2020 Election Post Mortem VIII. What in the world is Donald Trump doing?

I guess the safest thing to say is that neither I, nor anyone else, has any idea, but he should stop it.

Let's start with some things that few people are willing to acknowledge right now.  While the Trump Administration has been a roller coaster ride, and an unwilling one for many people, its had its accomplishments.  Setting aside the constant drama of the last four years, his judicial appointments have been excellent and many business people feel that his management of the economy and roll back of regulations was well done.  Opponents of abortion could note that he's the most pro life President in years.  Populists can claim him as the most populist President since Andrew Jackson, if you like populism.  People who wanted a draw down in military engagements overseas got that.  His taking on China in trade was also long overdue.

None of this is to say he is without critics, but rather if you look at things from the 30,000 feet view, he had some real accomplishments and it can be argued. . . .or could be argued that his oppressors were simply unreconstructed leftists who just hated what he was accomplishing.  Not that this view would really be correct or at least fully correct either.

Now, all of that is changing.  Donald Trump is going to be remembered as the President who made a desperate last ditch effort to subvert the election after the fact and hold on to power by any means.  That will be the single biggest thing he's remembered for.

Remember Richard Nixon?

Of course you do. And when you recall him, you think of Watergate right away.

Yup.

So why on earth is Trump doing what he's doing?

Before we look at this, we need to note something else. The damage being done by the sitting President to American democracy right now is a the epic level.  We are looking like a third world country to the outside world and the constant legal actions and attacks on the process are convincing a certain section of the population that the world's fairest election system is corrupt.  It's inexcusable and it will take at least a decade to overcome it.

It will also do untold damage to the Republican Party which is on shaky ground to start with. Right now, I'd give the GOP even odds on actually surviving or splitting into two parties.  If that sounds surprising I've heard Republican after Republican of the old school openly criticizing their party.  One person I know called the party "bat shit crazy".  Another GOP member I know told me that he's leaving the party after its safe to go to the courthouse and re-registering as an independent as he "doesn't want to be a member of a fascist party".

Now most Republicans won't leave the party, of course.. . . unless the Ben Sasse, Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney wings of the party can't reconcile with the Trump wing.  In that case, we're going to have two parties.

And all of this is being done in a doomed effort.

Indeed, if it isn't doomed, it will actually destroy American democracy to some degree. Trump will not be able to govern if he actually takes the Oval Office this way.  Protests, and extremely violent protests, will occur across the nation. Trump will call for the use of the National Guard against the protestors but some Governors won't do that, and at this point I'd guess that a fair number of National Guardsmen, quite a few of whom are minorities, wouldn't report if called.  It would be a mess of epic proportions.  A second effort to impeach the President would occur, but this time in a very closely divided Senate where some Republicans would definitely cross the isle.  Republicans won't all want to be associated with the mess.  We will have seen nothing like it since 1859 and 1860.

And as noted, it won't work.

So why is this going on?

It's almost impossible to say but it boils down to about three things.  Perhaps Trump really believes he won, in which case he's delusional to the extent that there's be some sort of disorder associated with it.  That's possible, as some people come to love themselves and believe themselves so strongly, that they actually can't accept defeat.

Nobody can psychoanalyze a person remotely, but lots of people try.  With Trump its been done before and there are those who have claimed him to not be quite right.  Earlier in his administration it was claimed that a lot of his his staff routinely work to simply defeat his various notions.  Now we could be seeing him essentially unleashed with no restraint.

Or it could be that all of this is necessary as there's something to hide.  That's been suggested a lot recently, but if that's the case he was never going to be President forever and whatever needed to be hidden ought to be well hid by now, unless of course once again the staff prevented it and this is a last ditch effort at distraction.  That seems unlikely.

Or it could be a genuine effort at what would amount to an electoral coup.  The Atlantic warned of this possibility in what seemed to me to be a farfetched scenario at the time, but now the script that they set forth looks as if its being read by the administration.  In the last three weeks the Trump campaign has attacked the process again and again and it made a real effort to have the Michigan legislature decide the electors this past week.  It doesn't seem to have calculated that state laws don't allow for this process everywhere in an unrestrained manner and it didn't figure either that in some states, like Georgia, the Republican Party wouldn't participate in it.  That effort still is going on, however, with various states still having not certified. Therefore, it remains a theoretical, but extraordinarily remote, possibility that the Trump campaign could be successful at this effort in one or more states, with enormously disastrous results.

If that's the attempt, a person has to ask why its being attempted, as it would suggest that Trump is willing to subvert democracy to stay in office. But why?  It would be a national disaster as noted.

Usually when this occurs its because the forces backing it believe that they have a moral imperative to rule that overrides democracy.  In the 20th Century we saw fascist and communist parties that absolutely took that position, and in some cases they in fact rose to power initially in an election.

We also saw in the 20th Century, and earlier, the same thing with personalities that claimed a right to rule in that fashion.  In Spanish the term is Caudillo. The man on horseback.  An entire series of such rulers governed Mexico until the fall of Porfirio Diaz, who provides a good example.  He couldn't imagine the country ruled by anyone other than himself and fought a civil war over it.  Many other such examples exist, however, such as Franco of Spain and Salazar of Portugal.  Franco might provide a better example in that he continued his rule well after there was any reason for him to claim a need to do it, he just couldn't step down. And he didn't.  At least realizing that the country would transition to democracy after his death, he took steps for that to happen only after he passed away.

If that's the goal, it won't work.  But what it will do is cause the party backing the effort to look like the parties that backed those figures.  Does the GOP want to be compared to the Spanish Falangists?

None of this will work, but its making the transition to the Biden Administration problematic and it also stands, for conservatives, to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. The GOP had a good election and just a few days ago it looked like it would retain the Senate.  Now it looks like the Democrats are going to take it. Every day in which this drama goes on makes things worse and worse for Republicans.

Which brings us to the final potentiality.  Maybe Trump knows all of this is doomed but he wants to run in 2024 and this is his way of keeping the Party under his control and retaining his base.  If that's his goal, at least its the least distressing one, even if its pretty distressing.  The problem with that, beside everything noted above, is hubris.  It's an assumption that an elderly man who is overweight and doesn't look to be in good health is going to be able to run in 2024 or even that the natural winding down of the clock of time, which none of us can control, won't run down.  At his age, after all, he's blisteringly close to the end of his naturally allotted years.

In an earlier post, I predicted November and December were going to be a mess.  But I sure didn't see anything like this.

One final thought.  For the first time yesterday I saw pundits referencing the Sedition Act.

In 1973 Gerald Ford made the mistake of pardoning Richard Nixon.  He shouldn't have.  Ford's pardoning of Nixon cost him the 1976 election and it further failed to provide an example which should have been provided that a President isn't above the law.  I know all of the excuses for doing it, but they don't meet the test.  Nixon should have been tried and convicted and served time for his crimes.

Democrats are now so enraged that there's real talk of prosecuting Trump for crimes, if there are any. This is going to be an early nightmare for the Biden Administration.  Having said that, there's now talk of the Sedition Act which addresses attempts to subvert the transfer of power.  Nobody would have mentioned that just three weeks ago.  It's being mentioned now.  Donald Trump, through this conduct, will not only be remembered for his actions in November 2020, but he's beginning to become the first President to have Sedition attached to his name.

This really needs to stop for the nation's sake.  But it doesn't look like it will.  Franklin stated that the Founders gave us a republic "if we could keep it".  Jefferson didn't think we would keep it after we ceased to be agrarian and that we'd descend to rule by the mob inevitably.  Whether they were right or not, we look pretty pathetic right now.

The GOP can still save itself, and the country, from this, but it has to do so right now.  And it has to involve a unified front of major Republican figures.  They should do it as its the only rational thing to do. But so far, they seem to have simply assumed that time will fix it and people will forget it.  If they keep up not saying anything, they're going to lose in Georgia and have a party that's effectively two parties in 2021.

November 22, 1920: Violence and Echoes of Violence

An almost indescribable slate of violent events made the Monday morning headlines on this day in 1920. 

Of interest, and probably depending upon whether  you were receiving a morning or evening newspaper, the violence in Ireland may have focused on one side, or the other, in the strife going on there.

On the same day Woodrow Wilson, acting as the arbiter on where the boarder between Turkey and Armenia was to go, issued his decision.  It was a moot point, the Turks, who had prevailed in their war against Armenian, would dictate where that border would be to Armenia's detriment.

DuPont bought a giant share of General Motors.

Governor Octaviano Larrazola pardoned sixteen Mexicans who had been imprisoned for the March 9, 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico noting that they appeared to have no real connection with Villa and were press ganged by the Villista's at the time of the raid and forced to participate.

Governor Larrazola had been born in Mexico to then wealthy parents who had suffered under the French rule and who ultimately went bankrupt.  He entered the United States with a Catholic Bishop as a teenager intending to study theology, which he did do, and then become a Priest.  Ultimately, he determined he was not called to the Priesthood and became a teacher in El Paso, Texas.  In El Paso his focus turned to the law which he studied and then stood for the bar in Texas.  He moved to New Mexico in 1895 where he practiced law and entered politics, becoming the state's Governor in 1918.  He'd ultimately serve a term in Congress.  As he was highly independent and tended to anger his own party, his political career was intermittent.

2020 Election Post Mortem VII. Joe Biden and the "Catholic vote".

I first used this photo back in 2016 when I wondered if Democrats would "choose to go with the Joe you know".  As it was later revealed, they very nearly did.  Now the inevitable JFK comparisons are going to be made.

Maybe no other group in the United States struggled more with how to vote this past Presidential election than dedicated Catholics, or at least Catholics that had a strong distaste for Trump.  Indeed, at least in states where the election was not close, and therefore a "wasted" vote on a third party candidate could be justified, quite a few opted this time, as with last, to vote for the candidates of the American Solidarity Party, the only party that they could vote for in such circumstances with a clear conscience.  Indeed, some notable Catholics, and Orthodox, just flat out noted their support for the ASP irrespective of whether this state was close or not.

And on Twitter, in forms, and on Youtube debates raged.  A Catholic Priest with a Vlog declared that Catholics couldn't vote for Democrats under any circumstance on pain of losing the soul.  His Bishop stepped in to suggest that he was going too far, while a Bishop from Texas came in and praised him.  Notable Catholics in the Ethersphere squared off against each other, with some such as Dawn Eden noting disapproval of Trump and getting rebuked by other Catholics including at least one Priest.  Bishops generally urged Catholics to consult voter guides put out by the American council of Catholic Bishops that urged their flocks to very seriously consider the moral implications of their votes, but nobody came right out and stated "vote for . . . "

Of course, some weren't troubled by such things at all.  Some people felt clarity in their decisions.  Once such person I know noted that it didn't matter how much he might fight Trump personally distasteful, he was going to vote for him no matter what due to his position on abortion.

And through it all, we'd note the the following.  Donald Trump is a Presbyterian, but one whose personal behavior in the past would have caused John Calvin to lecture him from the pulpit.  Mike Pence is an Evangelical Christian, but one who is a fallen away Catholic, something rarely mentioned.  Joe Biden, however, is a Mass attending Catholic.  Kamala Harris is a Protestant Christian, but not one of a denomination that I'm familiar with.  

I don't know about Harris, but its interesting to note that of the collection of these candidates, Biden is the most personally observant, followed by Pence.  Trump is the least.  As noted, I don't know about Harris.

That doesn't actually answer any questions, however, as we'll note below. And it didn't work the same way it did with the last Catholic President, and the only other one, John F. Kennedy, who was a Mass attending President, but personally very unobservant, which people didn't know.  Catholics in the 1960 election could go and and vote for him simply because he was a Catholic, if they the voter, was Catholic.  Observant Catholics familiar with  Biden's voting record couldn't do that, and indeed  many felt they had to do the opposite.  Probably, therefore, nobody voted for Biden because he was a Catholic.  Many observant Catholics did the opposite.

In spite of all of that, it was inevitable that when Joseph Robinette Biden was elected President that his Catholic faith would soon be mentioned, and, additionally, reference would soon be made to the only other Catholic President the nation has ever had, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

John F. Kennedy.  Presented as a young, vibrant, World War Two veteran of Irish Catholic background, Kennedy in fact was in extremely poor health and taking drugs that would preclude anyone from occupying the office.  He also had the sexual morals of an alley cat and was generally a pretty bad President.  No matter, his false image is still idolized.

Now, this is yet another one of the numerous posts here that should proceed with a cautionary tale first being introduced.  It's not safe to assume that the comments here indicate how a person voted. You can assume that votes were cast, but you shouldn't assume they were cast for Donald Trump. . . or Joe Biden. . . or whomever.  

Indeed, one of the features of rationality is to be able to hold two thoughts. . . or more in your head at the same time.  And the fact that the majority of human beings do not use logic, but emotion, for decisions, makes those who use logic subject to all sorts of abuse and misunderstanding.

The Presidency of Donald Trump was virtually a feast/torture for conservatives of logical thought.  Personally he was often detestable, but he also opposed abortion and appointed excellent Supreme Court nominees of the type Conservatives only dreamed of before.  We're unlikely to see either of those things out of Joe Biden, while at the same time he's likely to be much more personable and therefore tolerable in polite society.  Cynics are very much able to make the comment here that it seems people prefer presentation over effect.

Which brings us back to our main theme.

There's something going on in the Catholic world which is easy for those in the US to miss, but it's a big deal.

The Catholic Church is by far the largest Christian denomination in the world, and its growing like crazy.  It's far bigger than any Protestant denomination, and the American assumption to the contrary.  Indeed, the novelty of Biden being only the second Catholic to be voted into the Oval Office is likely to really cease being novel quickly, as Catholics are set to make up the majority of the American population in really short order.

Indeed, the thing going on in the Catholic faith had a role in this election.  We'll get to that thing in a moment, but one of the things that took pollsters way off guard is that the Latino vote has started to swing Republican, and not just in the Cuban American camp.  That was predicted here, but arrived much more quickly than we expected.

The thing, if you will, going on in the Catholic, and indeed Apostolic, world is that the generation of Church leadership that emerged from Vatican II and which took the Church in many places far to the "left" is dying off and retiring.  As it does, younger Catholics and Apostolic Christians are coming into their own. They're highly educated in their Faith, and they're highly orthodox.

Which gives them the problem of Joseph R. Biden.

The Press, remaining largely non Catholic and secular, doesn't really grasp this at all. To them, Biden is a Catholic. But to some younger Catholics that's so debatable that there's those who will dispute even that.  That being said, Biden is very clearly a Catholic that's way outside of orthodox thought in his public life.  Indeed, so much so that younger and older orthodox Catholics would generally regarded him as a very bad Catholic generally and one whose soul is in danger.

The press version of Biden's religion is the charming Irish American one that was told for Kennedy as well, but more so.  Biden was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania to an "Irish Catholic family".  Like a lot of American Catholics whose family roots stem back some time, in reality he's of mixed heritage, but Catholic heritage, descending from Irish, English and French roots.

Indeed his middle name, Robinette, was the last name of his mother, and is a French Canadian name.  The French version of the same name is generally Robinet, the difference in spellings being due to the Quebecois pronunciation of the name which pronounces the "t" at the end of the word.  The meaning of the name seems to be diminutive of the name Robert.  Biden, on the other hand, is a Saxon name meaning a button maker.

This background frankly fits the common American Catholic background more than the media version in which everyone grew up in tweeds eating Corned Beef.  Indeed, its somewhat reflective of my own background, which also includes French via Quebec and English, along with Irish.  

Biden was born in 1942 so he's a post Great Depression, and more or less post World War Two American Catholic.  That means he was born into an era in which to be Catholic didn't mean that you were limited in occupation, as it had been basically up until 1945.  It also meant that he grew up in the Latin Rite at a time it still used Latin, but he was a young man during Vatican II.  It also, more broadly, means he experienced, as a young man, the campaign of John F. Kennedy and the turbulent 1960s, both of which seem to have been hugely formative in his political views.

John F. Kennedy was portrayed as an Irish American Catholic during his 1960 campaign for the Presidency.  And indeed, JFK was an Irish American, although one of very different background than most.  As hinted at above, and as addressed elsewhere, it was only after 1945 that Catholics of any stripe really could hope for a university education, with some exceptions, and most took blue collar jobs.  The post war GI Bill changed all that rapidly.  But JFK himself had grown up in the prewar world when that had been true, but it certainly hadn't been true of his upbringing.  He was different right from the onset.

Irish Americans didn't see it that way, however, and neither did the Irish themselves, as one of the blogs we link in here on our feed recently noted.  As Mark Holan's Irish American Blog notes, the Irish intensely followed JFK's campaign and election in 1960.  The whole world has been watching the American election of 2020, but not because Joe Biden professes Catholicism or because he has Irish heritage.  Indeed, we've had another President, Ronald Reagan, who claimed the latter since then, although again how perfectly is a very large question.

In 1960 when JFK was running Irish Americans and other Catholic Americans were in new white collar jobs largely for the first time and also were, in urban areas, moving out of the "Catholic Ghetto".   They still were regarded with suspicion by a lot of Protestant Americans however.  JFK faced that in his election campaign of that year and the memory of Al Smith, the prior major Catholic contender for the Oval Office, remained strong.  Smith has been widely regarded as having lost the 1928 Presidential election as he was Catholic, and his religion was an open topic during the race.

Portrait of Al Smith as the Governor of New York.

Smith had addressed the religious issue he was presented with by declaring that he didn't want people to vote for him because he was Catholic, and people who would vote against him for that reason weren't acting as Americans ought to and he didn't want their votes either.  Kennedy, however, basically took the view that he was a Catholic only on Sunday.

We've addressed that before, but during his 1960 campaign Kennedy pretty much disavowed that his religion was anything more than a Sunday thing at a Baptist convention.  This satisfied worried Protestants who had an irrational fear of Papal control over the Oval Office, but it was gigantically destructive to American Catholicism.

Kennedy's views were rapidly adopted by American Catholics who too wanted to be seen as American first and Catholic second, something that's not really possible for adherent Catholics to do.  This didn't present an immediate problem but it soon would.  The Second Vatican Council was held from 1962 to 1965 to address problems that seemed to have come about due to World War One and World War Two and it introduced reforms into the Church and were associated, inaccurately, with reforms that were otherwise coming about.  Some of these were relatively minor, but by the 1970s, the "Spirit of Vatican II" was running amuck in the United States and changing everything from the language of the Mass to church architecture.  In 1968 the Pope issued Humanae Vitae, now largely seen as prophetic, which addressed artificial birth control, something running contrary to the Sexual Revolution which was then in full swing, but also a few years behind the introduction of artificial birth control.  1968, at the same time, saw massive social disruption on a global scale and, in some significant ways, ended the political order that had prevailed since 1945.

The net result was that in the United States the Church was enduring change everywhere, with it being everything from architecture to the views of younger Priest just coming in.

Well that era is over.

As addressed in a recent episode of Catholic Stuff You Should Know, younger Catholics have taken back orthodoxy and re reintroducing it back into the Catholic mainstream.  These Catholics aren't your great grandparents by any means, they're smarter and better educated in their Faith. They also definitely aren't operating with the Spirit of Vatican II.  And they're not "cultural" Catholics.

And that's why candidates like Biden are a modern problem for Catholics.  More than Kennedy was to Catholics of his era.

Catholics didn't really know much about what Kennedy really thought.  We now know that he thought a lot about screwing every young woman who crossed his path.  We also know now that his blundering was complicit in the murder of a foreign head of state.  He had the morals of an alley cat sexually and was a rotten President otherwise.*

Not somebody to emulate.

And neither is Joe Biden for orthodox Catholics, although he's certainly not personally immoral like Kennedy was.  Rather, it's his political stands on some matters that are hugely problematic for Catholics.

Biden came up in the political era in which, as we've noted, Catholic politicians were allowed to be claimed to be that and pretty much ignore their Faith as long as they went to Mass on Sunday.  It didn't happen all at once. Ted Kennedy, for example, was an opponent of abortion.  But by the 1980s it was in full bloom and the "I personally believe, but" Catholic politician became the Boomer rule.  An example of that is Biden, and another Nancy Pelosi.  They both freely vote for and even implicitly support matters which Catholic orthodox thought hold to be impermissible.  Indeed, so much so that doing it may perhaps be regarded, if done knowingly and with appreciation of the gravity, that it may be a mortal sin.  Not only that, but full absolution for it would not only take Confession, something that would be all that most run of the mill Catholics would have to do, but actually repenting of it through affirmative acts to address the harm caused by your prior acts.

Within a decade it will start to be the case that Catholic politicians who take this approach are going to be denied the sacraments and this is in fact already happening in some places. But the damage done by Kennedy and his followers has been vast. Vast, but not irreparable.

For the time being, however, the 2020 election provided a real struggle for Catholics.  Many found Trump deeply repellant for a variety of reasons, but for largescale deeply held moral reasons, he was the choice they'd otherwise be inclined to follow.  He has been opposed to abortion.  He had not held to the "progressive" view that gender is merely a matter of choice.  He has withdrawn American servicemen from contested areas around the globe and not become involved in new wars, something that Catholic theology holds to be problematic.  Seeking to define him in relation to moral issues, some went so far as to compare him to Cyrus the Great, the Persian Emperor who definitely wasn't Jewish but who took actions that favored the Jews.  Such a comparison is a stretch of course, but trying to figure out how to handle a personally repugnant, to some, person who does morally laudable things, has been a struggle for many.

What is certain is that Trump's views anticipated those that are coming, as we've already addressed, while his personal behavior was often repellant.  At the same time, the old Boomer Catholics are often seemingly comfortable in their mental ambiguity and JFK "went to Mass on Sunday" views and seemingly certain in the belief that those views will prevail in the Church, and outside, going forward.  That's not going to be the case.

And in the meantime, we have Joe Biden, who will be the last of the Boomer/Pre Boomer Presidents.  For Catholics, he's the second co-religious in U.S. history, a second of questionable significance at this time, but may be retrospectively or, should he adhere to the tenants of his Faith, will be this term, a term which is probably the only one he'll serve.

One thing, however, that has developed in the short term.  Catholics who didn't like Trump due to his character and agonized over their vote and then went for Biden have had their choice more or less ratified by Trump's post election conduct.  At the time this was being typed out Trump was still attempting to prosecute efforts to have courts stop vote counting or otherwise challenge votes.  The Secretary of State of Georgia, a Republican, has claimed that Trump backer Lindsey Graham pressured him regarding votes in some Georgia counties.  Trump is still asserting the election was corrupt with nothing to back him up, meaning of course that he's advancing lies against his opponent and against democracy itself.  The overall look for those who worried about Trump's character has verified their actions.

For a vote that seems to be developing and coalescing in the future that will leave the GOP with a lot of near term damage to repair.

*I realize that, in spite of all the evidence supporting this, there's a lot of people who simply can't accept this view of Kennedy and regard him, and indeed the entire Kennedy family as some sort of benighted heroic clan. Well, so be it. They aren't, and never were.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Grace Mission Baptist Church, Kaycee Wyoming.

Churches of the West: Grace Mission Baptist Church, Kaycee Wyoming.: 

Grace Mission Baptist Church, Kaycee Wyoming.

This is Grace Mission Baptist Church in the small Johnson County town of Kaycee, Wyoming.  Other than the location and that its a Baptist church, I don't know much about it.

Best Posts of the Week of November 15, 2020

 

The best post of the week of November 15, 2020.

Access to Courts and Contempt of the Law

Wars and Rumors of Wars

Casualties of the COVID Recession Part II

November 17, 1558. The Reign of Queen Elizabeth I commences.

The First Vice President of Color. . .

November 18, 1966. The Latin Rite of the Catholic Church relaxes the Abstention Rule.

Eating the Seed Corn

November 20, 1920. Seasonal scenes. Reflections of a century ago and today.

November 21, 1920 Bloody Sunday

November 21, 1920 Bloody Sunday

This day is remembered to history as Bloody Sunday, one of two days in Irish history bearing that unfortunate title.  The day featured violence on both sides.

The day started with Michael Collins' men of the IRA targeting members of the "Cairo Gang" for assassination.  Many of the fifteen men killed by the IRA were British Army intelligence officers assigned to that effort with a few policemen and a few people of unknown allegiance also killed in the early morning action.

Photograph commonly claimed to be the Cairo Gang, but for which there is some doubt and which may actually be of the Igoe Gang.  RIC officers who worked undercover.

That afternoon British police forces raided a football match at Croke Park. The force was a mixed one of RIC personnel and Auxiliaries.  The situation was tense and shooting broke out, resulting in the British forces firing over 200 rounds and ultimately killing fourteen people.  The RIC later claimed that they were fired on first, but there is little evidence to support it. Testimony by municipal police who simply happened to be on duty there due to the football match was to the contrary. The best evidence is that the RIC and Auxillaries simply stormed in and began shooting.

Croke Park today, after being expanded. From Wikipedia Commons.

That evening two IRA men in British custody were killed, with the British claiming they were shot while after trying to violently escape but the evidence otherwise contesting that.

Like a lot of things in the Anglo Irish War, the bloody day has been mythologized and therefore has become a legend, but probably a tragic one that is still somewhat out of context.  The RIC and the Auxiliaries were already notorious for their heavy handedness, a shocking example of which we provided earlier this week.  But the bloodiness of the day really commences with IRA assassinations aimed at what was proving to be a successful British counterintelligence action. Those killings themselves came in the context of the IRA resorting a war of murder which has, over the years, been glossed over to be presented as a sort of urban guerilla war.  In reality, given their weakness in comparison to the British, they were terrorists and justified their actions in the context of their goals.  The British counterintelligence actions came in that context and were proving successful, but not so successful that the IRA wasn't able to figure them out and strike back, as the did on this day.

The killings later that day by the RIC were marked by the unwise decision to raid a football match, something of questionable purpose at best, and an even worse decision given the tensions that had developed during the day.  Given the nature of the RIC and the Auxiliaries, and the British counterintelligence effort in general, the chances of it turning into a bloodbath featuring what might have simply been reprisal killings of innocent people was high.  The RIC was already turning the minds of the uncommitted Irish, whom were a majority of the population, against the British and something like this was guaranteed to greatly increase that trend

Oddly the number of people killed in the 1972 Bogside Massacre by British paratroopers when they opened up on civil rights protesters was fifteen people, with eleven more wounded, making it about equivalent in terms of loss of life by British arms in a similar event.  It's that event that was commemorated in U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday.

November 20, 1920. Seasonal scenes. Reflections of a century ago and today.

 On this day in 1920, the White House Thanksgiving entre was delivered in a White House shaped crate.

I don't know if this was before the moronic custom of "pardoning the turkey" or not.  Of note, this turkey isn't as plump as the ones you see today in this role for a simple reason, farm turkeys have been genetically selected in the past century to be plump, and hence are more plump than their ancestors of a century ago, save for wild turkeys, which are just about like this.

The custom of collections for the needy was in swing.

The House of Mercy was collecting donations on this day in 1920.  The organization was an Anglican organization that aided unwed mothers.

I have no idea what the giant dog represented.

The House of Mercy now has the unfortunate status of having its named as part of a goofball dance play, Escape from the House of Mercy, by the highly woke who performed it briefly pre Coronavirus Pandemic at a park which is at the location of the New York House of Mercy.  Further performances of this silly stupidity have been postponed until COVID 19 is beat, by which time hopefully the woke will have moved on to something else.

This helps demonstrate, however, that the well off and historically ignorant section of society has no real understanding of conditions of the past in numerous ways.  Society at large in 1920 wasn't as wealthy as it is in 2020, the government largely did not fund welfare systems, and the ability of almost any woman to support herself and an infant without a male income winner was darned near impossible.  Institutions designed to address this weren't hotel resorts, to be sure, but the alternatives tended towards abject destitution.  Fruity dancers aren't likely to experience that condition today, in a much wealthier society in which there are extensive publicly funded social institutions.

Various notables were photographed, and some honored, at some sort of big event in Washington D.C.   This included General Payton March and his family.

Secretary of War Newton Baker and his son Jack also were there.

What this was isn't clear to me, but my guess is that it was a football game.

The Country Gentleman hit the stands with a seasonal cover illustration.

The Russian Orthodox Church issued a Ukase, a set of instructions with the force of canonical law, directing Bishops to carry on outside of Russia, a measure which acknowledged that in most of the country and its former empire the Communist Party was now in control and was suppressing religion. The move lead to the formation of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.  It still exist today in spite of the fall of the Soviet Union, but it reentered communion with the Church in Russia in 2007.  The ROCOR was not the only Russian Orthodox body outside of the Soviet Union, and a small element of its membership went into schism at the time of the reunion. The Russian Orthodox Church is the largest Orthodox Church. 

November 19, 1920. Apparently the Christmas Season has always started early.

 

Eating the Seed Corn

The word of the LORD came to Elijah:

Leave here, go east and hide in the Wadi Cherith, east of the Jordan.You shall drink of the wadi, and I have commanded ravens to feed you there.

So he left and did as the LORD had commanded. He left and remained by the Wadi Cherith, east of the Jordan.

Ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning, and bread and meat in the evening, and he drank from the wadi.

After some time, however, the wadi ran dry, because no rain had fallen in the land.

So the word of the LORD came to him:

Arise, go to Zarephath of Sidon and stay there. I have commanded a widow there to feed you.

He arose and went to Zarephath. When he arrived at the entrance of the city, a widow was there gathering sticks; he called out to her, “Please bring me a small cupful of water to drink.”

She left to get it, and he called out after her, “Please bring along a crust of bread.”

She said, “As the LORD, your God, lives, I have nothing baked; there is only a handful of flour in my jar and a little oil in my jug. Just now I was collecting a few sticks, to go in and prepare something for myself and my son; when we have eaten it, we shall die.”

1 Kings 17 

The State of Wyoming is cutting, again, funds to the University of Wyoming.

This is part of across the board cuts. . .sort of.  Money budgeted for "clean coal" and a lawsuit attempting to force open ports remains. . . even as we are about to enter a four year administration of a President who has promised to phase out petroleum and who implicitly regards coal as a thing of the past.  And, before people get too up in arms about the incoming administration, it has to be noted that technological trends, longstanding for coal, but now also entering the petroleum field, suggest that the evolution away from fossil fuels may have entered a technological phase where they will continue no matter who is President.

Lest this seem too off topic, for something austensibly on the funding of the University of Wyoming, the reason the state is in massive financial trouble is because coal and oil aren't paying the bills anymore.  That day may be over even if petroleum makes a partial recovery.  Or even if it makes a full one.  The budget was in trouble before the collapse of petroleum prices, because of the collapse of coal.  The state may have its hopes pinned on a breakthrough on coal, but make no mistake, it'd be nearly a Manhattan Project size breakthrough in order to address the trend.  

All of this points to the need for the state to find a new means of funding itself.  It's going to half to think outside of the box, and as part of that its going to have to look at taxes There are things here that can be done in order to address the funding crisis that will not impact most Wyomingites, but as they would tend to impact the wealthiest Wyomingites, we'll have to be in a much deeper crisis than we presently are, and that would be deep, in oder to get there.  And it'd likely require a more active minority party to even be considered.

But one thing that shouldn't be considered is cuts to the University of Wyoming.

UW predated the current funding model of the state and its one of the real gems of the state.  It's also one of the real hopes of the state.  Funding shouldn't be decreased, it should be increased.  If funding clean coal makes sense, funding education certainly does.

The University of Wyoming is a land grant university.  While tied, originally, to agriculture, the entire concept of land grant universities was to fund education for those states coming into the Union following 1862.  Very progressive for its time, the backers of the system recognized that education would be directly tied to the economic fortunes of the state.  Somehow the state's leadership seems to have forgotten that.

Even just tying it to the original purpose of agriculture the state isn't going as of good job as it could.  We don't have a veterinarian program, for example even though there's both an agricultural and domestic need for veterinarians.  

Indeed, we lack professional degree programs with one solitary exception. UW doesn't issue MD degrees or DDS degrees, even though there is a need for both in the state.  The only professional degree issued, now "celebrating" the 100th anniversary of its founding, is the JD issued by the College of Law, but the state's adopting of the UBE makes the need for it moot.  Indeed, the one cut that really should be made is the College of Law, if which I'm a graduate, as it is no longer needed.

In lots of areas the university has done very well with what it has.  It's programs in all fields are overall excellent. But that's the point.  Cutting its budget will mean it has to make more cuts, and it just cut some degree programs.  It likely could cut more, but will have to be careful about it.

But the state should have no illusions. The more that is cut, the more we are simply exporting our young population.  Most of the exported population won't come back.  As that progresses, we'll increasingly become the state of the old, attracted to the state for a lack of taxes in their declining years.  Essentially a state of nursing homes and low paying nursing home jobs.

Elijah, in the Old Testament passage above, assured the woman that things would be fine and in fact they were.  But Elijah wasn't simply touring the land with the "it'll be okay message".  Indeed, he was a pretty tough person in general and his message was pretty stern.  

We seem to be simply assuming that everything will be okay.  We certainly aren't beseeching God for relief and we don't seem to be addressing any of our personal conduct in a radical way that's calculated for success in this crisis.  

We're now eating the seed corn.

We will regret that.

Churches of the West: November 18, 1966. The Latin Rite of the Catholic Church relaxes the Abstention Rule.

Churches of the West: November 18, 1966. The Latin Rite of the Catholic ...: 

November 18, 1966. The Latin Rite of the Catholic Church relaxes the Abstention Rule.

Smelt being eaten by members of Congress and their guests.

On this day the Latin Rite Catholic Bishops of the United States relaxed the rule on abstaining from meat on Fridays throughout the year.  This followed a Papal direction in 1962 that the Friday penitential requirement be adopted to local conditions, reflecting  a move by the Church focused on that goal. The same move resulted in the vernacular replacing Latin in the Mass at about the same time.

In the case of the Catholic Bishops of the United States the removal has created some confusion.  Fridays retain their penitential character and Catholics are urged to substitute something for abstaining from meat but few do.  Indeed, there's debate on whether there's any requirement to do and the fine, orthodox, Catholic apologist maintains there is not.  Some others maintain there very much is, with those holding that view tending towards the Catholic Trad community.

To the surprise of American "Roman" Catholics, the rule was not done away with globally and it remains a matter of Church law in many other localities in the world.  It also remains one, of course, during Lent.

There are a lot of rumors in the Protestant world about this practice, a lot of which are frankly absurd.  Old anti Catholic myths regarding fish on Fridays were one of the things that I still heard in school when I was a teen, usually centered around some completely bogus economic theory.  The actual basic reason for the practice is that it was a remaining Latin Rite penitential practice of which there had once been many, but which had dwindled down to just a few in the Latin Rite over time.  In the Eastern Rite and the Orthodox Churches, however, they remain numerous and occur throughout the year.

Indeed, the practice in the Eastern Rite and Orthodox Churches is instructive in that their fasts often extend beyond abstaining from meat and to other things.  During Great Lent, for example, they ultimately extend to oils, dairy and alcohol.  

The reason for abstention from meat (there was never any requirement that people actually eat fish) reflected the logistical economy of an earlier time.  Today fish is readily available on the table no matter where you are, but in earlier times this wasn't so.  Abstention from meat limited diets and protein sources other than fish were regarded, and frankly usually still are, as more celebratory.  People like fish, of course, but not too many people are going to sit down to a big Thanksgiving dinner of flounder.  The goal wasn't to starve people, but to focus on penance while still sustaining their needs.  Limiting food to the plain, and fish for most people, if available, was plain, emphasized that.

As with a lot of things, over time in Protestant countries this practice tended to mark Catholics and also became subject to silly myths.  Even now, over fifty years after the practice was relaxed in the United States, you'll occasionally find somebody who will insult Catholics with a derogatory nickname from the era related to fish.  Likewise, like a lot of dietary practices that have long ceased, people born far too late to really experience "fish on Fridays" will claim they did.

Ironically, of course, fish has gone from a less favored food even fifty years ago to a dietary and culturally prized one.  It's one of the odd ways in which the religious practices of Catholics, to include fasting, has come back around as a secular health practice.  And as Catholic orthodoxy has returned as the Baby Boomers wane, fish on Fridays has been reintroduced voluntarily among some orthodox or simply observant Catholics, even where they are not required to do it.

The First Vice President of Color. . .

 no, not Kamala Harris.

Charles Curtis.

Curtis was Vice President from 1929 to 1933 under Herbert Hoover.  He was a Kansan who was 3/8 Native American from a variety of tribes in the Kansas region.  His first words were in Kansa and French, not English.  While his mother, from whom his native ancestry derived, died when he was extremely young, he was raised in my of his early youth by his grandparents on his mother's side.  He lived on the Kaw Reservation in this period, was an excellent horseman, and was known as "Indian Charlie."

He graduated from high school in Topeka and then read law, making him an example of a successful lawyer who had never been to university.  He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1893 and served there until 1907 when he entered the Senate.  After serving as Vice President, he resumed the practice law and died at age 76 in 1936.

Somebody worth remembering.

2020 Election Post Mortem VI. Looking at the Democrats. . . isn't it time that Pelosi and Schumer pack their bags?

Well, the answer to this is no.

They should have been told that years ago.

Whatever a person thinks of the result of the Presidential election one way or another, overall, the General Election was a Democratic disaster.

Going into the election the Democrats were opposing the most disliked President in recent history.  A person would have to go all the way back to Herbert Hoover to find a sitting President facing an election who was disliked more.  Probably more analogously, the Democrats would have to go back to Richard Nixon to find a Republican President who was so disliked that the voters were set to sweep him out of office and his party with him.  That didn't happen to Nixon, of course, but it did the Republicans.  The voters took it out on Gerald Ford and Republicans in Congress.  

And todays' Democratic leadership ought to know that. They were in office then.  Schumer entered the New York State Assembly in 1975.  Pelosi was elected to the Democratic National Committee in 1976.

And that's the problem.

You can't really be a young vibrant party if you are run by old, old, highly established individuals.  

The GOP has this problem too, but this past election it was smarter about it.  The Republicans made inroads in Hispanic populations and actually did fairly well, in context, with other minority groups.  The Democrats just seemed to figure that they owned that vote and ran the same playbook there that they have since the 1930s.

And according to the Press, going into the election, Nancy Pelosi was concentrating on making gains in state legislatures so that she could parry any Republican effort to reverse close results there. As it turned out, the administration seemingly has made such an effort, but it was the courts that stopped it, not the Democrats.  The Democrats didn't make gains in state legislatures and it seems that at least to some extent, the reverse is true.

At this point, there's a lot of hand wringing about what all this means in the next Congress.  The Democrats lost ground in the House, where Pelosi and its unknown, right now, whether or not they'll take the Senate.  There's all sorts of discussion on whether Joe Biden will be able to reach across the aisle, but given as Barack Obama wasn't, why would Biden be able to?

Indeed, the Republican leadership in both houses has been really successful.  We don't hear much about Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader, but at age 55 he's a child compared to Pelosi, who is 80 years old.  Mitch McConnell, at s79, isn't a spring chicken, to be sure, but he's singularly successful, love him or hate him.

Usually after a failed election, there's a reckoning.  This hasn't been the case for the Democrats for a long time.  After 2018 it managed to put down its own insurgent elements.  That didn't seem to work for it in 2020.  Or, in actuality, it might have, by preventing a worse election disaster, but it's certainly not a history of success.

It'll be interesting to see if any of that matters in terms of their leadership.  

In real terms, it seems like it might.  The Democrats have taken the Oval Office, but not really with enough of a Congressional margin in order for that President to really do much.  That might be the way the voters wanted it, but it can't be the way the Democrats did.

November 17, 1558. The Reign of Queen Elizabeth I commences.

On this date in 1558 the disastrous reign of Queen Elizabeth I, which would last for 44 long years, commenced.

The illegitimate daughter of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, her long rule saw the Elizabethan Religious Settlement which was brought about due to pragmatism rather than religious conviction, and indeed there's reason to believe that Elizabeth personally shared the religious convictions of her half sister Mary but chose not to continue to pursue them in order to make civil compromises.  Her long reign guaranteed the success of the settlement and it many injustices for centuries.

November 16, 1920. Timely advice, then and now. Airlines, then and now. Beersheba.

Cartoon of this date with some timely advice.  From Reddit's 100 Years Ago Subreddit

.

The Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Service, Qantas, was formed on this day in 1920.  The third oldest airway in the world, its now the Australian national airline.

Qantas' first office.

Herbert Samuel, the British governor of Palestine, toured Beersheba.

Access to Courts and Contempt of the Law

Well, that right there may be the reason you've had difficulty findin' gainful employment. You see, in the mart of competitive commerce... 

Ulysses Everett McGill, Oh Brother Where Art Thou?

I've probably started this thread three times and shelved it all three.  It's too easy to misunderstand what its about.

As everyone now knows Donald Trump and his backers have filed a host of lawsuits all of which are biting the dust, as any legal observer would expect, at high speed.  Such high speed, and so predictably, that there's a lot of speculation on exactly why he would do it.  The common claim of just exhausting legal remedies is basically a dog that doesn't hunt unless the administration has a delusional mindset.  

Indeed, at this point it's really hurting the GOP, which makes a person further wonder what exactly is wrong with the Republican leadership.  It may be just flustered.  It's was clear going into the election that the chances of Trump vacating the office were high, and the party did much better than it was possibly imagined that it would do.  The Republicans have a chance to build on that but there's also a real chance that they're going to lash themselves to the Trump deck and look really bad.  That would covert a chance to take back the House in 2022 to a chance to lose seats there and, moreover, it may well flip Georgia to the Democrats who, right now, are looking a bit better in that early campaign than the GOP is.

Beyond that, however, the damage that has been done and is being done to the profession of the law as a result of all of this is immeasurable.  People assume something about the filing of lawsuits, if they aren't lawyers, which simply isn't true, that being that suits have merit simply because they are filed.

Now, most lawyers are careful about not filing meritless suits.  But there are suits that are meritless or otherwise on the legal fringe.  Because the American system highly values "access to courts" this is regarded by lawyers as just part of the price we pay so that everyone has access to the courts.  But when suits become absurd and serve another purpose, that begins to really break down.  The reason for this, long recognized in the law, is that average people take the "where there's smoke there's fire" approach to lawsuits.  Something must be there, right, because it was filed.

Nope, that doesn't mean that at all.

Indeed, because that doesn't mean that, there are two tort actions, malicious prosecution and abuse of process, that are designed to be counter weapons for the wrongfully sued, and a Rule of Civil Procedure, Rule 11, that also seeks to address that. The problem here is that they're really hard to obtain any relief from, so people usually just are content with their victory, if they obtain it, and call it good. That doesn't stop all the back channel whispering that goes on after you've been sued, however.

As an example of this, I stumbled upon a post in a political blog where the author of the article, commenting on a lawsuit filed by Donald Trump regarding counting ballots in Pennsylvania, gushed on and on about how it was "brilliant" and how even Ruth Bader Ginsburg fault to be totally bowled over by the logic of the compliant.

What total bullshit. Truth be known the Judge assigned the case in Pennsylvania is likely to go through it like shit through a goose, and about as quickly. He or she probably already has.

Lawyers know that a complaint is the initiating document in a lawsuit. The plaintiff lines out his allegations and tries to put them in the framework of the law, and then asks for legal relief.  In this situation, a "speaking complaint" was done, which is what lawyers occasionally do when they're writing their complaint for the press, rather than the court.  Most complaints are pretty dry.  In this one, when you get to the relief part, it looks like the scrivener plans on getting dumped by the Court, which is a logical presumption.

Quite a few of these suits are being filed and the result is that they're creating a delusion of probable legal success in certain demographics that desperately want to believe that there's something to them.  Cold to them at first, the GOP has eventually sort of come around to them and is backing them in their statements.  The local GOP has put up a couple of meme type things on their site, one of which says "We will win" (no, you won't) and another, bizarre one, which features a quote falsely attributed to Joseph Stalin to the effect that its not the number of votes cast, its who counts the votes that counts.

On that last one, Stalin never said that, but why anyone with any American political party, let alone the conservative party, would try to quote Stalin is totally beyond me.  If Stalin had said such a thing it would have been because the result in the Soviet Union was foreordained and baloney.  Arguing for that result is weirdly anti democratic.

Presumably what whoever put that up meant was that there were illegal votes that shouldn't be counted and the right folks will get to the bottom of it.  And, as Republicans who lukewarmly endorses Trump's efforts last week noted, if there are illegal votes, they shouldn't be counted. The problem is that there's really no evidence whatsoever of illegal voting.  Stories of illegal voting exist principally in isolated partisan groups that circulate them to themselves.  This year, that's among disappointed Republicans.  Earlier its been with disappointed Democrats.  

I even saw a post this year that the courts are about to bust wide open a the conspiracy that Q has warned us about, and there was live feed on the news of voter fraud, and during the election the President and his staff were in a secure room in the White House watching it, which oddly was photographed and leaked to the public, and you could see the "Red Castle" in the background.  

None of this is true.  The courts aren't about to bust open some big conspiracy as there isn't one.  There probably are some illegal or improper votes, and some of them will be Democratic and others Republican.  There won't be many, however, and even the body in Trump's administration that oversaw the election pronounced it to be the most secure in the nation's history.  It's another one of Trump's successes really, that his supporters should be proud of, and he should be too. 

Okay, so what's the concern here?  The courts will dump all these suits, nothing will go to the Supreme Court, and if it does, nothing will happen there.  On January 20 Joe Biden will be sworn in as President, like it or not.  No harm no foul, and the lawyers get to pick up some extra cash bucks in troubled times.

Well, that latter item is the problem.

Americans have a love hate relationship with lawyers already. They always have. But the reputations of American lawyers had sunk so low by the 1870s that the American Bar Association formed as a conservative, at that time, legal organization seeking to improve the standards of lawyers and raise their reputation in the public eye.  A classic guild, it sought to impose standards on its own members.

Formed in 1878, the ABA was a huge success. By the first quarter of the 20th Century it had already succeeded in really reforming the American standards of practice.  Highly conservative, it came ultimately to rate law schools and judicial applicants, and by the mid 20th Century most practicing American lawyers belonged to it.

That's no longer true.

It's no longer true in part because starting in the 1970s the same generation that argued in Taking Care Of Business that doing nothing all day was better than working (or at least being in a rock and roll band was) converted the law into a determined money making business.  Prior to that it emphasized its role as a profession, and sort of a tweedy one that was somewhat relaxed.  The generation that went into colleges and universities in the 1960s and came out in the 70s with a social justice mission welded that concept, self servingly, into one that emphasized money.

Now, in the US, you can sue anyone about anything. Everyone knows this.  It isn't that you'll win, but you can do it. The goal isn't to get to court as a rule, it's to get a settlement.  

Added to that, the Supreme Court in the 1970s struck down the provision that prohibited lawyers from advertising. Advertising doesn't have a dignity standard and not all lawyer advertising has been helpful to the image of the profession.

And even more, as the Boomer lawyers came up in the ABA, they converted it from a wall of conservative professionalism to an organization split so that its an activist organization in some quarters. Branches of the ABA has adopted progressive causes and essentially seek to back them through the courts.

The US isn't, contrary to what may be supposed, the most litigious nation in the world.  But its population per capita of lawyers is the highest in the industrial world.  It isn't the highest in the world, that would be Uruguay, but that's not an enviable comparison.  The fact that we spend so much time suing each other isn't a really good look or a really good thing.  Lawyers defend it as living in part of a free and fair society.

But when lawyers get around to attacking a free and fair election, the mask has really come off.  Lawyers serving to advance an effort that they know is pointless at best or part of a tactical effort to do just what Donald Trump falsely or delusional asserts he's the victim of, election stealing, are really harming the nation.

Probably because of that, the lawyers from one of the suits, and indeed I think its the one I've referenced above, have withdrawn from the case.  That is some of the lawyers from one of the firms have informed the court they aren't going forward in it.  Rumors last week held that there was internal dissension in that firm, which hadn't been shy about unpopular causes in the past, about their representation here.  They must have been, as they're now out.

And that's really to their credit.

What isn't to the profession's credit is backing this effort at all.  There is no merit to the cases.  It'll be interesting to see if any of the Judges sanctions anyone as a result of this.  Probably not, but I'd guess it a remote possibility.

And in terms of things remote and near, this means that going into 2021 there are going to be a collection of individuals who will absolutely believe the election was stolen. Believing in a false narrative of defeat is extremely dangerous and usually destructive in the long run. American democracy will be damaged and, ironically, a real chance for the GOP to build a new conservative coalition, based on some of the populist ideas that Trump advanced, and some of the real conservative ideas that his administration advanced, and based on demographic trends just beginning to operate, may be lost.

Some predicted that the end of the Trump Presidency might be the end of the GOP.  Ironically, the end of the Presidency proved not to be, but the Republicans might achieve that all on their own by advocating its own version of the Imperial Staff's 1918 "stabbed in the back" myth.  At this moment, every tortured Republican and Independent who voted against Trump in the General election, and every conservative Democrat who returned back to the Democrats as they feared Trump, has had those fears vindicated.  By looking back rather than forward, when they have a chance to do so, they may be destroying themselves. And by embracing a fantasy of false victory, they certainly are hurting themselves.

And lawyers at this point sort of jumped the shark.  We won't be getting the reputation of the profession back. All of the noble claims that we've made about representing the downtrodden in desperate causes, etc., well. . . . they don't look too true either.   When the scales came off, as they did about 1918, it's going to be obvious that just because a lawyer files something it doesn't mean anything, except perhaps about lawyers.

Monday Morning Repeat for the Week of September 6, 2009.

 It was the only post that week.

Slow medicine

Sunday Morning Scene. Churches of the West: Abandoned Church, Sinclair Wyoming

Churches of the West: Abandoned Church, Sinclair Wyoming: 

Abandoned Church, Sinclair Wyoming

Given the Spanish style of this abandoned, but apparently still maintained, church in Sinclair, my guess is that it was contemporaneous with the  construction of Parco, as the town was originally called.  All the principal buildings that were built in the early 20th Century along the refining town on the Lincoln highway, were built in that style

I'm not sure what denomination used this church, or even when it was last in use.  As noted, it's still receiving maintenance even though it is not serving as a church and is partially boarded up.  Oddly enough, the Baptist Church in Sinclair is using the giant Parco Hotel of the same vintage for its church.