Sunday, January 17, 2010
Solidarity – you’re doing it wrong
The Islamic Solidarity Games have been called off because Iran, which was to have hosted, put the words “Persian Gulf” on the medals.
Legitimately chosen
Richard Holbrooke, the Af-Pak special envoy, says that we should all “move on” from the stolen Afghan presidential election and that Karzai is “the legitimately chosen, legitimate leader of this country.” I don’t think that word, “legitimate,” means what you think it means. Also “chosen.” And “leader.” And “country.”
Speaking of legitimately chosen, the book Game Change says that in choosing Sarah Palin, John McCain was “flying by the seat of his pants.” Yeah, the seat of his pants...
Today -100: January 17, 1910: Of government by peers and beer, posthumous stabbings, and going on safari
The British election results are trickling in, showing a victory for the Liberal government. Lloyd George says, “England is declaring emphatically against government by the Peers and beer.”
A rich woman, Laura White, has died, and her will requires that ten days after her death she be stabbed in the heart three times (by a doctor, for a fee of $20). It seems that 45 years ago her fiancé died and when his body had to be removed to another cemetery a few months later, it was found that it had turned on its side, which gave her a life-long fear of being buried alive. Her only living relative is refusing to do it, but the Fidelity Title and Trust Company is insisting that it be done.
Last month I saved a lot of time by not reading any of the stories about Cook having faked reached the North Pole. This month I’m giving a miss to the many stories following TR cutting a bloody swathe through Africa, like this one:
ROOSEVELT AT LION HUNT.; Follows on Horseback as Natives Chase and Spear Beast. [PDF]
NAIROBI, British East Africa, Dec. 11. -- A long stream, of porters came winding across the veldt toward the station at Nairobi, looking for all the world like a string of ants. The stars and stripes was held aloft by a giant native, and the sound of horn...
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Resilient
The NYT, looking for an up side: “But if there is a benefit in the neglect that the Haitian people have experienced for so many years, it is that they are far more resilient than most.” As can be seen in their low life expectancy and high infant mortality rates. Let’s do condescend to the Haitians, NYT.
This morning, Bill Clinton and George Bush were at the White House in their new role doing whatever it is they’re supposed to be doing for Haiti. Obama noted, “As President, Bill Clinton helped restore democracy in Haiti” and Bush helped restore military dictatorship. Why is Bush involved in this, again? Hasn’t he really done quite enough
Bush said, “I commend the President for his swift and timely response to the disaster.”
He went on, “I am so pleased to answer the call to work alongside President Clinton to mobilize the compassion of the American people.” Trust Bush to make compassion sound scary.
“[Y]et it’s amazing how terrible tragedies can bring out the best of the human spirit. We’ve all seen that firsthand when American citizens responded to the tsunami or to Katrina”.
Haiti may just need even more of that fabled resilience.
Today -100: January 16, 1910: Of election-day rowdiness, hotel suicides, kissing the book, expensive electrocutions, leather whips, and short breeches
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.”
Friday, January 15, 2010
Prince Frankenstein
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.”
Today -100: January 15, 1910: Of Hepburns
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.”
Thursday, January 14, 2010
How can the most fucked-over people on the planet get even more fucked over?
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.
Criminal Charge of the Day, Chinese Version
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.”
Today -100: January 14, 1910: Of chairwomen and the palmiest days of sacerdotal ambiguity
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.”
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Today -100: January 13, 1910: Of speedsters, white slaves and dead heads
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.”
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Getting better
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.
Misc
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.
Diplomacy, Avigdor Lieberman style
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.
News from that liberal gay bastion, Salt Lake City
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.
Today -100: January 12, 1910: Of Ballinger and Pinchot
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.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Foxy as a Crazy
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.)
Happy 8th Birthday, Guantanamo Gulag!
And no one knows how to throw an appropriate party like Jon Stewart: tonight, he’s interviewing John Yoo on the Daily Show.
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