Today -100: May 19, 1911: Of Pancho Villa & Mahler

Pancho Villa says he is quitting the rebel army and Mexico itself, and will move to the US and “cease to be a Mexican.” Francisco Madero, who announced Villa’s plans, “did not appear to be greatly grieved over his loss.”

Gustav Mahler dies. At the time, he was perhaps more famous as a conductor than as a composer.

Today -100: May 18, 1911: Of inaugurations, toothaches, and great institutions

Sen. Gallinger (R-NH) introduces a resolution for an Amendment to the Constitution changing the presidential inauguration from early March to late April. Not for any reasons of good governance, but because it’s too fucking cold in D.C. in March. At Taft’s inauguration, thousands of dollars were spent on grandstands “which when the parade passed were occupied only by snowdrifts.”

Harriet Stanton Blatch and other suffragists were ordered off the floor of the NY State Senate, where they were lobbying for the women’s suffrage bill. Some senators are horrified that after having pledged to support women’s suffrage during the last election to get women off their back, the bill might reach the floor and they would have to actually vote on it.

Headline of the Day -100: “Diaz, in Agony, Tells Cabinet He Will Quit.” Mexican President Porfirio Díaz has finally agreed to resign sometime in the next few days, to be replaced by Foreign Minister Francisco de la Barra acting in conjunction with Francisco Madero pending a new election within six months. The rebels will also be in charge of half the states. Oh, the “agony” bit: Díaz has a toothache.

Pancho Villa crosses into the US in a rage to find Col. Garibaldi and settle their personal feud (they are ostensibly both on the rebel side, but they clashed during the taking of Juarez), but the mayor of El Paso, backed by the Secret Service, takes Villa’s guns from him and sends him back to Mexico. “The United States Secret Service is a great institution,” commented Garibaldi.

Arnold Schwarzenegger: “After leaving the governor’s office I told my wife about this event, which occurred over a decade ago.” What’s the douchiest part of that sentence?

poll by twiigs.com

Today -100: May 17, 1911: Spaniards versus pigs

Kosher Headline of the Day -100: “Taft Praises Jews.”

Non-Kosher Headline of the Day -100: “Spaniards Defeat Five Hundred Pigs.” The commander of Spanish troops in Spanish Morocco believed they were under attack by tribesmen one night and opened fire. Their commander sent a message to the Spanish consul claiming a great victory, then found out the next day that they had in fact routed a herd of pigs.

Meanwhile, in soon-to-be-French Morocco, French troops kill 100 rebel tribesmen.

British Chancellor David Lloyd George introduces a budget that includes an astonishing (to me, anyway) £1.5 million for the coronation. Also, members of Parliament will receive salaries for the first time (a sop to the Labour Party included in the bill, which is still working its way through the Lords, cutting back the veto power of the House of Lords). £2,000 per annum. Previously, only cabinet ministers received salaires.

Another of Count Zeppelin’s dirigibles, the Deutschland II, comes to grief, crashing into its hangar. It was windy. The Deutschland II lasted six weeks, a much longer career than that of the Deutschland I.

Today -100: May 16, 1911: Of guns, trusts, and pogroms

Gun control (permits for sale or carrying, registration of sales) passes the NY Legislature.

The Supreme Court affirms that Standard Oil must be broken up within 6 months. However, it also, in an act of gross judicial over-reach, construes the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to ban only “unreasonable” restraint of trade, despite the rejection of that language by Congress in 1890 and in attempts every session since then to so amend the Act, precisely because Congress didn’t trust the courts with the power to decide what constituted a reasonable or unreasonable restraint of trade.

Teddy Roosevelt refuses permission for the Progressive Republican League of Nebraska to put him on the Republican ballot for president in 1912.

Jews in Kiev have been expecting a pogrom ever since a boy was found murdered and mutilated near the Jewish quarter, leading to the traditional “ritual murder” rumors.

Nope, this still doesn’t make the IMF interesting. Important, but not interesting.

I’m a little surprised that every managing director of IMF hasn’t been arrested for sex crimes. Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s evident assumption that he has a droit de seigneur to use a Ghanaian maid however he sees fit just seems a natural extension of what the IMF does to the Third World every single day.

Strauss-Kahn had been thinking about running for president of France, so that probably won’t happen. Now if he were Italian....

Today -100: May 15, 1911: Of unions

President Taft, speaking to the convention of the Brotherhood of Railroad Men, opposes employees of the federal government being permitted to join unions and strike. Allowing strikes would be to “recognize revolution as a lawful means of securing an increase in compensation for one class, and that a privileged class, at the expense of all the public.”

Today -100: May 14, 1911: Of the most ignorant man on military affairs in the United States

Says the newly chosen secretary of war Henry Stimson, “I’m probably the most ignorant man on military affairs in the United States.” Hell, it was good enough for Rumsfeld. Stimson may have intended it as a joke, but the NYT agrees with his self-assessment. However, Stimson does possess one great advantage: he is a protege of Teddy Roosevelt, who Taft wants to appease to stop him running against him in 1912.

There’s been a slight disagreement between Francisco Madero and Gen. Pasqual Orozco. Namely, the general pulled a gun on the provisional president and ordered him to fire his cabinet. Pancho Villa supported Orozco, demanding that federal Gen. Navarro – who was rather vicious during the fight for Juarez, ordering prisoners killed and the like – be turned over to his troops and executed. Orozco eventually calmed down. Soon after, Madero personally drove Navarro out of town, got him a horse, and he is now hiding out in the cellar of a department store in El Paso.

In Russia, Father Iliodor, aka The Mad Monk, has split with the Orthodox Church and with Rasputin, with the support of the Tsar.

Headline of the Day -100: “Insane Patient Celebrates.” The 42nd anniversary of her confinement to the NJ state asylum for a “mild but incurable mania.” No word on whether there was cake.

Dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, with extreme prejudice

Attorney General Eric Holder explains that the Bin Laden assassination was not an assassination because he could have surrendered if he’d done it really really quickly before all those bullets hit him, and that the assassination was completely legal under international law (no one asked Holder whether it was legal under Pakistani law).

And he explained what separates us from those who we are fighting: “I actually think that the dotting of the i’s and the crossing of the t’s is what separates the United States, the United Kingdom, our allies, from those who we are fighting.” He did not clarify what we use to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. I’m guessing bullets and blood respectively.

Today -100: May 13, 1911: Of foolish stories of intervention

Secretary of State Philander Knox sent the following instructions to the US ambassador to Mexico (see if you can read the first sentence out loud on a single breath): “You are authorized officially to deny, through the local press and otherwise, as under instructions to do so, all foolish stories of intervention, than which nothing could be further from the intentions of the Government of the United States, which has the sincerest friendship for Mexico and the Mexican people, to whom it hopes will soon return the blessings of peace, which is not concerned with Mexico’s internal political affairs, and which demands nothing but the respect and protection of American property and life in a neighboring republic. You will use the language of this instruction.”

Secretary of War Jacob Dickinson resigns, to spend more time with his coal mines. Taft nominates as his replacement Henry Stimson, failed Republican candidate for governor of NY in the last election.

Today -100: May 12, 1911: Of lassoes

Duuuuude! A few days ago, rebels in Mexico made a bloody horseback charge on a federal machine gun in Mazatlan, trying to put it out of commission, and one of them succeeded by... wait for it... lassoing it.

Madero names a provisional cabinet in his new capital of Juarez. The federals plan to court-martial Gen. Navarro for surrendering Juarez. Also entering Juarez: American criminals, pickpockets, and suspicious characters (according to Madero). The rebels are allowing US Secret Service agents into the city to arrest them.

Newt and the enemies of normal Americans

Probably you’ve seen the Mother Jones article “Newt in His Own Words,” widely linked on the interwoobs this week. Here’s some more they left out:

1978: Running for Congress for the first time against Virginia Shapard. She intended to commute to D.C. from Georgia and hire a nanny. He accused her of breaking up her marriage (this was just before his wife got cancer and he dumped her).

1994: “You cannot get to universal coverage without a police state.”

1994: called for Republicans to take back the Senate from the “enemies of normal Americans.”

1995: called for mandatory death penalty for drug mules, with mass executions, 30 or 35 at a time.

It wasn’t just Susan Smith’s murder of her two children that Gingrich blamed on “how sick the society is getting”. The following year, 1995, when a 9-month pregnant woman was murdered (along with her two children) and the fetus (which survived) cut out, I guess to be sold on the black market, Gingrich blamed the welfare state for creating moral decay.

In 1996 he explained what freedom is all about: “A mere 40 years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. Now it is not only a sport in the Olympics. There are over 30 countries that have a competition internationally. There are some 13 states with 25 cities in America. And there’s a whole new world of opportunity opening up that didn’t even exist 30 years ago or 40 years ago, and no bureaucrat would have invented it. And that’s what freedom is all about. Freedom is about having a dream, and maybe I feel that particularly because the greatest Georgian of this century, Martin Luther King, went to the Lincoln Memorial and said in his extraordinary speech, ‘I have a dream...’”

1997: Clinton was thinking about apologizing for slavery. Gingrich said this would be “emotional symbolism” – one day after the House passed a Flag Burning Amendment.

By the way, in 1990, his opponent, David Worley, came within 1,000 votes of unseating him and might have won but the Democratic Party decided to give his campaign no funds because he broke omerta on talking about the pay raise Congress had voted itself.

(Update: Here’s one which I couldn’t find earlier because I googled pigs instead of piglets; Gingrich 1995 on why women should be kept out of combat: “If combat means living in a ditch, females have biological problems staying in a ditch for thirty days because they get infections and they don’t have upper body strength. I mean, some do, but they’re relatively rare. On the other hand, men are basically little piglets, you drop them in the ditch, they roll around in it, doesn’t matter, you know. These things are very real. On the other hand, if combat means being on an Aegis-class cruiser managing the computer controls for twelve ships and their rockets, a female may be again dramatically better than a male who gets very, very frustrated sitting in a chair all the time because males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes.”)

Today -100: May 11, 1911: Of trousers & aviators, Juarez, modest women, and big mirrors

Headline of the Day -100: “Woman in Trousers Daring Aviator.” A... wait for it... girl is taking flying lessons. A Miss Harriet Quimby (who will be the first American woman with a pilot’s license but not the first aviatrix). The Times seems almost as shocked by her wearing trousers – “For more than a week it was not even suspected that she was not a man”. (Spoiler alert: Quimby died in a plane crash in 1912).

Lt. George Kelly, one of the Navy’s new pilots, dies in a crash.

Nicaragua’s President/coup leader Estrada resigns and flees the country.

Mexican insurrectos capture Juarez. Gen. Navarro surrenders (interestingly, to Col. Giuseppe Garibaldi, Jr., grandson of the liberator of Italy) and Madero invites him and his officers to dinner, then puts them on their word not to leave the city.

For what seems like the thousandth time, women’s suffrage fails in the New York Legislature (90-38). One assemblyman argued, “For every woman who wants the ballot there are ten modest women who don’t.” A legislator from the Independence League said he was not surprised to find the machine politicians opposing women’s suffrage. Harry Heyman of Queens harrumphed, “I would like to know what Mr. O’Connor means by machine politicians.” Replied O’Connor, “If you can find a mirror large enough, take a good look in it; there it is.” Burn, 1911 style!

Worth every penny

White House spokesmodel Jay “The Carny” Carney, asked yesterday about the National Journal’s estimate that the cost of tracking down Bin Laden has been $3 trillion, said: “I have no idea about that estimate, but I think most Americans would feel that it was worth every penny.”

My, it’s almost like the Obama administration has taken complete ownership of every one of George Bush’s foreign policies and his domestic “security” policies. But that couldn’t be right, could it?

Worth every penny. Every fucking penny. All 300 trillion of them.

Sigh.

Everything there is to know about human gullibility and human greed is summed up in one sentence

“One person was told a Rolex watch was needed to remove demons.”

Today -100: May 10, 1911: Of parades, the People’s Republic of Tijuana, and polar bears

A NYT editorial admits the success of this week’s women’s suffrage parade in gaining “for perhaps the first time the serious attention of their foes,” despite the fact that the parade “by all the established conventions was distinctly unfeminine and therefore obnoxious and ridiculous”. It did so because “more notably and more obviously than ever before, the suffrage women in this vicinity showed themselves as a class to be active, courageous, and determined,” where previously the movement had seemed to consist of a few leaders who did all the talking. “We now know that there is an army as well as Generals”.

What there isn’t, however, is support in Albany. The relevant committees of both houses of the Legislature refuse to report suffrage bills out.

The rebels in Mexico are in the process of capturing and/or burning Juarez. And socialist rebels have captured Tijuana, which is why it is a utopian socialist paradise to this day.

Teddy Roosevelt denies that he will spend the summer of 1912 hunting polar bears in the Arctic.

Today -100: May 9, 1911: Of incidents of war

Madero is claiming that Díaz’s promise to resign (eventually when he feels like it after all unrest ends completely), somehow “changes everything” and can lead to the resumption of peace negotiations.

In another sign that Madero doesn’t control all the rebels, there is an attack on Juarez by 150 or so rebels. They beat the federals, but have to withdraw because the main rebel army didn’t join them. Bullets crossed the border (didn’t Taft tell them not to do that?), killing five in El Paso, but the US has decided to treat the deaths as “incidents of war,” and not use them as an excuse for military intervention.

Today -100: May 8, 1911: Of the dictates of conscience, lepers, and savage Africans & big ships

Francisco Madero decides not to capture Juarez after all, in an effort to stave off American intervention by keeping the fighting away from the border and stray bullets from crossing it. Forces will be withdrawn from the north and will now focus on capturing Mexico City, which the insurrectos say they will do within a month (it would be easier if they hadn’t blown up all those railroad bridges). Madero is making a huge tactical change and giving up a militarily advantageous position in the north purely to appease the US.

President Díaz announces that he will resign – just as soon as peace is restored. Or as he puts it, “when, according to the dictates of my conscience, I am sure that my resignation will not be followed by anarchy.”

A father in Rhode Island is refusing to give up his 15-year-old son to the authorities. The kid has leprosy, and they want to confine him to either the Massachusetts leper colony on Penikees Island or the Pawtucket Pest House, for the rest of his life. Who wouldn’t want to live in a place called the Pawtucket Pest House?

Headline of the Day -100: “Savage Africans Menace Big Ship.” The British freight steamship Kasenga, now in Brooklyn, had some difficulties in East Africa.

Today -100: May 7, 1911: Of armistices, parades, and wholesale debauchery

The armistice in Mexico ends, President Díaz having made no move to resign.

A Madero-supporting newspaper in Mexico reprints the claim of a NY socialist newspaper that the US is about to invade Mexico to restore peace, and then compensate itself for its trouble by annexing another strip of Mexico south of the Rio Grande.

The women’s suffrage parade went off as planned.


The NYT notes, “There were several negro women in the parade.”

One banner: “New York State Denies the Vote to Criminals, Idiots, and Women.”

Portugal ends the Catholic Church’s status as the state religion. Priests will no longer be paid out of taxes, the state is taking over all church property, and services must be held between sunrise and sunset with a government official present. Papal bulls are not to be published without government permission.

The Colorado Legislature adjourns without electing a new US senator to replace the late Charles Hughes, thanks to a deadlock among Dems. Colorado will have only one senator until 1913.

Headline of the Day -100: “The Wholesale Debauchery of the Ohio Legislature.” Several members of which were indicted this week for taking bribes from private detectives posing as lobbyists.

Every single fibre

Unexpectedly, the Scottish National Party has been elected to an absolute majority in the Scottish Parliament, and will at some point hold a referendum on independence. David Cameron says “If they want to hold a referendum, I will campaign to keep our United Kingdom together with every single fibre I have.” He wants the UK kept together with his fibres? Every single one of them? How many fibres does he have? Ah, I see, fibre is from the Latin fibra, meaning entrails. So he wants Scotland literally tied to England using his own intestines. Personally I support Scottish independence, if the Scots vote for it, but I’m also quite in favor of disemboweling David Cameron, so I’m rather conflicted here.

........

This is what happens when you blog on a Friday night: you start by picking at a phrase – “I will campaign to keep our United Kingdom together with every single fibre I have” – that can be read in two different ways, and it just goes all weird and disgusting and unpostable, but you post it anyway, just because you’re bored (although not so bored that I’ll write about the failure of the Alternative Vote referendum).

You’re welcome.