On Sunday morning’s Up with Chris Hayes, host Chris Hayes led off with the umpteenth cable news discussion of the Obama campaign’s assault on Mitt Romney‘s record at Bain Capital, and Romney’s attempt to draw a “character assassination” foul over it. Hayes and panel raised interesting questions about whether Team Obama’s courtship of private equity donors amounts to hypocrisy, and whether Romney’s Bain record is an indicator of how he would govern, among others.

Big Journalism Editor in Chief Dana Loesch has been tweeting some astute analysis of Mitt Romney‘s response to the race baiting Joe Ricketts-commissioned attack strategy against President Obama, particularly that the candidate is “playing good cop to PACs bad cop,”: and is “acting outraged” as part of that strategy.

Her analysis is so astute, in fact, that one liberal blogger thinks these revelations may have come from the horse’s mouth.

On the heels of Breitbart.com’s flaming, totally not-Birther failure to convict Barack Obama of claiming to be born in Kenya, The Drudge Report featured another item that threatened to revive the double-tapped controversy over the President’s origins. Drudge featured the headline “AP 2004 FLASHBACK: ‘Kenyan-Born Obama All Set for US Senate’” this morning, but now that everyone knows this was debunked in 2004, there’s no trace of it, or a correction, on his site.

Yesterday, Breitbart.com’s Joel Pollak published the latest in the site’s ominous-sounding “The Vetting” series, which consisted of a short Barack Obama bio from a super-obscure trade pamphlet that erroneously said he was born in Kenya. While swearing to God this didn’t make them Birthers, Breitbart.com insisted that now-President Obama (stings, doesn’t it?) was behind the error, in a classic example of media manipulation. Then, the editor of that pamphlet completely destroyed their already-ridiculous theory.

Uh-oh, this is it, folks. Time for Barack Obama to pay the piper that is Breitbart.com’s The Vetting. Our arrogant, elitist President is in deep doo-doo now. Having survived the scandal that was his praising of the first tenured black professor at Harvard during a protest for diversity, President Obama now has to contend with a 1991 pamphlet for a literary agency he hadn’t written for that says he was born in Kenya!

Although it was almost three weeks ago, it’s never too late to keep talking about Nerdprom, aka the White House Correspondents Dinner. WHCD headliner Jimmy Kimmel recently told Howard Stern that ABC News’ Jake Tapper helped him vet the jokes, and shared a particularly offensive example that Tapper vetoed, which has been somewhat mischaracterized as an “abortion joke.”

Read the joke in question, if you dare, and check out Tapper’s reaction to being Kimmel’s comedy mentor.

On Wednesday night’s The Last Word, host Lawrence O’Donnell devoted his “Rewrite” segment to shaming Red Eye host Greg Gutfeld for his slam of Chef Mario Batali‘s “Food Stamp Challenge.”

O’Donnell lovingly pointed out that Batali doesn’t just talk the talk when it comes to feeding the poor, and wondered if Gutfeld would “want to slap around” Jesus for feeding the 50,000.

Although no one was happy when things fell apart between Current TV and baseball blogger Keith Olbermann, several bright spots have emerged since his departure from the upstart progressive cable network. One of them has been the successful launch of the net’s morning block, headed by radio vet Bill Press. Right before today’s White House briefing, I got Bill to dish a little about Current, Mitt Romney, and his crystalline former colleague.

Looks like the shortlist just got shorter. The Minnesota Star Tribune reports, via Taegan Goddard‘s Political Wire, that former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty has taken himself out of the running for Vice President on presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s ticket, ending the dream of electing our first Ectoplasmic-American VP.

In a Politico item on the Mitt Romney Veepstakes™ yesterday, an unnamed Republican official said that the presumptive Republican nominee’s eventual running mate will be an “incredibly boring white guy.”

Well, several of those Wonder Bread slices took exception to that notion, reports Buzzfeed‘s Rebecca Elliott.

Intrepid DC gossip reporter Betsy Rothstein reports, for FishbowlDC, that CNN is trying to woo Jake Tapper away from the friendly confines of ABC News’ White House beat. CNN sources have declined to comment for Mediaite, but Tapper tells us he’s happy where he is, and ABC News says they’re happy with where Jake is. That doesn’t mean we can’t read between the boilerplate.

On Monday’s Now with Alex Wagner, the subject of Our First Gay President, Barack Obama, touched on John Heilemann‘s assertion, in New York Magazine, that “with Wall Street having largely dried up as a source of largesse,” Big Gay has become a huge pillar in the President’s fundraising apparatus. Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi disagreed that Wall Street has abandoned Obama, and when host Alex Wagner gave him the facts, said “I don’t believe that.”

Believe it, Matt.

Now, I know that sounds really bad, but the point that Up with Chris Hayes panelist and senior Daily Beast writer Michelle Goldberg was trying to make about Ann Romney‘s Mother’s Day op-ed was actually rather innocuous, or at least self-consciously amorphous. Similarly, when host Chris Hayes compared Mrs. Romney’s mom-ifesto to a “hostage video,” he meant it in the nicest possible way.

On the heels of his anti-gay marriage, anti-civil union double-down on Evolution Day, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was at least getting credit for supporting gay adoption. Thankfully, he cleared that noise up today in an interview with Charlotte, NC’s WBTV-CLT (The Clt!). Confronted with his statement that gay adoption was “fine,” Romney said he was simply acknowledging the fact that gay adoption is legal in almost every state.

One of the more interesting, yet woefully under-reported, facts to emerge this week about presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney is that, while attending Cranbrook boarding school/involuntary barber college, he was a cheerleader for the school’s pep squad. Also noteworthy, yet underreported, is the fact that the golden-tressed classmate Romney is accused of forcibly hair-butchering went on to share a passion with Romney’s golden-tressed future wife: dressage horses.

During a segment on the Mitt Romney campaign’s poor handling of the fallout from the Washington Post bullying story, News Nation host Tamron Hall got into it with frequent MSNBC guest and Washington Examiner correspondent Tim Carney, eventually cutting his mic. Carney’s crime? Accusing Tamron of playing the “old media trick” of “justifying second day coverage” by hyping a story in the first place, then claiming people are talking about it.”

One of the relatively “bright” spots to come out of this week’s discussion of gay marriage for Mitt Romney is that he has at least been getting credit for being “fine” with gay couples adopting children. However, a new video out from progressive SuperPAC American Bridge casts some doubt on the depth of that conviction, featuring clips of Romney arguing against gay parenting, even as compared with one live and one dead straight parent.

As if right-wing conspiracy theorists, convinced that The Washington Post‘s expose´ of Mitt Romney‘s prep school/involuntary barber school years is the result of some nefarious collusion, needed any encouragement, The Huffington Post‘s Mike Calderone reports that WaPo held the print version of their story in order to avoid placing it next to news of President Obama‘s recently completed “evolution” on gay marriage, and all that it would imply.

The Mitt Romney high school bullying story has sent right-wingers into a frenzy of the usual denials and deflections, but one example of these tactics, advanced by Sean Hannity Thursday night, only serves to reinforce the real problem with Romney’s 48 year-old bullying incident: his bizarre reaction. Hannity and others are pointing to a passage in Dreams From My Father to tar President Obama as a bully, but are characteristically leaving out the most important part.

On Al Sharpton‘s Politics Nation Thursday night, MSNBC contributor David Corn cut through the weaselly apologies and creepy chuckling claims of amnesia from Mitt Romney over allegations he held a high school classmate down and cut his hair, telling Rev. Sharpton “Let’s be clear here, this was not a prank,” adding “This was even more than bullying. This was an assault. It was violent.”

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney took a break from reminding Americans of just how very anti-gay marriage/civil union he is to remind Americans how bad he is at the dozens. Fox News’ Neil Cavuto broke Romney’s chops about his lack of “cool” traits like an ability to sing, to which Romney responded by challenging the President to a sing-off. He then tried to get in a dig about President Obama’s golf habits, but the contrast was unhelpful.

One of the media flashpoints in the recent debate over marriage equality has been the persistent use of analogies to the Jim Crow and slavery eras of American history, particularly over the idea of leaving the issue to the states. President Obama‘s evolution-heard-’round-the-world contained a reference that seemed to endorse the idea of marriage equality as a states’ rights issue, but should gay marriage supporters be disturbed by it?

Earlier, I reported some griping, by conservatives, about Fox News and MSNBC hosts calling out opponents of marriage equality over their bigotry, but there’s also some good news from the conservative blogosphere. Moe Lane, from the influential blog Redstate, calls out Politico for engaging in a popular gay marriage craze: blaming black people for anti-marriage laws.

Conservative website Newsbusters is outraged, OUTRAGED! that MSNBC’s Chris Matthews compared opponents of marriage equality with proponents of slavery and segregation. When Fox News’ Shep Smith made almost the same comparison, though, the site didn’t deem it headline-worthy, although they did point out that Smith was showing his “true colors,” whatever that means.

What either Newsbusters article failed to even attempt was to explain how the comparison was wrong.

President Obama‘s endorsement of marriage equality today completes an “evolution” that many advocates of same-sex marriage found maddeningly slow, but presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney reminded Americans, on this day, that he stands with those who haven’t reached the “standing erect” phase of their evolution on the subject. Earlier, he expressed opposition to gay marriage, but in other remarks to reporters, reiterated opposition even to civil unions.