On the day he's hosting a supposed $2 million fundraiser for Mitt Romney in Las Vegas, Donald Trump doubled down – wait, is it tripled down? – on his birther nonsense in a hilarious interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer. The normally deferential Blitzer wound up telling Trump: "Donald, Donald, you're beginning to look a little ridiculous."

Obviously Blitzer could have cut "beginning to look a little" from his put-down, but those were harsh words coming from Blitzer. Trump had already insulted the CNN anchor's ratings, telling him, "Frankly, if you would report [the birther conspiracy] accurately, I think you would probably get better ratings than you're getting, which are pretty small."

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Today it's appalling: puffed up by Romney's flattery, the preening, orange-haired narcissist doubled down on his idiotic birther claims against the president, telling the Daily Beast's Lloyd Grove: “Look, it’s very simple. A book publisher came out three days ago and said that in his written synopsis of his book, he said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia. His mother never spent a day in the hospital.”

If you haven't been following the story, and I tried not to, the addled spawn of Andrew Breitbart found a dusty 20-year-old catalog from Obama's former literary agency that said he was born in Kenya. An assistant quickly said that she wrote down incorrect information. Trump doesn't believe her.

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Throughout the president's first term, his most ardent supporters have reacted to those of us pushing him to do – and say – more on such issues with frustration and anger, some of it nasty and personal, some of it thoughtful and well-argued. They rightly blame Congress for blocking action on key progressive priorities, but strangely downplay the power of presidential leadership. Late last year, New York magazine's Jonathan Chait twice attacked liberal Obama critics for being "unreasonable" about what the president alone could accomplish, because "liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president."

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With so many Republican lies about President Obama, it's pretty hard to pick out the worst one. The most vicious stuff, of course, comes from the crazy birthers, who won't go away. (Way to spend Arizona's tax dollars, Sheriff Joe Arpaio!) Then there are the more mainstream slurs – Newt Gingrich calling him "the food stamp president," or Obama's "friend" Sen. Tom Coburn saying he favors government programs because "as an African American male," he received “tremendous advantage from a lot of these programs.”

But if you measure the power of a lie by its utter truthlessness combined with the breadth of its reach, the notion that Obama has presided over a wild federal spending spree is probably the biggest whopper spread by the GOP, with the help of the right-wing noise machine and lazy mainstream media. Mitt Romney regularly rails against the "debt and spending inferno" the president supposedly ignited. Last month on Fox, Charles Krauthammer called Obama's spending "radical, unprecedented," and CBS Radio's Mark Knoller reported that the "National debt has increased more under Obama than under Bush."

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Mitt Romney put out an ad Monday using Newark Mayor Cory Booker, along with former Tennessee politician Harold Ford Jr. and former auto czar Steve Rattner, to attack the Obama campaign for its criticism of Romney's work with Bain Capital.  "Have you had enough of President Obama's attacks on free enterprise?" the ad asks. "His own supporters have."

Booker, of course, has become infamous for telling David Gregory on "Meet the Press" Sunday that Obama ads criticizing Romney's Bain work are "nauseating" and "crap." Then Harold Ford Jr., who laughably tried to become the senator from Wall Street in 2010 after failing to become the senator from Tennessee in 2006, couldn't stand seeing Booker getting all the centrist Wall Street love, and jumped in behind him: ”I would not have backed off the comments, if I were Mayor Booker," Ford told his friends on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" Monday. "Private equity is not a bad thing. Private equity is a good thing in many instances." For good measure the Romney ad also scooped up Rattner's criticism – also on "Morning Joe" – from a few weeks ago: "I don't think there's anything Bain Capital did that they need to feel bad about," Rattner told the crew.

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Davis, Ayers and friends should remember that Obama sent in special ops to take out Somali pirates in 2010. These pirates' fate might be similar. Politically, of course. I'm not suggesting anyone use violence against them. And they're not suggesting anyone use violence against Obama, of course -- although their pitch is chock-full of eliminationist rhetoric. From its title, which promises to "stop [Obama's] spending for good," to its description of being "locked, loaded and ready" to "hit Barack right between the eyes" and bring about "his demise," the memo the New York Times released today is right-wing hate porn, designed for maximum titillation to Ricketts, its intended audience. It may not have worked on Ricketts, whose PAC disavowed the plan Thursday afternoon after a day of negative publicity. But will it work on anyone else?

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Of course not, but Mitt's not giving up.

In Lansing, Mich., last week, Romney derided Obama as an "old school liberal" compared to Clinton, whom he called a "new Democrat." Where Clinton "said the era of big government was over, President Obama brought it back with a vengeance," Romney told a crowd of college students. A campaign official told CNN that Obama "really turned his back" on Clinton's policies, including welfare reform and middle-class tax cuts.

Huh? Of course Obama cut taxes for the middle class in the 2009 Recovery Act, which Republicans consistently lie about, and Clinton controversially raised taxes on high earners (Romney would lower them) to cut the deficit in 1993. Meanwhile, Obama has left President Clinton's welfare reform alone, despite rising rates of poverty and unemployment in the recession.

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Rattner's reaction to Obama's tough Bain ad shows why Democrats have had a hard time capitalizing on anti-Wall Street sentiment among worried, screwed-over American voters: because for the last 20 years, at least, they've too often done Wall Street's bidding almost as reliably as the GOP.

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Much is being made of Toobin's revelations about the dramatic internal political divisions and infighting within the court triggered by the CU decision (more on that later). But what I think is most politically significant in Toobin's piece is that it shows the dramatic rightward – and backward -- march of Republicanism over the last 30 years. In January 1982, Ronald Reagan famously wrote in his diary, "The press is trying to paint me as trying to undo the New Deal … I'm trying to undo the Great Society." Reagan was anxious to unravel the anti-poverty programs Lyndon Johnson pushed into place (though not Medicare), but he collaborated with House Speaker Tip O'Neill to pass payroll tax increases to stabilize Social Security for the next 50 to 60 years.

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The right wing is now trying to accuse Washington Post reporter Jason Horowitz of an oppo-research operation, but his meticulously reported and well-sourced story of Romney's prep-school bullying, including two cases involving gay classmates, won't be destroyed by the noise machine.

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Last week we learned about President Obama's first post-college romantic relationships. This week, we're discovering details of Mitt Romney's prep-school sadism. While I think we should tread carefully when examining the youthful experiences and mistakes of both presidential candidates, I thought Obama's romantic past was fair game in Vanity Fair. I think the Washington Post's well-reported feature on Young Mr. Romney's entitled cruelty to gay classmates and a disabled teacher is even more revealing and important.

The Post has four named sources and a fifth who stayed anonymous to recount an incident in which Romney gathered a "posse" to forcibly cut the hair of a gay-seeming classmate:

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The latest Gallup poll shows that public opinion has gotten a little cooler toward gay marriage in just the last year, though most Americans support it. The sad truth is, most Americans may back it, but those who oppose it have been far more motivated to cast votes based on their animus, so far anyway.

That said, it was the right and necessary thing for the president to do. Future generations will look back and wonder what took him so long. The president believes in the saying attributed Martin Luther King Jr., that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Despite his too-slow "evolution" on gay marriage, Obama knows the arc bends faster when we pull on it, and today he gave it a good tug.

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A new survey by Harvard's Institute of Politics shows that voters 18-24 are less engaged in this election than that age group was in 2008, with only 64 percent registered to vote, as opposed to 73 percent four years ago. Where two-thirds said they'd definitely vote in 2008, less than half say that today. "The president’s support among young voters is bleeding away," Republican strategist Mark McKinnon claimed in the Daily Beast, using IOP data. When McKinnon hyped his piece Monday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Republican Joe Scarborough intoned that "the bull's-eye is really on the back of the young voters," who know that the "burden" of Social Security, Medicare and "the $17 trillion debt will fall on them."

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Since then, Republicans from Sarah Palin to John Boehner to Rick Santorum have had chances to slap down party members' false and ugly allegations about the president, from his birthplace to his religion to his loyalty to the U.S., and they all failed. Mitt Romney had his moment Monday, when a woman at a town hall event said Obama should be "tried for treason," and he failed too.

The moment seemed tailor-made for Romney to shake his Etch-A-Sketch and put the right-wing pandering of the primary season behind him. A woman in the crowd raised her hand and asked:

"We have a president right now that is operating outside the structure of our Constitution. And I want to know -- yeah, I do agree he should be tried for treason -- but I want to know what you would be able to do to restore balance between the three branches of government and what you are going to be able to do to restore our Constitution in this country."

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Sunday morning on "Meet the Press" Vice President Joe Biden went completely Joe Biden on the issue of marriage equality, telling David Gregory "I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men marrying women are entitled to the same exact rights," and crediting "Will and Grace." That's the Joe Biden we know and love.

Here's the exchange:

GREGORY: Have your views evolved?

BIDEN: The good news is that as more and more Americans come to understand what this is all about is a simple proposition. Who do you love? Who do you love and will you be loyal to the person you love? And that’s what people are finding out what all marriages at their root are about. Whether they are marriages of lesbians or gay men or heterosexuals. [...]

GREGORY: You’re comfortable with same-sex marriage now?

BIDEN: Look, I am Vice President of the United States of America. The president sets the policy. I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men marrying women are entitled to the same exact rights. All the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly I don’t see much of a distinction beyond that. [...] I think Will & Grace probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody has done so far. People fear that is different and now they’re beginning to understand.

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But it's becoming increasingly clear that growth and prosperity are threatened by the declining share of income going to the non-wealthy over the last 35 years.

Friday's disappointing jobs report confirms that "the job creators" should be fired, since they only created 115,000 new jobs in April, which isn't even enough to employ new entrants to the workforce. And while the unemployment rate ticked down from 8.2 to 8.1 percent, that's only because more unemployed people gave up and left the labor market entirely. Romney advisor Eric Fehrnstrom (Mr. Etch-A-Sketch) blames President Obama, and he even pretends his candidate cares that "people are so discouraged they are dropping out of the workforce all together."

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Now David Maraniss has found her, as well as another woman who may have been part of a composite in Obama's writings about his white girlfriends. In a Vanity Fair excerpt from his forthcoming book "Barack Obama: The Story," Maraniss shares the two women's memories – and even passages from letters and journals of the time – to explore their role in the future president's "Becoming Obama." Vanity Fair frames the relationships as symbolizing Obama's "struggling with his identity: American or international? Black or white?" Ultimately, though, the disintegration of his relationship with Genevieve Cook, his serious New York girlfriend, seems less about one of them being white, and one black, than about both being outsiders, at a time when Obama didn't want to be one anymore.

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Her "Meet the Press" debate with Alex Castellanos Sunday was one for the ages. The Republican who defended calling Hillary Clinton a "white bitch" in 2008 ("Some women, by the way, are named that, and it's accurate," he told CNN's Jeffrey Toobin) tried to confound Maddow with divergent claims about whether women are paid less than men – "actually no," he insisted; then he admitted they are, but there are reasons for it. And when he couldn't confound Maddow, he condescended.

"I love how passionate you are," he told her, all but patting her on the head. "I wish you were as right about what you’re saying as you are passionate about it. I really do." Maddow shot back: "That’s really condescending. This is a stylistic issue. My passion on this issue is actually me making a factual argument on it."

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So not only does Boehner call minimizing student loan debt a "fake fight," he mocks the relevance of young people to the political process by saying that addressing them, and the issue, is "beneath the dignity of the White House." I've been worried about whether young people will turn out this November the way they did in 2008. But with Boehner in the spotlight talking about these issues, things are looking better on that score.

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