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The hosts of MSNBC's Morning Joe on Wednesday ripped into the National Rifle Association (NRA) for using President Barack Obama's daughters in an advertisement opposing new gun safety measures.

On Tuesday, the pro-gun lobbying group sparked outrage by releasing an ad calling Obama an "elitist hypocrite" for opposing guns in schools while allowing his own daughters to be protected by armed bodyguards. The ad comes one month after 20 children were gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and just days after the NRA released a first-person shooting game for Apple's iPhone and iPad targeted at children as young as four.

After reviewing the ad on Wednesday, MSNBC contributor Mike Barnicle immediately denounced it as "political pornography."

"What's wrong with these people, Mika?" MSNBC's Joe Scarborough asked co-host Mika Brzezinski. "You have children who had no say in the decision in whether their father, who is going to step forward to be president of the United States, to run for president -- one of the most bone-crushing, sacrificing things any husband or wife can do to their family. And the second they make that decision, their children and their entire family have targets on their backs."

"And the NRA is putting something out?" he continued. "What's wrong with these people? Putting out apps that 4 year olds can play on the anniversary of the Newtown murders and now putting out an ad talking about the president's daughters."

"They are out of step, out of the mainstream, totally out of sync with what's going on in our society and, quite frankly after seeing that, I think that some of the people who run that thing are sick," Brzezinski agreed. "I really do. I think they are sick in the head. And I'm serious. I'm embarrassed right now. I'm embarrassed for our country, that we have a section of society, the NRA, which should have a voice certainly trying to protect a constitutional amendment. I understand that. There's a really legitimate debate there, [but] they just took it, they just brought it down to the lowest, most base level. I don't even want to -- it's now fringe."

"They are now a fringe organization with millions of mainstream Americans, gun, hunting guys and women that love to hunt," Scarborough noted.

"You should be embarrassed to be part of the NRA at this point," Brzezinski insisted. "I was even going to try and understand the people running to gun shops and loading up on these high-capacity weapons, assault weapons and magazines. I was willing to understand this debate and understand their fear of laws changing and try and discuss it on this show, but after seeing that, honestly, I'm done. They're done. This ad is the final straw."

"It can't be a real ad!" Scarborough exclaimed.

"That's so sick," Brzezinski lamented. "That's some sick person that did it at home in their basement."

"It's just disgusting people," CNBC host Donny Deutsch piled on. "It just gets to a point where it's below human decency."

"This is how they mark the anniversary of Newtown," Scarborough sighed. "I've never seen an organization as out of touch and extreme with middle America as this one... The NRA's worst enemy could not be doing the damage to this once-respected, mainstream organization as [NRA CEO] Wayne LaPierre is every single day."

"I'm terrified," Brzezinski concluded.

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If anyone ever needed any proof that if you're a neocon, right-wing war monger, that was our version of Baghdad Bob with selling the failed invasion of Iraq as some kind of huge success, and that failure means you're going to stay on the wingnut welfare rolls from here to eternity, you need look no further than Dan Senor.

I had the unfortunate circumstance of catching some of Senor's appearance on Morning Joe this Friday, who is getting air time again because guess who he's a senior adviser for? Mitt Romney. So if we' wind up with Mittens as our next president, say hello to four more years of Bush redux on foreign policy.

Senor's appearance on Morning Joe and his background was summed up fantastically by Stephen "DarkSyde" Andrew over at freethoughtblogs.com and I'll share some of the beginning here, but everyone really needs to go read the entire post.

Dan Senor: the man who was too wrong to fail:

The symptoms of the Great American Demise are all around me. In the end, when we have finally reached full-blown third-world status and our grandkids compete in contests for best rat trap, we’ll be able to look back and know we did it entirely to ourselves. One beautiful example of how we managed to blow a massive US lead in wealth and technology can be found in one Dan Samuel Senor, a man too wrong to fail.

Senor is a textbook example of all that is Evil and Foul in the US, a full-blown neoconservative capo groomed to succeed by way of epic failure from his earliest professional years. But I only picked him because he happens to be in my face right now. As I write this, our so-called liberal cable news channel, MSNBC, has their morning VJ, Joe Scarborough, carrying water for the failures of recent years on my TV. Current guest on screen, Dan Senor.

Senor cruised into the big leagues at a young age after an obligatory stint at Harvard business school and spent most of the 1990s working for a Republican Senator in New York state followed by a brief foray as an advisor to the Carlyle Group. That’s a privately held venture capital equity firm, sort of the Bain Capital of choice for petro sheiks, international arms smugglers, and drug kingpins the world over who want to profit from leveraged buyouts and influence peddling in the noble fields of US defense pork barrel spending, Asian sweatshops, and middle east oil conquests.

The hiring of Dan Senor also caught the attention of Rachel Maddow, who talked about how disturbing it is that Romney is reassembling George W. Bush's foreign policy team on her show this Thursday night. More on that below the fold.

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I had the unfortunate circumstance of catching this segment first thing in the morning from MSNBC's Morning Joe where Meet the Press host David Gregory made an appearance and decided to do a little Republican messaging to smooth over the extreme amount of obstruction we've seen from the Senate since President Obama got elected.

Mediaite's Tommy Christopher did a nice job of summing up just what's wrong with just about everything that came out of Gregory's mouth here -- David Gregory Cites ‘Resonant’ Mitch McConnell: Obama ‘Got Everything He Wanted and It Didn’t Work’.

Here's part the transcript via Newsbusters, who they linked over at Mediaite, and who humorously also think it's some kind of rare occasion for David Gregory to repeat Republican talking points on the air:

WILLIE GEIST: Hey David, it's Willie. I want to ask you a fundamental question we've been talking a lot about around this table. The argument from the White House and from many on the left is that the president can't get anything done because he has a party of "no" working against him. Is that a fair characterization based on the evidence we've seen over the last two-and-a-half, almost three, years now, of the way Republicans have handled themselves? Are they out to see the president fail, or are they just standing up for their core beliefs?

DAVID GREGORY: Well, I think it's both. I think it depends how you want to cast it. I think liberals and defenders of the president will say this is the party of "no." I think conservatives would say this is the party of "we're going to stop him from doing more; stop him from hurting the economy further." I mean, the president--Mitch McConnell said something several weeks ago that I think really resonated, which is: the president got everything that he wanted and it didn't work. He got a big stimulus. He got health care reform, he got financial reform. The economy hasn't moved.

Here's more from Christopher:

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More hackery from the set of Morning Joe. Dan Bartlett thinks that the release of Bush's memoir is going to make most Americans, except for those silly leftists of course, remember why they loved Bush so much. Yeah, sure Dan. If that's true why didn't your party roll his sorry ass out right before the mid-term elections so they could all remember just how much they loved him right before they voted?

SCARBOROUGH: Dan Bartlett, what do you think the result of this book is going to be? I suspect like you and you touched on it, people have turned George Bush almost into a cartoon character, suggesting that he didn't give a damn about anything, that he was just a cowboy shooting from the hip all the time. Do you think because expectations are so low and because he's been turned into such a two dimensional character that this book will actually help his standing a great deal with Americans?

BARTLETT: Well like most things in our politics it probably depends on your political perspective. For a lot of people on the left this will probably just reignite a lot of old emotions and give them frustrated all over, but I think for most Americans this will give them an opportunity to say “Okay, well now I know a little bit more about the guy and what he was thinking at the time.”

Sometimes with these big historic moments in our... in the country's history and how he was grappling with it, how he was doing it and seeing a little more of the character of the man; the big controversies like the war and those things, that will take history to settle. But I think this marker that he puts down in this book, I think will give people a better insight to what he is as a person and why people liked him so much when he first ran for president.

SCARBOROUGH: And Dan, let me ask you what happened when he stopped being president. What is it about the Bush's that they have the grace to keep their mouths shut when a new guy gets into the office and let them be President of the United States without hen pecking them for two years.

BARTLETT: That's a good question and a good point to make and I think it has to do with the example that was set by his father and he (inaudible) and we also were on the receiving end when we were in the White House and having presidents taking pot shots was never funny. He always said when we were there he goes “I'm not going to be like that. I know when I'm off the big dance floor it's somebody else's time to be in the Klieg lights and I'm going to go back to have as normal a life as I can.” And I'm happy to report that he's doing a pretty good job of that.

Scarborough seems to forget that he didn't need to go out there and "hen peck" anyone. He had his minion Cheney and his daughter to do the dirty work for him. And don't even get me started on Donny Deustch and two-wrongs-make-a-right Dan Senor.

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From the HuffPo -- Donny Deutsch Sidelined At MSNBC Over Keith Olbermann Segment:

Donny Deutsch has been pulled from MSNBC's 3PM hour after including Keith Olbermann in a montage of angry media personalities.

Deutsch, who had been hosting an "America the Angry" segment in the hour formerly occupied by David Shuster, was informed Wednesday that his time in the anchor's chair was over.

"For whatever reason, they decided they didn't want to go with it the rest of the week," Deutsch told the New York Times.

The Times' Brian Stelter reports that "four people briefed on the decision said the cancellation stemmed from an unflattering mention" of Olbermann. Deutsch had included Olbermann in what Stelter described as "a series of clips of media bloviators during a segment that pondered what role the media plays in fomenting the public's anger." Deutsch also hosted Hugh Hewitt, who called MSNBC's Ed Schultz a "hate-monger." The segment appears below.

Read on...

Keith Olbermann denied having anything to do with the show being pulled off the air. I think this had more to do with his boss not wanting the hosts on his network attacking each other. God knows Keith's abided by it since he has not made Joe Scarborough his "Worst Person in the World" and Tucker Carlson never made the list until he left MSNBC.

What the HuffPo didn't say anything about in their article is just how really awful the show was. I didn't watch all of it, but what I did watch was just terrible even without him bringing on hate monger Hugh Hewitt to comment on other people being over the top. One of our team members shared this with everyone a bit ago. It's an open letter to MSNBC asking to get David Shuster back on the air. I hope Phil Griffin read it -- My letter to MSNBC's Phil Griffin: "David Shuster".

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While asking Republican strategist Alex Johnson why the birther movement is not being disavowed by the Republican party strongly enough, he decided it was a good time to insert President Obama's middle name into the conversation, and then pretend like it was an accident. If these people want to be taken seriously and not as not trying to spread fear about the President as "the other" or a foreigner, they need to stop pulling crap like this. At least he immediately got called out for it on the show.

His back-tracking was pretty comical to watch. After doing exactly what he claimed the party should not be doing, which is trying to instill fear about President Obama, he tried to claim that it's only the fringe of the party doing it with this birther movement. Riiiggghhtt. As the Democratic strategist Julian Epstein pointed out, this is not coming from the fringe elements of the party and it is the Republican members of Congress who are stoking these coals.

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So which is it Chris Matthews? Are you for the rule of law or do you think it's okay to torture prisoners and violate our international treaties? You cannot call out a guest on your show one day for embracing Cheney's rhetoric and then turn around and embrace it yourself the next without rightfully being called either a complete hypocrite, or just psychotic. Matthews is a master of giving all of us a reason to never take him seriously when he does things like this. The man just has no filter.

He had on the ACLU's Anthony Romero in the previous segment and if anyone thinks him talking over Walsh in the clip I posted was bad he was worse with Romero. If Matthews just wants to hear himself talk I don't know why he bothers with guests at all.

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From Morning Joe April 8, 2009. Mark Sanford is confronted for his political posturing by Donny Deutsch. From Sam Stein over at the HuffPo:

Largely lost in the debate over the politics of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's flirtation with rejecting $700 million in stimulus funds for his state has been discussion of the human cost that such a rejection entails.

On Wednesday morning, Donny Deutsch brought the issue to the forefront, confronting Sanford during a segment on MSNBC's Morning Joe with the reality that a large portion of that money would be destined to help schoolchildren.

"Governor... it is going to go to education," declared Deutsch. "Once again, if my kid is in a class, and now instead of 30 kids there are 60 kids, this money is going directly to education. So tell me why it is not better for me as a citizen of South Carolina and for my children to get this money."

Sanford, who contends that the stimulus money should be geared towards closing the state's deficit and has warned that any other use would create additional government bureaucracy, held his ground.

As Think Progress noted, Gov. Sanford touted his decision which would result in firing teachers "reform".

DEUTSCH: Ideology is all great, but let’s pretend I’m a dad and I’m living in South Carolina. A lot of that money is earmarked for education. If you don’t take that money because of your point of view and my kid — there are less teachers, the tuition for the state schools go up, and education is really affected — this is not just in theory, this is reality. What do you say to me as a dad that I’m worried about my kid in a state that has very poor education records?

SANFORD: Yeah, but here’s the bottom line. What this tug of war is really about is reform within South Carolina. … It’s only in these kind of economic times that you can make the changes that are essential, frankly, to South Carolina being more competitive. So our view is, no, we could make some changes that created the dollars that could then be allocated to education and other things.