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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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The Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel on Sunday said that Republicans were succeeding at using "weapons of mass distraction" to obstruct President Barack Obama's second term agenda.

During an ABC News panel discussion about the a number of scandals that Republicans are using to attack the Obama administration, Washington Post columnist George Will asserted that IRS scrutiny of tea party groups was like Watergate because "it's the use of the federal machinery to punish enemies of the administration."

"Watergate? Seriously, George?" Vanden Heuvel replied. "I mean, Watergate was a scandal unique in its depths of criminality. You had a president at the heart of the White House directing the subversion of the FBI and other institutions, including the IRS... And the key scandal -- which you will disagree with -- is that we had after Citizens United a flood of money coming in, and you had groups which were clearly political and partisan trying to use this 501(c)4 [tax-exempt] categorization to escape political scrutiny."

Vanden Heuvel went on to point out that the Republican Party was trying to substitute the so-called scandal at the IRS, attacks in Benghazi and the Justice Department's seizure of Associate Press phone records for a real political agenda.

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While others in the media are finally acknowledging that the Benghazi "scandal" which Fox has been pushing for months on end is nothing but a witch hunt and that ABC's big "scoop" on White House emails just left egg on their face and was nothing but lies being fed to them by Republicans, what are they doing over at Fox?

You guessed it... still scandal-mongering over Benghazi. And of course there was no acknowledgement by anyone on the panel of Fox News Watch this Saturday that the Republicans were caught feeding lies to ABC News. In Fox-land, the talking points by Susan Rice are still supposedly a scandal. They're carping that the White House doesn't treat the press nicely enough to suit them and that they don't know how to handle their messaging properly -- because we all know if they were better at messaging and nicer to the press, Fox would then give them a fair shake, right? They haven't managed to make this fake scandal of theirs stick, but they're still grasping at straws to be outraged about.

I thought that maybe they would just move on, since they've got themselves a couple of new drummed up "scandals" to chase after as well, but apparently they're not ready to let this witch hunt go any time soon.

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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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Conservative columnist George Will on Sunday suggested that President Barack Obama could be impeached after it was revealed that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) targeted tea party groups.

The Associated Press learned last week that the IRS had apologized for what it was an "inappropriate" investigation into whether tea party groups were abusing their tax-exempt status.

"How stupid do they think we are?" Will asked during an ABC News panel on Sunday. "Just imagine... if the George W. Bush administration had IRS underlings, out in Cincinnati of course, saying we're going to target groups with the word ' 'progressive' in their title. We would have all hell breaking loose."

"This is the 40th anniversary of the Watergate summer," he added, reading a passage from former President Richard Nixon's articles of impeachment.

He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavoured to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposed not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be intitiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.

"I think it would be irresponsible to start talking about impeachment over this," Democratic strategist Donna Brazile replied. "Clearly, there was some incompetence at some level or bureaucrats looking into all these applications in a rush after Citizens United [Supreme Court ruling] to see whether or not they were legitimate organizations with the word 'tea party' or 'patriot' in it. Yeah, there are progressive patriots as well."

"Given what George has just said, you better get ready for your audit," ABC News White House correspondent Jonathan Karl quipped to Will.

"The IRS commissioner was a Republican appointed by [former President George W.] Bush, who his term expired in November," Brazile pointed out.

There is no evidence that President Obama directed or even knew of the targeting of tea party groups.

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As our friends over at Media Matters took note of this Thursday, the Republican propaganda channel has decided to yet again make another political attack ad for the Republicans. The Five's Eric Bolling offered up the clip shown above for Republicans (or Joe Biden) should they wish to use it against a Hillary Clinton presidential bid for 2016.

As one of the commenters pointed out in their post, this ad offered up by Bolling looks almost identical to one that the RNC had planned to run during the last presidential campaign and decided not to due to a request by Mitt Romney: Exclusive: The RNC Benghazi Attack Ad that Never Ran:

It was the Benghazi attack ad the Republican National Committee created but never aired.

ABC News has obtained an ad the RNC made last fall and approved to air in the final weeks of the presidential campaign. The ad begins with a replay of Hillary Clinton’s famous “3 a.m. phone call” commercial from the 2008 campaign and then cuts to video of the burning U.S. consulate in Benghazi Libya. [...]

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Former budget director David Stockman says that a "huge cultural problem" concerning defense cuts and higher taxes is linked to a massive alleged conspiracy to cheat on standardized tests in Atlanta Public Schools.

Last week, former Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent Beverly Hall was among 35 educators who were indicted for conspiring to rig standardized test scores between 2005 and 2009.

During a Sunday panel on ABC News, conservative columnist George Will pointed to the No Child Left Behind law passed under President George W. Bush and said that it had been a mistake to tie teacher pay to student test scores.

"We've put in all kinds of perverse incentives all linked to standardized testing," Will explained.

"Cheating is symptomatic of a huge cultural problem we have," Stockman opined. "The cheating that's going on in Washington today, in terms of not being honest about the real choices: higher taxes for you, Social Security cuts for the affluent, big declines in defense not there. The cheating that's going on in terms of the financial system that's totally out of kilter and really needs to be fixed in Wall Street is not even being addressed."

"So, that is symptomatic of a huge national problem."

As Reagan's budget director from 1981 to 1985, Stockman helped pushed through massive tax cuts under the theory that wealth would "trickle down" from richer Americans.

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Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman on Sunday accused tea party-backed Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) of using "non-facts" to argue that earned benefits programs like Social Security and Medicare needed to be cut in order to be saved.

"Unless we do something, these programs are going broke," Johnson opined during a panel on ABC News. "When I hear people saying Social Security is solvent to the year 2035, it's not."

"In a [sic] entitlement reform package, actually bringing in revenue for those entitlement reforms, I might look at that," he added. "But the fact of the matter is that we're already having a trillion dollars in tax increases hitting us in Obamacare. They're hidden, but it's middle class... As well as the $600 billion [in a January deal to increase taxes on wealthy Americans]. That's $1.6 trillion in tax increases hitting us in the next 10 years."

"We've just run aground right there," Krugman noted. "Your facts are false. The Social Security thing -- Social Security, it has a dedicated revenue base, it has a trust fund based on that dedicated revenue base. You can't change the rules midstream and say, 'Oh well, suddenly the trust fund doesn't count.'"

Johnson interrupted with the claim that "the trust fund is a fiction, it has no value in the federal government."

"It important to realize that the facts that are being brought out here are, in fact, non-facts," Krugman pointed out.

"They're absolute facts," the Wisconsin Republican shot back.

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Conservative columnist George Will on Sunday suggested that women shouldn't complain about the difficulties of juggling a family and a career because "no one can have it all."

During a panel discussion on ABC News, host George Stephanopolous noted that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg had started a national conversation with her new book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which argues that more women need to pursue their ambition to be leaders.

"Just look at one the reaction to Sheryl Sandberg's book has done," Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) observed. "It is so hard for women to wear our ambition on our sleeve, to pursue our dreams, to believe that we can reach the top on any profession and that we should always shoot for the stars."

The Florida Democrat added: "And what Sheryl Sandberg has done for little girls -- my two daughters and little girls across America -- is written a book, a manifesto, that says it is okay to ambitious to, it's okay to want to have it all, that balance is important, but there is nothing wrong with trying have a full professional life and be a leader and succeed as a woman and also having a full family life. You don't have to choose. It can be both."

Will, however, used to an column in The Atlantic by Ann Marie Slaughter to push back against the notion that women should expect to be successful in their careers while raising a family.

"And when Ann Marie Slaughter causes a huge national uproar with an article in, I guess, The Atlantic that says women can't have it all after all, I've got news for her, no one can have it all," he quipped.

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The pediatric neurosurgeon who shocked Washington by using his speech at the non-partisan National Prayer Breakfast earlier this month to suggest that the Bible calls for a flat tax now says that God might tell him to run for president in 2016.

In doing so, he joins a long list of Republicans who claim to converse with the Almighty and take their marching orders from above.

As President Barack Obama sat just a few feet away, Dr. Ben Carson went on a 27-minute rant about political correctness and how Biblical "tithing" would make a better tax system. Fox News quickly heaped praise on Carson, while other conservative outlets like The Wall Street Journal and World Net Daily called for a presidential bid.

In a Sunday morning appearance on ABC News, Carson suggested that a White House run wasn't out of the question if that was what God wanted.

"It's not my intention to do that," Carson told ABC's Jonathan Karl. "But as I always say in every part of my life, I'll leave that up to God."

Karl also asked the famed doctor what he thought of President Obama "as a leader."

"I think he's a very talented politician," Carson hedged after a short pause. "There are a number of policies that I don't believe lead to the growth of our nation and don't lead to the elevation of our nation."

"But what I would like to see more often in this nation is an open and intelligent conversation, not just people casting aspersions at each other," he remarked. "I mean, it's unbelievable to me the way that people act like third graders, and if somebody doesn't agree with them, 'they're this' or 'they're that' -- and it comes from both sides and it's so infantile."