'This Week' Transcript: Extreme Weather, Kevin Spacey

Kevin Spacey is interviewed on 'This Week'

ByABC News
February 14, 2014, 2:07 PM
ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl, Host, Fusion's "AM Tonight" Alicia Menendez, The Nation Editor and Publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel, and The Wall Street Journal Columnist Peggy Noonan on 'This Week'
ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl, Host, Fusion's "AM Tonight" Alicia Menendez, The Nation Editor and Publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel, and The Wall Street Journal Columnist Peggy Noonan on 'This Week'
ABC News

February 16, 2014— -- Below is the rush transcript for "This Week" on February 16, 2014 and it may contain errors.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Good morning. Welcome to This Week.

Weather wallop...

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Cars around me were just spinning.

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STEPHANOPOULOS: Monster storms, devastating drought, why so much extreme weather. How can we cope with the consequences and the costs?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. JOHN BOEHNER, (R) OHIO: This is a lost opportunity for America.

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STEPHANOPOULOS: The speaker clears the decks, but is his latest surrender setting up GOP games come November.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Openly gay man...

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STEPHANOPOULOS: Football stunner: a college star comes out. Will the NFL accept Michael Sam. Our powerhouse roundtable and experts take all of it on.

Plus...

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I have no patience for useless things.

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STEPHANOPOULOS: House of Cards is back. And we've got Kevin Spacey live all right here this Sunday morning.

ANNOUNCER: From ABC News, This Week with George Stephanopoulos starts now.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hello again. A lot to get to this Sunday morning when most of us are begging for spring.

So much of the country battered by this recordbreaking winter. And just this weekend yet another blizzard in the northeast. Out west, an epic drought.

Our panel of experts is here to examine what's behind this weird weather. What, if anything, can be done about it. And ABC meteorologist Ginger Zee starts us off.

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GINGER ZEE, ABC NEWS METEOROLOGIST: Most of the nation is in a state of meteological exhaustion. The coldest winter in Minnesota in 33 years, the Great Lakes almost 90 percent frozen. Normally it would be just over 30.

And New York City, buried. Now in their top 10 snowiest seasons.

Snowfall totals from North Carolina up to Indianapolis between two and three times their normal.

75,000 flights canceled since December 1 -- that's an all-time record.

And Pennsylvania, they've been in the heart of the misery, a giant pileup on Friday.

ABC's Lindsey Janice (ph) was right there.

(on camera): The sun was shining, the roads mostly clear, but there was one problem: temperatures plummeted overnight and turned this Pennsylvania Turnpike into a sheet of ice.

(voice-over): Causing this five mile long chain reaction pileup, more than 100 cars, dozens injured.

Almost all of this weather can be related to a single pattern locked in place.

(on camera): All winter, the pattern has been stuck. Every time we go into the weather center here, we see the same thing, the jet stream cutting the nation in half. On the east, the coldest air in decades allowed to come as far south as the Deep South, the Gulf really. And then the jet stream just right in the right place that moisture rides along it, meaning snow storm after snow storm from the Great Lakes through the northeast.

But that's also creating an extreme in the west, that big ridge over here gives record drought and heat. California last year, the driest year on record.

(voice-over): President Obama traveled west Friday to see the drought up close.

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: What happens here matters to every working American.

ZEE: Wayne Friedman from ABC 7 News in San Francisco visited a hay farm that's seen barely a sprout this year.