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The British are voting. Just as crowds were hostile to members of the House of Lords breaking tradition by speaking to election meetings, a crowd at Grimsby, outraged at Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George addressing voters on polling day, which is just not done, forced him to abandon the speech and flee. There were also shouts of “Traitor” and “Pro-Boer,” evidently from people still pissed at his stance during the Boer War a decade earlier. In his speech, LG had actually been refuting Balfour’s alarmism about the German menace, saying that if the German navy tried anything, it would be at the bottom of the sea in a matter of hours.
In Dundee, Winston Churchill, himself a once and future Tory, denounced the Conservatives as “the party of privilege and class.”
Rep. Henry is proposing a constitutional amendment to push the presidential inauguration back from March 4 to the last Thursday in April. The move is supported by D.C. hotels and the like, hoping for more business if there is a prospect of better weather.
In other hotel news, there has been a rash of suicides in Germany lately, possibly by people contemplating the prospects of the Germany Navy against the British Royal Navy, and the Association of Hotel Owners has issued a statement asking potential suicides to please do away with themselves somewhere other than in hotels, because there are really lots of alternative spots where they’d cause less inconvenient to others, and do you know what that does to the reputation of a hotel?
In Britain, witnesses in court have taken to refusing to kiss the Bible on health grounds, and the practice has been abolished altogether in Lambeth (London) Police Court. However, “To the poorer class the old formula seemed to appeal strongly. Remember you have ‘kissed the Book’ was usually the most crushing comment a defendant could make when challenging the statements of a witness.”
The NYC Board of Education bans competition or prizes being offered in high schools without authorization. This is aimed at a $100 prize offered by Mrs. Belmont to the female students at Wadleigh High School for the best essays on women’s suffrage.
New Jersey electrocuted six men in 1909 at a cost of $7,028. The cost of maintaining living prisoners was 33¢ a day.
At another institution of the state of New Jersey, the State Home for Girls in Trenton, it has been revealed that girls and women up to the age of 21 are lashed with leather whips. The NYT believes that whipping has been abolished in every other state. The trustees of the home complain that it has to house insane and feeble-minded girls alongside reformatory cases, that the state gives them no resources but expects them to train the girls, and that it expects them to discipline them without having a “proper house of detention so that we can separate temporarily the vicious girl”.
The shirtwaist strikers in Philadelphia have picked up a sympathizer: Helen Taft, daughter of the president, along with her fellow members of the Bryn Mawr Suffrage Club. After hearing about the conditions of shirtwaist makers, she said, “Really, I’ll never put on a shirtwaist again without a shudder. ... Why, it’s just like reading Nietzsche, isn’t it?” “And then,” the NYT snidely reports, “Miss Taft and her friends boarded a Thirteenth Street car and went to the opera.”
Headline of the Day -100: “King Drops Short Breeches.” Those invited to meet King Edward at Lady Paget’s, the men anyway, have been told they are to wear evening trousers instead of the usual black silk breeches and black silk stockings. “[T]he reason of the innovation is unknown.”
Headline of the Day (Daily Telegraph): “Aborigines to Ask Prince William to Return Warrior’s Severed Head.” And why do they think he can help them? Because he “has his mother’s heart.”
This is Jamuna Toni, born last month at the Munich zoo.
The NYT prints a letter in support of women’s suffrage by Katharine Houghton Hepburn, a leader of the suffrage movement in Connecticut and the mother of... wait for it... Katharine Hepburn. She writes that women would be more interested in public issues if they had the vote, but instead, “The Government has classed women with the mentally incompetent – those unfit to vote even in a democracy.”
Barack Obama, pledging “a swift, coordinated and aggressive effort to save lives and support recovery in Haiti,” asks for help from Bill Clinton and... George W. Bush. Because when you think swift, coordinated and aggressive effort to save lives and support recovery from a natural disaster, you think George W. Bush.
Chinese people have been lighting candles and leaving flowers outside Google’s Beijing hq. Evidently to do so is to commit the crime of “illegal flower donation.”
Two things have rendered me speechless by their sheer overwhelming, astonishing awfulness: the earthquake in Haiti, and the decision by the judge in the trial of Scott Roeder, the anti-abortion loon who assassinated Dr. Tiller, that he can argue that Tiller needed killing.
In Philadelphia as in NY, the shirtwaist strike is being supported by women suffragists, who are joining picket lines and going bail for arrested picketers.
A letter (I wonder, by the way, when the NYT stopped printing anonymous letters) congratulates the paper on being the first to use the term “chairwoman,” in an article about a suffrage meeting.
Prime Minister Asquith, in one of his last speeches before the British general election, accuses opposition leader Arthur Balfour of being wishy-washy about tariff reform (protectionism), which is popular with some parts of the Conservative Party but not so much with the general public, which doesn’t want to see food prices rise. At least I think that’s what Asquith is saying: “The oracle has spoken [referring to Balfour’s speech]. What is its message? Not Delphi or Dodona in the palmiest days of sacerdotal ambiguity ever gave forth a more uncertain sound.”
The NYT disparages the Liberals’ social policies, claiming that Britain is “overtaxed to pay old-age pensions” and can’t afford the proposed system of unemployment insurance (being superintended for the moment by Winston Churchill, of all people, at the Board of Trade). The NYT says that Asquith rules a coalition of “Socialists, laborites and Irish Nationalists. No promise has yet been made to provide husbands for suffragettes.” The editorial also refers, somewhat more fairly, to “the obviously insincere Liberal promise of home rule for Ireland.”
Bills in the NY Assembly would require autoists to have driver’s licenses and set speed limits of 15 mph city, 25 in outlying areas of cities, and 30 in the country. A second bill proposes lower speed limits.
The House passes the Mann Act.
Headline of the Day -100: “Charles Head Falls Dead.”
Headline of the Day: For weeks, Nigerians have been demanding that their president make some sort of public appearance. Umaru Yar’Adua has been getting medical treatment for a heart condition in Saudi Arabia since November. Today he re-emerged, giving a radio interview to the BBC. The London Times headline: “I’m Not Dead, I’m Getting Better’ Nigerian President Tells People Back Home.” For the record, that’s not a direct quote from Yar’Adua (although he did say “I’m getting better), that’s someone trying to sneak in a Monty Python reference.
Readers in Colorado: Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper is considering running for governor. He should be encouraged, because of the name. Say it with me: Hickenlooper Hickenlooper Hickenlooper.
Why the Prop 8 trial needs to be on YouTube: Anti-equality lawyer questions Harvard history professor Nancy Cott about whether Jesus Christ advocated monogamy.
In response to criticism by the Turkish prime minister of the Israeli invasion of Gaza, Israel said that “The Turks are the last ones who can preach morality to Israel” and the Israeli Foreign Ministry gave the Turkish ambassador a lower seat than Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Ayalon during a meeting which Israel called in order to complain about a Turkish television drama that portrayed members of the Shin Beth as child kidnappers. At the pre-meeting photo op Ayalon told the photographers, in Hebrew so that the ambassador wouldn’t understand, “Pay attention that he is sitting in a lower chair and we are in the higher ones, that there is only an Israeli flag on the table and that we are not smiling.”
Turkey called Lieberman and his deputy “adolescent youths.” Lieberman is trying to humiliate not only Turkey but also Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who stopped Ariel University Center, located in the West Bank settlement where Lieberman lives, being accredited as a university. Lieberman wants to get a scheduled trip by Barak to Turkey canceled.
Utah state Rep. Christine Johnson, an out lesbian who represents Salt Lake City, is pregnant, acting as surrogate to a gay male couple prohibited from adopting under Utah law.
A slow news day, so it’s time for some catch-up. The intra-mural fight in the Republican Party is growing, with Taft and Speaker of the House Joseph Cannon and their conservative allies battling the progressive Republican followers of Roosevelt. The current battle field is an investigation into relations between the Department of the Interior and the Forest Service. When he came into office, Taft reversed Roosevelt’s order that public lands in Wyoming and Montana from which water-power could be exploited not be sold. Gifford Pinchot, the head of the Forest Service since TR created it in 1905, accused Taft’s Interior Secretary Richard Ballinger of favoring certain corporations in those sales (there’s another land scandal in Alaska). Taft fired Pinchot a week ago (-100). The House will investigate the controversy, but the “insurgent” Republicans allied with Democrats to strip Speaker Cannon of the power to appoint all the members of the investigating committee.
Sarah “It’s God’s Plan” Palin signs on with Fox News. Boy, didn’t see that one coming.
CONTEST: Name her tv show. You know what she named her kids, so she clearly needs all the help she can get. Me first: “Too, Also.” “In What Respect, Charlie?” “The Tina Fey Can Just Go To Hell Hour.”
(Update: OK, Twitter got there first. They’ve got: Fancy Pundit Talkin’, Punditz, Are You Smarter Than a Tea Bagger?, The Rich Lowry is Touching Himself Hour, This Wink with Sarah Palin, You Don’t Betcha, Quittin’ Time.)
And no one knows how to throw an appropriate party like Jon Stewart: tonight, he’s interviewing John Yoo on the Daily Show.
Several protesters have been charged with the capital crime of “warring against God” (moharebeh).
The widow of the recently deceased Rep. James M. Griggs (D-Georgia) has done what the NYT calls “something new in American political history,” naming her personal choice to succeed her husband in the special election, a Mr. McIntosh. While the paper says her action is not to be condemned on account of its unusualness, they do subtly imply, less than a week after her husband’s death, that she just wants to get into McIntosh’s pants: “We are not informed as to whether or not Mr. McIntosh is an eligible bachelor or widower, and we should courteously decline to make use of any information on that point if we possessed it. The practice of seeking a purely personal motive for a public action that attracts notice is reprehensible. ... But the widow’s candidate ought to have the support of the women folks, who must approve of her patriotic butting in, and the women of Georgia know how to influence voters.”
But evidently not enough, because (spoiler alert!), the election was actually won by a Mr. Seaborn Roddenbery,who spent the next three years, until he too died in office, working for a constitutional amendment to ban interracial marriage.
Nursery maids at the Nursery and Child’s Hospital (these are essentially interns, who will go on to become nursemaids in private homes) have gone on strike, demanding to be called “Miss” Whatever Their Name Is instead of just by their first name. The superintendent says they will not be allowed back “unless they get that foolishness out of their heads. ... We don’t want any contrary Marys here.”
An article the next day explains that nursemaids are paid about ¼ of what proper nurses, who are called Miss or Mrs., receive, and eat with the servants rather than with the family. Also, nurses’ aprons cover from the waist down, nursemaids’ extend to the shoulders.
The guy who caused all the trouble at Newark Airport by kissing his girlfriend is being charged with “defiant trespass.”
