Pro-choice?

Planned Parenthood: “We regret that a pro-choice president of a pro-choice nation was forced to sign an Executive Order that further codifies the proposed anti-choice language in the health care reform bill”.

When a president signs an executive order that codifies anti-choice language, maybe it’s time to stop referring to him as a pro-choice president.

Hard to reach places

An NYT editorial about the FCC broadband plan refers to “the Universal Service Fund, established decades ago to ensure phones got to hard-to-reach places”. Elsewhere in today’s paper, an article about the (stupid) use of laws against teenagers who engage in “sexting” says that one-fifth of them do so. So, mission accomplished.

Today -100: March 21, 1910: They shoot horses and speakers of the House, don’t they?

Speaker Cannon is not happy with yesterday’s coup against him. At a dinner of the Illinois Republican Association, he says that the majority in the House is no longer held by the R’s but by the D’s plus a “15% slough from the Republican Party.” Which was the most polite thing he called them, alongside “curs,” “feeble-minded,” “abnormal,” “insane,” and “cranks.”

A dance marathon in San Francisco was stopped by police after a record 15 hours and 6 minutes, after doctors said that continuing might lead to fatalities.

You have suffered grievously

The pope wrote a pastoral letter to Ireland. He told the victims of priestly child sexual abuses, “You have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry.” So that’s okay then.


His “truly sorry” face

“Many of you found that, when you were courageous enough to speak of what happened to you, no one would listen.” He failed to mention the Cardinal Brady, who did listen – and then swore the children to silence (on the Bible? we still don’t know).

“It is in the communion of the Church that we encounter the person of Jesus Christ, who was himself a victim of injustice and sin. Like you, he still bears the wounds of his own unjust suffering.” Of course Catholics make paintings and stained-glass windows of Jesus receiving his wounds and wear little replicas of the instrument which inflicted those wounds around their necks...

The pope addressed the child abusers: “Sincere repentance opens the door to God’s forgiveness and the grace of true amendment. By offering prayers and penances for those you have wronged, you should seek to atone personally for your actions.” You know where they’d have plenty of time to offer prayers and penances? Prison. I must have missed the part of the letter where he told them to turn themselves in to the police, confess their crimes, and plead guilty. Maybe it just slipped his mind.

After he wrote the letter, he held a “special audience” with the Italian Civil Aviation Authority, and tried on a pilot’s hat. Remember: in the Vatican, it’s all about the hats.

I’ll be here all week

Catholic nuns, unlike the male bishops, are supporting the health care bill. They hear it’ll cover ruler elbow.

Today -100: March 20, 1910: Of House coups and death by suicide

The House votes 181-164 to remove Speaker of the House Uncle Joe Cannon from the Rules Committee, largely de-fanging him, 35 “insurgent” Republicans voting with Democrats. Then he is re-affirmed as speaker, with a 38-vote majority. Until this moment, Cannon, who had exercised a “czarist” control over Congress since 1903, was arguably more powerful than President Taft, and frequently thwarted Roosevelt as well.


The NYT notes in an editorial that when Roosevelt expressed an interest in currency reform, Cannon said, “There ain’t going to be no currency reform,” and that was that. “This was a typical manifestation of Cannonism. There has come an end to all that. The House is once more a deliberative body, not a meeting in vassalage to the Speaker.”

Since the revolt against Cannon began, Taft has consistently refused to say anything about it.

In Marion, Arkansas, a mob took two negroes from the jail and lynched them, hanging them in the Court House square. The coroner’s verdict: “death by suicide.”

Today -100: March 19, 1910: Of eggs

Remember the dispute in Canarsie between two families over possession of an egg lain by a passing hen in a lot on the border of their two properties? Two weeks later, it’s still going on, Magistrate Nash having passed it (the case and the egg, which the NYT insists on referring to as “Eggshibit A”) to Magistrate Voorhees, who is passing it to Special Sessions. More on this story as it develops (or hatches, as the case may be).

So that’s okay then

“Mr Netanyahu would also promise not to publicise further construction plans for Jerusalem.”

Today -100 goes to the movies!

100 years ago today, the horror movie was created, with the release of the Thomas Edison Company’s Frankenstein, with Charles Ogle in clown shoes as the monster. 12½ minutes.

Today -100: March 18, 1910: Of Short and Mud

The Philadelphia general strike will be supported by a state-wide strike. The transit company has again increased the number of trolleys running, and, indeed, running over two more children.

A man who tried to follow President Taft into a meeting in Chicago was seized by the Secret Service. He claimed to be a reporter, which he wasn’t, and that his name was, um, Dick Short. At the train station, a woman who tried to get into Taft’s car and fought with the Secret Service claimed that her name was Jennie Mud.

Republican Insurgents in the House are striking at the power of the over-powerful Speaker, “Uncle Joe” Cannon, by trying to remove him from the Rules Committee and strip him of the power to name members of the committee. One of the Insurgents, and presumably this is a real name, is Judge Crumpacker.

Barack Obama and the Shamrocks of Doom

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan threatens that if everybody keeps talking about the Armenian Genocide, he’ll be forced to expel from Turkey 100,000 Armenians who he claims are illegal immigrants. See, and you thought that there was maybe some sort of animosity in Turkey towards Armenians, wasn’t that just silly of you?

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Irish Taoiseach Brian Cowen gives Barack Obama a bowl of weeds shamrocks. CAPTION CONTEST!

Today -100: March 17, 1910: Of meat, trolleys, over-complicated electoral systems, and equal pay

The meat strike (boycott), which began in Cleveland and spread throughout the Midwest, is officially over. It was always supposed to be a 60-day event, but in practice most 1910 Americans simply couldn’t last much more than a week without beef. The price of beef has increased by 20% or so since the strike was announced.

The Philadelphia general strike continues. The transit company again claims a record number of trolleys in operation by scabs, with only one small child run over.

The Prussian Diet votes to reform the state’s electoral system, very slightly. There will be direct suffrage (presently, groups of 150 citizens vote for delegates who in turn elect members of the Diet), but Prussia will retain the three-tiered system in which electors are classified according to the amount of taxes they pay, each group electing one-third of the Diet, so that a small number of rich people in the 1st tier elects the same number of MPs as the vast majority of people in the 3rd tier.

NYC’s board of education votes 23 to 15 against equal pay for women teachers.

Formula

Ratio of the number of times a fire extinguisher is used in a Hollywood movie or tv show to extinguish a fire to the number of times a fire extinguisher is used to hit a guy in the face: 1:20.

Misc – yes, a mummified hand, a flying dog, evil priests and Joe Biden, I think that qualifies as a “misc” post

I thought the British newspapers were going to be worthless today, since David Beckham did himself an injury, but by gum we’ve got “Mummified Hand Stolen from Pub” – a pub haunted by the ghost of the “Demented Whist Player,” no less – and “Combat Dogs Take to the Skies for Secret Missions in Afghanistan.”


In priest child abuse news, most of the attention has gone to the pope’s personal involvement in the 30-year cover-up for an abusive priest in Germany, but for sheer assholery, you have to look to Cardinal Seán Brady, who made victims of abuse by a priest in Ireland take an oath of silence – did he make them swear on the Bible? – and is now daring the pope to fire him as the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Brady says it wasn’t his responsibility to report the crime to the police.

John Oliver in the Bugle podcast says of Biden’s 90-minute boycott of the state dinner in Israel in response to the announcement of new settlements (would Biden have even bothered to mention it if the announcement had been made the week before he visited or the week after?) that Israeli leaders were punished by being made to fill up on breadsticks.

Today -100: March 16, 1910: Of the census, inter-state commerce, official cars, unnecessary noise, general strikes, plain-clothes cops, and Frisco

Since I raised the question of race in the 2010 census, let’s look at 1910. The 1910 census was the last to categorize people as mulattoes (the more specific Octoroon and Quadroon designations were dropped after 1890). The Census Bureau defined mulatto for its enumerators as “all other persons having some proportion or perceptible trace of negro blood”. One problem with this system was that “perceptible” varied according to the race of the census worker (you’ll recall the Bureau’s fear that white people would be enumerated by black enumerators), with black census workers managing to detect more mulattoes than white ones. Efforts were also made to detect the racial purity of Native Americans. Asians were either Chinese or Japanese. Everyone else was “other.”

While recent socialist-led demonstrations in Germany for greater democracy (Prussia’s system is particularly antediluvian) have been met by police sabers, the Reichstag has voted to introduce a bill to make the government responsible to it rather than to the kaiser. It also voted to make Alsace-Lorraine, seized from France in 1870 and soon (spoiler alert) to be seized back, a federal state, with a diet elected by universal suffrage and a secret ballot.

An interesting discussion of separation of powers in the Senate. Taft’s bill for changes in inter-state commerce law, including the establishment of a Court of Commerce which would mostly deal with railroad cases, came to the Senate floor without a single senator willing to speak in support of the president’s bill (which isn’t to say the R’s won’t force it through anyway). Albert Cummins (R-Iowa) attacked the bill for having been re-written several times by the White House at the request of railroad magnates, with the Inter-State Commerce Committee simply adopting those changes verbatim. This is a departure, Cummins says, from Roosevelt, who said it was improper for the executive to suggest precise phrasing of bills.

Meanwhile the House of Reps has voted not to provide the vice president and speaker of the House Cannon with official automobiles.

The Society for the Prevention of Unnecessary Noise (evidently a women’s group) is lobbying NYC Mayor Gaynor against the Fourth of July, but it turns out he likes fireworks. So they plan to make his life miserable by phoning him at all hours and bombarding him with letters and requests for visits.

Since taking office 2½ months ago, Gaynor has been engaged in a fairly impressive attempt to reform the NYPD, cracking down on corruption and cracking down on cracking heads with clubs. Now he’s asking the police commissioner how many plain-clothes cops there are and what exactly they do that they couldn’t do in uniform. He also wants to know how many cops “are assigned to what is called special duty”. I don’t know what that is.

Compare and contrast: March 1910, the British Liberals plan to turn the House of Lords into a wholly elected body; March 2010, the Labour Party plans to turn the House of Lords into a wholly elected body.

The Philadelphia general strike – which may soon be joined by a state-wide sympathy strike – is growing or declining, depending on who you believe. The transit company says that today it operated more trolleys than on any day since the strike began, although they are also running over quite a few people. And the mayor and public safety director tell The New Theatre not to perform John Galsworthy’s play about a strike, “Strife.”

A letter from a former resident of San Francisco says that he never heard Los Angeles referred to as “Los,” but that there was an ad on the SF street cars asking people not to call the city “Frisco,” a term which rankles San Francishoovians to this very day.

History in Texas

I hesitate to announce a contest when my recent posting of little besides 1910 blogging has so reduced readership, but let’s give it a try: give us an excerpt (or excerpts) from history textbooks drawn up to the new specifications of the Texas Board of Education (sic). Remember, you can mention Phyllis Schlafly but not Thomas Jefferson, and free-enterprise system but not capitalism.

Census

Got my census form, just like the letter last week said I would. Thank you for the warning, superfluous letter.

They want to know my race. I don’t intend to reify socially constructed (that is, not actually existing) categories by answering this one. Will probably write “none.” Thoughts?

(Just checked the ol’ archives to see what I did in 2000. I was thinking about none then too, or something from the Star Trek universe. 3 days later I wrote, “In 1941 the Census Bureau told the government where to find Japanese Americans for internment. I may have to rethink the idea of listing my race as Romulan.”)

Update: I hear vampires are very popular among the kids these days. Maybe I should write that.

Today -100: March 15, 1910: Of midgets

How did New Yorkers entertain themselves in 1910? The midget circus is in town! Gerson’s Lilliputian Circus at the Hippodrome. 35 little people, none over 3 feet tall, and one of them described as a “small negro,” doing circus acts.

There was a related article, “Curious Facts About Midgets,” in the previous Sunday paper, in which the manager of the troupe explains that midgets dislike being picked up and called cute. So keep that in mind.

Today -100: March 14, 1910: Of general strikes (strikes general?)

The Philadelphia Central Labor Union orders all milkmen, bakers, grocery clerks and other providers of food to join the general strike (they avoided this sort of thing in the first week, but I guess the gloves are off), and for all union members to withdraw their money from banks. The NYT lists the costs to the trolley company of the strike, $1,150,000 so far, including $2,000 to replace 5,750 panes of glass broken in trolley cars, $1,350 to feed 6,000 policemen (480 Pinkerton men have also been hired). The company plans to make the city pay for damages inflicted by rioters (no wonder they’ve been so obdurate).

Don’t know much

In fact, as far as Texas conservatives are concerned, the only worthwhile thing Jefferson ever did was to fuck his slaves.