On this tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, both Joe Scarborough and Luke Russert attempted to do a bit of revisionist history this Tuesday morning on MSNBC and Salon's Alex Pareene did a fine job of taking them apart for it.

MSNBC selectively remembers the Iraq War:

Updated: Morning Joe and Luke Russert leave out some important context. Like how much MSNBC pushed for war

MSNBC today ran two very interesting segments addressing the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. In one, Luke Russert interviewed veteran NBC foreign correspondent Richard Engel on the state of Iraq today (spoiler: not great). In another, Joe Scarborough hosted a large panel to discus how the Iraq War happened and what went wrong.

The Russert segment is sort of bizarre, referring to “that big anniversary” and completely ignoring the reasons the Iraq War started. It concludes — after Engel explains how Iraq is once again in a sectarian civil war — with Russert essentially asserting the inevitability of a military strike against Iran, saying they could be “months” away from building nuclear weapons. [...]

Both of these segments show how incredibly little anyone learned from very recent history. [...]

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"Let these families take their White House tour next week and I'll cover the added expenses," he explained. "Word is it will cost around $74,000. If I can get the White House doors open, I'll pick up the tab... You know this is an offer you can't refuse. Give me a call."

"I think we just realized that The Five isn't your primary source of income," co-host Greg Gutfeld quipped.

Later in the hour, Fox News host Sean Hannity joined in Bolling's offer, tweeting, "[G]reat idea! Count me in, I will pay for a week also!"

But in all the fuss over whether or not lawmakers can give out White House tours as gifts, MSNBC host Martin Bashir pointed out that everyone was missing a very serious point that "it’s the public who are being injured by the sequester."

For the money that Bolling and Hannity have agreed to spend so that lawmakers can give constituents access to a short walk through the White House, the Fox News hosts could also provide one year of nutritional and preschool programs to 15 of the 75 children that could be cut from the Head Start program because of sequestration.

Or according to the Nation, they could fund over 90,000 meals to hungry families through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food stamps program, which is also expected to face cuts.

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House Republicans are pushing to amend the "fiscal cliff" deal that just passed in the Senate, but as Rep. Barney Frank told TPM, "if House Republicans amend the Senate bill to include spending cuts, they'll effectively kill the deal.":

"If they do, that'll kill the package," he said after a Democratic caucus meeting.

"I would not predict what these people will try to do because they are in thrall to extremists," Frank said. "But if they amend this I don't know how they think they -- an amendment basically says, our ideology is too rigid and we're not really trying to really [reach a deal]."

Speaker John Boehner's (R-OH) office said his members have expressed "universal concern" with the agreement's lack of spending cuts. Rumors on Capitol Hill are that the House GOP is considering amending the legislation and sending it back to the Senate.

House Democratic leaders demanded an up-or-down vote on the Senate deal on Tuesday afternoon.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) declined to discuss whether a GOP amendment to include spending cuts would threaten the bill.

"Look, the country deserves an up or down vote on the compromise bipartisan bill that passed the Senate," he told TPM. "What we're calling for is an up or down vote. Let democracy work its will. ... Let's just take this step by step."

Here's more from The Hill: Senate-passed 'fiscal cliff' agreement in trouble in House:

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Lil' Luke Russert explains to Martin Bashir why Boehner is putting Ryan in a leadership position on debt negotiations after voters rejected his policies.

It seems John Boehner is hoping to avoid having the same experience he did the last time around, where his caucus revolted on him while trying to negotiate a deal on the deficit.

Ryan's New Catbird Seat:

It’s fascinating (if somewhat predictable) to watch the rapidly diverging post-election prospects of the two members of the Republican presidential ticket. Mitt Romney is going to disappear from public view approximately ten minutes after his usefulness expires as a scapegoat for his party’s sins. But Paul Ryan is back in Washington, and back in the saddle again. This sentence from the New York Times’ Jennifer Steinhauer nicely describes his pivotal position with his party colleagues:

When Mr. Ryan returned to Capitol Hill last week, he was met with a standing ovation from his Republican colleagues, a bear hug from Mr. Boehner and the hope from conservatives that he would hold the line on taxes and other spending.

Yeah, Boehner’s hugging Ryan, all right, making it clear the Budget Committee Chairman is a key, and maybe the key, figure in the fiscal negotiations with the Obama administration and congressional Democrats. Whatever Boehner decides to do, he wants Ryan’s finger-prints all over it. And the more feral of House Republicans want Ryan very close to Boehner’s side to keep the Speaker from selling out America’s priceless heritage of freedom and low top marginal tax rates. Presumably Ryan will seek to reprise his role in earlier fiscal negotiations, re-establishing his MSM reputation as a “thoughtful” conservative “reformer” who always manages to be heavily involved in bipartisan discussions until the crucial point, when he invariably opposes compromise on one pretext or another.

Go read the rest of Ed's post for what this might mean for Ryan's future, but as Paul Krugman wrote about Ryan returning to his role as "Washington’s favorite Serious, Honest Conservative" -- A Public Service Reminder: Paul Ryan is a Con Man.

And TPM's Sahil Kapur reminded us what we can expect from these negotiations -- GOP’s Opposition To New Taxes: Same As It Ever Was:

Having run and lost on their central anti-tax stance, and with an austerity bomb nearing detonation, Republicans are softening their tone on the issue. But what may appear to be a meaningful shift on taxes among GOP leaders is belied by the unchanged policy specifics within the rhetoric.

“For the purposes of forging a bipartisan agreement that begins to solve the problem, we’re willing to accept new revenue under the right conditions,” said House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) in a post-election press conference.

That leaves the impression that Republicans are willing to raise revenue by limiting deductions and loopholes. Correct, but they’ve always been open to that — if and only if the new revenue is used to lower tax rates rather than reduce the deficit. Look closer and it’s apparent that that stance is still the same. Read on...

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Karoli already broke down this lie that Romney has been telling out on the campaign trail here at C&L. This Wednesday on MSNBC, Willard's number one neocon fan girl was out there doing some history revisionism for Romney as well -- Wash. Post's Jennifer Rubin Pushes Lie That Romney Health Care Plan Covers Pre-Existing Conditions:

Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin falsely claimed that Republican candidate Mitt Romney's health care plan always included a provision insuring that those with pre-existing conditions are not denied insurance coverage. In fact, this is the exact opposite of what the Romney campaign has said.

In a recent study, the Government Accountability Office found that "between 36 and 122 million adults reported medical conditions that could result in a health insurer restricting coverage."

This is why one of the major features of the Affordable Care Act is its requirement that insurance companies not deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions. The ACA prohibits insurers in the private individual market from denying coverage, charging higher-than-average premiums, or restricting coverage to individuals based on the individual's health status.

During the first presidential debate, Romney claimed that his health care plan includes protections for pre-existing conditions. But as CNN reported following the debate, top Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom clarified that this protection only applied to people who already had health insurance, not those seeking health insurance for the first time. [...]

PolitiFact evaluated Romney's claim following the debate that his plan insured coverage for those with pre-existing conditions and found it "mostly false."

But on MSNBC's The Daily Rundown, Rubin stated that Romney's "plan always covered pre-existing issues." Read on...

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Please... let it be Paul Ryan - Romney to announce running mate Saturday in Va.:

NORFOLK, Va. (AP) -- Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney will announce his running mate Saturday morning in Norfolk, Va., his campaign said Friday night.

The short list of candidates - if there is one - is believed to include Ohio Rep. Rob Portman, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan. In a statement issued Friday night, the Romney campaign said the running mate would be revealed at 9 a.m. EDT at the Nauticus Museum. Romney is kicking off a four-day bus tour through swing states.

Speculation has focused in recent days on Ryan, the seven-term congressman. Conservative pundits have been urging Romney to choose Ryan in large part because of his authorship of a House-backed budget plan that seeks to curb overall entitlement spending and changes Medicaid into a voucher-like system to save costs.

Pawlenty was maintaining his Saturday schedule campaigning for Romney in New Hampshire, an official close to Pawlenty's political team said. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak ahead of the formal announcement.

The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial on Thursday, praised Ryan as a strong choice for Romney: "The case for Mr. Ryan is that he best exemplifies the nature and stakes of this election. More than any other politician, the House budget chairman has defined those stakes well as a generational choice about the role of government and whether America will once again become a growth economy or sink into interest-group dominated decline."

Romney's choice comes as he tries to repair an image damaged by negative Democratic advertising and shift the trajectory of a campaign that's seen him lose ground to President Barack Obama. Read on...

UPDATE: It appears my wish may have come true and that Romney is going to pick Ryan. I guess we'll see once the announcement is made in the morning. In the mean time, here's the crew over at MSNBC pretending that Ryan's budget policies don't matter all that much because as David Gregory let us know, some in the Republican party consider him a "visionary." If anyone wants a preview of what Meet the Press is likely to look like this Sunday, I'd say you've got one with this late night coverage of Romney's potential announcement of Ryan as his VP from MSNBC. Video below the fold.

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Here's what we get to look forward to if Mitt Romney wins the presidential election. More ex-Bushies making their way back on to our television sets, like Tara Wall, who I had hoped to never see on the air again after Bush finally left office. No such luck since Romney's hired her as an adviser, and not a very good one at that. How bad are you on the stump when you let MSNBC's little Luke Russert trip you up?

From Think Progress: Romney Adviser Stumped On How Romney Would Reduce The Debt:

Mitt Romney’s campaign has fired back at questions about his tenure at Bain Capital and his failure to release tax returns by blaming President Obama’s campaign for not wanting to talk about the economy. Given a chance to talk about the economy this morning, though, a Romney adviser failed to deliver specifics about how his plan would boost economic growth while also balancing the budget, as Romney claims he will do.

As ThinkProgress has noted, Romney’s plan to provide a massive tax cut to the rich would blow a hole in the federal budget Romney promises to balance by 2020. When MSNBC’s Luke Russert asked Romney adviser Tara Wall how Romney would offset the lost revenue, she failed to offer any specifics, telling Americans they could instead “research” his plan to find them. When Russert returned to the subject, Wall again failed to deliver an answer, saying Romney’s business experience is the reason he would balance the budget:

RUSSERT: What are the offsets? What are we specifically going to do to balance the budget?

WALL: Well, I believe Americans will hear a lot more about Governor Romney’s plan, and if you want to see in depth what his plan is, you can certainly research that and look at that more in depth. But overall, there have been a number of new regulations, over-zealous regulations, on small businesses enacted by this administration, and we have to look at those things. [...]

RUSSERT: Even with those small business cuts you’re talking about, they’re in the billions. We’re talking trillions with a T. Non-partisan: increase by the debt, Mr. Romney’s plan with these tax cuts, by $2.6 trillion. Why are there no specifics? You guys want to talk about big ideas, you don’t want to talk about Bain and the tax issues. I don’t want to talk about that. I’m asking you specifically: How does Mitt Romney’s plan balance the budget by 2020?

WALL: I think, if you look at the economic numbers, I’m not an economist and I’m not going to play an economist, I think that Mitt Romney has a proven record of bringing economies back. He brought down unemployment as governor, he created jobs as a governor, he was effective as a businessperson overall, and I think you have to apply those concepts. [...] You can’t discount that, and you can’t discount the fact that we have to be able to look at how we begin solving the debt problem and bringing that down, and to do that, number one, is to start with streamlining our tax code, bringing down our marginal tax rate, the regulations that have been overburdensome, and making real true spending cuts.

As they noted, the trouble with that is, Romney hasn't provided a plan with any specifics that would offset the tax cuts. We all know where he'd likely get the money, which is taking it out of the hides of the poor and the middle class. I'm sure he'd rather not put that in writing since it might harm his chances of being elected.

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In the wake of President Obama calling for the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the 98 percent of Americans and 97 percent of small businesses making under $250,000 and the Republicans predictable response, which is to claim the tax increase will harm small businesses, MSNBC's Martin Bashir attempted to get his cohort, Luke Russert to admit the Republican leadership was fighting to the 2 percent and the 3 percent.

And he didn't have much luck getting an answer. After asking Russert three times whether he agreed with the sentiment or not, the most Bashir got out of him was some mealy mouthed response that if Bashir wants an answer to his questions, he'd better get John Boehner or Mitch McConnell on his show to ask them himself.

Bashir did get Russet to admit their rhetoric was all spin and talking points, and little more than election year rhetoric to throw red meat to their base, and accuse the Democrats of wanting to raise taxes. It seems little Luke is a whole lot more worried about keeping that access to Congressional Republicans than heaven forbid saying anything that might offend them. Bashir laid that bare when he continued pushing Russert to answer his question on who they were protecting by refusing to cooperate on the middle class tax cuts they're holding hostage for their tax cuts for the rich.

Since Russert is the one from the network with access to the GOP leadership Bashir told him he'd have to "suffice to take the beating." Russert couldn't resist getting in a cheap shot at Bashir about his Michael Jackson interview. Keep it classy there Luke. Russert seems to be learning his lessons well on how to be the next Karl Rove dance partner, David Gregory clone for the network.

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I'm sure by now that everyone who follows politics has had about a belly full of the fake outrage over Hilary Rosen's statement that Ann Romney has “never worked a day in her life," when it should be obvious to anyone that heard her, that she was talking about the fact that because Ann Romney has not worked a job outside of the home, her qualifications to advise the campaign on economic issues that concern women, when worrying about how you're going to pay your bills, has obviously never been an issue for her.

The Romney campaign has been desperate to change the conversation from the "war on women" — unless of course it's Mitt Romney accusing President Obama of waging one — and unfortunately Rosen stuck her foot in her mouth and gave them an opening to get the media to change the dialog to women working outside of the home.

Here's how Romney's surrogates were attempting to frame the debate today: Romney Surrogate Says Hilary Rosen Was Delivering Obama’s Message Against Stay-At-Home Mothers.

In the clip above, Luke Russert is desperately trying to hammer home that same theme, and even initially identifies Hilary Rosen, wrongly, as an adviser to the DNC. Their director, Patrick Gaspard, corrects him, which is followed by Russert literally badgering him about whether Rosen is a paid adviser, or an unpaid adviser, or whether she advises the Obama campaign. And finally he more or less asks if she even talks to them at all.

I'm not sure how many more ways Gaspard could have told Russert no, but after the fourth time, he finally stopped drilling him on her nonexistent ties to either organization. I think this dust up is a big distraction and it makes the Romney campaign look desperate. I would guess most people don't even know who Hilary Rosen is unless you follow politics closely, and as Gaspard stated, she's not working for the Obama campaign or the DNC, but sadly if she were, I think the media would continue to flog this story all the way though the election this November.

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Paul Krugman wrote a terrific column that the clip above depicts perfectly where Chris Cilizza and the panel on Chuck Todd's show on MSNBC are bemoaning the loss of those great "compromisers" in the U.S. House of Representatives -- those rotten corporate Blue Dogs who got voted out of office during the last election.

Heaven forbid we've now got some actual Republicans with an "R" behind their name instead of a "D", but they're rabid right wingers who would rather burn the whole house down than give an inch on their extremist ideology.

The Villagers love "centrism" and compromise as long as it always means everyone governing like Republicans and as Krugman points out later in his column, their fetish for it is allowing the extremism in the Republican Party to go unpunished. As John already wrote about here, I'm not sure what it will take to get them to quit with the "both sides" false equivalencies either, but I'm as tired of it as Krugman is.

Sadly the example in the clip above is just one of hundreds that are being pushed by the Villagers on every network day, after day, after day.

The Cult That Is Destroying America:

Watching our system deal with the debt ceiling crisis — a wholly self-inflicted crisis, which may nonetheless have disastrous consequences — it’s increasingly obvious that what we’re looking at is the destructive influence of a cult that has really poisoned our political system.

And no, I don’t mean the fanaticism of the right. Well, OK, that too. But my feeling about those people is that they are what they are; you might as well denounce wolves for being carnivores. Crazy is what they do and what they are.

No, the cult that I see as reflecting a true moral failure is the cult of balance, of centrism.

Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.

So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.

The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president. Once again, health reform — his only major change to government — was modeled on Republican plans, indeed plans coming from the Heritage Foundation. And everything else — including the wrongheaded emphasis on austerity in the face of high unemployment — is according to the conservative playbook. Read on...