skip to main |
skip to sidebar
In 1910, Lincoln was still a living memory. At the Graduates’ Club of the City of New York, Lincoln Day speeches were given by people who knew him personally. And the principal speaker at a Springfield, Illinois banquet at which the governor was toastmaster was Booker T. Washington, who recounted that his first knowledge of Lincoln was in a slave cabin, hearing his mother pray that Lincoln might succeed. NYT headline: “Negro at Lincoln’s Home.” Sigh.
A better headline, to a story about a “boy highwayman” who robbed a bank in Highland, CA, then escaped arrest by joining the posse looking for him: “Robber Pursues Himself.”
Airplane factories are having trouble keeping up with demand, with 600 expected to be delivered for the spring season. People wanting immediate delivery are having to pay as much as $8,200. The cheapest, the Demoiselle, is only $1,000.
France has many more planes flying about than the US does, and manufactures more of them.
The British Army has developed a military dirigible.
William Jennings Bryan declares war on liquor. He castigates the shift from locally owned saloons, which the community could pressure, to branch saloons owned by liquor producers, which “adds the evils of the trust system to the evils of the saloon itself. The saloon is constantly used to debauch politics, and to prevent the intelligent consideration of public questions.”
Dr. D.A. Sargent, Direct of Physical Training at Harvard, says that the physical condition of woman has been improving rapidly, but it would be “absurd” to say that she will ever be the physical equal of man. Nor is it desirable, because that would “interfere with her physiological functions”. By “physiological functions,” he of course does not mean respiration, digestion, etc, but rather pumping out babies. However, he does say that women are now far improved from the “weak, hysterical little thing” of a few years ago.
The Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales Igor Judge (presiding
over the case of Binyam Mohamed, tortured by the Americans with the complicity of MI5). That is, Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge.
Hope everyone is celebrating in an appropriate manner. Remember: it’s split a rail and free a slave, not vice versa.
Chicago music teacher Belle Squire will refuse to pay her property tax in protest at the lack of women’s suffrage. She says paying would encourage tyranny.
The Wall Street messenger who lost the $10,000 bill (which still hasn’t been found) is in jail, charged with grand larceny, with a $10,000 bond. Also, it seems that he likes to shoot craps with other messengers.
Employing a prostitute, and charging the US for her, isn’t among the 10 or even the 100 worst things Blackwater has ever done.
A jail guard and a police superintendent fight a duel on the streets of Chattanooga. The former dies, “his body perforated with bullets.”
Dr. James Walsh, Dean of Fordham University Medical School, says that if women’s suffrage were granted, “nature would eliminate form the race all who cared about exercising it in the course of three or four generations. He quoted history in support of his argument, and showed how often women had made a sudden burst to the front in intellectual matters, to fall back again inevitably to domestic duties through the working of some unknown biological law.” And he’s the dean of Fordham University Medical School, so he should know.
In Britain, Asquith is putting together a new cabinet. Given the Liberals’ lack of a parliamentary majority, he will have to attend carefully to the demands of other parties. John Redmond, head of the Irish Nationalists, says he will subordinate every other issue to Home Rule for Ireland: the 72 Nats will vote for Asquith’s budget if they get it, and against it if they don’t. The Labour Party has met and adopted a demand for adult suffrage, which would eliminate the remaining property qualifications for men and extend the franchise to women (this will be unwelcome to most women’s suffragists, who want a stand-alone measure giving women the vote on the same terms as men. Given that relatively few women owned property, this means that what even the most radical suffragettes are calling for is an electorate that would be 90% male.) Interestingly, in 2010, with the polls predicting a similar hung parliament after the next elections, Gordon Brown has developed a sudden interest in parliamentary reform, although in its weakest form, the Alternative Vote.
Headline of the Day 1: An Italian silk finished insists on pleading guilty to assault in the first degree in a NYC court rather than a lesser charge, preferring a long prison sentence here to deportation back to Italy “where he would be under the surveillance of authorities he had found unkind.” Headline: “Prefers Jail to Italy.”
Headline of the Day 2: “10-Year-Old Jailed For Debt.” A Newark boy who failed to pay $95.35 damages awarded against him by a court after a fight with a 16-year-old. However, by evening his lawyer had put up a bond and got him out.
The House Immigration Committee votes unanimously for the Japanese Exclusion Bill.
The NYPD have arrrested the leaders of a gang of horse thieves operating in Manhattan and Long Island. In 1910, Manhattan had horse thieves. And Chattanooga had duels.
Obama says of multi-million-dollar bonuses paid to bankers, “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.” Speak for yourself, dude, I totally begrudge people success and wealth. How ‘bout you, readers?
With constant talk about changing the rules of football to make it less lethal, the Yale football coach says the forward pass is the “vermiform appendix of football, a totally useless and highly dangerous play.”
One of Andrew Carnegie’s executives, an Alexander R. Peacock (the interwebs say that when Carnegie chose him, he asked, “Peacock, what would you give to be made a millionaire?” and Peacock replied, “A liberal discount for cash, Sir.”), upon finding that some of his employees had embezzled $25,000, “locked himself in a room with each of these men, one at a time, and beat them soundly with his fists. Then he drove them from his office. He declines to prosecute them.”
NY state senator Edgar Brackett introduces a bill to put the question of women’s suffrage to a vote of all women over 21. Suffrage groups strongly oppose the idea. A NYT editorial, which isn’t quite sure whether Brackett is pro- or anti-suffrage (anti, I think), notes that such a referendum would have no legal force and that if it failed it wouldn’t stop the suffrage agitation because “Is it not a part of the feminine nature to seek more eagerly and persistently privileges that have been denied?”
North Korea says it will take “all-out strong measures to foil the treacherous, anti-reunification and anti-peace moves of the riff-raffs to bring down the dignified socialist system,” using its hitherto unrevealed “world-level ultra-modern striking force.” So keep an eye out for that.
Speaking of world-level ultra-modern striking forces, Sarah Palin was interviewed by Chris Wallace on Fox yesterday:
EVEN MORE SO MERGING: WALLACE: How do you see yourself as a member of the Tea Party movement or a member of the Republican Party? PALIN: Oh, I think the two are and should be even more so merging because the Tea Party movement is quite reflective of what the GOP, the planks in the platform are supposed to be about.
A BEAUTIFUL MOVEMENT: “When the GOP strays from the planks in the platform, a people’s movement like the Tea Party movement is invited in to kind of hold these politicians accountable again and remind them of their constitutional limits there on the federal level and it’s a beautiful movement.”
SOME KIND OF REPLICATE: “No, I would hope that the Tea Party-ers don’t believe that they need some kind of well-oiled machine, some kind of replicate of the GOP or the Democrat Party and instead they remain a movement of the people uprising and saying, listen to us, we have some common sense solutions that we want our politicians to consider and to implement and this is much bigger than a hockey mom from Wasilla.”
GENERAL PERSONA REPORTING FOR DUTY: “PALIN: [Obama] has some misguided decisions that he is making that he is expecting us to just kind of sit down and shut up and accept, and many of us are not going to sit down and shut up. We’re going to say no, we do not like this... WALLACE: Wait, wait, where’s he saying sit down and shut up? PALIN: In a general just kind of general persona I think that he has when he’s up there at, I’ll call it a lectern. When he is up there and he is telling us basically, I know best, my people here in the White House know best, and we are going to tell you that yes, you do want this essentially nationalized health care system and we’re saying, no, we don’t.”
She explained that she wants to remove women’s right to choose in order to empower women: “I want to empower women though. I -- I want -- and -- and if Trigg is an example, and if Pam Tebow’s son, Tim Tebow is an example of the potential for every human life, then so be it. Let Trigg be that example. I want women to know that they are strong enough, and they are smart enough to be able to do many things at once -- including carrying a child.”
I’M LIKE NO: On resigning as governor: “And we said, ‘We’re going to get out there, and we're going to fight for Alaska’s issues,’ which usually involve energy independence. We’re going to fight for these issues on a different plane. And we’re not going to let you guys win. ... look it, I’m sitting here talking to Chris Wallace today. I think some of them are going, ‘Dang, we thought she’d sit down and shut up after we tried to do to her what we tried.’” ... So in that last -- in that lame duck session I’m like no.”
WHAT SHE’S NOT ONE TO BE: “Oh, you know, Rahm Emanuel, I think he had some indecent and insensitive ways of being, including his language. ... I’m not politically correct. I am not one to be a word police.” Although she does seem to have tasered a lot of words.
AND HEAVEN FORFEND SARAH EVER BE ABSURD: On running for president in 2012: “I think that it would be absurd to not consider what it is that I can potentially do to help our country.”
PLAYING THE WAR CARD: On how Obama might win re-election: “Say he played, and I got this from Buchanan, reading one of his columns the other day. Say he played the war card. Say he decided to declare war on Iran, or decided to really come out and do whatever he could to support Israel, which I would like him to do. But that changes the dynamics in what we can assume is going to happen between now and three years. Because I think if the election were today, I do not think Obama would be re-elected.”
TOO LATE: “WALLACE: What role do you want to play in the country’s future? PALIN: First and foremost I want to be a good mom.”
WHAT SHE’S NEVER GOING TO PRETEND LIKE: “And then I do want to be a voice for some common-sense solutions. I’m never going to pretend like I know more than the next person. I’m not going to pretend to be an elitist. In fact, I’m going to fight the elitist because for too often and for too long now, I think the elitists have tried to make people like me and people in the heartland of America, feel like we just don’t get it and big government is just going to have to take care of us.” Heaven forfend our Sarah ever feel like she just doesn’t get it.
The House committee investigating the high cost of food and the activities of the beef trust, which led to the meat strike, hears from a D.C. food inspector that Teddy Roosevelt liked to keep his beef aging until it was ready to fall to pieces before serving it. Evidently rich people liked really old, virtually rancid beef.
Dr. R. W. Lovett, professor in orthopedics at the Harvard Medical School, says that women should wear corsets.
U.S. Commissioner of Education Elmer Ellsworth Brown says “It strikes me that it is better to have a boy whipped than to let him go straight to the devil.” However, “There are cases, undoubtedly, where a loving sort of a whipping has shunted a boy off the downward track, but it is pretty hard to tell in any given case whether it will have that effect or not, and there are so many evils attending that form of punishment that it seems to be slowly dying out in this country.”
More from Palin’s tea party convention speech.
THINK OF THAT: “Do you love your freedom? (Cheers, applause.) If you love your freedom, think of that.”
REAL PEOPLE, NOT THOSE FAKE PEOPLE: “I look forward to attending more tea party events in the near future. It is just so inspiring to see real people, not politicos, not inside-the-Beltway professionals, come out and stand up and speak out for common-sense conservative principles.”
WE’RE TIRED, AND IT HURTS OUR NECK: “We’ve gotten tired now of looking backward. We want to look forward.”
“I caution against allowing this movement to be defined by any one leader or politician. The tea party movement is not a top-down operation. ...This is about the people, and it’s bigger than any king or queen of a tea party.” In other words, please don’t depend on me to do any actual leading, I’d just abdicate half-way through my term of office.
“[W]e should acknowledge that on Christmas Day, the system did not work. Abdulmutallab passed through airport security with a bomb...” How long do you think it took her to memorize “Abdulmutallab”? Or did she write it on one of her body parts?
She complained that Abdulmutallab was mirandized. “The protections provided, thanks to you, sir, we’re going to bestow them on a terrorist who hates our Constitution and fights to destroy our Constitution and our country? This makes no sense because we have a choice in how we’re going to deal with the terrorists. We don’t have to go down that road.” That awful, awful constitutional road.
Did you know that the Underpants Bomber was entirely the fault of Barack Obama? It’s true: “The events surrounding the Christmas Day plot reflect the kind of thinking that led to September 11th. The threat then, as the USS Cole was attacked, our embassies were attacked, it was treated like an international crime spree, not like an act of war. We’re seeing that mind-set again settle into Washington.”
WHAT WE NEED: “We need a foreign policy that distinguishes America’s friends from her enemies”,
DISSIN’ THE TENTH: “They were going to disrespect the 10th Amendment of our Constitution by essentially bribing us with, take this federal money, and then we’re going to be able to mandate a few more things on you, though.”
NOPE, NO IRONY HERE: “And underemployment now is 16.5 percent. We’ve got all these people who have just kind of given up right now”.
LAME DR. SEUSS: “Is that hope? Nope! It’s not hope!” said the dope.
“When our families, when our small businesses, we start running our finances into the red, what do we do? We tighten our belts, and we cut back budgets. Isn’t that what we teach our children, to live within our means?” Well it sure isn’t “use a condom.”
MORE LAME DR. SEUSS: “So what we’ve got to do is ax that plan for cap and tax”.
WHAT SHE SPENT THE LAST YEAR DOING: “Now, like a lot of you perhaps, I spent the last year thinking how to best serve. How can I help our country? How can I make sure that I, that you, that we’re in a position of nobody being able to succeed when they try to tell us to sit down and shut up, how can we best serve?”
“And you don’t need a proclaimed leader, as if we’re all just a bunch of sheep and we’re looking for a leader to progress this movement.”
NO SHEDDING ON THE COUCH: “I do believe that God shed his grace on thee.”
In the Q&A she referred to the “lame-stream media.”
BOTTOM LINE: “And when it comes to national security, as I ratchet down the message on national security, it’s easy to just kind of sum it up by repeating Ronald Reagan when he talked about the Cold War. And we can apply this now to our war on terrorism. You know, bottom line, we win, they lose. We do all that we can to win.” I wonder why no one ever thought of winning before?
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.”
