Obama goes to Israel: Meeting none of these challenges will be easy

Obama is in Israel, or as he called it, “the historic homeland of the Jewish people.” Oh, and some other people as well... what were their names again?

A COMMON STORY: Israel and the US, he says, “share a common story...” It’s total bullshit, but that’s why it’s called a “story” “...patriots determined ‘to be a free people in our land,’ pioneers who forged a nation, heroes who sacrificed to preserve our freedom, and immigrants from every corner of the world who renew constantly our diverse societies.” And the original inhabitants, mowed down in their thousands, because we don’t want our societies to be that diverse.

WHY WE STAND: “We stand together because we are democracies.” He must have not heard that the coalition deal for the new Netanyahu government this week includes rewriting the Basic Law to make democracy subordinate to Israel’s “Jewishness.”

THAT NOISE IS GUNFIRE AND THE MESS IS PALESTINIAN BLOOD: “For as noisy and messy as it may be, we know that democracy is the greatest form of government ever devised by man.”

He visited Pres. Shimon Peres.

INTO A RADIOACTIVE HELLSCAPE: Peres: “After the meeting we just had, I have all confidence that your vision can transform the Middle East.”

Obama: “Well, as with all our visits together, I have once again succumbed to your charms and I’m grateful to your hospitality.” Ewwwww.



Peres made him perform manual labor, as is the custom.



Do people still pay for trees to be planted in Israel, by the way? This was a common form of fund-raising for Israel in the early “making the desert bloom” phase, but they kept it up long after Israel had all the trees it wanted, after which the trees were planted, then immediately uprooted. I assume the same tree got “planted” over and over.

And of course Obama met Netanyahu. Both talked about how the US is giving Israel lots of money and military hardware so that Israel can defend itself “by itself.”



Obama says a two-state solution requires “a strong and secure” Jewish state (note that he’s stopped even pretending that Israel is secular or that all of its residents have equal status) and “a sovereign and independent” Palestine, which presumably has no need of strength and security.



He says that last year no Israeli citizen was killed by “terrorism emanating from the West Bank.” He didn’t say how many Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military (or by Jewish settlers), and I think we can be reasonably sure he doesn’t know how many were killed because it never occurred to him to ask.

TRUE DAT: “Meeting none of these challenges will be easy.”



On Syria’s alleged use of chemical weapons: “But as is always the case when it comes to issues of war and peace, I think having the facts before you act is very important.” Next up on Fox: a rebuttal from Dick Cheney.

“I believe that the Assad regime has lost all credibility and legitimacy.” He does not say when Assad had all that credibility and legitimacy.



He gave Israel a green light for a military attack on Iran (well how else would you read this?): “I think that what Bibi alluded to, which is absolutely correct, is each country has to make its own decisions when it comes to the awesome decision to engage in any kind of military action, and Israel is differently situated than the United States. And I would not expect that the Prime Minister would make a decision about his country’s security and defer that to any other country -- any more than the United States would defer our decisions about what was important for our national security.”

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Today -100: March 20, 1913: Constantine of Byzantium?

George’s son Constantine will be crowned today, but will it be as Constantine I of Greece or Constantine XII, continuing the numbering from the Byzantine Empires?

Not-At-All-Racist Headline of the Day -100 (LA Times): “Giant Negro Runs Amuck.”

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Today -100: March 19, 1913: Of assassinations and fanatical and hysterical women

King George I of Greece (aka, the King of the Hellenes) is assassinated while taking a walk in Salonika (Thessaloniki), which was recently captured from the Turks. Despite the assassination taking place on occupied territory during a war, it seems to have had nothing to do with the war, and his assassin, Aleko Schinas, is a Greek. The NYT already declares him “mad,” “degenerate,” “of low mental type,” and “an evil-looking fellow.” The Greek government will claim that he was a drunkard and certainly had no political motives at all, but in fact Schinas was a long-time anarchist activist, both in Greece and the United States. Further questions will be cut short by Schinas’s precipitate fall from a police station window a few weeks later.

George I was actually born a Danish prince, but was selected by the Greeks based on his eHarmony profile when he was 17, just shy of 50 years ago. His habits included taking long walks without guards. He was uncle to the kings/czars of England, Denmark, Norway and Russia.

The British Parliament discusses what to do with the militant suffragettes. There was a letter in the morning’s London Times from several pro-suffrage doctors about Lilian Lenton, who was released from prison last month because she was gravely sick. Home Secretary Reginald McKenna insists she was sick because she was hunger striking, but the doctors say she had pleurisy because of incompetently performed forcible feeding – the feeding tube was inserted into her lung rather than her stomach. The government lacked any legal authority to just release her like that, but wanted to ensure that if she died, it was not in prison. This is the game of hunger-strike chicken I mentioned a while back. McKenna accuses the prisoners of playing this game, saying that some suffragettes “pretended to take their food and surreptitiously starved themselves so that they became so weak and exhausted that they could not be dealt with [i.e., forcibly fed] and this for no other reason than the intention of dying in prison. ... to make martyrs of themselves in order that their cause may receive a further stimulus by their heroic example.”

MPs make various helpful suggestions. Lord Robert Cecil, a Tory supporter of women’s suffrage but not of militancy, suggests deportation. Someone asks where to; “Ireland” some wag suggests. Others suggest letting them starve themselves, because they wouldn’t actually do it, but McKenna insists that 30 or 40 would do so: “They are fanatical and hysterical women, who no more fear death in fighting what they believe to be the cause of women than the natives of the Soudan feared death when fighting the battle of the Mahdi.” He wants the ability to release prisoners temporarily, on license, the proposed Cat and Mouse Act.

Aristide Briand’s tenure as France’s prime minister ends after two months, brought down over plans to introduce proportional representation.

Tammany Hall puts out a story that Gov. Sulzer and Boss Murphy have met (at Delmonico’s, naturally) and settled all their differences. Sulzer denies it.

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Today -100: March 18, 1913: Of feuds and meteorological strops

NY Gov. Sulzer and Boss Murphy both attend a dinner of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, but don’t speak to each other, which seems less than friendly.

Woodrow Wilson is returning gifts from people he doesn’t know. “To-day he returned a razor strop and a cake of shoe blacking. President Wilson shaves himself and is perfectly satisfied with the strop he now uses, which has the remarkable quality of being able, through its varying conditions, to forecast the weather.”

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Today -100: March 17, 1913: Of canberras, birthday dinners, pellets of uncertain composition, and butterfly rights

Building began a few days ago on the site chosen for the future capital of the Commonwealth of Australia. The NYT claims that the word canberra, which was just chosen as the city’s name, means “laughing jackass” (that’s a bird) in one of the Aboriginal languages. Actually, no one really knows what canberra means.

Boss Murphy and Tammany Hall will boycott a birthday dinner to honor Gov. Sulzer and are pressuring Democratic politicians to stay away. The fight started over the refusal of Sulzer, an anti-Tammany Democrat, to appoint Murphy’s choice to be commissioner of highways (there are a lot of lucrative contracts in highways).

British women’s suffragists are no longer able to hold public meetings (outdoor meetings, anyway) without being mobbed and shouted down. Yesterday (Sunday), “General” Flora Drummond of the Women’s Social and Political Union attempted to give a speech in Hyde Park, only to meet with raucous interruptions, hurled clods of grass, oranges, and “pellets of uncertain composition.” A fight between the mob and police ensued, as was the custom. A meeting at Hampstead Heath was broken up non-violently, with shouting, singing and booing.

British papers are claiming there was a suffragette plot to kidnap Lloyd George.

Headline of the Day -100: “War over Butterfly Rights.”

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Today -100: March 16, 1913: Of pressers, the gallantry of the guillotine, and unfit ragtime

Pres. Wilson met with 125 reporters in the White House. This is supposedly the origin of the institution of the presidential press conference, although Woodrow doesn’t seem to have actually answered any questions.

Hubertine Auclert, the most prominent French suffragist leader, deplores the fact that Frenchwomen are never executed, and demands an equal right to be guillotined. To do otherwise “classes women with lunatics and despoils them of their rights.” Madeleine Pelletier adds, “This gallantry of the guillotine is an insult to the feminine sex, as is gallantry in general.”

Headline of the Day -100: “Ragtime Unfit for King.” People are bitching that ragtime was played during the procession of the King to the opening of Parliament. I prefer to think that the king is unfit for Ragtime.

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The Pope Versus the Anti-Clerical Left-Wing Elements of Doom

The Vatican says that the stories linking Pope Francis (or, when he’s just hanging around the house, Frances) with the Dirty War in Argentina in the ‘70s are part of a campaign by “anti-clerical left-wing elements”.

You know, it’s precisely the tendency of the church to use phrases like “anti-clerical left-wing elements” that make stories of collaboration between the Church and right-wing dictatorships so very, very plausible.

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Today -100: March 15, 1913: We want Alsace!

The Delaware state senate rejects women’s suffrage.

Riots in Paris over the increase in the length of military conscription to 3 years. Socialists fight with members of the proto-fascist Camelots du Roi, who shout “We want Alsace!”, the French province annexed by Germany after the Franco-Prussian War.

British suffragettes are now painting over house names, because why not.

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Today -100: March 14, 1913: Of shots, prisons, Easter bonnets, and rocket men

Everyone in the Navy is ordered to be inoculated against smallpox, starting with new Assistant Secretary Roosevelt (a couple of cases developed in the War Department, whose clerks share office space with Navy clerks).

NY Gov. Sulzer fires the superintendent of prisons, who had refused the governor’s order to replace the warden of Auburn Prison with a Democratic judge named Rattigan, which is the perfect name for a prison warden. Warden Rattigan. The state senate wants hearings. I believe this will become a bigger deal soon.

Headline of the Day -100: “Easter Hats Nipped in Bud.” Boston telephone operators will foreswear the customary chapeaus in solidarity with striking garment workers.

Rodman Law, a daredevil who has parachuted from skyscrapers and from the Brooklyn Bridge and starred in several movies that are not on YouTube, attempted to ride a 44-foot-long rocket from Jersey City to Elizabeth, NJ (12 miles), at which point he’d jump off and parachute safely to earth. Oddly enough, this has never been attempted before. Anyway, what actually happened was that the rocket was lit, and promptly exploded. Law was blown to safety, with nary an injury. In a couple of months he’ll be attempting to climb the Capitol Building. He will die of consumption in 1919, which probably wasn’t as much fun as blowing up on a giant rocket would have been.

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Separated at “birth”?

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Today -100: March 13, 1913: Moral force

The NYT says of Pres. Wilson’s statement to Latin America yesterday: “It is known that Mr. Wilson cherishes the belief that the moral force of his Administration will be able to work out great reforms in all the Latin-American republics.” Because American “moral force” has always been so helpful to Latin American republics.

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Name of the Day

The judge who struck down Bloomberg’s Big Gulp law is called Milton Tingling. Justice Tingling.

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Today -100: March 12, 1913: Of warnings, speeding tickets, the Isle of Pines, and Barrymores

Pres. Wilson issues a warning to the countries of Central and South America that the US will only “cooperate” with nations which are based on law and orderly processes of government. This is aimed at the former presidents of Nicaragua and Venezuela, who are supposedly conspiring to start a region-wide revolution.

South Carolina Gov. Coleman Blease’s negro driver is caught speeding again and is fined $15.75. Blease pardons him, again, and the police chief refuses, again, to recognize the pardon as applicable to convictions in the city Recorder’s court.

A few days ago Americans in the Isle of Pines, Cuba, began circulating a petition for the annexation of the island by the United States. Cubans are furious and want those responsible for the petition arrested for conspiracy against the sovereignty of Cuba.

Austria orders Serbia not to aid Montenegro in capturing Scutari. Austria and the other powers want Scutari to be part of a new Albanian state, not annexed to Montenegro as the allies are planning.

The actor John Barrymore is sued by a barber who he gave a black eye after, he claims, being given a haircut against his will when he only wanted a shave. A jury awards the barber $800.

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Today -100: March 11, 1913: Of retirement, courts martial, Constitutionalists, petitions, crowns, and tubmans

NY Gov. Sulzer investigated whether state Supreme Court Justice Albert Gladding actually reached the mandatory retirement age of 70 last December, as suggested by the birth date Gladding put on his life insurance policy and elsewhere. Gladding says that for a long time he mistakenly thought he was born in 1842 instead of 1843.

“Mother” Jones is on trial in front of a military court in West Virginia for conspiracy to murder. The conspiracy consisted of giving speeches which caused striking miners to fight with guards, some of whom were killed. If convicted, she will be executed by firing squad. Ms. Jones says, “Whatever, bitches, I’m 80,” or words to that effect. The state offered her amnesty if she agreed to leave West Virginia; she refused.

The NY State Senate votes to ban the employment of women in factories between 10 pm and 6 am.

The opponents of the Huerta Junta are now being called Constitutionalists. They have captured Agua Prieta.

British suffragettes are arrested trying to deliver a petition to the king on his way to open Parliament. “A report that the King scowled at the suffragettes is semi-officially denied.” The petition said, “Votes for women is the only cure for militancy.”

Two railway stations are burned, presumably by suffragists.

In the Parliament-Opening ceremony, King George V wore his crown, a tradition dropped by Queen Victoria.

Harriet Tubman has died, at 93 or so (today’s article, running a bit behind, says she is dying; the NYT obit several days later is just four sentences long).

Also dead: Godfrey Morgan, the 1st Viscount Tredegar, a captain who led a section of the Charge of the Light Brigade, at 82.

There will be no booze in the White House (or at diplomatic functions, which was one of Bryan’s conditions for taking the secretary of state job).

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Today -100: March 10, 1913: Of unprecocious PhD’s

Prof. Leo Wiener of Harvard says that any child of ordinary intelligence could, with a proper education, follow in the steps of his son Norbert, who will earn his Harvard PhD in a couple of months. At 18. Started college at 11. “Norbert is not precocious,” says his father, adding that the media should ignore him until he actually accomplishes something.

Norbert Wiener, of course, invented cybernetics, probably in order to invent a computer that could explain why his father was such a dick.

Cuban Pres. Gomez vetoes the amnesty bill the US threatened him about.

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Today -100: March 9, 1913: Of trespassing airplanes, speeding tickets, and frozen legislatures

Woodrow Wilson appoints Franklin D. Roosevelt, a NY state senator, as assistant secretary of the Navy, a job once held by his 5th cousin Theodore Roosevelt. Not that you should read anything into that.

Britain fines a French aviator 2 guineas for flying over England without permission, under the new law. Of course they couldn’t have done a thing about it if he hadn’t landed.

South Carolina Gov. Coleman Blease’s negro driver is given a ticket for speeding (the limit is 12 mph in Columbia; he was driving 30) and fined $3.75. Blease issues a pardon and demands that the fine be returned. The chief of police, one Clint Cathcart, refuses. Blease says until he gets the money back, he will pardon everyone convicted in that court.

Clarence Darrow’s jury-tampering second trial results in a hung jury (he was acquitted the first time). There will be no further trials.

Alaska’s first legislature is inaugurated, with limited powers. The House consists of 16 members, the Senate 8.

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Today -100: March 8, 1913: Of legally constituted governments and amnesties

US ambassador to Mexico Henry Wilson telegraphs that “I support the Provisional Government of Gen. Huerta because it is the legally constituted Government, and if it did not exist there would be no government, but chaotic conditions of worse character.” I hope someone asks for his definition of “legally constituted.” Note that the United States has not (spoiler alert: and will not) officially recognized the Huerta Junta.

Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan sends a protest to Cuba about an amnesty law which will liberate political prisoners and, er, every other prisoner, including some not yet tried. The goal seems to be to indemnify members of the Gomez administration, which leaves office in May, against corruption charges. The NYT thinks this amnesty can only mean an American military intervention (they consider an amnesty absurd, but the provision which the US inserted into the Cuban constitution allowing it to invade Cuba at any time for any reason perfectly legitimate).

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Today -100: March 7, 1913: Of office-seekers, foolish virgins, and the draft

Woodrow Wilson announced that he would speak with no office-seekers, and they should all go and bug members of his cabinet, who will be allowed to appoint their own subordinates. And so the flood of supplicants commences. Bryan for one plans to eject Republicans from the State Department.

The London County Council elections are coming up, and admission to some of the election meetings is by ticket only to prevent suffragette heckling. At one meeting, after two interruptions, President of the Local Government Board John Burns demanded that all women leave – although women have the vote for LCC elections. At another meeting, he referred to suffragette hecklers as “foolish virgins.”

The Greek Army captures Yanina, taking 32,000 captives.

The French Parliament is debating (by which I mean yelling Gallic insults at each other) extending mandatory military service from two years to three years (men from families with more than 6 children will still serve only 2). The French will tell you this is only needed to respond to Germany’s increase in military spending.

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Today -100: March 6, 1913: Of cabinets, cigars, and cats and mice

After months of the press bugging Woodrow Wilson to give a hint as to his cabinet nominees, today he finally made his choices public when he sent his cabinet nominations to the Senate. They were all confirmed by the end of day. BY THE END OF THE DAY. Seven have already been sworn in, and the rest will be tomorrow.

William Jennings Bryan is secretary of state. Treasury sec is William Gibbs McAdoo, who will marry Wilson’s daughter in 1914. Lindley Garrison, the vice-chancellor of New Jersey, will be secretary of war, I assume because of the aptonym (3 days ago the Times reported that it would be another Garrison, NJ Supreme Court Justice Charles Garrison. Whoops.) Wilson first offered the job to A. Mitchell Palmer, who replied, “Dude, I’m a Quaker,” or words to that effect. Four of the cabinet (out of 10) Wilson never met before inauguration day.

There is also a secretary of labor, a cabinet position created by Congress a few days ago. He is William Wilson, the son of a Scottish collier who emigrated to Pennsylvania after he was blacklisted and the family evicted from their company-owned house during a strike. Young William went down the mines himself at age 9 and was elected secretary of the local miners’ benevolent association at age, wow, 14. He was later an official of the United Mine Workers and a member of Congress. In a fine bit of irony, Congress created his job but forgot to appropriate a salary for it, so for the time being the first secretary of labor will be working for free.

Pres. Wilson revokes Taft’s ban on cigar-smoking in the executive offices.

Headline of the Day -100 (LA Times): “Women Hate Mann.” The women are the Chicago Woman’s Political Equality League and the Mann is James Robert Mann, Republican member of Congress and minority leader, the author of the Mann Act. He said of a woman in the D.C. suffrage parade hurt by one of the thugs that she should have been at home with her mother.

The British government has finally come up with a way to deal with hunger strikers that involves neither forcible feeding nor releasing hunger strikers from prison. The government will introduce a bill to release them under license, let them recover at home, then return them to prison. The recovery time would not count towards their sentences. The bill already has a nickname:

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Mobbing

The NYT has an article about a branch of the NYPD that “stag[es] interventions” with young people they think are going to become criminals:

“Officers not only make repeated drop-ins at homes and schools, but they also drive up to the teenagers in the streets, shouting out friendly hellos, in front of their friends.” So friendly.

They also keep dossiers on every juvenile who has gotten in trouble with the law, and try to get into their Facebook pages through fake profiles. You might call this sort of behaviour “stalking” or “police harassment,” but Det. Patrick Kennedy has another term:

“‘When they are all colored up like this in jackets and they go walking around other developments, that’s a problem,’ Detective Kennedy said. ‘They call that mobbing.’”

So your Street Vocabulary lesson for the day: when gangs get “all colored up” in jackets and walk around housing developments, it’s “mobbing,” when cops do it, it’s an “intervention.”

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