On the eve of what will be the failure of the Super Committee to reach an agreement (a good thing!), CBS' Steve Kroft interviewed Grover Norquist as though he were King of the country, deserving of deference and awe for his hostage-taking and holding.

This clip encapsulates everything wrong with Grover, the Republicans, and their ridiculous obeisance to a pledge that has more meaning to Republicans than the Pledge of Allegiance or their oath to the United States Constitution.

KROFT: You make it pretty clear. If someone breaks the pledge you're going to do everything you can to get rid of them.

NORQUIST: To educate the voters that they raised taxes. Lookit, we educate people --

KROFT: To get rid of them --

NORQUIST: To encourage them to go into another line of work like shoplifting or bank robbing where they have to do their own...stealing.

KROFT: You've got them by the short hairs!

NORQUIST: The voters do. Yeah.

KROFT: They're going to have to march in lockstep with Grover Norquist.

NORQUIST: With the taxpayers of their state.

So the "short hairs" reference was cute, but Kroft really missed an opportunity here. When polls consistently show that 70 percent of American taxpayers favor tax hikes, or at the very least, expiry of the Bush rates, Kroft owed it to viewers to ask him specifically which voters in those states he would be "educating." Norquist makes it sound like most people just loathe and despise the notion of paying more in taxes, except the polls prove that to be a lie. When Alan Greenspan gets behind their expiry, it should serve as a fairly large clue to Kroft, if not Norquist.

Yet, in what I've come to view as the lazy interviewer style, Kroft just lets it go with a laugh and a wave. But hey. At least he got to use the phrase "got 'em by the short hairs" on national television. So there's that.

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There's some doubt as to whether Einstein ever actually said that if honey bees died out, mankind only had four years left to live. But no matter the authorship, the truth is that we are very dependent upon bees for our food product and agricultural industry. And bees are dying, at a dangerously fast pace. By some estimates, a full 1/3 of the bee population has died off, in a phenomenon known as "Colony Collapse Disorder":

(A) mystery malady, dubbed "Colony Collapse Disorder," is sweeping through the apiaries, leaving many hives almost completely devoid of adult bees, which appear to abandon their hives and disappear. Apiculturists are looking at a number of potential culprits, from bad weather to bad corn syrup to genetically modified corn to pesticides to miticides, and many suspect the problem is compounded by the presence of the varroa mite, which weakens colonies so that invading pathogens pack a particularly destructive punch. (Scientists suspect the 2005 die-off was exacerbated by a viral event.) While Miller's bees have not, so far, been affected by the colony collapse, beekeepers in 24 states have reported losses as high as 80 and even 90 percent, and many of the afflicted bees have been in the almonds, rubbing shoulders with Miller's relatively healthy ones.

60 Minutes' Steve Kroft looks at the phenomenon with the apiarist credited for sounding the alarm, David Hackenberg. Full transcripts and video available at their website.

60 Minutes tells the story of how pharmaceutical industry lobbyists literally wrote the historic Medicare Prescription Drug Bill and twisted arms to get the necessary votes to have it passed in the middle of the night. Correspondent Steve Kroft documents how many of the congressmen and staffers who worked on the bill later went on to work for the drug companies their legislation helped enrich.

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"The pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote the bill," says [Republican Congressman Walter] Jones. "The bill was over 1,000 pages. And it got to the members of the House that morning, and we voted for it at about 3 a.m. in the morning....I've been in politics for 22 years, and it was the ugliest night I have ever seen in 22 years."

CBS:

If you have ever wondered why the cost of prescription drugs in the United States are the highest in the world or why it's illegal to import cheaper drugs from Canada or Mexico, you need look no further than the pharmaceutical lobby and its influence in Washington, D.C.

In January, one of the first things the new Democratic House of Representatives did was to make it mandatory for Medicare to negotiate lower prices with the drug companies.

A similar measure faces stiff opposition in the Senate, where the drug lobby is spending millions of dollars to defeat it. The president has already announced that if the bill passes, he will veto it.