Rachel Maddow gets it wrong again. No wonder progressives hate the right! They build false or misleading story lines (straw-men), and then attack this lie as if it were a truth:
According to the Census Bureau, the median income for men in 1980 was $12,530 per year. This grew to $20,293 in 1990 – a 62 percent increase. For women, this figure went from $4,920 in 1980 to $10,070 in 1990 – a 105 percent jump.
This means that the median income for the entire population in that decade rose at roughly the same rate as Maddow claimed the income for the top one percent did.
Makes you wonder just how often this MSNBC commentator so badly misrepresents economic data on her show.
Many do not realize how much of a hit Democrats took this past lame duck session. This cutting of the Bush Tax Cuts ~ so-called ~ was a main campaign promise from Obama:
NewsBusters points out, for instance, Rachel Maddow’s cheer-leading for the Democrats that they were finally going to implement a long standing promise… that is, defeating the Bush-era tax cuts. Here you see her on the eve of the big vote she was sure the Dems were geared up to win:
MADDOW (laughing): That, this evidence that you, that we have before us here in you, manifested in Bill Wolff, this phenomenon, being fired up like that, that is the key to the most important thing going on in American politics right now, I am convinced. This weekend Congress is going to be in session, this weekend! On a Saturday! We heard it as breaking news last night during this show, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announcing that he is not letting the Senate go home, the Democratic leadership is keeping the Senate in Washington over the weekend, because the thing that we have been talking about, the thing that they have been fighting about for months now is finally going to happen, tomorrow, on the weekend. Senate Democrats are finally going to do it. They are finally going to go through with this vote that they’ve been trying to psyche themselves up for on the Bush tax cuts.
Followed shortly after by Wolff donning a tall furry hat and marching off the set while thrusting a baton, as seen in embedded video, while Maddow said this —
MADDOW: This is not a matter of figuring out the policy! That is done. This is not a matter of doing the polling. That’s been done. This is not a matter of doing the math. The math has been done, the argument has been made, the numbers have been crunched, the debate has been worked through. It is a matter of whether or not the Democrats are psyched. It’s a matter of whether or not the Democrats have the fight in them to make this happen.
Hopefully we will see more of this in the next few years. That is, a compromising from the left for what is in the best interest of the country. Not to mention that I LOVE seeing Osama bin Olbermann pissed!
News Busters posted something that goes well with an old graph I post often… sort of like a “rub in your face fact” I like to put on the screen to irk passerbys. Here is the NB post followed by the graph:
According to a recent poll, likely voters get their political news primarily from cable television. Among cable channels, 42 percent, a plurality, watch Fox News for its political coverage. Only 12 percent said they watched MSNBC. What’s more, most likely voters don’t like or have never heard of MSNBC’s prime time talent.
The poll, conducted by Politico and George Washington University, used a sample split evenly between political parties – even slightly favoring Democrats in some areas: 41 percent of respondents identified as Republicans, while 42 percent said they were Democrats. Forty-four percent said they usually vote for Republicans, while 46 percent answered Democrats. Forty-eight percent voted for Obama, while only 45 percent voted for McCain.
Even among this group, Fox News is by far the most popular cable outlet. CNN comes in at second, with 30 percent. A sorry MSNBC brings up the rear.
Also not surprising: Fox News hosts wield a great deal of influence over the political discourse in this country:
Bill O’Reilly was rated as having, by far, the greatest positive impact, with 49 percent of respondents rating him positively, and 32 percent negatively. Glenn Beck was the second most-positively rated personality, with 38 percent of respondents saying he had a positive impact, and 32 percent saying he had a negative impact.
Rush Limbaugh meanwhile is losing steam and far more people dislike him than like him (36%-52%). Here’s the surprising part however: Very few people polled had heard of Rachel Maddow.
MSNBC’s personalities were largely ranked as unknown by respondents: 70 percent said they had never heard of Ed Schultz, 55 percent said they had never heard of Rachel Maddow and 42 percent said they had never heard of Keith Olbermann…
This catch over at NewsBusters made me laugh while wagging my head, as you will see, Rachel goes through her throes of body language while weaving a capitalist and xenophobic conspiracy of a great order. Except, her own guest makes a few statements both times he is on (the second interview begins around the 1:56 mark so you know) her show that complete;y dismantles her beliefs about this whole “sorted” topic.
Here’s NewsBusters end to their post on this:
But after Maddow introduced Loew, and Loew rehashed the details of his reporting on Senseman, Coughlin and CCA, Loew mentioned this awkward fact right at the end of his interview with Maddow…
LOEW: In addition, in Arizona we have a mindset among a couple of key legislators that privatizing the prison industry is a good thing. As you mentioned, they tried to privatize the entire system last year. The governor did veto that after the state corrections director sent her a letter saying, look, we can’t imagine having death row inmates in private prison systems and having death row inmates being taken care of by the lowest common bidder.
Excuse me, did you say “the governor” — by whom you mean Jan Brewer, correct? — vetoed the bill to privatize nearly all of Arizona’s state prisons? Shortly before she signed SB 1070, the law that would create vast penal colonies of suspected illegal immigrants? Apparently Brewer missed the memo on this fine-tuned, lucrative conspiracy.
Maddow’s flimsy premise having been demolished before her eyes — by a simpatico guest, no less — she invited Loew back the next night to harrumph about links between Republican state senator Russell Pearce, a major backer of SB 1070, and the private prison industry. (full segment from Maddow show linked here). Once again, Loew served up an inconvenient fact right at the end of his discussion with Maddow (third part of embedded video, starting at 2:28) —
MADDOW: Morgan, am I also right that in thinking that Russell Pearce was the man behind the effort last year to privatize all of Arizona’s state prisons?
LOEW: He was. He sponsored that legislation and we looked through his legislative record and it looks like as far back as 2003 he was pushing legislation that was calling for the privatization of state prison beds, I think 1,000 beds back in 2003, another 1,400 before that. But the biggest one is the bill that you just referred to, which would have handed over our entire prison system to the private prison industry. Now, that bill was vetoed but another bill passed that essentially did the same thing. Last year, our prison system would have, in a sense, most of it, would have been handed over to the private prison industry, but none of those companies would come forward to bid on them.
Once again, this fine-tuned, lucrative conspiracy — thwarted by the alleged conspirators.
This is a great story coming from Big Journolism, let me post a summation of it here:
Rachel Maddow does in her extremely lame attempt to prove that Fox News in general and Bill O’Reilly in particular are trying to make white people afraid of black people. She gives us the following examples:
The Shirley Sherrod video
ACORN sting videos
Van Jones is a Marxist
Eugene Robinson “traffics in racism”
Black/White divide on limited government
Here is John Sexton’s response:
On the Sherrod video, O’Reilly’s report didn’t appear until after she’d been fired at which point it quickly became national news. CNN also ran the clip twice the same night. Is Anderson Cooper trying to scare white people too?
…Clark Hoyt, ombudsman at the New York Times, looked at all the evidence and concluded that the manufactured sideshow about what the pair wore did not change the fact that they had presented themselves as a pimp and prostitute, nor did it cause the entire sting to unravel…
As for Van Jones, he is a self-identified Marxist and co-founder of the explicitly communist group STORM. You can read a pdf put out by the group itself here…
Eugene Robinson writes frequently about racial topics, including this defense of Harry Reid’s statements about the “light-skinned” President. I don’t consider that piece racism, but Robinson definitely traffics in race. Maybe O’Reilly misspoke. Even if he didn’t, where exactly is the fear factor here…
As for Maddow’s final clip, to which she devotes the most screen time, O’Reilly was discussing the findings of this Gallup survey. How can Maddow, minutes after blasting O’Reilly for his stance on the Sherrod video, then edit the clip of O’Reilly so dishonestly that viewers will have no idea of the proper context of his statements? That level of bullpucky should give Maddow whiplash, but apparently it doesn’t.
