President Obama’s traditional Super Bowl interview has come and gone, leaving barely two hours before the nation takes a forced respite from politics to watch the New York Giants take on the New England Patriots in what is growing to be a rivalry of several chapters. The President sat down with Matt Lauer this year in the White House and chatted about the likelihood of a good game tonight, but also answered questions about tension between Israel and Iran and made a pitch for why he deserves a second term.

It’s no secret that a number of us here at Mediaite have professed our love for NBC’s thursday night comedy block (which is currently suffering from a lack of Community), so naturally, the video below is chock-full of so many awesome people, places, and things, there are lit’rally (read in Rob Lowe‘s voice) no words to describe it.

ARE YOU READY FOR SOME POLITICS? Today’s Super Bowl is set to be a pretty intense one between the Giants and the Patriots, but let’s face it, we’re also tuning in for the ads. And according to POLITICO, tonight we are going to be bombarded by a storm of political ads. One of the latest issues to become a political football (ba dum tsss) has been abortion, given the widespread controversy this week over Planned Parenthood and the Komen Foundation. And now the FCC has ruled that one station has the right to refuse to air an anti-abortion ad during tonight’s game.

Lana Del Rey‘s lips (as portrayed to perfection by Kristen Wiig — which is especially interesting considering how many Twitterers wondered whether the performance was actually just a sketch starring Wiig) visited Saturday Night Live‘s Weekend Update to address the criticism hurled her away after her “stiff, distant and weird” performance three weeks ago.

Saturday Night Live brings us a glimpse into a not-so-distant future, a future when Barack Obama‘s second term leads us into a nightmarish socialist dystopia. Luckily, Newt Gingrich‘s vision for a moon colony became a reality.

It’s a fact of life that NBC has the best sitcoms currently airing on network TV (If you disagree with that fact, you might as well stop reading this post now. Here are some wacky Two and a Half Men bloopers to watch instead). Unfortunately, those sitcoms are stuck on the absolute ratings sink hole that is NBC. So, unfortunately, brilliant shows like Community get taken off the air and 30 Rock is stuck hitting an all time rating low. Fortunately, we don’t cover sitcom ratings here at Mediaite so I can pretend to live in a fantasy world where people on the street walk around with Parks and Recreation merchandise instead of the sad world I live in where I literally see people everywhere wearing…sigh…“Bazinga” shirts. So, to continue to fuel my fantasy, I’m going to pretend that there are people out there who are really excited to watch this hilarious 30 Rock webisode!

Hooray, delusion!

On Tuesday night, First Lady Michelle Obama visited NBC’s Tonight Show, chatting with host Jay Leno about her “Let’s Move” health initiative.

She also shared that, for her birthday, her mom baked her a red velvet cake (it really is the best kind of cake, folks — the “secret” ingredient is vinegar) with the help of First Daughters Sasha and Malia.

Obviously, we as a culture are on the brink of collapse. Where, at one point, American creativity was personified by Mark Twain and the invention of jazz, now we have Kim Kardashian and the invention of vajazzling. Basically, we are finished. All we need is that last push, that one last event to send us flying over the edge and into the pit of own making. And, recently, news has surfaced that NBC has elected themselves as the ones to put American society out of its misery. However, at the last minute, the network has changed its mind, opting to postpone our creative death till another time.

Yes, they’ve decided to pull the episode of Fear Factor where contestants drank donkey semen.

The Mitt Romney campaign released a scathingly simple ad today attacking Newt Gingrich– a simple, unadulterated news report by Tom Brokaw detailing his fall into disgrace. Now both Brokaw and NBC News are calling for the removal of the ad, the former noting he is “extremely uncomfortable” with his presence in the ad.

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich appeared on NBC’s Today show this morning, where he told Ann Curry that, if Nancy Pelosi knows something about him that would keep him from becoming president, she should simply “spit it out.”

The View‘s Elisabeth Hasselbeck is none too happy with how the folks at NBC handled last night’s GOP debate in Florida, calling the debate “crappy” and accusing the network of displaying an anti-Republican bias.

After a few rounds of questioning where the candidates discussed the 2008 housing crisis, the Iranian political situation, a couple of new moderators and a 3 AM phone call that Fidel Castro is dead, the candidates finally got to chatting about illegal immigration, and the first question– a general one asking for a solution– went to Mitt Romney. He began with a simple answer to the 12 million and counting displaced foreign nationals: “self-deportation.”

“Lord knows everyone knows each other by now,” Brian Williams noted as the start of this first debate in Florida. And the debate did start off at a pace that felt absolutely glacial compared to the fireworks within the first minute of last Thursday’s. But after a few warmup rounds, Mitt Romney started landing blows on Newt Gingrich‘s career at Freddie Mac as an “historian,” and had him cornered until Gingrich piped up and asked, “What was the gross revenue of Bain while you were working there?”

Who could have thought a week ago that the Republican presidential landscape would have changed so dramatically from then to now? As we inch nearer and nearer to Florida, each previous state has chosen a difference candidate, and the latest winner, Newt Gingrich, is going into tonight’s debate a volatile frontrunner. Many suggest he owes much of his newfound support to the debates, and with that in mind, today’s event presents that much more of a chance for every other candidate to jump in and rack up some points. The remaining four (Buddy Roemer, as usual, uninvited), will meet tonight at 9PM Eastern Time for a debate co-hosted by NBC, the National Journal, and the Tampa Bay Times.

The Tonight Show with Jay Leno has never been known known for having particularly “edgy” humor. That’s probably why it’s the only comedy show on NBC that most of America will actually watch (You don’t listen to the mean regular people, Community. We still love you!). Take for example a recent barb thrown Mitt Romney’s way; a joke whose vicious premise seems to be that, hey, that Romney guy is kind of rich, huh? It wasn’t exactly the most biting of satire. However, something went wrong along the way and the joke has somehow created an international incident with India’s Sikh community.

On the heels of last night’s news that his ex-wife Marianne would be sitting down for a revealing (and damning) interview about him, GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich spoke with Today co-host Ann Curry Thursday morning.

Earlier today, Gawker broke the news that Brian Williams thought Lana Del Rey had “one of the worst outings in SNL history” (not a huge news story but what do you expect on a national holiday?). How did they get this quote? Well, it turns out it was from a private email Williams sent to Gawker head honcho Nick Denton. Gawker posted Williams’ Del Rey critique along with some choice quotes about how often he checks the site’s “shit” on his iPad. Unsurprisingly, NBC PR wasn’t thrilled to see the message hit the front page.

Congress is set to return later this month, and one of the most hotly contested pieces of legislation it will be facing is the Stop Online Piracy Act. The bill was authored by Republican Lamar Smith, and has received bipartisan support and opposition in the House. There has been a lot of talk about internet- and technology-based companies that support the bill, including GoDaddy (up until recently) and the video game industry.

Good morning! Do you like Republican debates but lament that they are always so late at night? Well get ready for Sunday morning’s Meet the Press/Union Leader/Facebook debate, and watch along with us starting at 9 AM Eastern time.

Earlier in the week, the sad news broke that celebrity couple Russell Brand and Katy Perry were no more. The split was the result of much speculation, as were the intentions and feelings of the couple. But every cloud has a silver lining, and this one being Jimmy Fallon‘s spot-on impression of the comedian, in which Brand reads articles about himself in gossip magazines and corrects their misconceptions.

Last week, as America anticipated the Iowa caucuses, some analyses of the state highlighted its demographics as being potentially problematic as far as an accurate representation of the nation’s feelings go. On Fox News today, an anchor rehashed a similar concern about New Hampshire, and while the critique may sound similar, there is a narrow difference between the two takes that merits fleshing out.

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 [...]

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney — long seen as the “candidate to beat,” the one constant as his rivals take their turns rising and inevitably falling in the polls — is regarding the Iowa caucuses with just a smidge of trepidation. In a segment taped yesterday in Des Moines, Romney told the Today show’s Savannah Guthrie that he’s hoping for 25 percent of the vote, at best.

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.”

In case you hadn’t noticed, the week between Christmas and New Years Eve is kind of a dead zone. A lot of time it seems like those that aren’t lucky enough to be on vacation are just trying their best not to let anyone see them licking the stamps they’re using to mail it in. However, this kind of sleepy atmosphere also leads to some gloriously goofy segments like the Today Show‘s episode spent interviewing the “Internet stars of 2011″ (which basically means “people who were in viral videos”). While this sounds fairly insubstantial, it did give us a wonderful interview in which Matt Lauer squared off against the Huffmans, the lovable elderly couple whose attempt to use a webcam ended up garnering about 16 million YouTube hits.