Government in a box

McChrystal said, “We’ve got a government in a box, ready to roll in” to Marja, failed to specify what type of box. It seems the new governor, Abdul Zahir Aryan, spent 4 of those 15 years in Germany in prison for getting all stab-y on his stepson, who’d complained when Zahir beat up one of his wives. The WaPo quotes American military types saying it’s not a “big deal,” but not, for some reason, by name.

Must... resist... tasteless joke.... Can’t... resist... tasteless joke

Headline of the Day (WaPo): “Rep. Barney Frank Warns of Fannie, Freddie Risks.” And when Barney Frank warns you about fannie risks....

Sorry.

Today -100: March 6, 1910: Of general strikes

A NYT editorial on the Philadelphia general strike displays several assumptions that are worth examining. It assumes, without feeling any need to argue the point, that it is the job of the government to put down the strike, not simply because of the violence already displayed against trolleys and the scabs operating them, but because a general strike is inherently illegitimate, an act of violence rather than a withdrawal of labor. That definition in turn rests on the assumption that workers, even 100,000 of them, many in highly skilled trades, are simply interchangeable cogs. “The real element of efficacy in the general strike consists in the violence that would follow if it were carried out in the spirit already shown. ... If employers and merchants and tradesmen of all sorts had nothing to fear but the inconveniences attending the changes in employés that would occur, they would look upon a general strike with a good deal of equanimity.” Unionists, the NYT goes on, would not have voted for a general strike had they depended solely on this “inconvenience” to enforce their demands, given how very replaceable they know themselves to be, but on violence as well, and it is the duty of the authorities to repress this violence with, um, violence. A general strike is “a dream of the revolutionary minds of Europe”, a “declaration of war upon the community. It sets the unions apart from the rest of society in a hostile camp. It differentiates their members from the mass of the people, not only as a class, but as an enemy class, bent on attaining selfish ends by unfair and cruel means.”

Embracing the agenda

Right-wingers’ latest crusade is four SEALs who beat up an Iraqi prisoner of war and are being court-martialed. Here’s Sarah Palin’s tweeted contribution:


Yes, question that anti-beating-prisoners-up-and-lying-about-it agenda. Question it, I say!

Today -100: March 5, 1910: Of strikes, Russian Jews, and Enrico Caruso and the Black Hand

The Philadelphia general strike has begun, with 60,400 said to be on strike, including 200 milk wagon drivers, 2,000 cigarmakers, 225 egg candlers, 150 piano wagon drivers, 300 horseshoers, 200 suspendermakers, and 350 fresco painters. A demonstration has been called for Independence Square, which the police plan to ban; Mayor Reyburn quotes, in support of the ban, a Supreme Court decision that “the public possesses in the highway the right of transit only”. He calls on people not to loiter on the streets, collect in or join crowds, or use insulting language.

Harriot Stanton Blatch (suffragist, daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton) warns the NY Legislature against passing the Dana Bill, which has already passed the lower house, and would require that future amendments to the state constitution get a 2/3 vote of the electors rather than a simple majority. She believes (wrongly, I think) that it is intended specifically to thwart women’s suffrage and warns that “Heretofore there has been no reason in America for suffragettes to use militant methods... Our methods so far have been quiet and amiable. But with an added burden put upon us like this, we shall have to resort to...” wait for it... “open-air meetings, to bands and banners, and holding up people on the street corners.”

A committee of the Russian Duma denounces a 1907 government circular which instructed officials not to evict Jews who had settled recently outside the pale of settlement. The committee wants them not only evicted but brought to trial.

Two members of the Black Hand are arrested after sending threatening letters to Enrico Caruso demanding $15,000. Caruso wouldn’t talk to the press, and the director of the Met, Gatti-Casazza, merely “threw up his hands and said: ‘It is not musical and it is not artistic, and I know nothing about it.’”

Location location location

Senior German politicians suggest that Greece deal with its financial difficulties by selling off some of its uninhabited Aegean islands. I think we know what sort of buyers they might find, but how much income will that bring to the beleaguered Greek economy?

Today -100: March 4, 1910: Of civil wars, trolleys, lynchings, schools of crime, and presidential hoe-downs

I’ve more or less stopped following the stories of battles in Nicaragua, because they seemed highly untrustworthy, but the NYT reports that Estrada’s insurrection has been almost completely defeated, the impetus (as well as the possibility of direct American intervention) having gone out of it with Zelaya’s resignation.

The NYT publishes the positions of various sides in the Philadelphia trolley strike. The Central Labor Union complains that the trolley company sent detectives to spy on the union, fired employees purely for union membership, broke the agreement covering wages and negotiations, etc. Its manifesto also focuses on the role of City Hall in using violence and arrests against unionists and bringing in the State police. The trolley company claims that the June 1909 closed shop agreement was the result of “political coercion” and says it is fighting for the rights of its employees to deal directly with the company “without the intervention of an organization officered and controlled by outside men” and for the right of the company to fire anyone for any reason. Mayor John Reyburn criticizes the ministers’ association for “support[ing] a lot of men in the destruction of property and murder... Why, the same men would be the first to burn down their churches.”

In Dallas, a lynch mob of 3,000 people seized a black man in a courtroom where he was being tried for attacking a 3-year-old white girl, threw him out the window, which broke his neck, then dragged his body half a mile away and hung it on a spike. The mob stormed the jail, but other prisoners had been removed. Firemen tried to disperse the mob with water but “retired from the contest” when threatened with being lynched themselves. The first sentence of the longish story mentioned an “old negro” at the head of the mob, but nothing more was said about him.

Two women, 18 and 19 years old, arrested for shoplifting, tell the court that they were “instructed in the art of pilfering in a school of crime fitted up in imitation of a department store” in the home of a fellow employee of a button factory. Charmingly Dickensian, no?

President Taft gave a dinner in honor of Speaker of the House Cannon (who, rumor has it, he would love to get rid of). Afterwards, they danced. Cannon did a Highland fling, then, as he bragged about how well he’d done it, “For answer the President stepped smilingly forward and those who were present say the two executed several steps of an old-fashioned ‘hoe-down’ that delighted every one. Both were puffing when they finished.”

Today -100: March 3, 1910: Of ballots, guns, and sleeping bull moose

In an editorial on the Massachusetts ballot system, the NYT argues against its alphabetical listing of candidates and in favor of some system that allows voters to vote the party ticket, without bothering themselves to inform themselves about individual candidates. The real problem with elections is not straight-party voters, the Times says, but the large number of offices electors have to vote on. The “short ballot” would be a much more helpful reform than direct primaries or referenda.

Rep. Henry Rainey (D-Illinois), later Speaker of the House, accuses Bethlehem Steel, which has been getting increasing numbers of War Department orders, subcontracted from government arsenals, of doing shoddy work and of underpaying its skilled workers. A 14-inch gun burst during ordinance trials, Rainey says, and this was hushed up.

It is feared that Teddy Roosevelt, still on safari in East Africa, may have contracted sleeping sickness!

You won’t have Nicole Minetti in a gold bikini on a swing to kick around any more

Berlusconi’s party will not be running candidates in regional elections in 2 of the 13 regions voting later this month. In Lazio (around Rome), a party official failed to turn in the candidate list by the deadline. He says he was late because he was eating a panino sandwich. Or he was checking on his sick daughter. Or he was “distracted” by the Radial Party members. And in Lombardy, 500 of the necessary 3,500 signatures turned out to be invalid. This is a definite bump on the political road for showgirl slash dental hygienist Nicole Minetti, who was to have run in Lombardy. The Assemblea regionale’s loss is dental hygiene’s gain.

Ram or jam

Reading Orrin Hatch’s WaPo op-ed on why reconciliation would be the worstest thing ever leads me to wonder: which is the better verb – to “ram” through HCR or to “jam” it through? Ram, jam. Jam, ram. Has Frank Luntz focus-grouped this yet?

Today -100: March 2, 1910: Of union tyranny

In Philadelphia, pretty much the entire city is pressuring the trolley car company to accept arbitration, but it is still refusing. The NYT thinks there won’t be a general strike in Philadelphia, because businesses would take the opportunity to replace their workers with non-union ones and reorganize on an “open shop” basis to escape “union tyranny.”

The Maryland Legislature fails to pass a proposed bill to give women the vote in Baltimore municipal elections.

Today -100: March 1, 1910: Of women cops and hatpins

Mayor Samuel Shank of Indianapolis plans to introduce women police to clear the streets of the shopping district of “objectionable characters.”

The Chicago City Council considers enacting an ordinance restricting the length of women’s hatpins, which often stick several inches beyond the hat and are thus a hazard. Some women, on the other hand, insist that hatpins remain available for self-defense.

Berlusconi and the Silvioettes

Berlusconi has picked the latest batch of unqualified hotties as candidates for regional elections. Let’s meet them, shall we?

Nicole Minetti, a showgirl slash dental hygienist, who treated Berlusconi – I’ll bet she did, I’ll bet she did – after he was hit with that statue.


Former Miss Italy 2001 finalist Italia Caruso,


Giovanna Del Giudice, who Berlusconi “discovered” in a nightclub and made her a star, or at least a weather girl on one of his channels,


and model Graziana Capone, the “Italian Angelina Jolie.”


Minetti says, “I have my CV, I am prepared and I am up to fulfilling the role. Can you stop publishing photos from when I worked in TV?”

No, no we can’t.

John Reed

Well this is sad. D’Oyly Carte singer John Reed has died, and I can’t find his rendition of the Nightmare Song from Iolanthe on YouTube. Also – no obit in the London Times?

Today -100: February 28, 1910: Of trolleys, elevators, nails and x-rays, and suffrage and socialism

The Philadelphia unions vote for that general strike in support of the trolley-car operators, although the start will not be for six days. The violence ramped up again, now that the State Police have left the city to shoot at the Bethlehem Steel strikers instead. At 6th street, a crowd was smashing the windows of trolley cars; a motorman of an approaching trolley turned on full power in order to plow through the – then he got scared and jumped out. The car jumped the rails, hitting the crowd and smashing into a candy store, killing two people, one of them a child.

Chicago elevator operators have voted to strike. There are over 800 of them in the union. Well, I thought that was interesting.

Surgeons at Beth Israel used an X-ray machine to guide forceps in removing a nail from a 9-year-old boy’s lungs (he’d swallowed it).

Yesterday -100 was woman’s day for the American Socialists, which held women’s suffrage meetings all over the country. The NYT has been printing red-scaredy-cat letters for days, warning that women’s suffrage means socialism and socialism means women being shared in common. In New York, there was a large meeting where, as the NYT subhed puts it, “Speakers at Carnegie Hall All Women Except One, and He Denounces Man.” The sex traitor was one Franklin H. Wentworth of Salem, and you can read his speech (which was published) here if you want to, which trust me you don’t, though here’s a not-too-bad bit 20 pages in: “I do not fear the free woman. I fear only the enslaved woman. The man who fears to see his mate walk the earth a free and untrammeled being is himself at heart a slave, unworthy of his mother’s agony. I do not know what woman will do when she is free. I am willing to trust her. I do not even know what man will do when he is free! But what I do know is that all outworn institutions of human tyranny that fear the free man are the same ones that doubly fear the free woman”.

Name of the Day

The White House announces a new social secretary, who clearly deserves the job on the basis of her name alone: Julianna Smoot. White House Social Secretary Julianna Smoot.

Womb lynchings

In a tactic they must hope won’t get back to their white Bible Belt base, anti-abortionists are targeting black communities with claims that abortion is a “conspiracy” to keep the black population down. Says the NYT, “Black abortion opponents... sometimes refer to abortions as ‘womb lynchings’”. Sigh. Of all the anti-abortion arguments, this one is as contemptuous of women as any I’ve recently heard. Will black women respond positively to a campaign that tells them they are the idiot dupes of white racists?

(And Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona said today that the abortion rate among black women means that “Far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by policies of slavery.”

Today -100: February 27, 1910: Bunga bunga!

At the other big strike in Pennsylvania, the State Police shoot at strikers at the Bethlehem Steel Works, killing one and wounding two others. The NYT keeps stressing that some of the strikers are “foreigners,” and darkly notes that foreigners have bought up every pistol for sale in the area.

A bomb went off in a NYC tenement. Someone, presumably a member of the Black Hand (as the Mafia was known), was trying to put it together in his apartment. He escaped before police arrived, but did leave behind three fingers.

The NYT has caught up with the story of the Dreadnought Hoax, actually carried out in England on the 7th. Several members of the Bloomsbury Group, which first made itself known to the wider public with this event, disguised themselves as princes from Abyssinia and were given a royal tour of the H.M.S. Dreadnought, the most powerful battleship in the Royal Navy or indeed the world. This is them:


The one on the left, “Prince Sanganya,” is Virginia Woolf (Virginia Stephen, as she then was). To her right are Duncan Grant, Adrian Stephen (Virginia’s brother), playing the translator, Anthony Buxton, Guy Ridley and Horace de Vere Cole, playing a Foreign Office attaché (as of late February, their real names were not known beyond their circle of friends). They blacked up, put on false beards and shoes with turned-up toes, and spoke in a gibberish comprised of bits of Greek and Latin, pointing and exclaiming “Bunga bunga.” For some time thereafter, people on the streets muttered the phrase whenever a sailor from the Dreadnought went past. (Update: I’ve just discovered that the term has an altogether less pleasant meaning now.) After the incident, the ship was sent out to sea until the embarrassment died down.

A study in contrasting obituaries

From Friday’s NYT obits page. Lucky: Robert Myers, an actuary who in 1934 determined that the optimal retirement age for the planned Social Security program was 65, has died at the age of 97.

Unlucky: Kermit Tyler, who was at the aircraft tracking center in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, and responded to reports that radar had picked up a whole bunch of incoming planes, “Don’t worry about it.”

Today -100: February 26, 1910: Of lamas, trolleys, and more trolleys

China announces that it has deposed the Dalai Lama, calling him “an ungrateful, irreligious, obstreperous profligate who is tyrannical”. He is accused, among other things, of intrigue and refusal to pay tribute to Peking. The edict also declares all Tibetans to be Chinese subjects.

John Murphy, President of the Central Labor Union of Philadelphia says there will be a general strike if the trolley car strike is not settled within two days, and predicts bloodshed if the general strike occurs, noting “There are men in the Northeast who can shoot as straight as any trooper who ever drew a breath.” A warrant for inciting to riot is sworn out for him. The street car company rejected a plan for arbitration presented by a committee of clergymen.

The Edison Company tests a trolleyless street car that runs off batteries rather than overhead wires. They claim it can go 150 miles on a single charge, at speeds up to 15 mph.