MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell presented viewers to the “new and desperate Mitt Romney,” a Mitt Romney who is making himself more available to the media in the wake of former Speaker Newt Gingrich‘s rise in the polls.

As part of our one-part series Project: In Vino, Mediaite set out to capture media elites, gathered to fête Hardball host Chris Matthews‘ Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, in their alcohol-lubricated natural habitat, and maybe to drink some of it ourselves. With the aid of a hidden camera, I ventured to MSNBC’s book party Tuesday night to tear the lid off of this den of open bars and Wagyu beef hors d’oeuvres.

If you watched Lawrence O’Donnell on The Last Word Wednesday night, you may have noticed that he and author Richard Wolffe devoted some chunk of time to discussing radio host Rush Limbaugh‘s advice for Speaker John Boehner.

Limbaugh had some thoughts about that:

If there’s ever, if they ever do a colonoscopy on Obama, they’re going to find Richard Wolffe’s head there. Richard Wolffe, big author, and just a big Obama apologist.

One by-product of Ed Schultz‘s attack on Laura Ingraham, and subsequent apology and suspension, is that it gave his former MSNBC colleague, Keith Olbermann, an opportunity to answer for some of his own past wrongdoing. As he tweeted condemnation of Schultz’s remarks, he was confronted with some of his own. His responses provided a neat [...]

On Wednesday night’s The Last Word, host Lawrence O’Donnell spoke with MSNBC’s Richard Wolffe about one of the emerging contradictions in accounts of the bin Laden killing, the recent report that bin Laden wasn’t armed, but “appeared to lunge for a weapon.” O’Donnell observed that this was “The classic line that appears in every police report of every questionable shooting” of an unarmed suspect by police

On Monday night’s Daily Show, host Jon Stewart devoted a segment to the pool reporter who was restricted to a storage closet during portions of a fundraising event attended by Vice President Joe Biden. Admirably eschewing an obvious R. Kelly joke, Stewart instead did a “live” bit with a handcuffed Wyatt Cenac, and asked him an excellent question: why do White House reporters put up with the press office’s onerous restrictions? It’s a question I’ve tried to answer before, but Cenac may be onto something.

After today’s White House briefing, I caught up with MSNBC contributor and author Richard Wolffe to get his take on the media’s handling of Sarah Palin in the wake of the mass shooting in Tucson, and Palin’s handling of it, as well. Wolffe said he thought Palin was “refreshingly honest” at times in her interview with Sean Hannity, but criticized her “self-serving” overreaches, and defended the mainstream media’s coverage of Palin as part of the Tucson story.

MSNBC commentator and author Richard Wolffe, on CBS’ Late Late Show Wednesday, admitted to the label “journalist,” but not “Democrat”–leading host Craig Ferguson to ask if those weren’t two words for the same thing.

Wolffe described President Obama’s tax cut deal with Republicans as “embarrassing,” but suggested the broken campaign promise would actually insulate the president from GOP criticism since Republicans were now “in bed with him.”

Sarah Palin may have painted herself into a corner. As valid as her outrage over Rahm Emanuel’s derogatory use of the word “retarded” last November, behind closed doors (and many, many others before and since) may be her tepid response to Rush Limbaugh’s very recent, very public use of the word yesterday leaves a lot to be desired. Let’s compare shall we.

I can’t say I started crying during the opening credits of the upcoming HBO documentary By The People: The Election of Barack Obama, but only because I got to the theater five minutes late. The film — which will air on November 3 on HBO — begins in Iowa in 2007, eight months before the caucuses and light years before today, and spends nearly half of its two-hours focusing on the state and the young supporters populating its campaign headquarters.

Almost lost in the brouhaha over the reported truce between GE/Keith Olbermann and Fox News/Bill O’Reilly was the news that Olbermann had kicked replacement host Richard Wolffe off of Countdown. Olbermann cited the appearance of a conflict of interest between Wolffe’s consulting job and his duties as a political analyst for MSNBC. But given the landscape of cable news, in which many big name “politicos” consult on the side quietly or not-so-quietly, why was Wolffe singled out?

We watched Countdown with Keith Olbermann last night to see what he would have to say about the ‘Truce’-gate story but found another story, and it concerns MSNBC contributor Richard Wolffe. Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald raised questions about Wolffe’s day job at Public Strategies, Inc., and Olbermann addressed this tonight in a post on The Daily Kos – effectively banning Wolffe from Countdown.