Rachel Maddow was on Meet The Press over the weekend claiming that Mitt Romney wants to talk about “women and the economy,” to which Glenn pointed out, no, Maddow wants to talk about women and Romney wants to talk about the economy.

Maddow made the claim on Meet The Press that women only make seventy-seven cents on the dollar compared to men. After making the claim another commentator pointed out that there are many reasons for that which actually make that claim untrue when you break down the numbers. Of course, Rachel didn’t want to have anything to do with the pesky facts of this matter.

“No, wait. Don’t tell me the reasons. Do women make less?” Rachel responded when confronted with the facts.

Stu pointed out how ridiculous it is for anyone whose job it is to analyze the news to say ‘don’t tell me the reasons.’ Why confuse her with the facts when that will ruin her talking points?

“See, that's the problem. If you don't want to get into the reasons for it, well, then you can make it unreasonable,” Glenn said when comparing Maddow’s comments on salaries to the prices of cars. “Yeah, those damn Rolls Royce people, they're gouging the Kia people. Wait a minute. There's a difference here. There's a reason. One's handmade.”

“The reasons are fascinating when you get into it, because this whole thing falls apart. This war on women and the unequal income, it all falls apart,” Glenn later added.

The other panelist on Meet The Press with Maddow pointed out that, on average, men work about forty-four hours per week – women about forty-one hours. He later added that professions men are drawn towards, like engineering, science and math, tend to earn more.

“Right off the bat you're talking about almost 10% more an hour, which would already immediately eliminate half the difference between men and women,” Stu said.

Maddow’s response – “This is not a math is hard conversation.”

Unfortunately for her, it is, and our resident statistics point man, Stu, has that math.

Here’s what Stu had to say:

In fact, there's a great book written called Why Men Earn More and it's written by a guy who started off as a women's rights activist who was all about this, all about this argument like, "Oh, you know, they're only getting paid," at that time it was like 69 or 59 cents on the dollar and this is an outrage, went through and really dived through the numbers and found out this is true. Men and I think this is a compliment to women, by the way. Men prioritize their careers a lot higher. Women, when they get jobs and they're in the working community, decide to prioritize stuff like family time more and they start to prioritize not staying for all the overtime and they prioritize keeping themselves safe and not going to, you know, on dangerous jobs for six months at a time. All those jobs go to men. And so those jobs that do get a premium because they're dangerous or they have ridiculous work hours go to men a lot more often because they're the ones requesting them. I mean, and you look through the numbers, there's a new study out that went over 2,000 communities and went through, analyzed all the numbers on women who had just come out of college, who hadn't you know, come out of college, have the same degrees as men, went through the same industries as men and found out that with the same age, everything controlled the same, women earn 8% more than men. Apples to apples.

This particular study was about women in their 20s right out of college. So I mean, I think it's the most pure example of whether there would be bias because there's no long work history, there's nothing you there's nothing that can screw up the data. These are people that are leaving college and going into the workforce.

Yeah, and like even hateful cities in the South like Atlanta and Memphis, they're paying women 20% more than men, 20% in Atlanta and Memphis for the same work with the same experience and everything else. Those hateful, evil Southern cities.”

Glenn’s take on the situation was a little less in depth, “She's so much smarter than almost everybody else on the planet, and she's, of course, the one who will kindly nudge you into that conclusion. I don't believe she actually this ignorant. I don't believe she's this stupid. I don't believe that she can't do the math herself, that she can't look at stats and figure them out. She's disingenuous at best, lying most likely.”