On Friday, the Morning Joe crew took a look into their crystal ball (sponsored by Starbucks) and glimpsed ahead into what the future may hold for big-name Democrats. Is current Vice President Joe Biden gearing up to run for another presidential run? Would President Barack Obama do well to tap Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to be his 2012 running mate? Would either stand a chance if Boo were to seek the nomination?

Yesterday, we told you how NBC’s Andrea Mitchell had reported that “the rap on Iowa” is that the state is “too white, too evangelical, too rural” to accurately reflect the nation as a whole when it comes to voters. RELATED: NBC’s Andrea Mitchell: The Rap On Iowa? ‘Too White, Too Evangelical, Too Rural’ The comment [...]

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell offered a rather blunt analysis of Iowa as she covered the state’s upcoming caucus race for Nightly News.

“The rap on Iowa,” she said. “It doesn’t represent the rest of the country… too white, too evangelical, too rural. Still here, politics are personal.”

Newly “unaffiliated” mogul and reality television star Donald Trump called in to Fox and Friends Monday morning to discuss his plans for a third party run, taking some time to weigh in on a recent move by Texas-based activists to create a “Make America Great Again” party.

It seems almost impossible that this much time has elapsed, but we have finally reached the year in which we can legitimately start speculating about the 2012 elections is finally here. Goodbye, democratically generous but economically frugal 2011! Hello, somehow-already-tumultuous 2012! Want to join the million or so revelers ringing in the new year in Times Square? The video of the first seconds of the year below.

As we enter the new year, the most important question on people’s mind is whether or not the world will officially end as we know it by next December. But let’s face it, if 2012 is really going to bring about end times (because we should clearly be basing our plans for the end on the Mayan calendar), it’s going to have a tough act to follow. Many people are writing up 2011 as the year of this or the year of that, but let’s keep things in perspective here: 2011 was the year that the world descended into random chaos.

It’s fair to say that President Obama and Congressional Republicans have not had the best relationship over the past several years. Speaker of the House John Boehner has acknowledged in the past few months that while he still maintains a good relationship with the Commander-in-Chief, it has been getting “frosty” as of late. Some political analysts have predicted that because of Obama’s decreased popularity, running against an even more unpopular Congress could be a winning strategy in 2012.

For those of you who thought Sarah Palin was done being a part of this presidential race, think again! When asked during a tele-town hall organized by the Faith and Freedom Coalition whether he would consider the former Alaska governor as his running mate in 2012, Newt Gingrich explained that he would definitely consider her for that position.

President Obama has been arguing recently that not only is the economy going to take more time to come away from the crevasse, but that it would take more than one term and even more than one president to deal with the problem. Chris Wallace reminded viewers that Obama said himself he would be a one-term president if the economy didn’t turn around, and discussed Obama’s handling of the crisis with the panel.

Who: Richard Just, Jodi Kantor, Ryan Lizza, moderated by Franklin Foer
What: “The Year of the Herminator: A Panel of Reporters Explain the Weirdest Republican Primary Ever”
Where: New America NYC
When: December 8, 2011
Thumbs: Way Up

When I first read that the DNC had released another ad beating the dead horse that is the “Mitt-flopping” narrative, my first thought was that they really need to call the guy who made this ad, which breaks fresh ground in the campaign against Mitt Romney. Then, I caught a bit of the ad on Hardball, and was shocked to see the ad make cheap use of an old Ronald Reagan clip. I was even more shocked to learn that I’m apparently the only one who cares.

Judging by the latest effort put out by the DNC, it appears that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is still very much considered to be President Obama‘s most challenging foe in the 2012 general election. Mitt Vs. Mitt is the latest effort to portray Romney as an individual who appears to have been unwilling to stand on principles on a number of hot-button issues: reproductive rights, economic stimulus, even the legacy of Ronald Regan, at least as he’s portrayed in the following campaign.

The Rep. Michele Bachmann-Jimmy Fallon “Lyin’ Ass Bitch” controversy may be over, but Rep. Bachmann doesn’t sound too happy about its conclusion. Speaking to KLIF Radio this week, the New York Daily News reported the Republican presidential candidate said she “of course” accepted the apology from NBC’s Senior Vice President of Programming, but nonetheless considered it a result of a double-standard that the President of NBC himself did not send her a message.

It’s been a few months since the 2012 Republican candidates have been together for a debate on CNN (though only three days since the last debate generally), and this time, the candidates will be questioned by moderator Wolf Blitzer on foreign policy issues. With Newt Gingrich entering the debate as a frontrunner and Mitt Romney debuting his first major gaffe earlier today, there’s much to follow in this debate. Watch the whole thing with us at 8PM below!

New Republican frontrunner Newt Gingrich owes much of his newfound popularity to the fact that he repeatedly challenged moderators at debates, rather than turning on other candidates. On The O’Reilly Factor tonight, show regular Bernie Goldberg defied common conservative wisdom by questioning Gingrich’s latest foray into telling the media how to do their job, asking host Bill O’Reilly to clarify what CBS’ Scott Pelley did wrong in asking whether Gingrich would kill American-born terrorists overseas.

Sen. John McCain has been one of the most vocal Republicans speaking out against mistreatment of enemy combatants since the topic became salient once again upon the beginning of the War on Terror and, naturally, he was not happy to see his party so willing to use waterboarding techniques in interrogations in last Saturday’s debate. “Of course I am disappointed,” he told host John King on CNN today, arguing that waterboarding was “an affront to all the standards that we believe in” and clearly illegal as per the Geneva Conventions.

Ron Paul continues to make the case that he would be a good conservative challenger to President Obama in next year’s election, but as the congressman explained on Fox News Sunday today, he would be reluctant to support anyone else for the Republican nomination without first making sure they agreed with his principles of limited government.

On This Week today, George Will claimed that if President Obama should be hoping that the Congressional supercommittee convened to come up with a bipartisan plan to balance the budget and deal with high unemployment will fail, because he can’t run against a do-nothing Congress in 2012 if the public sees Congress is actually doing something. Christiane Amanpour showed a new ABC/Washington Post poll that shows that President Obama and the Republican Congress are roughly given the same amount of trust, 40 percent, when it comes to the issue of job creation.

On Fox News Sunday today, Chris Wallace asked Republican candidate Rick Perry about his decision to possibly skip one or more of the upcoming presidential debates. Perry argued that the number of debates being held was a bit much and seemed to indicate he could afford to brush off a few.

“I don’t want for a second for anyone to think that we didn’t screw up.” It’s been quite a long time since a presidential candidate uttered a sentence like that, but then again, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson never seemed to get a handle on what catering to Republicans during a presidential campaign consists of. Take, for example, the event that led to this declaration: his campaign completely forgetting to file for the New Hampshire ballot, resulting in a red eye from Arizona and rushing to sign into the primary a hair before the deadline.

This is the second week in a row I have watched the Sunday talk shows and been bombarded by more Chris Christie coverage than I was expecting. The prospect of Christie running for president is certainly an interesting one, but I can’t think of any candidate (not counting ex-governors of Alaska) who has garnered the kind of speculative media coverage that the New Jersey governor has received over the past several months.

On Face the Nation today, Governors Haley Barbour and Martin O’Malley got into a heated discussion over the Republican presidential candidates and whether the upcoming election would be a referendum on the economic policies of President Obama or not. Bob Schieffer asked Barbour why Republicans are so dissatisfied with the current Republican field of candidates.

After suggesting Republican voters were being “promiscuous” for cycling through their favorite candidates (or “flavors of the week”) in the presidential race, Bill Maher wondered how a hypothetical candidacy by none other than Jesus Christ would play out in modern times.

New Jersey governor Chris Christie finally broke his silence since rumors of a presidential run returned out of nowhere this weekend, speaking at the Reagan Library in California. Making the core of his speech the virtues of “leadership and compromise,” Christie delivered a speech demanding President Obama accomplish more, because “his failure is our failure, too.” It is not a garden variety gubernatorial speech, but it’s not exactly a campaign speech– striking square in Sarah Palin Iowa territory. His answer to the question? Christie directed everyone to a Politico compilation of him saying “no” repeatedly.

On Meet the Press today, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg weighed in on the Republican race for the presidency and whether New Jersey Governor Chris Christie would make a good candidate to go up against Barack Obama.