I should be thoroughly ashamed of myself for this post

Bill Clinton joined John McCain at the McCain Institute for (Snicker) International Leadership and talked about either Syria or Monica Lewinsky:

“Some people say, ‘Okay, see what a big mess it is? Stay out!’”

“Sometimes it’s just best to get caught trying, as long as you don’t overcommit”.

“we shouldn’t over-learn the lessons of the past”.

“What the American people are saying when they tell you not to do these things, they’re not telling you not to do these things”.

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Today -100: July 10, 1913: Of public bathing and ritual child-murders

Denver bans Japanese people from bathing in the lake in Washington Park. Negroes were already banned.

The lawyer for the Jew being tried for killing a Christian boy in Kiev asks the court to subpoena Christian theologians, presumably to ask them about ritual child-murder. He also wants the prosecution to produce Hebrew books cited by a prosecution witness, a Catholic priest who testified about Jewish child sacrifice, because, the lawyer says, those books don’t actually exist.

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Depth and maturity

11-year-old girl Chilean pregnant after two years of sexual abuse by her mother’s partner (but the mother says it was consensual, so that’s okay then) says (in a tv interview, because evidently Chilean tv is as awful and exploitative as ours) that she doesn’t want an abortion, not that she could legally get one in Chile. And the girl (did I mention she’s 11?) wants to raise it: “It will be like having a doll in my arms.”

Anti-choice Chilean President Sebastian Pinera says her decision in wanting to keep a baby because it will be like having a doll displays “depth and maturity,” because of course he fucking does.

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Today -100: July 9, 1913: Of hurt Slavonic feelings, scolds, roads, and lost independence

Someone finally declares war in the Second Balkan War, and it’s King Peter of Serbia, who issues a proclamation: “The Bulgarians, forgetful of the Servians’ brotherly help and the blood of the heroes who fell on the Thracian battlefields, have given the Slavonic nations and the civilized world an abominable example of ingratitude and greediness. This unbrotherly action has caused me the deepest pain and hurt my sincerest Slavonic feelings”. There’s probably an ointment for that.

More atrocity stories, which are probably about as true as the reports of great victories put out by all participants. Bulgarian troops supposedly imprisoned 700 men in a mosque in Kurkut and set it on fire.

A woman in Philadelphia is arrested as a common scold.

Gov. Elliot Woolfolk Major of Missouri has a plan for addressing the poor condition of the state’s roads: he will ask every able-bodied man to donate two days (in August, yet) to working on them. He plans to be out there with a pick himself.

Independence is gone. Independence, Louisiana, that is, wiped out by fire.

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Today -100: July 8, 1913: Of airlines, libellous statements, lethal golf balls, home rule and Havana shootouts

A Col. H. S. Maisy announces plans for a commercial airship service in England. Somehow Col. Maisy is exactly the sort of name someone who owns blimps should have. Maybe in a children’s book.

Yesterday the Daily Mail announced that the Cat and Mouse Act had destroyed militant suffragism in Britain. Which was more or less asking for it: today a pier is set on fire and a bomb exploded in Liverpool. And Christabel Pankhurst telegraphs from Paris protesting “the libellous statements in The Daily Mail.”

How They Died 100 Years Ago: “Killed by Acid in a Golf Ball.”

How They Died 100 Years Ago: a man in Plattekill, NY, hangs himself because it’s hot. He leaves behind a wife and ten children.

Parliament passes Irish Home Rule.

Over the weekend, police in Havana arrested members of a club owned by the governor of Havana Province, Ernesto Asbert, for gambling. A couple of days later the arrest of a porter at the club for possession of a firearm escalates into Gov. Asbert and two members of the Cuban congress shooting the chief of the National Police, Gen. Armando Riva, three times. He is still alive.

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Vast new powers

From a NYT article about how the Obama Administration became so, so disillusioned with Mohammed Morsi: “Mr. Morsi issued a decree claiming vast new powers, quickly puncturing the optimism in the White House and elsewhere in Washington.”

Because if there’s one thing Barack Obama cannot tolerate, it’s a government claiming vast new powers.

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Today -100: July 7, 1913: Of impersonation, Balkan wars, lynchings, and ice strikes

Sen. Cummins (R-Iowa) proposes legislation to make it illegal to impersonate members of Congress or engage in other fraudulent activities such as pretending to act on behalf of congresscitters.

So far, the Second Balkan War battles have been bloodier than First Balkan War ones, as is the way with sequels.

In Jacksonville, Florida, a negro who killed a sheriff who was trying to arrest some gamblers, is lynched. Hundreds of bullets are fired into him right outside a church where a service was going on, then his ears were cut up for souvenirs.

And in Coger, Oklahoma, site of a recent lynching, a mass meeting of white residents orders negro residents to leave forthwith.

The Great Cincinnati Ice Strike of 1913 is over, after the city seized the ice plants.

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Today -100: July 6, 1913: Of interracial marriage, charming rats and mice, and brunettes in the city

Headline of the Day -100: “Negro to Wed White Girl.” Yup, that’s news. The magistrate (in New York although the couple met in Virginia) refuses to marry them, though he claims it’s only because he doesn’t think magistrates should perform marriages.

Rodent Headline of the Day -100: “Rats and Mice Charm Queen Mary.” They ran through a maze for her at the Bedford College for Women.

A Dr. J.S. Mackintosh of London says in the NYT Sunday Magazine section that brunettes can stand city life better than blondes, which has something to do with his theory that races degenerate when they migrate from their ancestral homes.

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Today -100: July 5, 1913: Of Fourths abroad, Balkan wars, molested kings, post offices, and eugenic marriages

The US ambassador to Mexico went to Vera Cruz to celebrate the 4th of July with expatriates there, in order to avoid the festivities in Mexico City (actually on a US warship in the harbor) because Gen. Huerta planned to attend, and it would have looked like recognition of the Huerta Junta had they been seen together.

Elsewhere, though, attempts by expatriate Americans to celebrate were met by violence and trampling of the American flag. And by elsewhere, I mean Canada. In both Winnipeg and Moosejaw. Headline: “Serious Riot in Winnipeg.”

It’s oddly comforting to see rumors of atrocities being spread in the Second Balkan War, since you don’t get the anti-Muslim overtones of the First Balkan War propaganda when, for instance, the Greeks claim that Bulgarian troops massacred every resident of Nigrita and forced women to dance naked with bells around their neck.

King Constantine of Greece says that this new war is blessed by the Almighty.

Headline of the Day -100: “Suffragist Molests King.” Mary Richardson of the WSPU (we shall see her in a later post engaging in some art criticism) threw a petition into the king’s carriage, whereupon an equerry hits her with a sword, and then the whole crowd got involved.

South African police shoot striking gold miners (white ones; black and white miners never struck at the same time in South Africa, ever). Strikers burn down a newspaper and a railway station in Johannesburg. 40 miners are killed.

The US Post Office segregates its black and white clerks. There is no mention of this in the NYT that I can find.

The Pennsylvania Legislature has joined the trend of passing “eugenic marriage” laws, requiring couples to swear (or be certified by a physician) that they do not have TB or, ahem, other communicable diseases. The sponsor of this bill plans to introduce a more stringent bill banning from marriage anyone who within five years has been in an insane asylum or a home for indigent persons unless they are cured and can support a family.

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Today -100: July 4, 1913: Of the fate of the egg and hooting the Cabinet

Headline of the Day -100: “Hen Causes a Strike.” A porter at the North Eastern Railway Station in London takes an egg from a chicken in a crate and is arrested by a railway detective; a strike ensues until he is released although “the officials are still considering the fate of the egg”.

Sylvia Pankhurst has been summoned to police court for inciting a thousand or so suffragettes to go to Downing Street. Defending herself, she notes that Downing St. is a public thoroughfare: “What right have the police to stop the public from going there to hoot the Cabinet? ... Hooting was a time-honoured custom, showing public opinion.”

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An inclusive and transparent coup

Obama issues a statement: “I now call on the Egyptian military to move quickly and responsibly to return full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government as soon as possible through an inclusive and transparent process”.

Let’s take that keyword by keyword. “Quickly” is not the same as immediately, so he’s in essence accepting the coup for some unspecified period of time. Responsibly? I don’t know what that means. Responsible to whom? “A democratically elected civilian government” is not the same as THE democratically elected civilian government, you know, the democratically elected civilian government they had yesterday. Transparent, presumably like he considers the FISA court and NSA eavesdropping transparent. And what “process” is he calling for? A new election? Since he doesn’t call for the military to return Morsi to his elected office, or even to release him from custody, that would seem to be the assumption, an assumption which entails, again, an acceptance of the right of the Egyptian military to undo the results of those and any other elections.

Obama continued, “I have also directed the relevant departments and agencies to review the implications under U.S. law for our assistance to the Government of Egypt.” So he has to look up the relevant statutes on Lexis-Nexus to decide whether he should support a military coup regime with cash and arms, he can’t just have a, you know, foreign policy, or, and I feel silly for even saying it, some fucking principles?

“The United States continues to believe firmly that the best foundation for lasting stability in Egypt is a democratic political order with participation from all sides and all political parties —secular and religious, civilian and military.” So going in to the Fourth of July, the only thing he can dredge up in support of the principle of democracy is that in the long run it’ll lead to... stability. Thomas Fucking Jefferson, he’s not.

He “urges all sides to avoid violence,” which seems to be just about all the advice he’s got for any Egyptians who aren’t okay with military coups.

(Update: I forgot to mention this, but Morsi is a complete and total twat.)

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Today -100: July 3, 1913: Of frame-ups, commemorating fighting with fighting, and identity theft

NY Gov. William Sulzer says that the breach-of-promise suit (“frame-up” he calls it) against him was contrived by Boss Murphy of Tammany. He says Mignon Hopkins sued him for this once before and that they settled out of court.

50,000 veterans of the Battle of Gettysburg (from both sides) have set up tents at the site of the battle and have been celebrating its 50th anniversary with heatstroke and a brawl in the Gettysburg Hotel which started when someone insulted Abraham Lincoln and ended with seven men being stabbed. Seems appropriate.

The Senate is still investigating lobbying practices. Testifying today -100, Wall Street stock broker and lobbyist David “The Wolf” Lamar admits that in his lobbying endeavours he often impersonated members of Congress, including future attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer, in phone calls with financial leaders (this was not actually illegal) or threatened them with the wrath of important congresscritters.

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Democracies don’t work when everybody says it’s the other person’s fault and I want 100 percent of what I want

Obama held a press conference with President Jakaya Kikwete in Tanzania.

OUR COMMITMENT HAS BEEN TO A PROCESS: “Our commitment to Egypt has never been around any particular individual or party, our commitment has been to a process.” The signature Obama move: making hedging his bets sound like a principled position. “And when I took a position that it was time for Egypt to transition, it was based on the fact that Egypt had not had a democratic government for decades, if ever.”

VOICES YELLING IN PROTEST AND THEN IN PAIN AS THE POLICE BEAT THEM, THAT’S WHAT YOU MEANT, RIGHT? “And what is clear right now is that although Mr. Morsi was elected democratically, there’s more work to be done to create the conditions in which everybody feels that their voices are heard”.

BECAUSE IT’S ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS ABOUT AMERICANS: “we’ve been watching these big protests. Our number-one priority has been making sure that our embassies and consulates are protected.”

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING: “assaulting women does not qualify as peaceful protests.”

WE’RE STILL TALKING ABOUT EGYPT, RIGHT? “Democracies don’t work when everybody says it’s the other person’s fault and I want 100 percent of what I want.”

COMPOUNDED: Asked about the Congo (the bad Congo, not the good Congo, and we can please go back to calling the bad Congo Zaire?): “Well, the people of Congo need a chance. They need a fair chance to live their lives, raise their families. And they haven’t had that opportunity because of constant conflict and war for way too many years. And of course, the tragedy is compounded by the fact that Congo is so rich in natural resources and potential, but because of this constant conflict and instability, the people of Congo haven’t benefitted from that.” Oh, and the genocidal killings. The genocidal killings, AND their not being able to sell us minerals. Both pretty darned tragic.

Evidently the Congo conflict (Congflict?) isn’t anything the US can (or will) do much about: “We can’t force a solution onto the region. ... If you have one of the biggest countries in terms of geography in all of Africa with all these natural resources...” Funny how those natural resources keep coming up. “...but it’s constantly a problem as opposed to being part of the solution, everybody suffers.” So it’s up to the arbitrarily delineated “region” around Congo, itself composed of nations whose artificial borders were drawn up by European colonialists, to... well, to do what? Evidently to increase inter-African trade, because commerce solves everything. “[I]t’s easier to send flowers or coffee to Europe than it is to send it across the way.” Why does he think that is?

On Snowden’s leaks about US spying on NATO allies: “the problem is that these things come out in dribs and drabs. We don’t know necessarily what programs they’re referring to, we don’t know how they’re sourced. And so, what I’ve said is, to my team, take a look at this article, figure out what they may or may not be talking about, and then what we’ll do is we’ll communicate to our allies appropriately.” In other words, he needs to calibrate his cover-up based on whether Snowden knows about that thing they did, or about those other things they did. If you just, you know, told the truth, you wouldn’t need your “team” to do all that heavy analysis of the Snowden leaks.

TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD BETTER: He goes on to say that all intelligence agencies are just “trying to understand the world better and what’s going on in world capitals around the world from sources that aren’t available through the New York Times or NBC News”

WHY, WHAT DID YOU HAVE FOR BREAKFAST? (THE FOURTH AMENDMENT AND TOAST?) “And I guarantee you that in European capitals, there are people who are interested in, if not what I had for breakfast, at least what my talking points might be should I end up meeting with their leaders.” So what’s the point of all the travel, then? The respective spies could just meet on a park bench; a Tanzanian spy could hand a plain envelope with Obama’s talking points hidden in a newspaper to a CIA spy in exchange for a box of donuts with a microdot of Kikwete’s talking points (do they still do microdots? I suppose not) on a sprinkle.

Since one of the issues under discussion during this trip was human trafficking, Pres. Kikwete is asked about his adviser, a diplomat (I can’t find a more specific job title) who was sued by a woman he kept as a domestic slave in Washington for 4 years and fled the US when a court ruled against him for $1m. A fraction of that was paid last week after 5 years of stalling in advance of this trip. Kikwete says it was just a family dispute and has been put to rest, doesn’t answer whether the guy still works for him.

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Today -100: July 2, 1913: Of breach of promise, balkan wars, and regattas

New York Gov. Sulzer is sued for breach of promise of marriage by a Miss Mignon Hopkins, who claims he proposed to her in 1903 (he married someone else in 1908). Sulzer says he’s never heard of her.

A committee of the NY Legislature will go after Gov. Sulzer, investigating charges that he failed to report campaign contributions, that he made promises of favors to William Randolph Hearst and others in exchange for financial support, that he threatened to veto bills to extort legislators into voting for his direct primary bill, etc. Sulzer calls the investigation “rot.” Note that this is Democrats trying to destroy a Democratic governor.

Greece announces that it will fight Bulgaria without issuing a formal declaration of war (it doesn’t want to take responsibility for officially starting a war which it claims Bulgaria actually started). Serbia simultaneously announces that a state of war exists and that it accepts Russian arbitration.

British police are out in force to protect the Henley Regatta against suffragette attack.

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Today -100: July 1, 1913: Of Balkan wars, big armies, and suffragette plots

After weeks of minor skirmishing, the Second Balkan War begins in earnest with a major Bulgarian (or, as the increasingly erratic NYT Index puts it, Fulgarian; if there are no such people as the Fulgarians, there should be) attack on Serb forces in Macedonia and Greek forces in, I think, Salonika. Serb Prime Minister Pasitch was addressing his Parliament in support of accepting Russian mediation when the news arrived. Fulgaria did not issue a declaration of war (indeed, it claims that the Serbs and Greeks started the war).

The German Reichstag gives the kaiser the larger army he demanded. Some of the money for this will be raised by revoking the exemption of federal princes (whoever they might be) from taxation. The government said this was a patriotic gesture on the princes’ part and could not constitutionally be written into law, but the Reichstag wrote it into law anyway, because fuck those guys.

In Britain, the Daily Express says there is a suffragette plan to murder cabinet ministers if any suffragette dies in prison.

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Obama goes to prison

Specifically, Nelson Mandela’s old cell on Robben Island. CAPTION CONTEST!

(Click on image to actually see it, grumble bloody Blogspot grumble grumble)


“Man, I’d just have droned his ass.”

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Today -100: June 30, 1913: Of falls

Sen. Albert Fall (R-New Mexico) denies that he’s the unnamed senator who Mexican officials claim gave $200,000 to the rebels. Fall, who has extensive properties in Mexico, has called for an end to the arms embargo on the revolutionists (although Pres. Wilson loathes Huerta, he still allows arms exports to his regime).

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Favor?

Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa says Joe Biden asked him to reject Edward Snowden’s request for asylum “as a favor.” But is that a paraphrase? I want (but don’t really expect) journalists to nail Biden down on whether he used that exact word. I want to know if he thinks decisions on political asylum should be made on that basis.

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Today -100: June 29, 1913: Of immortal stetsons, bad clams, bacon, and the twin evils of our civilization

Headline of the Day -100: “Mrs. Stetson Feels She Is Immortal.” She leads a splinter Christian Scientist group.

Death of the Day -100: G. Waldo Smith dies after eating bad clams. Because if anyone ever had a destined-to-die-after-eating-bad-clams name, it was G. Waldo Smith.

The federal government approves plans for the dissolution of the merger between the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railways, as ordered by the Supreme Court under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

Sen. Augustus Octavius Bacon (D-Georgia) suggests that the solution to Mexico’s problems is for all the white men of the educated classes to take up arms to establish order throughout the country. I don’t know why no one thought of that before.

The LAT interviews Mississippi’s new US senator, James Vardaman, about his plans to introduce legislation to ban saloons in the District of Columbia, segregate the entire city, and add Jim Crow cars to every passenger train in the country. “I am going to fight whisky and the negro,” he said. “They are the twin evils of our civilization.” He wants the 14th and 15th Amendments repealed and negroes barred from voting throughout the US. He complains that the continuing racial issue means that the South is a one-party region dominated by that single issue. White Southerners disagree about the tariff, for example, but vote together to put down the negro, and that’s just not healthy. Like every racist pig, he insists that “I am the best friend the negroes have in the United States”.

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Today -100: June 28, 1913: Of job lots

The LAT has an editorial objecting to the idea being floated by, well, probably no one, that the US sell the Philippines to Japan. I presume the LAT’s intentions here are to use anti-Japanese bigotry to tar Woodrow Wilson’s plans to give the Philippines independence. By an interesting logic, the Times says that the Filipinos became American citizens by a combination of conquest and purchase, just like California, so it would be morally wrong to “turn these American citizens in a job lot over to Japan”. The Times also worries that without American protection, these citizens might be forced to abandon their property or “sell it for a song to Japanese purchasers.” As opposed to the recent California law forcing Japanese people to sell their property or lose it.

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