By Matthew Balan | April 29, 2015 | 8:44 PM EDT

Alex Wagner and her two left-wing panelists on the Wednesday edition of her MSNBC program – Salon's Brittney Cooper and The Nation's Ari Berman – likened the use of the word "thug" to describe the rioters and looters in Baltimore, Maryland on Monday to a notorious racial slur against blacks. Wagner played up how "there are folks, like CNN's Erin Burnett, who don't understand why it's offensive; and why some people are saying the 'T' word is the new 'N' word."

By Paul Bremmer | August 22, 2013 | 5:55 PM EDT

Former DNC press secretary Karen Finney continues to use her MSNBC show to brazenly fly her partisan flag. On Sunday’s Disrupt with Karen Finney, the half-black host slammed North Carolina as a state that showcases the Republican “agenda on steroids.” One of her guests went further, dubbing North Carolina “the laboratory where the GOP has perfected its Frankenstein monster.”

Finney began the segment by telegraphing her feelings about Republican policies in general: “While the national Republican Party is in disarray and discord, at the state level Republican leaders have been frighteningly well-organized enacting so-called reforms.” Apparently Finney is frightened by effective Republican governance. MSNBC pundits often gripe that the national GOP says no to everything and refuses to govern. But when Republicans govern by enacting their policies, they frighten Karen Finney. She also dismissed GOP reforms as “so-called reforms” because, as we all know, only liberal  Democrats make real reforms.

By Ken Shepherd | August 27, 2012 | 6:06 PM EDT

Appearing on a Now with Alex Wagner segment on voter ID laws today, The Nation magazine's Ari Berman insisted that the push for voter ID laws has been an incredibly recent phenomenon that is most certainly an anti-Obama, anti-Democrat push.

The problem, of course, is that it's simply not true, especially since a baker's dozen of states passed new ID laws prior to the rise of the Tea Party Republicans in state legislatures in the 2010 elections

By Ken Shepherd | June 6, 2012 | 4:07 PM EDT

In a segment titled onscreen "What's the Matter with FL," MSNBC's Alex Wagner today continued her network's efforts to flog conservative Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) for his voter "purge." This despite the fact that the "purge" -- which targeted a mere 0.02 percent of registered voters in the state-- has not disenfranchised a single eligible voter and has in fact brought to light noncitizens who were illegally registered to vote. What's more, neither Wagner nor anyone else on her panel informed viewers that the Obama administration itself appears to be violating federal law by not helping Florida with its voter rolls cleanup effort.

To service her network's spin on the matter, Wagner turned to Rolling Stone magazine's Eric Bates and Ari Berman, the latter of whom insisted that the Sunshine State's efforts were part of a GOP effort to "depress the turnout" of Obama-friendly voting blocs.

By Ken Shepherd | October 28, 2011 | 5:16 PM EDT

Nation magazine writer Ari Berman carped on today's Martin Bashir program on MSNBC that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) wants to take America back into "a new Gilded Age,"  an "era of the robber barons where the top one percent" would control the nation's wealth.

Immediately after that segment, Bashir turned to CNBC's Brian Sullivan for the day's "CNBC Market Wrap," a look looking at how the nation's stock exchanges performed today.

After discussing the "boring" but positive day on Wall Street, Sullivan added in closing that he would like to come on Bashir's program to debate Berman some time (MP3 audio here; video embedded below):