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The Obama administration has been criticized for their inaction on gun control during their first term in office. In fact, one of the earliest efforts by Attorney-General Eric Holder back in early 2009 was rebuffed by then White House Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel. In the wake of Newtown he's now calling for "meaningful action".

(CBS News) As the country is still reeling from the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn., Chicago Mayor and former chief of staff to President Obama, Rahm Emanuel, defended the president's position on guns, saying he has always been "very, very clear" on the issue.

"President Obama always stood for getting something done," Emanuel said on "CBS This Morning."

Co-host Norah O'Donnell, however, pointed out that the pro-gun control organization, the Brady Campaign, rated the president with an F grade during his first year in office for allowing guns in national parks and on Amtrak. She also pointed to a book by Danny Kleinmann called Kill or Capture that quoted Emanuel as being extremely angry when Attorney General Eric Holder said that the president backed a ban on assault weapons.

Here's her rather direct question to Emanuel and you'll hear his rather evasive reply.

NORAH O'DONNELL: "I want to ask you about what led us to this point. The assault weapons ban expired in 2004. You were President Obama’s Chief of Staff and in 2009, according to the book Killer Catcher, you were furious with Attorney General Holder who held a press conference in February of 2009 saying that the Obama administration was going to reinstitute, push the assault weapons ban, and that you sent word to Justice that Holder needed to “shut the [fuck] up on guns."

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Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist says that President Barack Obama did not win re-election because of his promise to raise taxes on the wealthy, but it was because attack ads made voters thing that Mitt Romney was a "poopy-head."

During a Monday interview on CBS, Norquist suggested that Republicans had a mandate not to raise taxes, even it meant going off the so-called "fiscal cliff."

"The House of Representatives was elected, committed to keeping taxes low," the Americans for Tax Reform president explained. "The president was elected on the basis that he was not Romney and that Romney was a poopy-head and you should vote against Romney. And he won by two points. But he didn't make the case that we should have higher taxes and higher spending, he kind of sounded like the opposite."

"Well, I'm not sure that's what the president called Mitt Romney," CBS host Norah O'Donnell pointed out. "The debate that was had -- and I listened very closely to it -- he said very clearly throughout the debate that the wealthiest Americans should pay more. And he won eight of the nine battleground states. And Republicans failed to reclaim the White House or the Senate. What about the exit polls that show a broad support on raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans? Are you wrong?"

"Again, you saw those ads that suggested Romney gave people cancer in Ohio for months and months unanswered," Norquist insisted. "You can trash an individual and get them to vote against him. Again where we have an election, there are 30 Republican governors, okay? And they're running campaigns against raising taxes and in favor of, frankly, phasing out the income tax in North Carolina and Kansas and Oklahoma."

O'Donnell pointed out that even House Speaker John Boehner had said that Republicans were willing to accept new revenue as part of a compromise.

"In 2011, Obama said the world would end and we should pass around smelling salts because he wanted to raise the debt ceiling," Norquist opined. "We got a debt ceiling agreement. It was a great compromise. We cut spending. We didn't raise taxes. We didn't cut spending as much as the Republicans wanted. The [Paul] Ryan plan would have reduced Obama's overspending by $6 trillion, we only got two and a half trillion in restraint."

"That's a compromise, it's not as much as the Republicans wanted. The Republicans have already compromised."

In exit polls released on Tuesday, six in ten voters said they supported raising taxes. Almost half wanted to see tax hikes specifically on those making more than $250,000 a year.

“On this particular issue, it wasn’t close,” Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod told CBS News on Sunday.

“You need new revenues, and every objective person who has looked at this agrees on that, so the question is where is that revenue going to come from?” he pointed out. “The president believes it is more equitable to get that from the wealthiest Americans who have done very well and frankly don’t need those tax cuts and who benefited disproportionately from the tax cuts in the last decade. Most Americans agree with that.”

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Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan says that he can't figure out what President Barack Obama meant when he mocked Mitt Romney's complaint about the Navy's smaller fleet of ships by saying "we also have fewer horses and bayonets."

During the third 2012 presidential debate, Romney had criticized Obama because "our Navy is smaller now than any time since 1917. The Navy said they needed 313 ships to carry out their mission, we’re not down to 285. We’re headed down to the low 200s if we go through a sequestration. That’s unacceptable to me."

In response, Obama promised that military spending would not be cut, adding, "I think Gov. Romney maybe hasn’t spent enough time looking at how our military works. You mentioned the Navy, for example. And that we have fewer ships that we had in 1916. Well, governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military has changed."

"We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so, the question is not a game of Battleship where we’re counting ships, it’s what are our capabilities?"

Appearing on CBS the next morning, Ryan told host Norah O'Donnell that he couldn't make sense out of the "horses and bayonets" line.

"To compare modern American battleships with bayonets, I just don't understand that comparison," the Wisconsin Republican said. "Look, we have to have a strong Navy to keep peace and prosperity."

"If all these defense cuts go through, our Navy will be small than it was before World War I," Ryan continued. "That's not acceptable. And, yes, the ocean hasn't shrunk."

In an interview on ABC, Vice President Joe Biden explained to host George Stephanopoulos that the president had told "the truth, that one aircraft carrier is probably more powerful than the entire United States Navy was back then."

"Our Navy is superior to every other navy in the world combined," the vice president pointed out. "In one aircraft carrier, we have more air power than almost every nation in the world has in their air force."

Biden said that he "felt a little badly" for Romney because he showed "it's clear he is not ready to be the commander in chief of the United States military. He demonstrated a lack of sophistication about what is going on in the world."

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Who needs Fox when we've got the talking heads over at CBS doing their best to keep up with them. Here's what the viewers were treated to just after Bob Schieffer's pearl clutching over whether David Axelrod was willing to use the word lie (gasp!) when talking about Mitt Romney -- CBS News Covers For Romney Campaign's Tax Doublespeak:

CBS chief political correspondent John Dickerson disputed President Obama's description of Mitt Romney's tax plan as a "$5 trillion tax cut" because one of Romney's advisers suggested he would reduce the size of his proposed tax cuts if he could not pay for them. But Dickerson is ignoring the fact that Romney running mate Paul Ryan suggested last week that Romney would not reduce the size of his tax cuts because lowering taxes is his highest priority.

During a panel discussion on the presidential debate on Face The Nation, Dickerson said that it was unfair to accuse Romney of being dishonest about his tax plan. Dickerson explained that a top Romney economic adviser "said we have two goals here. One is deficit reduction, the other is reducing marginal rates. If those come in conflict our primary goal is deficit reduction and the marginal rates might not go down as much."

That stands in direct contrast to remarks by Paul Ryan, who was asked specifically if Mitt Romney would "scale back on the 20 percent tax cut for the wealthy" if the cuts could not be paid for and replied "No, no.".

Dickerson also did his best to play the "both sides" are equally terrible false equivalency game by attempting to equate Romney's constant lying on the campaign trail about anything and everything he's done to President Obama for not keeping a campaign pledge to cut the budget in half and not closing Gitmo. As Axelrod rightfully pointed out, the comparison is utterly ridiculous, considering he was at the mercy of Congress on accomplishing both.

Whether Axelrod is right about the lies catching up, who knows, but it seems CBS is more than willing to do their part to help Romney out and gloss over them.

Transcript below the fold.

Continue reading »

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Here we go again. From this Sunday's Face the Nation, vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan repeats the notion that his voting to send people's kids off to die invading countries that weren't a threat to us as foreign policy experience.

Ryan: ‘I Have More Foreign Policy Experience’ Than Obama Four Years Ago:

Paul Ryan pushed back against President Obama's attacks on the Romney-Ryan ticket as new to foreign policy, arguing that he has more foreign policy experience now than Obama did upon entering office four years ago in an interview on CBS Sunday.

"I have more foreign policy experience coming into this job than President Obama, who sat on the Senate Foreign Relations committee, did coming into his," Ryan said on "Face the Nation." "I've voted to send men and women to war. I've been to Iraq and Afghanistan. I've met with our troops to get their perspectives. I've been to the funerals, I've talked to the widows, I've talked to the wives, the moms and the dads. That's something. That matters."

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White House senior adviser David Plouffe on Sunday chastised Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan for backing away from his earlier support of defense cuts, saying the Wisconsin congressman "was running away from them with the kind of pace he ran in that fictitional marathon."

Although Ryan voted for a deal that would have triggered significant cuts to defense, he has recently criticized the sequestration plan.

During an interview on Sunday, CBS host Chief White House Correspondent Norah O'Donnell asked Ryan why he was "criticizing the president for those same defense cuts you’re voting for and called a victory."

"I have to correct on you this, Norah. I voted for a mechanism that says the sequester will occur if we don’t cut $1.2 trillion in government," Ryan explained.

"Right, a trillion dollars in defense spending, and you voted for it!" O'Donnell pointed out.

"No, Norah," Ryan replied. "I voted for the Budget Control Act."

"That included defense spending!" O'Donnell pressed.

"Norah, you’re mistaken," Ryan insisted.

After hearing that he had refused to even admit he had supported defense cuts, Plouffe drew a comparison to Ryan's recent false claim that he had run a marathon in less than three hours.

"Interesting to hear Congressman Ryan," Plouffe told O'Donnell. "You asked him questions. He voted for the sequester. He voted for the Budget Control Act. He was running away from them with the pace that he ran in the fictitional marathon that you asked him about."

"Getting our fiscal house in order, dealing with the sequester is very simple. We need compromise," he added. "President Obama is the one person in Washington who is very committed to compromise."

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Ann Romney says she appreciates the support of actor Clint Eastwood and the "unique thing" he did during his Thursday speech at the Republican National Convention, but she would have rather seen a video praising her husband, Mitt Romney.

During surprise, rambling speech in which Eastwood interviewed an invisible Barack Obama, the actor shocked observers and set social media on fire.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow called the performance "the weirdest thing I've ever seen at a political convention in my entire life, and it will be the weirdest thing I've ever seen if I live to be 100."

The following morning, CBS host Norah O'Donnell asked Ann Romney if she would have preferred that a biographical video about her husband's childhood had taken Eastwood's primetime spot.

"We appreciated Clint's support, of course," the candidate's wife laughed. "But, yes, I do wish more people had seen those touching moments [in the video]."

"The Clint Eastwood thing, was it a distraction, was it a mistake?" O'Donnell wondered.

"Well, again, we appreciated Clint's support," Ann Romney repeated. "He's a unique guy and he did a unique thing last night."

"I didn't know it was coming," she added. "Again, I can tell you, we're grateful for everyone's support."

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From this Sunday's Face the Nation, Speaker of the House John Boehner repeatedly refused to specify which programs Republicans would be willing to cut in order to get out deficit under control despite being continually pressed about it by Norah O'Donnell. O'Donnell also allowed Boehner to get away with one of the lies they tell repeatedly, which is that it's President Obama who ran up the deficit.

As we've pointed out here already, it is George W. Bush's policies that are primarily responsible for the deficit Boehner is fearmongering over here. And par for the course, O'Donnell let him get away with it with no push back.

O'DONNELL: Let's turn now to another issue in this campaign and that is of course government spending. You have attacked Obamacare as something that this government can't afford. Are you willing to go forward to the American people and say, you're not going to be able to enjoy the same kind of services you have in the past, we've got to cut those services as part of shrinking the government?

BOEHNER: We clearly have a problem. This President's driven the debt up $5 trillion in less than four years. We've got a $16 trillion national debt now, a $1.3 trillion budget deficit this year. You can't continue to spend money that you don't have.

And I do believe that it's time to deal with this. I tried everything I could last year to work with the President to try to come to some agreement to begin the process of getting our debt under control.

O'DONNELL: So can you look people in the eye and say you are not going to enjoy the same services you have before?

BOEHNER: We've got to make changes to all of our programs, because if we don't, they will, not, exist.

O'DONNELL: So people won't have the same kind of services?

BOEHNER: We've got to make adjustments to them. How we do it, that's going to be the subject of a great debate as we get into this election cycle and as we get into the post-election cycle.

O'Donnell didn't ask him which programs he was talking about, but who wants to take dibs he would have lumped Social Security in with Medicare and Medicaid if she had?

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House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) on Sunday admitted that some parts of President Barack Obama's health care reforms were beneficial, but insisted that the entire law must be "ripped out by its roots."

"There's always going to be parts of it that are good," Boehner told CBS Chief White House Correspondent Nora O'Donnell.

"Since you're going to be repealing it, are you willing to roll back the provisions that would provide free mammograms under Medicare?" O'Donnell wondered.

"Listen, there are a lot of provisions that can be replaced," Boehner explained. "Remember I said we want to take a common-sense, step-by-step approach to replacing Obamacare."

"Why not then, if you like some of the provisions in the Affordable Care Act, why not work with it?" O'Donnell asked.

"No, no," Boehner replied. "This has to be ripped out by its roots. This is government taking over the entire health insurance industry."

"It has to be ripped out and we need to start over."

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Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich insisted on Tuesday that that fellow candidate Mitt Romney was a "liar," but could support him over Barack Obama if the former Massachusetts governor became the eventual Republican nominee.

At a Monday campaign event, Gingrich had complained about Romney refusing to speak out against attack ads being aired by a pro-Romney Super PAC.

"Here is my simple tag line: Somebody who will lie to you to get to be president will lie to you when they are president," Gingrich told suporters.

In an interview Tuesday morning, CBS correspondent Norah O'Donnell asked Gingrich if he was calling Romney a "liar."

"Yes," Gingrich replied.

"You're calling Mitt Romney a liar?" O'Donnell pressed. "Why are you saying he is a liar?"

"Because this is a man whose staff created the PAC, his millionaire friends fund the PAC, he pretends he has nothing to do with the PAC - it's baloney," Gingrich said. "He's not telling the American people the truth."

After explaining that Gingrich had just called Romney a "flat-out liar," CBS host Bob Schieffer wanted to know if Gingrich could support Romney if he eventually won the GOP nomination.

"Sure," Gingrich said without hesitation. "I would support a Republican candidate against Barack Obama because I think Barack Obama is tearing the country apart."

"You're saying Mitt Romney would be a liar as president," O'Donnell pointed out.

"Yes," Gingrich agreed. "But less destructive than Barack Obama."

But there are some Republicans that even Gingrich would have trouble supporting over the current Democratic president.

In an interview with CNN last week, the Georgia Republican said that he could not vote for GOP hopeful Ron Paul.