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I might have refrained from making fun of Bush’s chimp-like face if he’d had the decency to keep it to himself this weekend, but there it was, smirking at the dedication of the Flight 93 memorial,
trying to look all somber-like,
or possibly just falling asleep,
smirking next to his favorite comedy partner,
wondering how long this stoopid ceremony was gonna go on,
looking all squinty and somber-like at some flowers,
and (today) trying to look all dignitudinous at Ground Zero,
but not for long, ‘cuz he got to go a football game. New York Jets and Dallas Cowboys. Like we haven’t had more than enough in the last ten years of New York jets and Dallas cowboys.
Someone just told a dirty joke.
A few quotes from myself (because if I don’t quote myself, who will?). These are from the proto version of this blog in the days after 9/11:
Like a lot of people before them, they came to New York with no more than a dream in their hearts, a knife, and many hours spent playing with the flight simulator.
The Empire State Building is now once again the tallest building in NY, which is as it should be. Some of us never took too well to the sacrilege of the World Trade Center. Speaking of which, the Empire State Building was briefly evacuated today after a bomb-sniffing dog made a mistake. Thrown off by the lingering giant-monkey smell, no doubt.
Congress is so desperate to act as if it has a role in this that members are talking about declaring war. Against what or whom, they do not know or care.
From a guy at an Internet firm in the World Trade Center: “I’m a combat veteran. Vietnam, and I never saw anything like this.” No shit, I’m guessing that’s because there were relatively few 110-story buildings in the rice paddies?
Texas postponed an execution. No sense of irony, the Texans.
I especially liked how [Bush] said at the Pentagon, “Coming here makes me sad.” The man is a walking emoticon.
Rep. Don Young of Alaska thinks the real culprits might be the
eco-terrorists.
Bush says that we will now rid the world of evil. I see him traveling the world fighting evil wherever it arises. Like that guy in Kung Fu.
Bush’s use of the word crusade is another reason they should never let him speak in public again. He couldn’t have said something more disturbing to the Islamic world than if he called bin Laden a sand nigger.
Tony Blair on the rendition of prisoners to Libya for torture while he was prime minister: “You can’t know everything the security services are doing.”
In two towns in southern Italy, mobs storm the cholera hospitals, remove the patients and set fire to the hospitals, which they believe were actually created to put cholera patients to death. Some patients died in the fires, some died as they were being taken through the streets because they had, you know, cholera, and weren’t really up to a parade.
The French cabinet decides that it won’t release soldiers whose two-year conscription terms will come up later this month if Germany doesn’t release its two-year soldiers.
French feminist journalist Arria Ly (a pseudonym for Joséphine Gondon) wrote an article that raised a stir by calling for a class of celibate single professional women. Prudent Massat (or “the prudent M. Massat,” as the NYT garbles it), a (male) editor of the radical-socialist Toulouse Reporter, then published an article making fun of her ideas and basically calling her a lesbian. So she challenged him to a duel, demanding they exchange bullets “in the name of feminism.” He told her seconds (women, naturally) no, and then organized a protest meeting against her, at which she walked onto the platform and slapped him, twice, by way of repeating the challenge. After a few hours in a police cell, she accepted that the remarks were aimed at her ideas and not her character (although “de-sexed neurotic” sounds pretty personal to me) and withdrew the challenge (although she refused to apologize for the slap), and he wrote a letter of apology. However, a male admirer of Ly’s wrote an article that provoked Massat into challenging him to a duel. They got off two exchanges of fire, all of which missed, then they switched to swords and evidently still managed not to injure each other before the seconds stopped it.
Prince Adelbert, the third son of Kaiser Wilhelm, says that Americans are the rudest people in the world. Evidently some Americans refused his lunch invitation because they had a prior engagement and he, naturally, had never in his 27 years had his wishes disregarded. Two days later another American refused to play tennis with him because it was Sunday and it was against his religious principles to play.
Obama gave his little jobs speech to Congress yesterday.
BY WHICH I MEAN REALITY TV CONCERNS: “But the millions of Americans who are watching right now, they don’t care about politics. They have real-life concerns.”
WHO THIS PLAN IS FOR: “So for everyone who speaks so passionately about making life easier for ‘job creators,’ this plan is for you.”
OBAMA WILL PUT AMERICANS TO WORK BUILDING NEW SKIES: “Everyone here knows we have badly decaying roads and bridges all over the country. Our highways are clogged with traffic. Our skies are the most congested in the world. It’s an outrage.”
BUT IF YOU’RE NOT TAKING IT OUT OF OUR POCKET, ISN’T IT ALREADY IN OUR POCKET, SO IT DOESN’T HAVE TO GO INTO OUR POCKET BECAUSE IT’S ALREADY IN OUR POCKET? AND HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED HOW WEIRD THE WORD POCKET SOUNDS IF YOU KEEP SAYING IT OVER AND OVER? “Fifteen hundred dollars that would have been taken out of your pocket will go into your pocket.”
WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS: “Should we keep tax loopholes for oil companies? Or should we use that money to give small business owners a tax credit when they hire new workers? Because we can’t afford to do both.”
MATH WARFARE: “This isn’t political grandstanding. This isn’t class warfare. This is simple math.”
MOST? WHO ARE THESE APPEASERS OF WHOM YOU SPEAK? “Now, I realize that some of you have a different theory on how to grow the economy. Some of you sincerely believe that the only solution to our economic challenges is to simply cut most government spending and eliminate most government regulations.”
WHAT HE REJECTS: “I reject the idea that we have to strip away collective bargaining rights to compete in a global economy.”
RACE! “We shouldn’t be in a race to the bottom, where we try to offer the cheapest labor and the worst pollution standards. America should be in a race to the top.” Most expensive labor? “And I believe we can win that race.” Pollution standards aren’t actually a race, you know.
MAYBE NOT EVERYONE LIKES TRAVELING AS MUCH OF YOU, HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT OF THAT? “Ask yourselves -- where would we be right now if the people who sat here before us decided not to build our highways, not to build our bridges, our dams, our airports?”
HAVE YOU BEEN TALKING TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE’S DOCTOR? “The next election is 14 months away. And the people who sent us here -- the people who hired us to work for them -- they don’t have the luxury of waiting 14 months.” Seriously, we’re dying, aren’t we? You’d tell us if we were all going to die in less than 14 months, right?
He finished with a quote from John F. Kennedy: “Our problems are man-made –- therefore they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants.” And if there’s one thing that Americans have proven since then, it’s that Americans can be as big as they want.
We’re fat, is what I’m saying.
Headline of the Day -100: “Mad Monk Predicts Attack on Jews.” In Russia, where there are many mad monks.
Persian government forces defeat the forces of the deposed former shah, using machine guns.
John Shafroth, the governor of Colorado, is going to the New Jersey Divorce Convention (I don’t know what that is, but I’d guess it has something to do with standardizing divorce law nationally, or getting states to recognize divorces from other states) (update: elsewhere in the paper, NY State Senator Franklin Delano Roosevelt announces a resolution calling for a uniform federal divorce law). Gov. Shafroth so hates his lieutenant governor that he has barred him from acting as governor in his absence. Lt. Gov. Fitzgerald says he will break into the executive offices or call out the troops if he is barred from them.
I’ve mentioned the (female) mayor of Hunnewell, Kansas, Ella Wilson’s battle to the death with the city council, which refuses to confirm any of her appointments or even meet with her. As a result, no tax levy has been made this year, but she says she will appoint women who will serve without pay to the offices of city clerk, treasurer, marshal and streets commissioner.
Theodore Roosevelt pens an editorial in The Outlook attacking Taft’s arbitration plans as “shams.” He says “It is one of our prime duties as a nation to seek peace. It is an even higher duty to seek righteousness.” Wars in which the US put righteousness above peace include the Revolutionary, Civil and Spanish-American wars. He does not express an opinion on the righteousness of the War of Jenkins’ Ear. “I, for one, would rather cut off my hand than see the United States adopt the attitude either of cringing before great and powerful nations who wish to wrong us or by bullying small and weak nations who have done us no wrong.” (Colombia, which did us wrong by holding land Roosevelt wanted to build a canal on, might have something to say about that.) He lists various matters he thinks should not be subject to arbitration, including the Monroe Doctrine, the Platt Amendment with Cuba, the Panama Canal, racial exclusion of immigrants, etc.
Rudyard Kipling intervenes in the Canadian elections, denouncing the tariff reciprocity treaty in a message to the Canadian people. He says “Ten to one [90 million Americans to 9 million Canadians] is too heavy odds. ... It is her own soul that Canada risks to-day.” And once that soul is “pawned,” Canada will inevitably come to adopt American standards in all things. “She might, for example, be compelled later on to admit reciprocity in the murder rate of the United States...”
The (US) governor-general of the Philippines, William Cameron Forbes, issues an order: “The provisions of the act are hereby made applicable to all districts within the Moro Province. It is therefore declared to be unlawful for any person within the Moro Province to acquire, possess or have the custody of a rifle, musket, carbine, shot-gun, revolver, pistol or any other deadly weapon from which a bullet may be discharged, etc., or to carry, concealed or otherwise on his person, any bowie knife, dirk, dagger, kris, campilane, barong, spear or any other deadly cutting or thrusting weapon except tools used exclusively for working purposes and having a blade less than fifteen Inches in length, without permission from the Governor of the Province.”
Transcript, and if I’d known there would be a transcript this time, I wouldn’t have had to sit through that crap-fest. (Update: except the “transcript” is missing some stuff I wrote down).
AND IN SEVERAL MANSIONS: Romney: “Our president doesn’t understand how the economy works. I do, because I’ve lived in it.”
WHAT PEOPLE ARE LOOKING FOR: Santorum: “I think what people are looking for is someone to get something done.” He added, mysteriously, “I’ve done things.”
EVEN IF PERRY PRAYS FOR IT: Huntsman says he hates to rain on the parade of the Lone Star governor, but he did a better job of creating jobs in Utah.
WHAT KIDS NEED: Bachmann says there’s one thing she knows, which is one more thing than I gave her credit for, so good for her, except that the one thing was “Kids needs jobs.”
Ron Paul, a doctor, seemed to say that we don’t need an FDA to test drug safety because drugs do more harm than good. And consumers can decide if cars are safe.
Gingrich: “The fact that President Obama doesn’t come to the Reagan Library to try to figure out how to create jobs...” By reading the stacks of Reader’s Digests? “...tells you that this is a president so committed to class warfare and so committed to bureaucratic socialism that he can’t possibly be effective in jobs.”
Perry says Texas has an uninsured rate of 25% because the people of Texas “would like to see... the federal government get out of their business.”
Gingrich goes on attack against the liberal media, including the debate questioners, saying of the attempt to ask him questions about the candidates he’s competing against, “You want to puff this up into some giant thing.” Which normally is what he pays... oh, you’re all way ahead of me.
JUST POP THE HOOD: Santorum says no one did more than him in “working on the poor.”
Rick Perry then refers to Rick Santorum as “the last individual.” Probably forgot his first name.
Mittens: We’re living like an energy-poor country.
Bachmann defends her promise to reduce gas prices to $2 a gallon: “very time gasoline increases 10¢ cents a gallon, that’s $14 billion [I think the transcript is wrong and she said million] in economic activity that every American has taken out of their pockets.” Wow, every American had $14 billion in their pockets? Let me check. Hey, whaddaya know, she’s right! Fuck this blog, I’m buying Disneyland.
Huntsman says that the price of gas is actually $13 a gallon, “When you add up the cost of troop deployments, when you add up the cost of keeping the sea lanes open for the importation of imported oil” etc etc. So nice to see a politician admit that the wars are for oil.
YOU SHALL NOT CRUCIFY MANKIND UPON THIS CROSS OF GOLD: Ron Paul says he can get us all gas for 10¢ a gallon, because “you can buy a gallon of gasoline today for a silver dime. A silver dime is worth $3.50. It’s all about inflation and too many regulations.”
A NICE INTELLECTUAL CONVERSATION: Perry refuses to talk about what his book said about Social Security’s origins: “it’s a nice intellectual conversation, but the fact is we have got to be focused on how we’re going to change this program.”
CONTEST: What else does Rick Perry consider a nice intellectual conversation. Example: Which is correct, “Yee hah!” or “Yee haw!”?
Romney defends Social Security because “We have always had, at the heart of our party, a recognition that we want to care for those in need”. Say what?
SOME PROVOCATIVE LANGUAGE: Perry: “maybe it’s time to have some provocative language in this country and say things like, let’s get America working again and do whatever it takes to make that happen.”
Bachmann is against the mandatory vaccination of children “and especially by dictate to impose something like an inoculation on an innocent 12-year-old girl.”
WHOA, WATCH THE PROVOCATIVE LANGUAGE, TEX: Perry: “I hate cancer.”
HERE’S WHERE I HAD TO STOP THE DVR AND LAUGH FOR THREE MINUTES: Ron Paul: “These TSA agents are abusive. Sometimes they’re accused of all kinds of sexual activities on the way they maul people at the airport. So the airlines could do that.” He adds that 9/11 was the fault of the feds not allowing pilots to carry guns.
Paul has a plan to end all our wars: “if we did that and took the air conditioning out of the Green Zone, our troops would come home.”
Perry says Texas’s crappy education record isn’t so crappy, and anyway it’s crappy because Texas shares a border with Mexico. Stoopid Mescins.
And when Obama says the border is safe, “he was an abject liar to the American people.”
Ron Paul says darkly that the border fence all the other candidates want – “this fence business” – is actually “designed and may well be used against us and keep us in. In economic turmoil, the people want to leave with their capital. And there’s capital controls and there’s people control. So, every time you think of fence keeping all those bad people out, think about those fences maybe being used against us, keeping us in.”
Perry says he tips his hat to Obama over killing bin Laden but actually he gives more – well, the NYT transcript says props but I heard him say that he gives more probes to the Navy SEALS.
Santorum says Obama only bombed Libya because “the United Nations told him to.”
John Harris asked Perry which scientists he finds most credible on global warming. For some reason, Perry didn’t name any scientists.
Gingrich says he would fire Ben Bernanke tomorrow. Does the president have the power to summarily fire the chairman of the Fed? No, no he does not.
Gingrich wants to “liberate” much of Alaska for natural resource extraction.
Perhaps the greatest applause of the evening was when a question to Perry began by noting that he’d presided over 234 executions (the question was whether he ever had difficulty sleeping because he might have executed an innocent person) (No, he never has); the follow-up asked about that reaction. Perry said it was because “Americans understand justice.”
SC Governor Coleman Blease writes a letter to the NYT, which had rather mildly suggested that he might have better uses for his time than waging a war on the memory of Gen. Sherman. Blease accuses the NYT editor of “blackguardism... much of which is false and comes from a heart which is corrupt and from a head which is willing to lie or abuse in order to carry a point or win a temporary victory”. As evidence of his own high character he cites his election by “nearly 57,000 white voters”. He says that his defense of the Confederate army is not motivated by hatred for “the Yankee or the nigger.” He adds, “The Confederates were right; they fought for the highest of principles”.
The LAT quotes a circular put out by the Anti-Suffrage Association for next month’s Prop. 8 on women’s suffrage: “Women who assume the responsibilities of suffrage must either add it to present duties or lay down those duties to take up this one. The frequent low state of health among American women is a fact as undeniable as it is deplorable. When women generally vote and hold office, nervous prostration, desire for publicity and ‘love of the limelight’ will combine to produce a form of hysteria already increasing in the United States.”
British “Justice Minister” Kenneth Clarke blames the riots on a “feral underclass, cut off from the mainstream in everything but its materialism.” So at least they have one redeeming quality, is that what you’re saying, Ken?
A feral underclass is what happens when weak-minded bleeding hearts no longer let you hunt them down like the vermin they are, right Ken?
Truman Newberry, who was Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Navy, is charged with murder after running over an 8-year-old girl (or 7 years old, according to the article a week later saying the charges were dropped).
Rumors of impending war with France continue to grow in Germany. There are runs on banks in some places, and a story is running around that the ambassador to France was murdered in Paris. Rumors also arose from the early return of a regiment of German dragoons to their base in upper Alsace from maneuvers, however that was actually due to dysentery (the French army is also conducting maneuvers, which can’t be helping stem the ol’ rumor mill). Socialist unions in Germany have been talking about calling a general strike in the event of war. Non-socialist (which I take to mean Catholic) unions have been calling them traitors.
The mayor of Los Angeles orders the route of the Labor Day parade altered so it doesn’t go past the county jail where the McNamara brothers, accused of blowing up the LA Times building, are currently located.
During a firing exercise the USS Delaware fired its big guns at a repair ship rather than at its target. Well, they looked a lot alike. Fortunately, the Delaware also couldn’t shoot for shit, and missed both times.
In another near miss, a malfunctioning biplane knocks Sen. William Lorimer’s hat off, then crashes into a tree.
Rear Admiral Nathan Twining invents a dirigible aerial torpedo.
Headline of the Day -100: “Woman of 80 Grabs Negro.”
The worst thing about Obama junking his plans to reverse Bush’s lowering of standards for air pollution is, of course, that people will die because of it, and he knows it. The second worse thing is that he justified it with the argument that protecting the environment and people’s lungs is an optional extra in bad economic times, that profits must always come first. But I want to point out the third worst thing, the craven sneakiness of announcing the decision in a news dump on the Friday before the Labor Day weekend. Obama’s promised transparency has turned out as transparent as the air over Houston.
Oh, and EPA head Lisa Jackson should have resigned in protest. I miss people resigning in protest over matters of principle.
In Berlin, 200,000 attend a Socialist-organized protest against “the infamous war agitation” which is agitating for a war with France over the Morocco crisis.
The California congressional delegation is pressuring the State Department to press Mexico to sell the US a strip of the Imperial Valley 50 miles X 20, an area which includes a canal providing the valley with water from the Colorado River. During the Mexican Revolution, rebels demanded (and received) money not to blow up the canal.
There have been food riots in France. The NYT does not approve. It says that people have non-riotous recourse: “To refuse to pay prevailing prices for food is within the rights of all.” Just don’t eat; I don’t know why the French didn’t think of that themselves. Stoopid French people.
The Vatican denies being part of a conspiracy to overthrow the republic in Portugal and re-establish the monarchy.
Southern members of the American Bar Association are threatening to secede after the Association admitted a negro, Assistant United States District Attorney William Lewis.
President Taft bans cock fights, dog fights and bull fights in the Panama Canal Zone.
Headline of the Day -100: “Few Hoboes at Convention.” Hoboes, it turns out, don’t really go to hobo conventions.
This headline is also good: “CROWD GOADS AIRMAN TO FLIGHT AND DEATH; J.J. Frisbie Goes Up in Crippled Machine Because Kansas Spectators Call Him a Faker.” J.J. Frisbie. That name just screams out “man wearing a straw hat,” doesn’t it?
Some days there are no headlines of the day -100, then there are days like this when you get several in a row: “Sultan Receives Women.” “Receives” as in met with a deputation of them complaining about the treatment of women in the Ottoman Empire, not “receives” as in “received a new shipment of dancing girls.”
Rep. Charles Carter (D-OK) beats up four clerks in a store, with his fists and his cane, for allegedly insulting his daughter. The NYT offers an explanation: “Carter’s Blood is Almost Half Indian.”
Mitt Romney, 2011: I’m only doubling my mansion.
Mitt Romney, 2007: My view is, we ought to double Guantanamo.
Coincidence?
A New York state law goes into effect requiring the registration of all firearms and banning the carrying of blackjacks. Another new law makes it illegal for hotels and theaters to refuse admission to soldiers and sailors in uniform (unless they’re drunk).
Belgium is preparing for war, creating a military council to determine how to keep France, Germany and/or Britain from violating its borders if they go to war with each other over Morocco. Shells and ammunition has been sent to frontier forts, and artillery and machine guns to posts on the German border. Good luck with the whole neutrality thing, Belgium, you’ll need it.
General Electric has just finished making the most expensive electric fan ever, gold-mounted with an ebony switch. It’s for Queen Mary.
Mississippi has its first public hanging in 35 years (the NYT says that in the South, “executions are universally private and as far removed from the public gaze as possible”. Suuuuure they are.). You’ll be surprised and amazed to hear it’s a black man, who killed his wife. Stands were set up around the scaffold to sell the crowd sandwiches, coffee, lemonade, peanuts and everything else you need to make a day of it. “It was more like a gala picnic than the dispatching of a soul to eternity.”
Indy: “Israeli Military to Equip Jewish Settlers with Gas and Grenades.”
