Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough refuses to believe that Mitt Romney actually read and enjoyed The Hunger Games series. Refuses! And, moreover, he can’t believe Romney would take his young grandchildren to see “a movie where teenagers are hunted down and killed.” “He did not read the books,” Scarborough insisted. “We know he is not [...]

On Monday’s edition of Morning Joe, GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum vented some of his frustration at the media’s propensity to focus on certain issues — like contraception — after being asked about that very topic by host Mika Brzezinski.

On Monday’s Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough went on a long jeremiad about the direction of the War in Afghanistan, disagreeing with many of the Republican presidential candidates’ arguments about what “winning” the war meant. “Headline for all Republicans and Democrats that want to continue to fight this war, we won the war.” Scarborough exclaimed. “It was an anti-terror campaign. We went in to get Osama bin Laden. We went in to break up al Qaeda in Afghanistan where they launched the 9/11 attacks. We killed them. We routed them. We destroyed them. We didn’t go in to beat the Taliban. The Taliban is a different thing. Very different thing than al Qaeda. The Taliban doesn’t want to blow up buildings in Washington, DC, or New York or Charlotte or Atlanta. They want to be left alone to run their country by second century standards. We should let them.”

On a Super Tuesday edition of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough lit into Republican hopeful Mitt Romney for his various stances on individual mandates.

“What does it say about a candidate, though, who wrote an op-ed in 2009 saying that, please apply what we did in Massachusetts nationally on an individual mandate, and then goes on the campaign trail yesterday and just lies?”

On Monday’s Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough launched into a discussion on voter identification regulations and voter fraud with guest Marc Morial, former mayor of New Orelans and current president of the National Urban League. Morial argued that restrictions on the kind of identification voters must present are unreasonable and show racial discrimination. “You’re talking [...]

Last night, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell credited one particular Republican with sounding an alarm regarding the Blunt Amendment. The GOP must handle with issue with caution, he had warned, because soon “it stops being about freedom of religion and starts being about contraception, then Republicans will get routed in swing areas.” That Republican? O’Donnell’s network colleague Joe Scarborough, whom he’d invited onto the show in order to discuss the matter further.

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough went off on a fun little tangent Friday morning when he, like President Obama, praised former president George W. Bush on his post-9/11 2001 World Series baseball pitch.

On Tuesday’s edition of Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough was flabbergasted over the choices in the GOP field, in particular Rick Santorum.

“He’s not just offending left-wingers in Manhattan and Georgetown, he’s offending conservative right-wing women that have never voted for Democrats in their life!”

Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs and Joe Scarborough went after each other over Newt Gingrich SuperPAC funder Sheldon Adelson, devolving into a shouting match. “He’s a completely, by the way, unlikable guy,” Sachs said of Adelson. “And do we need major gambling influence and guy has played all over the world with governments so he gets the licenses and charges up and down as a core leader of our politics? Come on!”

Well, this was an odd thing to witness over our morning coffee (brewed by Starbucks, naturally). Morning Joe hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough were attempting to interview budget chairman Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND) about the fact that Democrats have gone one thousand days without presenting a budget.

Yesterday on The View, Barbara Walters admitted that, while she had problems with Rick Santorum, she understood what he meant with some of his controversial comments on modern day feminism. Today, over on Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski said something similar, stating that, while she didn’t ever agree with Santorum, she liked him. Clearly all of television’s most powerful women are uniting in their assessment that Rick Santorum is totally wrong about everything but, hey, at least he’s not a jerk or nothin’.

In a recent piece for Washington Post, columnist Ezra Klein referred to President Obama as a “moderate president in an immoderate time.” In contrast with conservatives (and some liberals) who think Obama is too ideologically rigid, many like Klein believe he has been one of the most moderate presidents of our era. David Gregory discussed this with the panel on Meet the Press, and whether it’s the president or his rivals who are more ideologically stubborn.

The Morning Joe team continued its ongoing discussion on the White House’s controversial — and, now, changing — birth control mandate, with host Joe Scarborough urging people not to turn an issue about government interference in religion into a discussion on contraception. This debate, he told his colleagues, is farther-ranging than a specific health care issue.

On Tuesday morning’s Starting Point, host Soledad O’Brien led yet another discussion of the Obama administration’s decision to give non-church religious employers one year to comply with the Preventive Services Mandate, which some claim is an “attack on religious liberty.”

O’Brien did a good job of challenging that false premise, but allowed guest Rep. Marcia Blackburn (R-TN) to slip in the lie that the mandate covers the “abortion pill.”

On Friday, the Morning Joe team once again tackled the question of whether a certain GOP candidate is just a little bit socially awkward, or just a little at a loss when it comes to relating to others. Mika Brzezinski referred to a New York Times piece by Frank Rich, where Rich notes that Romney’s attempts at small talk “famously take the form of guessing a voter’s age or nationality (usually incorrectly) or offering a greeting of ‘Congratulations!’ for no particular reason.”

MSNBC host and author Dylan Ratigan visited Morning Joe on Thursday, giving his two cents on Mitt Romney‘s recent comments about keeping his focus on the middle class and not being “very concerned about the poor,” and on Romney in general.

New York’s Senator Chuck Schumer appeared on Thursday’s Morning Joe to discuss his efforts in reining in the amount of corporate money spent on political campaigns.

Host Mika Brzezinski started things off by noting that Schumer’s colleagues in the National Republican Senatorial Committee “point out you are the number one recipient of Wall Street money in the Senate, and it’s funny you’re decrying the role of corporate money in the political process.”

The Morning Joe crew took a look at the fallout from — and the benefits of — using negative ad campaigns in presidential elections. The panelists agreed that Mitt Romney‘s success in the Florida primary was tied to his decision to “hit back” against Newt Gingrich‘s slew of negative campaign ads, both with his own ads and during debates.

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough — prompted in part by the characterization of “brain dead” Republicans in Richard Cohen‘s harshly critical Washington Post op-ed piece — had some choice words about the state of the media in regards to the GOP.

On Tuesday’s Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough took a moment to speak with GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, whom he’s known for some time. Santorum told the host he was gearing up to visit his old stomping grounds in Pensacola, Florida.

They grow up so fast, don’t they? Online political media giant Politico turns five years old today, and to celebrate, the site posted a video roast by some quotable notables in the political media world. While the site has arguably earned the right to toot its own horn at least once every half-decade, did they really have to overshadow the birthday of Saved By The Bell actress Tiffani-Amber Thiessen?

On Monday morning, Morning Joe‘s Mika Brzezinski reported that South Carolina’s GOP exit poll has primary winner Newt Gingrich ranking highest in electability, with 51 percent of the vote versus Mitt Romney‘s 37. And as the candidates look ahead to Florida, Romney is launching an offensive, labeling the former Speaker a “failed leader.”

Last summer, when Newt Gingrich made several significant campaign missteps, the media wrote his candidacy off before it even began. In December, thanks to his strong debate performances, he surged to the top of the field, and some analysts thought he would be the likely nominee. A few weeks later, his campaign fizzled and the media went back to writing him off again. So now that Gingrich is back in the spotlight, the media is naturally… writing him off again.

Comedy Central host and presidential hopeful Stephen Colbert visited the Morning Joe crew in South Carolina Friday to discuss the GOP race, as well as his (and Herman Cain’s) efforts in the state.

New Jersey governor and America’s Great Right Hope Chris Christie stopped by the Morning Joe set Wednesday, where talk eventually turned to his future aspirations. Or, at least, what some are anticipating and/or hoping his aspirations might be.