Cardboard Khomeini comes again

Don’t know how I missed this, but last week, for the 33rd anniversary of the Iranian Revolution, they paraded cardboard cutouts of the Ayatollah Khomeini along the route he took on his return from exile. This is the greatest thing ever.

Today -100: February 9, 1912: Of suffrage, escapes from Belfast, and slapstick

The Virginia Legislature votes down women’s suffrage. One representative, a Mr. Love, said he wanted women to remain in their present high realm and not have to mingle with negroes at the polls on election day.

Churchill gave his home rule speech in Belfast and was not torn apart by Unionists, although he was hit in the face with a flag by a suffragette. Then he escaped by a special train two hours before his announced departure time, because why take chances.

Headline of the Day -100 (LAT): “Pie Knocks Out Bandit.” A robber tried to stick up a restaurant in Denver. He told the night manager, coming out of the kitchen with hot custard pies in each hand, “Hold up your hands.” She said, “I won’t drop these pies for any villain like you.” He told her, “I don’t care what you do with the pies, but don’t move.” So she threw one of them at his face. Life back then really was exactly like it’s portrayed in silent films.

A note to liberals

who support Guantanamo and killing people with drones: you are not liberals. That is all.

Today -100: February 8, 1912: No hurry indeed

President Taft drops 8th Circuit judge William Cather Hook from consideration for the vacant Supreme Court seat. He had pretty much made up his mind for Hook but opposition arose because of his upholding of Jim Crow laws in Oklahoma.

Kaiser Wilhelm gave the traditional opening speech to the newly elected Reichstag. Unlike in Britain, they have to come to him in his palace to hear it. But the Socialists, one-fourth of the MPs, didn’t. Willy demanded a bigger army and a bigger navy.

It is reported that Germany’s war contingency plans call for sending all 50 military airplanes on a bombing raid on Paris the minute war is declared.

Headline of the Day -100: “No Hurry to Talk Peace.” The 3rd Peace Conference has been re-scheduled for 1915.

Turkey orders the closing of all Italian institutions in Turkey, including banks, insurance companies and an orphanage.

The Russian Duma asks the minister of interior why he illegally ordered newspapers not to write anything about Rasputin and why he seized those two newspapers for doing so. Also, a bishop and an abbot who Rasputin doesn’t like were ordered into exile.

Condescending Racist Headline of the Day -100: “Chinaman a Journalist Now. Anyway, He Has a Degree from the University of Missouri That Says So.” And a job as a, you know, journalist. Hin Wong, raised in Hawaii, plans to move to China (where he will indeed be a journalist until his death in Hong Kong in 1939).

Obama and the Marshmallow Cannon of Doom

Caption contest.

Today -100: February 7, 1912: Of cunnels, mad monks, darts, and spies

Minstrely Headline of the Day -100 (LA Times): “Georgia Whites for Taft. Negroes are for ‘Cunnel.’” It seems there were competing Taft & Roosevelt primaries for the state Republican convention, which will in turn elect delegates to the national convention. And while whites support Taft, blacks support what it took me a minute to realize was dialect for The Colonel (as TR liked to be called).

Florida Republicans will send competing Taft/Roosevelt delegations to the national convention, which will have to sort it out. The majority of delegates, pro-Cunnel, stormed out after the temporary chairman (a pro-Taft negro, as it happens, although the NYT notes that the black delegates were pro-TR) issued a series of rulings against them. They then organized separately to name their own delegation (Florida, like a lot of states, doesn’t have presidential primaries).

A couple of Russian newspapers are seized for saying bad things about Rasputin.

The French have invented a “terrible air weapon,” a 6-inch long “dynamite dart,” not actually dynamite, just a heavy dart that can be dropped on enemy soldiers from airplanes.

There is finally an armistice in the Chinese Revolution, but negotiations continue. The Empress Dowager is demanding the continued use of imperial titles, with commoners to continue showing the proper regal homage, the imperial family to retain its palaces and the Imperial Guard, paid for by the public, etc.

More in the spy wars: Brits are angered that one of their spies, Bertrand Stewart (actually a lawyer who thought he’d like to play at spies, but he did so with MI6’s bemused knowledge; a German agent lured him into the country by promising to sell him secret documents, then arrested him), is sentenced to 3½ years. The British press is suggesting that the evidence in the secret trial was too weak (it wasn’t) and the sentence is too severe. His father, however, expresses nothing but respect for the “judgment of the Supreme Court of an enlightened and friendly country,” while saying that his son’s actions “are no proof at all of anti-German feeling among the people of England. They merely show that ‘young men will be young men’” (Bertie is 39). Germany released him early, in 1913, in plenty of time to get killed in action in France one month into the Great War.

Today -100: February 6, 1912: Of bad barbers, time-outs, and turkey trots

Front Page Headline of the Day -100: “GOV. WILSON A BAD BARBER.; On Eve of Stumping Tour He Cuts His Lip While Shaving.”

The La Follette campaign seems to be shutting down, and Fightin’ Bob himself will take a few weeks’ rest.

The “turkey trot” has reached London, although stripped of the features found so objectionable in certain parts of New York society, but the London Times pronounces the dance “abominably ugly.”

Today -100: February 5, 1912: Of parachutes and censorship

Franz Reichalt, an Austrian tailor whose hobby was making experimental parachutes, got permission to test his latest from the Eiffel Tower, although he was supposed to use a dummy. Instead, he did the jump himself. He will be missed.

Utah Gov. William Spry is demanding the suppression of movies depicting Mormons.

Today -100: February 4, 1912: Problems

The NYT catches up to Robert La Follette’s melt-down, noting “Newspaper reports did not convey any idea of what really happened”. Fightin’ Bob needs a rest, his friends say. Also, he told the newspaper publishers that they are doing a crappy job, serving the interests of big business and no longer bothering to educate public opinion.

With rebellion increasing in Juarez, Taft warns against anyone shooting across the border into the US, and orders the mobilization of 15,000 troops along the border, with a view to maybe invading Mexico to enforce the no-shooting rule.

In Britain, the Women’s Industrial Union is trying to discover the cause of the “servant problem.” Evidently it’s that people don’t like being treated like servants.

Speaking of problems, the University of Virginia has received a grant for a fellowship “for the study of the negro.” The fellow will “prepare a paper on some aspect of the negro problem.” Like “servant problem” in the previous story, “negro problem” is a term that comes up pretty regularly and is never defined, although needless to say the people reading the NYT were not interested in the problems affecting servants and negroes, just in the problems caused by servants and negroes.

Today -100: February 3, 1912: I believe in women’s suffrage wherever they want it

The NYT covers the speeches by politicians at the banquet of the Periodical Publishers’ Association of America, but misses the big story, which came after the paper’s deadline.  It covers Woodrow Wilson’s speech but gives a scant three sentences to that of Robert La Follette, who basically destroyed his presidential chances, such as they were, with a Rick Perry-esque performance, but longer.  More than two hours long, in fact, rambling, repetitive (literally: he re-read certain paragraphs several times without noticing) and possibly drunken.  To be fair, he a) had recently had food poisoning and b) was worried about his daughter, who had a major operation scheduled for the next day, but the speech made many people think he was in the middle of a nervous breakdown, and Progressives switched their support to Roosevelt in droves.

The Association held a straw vote, which seems a rather unprofessional thing for publishers to do.  TR won.

First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill will come to Belfast soon to give a Home Rule speech.  It is expected that he will be met by 60 to 80,000 armed men – 30,000 will have revolvers and many will have clubs – one foot longer than the ones the police have.

A British submarine sinks with all hands (13 of them) off the Isle of Wight after being in a collision with the appropriately named gunboat Hazard.

Roosevelt writes an editorial in Outlook supporting women’s suffrage, sort of.  (It can be read here [pdf, 5 pages]).  He wants women-only statewide referenda on women’s suffrage to decide the issue: “I believe in women’s suffrage wherever they want it.  Where they do not want it the suffrage should not be forced upon them.”  He doesn’t think it’s a big deal either way: “I do not regard the movement as anything like as important as either its extreme friends of extreme opponents think.  It is so much less important than many other reforms that I have never been able to take a very heated interest in it.”  And most of the women with whom he associates oppose suffrage “precisely because they approach life from the standpoint of duty.”  And women are much more important as wives and mothers, which suffrage must not change.  “No woman will ever be developed who will stand above the highest and finest of the wives and mothers of today and of the yesterdays.  The exercise of suffrage can never be the most important of women’s rights or women’s duties.  The vital need for women, as for men, is to war against vice, and frivolity, and cold selfishness, and timid shrinking from necessary risk and effort.”

We either believe in markets or we don’t

Yesterday Rick Santorum (who has an ill/dying child himself), after sneering at people for complaining about the high prices of drugs when they pay $900 for an iPod, and they just want health care for free, told a mother whose son depends on a million-dollar-a-year drug that  “He’s alive today because drug companies provide care. And if they didn’t think they could make money providing that drug, that drug wouldn’t be here. ... Fact is, we need companies to have incentives to make drugs. If they don’t have incentives, they won’t make those drugs. We either believe in markets or we don’t.”

This gives me an excuse to bring up Eflornithine again. That’s a drug that’s effective against sleeping sickness, but the pharmaceutical company that owned the patent stopped manufacturing it in the mid-1990s because they weren’t seeing enough of those “incentives” Santorum touts, as is the case with drugs treating diseases that affect small numbers of people or, in this case, large numbers of poor people in sub-Saharan Africa.

There was a happy ending for the Africans, though. Eflornithine also treats unwanted facial hair in rich white women, and that’s a market Big Pharma knows how to market to, so it went back into production.

Drugs can also be problematic from the capitalist point of view if they’re too successful. In 2006, Genentech blocked the use of colon cancer drug Avastin for blindness because it was successful in such low quantities that it cost only $42 a dose, whereas the no-more-effective drug in common use for macular degeneration cost $1,600 a dose.

We either believe in markets or we don’t.

Today -100: February 2, 1912: Of planes, operas, and term limits

In another first in the history of warfare, Capt. Monte, an Italian aviator, is shot by Libyans while he was dropping bombs on them from above. He was able to get his plane, which was also shot up, back to base.

Juarez is in revolt against the Madero government, and names Emilio Gomez as provisional president.

The German police ban the performance in Berlin of Otto Neitzel’s opera “Barbarina” because one of the characters is Frederick the Great (1712-86).

France plans to keep employing the existing Moroccan officials in its new colony, excuse me, protectorate, but they will be “advised and supervised” by French officials.

Rep. James Slayden (D-Texas) introduces a resolution against presidents running for a third time (i.e., Theodore Roosevelt).

Or, you know, precisely the opposite, which is kind of the problem

Ha’aretz: “The United States criticized a recently declared Israeli plan to subsidize construction in several West Bank settlements on Tuesday, with a top U.S. official calling the move ‘unconstructive.’”

Today -100: February 1, 1912: Of Panamans, abdications, and hoboes

Headline of the Day -100: “Panamans Hoot Colombia.” Evidently the residents of the brand-new country of Panama were called Panamans then.

The boy-emperor of China has finally abdicated (disagreements among the revolutionaries led the imperials to stall for a while, hoping to avoid abdication).

The state of Pennsylvania indicts three more of last August’s Coatesville lynch mob, despite previous acquittals. This time, they plan on a change of venue.

The national hobo convention is scheduled for Cincinnati. Which is not best pleased.

I want you to remember when our White House reflected the best of who we are, not the worst of what Europe has become

Romney victory speech in Florida.

SO I LOANED HIM ONE OF MY SEVERAL MANSIONS. HAH! JUST KIDDING. “In the last ten days, I met a father who was terrified that this would be the last night his family would sleep in the only home his son has ever known.”

MAYBE THERE SHOULD BE A MORATORIUM ON QUOTING HISTORICAL FIGURES WHO WOULD HAVE DESPISED YOU WITH A RED-HOT PASSION: “In another era of American crisis, Thomas Paine is reported to have said..” [i.e., Paine never actually said this] “...‘Lead, follow, or get out of the way.’” I believe Paine had Romney in mind (he was just that foresighted) when he wrote: “It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.” (Age of Reason)

SOMEONE SIT ROMNEY DOWN IN FRONT OF A “HOW A BILL BECOMES A LAW” FILMSTRIP: “He forced through Obamacare; I will repeal it.”

IT’S ALLITERATIVE, SO IT MUST BE TRUE: “Like his colleagues in the faculty lounge who think they know better, President Obama demonizes and denigrates almost every sector of our economy.” What sector has he missed? Do tell the White House so he can get right on with that demonizin’ and denigrating’.

BY NOT TRAMPLING ON WOMEN’S RIGHTS, YOU MEAN: “President Obama orders religious organizations to violate their conscience”.

IT’S ASSONANT, SO IT MUST BE TRUE: “President Obama has adopted a strategy of appeasement and apology.”

IT’S ALLITERATIVE... AH, YOU GET THE IDEA: “If you believe the disappointments of the last few years are a detour, not our destiny, then I am asking for your vote.”

WE’RE “SPECIAL”: “I’m asking each of you to remember how special it is to be an American.”

SO YOU’RE SAYING THAT MICHELLE STOPPED SHAVING HER PITS? “I want you to remember when our White House reflected the best of who we are, not the worst of what Europe has become.”

I think that there’s a perception somehow that we’re just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly

Yesterday, Obama answered questions on Google+. The White House website still has no transcript; the Bushies were much better about this sort of thing.

He was asked about drones and acknowledged for the first time that the US is bombing people in Pakistan.

NEITHER WILLY NOR NILLY: “I think that there’s a perception somehow that we’re just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly,” he said, deploying the sort of folksiness we haven’t heard in government statements about killing foreigners since Rumsfeld.

DEFINE “HUGE”: “Drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties,” he said, deploying the sort of dismissiveness about civilian casualties that we haven’t heard... well, actually government statements have always been dismissive about civilian casualties.

OH, THERE’S A LIST, WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL US THERE’S A LIST: “This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists who are trying to go in and harm Americans, hit American facilities, American bases, and so on.” Did he mention there’s a list?

DRONE LEASHES: “It is important for everybody to understand that this thing is kept on a very tight leash.”

He explained that using flying robots to kill people in Pakistan was really all about respecting Pakistan’s sovereignty: “But understand that probably our ability to respect the sovereignty of other countries and to limit our incursions into somebody else’s territory is enhanced by the fact that we are able to pinpoint strike on al Qaeda operatives in a place where the capacities of that military in that country may not be able to get them. For us to be able to get them in another way would involve probably a lot more intrusive military actions than the one that we’re already engaging in.” Obviously the possibility of just not killing people in Pakistan is off the table; that’s just crazy talk.

Today -100: January 31, 1912: We are progressive in the sense that we are making progress all the time

Taft, evidently finally tired of all the criticism he’s receiving from within the Republican Party, makes a speech at the Columbus Glee Club denouncing Progressives, or rather declaring that the old-line Republicans are quite progressive enough, without “chasing chimeras and... unsettling the foundations of government merely to indulge in the fancies of hope.” “We are progressive in the sense that we are making progress all the time. But we are not progressive if that means the overturning of the Constitution and all the guarantees of life, liberty, and property, and all the checks on the momentary passion of the people.”

A negro is lynched in Cordele, Georgia, for supposedly assaulting a white girl.

Today -100: January 30, 1912: Of playboys and lawyers

Chicago’s Common Council (the city council, I guess) orders the play “The Playboy of the Western World” banned (there was a lot of heckling and stink bombs and such when it opened in NY last year).

Clarence Darrow is indicted for allegedly bribing a juror in the McNamara brothers’ case.

Today -100: January 29, 1912: Of nurses, dead generals, and Whigs

Italy seizes more Red Crescent nurses on the way to Libya, from a French steamer. One might begin to think that denying medical care was an intentional policy of some sort.

Not a good week for Ecuadoran military presidents. This time, José Eloy Alfaro, general and president 1895-1902 and 1906-11, who was arrested earlier in the month after a failed coup attempt, is killed by a mob that broke into his prison, along with his brother, who had been minister of war, and a few more generals.

The first woman to register to vote in Lake County, California, is 104 years old. She registers as a Whig.

Today -100: January 28, 1912: Of veterans, sacrifice cults, flying machines, and annoyed Italians

The last Civil War veterans still in the military are about to retire.

First NYT mention, I think, of a “Sacrifice Cult” in Louisiana, which has killed 26 people (five families). Victims and killers are all black, so I guess it’s not really news. (Update: the LA Times Jan. 30 issue says that no one has been arrested because no one is willing to talk about the cult, which is evidently a voodoo thing.)

The French military will purchase 328 flying machines (including dirigibles, I guess), because they heard Germany plans to do the same.

Headline of the Day -100: “Peace Pleas Annoy Italy.”