Berlusconi’s party will not be running candidates in regional elections in 2 of the 13 regions voting later this month. In Lazio (around Rome), a party official failed to turn in the candidate list by the deadline. He says he was late because he was eating a panino sandwich. Or he was checking on his sick daughter. Or he was “distracted” by the Radial Party members. And in Lombardy, 500 of the necessary 3,500 signatures turned out to be invalid. This is a definite bump on the political road for showgirl slash dental hygienist Nicole Minetti, who was to have run in Lombardy. The Assemblea regionale’s loss is dental hygiene’s gain.
Reading Orrin Hatch’s WaPo op-ed on why reconciliation would be the worstest thing ever leads me to wonder: which is the better verb – to “ram” through HCR or to “jam” it through? Ram, jam. Jam, ram. Has Frank Luntz focus-grouped this yet?
In Philadelphia, pretty much the entire city is pressuring the trolley car company to accept arbitration, but it is still refusing. The NYT thinks there won’t be a general strike in Philadelphia, because businesses would take the opportunity to replace their workers with non-union ones and reorganize on an “open shop” basis to escape “union tyranny.”
The Maryland Legislature fails to pass a proposed bill to give women the vote in Baltimore municipal elections.
Mayor Samuel Shank of Indianapolis plans to introduce women police to clear the streets of the shopping district of “objectionable characters.”
The Chicago City Council considers enacting an ordinance restricting the length of women’s hatpins, which often stick several inches beyond the hat and are thus a hazard. Some women, on the other hand, insist that hatpins remain available for self-defense.
Well this is sad. D’Oyly Carte singer John Reed has died, and I can’t find his rendition of the Nightmare Song from Iolanthe on YouTube. Also – no obit in the London Times?
The Philadelphia unions vote for that general strike in support of the trolley-car operators, although the start will not be for six days. The violence ramped up again, now that the State Police have left the city to shoot at the Bethlehem Steel strikers instead. At 6th street, a crowd was smashing the windows of trolley cars; a motorman of an approaching trolley turned on full power in order to plow through the – then he got scared and jumped out. The car jumped the rails, hitting the crowd and smashing into a candy store, killing two people, one of them a child.
Chicago elevator operators have voted to strike. There are over 800 of them in the union. Well, I thought that was interesting.
Surgeons at Beth Israel used an X-ray machine to guide forceps in removing a nail from a 9-year-old boy’s lungs (he’d swallowed it).
Yesterday -100 was woman’s day for the American Socialists, which held women’s suffrage meetings all over the country. The NYT has been printing red-scaredy-cat letters for days, warning that women’s suffrage means socialism and socialism means women being shared in common. In New York, there was a large meeting where, as the NYT subhed puts it, “Speakers at Carnegie Hall All Women Except One, and He Denounces Man.” The sex traitor was one Franklin H. Wentworth of Salem, and you can read his speech (which was published) here if you want to, which trust me you don’t, though here’s a not-too-bad bit 20 pages in: “I do not fear the free woman. I fear only the enslaved woman. The man who fears to see his mate walk the earth a free and untrammeled being is himself at heart a slave, unworthy of his mother’s agony. I do not know what woman will do when she is free. I am willing to trust her. I do not even know what man will do when he is free! But what I do know is that all outworn institutions of human tyranny that fear the free man are the same ones that doubly fear the free woman”.
The White House announces a new social secretary, who clearly deserves the job on the basis of her name alone: Julianna Smoot. White House Social Secretary Julianna Smoot.
In a tactic they must hope won’t get back to their white Bible Belt base, anti-abortionists are targeting black communities with claims that abortion is a “conspiracy” to keep the black population down. Says the NYT, “Black abortion opponents... sometimes refer to abortions as ‘womb lynchings’”. Sigh. Of all the anti-abortion arguments, this one is as contemptuous of women as any I’ve recently heard. Will black women respond positively to a campaign that tells them they are the idiot dupes of white racists?
(And Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona said today that the abortion rate among black women means that “Far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by policies of slavery.”
At the other big strike in Pennsylvania, the State Police shoot at strikers at the Bethlehem Steel Works, killing one and wounding two others. The NYT keeps stressing that some of the strikers are “foreigners,” and darkly notes that foreigners have bought up every pistol for sale in the area.
A bomb went off in a NYC tenement. Someone, presumably a member of the Black Hand (as the Mafia was known), was trying to put it together in his apartment. He escaped before police arrived, but did leave behind three fingers.
The NYT has caught up with the story of the Dreadnought Hoax, actually carried out in England on the 7th. Several members of the Bloomsbury Group, which first made itself known to the wider public with this event, disguised themselves as princes from Abyssinia and were given a royal tour of the H.M.S. Dreadnought, the most powerful battleship in the Royal Navy or indeed the world. This is them:
The one on the left, “Prince Sanganya,” is Virginia Woolf (Virginia Stephen, as she then was). To her right are Duncan Grant, Adrian Stephen (Virginia’s brother), playing the translator, Anthony Buxton, Guy Ridley and Horace de Vere Cole, playing a Foreign Office attaché (as of late February, their real names were not known beyond their circle of friends). They blacked up, put on false beards and shoes with turned-up toes, and spoke in a gibberish comprised of bits of Greek and Latin, pointing and exclaiming “Bunga bunga.” For some time thereafter, people on the streets muttered the phrase whenever a sailor from the Dreadnought went past. (Update: I’ve just discovered that the term has an altogether less pleasant meaning now.) After the incident, the ship was sent out to sea until the embarrassment died down.
From Friday’s NYT obits page. Lucky: Robert Myers, an actuary who in 1934 determined that the optimal retirement age for the planned Social Security program was 65, has died at the age of 97.
Unlucky: Kermit Tyler, who was at the aircraft tracking center in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, and responded to reports that radar had picked up a whole bunch of incoming planes, “Don’t worry about it.”
China announces that it has deposed the Dalai Lama, calling him “an ungrateful, irreligious, obstreperous profligate who is tyrannical”. He is accused, among other things, of intrigue and refusal to pay tribute to Peking. The edict also declares all Tibetans to be Chinese subjects.
John Murphy, President of the Central Labor Union of Philadelphia says there will be a general strike if the trolley car strike is not settled within two days, and predicts bloodshed if the general strike occurs, noting “There are men in the Northeast who can shoot as straight as any trooper who ever drew a breath.” A warrant for inciting to riot is sworn out for him. The street car company rejected a plan for arbitration presented by a committee of clergymen.
The Edison Company tests a trolleyless street car that runs off batteries rather than overhead wires. They claim it can go 150 miles on a single charge, at speeds up to 15 mph.
In that clip two posts back, Obama told McCain, “The election’s over,” and McCain responded, “I’m reminded of that every day.” Do you think he has an aide (or possibly Lindsey Graham) whose task it is to remind him of that fact every day, or does Cindy leave post-it notes on the bathroom mirror: “Your name is John,” “You are a United States senator,” “You are not the president (sorry),” “You are a ‘maverick,’” “The nice man who just gave you the sponge bath is named Lindsey,” etc.
The Pennsylvania state police have “awed” the trolley car strikers. In other words, they fired on several crowds, although they seem to have killed only one person so far.
In France, two senators, Raphaël Milliès-Lacroix and Lintilhac, fought a duel in a park in Paris. Some dispute over the secret ballot. With swords and everything. Milliès-Lacroix, the former colonial minister, stabbed Lintilhac in the forearm and the seconds stopped the duel. Dueling was almost never legally punished in France, and quite popular among certain politicians – Georges Clemenceau, prime minister 1906-9 and 1917-20, fought 22 duels. The practice largely died out, rendered absurd by World War I, although Gaston Deferre, the Socialist party leader and mayor of Marseille, fought his last duel with swords in 1967.
NATO sort of admits that an air raid in Afghanistan December that killed 8 boys aged 12 to 18 in their home was a “mistake.” An unnamed NATO official says “Knowing what we know now, it would probably not have been a justifiable attack.” What sort of human being feels the need to insert the qualifier “probably” into that sentence?
Some of us have waited impatiently our entire lives for this news: jet packs will be manufactured for sale.
The Navy will allow women onto their watery phallic symbols submarines. One supporter of this decision (but not of repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell): Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead.
I just read about the current Dalai Lama visiting Universal Studios in Hollywood, then I switched to the 1910 paper, in which the very first story is about his predecessor fleeing Lhasa, which was being occupied by 25,000 “anti-Buddhist” Chinese troops (drilled by Japanese officers). China was trying to reduce the number and influence of lamas in Tibet (for example by killing them and sacking their monasteries) and settle Chinese immigrants there. In Tibet history doesn’t repeat itself, it reincarnates.
A NY Supreme Court jury awarded a 15-year-old who worked for the George Sclecher Piano Company of Ossining who lost four fingers in an industrial accident $4,000 (a grand, er, a thousand dollars, each).
In response to the Philadelphia trolley strike, now in its fifth day, the city government yesterday called in something called the State Fencibles, which was some sort of non-governmental militia. They were completely routed by the strikers, who had a lot of fun with them, pulling their hats over their eyes and so forth. The state police, which is basically a military body created to fight coal strikes, is now being called in. There was somewhat less violence today.
The NYT reports a great relief in the US Senate that the Mississippi Legislature did not elect as the new senator (replacing the Confederate colonel who once discussed with John Wilkes Booth a plan to kidnap Lincoln) James Vardaman, the former governor (1904-8), aka the “Great White Chief,” a white supremacist (“if it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched, it will be done to maintain white supremacy”) whose main concern was repealing the 14th and 15th Amendments. Instead, the new senator will be Le Roy Percy, who is much... calmer on racial issues. In 1912, when senators were first chosen by popular election, Vardaman defeated Percy in the primary and was elected to the Senate, but lost in the 1918 election, having voted against World War I.
A letter to the Times from “Anti-Suffragist” points out that Socialists support women’s suffrage, which “only goes to prove what rational and careful persons pointed out long ago – that woman suffrage leads to Socialism. The yellow banner of the suffragists is very apt to turn a bloody red, and their ‘votes for women’ battle cry is a call to the road to ruin.”
But there will be no kisses on the road to ruin. Suffragist Alma Webster-Powell writes in to deny an earlier report in the paper about her proposed tactics: “I have never advocated the exchange of kisses for votes. Indeed, my inclination would be quite different, and instead of sending pretty maids [young women, I presume, rather than domestic servants] to Albany to woo votes with kisses, I would send our strongest women to force justice with horsewhips. Force applied in a noble cause is never undignified”.
