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Arnold Schwarzenegger recently floored veteran CBS reporter Leslie Stahl by revealing that he had rejected the Republican Party platform and performed multiple same sex weddings while still serving as the governor of California.

"I always said I have nothing against people doing what they want to do," Schwarzenegger told Stahl in an interview that will air Sunday on CBS. "If a couple wants to get married, they should get married. I personally always said that marriage is between a man and a woman, but I never would enforce my will on people. I always want people to make that decision. If they want to get married, let them get married."

Stahl reminded the former governor that he had once called his chief of staff "a cigar smoking lesbian."

"She got married. Did you go to the wedding?" the CBS reporter wondered.

"I performed the wedding in the office," Schwarzenegger replied with a smile. "I married her in the office -- in the governor's office. I don't have to be for gay marriage. I'm for that she gets the kind of wedding and the kind of ceremony that I had when I got married with Maria [Shriver]. That she happens to love a woman and I am a guy that loves a woman, that is two different things, that doesn't make any difference. She should still have her ceremony."

Schwarzenegger added that he had also married one other assistant who was in a same sex relationship.

"I didn't know that," Stahl said, clearly surprised.

"That's why I give you the scoop so you have some news," Schwarzenegger laughed.

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As if the interview with former CIA torture architect Jose Rodriguez on 60 Minutes wasn't bad enough, Sean Hannity followed up the next day with an even more infuriating interview of Rodriguez as well. If you were disgusted by Leslie Stahl lobbing friendly softballs to this war criminal, it's probably not going to do your blood pressure any good to watch the Hannity job he received the next evening on Fox.

Hannity brought on Pat Buchanan this Wednesday evening and was continuing to parrot Rodriguez's talking points that without torture, President Obama would not have had the intelligence needed to send in the SEAL team after bin Laden.

As Media Matters has been documenting, carrying water for Bush and Cheney's torture program is nothing new for Fox or the right-wing media. You can read more about that from last year here: Right-Wing Media Still Hyping EITs, Ignoring Experts' Dispute, and here: Right-Wing Media Tout Bin Laden Death As Victory For Torture, Ignore Dispute.

And here is their latest report debunking Hannity's talking points in the clip above: One Book Defending Waterboarding Doesn't Change The Fact That Torture Doesn't Work:

In a book published Monday, Jose Rodriguez, the former head of the CIA's Clandestine Service during the Bush administration, defends the use of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) such as waterboarding, a technique that groups such as Amnesty International have called "torture." Rodriguez claimed that EITs "led to the capture and killing of Usama bin Ladin." However, multiple experts, including a CIA interrogator, an FBI counterintelligence expert, a former CIA inspector general, and the chairs of the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committees, have said that these techniques were not effective or did not lead to the strike against bin Laden. [...]

One can hear the same argument Rodriguez is making on Fox News and other conservative media outlets, which have touted bin Laden's death as a victory for EITs and President Bush. But it's an argument rebutted by many experts, who dispute whether the use of EITs yielded critical intelligence that led to bin Laden.

And you can read those rebuttals in the rest of their post. I'm still waiting for Hannity to take up that offer Keith Olbermann made for him to be waterboarded back in 2009 if he still doesn't think it's torture. Transcript of Hannity and Buchanan below the fold.

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The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur takes apart the 60 Minutes interview with former CIA torture architect Jose Rodriguez which we posted on earlier here – Whitewashing Torture, Redux.

I'm quite sure that Rodriguez would never come on the air with someone like Cenk, who unlike Leslie Stahl during her softball interview with this man, who was openly admitting to torture and war crimes on the air, actually articulated the amount of disgust that Rodriguez deserves.

And Cenk's exactly right. This is what happens when you don't prosecute people for their crimes. They end up on television giving interviews trying to sell books instead of landing in a jail cell where they belong. And allowing this to go unpunished means that it will happen again. Sadly, our history in recent decades has proven him right about that already.

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In what was overall a pretty softball interview with Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, there was one pretty telling moment to illustrate the type of toxic political environment we're living in, due primarily to Congressional leaders like Eric Cantor and that is the unwillingness to even admit facts.

When asked about his image of being someone who is unwilling to compromise and the fact that the man he claims is his hero, Ronald Reagan, was willing to compromise on taxes and work with Democrats, Cantor denied that Reagan ever "compromised his principles." When Leslie Stahl pointed out the obvious, that not raising taxes was one of his principles, Cantor's press secretary interrupted the interview, yelling from off camera that what Stahl was saying wasn't true.

As has been noted here at C&L, the Republican myth about Ronald Reagan being unwilling to raise taxes is just not true. Heaven forbid, Reagan raising taxes 11 times, not just several as the 60 Minutes report stated, might get in the way of their talking points about St. Ronnie.

You can watch the entire interview here.

Transcript below the fold.

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In an interview that aired Sunday, General Electric Chairman and Obama job czar Jeffrey Immelt told CBS' Leslie Stahl that the notion that Americans were against big companies was "just wrong."

"I want you to root for me," Immelt said. "Everybody in Japan roots for Toshiba. Everybody in China roots for China South Rail. I want you to say, 'Win, GE.'"

Not only has GE shipped thousands of U.S. jobs overseas, the company also reportedly paid no taxes in 2010. Protesters at Occupy Wall Street and across the country are calling for corporations to be taxed at least at the same rate as individuals.

Former Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold (D) responded to Immelt Monday.

"Mr. Immelt is not recognizing that you root for corporations when corporations are making sure your jobs stay here in the United States," Feingold explained. "His corporation has had more to do with shipping jobs overseas than almost any corporation in the world. And so, the deal here is we root for corporations and we support them if they're fair to us. And these people who are protesting are recognizing that just about everything that has happened to working people has been unfair in recent years."

"When people look at these Occupy Wall Street protests though, support has grown across the country as we have seen," CBS' Erica Hill noted. "Is this the best way to go about making change and if it is, how do you turn this support into some sort of a movement?"

"This is a great way to make change," Feingold declared. "I don't just understand what the protesters are saying, I'm not just pleased about it, I'm excited about it. A few yards from here [in Madison, Wisconsin], some of the biggest protests in history of this country occurred when [Gov. Scott Walker (R)] ripped away the collective bargaining rights of public employees in Wisconsin. We did it here and I think this is going to happen all over the country because people have been kicked when they're down over and over. You can only kick people so long before they react. So this is the time now for accountability. And this is a good way to show people how strongly we feel that the working people of this country have been treated very brutally and it has to change."

Feingold also responded to comments made over the weekend by Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, that the Occupy Wall Street protesters were "anti-American."

"There is nothing more un-American than a person like Mr. Cain trying to intimidate people from exercising their right to protest," the former Wisconsin senator explained. "There is nothing more American than peaceful protests and if people are being hurt, if they can't get a job, if students go to school for five or six years and take out student loans and come out and see they are getting no job and no opportunity, and people on Wall Street continue to get whatever they want or are not properly regulated, that's the time to protest. This is the time to protest. It is the most American thing you can do."

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CNBC anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera visited the set of Morning Joe to push her new book You Know I'm Right and apparently we've got another Ayn Rand fan working for CNBC. After saying that the auto companies should have been allowed to fail, presumably to get rid of those pesky over paid union workers, Mike Barnicle asks her if she thinks we're going to have to raise taxes to pay our deficit.

Cabrera of course doesn't think we should raise taxes and says that instead we should cut spending. Leslie Stahl asks her where. She replies:

Easy stuff; you get rid of the Department of Labor, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education. You can get rid of all of those. They're not necessary. You don't need that stuff done at the federal level.

But the real issue, let's talk about it – Social Security and Medicare, right? We have over promised so much that someday if we don't do something, we're going to be Greece. We're on the path to that. So what you do right now is you tell young people instead of saving that Social Security and giving it to the government, you're going to have a personal account, and that's going to be your retirement. And in the mean time, as you get closer to retirement, you're going to have to live on that money instead, because...

Leslie Stahl asks her what happens when the markets crash again and there's no safety net. Her answer:

Well, this is the choice, okay? So you're saying the choice is I can have the government pay me in the future guaranteed, or I can have this uncertainty of the market. I see it differently. I see the uncertainty of the markets or the uncertainty of some future Congress, some future bunch of people who are... can at any day decide you've got to retire later. You've got to put up more money.

Or in other words, don't dare expect the rich to pay back the Social Security trust fund and you're on your own for your retirement. Her buddies on Wall Street crash the economy again... too bad, so sad. Cabrera would fit right in at the Tea Party rallies.