Things get a bit, shall we say, intimate almost instantly when Brand offers a glimpse of his boots to the panel and then begins a running commentary on all that he sees.

Following his on-set interview, Brand gave us more details about his tour and on his penchant for meditation in our green room. Watch below:

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“Let me keep doing my job,” he said, asked about presidential aspirations. “When those decisions need to be made, I’ll make them.”

And when will those decisions need to be made? “Probably not till 2015.”

But, of course, he has a few thoughts on the matter in the meantime.

“After you lose two elections, you want to win. I think our party should be focused on making sure we nominate the best possible candidate to get elected in 2016,” Christie said on Tuesday’s Morning Joe.

“We’re not doing what we’re doing on the state level, where we’re being enormously successful,” Christie said. “We’ve got 30 of 50 Republican governors in this country. Why? At the state level, they see the Republican Party as being doers, we actually get things done for people and we’re pragmatists and we bring people together—and we do so without violating our principles.”

Christie earned ire of his party for partnering with President Barack Obama after Hurricane Sandy in the course of rebuilding. He laughed on Morning Joe that some thought he should have “worn his Romney sweatshirt on the tour” of ravaged coastal New Jersey.

The Republican governor’s approval ratings in New Jersey have remained remarkably high: 70% of New Jerseyans approve of the job he’s doing in a recent poll.

In Congress, however, Christie sees two inefficient, disconnected parties.

“Almost everything I see coming out of the floor of Congress from both parties shocks me,” he said. “What you’ve seen in Congress is people are playing in both end-zones and nobodies playing in the middle and trying to get things done. They’re just screaming at each other from both end-zones.”

He then reiterated his call for leadership in Washington.

“I’m disappointed that the president hasn’t done that either,” he said, chiding the president for his recent charm offensive. “The fact that we’re in June of 2013 and we’re just talking about a charm offensive and trying to get to know Congress? You’re in the fifth year of the presidency. It’s a little late in the dating game to get to know somebody.”

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“I was the guy who didn’t even notice all of society’s subtle sexist behaviors.  Sometimes I participated without realizing,” Elleithee wrote on Salon on Sunday, in a letter to his daughter. “It wasn’t until I spent months traveling around the country with Hillary Clinton, and then later becoming your father, that I began to see all of this.”

But he began to see rampant sexism while working for Clinton as her press secretary during her 2008 presidential bid.

“The fact that every story about Hillary Clinton mentioned what she was wearing, what hair style she had. But you didn’t have that about Barack Obama or Joe Biden or John Edwards,” Elleithee said on Monday’s Morning Joe.

In his column, he pin-pointed the paradox of expectations women face.

“We tell girls they can be whatever they want when they grow up. So why are so many people still telling women that they can’t balance career and family?

We tell girls that they can succeed if they work hard and be themselves. So why is it that a woman in business or politics is seen as cold and harsh if she doesn’t show emotion—but seen as “emotional” or manipulative if she does?”

“I just saw these subtle behaviors in society that were fine before that I just didn’t notice or accepted it,” Elleithee said on Morning Joe. “Everyone tells their children they can grow up to be whatever they want to be. The problem is I think our young girls are getting mixed messages today.”

The media plays a large part in sending out mixed messages, Cosmopolitan’s editor-in-chief Joanna Coles said.

“Male congressmen, male senators are always described as ‘stating’ something in the House. Women senators and congresswomen are always described as ‘complaining’,” Coles said. “Women are emotional; men are somehow stoic.”

The expectations aren’t just in politics—the sexism occurs “across society, across culture” said Elleithee. Following a study that found that 40% of women are primary breadwinners, conservative media talking heads said such working moms were at odds with the “natural order.”

But some see hope in future generations.

“I asked my girls at dinner last night if there was any career they thought they couldn’t do and they looked at me like, ‘What are you talking about’?” co-host Mika Brzezinski remarked.

“That’s progress!” Coles responded.

The NRA began airing 30-second TV ads attacking the West Virginia Democrat last week, slamming him for sponsoring expanded gun background check legislation in a $100,000 ad buy. Manchin will respond with a matching ad buy, Politico reported on Monday’s Morning Joe. The NRA member and longtime A-rated politician will tape the ads this week in West Virginia.

It’s been two months since the Senate shot down the background check deal Manchin struck with Sen. Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican. Leading up to the vote, Manchin negotiated with the NRA, working with them to implement their suggestions into the bill, but lost the NRA’s support at the last minute.

The pair of dueling ads come as the background check fight is gearing up again: gun control advocates led a week of advocacy marking six-month anniversary of the Newtown school shooting, kicking off a second legislative push for background checks. Manchin and others leading the way on background checks hope to bring another vote before the end of the year.

Adding to the slew of advertisements, the NRA also sent out a mailer commending North Dakota Democrat Sen. Heidi Heitkamp for voting against background checks last week.

The debate has become a “very personal dispute” for Manchin and his aides, Politico’s Mike Allen said: Manchin’s chief of staff, Hayden Rogers, a lifetime NRA member has let his membership lapse and pulled the pro-NRA bumper sticker off his car.

Manchin met with the families of victims last week and promised his support and leadership on a second bill.

“This is not politics we are playing, this is real change in real people’s lives,” he told the families.

The polling shows a marked drop in support from people under the age of 30, black Americans, and independents, whose support for the president fell by 10 points, CNN reported.

It’s been a rough couple of months for President Obama: a leak revealed the National Security Agency’s anti-terror policy of widely running surveillance on Americans who interact with those abroad, the Internal Revenue Service announced that it had targeted Tea Party and Conservative nonprofits, Congressional hearings continued to hunt for more on the handling of the Benghazi attacks, and the Justice Department admitted it secretly subpoenaed journalist’s phone records while investigating a leak of classified information.

Support for Obama held on during the first weeks of scandals, but the controversies, particularly the news of the NSA surveillance, have clearly caught up to him—for the first time since Obama took office, 50% of Americans do not think the president is “honest and trustworthy.”

The 1,013 Americans polled last week were torn on which NSA programs they support: just over half support the government’s monitoring of phone records of Americans contacting those abroad, while a majority, 66%, support the government monitoring the internet behavior and communicators of Americans interacting with foreigners.

Despite that, 62% of those surveyed feel the government has become so ‘large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens,’ and 61% disapprove of how the president is handling surveillance—more than the number of Americans who disapproved of of George W. Bush’s surveillance methods, 52%.

Another poll, however, found a distinct partisan shift when it comes to surveillance, where a majority of both parties approving the programs when their own party held the Oval Office, and disapproving when the opposing party was in power.

For the rest of the poll and its methodology, click here.

This digital composite shows file photos (L-R, clockwise) Uchenna Eze stands with his N.J. SEEDS mentor, Roy Cohen. (Photo courtesy of N.J. SEEDS) Students pose for photos before a graduation ceremony on May 22, 2013. (Photo by Seth McConnell/The Denver Post) N.J. SEEDS’ Class of 2013 (Photo courtesy of N.J. SEEDS)

Uchenna Eze took control of his future after his freshman year of high school. As a result, he decided to enroll at the University of Southern California this year after he received acceptance letters from at least 17 schools around the country.

Eze, a senior who graduated this month from Orange High School in New Jersey, is one student who was selected to join New Jersey SEEDS-Scholars, Educators, Excellence, Dedication, Success-after his freshman year.

The nonprofit organization, founded more than 20 years ago, ensures that its students have the knowledge, skills, and support to thrive throughout college. Its College Preparatory Program aims to take high-achieving, low-income students, and guarantee they graduate and are accepted into distinct colleges and universities.

“We’re all there because we want to be there. It was us taking control of our future,” Eze, who described himself as a close-minded person until his participation in the program, told MSNBC.

N.J. SEEDS accepts 15 students per class year from Orange High School and Trenton High School. Students endure a selective recommendation and application process in order to enroll after their freshman year.

The average total income of a family with a SEEDS scholar is about $35,000 per year.

“You give one student the opportunity to go to college, to have a career, to raise children…you change not just that one life but you change the lives of a social circle,” Ronni Denes, president and executive director of SEEDS, told MSNBC.

For every high-achieving, low-income student who applies to college, there are about 15 high-achieving, high-income students who apply, according to a 2012 working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Many of these low-income kids do not apply to any selective college, so they are “invisible to admission staff.”

This month, 28 SEEDS scholars graduated from high school. As a group, they received 124 acceptance letters to 50 colleges and universities in 14 states.

Sam Akande, who also graduated from Orange High, said his life became “significantly better” after he joined.

“I still don’t know much about the world, but through SEEDS I know living in the city isn’t all there is to life,” Akande said.

The college program prepares students for standardized testing, educates them about unfamiliar colleges, pairs them with mentors who assist in making decisions about higher education, and advises them with the financial aid process. The scholars also receive academic and financial guidance throughout college.

“It’s so important that students recognize not just where they want to go and what they want to study, but to find a school that is also interested in them and has the resources to support them,” Denes said.

Students described the program as rigorous and challenging, but also fun because they learn how to thrive in college.

“Do not prejudge anything because you don’t know what the outcome might be,” Nordia Bennett, a graduated senior from Trenton High School, told MSNBC.

Are you making things happen like N.J. SEEDS? Join the conversation. Tweet us your brilliant ideas to #MoJoe, Morning Joe’s web-only series of videos.

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“Listen, I have been critical of those on the left when they have used race. And it’s happened—it happens every election, to race bait,” Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough said. “I’m going to be critical when people on my side do the same thing. This is an example. Look at the hands. Look at the side of the face.”

The NRA’s latest ad targets the West Virginia Democrat for co-sponsoring legislation expanding background checks.

“It’s so obvious,” Scarborough said. “Look at his hands. It looks like he is a coal miner from West Virginia. Look how dark they made his hands.”

Scarborough accused the makers of the 30-second ad of shading the president to make him look darker in color on-screen. The NRA’s leadership is “taking this organization so far away from what it’s supposed to be,” he said.

Manchin agreed: “The NRA leadership has lost its way and is more concerned about political power than gun rights and gun safety,” the West Virginia Democrat said in a statement. “The Washington NRA could spend one hundred million dollars on ads against me; it still won’t make what they say true.”

In the six months after the Newton, Conn. shootings that took the lives of 26 children and teachers, the NRA and gun control advocacy groups like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns­ have poured millions of dollars in lobbying and advertisements.

Morning Joe co-host Willie Geist downplayed the potential of damaging political repercussions for Manchin in his home state.

“Inside West Virginia, they know Joe Manchin­—he was their governor,” Geist said, adding that Manchin touted an A-plus rating from the NRA last election cycle. “They know that he’s for guns.”

A right-leaning poll found that Manchin’s approval rating dropped seven points last month following his support of background checks. But despite that drop, the same poll estimated that 63% of West Virginians support the Democratic senator.

Elsewhere, the NRA sent mailers to all North Dakotan members earlier this month to thank Democrat Sen. Heidi Heitkamp for voting against background checks in the Senate in April.

The fast-food chain devised “English Under the Arches,” a language-acquisition program that develops employees’ English skills to help them advance in their careers.

“Rather than waiting for Washington and waiting for policymakers to devise programs that could help in workforce training, they devised their own program,” Adam Kushner, executive editor of the National Journal, said Friday on Morning Joe.

McDonald’s program gives employees training, writing performance reviews, and basic managerial tools for advancement. The program is currently available at 44 locations nationwide.

The latest issue of the National Journal reports on 50 American innovators and the lessons Washington can learn from them.

“Big things are being born from the ground, from grassroots,” Kushner said. “This is basically a dispatch from the America that works.”