The map above is the late Friday afternoon SPC Severe Weather Outlook for Saturday morning through Sunday morning and you will find not much different from the previous outlook for the day. Everything running on line with Saturday looking pretty good around here with some sunshine and highs in the low 70′s. The next system moves into the area Saturday night. Indications are that it would be late Saturday night into Sunday morning…like after midnight toward sunrise. Rain and a thunderstorms are likely but nothing overly exciting should pop up. There is one set of indices from the GFS that are a bit interesting but I would discount that as it doesn’t make much sense and the much more pedestrian indices based on the NAM are much more likely. The SPC seems to agree as we aren’t even in the slight risk. We’ll watch it but I doubt if anything will change much for us. Poor Arkansas. Mothers Day will probably be dry for the middle part of the day but it will be cloudy and cool and windy and a wrap around vort lobe may even trigger a few showers late in the day or the evening. Afternoon temps may be in the 50′s. Celebrate with Mom indoors.
On This Date In History: On this date in 1872 Victoria Woodhull began her campaign for President. At that time, women weren’t even allowed to vote. Her platform was as a “free-thinking reformer” and supported free love, abortion, divorce, legalized prostitution and, of course, the women’s right to vote. One of the photos above is a portrait while the other is a cartoon showing her as the Devil. As part of her campaign, she sent out an article congratulating preacher Henry Ward Beecher for having an affair with a married woman in his congregation. But, she chastised him for not advocating the free love that she said he obviously practiced. On election day, she was in jail. The charge was for sending obscene material through the mail. The offensive material was the Beecher article. Reports of her personal practices of free love did not help her at the polls. An opponent of hers didn’t learn from her mistake.
Also on the ballot was George Francis Train. He was a millionaire with nothing else to do except to try and break speed records and advocate what he saw as struggles for freedom. Jules Verne is said to have based his novel Around the World In 80 Days on a trip that Train once took. But, Train didn’t count the days he spent in prison in France against his 80 days. He got involved in an attempted revolution and barely escaped a firing squad before he continued his global journey. He later beat his own record by going around the world in 67 1/2 days. No word on if he cheated on that one too. Neither he nor Woodhull were elected President. In fact, I bet you won’t find them on any 1872 election tally boards.
But, Train had a penchant for making money because his campaign proved to be a money making venture for him. He charged money for people to hear his speeches and he spoke over 1000 times to more than 2,000,000 people. In an attempt to show support for Woodhull, he published a collection of biblical quotations that he said were much more obscene than anything Woodhull had written. They slapped the old bracelets on him too and he was whisked off to jail.
Here’s a funny thing about this story. If you look at the platform of Ms. Woodhull that was so scandalous in 1872, you will find almost every single one of them are accepted today. If you live in Nevada, they are all legal and part of the landscape. And to carry that point further, if you look at the Socialist Party platform of the early twentieth century that helped to feed a “red scare” following the Russian Revolution of 1917, you will be amazed at how many of the items in the platform were eventually adopted by Congress. I bet that if you told someone in 1900 the things would be legal and acceptable in 2000, they’d probably fall over. Then again, they’d probably also collapse if you told them that man had walked on the moon, cured any number of diseases and that baseball players were making millions of dollars a year.
By the way….US Grant won re-election in the 1872 presidential race.
