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Sen. Marco Rubio sent out a letter this Monday, calling for the IRS commissioner to resign in the wake of the latest dust up over the agency's admission that there were some conservative groups targeted by the branch in Cincinnati. The problem with his request -- the IRS commissioner when these scandals occurred was a Bush appointee who no longer heads the department:

Commissioner Douglas H. Shulman, who was appointed by President Bush in 2008 and held by President Obama, left the agency in Nov. 9, 2012. Any pre-election misconduct would have had to occur on his watch. The current acting commissioner is Steven T. Miller -- a permanent replacement has not been nominated.

When TPM originally posted their report on this, they had not heard back from Rubio's office. As they noted in their update, here's their response:

In response to TPM's query, Rubio's spokesman Alex Conant noted that Miller was deputy commissioner when the targeting took place. He did not suggest the IRS acted inappropriately under Miller's watch as acting commissioner.

"He was Deputy IRS Commissioner when all this occurred," Conant said in an email.

So after someone pointed out to them that it was a Bushie that was in charge when these supposed abuses took place, now he wants the acting-director fired, even though the practice was not continued under their watch. Chris Jansing couldn't be bothered to point that out in the clip above, where she basically just read Rubio's letter with no context.

Some saner coverage of the topic aired a little later on the network, with both Joy Reid and Katrina vanden Heuvel doing a fine job of trying to put this story into its proper perspective and with Reid making sure the audience knew just who Rubio was initially calling to have fired -- someone who no longer works for the agency. Vanden Heuvel made some very good points about the fact that all of these groups ought to be getting a lot more scrutiny after the flood of them that came in after the Citizens United ruling.

In the meantime, all this is going to be is an excuse for more Obama derangement syndrome out of Republicans -- which is in full force already -- and more partisan witch hunts in the form of more hearings from Darrell Issa.

Video and Rubio's letter below the fold.

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Former Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on Sunday said that the debate over rights for LGBT people was "one sided" because Catholics were also being oppressed.

During a panel discussion on NBC's Meet the Press about gay NBA player Jason Collins, Gingrich quickly tried to change the subject from equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans to religious discrimination.

"I haven't heard you say if you think a Republican nominee for president can support gay marriage," NBC host David Gregory asked Gingrich.

"I doubt it," the former House Speaker replied. "I think that's up in the air, because I do think things are changing."

"But what I'm struck with is the one-sidedness of the desire for rights," Gingrich continued. "There are no rights for Catholics to have adoption services in Massachusetts, they're outlawed. There are no rights in D.C. for Catholics to have adoption services, they're outlawed. This passing reference to religion -- 'We sort of respect religion.' Well, sure. As long as you don't practice it."

"I think it will be good to have a debate over -- beyond this question of are you able to be gay in America, what does it mean? Does it mean that you actually have to affirmatively eliminate any institution which does not automatically accept that?"

The Grio Managing Editor Joy Reid pointed out that Catholic charities in Massachusetts had made the decision to halt all adoptions to prevent same sex couples from becoming parents.

"They withdrew them because they were told that you cannot follow Catholic doctrine, which is for marriage between a man and a woman," Gingrich insisted.

"I think the point is that you don't have the state telling religion what to believe," Reid observed. "If they oppose the idea of gay marriage within their religion they have the absolute right to do so. The question is whether or not religious institutions can make public policy."

"If the church is going to make our public policy, are we any longer a secular state?"

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After the release of Paul Ryan's new budget -- which looked a whole lot like his old budget -- despite the fact that the public rejected their policies when he and Mitt Romney lost the last election -- the panel members on MSNBC's Now with Alex Wagner this Tuesday were asked to weigh in on Ryan's proposal and this latest round of budget negotiations.

There were a lot of good points made about Ryan's ridiculous op-ed in The Wall Street Journal and the fact that he just wants to go after programs that help the poor, the elderly and the most vulnerable in our society and that his "budget" has a lot of numbers that don't add up. Ari Melber then made this point on how Ryan is regarded in political circles:

MELBER: I think Joy is hitting on something really important, which is those are the twin falsehoods, even apart from the hypocrisy of his record. One is, that just because it has numbers in it, doesn't make it a budget, right? My lottery ticket is not a budget. It's just a bunch of numbers on the page. And this thing [...] has a lot of numbers and as everyone has said, doesn't add up. It's more like fan fiction for Ayn Rand than it is a budget. And he's not a deficit hawk. To Joy's point, he's a health care hawk. He is interested in going after every health care program that's basically on the books from Obamacare, as you just articulated, to Medicaid, the program that is the most important for poor people, who need help and also for our society, because when we use medicine, preventative care for poor people, it actually saves all of us money, so it's good on both moral and efficiency terms and that's what's so frustrating here. I think Washington has called him serious for so long, they're over invested in treating this fake charade like it's a budget.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel followed up very nicely on Melber's points just a little bit later in the segment.

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Melissa Harris-Perry was on vacation this weekend, but I was very happy to see her guest host, Joy Reid and her panel members go after Democrats and President Obama for pretending that this god awful proposal for chained CPI would not be a cut in Social Security benefits for our seniors who can least afford it.

Sadly we don't have the opportunity for a group of actual liberals to debate policy as we saw here very often and are usually treated to our millionaire beltway Villagers talking about how we must extract a pound of flesh from the most vulnerable among us to balance our budget on the cable news programs instead. This was definitely a welcomed change of pace from what we're treated to far too often on MSNBC, where we've got way too many of them pushing for more austerity and cuts to our social safety nets, because heaven forbid we can't have taxes on members of the beltway cocktail party circuit going up.

Harris-Perry guest: Potential change to Social Security ‘absolutely a cut’:

On Melissa Harris-Perry on Sunday, panelists discussed the fact that Social Security was on the table in fiscal cliff negotiations — which has “progressives calling foul,” said guest host Joy Reid.

She discussed a proposed plan to divorce Social Security benefits from cost of living increases and tie them instead to the “chained consumer price index,” which assumes that people will buy cheaper alternatives when products become expensive.

House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) claims that such a shift would not be a benefit cut and would strengthen the program, but others claim it would inevitably lead to reduced benefits.

Reid goes on, “As we await a [fiscal cliff] deal, one of the most looming questions we face is just what aspects of Social Security are on the table?”

Recently, 102 Democrats sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) requesting that a shift to chained CPI be removed from consideration.

As they noted, that got some real push back from The Nation's Richard Kim and their other guests, Bob Herbert and Raul Reyes.

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After watching the better part of a couple of days of coverage on this tragic school shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in CT, I was glad to see at least one show on television where there was a discussion about the fact that what happened there, and the trauma that those children and their families are going through right now, is an all but too common occurrence which is sadly all too familiar to Americans living in our inner cities across the country.

Whether it's Chicago, or New Orleans or the other big cities across the country facing high crime rates, far too often the violence has been glossed over and ignored to the point by our national media, that it's just considered acceptable or something we're expected to live with.

As Melissa noted, to date Chicago has suffered at least 425 gun-related homicides in 2012 as of Dec. 14. The Huffington Post has more on that story here: Chicago Homicides Reach 400 This Year, City Turns To Twitter For Ideas To End Violence. And 117 of those victims this year alone were under the age of 21.

And in her home town of New Orleans, we've had 174 murders, most of which are gunshot deaths and in Los Angeles, there have been 512 homicides recorded for the year, and 75 percent of those deaths resulted from gunshot wounds.

HARRIS-PERRY: These are the gun related homicides that get treated as routine -- tragic, but expected. And yet, they need to be included when we talk about Newtown, CT, because their victims are just as real.

The Nation's Ari Melber followed with this:

MELBER: So while we understand exactly how terrible this is and why the story of it and the way it happened is so dramatic and we're rushing to it and the President's speaking to it, it's also true as a policy matter that if 27 people dying is something that connotes the President's attention or our attention and action, well then every day is this day, as you were saying and all around the country.

As Michael Eric Dyson noted, President Obama did bring up those in Chicago during his statement following this most recent shooting and made this important point:

DYSON: The reality is, we've become accustomed to believing that little black and brown kids and poor white kids in various spots across our landscape are doomed to this kind of violence by this... we are surprised it happened here. It's not supposed to happen here.

Which means by implication, that it's supposed to happen there, in Detroit, or Oakland, or California, in LA and the like. And I think that's the tragedy here.

As Harris-Perry rightfully noted a bit later in the segment, she just wants the same level of outrage when you're seeing these kids in our inner cities having their childhoods taken away from them with the violence that they are growing up around as a part of their daily lives as we've seen from these mass shootings that garner so much national attention in the media.

I hope if there is an ounce of good that comes out of this shooting, it's that conversations like this one are more common where we're talking about what we can do to put a stop to gun violence along with a host of other topics that are all interwoven with the same subject and those are not just gun control and gun violence, but mental health, providing adequate health care for all of our citizens, education, poverty, our social safety nets and just what kind of country we're allowing way too many of our children to grow up in.

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I'm not sure what Politico's Ben White's background is, or if he's ever worked at a job where you were really glad you had a union in place to join, because you work in a dangerous environment, and because of those protections provided to you by the union, you could speak out about conditions on the job without fear of being fired or retribution, but it sure didn't sound like it after hearing his crass statements on MSNBC's Now With Alex Wagner.

I'm also really disgusted with the rest of the panel that was on there with him this Friday, because even though they made a lot of really great points about just what Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and his cohorts in the legislature were doing with passing this right to work for less legislation in their lame duck session, they let him get away with a really key issue that Rep. Brandon Dillon laid out so well during his speech this week.

The supporters of "right to work" don't really care about anyone's right to a job. What you're doing, as Ken already explained here, is arguing that it should be allowed that nonunion workers to get benefits that unions negotiate without having to pay their share for the process. And as Ken noted in that same post, "Proponents of 'right-to-work' laws argue that without such 'protections', workers can be forced to join unions, which is not true and is illegal under federal law and has been since 1947."

If Politico's White wants to have an honest debate about unions, rather than giving Republican taking points, maybe he could explain why it's fair for someone to benefit from the work and negotiating and legal representation a union is forced to give that employee, without that employee paying for those benefits, rather than the union being allowed to tell them that if they don't want to join, they're on their own. I thought Republicans loved the idea of someone "pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps." But now they think it's perfectly acceptable for a union to protect them and pay legal fees and negotiate for fair wages for them, without them paying to make sure that union has enough money to conduct business?

And as much as I really like Joan Walsh and Joy Reid and agree with the points they made during this segment, they missed the ball by not making that exact point to White when he was so terribly concerned about the choices and benefits of these workers and whether it's unfair to have them pay their union dues or not. Here is the question he should have to answer. Is it fair to force a union to represent free riders who want representation, but refuse to pay for it?

I thought Republicans were all about personal responsibility. I guess not if it means someone being allowed to freeload from a union so you can bust them financially. Then it's perfectly fine in the name of "freedom."

If anyone would like to try to get White to respond as to why he thinks his comments here were acceptable and that unions should be forced to spend money representing those who don't want to pay to join, and why those that refuse to join should reap the benefits of what those unions negotiate for, you can let him know at @morningmoneyben.

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We've got stories that continue to come out about voter suppression everywhere from Arizona, to Colorado, to Pennsylvania to you name it, and stories like this one just coming out this week -- Florida 'Glitch' Wipes Out 1000 Early Votes In Black Area.

And this recent news from Ohio where their Secretary of State Jon Husted is doing his best to become the next Katherine Harris or Ken Blackwell -- Last-Minute Ohio Directive Could Trash Legal Votes And Swing The Election.

But never mind all that. If people don't like it that the Republicans are doing their best to keep them from voting or their votes from being counted, well that's too bad according to Mitt Romney's number one neocon fan-girl -- Wash. Post's Jennifer Rubin Dismisses Voter Suppression Concerns As "Sour Grapes".

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At a so-called "storm relief event" on Tuesday, GOP hopeful Mitt Romney repeatedly refused to answer questions about his promise to the federal agency responsible for responding to disasters like Hurricane Sandy, which devastated much of the east coast this week.

"TV pool asked Romney at least five times whether he would eliminate FEMA as president/what he would do with FEMA," according to a pool report. "He ignored the [questions] but they are audible on cam. The music stopped at points and the [questions] would have been audible to him."

A subsequent pool report elaborated on some of the specific questions the Republican presidential nominee refused to answer:

"Gov are you going to eliminate FEMA?" a print pooler shouted, receiving no response.
Wires reporters asked more questions about FEMA that were ignored.

Romney kept coming over near pool to pick up more water. He ignored these questions:

"Gov are you going to see some storm damage?"

"Gov has [New Jersey Gov.] Chris Christie invited you to come survey storm damage?"

"Gov you've been asked 14 times, why are you refusing to answer the question?"

As The Huffington Post's Ryan Grimm noted on Sunday, Romney had pledged to "absolutely" abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency when asked about it by CNN's John King during a Republican primary debate earlier this year.

"Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction," the former Massachusetts governor said, adding that it would be "even better" to "send it back to the private sector."

At the time, King even pressed Romney on whether he would completely eliminate federal disaster relief.

"We cannot -- we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids," the candidate insisted."It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we'll all be dead and gone before it's paid off. It makes no sense at all."

Campaign spokesperson Amanda Henneberg on Monday reiterated that Romney still believed that disaster relief should be left up to the states.

"Governor Romney believes that states should be in charge of emergency management in responding to storms and other natural disasters in their jurisdictions," Henneberg said. "As the first responders, states are in the best position to aid affected individuals and communities and to direct resources and assistance to where they are needed most. This includes help from the federal government and FEMA."

The Grio managing editor Joy Reid told MSNBC's Alex Wagner on Tuesday that Romney might have a good reason for wanting to avoid questions about FEMA less than a week before the election.

"Do you know who likes FEMA? Florida," Reid explained. "Florida loves FEMA and Florida is a very close state and Florida has had to rely on FEMA a lot because a lot of hurricanes have hit there. And you know who else is about to like FEMA? West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina. I mean, there are a lot of states where people say, 'I don't like the government, I don't want the government in my life.' But when something like this happens, you know who you want in your life? The government."

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Sean Hannity really is a nasty piece of work. He spent his entire show this Wednesday evening giving Trayvon Martin's killer, George Zimmerman an extremely leading interview where he walked him through a lot of the answers and at times talked more than Zimmerman did.

This interview comes in the wake of recent questions about whether Hannity is paying for Zimmerman's defense, which of course Hannity denied.

As Think Progress reported, here's how Zimmerman responded when asked if he had any regrets: George Zimmerman Says He Wouldn’t Do Anything Differently: ‘It Was God’s Plan’ For Me To Kill Trayvon Martin:

Tonight, George Zimmerman — who is currently facing second degree murder charges for killing Trayvon Martin — participated in a highly unusual interview on Fox News with Sean Hannity.

Hannity asked Zimmerman if he regretted getting out of his car to follow Trayvon, carrying a gun, or anything at all about the night he killed Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman said he regretted nothing because he believed “it was all God’s plan.” He also said there isn’t anything he would do differently in retrospect. [...]

Update: At the very end of the interview, Zimmerman goes back and to the question and says “I do wish there was something, anything I could have done that would have put me in the position where I didn’t have to take his life. And I do want to tell everyone…that I’m sorry that this happened.”

As they noted, Martin's father responded to Zimmerman's statement tonight as well. Lawrence O'Donnell and his panel members Joy Reid and Jonathan Capehart weighed in on the interview on MSNBC and Reid addressed something I was wondering as well, which is why Zimmerman's attorney would subject him to the extra scrutiny this interview is going to bring him ahead of his trial. Reid explained it was made clear that his attorney Mark O'Mara was willing to have him appear on Fox to get his fundraising going again.

You can watch that interview below the fold.

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I wonder if the Washington Examiner's Mark Tapscott was one of the Sarah Palin fan-boys trying to edit the Paul Revere Wikipedia page to cover for her after her gaffe this week. MSNBC, Chris Jansing and whoever her show's producers are should be ashamed of themselves for this segment.

Tapscott was brought on to echo the latest conservative talking point of the week, that Sarah Palin is not really an idiot who doesn't know anything about American history, but is actually smarter than the ones making fun of her. The article that they're all linking to in that Memeorandum hyperlink was written by one Andrew Malcolm, who was number 28 on Salon's Hack 30 where Alex Pareen described him as a Drudge-baiting conservative L.A. Times news blogger.

The Reid Report's Joy Reid, who got cut off by Mr-let-me-get-a-word-in-edgewise Tapscott after he monopolized the conversation earlier and didn't want to let her finish her point suggested on Twitter that Tapscott go watch some of HBO's "Assume the Position" with Robert Wuhl which compares facts to myths in American history.

Media Matters has more on the right wing's latest attempt to defend Sarah Palin -- Right-Wing Media Try, Fail To Declare Palin Was "Right" On Paul Revere Story.