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Here's something you don't see every day -- someone in our corporate media actually calling out Republicans for feeding them lies. Good for CBS and Major Garrett.

Via TPM: Wow, This is Pretty Epic:

Generally, once partisan, tendentious sources leak information that turns out to be wrong, nothing’s ever done about it. That’s for many reasons, some good or somewhat understandable, mostly bad. But on CBS Evening News tonight, Major Garrett did something I don’t feel like I’ve seen in a really long time or maybe ever on a network news cast. He basically said straight out: Republicans told us these were the quotes, that wasn’t true. Quick transcript after the jump …

SCOTT PELLEY: Also at his news conference today the president called for tighter security for U.S. diplomatic facilities to prevent an attack like the one in Benghazi, Libya, last year that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

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From this Saturday's The Chris Matthews Show, it seem the Villagers believe the Obama campaign is going to quit going after Mitt Romney on the issue of his taxes once the Republican convention rolls around. I'm not sure why they would do that but that was the consensus here.

After discussing how poor old Mittens was somehow “baited” into discussing his tax returns last week during his little whiteboard fiasco and the fact that the Obama campaign has been happy to keep the discussion on Romney's taxes going, Chuck Todd weighed in with this statement on how long that discussion might go on:

TODD: But it seems to me like we're getting to an expiration date.

COOPER: I think so. Don't you? (crosstalk)

GARRETT: Cayman Islands, Bermuda and Swiss bank accounts. That's one year of tax returns. The Democrats look at five or ten years and say, whoa... (crosstalk).

TODD: Kelly, don't (inaudible) thinks, if I get to the convention...

O'DONNELL: That they'll move on.

TODD: They'll move on.

Quite a far cry from Todd's colleague Rachel Maddow and her reporting last week: Maddow: Romney’s history shows he’s willing to lie about his taxes:

Friday night on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” host Rachel Maddow said that presumptive Republican nominee Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) has, if precedent is any guide, given us no reason to take his word on the subject of his refusal to disclose his tax returns. In fact, he has given voters rather the opposite. [...]

Romney said that when he looked back over his tax returns from the last ten years, he found that he had never paid less than 13 percent of his earnings and that we’re just going to have to trust him on that. However, Maddow said, in 2002 when Romney was running for governor of Massachusetts, it was demanded of him that he release tax returns to demonstrate a residency in that state of at least seven years. Romney refused and insisted that the public take his word for it.

Eventually it came out that Romney had lied. He was forced to pay Massachusetts taxes retroactively, because when he said that the public would have to take his word that he had paid taxes for seven years as a Massachusetts resident, it simply wasn’t true.

Now he wants us to take his word that he has paid at least 13 percent of his massive income over the last 10 years in taxes. Why should we take him at face value? He has demonstrated a willingness to prevaricate on this very subject in his career as a public figure.

So why would the Obama campaign drop this issue? I'm not sure when they taped this show and if it was before or after his interview with NPR, but as of this Friday, Major Garrett claimed he'd never even heard about the issue with the tax returns from 1999-2001 and the issue in Massachusetts. You can read more details about that here: Ex-Fox's Major Garrett: Never Knew Romney Caught Lying On 1999-2001 Tax Returns.

My guess on Todd's hackery here is this is what we're going to hear out of him once the convention rolls through. This is an old issue and it's time to move on. And he'll have plenty of help as well. Here's to hoping the Obama campaign ignores him and so far this election season, I'm happy to say they've been doing a lot of that and ignoring the cries by the beltway Villagers.

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Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann says that the U.S. should be more like China and do away with Great Society programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

At a debate with seven other Republican candidates in South Carolina Saturday night, National Journal's Major Garrett asked Bachmann what programs she would eliminate as president.

"The 'Great Society' has not worked and it's put us into the modern welfare state," she explained, referring to a set of domestic programs put in place by President Lyndon B. Johnson. They included the Civil Rights Act, the War on Poverty, federal aid to public education, Medicare, Medicaid, the National Endowment for the Arts, public broadcasting, the Department of Transportation, various consumer protection agencies and environmental protections.

Bachmann added: "If you look at China, they don't have food stamps. If you look at China, they're in a very different situation. They save for their own retirement security... They don't have the modern welfare state and China's growing. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they'd be gone."

With this statement, the candidate seemed to contradict her own website.

"As President, she will ensure that any reform to Social Security or Medicare will only affect those 55 and younger, and she will work to find a way to ease the next generation into a program that is solvent, fiscally responsible, and empowering to the individual," the website says. "Michele has also pledged to protect Medicare by repealing Obamacare."

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The audience at Saturday night's Republican presidential debate erupted into applause at the mention of waterboarding, an interrogation technique that is often described as torture.

The National Journal's Major Garrett asked Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain to respond to a Vietnam veteran who said he believed torture was wrong in all cases.

Cain agreed that torture was wrong, but said he would defer to the military as to what techniques constituted torture.

"Mr. Cain, of course you are familiar with the long-running debate we've had about whether waterboarding constitutes torture or is an enhanced interrogation technique," Garrett noted. "In the last campaign, Republican nominee John McCain and Barack Obama agreed that it was torture and should not be allowed legally."

"I don't see it as torture. I see it as an enhanced interrogation technique," Cain replied as the audience expressed approval.

Garrett then turned to Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann for her response.

"If I were president, I would be willing to use waterboarding," she explained as the crowd cheered wildly. "It was very effective. It gained information for our country."

But two of the candidates actually agreed with the veteran who said waterboarding should not be used under any circumstance. Both Rep. Ron Paul and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman said waterboarding amounted to torture.

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If there's one thing you can count on from a Republican primary debate when the subject is foreign policy, it's that there will be lots of drum beating for the United States to go to war with Iran. This Saturday night's debate on CBS was no exception with Newt Gingrich going so far as to say we should be assassinating their scientists if that's what it would take to prevent their nuclear program from moving forward.

Gingrich wasn't the first Republican to call for assassinating scientists, since we heard the same sort of rhetoric from his fellow GOP primary challenger, Rick Santorum last month as Dave wrote about here -- Santorum: Dead Foreign Scientists a 'Wonderful Thing'.

GARRETT: Mr. Speaker, is this the right way to look at this question, war or not war? Or do you see other options diplomatically, or other non-war means that the United States has at its possession to deal with Iran that it has not employed?

GINGRICH: Well, let me start and say that both the answers you just got are superior to the current administration. You know, there are a number of ways to be smart about Iran and there are also a few ways to be dumb, and the administration has skipped all the ways to be smart.

GARRETT: Could you tell us the smart ways?

GINGRICH: Sure. First of all, maximum covert operations to block and disrupt the Iranian program, including taking out their scientists, including breaking up their systems, all of it covertly, all of it deniable. Second, maximum coordination with the Israelis in a way which allows them to maximize their impact in Iran. Third, absolute strategic program comparable to what President Reagan, Pope John Paul II and a Margaret Thatcher did to the Soviet Union of every possible aspect short of war of breaking the regime and bringing it down.

And I agree entirely with Gov. Romney, if in the end despite all of those things, if the dictatorship persists, you have to take whatever steps are necessary to break its capacity to have a nuclear weapon.

Compare and contrast Newt's statements to a segment that aired that same morning on Chris Hayes' show on MSNBC, where former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman talked about the fact that the recent report coming from the U.N. which stated that Iran is moving forward with its nuclear program smells of the same sort of false statements and highly questionable intelligence that we were being fed in the run up to the invasion of Iraq.

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You’ve got to love this one. Chris Matthews on his weekend show put it to his “Matthews Meter” and asked his regulars if “serious candidate” Haley Barbour “can run as a Southern alternative [to Barack Obama] without appearing racially insensitive?”

And what was their overwhelming response? By 11 to 1 they said yes he can. Howard Fineman took the first turn out of the box defending Barbour.

MATTHEWS: Howard, you said he can get away with that sort of geographic appeal and Southern boy appeal without raising the old American problem.

FINEMAN: Well, he can’t just get away with it, he can do it, but he’s got to be careful. There is no margin for error. And he’s made a couple of pre-season errors here in some of his comments about how the controversy in Virginia over black history month didn’t mean diddly…

MATTHEWS: Confederate month…

FINEMAN: Confederate month didn’t mean diddly, etc., etc.

MATTHEWS: The Citizens Councils were pretty cool…

FINEMAN: But well, I think he is playing to the Southern old boy vote, there’s no question about the good old boy vote, there’s no question. But I think he can do it in still try to sell himself to the rest of the country if he’s careful. I’ve covered him for years. I’ve known him for a long time. He’s a very smart guy and he’s doing what you advised in your book, Hardball, which is if you have a problem…

MATTHEWS: Hang a lantern on it…

FINEMAN: Hang a lantern on it… I was a lobbyist, and I was a darn good lobbyist.

Yeah, who cares that he was a lobbyist, or that he's paling around with the KKK CCC, or that he's tried to rewrite the Civil Rights movement in the South. Why would anyone care about any of that? This just reeks of the same treatment they gave George W. Bush as just some regular guy everybody "would like to have a beer with" when that was about the furthest thing from the truth.

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Jeffrey Sachs was actually allowed some air time on Morning Joe to make a lot of really great points about how America is spending our money in the midst of what's being called a budget crisis. I would argue that we don't have a budget crisis. We have a refusal to levy adequate taxation on those that can afford it "crisis" created by our politicians who refuse to raise taxes on the rich at at time in our history that resembles the Gilded Age with income disparity. As Sachs noted, we're going after discretionary spending which hits in is words, science, education, technology, and energy and he's exactly right on how our approach to what we should be cutting is completely wrong.

As he noted we're not going after the extreme amount of waste in our military industrial complex, we're not fixing the amount of profits going to the insurance companies that are driving up the cost of our health care, the oil industry and corporate tax evasion. Instead we're looking to cut programs that harm the working class in America and I just want to say thank you to Jeffrey Sachs for laying out there how wrong headed our economic policies in the United States have been for at least the last thirty years.

Scarborough's response of course was to say that our working class and our seniors just haven't given quite enough so the oligarchs can keep their pockets lined. Brzezinski to her credit, pointed out that her father said if this keeps up we might see people taking to the streets and that he was called crazy for saying so. She didn't lay it on her buddy Scarborough and said he might not have been the one that said it, but I have the feeling that he was exactly who she was talking about and she gave him a pass. Of course Joe thought it was a good time to go to commercial break after she pointed that out to him.

I'm wondering if they'll have Sachs on again any time soon since he dared to speak the truth on that show. I'm not holding my breath for him to get another chance to say what he did today.

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During the panel discussion on This Week, George Will calls Republican opposition to raising the debt limit "suicidal" and Amy Walter gives us some insight into just what game Lindsey Graham is probably playing.

TAPPER: Speaking of -- of the tension between Speaker Boehner and the Tea Party Republicans coming in, I want to read you this quote from an interview Boehner gave to the New Yorker magazine. He was referring to the vote to raise the ceiling on the debt limit, which is currently $14.3 trillion.

Boehner says, "This is going to be probably the first really big adult moment for the new Republican majority. You can underline adult. And for people who've never been in politics, it's going to be one of those growing moments. It's going to be difficult. I'm certainly well aware of that. But we'll have to find a way to help educate members and help people understand the serious problem that would exist if we didn't do it."

Speaker Boehner suggesting that if you do not vote to raise the debt ceiling, you are not being an adult. George?

WILL: I know of no other developed nation that has a debt ceiling. This is a purely recurring symbolic vote to make people feel good by voting against it. The trouble is, it's suicidal if you should happen to miscalculate and have all kinds of people voting against it as a symbolic vote and turn out to be a majority, because if the United States defaults on its sovereign debt, the markets -- well, it will be stimulating.

TAPPER: Well, you heard -- and you heard Austan Goolsbee earlier today talk about -- the word "insanity" was what he used to describe it.

GARRETT: Let me give a sense of the anxiety that John Boehner, the Republican leadership in the House feels about this. At orientation conferences with incoming house Republicans, both at Harvard and at Heritage Foundation, this topic came up again and again and again. No matter what the policy conversation was, they wanted to know, why do we have to increase the debt ceiling? What are the economic consequences?

There was deep-seated, A, curiosity and skepticism about the need to do this. So internally House Republicans are going to have to sit down and -- and conduct what will amount to speed education courses on this matter.

Now, two other significant things. This will be a clean vote, a visible vote that will be separate from everything else. You can't tuck it into another legislative maneuver, as Democrats did under the Gephardt rule.

Secondly, what you will also see is the House Republican Appropriations Committee will move spending cuts through alongside these, so those who have to vote for the debt ceiling will say, "I've raided the debt ceiling, but I've also voted to cut spending." You'll see that happen much more rapidly because of the pressure applied politically on this debt ceiling vote.

TAPPER: Amy, last word on the debt ceiling?

WALTER: No, I think that Major is right. This is going to be a very interesting test, sort of a game of chicken. And I think there are a lot of Republicans out there right now hoping that they can take a symbolic vote because somebody else is going to be the adult and do that.

And you may see it based on when you're up for re-election -- the House obviously every two years, but in the Senate, you know, who is most worried about a Tea Party challenge, maybe the folks that can take a pass on that.

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Fox News wants to maintain an ideological divide within the media for marketing reasons, says a senior reporter that recently left the network.

Appearing on MSNBC's Morning Joe Monday, Major Garrett explained that his former employer has a vested interest in making sure the media is as polarized as possible.

NPR fired longtime analyst Juan Williams last week after he expressed fear of Muslims in airports.

"Look, Bill, I'm not a bigot," Williams told Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. "You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous."

"NPR was increasingly unhappy with him," Garrett told MSNBC's Joe Scarborough Monday.

"[NPR] was getting blowback from listeners about seeing Juan so often on Fox. That speaks to a problem that neither Fox nor NPR can solve -- they don't want to solve, which is the polarization of American media," Garrett said.

"For a certain amount of marketing points of view, Fox wants to keep that polarization saying, 'Look, we are different. We're dramatically different. You can see how we are different. If you like that difference, you better come over here and you better stay here.'"

"That is an embedded part of the marketing that surrounds what happens in the news division at Fox," he said.

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The endless war brigade of BFF's John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman took a trip to Afghanistan this weekend and from there, all gave the bobble head shows some "EXCLUSIVE" interviews demanding that there be no deadlines for withdrawal in Afghanistan. And despite allegations of corruption Lindsey Graham says don't dare cut off any of the money we're sending over there. Since he thinks that's more important than unemployment benefits, maybe someone could ask him if that bribe aid money was paid for in the budget?

I feel like I'm having Iraq-redux syndrome every time I listen to these guys speak. Same tired bullshit, different country. Someone needs to ask them to explain just how we "win" an occupation.

McCain: Kandahar Is Key to Victory in Afghan War:

Sen. John McCain, who visited Afghanistan's largest city in the south on Monday with two other U.S. lawmakers, warned of tough fighting ahead and predicted that casualties would rise in the short-term.

"The Taliban know that Kandahar is the key to success or failure," McCain told a news conference at the airport in Kabul. "So what happens in this operation will have a great effect on the outcome of this conflict. But I am convinced we can succeed and will succeed, and Kandahar is obviously the key area. And if succeed there, we will succeed in the rest of this struggle." [...]

Lieberman said he understood that Obama wanted to use the July 2011 timetable to send the message that the U.S. would not be in Afghanistan forever. Still, he said he thought the president was wrong to set it. "We hear it everywhere we go here. They say they think we're leaving. We're not going to leave until we win." [...]

All three criticized New York Democratic Representative Nita Lowey, chairwoman of a key House panel that voted to cut off nearly $4 billion in civilian aid to Afghanistan pending an investigation into allegations that Afghan officials were blocking corruption probes and foreign aid was being pocketed.

Afghan officials have pushed back, saying she was wrong to suggest that government officials in Kabul had misused or pocketed donor funds, accurately pointing out that contractors and foreign capitals hold the pursestrings for the vast majority of international aid in the country.

Putting nearly $4 billion in civilian aid in doubt is self-defeating because it's impossible to defeat the Taliban until Afghanistan has more effective civilian institutions, Graham said.

"Congress needs to understand that statements like this at this point in time are ill-advised," Graham said. "People are making a decision who to side with. ... The money in question is just as important to the war effort in my view as additional troops."