Possibly a rubber sword

Obama, the WaPo tells us, will meet Friday with House Republicans.

Does Obama even own a sword? Because it’s not a proper surrender ceremony unless you hand over your sword.

The State of the Union is...?

Time for our annual SOTU contest: What adjective will Obama use to complete the above sentence.

For extra points, what big initiative will he propose, post-Scott Brown? I’m guessing midnight basketball.

Well, that won’t help

To protest the shortage of tents available for refugees in Haiti, President Préval is moving into a tent.

Clarification: a tent office. Somehow I doubt he’ll actually be sleeping there.

Misc

The Afghan parliamentary elections are postponed from May to September, and quite possibly forever. International donors simply aren’t willing to stump up tens of millions of dollars to pay for a fraudulent election.

Sorry, let me rephrase that: international donors simply aren’t willing to be seen stumping up tens of millions of dollars to pay for an insultingly obviously fraudulent election.

Four Kenyans who were abused physically and sexually by the British in the 1950s are suing. The British government is arguing that the case should be thrown out because Britain isn’t actually liable for the acts of its own colonial government, that in fact Kenya became responsible for them upon independence.

Boy, there’s a joke in here somewhere: “Officials Fear Toxic Ingredient in Botox Could Become Terrorist Tool” (WaPo).

Today -100: January 25, 1910: Of acceptable beatings

Vice Chancellor of New Jersey Lindley Garrison, sitting as a judge, rules that a woman in the process of suing her husband for divorce should not get alimony in the interim on the grounds that her doctor husband hadn’t beaten her up all that badly and also she deserved it, having hung out with some guy after her husband told her not to, and called him “the old dog” to the servants. Headline of the Day -100: “Beating Just, Says Court.”

Today -100: January 24, 1910: Of negro cadets, meat, kiddie factory workers, and kaiser sandwiches

West Point is very worried that it may have to admit as a cadet one Ollie R. Smith of Cheyenne, who is black (he is an alternate, but will be in if some white kid fails the entrance exams, as 1 in 4 do). He would not be the first, as some blacks were admitted after the Civil War, but it has been 25 years or so since the last. Past practice at West Point was to send them to coventry, to ignore them – not even hazing them. Actually, a few paragraphs later, the NYT mentions a Johnson Chesnut Whittaker, who did experience hazing at West Point in 1880, if by hazing you mean being tied up, beaten and having one ear cut off and the other slit. West Point investigated and decided that Whittaker had done it all to himself, dishonorably discharging him and fining him $1. President Arthur refused to accept the findings and ordered him restored, but for some reason he soon resigned. (Wait, not true. Wikipedia says they expelled him a second time for failing an exam. He had been the first black man to graduate Harvard. Later he was a teacher, lawyer, principal and psych professor.) Anyway, the NYT interviews a lot of military types, none of whom think letting Smith into West Point is a good idea.

Side note on usage: the NYT calls it the “civil war,” without caps.

The St. Louis Central Trades and Labor Council voted against joining the meat strike for 30 days. A woman delegate accused them of doing so “simply because the working women were the first to start the movement here.”

The British Home Office orders Lady Constance Lytton (see yesterday) released from prison before her two-week sentence.

The NY State Commissioner of Labor says that “the problem of child labor in the factories of this State is well in hand.” By that he means that while 10,415 children below the age of 16 were discovered working in factories in 1909, only 8% of them were employed illegally. So, well in hand.

Headline of the Day -100: “Kaiser Passes Sandwiches.” Kaiser Wilhelm invited University of California President Benjamin Ide Wheeler to a nice family gathering. “It was a typical German domestic scene, the Empress doing needlework while taking part in the conversation, and the Emperor himself passed around the sandwiches and other light supper dishes.” Must... not... make... lame... kaiser roll... joke...

Why Scott Brown won. Theory 2.

What Scott Brown said: “I’m Scott Brown. I drive a pickup truck.”

What Massachusetts voters thought: Must be one of them lesbians. Lesbians are wicked hot.

Why Scott Brown won. Theory 1.

What Scott Brown said: “I’m Scott Brown. I drive a pickup truck.”

What Massachusetts voters heard: I will help you move.

Adjusting our privacy expectations

Saw Michael Chertoff on McNeil-Lehrer, hawking full-body scanners and saying people would just have to “adjust their privacy expectations.” Of course if there’s one person whose privacy expectations aren’t threatened by full-body scanners, it’s the living skeleton.

The purest form of self-defense

Headline Mixed Metaphor of the Day (NYT): “Republicans Strain to Ride Tea Party Tiger.”

Annoying Grant of Anonymity of the Day: The NYT, on the increase in drone attacks in Pakistan following the death of those CIA operatives: “Today, officials deny that vengeance is driving the increased attacks, though one called the drone strikes ‘the purest form of self-defense.’”

Or is this the purest form of self defense? Mircea Geoana, who lost the Romanian presidential election in December, getting 49.66% of the vote, blames witchcraft, specifically a “negative energy attack” during a debate that caused him to perform badly. And in fact, President Traian Basescu did go to that debate with a parapsychologist slash clairvoyant slash mind-control expert. This is the president and his court wizard in 2007.

Today -100: January 23, 1910: Of Alaska, bulldogs, and Liberal snobbishness

The Senate Committee on Territories decides on a plan for a Legislative Council for Alaska: a governor, attorney general, commissioner of interior and mines, and 8 judges. All appointed by the US president. If that system had still been in place under the Bush Administration, Alaska’s appointed governor would still have been Sarah Palin.

Creepy Headline of the Day -100: “Bulldog Breeders Form a New Body.”

Mrs Humphry Ward, a best-selling novelist in her time, which was the late 19th century, is the most prominent British anti-suffragist. But that doesn’t stop her writing letters to electors in Hertfordshire, where she is running her wastrel son’s campaign for Parliament. A complete non-entity, he would be known as “the member for Mrs. Humphry Ward.”

In Britain it has just become known that Lady Constance Lytton is in prison. A suffragette, Lytton had been given a prison sentence before, but it was unsatisfactory in that she was treated with favoritism (not being force-fed, that sort of thing), supposedly on account of her fragile health and certainly not at all because she was Lady Constance Lytton.


“Simply Liberal snobbishness,” she complained. So she disguised herself as a working-class woman, called herself Jane Warton,


and got arrested again, for breaking a prison window, and this time, funnily enough, prison medical authorities didn’t find evidence of a weak heart and did force feed her. (Spoiler alert: about a year later she had a massive stroke, and wrote her book on her prison experience with her left hand.)

Unequal and undemocratic information flow

China complained that attacks on its censorship of the internet amount to... wait for it... information imperialism. The Global Times (published in English by the People’s Daily) explains (and I’ll quote at length because I gather that Chinese pro-censorship diatribes against Google have themselves been censored today, so this may not continue to be available on the web) that the “bulk of the information flowing from the US and other Western countries is loaded with aggressive rhetoric against those countries that do not follow their lead.” Further, disadvantaged countries “could not produce the massive flow of information required, and could never rival the Western countries in terms of information control and dissemination,” therefore, “there is absolutely no equality and fairness. The online freedom of unrestricted access is, thus, only one-way traffic, contrary to the spirit of democracy and calculated to strengthen a monopoly.” “China’s real stake in the ‘free flow of information’ is evident in its refusal to be victimized by information imperialism.”

Today -100: January 22, 1910: Of full disclosure and the return of a gunslinger

Taft wants a law requiring congressional candidates to make public their campaign contributions and expenditures. The Chicago Tribune finds that there is “a majority of all members of each House are ready to vote for a bill applying the principle of the President, when it comes up – and that it will never come up.”

Rep. William Cocks of NY is willing to step down in favor of Teddy Roosevelt, if he wants the seat. TR is due to return from slaughtering white rhinos soon.

Free speech isn’t free, and will soon to be a lot more expensive

Our theme for this post: free speech

John McCain issues a not-at-all-stilted statement about his wife’s air-brushed appearance in an anti-Prop 8 ad: “Senator McCain respects the views of members of his family.” You can just hear his teeth grinding.

On the same day the Supreme Court ruled that corporations may “spend freely” to influence elections (when will Goldman Sachs start handing out congressional seats as bonuses?), Hillary Clinton evidently agreed that there was no difference between speech by individuals and speech by corporations. In a speech about the “five key freedoms of the Internet age,” i.e., chiding China on internet censorship, she insisted that, “From an economic standpoint, there is no distinction between censoring political speech and commercial speech.”

However, Trijicon Inc. will no longer put Bible messages on gun sights produced for the military. Evidently the Pentagon’s first reaction to this story was to claim that it was okay, just like printing “In God We Trust” on our currency.

In his partial dissent to one part of the Citizens United v. FEC decision, Clarence Thomas, who stands alone in this, opposes the release of the names of donors to political campaigns, citing the ability of the internet to harass those people. He goes on to cite many alleged instances of death threats and such against supporters of Prop. 8. “I cannot endorse a view of the First Amendment that subjects citizens of this Nation to death threats, ruined careers, damaged or defaced property, or pre-emptive and threatening warning letters as the price for engaging in ‘core political speech, the “primary object of First Amendment protection.”’” Or, alternately, you could pass laws against death threats, damaged or defaced property, etc. Oh, wait.

John Travolta is sending Scientologist missionaries to Haiti. Haiti is saved!

Today -100: January 21, 1910: Of billy clubs and meat

The new mayor of New York has been investigating cases of policemen beating members of the public with their clubs for no particular reason. Several cops have been suspended, fired or arrested. The NYT editorializes, though, that the police need their clubs, and that many of the stories about the “much-talked-of ‘third degree’” are “gross exaggerations.”

The meat strike has taken hold in St. Louis, and even Germany’s states, expressing their views on tariff negotiations are, in the words of the Headline of the Day -100, “United Against Our Meat.”

Today -100: January 20, 1910: Of factory fires, aerial warfare, and meat

In a fire at a shirtwaist factory in Philadelphia, five are dead (so far), having leapt from the fourth floor. It would have been much worse but many of the factory’s workers had joined the strike. And of course this fire foreshadows (spoiler alert) one we might be discussing here in a little over a year.

The International Bureau of Peace at Brussels wants to re-adopt the expired provision adopted by the first Hague Peace Conference forbidding the dropping of explosives from balloons during war and extend it to cover planes and dirigibles as well. Good luck with that.

The meat strike is spreading from Cleveland throughout the Mid-West, but an editorial doubts its effect on the price of meat (down 2¢ a pound!) will be permanent. “Of course, the workingmen of Cleveland have no inclination or intention to become vegetarians as a settled policy of life. They want meat, just as all other sane people do”.

Heckuva job, Brownie

poll by twiigs.com

Today -100: January 19, 1910: Of suffering executives, meat, Transylvanian wolves, and suffragettes and snow shovels

President Taft addresses the Conference of Governors with complaints about the ability of the executives at state and federal level to get the legislation they want out of insufficiently pliant legislative branches. He called the governors “my dear fellow-executives and fellow-sufferers.” He talked of the need for uniformity in laws between the states, which was a major theme of Taft’s and, coincidentally, of big business.

The meat strike in Cleveland is working. Meat sales have halved, and the price is coming down.

At the big Los Angeles flight meet, French aviator Louis Paulhan set a new cross-country record, covering 47½ miles in a little over an hour.

The front page of the NYT was so much cooler in 1910: “Baron Otto von Orban, a wealthy land owner, while riding through the forest in Transylvania was pursued by a pack of wolves. The wildly excited horse threw him and the wolves tore him to pieces.”

Also on the front page: A cop asked an (unnamed) woman in Burlington, NJ to have the snow on her sidewalk shoveled. She refused until such time as women have the vote.

Light shining out of darkness

Trijicon Inc., which manufactures “brilliant aiming solutions,” i.e., gun sights, and boasts on its webpage of its support of “biblical standards” and the NRA (not necessarily in that order), has been inscribing New Testament references on some of the gun sights it sells the US Army and Marine Corps, such as 2COR4:6, meaning Second Corinthians 4:6: “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Because nothing says the light shining out of darkness like a night-vision rifle sight. Iraqi troops are being trained with the, in ABC’s words, “bible-coded sights.” Anyone remember how the Indian Mutiny of 1857 got started?

Today -100: January 18, 1910: Of hysteria, meat, and flimsy blue material

The NYT wishes that Taft would stop his innovation of presenting Congress with draft legislation.

The Czarina of Russia has had an attack of hysteria.

An anti-meat strike has begun against high meat prices in Cleveland.

On the front page this slow news day: Lady Constance Stewart Richardson appeared at the Palace Theatre in London, dancing to the music of Tchaikovsky, Grieg and others, wearing – and this is the news-worthy bit – “a Greek short tunic apparently made of a single piece of flimsy blue material, through which flesh tints were plainly visible. In fact, the costume is described as the most daring ever seen on an English stage.”