Chuck Todd

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chuck-todd

In the summer of 2014, Chuck Todd, who is paid to say words about politics on television, declared that he had looked at poll results and that the American people had decided that the Obama Administration was “over.” Nice try, Barack, no point going on, it’s done. Chuck Todd had decided.

The problem with focusing only on the horse race is that you end up stepping into a lot of horseshit. The President accomplished a few things since Todd’s declaration. You don’t have to agree with any of them to understand the efficacy of the office despite what the chattering classes of Washington might say.

  • Climate pact with China.
  • Affordable Care Act upheld by the Supreme Court.
  • Gay marriage legalized.
  • Passage of fast-track trade authority TPP.
  • Diplomatic relations with Cuba restored.
  • International agreement to curtail Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
  • Eulogy delivered for the Charleston church shooting victims.
  • Commutation of more sentences for non-violent criminals as part of a broader attempt to reconfigure the country’s prison state.
  • Continued economic recovery with job creation each quarter.

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Not having a television makes it easier to live outside the idiot broadcast and cable news culture populated by loudmouths like Sean Hannity, who looks like the equipment manager of a lacrosse team that’s been suspended for hazing, and Chuck Fucking Todd, who announced that the President’s administration was “over” when there were still three full years to go. The important work continues apace despite what that sputtering Van Dyke says. The opening of “Obama’s Moonshot Probes the Space Inside Our Skulls,” Anjana Ahuja’s Financial Times piece:

“Every president needs a blockbuster science project to crown his time in the White House. While John Kennedy reached for the stars, Barack Obama decided to reach for the synapses. A year on from his pledge to unravel the secrets of the human brain, researchers are beginning to spell out how they will tackle this challenge.

The breathtaking implications of the research are also becoming clear; within a generation science may acquire the power to predict a person’s future capacities and possibly determine their life chances. The central idea of Mr Obama’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative is to understand how the human brain choreographs all the astonishing feats it pulls off. It is the seat of learning and the organ of memory. It generates our character and identity, and influences our behaviour. It is our brains, more than anything else, that make us who we are today – and shape who we will become.

But that neural versatility acts as a veil. How does the squidgy, three-pound lump between your ears – filled with nerve cells (neurons) firing tiny impulses of electricity across junctions called synapses – accomplish such a wide array of functions? Research grants announced this month shed light on how Mr Obama’s vaunted cerebral exploration will proceed. One avenue will be to catalogue the differences between healthy neurons and diseased ones. This will spur research into neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, which cast a shadow over ageing societies.”

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Chuck Todd, who grows irate, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit in advance of taking over Meet the Press. One exchange about the perception that President Obama has become emotionally disengaged:

Question:

Do you think the President has emotionally checked out of the White House already? Any chance you will ask him about his seemingly lackluster attitude lately and press him on how his personal struggles may negatively shape our Country’s future during such challenging times?

Chuck Todd:

I’ve heard this from a lot of Obama observers, not just from folks who don’t know him, but from folks who think they DO know him. That said, sometimes when the news is as horrid as it is right now, with his polls in the tank… folks end up assuming that all of this is impacting him more than maybe it is. Perhaps if we were in his shoes, we’d feel depressed or lackluster so we assume he must too… I always am leery of trying too hard to put a politician on the couch. But you aren’t alone in thinking this.”

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Our new technologies have enabled a neverending news cycle–more like a terminal sprint than a cycle, actually–that demands immediate response, that makes caution and patience seem like cowardice or obfuscation. The recent brouhaha about the IRS targeting Tea Party political groups was a scandal right before it was a non-story. That’s because no one waited for the facts. And conservative outlets and talking heads weren’t the only culprits–everyone caught the virus. The opening of Alex Seitz-Wald’s Salon piece on the topic:

The first few days of the IRS scandal that would consume Washington for weeks went like this: Conservatives were indignant, the media was outraged, the president had to respond, his allies turned on him … and only then, the Treasury Department’s inspector general released the actual report that had sparked the whole controversy — in that order. It’s a fitting microcosm of the entire saga, which has gone from legacy-tarnishing catastrophe to historical footnote in the intervening six weeks, and a textbook example of how the scandal narrative can dominate Washington and cable news even when there is no actual scandal.

While the initial reports about the IRS targeting looked pretty bad, suggesting that agents singled out tax-exempt applications for Tea Party and conservative groups for extra scrutiny, the media badly bungled the controversy when supposedly sober journalists like Bob Woodward and Chuck Todd jumped to conclusions and assumed the worst from day one. Instead of doing more reporting to discover the true nature and context of the IRS targeting, or at least waiting for their colleagues to do some, the supposedly liberal mainstream press let their eagerness to show they could be just as tough on a Democratic White House as a Republican one get ahead of the facts. We expect politicians to stretch reality to fit a narrative, but the press should be better.

And they would have gotten away with it, too, had their narrative had the benefit of being true. But now, almost two months later, we know that in fact the IRS targeted lots of different kinds of groups, not just conservative ones; that the only organizations whose tax-exempt statuses were actually denied were progressive ones; that many of the targeted conservative groups legitimately crossed the line; that the IG’s report was limited to only Tea Party groups at congressional Republicans’request; and that the White House was in no way involved in the targeting and didn’t even know about it until shortly before the public did.”

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