tourism in our state in advance of the 150th Anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, and recognize Virginia's unique role in the story of America."

These allegations of racism against conservatives have percolated in the media since Barack Obama's election in 2008. "Confederate" or "Confederacy" has been used 60 times in news reports on ABC, CBS and NBC since November 4, 2008, but it's this proclamation, coupled with the anger over the recently passed health care reform, that had some in the media wondering if conservatives were ready to wage Civil War Redux.