Bear with me

while I get the new commenting system up and running. Haloscan’s owners decided to start charging for a more annoying system. All the moving parts aren’t moving yet. Probably better not to add comments to any posts older than this one.

If a blogger on Blogspot with the JS-Kit Echo system installed is reading this, it would be very helpful if you could send me, by email or as a comment, the html code from its gadget box on the Page Lageout page.

Today -100: December 22, 1909: Of the spirit of a good son going to the rescue of his beloved mother

Madriz is sworn in as president of Nicaragua, saying, “I assume the Presidency unmoved by personal ambition, but by the spirit of a good son going to the rescue of his beloved mother, harassed and imperiled.” He announced a political amnesty.

However, the fighting continues, with the Estradists beating the government forces near Rama. The NYT attributes this to the former being “armed with the latest equipment and machine guns”. Huh. Wonder how that happened.

Shot

I thought better of titling this post “The President’s shot.” Anyway, Obama got his swine flu shot today. CAPTION CONTEST.

But is it kosher?

The various news stories and blogs talking about a supposedly discontinued Israeli program of secretly harvesting the organs and skin of dead Palestinians (and others) all fail to mention the reason Israel has a chronic shortage of organs: Orthodox Jews claim their religion prevents them being organ donors but not organ recipients.

Today -100: December 21, 1909: Of sick immigrants, lynchings, lynchings, and more lynchings, and all this Santa Claus business

Reading the 1909 papers goes a lot quicker if you don’t bother reading any of the stories about the controversy over whether Cook reached the North Pole.

The Commissioner of Immigration has decided that “physically or mentally unfit” immigrants will no longer be treated by the government but made the responsibility of the steamship companies that brought them.

As in NY, Philadelphia shirtwaist manufacturers are willing to concede pretty much every demand of the strikers – except union recognition.

The NY shirtwaist strikers’ ally, the Woman’s Trade Union League has introduced an innovation into the practice of picketing: the automobile. It will be used to cover all the factories where scabs are working. One striker, the amusingly named Fanny Fireman, has been sentenced to five days in the workhouse for throwing a rotten egg at a scab.

Here’s a picture I forgot to post earlier, I think from the paper 100 years + 2 days ago.


The Nicaraguan Congress has unanimously elected José Madriz, Zelaya’s nominee, to be the nation’s president. Gen. Estrada vows to fight on. US Secretary of State Philander C. Knox has issued a strong note saying that Madriz will have to show he is capable of directing a responsible government and make reparation for the execution of Cannon and Groce. But the US will not yet recognize either Madriz or Estrada.

In your lynching news of the day, a man who fatally wounded a marshal was lynched in Rosebud Texas; the Illinois National Guard is being moved to Belleville to protect another black man suspected of being involved in a fatal street car robbery in East St. Louis; a black man was shot to death by a mob in a jail cell in Devil’s Bluff, Ark.; and a lynch mob in Magnolia, Alabama was searching for 4 black brothers suspected of killing a white man. When the house one of the brothers was hiding in was set on fire, he shot at the mob, killing one and wounding two others, but was fatally shot himself as he tried to escape the blaze. Two others were arrested and narrowly escaped lynching; the fourth brother remains at large. “Nearly every negro resident left Magnolia to-day. The whites are all armed.”

Mark Twain announces “I am through with work for this life and this world.”

More front page news: The 6-year-old grandson of Rep. McMorran (R-Mich.) has been having doubts about “all this Santa Claus business.” So his parents told him to ask President Taft about it. Taft suggested that if he writes a letter to Santa and Santa then brings everything he asks for, that should be proof enough. The boy agreed, and is now busily writing his letter. Probably asking for a monkey-on-the-stick, whatever that might be (this?).

And that boy grew up to be Ben Nelson.

Mirror mirror

There is indeed a joke about the warlord running the Ministry of Energy and Water. Given the reliability of the power supply in Kabul, he is called the Minister of Darkness.

Karzai: “We have tried to ensure that the cabinet is a mirror of Afghanistan’s people, a cabinet that all Afghan people can see themselves in.” Evidently the Afghan people are only 4% female.

Would explain why Afghan men always seem so pissed off.

Sir Jean-Luc Picard! Make it so.

This is not renaming the post office

So to make up for the terrible abortion provisions in the health care bill, the D’s will create a Pregnancy Assistance Fund to convince pregnant women and teenage girls that forced childbirth is okay. The fund will provide money for “maternity and baby clothing, baby food, baby furniture and similar items.” The fund will be $25 million per year. Yup, that should cover it.

(Update: Smintheus points out “the most astounding aspect of this provision: It encourages teenage pregnancy by offering financial rewards to pregnant teens.”)

Mitch McConnell: “This is not renaming the post office. Make no mistake -- this bill will reshape our nation and our lives.” Although to be fair, he’d probably bitch and moan and filibuster and obstruct about renaming the post office too.

One of the warlords in Karzai’s cabinet is minister of electricity and water. There’s probably a joke in there somewhere.

Today -100: December 20, 1909: Of late trains

The shirtwaist strike spreads to Philadelphia, which has been getting orders from some of the NY firms being struck.

Another slow December news day, as demonstrated by a NYT headline gracing the front page: “Taft Train an Hour Late.”

What is the capital of Nelsonia?

As part of the deal Harry Reid cut with Ben Nelson, Nebraska will henceforth be known as Nelsonia. Adjust your maps accordingly.

Meaningful and unprecedented

Obama called his little deal at the Copenhagen summit a “meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough.” Because if there’s one thing that is both full of meaning and totally without precedent, it’s the world’s nations agreeing to “take note” of a non-binding aspirational document with no targets or compliance oversight that even if adhered to wouldn’t come close to averting global environmental catastrophe.

George Monbiot calls the closed-door negotiations among the big states “a scramble for the atmosphere comparable in style and intent to the scramble for Africa.”

Some people, of course, think even this goes too far.

Today -100: December 19, 1909: Of college girls, scabs, and monkey-on-the-sticks

Manhattan’s District-Attorney-Elect Charles Whitman (Wikipedia tells us that he was later governor, that Christine Todd-Whitman is married to his grandson, and that he was not the Texas tower sniper) (I had to look him up to get his first name; the NYT in 1909 was absolutely allergic to using first names) has chosen a deputy assistant, Cornelius McDougald, who is an actual negro, and will appoint a woman deputy to oversee work in the Children’s Court.

The Sunday paper, has a feature on “college girls,” by which they mean recent college graduates such as women’s suffragist Inez Milholland and her Vassar cohort, who have been joining the shirtwaist strikers on the picket line, attempting to prevent arrests, and arguing on behalf of the strikers in court. (The NYT also reports that wealthy suffragist Alva Belmont has been providing lawyers and bail money to arrested strikers.) Seeing the treatment of female strikers by police and Night Court, and hearing from the shirtwaist-makers about their work conditions, has been a radicalizing experience for them. Strikers have been invited to give talks to many middle- and upper-class women’s clubs.

Here’s a helpful tip if you’re ever on a picket line in 1909 New York: the word “scab,” shouted at the scabs, is against the law, and you can be arrested for it. “Strikebreaker” is okay. The scabs can yell pretty much anything they like at the strikers.

A story in the Sunday magazine section has Santa Claus complaining about these kids today: “Years ago children were satisfied with Jack-in-the-boxes, monkey-on-the-sticks, and other inexpensive baubles, but nowadays they’re looking for a whole string of iron cars, miniature automobiles, and flying machines.”

Torture is constitutional. It’s official.

Chris Floyd says what needs to be said about the Supreme Court’s decision to let the D.C. Circuit Court’s ruling in the Rasul case stand, as the Obama Justice Dept urged. I’d just add a link to my post two years ago on that ruling, which was remarkable for asserting that torture was precisely what was intended when Guantanamo was set up, so the torturers could not be sued because they were just doing the job for which they were employed.

Today -100: December 18, 1909: Of exiles and fish splits

Zelaya plans to leave Nicaragua.

Headline of the Day -100: “Harvard Split Over Fish.” Sadly, the story doesn’t live up to the potential of that headline, although the news day was so singularly uneventful that it was on the front page. The fish in question is not of the piscine variety, but Hamilton Fish III, captain of the football team (and later an isolationist congresscritter, rabid anti-semite and centenarian; not to be confused with the publisher of The Nation), who lost the class election to be First Marshal (I think it’s like class president) to someone who hadn’t made the football team. There are many bitter feelings and Fish fled Harvard for New York, but claims he “didn’t care a rap which way the election went.”

But I think it’s wrong

John McCain, complaining after Al Franken, presiding over the Senate, cut off Joe Lieberman’s 10-minute speech at 10 minutes: “I don’t know what’s happening here in this body, but I think it’s wrong.”

Why is it

that whenever I hear a news story about American drones killing people, I think of Joe Lieberman?

Today -100: December 17, 1909: Of fallen presidents, dead kings, trouble-making tin mills, immigrants’ children’s heads, and lowering standards

Nicaraguan President José Santos Zelaya resigns. To avoid further bloodshed and to avoid giving the US “a pretext for intervention,” he says, not because he was losing militarily.

The US has graciously decided to postpone demanding payment from Cuba of the $6,509,511 it claims Cuba owes the US compensate it for the expense of occupying Cuba.

US Steel responds to the declaration of war by the unions (2 days ago) by announcing a plan to dismantle its “trouble-making” tin mills (in the words of the president of the US Steel-owned American Sheet and Tin Plate Company) in Pittsburg altogether and build a new one in Gary, Ind. for $4,500,000.

A Immigration Commission report to Congress says that the children of immigrants look more like Americans. Actually, it only looked at Sicilians and Eastern European Jews in New York, but evidently the heads of the Sicilians’ children are no longer so long and those of the Jews are no longer so round and Jewy.

The British general election, called for January 1910, is in full swing, and many Conservative members of the House of Lords have been heckled and shouted down at election meetings. In part this is because it’s traditional for peers to keep out of elections to the other House, and in part because this election is largely about the constitutional position of the House of Lords, which has been screwing with the Liberal government’s bills for years (think Joe Lieberman), but went far beyond what most people considered its legitimate role to be when it rejected the budget, something the Lords hadn’t done for 250 years.


The suffragettes have also been actively heckling candidates, mostly Liberals. One jumped into Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George’s car and “upbraided and shook” him.

Leopold, the king of the Belgians, died.

Incoming Yale science and engineering students will no longer have to know Latin.

Does every post have to have a clever title? I think not.

Headline of the Day (London Times): “Oldest Butter in the World Found in Robert Scott’s Antarctic Hut.”

Sarah Palin, who certainly isn’t pandering for a 2012 presidential run, has a post about the true meaning of Hanukkah on her Facebook page. Since it was written by her ghost writer, the moral of the story of the oil that burned for 8 days is “With hope and dedication nothing is impossible, and the Almighty never abandons those who seek the light” and not “drill, baby, drill.”

If Obama thought that we’d accept moving some of Guantanamo’s prisoners to Illinois while continuing the Bushian system of extra-legal indefinite confinement to be the fulfillment of his campaign promise to “close Guantanamo,” he could have just changed Guantanamo’s name, put up a few new signs, and saved a whole lot of money.

Ben Bernanke named Time’s Man of the Year. Joe Lieberman will have his revenge for this, oh he will have his revenge.

Now for another electrifying edition of Here Are Some News Stories, Write Your Own Damn Jokes, I Have a Headache: The D.C. city council voted 11-2 for marriage equality. One of the dissenters was Marion “Bitch Set Me Up” Barry.

Annotated White House Flickr feed.

Today -100: December 16, 1909: Of Carrie Nation, divinity students, racist congressmen and Nicaraguan presidents all behaving badly. Also, cork legs.

Rep. Foster of Ill. introduced a bill for Civil War veterans who were honorably discharged (and presumably had had their leg or legs amputated) to be given new artificial cork legs every three years.

Carrie Nation visited the House and Senate buildings. Finding a House messenger smoking, she knocked the cigarette out of his mouth.

Divinity students at the McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago hanged and then burned the effigy of a professor of Hebrew in front of his residence. The students had failed to get the Faculty to drop Hebrew from the curriculum. What Would Ku Klux Klan Jesus Do?

Rep. J. Thomas Heflin of Alabama introduces a bill to segregate street cars in D.C. Heflin, the NYT reminds us, shot a black man (and, by ricochet, a white bystander) on a D.C. street car in 1908 for drinking whiskey in the presence of ladies (here’s the original story on that. Heflin said, “Under the circumstances there was nothing else for me to do.” Clearly.), and 21 months later still hasn’t been tried for it (he never will be, and Heflin, truly a vile piece of shit, would brag about the incident in later election campaigns) (he didn’t have to worry about the black vote in Alabama, having drafted the provision of the 1901 Alabama constitution that banned negroes from voting).

One Frederick Palmer has written an article about Zelaya in The Outlook which accuses him of having made a fortune off of state monopolies and that “Zelaya freely practices the droits de seigneur of the Dark Ages.”

Oral Roberts

no longer so oral.

Shouting, screaming or vocalisation at such a level as to be a statutory nuisance

News Story of the Day (BBC): “Noisy Sex Woman Admits Asbo Breach”

Every sentence in this story sounds dirty:

“A woman who was given an anti-social behaviour order banning her from making loud noises during sex has admitted breaching the order.” Heh heh, they said “breaching the order.”

“Caroline and Steve Cartwright’s love-making was described as ‘murder’ and ‘unnatural’ at Newcastle Crown Court. Neighbours, the local postman and a woman taking her child to school complained about the noise.” And those are just the people she had sex with Tuesday. Zing!

A neighbor said, “I cannot describe the noise. I have never ever heard anything like it.” Then she sighed wistfully and repeated, “I have never ever heard anything like it.”

“In November, Cartwright appealed against a noise abatement notice imposed in 2007, as well as the subsequent Asbo, which banned the couple from shouting, screaming or vocalisation at such a level as to be a statutory nuisance’. Her bid was rejected by Recorder Jeremy Freedman, who said: ‘It certainly was intrusive and constituted a statutory nuisance. It was clearly of a very disturbing nature and it was also compounded by the duration - this was not a one-off, it went on for hours at a time.’” Then he sighed wistfully and repeated, “For hours at a time.”

“‘It is further compounded by the frequency of the episode, virtually every night.’” Then he sighed wistfully and repeated, “Virtually every night.”

“Sunderland City Council told the court they had recorded noise levels of up to 47 decibels using equipment installed at Cartwright’s neighbour’s house. World Health Organisation guidelines state that 30 decibels is enough to cause sleep disturbance.” World Health Organisation guidelines also state that sex that produces noise levels of 47 decibels is “awesome.”