“It’s the lamest excuse in the world when we have at least $200 billion worth of waste, fraud, and duplication to say ‘oh my gosh, we can’t do that,’ we have to go borrow money against the very kids you say you want to help!” the Republican senator said. “It’s morally wrong, it’s repugnant to me.”

Coburn slammed critics for questioning him on fiscal beliefs during the recovery as a “crass, political game.”

Those same critics point out that the debate over whether to offset aid packages with spending cuts delayed aid for the victims of Hurricane Sandy for 100 days, nearly emptying FEMA’s coffers.

“If you’re in my shoes and you have the IRS targeting conservative groups, tea party groups, and any person critical of the White House, what would you think?,” Priebus said on Morning Joe Thursday. “Give me a break!”

The show’s panelists pushed back, arguing that a legitimate error on the part of the IRS doesn’t mean Republicans have free reign to misconstrue the facts and over-blow it.

While the government has admitted the IRS’s profiling and it’s clear that top officials knew about the practice for years, it’s far from the first issue Republicans have emphatically denounced as the president’s own Watergate, the scandal to end all scandals. Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski referenced the advice of a column by Charles Krauthhammer on Benghazi, where he pushed Republicans to embrace the scandals on their merit, not over-blow them: “Let the facts speak for themselves. They are damning enough,” he wrote in the Washington Post last week.

But Priebus asserted that the facts that already exist give him the right to an opinion.

“I’m entitled to an opinion that it’s evidence of political warfare gone amok on behalf of the administration. I’m entitled to an opinion that this is political guerrilla warfare and it’s lawlessness, but to the extent of how far it goes and how far it goes up, the evidence has to come in,” Priebus said.

“That’s an assertion,” New York magazine’s Heileman countered. “Before the facts!”

Watch the full interview below.

Weiner, who served New York’s 9th District from 1999 to 2011 resigned in disgrace after a handful of lewd, online affairs were made public. On Wednesday, he formally kicked off his candidacy for New York City mayor with an ad, reintroducing himself as a family man with strong middle class, New York roots and a humble, reformed civil servant craving a return to office.

“Look, I made some big mistakes and I know I let a lot of people down. But I’ve also learned some tough lessons,” Weiner said in the video. “I’m running for mayor because I’ve been fighting for the middle class and those struggling to make it my entire life and I hope I get a second chance to work for you.”

Weiner released a detailed platform, “Keys to the City: 64 Ideas to Keep New York the Capital of the Middle Class” on his website, detailing a moderate platform, in the vein of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s socially liberal, fiscally conservative, education-focused administration.

Weiner hopes to follow in the footsteps of Mark Sanford, the former governor who was recently reelected to his former Congressional seat in South Carolina.

Joe Scarborough: I lived in Mississippi and Alabama for a decade so I grew up understanding the devastating power of tornadoes. Thirty years of living along Florida’s Gulf Coast exposed me to too many hurricanes. But nothing I saw growing up and in the news business other than Hurricane Katrina prepared me for the devastation that awaited us in Moore, Oklahoma last night.

MB: We arrived in Moore, Okla. in the middle of the night. One of our senior producers, Jesse Rodriguez, located a position just outside the Moore Medical Center, across the street from what had been a quiet residential neighborhood yesterday morning. The storm had reduced it to rubble.

The medical center in Moore, Okla. (Louis Burgdorf/Morning Joe)

MB: Our team of Morning Joe producers is a small group, and we all hustled. We swallowed our horror as reports filtered in about the lost children and casualty reports. The Medical Center was reduced to its concrete and steel framework, with debris still flying through now-empty window frames. Across the street, homes had been ripped off their foundations and scattered in different directions by the 200-mile-per-hour winds. Tornado damage is known for being indiscriminate, but with a mile-wide twister, the storm ravaged wide areas. There was no luck of the draw. Every house in the neighborhood was destroyed.

Moore, Okla. (Photo by Louis Burgdorf/Morning Joe)

JS: As we drove into town, we feared that the death toll estimate—at the time, 51—was optimistic. Law enforcement officers and rescue vehicles filled the streets. Dozens were feared missing and dead at the elementary school.

Moore, Okla. (Photo by Louis Burgdorf/Morning Joe)

MB: I found myself fixated on one room of a house that remained partially intact.  It had a little girl’s CDs, a mirror, and a butterfly-shaped lamp. The girl’s closet door had been ripped away, but all of her dresses were still lined up perfectly, hanging exactly where she put them. It was a haunting reminder of how precious the simple things in life can be and how ruthless a twister’s wrath often is. This one was a wretched, cruel monster.

JS: As we were finishing our third hour on air, Moore, Okla.’s mayor told us that he expected the casualty count to hold steady. He reported that the city’s fire department had accounted for every citizen in town. Only four people were still missing. We were relieved to hear such good news.

Scarborough and Brzezinski on location in Moore, Okla. (Photo by Louis Burgdorf/Morning Joe)

JS: An hour later, reports came that the death toll had been lowered to 24. We mourn the loss of those Americans, and are heartbroken by the tragic deaths of seven children who lost their lives inside Plaza Towers Elementary School, but we know the death count could have been so much higher given the severity of the storm. We thank God that so many were spared and we’re grateful that school teachers, employers, first responders and concerned citizens moved so quickly to save the lives of those around them.

Moore, Okla. (Photo by Louis Burgdorf/Morning Joe)

Watch the below videos for some of Moore’s most gripping stories.

Take the man who helped neighbors pulled a car out of the front hall of an elementary school. Underneath it, a teacher had used her body to shield three young children.

“Good job, teach,” the man said, breaking down into tears. The tornado “ripped our house up. I still got a little girl buried in there.”

Moore Mayor Glenn Lewis shielded employees in the vault of his jewelry store where they were able to survive.

Another Moore resident, Mark, had his home of 23 years destroyed while he hid in the closet with his dog.

Another dog, Ginger, braced her owner’s fall as the tornado lifted the owner into the air and dropped her in the bathtub, where the she was trying to take refuge from the storm.

“I got picked up, thrown down to the ground. All I can remember after I hit my head was I landed on the dog. I could just hear her whimpering,” she remembered. “I just cannot believe we actually survived this thing.”

Click here for more information on how you can help the ravaged areas.

“We’ll work with the administration on making sure they have the resources they need to help the people of Oklahoma,” Boehner said at a brief press conference on Tuesday with House leadership and Oklahoma representatives.

The House of Representatives struggled to pass a relief bill to aid New York and New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy devastated coastlines. Two of Oklahoma’s five Republican representatives, Reps. Jim Bridenstine and Markwayne Mullin, voted against the relief bills. Rep. James Lankford voted for a smaller flood relief package, but not the larger aid package the House eventually passed. The bill funding Sandy relief didn’t pass for more than three months after the storm due to the battle over spending offsets.

Boehner dismissed questions on whether Republicans would demand cuts to offset the spending on tornado aid, likely delaying the relief funds.

“Let me just speak on behalf of all of our members, including those from Oklahoma, that we will work with the administration to make sure that they have the resources that they need,” Boehner said, before a quick “thanks” that concluded the presser.

In the Senate, however, Republican Sen. Tom Coburn, has vowed to only provide the aid that can offset by other spending cuts.  Coburn is the ranking member of Senate committee that oversees FEMA

“He will ask his colleagues to sacrifice lower priority areas of the budget to help Oklahoma,” spokesman John Hart told the Washington Post.

Boehner announced that flags on Capitol Hill would fly at half-mast Tuesday and Wednesday. He sent out prayers to the affected Oklahomans, and said that Rep. Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican, was not joining them at the presser because he had returned to his hometown, Moore, the city hardest hit Monday.

“We’re still very much into the rescue and recovery stage,” Fallin said. “We want to make sure that we have absolutely uncovered and looked into every single crevice that there might be for anyone that might have been injured in the tornado itself and the storm.”

Fallin, a Republican, described “challenging” recovery her state will embark on once the recovery is completed to turn power and water back on and rebuild the areas slammed by tornadoes, particularly Moore, which was ravaged by a massive tornado on Monday afternoon.

But she’s confident the state will come back strong.

“The people of Oklahoma will do whatever it takes to help their fellow citizens,” Fallin said. “We will come back strong.”

Rep. Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican, in 2010. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)

Rep. Tom Cole’s hometown was ravaged by a powerful tornado yesterday, and the congressman described a destruction he never thought he see.

Moore, Okla., the epicenter of destruction and tragedy in the Oklahoma storms, is the Republican representative’s hometown. His parents are buried there; his grandparents are buried there.

“I never thought I’d see anything worse than I saw in 1999, this is our fourth [tornado] in 15 years,” the Oklahoma Republican said Tuesday on Morning Joe. “This is even worse in terms of loss of life, and I’ve been talking to friends and family and officials on the ground and that number is gonna get worse.”

The death toll is officially 24, but it is expected to change in the coming hours. Hospitals reported nearly 150 being treated for injuries.

Cole, speaking by phone, walked Morning Joe through the ravaged area.

“My wife is less than a mile from where you’re standing,” Cole told hosts hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. “Moore’s been home for more than 50 years.”

Moore saw its hospital destroyed and one elementary school, Plaza Towers, ravaged, leaving parents frantic to find their children. One witness recalled pulling a car off a teacher  from the front hall of the school, who was shielding three small children with her body.

“Plaza Towers, it’s just—oh my god.  Those teachers and students did everything right,” Cole said. The school doubled as a local polling place and Cole recalled visiting the school hundreds of times with his mother, a local politician. “I used to do the grounds-keeping there when I was a kid, put myself through college.”

“The school was honestly the best place for those kids to be in that square mile area. It’s the strongest structure, with reinforced interior halls.”

The destroyed hospital was a big boon of pride for the city, Cole said.

“The town went a long time without one, so we were very proud to have it,” he said. “We were very fortunate there that all the patients and medical people go out. You look at the building and you wonder how in the world that happened.”

Moore, a city with more than 56,000 according to the 2010 census, is the seventh largest city in Oklahoma.

It isn’t a high-income area, Cole added.

“It’s a town full of really hardworking, really good people. They know about these things, they take warnings seriously,” he said. “People did everything right here, but if you’re in front of an F-4, an F-5, there is no good thing to do if you’re above ground.”

“There is a culture of intimidation throughout the administration. The IRS is just the most recent example,” McConnell said on Sunday’s Meet the Press. “What we’re talking about here is an attitude that the government knows best, the nanny state is here to tell us all what to do and if we start criticizing, you get targeted.”

Since news broke, the senator has been particularly combative, slamming the president in interviews and on his popular campaign team social networks, where the senator is already campaigning, despite not yet having a challenger (besides his own extremely low approval ratings). Democrats and Tea Partiers have offered ideas for challengers to unseat the candidate—a possible Tea Party-Democrat coalition was even floated—but no serious candidates have thrown their names in the ring.

McConnell’s strong response to the scandal has earned him support from the far right: last week, the senator was endorsed by one of the groups targeted in the IRS probe, TheTeaParty.net.

“With the new revelations that the IRS has been targeting Tea Party groups, we need Sen. McConnell more than ever,” said Niger Innis, the chief strategist of TheTeaParty.net.

McConnell has faced tough criticisms from Tea Partiers over spending in recent years and has sought to shore up the far-right’s support, stumping for the movement several times and hiring Jesse Benton, a Tea Party strategist, to run his reelection effort.

Sen. McConnell “has been standing up for his Tea Party Friends for over a year,” Benton told MSNBC, declining to answer whether the combative statements were a rallying point designed for or particularly successful with the Tea Party.

Instead, Benton pointed to the senator’s leadership on the issue; indeed, McConnell was one of the first to demand an investigation on IRS profiling. (Though, as David Gregory pointed out on Meet the Press, early in his career, McConnell railed against abuses of the nonprofit exception—the same abuses the IRS was investigating when they improperly profiled groups.)

McConnell shows no sign of dropping the issue. He told Breitbart News the recent IRS revelations were “just the beginning of the story. This is no little thing. This is a big thing. The good news about it is they finally got caught,” he said. “This is just one example of an administration-wide effort to silence critics.”

“Women actually have told me they’d limit the intake of fluid in the late afternoon, early evening, so they don’t have to use the latrine late at night in the middle of the night, because they’re worried about sexual assault,” the Democratic senator said on Monday’s Morning Joe, speaking out against the military’s sexual assault crisis.

Hagan, a member of the Senate Armed Services committee, said she supports the bipartisan Combating Military Sexual Assault Act of 2013 which aims to do “what we did 20 years ago” in civilian courts, creating sexual assault victims’ advocates and special victim’s units.

“This is a crime and it needs to be addressed as a crime, this is not a cultural phenomenon” Hagan said, advocating the full prosecution of assaults. “The military code of justice needs to address it as a crime.”

Military and political leaders have lamented the lack of a “silver bullet” to fix the astounding numbers of sexual assault cases in the military. About 26,000 military members were reportedly assaulted last year, according to a Department of Defense report released earlier this month. Survivors recount their careers suffering or even being ruined if they chose to report their rapes, while others see jury convictions overturned by rapist’s bosses.

Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass added that politicians and officials are underestimating how “corrosive” the epidemic would be.

“The military as an institution is based on your ability to trust the person next to you,” he said on Morning Joe. “This gets at the heart of the military’s ability to function.”

Haass’ comments echoed those made by President Obama last week after a meeting with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and other top military and national security personnel.

“Not only is it a crime, not only is it shameful and disgraceful, but it also is going to make and has made the military less effective than it can be,” he said. “This is not a sideshow. This is not sort of a second-order problem that we’re experiencing. This goes to the heart and the core of who we are and how effective we’re going to be.”

Hagan was one of a handful of red state senators who voted in favor of background checks in the Senate; her vote boosted her approval ratings. (“Thank you for your vote on that,” host Joe Scarborough added.)

Watch the full discussion below.