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It seems Gov. Scott Walker is suddenly very concerned about how this recall election is going to adversely affect some of the vulnerable people in his state. Won't someone think of the children and seniors please?

Walker: The Recall Costs Money — Think Of The Children And Seniors:

Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) appeared Monday on Morning Joe, discussing the upcoming recall election against him by the state Democrats and organized labor. And among other things, he said, the recall is only hurting children and seniors — by costing money.

MSNBC’s Willie Geist asked Walker: “You find yourself in the middle of this, mired in a recall election. The latest Marquette poll has you 47 approve, 47 percent disapproves, split right down the middle in the state of Wisconsin. This could be a long fight for you — a special election scheduled to take place in June, a primary in May. How distracted are you from doing the business of Wisconsin by trying to essentially win re-election in the middle of your term?” (Note: The May and June dates are not yet officially declared by state election officials, but are the likely outcome of the administrative process.)

“Well, we’re focused,” Walker responded, “but it’s a huge distraction, not just for me, for the legislature. I mean, it’s $9 million of taxpayers’ money just to run this. Think about the number of kids we could help, think of the number of seniors we could help in our state with $9 million that we didn’t have to waste on this — this frivolous recall election.

Maybe he should have thought of that first before he went on the attack of the working class and union members in his state for the benefit of his big business campaign contributors. And as TPM noted, he was also crying about the out of state money coming in from "special interests" outside of his state.

The Rev. Al Sharpton had a response to that later in the day on MSNBC, where he noted that 61 percent of the money supporting Walker is coming from outside of the state, $1 million of which is from just four donors, among them of course, the Koch brothers.

Video below the fold.

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About the only thing more ridiculous than the decision by the producers on Morning Joe to bring on Franklin Graham to throw flames on whether President Obama is a Christian or not, or whether he's supposedly "more concerned about Muslims than Christians that are being murdered in Muslim countries" was this bit of concern trolling for Graham by the panel on Fox News Watch, where host Jon Scott asked if Graham was "ambushed."

He wasn't "ambushed" or forced to participate in any flame throwing during that segment any more than he was when CNN had him back on again for more of the Obama is a secret Muslim ridiculousness. What's really pathetic here is the panel in the Fox segment tried to claim Graham's agenda and he wanted to talk about got sidelined by questioning him on whether he thought he was a Christian or not, when what they claim he came on there to discuss was raising the exact same sort of drummed up concerns, which is that he supposedly more concerned about Muslims and making them angry than he is Christians being murdered in Muslim countries.

Apparently they're really upset that one line of calling President Obama a secret Muslim that's not really a Christian got highjacked by the crowd over at MSNBC and didn't allow him to make another attack on pretty much the exact same issue. And just ignore the fact that Graham got ample opportunity to discuss exactly what they claim he did not during that same interview.

Anyone watching this debacle with Graham every time he shows up on television knows what his game is about, which is painting the President as "the other" who is not really one of us, and somehow foreign, and playing to the birther nonsense that Graham has already made himself notorious for.

It's a really sad state of events when you've got one network slamming a really horrible interview where the producers should have known better than to bring Graham on in the first place because they knew what they were going to get and being upset because it wasn't more horrible yet and trying to pretend Graham's agenda got highjacked somehow. It wasn't. MSNBC should be ashamed for putting this birther who's just out to line his pocket and push a right wing agenda on the air and so should Fox for carrying water for him.

I'm not some big fan of MSNBC regular Jonathan Capehart because frankly the man regularly just glosses over or minimizes just how crazy the Republican Party has become these days and chalks a lot of it up to just politics as usual, when I don't think there's anything normal about how far the GOP has fallen off the cliff to the right, but the treatment he received by both host Joe Scarborough and guest New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on this Thursday's edition of Morning Joe just sickened me.

As most people who visit this site probably already know, Gov. Christie vetoed the gay marriage bill in New Jersey and that ended up being the main topic of discussion during this segment. When Capehart tried to pin Christie down about why he thought it was acceptable to put a civil rights issue up for referendum with the voters, he ended up being bullied and talked over and interrupted by both Christie and Scarborough.

Christie is trying to have it both ways with this debate and deflect how rotten it is that he had a chance to single-handedly give a group of people in New Jersey the right to be married by signing that bill into law, and blamed his decision on the Democrats, because they claimed that a majority of people in his state wanted it, while not wanting it subjected to the will of the voters. So naturally it's all their fault because he had no other choice than to decide to try to prove them wrong instead of doing the right thing. He also tried to claim that both he and President Obama have the same stance on gay marriage.

When Capehart attempted to explain that that's not true since Obama has instructed his Justice Department not to defend DOMA, or the Defense of Marriage Act and that he has never issued any veto threats if the Congress would actually pass a law allowing gay marriage, Christie decided it was best to just talk over him and hammer him about what Obama's stance is on gay marriage. I'll give Capehart credit for this much though and that is he got Christie to admit that civil rights should not have been put up for a vote a half century ago. He didn't have that same luck trying to get him to relate that struggle to those wanting marriage equality for the LGBT community today.

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We got treated to round two of this Sunday's Meet the Press with the return of Peggy Noonan, E.J. Dionne and Joe Scarborough carrying more water for the Catholic bishops and their attacks on the new health care mandate on this Monday's Morning Joe. I don't agree with Scarborough about much of anything, but even he realizes that if this debate ends up being about contraception and not religious freedom, Republicans are going to lose that fight and he warned House Republicans not to push it too far in going after the new mandate.

Cue Peggy Noonan and another round of pearl clutching.

NOONAN: Let me ask you a question. Do you believe that at this point of this struggle, the White House and the National Abortion Action Rights League, and Planned Parenthood have decided that mischievously and for political gain they will put this whole issue and imbroglio forward as simply a disagreement on contraception? The Catholic Church is trying to take your contraception away from you? Those bad men are trying to mess up with your contraception?

Well that is not what this issue is about. It is not what the struggle and the imbroglio has been about. But I think you are suggesting, tell me if I'm wrong, that the administration for political reasons is going to muck up the waters in that way.

After Scarborough and Dionne pointed out that a lot of the Catholic institutions thought the President's compromise was perfectly reasonable with Dionne explaining that the insurance companies are not going to incur any additional costs because paying for contraceptive coverage actually saves money compared to the costs when women become pregnant, their arguments fell on deaf ears with Noonan.

NOONAN: Well, I'm talking the reality of it and they're going to pass it on to us too.

Completely tone deaf. Republicans have absolutely nothing to run on this year, so they're hoping to turn this into their big wedge issue to get their base riled up in the hopes they turn out at the polls. I'll repeat what I've already said about this, which is good luck with that. There are only so many Noonans and Bachmanns and Palins out there who are willing to throw their fellow females under the bus and then there are the other ninety some percent of us who know this is about reproductive rights and fairness and women having control over their own bodies.

You know, I'd really love to see someone ask Peggy Noonan if she's ever used birth control herself or not. She's a divorcee with one child. If she's so deeply concerned about the Catholic bishops having the right to impose their will on the women among their ranks, does she even follow their teachings? And for that matter, what does she think about the Catholic Church's views on divorce? I'm sure it will be a cold day in hell before one of her fellow Villagers ever asks her about either on the air.

I've really just had it up to here listening to these bloviating hypocrites pretending to take the moral high ground and feigning indignation over this issue and Noonan's been one of the worst offenders.

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On this Monday morning's edition of Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough did his best to carry water for the Catholic Bishops and church leadership that have been actively campaigning against to the Obama administration's decision to make religious institutions across the country start covering birth control for their employees.

I don't know if Scarborough is unaware of the statistics as to just how many Catholics disagree with their church's position or if he's just lying to the audience at MSNBC, but he decided to start arguing with Chuck Todd when he even mentioned the possibility that there is "a little bit of a split on this" among the church's membership. And I find it highly unlikely that Todd didn't know just exactly how big that split is, given his background as a pollster. He's been running the numbers on elections and voter trends since his days at Roll Call and it looked to me as though he knew exactly how large the divide is and just didn't want to argue with the bully Scarborough.

For a little reminder on just how many Catholics don't agree with the leadership, I'll just refer readers back to Blue Texan's post here -- If Obama Administration is 'At War' with the Catholic Church, So Are Most American Catholics.

If Joe Scarborough actually believes that this issue is going to cost Democrats the state of Pennsylvania in the upcoming election, he's completely ignoring the fact that most Catholics aren't practicing and don't believe in the views of their Church's leadership. That's a fact he'd rather ignore here since it doesn't fit in well with his talking point he decided he was going to hammer home for the morning.

I left out the portion of the segment where the Rev. Al Sharpton was trying to argue with Scarborough about his statement where he conflated the Catholic Church and the issue of birth control and the Ground Zero mosque debacle. I would imagine Al had a hard time during that portion of the segment in part because he didn't look like he understood what point Scarborough was trying to make any more than I did, but that didn't stop him from arguing about it with him.

Rough transcript below the fold.

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Joe Scarborough seems to have a little problem understanding why people would be upset with Mitt Romney's great wealth and how much he pays in taxes, or at least he pretended to on this Monday's Morning Joe. Here's Scarborough doing his best to carry a little water for Mittens and downplay whether those things should be an issue in the general election.

SCARBOROUGH: John Heilemann, Americans didn’t care that Jack Kennedy was rich. They didn’t care that Roosevelt was rich. They didn’t even care that John Kerry was rich in ’04. People aren’t talking about that. But Mitt Romney has given the Obama team so many buzzwords, Swiss bank account, Cayman Islands, "I like firing people," 14 percent, "let the market bottom out"...

BRZEZINSKI: "I know what it's like to be unemployed."

SCARBOROUGH: ...pink slips, I know what it's like.. You could go on and on. He has set himself up for a November killing.

BRZEZINSKI: He's the 1 percent.

After John Heilemann noted that Romney's "painted himself as a combination of Gordon Gekko and Richie Rich" and that his refusal to release his tax returns is going to come back to haunt him, Scarborough came back with this.

SCARBOROUGH: I’m not trying to be argumentative, but I think it’s a fair question to ask. [...] Why would they care that Mitt Romney paid a 14.3 percent tax on his income when John Kerry paid a 13.1 percent tax on his income and he had more money than Mitt Romney?

Simple answer Joe. Because they weren't advocating for austerity and policies that would make the fact that we've got record income disparity in the United States worse while also pushing policies that would make their own taxes lower, like Mitt Romney is now.

Stephen Colbert joined the set of Morning Joe live in South Carolina to discuss his "exploratory committee to run president of the United States of South Carolina" and his former Super PAC which is now being run by Jon Stewart which is urging Republicans to vote for Herman Cain, since it's too late for Colbert to have a place on the ballot in the primary.

Stephen actually made watching Morning Joe enjoyable for the close to twenty minutes he was on there, something I had previously thought was next to impossible.

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After virtually ignoring the upcoming SOPA legislation and the upcoming online blackout to protest the pending legislation, now that the blackout is upon us, the corporate news channels that also support the bill finally decided to let their viewers know what was going on, because they had no choice. Were it not for the blackout, I'm sure they'd still be ignoring it for the most part.

MSNBC decided to bring on recently retired Senator and now lobbyist for the motion picture industry, Chris Dodd, for a nice "fair and balanced" discussion on the blackout. Dodd more or less accused the web sites participating in the blackout of acting like a bunch of spoiled children and offered little in the way of details to address the concerns of those who are against the legislation.

Glenn Greenwald wrote a pretty scathing piece on Dodd and the letter he issued via the L.A. Times. You can read the rest for his criticisms of Dodd's lobbying activity among other issues, but I thought I'd share some of his thoughts on Dodd and the MPAA's response to the protest -- Chris Dodd’s paid SOPA crusading:

The L.A. Times, yesterday – “MPAA’s Chris Dodd takes aim at SOPA strike”:

Hollywood’s chief lobbyist lashed out at tech companies for mounting Tuesday night’s planned online blackout to protest proposed anti-piracy legislation that has pitted Southern California movie and music distributors against Silicon Valley Internet corporations.

Motion Picture Assn. of America Chief Executive Chris Dodd, the former Senator from Connecticut, accused technology companies such as Google, Mozilla and Wikipedia of resorting to stunts. . . .

“It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and who use their services,” Dodd said in a statement. “It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today.”

[...]

It is in that capacity that Dodd has become the leading public spokesman and private lobbyist for the truly dangerous PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, bills craved by the industry that pays him. These bills, which vest the power in large corporations and the government to seize and shutdown websites with little or no due process in the name of stopping piracy, pose the greatest dangers to Internet freedom of any bill in the last decade, at least. So serious are these threats that they have prompted a rare — and inspiring — protest movement from numerous large Internet companies and blogs in the form of an Internet “blackout” today.

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On this Monday's Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough spent a better part of the morning ranting and raving about how Mitt Romney's time at Bain Capital isn't going to hurt him in the general election should he win the Republican primary race. He really was at his most obnoxious during the latter part of this segment when guests Suze Orman and Jeffrey Sachs dared to suggest that Elizabeth Warren's arguments about how the financial sector has led to the destruction of our economy and the amount of debt most households are carrying now.

As Sachs pointed out, what has most people upset is the level of fraud we've seen from the big banks and the subsequent bailouts after making incredible amounts of money and it's the fraud that has most Americans very angry right now. That led Scarborough to go into this rant, which Mediate took note of this morning as well -- Joe Scarborough To Suze Orman: Debt Growth ‘Not Just About Big Business; It’s About Big Government’:

You know, I keep hearing about all of the problems being big businesses and big banks. And yes, there has been fraud. But we’re sitting here ignoring what is going on all around us. We have historical trends that are exploding in our faces. You look this past weekend, look what happened on Friday. France downgraded because of massive debt. Eight other countries in Europe, downgraded because of debt. Our federal government keeps getting bigger by the year, and we keep sitting here scratching our heads going, “well, what are we doing? Why are more and more people going into poverty? It must be big business’s fault.”

The federal government keeps growing by the year. The debt keeps growing. When Democrats are in power, the federal government gets bigger, and debt gets bigger. When Republicans are in, when Democrats are in, it gets bigger. And I hear Dr. Sachs saying all morning about Mitt Romney’s “right-wing radical plan.” That’s a bunch of bunk! It is bunk. Mitt Romney doesn’t have a conservative plan. If he did, I would already be on board with him. But he’s going to be a big-government Republican who is going to follow a big-government Democrat who followed a big-government Republican in George W. Bush. I mean, come on, we have to break this trend. And it’s been going on for 30, 40 years. The government just keeps getting bigger. And our debt keeps getting bigger. Crowding out takes place, and we just sit here trying to blame big business. That’s not going to sell with middle Americans moving forward.

What they failed to note over there was Sach's response, or the fact that Scarborough's rant is completely hypocritical given just which party is responsible for the debt we're seeing right now.

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Joe Scarborough did his best to attempt to rewrite the failings of conservative governance we've suffered over the last few decades along with some of his own history, surprise, surprise with a big assist by some of his fellow panel members, Jon Meacham, Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist.

While discussing some of the right's disdain for the current crop of Republican presidential candidates, Scarborough throws out the first whopper during the segment, that George W. Bush was not really a conservative. The New Yorker's David Remnick notes that the Republican Party doesn't seem to be the “party of ideas” any more and here's how Scarborough responds.

SCARBOROUGH: Two things have happened over the last decade. One, the election of George W. Bush... a man who claimed to be a conservative, but The New Republic had it right in 2000. Bush was for big government and he was for big business. The New Republic predicted it. I remember the cover of it.

And yet conservatives went along for the ride for the better part of eight years, they let him double the national debt without complaining. They let him engage in a Wilsonian foreign policy where he spent his second inauguration talking about ending tyranny on the four corners of the globe. They remained silent. They betrayed their values. They forgot everything they said in the 1990's and they sold their soul to have power in the White House. And then Barack Obama got elected. And then they lost their mind.

These Democrats have had the Bush derangement syndrome and they did. But then what did they get? Obama derangement syndrome. So it because less about ideas and it became more about destroying Obama and Jon Meacham, that's why they stopped focusing on balancing the budget, on having restraint.

Scarborough seems to have a pretty short memory because by his own definition here, he's part of that problem he's complaining about, and he apparently doesn't remember that he claimed that we won the Iraq War back in 2003 while berating anyone who dared to speak out against it. For a reminder of Scarborough's previous statements, go read Extreme Liberal's Blog here -- Joe Scarborough – A Look Back At His Previous Statements About War! Here are a couple of the quotes from Scarborough among many that they dug up in that post:

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