On Thursday afternoon’s Now with Alex Wagner, host Alex Wagner and panel employed a bit of pop psychology on presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, musing about how his parents’ political careers may have shaped his own political style. Conservative columnist S.E. Cupp tried to help out by demonstrating that perhaps Gov. Romney hadn’t been turned gun-shy by mother Lenore Romney‘s Senate run, or father George Romney‘s presidential bid.

In a panel discussion on President Barack Obama’s attacks institution of Wall Street in his campaign, Huffington Post political reporter Sam Stein said that Wall Street traders who have turned against Obama as a result of his rhetoric are “thinned-skinned.” The MSNBC panel said that Wall Streeters should be grateful that their industry was not nationalized and financial professionals were not locked into “stockades” in the wake of the crash of 2008.

MSNBC anchor Alex Wagner hosted a panel discussion on the resurrection of the “birther debate” by two elected officials in Arizona. She said that the investigations into President Barack Obama’s birth certificate are being conducted by “crazy people.”

The Catholic archdiocese of New York, headed by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, as well as more than 40 other Catholic diocese and organizations around the country, announced on Monday that they were suing the Obama administration for violating their constitutionally protected religious rights due to contraception mandates contained within the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. In an MSNBC panel discussion on the matter, Salon.com editor Joan Walsh said that it was the Catholic bishops that were imposing on the religious freedoms of most Americans who support those mandates.

New York Daily News Columnist S.E. Cupp and The Daily Show co-creator Lizz Winstead debated the impact of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s religiosity scared voters in 2008 in an MSNBC panel discussion on a Republican PAC’s plan to attack President Obama as a “metro-sexual black Abe Lincoln.” Winstead asserted that Palin’s praying at a Pentecostal church in 2008 “scares people.” Cupp fired back that praying is something “people do every Sunday.”

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.

On Monday’s Now with Alex Wagner, the subject of Our First Gay President, Barack Obama, touched on John Heilemann‘s assertion, in New York Magazine, that “with Wall Street having largely dried up as a source of largesse,” Big Gay has become a huge pillar in the President’s fundraising apparatus. Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi disagreed that Wall Street has abandoned Obama, and when host Alex Wagner gave him the facts, said “I don’t believe that.”

Believe it, Matt.

With President Obama’s announcement of support for same-sex marriage still at the top of the news cycle, today’s Now with Alex Wagner panel debated the significance of the announcement and whether the hype, particularly a certain Newsweek cover, was somewhat overblown. Georgetown Prof. Michael Eric Dyson thought the hype was on par with the significance, taking the Newsweek ball and running with it, asserting that President Obama’s declaration of support for gay marriage “forced us all to come out of closets.”

MSNBC’s Now with Alex Wagner had a panel discussion about Mitt Romney’s bullying episode as revealed in the Washington Post on Friday. They said that Romney appears callous and cruel in his discussion of the event from his childhood. The panel also discussed a recent ad by a pro-Obama Super PAC that is running with the notion that Mitt Romney is a homophobic bully. What a fitting message for the Obama campaign: to appeal to American’s sense of victimization. It is a prevalent sense that is deleterious to the state of the nation, but the campaign will do whatever it takes to win.

On Thursday’s Now with Alex Wagner on MSNBC, New York Daily News columnist S.E. Cupp weighed in on President Barack Obama’s revelatory interview with ABC News in which he confirmed that he did support same-sex marriage rights. Cupp questioned whether the moment was politically driven, more by the need for donations from the gay rights community than by belief in the cause of gay marriage. Also, she said that gay and lesbian Americans should rethink just how much Obama did for them by opening up in this way. Cupp said, “If I’m in the gay rights community, am I really happy that this is a president who just said, ‘well, I’ve finally decided to like you guys. I’ve decided I accept you people.”

Ana Kasparian, co-host of The Young Turks, apparently suffers from an all-too-common malady: Fox News Legs Syndrome. During a segment on Friday’s web-0nly portion of the Current TV hit featuring Bob Beckel playing pot/kettle with Joy Behar‘s looks, Kasparian confessed that The Five co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle‘s legs were “distracting” to her, a condition which host Cenk Uygur noted is common among Fox News viewers.

Thomas Mann, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein appeared on MSNBC’s Now with Alex Wagner on Wednesday to discuss their new book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How The American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism. They lamented the state of Republican politics and Mann advocated for “mandatory attendance at the polls” as a means of reinforcing centrism on the Congress. But this alarming recommendation, as well as the claim that the GOP has shifted more to the right than the Democratic party has shifted to the left, requires some measure of rebuke.

30 Rock actor Alec Baldwin joined Lawrence O’Donnell on Tuesday night, alongside Alex Wagner, to analyze the 2012 election. Baldwin, who’s not shy about sharing his political opinions, noted that Republicans seem to be “getting scared” about the election because they know it’s not looking good for them.

President Obama revealed his new reelection campaign slogan on Monday: “Forward.” On Now with Alex Wagner, the MSNBC panel dissected the latest shift in messaging from the Obama campaign and praised the contextualizing nature of the theme. Wagner described it as a “look back, but an emphasis towards the future.”

On Tuesday, an MSNBC panel on Now With Alex Wagner attacked tea party representatives in Congress. Buzzfeed editor and former Politico editor Ben Smith called many tea party representatives “flotsam” that “had no business being elected.” He said the “counter-revolution has arrived” and cautioned political observers to “enjoy Rep. Allen West (R-FL) while you got him.”

On Tuesday, Daily Rundown host Chuck Todd invited columnist S.E. Cupp, MSNBC host Alex Wagner and Time magazine’s Nancy Gibb onto the panel to discuss what, exactly, the vice presidency is all about.

On MSNBC’s Now with Alex Wagner, New York Daily News columnist S.E. Cupp and Wagner’s panel got into a heated exchange over controversial remarks made by Ted Nugent about Democrats and President Barack Obama. Cupp, while not defending Nugent’s remarks, made it clear that President George W. Bush had it bad and there is a “double standard on this issue,” while Wagner said criticism of Bush was made in a “more lighthearted fashion.”

On Tuesday, Alex Wagner’s MSNBC panel tackled the heated Republican primary race between five-term Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) and Indiana State Treasurer Richard Murdoch. The panel seemed to view the intraparty Republican feud as a continuation of the GOP’s rightward-drift ever farther away from the center of the American electorate. New York Daily News Columnist S.E. Cupp, however, had the temerity to suggest that the Republican party was pushed in that direction by the opposition – an assertion that was met with near revulsion by her fellow left-leaning panelists.

A panel discussion on MSNBC’s Now With Alex Wagner tackled what some view as the politicization of sports figures, particularly former Denver Broncos Quarterback, Tim Tebow, who on Sunday delivered an Easter sermon at a Texas church. The panel also examined the victory by golfer Florida native Bubba Watson in the Masters tournament and wonders if ‘New Yorkers’ can relate to openly religious and Southern sports figures. While the panel appeared even-handed in their commentary on Tebow and Watson, Wagner could not seem to contain her resentment that there is a Tebow craze to begin with.

The panel discussion on Now With Alex Wagner verged on the absurd this afternoon as the panelists, composed wholly of women with the notable exception of fellow MSNBC host Martin Bashir, sought to provide likely GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney with some sincere advice on how to ameliorate his and his party’s problems with the female electorate. Their conclusion, however, was essentially that he and his party have no hope and should just stop trying.

…Surprise!

On Wednesday, Inside Cable News released an in-depth, multi-part report on MSNBC’s failed rebranding effort to a news and information destination in the dayside and the cable network’s subsequent rebirth into one dominated by progressive opinion and analysis.

On MSNBC’s Now With Alex Wagner, fellow MSNBC host Rachel Maddow discussed her new book, the power of the presidency and how the Reagan administration was particularly adept at leveraging patriotic aggression for partisan gain.

Appearing on MSNBC’s Now with Alex Wagner, former White House advisor Van Jones said that embracing gay marriage, or even being gay himself, would not lose President Obama any support among African Americans.

On her show’s “Postscript” segment, Alex Wagner addressed Tennessee’s abortion bill that would publish names of doctors who perform abortions, and disclose details about women who have undergone the procedure. Wagner decried the legislation as “reproductive McCarthyism,” saying it would “make Big Brother proud.”

When you watch as much cable news as me, after a while you start noticing little patterns in news reporting — on Thursday, the prevailing meme on MSNBC was the number of times the candidates uttered the word jobs at the previous night’s debate in Mesa, Arizona. This factoid was brought up no less than three times on three separate shows!