One of the reasons why voters haven't called for the head of Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett is that he rarely speaks to the press - he does what he does in the shadows, so he doesn't mouth off enough to get people riled up. I didn't expect him to add much to the Penn State story on This Week with Christiane Amanpour, and I wasn't surprised:

AMANPOUR: So an eventful week on the campaign trail, but not enough to eclipse the story that continues to shock America, the unfolding scandal at Penn State, the outrage of a revered coach and esteemed university president looking the other way as an alleged pedophile preyed on children.

Yesterday, the Nittany Lions took to the field for the first time since the sordid story spilled into the open. Before kickoff, a moment of silence, as players dropped to their knees in recognition of the young victims. The Lions lost the game, their first without Coach Joe Paterno. And this morning, emotions on campus and around the state remain raw.

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett was the attorney general who began investigating accused sexual predator Jerry Sandusky, and he joins me now from Harrisburg.

Governor, thank you for joining me.

CORBETT: Thank you for having me on, Christiane.

AMANPOUR: Let -- let me just ask you, why do you think it took this sort of public shaming for the university to finally act? Why do you think everyone, basically, hid this thing for so long, from the president to Coach Paterno?

CORBETT: Well, Christiane, first, I have to put on the record that it's hard for me to talk about a lot of the -- the past. We have to look to the future, because I was the attorney general involved in the investigation. I have certain ethical rules that I have to follow.

But I would note that the board of trustees has appointed Ken Frazier to lead the investigation, along with my secretary of education, to determine exactly the question that you're asking. What happened? Why did it happen? And most importantly, how does the university move on from here?

I think that you saw yesterday a very good outpouring of support for everyone. When those two teams came together and, really, that whole stadium came together with those two teams.

AMANPOUR: Well, let me -- let me ask you, because this is obviously massively serious. And I understand your ethical and legal obligations. However, don't you think that the mere risk that somebody who you've been investigating for more than two years, the mere risk that he could have continued to abuse during this investigation, demanded a call to the police? Should that not have been, at the very least, something that the coach, that the president should have done?

CORBETT: We would have expected law enforcement to have been involved much sooner than it got involved. And as you know from newspaper reports, our office, as the attorney general became involved, not in a case related to the university, but in a case from a next-door county, Clinton County, and a school there, where Mr. Sandusky was helping out as a coach.

AMANPOUR: Do you think others are going to be held accountable? How far up do you think that this should go? Do you think Coach Paterno is going to face legal issues?

CORBETT: Well, as you know, again, Attorney General Linda Kelly has already said at this point that he's not a subject of the investigation. And she stopped at that point.

When you have investigations like this -- and I'm not going to talk about this one -- but the one thing you learn when you're conducting investigations is that, as people face charges, they may start to cooperate, they may start talking about different things. The investigation is an ongoing one. So, because of that, I can't make projections or speculation as to where this may go.

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FSM, save us from Michele Bachmann and her bat-sh*t crazy notions of foreign policy. At any other time in history, I'm convinced that Bachmann would be laughed off the national stage for being too nutty to be worthy of a platform. But after eight years of Orwell-speak with George Bush and three years of fact-free tea party rhetoric, our collective standards have been shoved into the sub-basement of sensible ideas.

Even with those low, low standards, Michele Bachmann is her own special kind of idiotic. At David Gregory's questioning of whether she realizes that her advocating for waterboarding at the GOP debate Saturday puts her at odds with Colin Powell, John McCain and the "generals on the ground" in the War on Terror™. Her response? She's on the side of Dick Cheney and "defeating" the terrorists. Because, you know, Powell, McCain and the generals are not:

MR. GREGORY: No, no, let me just make the point. Your view that waterboarding should be reinstituted, you understand that puts you at odds with most of the generals, OK, the former Republican nominee of your party John McCain, General Colin Powell. You realize you're on the opposite end of what they believe? Do you not trust them and their views?
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REP. BACHMANN: Well, but what, but I, but I'm on the same side as Vice President Cheney on this issue, and others as well. Because, I, again, what we're looking at is what will save American lives. And that's what the most important thing is. We've got, we've got to decide that we want to defeat the terrorists. And when we make that decision, we need to, we need to employ the methods that will best help us to defeat them.

I needn't rehash the rather overwhelming number of studies that show that torture is not effective; C&Lers are smart enough to know it already. What strikes me more is the distinction she draws against those who have actually been in a combat situation and understand the dynamics. Because according to her, they've decided they don't want to defeat the terrorists.

If that's not delusional enough, Bachmann dips even further into the crazy trough:

President Obama was given a war that is won in Iraq, and he's choosing to lose the peace. That's a desecration of the memory of 4400 Americans that gave their lives to liberate Iraq.

What the hell is she talking about? Are we "losing the peace" by pulling out of Iraq? How so? Would that Gregory be even a competent enough journalist to ask. Frankly, I think Bachmann's revisionist history is a desecration to the memory those 4,400 Americans. But we're not done with the crazy:

I believe that Iraq should pay us back for the money that we spent. And I believe that Iraq should pay the families that lost a loved one several million dollars per life...

MR. GREGORY: All right.

REP. BACHMANN: ...I think, at minimum. This is, this, this is a terrible situation that the United, that the president has left the, the war on terror in.

Again with the "Iraq should repay us" ridiculousness? Now she puts a price tag on it: several million dollars for each of the 4,400 deaths? Paid exactly how, Michelle? "Thank you so much for bombing our country to Kingdom Come, destroying schools, infrastructure, hospitals and displacing millions of our citizens. We'll be writing you a check now. " Again, if Gregory was remotely a competent journalist, he would not let this pass unmentioned.

Such a short clip, but yet so much stoopid.

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Here we go with more trashing of Occupy Wall Street compared to those lovely, gun-toting, Koch funded "tea partiers" from Bloody Bill Kristol on Fox News Sunday.

WALLACE: Bill, let's go back to what Brit was talking about, the politics of this, because Nancy Pelosi was not the only Democrat, at least in the beginning -- and you don't hear these statements of support so much now -- to embrace the movement. Barack Obama talked about them giving way to the frustration we all feel, Joe Biden compared them to the Tea Party.

At this point, particularly, as we see more sanitary problems, as people I think are getting tired of them occupying public parks, or private parks in the case of New York, is Occupy Wall Street a plus or a negative for Democrats?

KRISTOL: Ohm, I think it's absolutely toxic for the Democrats and for liberalism widely.

Step back for a minute and think of the Obama -- the mobilization behind President Obama. It was an incredible thing that we saw in 2007, 2008. It was law-abiding, it was peaceful, it was democratic, elected a president. Think of the Tea Party, law-abiding, peaceful, democratic, turned into --

WALLACE: Small "d," democratic.

KRISTOL: Yes, small "d," democratic. And people got -- nominated candidates, had primary challenges, some of them worked, some of them didn't, et cetera.

This is fundamentally anti-democratic. This is not an attempt to effect elections. This is -- it's not law-abiding. The whole notion of "Occupy Wall Street," that's not a sort of democratic movement that likes to participate in the whole process.

The whole term "occupy" is a kind of Marxist term, we're taking over these pieces of public property or private property, like it or not. These are our demands. We're dividing the country. This one percent has to be out of society.

I think it's deeply anti-democratic and anti-American. And if I were a liberal who might have been heartened by the Obama mobilization, who might think I still have a chance in 2012, because conservatives, of course, don't have all the answers, I would be deeply worried that Occupy Wall Street is just going to really damage liberalism.

How kind of Kristol to show such concern for liberalism.

It's an easy joke to make fun of Perry's inability to remember which three departments he'd close as President. It's clear that his campaign will likely not recover as he is polling somewhere south of "Just about anyone else" of likely Republican voters. After eight years of an intellectually incurious Texan governor driving the country and the world economy over the brink, even Republicans are wary of giving his dimmer clone an opportunity to do it again.

But what I think is more frightening is that everyone in the media is so focused on those 53 seconds of stammering that they don't ever get to what the consequences of losing those departments would mean to the country. Considering that he's not the only Republican on that panel making that noise, shall we look at the consequences of shutting down the Commerce, Energy and Education departments?

The Department of Commerce contains the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which runs our system of intellectual property. Without it, America would have no way to ensure that inventors could fully profit from their inventions, giving them little incentive to spend the time and money needed for breakthroughs. The pace of American innovation would likely take a huge hit.

Commerce also includes the Census Bureau. The accurate count of Americans that the department provides each decade lets leaders and policymakers know how to allocate resources--housing, roads, utilities--around the country. And Commerce also encompasses the National Weather Service (NWS), which issues crucial warnings about severe weather like hurricanes and floods. When state and local officials make decisions about how and when to evacuate, they're generally going off NWS information.

The Department of Energy, created during the Carter administration, protects U.S. nuclear weapons from accidents or terrorist attacks that could release dangerous radioactive material, killing thousands. Without the oversight that the Energy Department presently provides, it would be difficult to maintain a nuclear weapons program at all. The Energy Department also plays a key role in funding and promoting the civilian use of nuclear power.

As for the Department of Education--likewise created under President Carter--its role is more limited, because the U.S. education system is highly decentralized. Indeed, Perry is hardly the first conservative to pledge to abolish it. The Education Department does have a role in shaping education policy, however, by handing out funds to states that adopt its preferred reforms, and it also enforces privacy and civil rights laws in schools.

As they say, beware the unintended consequences. Can you imagine Rick Perry's America, where there is no innovation, because intellectual property is not protected any more than our nuclear weapons program? Where entire swaths of the country could be wiped out by a category 5 hurricane because our emergency services doesn't have advance notice? Where radioactive disposal is unregulated?

Catastrophe is not too strong a word for Perry's vision for our country.

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Conservative columnist George Will believes that Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain's sexual harassment scandal is a "test" for Republicans.

"A rule is when there are four women, there may be 24," Will told ABC's Christiane Amanpour Sunday. "There's a pattern here. He's says there's no pattern because all four are not telling the truth. Well, we shall see."

"For Republicans, it is a teachable moment because Republicans have said over and over again, character matters in leadership. We have this powerful government. The more power the government has, the more character matters in the chief executive. And this is a test for them."

Democratic strategist Donna Brazile explained that Cain had received a "martyr status" in some Republican circles.

"That may be the wrong message to send to someone who is a novice at presidential politics," she said. "The truth is that he was defined, he was defensive -- four women, two have come out and they went right ahead and started attacking those two women. Two are still anonymous. He attacked former Speaker Pelosi. He made fun of Anita Hill. This is not a good sign of a candidate who would like to remain a frontrunner in the Republican race."

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Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann says that the U.S. should be more like China and do away with Great Society programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

At a debate with seven other Republican candidates in South Carolina Saturday night, National Journal's Major Garrett asked Bachmann what programs she would eliminate as president.

"The 'Great Society' has not worked and it's put us into the modern welfare state," she explained, referring to a set of domestic programs put in place by President Lyndon B. Johnson. They included the Civil Rights Act, the War on Poverty, federal aid to public education, Medicare, Medicaid, the National Endowment for the Arts, public broadcasting, the Department of Transportation, various consumer protection agencies and environmental protections.

Bachmann added: "If you look at China, they don't have food stamps. If you look at China, they're in a very different situation. They save for their own retirement security... They don't have the modern welfare state and China's growing. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they'd be gone."

With this statement, the candidate seemed to contradict her own website.

"As President, she will ensure that any reform to Social Security or Medicare will only affect those 55 and younger, and she will work to find a way to ease the next generation into a program that is solvent, fiscally responsible, and empowering to the individual," the website says. "Michele has also pledged to protect Medicare by repealing Obamacare."

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If there's one thing you can count on from a Republican primary debate when the subject is foreign policy, it's that there will be lots of drum beating for the United States to go to war with Iran. This Saturday night's debate on CBS was no exception with Newt Gingrich going so far as to say we should be assassinating their scientists if that's what it would take to prevent their nuclear program from moving forward.

Gingrich wasn't the first Republican to call for assassinating scientists, since we heard the same sort of rhetoric from his fellow GOP primary challenger, Rick Santorum last month as Dave wrote about here -- Santorum: Dead Foreign Scientists a 'Wonderful Thing'.

GARRETT: Mr. Speaker, is this the right way to look at this question, war or not war? Or do you see other options diplomatically, or other non-war means that the United States has at its possession to deal with Iran that it has not employed?

GINGRICH: Well, let me start and say that both the answers you just got are superior to the current administration. You know, there are a number of ways to be smart about Iran and there are also a few ways to be dumb, and the administration has skipped all the ways to be smart.

GARRETT: Could you tell us the smart ways?

GINGRICH: Sure. First of all, maximum covert operations to block and disrupt the Iranian program, including taking out their scientists, including breaking up their systems, all of it covertly, all of it deniable. Second, maximum coordination with the Israelis in a way which allows them to maximize their impact in Iran. Third, absolute strategic program comparable to what President Reagan, Pope John Paul II and a Margaret Thatcher did to the Soviet Union of every possible aspect short of war of breaking the regime and bringing it down.

And I agree entirely with Gov. Romney, if in the end despite all of those things, if the dictatorship persists, you have to take whatever steps are necessary to break its capacity to have a nuclear weapon.

Compare and contrast Newt's statements to a segment that aired that same morning on Chris Hayes' show on MSNBC, where former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman talked about the fact that the recent report coming from the U.N. which stated that Iran is moving forward with its nuclear program smells of the same sort of false statements and highly questionable intelligence that we were being fed in the run up to the invasion of Iraq.

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The audience at Saturday night's Republican presidential debate erupted into applause at the mention of waterboarding, an interrogation technique that is often described as torture.

The National Journal's Major Garrett asked Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain to respond to a Vietnam veteran who said he believed torture was wrong in all cases.

Cain agreed that torture was wrong, but said he would defer to the military as to what techniques constituted torture.

"Mr. Cain, of course you are familiar with the long-running debate we've had about whether waterboarding constitutes torture or is an enhanced interrogation technique," Garrett noted. "In the last campaign, Republican nominee John McCain and Barack Obama agreed that it was torture and should not be allowed legally."

"I don't see it as torture. I see it as an enhanced interrogation technique," Cain replied as the audience expressed approval.

Garrett then turned to Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann for her response.

"If I were president, I would be willing to use waterboarding," she explained as the crowd cheered wildly. "It was very effective. It gained information for our country."

But two of the candidates actually agreed with the veteran who said waterboarding should not be used under any circumstance. Both Rep. Ron Paul and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman said waterboarding amounted to torture.

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Let's begin the debunking of this shameless exercise in lying to the American public with this: the so-called 'cuts' to Medicare in the Affordable Care Act were really an end to the Bush-era effort to privatize it. Subsidies were eliminated and/or phased out over time, forcing insurers to compete with traditional Medicare. This means they don't get guaranteed profits, courtesy of the American taxpayer and so they have turned to their bought-and-paid-for senators to distort the truth and erode growing support for "Obamacare". In fact, they're so intent on perpetuating these mythical cuts that they have written a competing Medicare handbook to the official government version.

From the transcript:

VAN SUSTEREN: The government has Medicare new 2012 book out. And you guys have a competing Medicare 2012. This is your book. Is this a parody?

SEN. TOM COBURN, R-OKLA.: You might consider it. It's much more truthful than the other one.

VAN SUSTEREN: In what way?

COBURN: In terms of describing what the Obamacare legislation has done to Medicare patients.

BARRASSO: How they took $500 billion away from our seniors on Medicare not to save and strengthen Medicare but to start a whole new government program for other people, how they will have unelected bureaucrats decisions about who gets what care and how much the government pays for it. You can go item by item why Medicare is more at risk now in terms of going bankrupt than it was before Obamacare passed.

What follows is an effort to spark an inter generational war. In addition to being dishonest, it's nothing more than yet another cynical attempt to pit youngers against elders for votes and support, something Republicans can't find much of these days.

VAN SUSTEREN: So if I am clear, we were on an unsustainable path before President Obama's national health care. Then he shepherded through the national health care and we are still in the unsustainable path. But you say $530 billion was taken out of Medicare. Where -- what was it taken from? And where did it go?

COBURN: It's going to go for a innovation council, $10 billion. It will go to subsidize the state exchanges, mandated care that all of us will have to buy if we don't -- can't demonstrate that we have it. So there is a subsidy there.

So we are taking money that people have paid into Medicare, taking it out of Medicare and subsidizing the care for people who have not paid into Medicare.

COBURN: That's part of it. But the vast majority is going into other programs for other people for health care that Medicare dollars weren't paying for to begin with.

Got that? All the Medicare withholdings from your paychecks are counted as 'not paying' by Senator Coburn. Leave it to Greta to just let him go on and on over it too with no challenge.

The next statement is so outrageous he ought to be tried for it:

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Sunday brings me to the end of my week here.....sure was fun. Until we meet again........

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Round up by Swimgirl (twitter @miamiswimmer). Send tips to mbru AT crooksandliars DOT com