Andrew Breitbart took the podium at CPAC Friday afternoon, to Rage Against The Machine’s Guerilla Radio, and revealed he had “videos” of Barack Obama from his college days. “I have videos, this election we’re going to vet him,” Breitbart disclosed to the crowd to raucous applause. “We are going to vet him from his college days to show you why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008.”

Perhaps moreso than many of the conference’s guests over the years, Andrew Breitbart has emerged as a uniquely revered figure at CPAC, partly for his ability to work the CPAC crowd over the job President Obama has done while in office. But much of it has to do with his work at CPAC outside of his speeches– namely, his ability to engage just about anybody. Last night, Breitbart walked outside the hotel hosting the conference to attempt a chat with irate Occupy protesters, demanding they “behave yourselves” and “stop raping people.”

Ever since Andrew Breitbart reminded Occupy protesters at CPAC that their movement had a serious sexual harassment and rape problem, Breitbart and many in his company have been repeatedly making the point as a reminder to a public that has mostly forgotten that Occupy exists that they are not, in the aggregate, the most serious group of political dissenters. This has gotten the attention of some of the lower-tier fringe left, with the latest of these being noted political scholar Alec Baldwin, who added this veritable contribution to politics today: “Andrew Breitbart is a festering boil on the anus of public discourse.”

Conservative media provocateur Andrew Breitbart made news at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference by hectoring Occupy DC protesters with cries of “Stop raping people!” On Tuesday night’s The Young Turks, host Cenk Uygur challenged Breitbart over his rant, and his assertions that the mainstream media hasn’t been covering sexual assaults at Occupy protests. Breitbart told Uygur his rant was “a stunt to go over the mainstream media, to get people talking about the rapes.”

MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell took a look at Ann Coulter‘s joke-filled CPAC speech about Mitt Romney. “Ann Coulter is once again re-writing Ann Coulter,” he said, “on the subject of Mitt Romney.”

RedState managing editor Erick Erickson has a bit of gentle advice for young men (and more than a few of the young women) in attendance at this year’s CPAC: Grow up.

Sarah Palin took the stage tonight with plenty of anticipation preceding her– after bowing out of a potential presidential run, Palin has taken something of a backseat to an increasingly unexpected series of characters at the helm of the Republican Party, and she returned in the rare form that made her a star in 2008. Shouting down Occupy protesters, making punchlines out of Obama Campaign slogans, and winning over a crowd that spent a year trying to warm up to Mitt Romney.

Tax reduction crusader Grover Norquist took the helm at CPAC earlier this evening with a fiery speech reminding CPAC attendees to keep their eye on the ball in reducing taxes and giving them a game plan as to how to promote conservatism to the best of their ability. The plan included plenty of what one would expect: refusing to sit at the table with Democrats to increase taxes and going on a state by state plan to flip Democratic leadership in each of the “fifty of fifty-seven states, who’s counting?”

For the past three years, the CPAC straw poll has been purely theoretical, with a presidential election actually far out of sight. Those three were won by Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Ron Paul, and Ron Paul. This year, to break the habit, Romney has won again, and what that means for the elections, as they are currently underway, is unclear, but it’s a good way for Romney to end the week.

Did you know that Jimmy McMillan, onetime New York gubernatorial candidate for the “Rent is Too Damn High Party,” is also running for President this year, as a Republican apparently? Yes sir, he is, and he took his campaign all the way to the Conservative Political Action Convention today, crashing an event at a hotel conference room there to command everyone there to “renounce every Republican Presidential candidate” and just endorse him or he “will vote for Barack Obama.” It gets better from there.

At Washington DC’s Marriott Wardman Park Hotel last night, one of several Occupy DC protests escalated into a clash with Metro Police, as a group of more than a hundred protesters made their way onto the grounds of the hotel, the site of the Conservative Political Action Conference. The police, in part of a disturbing pattern, used force and threats of arrest to keep reporters away, and even detained at least one credentialed CPAC blogger.

Mitt Romney spent a good deal of his speech time at CPAC this week trying to convince voters that he was conservative. “Severely conservative,” in fact. Whether that worked, however, is a topic of conjecture, and Rachel Maddow, in particular, doubts that it did. Speaking to guest Dave Weigel last night, both agreed that it appeared an uphill battle for Romney, with Weigel going further in that Tuesday’s primaries coupled with CPAC (not exactly his home turf) doesn’t make him “look like a winner.”

Often when talk about the best or greatest things in pop culture arises, nostalgia tends to things that, in real time, were not nearly as resplendently wonderful as they seem years down the line. If anyone ever considered that this may be the case for the single greatest debate show in history, Crossfire, Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala blew those doubts away. In a three-round “boxing match,” the two went over issues as varied as whether “America should kill all of its enemies everywhere” and word association games with “God” and “Newt Gingrich.”

I will be the first to admit that I did not see the sudden resurgence of Love Connection host Chuck Woolery coming. No, the host was a beloved apolitical memory for most of these years, and the Chuck Norris-esque conservative return caught me by surprise. Yet his appearance at CPAC has sparked something of a resurgence as the former host launches a campaign to install term limits in Congress– a campaign that has endorsed the most conservative candidate in the race, “all of them.”

One of the best things about the Conservative Political Action Conference is the apparently buttoned-down atmosphere in which the most memorable stars and names tend to not be the presidential candidates and national figures we see on television every day, but bloggers and artists that work mainly on the internet. One of the worst things about CPAC is, well, exactly the same thing. Take, for instance, this performance of a “founding fathers rap” that, to some, is simply an unfortunately unfunny endeavor, but others are already slamming as racially problematic.

Returning to TV the day after both she and her preferred presidential candidate took the stage at CPAC, Ann Coulter stopped by Fox & Friends this morning to discuss the recent Rick Santorum mini-surge and her conviction that Mitt Romney must be the next president. She also fended off the now-usual criticism of Romney as a moderate by pointing out his stances on immigration and why being tough with illegal immigrants was of vital importance: “if we lose on that issue, the entire country will become California and no Republican will ever win an national election.”

On day two of the Conservative Political Action Conference, Occupy DC created a few disturbances. A group of several hundred protesters tried to advance on the Marriott Wardman Park hotel, but were turned away by police, who also threatened to arrest Slate’s Dave Weigel. A bit later, a group  of about 20 Occupiers managed to crash the hotel, chanting “We are the 99%!”

They were quickly removed by police and hotel security, to heckling from CPAC attendees.

While addressing the CPAC crowd today, GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney made sure to bump up his conservative credentials, telling his audience, for instance, that he would fight for a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as a relationship between a woman and a man and reminding them that he has previously vetoed a bill “that would have opened the door to cloning and embryo farming.”

He also spoke about the challenges he’d faced as the Republican governor of a blue state, Massachusetts.

During his speech to CPAC on Friday, Republican hopeful Mitt Romney ostentatiously flouted his social conservative credentials to a receptive audience. “Now, you may recall that during my term in office, our conservative values came under attack, less than one year after I took office, the Supreme Court found a right to same-sex marriage in the constitution written by John Adams!” Romney riffed. “I presume he would be surprised! I fought to have a stay on that decision, then pushed for a marriage amendment. We lost by only one vote. I successfully prohibited out- of-state couples from coming to our state, and getting married. We fought hard and prevented Massachusetts from becoming the Las Vegas of gay marriage!”

>Columnist-cum-Presidential roaster Ann Coulter took to the CPAC stage Friday, where she spoke at length about President Barack Obama.

CNN’s Early Start welcomed Jimmy LaSalvia and Chris Barron — founders of gay conservative group GOProud — to the show on Friday morning, and hit on several issues with the duo, including how they can reconcile their political beliefs with some of those held by certain GOP candidates.

Conservative Christian comedian Brad Stine has been described as “a clean Denis Leary,” which basically means that he YELLS A LOT but only yells words WITHOUT FOUR LETTERS. As such, he was the PERFECT GUY to send CPAC attendees off before the day’s big dinner. To close off HIS SET, he explained that the ONLY THING missing from the conservative movement right now was “the COMEDY FACTOR,” as people like Jon Stewart and Bill Maher were spreading liberal messages far and wide. He told the audience that they needed TO RALLY TOGETHER to spread the truth about the LIBERAL WUSSIFICATION OF AMERICA. Some examples of wussification that Stine attacked were AIR BAGS and CHILDREN’s BIKES THAT AREN’T CLEARLY DESIGNED FOR ONE GENDER OR ANOTHER.

The Conservative Political Action Conference is like the 4th of July, Mardi Gras, and Festivus all rolled up in one for conservatives, and it draws a galaxy of right-leaning stars. Despite a late arrival, I managed to wander across one of the biggest of them all: former Love Connection and Scrabble host Chuck Woolery. Turns out, he’s here to Restart Congress, and he’s no fan of President Obama.

During a CPAC panel discussion on the Obama Administration’s new controversial contraception rule, conservative commentator Cal Thomas slammed MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. “I think that she is the best argument in favor of her parent’s using contraception,” he said. “I would be all for that! And all of the rest of the crowd at MSNBC, too, for that matter.”

Wondering how you can follow along with today’s CPAC discussions? Fret not; we’ve got you covered with livestream footage of this year’s Conservative Political Action Coverage.