Last night’s O’Reilly Factor began with a question near and dear to the heart of anyone trying to follow the 2012 race for the White House: “is the presidential election a joke?” Bill O’Reilly did not mean it in a colloquial way, however, but in the sense that comedians and pop culture had just as much of an effect on voting than substantive issues. To that end, O’Reilly asked, how would the overwhelmingly liberal swing of the media affect the way people perceive 2012 candidates?

Even George W. Bush’s top strategist Karl Rove thinks House Republicans overreached in reneging on the payroll tax cut deal. His advice: having lost the politics, Republicans should wait until (or to see if?) President Obama flies off to Hawaii on vacation, bash him and congressional Democrats for abdicating their duties, and then … pass the same Senate payroll tax cut compromise they could have passed on Tuesday.

Facebook on Monday published a note pointing to Newt Gingrich as an example of the one of the most “Facebook savvy” politicians on the social network. “Gingrich’s Facebook page is a great example of providing many ways for supporters to get involved, catering to every level of engagement while equally promoting all of the tabs,” [...]

A simple yes or no would have sufficed, but when House Speaker John Boehner was asked whether anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist was a positive influence on his caucus, he feigned ignorance.

“It’s not often I’m asked about some random person in America,” he said.

The strange case of the missing Mitt Romney YouTube video has been solved, Team Romney says: Turns out CNN did it.

In an email to TPM, Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul said her campaign pulled down the tough attack on Perry at the request of the news network.

Michele Bachmann spent a lot of time at Tuesday’s debate trying to get moderator Anderson Cooper’s attention.

Congress has always been Washington’s whipping boy, particularly near election time. The antics get sillier, the pace shifts from glacial to gridlock, and the frustrated public gets daily reminders that lawmakers are often too mired in politics to function in the national interest.

That’s not news.

What is news is that this time it’s starting to scare the pros.

Welcome to the third tier, Newt Gingrich. The former Speaker of the House and 1990s staple has continued his fledgling Presidential campaign despite said campaign apparently consisting almost exclusively of affirmations that it exists. It appears that what is obvious to nearly everyone else in politics is starting to get to the candidate, however, as he griped to supporters in a conference call this week about how often he must disprove the assumption that he has dropped out.

Teamsters union president James Hoffa would say it all again if he could, he told TPM Monday.

Hoffa riled up Fox News and the right wing Monday with a Labor Day speech in Detroit in which he called Republican members of Congress “sons of bitches” and said union workers are ready to “go to war” with the tea party next year and “take out” Republicans at the ballot box.

Hoffa said he’d say the exact same words all over again.

Anthony Weiner‘s seat, which includes parts of Queens and Brooklyn, should be safe for Democrats, but the September 13 special election to replace him is proving surprisingly competitive. Democrat David Weprin is losing ground to Republican Bob Turner. Making matters worse for Democrats, Weprin has turned into a gaffe machine right as voters are tuning in for the final stretch.

Call him crazy, but former Utah Gov. and former Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman is doubling down on his criticism of climate change skepticism as “not a winning formula” for the GOP in 2012, while calling out his opponents in the Republican presidential primary on their willingness to let the US default on its debt. [...]

Rick Perry is facing a full-on assault from former Bush aides over his comments on Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, pushing a long-rumored rivalry between the two ex-governors’ camps out into the open.

Acknowledging to TPM that “there is no love lost between the W camp and the Perry camp,” one Bush veteran appealed for detente.

“I do not think it serves any purpose for any Bushy to fuel to fire or resentment,” the person said. “The goal for us sh

Bill O’Reilly is concerned that the Tea Party is straying onto a volatile path. O’Reilly has become one of the more moderate voices in the current debt debate, being cited by White House Press Secretary Jay Carney as such and chiding Rep. Michele Bachmann for opposing compromise. Tonight, he opened his program asking if the Tea Party was “self-destructive,” comparing them to the radical “Yippie” movement of the 1960s.

The war between Media Matters and Fox News that has resulted in some on the latter network calling for the former organization to have its tax-exempt status removed has resulted in many comparisons between the two, and debates over how much bias is an unfair amount. On tonight’s Hardball, Chris Matthews and his panel debated just how ideological Media Matters is, but not for long before discussing the “authoritarian” nature of conservative opinion itself.

Newt Gingrich fired up the crowd in this blue state with the promise that President Obama is so bad that he’s made it possible for the Republicans to win over the African American vote in 2012.

Gingrich stopped off at an airport Marriott near Baltimore Thursday to keynote the Maryland GOP’s annual Red, White & Blue banquet. Before the speech, he assured reporters that his campaign was still going strong. When he took the podium, he offered Republican donors a long, dense speech full of red meat and warnings about the state of the world around us.

The DC media’s jaw-dropping obsession with the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal will peter out when the New York congressman officially resigns this afternoon. But there’s no better illustration of how this story came to consume the press than the video below.

Democrats had been prepared to up the pressure on Weiner to resign Thursday, but not before House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi held her weekly press availability in a large studio in the basement of the Capitol Visitors Center.

Ousted from the Senate in 2010, Russ Feingold, may have fewer Democratic friends to count on if he chooses to enter the race to replace retiring Sen. Herb Kohl (D-WI). The progressive icon eviscerated his former colleagues in an e-mail for his advocacy group Progressive United on Tuesday, accusing two prominent Democrats of enabling “corruption” by opposing new transparency measures on political donations.

Ratings for Donald Trump‘s NBC series The Apprentice have sagged the last couple of weeks, prompting a wave of speculation among the pundit class that his birther crusade is turning off the show’s viewership. In fact, his viewership has fluctuated wildly over the past several years, making such pronouncements premature.

Recently, Congressman Sean Duffy spoke at a town hall meeting and was asked why his yearly salary ($174,000) should be three times the size of the man’s entire family. Duffy chose an unfortunate tactic, complaining that he’s still “in more debt” than anyone in the room. After the Polk County GOP posted a video of the entire event on their YouTube account, news outlets began picking up on this moment and reposting the video.

Let me keep a nice and tidy story here and get right to the Sarah Palin quote: “Goodness, cleaning up the sloppiness of reporters could be a full time job,” the former Alaska governor wrote on Facebook, exasperated over the “sloppy” work of a reporter for The Daily Caller, who Palin insists “buried” her quotes.

The Tucker Carlson-led publication used quotes from a 650-word statement Palin provided, and then ran the statement in its entirety on the story’s second page. And yet Palin deemed that unacceptable, writing on Facebook that “in response to The Daily Caller’s online inquiry, I gave them a statement that the writer buried on his story’s second page (which most people won’t even notice – I didn’t even notice it.”

For Rep Ron Paul (R-TX), education and medical care are not rights but rather “things that you have to earn.”

In an exchange about U.S. credit policy with MSNBC’s Cenk Uygur on Wednesday, Paul was asked whether people should be able to borrow money to buy a house, or car. “Oh, in a free market, you can do that,” Paul said, but only so long as that credit is backed up by real money, and not something that “comes out of thin air.”

Here’s how the Republicans’ power over the purse could lead to an insoluble fight over spending, and, potentially, a government shutdown.

In a presentation at CPAC on Thursday, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) called on Republicans to hold the government hostage until President Obama abandons his dream of reforming the nation’s health care system.

Or to put it in King’s words: Republicans should do to “ObamaCare” what Democrats did to the Vietnam War.

After a weekend of horror and subsequent political confusion (and more than a bit of opportunism), Bill O’Reilly came out swinging in his opening segment tonight, condemning those on the left, particularly Paul Krugman and MSNBC, for what he called the exploitation of a national tragedy.

The national Tea Party Nation group is planning to send a letter to Sarah Palin asking the former governor of Alaska and John McCain sidekick to run for chair of the Republican National Committee.

Tea Party Nation leader Judson Phillips says in his letter to Palin that without her at the helm of the RNC, the party will fall back into “establishment” hands.

Helen Thomas, the long-time White House correspondent who was forced to apologize and retire last spring after making comments about Israel and Jews, stood by those remarks yesterday at an event in Dearborn, Michigan—and then made even more fiery statements. “Congress, the White House and Hollywood, Wall Street are owned by the Zionists,” Thomas said during her remarks at an Arab-American workshop, according to The Detroit News. “No question.”