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Deputy White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer told ABC's George Stephanopoulos that Republicans owed Susan Rice an apology after they misled the country about the Benghazi emails -- a story that was hyped by his network's correspondent Jonathan Karl. After Stephanopoulos feigned ignorance on the matter, Pfeiffer should have told him ABC owes her an apology as well.

Karl gave a sorry excuse for apology this weekend, saying that he regrets that "the email was quoted incorrectly." More like he regrets getting caught. So to sum things up after reading his statement and listening to this interview -- not only is ABC refusing to come clean about the names of the Republicans who lied to them and conned them into hyping and giving new life to this so-called scandal that was being ignored by most of the networks other than Fox until Karl and ABC decided to lend it some credibility -- Stephanopoulos decides to sit there and pretend he doesn't have any idea why someone might want Republicans to apologize to Susan Rice after what they did to her.

Instead he decided to ask Pfeiffer about the emails without a word on Karl's "apology" or any acknowledgement of his network helping to spread lies for Republicans by hyping doctored versions of them. Stephanopoulos should have been opening This Week with a statement from the network on their shoddy "journalism" and with Karl's statement instead of trying to pretend it didn't happen.

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After taking her viewers through the whole, long, ugly mess with ABC's big "scoop" on the Benghazi emails and the how the story pretty much fizzled out by the end of the week with the discovery that Republicans were responsible for doctoring the supposed quotes from the emails that they published, Rachel Maddow gave her two cents on ABC still protecting the sources who lied to them.

MADDOW: And now, part of the scandal here is a press scandal. You know what? When you get used like this and you end up publishing false information, false quotes, you have to correct it. But the bigger scandal here is not a process matter, not a press matter. There's a very stark fact that somebody in Congress right now, or somebody working for somebody in Congress right now, a staffer, concocted a big lie to try to make the White House look very desperately bad on this Benghazi scandal that they otherwise have not been able to get traction on.

Who told the lie? And a note to my journalist pals who got involved in this scandal. If your source lied to you, they are not actually a source. They are a con artist and you are their victim. It means you don't have to protect them any more. They're not a source.

When you get lied to, when you are a tool of somebody else's deception, when you get lied to, the person lying to you is no longer a source, they are news. Their lie to you is itself news and you can report that news. Republican Congressional offices shopped a false dossier as if it was a White House email. That is a story. The office and the staffers and the members of Congress maybe who did that... that is news. And if you know who it is, you can say so.

Boy do I wish they'd take her advice, but again, I'm not holding my breath.

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This was a nice change of pace, watching a Republican get shot down for their fearmongering on the air: ABC Journalist Calls Out Karl Rove: ‘Stop Scaring People’ About Background Checks:

During a heated debate about gun regulations on Sunday morning, ABC News’ Terry Moran accused Karl Rove of using “Orwellian” language to scare people about background checks, noting that the federal government is not seeking to confiscate guns but rather keep them out of the hands of criminals and people who are mentally ill. [...]

The proposals currently being drafted would require a background check on all gun purchases including those by private sellers while exempting family and temporary transfers. In some of the drafts being circulated, private dealers would have to maintain records for all private sales, while other exempt non-commercial private sales from record keeping. None of the bills would maintain a national gun registry, which is already illegal under current law. But the record keeping provision is important, advocates claim, to ensure that the checks are being properly conducted.

A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that 88 percent of Americans, including 85 percent of gun owners, believe “those purchasing firearms at private sales and gun shows should undergo a background check.”

Full transcript below the fold.

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was asked by CNN's Candy Crowley about whether or not their attempt to blame President Obama for rising gas prices was going to be successful, given recent polling showing that Americans primarily blamed the oil companies for the problem and the fact that Americans blamed the GOP by only three fewer percentage points than they did the president.

When McConnell responded by taking up for the oil companies and their subsidies, Crowley asked him if he thought those tax breaks were fair given their record profits and McConnell responded by accusing Crowley of "using all of the Democratic talking points" -- because that's generally what these guys do when they're trying to defend the indefensible. You go on the attack and accuse the interviewer of being biased.

Anyone who regularly watches Crowley's show on CNN knows full well whose talking points she's generally repeating, and they're not from the Democrats.

Transcript below the fold.

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Chuck Todd really should have just stuck to being a pollster, because ever since Tim Russert brought him on at MSNBC, he really has gone from someone who used to be pretty good at analysis of voter trends and elections for Roll Call and with his regular appearances on C-SPAN, to pretty much just another Villager hack once MSNBC hired him. I remember actually enjoying him sharing some of his insights on election coverage on Washington Journal, before he decided to join the D.C. cocktail circuit with the rest of the Villagers.

Todd seems to have made the move quite easily and unfortunately from someone who used to be more concerned about reporting facts and statistics and trends to the typical inside the beltway type of "reporting" we see from his colleagues Chris Matthews, David Gregory and Andrea Mitchell, among others.

His interview with Rep. Tom Price from this Wednesday is just the latest example of that. Todd was terribly upset with Stephen Colbert for making a "mockery" of his brand of "journalism" but sadly as Nicole noted, Todd's done a good enough job of that all by himself.

He did it again here by letting Price claim that you're going to kill the Confidence Fairies if you raise the capital gains tax and that will somehow lead to more offshoring of jobs.

That you shouldn't tax capital gains because that money has supposedly already been taxed.

That the Community Reinvestment Act and giving loans to poor people somehow caused the housing crisis.

That Republicans care anything about closing loopholes for businesses or doing anything about offshoring our jobs.

That unions are harming our economy or the working class.

That we need to lower the corporate tax rate.

And that we'd be "punishing businesses" if we dared to tax them if they want to repatriate the money they've been hiding offshore to avoid taxes in the United States.

If Chuck Todd considers himself a "journalist" you'd think he'd have bothered to push back a bit more harshly at any one of these lies, but that's not what we got during this interview. Heaven forbid he might lose some access for the next interview with Price or one of his colleagues to potentially keep the ratings up on his show if he dared to call him out for anything he lied about here.

I'm sure the salary is much better for Todd since he made the move to MSNBC from Roll Call. Sadly what he's contributing to the national political dialog for the most part has gone down the sewer while his salary has gone up for adding to the pollution.

Barack Obama Unveils the "Buffett Rule":

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that the U.S. needs money, but conservatives think Barack Obama is waging class warfare by taxing the rich.

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CNN's Don Lemon bragged about how he and his network are going to make an effort to not allow politicians to come on their shows and just repeat talking points instead of answering direct questions by their reporters. Well, that's all well and good, but if Lemon thinks this interview with Rand Paul was some example of what we should expect from those that want to call themselves journalists in our media, he's going to have to do a better job than he did with Rand Paul here.

While I agree that it's a good thing that anyone in our media doesn't want to allow any politician to come on their show and just filibuster the interview with talking points, and that definitely is a step in the right direction, it's also pretty worthless if when they do answer your question and lie, that they're not called out for that lie.

It's also worthless when your network continues to paint the "tea party" as some actual third party, instead of just the right wing of the Republican Party and to continues to do the lazy "both sides" false equivalencies as was done here by Don Lemon. Sorry Don, but there are not two parties unwilling to compromise to make government work. And the "middle" of our political spectrum does not lie between "compromising" on lifting our debt ceiling and crashing our country and our world's economy if one side does not get everything they want with destroying our social safety nets.

Lemon got onto Rand Paul for not answering his questions, but he did not let his viewers know that the Republican Party has gone completely off the cliff with the crazy train with electing extremists like Rand Paul and that the Democratic Party has moved way too far to the right, other than the members of the House progressive caucus who are about the only ones out there actually looking out for everyday working Americans and their interests these days. They're given no voice or very little in our corporate media with the usual exceptions which are some of the prime time shows on MSNBC.

The full interview with Rand Paul is below the fold and I hate to break it to Don Lemon, but if he thinks this represents some sort of hardball interview with Rand Paul and holding him accountable for how he's behaved since he's been elected with pushing his extreme right wing or Libertarian views on the rest of us and for lying about how their balanced budget amendment being included in debt ceiling negotiations that has zero to no chance of being passed through Congress with the clock is ticking is somehow either "rational" or a "compromise", I'd like to have some of what Don Lemon has been smoking.

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I try to monitor C-SPAN's morning call-in show Washington Journal when I get a chance just to see what viewers of that network and the public are saying about the topics of the day and this one jumped out at me this morning as being from someone who's been watching too much Fox News or for that matter possibly a lot of the rest of our corporate media with the right wing talking points this woman rattled off when weighing in on this debt ceiling kabuki theater.

How someone comes off thinking that President Obama sounds like a partisan when he has, to the dismay of liberals, bent over backwards to make concessions to Republicans, or says he's playing the "class warfare card" is beyond me, but obviously this person has no idea what "class warfare" even means, or that they're probably losing that war.

She also was informed enough to realize that there was a deficit commission put together that went nowhere and in her defense, the one thing she said here that I agreed with completely is that doing that again may very well be a colossal waste of time, but then she lost me with saying she really didn't understand this whole concept of the debt ceiling at all, and even though she admitted she was clueless on what they're debating about, claimed the whole thing is just some scare tactic by both sides.

It goes without saying that since she does not understand what the debt ceiling is and thought it was about future spending, she obviously has no clue that this is about approving raising the debt ceiling for spending that the Congress has already approved, and not what they might spend in the future. It also seems pretty obvious she did not listen to the president's speech at all this week or she would already know that.

It pains me to hear just how misinformed our citizens are in the United States and this is just one example coming from someone who actually knows just enough to know that a deficit commission existed but not a whole lot else on the specifics of what's going on in this debate. This is your brain on Fox or after hearing too much right wing propaganda from somewhere else. There is class warfare going on. Unfortunately too many people don't even understand what that means or who is waging it.

Rough transcript below the fold.

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Here's the latest talking point courtesy of Frank Luntz being rolled out ad nauseum by every Republican politician I've been on the television for some time now, and unfortunately as Digby noted, being validated by our President.

Here's a rough transcript via Digby:

Frank Luntz on Fox News this morning: All the statistics that I've been testing on both sides, this one stands out: the increase in discretionary non-defense spending over the past four years is 80%. Does any family within the sound of my voice have an 80% increase in spending?

Well that's what Washington is doing. So if a family can't afford an 80% increase, surely Washington can't afford it. All the things we've looked at, that's the most powerful of all.

Anchor: Wow. What impact do you think the influence of the Tea party will have on the public going forward as we get set to tackle the debt ceiling and the 2012 budget dramas we have yet to see?

Luntz: It's very significant. In fact we did a project with Freedomworks over the last 96 hours where they asked the question about the shutdown,whether if it was provoked or not if you would be less likely to vote for your member of congress. The Tea Party is saying to the American people, enough is enough, stop!

If families have to tighten their belts, so should Washington. If the American people have to do more with less, so should Washington.

Someone let me know when households have the ability to print money, raise taxes and start wars, will you? I'm sick to death of our politicians pretending that America is broke. The upper 1% are doing just fine, thank you. Our problem is there is not the political will to ask for some "shared sacrifice" from the have-mores out there and they're completely unwilling to do anything to protect American jobs. If these corporations want their tax cuts, tie them to job creation right here in the United States. Want to fix Social Security, raise the income cap. Want to fix the deficit, start with repealing those Bush tax cuts, now. But we can't have that, can we? And we've got these propagandists like Luntz out there feeding the politicians this nonsense to justify balancing the budget off of the backs of the elderly and the poor. Just shameful.

There's more at Digby's post so go read the whole thing, but I'll share this last bit here.

It's kind of an odd family that goes into debt so mom and dad quit their jobs and bring in even less money in order to pay it off, but hey, what do I know about finances anyway? I guess in good Real American families when you bring in less money and beat the children the debt magically vanishes somehow. I suppose God provides. [...]

Meanwhile, I'm going to move into my car, empty out my bank account and give the money to a rich person so he'll win the future for me. Isn't that what all responsible families are doing right now?

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Alan Grayson expressed his displeasure with Robert Gibbs for attacking "the professional left" on MSNBC. Rep. Keith Ellison has called for Robert Gibbs to resign. Host Chris Jansing asked Grayson if he agreed and thought Gibbs should resign as well.

"No, I don't think he should resign," replied Grayson, "I think he should be fired. He's done a miserable job. People I know refer to him as Bozo the Spokesman."

I have to say I agree with Grayson that Robert Gibbs really has been a horrible White House Spokesman and I've felt that way since he first got the job. I agree with Grayson's other point he made during this interview as well which is that all Gibbs did is to hand the Republicans talking points by bashing their liberal base.

Grayson: I'd like to see Gibbs show some frustration over 15 million unemployed Americans. I'd like to see him show some frustration over 40 million people who can't see a doctor when they need to. I'd like to see him show some frustration over the Republicans who have blocked the President's plans and his programs.

The White House as I said back in January is suffering from Stockholm syndrome. They have come to love their captors and in this case their captors, the people who are imprisoning the President's programs are not the liberals, they're the GOP, the Republicans specifically in the Senate and the Republicans nation wide. They're the opponents for him, not the liberals.

Jansing read some of David Frum's remarks that the GOP fears their base and the Democrats hate theirs and asked him if he agreed with that statement. Grayson decided to punt on that one and took the topic back to Gibbs.

Grayson: Again, that's not really the point. He needs to concentrate on getting things done for the American people and restoring the middle class in this country, not giving us Republican talking points. What he said about Canadian health care, Canadians live three years longer than Americans do on the average according to the CIA, so exactly how bad can their health care be?

You know, if I wanted Fox talking points I'd change the channel to Fox, not listen to the White House. (crosstalk) He needs to get his head on straight and do his job.

Amen to that brother. This administration had better wake up to the fact that kicking their base in the teeth might not work out so well for them come November if they expect to generate any turnout in the mid-term. I can understand where some of the frustration out of the administration is coming from given what they inherited and the obstructionist Congress they're dealing with but Grayson is right, Gibbs has been terrible and needs to go.