RELATED: Mitt Romney Tells Soledad O’Brien: ‘I’m Not Concerned About The Very Poor’

Everybody thinks, ‘Oh, well Mitt Romney, it’s because he’s rich, he’s out of touch, he’s not… doesn’t know how to connect to people.’ I think that’s wrong. I actually think that if Mitt Romney, if you you look at his history, there are a lot of folks in New York and around the world who do and did what Mitt Romney did, and they’re very sociable and relatable — they happen to be very rich, but they also happen to be very sociable and very good at relating to people.

“I think Mitt Romney’s problem,” Ratigan said, “is more that he’s just kind of a weirdo from Boston. It’s less that he’s rich or poor; it’s more that he’s just kind of a strange guy that doesn’t relate to people that well. If he was poor, he wouldn’t relate to people that well, if he’s rich, he doesn’t relate to people that well. He’s just kind of a strange dude.

Romney also wants to be included, Ratigan added, among the “super elite” and the cool kids.

Watch the clip below, courtesy of MSNBC. And be sure to watch to the end, for Joe Scarborough’s pitch-perfect impersonations of Republicans and Democrats:

He opened his program saying: “You see poverty, despair, service jobs or no jobs, you come here, and it’s the globalization of Miami Beach,” Huh? All I saw was Ratigan, sprawled out with guests Krystal Ball, Ari Melber and Touré clad in shades from Persol.

RELATED: Dylan Ratigan To AnimalNY Blog: Occupy Wall Street Has ‘An Opportunity To Transcend Politics’

Continuing their theme of helping out the average Joe, pinched by economic hardships, Touré, pictured here was kicking back by the pool with film star Mickey Rourke. While Rourke did go through a period where he too was looking for work, it seems since The Wrestler, those days are in the past.

Just last October, Ratigan cast himself as an everyman when he visited the Occupy Wall Street protests at Zuccotti Park.

“We are at a moment where it is just ‘us.’ We are just one enormous group of people, not in this square, but in this planet and in this country!” Ratigan exclaimed. “All of us are Tea Partiers on some level, all of us are occupiers, all of us are that intention which is the frustration with the world that lacks fairness.”

I am sure those people were welcome to join in to sit poolside, sipping a mixture of light rum, creme de almond and triple sec from a krazystraw.

Watch 3 clips of Dylan and his entourage celebrating the life of luxury below:

January 23 is also the birthday of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who, it should be noted, only won that one morning, and perhaps most fittingly, late Battleship Potemkin director Sergei Eisenstein. Most DC media types will tell you that they’ve never met a Politico reporter who wouldn’t push a baby down the stairs to get a story.

The nearly six minute video includes roastimonials from the likes of David Gregory, Bob Schieffer, Donald Trump,  Katie Couric, Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, Willie Geist, Diane Sawyer, Tom Brokaw, Candy Crowley, Luke Russert, Greta Van Susteren, Chris Matthews, Jonathan Karl, Andrea Mitchell, Steve Scully, Jamal Simmons, Norah O’Donnell, Erin Burnett, Alex Wagner, Dan Rather, Al Sharpton, Mark Halperin, Dylan Ratigan and Arianna Huffington. FishbowlDC‘s Betsy Rothstein collects some of the funnier quotes:

Politico is “truly a news organization that acts its age: a petulant five-year-old concerned with only trivial matters,” host of “MTP” David Gregory says with a smile.

With a few repeats and some intensive listening, Arianna Huffington can be understood as saying, “Just as I was sitting down to write this, I saw that Mike Allen had already broken what I was going to say.”

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” host Willie Geist remarks, “I’ve gotta recuse myself because I don’t care for Politico, inside the Beltway gossipy garbage. And CBS “Face the Nation” host Bob Schieffer cracks, “The next thing you know, you’ll be getting your driver’s license.”

I don’t know that I can top any of them, but I will add this: Why did the Politico reporter cross the road? I don’t know, but give it 5 minutes, and FishbowlDC will have a plog post about it. Probably without a photo.

Even though we don’t go for this kind of self-promotion, the video is fun, and Politico has earned every second of it. Happy Birthday, Politico.

Also, for some reason, there was a gong.

At the top of the segment, Wagner can be heard whispering an exasperated “Jesus” underneath a clip of Rick Santorum saying “It’s a term I know that people use all the time, called middle class. As if there are classes in America.”

The hook for the segment, as Wagner introduced it (with a charming stumble), was whether the populist rhetoric of Republicans like Santorum and Newt Gingrich is resonating with GOP voters, with Wagner ticking off the candidates’ 99%-unfriendly credentials. “Gingrich is on the advisory board of leverage buy out firm Forstman Little. Perry received more than $7 million from private equity firms, private investment firms, and hedge funds, and Jon Huntsman, Sr., co-founded private equity company Huntsman Gay with former Bain Capital executive Robert Gay.”

However, panelist Dylan Ratigan quickly deployed his trusty “there’s no difference between the President and the Republicans,” citing the appointments of financial sector bigwigs Bill Daley and Jack Lew as White House Chiefs of Staff.

Martin Bashir then pivoted the conversation to campaign finance, by asking fellow panelist former Gov. Ed Rendell “How much money did you raise for your campaigns, Governor?”

That sent Ratigan into a (spot-on) rant about the “naive belief” that overturning Citizens United would eliminate the corrupting influence of money in politics. “You have to acknowledge the second issue, which is money in speech and the 77 issue with Buckley Valeo…”

“Dylan, you are getting deep.” Wagner said.

“It’s time to get deep.”

Ratigan’s off-the-chain enthusiasm issues, a key to his appeal, is often undercut by his unrealistic expectations, exemplified by his assertion that President Obama has no more claim to a populist message than Republicans do. “The suggestion that this (fake populism) is a right-wing issue or ‘Oh, my goodness look at the foolish Republicans, can you believe it?’”

“But his numbers are going up.” Wagner interjected

“And the President is a sensational manipulator of information, allows him to be an effective leader. But when you see the restoration of capitol requirements, it’s not that I do not think it, it’s an observable fact that there’s no exchange for swaps.”

So, because President Obama hasn’t been able to turn back the tide of a zillion-dollar financial market with the wave of Dodd/Frank’s magic wand, he’s exactly the same as the Republicans? To quote Michael Corleone, “Now who’s being naive, Kay?”

Gov. Rendell may have had the line of the day, though, proclaiming, “No one is more unabashed in their for love for Dylan than me, except, perhaps, for thousands of women.”

More to the point, though, he asked “If Dodd-Frank did nothing, why in God’s name are they fighting so hard to get rid of it?”

“Slippery slope.” Ratigan replied.

“Don’t you have to start, a journey of a thousand miles…” Wagner interjected, before the tail end of the segment devolved into an argument between Ratigan and Politico‘s Ben White, who pointed out that capital requirements are on the table.

Since its debut in November, I haven’t had many opportunities to catch my former White House colleague’s show, but if this crackling, funny panel segment is any indication, I’ll start making a point to.

Here’s the clip, from MSNBC:

Too often, the SOP on internet comment threads is simply to try and make them as non-vile as possible, but the beauty of Keli Goff’s rant is that it moves those goalposts, and asks critics to actually add value to the conversation.

Goff began by saying that criticism doesn’t bother her, as it’s a sign that people are reading, and thinking about, what she’s written. “If you’re a writer and no one’s criticizing your work, that means very few people are actually reading it,” she said.

“One thing that does get under my skin when it comes to my critics,” Goff continued, “is poorly crafted criticism.”

She then offered some helpful tips to making criticisms that actually have some value.

“First and foremost,” Goff said, “actually read what you’re talking about. I’ve lost count of how many times someone has sent me a letter or left a comment, taking me to task for not saying something in a column. Only, I did say it, in the second paragraph, which the person apparently didn’t bother reading.”

She points out that sites like Gawker have taken to banning commenters who display such laziness. While many sites have a “more is more” attitude toward comments, I’m all for this kind of quality control.

I would add a similarly irksome brand of comment to this point, the “Well, where were you when x did y and z?” Challenging the consistency of a writer’s argument, without actually checking to see if the writer has been consistent, is lazy, and is rarely accompanied by a substantive disagreement.

Goff also instructs critics to explain why they disagree with the writer. “If you say, I disagree with your piece because you neglected to mention x, which contradicts y, you’ve just taught somebody something new, and probably made his work product better in the process.”

She concludes by advising would-be critics to “be funny” if at all possible, but not before cautioning against name-calling, which is a particular bug at many websites. Comments of a personally insulting nature are not just off-putting, they can ruin a site for all the good readers. This is especially true at a site like Mediaite, where readers have a unique opportunity to communicate, not just with our writers, but with the media figures we cover. Mainstream news personalities and producers are avid readers of Mediaite, and if the comments section is inviting and constructive, they’ll be avid readers of it, as well.

However, when they’ve got to pick through 20 or 30 pieces of nonsense (or worse) to find anyone who’s truly interested in offering substantive criticism, it trains them to ignore the comments, and it trains good readers not to waste their time.

Keli Goff says “Bravo” to Gawker for its comments policy, but I say “Brava!” to Goff for challenging (usually anonymous) critics to contribute something of value to the discussion, rather than simply push the limits of what will get them banned.

Here’s Keli Goff’s rant, from The Dylan Ratigan Show:

RELATED: Goldie Taylor Inspired To Share Her Own Story Of Sexual Abuse By Anger Over Penn St. Scandal

“This is not an easy thing for anybody,” a visibly distressed Williams said. “I think a lot of Americans probably have been mentally and sexually abused in their lives, I was. And you don’t know what it’s like until it happens to you and you don’t know how to react until you react. I didn’t do anything about it, I didn’t do a damn thing about it. Nothing, for years, I let it keep happening. And you know what — it didn’t make me gay, it didn’t make me screwed up in the head, it didn’t make me volatile. It’s just a part of my life.”

“Chris Matthews said something very interesting on his show,” Williams continued. “That when you walk into an institution, and you let them tell you how to live your morals and your life, then you’ll fail, because you’ve been to what they’re telling you to do. I went to the Citadel as an undergraduate, and the whole point of the Citadel is to walk into that school, let them break you down and build you up into, quote, the citizen soldier. I let them do that to a large degree, but i sure as hell kept a lot of Jimmy Williams in there. I don’t know what that kid or those ten kids went through, I know what i went through. I didn’t tell my parents or my priest, I didn’t tell anybody. I moved on with my life. doesn’t make that kid better than me or me better than her or whoever it is but you don’t know until it happens to you. if you know about it, you’ve got a duty to tell people and if you don’t, you’re just as bad as the person violating that kid.”

You could cut the emotional tension in the room with a knife and like fellow MSNBC contributor Goldie Taylor, Williams deserves credit for revealing a sensitive, personal story with his television audience that clearly has deeply affected him.

Watch Williams tell his personal account below via MSNBC:

For one, says Pfarrer, there are simply too many “official” versions of what happened in Abbottabad that night. For example, after President Obama addressed the nation with details of bin Laden’s capture and death, various politicians came forward with “disconnected, contradictory facts” of their own. The result, says Pfarrer, is that, by August, these disparate account metastasized into “an ugly tale of murder” rather than a special military operation.

How can one tell the difference between the two?

RELATED: Details Emerge On Secret Navy Seal Team That Killed Osama Bin Laden

Well, let’s look at it this way: You’ve got two helicopters approaching the target. You know, I’m not giving away any tactics to tell you that the high ground is where you want to go. One helicopter goes down, allegedly, on insertion. That’s why you have two helicopters. Why wouldn’t the second helicopter land on the roof, which is the nub of the operation? And am I really to believe that the second helicopter diverted to put its guys down on the other side of a 20-foot wall with a 10-foot steel gate? It just, it doesn’t float.

Pfarrer also noted that, in most high-profile missions, the goal is to capture the target, not to make sure this person is killed, calling the order to “kill some guy no matter what” an “unlawful order.”

The author also notes that he had to sift through various accounts from people who had different perspectives on how, exactly, the mission was accomplished, with people from certain agencies “really trying to sell me their stories.” He said he is concerned with how accounts of the mission coming from the White House and the government inadvertently painted the SEAL Team Six members’ actions as not only “sloppy,” but also downright criminal.

RELATED: Clinton On Shocked Expression In Bin Laden Sit Room Photo: May Have Been ‘Preventing A Cough’

As for that increasingly iconic photo of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others in the administration reacting, supposedly, to news of bin Laden’s death… Pfarrer says the photo more likely depicts footage of the helicopter that went down, adding that there’s no such thing as a “helmet cam” for such soldiers. Instead, footage of the mission most likely takes the form of an overhead view.

It’s worth noting that National Journal correspondent and The Atlantic contributor Marc Ambinder Tweeted that contentions Pfarrer makes in his book have been contested:

Have a look, via MSNBC:

Horowitz, who laughingly summed up his experience succinctly by saying “the level of indignity I’m willing to suffer for you people knows no bounds,” opened his footage with a clip of a Marilyn Manson lookalike who couldn’t stop twitching. However, that might give the audience the wrong idea about the protesters so Horowitz compassionately reminds the viewer, in his narration, that “Ok, they weren’t all like that.” He then cuts to a girl in a nose ring and an interview with someone who appears to be on drugs.

Look, this is just the latest in the long line of videos from Conservative media figures who are just trying to make the protesters look bad. Do you think Andrew Breitbart or the Red Eye guys are really giving us an unbiased depiction? Of course not. They’re just looking for the silliest dressed people to film. Obviously there are professional looking folks there. Like, for instance, all the Liberal media figures who are down there filming footage to make the protests look heroic! I mean, look how nicely Dylan Ratigan is dressed. Why can’t they interview him?

Basically, there’s a clear lesson to take away from this. If you really want an unbiased view of what’s going on at these protests, you’re probably going to need to go down to one yourself.

That being said, it’s a good thing Beck sent someone to go in his stead. He and New York crowds don’t mix well and no one wants any more wine getting wasted.

Watch the clip from GBTV below:

Schultz accepted Ratigan’s apology, and lampooned his own fiery persona by mock-yelling, “And I wanna tell you something else!”

The pair went on to discuss how they can “create the debate America deserves.”

Schultz argued the merits of incremental progress, versus the frustration with the scale of the problem that Ratigan expresses.

They concluded with an exchange of collegial respect, and a recognition of their respective passions. “We’re two dogs in the yard,” Ratigan said.

Here’s the clip, from MSNBC:

When Ratigan tried to interrupt, Schultz was having none of it. Ratigan protested, “but I want to address…” to which Schultz replied, “I don’t care what you want to address, I didn’t interrupt you!”

Ratigan apologized, and a piqued Schultz paused, and before continuing, asked, “Do I have the floor?”

Schultz went on to explain that the President’s plan puts “several million people back to work,” to which Ratigan interjected, “1.2 million,” (a lowball estimate. The President cited an independent analysis that puts the number at 1.9 million) to which a frustrated Schultz replied, “It’s a start! Where’s the Republican start?”

Ratigan, again, cut in. “Ed, did you hear what I just said?”

Schultz replied, “I gotta go back and do my radio show, I’m not going to be interrupted by Dylan,” and ended his participation in the segment.

While Ratigan allowed for President Obama’s good intentions, Schultz was clearly frustrated with his colleague’s seesaw framing of the American Jobs Act as a problem for both parties, framing it as a choice between “either a million jobs for Obama to get re-elected, or torpedos a million jobs in order to get the Republicans in.”

Schultz was essentially pointing out that there’s a big difference between a guy who has a plan to start building Rome, but not in a day, and a party that fiddles as it sets fire to that plan.

Here’s the clip, from MSNBC:

If Ratigan is to be believed, the Occupy Wall Street movement far exceeds the known reaches of politics, encompassing wholly the “principles of our humanity that are being breached by the bought government.”

“This movement has an opportunity to transcend politics,” he tells Turco, who asked about the potential of the movement as compared to the Tea Party. ”We are at a moment where it is just ‘us.’ We are just one enormous group of people, not in this square, but in this planet and in this country. All of us are Tea Partiers on some level, all of us are occupiers, all of us are that intention which is the frustration with the world that lacks fairness,” he continued.

Professing profound faith in the movement’s energy and potential, he says, “I can’t speak for myself, I could get hit by a bus walking home tonight, but I can speak for the permanence of the energy here.”

Check out the rest of AnimalNY’s Occupy Wall Street coverage here, and watch Turco’s full interview with Ratigan below:

“I love what you’re doing!” he told several of those gathered, before sharing that he himself is attempting to start a debate about the “unholy alliance” between business and state. “And so my argument to you guys,” he continued, offering his own possible solution, “is that we have an opportunity to convert the energy that you’ve already harnessed into a channel, a flow of energy into next year where we can push collectively for a constitutional amendment to get the money out.” (Later on in the segment, he rather comically reveals that the protesters weren’t terribly keen on his idea.)

At one point during the weekend, Ratigan participated in the demonstrators’ general assembly meeting, where he chanted “My name is Dylan! I live five blocks from here! I think you people are crazy! I love the way you communicate! I’m here because I agree with you!”

He also made a few new friends, including, evidently, a Tea Party member from Texas. Check it out:

Later on in the show, Ratigan’s “Mega Panel” discussion eventually circled back to the Tea Party movement. “When the Tea Party emerged, I was a Tea Partier,” Ratigan shared, “and I was, like, ‘The government is screwing this whole thing up and we have to reject the ability to buy the government.’” He had also thought that Obama’s professed commitment to change would couple with the Tea Party’s “rage and rebelliousness” to enact some sort of transformation within government… and when that didn’t happen, he explained, he decided to “launch” himself into the Occupy Wall Street movement, hoping that this protest, now, finally, will lead to change.

He then took issue with a panelist’s insinuation that the Tea Party is not “genuinely organic” like the Occupy Wall Street protest. Ratigan argued that the Tea Party was indeed very organic and genuine… before it was co-opted and “bought.”

Have a look, via MSNBC:

Touré discussed the Davis case, with its lack of DNA evidence and witness recantations, and compared it to the other execution in the past few days, that of Lawrence Brewer, a white supremacist who has been unrepentant about his 1998 torture and murder of a black man. Touré pointed out that, while it may seem that Brewer would be a perfect candidate for execution, he didn’t think either man should have been killed by the state.

“The way a nation treats its prisoners, says much about who it is. America is one of the last nations in the world to still employ the death penalty even though it cripples our status as a world moral leader and is barbaric and is not uniformly applied and is subject to bias and is rife with error and sometimes leads to the execution of people we’re not completely certain actually committed the crime. How could that happen? We’re just human and we need to end the death penalty and get out of the business of playing God.”

Ratigan said he “agreed completely” with Touré’s point and that the issue was with “that bloodlust crowd and the bloodlust politics.”

So, what do you all think of Touré’s argument? It’s a debate that brings up a lot of passion (quite possibly for evolutionary reasons).

Of course, that doesn’t mean things need to get mean in our comments section! Right?

Watch the video from MSNBC below:

Below are some highlights in the Political Mediasphere Blame Game over the past month that say little about who is actually to blame for our current economic woes (other than, of course, “everyone”) and a lot about how easily recyclable political narratives can be.

It’s Barack Obama’s Fault For Being Too Flimsy

Used By: Bill Maher, Chris Matthews, John Boehner

As both the left and the right attacked President Obama for being ill-equipped to negotiate with the Republicans, there are two variances of this attack. The on on the left came from those who believed the President to be giving up too much by agreeing not to increase federal revenue, as Matthews notes by calling the President too “cute” and “coy,” and Maher highlighted with his signature “uncomfortably racist, even if he is a liberal” joke-cracking (pun intended).

Then there is House Speaker John Boehner, who railed angrily against the President and Congressional Democrats to “put something on the table” in Congress or simply accept the Republican plan. Of course, this line of argument doesn’t make the President out to be a weakling so much as a whiner who would rather criticize the Republican plan without doing the work of offering an alternative. It would be an effective argument, except for the fact that Congressional Democrats did put something on the table.

It’s John Boehner’s Fault For Being Too Flimsy

Used By: The Tea Party

A rare argument to find during the debt debate, but there were some elements of the Tea Party who were more than ready to dismiss the Speaker of the House for not being steadfast enough in negotiating with the Democrats. Take, for example, Jenny Beth Martin of the Tea Party Patriots, who accused the Speaker of “compromising with our values” by agreeing to raise the debt ceiling, a move some elements of the right found absolutely unacceptable.

It’s Barack Obama’s Fault For Being Too Stubborn

Used By: John Boehner

While it may seem to be a bit of a contradiction to argue that the President was too flimsy in not offering any solution to the problem and too stubborn to accept the solution, Speaker Boehner used both attacks, the latter with far more efficiency. Arguing that the President would “not take yes for an answer” in his response to the President’s first national address on the matter, he suggested that the argument that it was he holding up talks was entirely false, and that the President was to blame for not wanting to sit down and talk things through. The Rep. Eric Cantor “don’t call my bluff” private incident did little to clear up who was really being the holdout here.

It’s John Boehner’s Fault For Being Too Stubborn

Used By: The White House, Rachel Maddow

Unsurprisingly, “intransigence” became one of the premier buzzwords of the debt crisis debate, not the least because it became the White House’s official position that the Republicans were acting like children. While House Majority Leader Eric Cantor got the brunt of it for the bizarre private incident with the President, the House Speaker, by leading the party, took as much as he received from his right for being too willing to negotiate. In light of the S&P downgrade last weekend, Maddow came out swinging against Republicans, arguing that their “any deal is a bad deal” philosophy was to blame. But long before that, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was accusing Republicans of “juvenile” antics to get what they wanted.

NEXT PAGE: The Tea Party Pile-Up

Williams yelled:

“The Tea Party doesn’t exist. . . . Anybody that thinks the Tea Party exists is smoking crack cocaine in America. It’s nothing more than the far right wing of the Republican party and they’re wagging the dog’s tail right now.”

Regardless, Ratigan was still impressed that the “Republicans, politically in terms of manipulating and accumulating power, are whooping ass” with their “scorched earth agenda.” And others on the panel credited the Tea Party with not only forcing the current debt debate, but also likely being able to secure major spending cuts. Yet anytime the word “Tea Party” was mentioned, Williams clearly was not pleased, and ultimately he concluded with this fiery demand: “I want the Republicans to own their damn people!”

Watch the clip from MSNBC below:

“You know the embattled ship of Casey Anthony’s life will founder again. This story’s not over. She’s a troubled person and karma will catch up with her. Many link her to OJ Simpson who, like her, might have gotten away with murder. But he ended up in prison anyway. Karma’s a dogged beast with an elephant’s memory so, Cacey, watch out.”

Touré went on to say that he thought it doubtful that Anthony would end up with a big book or TV deal any time soon as she’s too “radioactive” at the moment.

Watch the clip from MSNBC below:

Galifianakis was on Real Time last night to promote his new movie, though he appreciated the irony since it comes out next week, and today is the last day of the history of the world. With that in mind, heroin probably didn’t seem like such a bad idea, and Maher, who had a needle ready with “heroin” “like the cooking shows,” gladly shot him up. And that was only the beginning of the panel. Acting “high” after the “heroin,” Galifianakis was a bit slow on the uptake with several questions thrown at him, including “would you work with Arnold Schwarzenegger?” (“As his maid?” Galifianakis replied), and “what do you think about when you masturbate?” He was mostly quiet for the rest of the segment, which was a crash course in sex scandals beginning with Schwarzenegger’s and ending on the pedophilia scandals in the Catholic church.

Maher acknowledged that, as bad as Schwarzenegger’s case was, “the French are more rapey than we are,” though he attributed the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal to some misused Cialis (some on the panel were even more flexible than that– MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan argued that “when there’s a woman in the room, a man wants to have sex with her,” which made co-panelist Gillian Tett a bit uneasy). Where the panel seemed to have no leniency whatsoever was with the Catholic Church for its investigative findings showing that the 1960s were mostly responsible for their scandals– panelist Reza Aslan pointed out that this happened to be the era of Vatican II, which Pope Benedict XVI had never been too great a fan of.

The segment via HBO below:

Touré began his monologue arguing with a bit of confusion that it would be Common, of all people, to rile up the conservatives. Describing him as a “sometime vegan who dates tennis star Serena Williams, supports animal rights, AIDS awareness, and is committed to not putting anti-gay slurs in his lyrics,” he wondered how inviting Common to the White House could possibly prove that President Obama is a “caucasian-hatin Malcolm X in disguise.” In fact, he argued, Common was one of the most “kind, gentle, humble, poetic, and intellectual people in music today,” and actively refuses to participate in the  “violent and materialistic cliches that make some rappers so easy to demonize.”

Then he went straight to the lyrics: “I hold up a peace sign and carry a gun.” “You would think conservatives would applaud that,” Touré argued, the idea of wishing for peace but keeping a weapon, like so many NRA members preach. Not to mention the army of more violent artists that have visited the White House, like Eazy-E of NWA and, er, Johnny Cash, “a great American who sang about shooting a man just to watch him die.”

Bottom line for Touré? The Common controversy has nothing to do with Common. “It keeps some people from having to talk about Obama’s success in killing bin Laden.”

His segment via MSNBC below:

i want to see this country and all the places ive dreamed of and whether its the paps or being pulled into politics its been frustrating

As he reads Bieber’s tweet, Ratigan confesses to having just learned that “paps” means “paparazzi” (as opposed to, say, several trips to Walgreens), then deadpans into the camera that Bieber should be happy he’s holed up in a hotel room, instead of (dramatic pause) “in a bomb shelter.”

Fight the power, Dylan!

In fairness to Bieber, who’s only 16 years old, Ratigan seems to have skipped over some of Bieber’s earlier tweets:

You would think paparazzi would have some respect in holy places. All I wanted was the chance to walk where jesus did here in isreal.

They should be ashamed of themselves. Take pictures of me eating but not in a place of prayer, ridiculous

People wait their whole lives for opportunities like this, why would they want to take that experience away from someone

Yeah, what a prick.

Watch the clip below, courtesy of MSNBC:

In a good-natured nod to Olbermann’s famous ego, Rachel Maddow told Uygur, “You realize we all will now have to live in that house forever!”

Here’s the clip, including the toss to The Rachel Maddow Show:

From tonight’s appearance, it appears as though Cenk Uygur might be the next to “graduate” from the progressive farm system onto MSNBC’s regular lineup. Moving up from fill-in duty for Dylan Ratigan, Cenk’s performance on Countdown was smooth and self-assured, devoid of the hiccups that often accompany a guest-hosting spot. The Young Turks would certainly be a forward-leaning fit between The Ed Show and Countdown, where reruns of Hardball now reside.

Writing for Politics Daily, Lewis opines:

It was a good time and a great debate, but the comment that caught my attention most didn’t come from a panelist, but rather from Ratigan, himself, who said, “I consider myself a conservative.”

Ratigan went on to clarify, adding that, “you can do whatever you want. The social [issues] … I could care less. …”

Sadly, Ratigan didn’t get to finish explaining, but it was still an interesting moment — if for no other reason that that it is generally assumed that most MSNBC hosts are liberal Democrats.

Personally, I’ve always found Ratigan to be more of an intellectually honest, cynical iconoclast who is hard to pigeonhole. While he clearly has some conservative leanings, I was surprised to hear him describe himself as “a conservative.”

An “intellectually honest, cynical iconoclast who is hard to pigeonhole” sounds about right. Watch the brief clip below.

The following segment from The Daily Show proves yet again, that its way more fun and interesting to cover the reporters, journalists and commentators of political news, than it is to actually cover political news. After pointing out how President Obama appears to have somewhat given up on his pledge to focus on the commonalities between political rivals, he then showed how the analysts at Fox News and MSNBC strangely had the opposite opinion of how the President did (one can guess how that specifically worked out.)

He then showed a clip of Sean Hannity clearly removing the context of a portion of the President’s speech regarding increased tax rates in a pretty damning bit of commentary to the Fox News prime time host. The heart of Stewart’s commentary can best be summed up as follows:

“Starting clips later and cutting them off before the speaker finished the thoughts full construction can be a useful tool in helping your audience understand what you want them to think. It’s a fun and easy way to make people you disagree with say things that make them unelectable. Not that the Republicans need any help making themselves unelectable.”

The coda to the segment? Mocking CNN’s Rick Sanchez for his seeming school-girl crush on Twitter messages. Watch the clip below.