On Thursday, NBC’s Chuck Todd challenged Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) claim that the Obama administration has created a “culture of intimidation” in which “everything is about politics and destroying your opponent and dividing the American people for your electoral gain,” pointing out that the Rubio’s own PAC is actively fundraising from the ongoing scandals in Washington.

“Your PAC put out an e-mail raising money on IRS issue and doing a petition,” Todd said. “That’s campaigning. That’s politics too.” Rubio disagreed, saying that his PAC is merely trying to rally the American people against government abuse:

RUBIO: Here’s the point. I’m trying to get a petition of American citizens and Americans who support us in this endeavor to rally people. That’s different to say I’ll put on my website every donor to the Obama campaign and attack that individual, a private citizen by name, and I’m going to try to create this culture where people feel intimidated and oppose me. That’s two different things I’m talking about.

Watch it:

Rubio has also called for the acting IRS commissioner to be fired, introduced legislation creating criminal penalties for IRS officials who engage in political targeting and asked his supporters for money. In the eight days since the story broke, Rubio’s senate office put out seven different press releases about the IRS and he has granted numerous print, radio and TV interviews to discuss the matter.

Rubio’s Reclaim America PAC is running a petition asking supporters to “Stand with Marco and demand an investigation of the IRS” and is fundraising off of the story. “If there was ever a time for conservatives to take a stand against an expanding federal government, it is now,” his PAC’s fundraising pitch reads. “Together we can use this scandal to demonstrate to Americans of all backgrounds just how dangerous the status quo has become in Washington. But we’ll need all hands on deck. You can help by contributing to the Reclaim America PAC today.”

Rubio is widely considered a likely candidate to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

Apparently Chuck Todd asked President Obama why he isn’t asking people to “sacrifice” more amidst the recession.

The standard progressive answer to this starts by observing that the hundreds of thousands of people who are losing their jobs each week are, presumably, sacrificing. I take it that their spouses and kids are also sacrificing. And though they don’t count in the job loss tallies, I also spare some thoughts for the young people leaving school and coming into the workforce at a time when nobody’s hiring anyone. This all seems like a lot of sacrifice.

But there’s also some more fundamental misconceptions going on here. A lot of people in the press seem obsessed with the idea that it would be noble for politicians to ask people to sacrifice. But in general, the whole idea in public policy is to make things better, not worse, so the logic here is a bit hard to understand. It’s true that Charles Murray seems to think that suffering promotes virtue but this doesn’t really make sense.

Alternatively, underlying this is the idea that if some of us sacrificed that would make things better for other people. This is true in a certain narrow sense. If Vikram Pandit sacrificed some of the money he has and mailed it to some unemployed former manufacturing workers in the rust belt, they’d be in somewhat better shape. But if Americans were to collectively sacrifice—everyone agree to eat only potatoes on Wednesdays or something—that wouldn’t help anyone except the potato farmers. Consumption in a market economically is almost always a positive-sum exchange; economic growth, and therefore prosperity, requires more economic activity, not more sacrifice. If the big national problem were a giant war, things might be different—we could all conserve gasoline and save it to fuel the tanks. But it’s hard to see how sacrifice could solve the problem of rapidly rising unemployment.

I’ve generally liked Chuck Todd’s emergence as a TV talking head, but I’m not really sure it’s appropriate to just allege without evidence that Charlie Crist is entering into a sham engagement:

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The best thing about Todd when he first emerged as an on-air personality was that he was sticking so rigorously to the facts, the numbers, and the ins-and-outs of the Democratic Primary rule. It was like the kind of strictly business coverage you usually get at National Journal (where, of course, he used to work) except on television. But I suppose one problem with television is that if you do well on it, you get pushed to do more-and-more TVesque stuff like this.