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Sarah Palin spoke at the tea party convention.
OKAY, HOW’S THAT DOPEY, DERANGE-Y STUFF WORKING OUT FOR YOU? “How’s that hope-y, change-y stuff workin’ out for you?”
LIKE, DID YA EVER NOTICE THAT DOG SPELLED BACKWARDS IS GOD? “Let us not get bogged down in the small squabbles. Let us get caught up in the big ideas.”
LECTERNS ARE ENDANGERING AMERICA! LECTERNS ARE EMBOLDENING THE TERRORISTS! “Treating this like a mere law enforcement matter places our country at great risk because that’s not how radical Islamic extremists are looking at this. They know we’re at war, and to win that war we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.” I love the airy dismissal of “mere” law enforcement, and the suggestion that the way we “look at this” should be determined by radical Islamic extremists.
AND THEN MAYBE THE DESERT MENU: “America is ready for another revolution”. She also called Scott Brown’s election a “chowder revolution.”
BUT ONLY IF PEOPLE WHO ARE SEEKING FREEDOM FROM REPRESSIVE REGIMES ARE AS CONFUSED AS SARAH IS: “Around the world, people who are seeking freedom from repressive regimes wonder if Alaska is still that beacon of hope for their cause.”
GROUND-UP BEEF (OR MOOSE): “The tea party movement is not a top-down operation. It’s a ground-up call to action that is forcing both parties to change the way that they’re doing business, and that’s beautiful”.
SO TIRED: “We are just so tired of hearing the talk, talk, talk.” Says the person giving a speech, who quit her job in order to go on tv and talk.
WHAT SARAH WILL DO: “I will live, I will die for the people of America.” She did not say how she was planning to do that. Suggestions on how Sarah can die for the people of America in comments.
The national debt “should tick us off.”
WHAT THE FUTURE OF POLITICS IS: “The tea party movement is the future of politics”.
DON’T FAKE IT: “I would not be making the promises of bipartisanship if the promises can’t be fulfilled. Don’t fake it, don’t pretend that you want to work with the other party on [health care] because distrust is building and that makes us distrust all the decisions coming out of Washington and it makes us a less secure nation”. The logic is impeccable.
(Update: I’ve got the transcript now. More here.)
The Philadelphia shirtwaist strike is over. Wages will be decided by a shop committee, with binding arbitration in case of disagreement with the employers; a 52½-hour work week. No recognition of the union. The NYT hasn’t mentioned the NY strike in quite a while; I’m assuming it petered out.
Marilla Ricker (1840-1920), the first woman lawyer in New Hampshire, has announced that she is running for governor of the state (no, women did not have the vote in NH).
Mrs. Alva Belmont, president of the Political Equality Association, speaking at a presumably black Baptist church, invites black supporters of women’s suffragists to join the Association. The NYT says this was the first “colored meeting” in support of women’s suffrage ever held in NYC.
Chief Little Bison visited Nicaragua, where he hopes to relocate 8,000 Sioux from the South Dakota reservation, but President Madriz is worried that it’s some sort of plot with the insurgents under Gen. Estrada.
Former Vice President Fairbanks is visiting Italy. The pope cancels a scheduled meeting with him because he also planned to speak in the American Methodist Church in Rome. The pope objects to Methodists proselytizing among Italian Catholics.
WaPo headline: “U.S. Outpost in Afghanistan Was Left Vulnerable to Attack, Inquiry Finds.” So the outpost that was attacked was vulnerable to attack, you say? Good job, military inquiry!
President Taft has promised to attend the American-Polish national congress in May, and Germany is pissed off. Rather like China complaining about Obama meeting the Dalai Lama. The Conservative Post (Berlin) says this would be a deliberate and unfriendly challenge to Germany, Russia and Austria, the countries which carved up Poland.
British suffragette leader Christabel Pankhurst tells the NYT that the Women’s Social and Political Union will declare a truce in militant tactics as an experiment to see whether the new cabinet and the new Parliament will “yield to peaceful agitation”. She thinks that the loss of Asquith’s majority may make him more amenable to pressure (Spoiler alert: no it won’t).
In 1909, 37,261 patents were issued. Of those, 5,232 went to New Yorkers, the most of any state. 38 went to Nevada.
A messenger boy for the stock exchange company Hornblower & Weeks lost a $10,000 bill. He stopped to show it to his friends and it disappeared.
Dr. William Lawrence Woodruff, the author of Therapeutics of Vibration: The Healing of the Sick, an Exact Science, who believed in “the simple life and Spartan methods of raising children” and “first practiced his theories on his infant children, who thrive on coarse foods and ice baths and the wearing of only a single garment even in the coldest weather,” has died. A fat patient fell on him.
WaPo headline: “Snowstorm’s Intensity Has D.C. Region Hunkering Down.” Since it’s D.C., I suspect a euphemism.
CONTEST: What does it mean for residents of Washington D.C. to “hunker down?”
Nothing of interest in the NYT today, so I’ll backtrack to the British general election, which I think is finally finished. In those days voting didn’t take place in one day but over a couple of weeks – someone could lose in one constituency, then stand again somewhere else in the same general election. The result was a near exact split between Conservatives and Liberals, 273 to 275, but with the Liberal government firmly in control of Parliament with the support of the Irish Nationalists (82) and Labour (40, up from just 2 in 1900 and 30 in 1906). But the closeness between the two major parties gave the heavily Conservative House of Lords the excuse to continue obstructing implementation of the Liberal platform, leading to another “peers versus the people” election in December.
Thomas Watson, twice the Populist candidate for president, in that party’s declining years, fiercely criticizes Andrew Carnegie for saying that “the lowest negro of the South is more advanced than were my ancestors in Scotland 200 years ago.” Sez Watson, “Every intelligent man knows that in saying what he did about the Scotch, he lied, and in blarneying the Afro-Americans he despicably lowered himself: at the same time he insulted – fragrantly – grossly – infamously – every man that has in his veins the blood of old Scotland.”
One of the many well-off Northerners who paid a substitute to fight for them in the Civil War was one Abraham Lincoln. A statue to his substitute, J. Summerfield Staples, who died 10 years before, has been proposed for his home town of Stroudsburg, PA.
Quote of the Day: An AP article about the opinions of military personnel about gays in the military quotes an ex-infantry sergeant: “These are grunts, ground-pounding guys. They’re not gonna be thinking, I want to have a homosexual.”
Republican congresscritters agree with President Taft on a legislative program: statehood for Arizona and New Mexico, an appointed legislative council for Alaska, postal savings banks, creating a court of commerce, and something I don’t quite understand about conservation of public lands. The Republicans seem united despite strong disagreements within the party, with the “insurgents” trying to oust or at least reduce the powers of Speaker of the House Joe Cannon.
Headline of the Day -100: “Biggest Thigh Bone Found.” Turns out to be one of a set of dinosaur bones from Tanganyika and not, as you might have expected, William Howard Taft’s.
In Indiana a woman runs into her husband, who she had believed was killed in the Civil War. She sold the house moved away, so he could not find her when he came home from war. She remarried 40 years ago, presumably bigamously, but her second husband died 10 months ago. She will now re-marry her first husband.
The caption on this picture reads “Vatican City: A dove flies back into Pope Benedict XVI’s apartment after he released it.”
Evidently papal events are now based on Alfred Hitchcock movies. Which sort of explains why Pope John Paul II’s stuffed corpse is propped up on a throne in the basement of the Vatican.
CONTEST: Anyone have a papal “Strangers on a Train” joke? Rear Window? North by Northwest?
Names of the Day -100: Senator Fountain Land Thompson of North Dakota has resigned after less than two months in office following the death of the previous senator. This was news in D.C., which only found out about the doings in ND when his successor showed up, vouched for by the other ND senator, a Porter J. McCumber. Senators were still elected by state legislatures, but here’s something I didn’t know: the dates of those elections weren’t uniform. ND, for example, became a state in 1899, so McCumber, chosen then, was re-elected by the Legislature in 1905 and 1911.
Some corporations will refuse to file returns required by the corporation tax law, believing the law to be unconstitutional (the Supreme Court will be hearing a challenge in March). They fear that the real purpose of the law is not collecting the 1% tax, but collecting the information about the corporations from their returns.
Car license wars: New Jersey does not recognize car licenses from other states, so people whose cars are registered elsewhere have to pay additional fees before they can drive them in Joisey. Since other states don’t do this, there is an incentive for car owners in nearby states to register in NJ and only have to pay one fee. So nearly half the 34,000 cars registered in NJ belong to New Yorkers. The New York Legislature is about to consider a retaliatory measure, requiring licenses for people from states that do not recognize non-resident licenses. Penn. & Delaware already have such laws.
A Suffrage Settlement House opens in Harlem, financed by Mrs. Belmont. One of the speakers was Fanny Villard, who the NYT fails to mention was the daughter of William Lloyd Garrison. She said that she was the 2nd largest taxpayer in Dobbs Ferry, NY, but had no power to regulate or shut down its 26 saloons. And if women had the vote there would be no need of an army or navy, because the influence of women would make war unnecessary.
Obama had a “YouTube interview” today.
HE’S GOT A CERTIFICATE! “I would say that we have been certified by independent groups as the most transparent White House in history.”
YOU’D THINK THOMAS JEFFERSON WOULD HAVE HAD THAT ON JEFFERƒON.GOV, BUT EVIDENTLY NOT: “We are the first White House since the founding of the republic to list every visitor that comes into the White House online so that you can look it up.”
SEE, AND YOU THOUGHT OBAMA DIDN’T BELIEVE IN ANYTHING: “Well, I’m a big believer in net neutrality.”
ALTHOUGH GOD KNOWS WE’RE TRYING: “Al Qaeda is probably the biggest killer of innocent Muslims of any entity out there.” Israel is also trying pretty hard. Actually, the competition to be the biggest killer of innocent Muslims is rather fierce.
NOT ACTUALLY IN YEMEN AND PAKISTAN, JUST IN PLACES LIKE THEM: “We have to project economically, working in country like a Yemen, that is extraordinarily poor, to make sure that young people there have opportunity. The same is true in a place like Pakistan.”
Taft tells reporters that he enjoys strolling around D.C., looking in the shop windows, and “seeing some person give him a long look and then look away, while the next person would give a second look, then poke his companion in the ribs, ‘and in the dignity paid by Americans to high office, call out, “Hello, Taft!”’”
A NYT editorial says “We should advise our friends the protectionists not to ‘get gay’ over the statistics that show that more goods have come in free under the Aldrich tariff than under any other, and rather more than the total of dutiable goods.” So don’t get gay over that.
I’ve been skipping the many NYT stories about flooding in Paris, but there’s a new book, “Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910,” (see the NYT Book Review review of it).
Quote of the Day: Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce, who wants to legalize the carrying of concealed firearms without a permit, says with the current law, “All we’re doing is handcuffing good people, restricting their constitutional, God-given right to carry and perhaps their ability to defend their families.”
The price of Bibles is about to go up.
Federal agents have been investigating cotton plantations in Texas, where 2,000+ people – white as well as negro, the NYT reports breathlessly – have been held in a state of peonage after being abducted by force.
A single Pennsylvania train manages to get into two separate accidents, killing a husband and wife at a crossing, and hitting a car a few miles later, throwing it into the air and killing two passengers.
Harvard Prof. Franklin White, an expert on dietetics, says that workingmen could easily live on just 20¢ a day worth of food. For example, a nice meal of corn mush flavored with margarine and some cheap syrup would only cost 4¢ and fuel a day of hard labor. Or how about a potato flavored with smoked herring. Yum.
We knew there’d be a problem with the trial of Scott Roeder when we heard that Judge Warren Wilbert paid for an election ad in the Kansans for Life newsletter in 2008. Turns out he’s as competent as he is ethical. First he allows Roeder to premise his entire defense on the argument that Dr. Tiller needed killing, then, evidently realizing that there was no basis in law for such an argument, took away the jury’s option of convicting for voluntary manslaughter rather than first-degree murder. While that was (at last) the right decision legally, the whole judicial bait and switch undermined Roeder to the point where the conviction might well be, and probably should, overturned. He was allowed to base his whole defense on a strategy aimed at securing a manslaughter verdict, effectively putting on no defense against first degree. He might, for example, not have admitted that he had considered chopping off Tiller’s arms with a sword rather than killing him, but realized that he would still be able to teach others abortion procedures. This idiot judge gave Roeder a platform, but didn’t give him a fair trial.
Obama told the House Republicans, “They didn’t send us to Washington to fight each other in some sort of political steel-cage match to see who comes out alive.” Well, yeah, but only because we didn’t know that option was available. Put the “Political Steel-Cage Match To See Who Comes Out Alive Act of 2010” on the ballot and see what happens.
Kaiser Wilhelm’s 51st birthday, “and the entire Fatherland song for twenty-four hours the patriotic refrain of ‘Hoch der Kaiser.’” (which I believe translates literally as “phlegm-like noise for the emperor.”)
An article by Jacques Bardoux in the French newspaper L’Opinion accuses Austria and Germany of conspiring in a scheme for the former to annex Serbia.
Lady Constance Lytton describes forcible feeding at length: “It was a living nightmare of pain, horror, and revolting degradation. The sensation is that of being strangled and suffocated by the thrusting down of a large rubber tube which arouses great irritation in the throat and nausea in the stomach. ... There is also a feeling of complete helplessness, as of an animal in a trap”. “After the first time the doctor as he left me gave me a slap on the cheek, not violently, but apparently to express his contemptuous disapproval. I said to him the next day: ‘Unless you consider it part of your duty, would you please not strike me when you have finished your odious job?’”
In 2010, prisoners at Guantanamo are being forcibly fed three times a day, some of them for several years now.
Members of the court-martial in Nicaragua that “illegally” sentenced Groce and Cannon to death have been acquitted after former president Zelaya’s letters of instruction were shown to the court.
And in another sketchy report from the field, Estrada’s rebels may have defeated government forces in a battle at La Libertad.
NYPD Patrolman Arnold Samish, attempting to remove a drunk woman from the street car tracks on Lexington Ave., was attacked by “an unknown bulldog,” which removed his trousers. He had to walk 3 short and 1½ long blocks to his station house. “The urchins who attended the patrolman as far as the police station did their best to keep him from feeling lonesome.”
Scott Roeder, testifying in his trial for murdering Dr. George Tiller, said he is against abortion because “It is not man’s job to take life”. Um, right. Also, he is against abortion even in cases of rape or incest because “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
EXCEPT PHILOSOPHY MAJORS, OBVIOUSLY: “In the United States of America, no one should go broke because they chose to go to college.”
PETA wants Punxsutawney Phil the groundhog replaced in the Groundhog Day festival with a robot groundhog (William Deeley, president of the Inner Circle of the Groundhog Club, responds that Phil is “treated better than the average child in Pennsylvania”) (true fact: by Pennsylvania law and custom, children must dig their own burrows, in which they live until their seventeenth birthday). And if the robotic rodent sees its own shadow, well I for one welcome our new robogroundhog overlords.
Three more NYPD officers have been fired for clubbing citizens, including one who clubbed small children to break up a snowball fight. The mayor and police commissioner are also investigating police violence towards striking shirtwaist workers.
Wealthy aviator Charles B. Harmon insists in a lecture in Pasadena that aviation has rendered the battleship obsolete. “It has already been demonstrated that one balloon or aeroplane can carry enough explosives to annihilate any fleet in the world, while the warships would be powerless to protect themselves.”
A “colored woman suffrage mass meeting” will be held next month to organize a suffrage league among black women.
Indianapolis Mayor Shank has sentenced saloon keepers who broke the liquor laws to attend church, suspending their licences until they show a letter of attendance from a minister.
WILL THIS BE ON THE TEST? “Again, we are tested.”
GOSH, HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED: “One year ago, I took office amid two wars, an economy rocked by a severe recession, a financial system on the verge of collapse, and a government deeply in debt.”
BUT THE SHUTTER BUSINESS IS DOING GREAT! “But the devastation remains: One in ten Americans still can’t find work. Many businesses have shuttered.”
IT’S CALLED PENMANSHIP, TEACHERS: “I hear about them in the letters that I read each night. The toughest to read are those written by children”.
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION: “They don’t understand why it seems like bad behavior on Wall Street is rewarded, but hard work on Main Street isn’t”. You know, some people work quite hard at bad behaviour. Where’s their recognition? Where’s their recognition?
WAIT FOR THE PRESIDENT’S DAY SALE: “They’re tired of the partisanship and the shouting and the pettiness. They know we can’t afford it, not now.”
CONSTIPATION IS A TERRIBLE PROBLEM, ISN’T IT? “One woman wrote to me and said, ‘We are strained but hopeful, struggling but encouraged.’”
BUT STILL MORE POPULAR THAN JOE LIEBERMAN: “And if there’s one thing that has unified Democrats and Republicans -- and everybody in between -- it’s that we all hated the bank bailout. I hated it. (APPLAUSE) I hated it. I hated it. You hated it. It was about as popular as a root canal.”
LET’S INVADE THEM AND TAKE THAT SHIT! “There’s no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains or the new factories that manufacture clean-energy products.”
CONTENTIOUS, GRIDLOCKED – WHAT SILLY BILLY SAID THAT? “From the day I took office, I’ve been told that addressing our larger challenges is too ambitious, such effort would be too contentious. I’ve been told that our political system is too gridlocked and that we should just put things on hold for a while.”
AT THIS POINT WE’D SETTLE FOR SIXTH: “Well, I do not accept second place for the United States of America.”
BUT WE’VE ALREADY BOUGHT THE WHIPS AND THUMB SCREWS: “Look, I’m not interested in punishing banks.”
HE SORTA UNDERCUT THIS ONE BY EARLIER COMMENTS ABOUT THE NEED FOR “A NEW GENERATION OF SAFE, CLEAN NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS”: “I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change.”
HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP FOR EVERYBODY! “So tonight, we set a new goal: We will double our exports over the next five years, an increase that will support 2 million jobs in America.”
NO ONE AN ACCUSE HIM OF GETTING SOME LEGISLATIVE VICTORY UNDER HIS BELT: “I didn’t choose to tackle this issue [HCR] to get some legislative victory under my belt. And by now, it should be fairly obvious that I didn’t take on health care because it was good politics.”
MICHELLE IS TACKLING FAT KIDS: “I want to acknowledge our first lady, Michelle Obama, who this year is creating a national movement to tackle the epidemic of childhood obesity”.
“Still, this is a complex issue. And the longer it was debated, the more skeptical people became. I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people. And I know that with all the lobbying and horse-trading, this process left most Americans wondering, ‘What’s in it for me?’” A pony? (‘cause of the horse-trading. Try to keep up.)
THIS SPEECH IS A PRE-EXISTING CONDITION: “By the time I’m finished speaking tonight, more Americans will have lost their health insurance.”
HE THINKS REPUBLICANS WILL LET TEMPERATURES COOL. ISN’T THAT ADORABLE? “As temperatures cool, I want everyone to take another look at the plan we’ve proposed.”
WAIT, HAS NO ONE EVER TOLD HIM ABOUT SINGLE-PAYER? “But if anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know. Let me know. Let me know.”
Three-year discretionary spending freeze. Bipartisan Fiscal Commission, which “can’t be one of those Washington gimmicks that lets us pretend we solved a problem.”
NAKED JELLO WRESTLING? “Rather than fight the same tired battles that have dominated Washington for decades, it’s time to try something new.”
“With all due deference to separation of powers, last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections. I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests or, worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people.” Decided by the American people – isn’t he just adorable?
And he has a really specific proposal: “And I urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps correct some of these problems.”
NO, HE THOUGHT HE’D HAVE TO BE SWORN IN TOO: “Now, I’m not naive. I never thought that the mere fact of my election would usher in peace and harmony and some post-partisan era.”
THEY SHOULD DO IT BECAUSE IT’S FUNNY: “Neither party should delay or obstruct every single bill just because they can.”
BIDEN PREFERS TO TAKE THE TRAIN FOR THE HILLS: “To Democrats, I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades and the people expect us to solve problems, not run for the hills.” Really? Is that what people expect?
AND NOW, OBAMA TRIES TO SHAME THOSE WITHOUT SHAME. GOOD LUCK WITH THAT: “And if the Republican leadership is going to insist that 60 votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town, a supermajority, then the responsibility to govern is now yours, as well. Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it’s not leadership.”
SADLY: “Sadly, some of the unity we felt after 9/11 has dissipated.” Yeah, the unity that was exploited to curtail our freedoms and propel us into two wars, it’s so very sad to see any of that dissipate.
“MAKE NO MISTAKE” IS THE NEW “IN OTHER WORDS”: “But make no mistake: This war is ending, and all of our troops are coming home.”
INNOCENT BYSTANDER: “We have gone from a bystander to a leader in the fight against climate change.” Bystander? We were, and are, the leading contributor to climate change. We weren’t standing, we were driving our fat children to school in giant Hummers.
He says Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell will be repealed this very year.
I FORGET, WHICH IS THE TOP-RATED CABLE NEWS CHANNEL AGAIN? “The more that TV pundits reduce serious debates to silly arguments, big issues into sound bites, our citizens turn away.”
“Our administration has had some political setbacks this year, and some of them were deserved.” He did not say which ones.
“We have finished a difficult year. We have come through a difficult decade. But a new year has come. A new decade stretches before us.” Say what you will about the man, he totally knows how to read a calendar.
BIG FINISH: “We don’t quit. I don’t quit. Let’s seize this moment, to start anew, to carry the dream forward, and to strengthen our union once more.”
Rather than raise taxes on rich people, Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed cuts, or implemented them through the line-item veto, to support services for the blind and disabled, vision care for poor children, AIDS prevention, shelters for abused women, the welfare-to-work program, adult day-care, the Healthy Families program, etc etc etc. So why does he oppose tax increases? “I refuse to punish the people.”
There is talk about bits of California and Oregon forming their own state, Siskiyou (in later decades, the proposed state would be named Jefferson).
Obama told Diane Sawyer, “I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president. ... You know, there’s a tendency in Washington to think that our job description of elected officials is to get re-elected. That’s not our job description.”
So if I’m understanding him, the way to get re-elected is to do a mediocre job, but doing a good job would make him so unpopular that he’d be defeated.
You may have seen this: A 16-year-old rape victim in Bangladesh who became pregnant was sentenced by a village court to 101 lashes. The rapist, of course, got off scot-free. The Bangladeshi Daily Star implies that her father quickly married her off following the rape out of shame. But when she was found to be pregnant, she was divorced. My question is whether the village court shared with some American anti-abortionists the myth that rape victims can’t become pregnant, that conception requires orgasm. Does anyone know if that belief if widespread in that part of the world?
Also, 101?
Dr. Louise Robinovitch (noted here in November for demonstrating a defibrilator to the Edison Comp) has successfully used electricity as an anaesthetic in Hartford on a man having four toes amputated, although somehow I doubt the NYT sub-hed “Patient Has Merry Time.”
The Virginia Senate’s Committee on Schools and Colleges favorably reported out a bill to criminalize playing or officiating the game of football, with a $10 fine for the first offense and a 30-day jail sentence for a second.
Secretary of Commerce and Labor Charles Nagel, campaigning in Missouri for a congressional candidate, intervened in the trial of two boys for chicken-stealing. He got them off.
Obama, the WaPo tells us, will meet Friday with House Republicans.
Does Obama even own a sword? Because it’s not a proper surrender ceremony unless you hand over your sword.
Time for our annual SOTU contest: What adjective will Obama use to complete the above sentence.
For extra points, what big initiative will he propose, post-Scott Brown? I’m guessing midnight basketball.
To protest the shortage of tents available for refugees in Haiti, President Préval is moving into a tent.
Clarification: a tent office. Somehow I doubt he’ll actually be sleeping there.
The Afghan parliamentary elections are postponed from May to September, and quite possibly forever. International donors simply aren’t willing to stump up tens of millions of dollars to pay for a fraudulent election.
Sorry, let me rephrase that: international donors simply aren’t willing to be seen stumping up tens of millions of dollars to pay for an insultingly obviously fraudulent election.
Four Kenyans who were abused physically and sexually by the British in the 1950s are suing. The British government is arguing that the case should be thrown out because Britain isn’t actually liable for the acts of its own colonial government, that in fact Kenya became responsible for them upon independence.
Boy, there’s a joke in here somewhere: “Officials Fear Toxic Ingredient in Botox Could Become Terrorist Tool” (WaPo).
Vice Chancellor of New Jersey Lindley Garrison, sitting as a judge, rules that a woman in the process of suing her husband for divorce should not get alimony in the interim on the grounds that her doctor husband hadn’t beaten her up all that badly and also she deserved it, having hung out with some guy after her husband told her not to, and called him “the old dog” to the servants. Headline of the Day -100: “Beating Just, Says Court.”
West Point is very worried that it may have to admit as a cadet one Ollie R. Smith of Cheyenne, who is black (he is an alternate, but will be in if some white kid fails the entrance exams, as 1 in 4 do). He would not be the first, as some blacks were admitted after the Civil War, but it has been 25 years or so since the last. Past practice at West Point was to send them to coventry, to ignore them – not even hazing them. Actually, a few paragraphs later, the NYT mentions a Johnson Chesnut Whittaker, who did experience hazing at West Point in 1880, if by hazing you mean being tied up, beaten and having one ear cut off and the other slit. West Point investigated and decided that Whittaker had done it all to himself, dishonorably discharging him and fining him $1. President Arthur refused to accept the findings and ordered him restored, but for some reason he soon resigned. (Wait, not true. Wikipedia says they expelled him a second time for failing an exam. He had been the first black man to graduate Harvard. Later he was a teacher, lawyer, principal and psych professor.) Anyway, the NYT interviews a lot of military types, none of whom think letting Smith into West Point is a good idea.
Side note on usage: the NYT calls it the “civil war,” without caps.
The St. Louis Central Trades and Labor Council voted against joining the meat strike for 30 days. A woman delegate accused them of doing so “simply because the working women were the first to start the movement here.”
The British Home Office orders Lady Constance Lytton (see yesterday) released from prison before her two-week sentence.
The NY State Commissioner of Labor says that “the problem of child labor in the factories of this State is well in hand.” By that he means that while 10,415 children below the age of 16 were discovered working in factories in 1909, only 8% of them were employed illegally. So, well in hand.
Headline of the Day -100: “Kaiser Passes Sandwiches.” Kaiser Wilhelm invited University of California President Benjamin Ide Wheeler to a nice family gathering. “It was a typical German domestic scene, the Empress doing needlework while taking part in the conversation, and the Emperor himself passed around the sandwiches and other light supper dishes.” Must... not... make... lame... kaiser roll... joke...
What Scott Brown said: “I’m Scott Brown. I drive a pickup truck.”
What Massachusetts voters thought: Must be one of them lesbians. Lesbians are wicked hot.
What Scott Brown said: “I’m Scott Brown. I drive a pickup truck.”
What Massachusetts voters heard: I will help you move.
Saw Michael Chertoff on McNeil-Lehrer, hawking full-body scanners and saying people would just have to “adjust their privacy expectations.” Of course if there’s one person whose privacy expectations aren’t threatened by full-body scanners, it’s the living skeleton.
Headline Mixed Metaphor of the Day (NYT): “Republicans Strain to Ride Tea Party Tiger.”
Annoying Grant of Anonymity of the Day: The NYT, on the increase in drone attacks in Pakistan following the death of those CIA operatives: “Today, officials deny that vengeance is driving the increased attacks, though one called the drone strikes ‘the purest form of self-defense.’”
Or is this the purest form of self defense? Mircea Geoana, who lost the Romanian presidential election in December, getting 49.66% of the vote, blames witchcraft, specifically a “negative energy attack” during a debate that caused him to perform badly. And in fact, President Traian Basescu did go to that debate with a parapsychologist slash clairvoyant slash mind-control expert. This is the president and his court wizard in 2007.
The Senate Committee on Territories decides on a plan for a Legislative Council for Alaska: a governor, attorney general, commissioner of interior and mines, and 8 judges. All appointed by the US president. If that system had still been in place under the Bush Administration, Alaska’s appointed governor would still have been Sarah Palin.
Creepy Headline of the Day -100: “Bulldog Breeders Form a New Body.”
Mrs Humphry Ward, a best-selling novelist in her time, which was the late 19th century, is the most prominent British anti-suffragist. But that doesn’t stop her writing letters to electors in Hertfordshire, where she is running her wastrel son’s campaign for Parliament. A complete non-entity, he would be known as “the member for Mrs. Humphry Ward.”
In Britain it has just become known that Lady Constance Lytton is in prison. A suffragette, Lytton had been given a prison sentence before, but it was unsatisfactory in that she was treated with favoritism (not being force-fed, that sort of thing), supposedly on account of her fragile health and certainly not at all because she was Lady Constance Lytton.
“Simply Liberal snobbishness,” she complained. So she disguised herself as a working-class woman, called herself Jane Warton,
and got arrested again, for breaking a prison window, and this time, funnily enough, prison medical authorities didn’t find evidence of a weak heart and did force feed her. (Spoiler alert: about a year later she had a massive stroke, and wrote her book on her prison experience with her left hand.)
China complained that attacks on its censorship of the internet amount to... wait for it... information imperialism. The Global Times (published in English by the People’s Daily) explains (and I’ll quote at length because I gather that Chinese pro-censorship diatribes against Google have themselves been censored today, so this may not continue to be available on the web) that the “bulk of the information flowing from the US and other Western countries is loaded with aggressive rhetoric against those countries that do not follow their lead.” Further, disadvantaged countries “could not produce the massive flow of information required, and could never rival the Western countries in terms of information control and dissemination,” therefore, “there is absolutely no equality and fairness. The online freedom of unrestricted access is, thus, only one-way traffic, contrary to the spirit of democracy and calculated to strengthen a monopoly.” “China’s real stake in the ‘free flow of information’ is evident in its refusal to be victimized by information imperialism.”
Taft wants a law requiring congressional candidates to make public their campaign contributions and expenditures. The Chicago Tribune finds that there is “a majority of all members of each House are ready to vote for a bill applying the principle of the President, when it comes up – and that it will never come up.”
Rep. William Cocks of NY is willing to step down in favor of Teddy Roosevelt, if he wants the seat. TR is due to return from slaughtering white rhinos soon.
Our theme for this post: free speech
John McCain issues a not-at-all-stilted statement about his wife’s air-brushed appearance in an anti-Prop 8 ad: “Senator McCain respects the views of members of his family.” You can just hear his teeth grinding.
On the same day the Supreme Court ruled that corporations may “spend freely” to influence elections (when will Goldman Sachs start handing out congressional seats as bonuses?), Hillary Clinton evidently agreed that there was no difference between speech by individuals and speech by corporations. In a speech about the “five key freedoms of the Internet age,” i.e., chiding China on internet censorship, she insisted that, “From an economic standpoint, there is no distinction between censoring political speech and commercial speech.”
However, Trijicon Inc. will no longer put Bible messages on gun sights produced for the military. Evidently the Pentagon’s first reaction to this story was to claim that it was okay, just like printing “In God We Trust” on our currency.
In his partial dissent to one part of the Citizens United v. FEC decision, Clarence Thomas, who stands alone in this, opposes the release of the names of donors to political campaigns, citing the ability of the internet to harass those people. He goes on to cite many alleged instances of death threats and such against supporters of Prop. 8. “I cannot endorse a view of the First Amendment that subjects citizens of this Nation to death threats, ruined careers, damaged or defaced property, or pre-emptive and threatening warning letters as the price for engaging in ‘core political speech, the “primary object of First Amendment protection.”’” Or, alternately, you could pass laws against death threats, damaged or defaced property, etc. Oh, wait.
John Travolta is sending Scientologist missionaries to Haiti. Haiti is saved!
The new mayor of New York has been investigating cases of policemen beating members of the public with their clubs for no particular reason. Several cops have been suspended, fired or arrested. The NYT editorializes, though, that the police need their clubs, and that many of the stories about the “much-talked-of ‘third degree’” are “gross exaggerations.”
The meat strike has taken hold in St. Louis, and even Germany’s states, expressing their views on tariff negotiations are, in the words of the Headline of the Day -100, “United Against Our Meat.”
In a fire at a shirtwaist factory in Philadelphia, five are dead (so far), having leapt from the fourth floor. It would have been much worse but many of the factory’s workers had joined the strike. And of course this fire foreshadows (spoiler alert) one we might be discussing here in a little over a year.
The International Bureau of Peace at Brussels wants to re-adopt the expired provision adopted by the first Hague Peace Conference forbidding the dropping of explosives from balloons during war and extend it to cover planes and dirigibles as well. Good luck with that.
The meat strike is spreading from Cleveland throughout the Mid-West, but an editorial doubts its effect on the price of meat (down 2¢ a pound!) will be permanent. “Of course, the workingmen of Cleveland have no inclination or intention to become vegetarians as a settled policy of life. They want meat, just as all other sane people do”.
President Taft addresses the Conference of Governors with complaints about the ability of the executives at state and federal level to get the legislation they want out of insufficiently pliant legislative branches. He called the governors “my dear fellow-executives and fellow-sufferers.” He talked of the need for uniformity in laws between the states, which was a major theme of Taft’s and, coincidentally, of big business.
The meat strike in Cleveland is working. Meat sales have halved, and the price is coming down.
At the big Los Angeles flight meet, French aviator Louis Paulhan set a new cross-country record, covering 47½ miles in a little over an hour.
The front page of the NYT was so much cooler in 1910: “Baron Otto von Orban, a wealthy land owner, while riding through the forest in Transylvania was pursued by a pack of wolves. The wildly excited horse threw him and the wolves tore him to pieces.”
Also on the front page: A cop asked an (unnamed) woman in Burlington, NJ to have the snow on her sidewalk shoveled. She refused until such time as women have the vote.
Trijicon Inc., which manufactures “brilliant aiming solutions,” i.e., gun sights, and boasts on its webpage of its support of “biblical standards” and the NRA (not necessarily in that order), has been inscribing New Testament references on some of the gun sights it sells the US Army and Marine Corps, such as 2COR4:6, meaning Second Corinthians 4:6: “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Because nothing says the light shining out of darkness like a night-vision rifle sight. Iraqi troops are being trained with the, in ABC’s words, “bible-coded sights.” Anyone remember how the Indian Mutiny of 1857 got started?
The NYT wishes that Taft would stop his innovation of presenting Congress with draft legislation.
The Czarina of Russia has had an attack of hysteria.
An anti-meat strike has begun against high meat prices in Cleveland.
On the front page this slow news day: Lady Constance Stewart Richardson appeared at the Palace Theatre in London, dancing to the music of Tchaikovsky, Grieg and others, wearing – and this is the news-worthy bit – “a Greek short tunic apparently made of a single piece of flimsy blue material, through which flesh tints were plainly visible. In fact, the costume is described as the most daring ever seen on an English stage.”
The Islamic Solidarity Games have been called off because Iran, which was to have hosted, put the words “Persian Gulf” on the medals.
Richard Holbrooke, the Af-Pak special envoy, says that we should all “move on” from the stolen Afghan presidential election and that Karzai is “the legitimately chosen, legitimate leader of this country.” I don’t think that word, “legitimate,” means what you think it means. Also “chosen.” And “leader.” And “country.”
Speaking of legitimately chosen, the book Game Change says that in choosing Sarah Palin, John McCain was “flying by the seat of his pants.” Yeah, the seat of his pants...
The British election results are trickling in, showing a victory for the Liberal government. Lloyd George says, “England is declaring emphatically against government by the Peers and beer.”
A rich woman, Laura White, has died, and her will requires that ten days after her death she be stabbed in the heart three times (by a doctor, for a fee of $20). It seems that 45 years ago her fiancé died and when his body had to be removed to another cemetery a few months later, it was found that it had turned on its side, which gave her a life-long fear of being buried alive. Her only living relative is refusing to do it, but the Fidelity Title and Trust Company is insisting that it be done.
Last month I saved a lot of time by not reading any of the stories about Cook having faked reached the North Pole. This month I’m giving a miss to the many stories following TR cutting a bloody swathe through Africa, like this one:
ROOSEVELT AT LION HUNT.; Follows on Horseback as Natives Chase and Spear Beast. [PDF]
NAIROBI, British East Africa, Dec. 11. -- A long stream, of porters came winding across the veldt toward the station at Nairobi, looking for all the world like a string of ants. The stars and stripes was held aloft by a giant native, and the sound of horn...
The British are voting. Just as crowds were hostile to members of the House of Lords breaking tradition by speaking to election meetings, a crowd at Grimsby, outraged at Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George addressing voters on polling day, which is just not done, forced him to abandon the speech and flee. There were also shouts of “Traitor” and “Pro-Boer,” evidently from people still pissed at his stance during the Boer War a decade earlier. In his speech, LG had actually been refuting Balfour’s alarmism about the German menace, saying that if the German navy tried anything, it would be at the bottom of the sea in a matter of hours.
In Dundee, Winston Churchill, himself a once and future Tory, denounced the Conservatives as “the party of privilege and class.”
Rep. Henry is proposing a constitutional amendment to push the presidential inauguration back from March 4 to the last Thursday in April. The move is supported by D.C. hotels and the like, hoping for more business if there is a prospect of better weather.
In other hotel news, there has been a rash of suicides in Germany lately, possibly by people contemplating the prospects of the Germany Navy against the British Royal Navy, and the Association of Hotel Owners has issued a statement asking potential suicides to please do away with themselves somewhere other than in hotels, because there are really lots of alternative spots where they’d cause less inconvenient to others, and do you know what that does to the reputation of a hotel?
In Britain, witnesses in court have taken to refusing to kiss the Bible on health grounds, and the practice has been abolished altogether in Lambeth (London) Police Court. However, “To the poorer class the old formula seemed to appeal strongly. Remember you have ‘kissed the Book’ was usually the most crushing comment a defendant could make when challenging the statements of a witness.”
The NYC Board of Education bans competition or prizes being offered in high schools without authorization. This is aimed at a $100 prize offered by Mrs. Belmont to the female students at Wadleigh High School for the best essays on women’s suffrage.
New Jersey electrocuted six men in 1909 at a cost of $7,028. The cost of maintaining living prisoners was 33¢ a day.
At another institution of the state of New Jersey, the State Home for Girls in Trenton, it has been revealed that girls and women up to the age of 21 are lashed with leather whips. The NYT believes that whipping has been abolished in every other state. The trustees of the home complain that it has to house insane and feeble-minded girls alongside reformatory cases, that the state gives them no resources but expects them to train the girls, and that it expects them to discipline them without having a “proper house of detention so that we can separate temporarily the vicious girl”.
The shirtwaist strikers in Philadelphia have picked up a sympathizer: Helen Taft, daughter of the president, along with her fellow members of the Bryn Mawr Suffrage Club. After hearing about the conditions of shirtwaist makers, she said, “Really, I’ll never put on a shirtwaist again without a shudder. ... Why, it’s just like reading Nietzsche, isn’t it?” “And then,” the NYT snidely reports, “Miss Taft and her friends boarded a Thirteenth Street car and went to the opera.”
Headline of the Day -100: “King Drops Short Breeches.” Those invited to meet King Edward at Lady Paget’s, the men anyway, have been told they are to wear evening trousers instead of the usual black silk breeches and black silk stockings. “[T]he reason of the innovation is unknown.”
Headline of the Day (Daily Telegraph): “Aborigines to Ask Prince William to Return Warrior’s Severed Head.” And why do they think he can help them? Because he “has his mother’s heart.”
This is Jamuna Toni, born last month at the Munich zoo.
The NYT prints a letter in support of women’s suffrage by Katharine Houghton Hepburn, a leader of the suffrage movement in Connecticut and the mother of... wait for it... Katharine Hepburn. She writes that women would be more interested in public issues if they had the vote, but instead, “The Government has classed women with the mentally incompetent – those unfit to vote even in a democracy.”
