Mika Brzezinski, Letting Her Opinions Percolate on 'Morning Joe' and the Radio

"Do not freak him out," she pleads.

There is a bit of old-married-couple slapstick in their act. He declares that "you are boring me." She punches him in the arm for calling her a "Marxist." She texts friends while he is talking, sometimes sharing gripes with Scarborough's wife, Susan. Brzezinski shakes her head and rolls her eyes, saying things like "stop it," "you're crazy" and "you're just absolutely sick." It's all part of the routine.

"She finds herself playing the straight man a lot of the time," Scarborough admits. But at times, he says, "she does stick it to me. You stick a needle in the balloon and let the air out and people love that."

Citadel Broadcasting, which debuted the show on its New York station, WABC, and will carry it on KABC in Los Angeles next month, is looking for other syndication deals. Washington's Citadel station, WMAL, is sticking with its Chris Plante show, so the company is hoping to sign up another station.

Several television hosts -- Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, Rachel Maddow -- are successfully juggling radio shows. Bill O'Reilly recently dropped his radio gig, saying he was stretched too thin.

Brzezinski finds radio "more intimate" than television. She takes off her makeup and shows up in a T-shirt, jeans and scarf.

When "Morning Joe" began last year, after the controversy that knocked Don Imus off MSNBC, Brzezinski was installed -- at Scarborough's insistence -- as the news reader. She was uncertain how much banter she could engage in and still be viewed as fair.

The turning point came when Brzezinski refused to read a report about Paris Hilton -- "I hate this story," she declared -- setting a lighter to the script, ripping it up and putting it in a paper shredder. That was her YouTube moment, one that has been viewed 3.8 million times, and the reaction was overwhelming. A shtick -- and a co-host -- were born.

While their sparring clearly puts Brzezinski to the left of Scarborough, a onetime GOP lawmaker from Pensacola, Fla., she tries to resist being typecast as a liberal. She demurred when John McCain, during a September appearance, called her a "supporter" of Barack Obama. Brzezinski likes to point out that one of her brothers provided foreign policy advice to the McCain campaign and the other to the Obama team.

When Brzezinski was a teenager, her father would take her along when he was interviewed on such programs as "Today" and "Nightline." It was then that she decided she wanted to be a television reporter. While attending Washington's Madeira School, she and a friend started the "Mika and Melissa Show," which aired on a cable-access channel.

At 15 she tagged along when her father, by then out of office, met secretly in Tunisia with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, an encounter she remembers mainly for "being surrounded by men with guns."

The elder Brzezinski, a native of Poland, is not surprised by his daughter's newly combative role. "It reminded me a little bit of dinners we used to have at home, where she got her training," he says. "Her brothers were dominating. She had to fight, and she had to have something to say."