During an appearance on Meet the Press, Newark Mayor Cory Booker decried “nauseating” campaign tactics coming from both parties, singling out in particular attacks from the Obama campaign on Mitt Romney’s private sector experience at Bain Capital. Well, Booker slightly backtracked from his remarks on YouTube, explaining that while he may have an issue with how negative the race has become, he thinks Romney’s ties to Bain Capital are certainly fair game for the Obama campaign, and even encouraged them to look into the Republican candidate’s business past.

A recent study has found a connection between grocery shopping habits and consumer attitudes. You may either find this news shocking, not surprising in the least, or a load of crap, but in any case, last week the journal of Social Psychology and Personality Science published a study finding that purchasing organic food may make people act like “jerks.” In other words, people who go organic tend to have harsher moral judgments of others and reduced prosocial behavior.

As technology progresses, business models change. Consumer habits make way for new avenues to watch media. And yet, it seems that even with the rise of the internet, there has been a rather lethargic embrace of an ever-expanding online audience from the broadcast networks. Fewer people watch TV shows live anymore when they know they’re going to be able to watch it tomorrow on Hulu. Services like Hulu and Netflix draw in more people to shows past and present, which could be a great boon to the networks, if only they learned to fully embrace it.

You know what we haven’t had in a while? A good old fashioned town hall moment. There haven’t really been that many since the health care town halls in 2009, but yesterday, Congressman Joe Walsh heard some interesting opinions from a constituent. A woman interrupted Walsh to complain about the “seditious behavior” of people in elected office, and said that Obama should be honest about his political philosophy. What is that philosophy? According to this woman, “socialism… communism, Nazism, whatever.”

Campbell Brown, former news anchor for CNN and NBC, has an op-ed in today’s New York Times calling out President Obama for sounding too “paternalistic” and “maddeningly off point” when he talks about women in this economy. She advised that the president to drop his “tone that can come across as grating and even condescending,” explaining that many women don’t want to be “patted on the head” by politicians pandering to them, they want “a chance to succeed based on their talent and skills.”

Speaking at a Republican party event in South Carolina over the weekend, Florida Senator Marco Rubio called President Obama a divisive leader, and accused the Commander-in-Chief of being a “very different person” now than he was in 2008. Rubio told the crowd that he has “not seen such a divisive figure in modern American history than we have over the last three and one-half years.”

In what seemed to have been a surprise to many in attendance, Mark Zuckerberg married his longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan at a small wedding in their backyard today. According to People, “Guests thought they were coming over for a surprise party to celebrate Chan’s graduation from UCSF medical school” but apparently Zuckerberg and Chan had [...]

This weekend’s NATO summit in Chicago has already attracted some unsavory behavior from protesters, as the AP reports today that three protesters have been arrested for conspiracy to commit acts of terror after police discovered a plan to make Molotov cocktails to throw into the Obama Campaign headquarters and Mayor Rahm Emanuel‘s house, an arrest their defense attorney called “propaganda to create a climate of fear.”

After a tense diplomatic standoff between the US State Department and China following his attempt to escape house arrest, Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng and his immediate family are on a plane to New Jersey today after receiving sanctuary from the United States. Chen, who is best known for his activism against China’s One Child Policy, was reportedly not told where he was going until arriving at the airport, but had faith that he was leaving for the United States.

Remember the good ol’ days, when you went to the movie theaters and got to see a short propaganda reel before the main feature? Well, now our propaganda may no longer be relegated to films like Battleship, because an amendment added to a new defense bill will reverse a long-standing ban on disseminating propaganda materials in the United States. Supporters of the amendment argue that such propaganda is needed to combat propaganda being spread online by al-Qaeda.

Who says Republicans are against cutting spending from programs their constituents favor? On Friday, the Appropriations Committee in the House of Representatives voted to approve cuts to the Department of Defense’s budget which had been spent on recruitment sponsorships to motor sports and fishing. In a betrayal of Shakespearean proportions, as Politico notes, the final blow to the Pentagon’s NASCAR budget came from a Republican representative from Georgia.

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

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

For the last two weeks, much of the media focus has been on same-sex marriage, especially since President Obama completed his so-called “evolution” on the issue. This led to some pretty heated debates on cable news pitting pro-gay marriage pundits against conservative Christian leaders. And whether it was Rep. Barney Frank versus Tony Perkins, or Piers Morgan versus Bill Donohue, the socially conservative pundit’s point usually boiled down to this: We cannot take seriously any gay rights issues because homosexuality is a choice.

Earlier today, we reported that Ken Bennett, Arizona’s secretary of state, appears to have taken a turn toward birtherism. Bennett, apparently in response to constituents’ requests, has reached out to the state of Hawaii to verify President Barack Obama‘s birth certificate. Without said verification, Bennett said it’s “possible” he’d take Obama off the state’s ballot.

In an interview with West Virginia’s WTOV on Thursday, Vice President Joe Biden was asked about the results of the state’s recent Democratic primary in which a federal inmate running against President Barack Obama received more than 40 percent of the vote. Biden told WTOV that he did not blame the voters of West Virginia’s Democrats, and said “they’re frustrated, they’re angry.”

If Rush Limbaugh hadn’t already made up his mind about the Trayvon Martin case (which he probably has for a while now), the new evidence released in the last few days would have been enough for him to declare George Zimmerman innocent. Describing the new information and pictures, Limbaugh argued that the story “was falling apart” and had become “the Duke Lacrosse case all over again.”

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

Hundreds of pages of documents released yesterday in the Trayvon Martin case shed new light on a number of important aspects of the investigation . Maybe most importantly, it seems clear that George Zimmerman took a beating. Probably a pretty bad one. Bloody lacerations on his head, grass stains on his back, a “swollen” or “broken” nose and more than one witness claiming to have seen what must have been Martin on top of Zimmerman during the altercation, all support Zimmerman’s longstanding claim.

Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) is seeking a 22nd term in the House of Representatives, but he will not be receiving any support from former President Bill Clinton this year. A report in the New York Post on Friday reveals that Clinton will be sitting this cycle out and will not be making an endorsement in New York’s 15th congressional district’s Democratic primary.

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

Yesterday, there was a bit of hoopla over a 1991 bio of President Barack Obama, in which a literary agent incorrectly wrote he was born in Kenya — fuel to the birther fire, without a doubt. Now, Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett is taking things a little further: threatening to keep Obama’s name off the state’s ballot in November if he doesn’t get confirmation from Hawaii that Obama’s birth certificate is valid. Bennett said he’s responding to constituents’ request, and isn’t a birther himself.

As we previously reported, hip-hop artist and mogul-of-many-things Jay-Z told CNN Monday that he supports President Obama‘s recent decision to back same-sex marriage, calling it “the right thing to do.” Now another successful rapper, T.I., has joined the chorus, telling MTV this week that “you should be able to do whatever you want to do.”

Over the last few day’s we’ve been getting newly released information about the Trayvon Martin case. Today in particular, Special Prosecutor Angela Corey made public a cache of documents, and we also posted newly public photos of George Zimmerman, taken the night of the shooting. Now, we have surveillance video from 7-Eleven.

Special Prosecutor Angela Corey‘s newly released wealth of documents are the latest piece of the puzzle the public’s received about the Trayvon Martin case. Prior to that, we saw ABC News’ report that George Zimmerman‘s medical records support his account of a broken nose and scalp injuries. Now, among newly public information, we have some additional photos of Zimmerman.

As both the prosecution and defense prepares for the upcoming trial of George Zimmerman, we in the public are gradually getting more and more pieces in the puzzle of what happened the night Trayvon Martin was shot and killed. Two days ago, ABC released medical records of Zimmerman that seemed to support his claims that he was injured in a scuffle with Martin. This afternoon a wealth of new evidence has been released by Special Prosecutor Angela Corey’s office.