Fraud watch: The Mail-In-Poll Mess
Mark Hemingway stories at RealClearPolitics that “28.three million mail-in ballots stay unaccounted for” from elections between 2012 and 2018, in accordance with information from the federal Election Help Fee.” That’s “practically 1 in 5 of all absentee ballots,” but state and native officers “merely don’t know what occurred” to them. And whereas now we have “no proof that the thousands and thousands of lacking ballots have been used fraudulently,” their disappearance “raises critical doubts about election safety.” Worse, growing mail-in voting might incentivize fraud, which a number of research have proven is a significant danger of mail-in ballots — however most states have “ignored” such fears, and 5 “now do all elections solely by mail.” That’s worrisome, particularly if “the present pandemic goes to power the difficulty throughout a presidential election.”
Tradition critic: Why Elites Hate Phyllis Schlafly
“Liberal cultural elites have had it out for Phyllis Schlafly since she defeated the Equal Rights Modification in 1979,” Colleen Holcomb sighs at The Federalist. The newest: The producers of the FX/Hulu sequence “Mrs. America” opted to painting Schlafly as “the consummate sufferer, persecuted by her personal conservative ideology and even by God.” In actuality, Schlafly was “a Harvard College-educated, anti-Communist crusader,” whose opposition to the ERA for “subjecting [women] to the draft and eradicating vital protections” made her a “villain” to the cultural left. In all, “Schlafly was a formidable lady who empowered, impressed and gave a voice to the forgotten girls of her era” — not the “sufferer” the TV present portrays. Any “intellectually trustworthy viewer,” Holcomb fumes, “needs to be outraged” by the present’s mendacious narrative.
Pandemic watch: Relearning To Settle for Dying
“Within the 103 years because the final comparable pandemic,” Elisabeth Fortunato observes at American Greatness, “our cultural relationship with life and dying has modified.” In contrast to in earlier, extra religiously conscious eras, Individuals right this moment more and more “are inclined to deny dying and decay” and strenuously keep away from critical reflection on life’s ultimate journey. A part of the blame really lies with the funeral trade, which not affords a “extra private, holistic mourning and burial expertise like these from earlier instances in our nation’s historical past.” Again within the day, older girls within the household “would wash and costume their liked one’s physique, rigorously prepare the physique on a sofa or mattress and the group would come collectively and mourn.” The ritual was a part of the coping course of, and the attention of dying paradoxically served to focus on the “inherent worth of human life as a vital fact.”
Conservative: Why Bidenistas Love Lockdowns
The coronavirus is a “clarifying catalyst for American politics,” contends Daniel McCarthy at Spectator USA. It has shone a chilly mild on financial globalism, even because it “has highlighted the category divide that globalization produces inside nations reminiscent of America.” The skilled caste, which helps Joe Biden, has jobs that “are comparatively safe,” whereas “the service class,” together with “waiters and cooks and resort maids and retail clerks and others,” are out of labor and out of luck. “To not fear: The skilled class will write all of them checks for $1,200.” It’s wealthy: The identical “neoconservative, anti-Trump Republicans and Biden Democrats” who empowered China throughout a long time are actually calling for harsh lockdown measures and “attempting to close up skeptics and dissenters.”
From the left: ‘Reopening’ Gained’t Save Biz
Many governors, together with Florida’s and Georgia’s, are “hoping to jolt the financial system again to life” by permitting companies to reopen — however, Vox’s Matthew Yglesias factors out, they’re in for a impolite awakening once they understand they “can’t power folks to patronize them.” Clients “started abandoning America’s eating places” properly earlier than the lockdowns and can nonetheless be “cautious of really exhibiting up,” even when governors reopen them. And any conceivable reopening “will nonetheless depart giant segments of the financial system,” together with accommodations, salons and airways, “largely shuttered,” as Individuals have solely began “paring again on pointless spending, prompting additional rounds of misplaced earnings” for companies. “Reopening” alone gained’t save the financial system: For that, we want “actual public-health victories.”
— Compiled by Karl Salzmann & Sohrab Ahmari