On Friday’s The Rachel Maddow Show, Maddow hashed out one of the strongest key moments that defined Vice President Biden’s hard-hitting performance over Congressman Paul Ryan. She spoke to MSNBC colleague Chris Hayes about why Biden nailing Ryan’s flagrant hypocrisy on the stimulus was so much more than just a “zinger” or a “gotcha” moment.

Hayes said he believes that what made all the difference was Biden going beyond Ryan’s flip-flopping and actually defending the stimulus: 

“People should read Michael Grunwald’s 'New New Deal,' which I’ve talked about before on air, because he lays out in some ways, what Joe Biden did in overseeing that stimulus spending, it wasn’t some petty, trivial undertaking. It was actually really remarkable. And in fact, they lived up to, despite all the Solyndra demagoguery that has come from Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney, they lived up to an incredibly high standard, in terms of the efficiency and prudence, of spending that much money in that period of time. It was, in some ways, a great testament to effective bureaucratic deployment, to government doing what it should do. And that story has remained woefully untold.”

Hayes went on to explain that Ryan’s hypocrisy on the stimulus is part of a much larger misleading Republican trend. In 2002, Ryan made an impassioned plea before the House in favor of George W. Bush’s $700 billion in stimulus package, telling the Journal Times “you have to spend a little to grow a little.” Bush’s plan included an extension of unemployment benefits and millions of checks being mailed directly to people’s homes. Ten years later, Ryan called Obama’s stimulus a "wasteful spending spree."

With that evidence in mind, Hayes cautioned against buying into the idea that Republicans will shrink government.

“What they want to do now, in opposition, is create this ideological vision of smaller government, going after malformed bureaucracy," he said. "When they are in power, they do not do that. And no one should be suckered into thinking that they will.”

With Election Day looming, many folks are taking their politics very seriously. But approaching issues through comedy may actually be more effective in getting a message across – and, it helps take the edge off. On Friday’s Hardball, Chris Matthews spoke to The Daily Show creator Lizz Winstead and Mik Moore from the Jewish Council for Education and Research about the latest ad from their comedy-driven super PAC, Actually.org.

Moore explained how the organization works with comedians and American Bridge to make sure lies don’t go unchecked in politics. Their latest video features Rosie Perez mocking sympathy for Mitt Romney, who joked at a fundraiser in September that he could have had a better shot at winning the presidency if his father had been Latino. 

Perez has strong words for Romney’s policies affecting Latinos and brings the ad home with a message for him: “Being Latino wouldn’t win you the election. But saying jokingly that you wish you were might actually lose it for you.”

Winstead then told Matthews why she may have a better shot at connecting with voters than he does:

“I’ve been doing political satire for almost 30 years now. This is such an elevated time of people who are totally insane, so I think with comics you can hit with some raw language that sometimes is the inner voice that people want to use…I think that comics, they can resonate in a way that other folks can’t or regular ads can’t. So when you say, 'this is insane at this point, people,' we’re allowed to do that in a way that broadcasters aren’t and news men aren’t, and it’s been really effective.”

After spending the day at NYU’s law school hashing out marriage equality with Ted Olson, the ultra-conservative former Bush administration Solicitor General and gay rights advocate, Rachel Maddow continued the discussion on Friday’s The Rachel Maddow Show with Salon Senior Writer and co-host of The Cycle Steve Kornacki.

Maddow pointed out the seeming irony that Olson is playing the part of Joe Biden in Paul Ryan’s debate prep, considering their stark difference in opinion on this huge social issue. Perhaps it’s fitting, considering the conundrum facing the Republican Party as their politics struggle to catch up with public opinion. 54% of Americans now support marriage equality for gays, while 40-42% oppose it.

Pro-gay marriage ballot initiatives in Maine, Washington, Maryland, are all expected to pass in November. In Minnesota, the polling is almost dead even.

“Marriage equality so far has a really terrible record at the ballot box, but this year there is reason to believe that it might be different,” Maddow said. “What does that do to the Republican Party’s politics on this issue?”

Kornacki replied that the confidence of the pro-equality advocates is well placed, since Republican opposition is being overwhelmed by support from Democrats and independents:

 “Outside the Republican party, this is basically a settled issue. So what you’re seeing now, is when you put it in a blue state – Maine, clearly a blue state, Washington, clearly a blue state, Maryland, clearly a blue state – the odds are very good this thing’s going to pass comfortably. Minnesota we think of as a blue state, but as it gets closer to the presidential level it gets closer…a lot more social conservatives there, so it’s not surprising to me that it’s a little closer in Minnesota. But I think we’re at the point where if it goes on the ballot in a blue state, it passes. If it goes on the ballot in a swing state, it could pass, it might not pass. But then you still have, if its on the ballot in Kentucky or Mississippi or a Republican-heavy place like that, you’re a long way away from there, a real long way.” 

Maddow asked if individuals like Ted Olson can have an impact on the Republican Party’s views and actually move them in a more progressive direction. Olson will fight for federal equal marriage rights if the Supreme Court decides to hear the case.

Kornacki said yes, but that it would take a real leader, one who could influence the Evangelical community, as half the party identifies as Evangelical Christians.

“When you’re talking about the Republican Party, there’s going to come a day, at some point, I think in both of our lifetimes— though it might be years from now— when the Republican Party is going to come around on this issue. It’s just where society is heading," he said.

During Olson's conversation with Maddow, Olson argued that engaging in conversation with the opposition can go a long way:  

"Don't understate the possibility that dialogue and talking about the issues makes a difference. The tides are changing. Attitudes are changing. And the way to change those attitudes is dialogue... and to talk to people about fundamental rights. The way to deal with Republicans, in my opinion, is to say 'We are the party of Abraham Lincoln. Let's live up to that. [Let's talk about] decency, privacy, and respect.'"

In a heated appearance on MSNBC’s Hardball Friday, Jack Welch doubled down on his unsupported conspiracy theory that the Obama administration cooked the books on today’s improved jobs numbers.

Chris Matthews asked the former General Electric CEO to explain where the accusation came from. Welch said:

“All I can talk about are some of the numbers. We had 600,000 government jobs added in the last 2 months. We had 873,000 jobs by a household survey which is a total estimate from 50,000 phone calls. Of those 600,000 were temporary workers. Chris, these numbers are all a series of assumptions. Tons of assumptions. And it just seems somewhat coincidental that the month before the election, the numbers go one tenth of a point below where they were when the president started, although I don’t see anything in the economy that says these surges are true.”

Matthews voiced his suspicion that Welch’s assertions are based in political bias against Obama, not economic concern. He asked Welch what evidence he has that the Obama administration got to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and doctored data. Welch confirmed he hadn’t spoken to any economists, analysts, or accounting specialists:

“I have no evidence to prove that, I just raised the question.”

Matthews wasn’t satisfied; accusing a presidential administration of manipulating data is “Nixon stuff,” that goes beyond raising a question. He gave Welch one last opportunity to walk back the claim. Welch declined, “I don’t take back any part of that tweet.”

Former Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Keith Hall dismissed Welch's claim on Friday, telling The Wall Street Journal it is "impossible to manipulate labor survey data." Leading economist Jared Bernstein called Welch’s accusation “outrageous;” Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis dubbed it “ludicrous.”

UPDATE at 11:09 p.m. ET: In a later appearance on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, Welch said “I should have put a question mark on the end of that [tweet], let’s face it,” Welch said.

*NBC Universal, the parent company of NBC News and MSNBC, is a joint venture of Comcast and General Electric since 2011. Jack Welch was General Electric’s CEO until 2001.

After repeatedly defending his secretly taped description of 47 percent of Americans as “victims, dependent on government,” who don’t take responsibility for their lives, Mitt Romney appeared on Fox News Thursday evening and changed his tune, saying his comments were “completely wrong.”

Sean Hannity asked Romney what he would have said if Obama had brought up the damaging comments during the first presidential debate on Wednesday. 

“Clearly, in a campaign with hundreds, if not thousands, of speeches and question and answer sessions, now and then you’re going to say something that doesn’t come out right. In this case, I said something that’s just completely wrong," Romney replied. "And I absolutely believe that my life has shown that I care about the 100 percent. That’s been demonstrated throughout my life and this whole campaign is about the 100 percent.”

Romney had originally defended the 47% comments at a recent press conference as “not elegantly stated,” "off the cuff” and “a message which I’m going to carry and continue to carry.” MSNBC’s Alex Wagner stopped by Thursday's The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell and offered one explanation for the unexpected turnaround.

“You know, Lawrence, the word that has popped into my head in the course of the last 24 hours is ‘lobotomy,’" she told host Lawrence O'Donnell. "Either Mitt Romney wants the entire American public to have one, or is proposing they get one, because that’s the only way they’re going to believe what he’s saying. Or, he himself has had a lobotomy, which is the explanation for this pivot that is miraculous."

O’Donnell noted that a presidential candidate never wants to say the sentence,“I was completely wrong,” because it opens the door to questions about other things he could be completely wrong about.

In the same vein, back on the campaign trail in Wisconsin today, Obama capitalized on Romney’s habit of contradicting his own statements and hoping voters will forget.

“Whoever it was that was on stage last night doesn’t want to be held accountable for what the real Mitt Romney’s been saying for the last year," Obama said. "And that’s because he knows full well we don’t want what he’s been selling over the last year."

During Wednesday’s debate, Mitt Romney focused several talking points around the claim that “middle income Americans are being crushed” under President Obama’s policies. On Thursday’s The Ed Show, Ed Schultz asked James Hoffa, labor leader and General President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, if he believes that’s true. 

Hoffa said no way. “Let’s look at what’s going on," he said. "The economy’s coming back, we basically have people working. Teamsters are working, UAW members are working, the auto industry is thriving, all the different people that work in the plants are back to work, so we have hundreds of thousands of people who have their jobs back. So that’s good news. We’re on our way back and we need some more time, that’s all. And for him to say they’ve been crushed, that’s not true. If anybody crushed them, it’s his party that crashed the economy in ’08.”

Despite Romney’s strong, impassioned plea for middle class votes during the first debate, Schultz said he believes it won’t be enough to overcome the damage caused by the secret 47 percent video. Additional hurdles for Romney, Schultz said, include his record of opposition to policies like the auto bailout and increasing the minimum wage—plus his running mate’s budget plan, which critics say could be devastating for the poor and middle class.

Hoffa agreed with Schultz and said labor was not swayed by Romney’s debate performance. “For him to all of a sudden say he cares about the middle class, I believe that video about the 47 percent," he said. "That’s what he thinks about us. ... He is against the things that we stand for, and the things that basically are a safety net for America right now. And no matter what you saw last night, it was a big lie. He basically tried to remake himself last night, but you know, we know the real Mitt Romney.”

As political commentators try to explain what they largely see as President Obama’s uncharacteristically lackluster performance in Wednesday’s presidential debate, they have examined everything from facial expression to voice tone. On Thursday, Hardball’s Chris Matthews asked James Lipton, host of Inside the Actor’s Studio, to help analyze the performance aspect of the debate.

Obama is already being heavily criticized for looking down at his podium too often, as such behavior translates poorly to the split screen; Lipton added that the president wasn’t even looking in the right direction.

“There are only two places he can go," Lipton said. "Either into the camera, or at his partner, the person with whom he’s debating. … The rest of it was a waste of time and a waste of energy, and I think made him look insufficiently interested in the moment. In acting, we say that we have to find ourselves in the moment and he was not in the moment."

Romney fared far better, in Lipton's view. "Interestingly enough, Mitt Romney, whom I accused in my first article that I wrote about this, ‘How to Act Human,' of being unable to relate to the public, was in the moment," he said. "For the first time, he found himself in the moment.”

Matthews noted the differences in the candidates’ closing statements may have sealed Obama's defeat. “That was a victory speech and a concession speech, side by side,” he said, identifying Romney's closing statement as the victory speech.

Lipton agreed that Obama appeared listless and anxious, even unprepared. He also gave Romney credit for seeming to speak from the heart, almost as if the candidates’ styles had been reversed.

“The president of the theater guild once taught me a lesson about writing plays," he said. "He said, ‘Jim, the most important two minutes of your play, never mind everything else, are the two minutes before the audience goes out for intermission. Those last two minutes, that’s what they’ll remember.' The last two minutes were a disaster for the president and a triumph for Mitt Romney.”

In a fun Friday segment of The Rachel Maddow Show, Maddow examined an increasingly interesting Congressional race in Florida where Republican Rep. David Rivera had been favored to win, but thanks to a recent campaign/personal spending scandal, polls show he'll likely lose his seat to Democratic opponent Joe Garcia.

She explained the turnaround:

“Something kind of weird happened in South Florida when it came time for the Democrats to pick somebody in their primary to run against Congressman David Rivera. There was the candidate who everybody expected, who had run against David Rivera in the past, Joe Garcia – but then in addition to Joe Garcia there was another candidate in the primary, kind of out of the blue, [Justin Lamar Sternad], who reported almost no fundraising and had only a little over a hundred bucks in the bank. But he still managed to somehow put out really professionally done, professionally micro-targeted, high-end, well-researched campaign mailers, lots of different ones, to the tune of thousands of thousands of dollars in campaign spending.” 

Where was all that 'For Justin Lamar' money coming from? Basically, Rep. Rivera spent tens of thousands of his own money to create a fake Democratic candidate, a candidate he would have rather run against than Joe Garcia. If these allegations of funding the Democrat’s failed primary bid are true, Rivera will face criminal conspiracy charges. Speaker of the House John Boehner reportedly advised Rivera to drop out of the race, and Republicans fear the negative attention won't do Mitt Romney any favors with Florida voters.

Interestingly, Ana Sol Alliegro, Sternad’s former fake campaign manager and Rivera’s close friend, who is wanted for questioning in the case, went missing earlier this month after the FBI raided her apartment. Miami bloggers speculate she’s either trying to leave the country or trying to cut a deal with the FBI to avoid doing time. The self-described “Republican bad girl” has a lively past as well, including stories about shoplifting charges, pulling a gun on an ex-husband, and an 83-day marriage to former Miami mayor Joe Carollo.

One last twist: Rivera is also said to be Marco Rubio’s “closest friend in politics,” according to The New Republic, and in their 20 years of friendship Rivera has been “instrumental in Rubio’s rapid rise from Miami commissioner to U.S. senator.” However, pundits have speculated that Rubio’s ties to Rivera may well have cost him a shot at the vice presidential nomination.

The Tea Party’s crusade against voter fraud by way of suppression and intimidation was flipped on its head earlier this week as election officials in six Florida counties launched an investigation into potentially hundreds of cases of suspected voter fraud by a GOP consulting firm that was paid almost $3 million by the RNC to register Republican voters in swing states.

There’s been lots of talk from GOPers about cracking down on voter fraud, and now Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., wants to make sure equal attention is paid to the crime of voter intimidation. Boxer stopped by The Ed Show on Friday to discuss a letter she recently wrote to the State Department inquiring about their handling of voter intimidation. She told Ed Schultz:

“I know everyone’s paying attention, I know the Obama campaign is ready to act on this. But I realized that there are two important federal laws, the Voting Rights Act, passed in the 60s, and Voter Registration Act passed in the 90s, that have criminal and civil penalties for people who try to intimidate a voter. And I wanted to make sure that the Justice Department is moving on these cases. So I did hear from them today, and although they can’t confirm or deny any particular case because I wrote about Ohio, they did say that they had opened up 42 investigations this year, which is good to know.

They are pursuing, enforcing these laws, and they said I could say that anyone within the sound of my voice, anyone in this country who feels they’re being intimidated can call their nearest FBI office because it is a federal offense to harass someone, to intimidate someone. Think about all the people that worked so hard and struggled and went to prison and put their life on the line for the right to vote.”

Schultz asked Boxer to comment on a video that surfaced on Wednesday of a young girl in Colorado registering people to vote – but only if they were voting for Mitt Romney. The girl said she was being paid by the County Clerk’s office.

Boxer said it’s very simple, black and white: “That’s against the law.”

On Friday’s Hardball, Chris Matthews spoke to The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein and The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Oath, about the Supreme Court—a particularly underreported topic that weighs in the balance of the November election.

Matthews explained there’s much more at stake than just the presidency, simply because four of the current justices are "getting up there" in years: liberals Breyer, 74, and Ginsburg, 79; swing voter Kennedy, 76; and conservative Scalia, 76. The next president will likely be appointing Supreme Court justices who will have a strong hand in shaping federal policy for years to come.

Matthews asked Stein to name some of the issues at stake, and it wasn’t a short list: campaign spending regulations, separation of church and state, whether universities can use race in admissions, and Roe v. Wade. Stein said civil rights issues, especially gay rights, will probably be front and center: 

“One of the cases that could be considered is the Voting Rights Act, that could be overturned. Obviously, affirmative action is going to be on the docket, that’s a very complicated issue. But it works both ways – there’s a very high chance that this court will hear an appeal to DOMA. It could be the first court that establishes at least some progressivity with respect to gay rights and that could make it a sort of a historic court in some sense, even if the politics suggest otherwise. So you know, it works both ways. And it’s going to be curious to see not only which cases they pick up but in what manner and how they do it and And how the arguments play out. DOMA could come up, but so could Prop. 8 which is a different section of the gay rights debate, so I’m curious to see how it plays out.” 

Appointing a justice is one of the most consequential decisions a president can make; Matthews pointed out they even had the last word on the 2000 election. He asked Toobin how much power the next president would have to swing it to the left or right; to take a seat occupied by a conservative and give it to a liberal, or vice versa. Toobin said it’s tricky business, with huge implications:

“The fact is most Supreme Court nominations get through…but we have not seen a liberal replace a conservative in a very long time, maybe 1993 when Byron White was replaced by Ruth Ginsburg. But if, for example, the conservative – one of the conservative justices leaves in a second Obama term, that will be the World War III of all time because the conservative movement in this country has embraced their version of the Constitution as a fundamental aspect of what they believe in. More than Democrats have, frankly. Republicans talk about the Constitution more than the Democrats do these days, and if the balance could go from 5 to 4 Republican to 5 to 4 Democrat, the implications would be earth shaking.”