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After House Speaker John Boehner's ridiculous statement that he wants to know "who is going to jail" over the recent scandal at the IRS -- and Nancy Pelosi's statement that we need a "clear definition of what a 501(c)(4) is -- MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell did his best to attempt to remind these politicians that there is no need to change existing law to fix this problem.

Ahead of this Friday's hearing, O'Donnell hopes that at least one of the members of Congress attending will ask the IRS why they decided to change the way they enforced the statute.

O’Donnell reminds politicians of the real IRS scandal:

As O’Donnell has been saying since Monday, the so-called IRS scandal is only the consequence of an older and more basic problem with the organization’s reading of the tax code–specifically, with its reading of Section 501(c)(4), which exempts social welfare groups from paying taxes.

The law defines such groups as “civic leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare.” Since 1959, the IRS has been reading “exclusively” as “primarily.”

“By doing that they made IRS agents judges of political activity, investigators of political activity,” O’Donnell explained in the Rewrite Thursday. “IRS agents were then forced to evaluate just how political a given 501(c)(4) organization might be. And it is very clear that if the words “Tea Party” or the name of any political party at all appears in the title of your 501(c)(4) you absolutely do not qualify for 501(c)(4) status under the law.”

Some politicians, however, still don’t seem to understand the interplay between this law and how it’s enforced.

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Sen. Al Franken made a rare national media appearance on Lawrence O'Donnell's show on MSNBC this Monday evening to discuss his participation in the SEC's roundtable on credit rating industry reform this Tuesday.

Back in 2010, with bipartisan support, Franken managed to get his Restore Integrity to Credit Rating Amendment passed, which cleans up the credit rating system by making sure a bank or financial institution can't shop around for a credit rating agency that will game the system for them.

From Sen. Franken's press release when the amendment first passed back in 2010: Credit Rating Agency Reform:

The inherent conflicts of interest in Wall Street's current pay-to-play credit rating system were one of the greatest contributing factors to the economy's collapse. Right now, banks choose which credit rating agencies will rate the quality of their stocks, bonds, and other financial products, resulting in the agencies giving away undeserved top ratings to countless sub-par financial products in order to attract business.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations recently revealed examples of Wall Street financial institutions negotiating higher ratings from credit rating agencies for its sub-par products. Of the AAA-rated subprime-mortgage-backed securities issued in 2006 alone, 93% have been downgraded to junk status.

Sen. Franken's Restore Integrity to Credit Rating Amendment cleans up the credit rating system by making sure a bank or financial institution can't shop around among credit rating agencies to get a product's initial rating. The bipartisan proposal creates a board, overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which will assign credit rating agencies to provide initial ratings in order to eliminate inherent conflicts of interest. Senator Franken's proposal passed the Senate by a 64 to 35 vote, and the final bill passed into law requires that the SEC study the problem. If the SEC does not develop an alternative mechanism to address the conflicts of interest problem, Senator Franken's proposal will go into effect.

Here's more on the SEC meeting this week: Sen. Franken to Speak at SEC’s Roundtable on Credit Rating Industry Reform:

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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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Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe is one of 14 Republicans who have pledged to filibuster any sort of new gun restrictions and as MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell noted, he now apparently believes enough time has passed that he feels free to insult the parents of the murdered children from Sandy Hook elementary school.

I guess Inhofe believes only senators who have an A+ rating from the NRA are allowed to talk about gun control.

James Inhofe: Gun Debate Has Nothing To Do With Families Of Newtown Victims:

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said Tuesday that the gun control debate doesn't have anything to do with the families of the Newtown, Conn., shooting victims, and that the only reason those families think it does is because President Barack Obama told them it did.

Eleven family members of Newtown victims were in Washington on Tuesday, meeting privately with senators to urge them to support a forthcoming gun package that would impose tighter background checks, crack down on gun trafficking and enhance school safety measures. Speaking to a handful of reporters, Inhofe said he feels bad for those families because they're being used as pawns in a political fight.

"See, I think it's so unfair of the administration to hurt these families, to make them think this has something to do with them when, in fact, it doesn't," Inhofe said.

When it was suggested that the families of Newtown victims actually believe the gun debate pertains to them, Inhofe said, "Well, that's because they've been told that by the president."

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As James Lipton rightfully noted during his interview with Lawrence O'Donnell on this Thursday evening's The Last Word, this was really a remarkable example of just how talented Tina Fey is, who had little to no warning before being asked to revive her SNL impression of Palin for him this week:

‘Inside the Actors Studio’ showcases Tina Fey–or was it Sarah Palin?:

Tina Fey got mavericky once again, reviving her Sarah Palin character during a recent appearance on Inside the Actor’s Studio with James Lipton.

It’s been more than four years since Fey first introduced her indelible impression of John McCain’s former Republican running mate on SNL. (For the record, Fey said she prefers to be identified as “maverick at large.”)

Lipton told MSNBC that before they went on stage, he asked if she would be willing to improvise playing Sarah Palin again, and she said you betcha.

Fey, in character, weighed in on a range of topics like marriage equality (“The Bible says it’s gross…a lot of the amazing wonderful people I met in the audience at Dancing With The Stars seem to go that way. But no”), gun laws (“I believe that if everybody had guns, then there would be fewer guns in the stores”) and even beauty tips for fellow mama grizzlies (“I’m a fan of the Bump It”).

I'd like to see her back on SNL doing the dressed for Sturgis, CPAC 2013, fingernails on a chalkboard, post-Fox firing, Rove-bashing, reality TV version of Palin in the coming year.

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MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell declared former Sen. Scott Brown's political career officially deceased during his Rewrite segment that Monday evening now that Brown had decided to give it the kiss of death and take a job as a lobbyist:

Scott Brown officially ended his political career on Monday. Instead of choosing to serve in public office, Scott Brown has decided to take a job at a Boston law firm, Nixon Peabody, according to The Boston Globe’s report. The law firms states that Brown “will focus his practice on business and governmental affairs.” But as MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell states, “That is the lobbying world’s euphemism for lobbying ‘government affairs.’ So today, Scott Brown became a lobbyist. That is death for a politician every hoping to run for office again, and even Scott Brown is smart enough to know that.” [...]

Last month, Scott Brown signed on as a Fox News contributor. When Sarah Palin quit the Alaska governorship and left state affairs to Alaska Lieutenant Governor Parnell, she signed a contract with Fox News. So today, “[Brown] competed a full Palin by quitting politics completely and simply chasing the money that his political celebrity has earned him.”

O’Donnell continued to compare the two politicians’ trajectories. “Scott Brown is smart enough to know that he cannot go off and become a lobbyist and then take that dreaded occupation on to a debate stage as a candidate for anything ever again. This is Scott Brown’s full Palin—take FOX News’s money and then go for the money anywhere else he can. Like Sarah Palin, Scott Brown is all about the money, now.”

Here's more from Think Progress on Brown's new job: After Watering Down Financial Reform, Ex-Senator Scott Brown Joins Goldman Sachs’ Lobbying Firm:

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After Bill O'Reilly's outburst at his fellow Fox contributor Alan Colmes this week, Lawrence O'Donnell took his viewers on a little trip down memory lane with Bill-O and his anger management problems.

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The Last Word's Lawrence O'Donnell got his shots in at Fox and their joke of a business channel and the likes of Stuart Varney, who was previously claiming that the election of President Obama was responsible for the dip in the stock market the day after the election. With the markets reaching a record high this week, as O'Donnell rightfully noted here, those talking heads are just as clueless now about why the market went up as they were when it went down last year.

I'm not sure who actually watches the Fox Business Channel, but sometimes I wonder if they exist solely as an attempt to make CNBC look respectable in comparison.

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In a welcome change of pace from what we saw on the Sunday shows and on his own network last week, guest host Ezra Klein took the Last Word viewers through what we could actually expect to happen if our politicians were irresponsible enough to allow the United States to default on our debt.

This is what would happen if we breach the debt ceiling:

Want to make sure your calendar is clear when we hit the debt ceiling? Then don’t schedule anything between Feb. 15 and March 1.

That, according to a new analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center, is the likely range for debt-ceiling doomsday: The day when the Treasury Department runs out of room to maneuver and we actually begin to default on obligations. Either Congress figures out the debt ceiling before that date or things get very bad, very fast.

Imagine we hit the debt ceiling Feb. 15. The BPC’s analysis suggests that federal spending over the next month will be about $450 billion. Federal revenues will be nearer to $277 billion. That means that the government will have to default on about 40 percent of its obligations.

The choices it will face quickly become stark. It can cover interest on the debt, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense spending, education, food stamps and other low-income transfers, and a handful of other programs, but doing all that will mean defaulting on everything — really, everything — else. The FBI will shut down. The people responsible for tracking down loose nukes will lose their jobs. The prisons won’t operate. The biomedical researchers won’t be funded. The court system will close its doors. The tax refunds won’t go out. The Federal Aviation Administration will go offline. The parks will close. Food safety inspections will cease.

This is the difference between a debt-ceiling shutdown and a government shutdown. As Shai Akabas, a research at the Bipartisan Policy Center, puts it, “in a government shutdown, the government is shutting down future obligations. With the debt ceiling, They’ve already obligated the money. They owe these people the payments now, and they can’t make them.”

Then, of course, there’s the financial-market chaos. Trillions of dollars in derivatives and other financial products are based on the interest rate that the federal government pays when borrowing. U.S. government debt is, after all, supposed to be the safest investment in the world, and so it’s used to “benchmark” all other sorts of debt. A spike in the Treasury rate would mean a spike in credit card rates and mortgage rates, not to mention all manner of more esoteric financial derivatives. The damage to the economy would be tremendous, and it would occur at every level, from individuals looking for a loan to buy a house to hedge funders trying to play the markets. Read on...

Ezra needs to send his post over to the other hosts on MSNBC like David Gregory and Joe Scarborough so they quit lying to their audiences about the consequences of default and pretending that it would only be a partial government shutdown.

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Lawrence O'Donnell read the entire op-ed which appeared in the L.A. Times in his rewrite segment this Thursday evening: Loughner’s Judge Makes Conservative Plea For Gun Control:

Larry Alan Burns, the federal district judge in San Diego who just last month sentenced Tuscon shooter Jared Lee Loughner to seven consecutive life terms plus 140 years in federal prison, is no darling of the gun control movement.

Burns is a self-described conservative, appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, and he agrees with the Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia vs. Heller, which held that the 2nd Amendment gives Americans the right to own guns for self-defense. He is also a gun owner.

But while sentencing Loughner in November, Burns questioned the need for high-capacity magazines like the one Loughner had in his Glock, and said he regretted how the Federal Assault Weapons Ban was allowed to lapse in 2004. On Thursday, reacting to last week’s mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., Burns publicly called for a new assault weapons ban “with some teeth this time,” in an op-ed published by The Los Angeles Times.

A conservative case for an assault weapons ban:

If we can't draw a sensible line on guns, we may as well call the American experiment in democracy a failure.

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