The lie that emergency contraception is the same as the “abortion pill” RU-486 has just completed the jump from the minds of Republicans like Michele Bachmann, to Fox News opinion programming, to the broader mainstream media. On Sunday morning’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos sat mute as columnist George Will repeated the lie that the Obama administration’s Preventive Services Mandate would force religious employers to “provide…abortion-inducing drugs.”

George Stephanopoulos is returning to ABC’s This Week this weekend, right in the middle of election madness. RELATED: George Stephanopoulos To Return As Host Of This Week Stephanopoulos, who is coming back to host the Sunday morning show as former host Christiane Amanpour balances the role of global affairs anchor with a new show on [...]

Ron Paul rebuffed ABC News’s Jake Tapper on Sunday’s This Week, when he had brought up a quote by former senior campaign aide Eric Dondero, saying the Republican presidential candidate had engaged in 9/11 conspiracy theories. “About the conspiracy of Bush — of Bush knowing about this?” Paul responded incredulously. “No, no, come on! Come on! Let’s be reasonable! That’s just off-the-wall!”

On Sunday, This Week host Christiane Amanpour bid her audience farewell during her final broadcast as anchor, and wished George Stephanopoulos the best of luck when he takes over for her in the coming year. “It’s been an enormous privilege to anchor this prestigious program,” Amanpour said.

On Tuesday, ABC announced Christiane Amanpour would no longer be hosting This Week — she would stay on as a global affairs anchor, while returning to CNN to host a show on CNN International. While Amanpour seemed overjoyed (“This role is groundbreaking, bold and very different,” Amanpour said. “I am thrilled and honored”), ABC now had a role to fill. So they turned to the past, and announced Amanpour’s replacement: George Stephanopoulos.

Longtime host George Stephanopoulos is set to return to ABC’s This Week early next year with the news that current host Christiane Amanpour is set to return to CNN for a weekday show, and remaining with ABC for specials.

With several days of reporting and, today, a final official story on the departure of host Christiane Amanpour from ABC’s This Week (but not from the network entirely), the host herself has made the news official, and elaborated on her roles both for ABC and her weekly CNN International program– as well as CNN President Jim Walton responding to the news of her return.

With Newt Gingrich nabbing a major endorsement in New Hampshire this morning, the panel on This Week assessed his strengths and chances of making it through to the nomination with a record like his. While agreeing that he was, among other things, “undisciplined,” they noted his comments on immigration could be a positive in the general, with Michael Gerson labeling yet another “scandal of sanity” in the GOP.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell has no faith in the Tea Party’s ability to produce a president. This he noted today in a discussion with Christiane Amanpour on This Week, where he lamented the “very tense” tone currently in Washington and attributed some of that to the obstinacy of the Tea Party.

George Will really doesn’t like Newt Gingrich. On the This Week round table this morning, Will began his comments on Gingrich, now a frontrunner, by stating that his candidate “embodies everything disagreeable about modern Washington,” going on to laugh at the idea that Gingrich was hired by Freddie Mac as a “historian,” and, as a final blow, speaking more glowingly of even Rep. Ron Paul than of Gingrich.

One of the subplots to last week’s Herman Cain Bad-Press-A-Palooza (bad press that seems to have helped him) was his supposed gaffe in an interview with PBS’ Judy Woodruff on Monday night’s Newshour. The clip has widely been reported as demonstrating that Cain did not know that China has had nuclear weapons since 1964, and that he thinks they still don’t. For a week now, I’ve been waiting for someone to point out that Cain indicated no such thing.

In a stinging comparison that is sure to leave a mark, on Sunday’s This Week With Christiane Amanpour, George Will said the rise of Herman Cain had a lot to do with Republicans coming to the realization that Mitt Romney is their Michael Dukakis. “A technocratic Massachusetts governor running on competence, not ideology,” Will observed.

What a difference a week makes. Following his rocket ride to the top of the GOP presidential field, and a Bloomberg/Washington Post debate performance that made a star of his “9-9-9 plan,” former pizza mogul Herman Cain has rapidly become a media punchline. That arc culminated Sunday morning when This Week host Christiane Amanpour opened her interview with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by asking “Are you in Herman Cain’s famously designated ‘Beki-beki-beki-bekistan?’”

On This Week today, Christiane Amanpour pointed to David Axelrod‘s comments last week specifically targeting Romney’s flip-flops, and Will took this to mean the Obama administration is convinced Romney will be their opponent in the general election. However, Will did take note of the latest candidate enjoying the media spotlight, Herman Cain, and dismissed the idea that Cain is a viable candidate for the presidency.

In introducing her “powerhouse roundtable of economic experts” Sunday morning, This Week host Christiane Amanpour omitted a notable portion of Douglas Holtz-Eakin‘s résumé. Holtz-Eakin’s intro included “former director of the Congressional Budget Office,” but it might have been helpful to mention that Holtz-Eakin was chief economic adviser to Sen. John McCain‘s presidential campaign.

When we first learned that Hurricane Irene was headed for the United States, it was only a matter of time before comparisons and contrasts would be drawn between the response of federal and local governments during this storm to Hurricane Katrina, which Jake Tapper today described as “the hurricane that exposed mismanagement and weakness at the highest levels.”

On Sunday morning, Former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman continued his quest to become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee on Opposite Day, swinging hard at frontrunner Rick Perry (R-TX) and the rest of the GOP field. In an interview with This Week fill-in Jake Tapper, Huntsman derided his fellow candidates’ lack of leadership, opposition to science, and even cracked wise about Perry’s history of secession talk.

During his run as interim host of ABC’s This Week with…, Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper lobbied valiantly (but unsuccessfully) to get former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to appear on the program. While covering the shenanigans in Iowa this week, Tapper seized on the opportunity to finally get Palin to answer some “substantive questions,” but before Palin would face Tapper’s queries, she had priority business to take care of: “I’m gonna go meet a heifer first.”

Tapper’s amused, bemused reaction was priceless. “A heifer first?”

In an exclusive interview to Jake Tapper on ABC’s “This Week,” former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty announced that he was dropping out of the presidential race because he didn’t feel the momentum was there for him to move forward.

ABC’s This Week continued it’s now consistent pattern of featuring the most entertaining roundtable debate of all the Sunday morning shows. This morning Steve Rattner, a regular contributor to MSNBC’s Morning Joe and former advisor in President Obama’s Treasury Department was rightfully taken to task by George Will for suggesting Tea Party members of Congress were “economic terrorists” because of their “unreasonable” opposition to any tax increases. At first Rattner attempted to wiggle free from his own words, but then Will demonstrated the ridiculousness of the entire analogy.

As S&P downgrades United States debt for the first time ever, many Republicans and Democrats are pointing blame at each other for having caused the unprecedented occurrence. Yet conservative commentator George Will thinks that S&P has so little credibility that their assessment told us nothing new and that it’s rating perspective should have little economic effect.

Paul Krugman was very disappointed with President Obama and the Democrats for allowing the Republicans to frame the debt debate. Krugman insisted on the This Week roundtable, “from the perspective of a rational person, in other words, a progressive on this stuff, we shouldn’t be talking about spending cuts at all now.” Yet, according to Krugman, the “rational people” have now lost big time.

President of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist may have just revealed another way to win his support that might be less politically painful than having to sign his taxpayer protection pledge. All you have to do is look great in a bathing suit! During his appearance on ABC’s This Week, Norquist suggested Republicans will take back control of the Senate in 2012 because all of the open seats will either be in Red states or because Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown and his bathing suit will be running for re-election.

The roundtable discussion portion of the Sunday morning news shows is often the most entertaining and illuminating segment of the entire program. Given that the top-of-the show politician guests try their hardest (and often succeed) to stick to their talking points and to avoid going off script, it’s often left to the roundtable participants to provide an element of unpredictability to the Sunday morning festivities. Of the three shows with weekly roundtable segments, in my opinion, week in and week out there is a clear hierarchy between the shows based on the variety of topics discussed, the diversity of guests and the overall enjoyment of hearing the conversation.

Many conservatives and Tea Party activists across the country are eagerly anticipating the entry of Texas Governor Rick Perry into the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Yet Fox Business correspondent Charlie Gasparino suggests that many New Yorkers on Wall Street, presumably of both political parties, are not at all excited about the possibility of a Perry presidency.