On Tuesday’s edition of MSNBC Live, former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell (D) called for President Obama to “man up” and take a position on gay marriage.

Monday morning, while teasing a report on Nicolas Sarkozy’s defeat in the French national election, MSNBC mistakenly labeled the outgoing French president a “prostitute” when the wrong graphic appeared over video of him speaking.

The mistaken chryon read: “The Prostitute Speaks,” presumably referring to the Colombian prostitute who spoke to the Today Show about her Secret Service ordeal.

On Melissa Harris-Perry‘s eponymous MSNBC program Saturday, she hosted a panel that focused on North Carolina’s Amendment 1, which is up for a vote on Tuesday to approve a constitutional amendment to say that a marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic union to be valid and recognized by the state. Perry observed that a leaked memo from the National Organization of Marriage stated that the strategic goal of the amendment was to drive a wedge between gays and blacks, two of President Obama‘s key constituencies.

MSNBC’s Ed Schultz spoke with Real Time‘s Bill Maher Friday night and lamented that he could not give a donation to President Obama‘s reelection campaign or even his Super PAC under his network’s rules.

During Thursday’s edition of The Last Word, host Lawrence O’Donnell described how President Obama has significantly rewritten his position on the decriminalization of marijuana since becoming president.

O’Donnell re-told the story of how at the Summit of the Americas two weeks ago, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos told Obama that “the war on drugs is a failure” and that we should move toward the decriminalization, if not legalization, of marijuana and possibly cocaine. O’Donnell then reminded the audience of Obama’s dodgy response, in which the president said:

Look, most news people are nerds. Seriously, if you’ve lifted weights in the past decade, you could probably head to the nearest journalism school and be swimming in lunch money within an hour. So, I suppose it’s unsurprising that, faced with two big football stories, someone in the MSNBC graphics department mixed up whose picture they were supposed to show. Still, the mistake gets a bit worse when it happens during a story about someone’s tragic death.

As we reported in March, Al Qaeda claimed that Fox News Channel was their least-favorite news outlet, for it “falls into the abyss … and lacks objectivity,” adding that they’d like to see the network “die in her anger.” I’m surprised Fox News hasn’t made promotional commercials based on the laudable distinction of being the terrorist organization’s most-hated network.

On Wednesday, MSNBC’s host of Hardball, Chris Matthews, delved into why he believes the prospect of Mitt Romney as president is something to “fear,” because he believes the former Massachusetts governor is not all that interested in politics or the issues that motivate political commentators. Matthews says that he doubts that if Romney were not running for President that he would be consuming political debate by “watching this network at night.” Furthermore, Matthews says that Romney is a “useful tool” for Republican opinion leaders like Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist or Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol.

At a Commonwealth Club event in April, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow discussed why conservative media outlets are so much more successful than its liberal competitors.

Unlike her conservative competitors, Maddow explains, “I try not to imagine my audience being people who already agree with me. I, in fact, try to imagine a Republican audience.”

Following Saturday night’s White House Correspondents Dinner, MSNBC threw one hell of an afterparty, and all they asked in return was for a few of the attendees to name the blog they thought would be most influential during this election. Alas, in a display of characteristic media narcissism, many took the opportunity to pimp their own outlets’ online offerings, which, even when there’s a strong case to be made, is kinda bad form. Most egregiously, none got the answer right.

One of the main attractions of the annual White House Correspondents Dinner is the extracurricular WHCD party time, whose appeal can be summed up in two words: open bar. On that count, it’s tough to beat the MSNBC afterparty, where, for the past few years, the network’s primetime pillar, Rachel Maddow, has moonlit as Rachel Maddow: International Mixologist of Mystery. This year, Mediaite takes you there to see Rachel show off her mad martini skillz.

The big fight in Congress recently has been over a proposed student loan bill that passed in the House today despite a veto from the White House and almost certain defeat in the Senate. The Republican backed bill manages to make sure that interest rates on federal student loans don’t double in coming months. They did this by going into the new health care law, finding some women’s health funds that were sass-talking too much, and slapping them in the face. Metaphorically speaking that is. Unsurprisingly, Democrats have seized on that, arguing that Republicans would rather cut money for women than raise, say, raise payroll taxes for corporations and those with high incomes (which a competing Democratic bill in the Senate is proposing). These Democrats found a sympathetic ear in Martin Bashir who agreed with this thinking on MSNBC today.

Bill O’Reilly took on President Obama‘s re-election campaign on Thursday night, over an ad that featured MSNBC’s Ed Schultz espousing the president’s stance on student loans. They’re using the network’s personalities in their presentation, he said — a network that is “in the tank” for Obama.

On Thursday, Martin Bashir defended his colleague Andrea Mitchell from Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly who had accused Mitchell of liberal bias on his program. Bashir took O’Reilly to task for a flimsy attempt to tar Mitchell and he landed a punch when he responded to a challenge by O’Reilly to point out a Fox News political reporter who had ever crossed the line and exhibited bias. Bashir proved he was up to the challenge.

The crew over at Fox News have not, for most of the day, taken particularly well to President Obama’s appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last night– nor have many conservatives. On The Last Word tonight, Lawrence O’Donnell expressed no surprise at this line of attack, but some dismay at how it was not blindingly obvious to many arguing against the appearance that so much precedent corroborated its legitimacy– from Ronald Reagan on Dean Martin’s Celebrity Roasts to Richard Nixon hitting up Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.

Even the tamest election nights tend to be a bit busy, and last night NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell sighed exasperatedly at the stress of her job– she had to follow both Mitt Romney‘s and Newt Gingrich‘s speeches simultaneously. Whether she was grumbling over the fact that she had to watch these two Republicans or merely over the strain of the job was a matter of contention on The O’Reilly Factor tonight, where Bill O’Reilly criticized the anchor for being blatantly liberal on many occasions.

University of Colorado student Madalyn Starkey, whose star-struck photo with President Obama went viral on Twitter, dished to Al Sharpton about her fateful encounter, which it turns out was a genuine surprise — and “sweeeeet!”

On Tuesday, MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show bested both CNN’s Piers Morgan and HLN’s Drew Pinsky in combined demo ratings and total viewership. Maddow scored an impressive 221,000 demo viewers, more than any other MSNBC show on Tuesday night.

George Zimmerman, the man who shot Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, has been released from jail on a bond. Zimmerman received the news that he would be allowed to leave jail while the trial process transpires yesterday, with a number of caveats including a high bond payment, curfews, and a GPS monitoring system.

MSNBC’s Alex Witt‘s show, Weekends, carries the same relaxed weekend vibe of the shows that precede her– Up with Chris Hayes and Melissa Harris-Perry, and to enhance the casual feel of the show, she often finds her weekday colleagues buttoned down and asks about the issues in their home offices. In today’s segment of “Office Politics,” she sat down with Rachel Maddow to talk about candidates and their families, a subject Maddow insisted should be as off-limits as possible.

Martin Bashir spent some time talking to Obama 2012 Press Secretary Ben Labolt yesterday, attempting to highlight the absurdity of how conservatives have embraced the fact that, as a child, President Obama ate dog meat. Except Bashir inadvertently ended up sideswiping Sarah Palin in a story in which she had no fault, and claiming that her assertive retort at being “checked out” in 2008 by a Secret Service worker constituted “bragging.”

Rep. Paul Ryan‘s calls for fiscal austerity have not exactly been met with cheers around The Ed Show, as is to be expected. But on the program last night, host Ed Schultz took a look beyond the politics to Rep. Ryan’s interview with Catholic network EWTN, and how the Congressman has explained discrepancies in thought between himself and the church. Joined by Prof. Michael Eric Dyson, Schultz argued that Rep. Ryan’s reliance on the Church for charity was an easy way out, and Dyson argued that taking away safety nets was “antithetical to the fundamental issue of Jesus.”

“I feel like I’m swimming upstream,” meteorologist Paul Douglas told host Chris Hayes today, as he explained he shares two concurrent sets of beliefs that often find themselves in conflict nationally: the belief that the global climate is changing and warming up, and the belief in small government conservatism. Douglas came on Up today to describe how he reconciles what science has taught him with how it is often politicized, and how he expects the private sector, and not the government, will help solve the problem.

Last night’s O’Reilly Factor opened with its eponymous host positing a theory: a schism had begun to form in the mainstream media between hard news and ideological fare, with ABC News’ coverage of the Trayvon Martin tragedy reporting objectively, and NBC News providing a subjective take. After Bill O’Reilly warned NBC News was acting “dangerously” with its coverage, he turned to a veteran of both news organizations, Geraldo Rivera, for his take on the coverage.

NBC has not exactly gotten the best press for its coverage of the Trayvon Martin story. The network broadcast an edited version of George Zimmerman‘s 911 call that left out crucial context, and questions have been raised about Al Sharpton‘s activism on the case while still working under NBC’s corporate umbrella. On his show tonight, Bill O’Reilly contrasted NBC’s coverage with ABC’s, giving much credit to the latter.