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Is it unreasonable to expect the press, especially respected members of the press like CBS News' Bob Schieffer, to hold guests to account when they make ridiculous, incendiary, defamatory statements about the President of the United States? Evidently it's only unreasonable when Democrats do it about Republicans, but it seems to be perfectly all right for RNC Chair Reince Priebus to liken the President to the captain of the cruise ship that sank in Italy last week. Here's what he said:

SCHIEFFER: But Donald Trump -- he's, kind of, worried about it. You heard what he just said. He said, you know, he thinks they're cannibalizing each other. Do you think that's going to all come out OK?

PRIEBUS: Now, the history shows, Bob, that -- that tough primaries and a little bit of drama are a good thing for the challenging party. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama -- you know, they killed each other through June, and guess what? He won pretty easily. I think the evidence is there.

I think it's good for America. And in the end, in a few months, this is all going to be ancient history and we're going to talk about our own little Captain Schettino, which is President Obama, who is abandoning the ship here in the United States and is more interested in campaigning than doing his job as president.

SCHIEFFER: What -- what did you just say? What did you call President Obama?

PRIEBUS: I called him Captain Schettino, you know, the captain that fled the ship in Italy. That's our own president, who is fleeing the American people and not doing his job and running around the country and campaigning.

(LAUGHTER)

You made me think of it with all the ships behind you, Bob.

Really? See, if I were to consider a metaphor like captains of ships and the like, I'd think of Captain Chesley Sullenberger (Sully), who managed to save the crew and passengers of his plane by landing it in the Hudson River, saving all 155 people aboard the aircraft, instead of a cavalier, careless idiot like Captain Schettino, who had no business steering a ship so close to shallow water, failed to turn it in time, ran it into a rock and then leapt off the ship while passengers died in their life vests waiting to be evacuated.

Think about those metaphors. Who steered too close to the shore? George W. Bush and his merry band of regulators who sat around watching porn instead of paying attention to banks. Who failed to turn soon enough? Congress, perhaps, where Republicans routinely block each and every initiative to rescue this country from financial ruin? Who jumped into the life boats, leaving others to clean up and try and rescue as many as they could?

And yet, Bob Scheiffer's answer to Priebus?

SCHIEFFER: I -- I see what you're saying.

This is why we can't have nice things.

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This Week with George Stephanopoulos notes the passings of three service members killed in Afghanistan:

US Marines Cpl Christopher G Singer, 23, Temecula, CA
US Marines Capt Joshua C Pairsh, 29, Equality, IL
US Army 1LT David A Johnson, 24, Horicon, WI

According to iCasualties, the total number of allied service members killed in Afghanistan is now 2,880.

In addition, the following notable names passed away this week: actor Robert Hegyes, actor Ian Abercrombie, actor James Farentino and federal judge Wesley E. Brown.

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Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on Sunday said that he had an uphill battle to win the GOP nomination because "Massachusetts liberal" Mitt Romney was "carpet bombing" him with negative ads.

Fox News host Chris Wallace asked Gingrich why polls showed him losing over 15 points in Florida in less than a week.

"Governor Romney has the ability to raise an amazing amount of money out of Wall Street, from Goldman Sachs to all the major banks," Gingrich explained. "And he has a basic policy of carpet bombing his opponent. He doesn't build up Mitt Romney, he just tries to tear down whoever he's running against. And it has an affect."

"I think it is going to be close," the former House Speaker said of his chances in the Florida primary. "We have the two polls this morning that show that Santorum and I collectively are bigger than Romney. Romney beats me as long as we split the conservative vote. We have a tremendous effort underway to reach to conservatives to get them to see that the only effective way to stop a Massachusetts liberal from becoming our nominee is to vote for Newt Gingrich."

The NBC News/Marist poll released Sunday showed Romney with 42 percent support in Florida, a 15-point lead over Gingrich's 27 percent. Santorum was in third place with 16 percent support.

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Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul said on Sunday that airport security should be turned over to private corporations because the Transportation and Security Administration (TSA) effectively "voids" the Fourth Amendment.

Paul's son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), claimed last week that he had been "detained" by the TSA for refusing an intrusive pat down at an airport in Nashville, Tennessee.

"You have been raising money on your website on the notion of ending the TSA," CNN host Candy Crowley told the presidential candidate Sunday. "If you got rid of the TSA, what would you put in its place?"

"Well, it shouldn't be government," Paul replied. "You know, the people who protect very dangerous chemical plants, they're private sources. They have their police cares, they have their fences, they have their security, and they do a very good job. The assumption that the government has to do this is the wrong assumption."

"I voted against the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA, and it's a bureaucratic monster," he added. "It totally voids the concept of the Fourth Amendment -- searches and prodding a poking, you know, with no permission. And they trap us into into it, and there's no way you can travel if you don't do it."

In 1973, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the Fourth Amendment did not apply to airport security, "noting that airport screenings are considered to be administrative searches because they are conducted as part of a general regulatory scheme, where the essential administrative purpose is to prevent the carrying of weapons or explosives aboard aircraft."

Paul did not say how privatizing airport screenings would circumvent the Ninth Circuit's ruling.

Now, I'm going to assume that you didn't come in during the third act of Newt's career, and therefore you can appreciate just how funny it is when, on This Week, he's whining to Jake Tapper about how hard it is to pin someone down who will just lie about anything!

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Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) suggested on Sunday that anything corporations do is moral as long as they follow the law.

Fox News host Chris Wallace asked the House Budget Committee chairman if Republican presidential candidates should be criticizing each other over the way they made their money and handled their personal finances.

"I don't think so," Ryan replied. "We need to defend the morality of the free enterprise system and upward mobility. We need to defend the morality of a system in American that says you are free to take risks, to make money, to create jobs and to do it however you want to so long as it's legal. That's something we should be proud of."

"It does bother me when some candidates -- and there's more than one -- go after each other based on their success in the free enterprise system," he added. "That's not who we are. That's what Barack Obama is doing to us."

Earlier this month, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich charged that Bain Capital, the firm founded by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, was "exploitative" for the way it profited from buying and selling companies, often killing thousands of jobs in the process. Former Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry referred to that business model as "vulture capitalism."

Seriously, these people are nuts:

[Grover] Norquist is now mapping out how he can ensure further anti-tax victories by securing Republican majorities. In an interview with the National Journal, he mused that a GOP mandate would obviously enact an extension of the Bush tax cuts, work to maintain a repatriation holiday for corporate profits, and even pass House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) plan that jeopardizes Medicare. But when asked what Republicans should do if faced with a Democratic majority that won’t keep the tax cuts, Norquist had a simple answer: “impeach” Obama.

NJ: What if the Democrats still have control? What’s your scenario then?

NORQUIST: Obama can sit there and let all the tax [cuts] lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach. The last year, he’s gone into this huddle where he does everything by executive order. He’s made no effort to work with Congress.

The Republican Party is being ruled by clowns and idiots, to put it mildly. But even with the Joe Walshes and Dana Rohrabachers, there's no way that the Republicans will go down this route. Impeaching over letting tax holiday they voted for expire? Getouttahere, Grover. You may think you rule Washington, but that's just delusional.

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This has to be one of the more pitiful displays that I've witnessed in a while. Andrew Sullivan was on Chris Matthews' weekend show doing his best to give cover to the Republican establishment. While Sullivan has been famously sneering at those who criticize Obama, he has no problem with the race to the bottom on wages and competing with slave labor overseas. There's no other reason for him to defend both Mitt Romney and Steve Jobs and how both men managed to make themselves some of the wealthiest men in America.

There are absolutely lessons to be learned about how to fix the income disparity in the United States and what solutions we should be moving towards. But voices like Sullivan's--who glorify the state of being wealthy for an elite few to the disadvantage of most--are the last ones to whom we should be listening to if this interview is any indication. Sullivan's basic message here is that we're going to be competing with slave wages overseas and if that upsets you, well, there's nothing that can be done about it, as though our Congress and President Obama don't have any control over our trade laws, or how imports are taxed and whether we're on a level playing field with our competitors overseas.

Sadly, Sullivan's embrace of globalization and our inability to do anything about it wasn't necessarily the worst part of this interview here. He also lambasted President Obama for not doing more to promote the failed Simpson-Bowles Committee, pretending that anything that came out of that debacle ever passed Congress to sit unsigned on Obama's desk.

Here's more on the interview with host Chris Matthews leading it off this way.

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From this Saturday's Up With Chris Hayes -- Story of the Week: Democracy for Billionaires:

Chris's Story of the Week asks who is Sheldon Adelson and what does it mean for democracy when a billionaire investor and casino owner like him can give a Newt Gingrich-associated super PAC $10 million?

Chris highlighted The New Yorker's profile of Adelson, "The Brass Ring" which you can read in its entirety here -- The World of Business, The Brass Ring.

You can watch the rest of the show from this Saturday here and here.

Twitter announced Thursday that it can now censor tweets only in some countries, whereas before a message would disappear throughout the world if the operators erased it. The flexibility might be welcomed by users in nations with more of a commitment to free speech, but it could also be a sign that Twitter might be giving in to more repressive states, especially as the company expands globally.

Update: There's already a petition circulating asking Twitter to denounce censorship. You can view it online here.