I get the feeling that God is minding some other Solar System at the moment because this happened and there has so far been no obvious divine retribution for it.
[Rep. Darrell] Issa warned that the country’s democracy will only survive if a press is willing to undertake investigative reporting and work with whistleblowers, crediting journalists like [Sharyl] Attkisson as the only way his committee “has been able to succeed at anything.”
“My [Government Oversight] committee is a desert island if not for a press that will look at something fairly, scrutinize it, but if they see a there, there, report it,” he said. “When an administration says ‘no,’ it’s no different than when Andrew Jackson marched Indians down the Trail of Tears, to their death.”
If I were the Creator of the Universe, there would be scorched Earth wherever Darrell Issa was standing when he made these remarks. And Issa would be a smoldering husk.
But maybe we should talk about Andrew Jackson a little bit. His face is still on my $20 bill and he’s honored at countless Jefferson-Jackson dinners held by Democrats all over this country. I am forgiving of people who came of age in different times with different moral standards and vastly different circumstances, but there’s a line there that I think Jackson crossed with Native Americans. Personally, I find it easier to look beyond Jefferson’s transgressions against modern Democratic Party values than Jackson’s.
So, when the Cheney Administration was routinely committing crimes against humanity and stonewalling Congress, that was no different than…?
Let’s get Teddy Roosevelt on the $20! He’s a progressive Republican. Everyone will be happy!
The Republicans disowned him a long time ago.
Jefferson is credited, on his return from Europe (including Italy), as having brought the recipe for macaroni and cheese to North America. This alone absolves any moral transgressions.
Attkinson should have stuck with being a TV newsreader because apparently all her years on the job training at CBS and her “J” school degree never taught her how to be a reporter much less an investigative reporter.
Oh for the days when journalists were working class men and women. Learned their craft more as apprentices than in some classrooms. Like Pete Hamill and Carl Bernstein, they were also better writers.
The difference couldn’t be clearer from the first few pages of “Her Way: …” and “A Woman in Charge.” Gerth and Van Natta’s prose is turgid (and these were NYTimes guys) and their facts sloppy. Bernstein’s prose sings and zings. (I gave “Her Way:…” fifty pages before I couldn’t take any more.)
The Hill: Feds to allow Chinese chicken imports. Nice to know that China produces/processes more chicken than the Chinese need. But if the US can’t supply enough for US consumers, maybe we should eat less chicken. Or are we trading the higher quality chicken to satisfy the newly wealthy Chinese and importing China’s low quality crap to further bamboozle the low-income/poor USians that they are “middle-class” because they still have a chicken in their pots?
Putin has embargoed US chickens. Maybe HE should buy the Chinese chickens. Or doesn’t Russia have anything that the Chinese are willing to tradev for?
Russia has oil and gas. China doesn’t. And Putin knows better than to take China’s surplus chickens.
OTOH, China may have said to US, take our chickens or we’ll dump your T-Bills.
I don’t know, he does have go through his whole life being Darrell Issa. He must have done something pretty atrocious in his previous life to deserve that.
A cockroach. But he was an evil cockroach so this turn of the wheel he was demoted to Darryl Issa.
There’s also a basic irony in having Andrew Jackson on a Federal Reserve note. Another one of his accomplishments was to kill the Second Bank of the United States, and I don’t see why he would be any less hostile to the Federal Reserve. He probably wouldn’t have been too happy about having his face on the $20 bill himself, so maybe it’s a fitting punishment from his point of view.