Bullets. Lots of bullets.

US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are firing (do not click through to the original Belfast Telegraph story, which crashes Firefox)
250,000 bullets for every insurgent killed. Really, really bad shots? Or just really careful? “Sarge, I thought I’d probably killed him after shooting him 100,000 times, but I shot him another 150,000 times, just to be sure.” “Good thinking, private, you can never be too sure.”

Today -100: January 10, 1911: Little Oscar and the biplane of doom

Texas Governor-Elect “Little Oscar” Colquitt gets in a minor plane wreck. It was actually supposed to be a photo op of him in a plane on the ground, but he accidentally hit the accelerator and it went several hundred yards before the pilot, who was running along beside it or being dragged, managed to get the throttle closed.

Incidentally, Colquitt was a Democrat and the majority party in both houses of the Texas Legislature was the Prohibition Party.

But not, you know, really

Boy it’s been a tough week for political metaphors, what with a congresscritter “targeted” by Sarah Palin actually being targeted by a loon with an automatic weapon. I mean, I’d hate for my metaphors to be taken as something I intended literally.

That said, fuck Sarah Palin.

Today -100: January 9, 1911: Of senators and remembering the Maine

The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to vote this week for a constitutional amendment for the popular election of US senators. Opponents may try to derail it by setting qualifications for electors or having the federal government oversee the elections, which would be opposed by Southern Democrats as potentially giving the vote to black people. But the Committee is expected instead to allow the states to set qualifications by making electors for Senate the same as for the lower house of the state legislatures (which is what the 17th Amendment says).

The WaPo reports that the Department of War has concluded that the Maine blew up in 1898 because of an internal explosion, not a Spanish torpedo. So, um, whoops.

Oops

Israeli soldiers kill 65-year-old Palestinian asleep in his bed in Hebron instead of the Hamas member who lived in the apartment downstairs. The IDF apologizes, saying, “Sorry, we meant to kill a different unarmed guy asleep in his bed.”

I’m kidding, of course.

The IDF never apologizes.

Today -100: January 8, 1911: Of monks & nuns, and women voters

Portugal bans monks & nuns from wearing distinctive dress. And anybody is empowered to arrest them for it, or any of the Jesuits already expelled from the country.

The 1910 election has been followed by criminal prosecutions of hundreds of people in various places for vote-buying. Maybe it was like that after every election, I don’t know. In the Billtown School District in Ohio, which is near, um, Ohio I guess, every single male has been disfranchised for vote-selling, so in the next election only women will be able to vote or stand for school trustee.

Today -100: January 7, 1911: Of pardons & peonage, fireworks, mosquitos, suffragettes, mutinies, and pensions

Taft refuses to pardon the president of a lumber company in Florida convicted of holding foreign laborers in involuntary peonage (however, Taft had previously commuted the sentence from 18 months to 6 months). Taft says that “Fines are not effective against men of wealth. Imprisonment is necessary.”

The city of NY has won a court ruling that may allow it to recover from William Randolph Hearst the $250,000 it had to pay out to victims of a fireworks display at Madison Square Garden on election night 1902, put on by the National Association of Democratic Clubs of which Hearst was president, which killed 18 people.

The House votes a $72 a month annuity to a soldier who volunteered for a medical experiment, allowing himself to be bitten by yellow fever mosquitos to test the theory that that’s how you get yellow fever. It is.


The Archbishop of Lyons, France, forbids Catholics reading four republican newspapers, says it is a sin to do so.

British suffragette leader Sylvia Pankhurst is visiting NY, giving speeches and raising money. The NYT article begins by referring to her as “a little rosy-cheeked slip of an English girl” and keeps up the condescension throughout, using the word “girl” a lot and calling her “little Miss Pankhurst.” It says she is 20 and looks younger. She is in fact 28, and doesn’t. She said she expects British women to be enfranchised “this very year.”

A couple of months ago, some sailors on 2 Brazilian battleships and some other ships mutinied, demanding more pay, the abolition of corporal punishment on ships, etc, or they would bombard Rio. Which they did. The Brazilian Congress voted to accept their demands and give them amnesty but naturally they were arrested when they set foot on shore. Since then 45 of the imprisoned mutineers have mysteriously died of sunstroke, gangrene and suffocation.

There is still no quorum in the Tennessee Legislature, so still no governor. The NYT notes that the situation can’t continue for long because without a government, pensions to Confederate veterans would be stopped and “No man or set of men with political aspirations would care to hazard even an indirect connection with such a situation as that.”

More Daily Telegraphy: Cats do not talk

From the newspaper of record, the Daily Telegraph:

Scientists prove that women crying is a big turn-off for men. The scientists, wearing lab coats and everything, “collected tears from women watching a sad movie and then had a panel of 24 men smell them while at the same time looking at pictures of the opposite sex. This was then repeated using a salt water solution trickled down the cheek of the same women. When asked to rate the attractiveness of the pictures, the men who had sniffed the real tears found the images much less attractive than when smelling the fake tears.”

The makers of Super Scoop kitty litter are suing Fresh Step for its commercials suggesting that cats prefer the latter litter to the former, citing the alleged fact that “Cats do not talk”.


This nattily dressed gentleman, one Phoenix Jones, practices the trade of superhero in Lynwood, Washington.

Romania is imposing income tax on witches for the first time. The witches are resisting with, yes, spells.

Today -100: January 6, 1911: Of governors, skyscrapers, and first class tickets

Tennessee’s Governor-Elect Ben Hooper is still just governor-elect. A Fusionist, he’s pretty much an accidental, minority governor, his election the product of a bad split in the Democratic Party, mostly over prohibition. Now, mainstream Democrats elected to the Legislature are refusing to be sworn in until the Fusionists stop challenging the results in several seats D’s supposedly won. Without a quorum the Lege can’t swear Hooper in.

Chicago will limit all new buildings to 200 feet, a reduction from the current 260.

The Trial of the Century? The Pennsylvania Railroad files suit against Altern Miller, the president of the Union Electric and Power Company, for $2.16, the price of a first class fare, which Miller had refused to pay for the second part of his journey after being forced to stand from West Philadelphia to Belmar despite having paid first class. Miller vows to fight it to the Supreme Court if necessary.