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On This Week with George Stephanopoulos, it's a veritable free-for-all over Rush Limbaugh and the contraceptive debate. You got to see the full range of Villager conventional wisdom - from A to B! Let's listen as they discuss Rush Limbaugh's non-apology apology to college student Sandra Fluke:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Fair to say, I think, George, we're going to see her picture in Democrat ads as well. I can only imagine the pressure that Rush Limbaugh was on yesterday to force that apology. You know, the advertisers came out and started to pull their ads. I would imagine also Republican leaders are calling and saying, get this issue off our backs.

WILL: Well, it would have been nice if they had shared that with the larger public, the Republican leaders. Instead, Mr. Boehner comes out and says, Rush's language was inappropriate. Using the salad fork for your entrée, that is inappropriate.

Points for style to Mr. Will! Good one, George! As we know, using the proper fork is an important Beltway tool.

(LAUGHTER)

WILL: I mean, and Rick Santorum says, well, what he said was absurd but an entertainer is allowed to be absurd. No, it is the responsibility of conservatives to police the right and its excesses, just as the liberals unfailingly fail to police the excesses on their own side.

And it was depressing because what it indicates is that the Republican leaders are afraid of Rush Limbaugh. They want to bomb Iran, but they're afraid of Rush Limbaugh.

"Excesses" of the liberals? I would be so happy to see some. Where are they?

NOONAN: Look, what Rush Limbaugh said was crude, rude, even piggish, it was just unacceptable, he ought to be called on it. I'm glad he has apologized. I guess there will be a debate now about the nature of the apology. But what he said was also destructive.

It confused the issue. It played into this trope that the Republicans have a war on women. No, they don't, but he made it look they that way. It confused the larger issue which is the real issue, which is "Obama-care," and its incursions against religious freedoms, which is a serious issue. It was not about this young lady at Georgetown.

So what he said was deeply destructive and unhelpful and he ought to be called on it.

Oh, Nooners. Surely you're not drinking this early in the day? There are no incursions into "religious freedoms," no matter what those voices in your head tell you. That nice Dr. Dean tries to explain it to you:

DEAN: War on religious freedom is an important thing inside the Beltway among elite people, it's like the Fourth Amendment. It's a good argument for elite people. An attack on whether women can buy birth control pills or not, and have their insurance pay for it, every woman in America understands that.

This is a war on women. They've been warring on woman on abortion rights, now they're going after them on birth control rights. There's not a woman in the United States of America that doesn't get what the Republicans are doing.

And Mitt Romney is going to have to live with this. And he can't get out of it until the primary season is over. And that is his problem.

Donna Brazile jumps in:

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Honestly, there are so few nuggets of genuine wisdom in Washington that watching the Sunday talk-show hackery is a form of psychological torture. If only I could afford to throw a brick through my television! The only one who ever seems to notice the real stories behind the stage sets and dramatic speeches is Krugman, and no one listens to him but us DFHs.

Instead, we can sit back and listen to the Villagers explain that attacking the deficit is the biggest priority, that Obama has been governing from the left and not the center-right, and thank God he's back to the "center" (which is actually the right), and that the country voted for the Republicans because they wanted even more right-wing policies, not because they were frustrated by an administration who seemed to put their needs last.

Are we all clear now?

Here's the roundtable discussion from This Week with Christiane Amanpour:

AMANPOUR: That was President Obama delivering last year's State of the Union address. Welcome back. Joined again by our roundtable.

George, I know that you have a great, great regard for watching the State of the Union on television.

WILL: A, they're overrated. The next morning, the country is still a complex continental country with muscular interests (ph) and politics is its own momentum.

Between Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson, no one delivered this in person. They sent their report to Congress in writing. But now we've turned this into this panorama in which -- in an interminable speech, every president, regardless of party, tries to stroke every erogenous zone in electorate.

AMANPOUR: Oh, my goodness.

WILL: And it becomes a political pep rally, to use the phrase of Chief Justice Roberts last year. If it's going to be a pep rally, with the president's supporters or whatever party standing up and braying approval, and histrionic pouting on the part of the other, then it's no place for the judiciary, it's no place for the uniformed military, and it's no place for non-adolescent legislators.

BRAZILE: It's a once-a-year opportunity to talk to the American people to remind us who we are and where we're going. This is an opportunity for the president to use scripture to give us a vision, because the Bible says, without a vision, a people will perish, and we didn't have that over the last...

(CROSSTALK)

AMANPOUR: So what is the vision? Because now or never.

BRAZILE: It's about jobs. It's about rebuilding America, making America competitive and strong again, and taking care of all our issues, both on the domestic front, as well as international.

DOWD: To me, the State of the Union -- and I'll agree in part with George and disagree in part with George on this -- they don't affect the American public. If you look at like approval numbers going into State of the Unions over the last 35 years and coming out, they do not move the numbers. Even Ronald Reagan, who was lauded as one of the best communicators in the history of this country, never moved the American public.

Barack Obama, another great speaker, did very well in Tucson. In last year's State of the Union, didn't move the numbers. But what is important I think in this is for him to continue to connect the dots with the audience in the Capitol and the people that surround people in the Capitol that he is going to keep doing what he's been doing since Election Day.

It's not the event in itself that matters, but it's how -- the cumulative effect of it. And if he continues to, one, talk about jobs and the economy, and then tie to it an increase in making our discourse better and talking to each other across party lines, if he does those two things, he will continue to rise in the polls.

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I started the day with this story in the Times (how great that the corporate media so faithfully completes their assigned propaganda!), and because it made me so grumpy, was happy to turn on This Week With Christiane Amanpour and see Donna Brazile knock back George Will's Very Serious Take on public employees' unions. Would that our president were as good at standing up for working people!

WILL: There is one national resonance from this, however. In New York City, the issue is tangled up with the question, and it's an open question, whether the public employees union to make a job action point sabotaged street collection. I believe -- and this is entirely tangled up with the state bankruptcy -- that the issue of public employees and their dominance of blue states is going to be the biggest issue in this country for the next several years.

BRAZILE: No, they're the scapegoat, George. I mean, when you start cutting state budgets and city budgets, and you start cutting snowplows, and you start cutting the amount of salt that you have stored, that has a real impact on people's lives.

And, you know, the one thing -- in terms of Brooklyn and some of the -- you know, the other boroughs -- they didn't get snowplowed for two, three days, and so they were upset when Mayor Bloomberg went out and said, "Hey, everything is fine." And they're like, we have kids who are -- who need hospital treatment, but they can't -- the ambulance cannot get there.

George, I know that's the new baby on -- on the wish list, to cut all of these budgets, but when they start cutting these state budgets, people are going to feel it.

This, in a nutshell, is the problem with the how Democrats and Republicans govern. It sounds fiscally responsible to cut costs, to shrink the size of the government when speaking in the abstract. But when something happens, Americans WANT to rely on the government to take care of these necessities. Public employees didn't cause the "Snowpocalypse". But the constant drumming to cut costs to the bare bones (and sometimes even whittle those bones down further) shows you the danger of not having the resources when you need it.

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Head. Bangs. Desk.

Reason #2,348,293,297 why Americans are so tragically misinformed about the issues facing us today. CNN cut away from the Health Care Summit today to give us the oh-so-important musings of former Nixon speechwriter and D-list actor Ben Stein and Democratic strategist Donna Brazile. What? We need to cut away to get more unsubstantiated talking points?

But it gets even better. Stein launches into his socio-economic theories of why health care reform is unpopular with the Republican Party, and it's not because they're beholden to corporations and worship at the altar of the "free markets". It's not because their bank accounts are busting from donations by the health care industry. It's not even because they reflexively obstruct and are against anything the Obama administration is for. Oh no, it's because Republicans pay more taxes than Democrats do:

You asked one of the most brilliant questions I have ever heard anyone ask on TV, which is why are so many Republicans against more government interference in the health care system, and so many Democrats in favor of it? And the answer is much higher percentage of Republicans are taxpayers than Democrats and the Republicans are the people paying for it, and the Democrats are the people receiving it. So that has a lot to explain there.

There are a tremendous number of wealthy Democrats and wealthy Republicans, but as a general matter, Republicans as a group pay income tax at a much higher rate than Democrats, and I think that has a lot to do with everything. They also have a much higher rate, and are paying members of the insurance pools, and they realize that the insurance premiums are going up so that people who otherwise would not get insurance are going to get insurance and it has a lot to do with the fact that Republicans are a different group of people than Democrats.

You have to ask yourself why CNN felt that Ben Stein's opinion on anything (let us not forget that he also rejects evolution) is at all informative to the American public.

In fact, feel free to ask them directly: http://www.cnn.com/feedback/

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Damn it, it's a center-right nation, and don't you forget it!

I swear to you that is the editorial slant taken by pretty much all the bobbleheads, but none so nakedly as This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Note the make up of the panel is basically four Republicans to one Democrat (with all their concern trolling, I generously figure that Brazile and Stephanopoulos together equal just one Democrat). What's with that ratio? The American public has soundly and decisively voted against the GOP policies and the Bush doctrine, so what are frightened little Villagers to do but put on some former Bushies, Matthew Dowd and Torie Clarke, along with conservative stalwart George Will.

George Will, the sagest one of all, metaphorically pats Donna Brazile on the head and suggests that perhaps all the doom and gloom on the economy is unnecessary, as if Donna Brazile is the one to blame for the bearish outlook. He suggests that the foreclosure rate isn't as bad as everyone seems to think, that the unemployment rolls aren't that bad (WTF? 94% of the people who want to work are working? WANT to work?) and that this is strictly a financial sector problem, ignoring the fact that if the financial sector cannot lend money, it becomes a disaster to the consumer and small business owner as well. Typical Republican missing the forest for the trees.

Meanwhile, former Pentagon spokesperson Torie Clarke rings the warning bell that all these bailouts (not questioned when AIG and BearStearns came a-calling, mind you) are going to cause us to "out-France France"! Quel horreur! And Matthew Dowd insists that if Obama really wants to represent change from how things are done in Washington, he's going to have to reject a Democratic party-led program.

Um, huh? The logic of this escapes me. The American public has rejected GOP policies and rule and so therefore, Obama must reject a Democratic program? I have an idea for you, Matt (along with all of the ABC news bookers): how about we give a Democratic program (and a Democratic panel) a try for once? THAT would be a change.

In the typical Orwellian fashion that would cause him to name a rollback on pollution standards the "Clean Skies" Initiative and a failing educational system that reduces funding to the schools that need it the most "No Child Left Behind," George Bush has nominated Hans Von Spakovsky to oversee fair elections at the FEC.

Donna Brazile, former campaign manager to Al Gore, says about Von Spakovsky in Roll Call (subs. req.d):

"Who is Hans von Spakovsky?" It's a fair question, especially if you're not familiar with the new barriers that have been imposed on our electoral system, making it harder for certain Americans to register and vote. Von Spakovsky has been referred to by leaders in the civil rights community as one of the "chief architects" behind efforts to suppress and dilute the voting rights of minorities in this country. If Senators care about the right of all citizens to participate in our electoral process, they ought to attend the hearing and ask this nominee to answer some of the allegations.

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(Luscious coffee photo via a great foodie blog -- Je Mange La Ville.)

The Sunday Talk Head thread is up and running here. Lots of discussion set for the fired US Attorneys and the politicization of the Department of Justice, just based on the show listings. Take a peek at this line-up for CNN's Late Edition:

Samir Sumaidaie, Iraqi ambassador to U.S.; John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N.; Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah; Lanny Davis, former Clinton special counsel; Donna Brazile, Democratic strategist; Ed Gillespie, former RNC chairman.

Not enough coffee in the entire world to get me through that line-up, I can tell you that. Sheesh.

Although I would love to see Orrin Hatch have to answer several questions about the number of his minions who have their hands in this festering Turdblossom Special from Rove's shop. That could be very fun, indeed, because Sen. Hatch needs to be held to account for that Patriot Act provision, among many, many other things in this mess. Would that I could believe Blitzer would actually ASK those questions today. (If you have somehow missed the Media Matters analysis on the conservative leanings of the Sunday shows, do take a look at the report.)

So, what's catching your eye in the news this morning?

Donna Brazile used the term today on "Inside Politics" as the discussion moved to Alberto Gonzales's admission yesterday in the Valerie Plame leak case. Brad Blog heard the same question from David Gergen. While the gaggle hit Scotty pretty hard on some of the same issues. Free Scotty! Free Scotty! Does Scott McClellan need a special waiver form from the White House to answer a direct question these days?

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I've complained about the Democratic TV surrogates before so this is just a follow up. Donna Brazile, you have to do better. Please, Obama needs your help. The Newties are trotting out their "Pelosi-Reid" liberal deck of cards to try and intimidate Americans to not vote for Obama. "Don't vote for Obama because the Democratic Party may control the White House and Congress and America can't afford that!" Right, because as we've seen, Conservatives really know how to govern this nation. Gingrich---for the most part is running McCain's campaign already (with Hannity's help of course) and gets enough time on FOX already so whay is he on ABC? OK, let me stay on point. When I watched ABC's THIS WEEK, I wondered why Donna was already throwing cold water on Obama's head if he actually does win the election in November.

Newt Gingrich: If Obama won and had a moderate House and a moderate Senate, he would probably be a moderate president. His temperament would lead him to be much more like Richard Daley than like Reverend Wright. He's not gonna have that. he's gonna have card check to take away your right to a secret ballot. He's going to have an effort to eliminate freedom of speech for Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. He's going to have a congress that wants to raise taxes, that wants to increase government --- is he really going to veto and fight with Pelosi and Reid? ... As the Wall Street Journal said on Friday, here is what their promising their allies they're going to do.

Donna Brazile: Yeah, but they're not in office Mr. Speaker. Senator Obama will inherit a 10 trillion dollar deficit and he's going to have to put things on the table that perhaps many of us would not like to see a Democratic president put on the table in terms of cutting back on spending, freezing hiring and making some real tough decisions. So, I think he will be constrained by the deficit and also by the fact that we're still in two major wars.

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