Of all the names that it would be embarrassing for an MSNBC network host to blank on, Rick Perry's would have to be at the top of the list.  How countless many times has the Lean Forward network had fun at Perry's expense over his "whoops" moment during a 2012 presidential debate?

But that unfortunate fate befell Jose Diaz-Balart today, hosting his own new MSNBC show.  The topic was the way in which Ted Cruz and Perry would potentially fight over Texas donor dollars if they were to both run for president.  Diaz-Balart got Cruz's name without problem, but when it came time for Perry's, Diaz-Balart stumbled multiple times before giving up and just generically referencing him as the "Governor of Texas."  Whoops indeed! View the video after the jump.

Although all three networks covered Barack Obama's admission on Thursday that "we don't have a strategy" for responding to Islamic militants in Syria, ABC, CBS and NBC journalists were really animated by the President's tan suit. GMA news reader Amy Robach on Friday enthused, "Finally this morning, some presidential critics are saying, 'yes, we tan!'" [For a video montage, see below. MP3 audio here.] 

Over on NBC's Today, Dylan Dreyer lectured Twitter on the superficiality of such a topic: "President Obama had a very important press conference. He was talking about all sorts of world issues. So of course social media was focused on those world issues, right? Of course not. They were focused on his tan suit." Dreyer mocked Twitter in the midst of NBC's obsessing about the suit. 

Chelsea Clinton has announced the obvious: she’s leaving NBC News, telling People magazine in a statement she will “continue focusing on my work at the Clinton Foundation and as [her husband] Marc [Mezvinsky] and I look forward to welcoming our first child." New York magazine tweaked the news that Chelsea was "Leaving Her Unbelievably Cushy Fake Job at NBC."

As NBC nepotism goes, she made Luke Russert look like Edward R. Murrow. She’s been featured in only three reports in the last year, but still making the $600,000 salary. (So that's about $200,000 a story while her "news" career was in limbo, also known as the "Hillary speech rate.") We found her entire career was 30 reports (and four of those ran more than once). From June 14:

Embodying the old Hollywood joke “I’ve always wanted to direct,” Comedy Central star Jon Stewart took an entire summer off last year to direct a film called “Rosewater” about Newsweek reporter Maziar Bahiri being abducted in Iran. In an early review in The Hollywood Reporter, film critic Todd McCarthy implies it’s a direct-to-video dud.

Only Stewart’s adoring liberal fans make this film worth any notice, he wrote. The atrocities of ISIS make the idea of being held hostage in Tehran lack a sense of compelling urgency and feels like a “sideshow” on the current scene in the Middle East (trailer below):

Alexander the Great.  Stonewall Jackson. George S. Patton. To this list of some of history's greatest military strategists, a new name must be added: that of Barack Obama.  That is, if you agree with Joe Scarborough's take on President Obama's statement at yesterday's press conference that "we don't have a strategy yet" regarding possible attacks on ISIS in Syria.

According to Scarborough, speaking on today's Morning Joe, President Obama's "no strategy" statement was "straight out of The Art of War where when you were weak, you make your enemies think you were strong. When you were strong, you make your enemies think you were weak." It's what Scarborough would have done, he told viewers, if he were president. When Sam Stein said that he couldn't tell if Joe was joking, Scarborough assured him: "I'm serious. Dead serious . . . I am dead serious.  I am not joking."  View the video after the jump.

The New York Times invariably casts any GOP inquiry into the intelligence failures that led to the death of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, as a purely partisan venture. The pattern was noted last year by the paper's own Public Editor Margaret Sullivan, who wrote before hearings in May 2013, "The Times has had a tendency to both play down the subject, which has significant news value, and to pursue it most aggressively as a story about political divisiveness rather than one about national security mistakes and the lack of government transparency. Many readers would like to see more on that front, and so would I."

But the Times is still at it. Friday's story by Jonathan Weisman and Jennifer Steinhauer reduced a deliberative investigative effort by GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy to a politically motivated ploy to damage former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's presidential run in 2016: "Democrats Wary of Benghazi Inquiry Stretching Into ’16 Election Season." They also reveal that Benghazi is an outrage only for "the Republican Party's most conservative voters."

Stephen Colbert tells his interview guests that they’re about to be interviewed by a moron. Sometimes he sounds like that during the rest of the show. On Wednesday night, Colbert mocked MRC president Brent Bozell and others for allegedly arguing that the shooting of Michael Brown was caused by national media coverage.

It’s a completely inaccurate caricature. Only a fake-conservative TV moron like Colbert would argue nobody would be shot if the media never covered a shooting. The clips that Colbert’s crew snipped were about the incessant coverage of the Ferguson protesting, looting and rioting, not about the shooting. Colbert wants to pretend the press showing up to a violent protest scene has no effect on whether the protests and/or violence continues. (Video, transcript below)

On Thursday, an impatient Terry Moran at ABC News tweeted the following (HT Twitchy): "Say it: Russia has invaded Ukraine. Any other description is just weasel words."

Clearly, both President Obama and the folks at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, haven't been sympathetic to Moran's plea, instead opting for "weasel words." Obama, when directly asked if he "considered today's escalation in Ukraine an invasion," wouldn't characterize it with that word. At AP, a trio of reporters — Dalton Bennett, Jim Heintz, and Raf Casert — also labored mightily to follow their president's lead in avoiding the "I-word" in a late Thursday story (bolds are mine):

I struggle to come up with a reason, other than an irresponsible attempt to minimize the impact of the horror, why the headline at a Thursday evening Associated Press story by Zeina Karam and Ryan Lucas about "more than 160 Syrian government troops" massacred by ISIS is "JIHADISTS KILL DOZENS OF CAPTURED SYRIAN SOLDIERS."

But that's how the wire service is presenting it:

To close out his MSNBC show on Thursday, Ed Schultz invited on a Native American social activist to discuss the push by liberals and sympathetic members of the sports media to force the NFL’s Washington Redskins to change their name. 

In discussing recent supporters of the name in Sarah Palin and former NFL coach and player Mike Ditka, author and Native American activist Gyasi Ross smeared Ditka for being a “segregation-era football player who became, appropriately, a coach of – of a team – a team – an NFL team that was comprised largely of black players that he could dictate his will to.” [MP3 audio here; Video below]