Chuck Todd To Have Weekend Political Show

After Tim Russert’s death Chuck Todd was my top pick to take over as moderator of Meet the Press assuming we were limited to people at NBC News. I didn’t really think that Todd would receive the post due to his relative inexperience, suspecting that Russert was grooming him for such a job at a later date. David Gregory got the post instead, but has not been very impressive. Perhaps NBC sees the need to rapidly prepare Todd for such a high profile spot. The New York Observer reports that MSNBC is preparing a weekend political show for him:

The new show on MSNBC, to debut in late spring, would give Mr. Todd more experience as a political moderator and provide him with a good opportunity to develop his long-form interviewing skills. At the same time, it would give MSNBC an original political program to show off on a weekend schedule that is currently dominated by crime documentaries and taped content.

According to sources, the specifics of the show—live vs. taped, one-on-one interview vs. a panel of guests, half-hour vs. an hour, Saturday vs. Sunday—are still being worked out. Presumably the show will originate out of NBC’s Washington D.C. bureau, where Mr. Todd is stationed. Staffing has yet to be determined.

The only problem is that there are now far too many political shows to even try to keep up with, unless someone wants to spend a big chunk of the weekend watching television. Besides the major interview shows from each network there is a growing number of additional shows. Chris Matthews has one Sunday show where he is generally calmer than he is on Hardball. Perhaps the best of the newer Sunday interview shows is Fareed Zakaria — GPS on CNN.

Update: On second thought, Todd has been disappointing in some of his questions since moving to White House correspondant (as I noted here). Hopefully he will improve on an interview show.

Area 51 Information Declassified

area51

Area 51 is the site for conspiracy theories involving UFO’s. The Los Angeles Times reports that information related to the site has been declassified and people who worked there are now telling stories of what did happen there. I don’t know if conspiracy theorists will believe these stories, but they are interesting. Here is one from Kenneth Collins a CIA experimental test pilot:

On May 24, 1963, Collins flew out of Area 51’s restricted airspace in a top-secret spy plane code-named OXCART, built by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. He was flying over Utah when the aircraft pitched, flipped and headed toward a crash. He ejected into a field of weeds.

Almost 46 years later, in late fall of 2008, sitting in a coffee shop in the San Fernando Valley, Collins remembers that day with the kind of clarity the threat of a national security breach evokes: “Three guys came driving toward me in a pickup. I saw they had the aircraft canopy in the back. They offered to take me to my plane.” Until that moment, no civilian without a top-secret security clearance had ever laid eyes on the airplane Collins was flying. “I told them not to go near the aircraft. I said it had a nuclear weapon on-board.” The story fit right into the Cold War backdrop of the day, as many atomic tests took place in Nevada. Spooked, the men drove Collins to the local highway patrol. The CIA disguised the accident as involving a generic Air Force plane, the F-105, which is how the event is still listed in official records.

As for the guys who picked him up, they were tracked down and told to sign national security nondisclosures. As part of Collins’ own debriefing, the CIA asked the decorated pilot to take truth serum. “They wanted to see if there was anything I’d for-gotten about the events leading up to the crash.” The Sodium Pento-thal experience went without a hitch—except for the reaction of his wife, Jane.

“Late Sunday, three CIA agents brought me home. One drove my car; the other two carried me inside and laid me down on the couch. I was loopy from the drugs. They handed Jane the car keys and left without saying a word.” The only conclusion she could draw was that her husband had gone out and gotten drunk. “Boy, was she mad,” says Collins with a chuckle.

They deny the rumors of reverse-engineering alien UFO’s but do say that they did reverse-engineer some foreign technology including a  Soviet MiG fighter jet.