Haley and the kidney

Procrastination is good. I knew if I waited long enough, someone, in this case the AP, would write about the ethical implications of Haley Barbour pardoning the Scott sisters on the condition that Gladys give a kidney to Jamie. I’m so glad that Barbour has found a way of giving something to the black folks that won’t piss off his white racist base too much, and save the state hundreds of thousands in dialysis costs at the same time, but this is an ethical slippery slope. He can and should pardon them (16 years served so far for an $11 robbery!) so they can do the transplant, but making it a condition is a step too far, especially in a state that used to mass arrest black people on vagrancy and other flimsy charges and put them on chain gangs right before harvest season. We do not use our prisoners for spare parts.

Today -100: December 31, 1910: Of bathtub men

Headline of the Day -100: “Bathtub Men’s Plea for Clemency Fails.” This would be 14 corporations and 37 individuals comprising the Bathtub Trust, currently being prosecuted under the Sherman Anti-Trust Law. The Justice Dept is going after them personally, seeking jail sentences.

Today -100: December 30, 1910: Of mercenaries, white-capping, and lepers in cars

There’s a revolution going on in Honduras, led by ousted President Gen. Manuel Bonilla and the improbably named Gen. Lee Christmas, an American mercenary. This “revolution” was financed by the United Fruit Company. The NYT thinks that a recent story of two Americans being whipped by the Honduran police is a plant.

80 prominent farmers in Corsicana, Texas are indicted for “white-capping” (basically KKK-type vigilante intimidation) aimed at driving negroes out of the county.

Two Headlines of the Day -100 today, both public transportation related. #1:“Lepers Ride in Cars.”
#2: “Dies in Sleeping Car.”

Today -100: December 29, 1910: Of amateur politicians, resurrections, and street cars

In a speech to the City Club of St Louis, NJ Governor-Elect Woodrow Wilson says that this is the day of the amateur politician, the politician not seeking personal gain. I wonder who he has in mind? He also said, “You can trust the people providing you serve them. Reveal everything and the people will be just; conceal anything and make them jealous.” “Force public officials to report often and watch their eyes to see if they are telling you all they know.”

Some Christian Scientists are protesting the placing of an armed guard at the cemetery where Mary Baker Eddy’s body is waiting to be interred, because they expect her to be resurrected.

There are riots and shooting in a border war between Chicago and its suburbs, whose residents are now being charged double fares to ride street cars into Chicago.

Today -100: December 28, 1910: Of men in small spaces

Cornelius Dayton, who went insane when serving in the Civil War, has been kept for the last 45 years in a cage on the family farm in Connecticut.

In West Virginia a lynching is thwarted when a negro prisoner was kept from the mob for several hours in the railroad station’s safe. He almost died of suffocation.

Okay, I thought I was done with Obama before. NOW I’m done with Obama.

Obama took time out of his presumably busy schedule to call the owner of the Philadelphia Eagles to thank him for hiring perpetrator of violence against animals Michael Vick.

Today -100: December 27, 1910: Of suffrage, interrupted toilets, pigs, mistletoe, and Sunday baseball

There have been several letters in the NYT over the last couple of weeks -100 about whether or not female students at Barnard College have any interest in women’s suffrage. Now an editorial informs us that “The organization of suffrage clubs in the women’s colleges is not spontaneous, the idea of it is hardly tolerated by the majority in the undergraduate bodies. The young women do not go to college to argue politics or to let the subject intrude upon their studies. It offends them. ... Outside the colleges the agitation of the suffragists has wrought no demonstrable good. It can do no good within them, and it has no rightful place within them.” So that settles that.

Headline of the Day -100: “Morok’s Aeroplane Interrupts Toilet.” Belgian aviator Charles Frank Morok set off from North Bergen, NJ, only to crash into the second floor of a house “where a young woman was completing her toilet at the time.”

On Christmas, there was an explosion at the Llewellyn Iron Works in Los Angeles, part of an ongoing labor dispute. Now, 1,000 LA businessmen have formed a “vigilance committee” to beat up labor organizers, meet union agitators at the train station and turn them away, etc. A police captain says this is just what is needed.

The US sends a gunboat to Honduras. Just because.

Other Headline of the Day -100: “Won’t Let Woman Live with Pigs.” The Health Dept won’t let a woman back into her home in the, um, “Polackville” section of Queens.

Christmas-y Headline of the Day -100: “Mistletoe Kills Children.”

NY Governor-Elect Dix is such a politician: “I have never expressed myself on the subject of Sunday baseball.”

Today -100: December 26, 1910: Of common malefactors & robbers, strikes, and peacemaker’s heads

The governor of Chihuahua issues a proclamation calling for all citizens to organize themselves to fight the rebels and deriding the latter as common malefactors and robbers.

Employees of the Pressed Steel Car Company of Pittsburg are threatening to strike. 1909’s strike was accompanied by violence and this year plant workers have been buying rifles discarded by the Army. Oh, and they’re “foreigners.”

Christmas-y Headline of the Day -100: “Peacemaker’s Head Nearly Severed.” One Albert Hibbs in Camden, NJ, who tried to stop two negroes fighting (Hibbs’s race is not mentioned, which means he was white, since the 1910 NYT was incapable of referring to any African-American without making their race clear).

GOP gadgets

Republicans are proposing to allow members of Congress to bring their electronic gadgets into the House chamber – iPads, Blackberries, vibrators, etc. After all, Dick Cheney used to preside over the Senate, and he’s more machine than man.

CONTEST: What gadgets might be appropriate for Republican congresscritters in either House, collectively or for individuals, such as the iCurmudgeon, which reminds him what he’s cranky about on a real-time basis.