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NYC Mayor Gaynor ordered the New York Theatre closed because it was showing an indecent play – the police commissioner sent in stenographers – a French farce called “The Girl with the Whooping Cough.”
E.L. Blackshear, principal of Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College in Texas, writes a letter to the Times calling for the alliterative boxing match between Jack Johnson and James Jeffries to be called off because of the racial strife it is causing and will cause, especially if (spoiler alert: when) Johnson wins. Blackshear declares himself to be of the same race as Johnson, which makes him the first black person whose voice I’ve seen in the Times in the 6 months I’ve been doing these posts.
In California, a “sheepman and prospector,” worried about the possible ill-effects of the earth passing through Halley’s Comet’s tail, crucifies himself. A century later, he’d have been one of Glenn Beck’s biggest fans.
The circus visited Washington D.C. Senators and congresscritters abandoned committee hearings to watch the parade. It was bi-partisan: there were elephants, and clowns riding donkeys.
In the latest King-Edward-is-still-dead news, the NYT reports (via special cable) that his dog misses him.
The Pittsburg D.A. bans baseball games – not just professional, but kids on back lots – on Sundays.
The Supreme Court orders the release of a prisoner on the grounds that he has been subjected to cruel and unusual punishment, the first time the Court has ever done this. Oddly enough, the cruel & unusual provision it is upholding is in the constitution of the Philippines, which was legally considered a colony. Paul Weems, an official in the lighthouse service in the Philippines, was convicted for defrauding the government and sentenced to 15 years in prison at “hard and painful labor” and to be chained wrist to ankle. The dissenting justices argued that they should be restricted to the 18th-century definition of cruel and unusual punishment, the Spanish-Inquisition-Dick-Cheney stuff, “cruel bodily punishments.” But the majority said that civilization had moved on, and so must the definition of cruel and unusual punishment.
Dr. Max Baff (amusing name), professor of psychology at Clark College in Massachusetts, says that women are no better than savages from the psychological standpoint, as shown by “her love of bird feathers, hanging ornaments to her ears, wearing bracelets, rings and necklaces, affecting gaudy colors. ... Like savages, she is color blind, prone to religious hysteria, and impressionable.” Dr. Baff considers the women’s suffrage movement a form of emotional insanity and, you will be surprised to hear, is a bachelor.
Hillary Clinton, pandering to the let’s-remove-citizenship-from-alleged-terrorists trend-let: “United States citizenship is a privilege. It is not a right.” Wrong.
Quote of the Day: Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, on why Jews should hate Obama: “People are angry. Americans do not want peace shoved down the throats of the Israelis.”
The NYT breaks the news that the new king, George V, is “taciturn.”
The plan for a Senate primary in Mississippi in November, proposed by Sen. Percy after it was discovered that at least one of the state legislators who elected him had been bribed, has been rescinded because the other candidate, former governor Vardaman, refused to agree to the terms.
An article in the NYT Sunday magazine section warns that there are anarchist Sunday schools in New York City. Worse, “there is no God in the Anarchist Sunday school,” and no 10 Commandments.
A justice of the peace in New Jersey will have to decide if chickens can swim. One neighbor accuses another neighbor’s chicken of crossing a stream and doing $250 worth of damage to his strawberry plants.
Well, the Tories didn’t get a mandate, whatever Plastic Boy says. In fact, this election was a disappointment for the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. The LibDems failed to turn Nick Clegg’s alleged superstar status into an increase in the number of actual, you know, votes.
Since Cameron isn’t willing to give the LibDems electoral reform, just a time-wasting all-party commission, there will be no Tory-LibDem coalition. And the Tories did badly enough that the worst of all possible worlds, a Tory-Ulster Unionist coalition, wouldn’t give them a majority. So the likely outcome is a minority Tory government loosely supported by the LibDems and not able to do too much damage, with another general election some time fairly soon. Cameron will go into that one as the head of a weak government that won’t have accomplished much, but made clear just how harmful its budget cuts will be (combined with tax cuts for the rich). Labour will go into it with a new leader, presumably David Miliband, assuming Labour reacts to the loss with a coup instead of a civil war.
Michael White says Brown has snatched defeat from the jaws of disaster.
Other results: former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith loses her seat in Redditch to the expenses scandal and her husband’s porn habit. The Greens get their first MP ever, Caroline Lucas. Labour retained Rochdale, the constituency where Brown called Gillian Duffy a bigoted woman. The balance in Scotland remains almost exactly the same as in the 2005 elections, with the Tories coming in 4th in the popular vote and retaining a single solitary seat, and Labour actually increasing its vote slightly over 2005. Glenda Jackson, the only MP I’ve seen 1) naked, and 2) acting in a play (though not at the same time), narrowly retains her seat.
King Edward VIII has died. Was it... murder?
No.
At a meeting of the New York City Federation of Women’s Clubs, the novelist Amelia Barr gave a speech. After it, the audience was told that she had 15 children, news which was greeted with an enthusiasm that for some reason proved to the NYT that the clubwomen “show they care more for babies than the ballot.” Incidentally, Wikipedia says Barr had only 6 children, 3 of whom died in childhood.
There is a strike of bakers in Harlem. The union hired a band, which played behind a bakery. But it was a trap! When non-union bakers came out to listen, they were set upon by strikers.
Tufts College gives its reasons for abolishing co-education and establishing a separate women’s college: 1) the “delicacy” of certain subjects, 2) the different viewpoints from which men and women approach nearly all subjects, 3) a reluctance of both sexes to argue with each other, 4) women get better grades and thus a disproportionate share of awards and prizes. The college carefully explains that this is only because women are especially concerned with getting good grades and so take the classes they’re better at.
Because there David Cameron is giving his victory speech (for winning his own seat in Witney), but who are you looking at?
That would be Howling Hope, of the Monster Raving Looney William Hill Party (234 votes to Cameron’s 33,973). Here are some of the parliamentary candidates for Witney.
Campsfield House is a particularly nasty, privately run detention center for immigrants, and the guy with the sign is independent candidate/“comedy terrorist” Aaron Barschak, who got 53 votes. According to the Oxford Mail, “Security staff found a rubber lobster among Mr Barschak's possessions when they searched him.”
Headline of the Day -100: “Bakers Admit They Need Hands.”
Turns out to be about a strike.
Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the president of Kalmykia, a Russian republic, pop. 300,000, on the Caspian Sea (and also head of the International Chess Federation) said in an interview that he has talked with aliens and been on a spaceship in 1997. They wore yellow spacesuits. An MP in the Russian Duma has demanded an investigation. He wants to know if Ilyumzhinov revealed any state secrets to the aliens. And is there a procedure for officials who know state secrets and come into contact with aliens to report them to the Kremlin?
In a speech in St Louis, President Taft comments that he was probably the only man in public life who would admit never having had any farming experience.
Taft may be expelled from the steam shovelers’ union (an honorary membership, he didn’t have any experience, um, shoveling steam I guess, either) for attending a baseball game which was under boycott because the new Cleveland ball park was built with non-union labor.
Headline of the Day -100: “Trotting Men Eliminating Hopples.” I almost didn’t click on the story, in order to leave the meaning of those words a complete mystery. However I did read the story, and it’s still a complete mystery.
Other Headline of the Day -100: “Secret French Dirigible.” The French War Dept is building a balloon capable of traveling 50 miles per hour. The Germans must be terrified.
Charles Evans Hughes is confirmed by the Senate as a Supreme Court justice in a single day, without a debate. He will continue as governor of NY until Oct. 1.
The Supreme Court upholds state laws against trusts, including Tennessee’s decision to kick Standard Oil of Kentucky out of the state.
A medical device has been demonstrated in Britain that could (but won’t) revolutionize the practice of medicine: a telephone-stethoscope, which can transmit the sound of a heartbeat to a doctor over the phone. A doctor suggested it would be useful for tracking the development of pneumonia and typhoid patients.
I must have missed a letter to the NYT which asserted that women were unfit to wield the ballot because many of them wore hats with birds on them, but Alice Stone Blackwell responds that all those birds were killed by men. So there.
Updated with election results in purple.
Prop. 13. Seismic retrofitting won’t trigger increased property taxes. YES, why are they bothering us with obvious shit?
Wins with 84.5%. Which suggests why PG&E and Mercury failed to buy their initiatives: 15.5% of us will vote against absolutely everything, even if it's uncontroversial and unopposed.
Prop. 14. Open primaries, with the top two candidates from primary on the ballot in November. For all state and federal offices except president.
This system would not just favor the moderate center, as proponents say, but is designed to eliminate other views from political life, limiting the number of perspectives heard in the public sphere to exactly two (if that: Californians tend to live in one-party enclaves, which means that in one-third of California the choice in November would between two Democrats). In the past when the major parties presented us with a choice between two unappetizing hacks (Gray Davis v. Bill Simon for governor 2002, for example), at least we had the option of voting for a Green or Libertarian or Peace and Freedom candidate. This option would be removed by Prop. 14. Personally, I won’t vote for a death penalty supporter for governor or attorney general, and for more than 30 years the D and R candidates for these offices have all been deathers. Without a third-party option on the ballot, I would have to give up either my principles or my franchise (anti-abortion voters might well find themselves in the same boat).
Third parties have pioneered on issues the two bigs were unready even to discuss – the Peace and Freedom Party, for example, put gay marriage in its platform back in 1988. Prop. 14, while purporting to be non-partisan, would wipe out the third parties.
The ballot pamphlet argument against 14 infuriates me, saying that because candidates don’t have to declare a party, “Voters won’t know whether they are choosing a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or Green Party candidate.” This is an appeal to the laziest of voters, who are worried that they might actually have to read up on the candidates’ positions, when it’s so much easier to look at their party (for those voters, a helpful hint: Meg Whitman is actually a Republican).
But Prop. 14 itself is an appeal to the laziest voters. The “problem” this prop. is trying to solve, that the “extreme” candidates are increasingly winning D & R primaries, is not caused by the current primary system, it’s caused by apathy: the “moderate” voters Prop. 14 wants to favor simply haven’t been bothering to vote on primary election day, or work for moderate candidates, or run themselves.
Prop. 14 would apply to statewide races as well, so one could conceivably face a gubernatorial election where there are two Republicans on the November ballot, especially if there are several Democrats dividing the Dem vote in June. This happened in France, which has this system, in its presidential election in 2002, where the middle-left candidates split the first-round vote, leaving the second round was a distasteful choice between a corrupt center-right incumbent (Jacques Chirac) and an actual fascist (Jean-Marie Le Pen).
Vote NO.
Wins with 54.2%.
Prop. 15. Public funding for election campaigns for the office of secretary of state for candidates who voluntarily agree to restrict their campaign spending and private contributions. This is both a test case (applying to just one office, and only in the 2014 and 2018 elections) to demonstrate how public funding would work, and a trojan horse for the provision lifting the ban on public funding of all state candidates, allowing the Legislature to expand this program to all state offices without a further referendum.
The ballot pamphlet’s No argument is especially dishonest, saying that the funds would come from taxpayers, which is only true if you think of a fee paid only by lobbyists as “new taxes.” Why are they allowed to lie to us? They imply corruption, talking darkly about lobbyists funding the very office that regulates them, but a mandatory fee paid into a fund for all candidates is not a bribe. They say that if the fee didn’t bring in enough money for the program, tax money would have to be used, which is another lie: Prop. 15 specifically says that if the fee wasn’t enough, funding would be reduced.
However, on this one I’ve changed my mind while writing this. While I support public financing as a means of reducing the cost of elections to make it possible for people to run without having to either be multi-millionaires themselves or spend all their time sucking up to multi-millionaires and corporations for donations. But Prop. 15 just feels sneaky. It allows the Legislature to design public financing for every other state office at some future date behind closed doors without another initiative, which is the sort of blank check I’m not willing to entrust to them. They should have to come back to the voters before such a fundamental alteration of our electoral system. Vote NO.
Loses 57.4% to 42.6%.
Prop. 16. The anti-public power initiative. The PG&E ads all talk about the “taxpayers’ right to vote,” which is an attempt to obscure reality, at least for people who aren’t paying very close attention – they’re depending on people not paying very close attention – in two ways: 1) the word “taxpayers” is intended to scare people who aren’t paying very close attention into thinking this measure has something to do with taxes, 2) the phrase “right to vote” is intended to get people who aren’t paying very close attention to overlook that the 2/3 provision means their vote might not actually count: yes you had a right to vote, but only 66% of your neighbors agreed with you, so hard cheese.
What PG&E is counting on is that all they would have to do is mislead or scare 1/3 of the voters. If you’re wondering how they plan to do that, you’ve got a perfect preview in the lopsided campaign you’re seeing now around Prop. 16: a large private corporation, and a monopoly at that, spending millions of dollars on ads and the other side not heard because municipalities are prohibited from spending public money to rebut them.
Aside from the undemocratic 2/3 provision, you have to admire the audacity of PG&E talking about the “right to vote” when the choice on offer in a local referendum would be between a public utility run by elected officials and a private one run by an unaccountable, unelected corporation responsible only to its stockholders. Did you have a “right to vote” on PG&E CEO Peter Darbee’s $9.4 million compensation last year? Or on whether you wanted a “smart meter”? Or nuclear power plants? Or on whether PG&E could spend the money they charge you to bankroll a proposition to protect their monopoly and fill your mailbox with propaganda?
PG&E is not spending $35+ million because they’re concerned about the “taxpayers’ right to vote.” They’re concerned about protecting their ability to continue charging some of the highest rates in the country.
Vote NO. That said, when do I get a vote on getting rid of Comcast?
No, 52.%, but not before every remaining tree in Washington was cut down for pro-16 mailers. When you pay your next PG&E bill, write "Ha ha" on your check.
Prop. 17. Allows auto insurance companies to jack up rates for people who haven’t had continuous insurance.
Another corporate-sponsored initiative (sigh). Can we assume that Mercury Insurance did not pay millions to put this on the ballot out of a philanthropic impulse to reduce everyone’s rates?
This is another one where the arguments in the voter booklet disagree fundamentally on the facts, which means someone is lying. I had to read the text of the prop. to find out, for example, whether there really was an exemption for lapse in coverage due to military service (only if service is outside the US). The Yes argument claims there is protection for people who drop coverage for economic or medical reasons, but what Prop. 17 actually says is that “Continuity of coverage shall be deemed to exist even if... coverage has lapsed for up to 90 days in the last five years for any reason other than nonpayment of premium.” But if that nonpayment was because you lost your job, what then? There is nothing in the text of the initiative that says how that would be resolved, so, you know, good luck with that. If this passes, I foresee plenty of frustrating phone conversations with insurance company reps.
Vote NO to frustrating phone conversations with insurance company reps.
No, 52.1%. It's almost like people don't think insurance companies are on their side and just want to charge them less.
Headline of the Day -100: “Memorial to Daniel Boone. North Carolinians Erect a Shaft and a Reproduction of His Log Cabin.” They like him! I mean, they really like him.
134 members of the women’s suffrage group No Vote No Tax Association in Chicago have adopted a resolution to refuse to pay taxes until they have the vote.
A woman in Indianapolis committed suicide because she answered a census question (what company her husband worked for) incorrectly.
An Episcopalian bishop from Maryland, visiting Rome, hoped to have an audience with the pope but is informed by the Vatican that the pope “is neither a picture nor a statue to be inspected and criticized”.
Magistrate O’Connor of Jefferson Market Court (NYC) convicted an alleged pickpocket, who had a record but against whom the only evidence this time seems to have been that he was “jostling pedestrians,” because that he understand what the judge was saying. The defendant displayed his huge hands and asked how he could possibly pick a pocket: “I can hardly put my hand in my own pockets.” The magistrate replied, “Don’t try to kid me. You know a good dip [pickpocket] doesn’t work with his hand. He works with two fingers. You know what ‘bringing the hanger’ [opening a woman’s handbag] means, don’t you?” Greenfield nodded. “I suppose you were framing a sucker to get away with a whole front [steal everything the victim has], or at least you expected to snag a poke [pocketbook] or a super and slang [watch and chain]. Instead you got dropped by a flatty [arrested by a detective] and were canned for a sleep [held overnight], eh?” Since Greenfield knew what all that meant, he got a $5 fine.
Tony Blair enters the electoral fray, to remind the British people that there is someone they despise more than Gordon Brown.
His contribution is to attempt to win back disaffected voters who are considering voting LibDem by disparaging them. Such a vote, he said, is “not a serious thing”. “The fact that it might seem an interesting thing to do is not the right reason to put the keys of the country in their hands.” Possibly the British tolerance for being patronized to by smug bastards is higher than mine, but I can’t imagine this sort of dismissiveness being particularly persuasive. And unlike Gordon Brown, he knew his microphone was on when he slagged off a large segment of the population.
The Democrats are thinking about requiring everyone to carry national ID cards with biometric info. The British government likes to propose this every couple of years and what always stops it is not civil liberties concerns, but the fact that they’re expensive. Good luck to the politician who votes for making every American stand in line at the DMV or post office and write a check for $50 or $80.
Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov denies having his former bodyguard Umar Israilov, who had filed a complaint against him at the European Court of Human Rights, killed on the streets of Vienna. Said Kadyrov, “Excuse me, but it would be so stupid and cruel to kill a person in the city center. Why would I need to do this?”
Because you’re stupid and cruel.
This has been another edition of simple answers to stupid questions.
