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Looks like Tommy Christopher at Mediaite figured out what we've been saying over here for a long time now... that David Gregory is a right wing tool who's constantly advocating for really bad Republican economic policies along with a bunch of his fellow Villagers in the media: David Gregory Tells Morning Joe That President Obama Must Gut Medicare To Succeed:

On a very special 2nd Quadrennial Barack Obama Day edition of Morning Joe, Meet The Press host David Gregory provided some more evidence against the mythical “liberal media bias” when he endorsed the emerging Beltway media consensus that in order to deal with debt and deficits, President Obama is going to have to gut Medicare. “He’s got to be able to convince his own party, but also to do something that, frankly, Americans don’t want done,” Gregory said of Medicare, “which is to have to give back some things.”

[...] what’s significant is that Gregory wasn’t offering merely pragmatic political advice, but actually endorsing the idea that the way to solve our fiscal problems involves cutting Medicare for beneficiaries.

Unfortunately for America, President Obama has already indicated a willingness to move in that direction, having already placed raising the Medicare eligibility age on the table. Raising the age will only shift those costs, at higher rates, and only partially away from the federal government. Those two extra years will either be paid for by the seniors themselves, who will be charged up to 3 times as much for health insurance on the individual market, or by the government in the form of Medicaid for those who can’t afford private insurance, or by private insurance companies.

What no one is talking about is that Medicare is a huge break for private insurers, who get to lay off their highest-risk patients onto the government. People with retiree group health insurance will be covered by their health insurance for those two extra years, at great expense to those companies. The amount of money they pay out in claims will far outstrip what they can take in in premiums, and the additional premiums will fall on those retirees’ employers.

The other problem is that, relatively speaking, 65 and 66 year-olds are bargains for Medicare, and eliminating them from the program would only succeed at making the overall pool of Medicare recipients older and sicker. If there was a way to eliminate the last 2 years of eligibility, you’d be on to something.

Gregory and his fellow beltway hacks Joe Scarborough and Tom Brokaw have been singing this tune for some time now as we've pointed out here over, and over, and over, and over and over again. And as Christopher rightfully noted out, there are ways to make Medicare solvent without turning it over to the private insurance market:

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From this Monday's extended edition of Morning Joe on MSNBC, Chuck Todd is asked about the new PAC, Organizing for Action, which as we noted here is building on the Obama campaign apparatus to continue support for his policy objectives and after discussing the new organization, Todd had one question. He wasn't sure how they were going to appeal to Republicans and get their votes.

I wonder if he's ever said the same thing about a single Republican PAC. Anyone think he asked how Rove's Crossroads GPS was going to get more Democrats to vote for Republicans? Maybe they ought to worry about advocating for policies their own voters care about first Chuck.

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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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I don't know about anyone else, but I'm getting really tired of watching a bunch of extremely rich pundits sit around and tell the rest of us that there just hasn't been enough shared sacrifice from the working class, the elderly and the poor yet in order to solve our deficit problem. But that's exactly what the viewers are treated to day after day on MSNBC's three hour long Villager conventional wisdom regurgitation-fest called Morning Joe.

This Wednesday was no exception and immediately following the so-called "fiscal cliff" debacle coming to a conclusion, and the pundits on there didn't miss a beat with demands that President Obama had better get out there and use his bully pulpit to explain to the American people that we're all just going to have to be willing to give a little more in order for Republicans to not kill the hostage called the world's economy over this upcoming debt ceiling standoff.

This week we had Tom Brokaw going on Meet the Press and telling everyone that there's nothing wrong with raising the retirement age for Social Security and telling the lie that Americans are living longer. It's little wonder he'd have that view since he's not ever going to have to worry about his retirement security. And yes, rich people like himself are living to be older. Not so much for most of the rest of us.

If these guys want to go on the air and pontificate about how we ought to get a pound of flesh out of the working class, I think their salaries and net worth ought to be displayed right under their names in the chryon for the viewers. Maybe they'd feel a little differently about their opinions.

According to Forbes, Brokaw has an estimated net worth of $70 million.

And if the site Celebrity Networth is accurate, Scarborough's is $18 million and Brzezinski's is $8 million.

I'm not sure what some of the others who were on there this Wednesday like David Walker, Chuck Todd, Dan Senor, Richard Haas and Mark Halperin are worth, but I'm pretty sure they're all being paid really well and aren't worried about relying on Social Security for a comfortable retirement as well. But every one of them was joining in on carping about the deficit that none of them cared about it when Bush was blowing holes in it a mile wide with tax cuts and wars that weren't paid for. Deficits only matter when Democrats are elected as president.

And as far as Walker's claim that his group has gone around the country and gotten a positive response from ordinary people as they explained to them that they need to cut our social safety nets in order to balance the budget, well, that's not the experience our own Susie Madrak had when she went to one of them. As she noted:

You know what most of them wanted to do? Soak the rich -- and cut defense spending. [...]

I thought maybe it was just my table, but when they tabulated the results, it was pretty much the same throughout the crowded ballroom of several hundred attendees.

And of course absent from this conversation was any discussion about what to do to get Americans back to work. If we were at full employment and had some sort of decent economic growth in the United States, this deficit problem would take care of itself because we'd have more people paying taxes.

They also keep pretending like Social Security adds to our deficit. It doesn't and it has a surplus. And if they want to solve the problem with Medicare, we need to fix our health care costs over all. We pay way more than any other developed country with worse outcomes and putting seniors into the private insurance market doesn't solve the problem. It just shifts the costs around and drives them up. But you won't hear that discussion while they're pounding their fists about lowing the deficit.

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I don't know who Chuck Todd thought he was kidding on MSNBC's Morning Joe this Thursday, but it seems it might be himself. He started out this segment pretending that if President Obama just reached out to Republicans and gave them more of what they want on this so-called "fiscal cliff" deal to try to get a "grand bargain," then maybe they'd get around to working with him on immigration or gun control.

TODD: There is incentive I think for the President to do whatever it takes, even if it means maybe going further than he ever anticipated in trying to get a big deal, because if he's got to spend all of 2013 dealing with budget impasse after budget impasse, so he can't get it done here in this lame duck. Then it takes January. He's got to use his inaugural and the State of the Union to argue about fiscal and deficit issues and tax issues. Then you have the debt ceiling.

I mean, if that's how the first three or four months play out, when does immigration get done Mike? I'm still trying to figure that out. When does he get to the gun issue which they seem intent on trying to do? When does he start dealing with energy? There's a whole domestic – and by the way, let's remember second term – domestically they don't last four years. You've got about a year, maybe a little bit more before the mid-term election when you can get something done through Congress.

So, if this is – and by the way, the bitterness that is setting in, in the personal relationships between the President and Mitch McConnell, the President and Speaker Boehner – I think make it that much worse.

He turned right around just a little bit later and contradicted himself, saying that the Republican base is never going to allow any compromise with the President and that their voters won't reward it. And he called them "playing with political fire" because the one group of their constituents they do care about, the business community, might finally get sick of them holding the debt ceiling hostage and putting our economy at risk.

I'm not sure where Chuck Todd has been for the last four years, but I've seen absolutely no evidence that any Republicans plan on compromising with the President, ever on any issues. I don't know why he believes if he just caves in on these negotiations and of course throws his base under the bus, which is what you know Todd is talking about here, that he'd get a year out of them to work on anything. If they come forth with any legislation on either immigration or gun control, you know it's going to be something awful that no one on the left will want to vote for, like turning immigrants into some sort of underclass that never has a chance for citizenship or to unionize, or putting more guns in our schools.

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Joe Scarborough is back at it again, apologizing for torture and telling lies about whether it works. Every time I think this show can't get much worse, I turn it on like I did this morning and realize I'm wrong. This had to be one of the more disgusting segments I've watched in a while, and that's saying a lot for this show. Scarborough and his panel members, David Ignatius and Jon Meacham, did their best to help revise history and help Scarborough play torture apologist while discussing the new film coming out this month, Zero Dark Thirty.

Glenn Greenwald has more on the problems with the premise of this movie: Zero Dark Thirty: new torture-glorifying film wins raves:

Earlier this year, the film "Zero Dark Thirty", which purports to dramatize the hunt for and killing of Osama bin Laden, generated substantial political controversy. It was discovered that CIA and White House officials had met with its filmmakers and passed non-public information to them - at exactly the same time that DOJ officials were in federal court resisting transparency requests from media outlets and activist groups on the ground that it was all classified.

With its release imminent, the film is now garnering a pile of top awards and virtually uniform rave reviews. What makes this so remarkable is that, by most accounts, the film glorifies torture by claiming - falsely - that waterboarding and other forms of coercive interrogation tactics were crucial, even indispensable in finding bin Laden.In the New York Times on Sunday, Frank Bruni wrote: "I'm betting that Dick Cheney will love the new movie 'Zero Dark Thirty.'" That's because "'enhanced interrogation techniques' like waterboarding are presented as crucial" to finding America's most hated terrorist. [...]

The claim that waterboarding and other torture techniques were necessary in finding bin Laden was first made earlier this year by Jose Rodriguez, the CIA agent who illegally destroyed the agency's torture tapes, got protected from prosecution by the DOJ, and then profited off this behavior by writing a book. He made the same claim as "Zero Dark Thirty" regarding the role played by torture in finding bin Laden.

That caused two Senators who are steadfast loyalists of the CIA - Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein and Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin - to issue statements definitively debunking this assertion. Even the CIA's then-Director, Leon Panetta, made clear that those techniques played no role in finding bin Laden. An FBI agent central to the bin Laden hunt said the same.

What this film does, then, is uncritically presents as fact the highly self-serving, and factually false, claims by the CIA that its torture techniques were crucial in finding bin Laden. Put another way, it propagandizes the public to favorably view clear war crimes by the US government, based on pure falsehoods.

And Mediaite's Tommy Christopher did a nice job of breaking down just how dishonest this Morning Joe segment was: Joe Scarborough Claims Zero Dark Thirty Torture Scene True, Screenwriter And Facts Disagree:

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Stephen Colbert did a fine job of making a mockery of Joe Scarborough and his criticism of New York Times blogger, Nate Silver and his hackery where he told the viewers at MSNBC that they should take Scarborough and his "gut" more seriously than Silver and math, because as Colbert explained here, we all know math has a liberal bias.

Here's more from Media Matters on the segment Colbert was making fun of during this segment.

Pundits Vs. Nate Silver, Data Vs. "Gut":

Nate Silver has a computer model. Each day he plugs the data from the various national and swing state polls into that model, numbers are crunched, simulations are run, and he posts the results on his New York Times blog indicating who is more likely to win the presidential election: Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. (As of this posting, Silver's analysis has Obama winning in 74.6 percent of scenarios.) And for this, Silver is coming under attack from pundits who insist that their gut feeling tells them the race is a true toss-up.

"Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they're jokes," complained Joe Scarborough on the October 29 Morning Joe. [...]

It makes sense that pundits like Scarborough and Brooks would have it out for a numbers guy like Silver. Their oeuvre is the intangible. They analyze based on gut feelings and nonspecifics. Their great trick is to transform the utterly unquantifiable into something approaching concrete certainty.

Nate Silver joined Colbert in the following segment and he didn't get him to call Scarborough out by name, but he didn't have any kind words for pundits during the interview and quite frankly, I don't blame him. He was a lot kinder than I would have been with Scarborough given how rotten, nasty, personal, and wrong Scarborough was to him on Morning Joe.

You can watch Silver's interview with Colbert below the fold.

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It seems Grandpa McGrumpy wasn't too happy about his buddy Willard getting zinged by President Obama during the final presidential debate this Monday and let the audience know during his appearance this Tuesday on Morning Joe.

McCain: Obama’s ‘Bayonets And Horses’ Remark A ‘Cheap Shot’ And I ‘Resent It’:

Appearing on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) praised Mitt Romney's performance in the final debate and criticized President Obama for mocking the GOP candidate's approach to the defense budget.

"Frankly, I don't understand why the president wants to take these kind of cheap shots -- bayonets and horses, what's that all about?" he said. "You know, when I debated then-Senator Obama I didn't criticize or belittle his lack of experience on national security issues. And he seemed to take these kind of cheap shots. ... I kind of resent it."

"I think you should treat your opponent with some respect. ... It was small ball."

This coming from the same man who inflicted Sarah Palin on the rest of the nation and allowed her to be running around the country during the presidential campaign accusing then Sen. Obama of "paling around with terrorists." And from the same man who called Obama a celebrity and compared him to Paris Hilton. Small ball, huh? Well, you'd know all about that, now wouldn't you?

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Conservative MSNBC host Joe Scarborough cried out for his Savior on Wednesday after viewing video of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney awkwardly trying to get a crowd in Ohio to chant his name.

After Romney gave a shout out to his running mate, Paul Ryan, in Vandalia, Ohio on Tuesday, the crowd got excited and began chanting, "Ryan! Ryan!"

"Wait a second," Romney said, reminding the crowd that he was at the top of the ticket.

"Romney-Ryan, Romney-Ryan," the former governor instructed the crowd, although most of them ignored him. "There we go."

After co-host Mika Brzezinski played the video on Wednesday, Scarborough could only put his hands over his eyes and utter, "Oh, sweet Jesus."

"What do the Catholics say? 'Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now in the hour of [death]'?" the conservative host wondered.

"No, it's over," Brzezinski pointed out. "It's not going to work. It's too late for that."

"You know what? You don't fix it," Scarborough agreed. "Sadly, I say this about Mitt Romney, he's a great man. He is. He's a great father. He's a great husband. He is a great business man, great turnaround guy. If I had a business anywhere in the world, I'd have him run it. He just -- he's a horrible politician. He's one of the worst."

BuzzFeed's Mike Hayes supplied this:

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From this Tuesday's Morning Joe, former Gov. George Pataki really was not happy with author Kurt Eichenwald's new book, 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars, or his op-ed which Susie wrote about here -- 9/11: When The Facts Didn't Fit Their Neocon Fantasy.

Unfortunately for him, Pataki managed to make a fool of himself while going after the author and throwing a bit of a fit on the show, because he freely admitted he hadn't read the book and didn't intend to. Nothing like conservatives sticking their fingers in their ears and going lalalala I can't hear you when someone's trying to tell them something they don't like. Eichenwald did a good job of pushing back at Pataki's assertions that the book was just intended as a hit piece on the Bush administration, actually read a few passages from the book and told Pataki that the most positive feedback he's gotten on the book is from members of the Bush administration.

I'm not sure where Scarborough slithered off to while this segment was airing, but he was no where to be found. I guess he wasn't so worried about one of his guests being attacked by another one, like we saw when he had so much concern for Reince Priebus when Chris Matthews jumped on him for the birtherism and racist dog whistles.

Partial transcript below the fold via:

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