RELATED: NY Times Buries The Lede: Anderson Cooper’s Ratings Surge At 8PM

Apparently, an enterprising campaign staffer or consultant got into Biden’s coffee. That, or they finally persuaded him that soft-talking, commanding-presence Biden was not playing well:

One thing I do resent. I resent when they talk about families like mine that I grew up in. I resent the fact that they think we’re talking about – we’re envy. That it’s job envy, it’s wealth envy, that we don’t dream.

Contrary to the tone of his speech, the Vice President was forced to scale back his dreams mid-sentence:

My mother believed and my father believed, that if I wanted president of the United States – I could be, I could be vice president of the United States.

The above quote has the dubious distinction of being the moment where Biden exhibited the most forethought of his career. He managed to correct himself less than a quarter second after a gaffe, thus nullifying the sound bite. Well played, Mr. Vice President.

My mother dreams as much as any rich guy dreams. They don’t get us. They don’t get who we are.

Applause, ladies and gentlemen, for 2012’s most ham-tacular campaign stop performance. In the roll of righteously aggrieved populist slash spectacularly wealthy and powerful office-holder: Joe Biden.

Remember during the 2012 cycle, when tea partiers across the nation were capturing the national zeitgeist with their angry town halls and protests, the talking heads were universally wondering why President Obama was not exhibiting the same flavor of rage?

Obama heard the message and, in a scripted moment of faux-perturbation, told NBC through pursed lips that he was traveling to the Gulf Coast amidst a catastrophic oil spill to learn “whose ass to kick?”

Yeah. That’s what this feels like.

One part manufactured rage mixed with few dollops of sound bites – unfortunately, the frothy stew that the Obama campaign was concocting was doomed from the start. The very mixing bowl into which they poured their latest concoction was tainted. Behold, “Angry Biden.”

I await the viral internet meme that will form around this episode in three… two… one…

Watch Biden’s rambling, gambling revival speech below:

h/t The Blaze

When the oil spill that happened in the spring of 2010, there was another moment to say, “Hold on a second, let’s re-look at energy policy in America. Should we be subsidizing companies that are risking our health immediately and in the long-term?” We didn’t do it. You’ve never seen the environmental movement more quiet during an oil spill. I guarantee you if John McCain had been president, with that oil spill, or George Bush had been president with that oil spill, I’d have been out there with a sign protesting. I didn’t, because of who the president was.

Pretty much the greatest unintentional description of partisan hackery since…ever. When people so closely identify with party politics and their leaders, then most issues become “My Idiot vs. Their Idiot,” instead of the actual questions at hand. Take, for instance, how much of the anti-war movement has suddenly disappeared since Obama took office, despite his policies mirroring many of Bush’s.

However, Jones does go on to say that he regrets the partisan blinders he once wore:

Well, that’s a bad, uh, that’s not good for the earth, it’s not good for the cause, it’s probably not good for the president. It’s certainly not the way we should conduct ourselves. And so, I’m very tough on progressive movements and leaders, including myself, who did not stand on principle, based on who we looked across and saw as president.

Hindsight is indeed 20/20, Mr. Jones. Once a Republican is back in office, you’ll be back at it again…protesting for the very same reasons you would have — but didn’t — under Obama.

And I’m sure the staunchly anti-war liberals who’ve suddenly gone silent under Obama will bemoan their silence once a conservative hawk is back in the Oval Office, parroting the same exact policies but with a distinctly Republican spin.

Clip below, via C-SPAN:

(H/T The Blaze)

RELATED: Majority Of Americans Say Same-Sex Relationships Are Morally Acceptable

“Homosexuality is the one sin, the one habit, that is 24/7,” Cameron explained on the program. “While I’m not sure about the claims by the various people who have reported that Obama has at least participated at times with them in homosexual acts, this certainly lends some credence.” He did not elaborate on who the “various people” are, but the most “reliable” source a Google search could turn up on this is World Net Daily, so perhaps it’s best he didn’t try to justify this one.

He then went on to explain the “homosexual movement,” with which he appeared to be intimately acquainted (as an expert of course):

Mark my words clearly; the long term goal of the homosexual movement is to get every little boy to grab his ankles and every little girl to give it a try. They will not rest until every one of our children at least gets to try, has the opportunity and maybe is forced to at least once experience homosexual acts. There is no retreating from that, they made it very clear earlier on—now they don’t take about it—but that’s what they want, they will not be happy until they get it, marriage is just a step along the way.

It isn’t hard to see how this happened– how the more fringe anti-Obama elements decided that his declaration was a confirmation that he was secretly gay (hey, Newsweek did the same thing, albeit less maliciously and more metaphorically).

The clip from the Crosstalk program below:

[h/t Right Wing Watch via Queerty]

The president’s DNC acceptance is scheduled for September 6th in Charlotte, North Carolina. The same night that the likes of Justin Bieber and Katy Perry will gather at the Staples Center in Los Angeles to accept moon-men statuettes. According to CNN, however, MTV now plans to move its scheduled airing so as not to conflict with Obama’s speech:

An MTV spokeswoman told CNN the station would air the awards from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. Eastern, rather than their usual 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. “to avoid conflict with the Democratic National Convention proceedings that evening.”

The Obama campaign had no comment.

Before any conservatives interpret MTV’s decision as proof-positive of the network being “in the tank” for the president, let me say that this is proof-positive of one thing: the free market in action. The acceptance speech will be a highly-watched affair, and the businessmen at MTV don’t want to risk the lower ratings by airing during a conflicting time slot.

That’s not to say that MTV isn’t in the tank for the president in other ways. They probably are…given their demographic. But sorry folks, this just isn’t an example.

RELATED: Christie’s High Approval Proves He Has Yet To Anger New Jersey, Not That He Has Tamed It

“I don’t want another question about flooding, I don’t want any more questions about being vice president, and these kids! These kids with all these questions! I can’t take it anymore,” an exasperated Gov. Christie tells the camera as his aides suggest yet another town hall meeting. He decides to come up with a better idea, and heads to Newark from Trenton.

When he shows up in Newark and asks if he can help with any trapped people, “fires or problems or anything,” but is shooed away while the Mayor receives a venerable to-do list of disasters. Among the good deeds on Booker’s list today? Putting out a fire, shoveling snow, saving a falling baby and even making a critical guitar donation to a crippled Bruce Springsteen concert. How could Christie compete?

The sketch makes a bizarrely (for New Jersey politics) warm-hearted full circle, where Booker finds himself answering a call from Mitt Romney about being his Vice Presidential choice and has no idea how to respond. “Don’t worry, Mayor,” Christie interrupts, “I’ve got this.”
It’s got high production value, high cuteness value, and sets a brand new precedent in New Jersey politics for the “keep your friends close, your enemies closer principle”—after all, Booker would be a Democratic frontrunner should he choose to run for governor. For anyone who recalls the viciousness of the past gubernatorial campaigns (Corzine’s offensive on Christie was almost exclusively comprised of “but he’s fat!”), the collaboration will certainly come as a surprise. For the national media, though, the takeaway will be obvious: if Mitt Romney comes knocking on Christie’s door, he’ll answer with a cool, “I’ve got this.”

The video (via Christie’s YouTube account, of course) below:

In our brief interview, Bill told me he is very happy at Current, and the feeling seems mutual. “Having three hours of progressive morning talk with Bill based in DC and featuring the newsmakers and those who cover them sets the daily table for our conversations,” Joel Hyatt, CEO and co-founder of Current TV, told me. “Bill is an essential part of our programming mix and we’re proud to have him.”

The morning block continues to outperform the network’s expectations, with ratings that are up about 250% from the prior year, and Bill says he’s noticed a positive effect on his already-established syndicated radio show. A wider, more diverse audience and a deeper pool of guests to draw from (TV is a more attractive medium to many people) are a few of the dividends the move has paid. I also noticed that Bill’s staff is no longer constantly woozy from donating blood.

Press started at Current the Monday before Keith Olbermann was fired, so I was surprised to learn that, even though they worked together for barely a week, hundreds of miles apart, Olbermann still managed to cause friction. Hear the story behind that, and Bill’s quick thoughts on Mitt Romney, during our brief chat:

RELATED: Obama Ad Blasts Romney: He Was A ‘Job Destroyer’

The interview turned contentious almost immediately, as Banfield took LaBolt on over the ads numerous assertions that were determined to be less-than-factual.

“Mitt Romney has asked us to judge his tenure as a corporate buyout specialist – he’s listed that as his lead qualification for the presidency,” said LaBolt. “We’re not questioning the private equity industry as a whole, we’re questioning Mitt Romney’s economic philosophy. Is that the type of economic philosophy you’d like to see in the Oval Office where Mitt Romney and the wealthiest few profit at the expense of the middle class.”

Banfield cited the Washington Post’s fact checker which gave the ad one out of four “Pinocchio.” She said that the paper was considering giving the Obama team’s ad “two pinnochios.”

And in rides Politico to rescue LaBolt. Politico’s media reporter Dylan Byers gave Ashleigh Banfield “three Pinocchios” for her characterization of WaPo’s “Pinocchio” scale.

Quick note on that last post: While CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield was grilling Obama campaign press secretary Ben La Bolt over the campaign’s latest ad — the anti-Romney, anti-Bain Capital spot — she said the Washington Post gave the ad “one Pinocchio, which is ‘a big fat lie.’”

In fact, the Washington Post’s Fact-Checker defines “one Pinocchio” as “Some shading of the facts. Selective telling of the truth. Some omissions and exaggerations, but no outright falsehoods.”

The Washington Post fact checker ruled that the Obama team’s expressed the following untruth:

Bain Capital was clearly involved in the company’s decisions to greatly add to its debt load — decisions that were made while Romney was actively running Bain. That debt load may have contributed to the company’s failure to weather a steep decline in steel prices, but it was not the only factor that led to the company’s bankruptcy filing. The ad fails to make clear that the Kansas City plant was already facing hard times, and Bain Capital’s investment may have represented its best chance for survival.”
…
Romney had left day-to-day management of Bain in February 1999 to help organize the Salt Lake City Olympics. So he was running Bain when GS Industries settled the 1997 strike with workers by promising guarantees on their pensions, but he was not there when the company used the bankruptcy process to break those promises and slash those benefits…The Kansas City plant was closed in February 2001.

So, Banfield was partially right – she was correct that the heart of the Obama team’s ad was factually incorrect and sought to make a link between Romney and this failed plant where a direct connection is tenuous at best. However, she pretty much biffed it on the “Pinocchio” scale… so, I guess we can call it a wash, right?

The point that the Washington Post and Banfield make is that this is ad is somehow an indictment of Bain’s practices and Romney by extension. Even President Obama’s former “car czar” Steve Rattner criticized the intent of the ad on Monday, saying that he thought “the ad is unfair.”

Look, Mitt Romney made a mistake ever talking about the fact that he created 100,000 jobs. Bain Capital’s responsibility was not to create 100,000 jobs or some other number. It was to create profits for its investors, most of whom were pension funds and endowments and foundations. And it did it superbly well, acting within the rules, acting very responsibly, and was a leading firm. And so yeah, I do think to pick out an example of somebody who lost their job, unfortunately, this is part of capitalism, this is part of life, and I don’t think Bain Capital did anything they need to be embarrassed about.

No more damning condemnation needs to be made of the Bain ad. Even those political operatives that would love to indict Bain as a thoughtless engine of capitalist destruction have to say that this ad goes too far.

LaBolt pivoted to Romney’s record as a job creator, which as LaBolt says, WaPo rated as a false claim as well. “Their goal was wealth creation, not job creation,” said LaBolt echoing Rattner’s point rather effectively thought attempting to reach the opposite conclusion.

“The policies he’s proposed today would return to the same budget-busting tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires that benefited a few,” said LaBolt before he was interrupted by Banfield.

“Ben, I don’t want you to campaign on this program, I want you to answer question about the ad,” said Banfield. While LaBolt continued to talk over her, Banfield never lost her congenial demeanor. “You know business is complex,” said Banfield. She went on to outline how the plant that was the focus of this ad was already failing when they brought Bain to delay that failure.

“This isn’t just one plant, Ashleigh,” said LaBolt.

“Oh, you highlighted this one plant, Ben,” replied a curt Banfield, her joviality beginning to melt away as the frustration associated with pounding the sand that is interviewing a campaign spokesperson began to wear on her. “You and your campaign highlighted this plant and those workers were from this plant.”

“The company failed,” said LaBolt. “750 workers lost their jobs. And ultimately, [Romney and his Bain partners] walked away with millions for themselves after this company failed. It’s not on that premise that we can build our economy.”

It’s hard to argue with a campaign advocate. I don’t begrudge LaBolt his position. Banfield appeared vexed that she could not get LaBolt to admit his employer’s folly in this ad, but she did a good job of maintaining her trademark likeability while taking the Obama campaign to task. Here’s hoping we see more of this in the weeks and months to come.

Watch the heated exchange below via CNN:

Taking the ol’ “Even Ronald Reagan would be too liberal for modern conservatives” type of argument to its logical extreme, Christopher pointed out why the Jesus could be the King of Kings…but not a Republican candidate.

“It was a lousy endorsement, but the thing making me laugh was the idea of Jesus running against Obama. I can just see the ads now. ‘Jesus turned water into wine, devastating the liquor industry. He brought loaves and fishes, killing hundreds of fishing and baking jobs.’ Y’know? Jesus would get crucified during a Republican Primary.”

I have neither gone to enough CPACs or read enough of the Bible to really comment on how true Christopher’s statement was. Fortunately, we’ll never have to find out. Obviously, Jesus is too busy to run for office.

Watch the clip from Current TV below:

RELATED: Chris Matthews Explains His Hardball Reporting Method To Alex Trebek

The insult seems to have gone astray when actually meant for Chris Wallace, who responded to her factual statement that she had been on the program with Olbermann and Sen. Al Franken by jokingly calling them both “dopes” after guessing she had been on the show with Einstein. The blind rage after being called a “dope” in comparison to Einstein seems to have triggered Olbermann to call her entry into Final Jeopardy a “mercy play” and remembering her exact score:

It is true that ending on a negative number– in this case, -$1800, as Olbermann recalled– does not allow one to continue to final Jeopardy! as it requires a wager of money already earned.

Wallace was on Fox & Friends to discuss his stint on Jeopardy! to air tomorrow, alongside Dr. Oz and Katty Kay. He noted that he was unable to discuss what transpired (“my lawyer would break my fingers”) but that he was quite concerned a medical topic would come up and render useless any of the knowledge he acquired in the process of working in journalism.

“I did this a couple of years ago as well,” Carlson noted, asking Wallace to guess who the contestants against her were. “Einstein?” he asked jokingly. She gave the answers, to which he said, “they’re dopes, the both of them.” Olbermann promptly retweeted someone catching the comment on television, though he later cooled on attacking Carlson by confirming that she was, in fact, both a Rhodes Scholar and Miss America. He also retweeted a video of his appearance and explained his loss– “Al beat me my about $1200. Then again one category was about sketches HE’d written for SNL :).”

The emoticon does make up somewhat for the excessively swift attack on Carlson– something we’d not even expect out of the poor people who had to play against Wolf Blitzer last time around– so perhaps Olbermann was just kidding around. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the kind of reputation that lends itself to people giving you the benefit of the doubt when they don’t know if you’re kidding or legitimately outraged, though one can’t imagine Carlson will be wounded by the reminder of her negative scoring enough to turn this into a back and forth.

The Fox News clip below:

RELATED: NY Times Buries The Lede: Anderson Cooper’s Ratings Surge At 8PM

Wagner asked “Rev.” Sharpton if he thought it was a problem for Obama that the findings in a new CBS/New York Times poll that showed 67 percent of voters viewed the President’s embrace of gay marriage rights as a political maneuver while only 24 percent said they believed he was moved to support same-sex marriage out of principle.

Sharpton said that Obama would have to address that issue, but also said the voters were dead wrong that it could have been a political calculation because Obama has not benefited politically from the announcement.

“As you go down the rest of the poll, there was not that much of a political advantage here, and if anything he got some flack in his own base,” said Sharpton. “So, I think that those who have been made to believe or believe on their own he did it for political reasons would then have to look at the results and say you have to be smarter than that to know that he was not going to gain politically because he didn’t.”

Where to begin? First, Sharpton has confused political opponents of President Obama with registered voters. That 67 percent of registered voters probably includes significant overlap among Obama supporters and opponents.

Second, is it not at least excusable for a voter to think that Obama made a political calculation when he embraced gay marriage seeing as how he contradicted himself on the matter several times over the course of his career? Indeed, Obama only embraced gay marriage after his Vice President publically contradicted him and the White House was hounded by the press for almost 72 consecutive hours to clarify the President’s official position.

Finally, once Obama “came out,” as it were, he proceeded to use it as the singular pillar of his reelection fundraising efforts – holding several high-profile fundraising events with openly-gay celebrities and suggesting that his likely opponent, Mitt Romney, is “backward” on same-sex marriage rights in fundraising emails because he holds an opposing rhetorical – not policy – position on the issue. One, by the way, that Obama had held not one week ago.

And Sharpton asserts that Obama did not benefit politically from his announcement when he knows quite well that he did. Obama raised yet-undisclosed millions from the various fundraisers – the campaign even announced that they had raised $1 million within 90 minutes of announcing his pivot on gay marriage rights. If that’s not political advantage, what is?

Bashir compounded the asininity when he said that the respondents in this poll were “accusing” Obama of making a political move and it was actually Romney that was the chief beneficiary of Obama’s announcement on gay marriage. Not because Obama had forfeited some enthusiasm among his base of conservative African American supporters – but because it allows Romney to finally secure some of the evangelical vote that had been wary of Romney… Because it’s January, in case you were unaware.

Bashir went on to compare President Obama to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to which Rev. Sharpton agreed. Because, we all remember that famous speech that Dr. King delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character… And I continue to believe that this is an issue that is gonna be worked out at the local level, because historically, this has not been a federal issue.”

Meanwhile, back at present-day MSNBC, Wagner played a clip of a black pastor who told CNN that he planned to stay home on Election Day as a result of Obama’s expressing support for same-sex marriage rights. Sharpton cited Democratic governors, like Maryland’s Martin O’Malley and New York’s Andrew Cuomo, who have backed policy legalizing gay marriage and asked if that pastor would stay home for them as well?

Ostensibly, the answer is yes. The top of the ticket drives turnout in presidential years, and the down-ballot races always suffer when turnout is low. “We’re going to risk the Supreme Court, we’re going to risk health care, we’re going to risk the economy because any governor or president or anybody that on one issue I disagree with, I’m going to stay home,” said Sharpton. The answer is yes, yes and yes, Rev. Sharpton. That’s the thing about single-issue voters.

In all likelihood, the debate over gay marriage will be a distant memory by November. By then, Obama will have extracted all the necessary good will and donations that stem from his announcement. Furthermore, the national conversation will have progressed enough so that his support among conservative African American voters will have rebounded. But you would not know that from the exaggeration that passed for analysis on this segment. Passion on the issue is no substitute for measured analysis.

Watch the segment below via MSNBC:

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The offending segment was a look at President Obama’s schedule for the day, which included welcoming the Major League Soccer champions, the LA Galaxy. This seemed to confuse Todd a bit, in jest. “As you can see, he… welcomes the Major League Soccer champions?” he notes timidly, “All you LA Galaxy fans out there– does this mean Beckham shows up? I’m not sure. Is he really a member of the Galaxy or not?” He then promises as he cuts to break “no more soccer references.”

Fiore happened to be watching MSNBC and also near the Twitter machine, and while this aired, he tweeted (in Spanish): “I am watching MSNBC and the commentary from a Mr. Chuck Todd over the LA Galaxy White House visit is deprecating. Why? Ignorance.” He was not any more conciliatory when he found Todd on Twitter:

Todd hasn’t responded, and given that he seems to barely know who David Beckham is, it would be shocking if he knew Fernando Fiore. But it’s a fascinating story for many reasons, primary among them the power of social media to connect in contention worlds that would otherwise never have reason to meet. The sheer number of people that would, in significant circles, be considered “celebrities” that Twitter holds is more formidable that most other forums in history– and that doesn’t just mean Jose Canseco spreading Al Gore death rumors or J-Woww (who boasts two Bachelor’s degrees, according to her) calling Bristol Palin uneducated. It crosses lines of culture and language beyond the entertainment classes, joining otherwise parallel worlds in trying to figure out who the other person is. It is as likely that fans of República Deportiva, the sports show Fiore now hosts, know nothing of Todd’s work as a senior political reporter following the highest levels of American government. Conversely, those who would recognize Todd as a household name couldn’t tell you about Fernando Fiore’s 90s prank show Lente Loco or tell you an old travel show he hosted was the first time Sofia Vergara got national exposure in the United States. But now that they’re mutually aware of each other (at least we assume Todd has seen the tweet), we can only hope an informational soccer workshop, at least, is in the works for the two.

The clip with which the outrage began via MSNBC below:

That comment came from conservative author Deneen Borelli, a catchy attack which she actually said twice during the brief segment. Borelli charged the President with being “on the wrong side of the issue” (personally, I’d much rather be on the wrong side of an ephemeral “issue” than on the wrong side of the more permanent “history” any day, but that’s just me). She accused the President of choosing the gay community over the black community, saying that he had “taken black votes for granted” and that his policies were hurting blacks in America.

“If you look at how unemployment in the black community is deplorable, it’s 13%, it’s almost double among what it is for whites. And among black teens, it’s 38.2%. Those numbers are outrageous. and so Obama’s policies are failing our country, failing the black community. His energy policy is a regressive policy. High gasoline and utility prices are harming hard-working Americans and those who are unable to afford higher energy prices. So, really, his policies are harming Americans, harming blacks, and I say he has thrown the black community really under the bus in order to get money from the gay community and to get their votes.”

Fox News’ Bill Hemmer helped out by adding that “some people” are sensing “desperation” or fear in the Obama campaign. That vaguely defined group of desperation-sensing critics did not seem to include Santita Jackson, who disagreed with the implication.

“You know, I don’t think that this campaign is scared. I think that we have to dial this back a bit and understand that President Obama is the President of the United States. He’s not the Pastor of the United States. He made a political announcement, not a prophetic pronouncement. I think those who are going to stay home were going to stay home anyway because the excitement of 2008 would have been very, very hard to maintain in 2012. That having been said, I think that African-Americans overwhelmingly, those who vote will be voting for President Obama because we understand that he is the CEO of the government, a government that has a Constitution that he’s sworn to uphold, a government that has a Constitution that protects all americans; red, yellow, black, brown and white, straight and gay.”

That “Pastor of the United States” line is a good one. I’m clearly not the only one who thinks so considering Rev. Delmond Coates said the exact same line last night on Hardball and Rev. Raphael Warnock said it to his congregants over the weekend. That might seem cheesy but clearly people think it’s a good line so they should use it as much as possible.

After all, as we can tell, nothing good lasts long in politics.

Watch the clip from Fox News below:

Vice presidential hopefuls are famous for ruling themselves out, only to hear he siren again later, but Pawlenty’s kiss-off sounds pretty final:

“I’m going to take my name off the list, so if … you’re a journalist, an observer, remove my name from the list,” Pawlenty said. “I went through it before with McCain.”

Sen. John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, passed over Pawlenty for Sarah Palin.

This time around, Pawlenty has been mentioned as a possible contender for Mitt Romney’s second-in-command, often followed by a one-word assessment from pundits: “boring.”

How boring is Pawlenty? He actually made this announcement 2 weeks ago, but the reporter just noticed.

T-Paw was unclear about his future plans, other than explaining to the enraged Trekkies who show up at Romney campaign rallies that he is not a Vulcan high priestess:

He was more vague about his future. Asked whether he might run for U.S. Senate or for governor in 2014, he replied: “I haven’t ruled anything in or out.”

…The former governor, who was heckled at an Oklahoma Republican convention over the weekend that later was shut down when Paul and Romney supporters brawled, said he does not plan to attend this weekend’s Minnesota Republican convention.

He will, he said, be elsewhere in the country, campaigning for Romney.

All kidding aside, Pawlenty would have been an excellent fit for Romney, with good conservative street cred, but a moderate temperament that would have appealed to independents. He also possesses a great deal more personal warmth than Romney, all qualities which suggest that Pawlenty bowed out of the presidential race too soon, before everyone in the known world got a turn as Republican frontrunner.

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

Politico‘s Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei report that the Romney search committee has adopted the political equivalent of the George Costanza rule:

The strategy: Whatever McCain did, do the opposite.

Many of the current strategy discussions are centered on not falling into the traps McCain did: looking wobbly as a leader and weak on the economy in the final weeks of the campaign. The private discussions include ruling out any vice presidential possibilities who could be seen as even remotely risky or unprepared; wrapping the entire campaign around economic issues, knowing this topic alone will swing undecided voters in the final days; and, slowly but steadily, building up Romney as a safe and competent alternative to President Barack Obama.

McCain, according to Romney advisers, blew it on all three scores. And of the three, the most conscious effort by Romney’s team to do things differently will be in the vice presidential selection process. One Republican official familiar with the campaign’s thinking said it will be designed to produce a pick who is safe and, by design, unexciting — a deliberate anti-Palin. The prized pick, said this official: an “incredibly boring white guy.”

I’m not sure who to be offended for, the incredibly boring white guys, or the women, non-white men, and Chris Christies who are being denied the chance to be Mitt Romney’s running mate. I’m also not sure about the strategy, if the idea is to go whiter and more boring than Mitt Romney. They’ll have to run him with a piece of paper that says “This Page Intentionally Left Blank.”

In a great bit of post-Ben Smith synergy, Buzzfeed sought comment from four of Romney’s prospective pale riders. Ohio Senator Rob Portman told Rebecca Elliott “I hope that I’m viewed as someone who gets things …” zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Elliott actually published reactions from Portman, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’ office, and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell‘s spokesman, but the funniest reaction was this one:

Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty did not respond to a request for comment.

What’s funny about that is that Pawlenty did respond to Elliott, in person, standing on his head, holding two road flares.

Not that he asked, but I still think Romney ought to pick Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Sec. Rice has been pooh-poohed as a pick (despite polling that shows support for the idea) because of some moderate positions she holds, particularly on abortion rights. Those might make her less-than-palatable for the conservative base, but those people hate President Obama so much, they’d turn out for George Soros if you put an “R” after his name. Sec. Rice would, however, appeal broadly to independents, and maybe even some Democrats, in a way that your average white male VP pick never has.

RELATED: President Obama Scolds The Media During Barnard College Speech

“Congratulations on earning your degree,” Winget began. “But the truth is that the degree alone isn’t going to be enough to ensure your success in the real world.”

In the real world, employers don’t care much about your degree, or your happiness, or your income or much of anything that has to do with you at all. They care about what you can do for them. And from this point on, that’s how you have to think.

Winget continued along the theme of fostering selflessness in the name of helping a student’s future employer make a profit:

Businesses exist to be profitable. It is your job to help make them profitable. If you know how to do that – how to be worth more than you cost – then you have value in the workplace. And if you don’t know how to be worth more than you cost, than employers will pass you over and find someone else.

Winget continued to do his best impersonation of Larry from the Bob Newhart Show:

Let’s look at what it really takes to be successful in the real world: first, you have to take responsibility. Your life, your results, your success, happiness, health and prosperity are up to you. When it turns out well, you get the credit. And when it doesn’t work out the way you wanted it to, well, you get the blame. It isn’t up to someone else to make sure you are successful. It’s always up to you, so be responsible.

Preaching the gospel, Winget decided it was time to teach the kids the golden rule – presumably, a lesson he believes is not being taught to school-age children anymore:

Next, respect others. Respect your employer enough to be on time. And give them your personal best every day, because that’s what they’re paying you for.

Respect your boss – even when you think he’s an idiot. Because he’s still your boss and deserves your respect. Respect your coworkers because they respect you. And your customers because they pay you.

Winget told his audience of rapt students by saying that they should disabuse themselves of the notion that they should prioritize their physical appearance — in fact, making and saving money should be their paramount concern:

Then establish clear priorities. Your time, your energy and your money will always go to what’s important to you. If looking cute is important to you, then you’ll spend all your money at the mall. If being financially secure is important to you, you’ll make sure that you save, invest and live on less than you earn.

Finally, Winget concluded by telling his invisible students that their happiness is immaterial. Their days of happiness are, in fact, well and truly over. Now is the time to toil endlessly in order to create profit for their employers. Also, Winget seems to know a series of incompetent and/or lazy idiots:

Last, it’s about work and excellence. It’s not about your passion – as I know people who are passionately incompetent. It’s not loving what you do or being happy every day – you aren’t paid to be happy on the job. You are paid to do your job. Success always comes down to hard work and excellence. And it takes both. Hard work alone won’t cut it – I know people that work really hard, yet just aren’t any good at what they do, so it doesn’t matter. And I know people who are excellent at what they do, but they don’t work hard enough for it to make any difference.

So work hard, and be excellent at what you do every day. And remember this: if any ‘one’ can do it, then anyone can do it.

I wish you the best.

Watch the speech below via Fox News Channel:

RELATED: On SNL, ‘Joe Biden’ Complains About Being Overshadowed By Obama…To Pal ‘George W. Bush’

That’s not exactly a surprising response from The Five. What I did enjoy about this segment is that it contained one of my favorite cable news tricks; the Segment That’s Not Actually About What The Tease Made It Seem Like It’s About.

Before the commercial break, the segment was teased as being about how SNL “censored” a writer who wrote about Obama but did a Bush sketch instead. However, once this segment started, the “censoring” was only mentioned offhand. Perhaps that’s because the story turned out to be completely false (as the writer himself, Jim Downey, told Mediaite last week). Yeah, no one got censored. But, sure, say that in the tease for this segment. And then have a chyron up the entire time reading “ONE WEEK AFTER ‘SNL’ KILLED OBAMA SKIT, WILL FERRELL PARODIES GEORGE W. BUSH.”

That’s fair and balanced. The balance being between what the hosts are actually talking about and some made up thing people can get outraged about.

But don’t think I’m just ragging on The Five here. I said this is one of my favorite cable news tricks because I literally see it about 20 times a day. Seriously, now that I’ve pointed it out, you won’t be able to miss it.

It’s just misleading. Almost as misleading as making the headline of a blog post about The Five discussing SNL and then instead writing a lengthy column complaining about conventions of television production.

Oh…wait.

Um…just watch the segment from Fox News below:

Michelle Schimel is a Democrat who’s been her district’s assemblywoman for three terms now. However, in the race for her fourth term, she will now be running against Mark Schimel, yes relation. Schimel is her estranged husband who just recently sought and received the Republican nomination in the race.

From ABC News:

“Frank Moroney, chairman of the North Hempstead Republican Committee, told ABC News Mark Schimel assured them he wasn’t running with an agenda to hurt his estranged wife.

‘He had the plan and the interest, and we made sure that everybody knows him. We weren’t looking for a circus. We weren’t looking for a sideshow,’ Moroney told ABC News. ‘We want an issue oriented campaign. He made that commitment, and we moved forward. He kept reassuring us that it was all about business.’”

Yeah, that sounds believable.

We can all see how this would work in a movie. Rachel McAdams just doesn’t have enough time for her husband, Ryan Gosling, because of her high-profile political campaign. So, to save their marriage, Gosling does the only thing he can; gets in the race himself! With his wacky best friend, Jason Segel, as his campaign adviser, Gosling gets to the big debate where he declares his love and then he and McAdams make out in the middle of a bunch of red, white, and blue confetti! And Jason Segel totally bangs McAdams’ sassy press secretary played by Aubrey Plaza! Yay!

Somehow, I don’t see the real life version going this way. I also don’t think the movie version would give the couple two poor children who are caught in the middle. Because that, like everything else, more sad than funny.

But don’t worry! At least the real story has a wacky old lady character! Just read how funny this is!

“Mark Schimel’s mother, Irma, expressed disbelief at her son’s decision to run against his wife to a New York paper.

‘You’re joking,’ Irma Schimel told the Daily News when she learned about his bid. ‘This is a really startling thing. It’s a shock. Why would he do this?’

When contacted by ABC News, Irma Schimel said she was no longer discussing her son’s campaign.”

Oh, wait. No. Just sad again.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether their cover outing President Obama would go on to become as iconically controversial as some of their others, but it wasn’t the first time that Newsweek had made headlines for a provocative cover photo in recent times. In fact, it is pretty clear that part of the Newsweek/Daily Beast strategy for the ailing weekly is to get people talking about them. Good and bad. So like any good lemmings might, we are here to oblige.

Here are some of their most notorious modern-era covers:

RELATED: National Review Ends Relationship With John Derbyshire

Writing for VDARE.com, a website in which you have to click through a splash page with a content warning in order to reach their content, Derbyshire published “Who Are We? – The ‘Dissident Right’ on Thursday.

“White Nationalist,” which has a fairly healthy currency here on the Whadda-We-Call-Ourselves Right, strikes me as even more problematical. What is the nation to which “nationalist” is the referent? “White” isn’t a nation, nor likely to become one.

I don’t mind the word “white” in either of those expressions. Conservatism, Inc. or otherwise, is a white people’s movement, a scattering of outliers notwithstanding.

Derbyshire goes on to suggest that the phrase “white supremacy” is, essentially, redundant:

Leaving aside the intended malice, I actually think “White Supremacist” is not bad semantically. White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with. There have of course been some blots on the record, but I don’t see how it can be denied that net-net, white Europeans have made a better job of running fair and stable societies than has any other group.

VDARE is raising tax deductible donations for Derbyshire’s chemotherapy treatments, which Gawker notes is admirable. However, they note in callous Gawker style, that they support this effort only to postpone their having to eulogize him should he pass away.

If anything, this post proves that it was not short sighted of National Review editor Rich Lowry to end their relationship with Derbyshire in early April after he published a disturbing diatribe on the inherent intellectual deficiencies with which African Americans wrestle in a site called Taki Mag.

h/t Gawker

Betsy Rothstein, love her or not, is well-connected in DC, and she reports:

CNN is trying to lure ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper away from ABC. FishbowlDC has learned that Executive V.P. and Managing Editor for CNN Worldwide Mark Whitaker and CNN Senior V.P. Amy Entelis have been making serious overtures to Tapper and his reps. We hear the network is trying their best to figure out a “game changer” and have their eyes on Tapper.

CNN has struggled to make ratings gains in a crowded cable news market, and Jake Tapper would, indeed, be a “game changer” whose journalistic chops would enhance the just-the-facts brand that the network cultivates. He has the added benefit of being a superstar in the news business, without the superstar temperament that can derail a big move like this.

Such a move could also be attractive to a talent like Jake Tapper, who has twice been passed over as host of This Week, and has a limited number of opportunities to make an impact at a broadcast network. On CNN, he would be a very big fish, in a well-respected pond.

ABC News seems to recognize Tapper’s value. ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider told us, in an email, that he’s “Hardly surprised to read about all kinds of poachers being interested in Jake Tapper – that’s what happens when you are at the top of your profession. We are thrilled Jake works for ABC News and expect him to have a leadership role here for a long time to come.”

Without denying the overtures, Jake told us, via email, that “Being the White House correspondent for ABC News is a dream job, one I’m focused on 100%. I couldn’t be happier where I am right now.”

Whether he remains such a happy camper probably has little to do with the size of the truckload of cash that CNN offers him (ABC has deep dollar dump trucks, too), but rather, on the trajectory of the career path they, or ABC, offer. Betsy speculates that Jake may be in line for the next This Week opening, but a daily newshour at a network like CNN is also mighty attractive, and right in his wheelhouse.

Whoever ends up with Tapper is going to need a big truck, and an even bigger pitch.

RELATED: Chris Christie Insiders: He Is ‘Comfortable’ Accepting Vice-Presidential Nod

Blake explains that 56% is a high number for a New Jersey politician by look at other numbers, mostly from Quinnipiac, for other prominent New Jersey officials. He begins with the numbers for President Obama, which present a good argument for New Jersey being a swing state, but not exactly for it being tougher than any other on the President: “President Obama hasn’t gone higher than 56 percent approval in Quinnipiac polling of the state since June 2009 — slightly after he took office on a high note.” The other politicians include Senator Bob Menendez, who “hasn’t cracked 50 percent approval in at least the last two years,” former Senator Robert Torricelli (“never cracked 50 percent”), former Gov. Jon Corzine (“barely cleared 50%” after getting into a car accident, his most popular achievement as governor), and Sen. Frank Lautenberg. Sen. Lautenberg’s highest rating was at 55%– during his first term, which had concluded in retirement.

But that retirement was not to last for the very reason that makes clear it is not voter attitudes that dictate the low ratings of New Jersey politicians, but elected official behaviors. Blake euphemizes Sen. Lautenberg’s return as something of a “comeback,” prompted by his own desire to return. It’s a euphemism for “cleaning up Torricelli’s corruption mess”– a broken-down reelection campaign derailed by an ethics reprimand for accepting questionable gifts. His departure before they could charge him for anything serious came as a surprise to many– especially the state Democratic establishment– and prompted meaningful conversations in the Star-Ledger (the state’s biggest paper) like this one, followed by the tenure of Jim McGreevey, whose own resignation amidst scandal proved just how futile that conversation was (and yes, that URL is correct: NJ.com does have an entire subsection entitled “Corruption”). Torricelli himself resigned defiantly, whining in his press conference departing from the Senate race, “When did we become such an unforgiving people?”

As for the others mentioned in the low-ratings round-up, the Jim McGreevey story is an oft-told one, of how he raised his approval ratings all the way up to 45% by, instead of plainly admitting he was paying a foreign friend six digits as a Homeland Security official when he got caught, came out of the closet as gay. And the sad but true story of how Corzine– a Senator-turned-Governor who shut the state economy down to raise taxes over the legislature’s objections and is now known as the Obama supporter who mysteriously lost $1.2 billion– was most beloved when he was politically immobilized by an accident can perhaps be considered the peak in corruption that led to a U.S. Attorney winning the governorship.

And those are only the biggest fish in the viscous, money-green Jersey politics tank. Flitting around them are a cast of Greek tragic heroes that put most of the worst politicians in the rest of the country to shame: local characters like former Hoboken mayor Peter Cammarano (arrested on his 23rd day as mayor), former Newark mayor Sharpe James (who Christie attempted to imprison for 20 years, but got 27 months for turning government property into personal profit), and former Jersey City Deputy Mayor Leona Baldini, who faces up to three years for accepting bribes during the same operation that caught Cammarano.

Perhaps it is true that New Jersey is harder on its politicians that other states– a quick look around the national political landscape shows that, apparently, Louisiana voters forgave Sen. David Vitter, and Rep. Charlie Rangel‘s tax woes have done nothing to dethrone him. That the state has taken relatively warmly to Christie– despite the helicopter privilege abuse, allegations of potential pension double-dipping, and incessant shouting–is not a sign that Christie is exceptionally good or understands the state exceptionally well. It is only proof that he is what he promised to be since the beginning: a better politician than New Jersey has seen in a long, long time.

It’s a big week on the business side: Don and his team are working on a campaign for a soft drink called “Sno Ball,” and they narrow it down to two pitches: one from Ginsberg that is a play on snowball fights, and one from Don that references the expression “snowball’s chance in hell.” Ginsberg’s idea is fresher, more youthful, and clearly right for this pitch. In the past Don has always placed the highest premium on doing the best work, but in this case he can’t stand being outshone by a junior member of his team, and ends up “forgetting” the illustration for Ginsberg’s pitch in the cab prior to the meeting. When Ginsberg calls him on it later, Don lies “I don’t think about you at all.” Don’s relevance is called into question again when Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce gets left out of a Sunday Times feature on hip ad agencies, which seems to push him ever closer toward becoming a cranky old man. It’s nothing compared to the devastation that Pete Campbell feels at being left out of the story, since he had convinced himself he would be the star of the piece and that Alexis Bledel would have sex with him in his office after reading it. None of these things come to pass.

In other news, Ginsberg is doing some extra secret work for Roger, who is working with Bert Cooper to get an account with a Monarch, a company that manufactures kosher wine but is looking to break into the Gentile market. He settles on Ginsberg as the natural choice for the job and asks him to come up with some ideas he can pitch at dinner to look smart to the potential clients, which Ginsberg agrees to do after he extorts Roger for $200 (“I’ve got to start carrying less cash,” Roger sighs) and warns him that he’s not able to keep a secret. True to form, he tells Peggy immediately, and she’s offended that Roger has found somebody else to do his secret creative work. When she confronts Roger he argues that Ginsberg’s a better fit because he’s Jewish, and Peggy whines that she’s sick of people using that logic. “It’s every man for himself,” Roger tells her, a sign that while Ginsberg might still be pigeonholed by his ethnicity, in Roger’s eyes Peggy is just another copywriting dude. Progress?

Roger gets extorted again almost immediately, this time by Jane, who is in the process of divorcing him but whose Jewishness Roger needs to impress the Monarch executive at dinner. She gets him to agree to buy her a new apartment (aim higher, Ginsberg and Peggy!) but after they have a post-dinner roll in the hay in the new place she tells him that it’s been ruined, since now it’s also tainted with the memory of their failed marriage. “You get everything you want, and you still had to do this,” she pouts.

Unsurprisingly, however, the grand prize for immaturity has to go to one Betty Francis, who has joined Weight Watchers since we saw her last, and is trying desperately and not all that successfully to get her weight under control. She has to suffer the twin blows of seeing young, gorgeous Megan in her hip apartment in the city when she picks up the kids, and reading a love note Don wrote to Megan that Bobby Draper used as scratch paper for drawing a picture. Naturally, she chooses to lash out at Don and Megan through Sally, who is working on a homework assignment that involves drawing her family tree. Betty innocently tells her to include Don’s first wife, Anna, and expresses her surprise that Megan never told Sally about her. Oh, Betty. Sally flips out at this, snarling at Megan later on that she thought they were friends, but now she knows that Megan is a “phony.”

“You’re not special, and neither is Anna” she tells her.

It’s hard to feel bad for Betty when she does things like this, even when they’re followed by truly tragic behavior like spraying whipped cream directly in her mouth, spitting it out and swishing with water at the kitchen sink. Her Weight Watchers meetings emphasize the emotional connection with food, and she seems to be absorbing some of it — like when she has a gentle and understanding talk with Henry about his frustrations at work — but she can’t help taking out her feelings of anger and helplessness on her children.

The only person who seems really in tune with the feelings and motivations of the other characters this week is Megan, who is wounded by Sally’s rejection of her and upset when Don yells at her too. He’s clearly just looking for someone to blame, and Megan successfully talks him out of calling Betty, since it will just “give her the thrill of poisoning [them] from fifty miles away.” It leads to a sweet moment between Don and Sally when he comes clean about his first marriage, and Sally goes home to her mother and tells her that she saw pictures of Anna. It might be an exaggeration, but it certainly has the desired effect. Betty looks like she’s choking on her disappointment, and sends her daughter to watch TV. The final shot of the episode is Betty’s sad dinner plate, nearly bare but for a few tiny spoonfuls of Thanksgiving dinner. It’s fitting, since she certainly doesn’t have much to be thankful for.

The episode, entitled “Tea Peter,” featured the show’s main character joining the local Tea Party after the government shuts down the unlicensed mall he was running out of his house after affixing a “Come in, we’re open” sign to his front door. It, uh, made a little more sense in context.

Peter is warned by the show’s voice of reason, Brian the dog, that the Tea Party is merely a ruse run by rich businessmen who want to use populist anger to rid the country of regulations. Sure enough, when Peter gets there, his rich father-in-law is running the entire thing by wearing a mullet wig and pretending to be a guy named “Joe Workingman.” The Tea Party ends up demolishing the government, anarchy rules in the streets, and Peter learns the valuable lesson that rich people aren’t actually looking out for any of us.

All in all, it was a fairly funny (although sledgehammer broad) parody of conservative Astro Turf groups run by duplicitous billionaires. That being said, pegging it all on the Tea Party made the whole thing seem about as current as satirizing the Whigs.

Watch a couple clips from Fox (heh, that’s still funny) below:

Believe it, Matt.

Here’s what Heilemann said about the President’s gay marriage evolution revolution and fundraising:

With Chicago terrified by the almost certain prospect of being outspent by the cumulative forces of the Romney campaign and its conservative Super-PAC allies, and with Wall Street having largely dried up as a source of largesse, the campaign has turned increasingly to three sources of big-donor dollars: Holly­wood, Silicon Valley, and the gay community. (Amazingly, reports the Washington Post, fully one in six of Obama’s bundlers reside in the last ­category.) From all three of those wellsprings, Obama’s ­embrace of marriage equality is likely to pay dividends—literally.

Taibbi is known for being something of an iconoclast, but when confronted with Heilemann’s thesis, he resorted to uncharacteristic dissembling. ”I totally disagree that Wall Street has completely dried up as a source of largesse,” Taibbi said, then cited a completely irrelevant fact. “Obama has a two to one fund-raising advantage over Romney as we speak.”

It’s like Taibbi took an accidental overdose of Rove-zac. Not only does that statement ignore the fact that the subject was Wall Street donors, as opposed to the entire universe, Taibbi seems unaware of the huge disparity in SuperPAC donations that will likely place the two candidates even, or put the President behind, by the end of this campaign.

When host Alex Wagner served up the fact that “Wall Sreet dollars, 92% of them are going to Romney or Romney SuperPACs,” Taibbi just shut his eyes.

“I don’t believe that,” he said. ” I’d like to see that.”

We’ll get to that in a minute. Taibbi added “Wall Street heavily favored Barack Obama by almost two to one in the last election.”

About that, Taibbi is essentially correct, and that’s important for two reasons. First of all, it shows that Wall Street obviously feels it didn’t get what it paid for in President Obama, which ought to be seen as a positive. The second is that the stat he cites is from data that is apples-to-apples with the one he disbelieved from Alex Wagner, totals of bundled contributions from Wall Street (from OpenSecrets.org):

Let there be no doubt where Wall Street’s political loyalties lie: Of all the money the securities and investment industry has poured into the 2012 presidential contest so far — to the candidates and the super PACs behind them — an unambiguous 92 percent has gone to the GOP, according to a new Center for Responsive Politics analysis.

And in so doing, the securities and investment industry is betting hard on the candidacy of one of its own: Mitt Romney.

Between his campaign committee and a monster super PAC supporting his candidacy, Romney has benefited from about 72% percent of the near $33 million Wall Street has contributed through February.

There are a lot of ways to slice and dice the numbers. The President obviously still has some support from Wall Street, so you’ll probably hear his opponents quote raw dollar figures that sound big if you don’t look at what Romney’s campaign and SuperPACs are getting, but the contrast could not be clearer.

What’s also strange is the way Taibbi insists that the President “was outed by Joe Biden essentially. They weren’t going to do this til Joe Biden started flapping his gums in front of a reporter.”

It’s true, they weren’t going to do it last week, but no reasonable observer thinks that the President wasn’t going to announce his support for gay marriage at all during this campaign. Taibbi criticizing the President is nothing new, but doing it like a blogger on Fox Nation certainly is.

Here’s the clip, from MSNBC:

RELATED: Kirsten Powers: Obama’s ‘Flip Flop’ On Gay Marriage ‘Less Evolution, More Intelligent Design’

In the clip below, Gidley said there is a movement within some segments of the Republican party that “want to move with the polling” towards an acceptance of same-sex marriage rights but there is also a fear that the base of the GOP will lose enthusiasm and hand the election –and the down-ballot races—to Democrats. Gidley said that there is a similar instinct on the Democratic side, with more cautious Democrats worried about the center of the electorate rejecting advocates of same-sex marriage on the left, while others want the party to make a stand for gay marriage as a civil rights issue.

Goodfriend agreed, saying that both parties are feeling the pressure from their “true believer” wings. However, he says that the “true believers” on the right will be driving Romney over a cliff while the President’s supporters are not pushing Obama into an untenable political position.

“The polling shows that’s [gay marriage] is going to hurt him with moderates and independents in the middle,” said Goodfriend. “By contrast, with the Democrats and President Obama abiding by his base and coming out so forcefully in favor of gay marriage, he’s not doing any damage to himself and the party and the polling shows he’s actually going to help himself with moderates and women – with the people who have to be won this election.”

Well, not quite.

President Obama did not spend his weekend on a conference call with black ministers, according to the New York Times, who are vehemently opposed to gay marriage because it is a fun way to kill an 75-degree Saturday afternoon.

The ministers, though, were not all as enthusiastic. A vocal few made it clear that the president’s stand on gay marriage might make it difficult for them to support his re-election.

Of course, the Times notes that at least one of the ministers came around by the end of the call and told the President that they would happily “work aggressively” on his behalf ahead of November.

And that was the calculation that the White House made. They knew that gay marriage was popular among their base on the coasts and deeply troublesome for their more religious supporters; particularly African Americans and seniors.

The campaign determined that the goodwill that their embrace of gay marriage would generate among independents, not to mention their openly gay bundlers and donors who support gay marriage, would outweigh the costs associated with taking this controversial position.

Meanwhile, with the conventional wisdom suggesting that conservative African Americans would exhibit the most resistance to Obama’s embrace of gay marriage, the Daily Beast, writing about a Pew Research Center from April, say that the group is moving towards Obama’s new position on the issue with stunning alacrity.

The most recent Pew poll taken this past April showed only 47 percent of African Americans oppose gay marriage today, nearly 20 percentage points lower than in 2008.

Back in the MSNBC studios, Goodfriend concluded his segment by telling Gidley that “you Republicans never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”

You should own the Latino vote. You should have half the African American vote. You should have half the gay vote. You know what? Because there are plenty of people in those groups who agree with you on everything and then you spurn them with these exclusive and obnoxious policies. We’ll take those votes, thank you very much.

He is partially correct. Jay Cost, writing for the Weekly Standard, has noted for several months how the Democratic party has become an institution that promise to reward its political clients to the exclusion of all else. The Republican party hopes to appeal to voters based on a blanket ideological position that espouses the maximization of opportunity if not results. In that sense, they do appeal to segments of all demographics. But the Republican party almost never makes the calculation that Democrats do – in particular, that portions of the base can be neglected six months out from an election in order to expand the big tent.

The GOP has been married to Karl Rove’s base-rousing strategy since, well, 2004. The Republican party has not won a national election with more than 51 percent of the popular vote since 1988. A base-courting strategy in presidential years has become gospel. But it has the disadvantage of projecting an image of the Republican party as being insular.

The GOP could triangulate many of the divisive social issues and fracture Democratic groups – If they had the temerity to shun their base for a week – with the understanding that those groups that represent the Republican’s bread and butter (evangelicals, white, working-class males, married couples) would be there for them in the fall. Particularly in a year like 2012 which is shaping up to be a referendum on a lackluster incumbent.

Republicans could embrace tax code reform: embrace a flatter tax. Eliminate deductions across the board, including those for marriage. By getting government out of the marriage issue, they can truly return the issue of marriage to the states (as President Obama has advocated without offering any substantive policy approach as a means of accomplishing that).

Republicans could address black and Hispanic voters on their terms, talk about strengthening the family and increasing economic opportunity while simultaneously attacking those progressive organizations that would seek to vilify reformers of the entitlement state as salesmen who are to be mistrusted.

But there is risk-aversion within the Republican party’s political operatives, and a sense to that level of experimentation is too dangerous when the stakes are as high as they are in presidential years. Meanwhile, despite argumentation to the contrary, demography is destiny. It is incumbent on the GOP to broaden their appeal to key voting blocs or devolve into a regional party.

Democrats have been spectacularly neglectful of their coalition. The problem with being a party of clients, as Cost notes, is that you have to continually deliver once you are rewarded with high office. Republicans have a phenomenal, once-in-a-generation opportunity to wrest portions of traditional Democratic voters away from the party, but to do so they have to cast off the base-election strategy.

By November, gay marriage will not register with swing voters – the economy will. All those funds that were generated for Obama in the last week will have long since been invested in ads, offices and staffers. Democrats took a risk and will be rewarded for it in the long-term — both in this cycle and in future cycles.

The GOP should listen to Goodfriend – he is correct. The Republican party’s support of traditional marriage also extends to their marriage to a dated electoral strategy. Maybe it’s time the GOP contemplated divorce.

Watch the panel discussion below via MSNBC:

RELATED: Survivor: One World Recap: Changing Tides

The episode kicks off with an unbelievable opening which cast a spotlight on each woman left in the game. Bravo production…totally impressive. When the women return to camp Alicia finds herself feeling a little slighted saying that Tarzan, one of her “powers” (whatever that means), has gone home. However, she truly believes that herself Kim, and Christina will be sitting at the end, so she quickly puts these feelings to rest. She claims she has played one hell of a game…will someone please tell me what she has done? Man, this woman drives me insane. While Kim and Sab are walking back from tree mail, Kim suggests that Chelsea should go next and she’s thinking Christina should go to the end. Basically, Christina’s a goat so it’s very tempting to want to keep her around. Anyway, we’ll put this on the back burner for now…

You’re a Beast!

At the immunity challenge, the castaways will race across a balance beam maze and collect 5 bags of puzzle pieces on a suspended net. Once the pieces are collected, they will race to solve a jigsaw puzzle that will provide clues to three numbers. Once they have the numbers, they will use them to solve a combination lock and raise a flag. Winner gets a guaranteed spot in the final four. HUGE. I remember this challenge for me was crucial and also included a balance beam! I’ll never forget what it felt like to hear Jeff say “Ashley, you have a guaranteed 1 in 4 shot of winning 1,000,000 dollars.” Surreal. Back to the challenge, Alicia is now untying other people’s bags of puzzle pieces because she can’t follow directions. Way to give the others a head start! The girls are neck and neck solving the word jigsaw, but Kim, for the third time, pulls this out like the BEAST she is! The other girls should just sit down. Ok, that was mean but seriously! Is she human? The girls return from the challenge and Kim and Chelsea go off to talk…Chelsea feels like Kim has had her back the entire game and feels “safe”…little does she know that Kim is tossing other scenarios around in that smart little brain of hers. Kim tells Alicia that she’s safe and the vote is going toward Chelsea…I mean, it would make sense to keep Alicia and Christina until the end, but at this point, if you completely piss people off you could lose more jury votes, and Kim knows that she already has a few enemies on the jury.

Then There Were Four…

Come tribal council, Jeff is focusing completely on Kim since she has the biggest vote. Kim makes the point of how difficult it is in the game of survivor to separate your heart and emotion from the strategy of the game. When it comes to the vote, it’s clear that it will come down to Alicia or Chelsea. Kim made a promise to Sabrina and Chelsea from day 1 to go to the finals, and she could earn respect back from the jury if she keeps that promise. With that, we go to the vote, and the final four is sealed: Kim, Sabrina, Christina, and……CHELSEA!!!! Looks like the trio will make it afterall! …or will they?

Four’s A Crowd

The great thing about tonight is that we have THREE whole hours of Survivor fun!! I love it…back to back challenges and final tribal coming right up! It’s so close I can almost taste it! Christina of course, realizes she has been played the entire time but isn’t giving up yet. She is going to play up the fact that she hasn’t done anything but ride coat tails … (Which she doesn’t really have to “play up” at all, because everyone already knows that) and that she has zero chances of winning. Prior to the last challenge, the final four pay tribute to their fellow cast mates…I honestly despised this whole thing when we had to do in in Nicaragua. Ha! Simply because it was SO hot that morning and we had to shoot every shot like three times!! By the time the challenge came, we were all completely exhausted! My favorite part of this though, was when they highlighted Colton and we got to see his amazing toe-touch again. Wow…

The final immunity challenge of the season…I’m excited to see what the producers have in store for these four women! But ok…not gonna lie I was a little disappointed that this is what they came up with. Anyway, they will use a long pole to maneuver a wooden bowl through a channel then place it on a platform at the top. The apparatus is attached to a spring which will make it more difficult to maneuver the bowl with it swaying back and forth. The first person to stack all ten bowls on top of each other will win immunity and a guaranteed spot in the finals! So far, Kim is nice at this challenge (shocker!) but Christina is not far behind! Uh oh! Could not be good for the master plan! Just as we’re about to curse at the screen after a Christina victory, Kim takes yet ANOTHER immunity challenge. I sound like a broken record but sorry I’m not sorry. That girl deserves to be in the final three and in my opinion, she deserves to win it all!!

There was really no scrambling whatsoever, and Kim probably earned even more respect from Christina by telling her that she was the next to go. Christina didn’t even fight for it at all, she was like “well, I did well making it to day 38!” Who does that? Doesn’t surprise me coming from her, but I was hoping she would put up a bigger fight….and so was Jeff. It’s painful to listen to Christina answer Jeff’s questions. I’m embarrassed for her actually. How are you NOT going to fight for a spot in the final three; you can’t just lay down and die? I’m glad Jeff didn’t let her off easy…and the result was basically what she wanted…Christina is OUT and the final three is set: Kim, Sabrina, and Chelsea.

Lay It All On The Line

Going into the final arguments, each woman has a solid story and have made close bonds and relationships with individual jury members.

Sabrina is a teacher in Brooklyn who was laid off prior to the show. Kim is recently divorced and throughout this game has regained some of her confidence and belief in herself. Chelsea has been the self-labeled “badass” of the show, but has been able to form great relationships with the men in this game.

Chelsea leads off and is extremely nervous. I honestly didn’t understand what she said. I really loved her in the game, but I think what she said to the jury actually hurt her. Also, am I wrong or was she totally helping Kim in her speech as well? Confused…

Kim started off explaining that she viewed this as a game the entire time, and she only knows how to play one way and that is all out, hard. She had to separate the emotion from the game and my doing that was able to play the most strategic way. She also brought up her family and that’s always a great point to hit to gain some sympathy. Her strategy certainly didn’t stop in the finals…she only got stronger.

Sabrina says that her game was all about balance. She scaled back in some physical challenges and also shared that she was laid off prior to the game. Ugh, I feel for her. If Kim doesn’t win (which I think she will) it HAS be this woman!

The jury went pretty easy on the three of them and I was left wanting more. It’s always SO awkward to watch but there were a few touching moments that are worth writing about. Tarzan thanked the girls for taking him as far as they did and allowing him the opportunity to see his wife of 30 years. I shed a few years at this part…. Also, when Kat spoke I pretty much lost it. She has had two open heart surgeries and her third will be next year…information she didn’t share with the group until now. Wow…the girl that everyone thought was “crazy” has a soft spot and is completely lovable. I’m proud of her for speaking on that issue – I’m sure it was extremely difficult but hats off to her!

After a few more gripes from Alicia and “blah blah blahs” from Christina, the finals votes are cast and we segway into the LIVE REUNION straight from NYC with cute little Jeff coming down the “wooden bridge” carrying the results! I always love to see what everyone looks like with a little makeup, their hair did, and at normal weight. It’s quite fun and this cast is quite hot! You can tell that Sab, Kim, and Chelsea are extremely nervous as Jeff reads the vote…my heart was racing for them!

The winner of Survivor: One World is…….KIM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am SO happy for her….she rightfully deserved to win and I’m glad the jury rewarded her for her gameplay. Sabrina and Chelsea should be super proud for making it to the end…I’m sure it stings a little to make it so close, but they can’t hang their heads. Survivor is a game that can chew you up and spit you out, and those girls hung tough all game! The reunion show had some super awkward moments with Jeff questioning Colton and even his mom about his behavior on the show (Happy Mother’s Day)! Ha! She seemed like a sweet woman though. Also, it came down to Troyzan and Kim for the 100K Fan Favorite vote…guess who took it? Well, starts with a ‘K’ ends with ‘IM’ … She’s ridiculous! Amazing job and another congrats to all of the castaways on an ENTERTAINING and FUN season!!!

Until next time…

Ashley

xoxo

Ashley Underwood was a participant on the CBS hit reality show, Survivor: Redemption Island, and finished as the third runner up. Beyond reality TV, Ashley is a former professional basketball player, former Miss USA contestant, and a registered nurse. Check out her website at www.ashleyunderwoodonline.com, and follow her on Twitter at @AshleyUSurvivor.

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“The warnings were there,” Crumpton told Logan of Bin Laden, who his unit of the CIA had been tasked to find and take out. But he encountered nothing but difficulties, as the Clinton White House seemed not to trust the sources the CIA used to find information in Afghanistan.

Crumpton explained the variety of options at hand for the CIA to use against Bin Laden, though they finally settled on using a Predator to survey Al Qaeda. “We saw a security detail, a convoy, and we saw Bin Laden exit the vehicle [in Kandahar],” Crumpton told Logan. Yet despite the relatively easy access and clear ability to target, as well as the CIA’s desire to take Bin Laden out, Crumpton narrates that “the Clinton administration’s response was, ‘Well, it will take several hours for the TLAMs, the cruise missiles launched from submarines, to reach that objective. So you need to tell us where Bin Laden will be five or six hours from now.’ The frustration was enormous.”

Crumpton answers Logan later that he does think the Predator drone strikes in Pakistan today were designed in part to avoid the time-consuming bureaucracy that led to Bin Laden escaping the CIA many times before. “The handful of CIA officers that we had, in great frustration, we began the discussion of, ‘Okay. We find him again we will have to engage ourselves,’” he notes.

Newsbusters didn’t squander the occasion to point out that Clinton had appeared in an ad precisely about terrorism with President Obama, and given the damage a dead Bin Laden in 1999 would have saved the country, it’s hard to blame the right for tackling an absymal Clinton-era foreign policy record the Obama camp actively brought to the fore in an attempt to throw sand over the highlight of his resume– his exacerbation of the Bush Doctrine. But that doesn’t mean the ad doesn’t make sense for a target audience of Democrats who are highly suspicious of President Obama’s neo-conservative record on foreign policy. Nor does it make this interview with former Deputy Director Crumpton.

The video via CBS below:

Goldberg started out discussing the GOP’s attempt to revive the Hillary Rosen controversy, in which a Democratic strategist made a perfectly legitimate point, and then, in typical Democratic Party fashion, could not stop apologizing for it (she did so again this morning, on Meet The Press). She wondered if the degree to which Republicans have milked the story had turned Ann Romney from a neutral figure into an “insufferable” one.

As I’ve said before, that’s a moot point. Ann Romney is a political spouse, so even if she went around recommending cake to starving people, any whiff of an attack on her is always going to be a net loss. That’s too bad, because after years of Democrats trying to get people to understand that motherhood is political, Ann Romney is the flesh-and-blood embodiment of that concept. As the panel later pointed out, if there’s a “War on Mothers,” it’s in the form of deep-rooted resistance to government policies that might actually help those mothers who lack the privileges that Ann Romney (through no fault or vice of her own) enjoy.

Even if you found Ann Romney’s politicized glee at the faux outrage that the Rosen flap incited, even if you think she’s “insufferable,” hell, even if she is insufferable, you’ll always lose by saying it out loud. That’s because, legitimately, she has a right to be all of those things, and worse (or better), because she’s not running for office. Better to focus on the guy who is.

So I had to force out a laugh when Goldberg described her unease with part of Ann Romney’s Three Seasons of Motherhood. “I found that phrase, the “crown of motherhood,” really kind of creepy,” she said, “not just because of its, like, somewhat you know — it’s kind of usually authoritarian societies that give out The Cross of Motherhood, awards for big families, Stalin did it, Hitler did it…”

It’s funny not just because you can hear millions of outraged heads exploding in advance, but because Michelle positions the Hitler thing as the second-most creepy thing about the phrase. She went on to say “It plays into this thing where  we have this kind of compact in the United States where what we deny women in social support or status or economic security, we make up for in this sort of insipid, condescending praise.”

That’s an excellent point, which Hayes compares to a similar disconnect between our individual reverence for “the troops,” and policies that don’t benefit them.

If nothing else, I learned something new today. The Nazis did, indeed, give out the Mother’s Cross of Honor, while Stalin’s Soviet Union had a whole series of Motherhood Glory medals that you can own for about $600. Who knew that those “World’s Greatest Mom” mugs were an extension of fascist totalitarianism?

For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure if someone tried to award my mom the Mother’s Cross of Honor, or the Motherhood Glory, she’d probably have said something along the lines of “Why don’t you keep your medal, and just clean your room once in awhile?”

Similarly amusing was Chris Hayes’ observation of Ann Romney’s op-ed that “it reads a little like a hostage video,” and that “there’s a core of genuine desperation,” which he gets around to explaining as an acknowledgement that “it is super-hard, she was raising five boys. Without, as admitted by Mitt Romney, much help from Mitt Romney.”

I must admit to feeling some mischief-maker’s guilt at posting this clip, which I could rationalize by saying “Well, if I don’t, someone else will,” but I won’t. (after all, aren’t outrage junkies people, too?) As a media critic, I think this two-minute clip illustrates why I love this show, because all of the annoying weekend political chat cliches that I can’t stand, the posturing, the talking points, the inane, rehearsed doublespeak, and even the hyped-up Crossfire atmosphere of some political panels, fail in this format.

What’s left is that rarest of commodities in cable news, and the media in general: something real.

Here’s the clip, from Up:

The Clt‘s Paul Cameron asked Romney, “You came out in favor of gay adoptions, how does that sway with gay marriage? Some would say that’s a position that’s far left.”

“I think all states but one allow gay adoption,” Romney replied, “so that’s a position which has been decided by most of the state legislature, including my state some time ago, so I simply acknowledge the fact gay adoption is legal.”

While this position seems more in line with Romney’s argument that even a dead straight parent is better than a live gay one, it is still a reversal of his prior historical statements on the subject. Way back in May of this week, Romney told Neil Cavuto that (italics mine) ”in my state individuals of the same sex were able to adopt children. In my view that’s something that people have the right to do. ”

It’s never a surprise to see Mitt Romney flipping like a mattress in a $20 brothel, but in this case, the shift is most welcome, especially to his supporters. Even the faintest bit of credit on gay rights issues could hurt him with his base.

Interestingly, President Obama appears to be using similar sleight of hand on whether gay marriage should be a state issue, making statements that people interpret as an endorsement of states’ rights, but can be re-spun as mere acknowledgement of it.

Here’s the clip, from The Clt:

(h/t ThinkProgress)

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There’s nothing much to this bit at all. Just four grown men running around in giant bubbles trying to kick a soccer ball around an enclosed space. Is it weird and undignified? You bet it is! But the way these four men absolutely commit to this wacky sport is just too funny.

Watch the match below, courtesy of NBC: