This July 4th marked by Jackson memorial, WaPo blowup, N. Korea rockets
Friday, July 3, 2009 at 11:37AM On Saturday, we'll observe our country’s official birthday. We’ll cheer the occasion with cookouts and fireworks. Media and bloggers will talk up some of our nation’s founding documents since there’s a solid paper trail dating to the first whispers of the fight for freedom. If we tucked away a newspaper in observance of July 4, 2009, what events would be committed for posterity?
We could start with the Washington Post’s salon gone bust. Politico reported publisher Katharine Weymouth nixed the big do at her house, where “for as much as $250,000, the Post offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record access to ‘those powerful few’— Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and even the paper’s own reporters and editors.” As other media outlets and pundits assailed the publisher, they quite naturally missed the boat on the real issue. [Story continued below photo.]
President Calvin Coolidge signs the tax bill that would eventually be called ‘Mellon’s Tax Plan.’ Financier and industrialist Andrew William Mellon was secretary of the treasury from 1921 to 1931, a term of office that spanned the administrations of Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. During his years as secretary of the treasury, taxes and the national debt were substantially reduced. This seeming paradox was effected, in part, by drastic budget cuts. In 1924, Mellon published Taxation: The People's Business, a plan to put more money in the hands of consumers and businessmen by reducing the federal income tax. His proposal bore fruit in the Revenue Acts of 1924, 1926, and 1928. Andrew Mellon is shown at far left in this picture taken Feb. 26, 1926. Others shown are: Senator Simmons, Rep. John Q. Tilson, Rep. John N. Garner, Senator Reed Smoot, Director of the Budget Lord, Rep. William R. Green standing behind President Coolidge as he signs tax bill.[Photo in public domain from Underwood and Underwood collection, the US Library of Congress.]
Weymouth, if she planned to charge up to $250k, had to feel confident she could get “those powerful few” over for a toast and a little quid pro quo. That’s pretty brassy, to make the type of guarantee that made her confident enough to accept money. That, by the way, is the real story no one’s looking into.
Are you finally convinced much of major media functions as a de facto arm of the government, having been completely ‘Obamatized?’ Happy Birthday, USA.
