News From the Past - July 31, 1929

Today's selection comes from Titusville Pennsylvania, which I admit I wnet to because I once lived in Titusville Florida.

Policemen Must Use Own
Slenderizing Equipment
PITTSBURGH, July 30.—(AP)— Pittsburgh policemen and firemen who want to reduce will have to use other than city-owned equipment for the slenderizing process.
Council today voted down a proposal for the wholesale purchase of mechanical health and muscle builders. The plan called for placing one of these machines in each police and fire station.

I like this one mostly for the odd terms they use - but I guess "physical fitness" wasn't in the vocabulary yet.

Something to Consider

Linda Chavez's latest article takes on the question of how her race impacts her work, and whether some of the criticisms she's received for being a Latina conservative are fair. Unsurprisingly she says they aren't.

We rightly condemn stereotyping when it maligns whole groups of people. We know that it's bigoted to use terms like shiftless or lazy or greedy to describe racial or ethnic groups.

. . . We ought to relegate terms like Uncle Tom, sell-out, and traitor-to-your-race (or sex) to the same category we do racial and sexual epithets. They reflect the same root prejudices. Anytime we assume that we know something fundamental about how a person behaves or thinks based on race, ethnicity, or sex, we're exhibiting our own biases. People aren't good or bad, hard-working or irresponsible, smart or dull, liberal or conservative based on the amount of melanin in their skin or the number of X-chromosomes in their DNA.

Fair enough as far as it goes. But let's be honest. A certain amount of Chavez's marketability comes from her Latina status. A white male saying the same things that Chavez says would not be quite as valuable to those who employ Chavez. You see most conservatives, like most people, don't want to think of themselves as racist. And Democrats have occasionally been too free with accusations of Conservative racism. And at other times they have accurately pointed out Conservative Racists. So it is obviously very comforting for Conservatives to listen to or read Latinos, blacks, women and so on who largely agree with them.

That said, I, being a white male, may not be the best person to write on this.

News From the Past - July 29, 1929

Posted that before I meant to. Todays story comes from the Daily News Standard out of Uniontown PA.

MACHINE GUNS RESTORE PEACE AT AUBURN
4 Convicts
Escape, Said
After Check
AUBURN, N. Y., July 29.—Machine guns atop the ivy-covered walls of the Auburn prison brought armed peace today and ended the most daring outbreak In any New York state penal institution.
Warden Edgar S. Jennings announced shortly before dawn that all but four of the 1700 prisoners who attempted to battle their way out of their narrow world of walls yesterday had been accounted for. The four men apparently escaped. They were George Small, New York City, serving a 12 year term for second degree robbery; Joe Catricio of Rochester, N. Y., serving a 20 year sentence for robbery; Arthur Barry of Nassau county, serving 25 years for burglarly, and Stephen Tawlak, Buffalo, sentenced to life imprisonment as a fourth offender under the Baumes law.

I guess those Machine Guns are useful. Nice to have them on our side.

I'll note that the newspaper also contains articles about Irish Day (at Shady Grove Park) and Big Slovak Day, which is apparently Friday (in 1929). I just like the inclusion of Big there. Big Slovak Day. Probably the little Slovaks have their own day.

We need an early asteroid warning system

And we need to stop all this fooling around with environmentalism. Or such seems to be the point to Jonah Goldberg's latest.

The year is 2109. Celebrations continue as mankind's heroic, century-long, quintillion-dollar effort to lower the global mean temperature by 1 degree has paid off: July 2109 is just as hot as July 2009. Few can contain their jubilation.

But even as the carbon-neutral champagne corks fly, the sky darkens. A projectile of a different kind is coming our way. An asteroid streaks across the skies, giving the media just enough time to spread the word. The New York Times, now beamed directly into subscribers' brains via digital-neural networks, fulfills ancient prophecy and warns that women and minorities will be hardest hit by the incoming object.

But there's little we can do. The space flotsam smashes into the solar energy farm formerly known as Arizona. The space rock, 100 meters in diameter, hits at 50,000 mph with the force of thousands of nuclear warheads. Millions die.

. . . So horrendous is the calamity that some even wonder if the enormous investment in fending off climate change might not have been better spent.

Um. OK. that seems like an odd argument; but how about this. We build an early asteroid warning system and fix the damn environment?

Like Ann Coulter but More Vile, it's Doug Giles

Trying to make a rhyme. Anyway, Doug Giles regularly writes about how he prefers a muscular type of Christianity, a Christianity of Hate if you will. This week, however, he sticks to politics, and shows why he is really working at at being more vile than Ann Coulter.

Did anybody else notice feces fumes coming off Obama’s head during his last presser? I think after that methane emission Obama owes Al Gore a few grand for carbon offsets. This guy has taken lies, hype and spin to an all-new human level. I hear Beelzebub is jealous.

Watching Barack work his voodoo last Wednesday was like watching Michael Jordan airwalk, or Michael Jackson moonwalk, or Gary Busey simply walk. Or maybe it was like watching Rosie O’Donnell devour a five-gallon bucket of bacon grease sprinkled with lizards and broken eggshells in 30 seconds flat.

It was truly amazing to behold B-HO lie his mocha-chino off to America about his Health Care Reform Bill or Health Insurance Reform Thing-a-ma-jig or whatever the heck it’s called now. His ability to misrepresent like that must stem from his Muslim upbringing; y’know, the whole “end justifies the means” mantra.

Is the end justifies the means really a Muslim doctrine? Maybe he meant Marxist and confused the two.

I debated leaving in the bit about Rosie O'Donnell just because it's so very ugly, but then I figured you needed to see the type of Christian that Giles is.

News from the Past - July 26, 1929

Gorillas attack Elizbeth Illinois, which is a silly name for a town. Only it turns out it was a monkey enlarged by the power of moonshine.

Think Person
'Saw Things'
Freeport, III., July 26-{AP)— The terrible gorilla 'which yesterday had Elizabeth, Ill., agog, astir and aghast had shrunk today to a monkey, if even that.
The farm women who locked themselves indoors, and the men folk who went forth with guns and grim determined faces, were breathing more easily. The "gorilla" they wanted was the one who started the story.
Preeport police said the gorilla was a combination of monkey and moonshine. A carnival lost some monkeys
while showing here recently, The police hold that some person suffering from sunshine and moonshine saw a monkey and translated it into a gorilla.
As one astute officer explained, even good whiskey has been known to produce an entire horde of pink elephants.

Ok this is kind of a silly one - but isn't there an entertaining movie in it somewhere? Monkeys and Moonshine!

Come off it!

Here is one of the chief complaints against providing a government option to to health care, coming from Jonah Goldberg's latest article.

Under his plan, an official body -- staffed with government doctors, actuaries, economists and other experts -- will determine which health-care treatments, procedures and remedies are cost-effective and which are not. Then it will decide which ones will get paid for, and which won't. Would a 70-year-old woman be able to get a hip replacement, or would that not be considered a wise allocation of resources? Would a 50-year-old man not be permitted an expensive test his doctor wants if the rules say the cheaper, less thorough one is sufficient? The Democrats call this "cost-controls." But for the patient and the doctor, it's plain old rationing.

Except that that's what we have now. Right now people are making the call about what medical care is necessary and what isn't - those people work for insurance companies. Those people have a strong motivation to deny expensive services that would negatively affect their cash flow. At least in "Obamacare," the people "rationing" will be working for the government.

Poor Rush Limbaugh

Brent Bozell steps up to the plate this week to defend Rush Limbaugh against some pretty mean insults coming his way. For one thing, many liberals make fun of him for being fat.

Now I'm somewhat with Bozell on this one. It is one thing to note that Limbaugh doesn't have much sympathy with the hungry in America; that's fair game. But some of these attacks go well beyond that and are frankly pretty ugly.

But of course Bozell, being Bozell, has to overstep.

Let us be honest: Sometimes conservative talk radio goes too far. But never will you hear a credible conservative talk show host -- say, Rush, or Hannity, or Levin or Ingraham -- resort to this sort of ugliness.

They don't have to. They just call liberals liberals and laugh, while those liberals explode with outrage.

Yeah that's all Rush does. Wait, no it's not. What Rush does on his show is gin up hatred for Liberals as often as he can.

We view liberals as a threat to the founding of this country. We view them as a threat to the future. We view them as a threat to the traditions and institutions that have defined this country's greatness. We view them as people who need to be defeated, not worked with.

Like that.

And as I've noted before, Limbaugh doesn't confine himself to insulting the powerful and the wealthy. Instead he attacks every liberal as a threat to this nation. So while I'm not keen on the fat jokes, there's still plenty about Rush to attack.

Pat Buchanan and the Persecuted Evangelicals

Buchanan is upset at the Sotomayor nomination, as all good conservatives are. But beyond that, he asks some tough questions about the role of White Evangelicals in our justice system, in his latest article.

And who is the least represented minority in America on the U.S. Supreme Court? Not Catholics, who have two-thirds of the seats. Not Jewish-Americans, who though 2 percent of the population, have 22 percent of the seats. Not African-Americans, who at 13 percent of the population have 11 percent of the seats. And not Hispanics, who at 15 percent of the population will have 11 percent of the seats.

No, the most underrepresented group of Americans -- nay, the most unrepresented minority, the largest group of our fellow citizens never to have had one of its own sit on the U.S. Supreme Court in the modern era is -- Evangelical Christians.

. . . Republicans should now be searching for highly qualified Evangelical Christian judges and constitutional scholars, women as well as men -- and, when falsely accused of being "anti-Hispanic" or "anti-woman," ought to reply: "What do you liberals have against white Christians, man or woman, not to have named one in 45 years?"

He does use the turn Christian and Evangelical interchangeably; but seems to realize that Catholics are Christians. At any rate, I don't have a lot to say about this particular nonsense; the argument that White Christians aren't powerful enough in our society always makes me laugh.

News From the Past - July 20, 1929

This is from the Charleroi Mail From Charlerrow Pennsylvania. Kind of a jokey article.

Witness Ejected From
Court, Proves Prisoner
Winchester, Eng., July 20 - "That's a lie," shouted a man to a witness in court here.
"Turn that man out of court at once," ordered Justice Hawkes.
Immediately tehre was a scuffling of feet in the dock and two burley warders were obeying the order and were rushing the offender down the steps of the dock.
It was the prisoner who had shouted.
He was quickly brought back.

Yeah I do like the idea of a guy nearly getting away because he's thrown out of court. But it's still kind of a jokey article.

Those Darn Kids!

Burt Prelutsky, humorist, in his latest article, is trying to pin down just when America started to go bad. Was it when Carter failed to take out the Ayotollah? Was it when Bill Clinton got a blowjob? Or was it this?

For all I know, things might have begun sliding the very first time some slack-jawed teenager struck a pose and struck a chord on an imaginary guitar. There was a time, after all, when most American kids were actually given music lessons and learned how to play an actual instrument, and even saved up their allowance to buy sheet music.

Ah the good old days. Actually I saved up money and bought sheet music. But it was to a Sting song if memory serves (Russians I want to say), so I probably don't count.

Of course we did have Reagen and Bush in there, and a Republican controlled congress - so maybe Rock and Roll didn't ruin America.

The rest of the article is lazy and sloppy about what you would expect; Obama is ruining the country and apologizing to other nations (which is just awful).

Oh one other thing, check out the comments on this post from Random Goblin - he wrote a long bit, and it's worth reading.

News From the Past - July 17, 1929

This news report is from a simpler time, when simple people lived simple lives. Also it's from The Carroll Times, Carroll, Iowa.

PICNIC POSTPONED
ACCOUNT OF RAIN
The annual K. C. picnic, sponsored by Charles Carroll Council which was scheduled to be held last Sunday in Feld's grove, one mile north of Carroll, was postponed because of a continuous rain during the night previous and on Sunday.
The committee In charge has decided to hold the picnic this Sunday, weather permitting, at the same place. A cordial invitation is extended the general public to attend this annual day of fun and frolic. There will be sports of all kinds, and stands have been erected where the thirsty and hungry can satisfy their wants. Those desiring to bring picnic baskets may do so. Coffee will be served on the grounds.

It is nice that if you want to bring your own food you can.

Running out the Clock

Let's be frank; it wouldn't matter who Obama nominated, Republicans would have trashed them using most of the same arguments they've used against Sotomayor. And today's article from Ed Fuelner just underlines that. It's the old canard about using foreign law to settle American questions.

Just two years ago a book titled “The International Judge” featured an introduction she penned. “The question of how much we have to learn from foreign law and the international community when interpreting our Constitution,” she wrote, is “worth posing.”

Yep - because that means that when she's hearing cases on the Supreme Court she's just as likely to draw from the the French or Sudanese constitution as the American one.

Oh and get this, Judge Ginsberg said that Judges should be aware that other nations look at how we interpret laws. Horrors.

Of course neither of those quotes says that the justices involved will misinterpret the law based on foreign laws, unless you are already convinced that Justices Ginsberg and Sotomayor are already going to misinterpret the law. Rather they are just commenting on the world that judges live in; there are more laws then our own and there's nothing wrong and possible much good with being aware of that.

I find myself wondering if a liberal Justice said "I really like listening to Miles Davis in my chambers while I am writing my decisions; something about that music gets to me." if we'd read day after day of articles suggesting that this Justice was going to go to Miles Davis rather than the law or the constitution.

But the plus side is that Sotomayor is very likely to be our next justice, as Mike Madden notes in an article about the last day of hearings.

Four days of hearings demonstrated what everyone already knew about Sotomayor: She's obviously qualified, she's not remotely the radical activist the right says she is, and her appointment as the first Latina justice truly will make history. The only question left by the end of the day Thursday was exactly when the Senate would get around to making her confirmation official.

Scare Tactics

There are a lot of articles on the Sotomayor hearings, as you might expect. With the Republicans/Conservatives pretending that the Moderate Obama is practically a Stalinist, it's not too hard for them to approve the balanced Sotomayor is a fringe and somewhat crazed judge. One example comes from Horace Cooper, in which he trots out the standard arguments.

He references the Wise Latina, but like all conservatives, leaves out the context. For those who don't know the quote, while a bit further than I would go, was basically saying that her experience brings some value to the role of judge. In a judicial system, that by any measure, treats blacks and Hispanics differently than it treats whites, and treats the poor differently than it treats the wealthy I don't know what's so controversial about saying that.

And then he brings up the line about the courts of appeals being where policy is made. And he takes this further out of context. Again Sotomayor was asked what is the difference between Courts of Appeals and other courts, and what she said is, in reality, completely non-controversial. But Cooper, of course, reads it as a prescription for activist courts.

. . . policy making is among the least appropriate practices of the judiciary and her comments raise the question as to what policies will be promulgated and for whose benefit and perhaps most importantly if the U.S. Constitution and American law won’t be used, on what will she use instead as the basis for these policymaking decisions?

Except that of course precedent is a key part of our legal system. Yes the Congress passes the laws, but interpreting them often falls to the courts. And that's where Sotomayor is, naturally, completely right in noting that they are required, in listening to their cases, to decide what that precedent is going to be. And they determine that precedent by referring to the Constitution and American Law.

What exactly is controversial about that?

He also pads out his article by talking about a Clinton era appointee who he sees as similar; subtly equating the two, although it's clear she went a good deal farther than Sotomayor.

I do think it's interesting that in her legal decisions, with the exception of Ricci (in which they believe she should have had empathy for a white fireman and ruled in his favor regardless of the law), they aren't finding anything. She wasn't appointed yesterday. You'd think with that record they'd have more substantial criticisms, but I guess not.

For more on the court of appeals policy quote, check out this post at the Huffington Post.

News from the Past - July 15, 1929

News from the mean streets of LA today - it's the sad story of a movie messenger who got robbed, brought to you from the Jefferson City Post-Tribune, Jefferson City, Missouri.

Los Angeles Theater
Robbed of $15,000
LOS ANGELES, July 15.—(AP)— A messenger of the Chinese Theater, one of Los Angeles' largest motion picture houses, was robbed of approximately $15,000 today by three men, one of whom was captured by police. A pedestrian was wounded in an exchange of shots between the policeman and the robbers.

It's a hard town.

News from the Past - July 14, 1929

OK this is legitimately an odd one - from the Nevada State Journal out of Reno, Nevada.

'Girl' Becomes Boy
To Go Into School
SELINSGROVE, Pa., July 13.- (AP) —Marion Bodmer, 19. son of Gurgess G. A. Bodmer, after masquerading for 19 years as a girl, donned mannish attire and is preparing to enter the legal profession. This was revealed here today when it was learned that Young Bodmer had enrolled at an Allentown preparatory
school, a boys' school.
Inquiries as to why a girl was enrolling at a boys' preparatory school brought the admission from the parents that Marion or Marian was really a boy and not a girl.
Young Bodmer was graduated from the Selinsgrove High School in 1928 as a girl. He had made a good scholarship' record and, had played three years on the girls' basketball team at the school.

OK - so I guess he grew up as a girl for 19 years? I wonder how that worked out for him.

Your Weekly Rush - Obama Wants America to Fail

Yeah - Limbaugh just got back from vacation, and he's still pretty upset.

It's really not even a question of wanting Obama to fail. He has failed, not the way I wanted him to fail. He succeeded in his mind. He has succeeded. This is my whole point. This is a man with a chip on his shoulder. This is a man who seeks to get even. He apologized for this country again on this latest trip. He said, "We had nothing to do with the Cold War. We had nothing to do with anything, no, no, no." He's out there apologizing and I believe this man has as his intention to cut this country down to size, and that's why I think he chose Sonia Sotomayor.

I think we've got people here who have a deep resentment of this country. He's into transfer and redistribution of wealth and to do that he has to take wealth from somebody, and he's taking wealth from those who have produced it and created it, and he's going to transfer it to those who can't.

He was more clear on this today, when I was listening to him driving around at lunch. Obama wants this country miserable, so he can punish it with liberal programs.

Maybe Limbaugh should go back on vacation.

A Small Thing

This is just niggling me, so I'm going to get it out there. I am reading Michael Barone's latest article.

Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, who promised a health-care bill last month, still isn't delivering, and neither is the Health Committee's Christopher Dodd. They're both trying to nibble down cost estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, which has put the price tag at a trillion or more. But their latest ploys -- broad-based tax increases, transferring more of the Medicaid burden to the states -- sound like sputtering.

Meanwhile, Majority Leader Harry Reid says he's taken off the table one approach that has potential bipartisan support -- ending the tax preference for employer-provided insurance.

I don't know enough about the health-care proposals to know if this is a valid approach or not; I just am annoyed at the phrase "one approach that has potential bipartisan support." What that means in this context is that Reid has rejected the Republican plan.

The argument assumes that it's up to the Democrats to compromise and work with Republicans; Republicans are under no obligation to compromise with Democrats. If there is to be bi-partisan, it's up to the Democrats and the Democrats alone.

Bi-partisan on those grounds isn't bi-partisan. It's capitulation.

Acknowledging your Biases makes you a Slave of Them

Or such is the theme of Mario Diaz's latest article.

“Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.” — Judge Sonia Sotomayor, October 26, 2001 speech at the University of California–Berkley.

Really? So now judges are supposed to ignore facts because they don’t comport with their heritage? As a Hispanic, I can proudly say Judge Sotomayor’s views do not represent my views or those of the Hispanic community in which I participate. Do you want to know what we believe in? We believe in justice, fairness, freedom, and equality. I have never met a Latino who thinks he is wiser than a white person because he is a Latino. Sotomayor stands alone on that one.

Although I proudly join her in celebrating her heritage, I strongly disagree with her judicial philosophy. I believe judges must look away from personal heritage and look to the rule of law. Judge Sotomayor’s own words indicate that she is incapable of doing this. Therefore, senators should not confirm her to the Supreme Court.

I have to Say Diaz sounds like kind of a twit for advancing this argument. She clearly is talking about how biases affect all of us, not saying that she would abandon facts or the law in favor of her biases. I mean this isn't even really an example of someone taking something out of context; this is Diaz quoting what Sotomayor said and pretending it means something else.

News From the Past - July 13, 1929

Wasn't feeling great this weekend and today is very busy, but I can't miss out on News from the Past for too long. Today's comes from the Edwardsville Intelligencer from Edwardsville Illinois. It's a somewhat shocking story, as it turns out the Governor's Wife's Negro chauffeur is a speeder.

GOVERNOR'S WIFE FINED
$7.50 FOR SPEEDING
Maishall, Mo., July 13—Mrs. Henry Caulfield, wife of Governor Caulfield, was forced to pay $7.50 fine for speeding here before she was allowed to continue from Jefferson City to Cariolton.
The ofticer who stopped the Caulfield machine at Halla Bend testified the Caulfield negro chauffeur was driving 58 miles per hour. The speed limit at that point is 20 miles per hour.

Not much to say about this one; except that reference to Negro Chauffeur kind of chafes, doesn't it?