Guy Fawkes arrested in the cellar of Parliament with the explosives.
Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason, and plot;
There is no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!’
Early in the morning of November 5, Guy Fawkes crept, torch in hand, into the cellar beneath the House of Lords in the Palace of Westminster. In that cellar, he and his fellow conspirators had previously placed a cache of 1800 pounds ((36 barrels, or 800 kg) of gunpowder. Just as he was about to ignite the barrels, blowing himself and the House of Lords to Kingdom Come, the torch was snatched from his hand by a man named Peter Heywood.
Fawkes was arrested and taken before the privy council where he remained defiant. When asked by one of the Scottish lords what he had intended to do with so much gunpowder, Fawkes answered him, “To blow you Scotch beggars back to your own native mountains!”
So went the attempted Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
The intention of the plotters was to use the explosion, timed to coincide with the opening of Parliament, to kill King James I and eliminate much of the ruling Protestant aristocracy. They also intended to kidnap the royal children, then raise the standard of revolt in the Midlands with the object of restoring the freedom to practice Catholicism in England.
Dr. Mercury, at Maggie’s Farm, is on the side of Gunpowder Treason, and serves up a nice video excerpt from James McTeigue’s V for Vendetta (2005).
There was pushback from the Pentagon press office, and in a piece by Jonathan Weisman in a Wall Street Journal blog, pooh pooh’ing yesterday’s report from two major Indian media outlets, the Press Trust of India (PTI) and New Dehli Television (NDTV), that an entire US carrier group of 35 ships had been dispatched to hover off Mumbai to inderdict sea lanes and potentially provide air cover for the presidential visit.
The Pentagon press officer characterized the reports in the Indian media as absurd.
I will take the liberty this time of dismissing as absolutely absurd this notion that somehow we were deploying 10 percent of the Navy — some 34 ships and an aircraft carrier — in support of the president’s trip to Asia,” said Morrell at today’s Pentagon briefing. “That’s just comical. Nothing close to that is being done.”
The US Navy does not provide on the Internet direct indications of the present location of US carrier groups. But general news reports indicate that at the present time there are, in fact, two US carriers, the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) and the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75) in the US 5th Fleet Area of Responsibility.
Thus, 20% of the American carrier force was already in the neighborhood.
It would not be completely surprising if one of the two groups was tasked in addition to its normal duties with operating special patrols looking for terrorist ship traffic approaching Mumbai and assigned air patrol duties in connection with the Obama visit.
Wikipedia says: “On October 17, 2010, the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) and guided missile cruiser USS Cape St. George (CG 71) arrived off the coast of Pakistan to support the coalition troop surge in landlocked Afghanistan”
If you have a carrier group “off the coast of Pakistan,” it is indeed in a suitable position to interdict the sea lanes off Mumbai and to provide air support in the region of that city.
How reasonable presidential security measures are, and how justifiable their cost, is inevitably a matter of opinion. A recent video taken in Seattle during a campaign visit just before the recent election by President Obama gives some indication of the scale of ordinary domestic security measures. Watch the video and tell me you don’t think they’d put a carrier group on alert.
Theo Spark labels this video “Obama Goes for Pizza,” but the French source merely says that Obama Has Quite an Escort.
The video’s British title, referring to going for pizza, like the Indian press reports, may feature an element of exaggeration in phraseology. Obama may simply have been traveling anywhere in Seattle or leaving for the airport. The carrier and its 34 escort ships were clearly already somewhere not terribly far away.
But all you have to do is look at the video and read about the tunnel and the removal of coconuts and you know that, give or take a shade of self-indulgent reportorial emphasis, the substance of the story was not wrong.
Obama didn’t “take” a carrier group with him. It was already in the general area, but New Dehli and Mumbai are not Republican strongholds. The Indian media has no dog in domestic American political fights, and if they felt moved to poke fun at the scale and expense of security measures going on in their own backyard for the presidential visit, their reaction was not partisan or contrived. They really were amused.
A delightful excerpt from a superb performace by Marc Minkowski and the Musiciens du Louvre of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s comic opera Platée, written to a libretto by Adrien-Joseph Le Valois d’Orville as part of the entertainments for the wedding of Louis, Dauphin of France, son of King Louis XV of France, to the Infanta Maria Theresa of Spain at Versailles on March 31, 1745.
In order to cure Juno of jealousy, the gods plot a joke marriage of Jove to the homely water nymph Platée. Mireille Delunsch performs with exceptional panache the famous aria in which La Folie (Madness) attempts to warn Platée by recounting the story of Apollo and Daphne.
Dedicated on Facebook by the gallant Constandin to the fair D.L.
An American president visiting a foreign country needs to bring along some staff, equipment, and a protection detail. Brarack Obama seems to need a little more staff and protection than most presidents. He needs 800 rooms worth of staff and requires a fleet headed by a carrier for protection.
The White House will, of course, stay in Washington but the heart of the famous building will move to India when President Barack Obama lands in Mumbai on Saturday.
Communications set-up, nuclear button, a fleet of limousines and majority of the White House staff will be in India accompanying the President on this three-day visit that will cover Mumbai and Delhi.
He will also be protected by a fleet of 34 warships, including an aircraft carrier, which will patrol the sea lanes off the Mumbai coast during his two-day stay there beginning Saturday.
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He even needs a tunnel to get to a museum.
Barack Obama’s planned visit to Mani Bhavan —the Gandhi museum — on November 6, soon after he reaches Mumbai. On Monday, US secret agents visited the museum to plan Obama’s security detail.
They were accompanied by officers of Mumbai Police and civic officials of the D ward (where Mani Bhavan is located). While inspecting the route and the buildings lining up the route to the museum, the Americans detected a skyscraper near Peddar road and also found the area to be highly populated.
Since it is difficult to monitor such a congested area, they came up with a quick solution which left the Indians accompanying them amazed: A bomb-proof over-ground tunnel — to be installed by US military engineers in just an hour.
The tunnel would be a kilometre long and measure 12ft by 12ft — enough to let Obama’s cavalcade pass through. The tunnel would be centrally air-conditioned, fitted with close-circuit television cameras, and will be heavily guarded at every point, including, of course, its entry and exit.
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Even with his own personal tunnel, there remained a coconut threat to be neutralized.
While President Obama may have taken one on the jaw in Tuesday’s elections, officials in India are seeing to it he doesn’t take one on the head during his upcoming visit.
City officials in Mumbai have ordered the removal of all the coconuts from the trees around a museum dedicated to Gandhi for fear one could come loose and fall on the President’s head.
“We told the authorities to remove the dry coconuts from trees near the building,” Meghshyam Ajgaonkar, executive secretary of the museum, told the BBC. “Why take a chance?”
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Isn’t all this getting a little out of hand?
Three Iowa Supreme Court justices lost their seats Tuesday in a historic upset fueled by their 2009 decision that allowed same-sex couples to marry.
Vote totals from 96 percent of Iowa’s 1,774 precincts showed Chief Justice Marsha Ternus and Justices David Baker and Michael Streit with less than the simple majority needed to stay on the bench.
Their removal marked the first time an Iowa Supreme Court justice has not been retained since 1962, when the merit selection and retention system for judges was adopted.
The decision is expected to echo to courts throughout the country, as conservative activists had hoped.
Byron York explains in the Washington Examiner that union money and gambling industry muscle allowed an extremely unpopular senator to survive a weak challenge.
Funded by millions of dollars from public-sector unions, Reid relentlessly attacked Angle from the moment she won the GOP nomination. Many of the earliest attacks went unanswered, forming impressions of Angle so negative that they outweighed the voters’ negative opinion of Reid.
And then there was Reid’s organizational strength. Both Reid and Angle held their election-night parties in Las Vegas casinos, Reid in the new Aria complex and Angle at the Venetian. That’s nothing out of the ordinary in Nevada, but the difference between them was that Reid was entirely at home, with the enormous financial power and organizing muscle of the gambling industry and its union allies in his corner, while Angle was relying on votes from people who live far from Las Vegas. Republicans across the country who were hoping for a miracle in this race discovered that raw power wins the day.
And bending the rules, too. On election day there were reports that casino giant Harrah’s had worked with the Reid campaign and the unions, particularly the Culinary Workers Union, to herd virtually all unionized employees to early voting stations to vote for Reid. According to a report in National Review Online, one Reid staffer told Harrah’s officials that he would do anything—for emphasis, he wrote it ANYTHING —to get those workers to the polls.
By mid-day Tuesday, the Nevada Republican Party had filed a complaint with the Secretary of State’s office. “Employees’ votes were being tracked and supervisors were instructed by top management to personally confront employees to find out why they had not voted,” the complaint said. “Further, the evidence shows that Harrah’s management has continually communicated to employees their concern with electing Harry Reid and not just to ensure that the employees voted for the candidates of their choice.” Such conduct, the complaint argued, violates Nevada law.
The Republican capture of 60-70 House seats well exceeds the most optimistic pre-election forecasts.
It was disappointing to our best possible case hopes that we did not also take control of the Senate. Clearly, a number of weak Republican candidacies combined with democrat professional organization in ultra-blue states was too much to overcome… this time.
I really wish that we had knocked off Harry Reid and Barney Frank, and the California results are truly depressing. But, we did beat ultra-leftist Russ Feingold in Wisconsin. I am very happy to see Pat Toomey replacing Arlen Specter, and Marco Rubio’s victory in Florida is extremely significant. Rubio is articulate, charismatic and a hard-core conservative. The son of ultra-libertarian Ron Paul, named after Ayn Rand, is going to the Senate as well. Delightful.
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CORRECTION:
A Genius commenter informed me that Rand Paul was not really named after Ayn Rand.
I looked it up, and found that he says his first name is really Randall, and his wife changed the short version from Randy to Rand.
Here’s Rand Paul explaining.
Quick, somebody name a kid after Ayn Rand, and we’ll elect him!
The Onion reports that Americans Bravely Go To Polls Despite Threat Of Electing Congress:
Despite the very real threat of electing the 112th Congress, millions of courageous Americans lined up at their polling places today and put their right to vote above the awful possibility of sending a politician to represent them in Washington.
The Gallup Poll election eve results resemble nothing ever seen in the modern era of political polling.
The final Gallup Poll before President Obama’s first midterm elections Tuesday indicates Republicans are poised to reap historic gains in the House of Representatives, possibly electing twice as many new members as they need to seize control of the chamber where financial legislation originates.
Gallup’s latest findings this morning predict Republicans will easily gain the necessary 39 seats to seize control of the House regardless of voter turnout. They predict a minimum GOP gain of 60 seats “with gains well beyond that possible.” That kind of rout would be the worst shellacking of a president’s party in a half-century.
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At the New York Times, Nate Silver points out five reasons that Republican gains could turn out larger than previous polling has predicted.
