The MSNBC weekend host ran a blog called The Reid Report — which is the same name as her now-defunct cable news show —a decade ago while she wrote for the Miami Herald. As first resurfaced by Twitter user Jamie_Maz and reported by Paste Magazine, Reid wrote numerous bigoted blog posts smearing, mocking, and attacking former Florida governor Charlie Crist. These rants included calling Crist “Miss Charlie” and sarcastically using the tags “gay politicians” and “not gay politicians” — despite the fact that the twice-married, heterosexual man has never come out as gay.
Reid went on to spread the conspiracy theory that Crist was actually a closeted gay man who refused to come out for fear that his sexual orientation would hurt his political career. Additionally, the AM Joy host claims Crist’s marriages to women are part of this elaborate cover up.
As bad as the conspiracy theory is in itself, Reid doesn’t just suggest Crist is gay — she assumes he is gay and proceeds to seemingly deride him for it. “Miss Charlie, Miss Charlie. Stop pretending, brother. It’s okay that you don’t go for the ladies,” wrote Reid in a 2007 post.
In another, Reid wrote, “Now that he’s married to a girl, Charlie Crist is being sought out for all KINDS of good stuff… [The GOP] are wooing Miss Charlie to run.”
One of the more disturbing examples of Reid’s bigotry is her theory that Crist spent his honeymoon checking-out men and dreading physical relations with his wife. “I can just see poor Charlie on the honeymoon, ogling the male waiters and thinking to himself, ‘god, do I actually have to see her naked…?’” Reid wrote.
Reid is famous for slamming anyone who criticize her political views by calling them a bigot, sexists or racists.
MSNBC has not replied to any e-mails sent by this website asking for a comment.
Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus has canceled the next GOP Presidential debate with MSNBC scheduled February claiming that NBC’s partner network CNBC asked questions that “weren’t fair” to the Republican candidates.
I write to inform you that pending further discussion between the Republican National Committee (RNC) and our presidential campaigns, we are suspending the partnership with NBC News for the Republican primary debate at the University of Houston on February 26, 2016. The RNC’s sole role in the primary debate process is to ensure that our candidates are given a full and fair opportunity to lay out their vision for America’s future. We simply cannot continue with NBC without full consultation with our campaigns.
The CNBC network is one of your media properties, and its handling of the debate was conducted in bad faith. We understand that NBC does not exercise full editorial control over CNBC’s journalistic approach. However, the network is an arm of your organization, and we need to ensure there is not a repeat performance…
I have tremendous respect for the First Amendment and freedom of the press. However, I also expect the media to host a substantive debate on consequential issues important to Americans. CNBC did not.
Speaking Thursday in Colorado, Ben Carson decried the “gotcha” questions of the CNBC debate.
Marco Rubio used the debate to go after the “mainstream media” on FOX News of course. “I don’t think it’s atypical from what you see among most people in the mainstream media, which is privately they believe they’re smarter than the people running, and they can’t wait for their chance to show off in front of their buddies by asking some question they think is going to embarrass us, especially Republicans,” said Rubio.
But let’s be honest. Ben Carson brazenly lied about his disturbing ties to Mannatech, a nutritional-supplement company that’s paid millions to settle lawsuits about its fraudulent claims. Donald Trump lied when he said, “I was not at all critical” of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for his efforts to advance comprehensive immigration reform and widen the H-1B visa program. Carly Fiorina lied when she claimed 92 percent of those who lost jobs in President Obama’s first term were women. Marco Rubio lied when he charged the media ignored evidence that Hillary Clinton was a “liar” at last week’s absurd Benghazi hearing.
This is the REAL reason why the GOP Presidential candidates are upset.
Because being busted in outright lies on national television is SO UNFAIR.
The Anti-Defamation League is up in arms and has publicly denounced the Family Research Council’s hate group leader Tony Perkins and demanded an apology for comparing the ruling against a bigot who refused to bake a gay wedding cake in Colorado to Jews being loaded onto boxcars in Nazi Germany during WWII.
ADL director Abraham Foxman has issued a statement:
Tony Perkins’ invocation of the Holocaust in his statement referring to a judge’s finding that a baker unlawfully discriminated against gay customers is offensive and inappropriate. There is no comparison between contemporary American political issues and the actions of Hitler’s regime during the Holocaust. Such inappropriate analogies only serve to trivialize the Holocaust and are deeply offensive to Jews and other survivors, as well as those Americans who fought valiantly against the Nazis in World War II. We urge Perkins to apologize and to refrain from using Holocaust imagery to make his point.
Where is the coverage on Tony perkins saying such a crazy hateful thing on CNN and MSNBC? The same news channels that host him as a “conservative christian” expert?
If mainstream media outlets are going to continue having Tony Perkins on their shows, they need to really nail him with his own words and extreme beliefs, and not treat him with kid gloves each time he appears. If they can’t do that, they should not have him on at all. If they can’t reveal him for who he is and what he really stand.
On the Friday, April 18th. edition of All In With Chris Hayes on MSNBC held a discussion, abut the resignation of former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich framing it that Eich was pressured from his job for simply donating to Proposition 8 the political campaign opposing same-sex marriage, and totally dismissing the fact that Eich also donated to far right wing anti-black and anti-Jewish bigot Pat Buchanan and the fact that much of the forces behind Eich’s resignation came from both straight and gay employees and board members within Mozilla itself. And if that wasn’t bad enough Hayes set-up a comparison question using the Eich resignation and the recent firing of the Lesbian Police Captian in South Carolina.
Guest Richard Kim of The Nation magazine intoned that he found it “disturbing” that gay activist friends of his have expressed interest in “targeting” more people who have made similar donations, and who have declared they should “find out where they live.”
Kim: Here’s a disturbing thing. I did ask some of my gay activist friends, I was like, “Look, here’s a list; 6,500 people gave the same amount that he did or more in California. Should we go down the list and sort of start targeting all these people?” And I asked this facetiously, and people were like, “Let’s do it. Let’s find out where those people live. It’s all-” To me, that’s a disturbing level of targeting people.
Hayes, who had earlier expressed reservations about Eich’s firing, exclaimed, “Yes,” to Kim’s view that such talk was “disturbing.”
As he brought up the discussion, the MSNBC host seemed skeptical of the former Mozilla CEO’s firing: “And there was part of me that did not know how to feel about how this whole thing unfolded.”
Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Friday, April 18, All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, with critical portions in bold:
CHRIS HAYES: So here’s the other interesting part of this, and I want to use this to segue to the Brendan Eich story because what you hear and see here are changing social norms, right? It is legal in South Carolina to fire someone because they’re gay. Increasingly, that is not viewed as socially acceptable, right? And rightly so. We agree everyone at the table agrees that is wrong.
But, now, there’s also social norms about whether it is socially acceptable to have the belief that gay folks can’t get married or to oppose gay equality. And this came to a head in the tale of Brendan Eich, who was the CEO of the firm, Mozilla, which makes a very popular Web browser. People found out that he had given a contribution to the wrong side in Prop 8, which was the anti-equality side. It was in a public record.
And there was a campaign that basically got rid of him, basically saying this is an unacceptable view for the CEO of a major firm to have. And there was part of me that did not know how to feel about how this whole thing unfolded. What was your thinking?
RICHARD KIM, THE NATION: Yeah, so I, first of all, say I don’t think anybody’s rights were violated.
HAYES: Nobody has a right to be a CEO.
KIM: Right, exactly, exactly. I do, on the level of proportion, question this. So this guy gave one $1,000 donation six years ago to a campaign that 7 million Californians voted for, that 6,500 people gave a donation at his level or higher. Mozilla has an anti-gay discrimination policy. He had no intent to change that. Marriage in California is settled law.
So there’s a question of whether or not all the sort of fury targeted at him and this one sort of, you know, attempt to oust him is in proportion to any threat that he represents to gay people in the future.
CATHY HENNA, LGBT ACTIVIST: It’s somehow, it’s how the culture works, too. This is a major tech company in Northern California, and, you know, as we were talking about before, you know, this is not just about gay people anymore. This is about allies. I mean, the second this went on social media, on Facebook, on Twitter, people just find this unacceptable. It’s no longer acceptable to be anti-gay.
HAYES: But did they find it unacceptable, there was a weird kind of advertising of one’s own enlightenment that this was part of. You know what I mean? It felt to me a little bit like, “I can like this, I can get behind this because this is a kind of, it’s no skin off my back, you know? Like, I don’t care who the CEO of Mozilla is.” And this shows — that’s what conservatives were saying, right? Conservatives were saying that this is basically hounding people, this is totally “il-liberal.”
HENNA: (INAUDIBLE) -to say that when it works for them because what their big thing is, “Oh, it’s about the free market.” Well, in this case it was the free market. People are making decisions about what they do and what they buy and what the organizations and the companies they support and the decisions they make as consumers voting with their wallets based on the leadership of those companies.
KAREN FINNEY, MSNBC HOST: It’s the little bit of power that we have as consumers. And you hear Karl Rove and the right wing. What do they always say about the companies that give to right-wing causes. We don’t want to have to publish our names. They’re afraid of a backlash. Well, guess what: I can decide I don’t want to spend my money at, with your company if I don’t approve how you spend that money. I can decide-
HAYES: Barack Obama in 2008 was opposed to marriage equality.
FINNEY: And he still got elected, you know, that’s the process.
HAYES: The point, but this guy gave them-
KIM: Here’s a disturbing thing. I did ask some of my gay activist friends, I was like, “Look, here’s a list; 6,500 people gave the same amount that he did or more in California. Should we go down the list and sort of start targeting all these people?” And I asked this facetiously, and people were like, “Let’s do it. Let’s find out where those people live. It’s all-” To me, that’s a disturbing level-
HAYES: Yes.
KIM: -of targeting people.
FINNEY: But is part of it is because of Prop 8 is so, it became such a heated issue in this country, and it sort of became, I think, and it is a sort of either you’re on the right side or the wrong side, and, ironically, even the lawyer in the case has been evolving as he’s planning his daughter’s wedding.
As the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) kicks off just outside of Washington DC, and all the news networks scramble to cover it, not one is reporting about the fact that ProEnglish, the white nationalist led English-only outfit that created serious headaches for the conference back in 2012, has quietly been allowed to again be an official exhibitor at CPAC 2014.
According to the CPAC 2014 event site, the ProEnglish booth is number 538, sandwiched between the booth for a movie about the IRS “scandal” and the booth for the group, Tradition, Family, Property. The site lists the ProEnglish contact for CPAC as Robert Vandervoort who was the organizer of the white supremacist group, Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance, while he lived in Illinois. During that period Vandervoort was at the center of much of the white supremacist activity in the region. While he was in charge, Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance often held joint meetings with the local chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens. He also made appearances at white supremacist events outside Illinois, for instance participating in the 2009 Preserving Western Civilization Conference.
ProEnglish, was founded by white nationalist John Tanton who also created a network of organizations – the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and NumbersUSA – that have profoundly shaped the immigration debate in the United States. A retired Michigan ophthalmologist, Tanton has white nationalist beliefs and has written that to maintain American culture, “a European-American majority” is required.
In His Own Words
“I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”
– Dec. 10, 1993, letter to the late Garrett Hardin, a controversial ecology professor.
And there the group sits at CPAC14 while not one major television or print news network has the journalistic integrity or balls to report that they are there.
RNC Chairman Reince “Pouty Puss” Priebus has issued a call to all Republicans to boycott MSNBC and not appear on any of thier news shows over yesterday’s tweet which suggested that “right wingers” would hate the biracial family featured in a new Cheerios commercial. The tweet which was almost deleted immediately and was followed by two tweeted apologies.
Via Breitbart Batshit News:
“Until you personally and publicly apologize for this behavior, I have banned all RNC staff from appearing on, associating with, or booking any RNC surrogates on MSNBC. I have asked Republican surrogates and officials to follow our lead,” Priebus told MSNBC President Phil Griffin in a letter sent today. Priebus also sent a memo to Republican officials and surrogates urging them not to appear on the network until Griffin apologizes. “This is more than just a tweet or an offhand comment. This is part of a pattern of behavior that has gotten markedly worse, and until Phil Griffin personally apologizes and takes corrective action, we cannot be part of this network’s toxic programming,” Priebus said. “MSNBC hosts—including Alec Baldwin, Martin Bashir, Melissa Harris-Perry, Alex Wagner, and Ronan Farrow just to name a few—have had a troubling streak in the last several weeks of making comments that belittle and demean Americans without furthering any thoughtful dialogue. Perhaps it’s time for the executives at MSNBC to consider whether their network is upholding a meaningful journalistic mission,” the Wisconsin Republican added.
MSNBC President Phil Griffin who could have used this opportunity to change MSNBC into a true progressive cable news outlet has spinelessly issued another apology and fired their Twitter person.
“The tweet last night was outrageous and unacceptable. We immediately acknowledged it was offensive and wrong, apologized and deleted it. We have dismissed the person responsible for the tweet. I personally apologize to Mr. Priebus and to everyone offended. At MSNBC, we believe in passionate, strong debate about the issues, and we invite voices from all sides to participate. That will never change.
Signed, Phil Griffin.”
Obviously Griffin doesn’t realize that kissing the ass of a political group whose followers don;t and never will watch his news station is not only cowardly but stupid.
“It’s been an incredible experience so far. I certainly don’t want to be a commercial for Russia… [but] I haven’t run into any discrimination so far since I’ve been here. Just by showing up, just by being visible, just by the sheer presence of my husband being there with me, and just the interest that this might generate in what my personal back story is, I think that just sends a strong message that you can have a highly successful professional career and a successful personal life and they can be integrated. The LGBT community has the right to be outraged. But it’s not the time to shy away, it’s the time to show up. And it’s the time to make sure that you show up and that you’re visible, and that you’re respected, on an equal footing. There have been great people who have come out in support of this and they get what I mean by this role being too visible to pass up for an LGBT person, because [Miss Universe] is seen in over 190 countries by a billion people. It’s not about the money.” – MSNBC anchor Thomas Roberts, speaking from Russia this morning.
Perhaps one day Thomas Roberts will realize what he is doing is the equivalent of playing Sun City in South Africa during Apartheid.
Well, even if nobody else agrees with him you know Elton John does.
Over the last several months Russian President Vladimir Putin has approved new homophobic laws for his country. Yes, laws that criminalize and stigmatize lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their allies in Russia.
These actions attracted worldwide news coverage with some critics labeling it: Russia’s dark chapter in the history of gay rights. World leaders have expressed their contempt for these discriminatory laws with President Barack Obama declaring that “nobody’s more offended than me.”
In August, the Miss Universe Organization issued its own statement that Russian laws are “diametrically opposed to the core values” of Miss Universe.
I too am diametrically opposed to these laws and share in the President’s outrage. I am unafraid to say I am proud of my husband and my family—I’m proud of their love for me. I’m proud of the incredible steps forward equality has taken this year.
I’m proud of our nation, which still aspires to live up to the promise of its founding fathers. I am unafraid to tell you how traditional my husband and I are. After thirteen years, we continue to foster and grow our life together, with highs and lows, the folly and the fights. The same things many long term couples experience. Simple things: Trash night, dog walks, the remote control. Tough things: Homophobia, job loss, death.
You can’t get more traditional than that and, above all, we love each other.
So people may wonder: “Thomas, how can you accept this assignment? Shouldn’t you boycott Russia?” I am not going to boycott. Boycotting and vilifying from the outside is too easy. Rather, I choose to offer my support of the LGBT community in Russia by going to Moscow and hosting this event as a journalist, an anchor and a man who happens to be gay. Let people see I am no different than anyone else.
Well Thom, unless you are going to begin with: “Welcome to the Miss Universe pageant, I’m gay!” How are most Russians to know that you re actually gay considering that there’s pretty much a ban on acknowledging anything positive as gay.
I don’t suppose the fact that you work for MSNBC which is getting plenty of blow-back for airing and supporting the Sochi Olympic games doesn’t have anything to do with you hosting the Miss Universe Pageant also aired by NBC?
And as for hosting a sexist, misogynist event to promote LGBT equality. Not the best of moves, or spin.
“It’s one thing for the right to fall in love with its own politicians, to make Reagan a saint, Sarah Palin their own collective girlfriend, but the president of Russia, he is not that into you. Seriously, I know you guys hate President Obama, so it feels good to have a man-crush on somebody else, but this guy is the president of Russia. Zip it up, you guys, seriously. Have some respect.”
Watch honest and fearless Howard Dean call out the Right Wing propaganda machine on MSNBC’s ridiculously stupid Morning Joe and watch Scarborough and Mika act as though he has said something preposterous even though they know he’s 100 percent correct so not to piss off the Tea Party loons.
