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Joe Biden was in Pakistan this week. He made some rambling remarks alongside Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani.
GILANI SUFFERS FOR HIS COUNTRY: “And I tell you that we have had numerous telephone conversations, and I thank you for always taking my call, and I thank you for your input.” Like all those calls when I was trying to update to Windows 7.
SO SADDENED, IN FACT, THAT SALMAN TASEER’S ACTUAL NAME HAS ENTIRELY SLIPPED HIS MIND: “The president and I -- indeed, the entire world, I would suggest -- were saddened, saddened by the cold-blooded murder of a decent, brave man. The governor was killed simply because he was a voice for tolerance and understanding.”
WHAT JOE WOULD RESPECTFULLY SUGGEST: “There are those also who accuse the United States of violating your sovereignty as we support your army and pursue terrorists where they hide. .... But I would respectfully suggest that it’s the extremists who violate Pakistan’s sovereignty and corrupt its good name.” Well technically those guys are mostly Pakistanis, so I’m not sure how exactly they violate Pakistan’s sovereignty. But even if they do, that doesn’t mean that assassinating them with drones on Pakistani soil doesn’t likewise violate Pakistan’s sovereignty. I feel silly even pointing out something so obvious, but Biden speaks as if he thinks he’s making some sort of logical argument here.
BECAUSE NOTHING SAYS RESTORING AND STRENGTHENING SOVEREIGNTIES LIKE MISSILE STRIKES BY ANOTHER COUNTRY: “Our goal is to work with your leaders and you, Mr. Prime Minister, to restore and strengthen sovereignties in those areas of your country where extremists have violated it.”
QUITE THE OPPOSITE: “The assertion that we disrespect Islam is actually quite the opposite. Islam is the fastest growing religion in the United States of America.” Or maybe it’s Gleeks, I always get those two mixed up.
REST AREA: “So I want to put to rest, which I know I will not by this simple assertion -- we are not, we are not the enemies of Islam”. Frenemies?
ADMIRES SO MUCH THAT JINNAH’S ACTUAL NAME HAS ENTIRELY SLIPPED HIS MIND: “America admires, admires the vision of your great founder, who said wisely, and I quote...”
A “foreign bank” in Pittsburg goes bankrupt and the owner blows his brains out. But depositors, described by the Times as “Gypsies, Poles, and Slavs, a number of them women, in fantastic headgear,” gathered in front of the closed bank demanding to see the body to ensure that he hadn’t faked his death and absconded.
The House is working on a bill to outlaw spies. In 1911, it seems, spying for a foreign nation was only a crime if the US was actually at war, in which case it fell under the treason laws. The timing is probably related to several recent incidents in Europe, such as British “hikers” being arrested in Germany making sketches of fortifications, but also to the activities of Japanese spies who got hold of blueprints to fortresses along the Pacific Coast and in the Philippines.
Teddy Roosevelt is to go hunting with a group of his Rough Rider pals in Mexico. Did no one tell him there’s a revolution going on there?
Taft goes to the top of the Washington Monument for the first time.
Eugene Debs calls for socialists to rise up in revolt, the nature of which he fails to specify, against the Supreme Court. On Lincoln’s Birthday. Debs particularly objects to the 6-month sentence given to an editor for posting a reward for the return of the fugitive ex-governor of Kentucky (which I’ve mentioned before), given that union leaders Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone were infamously kidnapped in Colorado by Idaho police and brought forcibly to Idaho in 1906.
In Brooklyn, Surrogate (like a judge) Ketcham rejects the will of millionaire Robert Thompson. 4 months before his death, the 70-year-old Thompson married a 27-year-old stenographer at his paper company. His relatives were not best pleased, including his dead first wife, “Muzzie,” whose displeasure from beyond the grave was made known through spiritual messages helpfully relayed by Thompson’s granddaughter, Marion A. Funk. The dead wife also said that if he did marry, he should cut the second wife from his will in favor of his grandchildren, and this he did. The surrogate ruled that the will was the product of fraud.
Carrie Nation collapses!
The memorial in Tuscon yesterday. Obama gazing beatifically into a new enlightened era of civility, or something, and John McCain (2nd row, 2nd from the left) glaring balefully at Obama. But what is he (either one, or both) thinking?
Two burglars are the first people convicted in New York state on the basis of fingerprint evidence (actually, they decided to plead guilty when confronted with it).
Rep. Peter King wants to ban people carrying guns within 1,000 feet of congresscritters and other federal officials. He doesn’t mention 9-year-old student council members; I guess they can take care of themselves. So the lesson he’s drawn from Tuscon is that he isn’t privileged and protected and pampered enough.
And Rep. Dan Burton wants to enclose the House gallery in plexiglas.
Funny. I’d like to enclose Rep. Dan Burton in plexiglas. Or carbonite. Or yak manure.
Samuel Gompers attacks Taft’s support for a proposed law on injunctions, which is supposed to rein in judge’s use of injunctions against strikes, but would institutionalize their use (judges have been citing “common law” when issuing these questionable injunctions).
Inexplicably Amusing Headline of the Day -100: “Gas Kills Benjamin Cramp.”
US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are firing (do not click through to the original Belfast Telegraph story, which crashes Firefox)
250,000 bullets for every insurgent killed. Really, really bad shots? Or just really careful? “Sarge, I thought I’d probably killed him after shooting him 100,000 times, but I shot him another 150,000 times, just to be sure.” “Good thinking, private, you can never be too sure.”
Texas Governor-Elect “Little Oscar” Colquitt gets in a minor plane wreck. It was actually supposed to be a photo op of him in a plane on the ground, but he accidentally hit the accelerator and it went several hundred yards before the pilot, who was running along beside it or being dragged, managed to get the throttle closed.
Incidentally, Colquitt was a Democrat and the majority party in both houses of the Texas Legislature was the Prohibition Party.
Boy it’s been a tough week for political metaphors, what with a congresscritter “targeted” by Sarah Palin actually being targeted by a loon with an automatic weapon. I mean, I’d hate for my metaphors to be taken as something I intended literally.
That said, fuck Sarah Palin.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to vote this week for a constitutional amendment for the popular election of US senators. Opponents may try to derail it by setting qualifications for electors or having the federal government oversee the elections, which would be opposed by Southern Democrats as potentially giving the vote to black people. But the Committee is expected instead to allow the states to set qualifications by making electors for Senate the same as for the lower house of the state legislatures (which is what the 17th Amendment says).
The WaPo reports that the Department of War has concluded that the Maine blew up in 1898 because of an internal explosion, not a Spanish torpedo. So, um, whoops.
Israeli soldiers kill 65-year-old Palestinian asleep in his bed in Hebron instead of the Hamas member who lived in the apartment downstairs. The IDF apologizes, saying, “Sorry, we meant to kill a different unarmed guy asleep in his bed.”
I’m kidding, of course.
The IDF never apologizes.
Portugal bans monks & nuns from wearing distinctive dress. And anybody is empowered to arrest them for it, or any of the Jesuits already expelled from the country.
The 1910 election has been followed by criminal prosecutions of hundreds of people in various places for vote-buying. Maybe it was like that after every election, I don’t know. In the Billtown School District in Ohio, which is near, um, Ohio I guess, every single male has been disfranchised for vote-selling, so in the next election only women will be able to vote or stand for school trustee.
Taft refuses to pardon the president of a lumber company in Florida convicted of holding foreign laborers in involuntary peonage (however, Taft had previously commuted the sentence from 18 months to 6 months). Taft says that “Fines are not effective against men of wealth. Imprisonment is necessary.”
The city of NY has won a court ruling that may allow it to recover from William Randolph Hearst the $250,000 it had to pay out to victims of a fireworks display at Madison Square Garden on election night 1902, put on by the National Association of Democratic Clubs of which Hearst was president, which killed 18 people.
The House votes a $72 a month annuity to a soldier who volunteered for a medical experiment, allowing himself to be bitten by yellow fever mosquitos to test the theory that that’s how you get yellow fever. It is.
The Archbishop of Lyons, France, forbids Catholics reading four republican newspapers, says it is a sin to do so.
British suffragette leader Sylvia Pankhurst is visiting NY, giving speeches and raising money. The NYT article begins by referring to her as “a little rosy-cheeked slip of an English girl” and keeps up the condescension throughout, using the word “girl” a lot and calling her “little Miss Pankhurst.” It says she is 20 and looks younger. She is in fact 28, and doesn’t. She said she expects British women to be enfranchised “this very year.”
A couple of months ago, some sailors on 2 Brazilian battleships and some other ships mutinied, demanding more pay, the abolition of corporal punishment on ships, etc, or they would bombard Rio. Which they did. The Brazilian Congress voted to accept their demands and give them amnesty but naturally they were arrested when they set foot on shore. Since then 45 of the imprisoned mutineers have mysteriously died of sunstroke, gangrene and suffocation.
There is still no quorum in the Tennessee Legislature, so still no governor. The NYT notes that the situation can’t continue for long because without a government, pensions to Confederate veterans would be stopped and “No man or set of men with political aspirations would care to hazard even an indirect connection with such a situation as that.”
From the newspaper of record, the Daily Telegraph:
Scientists prove that women crying is a big turn-off for men. The scientists, wearing lab coats and everything, “collected tears from women watching a sad movie and then had a panel of 24 men smell them while at the same time looking at pictures of the opposite sex. This was then repeated using a salt water solution trickled down the cheek of the same women. When asked to rate the attractiveness of the pictures, the men who had sniffed the real tears found the images much less attractive than when smelling the fake tears.”
The makers of Super Scoop kitty litter are suing Fresh Step for its commercials suggesting that cats prefer the latter litter to the former, citing the alleged fact that “Cats do not talk”.
This nattily dressed gentleman, one Phoenix Jones, practices the trade of superhero in Lynwood, Washington.
Romania is imposing income tax on witches for the first time. The witches are resisting with, yes, spells.
Tennessee’s Governor-Elect Ben Hooper is still just governor-elect. A Fusionist, he’s pretty much an accidental, minority governor, his election the product of a bad split in the Democratic Party, mostly over prohibition. Now, mainstream Democrats elected to the Legislature are refusing to be sworn in until the Fusionists stop challenging the results in several seats D’s supposedly won. Without a quorum the Lege can’t swear Hooper in.
Chicago will limit all new buildings to 200 feet, a reduction from the current 260.
The Trial of the Century? The Pennsylvania Railroad files suit against Altern Miller, the president of the Union Electric and Power Company, for $2.16, the price of a first class fare, which Miller had refused to pay for the second part of his journey after being forced to stand from West Philadelphia to Belmar despite having paid first class. Miller vows to fight it to the Supreme Court if necessary.
John Boehner was sworn in today as Speaker of the House,
Give it, Nancy! I said give it!
so I guess I have to start paying attention to John Boehner now, so let’s blog his stupid first speech as stupid speaker of the stupid House of Representatives.
Nancy, look out, he’s behind you, he’s behind you!!!
NOT LIKE THOSE CRAPPY, LAZY ONES – I’M LOOKING AT YOU, MASSACHUSETTS’S SEVENTH DISTRICT: “I am honored and humbled to represent a great, hard-working community in Congress.” (Note to any readers in Massachusetts 7th; I picked that number at random, I don’t even know where you are, except probably in Massachusetts, I’m sure you’re lovely, so no complaints please.)
YEAH, WE’RE ALL REALLY GRATEFUL, OHIO’S 8th: “The people of Ohio’s Eighth Congressional District continue to afford me the privilege to serve, for which I am deeply grateful.” And the privilege of leaving Ohio in the winter, or any time, really. (Note to Ohio... ah, screw it.)
Aaaand, he’s crying.
BECAUSE THERE WON’T BE ANY MORE ROAD MAINTENANCE FUNDING, SO THE CAN WOULD JUST FALL INTO AN ENORMOUS POTHOLE: “No longer can we kick the can down the road.”
BECAUSE WHEN YOU THINK HUMBLE, YOU THINK JOHN ANDREW BOEHNER: “The American people have humbled us.”
Humble
OR SELL IT TO THE HIGHEST BIDDER. YOU KNOW, WHATEVER. “Our aim will be to give government back to the people.”
SIZE DOESN’T MATTER: “We will dispense with the conventional wisdom that bigger bills are always better...”
NO PREMATURE LEGISLATION: “...that fast legislating is good legislating”.
HE CAN SOMEHOW GET THROUGH THIS SENTENCE WITHOUT LAUGHING MANIACALLY, THAT’S WHY THEY GAVE HIM THE JOB: “Above all else, we will welcome the battle of ideas, encourage it, and engage in it openly, honestly, and respectfully.”
Fondling the Speaker’s gavel. What, he’s fondling the Speaker’s gavel, why are you snickering?
OR EVER: “We will not always get it right.”
THAT IDEA: I THINK I’LL HAVE SOME MORE NACHOS: “More than a country, America is an idea”.
IT’S THE PEOPLE’S HOUSE? THAT’S GREAT, CUZ THE PEOPLE JUST GOT FORECLOSED ON: “Welcome to the people’s House. Welcome to the 112th Congress.”
Aaaaand, some more with the crying.
Lots of people have rightly piled onto Ross Douthat for his recent column. But let’s boil it down, shall we? The desire of infertile couples for adorable white babies places absolutely no moral obligation on women with unwanted pregnancies to fill that need. None.
A dirigible capable of carrying 50 passengers is supposedly being built. Its designer promises it will neither explode nor fall.
An earthquake in Russia, 7.7 on the Richter scale, destroys Vyerny, the capital of Semiryetchensk.
Chicago bans anarchists holding a demonstration in honor of the Sidney Street burglars.
The endless discussion in the NYT letters pages about the women’s suffrage movement in colleges continues with a letter from “E.K.R.”, whose daughter is a student in a “prominent college.” She informs him that “without doubt most girls comes out of college suffragettes. ... I have three other daughters, and I am quite sure that no other girl of mine shall go to college to have this stuff ground into her head. It seems to me too bad that our girls should have their poor little heads filled up with this nonsense, thereby constantly increasing the already large army of spinster ladies in the United States of America; for what young man, except one of those long-haired poltroons, would marry a girl who is both a college graduate and a suffragette?”
The Siege of Sidney Street in London. Several weeks before, some Latvians who the press would make out to be anarchists trying to finance their hideous cause but were probably just small-time burglars were interrupted by police while tunneling into a jewelry store. They killed two cops (three?) and escaped, going to ground in a house in Stepney, where they were discovered three weeks later. Home Secretary Winston Churchill, who naturally went along himself to observe the fun (a bullet passed through that nice top hat – questions about his recklessness were later raised in Parliament), sent in pretty much every cop in London to surround the house, plus Scots Guards from the Tower of London, who brought along a Maxim gun (which wasn’t used). A major gunfight ensued, lasting two hours, against what turned out to be just two people. The building was set on fire, Churchill refused to let the fire brigade put it out, and the two Latvians died, evidently at their own hands.
Click for the Manchester Guardian’s coverage.
Click for newsreel footage (3½ minutes):
LONDON - BATTLE OF LONDON - SIDNEY STREET SIEGE
The Supreme Court rules that Alabama’s labor contract law violates the 13th Amendment ban on slavery. The law prevented people who received pay in advance from quitting their jobs until it was repaid, and was used to reduce negroes to debt peonage.
Henry Cabot Lodge, although a three-term US Senator, is only now giving his first election speech, in advance of the Massachusetts state legislature’s vote on whether to give him a fourth term.
In 1910 376 people were killed by vehicular traffic in New York City, of whom 104 were killed by automobiles, 114 by or in trolleys, and 158 by horse-drawn vehicles. Part of the reason for the large number in the latter category is that while there is a stiff fine for drunk-driving an automobile it is not even illegal to drive a wagon drunk.
In 1910 there were roughly 500,000 automobiles in the US.
