Giving thanks

for the Tom DeLay money-laundering conviction. I’m sure the footage of the verdict being announced will be played on tv every Thanksgiving. “It’s a Tom DeLay guilty verdict, Charlie Brown!” Snoopy dance, everybody!

The White House turkeys were named Apple and Cider. CAPTION CONTEST!

“Live long and prosper”

Today -100: November 25, 1910: Of men on horseback and creeps united

Apropos of Taft’s visit to Panama, the NYT notes that it’s not especially healthy for the canal workers because “Only brown men and black ones can really live in the tropics. The white man can rule there, but if he stays too long he invariably either dies or degenerates.”

Madero’s statement says that as soon as Mexico City and half the states have been liberated, he will organize new elections.

The NYT reports a rumor that Madero was seriously wounded in the fighting. Or possibly just fell off his horse.

Another NYT Index Typo: “SPECIAL SERVICES FOR THANKSGIVING; All Creeps Unite in Praise for the Benefits of the Last Year.” Creeds; all creeds unite. And yes, the distinction is often a subtle one.

Today -100: November 24, 1910: Has the Mexican Revolution been completely repressed?

Francisco Madero declares himself “President of the Provisional Government of Mexico,” and orders his followers not to attack Americans or banks. Madero’s brother Gustavo arrives in Washington to deny that the rebellion is anti-American.

However, the Mexican foreign minister tells the NYT that the revolt has been “completely repressed.”

Massachusetts Governor-elect Foss changes tack, appealing to Henry Cabot Lodge to agree that no decision on the senatorship be made by the Legislature and that a new law be enacted for direct election of senators.

I submit to you that your empire is illogical

In 2002, it came out that despite the fact that the one thing that was always mentioned about Mullah Omar every time his name came up in news stories was that he was deficient in the eye department to the tune of one, the wanted pictures of him which the CIA had been dropping all over Afghanistan were of someone with two eyes. As I wrote at the time, “In the kingdom of the American intelligence community, the one-eyed man is king.”

Clearly the “Taliban leader” we have been negotiating with (and paying off) is not the “imposter” he is depicted as, but works for that alternate-reality Taliban’s Two-Eyed Mullah Omar. Expect to see McCain and Lieberman on the talk shows this Sunday calling for a preemptive strike on the Mirror Universe, before it’s too late.

Unfortunately Phrased Headline of the Day

“Pope Softens Stance on Condoms” (AP). That does tend to happen at his age.

Today -100: November 23, 1910: Of demented creatures, the Mexican Revolution, and lunacy commissions

British suffragettes “assaulted” Prime Minister Asquith, the NYT says, and threw stones at the houses of Asquith, Churchill, and other Cabinet members. As contemptuously condescending as the NYT’s reporter was, that of the London Times was worse: “The rioters yesterday appeared to have lost all control of themselves. Some shrieked, some laughed hysterically, and all fought with a dogged but aimless pertinacity. Some of the rioters appeared to be quite young girls, who must have been the victims of hysteria rather than of deep conviction. ... The women behaved like demented creatures, and it was evident that their conduct completely alienated the sympathy of the crowd.”


There are revolts and fighting between rebels and the army throughout Mexico, and signs of serious division within the army. A document was supposedly found in some revolutionary’s house detailing a plan to to dynamite the building of the newspaper El Imparcial and to assassinate many government officials and display their bodies suspended from electric-light wires. President Díaz would be spared because of his past services to the country.

Headline of the Day -100: “Lunacy Commission Takes Up Food Theft.”

Awkwardly Phrased Headline of the Day

From an op-ed piece in The Guardian: “The Pope’s Shift on Condoms Is the Thin End of the Wedge.”

Today -100: November 22, 1910: Of senators, Jim Crow, assassinations, revolutions, and new constitutions

Unlike Foss in Massachusetts (see yesterday), NY Governor-Elect Dix says he will leave the matter of electing a US senator entirely up to the Legislature, and won’t even express a preference.

Democrats on the Baltimore City Council are moving towards adopting an ordinance for residential racial segregation. A committee report says “No fault is found with the negroes’ ambitions, but the committee feels that Baltimoreans will be criminally negligent as to their future happiness if they suffer the negroes’ ambitions to go unchecked. The existence of such an ambition is a constant menace to the social quietude and property values of every white neighborhood in Baltimore.” To quote Jimmy McNulty, “What the fuck is wrong with this city?”

The editor of the Kentucky newspaper Appeal to Reason is sentenced to 6 months in federal prison and a $1,000 fine for mailing envelopes on which was printed “$1,000 reward will be paid to any person who kidnaps ex-Governor Taylor and returns him to the Kentucky authorities,” which the jury considered defamatory and threatening. The NYT doesn’t explain, but this is about the 1900 assassination of Gov. William Goebel, which I mentioned on the 18th when another of the (alleged) conspirators was elected to Congress. William Taylor was initially declared the winner of the 1899 elections but served only 50 days before the legislature reversed the results (there was so much corruption and partisan maneuvering I really don’t know who actually won the election). So the assassination was a subtle means of keeping Taylor in office, but didn’t work and Goebel was inaugurated before dying of his wounds. When the indictments started coming down, Taylor fled to Indiana, whose governor refused to extradite him. Thus the reward for Taylor’s return to Kentucky (in 1909, after the reward announcement, Taylor was pardoned by another Republican governor).

Old Mexico: Rebels capture the town of Gomez Palacio. 300 Federal troops evidently go over to their side. Francisco Madero has crossed into Mexico from the US.

New Mexico: The constitutional convention has finished its work. Hispanics, suspicious of the Federal enabling act requirement that all state officers and legislators must speak English, demanded equality before the law. So provisions ban any distinction based on inability to speak English for jury duty, the franchise or other officials not covered by the Federal act and also ban separate schools for whites and Hispanics.

Obama press conference at NATO: I understand people’s frustrations

Obama held a press conference following the NATO summit in Portugal.

UNLESS YOU COUNT BRANGELINA: “For more than 60 years, NATO has proven itself as the most successful alliance in history.”

THOSE DARNED SKEPTICS: “At no time during these past six decades was our success guaranteed. Indeed, there have been many times when skeptics have predicted the end of this alliance.” For example, those skeptics skeptically pointed out that the whole reason for the thing ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

WHAT IT IS IMPORTANT FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TO REMEMBER: “It is important for the American people to remember that Afghanistan is not just an American battle.” There are also a lot of dead Afghan shepherds.

GROWING THREAT: “we agreed to develop a missile defense capability for NATO territory, which is necessary to defend against the growing threat from ballistic missiles.” Growing threat? What growing threat?

DE-STRAINING ACCOMPLISHED! “The second message I want to send is that after a period in which relations between the United States and Europe were severely strained, that strain no longer exists.”

WHERE’S THE TRUST? WHERE IS THE TRUST? On the “New START” treaty: “And Ronald Reagan said, trust but verify -- we can’t verify right now.”


SO WE DID HAVE AN ENGRAVED INVITATION: Asked whether Karzai saying the US military should stop doing certain things (night-time raids, killing civilians, employing mercenaries) meant that we were in some way obligated to stop doing those things: “Now, to go to the point about President Karzai, we are there are their invitation. You are absolutely correct. Afghanistan is a sovereign nation.” Define sovereign. Define nation.

AN ENTIRELY LEGITIMATE ISSUE: And on the killing of Afghan civilians: “That’s an entirely legitimate issue on the part of President Karzai. He’s the President of a country and you’ve got foreign forces who, in the heat of battle, despite everything we do to avoid it, may occasionally...” Occasionally! “...cause civilian casualties, and that is understandably upsetting.” Nice of you to understand. “I don’t fault President Karzai for raising those issues.” Oh good. “On the other hand...” Oh Christ, he’s going to do an “on the other hand” about the killing of thousands of civilians “...he’s got to understand that I’ve got a bunch of young men and women from small towns and big cities all across America who are in a foreign country being shot at and having to traverse terrain filled with IEDs, and they need to protect themselves. And so if we’re setting things up where they’re just sitting ducks for the Taliban, that’s not an acceptable answer either.”

CONFESSION TIME: “With respect to the TSA, let me, first of all, make a confession. I don’t go through security checks to get on planes these days, so I haven’t personally experienced some of the procedures that have been put in place by TSA.” Nevertheless, “I understand people’s frustrations.” No you don’t. And that could soooo easily be rectified with a little presidential-junk-touching sexytime session at the White House.

WHAT HE’S SAID TO THE TSA: “And what I’ve said to the TSA is that you have to constantly refine and measure whether what we’re doing is the only way to assure the American people’s safety.” But they’re too busy measuring the American people’s collective junk.

“But at this point, TSA, in consultation with our counterterrorism experts, have indicated to me that the procedures that they’ve been putting in place are the only ones right now that they consider to be effective against the kind of threat that we saw in the Christmas Day bombing.” (He used the term “Christmas Day bombing” twice, although in fact it was only an attempted bombing. That said, if Obama wants to refer to that event, he has to use the phrase “underwear bomber” just like every one else.)(I just want to hear Barack Obama say “underwear bomber.”)

Today -100: November 21, 1910: Of Tolstoy, petty political uprisings, and demented viragoes

Leo Tolstoy has died.

The NYT finds no evidence that a revolution has actually started in Mexico, as it was supposed to do yesterday when Madero returned to Mexico, except for an outbreak at Guerrero. But as a precaution, all bullfights have been canceled in Mexico City.

A NYT editorial craps all over the “petty political uprising” that is the Mexican Revolution, as well as its leader, former presidential candidate Francisco Madero. Says the Times, “The sooner Gen. Diaz silences Madero, however, the better it will be for the peace and credit of his country. The most pitiful revolution is dangerous in a country whose population includes 52 different varieties of the Indian.”

Massachusetts Governor-Elect Eugene Foss demands that either Henry Cabot Lodge “surrender his seat in the United States Senate by withdrawing from his contest for re-election” or Foss will stump against him up and down the state in the time left before Foss takes office (a reminder: it was the Legislature, not the people of the state who would have the final say).

In what will not be the last incredibly condescending editorial on the subject of women’s suffragists, American or British, the NYT says that the women who marched on Parliament Friday took advantage of the “fact” that they would be treated more gently than would men who did the same thing, in which case there would have been “more or less killing and wounding as the first result, and later some trials for high treason, with hangings not far out of sight”, whereas women only suffered “dishevelment of hair and clothing,” a few arrests and brief imprisonment. “In other words, it was not war that the women made, but a ‘scene,’ and while it would not be either fair or true to say that all women love ‘scenes,’ it is both to say that a good many of them apparently do – that none of them seems to fear the public exhibition of emotion anything like as much as most men. So, in a sense – and a reassuring sense, too – while the riot may have been ‘unladylike’ – which is no very grave condemnation – it was quite ‘womanly,’ in that it would have been possible only for women.”

In fact, the 119 women arrested on Black Friday were all released without charge on Home Secretary Winston Churchill’s orders, in part to prevent publicity being given to the abuse and sexual humiliation the police inflicted on the protesters. For this leniency, he was criticized by the Times of London and other papers, including the Daily Express, which referred to the women as “demented viragoes” and “sexless creatures.”

Today -100: November 20, 1910: Of princes flying, Yalensians hugging, congressmen punching, and deer killing

Admiral Prince Heinrich of Prussia, the kaiser’s younger brother, has been taking flying lessons.

The NYT offers a heart-warming vignette from the Harvard-Yale game: “ELDERLY YALENSIAN HUGGED THE PORTER; ‘Are You for Yale?’ He Demanded. ‘I Is,’ Replied the Negro, and That Was Enough.” (The game tied 0-0).

Mexican President-For-Not-Much-Longer Díaz reassures an American tourist agency that the beginning of the Mexican Revolution is “of no real importance against the peace of the republic”.

Congresscritter Charles Evans (D-Georgia) gets into a fistfight with the editor of the Savannah Press, a Mr. Pleasant A. Stovell, over the latter’s coverage of the former’s election. Evans won.

Roosevelt visits the White House for the first time since leaving office, making sure to come while Taft is out, and also goes to the Smithsonian, which is now pretty much just a large collection of things he’s killed. It was a trip down Memory Lane for the Colonel: Ah, that’s my first elephant, why I remember shooting into a herd of hippo and killing this one...

Headline of the Day -100: “Maine Deer Kill Poor.”

All the news the Daily Telegraph sees fit to print

Today’s paper tells us that Sarah Palin really admires Simon Cowell.

And that the world’s tallest couple (she’s 6'6, he’s 6'10.4") live in Stockton.

And that Silvio Berlusconi ordered a new penis for a 2nd century statue of Mars, at a cost of 70,000. It’s attached with a magnet. “Experts studied statues of male nudes from the same period in order to determine what the dimensions of the prosthetic penis should be”. (One of the commenters on the article heard the story on the BBC, reported by David Willy.) He also had a hand restored to Mars and one to the Venus statue with which it’s paired. I suppose we should be thankful he didn’t give Venus a boob job.

Before & after:


Speaking of Berlusconi and art, here’s a picture (which I cropped) from yesterday’s NYT, showing a horse’s ass and a painting.

Today -100: November 19, 1910: Of wild men & wild beasts in Africa, wild revolutionaries & wild troops in Mexico, and wild suffragettes & wild bobbies

Theodore Roosevelt gives a lecture to the National Geographic Society on his African safari entitled... wait for it... “Wild Men and Wild Beasts in Africa.”

In Puebla, Mexico the police try to break up an indoor anti-Díaz meeting. A woman in the building shot and killed the police chief. Other police were killed by a bomb and ultimately 100 people died in the fighting. As of the last report, federal troops were besieging a house full of rebels and shouting “Long live the Supreme Government!”, an uplifting slogan if ever I heard one. The revolution is... on.

NY governor-elect Dix spent $4,372.32 on his campaign and received contributions of $575.

A story that seems to have been cut from the paper, leaving an orphan sub-headline appended to the previous story: “Candidate for Judge Bought No Cigars -- Garretson Spent $6,503.”

AFL President Samuel Gompers says the supremacy of the Caucasian race in unions must be maintained. Negroes, he says, “cannot all be expected to understand the philosophy of human rights. They are less than two centuries away from the barbarians of their own African lands and a little less than a half century removed from chattel slavery.”

In London, suffragettes were attacked by the police and 116 arrested on what quickly became known as Black Friday. Or, as the NYT puts it, “Suffragettes Riot, Spill Real Blood” (Here’s the London Times coverage). 1,000 women led by Emmeline Pankhurst “charged” (i.e., marched on) Parliament to demand a vote on the women’s suffrage bill before the next general election, which is likely to be next month, if the House of Lords rejects a bill restricting its power of veto over bills passed by the Commons (spoiler alert: it will). Pankhurst and two other women were eventually allowed in to see Prime Minister Asquith’s secretary, who told them Asquith wouldn’t see them and there would be no vote. By chance, Asquith came into the room while this was going on, but upon seeing the women scurried quickly back into the House chamber. The Women’s Social and Political Union published depositions from women on the march who had been abused by the police – pinched, squeezed, obscenities whispered into their ears, etc etc – but the government refused to investigate.

Oh, the “real blood” mentioned in the headline belonged to a constable. His hand got cut.

A very Hope-y Thanksgiving

During the Bush years, the American public was invited to vote on the White House website on names for the two White House turkeys. And also on this website. Since the Obamaites have discontinued the tradition, what was once the alternative Name Those Birds Contest is now the only game in town. Have at it in comments, and here are some to start you off:

• Tea and Party
• Quantitative and Easing
• TSA and Junk
• I’m and You
• Reid and Pelosi
• Speaker and Boehner
• Don’t Ask and Don’t Tell (still)
• Sanity and/or Fear
• Shellacking and.... oh I can’t think of another term to pair with this, so I guess just another Shellacking, because it’s been that sort of year

I fear for our democracy

News Flash of the Day: WaPo headline: “GOP May Be Less Eager Than Obama for Bipartisanship.”

My favorite quotes from the NYT Magazine article on Sarah Palin: “I just tweet; that’s just the way I roll.”

And: “Palin told me that because of the media’s unfairness toward her, ‘I fear for our democracy.’ She cited a recent Anchorage Daily News article that commented on her casual manner of dress at a rally for Joe Miller”. Yup, that’s it, democracy’s a gonner.

Today -100: November 18, 1910: And the band played Ragtime

Another false rumor of an armed band of Mexicans crossing the border, this one said to be advancing on Marathon, Texas.

Taft is visiting the Panama Canal construction zone. His inadequate reply to the grievances of 100 boilermakers has set off a mass resignation.

Massachusetts Republicans plan to ask the incoming US House of Representatives not to seat newly elected congresscritter James Curley, who once served a year in prison for taking other people’s civil service (post office) exams for them. The Massachusetts Legislature some time back refused to seat his brother Thomas, who was convicted of the same crime. James Curley was elected to the Boston Board of Aldermen in 1904 while still in prison, and will be elected mayor of Boston for his fourth term in 1945 while under indictment for mail fraud. His slogan: “Curley Gets Things Done.” He certainly did. (He also got 6-18 months in the pokey, did not resign his office, to which he returned when Truman pardoned him after 5 months).

Another controversial congresscritter-elect: Caleb Powers (R-KY), who stood trial several times, resulting in overturned convictions and a hung jury, for being the master-mind in the 1900 murder of Governor William Goebel (the only sitting governor ever assassinated, sort of – he was inaugurated a day after being shot and three days before he died); he was pardoned in 1908. The Times thinks that since Curley & Powers are of different parties, the House will simply let both in as a compromise, which I assume was what happened, since both were allowed to sit in Congress (multiple terms).

Reporters finally catch up to Theodore Roosevelt for the first time since the election, but he has absolutely nothing to say about it “now or in the future.”

Ralph Johnstone, the trick-bicycle-rider-turned-aviator (his unfulfilled ambition was to do a loop-the-loop in a plane; Wilbur Wright told him if he tried it, he’d be fired, successful or not) and holder of the current altitude record, crashed after his plane... I think the technical term is “fell apart”... in the sky during an air show. “Scarcely had Johnstone hit the ground before morbid men and women swarmed over the wreckage fighting with each other for souvenirs. One of the broken wooden stays had gone almost through the airman’s body. Before doctors or police could reach the scene, one man had torn this splinter from the body and run away, carrying his trophy. The crowd tore away the canvas from over the body, and even fought for the gloves that had protected Johnstone’s hands from the cold. ... The band in the grand stand, blaring away under contract, never ceased to play” (Ragtime, of course).

Today -100: November 17, 1910: Of trifles

The NYT reports concerns that another “trifle” could set off conflict with Mexico – like another trifling Mexican citizen being tied to a trifling stake and set on trifling fire, presumably. But the NYT reassures its readers that in such an event, the US military could kick Mexico’s ass.

Taft, visiting Panama, reassures everyone that the US won’t annex Panama, unless it does. At a dinner in his honor given by the Panamanian president, Taft said that the treaty between the two countries made the US guarantor of the integrity of the Panama Republic “and therefore, in a sense, the guardian of the liberties of her people secured by its Constitution. Our responsibility, therefore, for your Government requires us closely to observe the course of conduct by those selected as the officials of your Government after they are selected, and to insist that they be selected according to law.” So nothing would justify annexing territory “unless there were some conduct on the part of the Panama people which left them no other possible course.” I’m sure everyone was very reassured.

The Honolulu YMCA refuses to admit a Japanese man – the Japanese vice consul, in fact – on the grounds that “the social incompatibility would militate against the usefulness of the organization.”

Startling Headline of the Day -100: “The Nigger Wins By a Nose.” Yes, “The Nigger” is what some sensitive soul named their racehorse. (After that, I came across the headline “Indians Whipped by Law Students,” which I’m happy to report is only about a football game.)

Today -100: November 16, 1910: Of smoking & voting, trust, cowboy leaders, and porcupine prospectors

One result of the introduction of women’s suffrage in Washington: Seattle’s City Council is considering a bill to ban smoking in polling stations.

James N. Huston, the Treasurer of the United States under Benjamin Harrison, is on trial with several others for fraud through their National Trust Company. Here’s a letter entered into evidence which the company wrote to the National Bond Company in reply to a request for information on the company’s history:


You can see why they called it the National Trust Company.

Anti-American violence is still occurring sporadically in Mexico, and there are (false) rumors that 400 Mexicans are marching on Rock Springs, Texas, the town where a Mexican national was burned at the stake two weeks ago. 2,000 armed American ranchmen and cowboys (many of them former Rough Riders from the Spanish-American War) have poured into the town to defend it. The “cowboy leaders” issued a statement claiming that the lynching was not racially motivated: “the cowardly brute’s nationality was not considered.” So that’s okay, then. In fact, they claim, many Mexicans took part in the lynching and it was they who insisted that burning rather than hanging was the proper course of action.

Another move towards militarizing aviation: a plane has taken off from a ship, the scout cruiser USS Birmingham, and flown five miles to shore. They haven’t figured out how to land a plane on a ship yet, but they’re working on it.

Headline of the Day -100: “Miners Die in New District: Porcupine Prospectors Cut off from Base of Supplies.” Porcupine prospectors were hardy men, working in the porcupine mines of Canada... oh, all right, there’s evidently a mining district in Northeastern Ontario called Porcupine.

Overshadowed

Not that I don’t think victims of government torture should be compensated, but the British government, in settling the court cases of seven former Guantanamo detainees (including Binyam Mohamed), is paying them millions of pounds purely in order to suppress the evidence that would come to light in the trials about British complicity with torture. A Cabinet Office statement today complains about the “totally unsatisfactory situation” where, in David Cameron’s words, the “reputation of our security services has been overshadowed by allegations about their involvement in the treatment of detainees held by other countries”. Don’t you hate it when your reputation is “overshadowed” by the facts about the awful shit you did?

So what’s on the minds of the 2008 Republican ticket today?

The Passion of the Snooki, or something.