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Headline of the Day -100: “Memorial to Daniel Boone. North Carolinians Erect a Shaft and a Reproduction of His Log Cabin.” They like him! I mean, they really like him.
134 members of the women’s suffrage group No Vote No Tax Association in Chicago have adopted a resolution to refuse to pay taxes until they have the vote.
A woman in Indianapolis committed suicide because she answered a census question (what company her husband worked for) incorrectly.
An Episcopalian bishop from Maryland, visiting Rome, hoped to have an audience with the pope but is informed by the Vatican that the pope “is neither a picture nor a statue to be inspected and criticized”.
Magistrate O’Connor of Jefferson Market Court (NYC) convicted an alleged pickpocket, who had a record but against whom the only evidence this time seems to have been that he was “jostling pedestrians,” because that he understand what the judge was saying. The defendant displayed his huge hands and asked how he could possibly pick a pocket: “I can hardly put my hand in my own pockets.” The magistrate replied, “Don’t try to kid me. You know a good dip [pickpocket] doesn’t work with his hand. He works with two fingers. You know what ‘bringing the hanger’ [opening a woman’s handbag] means, don’t you?” Greenfield nodded. “I suppose you were framing a sucker to get away with a whole front [steal everything the victim has], or at least you expected to snag a poke [pocketbook] or a super and slang [watch and chain]. Instead you got dropped by a flatty [arrested by a detective] and were canned for a sleep [held overnight], eh?” Since Greenfield knew what all that meant, he got a $5 fine.
Tony Blair enters the electoral fray, to remind the British people that there is someone they despise more than Gordon Brown.
His contribution is to attempt to win back disaffected voters who are considering voting LibDem by disparaging them. Such a vote, he said, is “not a serious thing”. “The fact that it might seem an interesting thing to do is not the right reason to put the keys of the country in their hands.” Possibly the British tolerance for being patronized to by smug bastards is higher than mine, but I can’t imagine this sort of dismissiveness being particularly persuasive. And unlike Gordon Brown, he knew his microphone was on when he slagged off a large segment of the population.
The Democrats are thinking about requiring everyone to carry national ID cards with biometric info. The British government likes to propose this every couple of years and what always stops it is not civil liberties concerns, but the fact that they’re expensive. Good luck to the politician who votes for making every American stand in line at the DMV or post office and write a check for $50 or $80.
Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov denies having his former bodyguard Umar Israilov, who had filed a complaint against him at the European Court of Human Rights, killed on the streets of Vienna. Said Kadyrov, “Excuse me, but it would be so stupid and cruel to kill a person in the city center. Why would I need to do this?”
Because you’re stupid and cruel.
This has been another edition of simple answers to stupid questions.
NYC District Attorney Charles Whitman proves that the white slave traffic is real. His female undercover operatives went into the Tenderloin and purchased four under-aged girls (described by the NYT thusly: “Two of them are Jewish and two American.”) (one of them, believed to be 15, cried because she had to leave her teddy bear behind). Whitman claims that the grand jury investigating white slavery has forced the trade to lie low: “One large dealer declared to the agents that though two years ago he could have sold them all the girls they wanted for $5 to $10 apiece, he would not risk selling one now for $1,000.” The price paid for the four is being kept a secret until the trial. (Update: $40 for the Jews, $120 for the Americans, who are also younger.)
There are plans for a delegation of rich Nicaraguans to visit the US in order to beg Taft to intervene militarily in the civil war there and re-establish conditions conducive to their continuing enrichment.
Two Presbyterian missionaries were eaten by cannibals on Savage Island (aka Niue). In an extinct volcano, no less.
A letter, responding to a story I’m unable to find, asks, “Can it be true... that in one of our leading hotels a lady was made to get out of one of the passenger elevators because of the pre-emption exercised by a lady of some musty European aristocracy? Is there a hotel in this liberty-loving country that would endure such dictation?”
A NYT editorial expresses relief that the NY Assembly refused to consider women’s suffrage, which would mean “a radical change in the present structure of society and the relations of the sexes. ... We are willing to admit that the social system at present has its evils, but the home is now the basis of all society, and when the home is destroyed there must be chaos before some new order, of which only the haziest ideas are now entertained, is established.”
But while that danger has been averted in NY, Kansas is moving slowly but inexorably towards that awful new order: a widow wrote to the governor asking if she might be allowed to wear men’s trousers while working at home. He asked the attorney general, “who ruled there was no law prohibiting a woman from wearing men’s trousers, especially if she were the head of the house.”
Teheran’s police chief is threatening to arrest women with suntans. Where does he think he is, Arizona?
Oklahoma passes two more anti-abortion measures over Gov. Brad Henry’s vetoes. One requires the patient to have an intrusive ultrasound and to be forced to listen to a detailed description of Your Fetus, because they should have all the facts before making a decision, while the other allows doctors to lie to women pregnant with disabled fetuses to trick them into going through with the birth, because women should not have all the facts if they might make a decision of which the doctor disapproves.
The British have imported into their election yet another American political innovation, the open-mike incident. Gordon Brown has a nice chat with a voter, gets into his car and starts complaining that they let this “bigoted woman” near him, still with a tv mike on him. And Gordon Brown being Gordon Brown, the hapless sad-sack that he is, she happens to be a grandmother who, before she retired, worked with disabled children.
The NY Assembly voted 87-46 against further consideration of a women’s suffrage amendment to the state constitution. Assemblyman James Shea (R-Essex) said he felt qualified to speak for married men: “I provide a home for my wife and I expect her to do her share in maintaining it, and I think that is reasonable enough. If we give women the vote our wives will soon be absorbed in caucuses instead of in housekeeping. ... When I come home at night I expect my wife to be there, and not in a political caucus or locked up in a jury room with eight or ten men.” Assemblyman Albert Callan (R-Columbia County) said he could speak for unmarried men, and his mother and sister threaten that if he votes for it “they will close the door against me.”
I just received an unsolicited offer (the first of its kind) from a betting website which wants to put an ad on this blog. They’re offering $500 for one year. Not going to do it, but thought y’all might be interested.
Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin is evidently not intended as a joke, although its URL is jewsforsarah.com, which... really?
CONTEST: Clearly, Jews for Sarah needs a catchy slogan or possibly a song. Which is where you all come in...
Austrian President Heinz Fischer (who was just reelected) refused to attend the funeral of the evil twin in Poland because it was his chauffeur’s day off.
A more, um, hands-on politician, Idaho Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter, was hospitalized briefly last week with some sort of bacterial infection. He “began feeling ill Saturday while helping Lt. Gov. Brad Little brand and castrate calves.”
Taft did officially nominate Charles Evan Hughes to the Supreme Court, but on the understanding that it not take effect until October (evidently the Supreme Court just took 6 month vacations back then), allowing him to participate in the process of choosing his successor. The whole thing was done by letter: Taft sent a letter on the 22nd offering Hughes the job, without knowing if he’d accept it, and Hughes responded by letter on the 24th. One possible obstacle to Hughes accepting was the small salary of a Supreme Court justice, $12,500.
The Supreme Court is currently considering whether corporal punishment in schools is legal.
The Louisiana Supreme Court rules that Jim Crow laws do not apply to octoroons or quadroons.
Obama eulogy for the W Virginia miners: “These miners lived - as they died - in pursuit of the American dream.” The American dream is at the bottom of a coal mine?
It was a slow news day (on page 1: President Taft invites Sgt Thomas Morley of the Pittsburg police, who looks just like him, to sit next to him at a baseball game), so let’s focus this post on our...
Person in the News -100: Clara Shortridge Foltz (1849-1934), who just became a deputy district attorney for Los Angeles, the only woman deputy DA in the country. Wikipedia and, better yet, this article (well worth reading), say she was the first woman lawyer in California, in 1878 (she was a divorced mother of 5). Since the law had said that lawyers in CA had to be white and male, she herself wrote a new law deleting both disqualifications and got it passed (on the second try). Then she had to sue the Hastings College of Law, a public school, to force it to admit her (reported in the San Francisco Chronicle under the headline “Two Lady Lawyers Who Demand Admission to the Hastings Law College--How They Dress”), and when Hastings appealed the ruling she represented herself again before the state Supreme Court. She helped create both the public defender system and the parole system in California, and got SF to stop putting defendants in iron cages during their trials.
A San Francisco DA once closed a case in which she represented the defendant: “She is a WOMAN, she cannot be expected to reason; God Almighty decreed her limitations ... this young woman will lead you by her sympathetic presentation of this case to violate your oaths and let a guilty man go free.”
She was the president of the California Woman Suffrage Association in her 30s and drafted the suffrage amendment that passed in 1911.
She was a descendant of Daniel Boone and the sister of Sen. Samuel Shortridge (R-CA, 1921-33). She ran for governor of California in 1930 in the Republican primary at 81.
Russia will “expel fewer Jews” living outside the pale of settlement.
A paramilitary movement for boys will be established, following the model of a group in Britain. The American version will also be called “Boy Scouts.”
British Foreign Minister David Miliband’s message to the voters: “Look, you’ve punished us enough about Iraq.”
