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Obama held a press conference following the Nuclear Security Summit.
CONCRETE COMMITMENTS: “I said this morning that today would be an opportunity for our nations, both individually and collectively, to make concrete commitments and take tangible steps to secure nuclear materials so they never fall into the hands of terrorists who would surely use them.” As paper weights? Surely you need a weapon to put them in as well.
NO, JUST SHORT ULTIMATUMS: “This was not a day of long speeches or lectures on what other nations must do.”
IRAN AND NORTH KOREA WERE NOT INVITED: “We listened to each other, with mutual respect.”
WHAT EXACTLY WAS SERVED AT THAT DINNER? “Coming into this summit, there were a range of views on this danger. But at our dinner last night, and throughout the day, we developed a shared understanding of the risk.”
THEY’RE VULNERABLE AND THEY JUST WANT TO BE HELD: “I am very pleased that all the nations represented here have endorsed the goal that I outlined in Prague one year ago -- to secure all vulnerable nuclear materials around the world in four years’ time.”
DAMN, LOOK AT THIS GAFFE, HE IS JUST LIKE GEORGE BUSH: “So we’ve committed ourselves to a sustained, effective program of international cooperation on national [sic] security, and we call on other nations to join us.”
THE CANADIAN THREAT HAS BEEN DEFUSED; I REPEAT, THE CANADIAN THREAT HAS BEEN DEFUSED: “Canada agreed to give up a significant quantity of highly enriched uranium.”
“PEACEFUL NUCLEAR ENERGY” – LIKE IT’S THE ENERGY’S FAULT: “for nations that uphold their responsibilities, peaceful nuclear energy can unlock new advances in medicine, in agriculture, and economic development.” Agriculture?
CBS’s Bill Plante asked whether all these agreements he was announcing weren’t entirely voluntary. Took Obama a while to admit there was no enforcement mechanism.
NOT A MAGIC WAND: “Sometimes I hear the argument that, well, sanctions aren’t really going to necessarily work. Sanctions aren’t a magic wand.”
Scott Wilson of the WaPo asked if it wasn’t hypocritical never to call on Israel to declare its nukes and sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Obama decided he was comfortable with his hypocrisy: “And as far as Israel goes, I’m not going to comment on their program.” Heaven forfend. “What I’m going to point to is the fact that consistently we have urged all countries to become members of the NPT. So there’s no contradiction there.” Bullshit, yes, contradiction, no. Later, he said more or less the same thing about Pakistan. He added that the security around Pakistan’s nuclear facilities was okay, but there can always be improvements, mentioning that time when US nukes were loaded on a plane without anyone realizing. Of course our military probably has fewer friendly ties with Al Qaida and the Taliban than Pakistan’s.
PHFEW: Asked if the sanctions he’s proposing for Iran aren’t exactly the tactic that failed against North Korea: “Well, I’m not going to give you a full dissertation on North Korean behavior.”
NOT A MAGIC WAND, REDUX: “As I said, sanctions are not a magic wand. Unfortunately, nothing in international relations is. But I do think that the approach that we’ve taken with respect to North Korea makes it more likely for them to alter their behavior than had there been no consequences whatsoever to them testing a nuclear weapon.” So, doing something which has no effect is better than doing nothing which has no effect.
SAINTLY, EVEN: “I think the work that we’ve done in recent days around nuclear security and nuclear disarmament are intrinsically good. They’re good just in and of themselves.”
A PARTNER WITH HOT SPOTS: “And I remain committed to being a partner with countries around the world, and in particular hot spots around the world”.
WHETHER WE LIKE IT OR NOT: “It is a vital national security interest of the United States to reduce these conflicts because whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower”.
SO THEY’LL BE MEASURE NOT IN DAYS OR WEEKS BUT IN TIME? “But I think on all these issues -- nuclear disarmament, nuclear proliferation, Middle East peace -- progress is going to be measured not in days, not in weeks. It’s going to take time.”
Guardian headline: “Vatican Tells Bishops to Report Abuse Cases to Police.” Boy, I hope the Vatican was a little more specific in its instructions, because to listen to some of the bishops lately, you can see them sitting in a police station showing the cops on a doll where the Zionist homosexuals abused the church.
John McCain sends out an email via his PAC on the Supreme Court vacancy. It comes with a questionnaire. For example, it asks how the Senate should respond to Obama’s request for a swift confirmation process, and you might choose to check “Yes, I agree with President Obama that Senators should confirm his nominee as quickly as possible, without proper scrutiny of a nominee’s qualifications and philosophy.” McCain gives his own view: “I am committed to ensuring his nominee receives a vigorous and thorough confirmation process as mandated by the Constitution.” Because when you think vigorous and thorough, you think John McCain.
When Roosevelt was in Rome, Abbot Lawrence Janssens of the Benedictines tried to visit him (he wasn’t in). Since the pope had refused to see TR unless he promised not to see Methodists as well, the Vatican publicly repudiated the abbot, adding, “It did not wish Mr. Roosevelt to bracket the Pope with other more or less royal personages he will boast of having hunted in Europe after his African hunt.” (Update: as a result, Janssens was soon forced out of his position as secretary of the Congregation of Affairs of Religious Orders.)
More attacks in New York on kosher meat dealers and shops in an attempt to enforce the meat boycott. Rumors have it that meat wholesalers in the city have been buying up eggs in large quantities in order to raise their price, thereby preventing them being used as a substitute for meat. And in Brooklyn, the high price of beef, pork, lamb etc has led to the poor turning to goat meat.
In rhyming news, Fong Hong has been shot in Tong war.
Tufts college will cease to be co-ed. A separate college will be started for women students.
When the (evil twin) brother of the late Polish President Kaczynski went to identify his body, Vladimir Putin, according to the London Times, “asked if he could go along as well”. Kaczynski said no.
Little-known fact: one of Putin’s hobbies is examining the bodies of airplane crash victims.
The Jobbik party, a Hungarian nationalist party (and if you guessed that “nationalist” meant anti-Semitic and anti-Roma, you guessed correctly) won 16.7% in the 1st round of parliamentary elections. Now I’m afraid the London Times confused me somewhat here, since the story mentioning that the party “has a uniformed wing that marches in military formation” was accompanied by this picture.
It turns out that those people are not from Jobbik’s Magyar Garda at all but from the Association of Cultural Preservation for Hungarian Hussar Unit. The Magyar Garda look rather less festive,
although they do have the feather, which is a nice touch.
Also from the London Times (that pay wall in June is beginning to worry me), someone in Kandahar asks about today’s incident, “Even they must know a bus is full of civilians? If they are afraid of a bus, how can they continue with an operation in Kandahar?” And the head of security in the Kandahar police dept dismissed protesters thusly: “They were unemployed people and some of the bus passengers.”
The Central Kentucky Women’s Clubs are objecting to housewives being classified in the Census as having no occupation.
This story is for you “Deadwood” fans: Seth Bullock, US marshal in Deadwood, has been invited to join his old friend Teddy Roosevelt (they met when TR was a deputy sheriff in ND in the 1880s) in England, and is going.
Morocco’s grand vizier has been poisoned by three of his wives.
Maryland Governor Austin Lane Crothers vetoes the Negro Disfranchisement Bill. However, he will allow a referendum creating a $500 property qualification for negroes.
NYT: “Bishop Cummins had first petitioned the doctrinal office to defrock Mr. Kiesle in 1981. He also wrote directly to Pope John Paul II. Cardinal Ratzinger requested more information, which officials in the Oakland Diocese supplied in February 1982. They did not hear back from Cardinal Ratzinger until 1985, when he sent the letter in Latin suggesting that his office needed more time to evaluate the case.”
What did they have to do that was more pressing than investigating a priest who tied up and sexually abused two boys? What was it they considered a better use of their time?
Polish President Lech Kaczynski has died in a plane crash. This blog expresses condolences to the surviving evil twin.
The expulsion of Jews from parts of Russia is intensifying. And private schools are forbidden from taking a higher proportion of Jewish students than the quota enforced on the public schools.
The Theosophists have decided that William Sidis, the 11-year-old boy genius studying mathematics at Harvard, is the reincarnation of Euclid. Sidis responded, “What bosh!”
I’ve been totally stale and uninspired for days. It happens. Here’s something I wrote a couple of days ago and didn’t bother posting:
The British Conservative Party has lost the gay vote. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling (and is there a more Tory name than Grayling?) (Yes, yes there is: Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, parliamentary candidate for South Dorset – the grandson, or something, of Admiral The Honourable Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, owner of the best name in the history of the universe – who is calling himself plain old Richard Drax, which does make him sound like a Bond villain, but not like a complete tit) said that it’s okay for bed & breakfast owners to refuse to accommodate gay couples. Days later, David Cameron has yet to comment.
And then I had something about the danger to politicians daring to block gay men from their beloved B&B’s, but I don’t want to say something that could be misconstrued and endanger my chances of Obama naming me to replace John Paul Stevens.
The Speaker of the New Jersey House of Assembly denies that there was an orgy in the Assembly: “Not a single woman and no liquor of any kind were in these rooms at any time.” Instead, they were hard at work all night on the McCran Water Bill and the Railroad Valuation Bill. So that settles that.
The news today is all about disharmony within the Republican Party.
The NYT thinks Secretary of State Philander Knox and Treasury Sec. Franklin MacVeagh are about to resign. The NYT is wrong; both served until the end of the Taft administration. But it analyzes the causes of their supposed respective discontents at length.
And the “story runs in Washington” that many Republicans would be perfectly happy to lose the House in November if the Republican “insurgents” were also hurt, since the R’s would still retain the presidency and the Senate and the D’s in the House would likely screw up and lose again in 1912. The NYT (which in 1910 was more than a little Republican-leaning) thinks this is wrong-headed, and that opposition to Taft’s unpopular Payne-Aldrich tariff might be a winner for the D’s, with discontent growing over high prices (a meat boycott in Harlem, for example, just turned violent, with women attacking butcher shops and pouring kerosene over meat purchased by women who violated the boycott).
The Indiana Republican Party’s convention refused to endorse the tariff, and Taft responded by canceling plans to visit Indianapolis.
And looming above all this: the imminent return from his year-long world shoot-em-up tour of the prodigal Rough Rider.
On his African trip, Teddy Roosevelt sent 11,397 specimens of slaughtered vertebrates to the Smithsonian. That’s 4,000 birds, 2,000 reptiles and batrachians, 500 fishies, and 4,897 mammals. That’s the difference between TR and Dick Cheney: Cheney never sent any lawyer specimens to the Smithsonian.
Milwaukee’s mayor-elect, the socialist Emil Seidel, says “There will be no Utopia, no millennium, none of the wild antics that our opponents have charged to us.” But he promises that the street cars will be cleaner.
At the B’nai B’rith’s annual banquet, President Taft said that he likes Jews “because they are essentially artistic, because they make excellent citizens, and are in favor of law and order.”
Governor of Virginia Bob McDonnell declares April Confederate History Month. Some might find this offensive, but I’m fine with it: maybe they’ll finally get it through their thick skulls that they fucking lost.
His declaration states that the Confederacy leaders and military “fought for their homes and communities and Commonwealth...”, oh, and something else, what was that other thing they fought for again?
“...in a time very different than ours today.” Which is what McDonnell said about his own college thesis.
“WHEREAS, all Virginians can appreciate the fact that when ultimately overwhelmed by the insurmountable numbers and resources of the Union Army, the surviving, imprisoned and injured Confederate soldiers gave their word and allegiance to the United States of America, and returned to their homes and families to rebuild their communities in peace...”
The declaration contains not a single word about slaves.
Milwaukee elects not only a socialist as mayor, Emil Seidel, the first socialist mayor of a major American city, but also a socialist majority on the city council (21 Social Democrats, 10 Democrats, 4 Republicans, with an even larger majority on the Board of Supervisors).
In Illinois, 28 towns voted for prohibition, 26 (mostly larger towns and cities) voted wet, several of which had gone dry two years before.
The American Methodist College in Rome issued a nyah nyah statement about Roosevelt’s spat with the pope, applauding Italians who had converted from Catholicism and saying that for the Methodists “To be anathematized by the Roman hierarchy is to be named a friend.” In response, TR canceled the reception he had planned at the American embassy, just in case some of the Methodists showed up.
36 Michigan counties voted on prohibition, and 19 went dry. Of the 10 counties that went dry 2 years ago, 2 voted to let the saloons reopen.
Multiple stories in today’s paper giving the opinions of pretty much everyone on the planet of Roosevelt’s little scheduling problem with the pope.
President Taft visiting Worcester, Mass. on Sunday, pissing off a lot of church folk because he participated in a parade and a meeting – on the sabbath. Rev. Edward Eells noted that Roosevelt once gave up a bear hunt that fell on the sabbath.
At Easter mass, Cardinal Angelo Sodano preached (if “fuck you” can be considered preaching), “Holy Father, the people of God are with you, and do not let themselves be impressed by the gossip of the moment, by the challenges that sometimes strike at the community of believers.”
Gossip.
(Update: Reuters gives the line as “petty gossip of the moment”.)
The Maryland Legislature votes to disfranchise blacks in state and municipal elections, using the extremely dubious claim that the 15th Amendment, which Maryland never ratified, doesn’t apply to those elections. The national Democratic Party is worried that this will hurt them in November, possibly threatening their chances of taking back the House of Representatives, which depend in part on winning over some black voters in several states. The article mentions in passing that the minority (Democratic) leader in the Senate, Sen. Hernando De Soto Money of Mississippi (a former Confederate soldier), believes that the 14th and 15th Amendments weren’t constitutionally ratified.
You’ll remember that two months and 100 years ago, the pope canceled a meeting with former Vice President Fairbanks because Fairbanks was also going to speak in the American Methodist Church in Rome. Now, Teddy Roosevelt is visiting Rome, and received a preemptive warning from the Vatican that the same thing would happen if he dared speak to the Methodists (which he actually had no plans to do). TR replied that he refused to “submit to any conditions which in any way limit my freedom of conduct,” and so the pope won’t see him. TR explained in a letter to The Outlook that he thought most Americans, Catholic as well as Protestant, “will feel that I acted in the only way possible for an American to act”.
Yet another Philadelphia trolley runs over yet another child, 3-year-old John Traconnelli, and an “enraged crowd of foreigners” (i.e., Italians) set about lynching the conductor and motorman, but were thwarted by their being armed, and the police showing up.
Epithet of the Day -100: Rev. John Wesley Hill, doing the Glenn Beck thing 100 years early, attacks what he sees as socialism in churches. But the important thing is the epithet: “pecan-headed little parsons.”
The regional governor-elect of Veneto, Italy, Luca Zaia of the Northern League, said he will (illegally) prevent the administering of RU-486 because “It banalizes the trauma of abortion”. I’m sure Italian women will thank him for saving them from banality.
