skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Obama gave a speech about education yesterday at the Kenmore Middle School in Arlington, Virginia. Do you think schools within 10 miles of D.C. ever get tired of being used as backdrops?
TOO MANY: “unfortunately too many students aren’t getting a world-class education today.” He didn’t disclose what the right number of students not getting a world-class education would be.
A LOT OF ARGUMENTS: “There were a lot of arguments for a lot of years. Some people thought if you just put more money into education that would solve the problem. And then the other side thought, money doesn’t matter; what we need is reform. In fact, there were those who argued that we should just dismantle the public education system altogether.” So as part of this everyone’s-to-blame-so-no-one’s-to-blame scenario he’s accepting the premise that part of the problem is that liberals just want to throw money at problems. Dirty fuckin’ hippies.
NOT GIVE YOU ANY OF IT, JUST SHOW IT TO YOU: “So what we’re doing is we’re saying to states [with the “Race to the Top” program], prove you’re serious about reform, and we’ll show you the money.” And we’re saying to the remaining 37 states, “Too bad you weren’t serious enough. Come back in five years and maybe we’ll fund your education then.”
WITH “WINNING TO THE FUTURE” ON THE WALL BEHIND HIM, HE COINS ANOTHER LAME CATCHPHRASE: “it’s not enough to leave no child behind. We need to help every child get ahead.” Except the children in the 37 states that aren’t “serious” about reform. They’ll have to find a way to get ahead all by themselves.
AN ASTONISHING NUMBER: “under the system No Child Left Behind put in place, more than 80 percent of our schools may be labeled as failing... That’s an astonishing number.” He’s easily astonished.
WHAT WE KNOW: “We know that four out of five schools in this country aren’t failing.” Indeed, one of the 80% is Kenmore Middle School itself, he says, revealing Kenmore’s shame to a watching world. But “Kenmore -- Kenmore is thriving. You guys are doing great. You got more work to do, but you’re doing fine. (Applause.)” Oh sure, praise the failing school.
AND VICE VERSA: “We need to make sure some of our best teachers are teaching in some of our worst schools.” Some?
OF COURSE MOST AMERICAN STUDENTS ARE BUBBLE-SHAPED THEMSELVES, SO THAT WORKS OUT: “We don’t need to know whether a student can fill out a bubble.”
FOR EXAMPLE, THERE’LL BE A POP QUIZ ON THIS PHOTO OP TOMORROW: “Now, that doesn’t mean testing is going to go away; there will be testing.” So I guess we do need to know whether a student can fill out a bubble.
JUST AS SOON AS WE’RE DONE BANNING THEIR UNIONS AND ELIMINATING THEIR RETIREMENT FUNDS: “In South Korea, teachers are known as ‘nation builders,’ and I think it’s time we treated our teachers with the same level of respect right here in the United States of America.” Or we could give them decent salaries and benefits, but “respect” is a whole lot cheaper, so yeah, let’s go with that instead.
SURELY THAT’S WHAT THE MINIMUM WAGE LAWS ARE FOR: “we’ve got to start valuing our great teachers.”
GETTING INTO IT: “I don’t know any teacher who got into it for the pay.” Although some pay would be, you know, nice. (Actually, Obama’s budget includes hundreds of millions of your tax dollars for teacher incentive plans, which have never been shown to actually work, so that means, I don’t know, that he thinks it’s a bad thing that teachers don’t get into it for the pay, because they’d do a better job if they did.) (I wonder if Obama is such a mediocre president because there’s no incentive scheme?) “The teachers who are here, you got into it for the kids...” We had a high school English teacher like that, but they (eventually) fired him. “...for the satisfaction of feeling like your [sic!] passing on knowledge that these young people will use and carry on for the rest of their lives.” Except for grammar, obviously.
HEY, THOSE TAX CUTS FOR MILLIONAIRES DON’T PAY FOR THEMSELVES, YOU KNOW: “A budget that sacrifices our commitment to education would be a budget that’s sacrificing our country’s future.”
McCain & Holy Joe Lieberman have introduced a resolution for an immediate no-fly zone in Libya.
In a speech in the Senate yesterday, McCain said of the need for a no-fly zone, “It is Libyans themselves who want to do the fighting against Qaddafi, but they want it to be a fair fight. So should we.” Because if there’s one thing John McCain hates, it’s an unfair fight.
He added that we must immediately recognize the opposition as the sole legitimate governing authority: “Some continue to say that we do not know who the opposition is and thus we cannot assist them. This is ridiculous.” Yes, it is ridiculous to elevate people we do not know.
Headline and Opera of the Day -100: “KAISER MAY HAVE URGED ‘TWILIGHT’; But Nevin’s One-Act Opera Is Not Likely to be Given at the Metropolitan This Season.” Kaiser Wilhelm was a big fan of the opera about a teenage girl in love with a brooding, shirtless vampire (Enrico Caruso).
There is a furore in Boston over a planned women’s club that will allow... wait for it... smoking.
The Obama administration takes ownership of another Bush policy: support for the Haitian coup and the exile of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Today the State Dept publicly urged him not to return home before the elections, which is said would be “destabilizing” and “could only be seen as a conscious choice to impact Haiti’s elections.” And, er, what exactly is wrong with that? However, spokesmodel Mark Toner declared, “The decision to allow Mr. Aristide to return is up to the Government of Haiti. Under the Haitian constitution, he has the right to return to his country.” If he has a constitutional right to return, how is it “up to” the government of Haiti whether to ban him? Toner is unambiguously signaling that we’d be okay with Haiti continuing the unconstitutional policy of banning Aristide from the country (just as they ban his party from elections). Condi Rice, another supporter of the forced exile of Aristide, couldn’t have said it better.
Buffalo Bill Cody is rumored to want to be Arizona’s first senator.
The Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of corporate tax law. Taft is delighted.
In Albany, the Children’s Society is demanding a state law for the segregation of sexes in the audiences of motion pictures. And that they be shown with the lights on (the motion pictures, that is, not the sexes).
Teddy Roosevelt writes President Taft (privately) about the Mexican Revolution, offering that if “by any remote chance... there should be a serious war, a war in which Mexico was backed by Japan or some other big powers, then I would wish immediately to apply for permission to raise a division of cavalry, such as the regiment I commanded in Cuba...”
While the firing of P.J. Crowley is certainly ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid, to coin a phrase (or, as Obama would put it, “appropriate and are meeting our basic standards”), since he appended to his remarks about the treatment of Bradley Manning that Manning, who has been convicted of precisely nothing, belongs behind bars, I can’t bring myself to feel sorry for Crowley.
Obama on Boehner: “I used to think that it was a tan, but after seeing how often he tears up I’ve come to realize that’s not a tan -- that’s rust.”
Out of curiosity, does anyone know where Japan puts the waste from all its nuke plants?
“Los Angeles horsewoman” (and women’s suffragist) Flora S. Russell broke through the lines of both Mexican and US troops to plant the flag of something called the “Republic of Díaz.” “I wanted to prove that women have the courage of men,” she said.
Mexican Prez Díaz tells the AP that he is completely healthy, that conditions are improving in Chihuahua, and that military operations there do not constitute warfare but “hunting.”
A US Army private, part of the mobilization on the Mexican border, was stabbed in Galveston after his companion made some sort of racist remark in the black part of town. Soldiers responded with a rampage, beating up blacks and Mexicans, and setting a house on fire.
In a “humorous” editorial about Mormon proselytization in Britain, the NYT suggests that English suffragettes should consider emigrating to Utah and becoming polygamous wives because, not having to pay as much attention to their husbands as monogamous wives, they’d have plenty of time for politics.
French standard time was officially set back 9 minutes and 21 seconds, to fall in with Greenwich time. Parisians celebrated the two midnights in cafés and restaurants, because why not? Up until now, French clocks on the outside of railway stations marked the real time, while clocks inside railway stations were five minutes slower. It kept lazy French people from missing trains, or something.
Headline of the Day -100: “Quakers No Match for Tigers.” The University of Pennsylvania and Yale wrestling teams, respectively, not actual Quakers and tigers.
The Anti-Treating Bill passes the Missouri House 82-17. If it passes the senate, it will be illegal to stand a friend to a drink in a bar.
The Mexican authorities will begin summarily executing rebels. Which includes anyone caught in the act of highway robbery, cutting telegraph or telephone wires, or throwing a rock at a train.
One of rebel leader Madero’s spokesmodels claims the Mexican government has a scheme to import 15,000 Japanese veterans of the Russo-Japanese War and settle them along the border prepared to fight off the American Army if the US invades.
Los Angeles District Attorney John Fredericks orders that movies about the Mexican Revolution (fictional ones, not newsreels) be censored because such movies might cause trouble among Mexicans in America.
Commerce and Labor Secretary Charles Nagel gives a speech about immigration to the Republican Club. He says there is a need to “draw the line. If we are to hold aloft the flag of a republican form of government we must see that the people we admit are capable of self-government.” Nagel has absolute authority to send any prospective immigrant back from whence they came.
The German minister of war says that he will not tamper with the “free institution” of the military, by which regiments select their own officers. And since there is – he said it, not me – “widespread anti-Jewish sentiment in the country,” this mean effectively no Jewish officers allowed.
Sen. Reed Smoot (famous much later for the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, but in 1911 famous as the senator from Utah who was kept from taking his seat for four years while the Senate debated whether an “apostle” of the Mormon church could do so) defends a silver service with the portrait of Brigham Young which is to be presented to the battleship Utah. There have evidently been many protest meetings against the silver service (news to me).
Smoot also said he’d welcome an investigation of charges by British Home Secretary Winston Churchill that Mormon missionaries in Britain are trying to recruit girls to emigrate to Utah (where more wives are needed, for some reason).
Obama held one of his rare press conferences today.
He began by expressing his condolences to Japan on behalf of the American people (so expect a rebuttal from Mitch McConnell) for the earthquake/tsunami/volcano/Godzilla attack, which he called “a potentially catastrophic disaster”. Potentially?
Then he moved on to a real catastrophic disaster: rising gas prices in the US. But, he says, there is “good news. The global community can manage supply disruptions like this.” If by “manage supply disruptions,” you mean use the excuse of a tiny hiccup in a country accounting for a small percentage of the world oil supply to jack up oil company profits.
He talked about his “commitment to do everything that we can to get gas prices down,” but will he invade Libya and steal their oil? I think not.
I DON’T SEE HOW ANYTHING COULD GO WRONG WITH THAT. He said that domestic oil production is at a high, including in the Gulf of Mexico.
HAVE YOU READ SARAH PALIN’S TWITTER FEED LATELY? “I don’t think anybody has forgotten that we’re only a few months removed from the worst oil spill in our history.”
BY WHICH I MEAN MOONSHINE: “Right now, all across America, our farmers are producing homegrown fuels”.
WHAT WE’VE BEEN HAVING FOR NEARLY FOUR DECADES NOW: “We’ve been having this conversation for nearly four decades now. Every few years, gas prices go up; politicians pull out the same old political playbook, and then nothing changes. And when prices go back down, we slip back into a trance. And then when prices go up, suddenly we’re shocked. I think the American people are tired of that. I think they’re tired of talk.” Oh, wait, they’re not tired, they’re just still in that trance.
IF BY “SLOWLY,” YOU MEAN IMPERCEPTIBLY: “across the board we are slowly tightening the noose on Qaddafi.”
I DON’T THINK “BEING ISOLATED INTERNATIONALLY” IS AS SCARY TO DICTATORS AS AMERICAN PRESIDENTS ALWAYS SEEM TO THINK IT IS: “He is more and more isolated internationally, both through sanctions as well as an arms embargo.”
CONVERSATIONS! A SERIES OF THEM! IF THAT DOESN’T SCARE QADDAFI, I DON’T KNOW WHAT WILL. “And what we’ve done is we’ve organized in NATO a series of conversations about a wide range of options that we can take...”
24-HOUR SURVEILLANCE! IF THAT DOESN’T SCARE QADDAFI, I DON’T KNOW WHAT WILL. “...everything from 24-hour surveillance so that we can monitor the situation on the ground and react rapidly if conditions deteriorated, to further efforts with respect to an arms embargo, additional efforts on humanitarian aid, but also potential military options including a no-fly zone.” NATO will be discussing that one on Tuesday. No rush, have a nice weekend.
WHEN SOMEONE SAYS THEY HAVEN’T TAKEN ANY OPTIONS OFF THE TABLE, AREN’T THEY JUST BRAGGING ABOUT THEIR LACK OF ABILITY TO MAKE A DECISION? “So the bottom line is, is that I have not taken any options off the table at this point.”
SO WE’RE WATCHING AND WE’RE PAYING ATTENTION. IF THAT DOESN’T SCARE QADDAFI, I DON’T KNOW WHAT WILL. It’s important “to continue to find options that will add additional pressure, including sending a clear message to those around Qaddafi that the world is watching and we’re paying attention”.
Mimi Hall (USA Today) asks if it’s an “acceptable option” that Qaddafi not leave. He doesn’t like that question, so he decides he’s being asked if the US would invade Libya, and um, doesn’t answer that question either, even though he asked it of himself.
WHAT RAISES OUR ANTENNA: “And some of the rhetoric that you’ve seen -- for example, the idea that when Qaddafi said that they’d be going door to door hunting for people who are participating in protests -- that implied a sort of lack of restraint and ruthlessness that I think raises our antenna.” Isn’t that exactly what US troops do in Afghanistan? Does that imply a sort of lack of restraint and ruthlessness?
D’UH, WINNING: “We can’t stop investing in infrastructure -- those things that are going to make us competitive over the long term and will help us win the future.”
WHAT IT’S VERY IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND: “I think it’s very important, when we think about the budget, to understand that our long-term debt and deficits are not caused by us having Head Start teachers in the classroom.” Not unless we pay them, and Gov. Walker is leading us inexorably towards a slave-based educational system.
AFTER ALL, NO STANDARDS ARE MORE BASIC THAN COMPLETE NUDITY: On Bradley Manning: “I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are.” So that’s okay, then.
At the end of it, he was asked by a Japanese reporter about the earthquake/tsunami/volcano/alien invasion/mecha-Godzilla attack in Japan and said, no doubt in calm, measured tones, “I’m heartbroken by this tragedy.”
Naturally, he buried his heartbreak in the only way he knew how, by meeting the Chicago Blackhawks. He got a jersey and a ring and a miniature Stanley Cup, which he held aloft with an expression that clearly betokened his intention to use it to pound his enemies into dust.
Francisco Madero’s brother Gustavo says the insurrectos will be in Mexico City by Cinco de Mayo. As guests of President Díaz? some smart-ass reporter asks. No, to raise a new flag.
In Yucatan, the rebels capture two (or more) towns. They rename one Madero.
Meanwhile, the 80-year-old Díaz sends a telegram to the NYT that his health is “perfect.”
The German military wants to train pilots and is asking for unmarried lieutenants to volunteer for a two-month flying course, from which it will pick the 60 with the best sight and lowest weight.
Booth Tarkington says he is done writing plays. He never wants to look at a rehearsal again. He will change his mind.
Rep. Peter King (R-Hysteria) says, in an email to his supporters that links to his website which has a video labeled “Rep. King trains at the Bellmore Kickboxing Academy as he gets ready to hold hearings on the radicalization of Muslim Americans,” “I will not back down to the hysteria created by my opponents”. Because Tailgunner Pete is totally against hysteria.
And as King likes to say, “100% of the Islamic terrorists are Muslims”.
The NYT says that the “worst feature” of the Mexican Revolution is the Mexican government’s suppression of news.
Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin blows up. That explosives factory turns out to be maybe not such a good idea. The explosion was felt up to 500 miles away, doing $10,000 in damage to plate glass windows on State Street, Chicago alone. Only one person was killed, unlike the 1906 explosion at the plant, in which 9 were killed. There have been 9 explosions there in the last 10 years.
Stupid proposed laws: 1) One in the Connecticut legislature to ban the publication of pictures of policemen or to report on crimes until all suspects in the crime have been arrested. 2) One proposed in the Illinois legislature to ban harem skirts and hobble skirts.
The British Foreign Office says they did not ask the US to intervene in Mexico to protect British nationals and business interests, as rumors have been claiming.
NYT: “Administration and War Department officials frankly admitted to-day that the ‘manoeuvres’ explanation of the sudden mobilization of an army division in Texas and Southern California strains credulity for acceptance, and then calmly repeated it and declared that it is the real explanation.”
Neither the Mexican government nor the insurrectos want American intervention. In case you were wondering.
The US is moving 20,000 troops, one-forth of the entire army, to California and Texas along the Mexican border. Also part of the fleet. The government is claiming that these are just “maneuvers” to demonstrate that the army can be rapidly mobilized and that they have nothing to do with the Mexican Revolution. But what will the troops actually do? Enforce “neutrality” by preventing the movement of rebels and arms back and forth across the border? Engage in a full-scale military intervention? Or wait for the inevitable chaos in the event of the (falsely) rumored imminent death of 80-year-old dictator Porfirio Díaz?
Catholic bishops in the US announce, in obedience to a 13th-century papal law, that henceforth no absolution will be given to parents who fail to send their children to Catholic schools.
Joseph Cooney of San Francisco murdered his cousin. The next day, he went to observe the California State Assembly as it debated capital punishment; “He showed great anxiety while the vote was being taken.” The vote was 46 to 31 to abolish the death penalty, so Cooney immediately turned himself in to the San Francisco sheriff, who was in Sacramento in his other capacity as a state senator.
The British, who I’m given to understand used to run an entire empire, sent what Foreign Secretary William Hague calls “a small British diplomatic team” to Benghazi by helicopter, equipped, as all diplomatic teams are, with guns, explosives, and false passports. Given that no one was expecting armed SAS soldiers to drop from the sky, the anti-Qaddafi rebels they were supposed to be making contact with immediately took them prisoner (Hague: “They experienced difficulties”), and subsequently expelled from the country (“which have now been satisfactorily resolved”).
Meanwhile, a former aide of Qaddafi claims that the reason Qaddafi was elected head of the African Union in 2009 was that Silvio Berlusconi got the leader of an unnamed nation who was opposing him to change his vote by sending two prostitutes to... convince him.
A black man is murdered by a mob in Marianna, Florida, after threatening to shoot the town marshal. The mob broke in the jail door to get at him.
Railroad firemen on the Cincinnati, New Orleans & Texas Pacific Railroad are voting on whether to call a strike against the practice of promotion by seniority. Because under it, black people can be promoted. And we can’t have that.
The NYT is worried about a medium-sized “army,” largely consisting of Americans, now in the Chihuahua region with the intention of turning Lower California into a “socialistic republic,” which would eventually join the United States.
Sharia law, Cajun style: a 78-year-old convicted child molester was castrated as a condition for parole in Louisiana. Because mutilating old men is how they roll down there. His prostate cancer delayed the operation, but finally the judge insisted that “it’s time to give Caesar what Caesar is owed,” which is evidently one wrinkly old penis. “They tell me it’s comparable to having your wisdom teeth pulled,” says Maj. Richie Johnson of the West Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office. I’m pretty sure having your wisdom teeth pulled and having your dick, um, pulled are actually in no way comparable, but I’m loathe to argue the subject with someone named Major Johnson.
Update: the CBS story on this begins “Convicted pedophile Francis Tullier, 78, cut his prison sentence in half - and that’s not all”.
The operation (a medically unnecessary procedure for which some doctor needs to lose his license) was performed at the Earl K. Long Medical Center. Which looks like this:
Just saying.
The French prime minister praises Henri Bernstein for withdrawing his play, but the violence does not end. The son of the the Comédie-Française’s director fights a duel with the editor of the Camelots du Roi organ L’Action Française. They exchanged four bullets before moving on to rapiers. The son guy got injured. The NYT says that the whole brouhaha couldn’t happen here: “if any representatives of the lawless tried to disturb a performance of a play they would be suppressed, partly by efficient police, largely by the opposition of playgoers in general to rude conduct in theatres. We do not even hiss plays here.”
The Honduran peace conference between the government and rebels agrees on a provisional president, pending new elections in October, so the US envoy doesn’t have to pick one for them. Dr. Francisco Bertrand is a backer of the former president and current rebel leader Manuel Bonilla. His cabinet will consist of equal numbers of men from both sides. There will be an amnesty and the government will pay the war expenses of both sides.
On the last, remarkably foul-tempered day of the lame-duck Congressional session (though Taft plans to call a special session of the newly elected Congress to vote on the dreaded Canadian reciprocity treaty), Sen. Robert Owen (D-OK) filibusters everything in sight to prevent the admission to statehood of Republican New Mexico unless Democratic Arizona is admitted at the same time. He wins that, but the final bill for both territories falls short of the necessary 2/3 vote (45-39).
Then, Sen. Joseph Weldon Bailey (D-TX), who once beat up another senator during a debate, melodramatically resigns – or tries to resign – from the Senate in fury at his fellow Democrats for voting for the Arizona constitution despite the inclusion of provisions for initiative, referendum and recall, which he calls “populistic heresies” in his resignation telegram to the governor of Texas. He had to send that telegram because Vice President Sherman, presiding over the Senate, refused to accept his resignation. The governor didn’t accept it either. Bailey later calmed down and rescinded his resignation, accepting the Democratic senators’ explanation that they also hate those provisions but wanted to let the people of Arizona decide for themselves.
The immigration authorities prevented a ship smuggling “contraband” Chinese coolies landing at San Pedro, shooting at the launch. So the coolies were dumped into the Pacific Ocean and drowned instead. The same thing happened two weeks ago, so they knew what might happen when they stopped it from landing.
Headline of the Day -100: “Leather Insurgents Gain Part Victory.” Some court case by stockholders in the Central Leather Company. Whatever. But: leather insurgents!
Speaking of insurgents, Francisco Madero is demanding the city of Chihuahua surrender or be starved into submission.
The federal government sues to dissolve the “electrical trust,” 34 companies centered on General Electric and the National Electric Lamp Company, which has gained control of 97% of the 80 million lamps sold annually in the US since the patent on carbon filament incandescent lights expired in 1904. One tactic: setting up fake “independent” companies to sell inferior lamps to damage the reputation of real independents.
Headline, er, Other Headline of the Day -100: “Term in Prison for Banker Belling.” Sadly, it turns out to be a banker named Charles Belling (for forgery); there was not a crime of banker-belling.
Henri Bernstein withdraws “Après Mois” from the Comédie-Française, saying he does not wish to be responsible for more bloodshed.
You know how you can tell that the White House-Congressional meeting on the budget went really, really, really well? Joe Biden’s statement afterwards is just ten words long.
The House of Commons passes the bill removing the House of Lords’s veto power. Opposition leader Arthur Balfour gave a speech on the benefits of retaining hereditary power but said, “Let it be our servant; let it no longer be our master.” MPs laughed at him.
More theatrical disturbances in Paris, where a large mob fight the police while trying to storm the Théâtre-Français as Henri Bernstein’s “Après Mois” was being performed. Inside, 100 detectives (in evening dress) failed to prevent the usual disruptions, including exploding magnesium.
There’s a story about an 8-year-old white girl whose mother had left her when she was six months old with a “black mammy of the old type” and then went off to commit suicide. (A follow-up story says she was a 16-year-old chorus girl and did not actually commit suicide). Though the girl was well-cared for and happy, the authorities of course take her away. Read it if you want to be depressed for the rest of the day.
Libyan clothes horse Muammar Qaddafi gave a 2½ hour speech today. He said that there had been “no peaceful demonstrations at all” in the last couple of weeks, and that no government officials have resigned. But then again, he says that he can’t resign either, because he doesn’t actually have any job – he’s the Sarah Palin of Libya – “I carried out a revolution in the 70s, handed over power to the people and then rested.” He does look very well rested, doesn’t he?
If foreign troops invade, they “will be entering hell and they will drown in blood.” But then again, he also says that about “whoever took the last Pop-Tart, which I was totally saving for a snack while watching Glee.” He will fight “until the last man and woman.” But not until the last voluptuous Ukrainian nurse, because she left last week.
He blamed the unrest – which totally doesn’t exist – on Al Qaida, which of course serves Western interests. Er, it’s all very subtle.
And then he got in the Qaddafi-mobile and left.
The lame-duck Senate declares William Lorimer (R-Illinois) duly elected by a vote of 46-40, despite the wide-scale bribery of state legislators in his 1909 election. Interestingly, he was supported by 36 Republicans and 10 Dems, and opposed by 22 R’s and 18 D’s. The Senate’s so-called investigation did not require Lorimer to testify. The vote is an interesting coda to yesterday’s vote against the popular election of senators.
Lorimer will eventually be expelled in the summer of 1912.
Me, trying to read an article by a Mormon about their magic underwear: “The Garments of the Holy Priesthood, or garments, as we call them for short, are simple underclothes that a member” snort giggle “of the church who has participated in the endowment ceremony...” HAHAHAHA!
Hey, Today -100 fans, er, both of you: I should have mentioned that PBS aired a documentary last night on “American Experience” about the Triangle shirtwaist fire of 1911. Check local listings for the re-broadcasts. And there’ll be another doc on HBO on the 21st.
It was... okay. More time spent on the social conditions and the 1909-10 shirtwaist strike than on the actual fire, which is fine by me, although I got the impression it was mostly because they weren’t particularly interested in the factory workers themselves. I do have two objections. 1) I couldn’t tell which of the images they used were actually images of the things they were discussing and which were stock footage – were those firemen the actual ones trying to put out the fire at the Asch Building or just any old firemen from around that period? 2) They willfully obscured the fact that most of the Triangle workers were immigrants. None of the voiceover actors supposedly speaking the words of the survivors had so much as a trace of an accent. And when they talked about the Cooper Union meeting in 1909, they mentioned that Clara Lemlich stood up and gave a rousing speech that roused the meeting, against the wishes of Samuel Gompers and the other union leaders on the stage, into calling the strike, they even quoted some of her words, but failed to mention that they were given in Yiddish. Funny, that.
And of course check back here on March 26th for up-to-the-minute -100 coverage of the fire.
The proposed constitutional amendment for the direct election of senators falls 4 votes shy of the required 2/3 vote in the lame-duck Senate. Both parties were split on the subject, southern Democrats and New England Republicans accounting for most of the no vote.
A party of Shoshone Indians battles with the Nevada State Police. 8 of the former – some of them children – and 1 of the latter are killed, possibly because the Shoshones (actually the “squaws” in the group) used bows and arrows. The Shoshone had killed some ranchers.
Amateur hypnotist Fernando Loutzenheimer will attempt to hypnotize a subject over a long-distance telephone wire (NYC to Canton, Ohio).
Hillary Clinton accuses Qaddafi of using “mercenaries and thugs” against protesters. Or as we call them, at least when they’re caught shooting people in Lahore, “our diplomats.”
She was lukewarm about the idea of Qaddafi going into exile because “accountability must be obtained for what he has done.” Again, unlike “our diplomats” or any other employee of the US government.
Also, Hillary, when you’re accusing someone of using excessive force, maybe you shouldn’t say about the US’s possible response that “nothing is off the table.”
Qaddafi, meanwhile, says that all the Libyan people love him and there have been no protests in Tripoli. So that’s okay then.
Grossest anti-Qaddafi chant: “The blood of martyrs won’t go to waste.”
There is a furore in Virginia over the use in a mandatory history class at Roanoke College of Rev. Henry William Elson’s A History of the United States, which discusses how slave-owners used to fuck their female slaves (the NYT article quotes the relevant passage). Parents are ordering their daughters not to attend the class.
I’m reading South Dakota’s new law to make women seeking abortions jump through hoops.
A woman with an unwanted pregnancy – or as the act puts it, “a pregnant mother considering termination of her relationship with her child by an abortion” – must go to a “pregnancy help center” (described in the act as having a central mission of helping “pregnant mothers” “maintain and keep their relationship with their unborn children”) for “counseling,” that is, to receive information she does not want about help she could receive if she didn’t have an abortion. By the way, the “problem” the bill claims to be addressing is that “In the overwhelming majority of cases, abortion surgery and medical abortions are scheduled for a pregnant mother without the mother first meeting and consulting with a physician or establishing a traditional physician-patient relationship.” Yes, South Dakota, that would be because you drove almost every abortion provider out of the state.
Also, the law claims, abortions are currently scheduled “without a medical or social assessment concerning the appropriateness [!!!] of such a procedure or whether the pregnant mother’s decision is truly voluntary, uncoerced, and informed”.
It asserts that “Such practices are contrary to the best interests of the pregnant mother and her child and there is a need to protect the pregnant mother’s interest in her relationship with her child and her health by passing remedial legislation”. See? they’re just protecting her interests.
Like the Oklahoma law of 2009, which claimed that the need to prevent sex-selection abortions required that abortion-seekers be asked loads of intrusive questions and their answers be put on the internet, South Dakota is also deeply concerned with women’s motives, asserting that doctors have a “common law duty to determine that the physician’s patient’s consent is voluntary and uncoerced and informed”. Which is why they need to be sent to pregnancy help centers to be coerced and misinformed.
The doctor, like the woman, must jump through time-wasting hoops, like meeting the woman “physically and personally” to assess not just her medical but also her “personal circumstances,” determining whether her decision to “submit to an abortion is the result of any coercion, subtle or otherwise.” Do they do subtle in South Dakota? Reading the language of this thing, I tend to doubt it. The doctor shall demand to know the age of the father and “shall determine whether any disparity in the age between the mother and father is a factor in creating an undue influence or coercion.”
Then the doctor has to send her to one of those centers, which will also cross-examine her for signs of coercion. The patient must then give the doctor “a written statement that she obtained a consultation with a pregnancy help center, which sets forth the name and address of the pregnancy help center, the date and time of the consultation, and the name of the counselor at the pregnancy help center with whom she consulted”. I’ll get back to this in a minute.
The state will maintain a list of pregnancy help centers, which for some reason seem to escape from the level of scrutiny and regulation imposed on doctors, or indeed any scrutiny or regulation at all (“Nothing in this Act may be construed to impose any duties or liability upon a pregnancy help center”) (such as a requirement that its counselors have any medical knowledge or indeed any training at all, or that they tell the truth). However, any center on the list must have as one of their “principal missions... to educate, counsel, and otherwise assist women to help them maintain their relationship with their unborn children”. And they can’t perform abortions, be affiliated with anyone who does, refer women for abortions, or have ever referred women for abortions since 2008. Yeah, those are definitely the people to keep a pregnant woman safe from coercion.
While the pregnancy help centers are supposed to determine if the woman is being coerced, they are “under no obligation to communicate with the abortion provider in any way,” even if they see signs of coercion, and are “under no obligation to submit any written or other form of confirmation that the pregnant mother consulted with the pregnancy help center.” Presumably because the centers which the legislators most want pregnant women to go to would refuse to cooperate in any way with satanic abortion mills.
If the doctor doesn’t follow the act’s provisions, any patient who has had an abortion can sue him/her for $10,000 plus attorney’s fees, plus any damages that “the woman or other survivors of the deceased unborn child may be entitled to receive under any common law or statutory provisions”. In such court cases, there will be a rebuttable presumption that if the doctor had made her jump through all the hoops, she would have decided not to have an abortion. If the court decides that someone coerced the woman, there will be a nonrebuttable presumption that she would have decided not to have an abortion.
Fortunately for pregnant women who don’t want to go to a “pregnancy help center” to have someone try to talk them out of their decision, the only real requirement the law puts on a patient is that she give the doctor a written statement that she went to a center, not that she actually go there. There is no enforcement in this act that applies to the patient. So my advice to them, as it was with the Oklahoma law, is to lie. Pick a center off the list at random, tell your doctor that you went there Tuesday and spoke with Susie. Lie, it’s an appropriate, ethical and legal response to this coercive, intrusive, obnoxious law.
There are reports that the Mexican government has made approaches to the rebels for a truce.
Fox News -100, or its yellow press equivalent, is all over this story: Milwaukee’s socialist mayor, Emil Seidel, recognizes Labor Day as a holiday, but kept his office open on Washington’s Birthday. The NYT does agree that there are too many damn holidays. We’re not like those lazy Mexican peons, people!
from the HBO one-man play about him with Laurence Fishburne: his first wife was named “Buster,” his second wife was named Cissy.
Weird.
Pope Pius X comes out against various fashionable forms of women’s dress, including – and I have no idea what any of these somewhat alarming terms mean – the jupe-culotte, pneumonia blouses, harem skirts, sheath robes, and hobble gowns. He writes, “The fashions of these women – women, not ladies – would have had a most unfavorable judgment from pagan Roman matrons. ... In the old Roman days the demi-monde was publicly marked; but now even young women called ladies so dress that one class is mistaken for the other.” I think he’s saying those clothes make them look like whores.
The Socialist Party holds a women’s suffrage meeting in Carnegie Hall. The Times just can’t refrain from mentioning the clothing of the meeting’s chair, Anita Block (“a gown of the extreme ‘hobble’ variety”).
Norway will allow women to occupy state offices. Well, except for the Cabinet. And the military. And the diplomatic service. And the Church.
Lorin Collins, until two months ago a justice on the Panama Supreme Court (the Canal Zone’s Supreme Court, I assume), and before that Republican speaker of the house in the Illinois legislature, says that Taft is acting as a despot in Panama: “The president’s word, not the law, governs all and everything.”
Two negroes are lynched in Warrenton, Georgia.
Peace negotiations over the Honduran civil war are taking place on board the US warship Tacoma. The elected president Miguel Davila offered to resign in the interests of peace, if rebel former president Gen. Bonilla, who Davila correctly accuses of being an agent of the United Fruit Company, also withdraws as candidate for the post. So a temporary president might be appointed by... American special representative Thomas Dawson.
The Senate takes a break from making sure that Japanese laborers will continue to be excluded from the US under the new treaty with Japan (now ratified) to consider a resolution in favor of abrogating the 1832 treaty with Russia because of its exclusion of American citizens who are Jewish.
Parisian men have expressed their disapproval of the new fashion of trouser-skirts (trousers skirt, the NYT calls them) by mobbing and throwing eggs at women seen wearing them. French newspapers have been printing medical opinions for and against the style.
The fight over Henri Bernstein’s play “Après Mois” continues in Paris. Last night the police had to storm one of the theatre’s boxes, which had been barricaded from the inside by five Camelots du Roi in possession of car horns. When the Camelots were ejected, there were cries of “Down with the Jews” from their compatriots. That was during the first act. The second act was marked by the release of a flock of doves. Bernstein has written to Prime Minister Briand asking that the president of the Camelots, Lucien Lacour, be temporarily released from prison so that he and Bernstein can duel. Lacour is serving a sentence for slapping the same Prime Minister Briand (Lacour was elected president of the Camelots while in prison in honor of that act).
“The Cunarder Lusitania arrived late yesterday afternoon after one of the roughest voyage [sic] across the Atlantic she ever has experienced.” But not the roughest she will ever experience.
In Chicago, Theodore Roosevelt announces his support for women’s suffrage.
The Tafties reassure California that even under the new treaty with Japan, there won’t be any Japanese immigration, because Japan itself will continue to restrict emigration. Some Californian politicians are not reassured, though Gov. Hiram Johnson says, “California wants exclusion. President Taft says we will get it. That is enough for me.”
Members of the monarchist (and more or less proto-fascist) Camelots du Roi have been disrupting performances of Henri Bernstein’s play “Après Mois” at the Comédie-Française in Paris with shouts, car horns, whistles, etc. Everyone’s a critic. Actually, their problem is less with the content of the play than with Bernstein’s Jewishness and his desertion from the military as a young man. Newspapers have been attacking each other over the play, and many duel challenges have been issued, including several to and from Bernstein.
John McCain & Joe Lieberman, who you will be scared to hear are in the middle of a diplomatic tour of the Middle East, issued a statement about Libya yesterday, calling for “a no-fly zone to stop the Qaddafi regime’s use of airpower to attack Libyan civilians.” Obviously such a thing could only be enforced by a military force ready and willing to shoot down Libyan planes.
The Canadian Parliament declares unanimously that Canada should not be annexed by the United States.
The California state senate unanimously demands that the US Senate reject the new US-Japanese treaty, calling the omission of a provision allowing the US to exclude Japanese immigrants “fraught with so much danger to our citizens, to our industrial development, and to our civilization.” The new governor, progressive Hiram Johnson, refuses to comment: “I don’t desire to discuss it.” Wimp.
“Pourmecoffee” on Twitter: “Rahm Emanuel wins Chicago Mayor. You may know him from previous job, trying to please Olympia Snowe and Joe Lieberman.”
So winning the votes of corpses is not a new experience for him.
Libya’s leader, Muammar Qocksucker (sometimes spelled Ghocksucker, Khacksukker, etc etc), went on tv to proclaim that he will “die a martyr” and “fight until the last drop of my blood.” A couple of days ago his son promised to “fight to the last bullet.” If only the last drop of the “colonel’s” blood leaked out as the last bullet thudded into his body, this could still have a happy ending.
In fact, he insisted that he hadn’t ordered “one bullet to be fired” yet, but “when I do, everything will burn.” So we have that to look forward to.
He declared himself “a fighter, a revolutionary from tents”. “Muammar is leader of the revolution until the end of time,” he predicted, and called on the people of Libya to come out and beat up the protesters.
He denounced protesters as “cockroaches,” “rats” and “mercenaries” “serving the devil,” as inspired by “bearded men” and as being “drug-fuelled, drunken and duped” (not necessarily in that order). He said, “Muammar Qaddafi is history, resistance, liberty, glory, revolution” (he personally wrote Libya’s official thesaurus). If only he had stopped after the first four words.
British Tory Party leader Balfour says he will consent to removing the House of Lords’ veto power only if any measure of Irish Home Rule is submitted to a popular referendum.
Irish Nationalist MPs will boycott George V’s coronation ceremonies.
The Taft admin has sprung a proposed treaty with Japan on a Senate that evidently didn’t know it was being negotiated. It’s much like the expiring 1894 treaty but leaves out the provision requiring Japan to accept American racial exclusion laws. The Tafties want it ratified quickly, hoping the Californian delegation won’t provoke the usual racist agitation while the lucrative 1915 Pacific-Panama Exposition can still be taken away from San Francisco.
The Flushing Association (an organization of the hoity toity of Flushing)(which would be a great name for a rock band) calls on the Board of Education to eliminate dancing in public schools. It’s not the dancing they object to per se, it’s that black and white pupils might be required to dance... together.
But how do you determine that all-important question, who is white and who is black? “In an endeavor to determine scientifically the race of a child, staff physicians at Johns Hopkins Hospital to-day made an examination of Luella Loftridge, an eleven-year-old girl, who is trying to obtain her freedom from a negro institution in which she has been confined for nearly seven years. The examination, it was said, did not settle the question, and the lawyers for the girl declared that there would be no cessation of the fight for her release. ... The physical characteristics by which physicians are said to be able to detect the presence of negro blood, but which are held by some authorities to be utterly valueless, played a large part in the examination. The main point to be settled – one that has been the subject of unlimited debate for decades – is what can really be considered the line of demarkation between a white person and a negro. In the present case it was stated that all the accepted tests for the presence of negro blood, save one, had failed. That one is the presence of a black line across one of the girl’s fingernails”. Neither Google nor the NYT index shed any light on the subsequent fate of Luella Loftridge.
Playwright Henri Bernstein asked the leading actress in his play “Après Mois” in the Comédie-Française in Paris to wear a trousers skirt. This set off a scandal at the public dress rehearsal (spoiler alert: not the last scandal associated with this performance – keep watching this spot!). The American ambassador was heard to exclaim, “Gee whiz!” The offending garment will no longer be displayed.
A letter to the editor from guest publication The Car in Britain, written by George Bernard Shaw, entering a discussion in that periodical on what to do when one runs over a dog (I’m folding in a follow-up later in the March 15th issue)(um, the squeamish might stop reading at this point). GBS says that he has been in a car, driven by himself or his chauffeur, on 13 occasions when it has killed a dog. In one incident, his driver ran over the dog of an 8-year-old girl. They stopped, but “When the begoggled monster who had just killed her dog approached her, possibly with the intention of continuing his fell work, she went into screaming hysterics”. So he suggests that the most tactful thing to do is “withdraw as rapidly as possible”, although he does confine that advice to dogs: “On the whole, when you kill a human being, stop.” He disagrees with those authors of letters to The Car who point out “that the motorist who runs away loses an opportunity of demonstrating that he is a gentleman, and thereby defeats the main purpose for which, in the opinion of many respectable Englishmen, the universe was created.”
Hillary Clinton to Libya: “Now is the time to stop this unacceptable bloodshed.”
There are days when I think that every public figure is just as batshit insane as Glenn Beck, or at least morally insane, but some of them are just capable of hiding it better. I suspect Hillary has two large blackboards in her office, on one of which there is a list of acceptable bloodshed and on the other a list of unacceptable bloodshed.
Back after 2½ days of internet outage. Fucking Earthlink.
But my call is very important to them.
They even asked me to take a survey about the assistance their support associate had just given me.
Without, of course, having actually ever connected me with a support associate.
Fucking Earthlink.
Anyhoo, the Headline of the Day, from the Guardian: “Women Still Face Glass Ceiling.” Maybe they’d achieve more job advancement if they weren’t lying down all the time (facing glass ceiling, geddit?).
The NYPD has been cracking down on beggars, and the NYT is pleased: “Street beggars are almost always impostors. ... Beggars should be driven from the streets and kept away from all public places. ... Street beggars are undesirable persons.” Don’t know what the Times’s deal is here; maybe the newspaper of choice for the homeless to sleep under was the New York Evening Journal.
Mexican revolutionary leader Francisco Madero is evidently considering introducing an educational qualification for the franchise.
The Chinese government is, under threat from Russia and Japan, finally taking action to combat a major outbreak of bubonic plague (which many Chinese think was deliberately introduced by Russia). Villages in the affected region have been ordered to burn their dead. Garbage is being collected.
The Mormon Church’s Board of Education summons three Brigham Young University professors (in biology, psychology and education) to answer charges of being “modernists” and heretics. Their crime: applying higher criticism to the Old Testament. They are expected to be fired.
Very high tech: President Taft will open the Elks’ carnival in Honolulu by pushing a button in the White House that will send an electrical current all the way to Hawaii, lighting up a clock.
Harry Plate, a plumber, is the first artisan ever raised to a life peerage in the Prussian House of Lords. Enjoy it while you can, Harry.
The district attorney in New Orleans indicts Manuel Bonilla, the former president of Honduras who is attempting to overthrow its current government, and his American mercenary general Lee Christmas, on a charge of attempting to smuggle weapons from the US.
There’s a report (or possibly just a rumor) that Jack London has been arrested on the Mexican border for violations of the neutrality laws.
The Sunday book review section rather fails to connect with E.M. Forster’s Howards End, and concludes, “Mr. Forster’s métier would seem to be conventional comedy. ... But he evinces neither power nor inclination to come to grips with any vital human problem.”
The anti-trust case against the “Bath Tub Trust” continues to produce amusing headlines: “Bath Tub Men Seek Immunity.” For crimes against rubber duckies, one imagines.
Those Wobblies are forced off the train they hijacked. Only made it as far as Ashland, Ore.
Headline of the Day -100: “Taft to Dine Classmates.” Er, that doesn’t mean Taft will eat his classmates, does it? Does it?
Black people are annoyed at a judge on the District Supreme Court (which I guess is the court with jurisdiction over D.C.) who, when sentencing a black purse-snatcher, said “From the viewpoint of the white women of the National capital, it is not to be tolerated that a colored man should dare to put his hand on one of them, and a man of your color who lays hands on a white woman will not be tolerated if I can help it.”
91 property owners on W 136th Street in NYC, calling themselves the Harlem Real Estate Protective Association, file a covenant in the Hall of Records that none of them will rent or sell to black people (including mulattos, quadroons, or octoroons) for the next 15 years. Tenants will even be restricted from employing more than one servant who is negro, mulatto etc. Somehow this covenant is supposed to be constitutional (and legally binding) because it carefully states that they have nothing against people occupying their premises solely on account of their race, but just want to keep rents up (by keeping blacks out). They claim that colored tenants are being deliberately brought in as part of a real estate speculation/blackmail scheme.
Headline of the Day -100: “LAUGH AT KAISER’S JOKES.; Agricultural Congress Ripples with Merriment as He Talks Farming.” Jokes by Kaiser Wilhelm about farming! Well known as the height of humor -100. Tell us, tell us! Unfortunately... the NYT doesn’t relate a single one of the jokes. I has a sad.
The Guardian: “Colin Powell, the US secretary of state at the time of the Iraq invasion, has called on the CIA and Pentagon to explain why they failed to alert him to the unreliability of a key source behind claims of Saddam Hussein’s bio-weapons capability.”
Because you didn’t ask.
This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.
Archeologists prove that ancient Britons were in fact zombies.
Wait. Pale, grayish skin, bad teeth, silly walks, steak and kidney pies, Margaret Thatcher...
Although Secretary of State Knox denied yesterday that the reciprocity treaty with Canada has anything to do with annexing Canada, Rep. William Bennet (R-NY), an opponent of the measure, introduces a spoiling resolution, intended to embarrass the Canadians or something, calling for Taft to begin negotiations with Great Britain on the annexation of Canada by the US.
A former NY state senator turned lobbyist Frank Gardner is being tried for bribing State Sen. Otto Foelker in 1908 to vote against bills banning racetrack gambling (he was brought from his sickbed after an appendectomy and carried in to vote on a stretcher, and the bill was defeated by one vote). Foelker, now a member of Congress, is the chief witness against Gardner and was cross-examined today. His honesty came into question. For example, he took the Regents’ Examination in his late 20s as a prerequisite for being admitted to the bar. The exam was given in the Grand Central Palace. Which entrance did he use? 42nd street. There is no such entrance. “Parlez-vous Français?” Not so much, although he scored 100% in his French exam. He scored 95% in logarithms and 98% in syntax, although on the stand he could not even define either term. In other words, he paid someone to take the test for him, someone currently in jail for taking tests for people. Foelker says the man was just his tutor. Gardner will be acquitted and Foelker’s political career is over.
A bunch of Industrial Workers of the World in Washington state, intending to go to Fresno to “attempt to enforce their alleged right to speak on the streets” (the NYT doesn’t explain what that’s about) steal a train from Southern Pacific. Wobblies were so fucking cool.
Mexican Gen. Navarro declares Juarez under martial law, shutting down all businesses, “including saloons and keno games.”
Secretary of State Philander Knox denies that the reciprocity treaty with Canada is a first step towards absorbing Canada into the US: “It is an ethnological fact that political units of the English-speaking people never lose their autonomy. Like bees, they give off their swarms, who set up for themselves independently, but they do not make political combinations among themselves.”
At a press conference, his first of 2011, Obama, asked, “If we’re cutting infant formula to poor kids, is that who we are as a people?”
