It’s a cliche in American politics to attack the other side with some variation of “you can’t handle the truth,” but sometimes it’s hard to find any other way to describe moments when prepackaged political views and hard data collide. MSNBC host Cenk Uygur had one such moment today as he appeared to refuse to read data on a chart by his guest’s institution that showed black separatists groups were in the top three kinds of hate groups in America today.

New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg called lawmakers on the Mayors Against Illegal Guns coalition together for a City Hall meeting to discuss the Arizona shooting that left six dead and Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords recovering from a bullet to the head. Among the issues discussed was gun control, a topic which inspired an impassioned speech from the Mayor on what, exactly, we should be taking away from the weekend’s events.

On Fox News Channel’s O’Reilly Factor last night, host Bill O’Reilly told senior political analyst Brit Hume that, in his opinion, New York Representative Peter King holds more power in the Republican party than incoming Speaker of the House John Boehner. More like the O Rly Factor, amiright?

On Fox News Radio’s Kilmeade & Friends, host Brian Kilmeade and guest Congressman Peter King discussed Director of Intelligence Gen. James Clapper‘s embarrassing ordeal of being unaware of the London arrests of 12 people as part of a potential holiday terror plot. Kilmeade was stunned when King revealed “we’ve been aware of London for weeks” and that “we knew that there was a plot in London and we knew that it was being monitored.”

Republican Representative Peter King, the soon-to-be Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, appeared on Fox News Channel with host Jamie Colby and discussed his plans to hold hearings on the “radicalization” of Muslim Americans.

New York Congressman Peter King believes the Obama Administration has a “liberal ideological bias” that keeps them from protecting the nation by going after the people who do it harm–like The New York Times.

Talking today on Fox News’ Happening Now, King said the first priority now is to go after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. But after that, King said he’s repeating a call he first made four years ago in another matter–for the prosecution of the Times.

William Shakespeare once famously wrote in The Tempest “misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows,” which has later been bastardized to its more common elocution “politics makes for strange bedfellows.” There is no more apt example of this notion than Rep. Peter King, the firebrand Republican from Long Island, NY, who just now gave a passionate and articulate defense of his fellow New Yorker and ideological foe Charlie Rangel.

In a radio interview for The Steve Malzberg Show, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) continued the political haymaking that has attended the latest Wikileaks document dump. King told Malzberg that President Obama isn’t as upset “as he should be” over the leak. He makes this leap by comparing Assange to Daniel Ellsberg, and asserting that Obama’s “political upbringing” makes it “difficult to take action against someone who is the logical descendent” of Ellsberg.

During an interview on America Live, ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) told host Megyn Kelly that the current UPS Bomb scare story is the sort of plot that is “a test of our defense system” and “this is for real” “whether or not it’s a test.” Additionally, he said, “there is something happening here which has been taken very seriously.”

Mediaite was the first to suggest that binding arbitration could be a solution to the brewing conflict between cable provider Cablevision and News Corp. over renewing their contract and carriage fees. Cablevision has agreed to the suggestion of binding arbitration put forth by Rep. Peter King and Steve Israel to resolve the dispute, but News Corp. did not. Perhaps that will change now that a bipartisan collection of 27 legislators have joined the call for binding arbitration.

With the fight between Fox and Cablevision quickly approaching tomorrow night’s midnight deadline, is binding arbitration the answer to the growing annoyance of feuds between TV networks and cable companies? Congressmen Steve Israel and Peter King of New York think so, and they might be the right.

Has everyone in Washington completely lost their minds? Or is this really just midterm fever gone wild. Yesterday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told San Francisco’s KCBS radio that she is joining those “who have called for looking into how is this opposition to the mosque being funded.” No really, that is what she actually said.

The last time we saw Republican New York Congressman Peter King, he was playing the Felix to Rep. Anthony Weiner‘s Oscar over aid to 9/11 relief workers. Today he visited Fox News sans sidekick to comment on President Barack Obama‘s support of the lower Manhattan Islamic community center, and while he noted that “nobody is questioning the right” to have it, he would have liked to see more sensitivity over the emotions of the 9/11 victims.

Yesterday on Fox News, New York Congressmen Anthony Weiner and Peter King did battle over the passing of a bill to aid 9/11 first-responders that developed health problems. Even with discussion moderated by a fairly silent, impartial Bill Hemmer– who piped up mostly to point out that everyone hates Congress– it got pretty heated. Now imagine that same conversation with Sean Hannity as host.

Anthony Weiner and Peter King have all the makings of that classic tv sitcom trope: two guys that get on each others nerves, but really are just good pals. They’ve much in common: both represent New York in congress, representing both different districts and political parties. And both want to honor and aid those who have sacrificed in our hour of need. But they seem to really disagree over the specifics – in this case, the process by which first responders to 9/11 can receive aid.

Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano may have given conservatives a great new t-shirt idea yesterday by claiming that the system “worked like clockwork” once the flight 253 incident had occurred (a disclaimer that rendered the statement meaningless), but there may actually be some truth to the notion that the system worked. Napolitano’s statement (since “clarified”) was a wrongheaded attempt at reassurance, it seems that a whole bunch of other people have an interest in making you as scared as possible.

President Obama stepped away from his Christmas vacation in Hawaii to hold a short press conference in order to address Friday’s averted terrorist attack aboard Northwest Flight 253 as well as the escalating conflict in Iran. The President appeared without tie, or teleprompter, to reassure the nation that “we will not rest until we find all who were involved and hold them accountable” and that “the American people should be assured that we are doing everything in our power to you keep you and your family safe and secure during this busy holiday season.”

This holiday weekend featured news of not just one, but two potential terror attacks. Had this happened during the Bush Administration, we would have had a steady diet of Tom Ridge and color-coded terror alert system bars. Under President Obama — we finally see him speak three days after news broke. Were we better off with or without the color bars (and all that came with it?) Or put another way, should we be freaking out right now or not?

The biggest question to come from Thursday’s thwarted terrorist attack is how did someone on a watch list manage to get on a plane? This explanation from a senior administration official, via Politico, may go some ways to answering that question: There’s a lot of bureaucracy involved.

Where to point the finger over Thursday’s averted terror attack on Northwest Flight 253? How much responsibility for this falls on President Obama? Perhaps this is a good time to point out Obama has been in office three and a half months longer that George W. Bush was when September 11 occurred. So who inherited what?

Hot on the heels of Janet Napolitano‘s “The system worked like clockwork” appearance on This Week, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs faced questions from Jake Tapper, who got to the heart of the issue. If the flight 253 suspect was on a watch list, who was watching him? Gibbs’ response was equally on target.

Another incident has been reported on Northwest Airlines flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit, CNN and BNO News are reporting. Details are still coming in, but here’s the information that’s available thus far, as gleaned from Twitter.

Jake Tapper interviewed DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano on ABC’s This Week, giving an early indicator of what the administration’s narrative on Flight 523 will be. Caught between the need to reassure a jumpy public, political opponents drooling at the chance to score points, and an unwillingness to tip our hand to those who would do us harm, Napolitano had her work cut out for her. Even given those factors, the Secretary’s overarching message was tone deaf, to say the least.

There may have been a brief reprieve because it did happen on Christmas, but make no mistake: the politicizing of the attempted attack on Northwest airlines flight 253 has begun. Rep. Peter King (R-NY) criticized President Obama on CNN Saturday, questioning the response of the administration in the aftermath of the potentially deadly incident. “It is important at a time like this that the President of the United States or someone in the administration would step forward,” said King, a congressman from New York.

There were several disappointments at Thursday’s Crasher-gate hearing, but chief among them were Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan‘s continued insistence that the now-famous security breach posed no threat to the President, and the committee’s focus on Social Secretary Desiree Rogers‘ role in said breach. This is absurd on two counts.