Teasing an upcoming softball interview with Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday, MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell wondered: "Does she now hold all the cards after President Obama says the Speaker has lost control?" Mitchell later introduced Pelosi by proclaiming: "John Boehner is gonna have to turn to the Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi to save the country from default, to put up Democratic votes to get this [budget deal] through." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Near the end of the friendly exchange, Pelosi credited her Senate counterpart for the deal: "I never saw anything like what Harry Reid did. To watch him was to watch a master at work. He was superb, intellectually, politically astute." Mitchell seized on that comment to make a sycophantic segue: "Speaking of masters at work, you have just been inducted, as I understand it, into the Women's Hall of Fame, which is such a high honor. So congratulations to you. "

"I’m going to torch this [bleep]ing place." That's what an angry Ed Schultz reportedly threatened at a testy August 2010 exchange with the suits at MSNBC. Schultz was reportedly fired up because, "the network was running election-night promos and he wasn’t in them. He’d been arguing on the phone with marketing, then he slammed down the phone and exploded," a witness to the outburst told the New York Post.

So imagine our glee this afternoon when ol' Ed opened up his September 23 program with a montage featuring, wait for it, "Burning Down the House," by The Talking Heads.

Has Glenn Thrush at the Politico thrown up the white flag on Democrats regaining control of the House until 2022, the first election cycle after the next wave of congressional and statehouse redistricting? If so, he clearly underestimates Republicans' ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, but I digress.

It would appear that Thrush has thrust himself into the throes of despair, based on the bolded sentence seen after the jump from his Friday report on how 2010 losses of control of the U.S. House and especially control of so many statehouses and state legislatures "still haunt" Dear Leader Barack Obama:

NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent and MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell sat down for an interview with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday’s Andrea Mitchell Reports. But instead of asking the Democratic leader tough questions about issues facing the House of Representatives this summer, Mitchell instead chose to lob softballs at the former speaker of the House – giving Pelosi an opportunity to hype Hillary Clinton’s potential run for president and blast Republicans for assaults on “reproductive freedom.”

Mitchell teased the interview at the beginning of her program by weighing Pelosi’s “new initiative on women being launched” that Thursday against the “new restrictions on [women’s] rights to reproductive freedom” that have women “feeling besieged.” Of course, Mitchell ignored the fact that many of these abortion restrictions are popular with Americans, perhaps because Mitchell is an outspoken – and fierce – pro-choice advocate.

On Saturday, reporter Jonathan Martin wrote an interesting piece in the New York Times about Republican efforts to paint Hillary Clinton as “old news” for her potential 2016 run. Martin pondered the “striking” notion that Democrats “could run an older candidate” while Republicans “could nominate a youthful standard-bearer” in the next presidential election.

Of course, to the liberal panel on Monday’s Morning Joe – absent host and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough – GOP criticism against the former secretary of state is nothing but a sexist, hypocritical attack on the victimized Clinton.