We're in the thick of it, folks. November 6 is around the corner. You would think the Romney campaign would get this, but instead they face the reality of a candidate who is acting like a mark pretty much daily. (Perhaps he learned from "MC Sheriff" in the EPMD video above just how it's done.)

Our own Rachel Maddow last night highlighted comments from the Marriott International chairman thanking Mitt Romney for reeling in his yacht -- just like he'll do for America!

"So I finally found a place to park [the yacht] after about 20 minutes, and I pulled in, I said, 'Who's going to grab the rope?,' and I looked up and there was Mitt Romney. So he pulled me in, he tied up the boat for me. He rescued me just as he's going to rescue this great country."

I totally relate to that whenever I parallel park! Thanks, Mitt Romney!

Oh, and as Jay Smooth noted in his most recent videoblog for Animal New York, even Romney's own family members aren't helping:

Why is it that whenever Mitt Romney's family talks about Mitt Romney, they always tell stories that make him sound like a d*ck?

I mean, I'm not judging; I'm sure he is a loving husband and a father, I'm not judging him as a person. I'm just saying, whenever his family talks about his family life, he ends up sounding like someone you'd never want in your house, much less the White House.

From #47percent and this week's "harvesting" comments (more on that later), to Clint and his chair and all the way back to the high-school gay bashing and putting the dog on the roof, I'm not sure that "messaging discipline" are words familiar to those in Romney's Boston headquarters. Or if they are, they're doing it wrong. It would be one thing if it were just something a quirky candidate does on the way to victory (see: Bush, George W.) The problem for the Romney campaign is that this stuff is hurting them (where it hurts, no less).

President Obama may have him marked for a whooping in a few weeks, and a sound one at that. He's lining up early voters while his opponent is still trying to get America to like him. But today, Melissa will get into a number of big reasons why this is not over.

Samuel L. Jackson made it quite clear in his new, not-so-much-a-children's story for Obama voters this week made it clear that he does not believe this is a game:

One of the biggest reasons this isn't over? Well, a lot of those Obama voters, even if they're jazzed up by Jackson's appeal, won't be able to vote. In particular, we'll dig into the insanity happening in Pennsylvania in today's edition of This Week in Voter Suppression!™ We'll also delve into how the NFL's replacement referee lockout turned some Republicans (even Scott Walker) pro-union; the fees and roadblocks that help form the achievement gap in this country's education system; and a Foot Soldier we got from a Facebook submission by a viewer out there in #nerdland!

Our guests include Democratic Congresswoman Gwen Moore of Wisconsin, political sports journalist and author Dave Zirin, MSNBC contributor Ari Melber, and many more!

As always, folks -- be sure to interact with us during the show here in the comments of this post, on Facebook, and on Twitter, using the hashtag #nerdland. We look forward to having you join us at 10am ET on msnbc!

You can see the Jay Smooth video referenced above after the jump.

Perhaps the highlight of Sunday's Education Nation Student Town Hall -- hosted by Melissa, naturally -- came when Eboni Boykin, a freshman at Columbia University, was profiled in the first hour. Eboni's story is unique because she grew up in St. Louis with hardships almost no student (let alone future Ivy Leaguer) has to endure:

She's spent much of her childhood in and out of homeless shelters. She's attended more schools than she can easily keep track of — most of them struggling urban schools where disruptions and low expectations are the norm.

But visions of the Ivy League have motivated this high school senior since she was 13, when she became captivated by a character's similar quest on the television drama "Gilmore Girls."

The profile we produced, and Melissa's interview with her at Sunday's event, is our Good Look™ of the week. Whether you missed the town hall, or want to revisit and/or share the video, please check our carousel above for all the Education Nation video!

We will be talking about education today, reporting and discussing the achievement gap. That, and much more today at 10am ET on msnbc! See you in #nerdland!

In today's show, we'll lead off by recapping perhaps the worst week in Mitt Romney's political life, all the way from Monday's Mother Jones secret-video scoop (at which "Saturday Night Live" took a well-placed shot this week, hitting Fox News with some comedic shrapnel) to yesterday's puzzling release of his 2011 tax returns (in which he paid a 14.1% tax rate, engineered for the public's eye) and a "summary" of his returns from 1990 to 2009.

And that's not me calling it "puzzling," it's Republicans like former Romney strategist Alex Castellanos, who remarked, “At first I thought this was an April Fool’s Joke...but this isn't April":

“I can’t imagine that David Axelrod will now say, ‘I’m glad Mitt put this issue behind him.’ This will drag Mitt’s taxes back into the debate. And there’s not many days left. I just can’t imagine why they would do this. There are 40 days left and you have now made more of them about Mitt’s taxes….you don’t serve a life sentence and then confess afterward. They’ve taken their beating on this (already) … I just don’t understand how a (being) ‘little pregnant’ strategy (works).”

Considering the bad week -- no, month -- Romney has had, we'll take a look at how he and other factors will contribute to what candidates (and what initiaitive or referendum) wins down the ballot. We'll also get into a new, revelatory Pew poll on the so-called "engagement gap" in our weekly This Week in Voter Suppression!™ segment.

We'll also dig into senior-citizen issues later in the show, taking note of this Paul Ryan embarrassment yesterday at the AARP conference:

Paul Ryan’s speech to AARP’s national conference in New Orleans did not go over too well with the audience.

The Republican vice presidential nominee, who has led his party in proposing a privatization plan for Medicare, drew repeated jeers and catcalls as he made the case for Mitt Romney’s platform on entitlements. Easily the worst moments came as Ryan discussed repealing the Affordable Care Act, which increased prescription drug and preventive service benefits for seniors.

But folks, I may have saved the best for last: the great musician Willie Nelson (see above) will join Melissa to talk about this year's edition of his benefit festival Farm Aid, which celebrates its 27th anniversary today. We'll have other guests, too:

• Eddie Agosto, Air Force veteran and former postal worker, and current volunteer at the AARP.
• Ari Berman, contributing writer at The Nation magazine and author of "Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics."
• Brenda Gardner, actress and AARP member.
• Imara Jones, economic justice contributor, Colorlines.com.
• Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, executive director, CEO, and co-founder of MomsRising.org, and author of "The F Word: Feminism in Jeopardy."
• Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation magazine and author of "The Change I Believe In: Fighting for Progress in the Age of Obama."
• Alex Wagner, host of "Now with Alex Wagner" here on MSNBC.
• Matt Welch, editor-in-chief of Reason magazine and author of "Declaration of Independents" and "McCain: Myth of a Maverick."

As always, folks -- be sure to interact with us during the show here in the comments of this post, on Facebook, and on Twitter, using the hashtag #nerdland. We look forward to having you join us at 10am ET on msnbc!

Morning, #nerdland! I'm just going to get out of the way of this one, and just say this: Melissa talked to the one and only Dr. Maya Angelou last week. (Really, do you need more of an enticement than that?)

Video of their compelling conversation is both below, and after the jump. See you all at 10am ET on msnbc for another edition of "Melissa Harris-Perry"!

AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney holds a press availability to discuss his secretly-videotaped comments at a May fundraiser.

I'm not sure Mitt Romney gets what "spit hot fire" means.

By now, I was expecting a series of Serious Policy Speeches™ in the vein of then-candidate Barack Obama's famed Philadelphia address on race, or his speech in Berlin during the 2008 campaign. Rhetorical torches meant to lead, and inspire. Even if they disagreed with his arguments, many would certainly would welcome Romney offering serious thoughts about serious issues. What we've gotten now instead is unserious thoughts of an unserious candidate, uttered in (what he thought was) private.

David Corn of Mother Jones has released several lengthy, secretly-videotaped portions of remarks Romney made at a $50,000/plate fundraiser at the home of private-equity manager and sex-party enthusiast Marc Leder on May 17. Yesterday, there was this Shocking Just Shocking!™ Romney dis of just about half of the country. On the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, a new type of percenter was given a name:

"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax."

As Matt Welch of Reason notes, this is "economic determinism at its worst, going against the very message the Republican Party was trying to see to the world during its quadrennial national convention last month." As such, damage control was in order. In the hastily-called presser (staged after 10pm Eastern last night, when likely a lot of those 47-percenters were sleeping), Romney offered a semi-apology-not-really for the remarks, saying that his sentiments weren't "elegantly stated." (Perhaps not as much so as he'd done before, at least.)

He also demanded the full release of the video, which was rich, considering. This morning, Corn and Mother Jones obliged to a point, releasing more video from the fundraiser. This second report featured comments about Israel and Palestine that might disqualify a man running for President in a sane world:

Romney was indicating he did not believe in the peace process and, as president, would aim to postpone significant action: "[S]o what you do is, you say, you move things along the best way you can. You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem…and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it."

The Romney campaign is a seven-alarm fire right now, thanks to their own candidate the arsonist, spewing hot fire all over himself like a drunken dragon. The ejaculatory condemnation he made of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo for a statement made in an attempt to head off a violent protest -- and the immediate appearance of political opportunism in the wake of four American diplomats in Libya -- is still fresh in the minds of an American public increasingly tuned into politics. Now, less than 50 days before the election, we get these Mother Jones scoops.

You certainly can't blame Seven of Nine for this, but perhaps President Obama himself is to blame. I'll elaborate.

The President has a talent, if you can call it that, for running against candidates who self-immolate. As Melissa referenced on Saturday morning, this was detailed well in theGrio last week by my friend Zerlina Maxwell. In the midst of Romney comparisons to eventual losers Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, her column brought back to mind a name which I hadn't considered: Jack Ryan. Remember him?

In the 2004 Illinois race for U.S. Senate, Ryan was the Republican opponent who Obama was supposed to face. That is, until it was revealed that he once frequented sex clubs with his wife, actress Jeri Ryan, asking her to perform sex acts amongst the patronage. Jeri Ryan, who gained fame portraying the liberated Borg drone Seven of Nine on television's "Star Trek: Voyager" in the late nineties, had since liberated herself from her politician husband -- and as such, put his activities through a media megaphone. Her ex dropped out of the race against Obama, and that was that. Flame, on.

Ryan was replaced by the irascible Alan Keyes, who poured rhetorical gasoline upon himself during his joke of a campaign, making Obama's win an easy one. While he wouldn't necessarily coast against Senator John McCain in 2008, there's no doubt McCain set his campaign on fire by nominating Sarah Palin as his running mate and later, by suspending his campaign to go back to Washington for bailout negotiations. What he thought would be seen as heroic adherence to his elected duties came across as petty grandstanding, an attempt to position himself as a man of action.

What folks may not recall is that it was also pure avoidance. McCain pulled that stunt right about this point in the campaign; the four-year anniversary of it is next week. It was right before he was scheduled to debate President Obama for the first time, a debate which he insisted upon canceling in light of his sudden need to be needed in Washington. In the exact moment McCain sought to look superhuman, he was revealed as a political coward.

The debate I note all these instances to draw attention to what this new Romney crisis is really all about: character.

A while back, I had a spirited conversation on Twitter with one of the journalists whom I most respect: Spencer Ackerman of Wired. Our rare disagreement centered around a significantly less important remark, that of Romney's running mate, Paul Ryan, about his mythical marathon time. Spencer didn't think it was a story worth discussing, but I defended sending a tweet with a story about Ryan's fabrication because, particularly in the wake of his Republican National Convention speech, it pointed to a character issue, and this was about why character matters in presidential elections. I'd say the same now of Romney's fundraiser remarks.

So would Jonathan Chait of New York:

To think of Romney’s leaked discourse as a “gaffe” grossly misdescribes its importance. Indeed the comments’ direct impact on the outcome of the election will probably be small ... it won’t strike many voters as an insult: Most people who don’t pay income taxes do pay other taxes, and fail to distinguish between them, and thus don’t consider themselves among the 47% scorned by Romney.

Instead the video exposes an authentic Romney as a far more sinister character than I had imagined. Here is the sneering plutocrat, fully in thrall to a series of pernicious myths that are at the heart of the mania that has seized his party. He believes that market incomes in the United States are a perfect reflection of merit. Far from seeing his own privileged upbringing as the private-school educated son of an auto executive-turned-governor as an obvious refutation of that belief, Romney cites his own life, preposterously, as a confirmation of it. (“I have inherited nothing. Everything I earned I earned the old fashioned way.”)

That brings me to a bigger issue for Romney than whether or not he offended poor people on government assistance, or implied he'd pass the buck on Israel and Palestine. Give folks a day or two of good, old-fashioned false equivalence, and that'll dampen. The issue is that we can't really know if Romney even meant what he said.

Chait argues that this exposes a side of the GOP candidate which he hadn't seen, but who is to say this is the "real Romney"? Jamelle Bouie pointed out last night that this could have been a message tailor-made for a ton of really wealthy guys who favor Israel in a "quiet room," in Romney's parlance. As Welch noted in his piece, this 53/47 stuff is not uncommon scapegoating on the Right (remember the "I am the 53%" folks?), so perhaps Romney wasn't revealing he was a True Conservative™, but doing what he's been doing for virtually the entire campaign: merely playing to the crowd.

This is a talent more befitting a comedian, or a wedding MC, than a President. Considering Romney is asking America to send him to the White House in less than eight weeks, his real problem is that these videos shine a brighter light on Romney's penchat for saying anything to be liked to the people he thinks can carry him to his goal, and withholding anything he thinks may make him unlikeable to everyone else (i.e., these exact comments to a larger audience; tax returns). As any fifth-grader can tell you, that is a recipe for becoming unpopular to everyone. (Even David Brooks.)

The question of whether or not men are "over" was asked over the weekend on "MHP," and this all has some questioning whether the same can be said of Mitt Romney. This controversy may not end the election, as Bloomberg's Josh Barro predicted -- especially in the age of Citizens United and voter-ID laws. Romney's chances at the Presidency may not have gone away for good, but all this has helped us get to know Mitt Romney just a little bit better. The more we get to know about his character, the less there is to like.

At best, this is a bad look. Not only did he make disqualifying, unserious remarks about the Israel-Palestine conflict, Romney blew off 47% of the nation, clowning the 47-percenters as self-victimizing leeches of the American promise. That must have seemed a better option than actually examining the valid reasons many of them have for not voting for him.

Below is "The Rachel Maddow Show" coverage last night of the video. Two videos featuring Romney's fundraiser comments are embedded below the jump, courtesy of Mother Jones . The rest can be found at their YouTube page.

Update: Politico reported moments ago that Mother Jones plans to release the full video later today. "We have the whole tape, which we're releasing later today," said co-editor-in-chief Clara Jeffrey.

Ed. note: Below is an excerpt from "Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America," the new book by one of our Sunday guests, Eboo Patel. Dr. Patel is the founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based non-profit whose purpose is to make interfaith cooperation second nature in America and throughout the world. According to his bio on that organization's website, his "core belief is that religion is a bridge of cooperation rather than a barrier of division. He’s inspired to build this bridge by his faith as a Muslim, his Indian heritage, and his American citizenship."

Being that today is the 11th anniversary of the September 11th attacks and the panel in which Dr. Patel participated (with Sikh American filmmaker Valarie Kaur and Princeton professor Amaney Jamal) dealt with violence and terrorism after 9/11, we thought it best to share with you an excerpt from "Sacred Ground" pertaining to the conversation Melissa hosted on Sunday's show. Read it below.

A few months after 9/11, my father went to a banquet hosted by a Muslim activist organization. Somber prayers were offered for the victims of the attacks, appropriate anger was directed at the terrorists. One of the hosts gave a passionate address about the coming threat to Muslims in America, how our rights were about to be trampled by the government in the name of security. The response, he told the fired-up crowd, should be a Muslim civil rights movement.

The chief guest at the dinner was the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Perhaps this man felt as if he was paying homage to the movement that Reverend Jackson had helped lead. If so, what happened next must have come as something of a shock. In his remarks, Jesse Jackson pointedly said that there was no such thing as Muslim civil rights. 

Jackson wanted to make sure his audience left with a full understanding of the meaning of the civil rights movement. The marches, the sit-ins, the braving of fire hoses and attack dogs, it had not just been about safeguarding the rights of one community - the purpose was to expand and secure a framework that protected all communities.

It was a movement not for the African-American Dream but, in the words of Jesse Jackson's mentor Martin Luther King Jr, for "the American Dream, the dream of men of all races, creeds, national backgrounds, living together as brothers." It was a movement that not only helped pass legislation dismantling racist policies in the domestic realm, but whose spirit changed immigration laws as well, ushering in the Immigration Act of 1965, legislation that allowed people like those gathered at that Muslim banquet to come to America. King had a vision of a nation where all communities participated in the privilege and responsibility of pluralism, a vision that included religious identity as readily as race: "One of the first things we notice about this dream is an amazing universalism. It does not say some men, it says all men. It does not say all white men, but it says all men which includes black men. It doesn't say all Protestants, but it says all men which includes Catholics. It doesn't say all Gentiles, it says all men which includes Jews."

"We weren't fighting for black civil rights," Jackson told his audience that night. "We were fighting for your civil rights. You have a choice right now: you can talk about an America where your people don't get sent to the back of the bus, or you can talk about an America where no one gets sent to the back of the bus."

Muslims in America, particularly those of us from immigrant backgrounds, are learning that to register our experiences in the narrative of American discrimination offers opportunities for commiseration, but more importantly, it gives us a dramatically expanded set of responsibilities. You quickly learn that other American communities used their moments of suffering to work for a nation where no one suffers. You quickly realize that other people's struggles have secured your rights. It begins to dawn on you that you have a responsibility to use the moment when the spotlight shines on you to secure the rights of others. "Whoever degrades another degrades me," wrote Walt Whitman. That is the heart of the American spirit. 

America has not been a promise to all its people. "We didn't land on Plymouth Rock," Malcolm X said, "Plymouth Rock landed on us." But, to borrow from Maya Angelou, the dust was determined to rise, and generous enough to carry the rest of us with. People who knew the whip of the slave master in Alabama, the business end of the police baton on the south side of Chicago, people who could easily have called our nation a lie, chose instead to believe America was a broken promise, and gave their bodies and their blood to fix it. As Langston Hughes, wrote:

O yes, I say it plain

America never was America to me

And yet I swear this oath

America will be

I could sense the emotion in my dad's voice when he called to tell me about the event. He paused for a long time, collecting his thoughts, and then said, "We owe our citizenship to that movement."

Watch the full discussion from Sunday's show below and after the jump.

Scott Van Duzer, the owner of Big Apple Pizza and Pasta, has big muscles. Dude checks in at a linebacker-esque 6'3", 260 pounds, and claims he can bench 350 pounds, per the New York Times.

That information is in  the New York Times because of what you see below: the small-business owner bear-hugging the President of the United States.

AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

Van Duzer reportedly cleared this with the Secret Service beforehand, in case you were wondering. From the Times:

“Look at that!” [President] Obama exclaimed after the ebullient pizza shop owner lifted him a good couple of feet off the ground after he walked into the restaurant. “Man, are you a powerlifter or what?”

Nope -- he is just a registered Republican who got a surprise visit from President Obama today during a surprise stop along the incumbent's Florida bus tour. He told the press pool, "I don't vote party line, I vote who I feel comfortable with, and I do feel extremely comfortable with him." As it is with presidential campaigns, this was no accident: Van Duzer voted for Obama in 2008, and told reporters he plans to do so again this year. The President also wanted to highlight Van Duzer's work with blood donation:

“One of the reasons that we wanted to stop by is that Scott has been doing unbelievable work out of this pizza shop in promoting the importance of donating blood,” Mr. Obama said. “And so he has set some records here in Florida. He has received commendations from the White House, the surgeon general, he has galvanized and mobilized the local community and he’s educating kids and folks all across the country on this issue.”

All that said, the image of a white Republican small-business owner giving the President a bear hug is a memorable one. And of course, in the wake of the bounce the President has received in the polls since the Democratic convention, the metaphor is perhaps too easy. From Reuters today:

The president's margin over Romney in the daily rolling poll was unchanged from Saturday's numbers, turning up the heat on Republican strategists who were hoping for a more muted post-convention "bounce" for Obama in the wake of Friday's release of weak employment numbers. Of the 1,419 likely voters polled online over the previous four days, 47 percent said they would vote for Obama and 43 percent for Romney if the November 6 U.S. election were held today.

"It means (Democrats) are on good footing going into the rest of the election," Ipsos pollster Julia Clark said.  

 Whether or not you look at symbolically, or as simply a funny photo, it's worth sharing. (Next, I need to see Mitt Romney try to enter a Hot Sauce Williams back in my old Cleveland neighborhood and ask for someone to lift him up. Can we make that happen, Eric Fehrnstrom?)

If you'd like to donate blood, I suggest visiting the American Red Cross' site, redcrossblood.org. A photo of what happened after the bear hug is below the jump.

Update: CBS News has video. It's been added below the jump.

"With great power comes great responsibility" may be the most quoted comic-book lines in existence. It is a credo and also, a warning, issued by Peter Parker's Uncle Ben around the time (unbeknownst to the uncle) young Peter became Spider-Man. Someone looking at politics without cynicism might say that the same could be part of the oath given to every public official all the way up to the President.

The point can't be made forcefully enough: politics is about power, increasingly great all the way up to Congress and the White House. Certainly, there are some dedicated public servants, perhaps on both sides of the aisle, who get into the business with altruism in mind -- but it is difficult to argue to power doesn't come with the position, and that the pursuit of that power is endemic to political campaigns, and the use of it is necessary to run government effectively.

Today, we'll look at power from a number of perspectives. First, we'll introduce the latest edition of This Week in Voter Suppression!™ (we're about to trademark that), digging through the fine print of Pennsylvania's voter-ID legislation. We'll look at how power is used in actual governance, from domestic to foreign policy. And as the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches this week, we'll examine the power of violence and terrorism in our lives, and how the definitions of those words have changed since that horrible day. Lastly, Melissa will end the show with a hopeful Footnote which you don't want to miss.

Our guests include:

• Judith Browne Davis, co-director of the Advancement Project.
• Mickey Edwards, former U.S. Congressman, vice president of the Aspen Institute, and author of "The Parties Versus The People."
• Amaney Jamal, politics professor at Princeton University and author of "Of Empires and Citizens."
• Valarie Kaur, Sikh American filmmaker and director of Groundswell, an initiative at Auburn Seminary.
• Eboo Patel, author of "Sacred Ground" and founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core.
• Kenji Yoshino, law professor at New York University.

As always, folks -- be sure to interact with us during the show here in the comments of this post, on Facebook, and on Twitter, using the hashtag #nerdland. We look forward to having you join us at 10am ET on msnbc!

Incarceration is a uniquely American issue. Whether or not you think it's a problem, a badge of honor, or merely a proclivity, you cannot deny that we love locking folks up. I say "uniquely American" because as it stands, the good ol' U.S. of A jails its citizens at a higher rate than any other in the world. A lot of credit for that can be attributed to what is commonly known as the "school-to-prison pipeline," a means by which particularly young men of color are channeled into the prison system, guided by inherent social disadvantages, discrimination, and a lack of education.

Melissa today will show you a remarkable interview she conducted in her hometown of New Orleans with an activist, Norris Henderson, who has dedicated himself to destroying that pipeline. That will spark a conversation you will not want to miss, and will tee off a Foot Soldiers profile of more folks making a difference at a local prison here in New York.

Other topics we'll cover today include, naturally, the just-concluded convention season -- including a full recap of what was discussed and presented at this week's Democratic National Convention, and what wasn't discussed. To help us break all that down are our guests:

• Lola Adesioye, British-born political writer and social commentator.
• Soffiyah Elijah, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York.
• Glenn Martin, vice president of Public Affairs at the Fortune Society.
• Ari Melber, correspondent for The Nation and an MSNBC contributor.
• Joy Reid, managing editor at theGrio.com, and an MSNBC contributor.
• Leslie Sanchez, Republican analyst and author of "You've Come a Long Way, Maybe."

As always, folks -- be sure to interact with us during the show here in the comments of this post, on Facebook, and on Twitter, using the hashtag #nerdland. We look forward to having you join us at 10am ET on msnbc!

This week's Good Look features Melissa's Sunday Footnote, in which she remembered the late Rep. Barbara Jordan of Texas, who delivered the Democratic National Convention's keynote address in 1976, becoming the first African American woman to do so. I was reminded of Jordan's speech when I saw another woman address this year's convention, one without elected office, but with similar social ostracism as the gay, black Congresswoman with multiple sclerosis.

On Wednesday night, 27-year-old Benita Velez became the first undocumented immigrant to address a national party convention. In her speech, she defended her inherent American character and identity while also expressing an optimism about how we all can contribute, politically, socially, and economically.

Paraphrasing something Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson once told me in an interview about the struggle for racial equality, it's all about being put on a level playing field, not gaining some sort of retributive advantage (as those with the built-in advantages would have us believe). Given the venue in which Velez made her remarks, it's fitting to quote something Jordan said about the Democratic Party:

We believe in equality for all and privileges for none. This is a belief -- this is a belief that each American, regardless of of background, has equal standing in the public forum -- all of us. Because -- because we believe this idea so firmly, we are an inclusive rather than an exclusive party. Let everybody come.

At their 2012 convention, Democrats lived up to that, to an extent (I still needed to see a speaker who wasn't cisgender, for example). And outside of the venue where Velez spoke, there were still undocumented immigrants protesting for the very pathway to citizenship, screaming and blocking traffic to be a full part of this nation. In that regard, even for Democrats, the struggle continues.

Join us for a full breakdown of the Democratic convention, and much more, at 10am on msnbc!

Our special coverage is beginning right now on msnbc, and Melissa will be a part of it! Be sure to keep an eye out for her -- but of you're interested in watching the raw feed, or are away from your TV, click on the live video window below. Then, get the conversation going in the comments!

See you online, #nerdland, and on msnbc!

Melissa is in Charlotte to cover the Democratic National Convention, and as such, was on TV quite a bit today. Take a look at her contribution below (and after the jump) to the political panel on Chuck Todd's "The Daily Rundown." Whenever you click away from NFL's opening-night game, be sure to join msnbc tonight for live coverage of the convention's second night; former President Bill Clinton is tonight's big draw.

Special coverage begins at 7:00pm ET! See you then, and keep an eye out for Melissa over the course of the night.