The Basque separatist group ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) declares a ceasefire, but Spain says no thanks. This is what ETA declaring a ceasefire looks like.
Some Catholics in France are complaining that Muslims are “calmly taking possession of our churches with the complicity of the Catholic authorities.” By which they mean that one of the new gargoyles on a 12th-century cathedral in Lyons was made to resemble a foreman on the restoration project – who happens to be Muslim.
The record for “fastest furniture” was broken this weekend (but is there footage on YouTube? No there is not) by Perry Watkins and his nitrous-powered Queen Anne table with silver dinner service (113 mph).
Clive Williams, a retired electrical engineer in Henley-on-Thames, has discovered in his garden a carrot that looks exactly like Buzz Lightyear.
YOU ARE ENTITLED TO A PHONE CALL: NYC Police Commissioner Baker orders that people under arrest have a right to send a message or have someone notified by telephone without charge. In the past, cops have extracted graft for providing this service.
Headline of the Day -100: “Stabbed, He Falls Before Baby Parade.”
Political cartooning is something of a dying art these days, but Paul Conrad was one of the best, earning himself a proud place on Nixon’s enemies list and provoking Nancy Reagan into calling Conrad’s publisher at the LA Times every day when Ronnie was governor until he stopped taking her calls. Paul Conrad, dead at 86.
The Columbus, Ohio trolley company gets a temporary injunction forbidding the striking Association of Street Car Men handing out printed manner warning people not to ride the trolleys, picketing stations or stopping points, or intimidating employees.
In Bari, Italy, a mob of 2,000, displeased by an ordinance prohibiting the eating of figs because of a cholera scare, wreck the local sanitation office and beat up the employees.
Figs?
64,000 Russians have died during the current cholera outbreak. Russians must eat a lot of figs, or something.
Today Secretary of State Clinton was interviewed jointly by Israeli and Palestinian tv.
AND BY ASSOCIATED, YOU MEAN THAT YOU WERE MARRIED TO THE PRESIDENT: “And I think I’m the first person ever associated with an American administration who called for a Palestinian state as a way to realize the two-state solution.”
WHAT’S CLEAR TO HILLARY: “It’s clear to me that the forces of growth and positive energy are in a conflict with the forces of destruction and negativity.” “Forces of growth and positive energy.” That’s good rhetoric, Hills, because if Muslims and Jews can find common ground on anything, it’s that spacey new age talk like that is annoying.
WHAT HILLARY CANNOT DO: “Now, I will be the first to tell you it is very difficult. I cannot change history. I cannot take an eraser to the history books and change everything that has happened between you for so many years.” For example, while some Palestinians might wish to erase the Jews, Hillary would want to erase just one Jew, named Monica.
WHAT WE GOT: “And from [Israelis’] perspective, and one of the reasons for the skepticism in Israel, is we pulled out of Lebanon, we got Hezbollah, we pulled out of Gaza, we got Hamas.” Straight out of the Likud handbook, that line.
But it gets worse:
“So I think that Iran is a serious problem. I’m the first to tell you that.” Funny, I thought Iran was a country. “It’s a problem not just for the United States. It’s a problem for the entire region, because more than anyone, you see the results. I mean, Hamas is not only attacking Israelis; Hamas has been brutal to the people in Gaza in so many ways over the last years.” Hamas = Iran.
NO ONE DESERVES A FUTURE IN TORONTO OR CHICAGO: “I’m hoping that the leadership will be willing to try one more time and to be willing to do the hard work of making peace, because these young people – they deserve to have a future in Ramallah or Jericho, not in Toronto or Chicago.”
Asked, presumably by the Israeli reporter, why she had changed her mind since Candidate Hillary said that Jerusalem was the undivided capital of Israel: “I want to support what is the outcome that the parties can agree to.”
The chief rabbi of Britain refuted Stephen Hawking’s proof of the non-existence of God. But he did it behind the Times’s paywall, which means that you live in a cold, purposeless, chaotic universe unless you pay Rupert Murdoch.
Fortunately for those of living outside the paywall we still have the Daily Telegraph, which today introduces us to the world’s biggest potato. Those of us outside Murdoch’s praywall will just have to worship it as our new god:
Headline of the Day: “JM Barrie in Clear over Dead Babies Found in Trunk.” Turns out the trunk was owned by a nurse named Janet M. Barrie, and not by the author of Peter Pan.
Make-Over of the Day: “Phone Box Turned into Lavatory.” When was the last time you saw a phone box that hadn’t been turned into a lavatory?
Finally, some nurses at an NHS hospital in Milton Keynes do a rap about washing your hands (the rap begins at 0:58). “Even if your hands look clean / Just remember where they’ve been.” So sad, so very sad.
The American Marines in Nicaragua, having succeeded in preventing the Madriz government taking the port of Bluefields and thereby playing a small-to-medium role in Madriz’s downfall, are being withdrawn.
Taft leaks, or someone leaks on his behalf, that parts of TR’s “new nationalism” sounds unconstitutional to him. In particular, a federal child (and women) labor law and a workmen’s compensation act would infringe, Taft thinks, on the powers of the states.
Taft does not plan to do any campaigning on behalf of Republican candidates this fall. Back then, it just wasn’t done.
A mob in Graceville, Florida lynches a black man and woman believed to have shot a cop trying to arrest the man for stealing a watch. They were seized from the town jail and hanged from a trestle.
A NYT editorial tries to explain the feminist opposition to the city’s new Night Court for women without quite explaining what they object to, which is “to the systematic examination to which women of a certain class are to be subjected to in court, though its object is clearly humane and in the interest of public health and morals.” If I’m reading this correctly, prostitutes are being forced to undergo medical examinations of their naughty bits.
New York bans all betting, whether “orally or otherwise.” The bill was originally aimed just at racing, but amendments got out of hand. The racing season was just aborted prematurely, before this law came into effect.
NYC opens a separate Women’s Night Court. Feminists are organizing against it.
A negro is lynched in Jackson Crossing, Mississippi. A crowd of 2,000 participates.
Headline: “Kaiser Reviews 30,000 Men.” Boy, everyone’s a critic.
Tonight Barbara Boxer and Carly Fiorina debated for the California Senate seat (flawed transcript).
Carly: “But I think our founding fathers intended for ours to be an elected government.”
Boxer: “When she was CEO of Hewlett Packard, before she was terminated, actually, she shipped 30,000 jobs overseas. Think of it. That’s the size of Foster City.” On the other hand if she’d actually shipped Foster City overseas, would anyone have noticed?
Boxer: “I want to see the words ‘made in America’ again.”
Carly-cakes: “She voted against body armor.”
F: “Senator boxer has vilified the people of Arizona, even though the federal government isn’t doing its job.”
F: “she is also for big government and elite, extreme environmental groups.”
B: “And I have a record which won me an award from doctors who were trying to find out better treatments for burn victims.” What would such an award be named? The Burny? The Crispy?
Boxer: “So I love the military. In a very personal way.”
Questions from viewers. A Mr. Tim Tam, if that is his real name, asks, “Senator boxer, you have been staying in the office three terms. Why don’t you let other people try?”
B: “I don’t think we need those Wall Street values right now.”
F: “The truth is that California has higher-than-average unemployment rate because we are destroying jobs and others are fighting harder for our jobs. Texas is fighting harder for our jobs. So is North Carolina, Brazil, Guatemala, China, India, Russia, Poland. I know precisely why those jobs go. And I’ll tell you why. Because China for example, like Texas, like Brazil, gives companies huge tax credits. They help them cult through reg -- cut through regulation.” Fiorina’s new slogan: culting through regulation.
F: “And frankly, I don’t think there are enough people in Washington who understand why private sector jobs are important.”
SF Chronicle reporter Carla Marenucci asked Boxer about the most important moment in recent California political history, when Boxer asked Gen. Michael Walsh to call her senator rather than ma’am. Boxer says she called him general. Evidently after the scandalous event in question, she called the general and asked if she should apologize for upsetting him and he said no.
Fee-fi-fo-orina said it was just a shame that Boxer is using Hewlett Packard, “a treasure of California,” as a political football.
Asked if she ever disagreed with her boyfriend Obama on anything, Boxer said we need an exit strategy in Afghanistan and he should appoint Elizabeth Warren, right now.
Carly says she is pro-life because “My husband’s mother was told to abort him” because of health concerns, but “She lived a ripe old age to 98.” So clearly, as that anecdote demonstrates, nobody needs abortion rights.
Carly says Boxer “said that she doesn’t think a baby has rights until it leaves the hospital.” (In 1999, and she said no such thing. It was in a debate with Rick Santorum. She said she’d had 2 children, Little Ricky said he’s had 6, she said, no your wife had 6, he said no we both did, “That’s the way we do things in our family.”)
Fiorina says she’d overturn Roe v. Wade “If there were an opportunity. It’s not something I’m running on.”
F. keeps saying Boxer has sponsored only four successful bills in her Senate career. Eventually, Boxer notes that the way Fiorina is counting, neither McCain nor Feingold would get credit for McCain-Feingold.
F: “Recovery summer has become the summer of despair in California.”
F. seems to support Prop. 23 (to kill state global warming legislation), although she also refuses to take an explicit position, because “The only way to impact global warming is to act globally. A state acting alone will make no difference.”
B. says if you support Prop. 23, “China takes the lead away from us with solar. That Germany takes the lead from us with wind.” Heaven forfend Germany take the lead from us with wind. “But I guess my opponent is kind of used to creating jobs in China and other places.”
F: “I think it’s crystal clear that we have loads of laws.” So we should all be allowed to have assault weapons.
Another trolley is blown up in Columbus, and there is a threat to turn the trolley strike into a general strike if it is not resolved in 72 hours.
Woodrow Wilson, speaking to the American Bar Association’s annual convention, says that the “fatuous, antiquated, and quite unnecessary fiction” that corporations are legal persons should be abandoned. When they do wrong, their directors should be punished, not their shareholders. Society “cannot afford to let its strongest men be the only men who are inaccessible to the law.”
And Teddy Roosevelt makes exactly the same point – “officers, and, especially, the directors, of corporations should be held personally responsible when any corporation breaks the law” – in a speech at the John Brown Celebration in Osawatomie, Kansas which marked his first use of the term “new nationalism,” which would feature in his 1912 presidential campaign, and which meant a much stronger president, capable of overriding “local selfishness,” Congress, corporations etc in the national interest. He also called for a progressive income tax and a progressive inheritance tax on large corporations, and said, “There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains.”
Headline and Scoop of the Day -100: “Czar Growing Stouter.”
This time, it was the voluble Joe Biden who said it most succinctly: “We’re going to be just fine. They’re going to be just fine.” Obama spun that nonsense out at greater length, in a soporific monotone.
WHAT THIS MILESTONE SHOULD SERVE AS A REMINDER TO ALL AMERICANS OF: “But this milestone should serve as a reminder to all Americans that the future is ours to shape if we move forward with confidence and commitment.” Funny, I’d have said the last 7+ years of the Iraq war have shown that the future is not ours to shape, no matter how much misplaced confidence and commitment we exude.
MAYBE WE SHOULD BURN THAT DESK, JUST TO BE SURE: “From this desk, seven and a half years ago, President Bush announced the beginning of military operations in Iraq.”
“A war to disarm a state became a fight against an insurgency.” Here, Obama buys into the narrative that Bush began the invasion of Iraq to disarm Saddam Hussein. Wouldn’t want the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud, you know.
EXCEPT FOR THAT WMD SNIPE HUNT, OF COURSE: “The Americans who have served in Iraq completed every mission they were given.”
WHY WE FOUGHT: “Our troops fought block by block to help Iraq seize the chance for a better future.” And I’m sure the surviving residents of those blocks are standing by their piles of rubble, just being grateful for that chance for a better future.
“So tonight, I am announcing that the American combat mission in Iraq has ended.”
“And Iraqi forces have taken the fight to Al Qaeda, removing much of its leadership in Iraqi-led operations.” And here (and elsewhere in the speech), Obama buys into the narrative that the Iraq war was about Al Qaida.
IT’S ABOUT FIVE MONTHS LATE FOR THAT “SENSE OF URGENCY” THING: “Tonight, I encourage Iraq’s leaders to move forward with a sense of urgency to form an inclusive government that is just, representative, and accountable to the Iraqi people.”
IRAQ = PAGE. “Now, it is time to turn the page.”
WHY ON EARTH WOULD YOU WANT TO DO THAT? “This afternoon, I spoke to former President George W. Bush.”
I’M PRETTY SURE THERE IS SOMEONE WHO COULD DOUBT THAT: “Yet no one could doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security.”
HE NEVER WANTS US TO MAKE A MISTAKE: “But make no mistake: this transition will begin - because open-ended war serves neither our interests nor the Afghan people’s.”
“Over seven years before, American troops and coalition partners had fought their way across similar highways, but this time no shots were fired. It was just a convoy of brave Americans, making their way home.” So the big victory is that they didn’t shoot at us when we were leaving. Hurrah.
IT’S HARD TO GET TO KNOW SOMEONE YOU JUST SHOT OR BOMBED: “Along with nearly 1.5 million Americans who have served in Iraq, they fought in a faraway place for people they never knew.”
THE LIGHT OF ELECTRICITY MORE THAN TWO HOURS A DAY WOULD ALSO BE NICE: “They stared into the darkest of human creations – war – and helped the Iraqi people seek the light of peace.”
HOW WE MUST EARN VICTORY: “In an age without surrender ceremonies, we must earn victory through the success of our partners and the strength of our own nation.”
PAINTED GRAY AND UNDERWATER? “Our troops are the steel in our ship of state. And though our nation may be traveling through rough waters, they give us confidence that our course is true, and that beyond the pre-dawn darkness, better days lie ahead.” So, if I understand this metaphor correctly, we’re traveling through rough waters on a ship built out of troops (I’m picturing the pirate comic in Alan Moore’s Watchmen) in pre-dawn darkness to better days.
Today Obama also issued a proclamation for National Prostate Cancer Awareness Month. Just saying.
At the Israeli whitewash investigation of the flotillacide, Major General Eitan Dangot of the IDF insists “There was no justification for the flotilla, because there was no humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”
What does the IDF find justified? As Lenin reminds us, shooting a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then going over and emptying a magazine into her to “confirm the kill,” that was considered justified. (My oldposts on the case.)
The pope has ordered the closing of the seminary in Perugia, Italy, because the students gave an ovation to the king and queen of Italy.
The NYT reports that Henry Reed Rathbone is near death. They’re wrong by a year, but this story was new to me, not being an assassination buff: In April 1865 Rathbone, a Union army major, and his step-sister Clara were guests of the Lincolns at Ford’s Theatre. Rathbone received several stab wounds trying to stop John Wilkes Booth. He recovered and entered government service, but slowly went insane. In 1883, while US consul to Hanover, he shot Clara, who he had married in 1867, fatally, then tried to commit suicide by stabbing himself 6 times. He was committed to a German insane asylum for the rest of his life.
The trolley strike is still going on in Columbus. A couple of trolleys are dynamited, with passengers aboard, but no one is killed. The mob fights with soldiers.
Headline of the Day -100: “Brooklyn Helpless Before Cardinals.” Oh, baseball, not a Hitchcock, Tippi Hedren thing.
The governor of Colorado and the mayor of Denver call for Theodore Roosevelt (who they were introducing in the Denver Auditorium) to run for president in 1912. They are both Democrats.
Sorry, I just can’t. I didn’t read Beck’s speech and I got as far in Palin’s as “I must assume that you too know that we must not fundamentally transform America as some would want,” then I had to lie down.
So feel free to caption these here pictures:
(The Reuters caption says that Beck is introducing a representative Jew, a representative Indian, a representative guy unafraid to wear a pink shirt that in front of a bunch of people who think anyone wearing a pink shirt is a fag and must be killed, and a descendant of Protestant settlers.)
(Update: Palin tweets “So honored to be a part of the ‘Restoring Honor’ rally today in D.C.” Yes, Sarah, “restoring honor” meant restoring it to you, because it’s always all about you.)
Kaiser Wilhelm delivered a speech in which he insisted that the crown came to him “by God’s grace alone, and not by Parliaments, assemblages of the people, or resolutions of the people”. Predictable shitstorm ensues.
Russia gives special permission to Oscar Straus, the US ambassador to Turkey, to enter visit St. Petersburg. Permission is required because Straus is Jewish.
Secretary of War Jacob Dickinson, visiting the Philippines, hears from Moros who want Mindanao annexed to the US, or made independent, but definitely not subsumed within the Philippines.
