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MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski on Friday ripped a panel of male pundits on the Fox Business network who were upset on Wednesday by a report that said women were the primary source of income in 40 percent of U.S. households.

Fox News contributor Erick Erickson told host Lou Dobbs that the idea of female breadwinners went against nature. Fox News political analyst Juan Williams also lamented the "disintegration of marriage" and contributor Doug Schoen warned that "it could undermine our social order."

"That was like caveman central!" Brzezinski exclaimed on Friday. "What the heck was that?"

"The fact that this day and age, that we could have men talking that way is stunning," panelist Donny Deutsch agreed.

"We're in the middle of a generational divide," co-host Joe Scarborough explained sarcastically. "And, you know, Erick, my good friend -- and he's a good friend of mine -- Erick's 65 years old."

"But, no, we're in a transition here, Mika," Scarborough continued. "And for a lot of guys, it's difficult."

"I would try and counter their arguments and say the problems with our society or our social order or whatever else it was we're so concerned about was them, the cavemen," Brzezinski insisted. "They can't take it. They can't handle it."

"They're struggling through a tumultuous time," Scarborough snarked.

(h/t: Media Matters)

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Former Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on Monday tied a scandal where the Internal Revenue Service targeted tea party groups to President Barack Obama's health care reform law and last September's attacks in Benghazi.

In an interview on MSNBC, host Joe Scarborough asked the former House Speaker what the president needed to do after The Associated Press revealed that the IRS has improperly scrutinized tea party organizations to determine if they had abused their tax-exempt status.

"This is a huge problem because Obamacare relies very heavily on the IRS," Gingrich opined. "I think the president has to say he's going to open up totally, he's going to demand everybody meet with Congress, go to the hearings, he's going to fire everybody he can legally fire who's been involved in this."

"And they've got to look at changes," he continued. "How can you put Obamacare under an Internal Revenue Service -- remember this is an administration which will not profile terrorists, but profile patriots, profile constitutional groups. I mean, this is almost madness."

But Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Carl Bernstein said that Gingrich was making a mistake by tying the IRS scandal to Obamacare.

"There ought to be an investigation, there ought to be a criminal investigation if it's warranted," Bernstein explained. "And that's it. But to start making these global pronouncements about where it goes and it affects Obamacare seems to me is part of the problem."

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The title is from Washington Post conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin yesterday, who took freshman Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) to task for mocking his fellow Republican senators in public over the weekend. Rubin's, and this morning Joe Scarborough's admonishments notwithstanding, it's hard to see Ted Cruz doing anything other than what he has been doing since he got elected to the senate, which is basically being a royal pain in the ass for everyone else. Certainly calling other Republicans "squishes" won't endear him to anyone.

Here is part of what Rubin wrote:

There is being principled, and then there is being a jerk. Putting down your colleagues to boost your own street cred with the base falls into the latter category.
...
Cruz’s actions suggest an immaturity and lack of sophistication about conservative governance. He might want to apologize to his colleagues for betraying their confidence and sit down and think what it is he wants to do in the Senate. Obstruction is easy; governance is hard. And if the answer is that only hackneyed gestures (e.g. push for repealing Obamacare with a Dem Senate majority, but offer no alternative) that interest him, then the people of Texas are being shortchanged. Worse, he’s doing nothing to suggest he’s a man of stature and future leader in the party.

And here are Cruz's full comments, upped to YouTube by FreedomWorks.

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Nothing like watching a bunch of overpaid, millionaire pundits yucking it up and having a grand old time discussing whether the administration has happily thrown their base under the bus with -- no regard for the lives of those who would be affected by these policy changes.

That's exactly what the audience was treated to on this Friday's Morning Joe on MSNBC. These millionaire pundits probably would not find the hippie punching so humorous if any of of them thought they might have to rely on Social Security to get by in their old age.

Carville: I Think Obama Likes Angering Liberals (VIDEO):

Democratic strategist James Carville said Friday that he doesn't think President Barack Obama is sweating the criticisim he's taken from his liberal base over a budget proposal that includes cuts to Social Security.

Appearing on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Carville said he thinks Obama relishes the commendation he's received from deficit hawks like New York Times columnist David Brooks and host Joe Scarborough. Asked by co-host Mike Barnicle how the President will respond to the outrage from the left-wing of the Democratic Party, Carville was blunt.

"I think he likes that," Carville said. "I don't think he's upset. He got a very favorable Washington Post editorial. 'Morning Joe,' very favorable commentary right here. I guarantee you if he's up watching this right now. Got a good David Brooks column. He's kind of excited this morning. This is kind of important to him."

But Carville added that the White House is not "totally out of bounds" with its budget, arguing that the proposal will "throw the Republicans off" and that Obama is desperate to strike a grand bargain with the GOP.

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After again endorsing his sister in the upcoming House race in South Carolina and after her opponent, former Gov. Mark Sanford's appearance on Morning Joe this Wednesday, where he was given a big wet kiss by the crew of the show and Scarborough announcing that it was "going to be, Morning Joe vs The Colbert Report," Stephen Colbert was more than happy to respond.

COLBERT: Oh... oh... it is on! Morning Joe vs The Colbert Report. Did I want this fight? No. [...]

Of course in some ways, it's always been Morning Joe vs The Colbert Report, though technically at that time of the morning, my network runs a P90X commercial. Yes. It's all about the muscle confusion. Where as Joe's show is just about confusion, in that sometimes people confuse it with news.

But not this morning folks. Because this morning was just pure infomercial for his old buddy, Mark Sanford.

After showing footage of the lot of them sucking up to Sanford, the worst of it being Mike Barnicle, who actually told Sanford that "he was struck" by Sanford's "honesty" over his affair, after he got busted "hiking the Appalachian Trail" with his mistress and if "there was any fear of that honesty coming back and playing a perilous role" in his political future, Colbert responded.

COLBERT: Oh, that's some in depth reporting. You know, Woodward and Bernstein may have had Deep Throat, but Mike Barnicle is doing something similar to Mark Sanford. I just hope... I just hope Mike can breathe through his nose. Because he's right. He's right. When Sanford finally surfaced, the first thing that everybody thought was "Man, that guy is being so honest about how much he lied." And I'm sure he would have been just as honest if no one had caught him.

Well, it's my turn Joe Joe. I'm going to shock some people right now, and endorse my sister, Elizabeth Colbert Busch for Congress. Yes... yes... yes... she's a Democrat, but she's a businesswoman, a job creator, who when raising three children on $14,000 a year went back to school, built a twenty year career in international trade and is now leading Mark Sanford in two consecutive polls.

Are we ready to do this nation! Yeah! Yeah!

And I tell ya. I'll tell ya. Mark Sanford should thank you Joe Scarborough, because I would not have done that, if you had not inspired me.

I look forward to seeing if the crew on Morning Joe actually acknowledges this segment and responds to it, or if they choose to try to pretend it didn't happen, or worse yet, if they respond and selectively edit Colbert's remarks and spare both Scarborough and Barnicle from the worst of his criticism. We'll find out shortly.

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Thom Hartmann takes our corporate media and the cheerleaders for war with Iraq to task and ten years after our invasion, asks 'Where are the apologies?'

Via Truthout: How the Media Fueled the War in Iraq:

Yesterday, the U.S. marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. And, over the course of the past ten years, we've learned more and more about how the war with Iraq actually started.

It's incredibly easy to blame the Bush administration for its lies that led us into Iraq. But Cheney, Rumsfeld and company weren't the only ones who played an integral role in convincing this nation that Saddam Hussein was a threat, and that WMD's were a forgone conclusion.

In the days and weeks leading up to the invasion of Iraq, corporate media – and even NPR and PBS - were abuzz with the talking points of the Bush Administration, echoing claims that Iraq had its hands on "yellow cake uranium" and that it had a massive arsenal of "weapons of mass destruction."

Thanks to the media's repeated claims that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were immediate threats to our nation, in the weeks leading up to the invasion, nearly three-quarters of Americans believed the lie promoted by Donald Rumsfeld that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the attacks of 9/11.

One of the biggest proponents of the Iraq War was Bill O'Reilly.

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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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During a discussion about RNC Chairman Reince Priebus and his latest effort to try to "fix" the GOP and his so-called "minority outreach initiative," which, as we already discussed here, looks like it's headed to be a massive flop, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough decided he'd give old Reince a hand with that minority outreach program by badgering guest Eugene Robinson and demanding he name "the top three issues that make that sort of outreach difficult for Republicans."

Note to Joe Scarborough -- if you want to help out with reaching out to African-Americans, here's a few things you could do. One, don't do it while badgering one of your African-American guests to rattle off a list while you brow beat them and presume that they would want to speak for every other African-American in the country. And don't pretend you don't know full well what the real answers to your questions are already.

Here's a hint on why the Republicans lost the majority of the African-American vote: The New Deal and the Civil Rights Act. And then we there's the Southern Strategy and demonizing and fearmongering to win elections. And to this day you can throw in voter disenfranchisement, these White Supremacist groups and militias cropping up everywhere, the birther movement, the overt racism we saw come from these TeaBirchers and the fact that the Republican party looks like they've completely lost their minds since the election of the first black president.

I'll leave it at that but the list is miles long when it comes to what Republicans have done to slowly disenfranchise the majority of the electorate other than old white men. Good luck with that outreach program Reince. You're going to need it.

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The Krugman-bashing on Morning Joe continued unabated Wednesday, following Joe Scarborough and Paul Krugman's debate the other night on Charlie Rose's show. It seems the right has been looking for countries to prop up to prove that their calls for more austerity measures in the United States are not going to harm the economy and they've found at least one in the tiny Baltic nation of Estonia.

Scarborough started things off in the clip above by writing off our current economic circumstances as just another "period of deleveraging" where the United States needs to get its fiscal house in order with absolutely no reference to the fact that we should not be taking a series of booms and busts as the norm, or the part that deregulation and the dismantling all of the protections that were put in place following the Great Depression to attempt to prevent these types of cycles from happening again have played.

After Scarborough pointed out the fact that Americans and particularly young people are not longer racking up debt, but are also not spending and pumping money into the economy, his guest and CNBC regular Miles Nadal then moved onto the Krugman bashing:

NADAL: So when you say, are you positive on the economy, I'm positive in a cautious kind of way, but as Joe articulated on The Charlie Rose Show, which I thought was really a terrific debate, there are things on the horizon that are very scary. And I thought Paul Krugman's perspective was kind of, a little frightening in the sense that he didn't see any possibility of any Black Swan on anything that's happening and if you talk to any informed business person, that's not possible that you could completely eliminate the probability that nothing, including this multi-trillion dollar deficit would have no impact.

And as we articulated in the green room, nobody could run a company or a home the way the government is running things.

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Chuck Todd and the rest of the beltway Villagers over at MSNBC just can't stop themselves. Todd treated his viewers to yet another infomercial from the network for the Fix the Debt campaign, this time with former Republican Rep. Mark Kennedy having a seat at the table instead of their regular contributor, Ed Rendell, who is usually the one who we see shilling for that organization on the network.

After showing some footage of Republican Paul Ryan blaming the budget sequester on President Obama, but completely ignoring Ryan's hypocrisy on the matter, Todd opined and asked Kennedy why, if this current threat of sequester didn't force both sides to come together, how in the world are we ever going to believe they'll ever work anything out?

Kennedy responded by blaming the problem on the lack of trust between the two parties (never mind which party we can rightfully blame for the better part of that), and he blamed a good portion of the impasse on what he called “debt deniers."

It looks to me like this is taken straight out of the latest attack on Paul Krugman from Todd's fellow MSNBC contributor, Joe Scarborough. After Krugman came on the air with Scarborough and handed his ass to him, Scarborough continued to rant that he was right about the debt.

Here's more on that from Jonathan Chait: Scarborough and Friends Trying to Make ‘Debt Deniers’ Happen:

The deficit scold cause has suffered significant intellectual erosion over the last year or so. In the short run, the interest rate spike they keep insisting will happen keeps not happening. In the long run, the health-care-cost inflation that is at the root of the long-term fiscal predicament is growing markedly less dire. The case for prudent fiscal adjustment remains strong, but the case for bug-eyed, table-pounding terror is growing increasingly ridiculous.

But bug-eyed, table-pounding terror is the stock-in-trade of the fiscal scold movement. And so they are striking back by labeling anybody with a calmer view of the deficit as a “debt denier.” Joe Scarborough, who may have launched the new catchphrase on Twitter, has a new op-ed in Politico brandishing the epithet. Meanwhile, the anti-deficit lobby “Fix the Debt” — for whom Scarborough has served as one of many media spokespersons — has taken up Scarborough’s favorite label with a new campaign, debtdeiners.com, which, alongside its latest attempt to generate a viral dance video, amounts to a concerted counteroffensive against Paul Krugman and others who have ever so slightly mitigated the tone of apocalyptic hysteria surrounding the fiscal debate. They even have their own debt deniers hashtag. They are trying very hard to make “debt deniers” happen.

Go read the rest of Chait's post on why pushing for deficit reduction now is harmful to our economy and helping it to recover and how ridiculous the position of these deficit scolds has been.

Never mind that though if you watch this interview. In the world of Chuck Todd and his guest Mark Kennedy, the almighty Thomas Friedman must be listened to -- because everyone knows that's what all the Very Serious People out there do. He's never been wrong about anything and "debt denier" is now the new phrase they're going to use for anyone who actually wants us to grow our economy by enacting some progressive policies -- instead of using the deficit as an excuse to slash our social safety nets.