The Romney campaign has long been notoriously evasive when it comes to questions from the press. But even by Mitt Romney's exacting standards, Nickelodeon's Kids Pick the President special doesn't seem like a tough interview. So why did his campaign tell Nickelodeon that he would not be participating in the special?

"The half-hour special gives both candidates' biographies, then shows their answers to questions solicited from kids all over the country," said host Lawrence O'Donnell on Tuesday's The Last Word. One illustrative question, asked by a hard-hitting young boy during the 2008 presidential election, was: "Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. When you were a kid, what was your favorite costume?"

"We don't ever know, really, why" candidates withdraw from the special, said Kids Pick the President host Linda Ellerbee, "because we don't talk to the candidate. We talk to the candidate's staff. And we began talking to the Romney staff six months ago, in April, and they were very encouraging. ... And then, something happened, we don't know what, but all of a sudden it was, 'He can't fit it into his schedule.' And that's all they would ever say."

Since 1992, the nominees of both major parties have appeared in the special every election cycle, except for during the 2004 race. At the end of each special, children vote for who they think should be president; according to Ellerbee, her pint-sized audience has accurately predicted the outcome of every presidential election except for 2004.

In Mitt Romney's speech Monday at the Virginia Military Institute, he vowed that as president he would "recommit America to the goal of a democratic, prosperous Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with the Jewish state of Israel." But that promise is out of step with what he said in remarks at a private fundraiser in May.

In the same leaked video in which Romney made his infamous remarks about the "47 percent," he is heard saying, "I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel." The only way forward in the crisis, he argues, is to "sort of live with it, and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it."

"He almost literally said 'kick the can down the road,'" said host Alex Wagner on Monday's NOW with Alex Wagner.

In contrast, Romney's Monday speech criticized President Obama for not aggressively pursuing a negotiated resolution. "On this vital issue, the President has failed, and what should be a negotiation process has devolved into a series of heated disputes at the United Nations," he said. "In this old conflict, as in every challenge we face in the Middle East, only a new President will bring the chance to begin anew."

Newsweek's Megan McArdle said she was "in agreement with 'Secret Romney.'" "We've now had how many presidents who have tried to solve [the Israeli-Palestinian conflict]?" she said. "Basically everyone since Carter has tried to sit down and do this. No one has managed, so I tend to assume that probably the next president—whether it's Barack Obama again or Mitt Romney—is probably not going to do it."

"We are here to nominate a president," said former president Bill Clinton, opening his prime time address on the second night of the Democratic National Convention. "And I've got one in mind." For the better part of the next hour, he delivered a detailed, animated endorsement of President Barack Obama and a firm denunciation of the modern Republican Party. It was, said MSNBC contributor and Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, an "extraordinary, virtuoso political performance."

In a wide-ranging speech that often strayed from the prepared remarks, Clinton dug deep into Obama's record, citing statistics and explaining specific provisions in the current president's health care policy, student loan policy, auto bailout, welfare waiver system, tax policy, approach to the national debt, and more.

Here, from the New York Times transcription of his remarks as they were delivered, is a representative passage:

So the president’s student loan is more important than ever. Here’s what it does — (cheers, applause) — here’s what it does. You need to tell every voter where you live about this. It lowers the cost of federal student loans. And even more important, it give students the right to repay those loans as a clear, fixed, low percentage of their income for up to 20 years. (Cheers, applause.)

Now what does this mean? What does this mean? Think of it. It means no one will ever have to drop out of college again for fear they can’t repay their debt.

And it means — (cheers, applause) — it means that if someone wants to take a job with a modest income, a teacher, a police officer, if they want to be a small-town doctor in a little rural area, they won’t have to turn those jobs down because they don’t pay enough to repay they debt. Their debt obligation will be determined by their salary. This will change the future for young America. (Cheers, applause.)

It wasn't all wonky detail, however. Clinton also brought a fair amount of acid to his description of the Republican Party's response. "It takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did," he said, after saying the Romney campaign was hypocritical in its attacks on Obama's Medicare policy. He also blamed Republican obstruction for America's persistent unemployment problem.

"Though I often disagree with Republicans, I actually never learned to hate them the way the far right that now controls their party seems to hate our president and a lot of other Democrats," he said. The Republicans' "number one priority" for Obama's first term, he went on, "was not to put America back to work; it was to put the president out of work."

"We’re going to keep President Obama on the job," he added, to roaring applause.

One of the newer line of attacks Clinton deployed in his speech was that the Romney would bankrupt Medicare by 2016. "He wants to go back to the old system, which means we’ll reopen the doughnut hole and force seniors to pay more for drugs, and we’ll reduce the life of the Medicare trust fund by eight full years," he said, adding: " That means, after all, we won’t have to wait until their voucher program kicks in 2023 to see the end of Medicare as we know it."

Though Clinton was there to present a unified Democratic front, he did allude to the famously acrimonious 2008 primary between his wife and Barack Obama. Noting that Obama appointed Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State, Bill Clinton said, "I’m grateful for the relationship of respect and partnership she and the president have enjoyed and the signal that sends to the rest of the world, that democracy does not have to be a blood sport, it can be an honorable enterprise that advances the public interest." The "blood sport" line was not in his prepared remarks.

The Obama campaign reportedly did not know the contents of Clinton's speech before he delivered it, but based on the punditocracy's reaction, they must have been pleased with the response. "I'm sitting here, I'm giddy!" enthused MSNBC's Ed Schultz. "I mean, this is exactly what Barack Obama needed." MSNBC's Chris Matthews said Clinton "brought the center home."

Barack Obama appeared on stage shortly after Clinton's speech concluded, and the two embraced, before walking off together.

It's not just the definition of "rape" that Paul Ryan and Todd Akin have sought to limit through legislative means. An earlier version of the No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act they co-sponsored would also have limited exemptions from the law for victims of incest.

H.R. 3 is best known as a piece of aggressive anti-abortion legislation co-sponsored by Ryan and Akin, in which the only rape victims exempt from the law's abortion restrictions would be those who had been subjected to "forcible rape." However, as the Guardian's Ana Marie Cox pointed out on Monday's The Last Word, the same incarnation of that bill which included the "forcible rape" language also would have narrowed the definition of incest. H.R. 5939, introduced in July 2010, included exemptions only for "an act of forcible rape, or incest with a minor"—not incest in general.

That version of the bill had 186 co-sponsors, including Ryan, Akin, and 25 Democrats.

The Last Word host Lawrence O'Donnell was flabbergasted. "What are they thinking?" he said. "It's like, I think I get what they're thinking when they do this stuff, and then they come up with something like that."

Ryan has defended the "forcible rape" language in H.R. 5939 by referring to it as "stock language." He does not appear to have yet commented on the "incest with a minor" language.

Romney may be taking a softer tack on women's rights than his party when he says he would allow for abortions in cases of rape or incest. But, says Salon's Irin Carmon, implementing those exceptions in practice would be deeply degrading.

"Rape exceptions, in practice, involve rape victims having to go before a system and prove that what happened to them was bad enough that they should be allowed to not be pregnant anymore," Carmon said on Tuesday's The Last Word. In other words: For the state to enforce legal exceptions to an abortion ban, they would have to begin with the presumption that the women who claimed those exceptions were lying—that they are guilty until proven innocent. Then it would have to interrogate and investigate those women until it was satisfied this was not the case.

A Republican Party that instead denounces all abortions in all circumstances, Carmon said, might actually be preferable, because it reveals what's really at stake.

"I think it's so great that they're absolutist, because we can honestly confront their views and see that basically what they think is that women should be forced to stay pregnant," she said. "And if we're going to start parsing and say, 'Did you enjoy it, and were you raped, and did you ask for it,' well, we're going down the same road as them. And it's time for everyone to realize how much of this is really misogyny; how much of this is not really about saving babies, it's really about a contempt for women."

Evan Vucci / AP

Mitt Romney speaks during a campaign rally, Monday, Aug. 20, 2012, in Manchester N.H. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released on Tuesday shows President Barack Obama holding a four point lead over Republican challenger Mitt Romney. But among African Americans, the poll shows an even stronger lead for Obama, as First Read reports:

Looking inside the numbers, Obama continues to lead Romney among key parts of his political base, including African Americans (94 percent to 0 percent), Latinos (by a 2-to-1 margin), voters under 35-years-old (52 percent to 41 percent) and women (51 percent to 41 percent).

That's right: according to this poll, Romney has zero percent support among African Americans.

"The numbers came from a statistically significant sample of more than 100 African-American voters out of 1,000 total voters in the poll," NBC News senior political editor Mark Murray told Lean Forward. "Given the sample size of these African-American respondents, the margin of error is well within the 95 percent-5 percent split with which Obama won this group in 2008. "

In other words, none of the roughly 110 black respondents to this poll said they would support Romney. The poll should not be taken to mean that Romney has no African American supporters at all.  However, at the very most, he has far fewer than Obama.

By now you might have heard that Mitt Romney's trip to the United Kingdom is not going very well. The Guardian is keeping a running count of his various missteps—from demeaning the London Olympics to accidentally revealing classified information—and it's not pretty.

In fact, it's gotten so bad that tweeters on both sides of the Atlantic are mocking the Republican presidential candidate's repeated stumbles with the hashtag "#romneyshambles." The intent behind the hashtag is easy enough to figure out: "Romney" because of Mitt Romney, and "shambles" because his journey across the pond has become an unmitigated disaster. But figuring out exactly where the hashtag came from, and why it's so funny, requires a little background knowledge of British pop culture.

"Romneyshambles" is a bastardization of the word "omnishambles," which itself comes from a popular BBC sitcom called The Thick Of It. The show, which will air its fourth season this fall, is a black-hearted, profanity-laden satire of UK politics, set in the government's fictional Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship (DOSAC). A typical episode begins when the department's minister or staff makes a huge political blunder, which the Prime Minister's PR enforcer (an acid-tongued Scot named Malcolm Tucker) has to then fix.

In the first episode of the third season, after learning that the new minister of DOSAC is a public relations nightmare, Tucker dubs her "the [expletive deleted] omnishambles." Here's some video of the now-famous scene. Warning: like pretty much every scene in the show, it contains a lot of swearing.

Despite his protestations, Mitt Romney is "legally responsible" for what Bain Capital did between 1999 and 2002, former SEC Commissioner Roberta Karmel said on Thursday's The Last Word.

"Generally, when a businessman is the chairman, CEO, and, in this case, sole stockholder, he's accountable for the business and affairs of that company," said Karmel, who is currently a professor at Brooklyn Law School. "And even if he's not making day-to-day decisions or managing the investments of a company like this—which was a venture capital company—he's still legally responsible, and should be accountable, for the business and affairs of that company."

Earlier that day, the Boston Globe reported on SEC filings showing that Mitt Romney had remained the president, CEO, and sole stockholder of Bain Capital for three years after he ostensibly left the company in 1999. Romney has repeatedly claimed that he had nothing to do with decisions that company made during his absence.

"Unfortunately, too many business execs have tried to exculpate themselves from that kind of accountability," said Karmel.

Stephanie Cutter, a spokesperson for the Obama campaign, suggested that Romney was either misleading voters now or had misled the SEC when he claimed to still be in charge of Bain. The latter, she noted, "is a felony." The Romney campaign demanded an apology for that remark from Obama 2012, but spokesperson Ben LaBolt made it clear that none would be forthcoming.

Karmel said if Romney misled the SEC, it would be a serious matter.

"If information in those documents is false or misleading, there are serious consequences," she said. "There can be civil cases brought by the SEC. And depending on the facts and circumstances, if there's a false filing with the SEC, there can even be a criminal prosecution. I'm not saying Mitt Romney should be criminally prosecuted, but that is a potential consequence of a false filing."