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John Boehner was sworn in today as Speaker of the House,
Give it, Nancy! I said give it!
so I guess I have to start paying attention to John Boehner now, so let’s blog his stupid first speech as stupid speaker of the stupid House of Representatives.
Nancy, look out, he’s behind you, he’s behind you!!!
NOT LIKE THOSE CRAPPY, LAZY ONES – I’M LOOKING AT YOU, MASSACHUSETTS’S SEVENTH DISTRICT: “I am honored and humbled to represent a great, hard-working community in Congress.” (Note to any readers in Massachusetts 7th; I picked that number at random, I don’t even know where you are, except probably in Massachusetts, I’m sure you’re lovely, so no complaints please.)
YEAH, WE’RE ALL REALLY GRATEFUL, OHIO’S 8th: “The people of Ohio’s Eighth Congressional District continue to afford me the privilege to serve, for which I am deeply grateful.” And the privilege of leaving Ohio in the winter, or any time, really. (Note to Ohio... ah, screw it.)
Aaaand, he’s crying.
BECAUSE THERE WON’T BE ANY MORE ROAD MAINTENANCE FUNDING, SO THE CAN WOULD JUST FALL INTO AN ENORMOUS POTHOLE: “No longer can we kick the can down the road.”
BECAUSE WHEN YOU THINK HUMBLE, YOU THINK JOHN ANDREW BOEHNER: “The American people have humbled us.”
Humble
OR SELL IT TO THE HIGHEST BIDDER. YOU KNOW, WHATEVER. “Our aim will be to give government back to the people.”
SIZE DOESN’T MATTER: “We will dispense with the conventional wisdom that bigger bills are always better...”
NO PREMATURE LEGISLATION: “...that fast legislating is good legislating”.
HE CAN SOMEHOW GET THROUGH THIS SENTENCE WITHOUT LAUGHING MANIACALLY, THAT’S WHY THEY GAVE HIM THE JOB: “Above all else, we will welcome the battle of ideas, encourage it, and engage in it openly, honestly, and respectfully.”
Fondling the Speaker’s gavel. What, he’s fondling the Speaker’s gavel, why are you snickering?
OR EVER: “We will not always get it right.”
THAT IDEA: I THINK I’LL HAVE SOME MORE NACHOS: “More than a country, America is an idea”.
IT’S THE PEOPLE’S HOUSE? THAT’S GREAT, CUZ THE PEOPLE JUST GOT FORECLOSED ON: “Welcome to the people’s House. Welcome to the 112th Congress.”
Aaaaand, some more with the crying.
Lots of people have rightly piled onto Ross Douthat for his recent column. But let’s boil it down, shall we? The desire of infertile couples for adorable white babies places absolutely no moral obligation on women with unwanted pregnancies to fill that need. None.
A dirigible capable of carrying 50 passengers is supposedly being built. Its designer promises it will neither explode nor fall.
An earthquake in Russia, 7.7 on the Richter scale, destroys Vyerny, the capital of Semiryetchensk.
Chicago bans anarchists holding a demonstration in honor of the Sidney Street burglars.
The endless discussion in the NYT letters pages about the women’s suffrage movement in colleges continues with a letter from “E.K.R.”, whose daughter is a student in a “prominent college.” She informs him that “without doubt most girls comes out of college suffragettes. ... I have three other daughters, and I am quite sure that no other girl of mine shall go to college to have this stuff ground into her head. It seems to me too bad that our girls should have their poor little heads filled up with this nonsense, thereby constantly increasing the already large army of spinster ladies in the United States of America; for what young man, except one of those long-haired poltroons, would marry a girl who is both a college graduate and a suffragette?”
The Siege of Sidney Street in London. Several weeks before, some Latvians who the press would make out to be anarchists trying to finance their hideous cause but were probably just small-time burglars were interrupted by police while tunneling into a jewelry store. They killed two cops (three?) and escaped, going to ground in a house in Stepney, where they were discovered three weeks later. Home Secretary Winston Churchill, who naturally went along himself to observe the fun (a bullet passed through that nice top hat – questions about his recklessness were later raised in Parliament), sent in pretty much every cop in London to surround the house, plus Scots Guards from the Tower of London, who brought along a Maxim gun (which wasn’t used). A major gunfight ensued, lasting two hours, against what turned out to be just two people. The building was set on fire, Churchill refused to let the fire brigade put it out, and the two Latvians died, evidently at their own hands.
Click for the Manchester Guardian’s coverage.
Click for newsreel footage (3½ minutes):
LONDON - BATTLE OF LONDON - SIDNEY STREET SIEGE
The Supreme Court rules that Alabama’s labor contract law violates the 13th Amendment ban on slavery. The law prevented people who received pay in advance from quitting their jobs until it was repaid, and was used to reduce negroes to debt peonage.
Henry Cabot Lodge, although a three-term US Senator, is only now giving his first election speech, in advance of the Massachusetts state legislature’s vote on whether to give him a fourth term.
In 1910 376 people were killed by vehicular traffic in New York City, of whom 104 were killed by automobiles, 114 by or in trolleys, and 158 by horse-drawn vehicles. Part of the reason for the large number in the latter category is that while there is a stiff fine for drunk-driving an automobile it is not even illegal to drive a wagon drunk.
In 1910 there were roughly 500,000 automobiles in the US.
John Boehner still lacks a widely agreed upon nickname. He was called Boner by his oh-so-imaginative high school classmates, and lately I’ve been seeing Orange Julius. There’s The Great Pumpkin – I just had to google to see if I coined that one (evidently not) – Agent Orange, the Town Crier....
What else have you heard? What did Bush call him? Answers in comments, along with any suggestions of your own.
Honduras’s deposed president (or coup leader, if you will) (1903-7) Manuel Bonilla re-enters the country and declares himself president again. The NYT notes that “There are disquieting rumors from Washington... that the State Department rather favors the revolutionists in Honduras.” State Department, United Fruit Company, no big diff.
An American military campaign in Mindanao (in the Philippines) against “bandits” ends. One private was killed and “The head of a soldier, which was held as a trophy by the bandits, was recovered.”
Headline of the Day -100: “Dead Hand out of the Ice.” A small boy finds an axe-murdered Italian in a frozen stream in New Jersey.
Oh, and the very next story: “Umbrella Stab to Brain.” Also in Jersey.
If you’re wondering why I haven’t had much on the ongoing Mexican Revolution, a NYT editorial beginning “One who reads the newspapers with some care may note that there is ‘war’ in Mexico” goes some way towards explaining it. The Times says that the war, which “has the proportions of a riot,” may be confined to a small part of Chihuahua, although there may be uprisings elsewhere, “But of these disturbances we only get the vaguest reports”. Those reports insist that the Díaz government “is beaten daily if not hourly. One feels sorry for a Government that is so persistently beaten, and yet is unaware of its plight.” So the NYT has only crappy sources which it doesn’t trust and it doesn’t think that its job as a newspaper is to do anything about that.
In 1910, 76 children were killed by automobiles in New York City and 215 seriously injured. The National Highways Protective Society blamed 40% of these on the children and has begun an educational program in schools about not getting run over.
NYT: “To highlight his thrift, [Jerry] Brown, a Democrat, plans to stop at a cookout after he takes the oath to snack on hot dogs and chips.”
California has a very odd oath of office.
Headline of the Day -100: “Moisant and Hoxsey Dare Winds and Die.” Aviator Archibald “Arch” Hoxsey (who took Teddy Roosevelt up in a plane in October) dies in a crash near LA blamed on “holes in the air,” which was evidently a problem in 1910. Earlier in the week he had set a new altitude record (11,474 feet). (Ralph Johnstone, another pilot who had a fatal crash in November, also did so just a few days after setting an altitude record. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere.)
And in Louisiana, another famous aviator, John Moisant, was thrown from his plane, broke his neck and died.
32 people died in airplane crashes in 1910.
