The Birth of a Notion

 Anne Applebaum traces our continuing discontents to The Don's birtherism, that bit of comic opera that she says “all of us including me, underrated.” I think she is right.

 You can hear and read her saying it in the New York Times podcast here, in response to a question about the 22 minute mark, and also, more briefly, on National Public Radio here.

 

Trump Floats Election Delay - Updated

Please tell me he can't do this:

From the article on HuffPost:

President Donald Trump on Thursday suggested delaying the November presidential election while baselessly warning that mail-in voting will lead to “the most inaccurate and fraudulent election in history.”

States are increasingly offering mail-in ballots due to concerns related to the coronavirus pandemic, but Trump has repeatedly tried to dissuade people from voting by mail, claiming — without any supporting evidence — that it will lead to voter fraud. 

Trump has no power over the election schedule; moving it would require changing federal law. The Constitution states the exact date and time when a president and vice president’s term ends. There is no clause that would allow a president to remain in office beyond that date, which is the Jan. 20 following the presidential election.

"...His likely Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, has previously suggested that Trump may try to delay the election in an effort to win."

“I think he is gonna try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can’t be held,” Biden told supporters in April. 

“This is simply not true, and it’s dangerous for our democracy. The President cannot delay the election,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) tweeted, while urging his Republican colleagues to “publicly and forcefully refute the President’s alarming suggestion that he can.”

“The USA held an election during the Civil War, and we will hold one in 96 days,” tweeted Pete Buttigieg, the former Democratic candidate and mayor of South Bend, Indiana."

Updated:

I see that Hong Kong has postponed its election for a year, ostensibly because of the pandemic, but more likely for more cynical political reasons. It is unclear to me whether that announcement came before or after Trump's Tweet suggesting ours be delayed. The timing doesn't especially matter, because we know he was thinking about it anyway. It just adds another layer to the reasons a delay should be resisted with all our strength, since it echoes the actions of a totalitarian government (if there was any doubt about Hong Kong's status under the People's Republic.)

Our Lady of Good Help

Perhaps foolishly, in light of the coronavirus*, my wife and I got away for a few days to Door County, WI.  While there, we visited a Marian shrine. 

Holy Fan Fiction

Please bear with me as I indulge in a small rant.  I am going to scream if I ever hear another homily based on the Protoevangelium of James.  The occasion was the feast day of Saints Joachim and Ann, which falls on July 26.  Of course this year it fell on Sunday, which takes precedence. So the priest decided to give some reflections on the feast today. He did make clear that the Protoevangelium was not a canonical gospel and that one was not obliged to believe in it. But he went on to repeat some of the legends surrounding the birth and childhood of Mary.

Test of New Interface

I am testing the new interface.

New Interface

Is the transition complete? Posts there don't seem to have comments.
Anyone mastered the beast?
As my mother used to say: "Why don't you leave well enough alone!!"

Margaret Sanger erased

Ross Douthat in today's Times:

"This week, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York announced that it would remove Margaret Sanger’s name from its Manhattan Health Center. The grounds were Sanger’s eugenic ideas and alliances, which for years have been highlighted by anti-abortion advocates and minimized by her admirers. Under the pressures of the current moment, apparently, that minimization isn’t sustainable any more.

"This is an interesting shift from just a year ago, when Clarence Thomas faced a wave of media scorn when he took note of Sanger’s eugenic sympathies. But Thomas was citing Sanger’s writings to suggest that abortion in America today reflects a kind of structural racism — an inherited tendency, which persists even without racist intent, for pro-abortion policies to reduce minority births more than white births. Whereas the removal of Sanger’s name, presumably, was intended to drive home the opposite point — to establish a clear separation between past and present, between racism then and abortion rights today.

"But the difficulty is that according to current thinking on how structural racism lingers and what anti-racism requires, Thomas still seems to have a reasonable case....."

And Douthat shows how. This is an argument that anyone who has ever read a biography of Sanger can hardly deny. It has now been cast in the BLM/structural racism mode of analysis and will perhaps get more attention.