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The Morning Joe crowd got a big laugh over John Heilmann's seeming word stumble this morning, with Scarborough in particular busting a gut. In the subsequent re-airs, and on the web this part was edited out, as first noted by TV/Newser

via Greg Mitchell

John Heilemann, very early on Morning Joe today, in a discussion about opposition to Susan Rice, suggested that Sen. Lindsey Graham is, essentially, a "woman." This was in the context of Sen. Kelly Ayotte replacing outgoing Joe Lieberman in the "three amigos" grouping (McCain, Graham, Lieberman). Heilemann said that now two of the three are actually "women." Well, Joe Scarb had a good laugh about it right on camera and then they moved on. And, as Mediaite just noted, that bit was pulled when the segment was re-aired after 8 a.m.

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Lawrence O'Donnell, Krystal Ball and John Heilemann take a look at the latest hack job by team Romney in the political ad wars for the presidential election.

Ed Schultz went after Romney and Fox Wednesday evening for distorting President Obama's comments about small businesses. This Thursday, it was more of the same on Fox, with Neil Cavuto even bringing on one of the people featured in Romney's latest attack ad, small business owner Jack Gilchrist.

The trouble for Mitt Romney is that even Jack Gilchrist actually agreed with the points President Obama was making in during his speech. And the Obama campaign has released a new ad of their own showing that Mitt Romney does as well. As I said in the post on Ed's show and as the panel members agreed on O'Donnell's show, it's pretty pathetic when the Romney campaign has to resort to making things up and taking words out of context, but that's all they've done from day one, so it's nothing new for them to lie continually.

I have to wonder when the public is going to finally start punishing him for it in the polls.

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I can't think of anyone less qualified than the Snowbilly from Wasilla to weigh in on who Mitt Romney ought to pick for his running mate in the upcoming presidential election, but apparently Sean Hannity believes inquiring minds want to know. And of course Palin used it as an opportunity to beat up on that "liberal media" that supposedly treated her unfairly when McCain picked her as his running mate.

HANNITY: Question Governor and four years ago you were selected and you didn't know you were going to be selected, you were telling me, until what, four days until you were, you didn't know you were even being vetted four days prior, which is a pretty amazing story.

The names I hear most often are Portman in Ohio, Rubio in Florida and Paul Ryan, who will be on this program tomorrow night, from Wisconsin. Good choices?

PALIN: They are good choices. They are and I think that Gov. Romney will probably play it safe, relatively speaking in terms of finding someone who is a known commodity, so that the media doesn't do what the media did to me; making things up and kind of trashing somebody's reputation and record in order to distract from what the election really was supposed to be about.

So, those are good names. There are other great names out there being batted around and I look forward to seeing who that one is who can assist Gov. Romney in moving forward.

I hate to break it to you Sarah, but if there was some damage done to your reputation, you brought it on yourself and I think John McCain's staffers like Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace who dished out the dirt for Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's book, Game Change, that HBO made into a movie did your reputation as much or more damage as anything you can blame on the so called "lamestream media" you love to bash and that you now work for. If what was represented in that movie is true, they were pretty horrified by the fact that you were not remotely qualified to be vice president or step in as president if something happened to his health not too long after McCain picked you to run with him.

Now sadly, we can all thank him for inflicting you on the American body politic and as a new member of the wingnut welfare club for years to come over at Fox noise, where propagandist and fellow right-wing flame thrower Hannity thinks you have anything of value to add to the discussion on who else should potentially be allowed to be one breath away from being our next president, that we might rightfully be terrified of, as anyone with an ounce of sense was of you.

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Rep. Paul Ryan appeared on this Tuesday's Morning Joe and defended his latest terrible budget proposal which is more or less a repeat of the last one and that Republicans are apparently going to be willing to support again, despite the fact that once most Americans get a chance to take a good look at what he's proposing, reject the type of policies he's advocating for.

Think Progress has done a good deal of fact checking on this and flagged this portion of Ryan's appearance on MSNBC -- Paul Ryan’s Budget Includes $3 Trillion Giveaway To Corporations, The Rich:

The budget unveiled by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) this morning includes substantial changes to the American tax code, both for corporations and individuals. Ryan’s tax plan shrinks the number of income tax brackets from six to two, with marginal tax rates set at 10 percent and 25 percent. He repeals the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), slices the top corporate tax rate to 25 percent, and repeals all of the health care taxes contained in the Affordable Care Act. It also repeals the repatriation tax on profits corporations earn overseas then bring back to the United States.

In all, those tax breaks amount to a $3 trillion giveaway to the richest Americans and corporations, according to the Tax Policy Center. Repealing the repatriation tax would add roughly $130 billion to that.

This morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Ryan insisted that the plan would generate the same amount of revenue as the government currently receives. In true Ryan form, though, he wouldn’t say how:

RYAN: We’re taking the tax system and reforming it along the way this new bipartisan compromise and consensus is showing. Get rid of the special interest loopholes, special deductions, lower everybody’s tax rates, bring in at least as much revenue to the government but grow the economy and create jobs, and get spending under control so we can pay off this debt.

SCARBOROUGH: So you say that you want to bring as much revenue into the government even with lower tax rates. There are obviously only a few ways to do that as far as eliminating tax loopholes, whether you’re talking about the home mortgage loophole, the health care loophole, or the charitable interest deductions. Which one of those do you eliminate?

RYAN: We want to do this in the light of day and in front of everybody. So the Ways and Means Committee, which is in charge of the tax system, sent us the plan here, which is a 10 and 25 percent bracket for individuals and small businesses, and then they want to have hearings and, in light of day, show how they would go about doing this.

The taxes Ryan wants to repeal all primarily impact the richest Americans and corporations. Repealing the repatriation tax, as Republicans have attempted multiple times since taking control of the House in 2011, amounts to a huge giveaway to corporations. And ending the AMT and investment taxes from the ACA while dropping the top income tax rate would give massive tax breaks to the rich. That isn’t surprising — it’s virtually identical to what Ryan attempted in last year’s budget, which he called the “Path to Prosperity.”

And here's more from their site on Ryan's budget -- The 5 Worst Things About The House GOP’s Budget:

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After watching the movie adaptation of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's "Game Change" this weekend on HBO, the one thing I found surprising about the movie is just how big of an emotional mess Sarah Palin was almost straight from the get-go after they recruited her to run with John McCain after not being properly vetted, and the campaign started finding out all of the dirt on her that they should have known about ahead of time if they were doing their jobs.

Which led to scenes like the one above where Palin was none to happy with staffer Nicolle Wallace after her disastrous interview with Katie Couric. I'm sure we can all take a lot of what was in the movie with a grain of salt, due to the fact that a lot of what was in it came from campaign staffers stabbing each other and McCain in the back for their terrible decision to draft Palin in the first place, and other anonymous sources, but on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Wallace admitted that the scene above was "true enough" to make her squirm.

That didn't stop former Dick Cheney adviser, Mary Matalin from calling it a work of fiction, even though she wasn't there herself. Leave it to Matalin to still be carrying water for Palin since she's been one of her staunchest defenders from day one. I expect we'll be hearing more of the same type of sentiments from Republicans who still don't want to admit that McCain made a huge mistake picking her, that she was not ready for the job and that it helped to tank his candidacy, whether every detail in the book or movie are completely accurate or not. The overall theme of the movie and how she was portrayed was pretty obvious to most of us watching that campaign at the time as the events actually occurred in real time.

Full transcript below the fold.

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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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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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Stephen Colbert opined on the subject of open marriage, after first brusquely dismissing the question from Morning Joe's Willie Geist as a "garbage question". When John Heileman brought the subject up later he had a bit more to say on the subject.

STEPHEN COLBERT: "Honesty is the best policy. Here’s the thing that I don’t think Newt Gingrich gets enough credit for: a lot of politicians screw around on their wives, but he was enough of a gentleman to ask permission. That’s a Southern gentleman. That’s what Robert E. Lee would have done."

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On this weekend's Chris Matthews Show, Matthews' "Big Question" for the week was this: Of the Republicans running for president, which one offers the best chance of becoming, a great president? The response, mainly crickets by his panelists John Heilemann, Kelly O'Donnell, Gloria Borger. The only one willing to give him an answer was Joe Klein.

His response of what Republican president might end up on Mount Rushmore -- Barack Obama. That's a pretty sad state of affairs with our current field of Republican candidates when all of them were not willing to say anything good about any of them.

And someone should remind Joe Klein that to be an actual Republican these days and not the Villagers imaginary idea of what remains of the Republican Party, you have to be a bat shit crazy ideologue who's not willing to negotiate with anyone on anything if you think there's political gain in it and the public will fall for it.

I'm not any happier than a lot of us with how far both parties have moved to the right and how money is corrupting our political process, but sorry Joe, the party that has run off the cliff with being insane should not have their label attached to our current president.

I'd like for him to be further to the left like the rest of us, and as aggravated as I have gotten with what's he's been willing to concede to the other side and with validating a lot of their talking points, I would not wish having to navigate this current political climate he walked into and the Congress he's been forced to deal with on my worst enemy. And today's current Republican Party does not deserve to have anyone who is even half-way sane tagged with their label. They deserve to be called out for the zealots and TeaBirchers they are that have taken over their party.