Brian Schweitzer

There could be only one good reason to have Dem Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer on Morning Joe: to grill him on his ugly anti-Mormon swipe at Mitt Romney.   Schweitzer recently said that Romney would have trouble attracting women voters because "his family came from a polygamy commune in Mexico."

So naturally I waited for Mika Brzezinksi, Mark Halperin, Cokie Roberts--anyone!--to raise the question of Schweitzer's slur.  And waited.  It never came.  Instead, Schweitzer was allowed to to chortle his way through several minutes of faux bonhomie and third-rate tourism promotion, as he gave away some trinkets, touted a new flight from Newark to Bozeman, and managed to work in a boast about his budget surpluses.  This was sheer journalistic malpractice on Morning Joe's part.  View the video after the jump.

There is an ethics squabble going on in Montana perpetrated by the senior counsel to the Democrat Governor of Montana, Brian Schweitzer. It has been revealed that the Governor's "senior counsel," a man named Eric Stern, has been caught trying to "back-door" the judge in a case in which he is involved on behalf of Governor Schweitzer. The ethics violation is bad enough, but it has also been discovered that, even though he is claimed to be an attorney and the Governor's senior counsel, Eric Stern, is not licensed to practice law in the state of Montana. This seems to say that Eric Stern is practicing law without a license, doesn’t it? Strangely, the media have not bothered to report this most important fact.

According to reports, Eric Stern "a senior official in the governor's administration" improperly contacted the commissioner of political practices "outside of official proceedings in an ongoing ethics case." In effect, Stern is accused of trying to "back-door" the judge by discussing the case outside of official proceedings, an extremely blatant ethics violation.