Rachel Maddow Does It Again Friday Part II

Rachel Maddow followed with more information on FAIR on Friday night.  Pointing out the lies from Dan Stein, FAIR President from the previous night’s interview.  Here are a couple highlights:

If you go to Mr. Stein‘s own Web site you will find that, quote, “FAIR has committed $150,000 to help ensure that the Protect Arizona Now initiative is put before the state‘s voters in November.” If you don‘t believe FAIR themselves on that number, you can also check their actual payments that were documented on the Arizona Secretary of State Web site.  Quote – this is the official contribution filing from Protect Arizona Now.

You can see there – April 1^st, 2004, $50,000 from FAIR.  Same day, $50,000 from the FAIR Congressional Task Force.  May 11^th, 2004, $25,500 from FAIR; same day $25,000 from the FAIR Congressional Task Force.   June 11^th, $50,000 from FAIR; same day, $55,000 from the FAIR Congressional Task Force.  A grand total of $255,500 paid from FAIR to Protect Arizona Now.

That‘s on the Arizona Secretary of State‘s Web site.

You‘re lying when you say that.  That wasn‘t the only thing that we need to correct the record on from this segment that we did last night.  I want to be clear here and to do so, I need to be a little bit blunt.

I did not say anything factually incorrect in our interview last night.  Not that we could find any way in our big postmortem fact check that we did on the interview today.

But Dan Stein, president of FAIR, was my guest.  And I have always believed that an invitation to be a guest on the show is implicitly an assurance from me to you, the viewer, that the person in my guest chair is worth listening to.

And so while I‘m not trying to be rude to Mr. Stein as a guest and I know FAIR likes to represent itself as a credible source of information on the subjects they work on, I do feel the need to correct the record on several statements Dan Stein made on the show as if they were facts that were actually flat-out lies or at least misleading.

In addition to him lying flat-out about funding that group, Protect Arizona Now, there was another sort of weird moment where Dan Stein denied ever saying something that he was reported to have said.

This is much more where he tried to disassociate from the extremely racists comments of FAIR’s founder John Tanton.  It was clear that everything is of public record watch the video or read the transcript here.