The passing of legendary disco singer and one of America’s first dance music icons Donna Summer received an immediate, mournful reaction today. On MSNBC today, Andrea Mitchell sat down with Touré to get his take on the impact Summer and disco music had on American culture in general. Praising her “big, lush, beautiful voice,” he chided the anti-disco movement as something political, forcing those who enjoyed it to “get back in the closet.”

The media have been enthralled this week with the story of Eduardo Saverin, onetime Facebook founder and current millionaire/fictional Aaron Sorkin tragic figure. He gave up his American citizenship earlier in the week allegedly to avoid paying up to like $67 million in taxes (according to Sens. Chuck Schumer and Bob Casey), and now the Senators are planning to legislate the problem away, as only senators can. During a press conference this morning, Schumer and Casey unveiled the “Ex-PATRIOT Act,” specifically designed to prevent “outrages” like Saverin’s move to Singapore.

Business Insider reports that on Wednesday in St. Petersburg, Florida, presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney began campaigning with an interesting prop behind him: a large, real-time debt clock, tracking the American debt and each individual taxpayer’s share of it. During his speech, with the debt clock ticking away behind him, Romney rightfully blamed both parties for our rapidly-growing national debt. It’s a serious problem that neither party seems willing to address. But this prop is obnoxious. It is incredibly dishonest for Romney to scare people about the debt when, in reality, he has absolutely no serious plan to cut spending and reduce the national debt.

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.

In a panel discussion on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews on a surprise, come-from-behind victory in the Republican Senatorial primary race in Nebraska where local rancher Deb Fischer defeated Republican Secretary of State Jon Burning, a conversation over the impact of money in politics became heated. In the end, a Republican Super PAC representative schooled Matthew’s and his guest from the Center for American Progress on the impact of money in politics and how it results in a better informed electorate. He’s right.

Today on The Five, the gang was discussing super rich people (finally someone gives air time to that poor, under-represented group!) like Mark Zuckerberg and Robert Downey Jr., with Eric Bolling complaining about how software billionaires get to be cool but bankers can’t, a serious societal problem if there ever was one. At the end of the segment, he began explaining the interesting fact that “the new hipster” now likes money. Dana Perino was confused. Oddly enough though, she wasn’t just wondering what on earth he was talking about, but what on earth a “hipster” is.

Vice President Joe Biden, scourge of sculpted campaigns and defiler of the photo-op, has once again made himself the story with a true Howard Beale moment. On Wednesday, at a campaign stop in Youngstown, Ohio, Biden grabbed his audience by the lapels and projected copious wads of ferocious saliva in their faces as he enumerated the myriad reasons why they should be—er, I mean, why he’s outraged over the state of American politics.

In what may be the most unintentionally accurate summation of how political partisanship works, former Obama green jobs adviser Van Jones recently told C-SPAN’s Book TV that he didn’t protest during the 2010 BP oil spill because Barack Obama was president. Jones admitted that had John McCain or George Bush (or, we can assume, any Republican) been president during the disaster, “I’d have been out there with a sign protesting.”

This week, Newsweek dubbed President Obama the “first gay president,” but it is difficult to believe that anyone would take them seriously. Enter Paul Cameron, expert on homosexuality for the Family Research Institute, who won’t say he completely believes President Obama is gay, but told the Voice of Christian Youth radio show Crosstalk last week that his declaration “lends credence” to “various people” who claim the President “has at least participated at times with them in homosexual acts.”

CNN reports that President Obama will deliver his Democratic nomination acceptance speech the same night in September as the MTV Video Music Awards.

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:

Well… this was unexpected. Gov. Chris Christie, as a poll released this week clearly showed, may be one of the most popular politicians in New Jersey history—challenged in that positive spotlight only be Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s exploits saving people from fires by hand and driving around town shoveling snow. In a comedy sketch released by Christie this week, he pokes fun at his frustration with Booker’s apparent superhero antics until he finds the one thing Booker can’t handle: a call from Mitt Romney.

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.

Obama For America Campaign National Press Sec. Ben LaBolt squared off with CNN anchor Ashleigh Banfield on Tuesday in a contentious interview. Banfield took LaBolt to task over several assertions made in the most recent ad that focuses on Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain and a factory which had its assets sold off and its workers laid off in the early 2000s. What follows was a heated session in which Banfield seemed troubled that she could not get LaBolt to admit the Obama campaign stretched the facts in this latest ad.

This morning, Mediaite’s own Tommy Christopher stopped by Current TV’s Full Court Press with Bill Press. Both he and Press were amused by the lukewarm endorsement Mitt Romney got from Pat Robertson, an endorsement that could basically be paraphrased as “Sure he’s not Jesus but what’re ya gonna do?” Christopher found it especially funny considering, as he argued, even if Jesus were running, he’d never make it through a Republican Primary.

Breaking News: someone mentioned Keith Olbermann on television! This was a major development in the Olbersphere today, and Olbermann, via his Twitter account, snapped at the opportunity like a fry near the surface of the ocean tempted by the most alluring chum the anglers above could offer. Today the inadvertent target was Fox & Friends‘ Gretchen Carlson, who noted that she had been on the “Power Players” edition of Jeopardy! with Olbermann. For her high insolence, Olbermann tweeted, “that’s why they let her into Final Jeopardy as a Mercy Play.”

On Monday, Alex Wagner invited fellow MSNBC hosts Martin Bashir and Al Sharpton on her midday program to discuss the political impact of Obama’s support for gay marriage as registered in a new CBS/New York Times poll: the verdict in the poll was that the news is not good for team Obama. In fact, the news was so bad that Bashir took to arguing with the respondents have “accused” Obama of making a political calculation. Those voters, Shaprton said, should be “smarter” than to think Obama won political points with his pivot. Their resentment is, well, misguided.

MSNBC’s Chuck Todd is likely very accustomed to criticism for his politics from all sides– after all, that’s what the job entails. What he perhaps wasn’t expecting this morning is that Fernando Fiore, host of the most popular sports show on Univisión, took umbrage at his report on the President’s schedule, in which he jokingly promised never to talk about soccer again.

It’s amazing how quickly momentous occasions can become nothing but polling topics in the world of politics. Heck, Osama bin Laden only got to be a corpse for a few magical minutes before he and the photos of him became a Thing to be Debated™. So, when a sitting President of the United States of America actually comes out and says the gay people should be married (an unquestionably positive thing if you’re not, y’know, reading this post from either a cave or time machine), it only makes sense that the cable news channels wasted no time in looking at it beyond the prism of American history, and purely through the prism of November 2012. And, nearly a week later, we’re still discussing it in fiery segments like this Fox News panel in which Obama was accused of throwing the entire black community “under the bus.”

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.

Larry Winget, author of Shut Up, Stop Whining, And Get A Life, appeared on Fox & Friends on Tuesday where he delivered the single least inspirational faux graduation speech you will ever hear.

This weekend, Will Ferrell made a triumphant return to the Saturday Night Live stage and brought with him his impression of former President George W. Bush which he made famous for years on the show (and even for a limited run on Broadway!). Today, on The Five, the gang talked about the sketch with everyone giving it and Ferrell high marks. However, most of them found reason to complain that SNL doesn’t seem to have nearly as much fun making fun of President Obama.

Has this ever happened to you? Someone tells you a story and you immediately respond, “Oh, man, that sounds like the worst romantic comedy ever. Who’s in it?” and then they say, “No, this isn’t a movie. This is something that’s really happening in New York politics.” and then you don’t say anything and then everyone gets quiet and sad? Well, that’s what just happened to us after hearing about the New York man who’s decided to campaign against his own wife of 32 years that he’s now separated from.

With Time magazine sucking up all the buzz from last week with its controversial cover featuring a breastfeeding mother, Newsweek has decided to up the ante with a cover this week declaring President Obama “the first gay president.” “If President Clinton was the ‘first black president’ then Obama earns every stripe in that ‘gaylo’ with [...]