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MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell went after the NRA's Wayne LaPierre after he attempted to exploit the Boston Marathon bombings with his claim that more of the city's residents would have liked to have had a gun while the manhunt for the suspects was going on.

Cops–not NRA’s armed citizenry–stopped terrorists in Boston:

“How many Bostonians wished they had a gun two weeks ago?” National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre asked an audience Saturday at the gun lobbying group’s annual convention in Houston, Texas. LaPierre argued more guns in the hands of Bostonians would have helped in the city-wide manhunt for the marathon bombing suspects and protect residents.

O’Donnell said that comment was “spoken like a man who knows nothing about Boston.” The Last Word host said guns could not have stopped the tragedy that unfolded following the deadly attack.

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The Last Word's Lawrence O'Donnell explained that not all Republicans agree with Texas Gov. Rick Perry and the others in their party who believe that marriage is supposed to be between one man and one woman, such as St. Ronnie, Newt Gingrich and his fellow "serial polygamist" Rush Limbaugh.

O'Donnell also explained why Republicans might be having so much trouble finding a verse from the Bible that they'd be willing to quote on the subject.

Lawrence O'Donnell pretty well eviscerated the "Independent" Women's Forum's Gayle Trotter, and her appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, where she testified that assault weapons should not be outlawed because they were the "weapon of choice" for young mothers who need a "scary-looking gun."

I was glad to see O'Donnell call out her organization for being anything but "independent" because they're not. And apparently attorney Trotter, who also opposes the Violence Against Women Act (go read why), isn't too fond of being called a right-winger. O'Donnell's back-and-forth with her starts about nine minutes into the clip above.

Here's more from O'Donnell's blog at MSNBC: ‘Guns make women safer,’ says Gayle Trotter. Study says, not so:

The use of assault weapons among women emerged as standout topic at Wednesday’s Senate hearing on gun control legislation. Gayle Trotter, a lawyer and senior fellow at the conservative Independent Women’s Forum, said women need that type of firearm to level the playing field when confronted by physically stronger male attackers.

The guns rights advocate told lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee that “guns make women safer.” To her, AR-15s are the “weapon of choice” because “they have good handling, they’re light, they’re easy for women to hold.” And the appearance of such a “scary-looking gun” deters violent male criminals during home invasions.

But a recent study conducted by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center disputed those assertions. The study found that women living in states with more accessibility to guns are at a greater risk for violent death. This includes “unintentional gun deaths, suicides and homicide, particularly firearm suicides and firearm homicides.”

During an interview on The Last Word Wednesday night, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell challenged Trotter for not being able to provide one real life example of a case when an assault weapon specifically saved one woman’s life in that kind of a situation. “You don’t go to the Senate to imagine things!” O’Donnell said.

While speaking in front of the senators, Trotter described a hypothetical scene of a “young woman defending her babies in her home” when faced with “three, four, five violent attackers, intruders in her home with her children screaming in the background” as a reason to own an assault rifle.

“The peace of mind that she has, knowing that she has a scary-looking gun, gives her more courage when she’s fighting hardened, violent criminals,” said Trotter, who was the only woman on the five-person panel.

“If we ban these types of assault weapons, you are putting these types of women at a great disadvantage–more so than men because they don’t have the same type of physical strength and opportunity to defend themselves in a hand-to-hand struggle.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse pointed out that the woman she referred to in her statement, a young Oklahoma mother who shot an intruder, used a gun that wouldn't be banned by the law.

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We've written about this over and over again here at C&L and what a bad idea it is to be calling for the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare to be raised -- how it just inflicts pain on the poor at a time of record income disparity. Not to mention the fact that there are other ways to address our debt and deficits other than attacking our social safety nets! It was nice to see Ezra Klein once again give some grief to the wealthy CEOs and pundits out there who have downplayed just how damaging these policies are for anyone who actually works for a living and is not sitting in some cushy, over-paid job. They don't care when or if they retire because they love their jobs.

Meanwhile, working people are in so much pain from the hard work they do, they take a big hit on their benefits to retire early.

For anyone that missed the segment, you can check that out here: Ezra Klein: Raising Social Security Retirement Age Concentrates Pain on the Poor.

Klein discussed the recent news that CEOs and The Business Roundtable are pushing to have the retirement ages raised to 70, but don't want the income cap raised on Social Security, because heaven forbid we do anything to harm those uber-wealthy "job creators." As Klein notes, while they didn't mind pushing for those with much lower incomes to take a big hit on their retirement benefits, the wealthiest among us aren't willing to share in that sacrifice themselves. They're drawing the line when it comes to raising their own Social Security taxes as Reuters reported:

But the group rejected shoring up Social Security by making incomes above the maximum annual threshold - which in 2012 was $110,100 - subject to payroll taxes, saying that would hurt the economy.

"You would have to raise the base upon which the taxes are applied very substantially to drive a sufficient level of revenue to address the long-term solvency of the program," Loveman said.

"That would be far more damaging to economic growth than what we're asking people to consider," he added. "If you raise the tax rate on people who earn over the current threshold, you'll have an immediate deleterious effect on employment and economic activity."

I was very happy to hear the way Klein followed up on this:

KLEIN: So if you're a CEO who makes maybe $1 million, you're only taxed for Social Security on first tenth, tenth of your income. If you're making $60,000 a year, a normal worker, every one of your $60,000 is taxed for Social Security. And this is the kind of thing, it just drives me crazy. Because you know what the flip side of these guys loving their jobs and never, ever, ever wanting to leave, not even when they're old and their back hurts and they've got lots of grand kids is and the money to take all those grand kids to an island?

They're also not going to stop being CEO of Caesar's because they're paying payroll taxes on more of their income, because they love their jobs. But that is the shell game that gets played here. Folks at the top have convinced themselves that things that won't hurt them at all like raising the retirement age are easy, no brainers, because they won't hurt anybody at all. They're just common sense.

And then they've also convinced themselves that things that will hurt them, will devastate the economy. So when they're saying no to paying higher taxes, they're not being selfish, they're just protecting jobs and growth. As Upton Sinclair liked to say, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on him not understanding it.

Groups like The Business Roundtable, they have a big voice and they like to quote themselves in the economy and argue that what they say and what they do are informed and driven by just wanting what is best for jobs and for growth and for their company. But it seems to often come down to what is best for the CEOs. It is good to be on the top.

Sadly, yes it is. And those on top seem to be more and more detached from the lives of everyday Americans as the rest of us face those realities on a day-to-day basis. Segments like this one with Klein calling them out for it on cable television unfortunately are all too rare an occurrence these days.

You can read more about this push to raise the retirement age at Klein's blog here: CEOs want to raise the retirement age to 70,

And here's more from Think Progress: Wealthy CEOs Want To Force Americans To Retire Later.

This has to be one of the most pitiful things I've read in a long time. It's bad enough that Romney refused to come off the campaign trail for a day and then pretended he wasn't really campaigning, but having a "relief event" instead. Now we get treated to this -- Romney compares Sandy relief to cleaning up after high-school football game:

And to buff his own image as a disaster-relief specialist, Romney compared the Sandy relief effort to … his experience cleaning up the field after a high-school football game. Seriously.

I remember once we had a football field at my high school. The field was covered with rubbish and paper goods from people who’d had a big celebration there at the game. And there was a group of us there assigned to clean it up. And I thought, ‘how are we going to clean up all the mess on this football field?’ There were just a few of us. And the person responsible for organizing the effort said, ‘Just line up along the yard lines. You go between the goal line and the 10-yard line, and the next person between the 10 and 20, and just walk down and do your lane. And if everybody cleans their lanes, we’ll get it done.’ And so today, we’re cleaning one lane if you will.

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell wasn’t buying it. In his Rewrite segment on Wednesday’s edition of The Last Word, he did a play-by-play on what he called the Romney campaign’s “fake” storm relief event.

“Because the desperate and shameless Romney campaign believes it cannot win the election without winning Ohio, Team Romney pushed their candidate out on a stage in Ohio yesterday,” O’Donnell explained. “Because the storm was still in progress in some states and the death count was climbing in New York and elsewhere, traditional political decency dictated that Mitt Romney be not caught campaigning yesterday.”

Buzzfeed also reported Romney campaign staffers stocked up beforehand on $5,000-worth of canned foods and other essentials at a Wal-Mart the night before — “to put on display while they waited for donations to come in.”

h/t Captain Kangaroo

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As Lawrence O'Donnell rightfully pointed out this Tuesday evening, even if your leaders renounce the likes of Rep. "legitimate rape" Todd Akin, it doesn't mean much when you won't say a word about wingnuts like Rep. Paul Broun, who just said that denying evolution, embryology, and the Big Bang Theory are "lies from the pit of hell." And as he noted, they've yet to denounce this wingnut as well -- Arkansas State Rep: ‘If Slavery Were So God-Awful, Why Didn’t Jesus Or Paul Condemn It?’:

After Arkansas Republicans disavowed a book by state representative Jon Hubbard (R-AR) claiming slavery was “a blessing in disguise” for African Americans, Hubbard’s colleague, state Rep. Loy Mauch (R-AR) has been outed by the Arkansas Times for his pro-slavery, pro-Confederacy letters to the editor over the past decade. Mauch’s run for reelection this year is backed by the Arkansas Republican Party.

In letters to the Democrat-Gazette, Mauch vehemently defended slavery and repeatedly suggested Jesus condoned it:

If slavery were so God-awful, why didn’t Jesus or Paul condemn it, why was it in the Constitution and why wasn’t there a war before 1861?
The South has always stood by the Constitution and limited government. When one attacks the Confederate Battle Flag, he is certainly denouncing these principles of government as well as Christianity.

His other letters call Abraham Lincoln a Marxist and celebrate the Confederate flag as “a symbol of Christian liberty vs. the new world order.” He also organized a conference in 2004 praising John Wilkes Booth and calling for the removal of an Abraham Lincoln statue. Mauch has been supported mainly by contributions from the Republican Party and other Arkansas candidates. Now, the state GOP is pulling all funds from Mauch, Hubbard and another state legislative candidate, Charlie Fuqua, who wants to expel all Muslims from the country and thinks rebellious children should receive the death penalty.

These idiots have just thrown out the dog whistles. Forget subtlety, break out the blow horns.

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Lawrence O'Donnell took apart the myth in his Rewrite segment this Monday evening that there's an ounce of difference between the views of Paul Ryan and Todd Akin on abortion and exceptions for rape and the life of the mother. But despite the fact that their policy positions are nearly identical, Todd Akin gets treated as a loon while the media continues to treat Paul Ryan with great deference.

I agree with him and it's not just the abortion issue where he's given too much deference. How anyone with the monstrosity of a budget he came up with that makes the deficit worse and goes after the poor and elderly and most vulnerable in our society as some "policy expert" on the budget is beyond me.

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Lawrence O'Donnell took NRA lobbyist Wayne LaPierre apart last year after the shooting of Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords. On this Monday evening's show, he did it again in the wake of the Aurora massacre.

O`DONNELL: In the Rewrite tonight, another huge win for the Grover Norquist of gun control, Wayne LaPierre. Wayne is the blood-drenched lobbyist who makes sure anyone in America, anyone can get 6,000 bullets, even people who want to use those bullets to shoot babies in movie theaters.

Wayne LaPierre is not a credit hog like Grover Norquist. Grover loves flexing his anti-tax lobbying muscles publicly. He loves calling senators idiots. He loves taking credit for preventing any consideration of sensible tax policy in this country.

Wayne is old school. Wayne LaPierre follows the old lobbyist playbook of never publicly taking credit for anything. Every time an American mass murderer uses the right that Wayne has preserved for any one in this country, including al Qaeda and homicidal maniacs, to buy insane amounts of ammunition, and then that mass murderer gets huge headlines, wall-to-wall cable news coverage, and comments from the president, Wayne LaPierre never takes credit for any of that. Never.

Wayne always does a kind of, aw shucks modesty thing and says, if I hadn`t made sure that that mass murderer could get thousands of bullets, he would have used something else to kill all those people. Talk about modesty, huh. Maybe some of our mass murderers would have found another way to kill a lot of people, but we`ll never know, will we? Because Wayne has just made it so easy, so very easy to kill babies with bullets, to kill fathers and mothers with bullets, to kill sons and daughters with bullets, to kill sisters and brothers with bullets.

Bullets are the American mass murderer`s first choice. And what we`ll never know is how many of them would be successful mass murderers today if Wayne LaPierre didn`t make sure they could easily get bullets, unlimited supplies of bullets. How many of our mass murderers would switch to making bombs if they couldn`t get bullets?

And how many of them would blow themselves up by mistake while making bombs and never hurt anyone else? Surely a few of them. Just how determined are American mass murderers? We`ll never know, because Wayne LaPierre makes it so, so easy for mass murderers.

Wayne has not said a word about our most recent mass murder. On Friday, he had his press secretary put out this statement: "our thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their families, and the community. NRA will not have any further comment until all the facts are known."

See how modest Wayne is? He`s the head of the National Rifle Association, and he wouldn`t even put his name on yet another high-profile NRA press release about a mass murder. Wayne presumably spent the weekend enjoying the summer with family and friends, none of whom were shot by a mass murderer this weekend.

Wayne`s unlimited ammo-for-all policy has never negatively affected Wayne`s life in any way. I invited Wayne to come on this program tonight, but you know Wayne. Even when he deserves 24-hour media attention, Wayne LaPierre is the perfect picture of modesty, blood-drenched modesty.

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I've got to wonder how this story is going to sit with so-called pro-life advocates if it manages to gain some more traction during this presidential election cycle. David Corn joined Lawrence O'Donnell and Karen Finney to discuss his latest article at Mother Jones on Romney's time at Bain Capital and their investments in a medical waste firm that disposed of aborted fetuses:

Earlier this year, Mitt Romney nearly landed in a politically perilous controversy when the Huffington Post reported that in 1999 the GOP presidential candidate had been part of an investment group that invested $75 million in Stericycle, a medical-waste disposal firm that has been attacked by anti-abortion groups for disposing aborted fetuses collected from family planning clinics. Coming during the heat of the GOP primaries, as Romney tried to sell South Carolina Republicans on his pro-life bona fides, the revelation had the potential to damage the candidate's reputation among values voters already suspicious of his shifting position on abortion.

But Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney founded, tamped down the controversy. The company said Romney left the firm in February 1999 to run the troubled 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and likely had nothing to with the deal. The matter never became a campaign issue. But documents filed by Bain and Stericycle with the Securities and Exchange Commission—and obtained by Mother Jones—list Romney as an active participant in the investment. And this deal helped Stericycle, a company with a poor safety record, grow, while yielding tens of millions of dollars in profits for Romney and his partners. The documents—one of which was signed by Romney—also contradict the official account of Romney's exit from Bain.

The Stericycle deal—the abortion connection aside—is relevant because of questions regarding the timing of Romney's departure from the private equity firm he founded. Responding to a recent Washington Post story reporting that Bain-acquired companies outsourced jobs, the Romney campaign insisted that Romney exited Bain in February 1999, a month or more before Bain took over two of the companies named in the Post's article. The SEC documents undercut that defense, indicating that Romney still played a role in Bain investments until at least the end of 1999. Read on...

No matter what comes of this story, one thing is pretty clear and that's Mitt Romney and his partners at Bain were more worried about lining their pockets than anything else and as David Corn pointed out in the interview with Lawrence O'Donnell, this is not the only time the Romney campaign has tried to say that he was no longer with Bain when it's clear that he was, in order to avoid taking responsibility for many of the firm's actions.

So much for Republicans being the party of personal responsibility. Romney not only wants to avoid taking responsibility for his time at Bain, but also wants everyone to forget every political position he's taken on every issue as well. I guess that might explain why his campaign has decided he's going to retreat to the extremes on the right and try to avoid any actual journalists that are left out there as Think Progress reported this week: Romney Advisers Reveal Strategy: Ignore Journalists, Pander To Right-Wing Conspriacy Websites.

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I've been arguing this for weeks on The Professional Left Podcast, and want it to be in writing, on the record:

I don't think Mitt Romney wants to win this election.

It's not just that an obviously competent businessman (in terms of making capitalism work for him) is having such a hard time managing a staff of incompetents. Your own spokesman claims your message is like an etch-a-sketch and goes completely off message on whether Obamacare is a tax. You claim you like firing people, but this guy is still on your staff.

Another staffer misspells "America" and "Reagan" and more on campaign projects. You claim you like firing people who don't provide good service. Even Rupert Murdoch can't figure out why you're holding on to these staffers. The elephant in the car elevator is, you don't want to be President.

And really, Mitt, who can blame you? You're a billionaire who has a newly renovated house in California (one of six) and a great life ahead of you as a grandfather, dressage horse investor, and glad-handing board room man about town. Being the Republican nominee against Barack Obama in 2012 puts you in the history books without inconveniencing you into having to, you know, govern.

And trust me, Mitt, Fox News and Rush Limbaugh don't want you to win, either. Their bottom line is only secured with four more years of Obama bashing. And betcha ten thousand dollars Michelle Malkin already has a book contract for Spring 2013 to write some lie-fest entitled "Eric Holder, Worse than Seven Hitlers." You'll ruin all her plans if you actually win.

In the meantime, we can't wait to watch the horse ballet that is called the Romney 2012 campaign. Hint: make Bachmann your running mate. And put her in charge of messaging.