Today -100: August 2, 1911: Of reapportionment, Sunday golf, and braaaaaiiinnnsss!

The reapportionment bill is going through despite opposition from Robert La Follette, who notes that the changes will disadvantage Republican Insurgents in the Electoral College, and from a few mainstream Republicans like Elihu Root, who think any reapportionment will work in favor of Democrats (which it will, because R’s did so badly in so many state legislature elections in 1910).

Follow up: Upton Sinclair and the ten other members of the Arden, Del. Single Tax colony will serve 18 hours in the workhouse for violations of the blue laws. Sinclair, imprisoned for felonious tennis-playing, now plans to go on the offensive against the blue laws by applying for arrest warrants for anyone who plays golf or other games on the sabbath. Wilmington Country Club, you have been warned!

Headline of the Day -100: “Doctors Buy Her Brain.” Progressive teacher Celeste Parrish. She has a really good memory. They’ll wait until she’s dead to collect it.

A detailed case

Obama, in his announcement yesterday of the debt ceiling deal: “And over the next few months, I’ll continue to make a detailed case to these lawmakers about why I believe a balanced approach is necessary to finish the job.” After all this time, he still thinks it’s about reasoned discussion, healthy debate, back and forth, making a detailed case. Dude’s learned nothing.

Today -100: August 1, 1911: Of sugar and anarchist sabbatarians

The House Special Committee investigating the Sugar Trust held a sugar-tasting session. They decided that French sugar was the tastiest.

George Brown, a philosopher and anarchist, angered by his treatment at the (Henry) Georgian Single-Tax utopian colony in Arden, Delaware, where his espousal of his views at a meeting of the Economic Club after they had expelled him from membership earned him a $2 fine (and 5 days in the workhouse when he refused to pay), is seeking his revenge by swearing out warrants for the arrest of all the top leaders at Arden for violations of the state’s blue laws. He charges Upton Sinclair with having played tennis on a Sunday and others with playing baseball or selling ice cream.

Super

So there will be a “Super Congress.” Prepare for much hilarity in the days ahead as we discover which members of the current Congress are considered “super.”

Happy now?

Paul Krugman reminds us of Obama’s press conference last December after he gave in on tax cuts for the rich, when he was asked whether not having addressed the debt ceiling left the Republicans with significant leverage and Obama said that Boehner would never be so crass as to do that.

In my analysis of that press conference, which is worth re-reading (if I do say so myself) as a reminder of how smug and self-righteous Obama was about his so-called pragmatism, I see that Obama said this: “I am happy to be tested over the next several months about our ability to negotiate with Republicans.”

Today -100: July 31, 1911: Of raging kaisers

Headline of the Day -100: “Kaiser in Rage on Morocco.” He’s pissed at Foreign Minister Baron von Kiderlen-Waechter (say that three times fast), who had thought that Britain wouldn’t back France up, even though they have a mutual defense treaty.

In the Canadian elections, the Conservatives are making a big deal over a telegram Taft sent to the Hearst newspapers, thanking them for supporting the tariff reciprocity treaty. Since William Randolph Hearst also advocates annexation of Canada, the Conservatives say that this telegram obviously means that Taft does too.

Today -100: July 30, 1911: Of popular wars, bloodless revolutions, elections, bounties, and guillotines

A “highly qualified American observer of European affairs” thinks that the Moroccan crisis shows that a war between Britain and Germany might not be unpopular in Britain.

The NYT reassures its readers that the ongoing revolution in Haiti is bloodless.

The Canadian Parliament has been dissolved, and elections will be fought in part on the reciprocity treaty with the US.

The government of Persia offers a $100,000 reward for the head of the former shah, Mohammed Ali Mirza, who is trying to recapture the throne.

The Paris guillotine (the “widow”) is moved inside La Santé Prison. In future it will no longer be ceremonially transported to the prison prior to executions on a cart drawn by a white horse (French executions were public until 1939). The guillotine had been kept in a shed outside the house of the public executioner, Anatole Deibler (who inherited the job from his father, and also married into a family of executioners, which is not at all creepy). He assembled guillotines himself, IKEA-style, from parts ordered from separate carpenters and joiners, so none of them knew what they were working on. He also put together guillotines intended for export. China just ordered one. Deibler’s “staff has a sense of humor, for a year or two ago they amused themselves by strapping their chief to ‘the widow,’ with his neck under the fatal knife, and left him there for quite a while to appreciate the sensation of one of the condemned wretches whom he has so often dispatched to the next world.”

Projecting

George Bush explains the Pet Goat thing: “I wanted to project a sense of calm. I had been in enough crises to know that the first thing a leader has to do is to project calm.” He added, “But mostly I wanted to wait until I stopped projecting pee.”

Daily Telegraphy: Kitler, gay alligators, humble days, and juggler’s hat sex acts

Headlines of the Day, from the One True Source of All News:

“Hitler Cat Fails to Find Home.” Poor Kitler.


“Judge Tells Teacher Sex Offender: ‘I don’t criticise you for being attracted to children.’” A (female) judge with a record of leniency towards sex criminals – “In 2008, she allowed former headmaster Phillip Carmichael to walk free from court after accepting that medication for Parkinson’s disease had turned him into a paedophile” – who maybe shouldn’t have been given this kiddie porn case. “Reading Crown Court was told that the teaching assistant became alarmed after noticing files on Armstrong’s laptop with names including ‘rape wife’, ‘nude model’ and ‘gay alligator’.”

Gay alligator?

“Jonnie Marbles” is convicted of pieing Rupert Murdoch. “The part-time stand-up comic emerged from court and said: ‘I would just like to say this has been the most humble day of my life.’”

“Harry Potter Dwarf Spared Jail over Juggler’s Hat Sex Act.” To clarify, he is a dwarf in real life and a goblin in Harry Potter (and an Ewok in Return of the Jedi). “It is understood that Read has recently been hiring himself out to stag parties, offering to be handcuffed to the stag while dressed as a diminutive fictional character such as a Smurf or Oompa-Loompa.”

What does the auto club have to do with this?

Obama this morning:
“we could lose our country’s AAA credit rating, not because we didn’t have the capacity to pay our bills -- we do -- but because we didn’t have a AAA political system to match our AAA credit rating.” We do have an AA political system, though, amiright? I’ll be here all week.

WE’RE DOOMED: “I’m confident that common sense and cooler heads will prevail.”

Today -100: July 29, 1911: Of Jews and ashes

Russian Prime Minister Stolypin (Putin’s hero) wants to force banks to stop extending so much credit to Jews. Because the banks are all controlled by Jews and Jews monopolize trade and Jews speculate in the grain trade and blah blah anti-Semitic blah.

Front-Page Headline of the Day -100: “SAYS HE THREW AWAY COL. WARING'S ASHES; Then Mixed Drinks in the Urn at Quarantine Orgy, Testifies Arthur Denyse.”

Today -100: July 28, 1911: Of Morocco and Germany

A NYT editorial tries to put the Moroccan crisis in perspective, or figure out what “international morality” requires, or something. It says that Germany should be supported if its purpose it to nobly preserve the territorial integrity of Morocco (like the US did with China) if “France and Spain are seeking to divide Morocco instead of performing the white man’s duty.” But the paper isn’t sure that Germany really is being noble rather than being just as land-grabby as France and Spain (which it obviously is, just not in Morocco, where it’s playing let’s-make-a-deal), like the US in Panama, “the sole blot on our record.” It warns Germany that “She is too far advanced in civilization to defy those rules of right conduct which only the barbarous exult in ignoring or infringing.” (Spoiler alert: no she isn’t.)

Today -100: July 27, 1911: Of good character, and unwanted lions

An amendment to the Georgia constitution is proposed establishing a “good character” qualification for the franchise, as determined by “respect for good womanhood.” Which seems to mean that a black man would have to have his character attested to by two white women (in person). According to the amendment’s author, Rep. J.J. Slade, “Circulars are being sent to negroes all over the State telling them to qualify for the ballot under the educational and property qualifications. I want to make it impossible for any one with a black or mulatto skin to vote in Georgia, no matter how much book learning he may possess. The protection of the white race demands that negroes be made positively and forever the political inferiors of the whites, as they are their social inferiors.” White men would also have to have white women attest to their character but, according to Slade, “Any good white man can get a good white woman to testify that she would trust him in the dark. If any white man can’t, the scoundrel should be disfranchised.” I’m pretty sure this amendment went nowhere.

A Coney Island amusement park, in a publicity stunt that could in no way have gone horribly, horribly wrong, sent a lion to Theodore Roosevelt’s office, with a letter saying “We are sending you a lioness we have no further use for.”

Today -100: July 26, 1911: Of hotels and fleets

A Chinese man (president of a D.C. YMCA branch) tries a dozen hotels in Ocean Grove, NJ, none would give him a room.

Britain cancels a planned visit by the Atlantic fleet to Norway. This is another slightly veiled threat to Germany over Morocco.

Define “excessive”

Last week, Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny attacked the Vatican cover-up of sexual abuse by priests. So today the Vatican recalled its ambassador, expressing “surprise and disappointment at certain excessive reactions.” Well we’d certainly hate if anyone reacted excessively to decades of child-rape.

Another day, another Obama address to the nation about the debt ceiling

And it’s pretty much the same one he gave last time and the time before that. Debt bad, default bad, compromise good.

WHEN DID THEY AGREE ON THAT? “Democrats and Republicans agree on the amount of deficit reduction we need. The debate is about how it should be done.”


WHAT MOST AMERICANS DON’T UNDERSTAND: “Most Americans, regardless of political party, don’t understand how we can ask a senior citizen to pay more for her Medicare before we ask corporate jet owners and oil companies to give up tax breaks that other companies don’t get. How can we ask a student to pay more for college before we ask hedge fund managers to stop paying taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries.” How can Republicans ask that? With a song in their heart and a large campaign contribution in their pocket.

ALTHOUGH IT’S A LOT EASIER TO HAVE YOUR WAY... AH, YOU KNOW WHERE I’M GOING HERE. He quoted Jefferson: “Every man cannot have his way in all things.”

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Then John Boehner came out, to rebut the crazy idea that he cannot have his way in all things.

He was amazed that the federal government does not work in exactly the same way as a small business in Ohio. In fact, he was amazed that it doesn’t work like “every other business in America.” Well see, that’s the source of your amazement right there: government is not actually a business.


Now he’s accusing Obama of not taking yes for an answer, just like Obama accused the Republicans last week. Could this all be just a wacky misunderstanding?

SO SAD: “The sad truth is that the president wanted a blank check six months ago, and he wants a blank check today.”

Boehner refers to “the crisis atmosphere he has created”.

AND THE PURPLER THE GOVERNMENT, THE MORE ORANGE THE PEOPLE (OR SOMETHING): “I’ve always believed that the bigger the government, the smaller the people.”

Today -100: July 25, 1911: Of lynchings and wet Texas

A negro farmer shoots four white farmers in Shreveport, LA “without cause,” and is lynched in front of the negro church.

The Texas prohibition referendum fails, 234,000 to 228,000.

Today -100: July 24, 1911: Of war widows and x-raying souls

Remember how until recently they kept discovering new “last Confederate widows,” some 100-year-old woman who’d married a 100-year-old Confederate veteran when she was a teenager? Well, in 1911 there was at least one living War of Independence widow. Born in 1800, at 19 she married one Hiram Proctor, a veteran of both the Revolution and the War of 1812. She gets a $12 a month pension because of his service in the latter war, and is cared for in a tumble-down cabin in North Carolina by her 90-year-old daughter.

There is a serious scientific dispute going on about whether the human soul can be x-rayed. An experiment is about to be conducted at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Duncan MacDougall of Haverhill, Mass. thinks that it can’t be done, because the skull gets in the way, except perhaps at death, when the soul substance becomes more agitated. He says it gives off a light just like that of interstellar ether. Oh, and that the soul weighs between ½ and 1¼ ounces. MacDougall has performed experiments on dying people that prove it.

The Ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Parking Lot of Doom

Not a lot of pictures of this week’s Jerusalem parking lot protest.


But there was a nice innovation: secular counter-protesters. Unconstrained by sabbatarianism, they can bring their cars and... water pistols.

Debt negotiation caption contest