Chuck’s Commentary - The Full Spectrum of Trump: Chaos Abroad, Division at Home + We Need To Amend The Pardon Power - The Chuck ToddCast

Episode Transcript
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Welcome to another episode of the Check podcast. We have

(01:48):
made it to December. First, we are getting close. We
are now the first day of the last month of
twenty twenty five. I have to say this is this
has been a fascinating year for me personally for a
variety of reasons. Major transitions, both for myself professionally, my family,

(02:10):
empty nesting. Right, you put all that together, and let's
just say twenty twenty five has been a very It's
had its share of monumental moments in as far as
my household is concerned and my family is concerned. So here,
let's just say I feel like this year flew by.
I know for some of you it may be trudging along,
it may have taken forever. Politically, we can't say this

(02:33):
hasn't been an inactive year. This has been. It's a
phrase I used quite a bit during the Obama era
that now feels antiquated, because I think in the Trump
era it makes this following phrase more relevant and in
some ways a lot less relevant than Trump. I used
to say every day is a week, and every week
is a day in the Obama era. I think that's

(02:57):
true in the Trump era. At times, you know, times thousand,
if that's possible, right, Months feel like they go by
in weeks. The space time continuum is totally blurred. You
can't remember what's real what isn't. And in many ways
we've got a taste of sort of the entire Trump
experience of the Trump era, one that I do think

(03:18):
is exhausting. The vast but the vast majority of people
pole certainly indicate that, you know, those that are not
ideologically motivated to hate him or love him, right, they're
sort of dominating a lot of this conversation. But I
do think the vast you know, those of us in
the seventy percent here that accept the premise that you know,

(03:38):
you're not always going to get a president alike or
one that wants to unify the country. This has still
been an unusual period in American history. And when I
would say that we've got the full spectrum of Trump,
this week, right, we had a tragedy that happened in
the nation's capital, a Trump response that was not surprising
but still demoralizing in and depressing that an American president is

(04:01):
instinctively so divisive no matter what happens in any given moment.
We've got the president, We've got, we've got sort of
the media, a media firestorm getting created by something the
president says, and very little media firestorm being created by
something the president actually does pardons. And then finally, I

(04:23):
think we're I think Congress finally awoke from its slumber
in all things Venezuela, now that there are reports that
essentially the Secretary of Defense perhaps committed a war crime
when he said no survivors. I mean, it is against
the Geneva Conventions to continue with an order that says
there should be no survivors. And if survivors are sort

(04:45):
of show themselves there to be taken out. So the
fact that Congress is now going to investigate this probably
now starts the clock on Pete hag Seth, because one
thing about the Trump era in general is there's always
got to be a fall person and he will never
accept responsibility. He will, you know, sort of defend everything

(05:06):
that's going on until there's a moment where essentially he
needs to offer up a sacrifice to make sure they
don't come after him. Well, Pete haig Seth, you are
going to be that sacrifice. You probably believe you are
carrying out the exact orders the President of the United
States wants. But I promise you he will not have
your back. He does not care about you, He does

(05:27):
not care about your future, He does not care about
what happens there. And in fact, I do think pick
haik Seth is going to need a lawyer because and
a lot of people who carried out these orders. Look
at some point, the head of southcom who decided to
resign essentially in and around this period where these controversial
orders were given, is a flashing red light that there

(05:51):
are people in the chain of command who thought they
were getting illegal orders and just didn't weren't weren't realized
it is against the law to follow an illegal order,
as these lawmakers said, you know, they We got to
remember why these lawmakers first put this you know, first
put this video together. Yes, are they Are they trolling
a little bit, of course? Are they trying to make

(06:12):
a political point, Yes, But at the same time, it
was a real concern that the Secretary of Defense was
giving illegal orders and what was happening in Venezuela without
any sort of Remember, the administration has not gone to
Congress in order to get legal authority to do this.
They are using authority that previous Congresses gave to presidents

(06:35):
having to do with actual terrorism threats from overseas, the Taliban,
al Qaeda, things like that. This was not about a
manufactured terrorism threat in this sort of designation of narco terrorists,
which do not exist. The closest thing you could call
anybody to a narco terrorist or the essentially or the Taliban,

(06:59):
and that they were growing poppy in order to sell
heroin in order to fund terrorism. So if you're looking
for anybody that fits the definition, you could argue you'd
have to go to Afghanistan to get that to go
meet that definition. There is no place in and around
Venezuela that that meets that definition. And so it is

(07:22):
I think we now see and I have a little
bit more to say on that, but I want to
sort of start with what the tragedy that happened the
night before Thanksgiving, and that was the tragic shooting of
two members of the National Guard that the President ordered
to be deployed into Washington, d C. A deployment that

(07:42):
many people don't believe is necessary. Certainly where they've been
deployed hasn't been very effective. It has been clearly when
you see it, and as trust me, as people come
in to visit for the holidays, they ask us locals
about it, and they're like, how come they're you know,
I said, it's meant for you to notice. It's not
meant to be there for security. It's meant for people

(08:04):
to see see it. It is meant for show. It
is not necessarily meant to help. And when you look
at the what's tragic is the President's decision on the
day before Thanksgiving to be as divisive as possible. Right
he immediately and this goes back to you know my

(08:24):
earlier warning, why Pete Haig Seth is is, you know,
is about to be sacrificed by Donald Trump. Pete Haig
Seth doesn't know it yet, and maybe Trump himself doesn't
realize he's about to do this. But Trump never accepts
the premise that he has any fault at all, and
anything bad that happens, he's got to find somebody else,
got to find a scapeboat. So this happens, and he
immediately Look, when the shooting first happened, I think many

(08:49):
of us had I don't want to put thoughts in
anybody else's head. This could have been a variety. You know,
you don't know the scenario. There's a reason you want
to wait for all the facts. Right when this shooting
first hit with breaking news, I'm going to guess most
of you didn't have a former aff a former Afghan

(09:16):
employee of the CIA. I'm guessing none of you had
that on your bingo card, no matter how much you
follow the news. There perhaps was feared that this was
something was to say misunderstanding, was there was there a
sub suspect, was to say, a crime that was taking
place and they and they helped get involved sadly, it

(09:37):
turned out these National guardsmen were targeted by this gentleman.
And the question is why did he target him? Did
he target him because he's angry at the United States?
Did he target him because he's angry at the US
government who he believes hasn't fulfilled their obligation. Is he
just angry because he has a total mental decline from
all of the war that he participated in. And this

(09:59):
is frankly something that we've seen happen to many of
our own American servicemen and women. War basically damages them
almost permanently in their head. And there's certainly plenty of
reports about their shooter, Ramanala Lakenwal that he since being

(10:20):
placed in Washington state, friends and family. It said he'd
been behaving erradically, going on these cross country trips and disappearing,
So it's quite possible he lost it. And of course,
you know, my thesis on many a many a mass
shooter that we end up finding out about is that
they're all mentally unstable. Something triggered them, right, Maybe it

(10:41):
was bad parenting, Maybe it was bad diagnoses, people not
diagnosing what was wrong. Maybe it was something that happened
that traumatized them, perhaps war, perhaps something else. But the
point is is that it does seem as if, more
times than not, this suspect is triggered into doing this,

(11:05):
triggered for a variety of reasons, and in this case,
there certainly is a lot of hand ringing here, right,
But immediately President Trump went into blame game mode. Like
I said, I don't know what his response would have
been had this been just just sort of typical criminal
situation in DC where a criminal overreacted and shot somebody

(11:29):
and then it became something bigger. Who knows what the
deployments would have looked like in this city or many others.
But instead it turned out to be a different situation
and one that not a lot of people had had
on their Bengo card, but it was. You know, presidents
have a choice to make. They can try to unite
the country or they can actively try to divide the country.

(11:51):
We know this president his entire political currency is division.
It is how he got the Republican nomination, it is
how he sort of took over the Republican Park, and
it's how he governs. It is always divide, divide, divide,
and on this he divided he's trying to blame Biden
for bad vetting of Afghan refugees into this country, whatever
he can do to not take any blame here at all.

(12:14):
He's trying to sort of blame it all, you know,
sort of conflate it with all the immigration issues because
he doesn't want to take any responsibility that maybe his
folks didn't do vetting. Maybe putting the National Guard in
the nation's capital put a target on these young men
and women who didn't sign up for this type of duty.

(12:34):
But it's something that I think everybody needs to ask themselves.
Does the president's actions and how he treats the military,
turning them into political pawns put essentially put a political
target on their back? And I think that this is
a conversation that as adults we should be able to have.

(12:55):
And I think there's you know, I'm sorry his first
reaction was maybe deploying the military wearing fatigues around the
nation's capital is inviting people to target the military in
some way. I just think it's a question. It's a

(13:15):
serious question that needs to be asked and debated, and
we need to have serious answers, not just whimsical bullshit
that comes comes from somebody's social media feed. So there's
one issue there. The second is he had made a promise,
he had questioned whether these folks were vetted very well

(13:36):
or not well. What is his administration done on vetting?
It turns out they don't really vet at all, as
we know they're so they're so trying to have numbers
and just trying to kick everybody out of the country
and come up with all sorts of numbers where they
want to say, hey, look at everybody we're deporting that
there doesn't seem to be any effort to create a

(13:57):
vetting mechanism. We're not interested in in setting the example
for the world about political asylum on things like that.
And then of course there's the question of the blood
on our hands that every American lawmaker has on their
hands when it comes to Afghanistan. Okay, just remember Biden's

(14:17):
horrible withdrawal was due to having his hands tied by
Trump's terrible, a terrible deal that he caught with the
Talibon that essentially gave away every gain that was possible
that the United States attempted to make and Afghanistan. Trump
gave it all away, handing Biden the job of executing

(14:43):
a withdrawal that, yes, could Biden have superseded It could, No,
eadn't politically want. It would extend the time of the
US military occupation in Afghanistan. So I understand the political
motives he had to go ahead and abide by these deadlines.
Does not mean he should be let off the hook
for the terrible and horrendous mismanagement that the State Department,

(15:05):
the military, and the White House collectively made there. Now
there's a lot of finger pointing to this day about it,
but let's not forget the terrible decision that Donald Trump
made in negotiating with the Taliban and doing what he
did to put his successor in the position that he
was in. The point is is that the disaster that
is Afghanistan, that is Afghan refugees who were especially those

(15:27):
who were vital to the US operation in Afghanistan, like
this young man, Ramanala lakanawal Okay. He worked for the
United States military, worked for the government, worked for intelligence services.
In many ways, he's the very definition of somebody that
deserved essentially special status for getting into this country because
guess what, they were going to be targeted by the

(15:48):
Taliban because they were working against the Taliban. He had
no chance to survive in Afghanistan. In theory, he was
supposed to have a better chance here. So the point
is is that this is a tragic situation based on
a bad policy from three to four presidents. We can

(16:10):
basically every president's of the twenty first century is fucked up. Afghanistan,
screwed up the entire situation. And so the point is
there's collective blood on the hands of Republicans and Democrats alike.
There's collective blood on all of us as Americans, since
there are representatives. So the point is when a tragedy

(16:30):
like this happens, there should be a little bit of
shared experience with this, and it's a moment, especially when
we're all gathered together as it is. Wouldn't have been
hard to use this as a unifying moment, but again
it is not. The president has no ability to do this,
and instead he went off on some ridiculous rant something

(16:52):
about the auto pen and Joe Biden, and then he
claimed on social media that he has nullified every executive
order Joe Biden has done. You know, there is no
one executive order he could sign that would do that
if he wants to nullify every executive order that that
Biden signed, either by himself or via autopan, He's got
to sign individual executive orders that essentially pull them back

(17:14):
in one form or another. And I don't think he
can do anything on the pardons if he wants to
try to undo the pardons. But the point is what
was really shocking were how many people covered this as fact.
And this gets that to he sat there trying to
weaponize a tragedy for political gain, trying to create that hey,

(17:36):
this was Democrats soft on border policies that led to
this situation, when actually, now that we know more of
the situation, it has nothing to do with that, and
it has everything to do with the horrendous way that
all of the pre presidents, including Donald Trump, but especially
Donald Trump, since he negotiated the surrender of it whatever

(18:00):
America was trying to do in Afghanistan, he basically just
decided to completely walk away and just left the left
the mess for his successor and Joe Biden, who decided
to just follow the same bad path. So I have
no empathy for Joe Biden's decision making other than more

(18:21):
proof he was not a very good president, but he
was following a situation that was created by a worst president,
in this case in Donald Trump. So we're in this
we're in a moment where he could have brought the
country together and he chose not to do it. And

(18:42):
what was, like I said, what was really disconcerting was
how focused it seemed much of the world was on
this thing we we did with the pardons. And I
saw a few people, probably you know, younger reporters who
were being asked to work over the holiday. Right, This
is if the with some serious attempt. There were headlines

(19:02):
that were breaking news alerts, right, and then you found
out what he actually did, you know? And this this
gets back to sort of one of the larger reminders
with Donald Trump. Stop paying attention to what he says
and continue to only pay attention to what he does.
He says a lot of shit. Most of it isn't true,

(19:25):
most of it isn't going to happen. Most of it
is bullshit, right, And I understand, you know there's always
this oh take them literally whatever it is. The fact
is what he says versus what he does. Okay, if
you're going to get outraged, get outrage and what he does,
not what he claims he's going to do, because most
of the time he doesn't do what he claims he's
going to do. All right, But while we are talking

(19:49):
about what he says he'll do in nullifying all of
Joe Biden's auto pen executive orders, he was doing something
far more consequential, far more damaging to the United States
long term folks. He used his most absolute power of
his presidency, the pardon, and he, once again, it appears,
did another pay for play, especially because we now know

(20:12):
who is involved in helping facilitate the pardon and getting
the pardon for the presidency. This episode of the Chuck
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So let me talk about it. It's a full pardon

(22:03):
for a gentleman by the name of Juan Orlando Hernandez.
He's the former president of Honduras. He was convicted in
a US federal court just last year for trafficking hundreds
of tons of cocaines in the United States since of
forty five years. Now, let's just remember, one of the
reasons that Donald Trump is threatening war on Venezuela is
because he says Moduro is essentially the head of the

(22:25):
one of the largest drug cartels in the world that
is killing Americans, intentionally killing Americans via the drug trade.
So what does he do. He just released somebody who
we in the United States just convicted of doing just

(22:46):
what he claims the head of Venezuela is doing. But
now this guy has been cleared, had his record white clean,
and he's being released back into Central American politics. In fact,
Trump is using the pardon of Wan Orlando Hernandez to
essentially endorse the political party that is on the ballot
right now that Hernandez belongs to, to essentially get that

(23:11):
group of politicians back in power. And he said if
the election doesn't go the way he wants it to go.
He's going to somehow punish Honduras over this, So he's
threatening the voters of Hoduras. This is not America First.
By the way, America First doesn't care what people do.
People are supposedly can do whatever the hell they want
outside of America's borders. Right, we are not going to

(23:31):
involve ourselves in their politics. Obviously, it is so crystal clear.
Donald Trump is not a he's not an America First.
He's a Trump firster. Whoever pays him the most is
going to get. And we now know Roger Stone is
basically the pardon you know, the pardon whisper to a
lot of these Latin American and international crooks, and they

(23:54):
use Roger Stone himself a pardon crook. And Stone bragged
about visiting the president about two weeks ago on his
social media feed, dressed in the absurd zoot suit that
he loves to wear. Claim he's like really stylistic person,
He's stylistic for the nineteen forties. Congratulations, he would make
a great Dick Tracy villain. I probably gave him a

(24:17):
compliment by saying that. But the guys, you know, the
guys tells a great story spins a great yarn. But
he's a crook and he has destroyed political the political
consulting world by making it as crooked as it is.
He and Paul Manifort paved the way to essentially the
corrupt nature that lobbying is today. The godfathers of this

(24:40):
are Roger Stone and Paul Manafort. And of course it's
Roger Stone who's totally connected and was personally urging Trump
to pardon this guy visiting with him two weeks ago,
so we know this was done. So this wasn't a
pardon for diplomatic reasons or for some geopolitical reasons that
we thought would help the security of the United States.

(25:04):
There was no Department of Justice review for this pardon.
It just was a direct result of lobbying from one
of Trump's closest, most controversial confidants, a man himself who
have received clemency from Trump, a man who now's appear
appears to be essentially one of the central nodes in
this pay for pay pardon scheme that it should be

(25:27):
extraordinarily controversial, and yet nobody raises a peep about it.
The lack of outrage over essentially what is almost a
weekly thing. Now Trump has normalized, normalized the pardoning of
convicted felons, and it's always the same. It's either convicted

(25:49):
of some sort of financial scheme, ripping off governments or
ripping off people. Something he has been accused of doing
quite a bit as a developer over the years, and
you know, an unsuccessful casino owner over the years. Anybody
that's ever been accused of something, he's been accused of,
he pardons. And you know, it is now an obvious pattern.

(26:13):
And of course anybody who will pay the price is
obviously willing to be pardoned. It is happening here in
plain sight. Two weeks ago, right I went, I sort
of was trying to surface up some urgency about his
abuse of the pardon. How when he pardoned the form
the head of finance one of those crypto schemes that

(26:34):
are out there, And how did this guy get on
the attention of Trump. Well when he went into business
with Trump's kids in the crypto world, so it became
sort of a part of the family business to get
this done. It's it's it's one of those where you
don't quite understand why there's you know, to quote Bob Dolan,

(26:57):
nineteen ninety six when he was running against Bill Click
and an upset about the lack of you know, there
were all sorts of crazy schemes that Bill Clinton's was
using to raise money, using the White House as a
vehicle to this. By the way, the things that Bob
Gore would be upset about today wouldn't even make Donald
Trump blush. Right. Donald Trump essentially has done whatever the

(27:19):
Clintons did and said I'm going to do it on steroids,
and he's kind of done that. By the way, he
made a second commutation this week, and again it's one
that's all about the Benjamins. Here a guy named David Genteel,
a private equity executive who was convicted in a one
point six billion dollar fraud scheen was sentenced to seven years.
He got a sentence commuted after just two weeks. So

(27:41):
while we don't know quite how much money mister Genteel
paid Trump associates in order to get his pardon, I
promise you the pardon is not free. None of these
pardons that Donald Trump makes are free. But again, where
you get so many folks in sort of the political

(28:02):
media get obsessed over the stuff he says, and the
lack of focused or interest in the stuff he does,
whether it is an illegal, unconstitutional war that he's essentially
trying to start in Venezuela. By the way, he's got
political risk here if he doesn't follow through on that.
I'll talk about that in a minute. And then it's

(28:22):
literally almost weekly now he pardons somebody that is that
makes the Bill Clinton, Mark Rich pardons seem just like
another presidential pardon that eh kind of smells. But hey,
they all do it. The fact is they don't all
do it. They've all done one or two really bad
pardons that you're really uncomfortable with, and you're like, God,

(28:44):
damn it, did you really just do this so Roger
Stone could make a couple of bucks, or did you
really just do this because Tony Rodham needed to make
a couple of bucks, Because that is what it felt
like was happening with the Clintons, and it felt that,
you know, when Bush sort of commuted the sentence of
Scuber to Libby, you know, yes, he didn't pardon him,
but he was You see this, there are these little
favors that are done and and you know, there's honor

(29:05):
among thieves. And I think we as a public we're
kind of grossed out by it that it happens at all,
but we're weirdly forgiving of a couple. We sort of assume, oh,
that's the price of business. But literally, Donald Trump just
peas in our face. He is so he doesn't even
pretend to do anything morally or ethically correct, and instead

(29:25):
he does these things that are so beyond the pale.
But he does it consistently, consistently and regularly, and he
does it on a schedule that we just barely even
shrug a shoulder. There's two issues that this week alone
has triggered it as a reminder. First of all, we
have a corrupt Justice department. Right, we do not have

(29:46):
a Justice department that you can feel good is honest
and fair, because we've already seen the way pay Bondi
has allowed the Justice Department to be run. It's whatever
Donald Trump wants. So now there's real questions about the
rule of law. Judges are throwing cases out because they're
really not It appears that they're not following even basic
you know, the basic protocols that they're supposed to make. One. Two,

(30:10):
the pardon power is so corrupt that it's clear we
need a constitutional amendment to amend this. To this day,
you've heard me ask this question a few times, which is,
how the hell did you know the Founding Fathers. One
of the head scratchers to me is the fact that
they allowed a pardon power to be given to a president,
because we were supposedly revolting against a monarchy, so why

(30:34):
give any sort of monarchical powers to the president? Right,
everything about the Founding Fathers was to try to create
a weak executive. They didn't want a non existent executive,
but they wanted a fairly weak executive with the power
of the law of actually resting inside of the power
to make laws, not with the executive branch, but with
the legislative branch, the power to decide if the laws

(30:57):
are constitutional, not to judiciary. Essentially, all the executives supposed
to do is execute the loss, but they gave him
this pardon power and the amount of abuse. Now I
know the Founders had a lot more faith in the
legislative branch and essentially protecting the constitution and protecting the

(31:19):
country from a runaway executive. That is not the situation
we have now. Right, we do not have a speaker
of the House. We have a spino, a speaker in
name only. As you know Mike Johnson essentially admitted it
the other day, is that he really isn't a speaker
of any you know, he has at the title, but
he doesn't do the job of running the legislative branch.
He does whatever Donald Trump asked him to do, which

(31:41):
really has harmed the Constitution, and he's put his own members.
This is why you're going to see this retirement. We
got another retirement over the weekend. I promise you, I'm
in a guest that we average two to four retirements
every day every week, excuse me, between now and the
end of the year. Well, fact check me on this
by the end of the year, but I'm I'm going
to yes that we will have at least ten more

(32:02):
retirements before the end of this calendar, which would put
us on an average of two to three per week
for the rest of the year. So I think that's
going to happen. But the uninterest in Congress and trying
to reign in this executive is shocking to me. We
are finally going to get and I think it took

(32:22):
you know, last week I shared with you how I
had an interview with Mike Turner, republic former. He's a
current member of congre Republican member of Congress, but the
former chair of the House Intel Committee. And you could
just if you just watched the conversation he and I
had over Venezuela and whether these orders were legal or not,
and how concerned he was about the legality of what
was happening here. He was basically saying, without saying directly,

(32:48):
that yes, this thing is totally illegal, and we are
totally and Congress is totally out of the loop. So
this report about the shoot to kill order, no survivors
are allowed by Hegseth, which appears to be a violation
of the Geneva Conventions, especially when there's been no declaration

(33:08):
of war whatsoever on any of these folks. Congress is
finally awoke from its slumber, and we'll see. I have
some faith in the Senate Armed Services Committee to do
something serious because I think Roger Wicker, the Republican chairman,
and Jack Reid, the ranking member, they seem to put
the country before party, both of them whenever they've they've

(33:32):
worked together a long time. I think that they're going
to do a really serious inquiry I don't know about
the House as we know the House Republicans will see.
I think it depends on who you get. I do
think you have some House Republicans that realize that Donald
Trump treats them like sacrificial lambs and that they're nothing
but pawns. And I think that that is I do

(33:54):
think he is accumulating more and more critics from his
own party for the way he behave. As I said,
it's not been very America first. It's always Trump first,
but not America first. That's making some people peel away
getting involved in other people's in more foreign entanglements. That
seems to be an issue. But let me introduce one

(34:15):
more political peril that Trump has created for himself with Venezuela.
Now that he's got Congress's attention with what they're doing,
in theory, it might hamstring him more. Ironically, what they've
been doing has been raising the hopes of the Venezuelan
and Cuban communities in South Florida that Trump's going to,
you know, go and get Madurea if he doesn't get Madurea.

(34:44):
And this is where I think, unfortunately, he's going to
do something that's likely illegal here and he's going to
do he's going to make he's going to give an
order that we're going to be debating for years about
whether this was legal or not and what happens here
with Maduall, let's see how it's done. But he's more
likely to try something then actually get congressional approval because politically,

(35:06):
if he doesn't follow through and his threat to get
rid of Maduro, this will be the bay of pigs
for Venezuelans, Venezuelan Americans. You know, Essentially the Cuban Americans
turned on the Democratic Party because they believe Kennedy didn't
help out those Cuban exiles who were trying to overthrow
Castro and he sort of left them defend for themselves

(35:28):
and he didn't follow through, and it is the initial split,
like why are Cubans Republicans? It's because of that moment,
no other reason. Well, if Trump never gets Maduro, that's
the situation he's setting himself up. And it could trickle
into the Cuban community as well. So because of that fear,

(35:48):
and I know that, and I would suspect that Marco
Rubio color Cementez, many of the long time Cuban American
politicians down in South Florida who understand this issue, You
understand what South Florida exiles may expect from President Trump
here are going to end up pushing him and pushing
him and pushing him to do something that, again, I

(36:10):
think is going to have enormous constitutional consequences and long
term impact on the role of Congress and what it
plays in war making, and potentially on this fragile coalition
that is mega that he put together. Because did any

(36:31):
of them, these are all folks that all are supposedly
against the Iraq war, did any of them vote for this?
And I think you could see more fracturing even as
he remember he lives in South Florida, so he's become
an unofficial member of the Cuban in Venezuelaan exile communities
down there. He constantly gets that pr in his ear,

(36:52):
So we know where he's going to end up ciding.
What he does not fully appreciate is what that's going
to do the rest of his coalition outside of South Florida.
All Right, with that, let's sneak at a break and
when we come back, Sarah Eskert and of course, after
that conversation, which I think you'll enjoy. It's a tremendous one.

(37:12):
After that conversation I have by toodcast time Machine, I
got a fun one. This is a fascinating one. I
actually take three moments in history and combine them into
one time machine moment. And of course I have a
few things to say about the status of college football,
in particular the leadership or shall I say the lack
of leadership at the ACCI but first equip ranking. There's

(37:37):
a reason results matter more than promises, just like there's
a reason Morgan and Morgan is America's largest injury law firm.
For the last thirty five years, they've recovered twenty five
billion dollars for more than half a million clients. It
includes cases where insurance companies offered next to nothing, just
hoping to get away with paying as little as possible.
Morgan and Morgan fought back ended up winning millions. Fact

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in Pennsylvania, one client was awarded twenty six million dollars,
which was a staggering forty times the amount that the
insurance company originally offered. That original offer six hundred and
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the country, they know how to deliver for everyday people.
If you're injured, you need a lawyer, you need somebody

(38:20):
to get your back. Check out for the People dot
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two nine law on your cell phone. And remember all
law firms are not the same. So check out Morgan
and Morgan. Their fee is free unless they win. So
with that, let's go into the time machine. So this

(38:48):
week on the Toddcast time machine, obviously I'm looking look,
it is hard to ignore December seventh, So I'm not
going to ignore December seventh. I'm going to lean in
to December seven, but I'm going to do it in
a slightly different way than you might expect, because what
December seventh did is it shifted us from a nation
that listened together. It was the beginning of something where

(39:09):
we were a nation that listened together. Now we're a
nation that listens alone. So I'm kind of starting with
December seventh, nineteen forty one, Pearl Harbor. We at least
have read about the shock. We don't remember the shock, right,
we weren't there most of us weren't alive for that moment.
That's listening here. Some of you were, but most of
us won't write at this point in time. Right, if

(39:33):
no baby boomer in theory, right, if you think about
the entire baby Boomer generation, the first ones were born
in nineteen forty five, so in theory, none of them
were alive. Right, that's how few people. It's hard to
believe that, but that's how few people. So we remember
the tragedy, and of course it was a turning point
in American history and in world history. But Pearl Harbor

(39:53):
also is the greatest single demonstration of the power of
shared media in America life. What do I mean? Well,
in nineteen forty one, more than eighty percent of American
households had a radio, and for many families, that radio
was the most valuable object in the house, the most
valuable thing they owned that didn't have four wheels attached
to it, obviously the car. And on the morning of

(40:16):
December seventh, the entire nation turned into that same medium.
At the same time. They heard the president, they heard
the bulletins, and of course they heard the war, and
you heard it with everyone else. It was a shared experience.
Radio wasn't just dominant, it was the national hearth. If
you will, I mean literally right those fireside chats, we

(40:38):
were all sitting around the radio to find out what
our president knew, what can he could tell us. The
country had one soundtrack, one voice, one shared experience. This
is the height of communal media in America. But four
years later, this same week in history, we had our
first crack in communal media. The first crack appeared, and

(41:02):
it comes from a place no one was watching. On
December one, nineteen forty five, the FCC quietly approved a
massive expansion of what was called the FM broadcast band.
To most Americans, this meant zip, but it would eventually
change everything about what we listened to and how. A
few things happened. Because of this decision one, we ended

(41:23):
up with more choice. At the time of this rule
in the United States had just forty eight FM stations.
Within ten years that number exploded to over five hundred,
a tenfold increase. Romember AM radio was the initial radio.
Suddenly radio wasn't one monolithic block. We actually had a
menu of options, and there were a whole bunch of
new formats. We had musical formats, jazz, classical album rock,

(41:46):
adult contemporary soft rock. FM created the space for niche
music programming, the beginning of fragmentation, something we're all familiar
with now. FM sound quality was so much better than
AM that listeners began choosing stations based not on personality,
but on clarity and fidelity. This was true in the

(42:07):
car I grew up in my dad. My dad hated
wanted to listen to some AM radio guys, but hated
the sound quality, so we ended up listening to more
FM radio. By nineteen seventy eight, just before our next
big milestone, which I'm going to get to in a minute,
FM overtook AM for the first time. It commanded fifty
eight percent of all listening in the United States. The

(42:28):
communal world that had existed at the time of Pearl
Harbor was already beginning to split. More stations, more formats,
more choice. The era of everyone listening to the same
thing was slowly dying. But choice is one thing, personal choice, boy.
That is something else, and that wouldn't arrive for decades
in the form of a tiny, blue plastic cas set

(42:50):
player with foam headphones. If Pearl Harbor was the height
of shared listening and FM was the beginning of fragment.
Then the moment that truly ended the broadcast era arrived
in the summer of nineteen eighty when Sony quietly introduced
the Walkman into the United States. There wasn't a big

(43:11):
launch event. There was no splashy TV campaign, no Steve
Jobs style reveal if you will. It had been introduced
about a year earlier in Japan, but for one hundred
and fifty dollars you two could have a personal stereo.
It was about five hundred dollars in today's money, by
the way, and it was just slipped onto American shells
and guess what, It sold out almost instantly. Sony expected

(43:32):
to sell five thousand units a month. Instead, they sold
over thirty thousand units in the first two months, a
number that shocked even Sony's executives. And why because, for
the first time ever, millions of Americans experienced private entertainments.
The Walkman wasn't a radio, it wasn't a sterio, it
wasn't a boombox. It was a portable personal bubble, a soundtrack.

(43:55):
You controlled, songs, you chose, moments, you curated. No DJ
no commercials, no shared listening, no mass experience, just whatever
you wanted to hear, whatever you put together. This was
the beginning of a personalization revolution, one that arguably we're
still in the middle of. And I'll tell you this,

(44:16):
once Americans got a taste, that's something about it. Right.
The more choices you give us, the more choices we demand.
So that gives us. And this is a moment that
I think people need to understand to understand the current
media landscape. If you follow the death of radio, then
you will understand what's happening right now a cable news
and broadcast television. So the Walkman, it didn't kill radio overnight,

(44:39):
and no, video didn't kill the radio star. Sorry I
couldn't help myself. But just like streaming didn't kill cable overnight,
it all starts slowly, then it celerates, then it becomes irreversible.
So here's what happened. Familiar pattern. And again we're talking
about FM radio. Young listeners fled first radio listening among
twelve to twenty four year olds twenty percent during the eighties,

(45:01):
the exact decade when they Walkman took over. That's my decade, folks,
of when I was that age, and yep, I I
knew what time WSAG, one of three point five in
Miami was going to get the let out, which meant
I was going to get thirty minutes of led Zeppelin songs,
songs I had not owned yet, and I wanted to

(45:24):
tape them, so I would tape them and then have
them magically for myself, right without having to pay a dime.
That was the other part of this, right, that's what
that was the other thing parents. You know, my dad
wasn't giving me the money. I had to do the
Columbia house crap. And that's how I sort of built
my own, my own music catalog. So there we were.
In the eighties, car listening completely changed. Cassette listening in

(45:47):
cars went from almost nothing in nineteen eighty to forty
percent of all in car listening by nineteen ninety. Right, like,
it's like what happened. We first had radio, and then
suddenly we had CDs, and then suddenly now your phones connect.
When was the last time Ask yourself that you used
your car installed car radio to listen to something. I'm

(46:09):
gonna guess if you did, it's probably like me listening
to a ballgame on the way home. Quickly because you
vaguely remembered where you heard play by play for whatever
sports team you remembered. But that might be it. But
this is happening. This is how we lost FM radio.
So four and ten moments spent in the car were
suddenly not radio moments. In nineteen seventy nine, Arbitron track

(46:35):
roughly a dozen major music formats, and by the late
nineties there were more than forty. Radio was trying to
adapt to a world where audiences were no longer captive.
They were trying to stave off this revolution, so they
tried things like talk radio. From nineteen eighty to the
mid nineties, talk radio's audience grew three hundred percent. Music
abandoned AM entirely, and AM clung to political talk as

(46:57):
its remaining asset. It's exactly the same way broadcast TV
today clings to live sports, and cable news clings to
talking heads. So Walkman, Discman, MP three players, iPod, iPhone.
By nineteen eighty six, Sony had sold almost ten million Walkman's.
By the end of the product line, the Walkman finally
had passed two hundred and twenty million units sold worldwide.

(47:18):
Radio never recovered from what started in nineteen eighty. It
aged a trank. It fractured, just like television is doing
right now. So the modern parallel TV is just radio
two point zero. Everything we watch happened to radio after
nineteen eighty is almost exactly what we're watching. He happened
to cable and broadcast TV today, right when unified, fragmented, personalized,

(47:39):
and collapsed. Right, let's compare radio. Pearl Harbord unifies, FM
creates choice, Walkman personalizes radio collapses. Okay, nineteen forty one
is the unifying moment. Forty five is the beginning of choice.
Nineteen eighty is the Walkman. Nineties and two thousands radio dies.
Television nine to eleven unifies. Right, we all were watching
the same news channels in two thousand and one. The

(48:00):
DVR creates some choice in the two thousand. Smartphone personalizes
TV collapses in the twenty twenties. Right, let's just go
to hear cable households. In twenty eleven, we had one
hundred and five million households that had access to cable television.
Today it's about sixty million. That's a forty five percent
collapse in a decade, and I promise you more's coming.
The broadcast TV media and viewer age in nineteen ninety

(48:22):
three was forty one. Today it is nearly sixty. In
cable news it is now it's seventy. For Americans under thirty,
over sixty percent of all video consumption happens on smartphones. So,
just like the Walkman destroyed the idea of shared listening,
the smartphone has destroyed the idea of shared viewing. We
don't watch the same shows, we don't see the same ads,
we don't get the same news, we don't share the

(48:43):
same reality. We're all walking around with our own private feeds.
Just like the Walkman owners walked around with our own
private soundtracks. We now took it to everything else in life.
So this week in history gives us a three step
evolution of American media. You didn't see that. I was
going to start with Pearl Harbor and go to media
route right December seventh, nineteen forty one. The only thing

(49:05):
we have to fear is fear itself. It's a peak
of shared communal broadcast experience. Americans united around one broadcast
nineteen forty five. We get FM expansion, by the way,
in this same week in history, and that's the beginning
of choice of specialization, if you will, Niches fragmentation. In

(49:29):
some ways, it is what FM radio is in nineteen
forty five, is what cable TV was in the eighties.
Then the summer of nineteen eighty we get the Walkman,
and it's the birth of full on personalized media. And
once we put those foam headphones on, we've never really
taken them off. We're now always at least got one

(49:50):
year with this our personalization eras began, radio crack, television's cracking,
and the entire media environment is built around the logic
of the Walkman, my feed, my soundtrack, my show, my news.
So there you have it. Pearl Harbor. This week in
history is Pearl Harbor and not an insignificant moment. But

(50:14):
what is interesting is when you think about the moment
through the lens of media and what nineteen forty one
was and where we are today. It has been one giant,
fast revolution in how we consume content in this in
not just this country, in the world. So there you go,

(50:38):
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todcast for thirty percent off. All right, let's get in

(52:04):
a few questions, ask Chuck. I'm going to do two
or three because I, let's just say, I do have
a lot to say about about college football. This one
comes from Aaron from Cincinnati. Hey, check, I really enjoy
the author segments, especially your recent feature on the Barn.
It's one of the most powerful books I've read in
a long time. Thanks for sharing what you're reading, and

(52:24):
please keep highlighting your favorites. I also learn a lot
from the sports discussions, even as a non sports fan.
They help me better understand the world around me. Great
job on Election Night special and Happy Thanksgiving. Wow, there's
no question in there, but hey, who doesn't want to
read some like reinforcing mail that Hey, we at least
have one person in our audience that appreciates what we're doing.

(52:45):
My whole goal it's about one person at a time. Aaron,
in all seriousness, thank you, And that is something that
I'm trying to look. I know I'm always going to
have a political focus too strong of a word, a
sort of a political you know, I worked in politics

(53:07):
or in political media professionally for so long of it,
so that's always going to be the dominant part of
that conversation. But one of the things that I want
to be better about with this podcast is sort of sharing.
You know, I do, even my pop culture consumption in
some ways, I do see sometimes through the prism of politics,
and I know I'm not alone in that, so I

(53:29):
will continue to at least share what I'm reading, what
I'm watching. There's a couple of things I'm watching right
now that I'll admit I'm still not sure how I
feel about it. The biggest one is Pluribus. I don't
even know how I would describe this to somebody if
they were asking me, well, Hey, what are you watching
now while I'm watching this show on Apple called Pluribus.

(53:51):
It's by the guy who did Breaking Bad and Better
at Call Saul, and I loved those shows, so I'm
trusting him on this one, mister Galligan. But man, this
is one of those It's like it feels as if
Vince Gilligan took Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul and ran

(54:13):
it through and somehow merged it with merged it with
that other Apple show where, God, I'm drawing a blank
on that Apple show where we're a severed sorry Severance.
I was about to you caught me in or you
caught the editing process. I was about to signal that, hey,

(54:36):
we better edit this out, but I won't edit this
out anyway. I was drawing a blank on the name
of the show Severance. But it's I think that's what
this feels like. It's like, it's like if you took
the plot line of Severance, the plot line the plot
lines with Breaking Bad and Better Call Saw and put
them all together, you might get this show. I think.
I say that. I don't think I'm through it enough

(54:59):
to to know for sure what the hell I've gotten into,
But I can't wait to watch the next episode. I
will fully admit that. And I am doing a little
stranger things also in the moment. So there's that. And
I did promise that in the sub stack next week.
By the way, it's going to be some reading recommendations
and podcasts recommendations for all things having to do with

(55:23):
the fall of the Ottoman Empire and World War One
through the prism of the Middle East rather than just
through the prism of Germany. All right. Next question comes
from Sarah Kay and Lansing, Michigan. Should I say, Chuck.
I'm a middle school math teacher working to instill values
like kindness, respect, and civil disagreement, but today's political leaders
on both sides often model the opposite. Undermining these norms
in public at leads me wondering, it's just how we're
expected to lead and live Now is our hope will

(55:44):
return to respectful bipartisan discourse? Kind regards Sarah, this sort
of I'm kind of talking about this. The president chose
this tragic moment that befell these two young National guardsmen,
and he turned it into a political extra size and
weaponized it for political purposes. When the right thing to
do at a moment like this is you set politics

(56:06):
aside and you had a unifying moment. You know, maybe
you learn a little bit more about these victims, but
a little bit, you know, find out what Let's find
out what the cause of the shooting was. Let's let's
let's get all of the facts before we immediately try
to assess who gets political gain and who gets political demerits.
And there's no doubt right this is you know, it's

(56:30):
one of those things. Is that Trump's fault or is
Trump the result of an era that is, you know,
the coarseness of social media has become sort of made
coarseness more acceptable in our everyday lives. I don't know
quite how to put it, but but we definitely are
in one of these moments where we don't have empathy anymore.

(56:51):
And it goes back to Donald Trump doesn't have empathy,
It doesn't mean the rest of us don't have to
have empathy. And you know, whatever broken childhood issues that
Donald Trump's brain has been messed with shouldn't impact how
we raise the next generation of Americans in this country.
And unfortunately, I do think that you know, this gets

(57:14):
this gets it to something I've been concerned about for
some time, that that you know, we the first half
of the Trump era was defined by a whole group
of people, regardless of ideology, who said no, no, no,
no characters should count that you know, we should have
high morals, high ethics, and good character in our political leaders.

(57:35):
And we saw a group of people that were uncomfortable
with the with the the bad character of Trump. I
don't know else to describe it as right. He's just
a bad guy. He's got bad you know, he's amral.
I don't know if he's immoral. I know he's amore.
I don't think he cares what right and wrong is.
It's about whether he benefits or not. He's uber transactional

(57:56):
to the point of right it. You know, it puts
everybody else second to his benefit. If that is considered
how to succeed in politics, then you're only going to
have people emulate even more from all political sides, not
just the maga side of things. And you know we've

(58:17):
seen right this sort of course rhetoric. Now at first
it's been like, well, let's curse more. If we just
drop the F bomb, we'll show we can track real people.
But there's this perception that somehow work in people who
are live in paycheck to paycheck haven't don't have morals
or ethics, or don't care about morals and ethics. That's

(58:38):
not That wasn't my experience growing up as a working
class kid. That wasn't my experience with other working class
families that I spent time with If anything, there was
more morals and more ethics that you know, hey, you've
got to that stuff. You know, what you don't have
in wealth, you have in your character. Right, nobody can
buy character. So it's a you know, let's see what

(59:05):
we do. In twenty eight I had some hope that
Joe Biden could be a better moral authority for this country,
and he turned out to be a failure. Now, maybe
a younger version of Joe Biden might have been able
to pull this off, but you know, he also had
his own blind spots on morals and ethics when it
comes to his family. So I don't know who the
next next, you know, but I guess I have some

(59:28):
you know, I'll be curious to see what the voter's prioritize.
Right in seventy six, the voters really wanted somebody who
was moral and ethical, and we went with Jimmy Carter,
who turned out not to be a very good manager.
He was highly moral, highly ethical. To this day, it
is interesting you will have people simultaneously saying that he

(59:49):
was a man of high character and he was a
bad president, and look, he was a bit of a micromanager.
And what if I told you he fired his entire
cabinet one day, he'd be like, oh, that's kind of funny,
hinged two. But because he had to high morals and
high character in some ways, he would get more benefit
of the doubt than others would have given him. I'm
very curious to see in twenty eight whether Democrats stick

(01:00:14):
to wanting to try to find an adult as their
party leader or whether they want a combatant a la Trump,
but just a liberal version of it, right, And I
think it's an open question. I would say, right now,
I see a Democratic party that's more interested in fighting
fire with fire than I do seeing a Democratic party

(01:00:36):
that wants to set a higher bar for morals and ethics. Now, look,
I think we as an electorate are pretty cynical about
morals and ethics right now and assume that nobody has them.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for them, and
it doesn't mean we shouldn't attempt to legislate for them. So,

(01:00:57):
you know, I guess I would say this, let's not
give up quite yet on the American electorate for not
sort of demanding better. Let's see what happens in the primaries,
and let's see if we start to hold other people
to higher standards than what we held Donald Trump to do.

(01:01:21):
Two more questions. This next one comes from Chip from
Colorado Springs. Hey, check, I'm really enjoying the long form podcast.
Do you think the US presidency concentrates concentrates too much
responsibility into one person serving as executive commander, chief head
of state, and party leader? Should we consider distributing those
roles to prevent further power consolidation? Also, thanks for the
Boilermaker shoutouts this season, though I'm not optimistic about the

(01:01:41):
bucket game. Yeah, the old oaken bucket game to Indiana
and Purdue. I did something that I've done all year long,
and it is nothing costs me nothing but cash, and
that is I have faded the Hoosiers in some of
these football games against Big ten teams in cold weather,

(01:02:04):
assuming that they wouldn't pile it on a sure enough
I thought, for sure, Well, they're not covering twenty nine
and a half this week? Are they? Man? When am
I gonna learn? Right? There are two things. There are
two truths this year for my betting prowess. One, stop
betting in any games involving the Atlanta Falcons and two.
Stop trying to fade the Indana hoosiers. I think I am.

(01:02:26):
I swear to God, I'm saying it out loud to
prevent myself from doing vote. But let's talk about your
more serious question, and that was with presidential power. You
know this is it is not as if we our
founders gave us the tools to make sure we didn't
do this, and it is a poor management. Two things

(01:02:50):
that have happened. Right, You had a legislative branch that
is been afraid of taking votes and afraid of being
specific on legislation for fear they couldn't get the legislation passed,
so they create ambiguity and the laws that they create.
And when you create ambiguity and essentially allow the administration
straight of state to make these decisions on how to

(01:03:12):
execute a law that Congress passes, well, all you've done
is empowered the executive branch to essentially accumulate more authority
of how laws are executed. So I go back to
that because that is source one of our problems. Source
two is a judiciary branch that continues to say, well, hey,

(01:03:33):
if Congress doesntlike it, they can pass a lot to
undo it. And until they do. You do have a
judiciary that, at least amongst Republican appointees, has been filled
with legal scholars who are now judges who buy into
this unified executive theory business, who want to see a

(01:03:56):
stronger executive branch. So essentially side any time there is
a dispute between branches of government, essentially give the benefit
of the doubt to the executive. I think one hundred
percent we've concentrated too much power to the executive. It
was never the intent. We were supposed to have a
balanced that the legislative branch was supposed to be equally

(01:04:18):
as powerful as the executive branch, and there was a
real assumption that we would essentially have a legislative branch
that felt almost as powerful as a parliamentary system, with
a presidency that could serve the role as commander in
chief and sort of how to execute laws, to essentially
be a check to make sure the legislative branch didn't

(01:04:39):
try to accumulate too much power, and instead, over nearly
two hundred and fifty years, we've essentially watched the legislative
branch hand power over to the presidency. Now, part of
that I could and this goes a little bit to
my todcast time Machine topic. I actually could blame the
media for this a little bit. And when I say
the media, it's just the fact that we are the

(01:05:05):
mass media in general always is looking for a singular
figure to solve a problem, or a singular figure to
execute a solution, and we have just if you think
about it, you know, the presidency. You know, as soon
as mass media got powerful, starting with radio, our presidents

(01:05:28):
got more powerful. FDR was a powerful president, but before that,
we didn't have a really powerful president really until that
went back to Lincoln, and that was due to essentially
powers he had, you know, suspending the Constitution a couple
of times we were in the middle of a war.
But ever since FDR, each president has has sort of

(01:05:49):
found a way to accumulate more power. And I just
throw it out there as a question, have we as
a society because we make the president the singular figure,
we certainly set the expectation that the presidency themselves is
more likely to solve problems than the legislative branch. We don't,
And we do a terrible job collectively in mass media

(01:06:12):
educating the public that actually it's a legislative branch that
is the place that this needs to be happening, and
that they're the reason why we have this problem. And
I think that that's I just would I would throw
that out there as one of one of the reasons
of how we got to this too powerful executive. All right,

(01:06:35):
last question comes from Mark D from Seattle, Washington. Hey, Chuck,
never missed the check todcast, and I'm so glad you win.
Inte Pennant, thank you. In light of Marjorie Taylor Green's
resignation and the question about her position pension, you mentioned
she's only receiving the minimumount, I began wondering what are
the benefits congress re seats after five years of service?
What is the maximum that can can receive. While we're
on the subject, what healthcare coverage do they get? Are
they on Obamacare or something else? Big fan? All right, Mark,

(01:06:58):
I am giving you the best answer I can give you,
and this is for people elected in nineteen eighty four
or later. So this really now does pretty much handle
everybody in Congress, I think except Chuck Grassley at this point,
who was elected in nineteen eighty But it is a

(01:07:21):
far less generous system than you might agree. So this
is the federal employee's retirement system, and this is what
Congress is a part of. So this is how it works. Okay,
members of Congress accrew one point seven percent of their
highest three years of salary for each of the first
twenty years, and then it's one percent per year for
each year after twenty so, and they also get solid security.

(01:07:43):
There's also a four to one K matching plan of
five percent. I mean, this is where you're saying, they're going, Wow,
they get solid security and a four to one K
and a pension. But there's a bit of a pension cap.
There's no explicit eighty percent statutory cap, but the path
makes the ceiling effectively pretty low. So twenty years at

(01:08:04):
one point seven percent is thirty four percent of the salary.
Twenty more years plus one percent is twenty percent. So essentially,
in any given year, your pension is going to be
no more than fifty four percent of your highest three
year of salary as a member of Congress. And that's
after forty years of service in the government. So let's

(01:08:28):
shall we say, very few get there. So, for instance,
a member with twelve years of service retiring at age
sixty two we'll receive thirty to forty thousand dollars per year.
That ain't jump change, but that's about what many people
get on Social Security. A member with twenty years retiring
at or after sixty two would get forty to fifty
five thousand dollars per year. A member with thirty years

(01:08:49):
sixty to seventy five thousand dollars per year, and the
rare member with thirty five to fifty years of experience
could get up to eighty to ninety percent, but not
the full salary. So even the longest serving members do
not get one hundred and seventy four thousand dollars a
year in a pension, okay, which is what the current
salary is, and they're mathematically there's no way for them

(01:09:12):
to mathematically ever get there. A member has to serve
five years to invest in a pension, and the minimum
retirement age varies somewhere fifty seven to sixty two. So now, look,
there was the old congressional system before it was redone.
There were a handful of longtime members of Congress that
got eighty percent of their pay and a lot of
talk radio and chain emails in the nineties. In the

(01:09:35):
two thousands exaggerated many of those benefits, but even since
twenty twelve, members have had to contribute more of their
own money to their pensions and the benefits are smaller.
Look the point of the Marjorie Taylor Green pension issues.
I know that people got all excited about it, but
when you actually dig into the numbers, this is not
Trust me, the unpopularity of Congress has already forced previous

(01:09:59):
Congresses to amend this pension situation so that it really
is Yes, there's a pension, but it's it's not a
how to get rich pension. It is arguably a reasonable
amount of money and a reasonable pension in exchange for
the public service. All Right, that was the reasonable, and

(01:10:26):
now to the unreasonable and my take on the week
that was in college football. I'm going to start my
rant this week not about the committee and Notre Dame
and the whole. Should Notre Dame be in over Miami?
I think no. I think it's clear they don't they
want to. I think Miami only gets in if they
decide to take both Notre Dame and Miami. I could

(01:10:47):
argue that if you're gonna you know, the issue really
is is the the fact that the SEC is way
overrated this year. There is no doubt the SEC plays
the most competit of college football, but the gap between
the SEC and the other conferences has never been smaller.
I mean, just look at the ACC versus the the

(01:11:09):
SEC this year, and really this year matters more even
than last year because you have more sort of more
of a leveling of the nil playing field across both conferences. Right,
the SEC got a jump start and the AEC has
been catching up. And what has that led to the
I think they met up ten times, just so you know,

(01:11:30):
and the ACC one four and the SEC one six,
So it is we're not talking about a big difference
between the two. So the point is, I don't think
all these SEC schools should be getting in with and
the AEC getting zero, especially the Duke. Now let me

(01:11:53):
get off of my rant here a minute before I
get to sort of what we saw this week in
college four. Well, first of all, I got to give
Miami credit. That's the best Miami's ever played in weather
below forty degrees in the history of the University Miami football,
as far as I'm as far as my lifetime is concerned.
I mean, I can't tell you how many times we
played in Boston or in pitt outdoors in November and

(01:12:17):
played like garbage. The cold weather games. It's always been
an issue with these Miami teams. The Dolphins most recent
last time they were in the playoffs was in a
super cold weather game in Kansas City, and we all
know how that turned out. It's a it's usually pretty difficult.
The Miami played an out standing game in cold weather's
that's one thing. And you know they played like they

(01:12:40):
needed to that they had something to say. I think
it's pretty clear they're one of the ten best teams.
They're one of Realistically, I look at it this way,
who could beat Ohio State. They're one of a handful
of teams at can beat Ohio State. I think there
are only five or six teams that can beat Ohio State.
Miami's one of them. Miami has the offensive line and
defensive line to do it. So well, I don't know

(01:13:01):
what more. You know, obviously, Mimi. You could say they
shouldn't have lost two conference games. Well guess what Notre
Dame shouldn't have lost both of those games, but they did.
It just happened. So then you compare with what you got.
I don't get that, dont but let me go to
let me go to something where I'm really ticked off,
and that is at the leadership, the horrendous leadership of

(01:13:24):
the ACC. First of all, they have a tiebreaker situation
for their champion that does not factor in non conference games.
It only factors in conference games. So I don't know
if you are like me and you're like, how the
f did Duke who was seven and five overall? Okay,
how did Duke at six and two in the conference

(01:13:50):
but one in three out of conference allowed was even
allowed to be eligible for the conference title if you
have a losing record out of conference, when two of
your three losses or two teams that are not in
power for conferences. Right, So, ultimately the ACC is going
to have to fix this. No team because the possibility
that Duke win defeats Virginia and is wins the conference,

(01:14:15):
Duke may not be one of the five highest ranked
conference champions because the winner of the American, which may
be North Texas or Tulane. I think that's what we have.
I have there on the American or the winner let
me get this right, It'll be North Texas or Tulane

(01:14:36):
or the winner of the sun Bell Okay Conference, which
could be James Madison might both be ranked higher than
the winner of the a CC. And of course then

(01:14:56):
the ACC could be left out completely at this point,
because you could have a twelve and one James Madison
team and let's say a twelve and one North Texas
team and an eight and five Duke team. Remind you
two of Duke's losses. One of them was to two lane.
One of them was to that football powerhouse in the
Northeast called Yukon, the University of Connecticut Huskies, who are

(01:15:19):
not a member of any conference. I might argue the
a CEC probably should have taken them a while ago,
but I digress. The fact that the leadership of the
ACC created a tiebreaker that take does not that allows
a team that does not play ten or more power
for schools in their schedule is eligible for their conference championship.

(01:15:45):
That is mistake number one, because, in case you're wondering,
Duke gets the tiebreaker based on the they they have
sort of there are seven uh tie breaking orders, okay,
and so what you had was you had a one, two, three, four, five,
You had a five way tie per second in the
ACC between Duke, Miami, Georgia Tech, SMU, and Pitt. They

(01:16:08):
were all six and two an ACC play, So this
is how the tiebreaker worked head to hegg among all
the tie teams, if they all played each other, unfortunately
they did not. And if they didn't all play each other,
is there a team that beat all the others in
the tie that also didn't happen? Then it was win
percentage versus all common opponents. Wasn't enough to deal with that,
then it was win percentage versus common opponents ordered by

(01:16:28):
finishing the ACC standings, that couldn't figure out a winner,
So then it became combined win percentage of each team's
ACC opponents i e. The strength of schedule within the conference,
and that is where Duke ended up ahead of everybody else.
Their ACC opponents are combined twenty nine and twenty nine.

(01:16:49):
Miami's ACC opponents are combined twenty seven and thirty two.
Georgia techs are combined twenty five and thirty two. Sm
Us are combined twenty four and thirty five. Pits are
combined twenty four in thirty six. So Duke who sits
there and loses to two non Power four schools and
Yukon and Tulane. Those losses do not factor in at

(01:17:11):
all whether or not they are worthy of the ACC
Championship game. This is on the leadership of the ACC
that there was no role about playing ten Power four teams.
I think there's going to be now number one, that
you would not get that losing to non Power four
teams would actually be a demerit and would actually should

(01:17:33):
count for more, could count more against you than losing
to a Power four school because the idea is to
try to strengthen the schedule. So I just find the
leadership of the ACC. They literally were silent when the
ESPN and CFP Invitational committee denied an undefeated Florida State
team a place in the College Football Playoff. He sat

(01:17:55):
there barely in silence when Miami was left out of
the College Football Playoff last year. Is the number one
offense in the country and attend and two with the
number one overall pick. And then this year the ACC
has done slightly better in the pr stands from the conference.
But this is a debacle. And if the ACC only
gets one team in the playoff, right, there's no doubt

(01:18:18):
And that's if we're lucky, right, if we only get
one team in the playoff, might end up being only Miami.
But this is on Jim Phillips and the ACC. The
fact is this is a complete and utter failure. The
ACC's largest business partner, ESPN, has devalued the conference. They
have reporters who ridicule the conference. Heather Dinwich ridiculed Georgia

(01:18:39):
Tech schedule and says they have don't belong on the
same field as Georgia. Basically, it took. It took. The
last game went to the last second because it was
a one score game. The difference between the two conferences
are this not this anymore because guess what, everybody's paying
and there is no dominance that they all think and

(01:19:02):
so there's a perception about the SEC. And here's the thing.
I wish Greg Sankee were my conference commissioner, because look,
do I blame Greg Sankee for fragmenting college football, for
making it harder to make college football bigger and better.
He is trying to turn college football into a smaller
club where only people in the SEC and the Big

(01:19:23):
Ten can succeed. I think that's but you know what
he does, He fights for his members, He fights for
his conference. You know what Jim Phillips does none of that.
He does not fight publicly, and he's not a good communicator.
Perhaps he is not you. And again, some of this
isn't his fault. Some of this was the previous administration
of the ACC getting into bed and a bad deal

(01:19:44):
with ESPN, desperate for money and extending the Grannar rights
way too long. But they've allowed themselves to be in
a situation where the ACC gets less say about this
college football committee going forward? Right, the SEC and the
Big Ten get to decide format somehow, the other powerful
conferences don't get a say here. The biggest business part

(01:20:08):
in the ACC, which is ESPN, treats the ACC like shit,
like dog excrement, okay, and yet there is nothing that
is done. So look, this is a debacle. The fact
is the ACC had a pretty good year, was very competitive,
and has no business allowed having Duke in its championship game.

(01:20:29):
But for the ridiculous and dumb leadership and inability to
see how awful and stupid this tiebreaker was, and not
fully appreciating that the entire especially the ACC, which is
trying to fight for relevance. Your non conference schedules should
be as important as your conference schedule, if not more important.
Miami goes out there and schedules real opponents, Florida State

(01:20:51):
goes out there and schedules real opponents, Clemson goes out
there and schedules real opponents, and Duke schedules yukon. Okay,
what are we thinking? So this is terrible leadership from
the ACC. He should be there should be a total
house cleaning. And because this is costing the University of
Miami millions, this is costing every ACC school millions of

(01:21:14):
dollars due to this poor leadership, So there needs to
be a real serious meeting of the minds. ACC presidents
need to realize they are not being served very well
by this institution, that if anything, it has made things worse.
They should be in litigation with ESPN over how poorly
ESPN has devalued. They have actually devalued the conference in

(01:21:38):
when they schedule games, how they schedule games, who broadcasts.
They're reporting all of the demeaning things they've done and
participating in this nonsense. I mean, Kirk Kirbstreet is embarrassing
himself by essentially doing commentary that supports ESPN's media deals
rather than I kind of think he doesn't believe that

(01:22:00):
he is. He really going to make the argument that
head to head shouldn't count. He literally And by the way,
I'm very curious now Florida State was not allowed to
compete in the playoff because they lost their starting quarterback.
Is ole Miss going to be allowed to compete in
the playoffs since they lost their basically half their coaching staff? Again,
I promise you if ole Miss were remember the ACC,

(01:22:22):
one hundred percent chance they would not be in this thing.
But the SEC will fight for its member with its
business partner, ESPN, something the ACC doesn't know how to
do and has not figured out. And yeah, I get
really heated about this because I spend way too much money,
I care way too much. Yes, it's entertainment, that's what
it is. But when you don't follow the basic rules

(01:22:45):
of fairness and you don't actually fight for what's right
and fight against what is just wrong, Yes, it's an energy,
but to literally see pure manipulation be used to punish
your product and you sit there silently and do nothing.
Come on, man, this has been You know, the ACC

(01:23:09):
is in a worse position because of the leadership that
it has right now, not a better persition. Miami's in
a better position personally because they basically had to take
matters into their own hands. Clemson in Florida State tried
to take matters in their own hands with lawsuits. I
think they got so focused on lawsuits they forgot how
to build football teams. Miami at least sat there and said, fine,
we're just gonna do what we can to schedule. By

(01:23:30):
the way, we just had South Carolina cancel a game
with Miami because of these conference scheduling issues. But at
least it's an attempt to try to schedule Power four.
But you know, I understand why South Carolina they have
to do. You know, if they have to do a
ninth SEC game plus their annual matchup with Clemson, they
didn't want to have eleven of their twelve games be
against Power four. Now I wouldn't mind. That'd be kind

(01:23:51):
of nice. Now, as for the weekend, obviously, if Duke
had lost a wake for US, Miami would be in
this ACC title game, and the playoff Committee's problems would
have been solved. But now they're not solved, and now
they've got to decide between all these ten and two teams,
and you know, I do not think any playoff that

(01:24:14):
includes Notre Dame but does include Miami is fair. And
if it's the third straight year that it's always the
it's the ACC that gets booted, then the ACC should
stop scheduling Notre Dame completely. Every single school should cancel.
If games against Notre Dame don't count, then why schedule them?
Why put your players through that? So I think that's

(01:24:37):
that's got to be a serious situation that people need
to be thinking about. I find it comical that there's
this Texas contingent that thinks, after losing to Florida, the
way they lost to Florida, going to overtime against Kentucky,
almost losing to Mississippi State, that there's that a victory
over a Texas A and M team that was not

(01:24:59):
putting one hundred percent of their focus on this game
because it literally was a meaningless game. Yes, it mattered
to the alums, but I don't think it mattered to
the coaching staff for the players. And we're supposed to
now say Texas is a part of the playoff. Sorry, guys,
don't go to over time at Kentucky A team that
just got shut up by forty points by Louisville and
one of those lowly acc teams by the way. So look,

(01:25:24):
I think it's going to come down to Alabama, Ole Miss,
Oklahoma because I do think this Old Miss coaching situation. Again,
if if Jordan Travis not being available to Florida State
was a reason to keep them out of the playoff,
then not having the offensive the offensive mastermind of Old

(01:25:45):
Miss involved in the playoff. Sorry, guys, you know this
is you know and in fact, this system I think
it sucks for the players, but guess what. This is
what Lane Kiffin put them in. This is the position
they got. They got put in. So you have a
choice to make. Either you've finish your job with ole

(01:26:05):
Miss h and let's let LSU hire somebody else. Yes,
do I think the transfer portal, window, timing and all
that should change, There's no doubt about it. But Ole
Miss is not going to be the same. If they
don't win a game, We're gonna say, well, if Lane
Keivin had been there, right, So I think if you're
gonna again, if if Jordan Travis was a precedent setter

(01:26:27):
by this playoff committee, then I suspect Ole Miss will
get left out. Not again. I don't think that's fair.
I'm you know, I think that's that that sucks. By
the way, Ole Miss, be careful of hiring the popular
assistant that the players want. Miami did this in two
after the two thousand season with Larry Koker. It worked

(01:26:47):
for you know, it worked until it didn't. It's it
is it's it helps you if you really think you're
that close to winning the whole thing. It worked right,
and Miami had a bunch of senior leadership going into
that first year of Cocher with Ed Reid and Ken Dorsey,
and they had coaches on the field. But I don't know.

(01:27:08):
But I could also argue that because they went in
a direction that they probably wouldn't have gone under any
other circumstance. The program hit hard times, much quicker, much
faster than it should have or suspected that it should have.
But let's just say the weekend look, I was certainly
pulling for LSU, I was pulling for Auburn. There's no

(01:27:30):
doubt it would have been nice to see one of
those teams lose. But ultimately it's going to be this
conversation between Miami Notre Dame. If Alabama loses to Georgia
does a three loss Alabama team, Yes, I know they
made the SEC Final. I'm sorry. If you are going
to compare Miami and Alabama, they have a common opponent.

(01:27:51):
Miami beat the common opponent, Alabama loss of the common opponent.
If you're going to put up Oklahoma and Miami, I
think it's not even a close call when you look
at the two offenses, and the defenses are pretty similar. Obviously,
Miami beat Notre Dame had to head, so I don't

(01:28:11):
think it's really that difficult. I think it's it's a lot.
You have to come up with more convoluted reasons to
keep Miami out than to put them in. Right there,
there's sort of there are more logical reasons to include them.
Last year it was harder. Okay, Miami also ended the
season poorly this time. Mimi didn't end the season poorly
this year. To leave them out is to send a

(01:28:33):
message to the ACC and I think should invite a lawsuit,
multiple lawsuits, because this is there is no good explanation
other than some sort of of marketing or media preference,
which is not supposed to be in the criteria at all,

(01:28:54):
And this is all that any of us are begging for.
Can you just give us criteria that we know at
the beginning of the season, so that you know there
is it's purposely ambiguous, so they can pick and choose
what teams that they want, so that they don't have
to include certain teams that they don't want to include, which,

(01:29:15):
of course sends a terrible message to our youth in America. Right,
are we americatocracy? You know what's supposed to make America
different is that we're a meritocracy and things get Hey,
what happened on the field? Right? Did you have it
on the field? What happened on the field? What happened
in real life? Don't tell me what happens in a
statistical analysis, tell me what actually happened. If we are

(01:29:38):
not going to live in the real world and we
are just going to manufacture this, And why isn't all
sports become the WWE Because we are getting awfully close
to getting there with the way this ridiculous committee works,
and we're in a period of time where we don't
trust institutions as it is, and we're certainly not got

(01:30:00):
to trust this institution, and and the thing is is
that if anybody else were sitting in Miami's shoes, they
would be just as annoyed at this injustice, be just
as and you just sit there going, you know, why
can't we just have fairness? All we're asking for is fairness.
And right now the ACC is not treated with any
fairness whatsoever by ESPN and and and its invitational committee,

(01:30:24):
and their behavior here has really been a turn off.
I did not watch a single bit of ESPN commentary
because I knew it was going to be a bunch
of horseshit bullshit about Texas and a bunch of hot
you know, especially on Saturday morning, and the planting of
the seeds of these absurd arguments that somehow you have

(01:30:44):
to dismiss an actual result that took place on the field.
It is literally I do think they are participating in
the very definition of gas landing. So ten days obviously,
I've got to h you know, I am prepared for
what's likely going to happen, which is that somehow Miami
gets screwed out of this due to poor ACC leadership.

(01:31:10):
But if I if you take away one thing from here,
and the one thing that I as much as I
get upset about ESPN and the SEC and what they do,
ACC has terrible leadership and it's got to change the
fact that Duke was A system was created that allowed
a seven and five team that played that lost to
Yukon and Tulane got into the Witch Championship game. That's

(01:31:32):
on you, Jim Phillips and the ACC. This is not
a smart way to do this. This was not in
the best interest of the ACC, and you have hurt
financially every single member school at the ACC. Other than that,
you're doing a terrific job. All right. With that, I'll
see in forty eight hours when we get our first
taste of what the College Football Committee has to say.

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Chuck’s Commentary - The Full Spectrum of Trump: Chaos Abroad, Division at Home + We Need To Amend The Pardon Power

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Chuck’s Commentary - The Full Spectrum of Trump: Chaos Abroad, Division at Home + We Need To Amend The Pardon Power