The Turncoat Haley Stevens

Michigan Democratic Representative Haley Stevens made a bombshell announcement yesterday that she is voting for the Republican Mike Rogers for the Senate. She went to church with Rogers yesterday and decided to endorse him. Her statments about the reasons for this decision have been hopelessly muddled and nonsensical. It goes againt everything she has said up to this point, and reiterated in a 25-minue phone call the night before with Jamie Rankin, in which she asasured Rankin that she was still supportive of the Democratic candidate, Abdul El-Sayed.

She was apparently so upset at being disinvited from an Al Sayed rally that she not only decided to vote against him, but also decided to go public with her decision, like a little kid who is upset at not getting his or her way.

The backstory here, which hasn't gotten much play in the media, is that she is engaged to be married to a Jewish man who has endorsed Rogers, and who has aparently influenced her to follow his lead.

Certainly there hs been a lot of hate in this campaign. Al-Sayed has made some anti-Israel comments, true, but these pale in comparison to the Islamophobic attacks against him, falsely calling him a jihadist and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Haley Stevens has cast her lot with a party which worships Donald Trump and his hateful, xenopohobic diatribes. She will disappear from the public light, but her dishonor will remain forever.

"American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst", by Jeffrey Toobin

Jeffrey Toobin is one of the top legal analysts working today. He has written this new book on the Patty Hearst story, which captivated the country during the 1970s.

Patty Hearst was kidnapped on February 4, 1974, when I was in my second year of law school. After about two months she had bonded with her captors, and from then on was a part of the Symbionese Liberation Army, as the group who kidnapped her called itself. Amazingly, she remained at large until september 18, 1975, when FBI agents found her in a San Francisco apartment and arrested her for a bank robery she had partipated in while acting with the SLA.

This part of the story takes up the first 257 pages of Toobin's book, 75% of the total. This detailed, day-to-day account strikes me as rather pointless. I was much more interested in the legal machinations which followed.

Patty's father hired a local attorney, Kayo Halliman, to represent Patty at the bail hearing. Halliman had Patty sign an affidvait saying she had spent her time in captivity in a drug-induced haze, which was contrary to the facts as unovered by Toobin in his research. Toobin says that this affidavit was a "gigantic legal miscalculation", because it locked Patty into a version of her time in captivity before her attorneys had a chance to investigate and plan an appropriate trial strategy. Patty was denied bail, so the suberterfuge with the affidavit was all for naught.

Understandably, Patty's father looked for a higher-profile lawyer and came up with F. Lee Bailey, who met with Patty in jail on September 26th, a scant eight days after her arrest.

The bank robbery trial began on February 4, 1976, exactly two years after the kidnapping. Bailey presenting Patty's brainwashing defense, and the jury got the case on March 19th. The guilty verdict came in the next day, and she received a prison sentence of seven years, which the judge determined to be the normal sentence for a San Francisco bank robber.

Toobin rightly critices Bailey, whose legal skills did not justify his reputation. Bailey had gained his national repuation in the 1960s when he took on the Sam Shepard case and won him a new trial, at which Shepard was acquitted. But losing the Patty Hearst case in the 1970s severely damaged his reputation. It wasn't until the 1990s that I became personally aware of what a poor advocate he had become, when I saw him in court during the O. J. Simpson murder trial. Bailey simply had no ability to communicate effectively, no ability to connect with the jury. Simpson's other attorneys were admirable, but Bailey was a bust. Bailey had many ethical problems as well, and in 2001 he was found guilty of seven counts of attorney misconduct by the Florida Supreme Court and was disbarred; he lived out the rest of his life in disgrace.

The aftermath of Patty's conviction is, in many ways, the most interesting part of the whole saga. There arose a groundswell of support for a commutation of her sentence to time served, and on January 29, 1979, President Jimmy Carter signed the commutation. Nearly everyone who weighed in supported the commutation, including the U.S, Attorney's office which had proseucted her, the FBI agents who had worked on the case, and former California Governor Ronald Reagan, who was already shaping up to be Carter's opponent in the 1980 election.

The backdrop at this time was the mass suicide of 909 followers of Jim Jones in Guyana just two monthe earlier, in November of 1978. This caused John Wayne to advocate for Patty's release by observing: "It seems quite odd to me that the American people have immediately accepted the fact that one man can brainwash nine hunderd human beings into mass suicide, but will not accept the fact that a ruthless group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, could brainwash a little girl by torture, degradation,and confinement."

After her release from prison, Patty married her bodyguard, Bernie Shaw, and lived a quiet life with him and their two daughters in San Francisco. In the 1990s she decided that she wanted a presidential pardon, and she started lobbying for one from President Bill Clinton. She had powerful allies in Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, both of whom wrote handwritten letters to Clinton in support of the pardon. On January 20, 2001, Patty was among the 140 pardons issued by Clinton on his last day in office.

Toobin waxes philosophic in describing the Heart sage as representative of the death of the 1960's counterculture: "In and around San Franisco, the music stopped when the 1980s arrived. There was, essentially, no more counterculture; the term became obsolete. Radical outlaws like the members of the Symbionese LIberation Army, who even in their heyday were stragglers from the 1960s, virtually disappeared altogether....In San Francisco, the AIDS plague arrived, decimating the gay commmunity and sapping, for a time, the political energy of the city. The notion of revolution, which was never appealing to more than a handful of Amerians, became absurd....The surviving members of the SLA, and their allies, struggled to find a place in this unwelcoming world."

My own life trajectory fits squarely into Toobin's narrative. I spent most of the first half of the 1970s in law school, which I enjoyed immensely. But when I got out in 1975, Legal Aid jobs had dried up, and I drifted into private practice with a small firm. What followed were four years of misery, until I broke free of my shackles in early 1980 and struck out on my own. I was still faced with the hostility and racism which were so pervasive in thr adult world, but at least I was my own boss.

The '70s were a bleak time in other ways as well. The music cuture had completely gone to pot with the prevalence of country, disco, and rap. In the political/economim world we were subjected to the inept rule of President Jimmy Carter, who gave us 18% home mortgage loans. Unscrupulous real estate agents, which describes most of them, were talking naive home buyers into undertaking these outrageous loans, on the false promise that houses were a great investment for the future and would continue to appreciate at the then rate of 11% a year.

The deacde ended with the year-long Iran hostage crisis, spawned by Jimmy Carter's horrendous decisin to let the Shah of Iran into the U.S. Our faith in ourselves and our country was severely shaken by this debacle. The 1970s were just a bleak time any way you look at it. All the promises of the '60s seemed to disintegrate into a decade aptly called the "Me Decade" by Tom Wolfe.

The 2026 MLB Regular Season

Though the 2026 season was fairly unexciting, there was some drama on the last day as two playoff positions were still in doubt. In the end the Phillies won the last NL wild card slot from the D-Backs, and the Astros won the NL West over the Rangers. Also, the Tigers lost out to the Twins for third place in the AL Central, capping a most disappointing season.

The Tigers were not the only team to disappoint this year. Three other teams that were expected to compete for division titles disappointed. The Blue Jays finished last in the AL East, the Mariners finished third in the AL West, and the Mets finished last in the NL East. On the brihht side, two of my favorite teams, the Padres and the Brewers, had good seasons and are in the playoffs. The Brewers won 103 games, the best in baseball, and with their low payroll they are the most impressive team, along with the 98-win Rays.

Two other teams started out to be huge disappintments, but turned their seasons around after managerial changes. The Red Sox were 14 games under.500 in mid-July, and the Phillies were 10 games under .500 in late April. But after Chad Trady took over for the Red Sox, and Don Mattingly for the Phillies, both teams rebounded to make the playoffs.

The most striking thing about this season was the dominance of the NL over the AL. In head-to-head games, the NL won 52 more games than the AL. The result is a most bizarre situation where the weakest NL playoff team, the Phillies with 88 wins, had more wins than four(!) of the AL playoff teams: the Astros (81), the White Sox (84), the Guardians (85), and the Red Sox (87).

The season ended with two feel-good stories on the last two days. Justin Verlander made his last career start, and Max Scherzer made what might be his last career start. In each of these games the pitcher's wife and kids came out onto the field for emotional moments.

The Mutiny on the Bounty

I have long been fascinated by tales of the sea. One of the most interesting of these tales is the story of the mutiny on the HMS Bounty in 1789. I recently looked into this and wrote the following summary of the basic facts.

The HMS Bounty set sail from England in December 1787 with a crew of 44 Royal Navy personnel and two civilian botanists. Its mission was to collect breadfruit plants from Tahiti and transport them to the British West Indies as a cheap food source for the slaves there. (Ironically, a later successful expedition brought breadfruit to the West Indies, but the slave population refused to eat it, fearing it was poisonous.)

The initial plan was to sail around the southern tip of South America, but severe weather forced a change of route. Captain Bligh rerouted around the tip of Africa instead, which added 7,000 miles to the journey.

After ten months at sea, the Bounty arrived in Tahiti in October 1788. The crew spent five months on the island collecting and preparing 1,015 breadfruit plants for transport. Captain Bligh allowed the crew to live on shore to tend to the potted plants, and during this time the crew became immersed in Tahitian culture, many of them forming relationships with Tahitian women.

The ship finally left Tahiti on April 4, 1789. The mutiny occurred 24 days later, in the early morning hours of April 28th. Fletcher Christian had the night watch the night before, and he and his fellow mutineers broke into the weapons arsenal and took Captain Bligh prisoner in his cabin. The rest of the non-mutineering crew did not violently resist, after seeing their captain tied up and helpless.

The captain and five of his crew were ordered into the ship's boat, which is a small boat used for transport between a ship and the shore. Thirteen other crew members loyal to Bligh chose to join Bligh in the open boat rather than remain with the mutineers on the Bounty. With no maps or compass and limited provisions, Bligh used his photographic memory of the geography of the area to navigate his way on a 4,000-mile journey to the Dutch colony of Kupang, on the island of Timor. After 47 days at sea, Bligh had lost only one man on the journey, a crew member who was killed by hostile natives when Bligh stopped at the island of Tofua to look for supplies.

Those left on the Bounty sailed to the island of Tubuai, where they tried to settle. After three bloody months of conflict with the natives, they left and sailed back to Tahiti. Fletcher Christian's goal was to find an island where he and the other mutineers would never be discovered, so remaining on Tahiti was not an option for him. However, 16 crew members elected to stay on Tahiti. These 16 included four crew members who were loyal to Captain Bligh, but who could not get onto the open boat because of the limited space. (These four were ultimately exonerated at the court-martial, after Captain Bligh testified they were blameless in the mutiny.)

Christian set sail from Tahiti in September, 1789, with eight other crewmen, six Tahitian men, and 11 Tahitian women. (The imbalance of men to women figured into the later conflicts.)

After four months, Christian happened upon Pitcairn Island, an uninhabited island which he recognized as being misplaced on the Royal Navy's charts. The group settled there and the Bounty was burned so that noone would ever by tempted to leave.

The settlement on Pitcairn Island was not discovered until 1808. By that time only one mutineer, John Adams, remained, the rest having perished from disease or internal conflicts within the group. The Brits elected not to proceed legally against Adams at that late date. Today the population of Pitcairn is estimated at only 35 permanent residents, down from a high of 233 in the 1930s. Most are descendants of the Bounty mutineers and the Tahitian settlers.

After Captain Bligh returned to England and told his story of the mutiny, the British navy sent the HMS Pandora to the South Pacific to locate and round up the mutineers. Fourteen of the men were found on Tahiti and imprisoned on the ship, the other two having died in a quarrel. The Pandora then spent three months exploring the islands in the area searching for the remaining mutineers, with no luck.

Finally, the Pandora gave up and headed back toward home, but it ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef on August 29, 1791, resulting in the death of four of the prisoners. The survivors left in open boats and eventually made their way back to England. There the remaining ten prisoners were court-martialed, with the four innocent ones acquitted, and the other six convicted, Three of those six were pardoned, and the other three were executed.

Captain Bligh was court-martialed first, before the alleged mutineers. The purpose was for the British Admiralty to determine what happened and to what extent Bligh was guilty of wrongdoing leading to the mutiny. Bligh was exonerated, and continued to serve in the British Navy.

In 1806 Bligh was appointed governor of the Australian state of New South Wales, but due to his authoritarian nature he was again the target of a mutiny, in which he was overthrown and put under house arrest in the Rum Rebellion. This time he was not court-martialed, but he did give evidence against the two mutineers, who were convicted but given only a slap on the wrist. After this debacle Bligh remained in the royal navy but without another important command.

The excellent 1935 movie depicts Bligh as holding out his hand to the Admiral in charge of the Bounty court-martial after his acquittal, with the Admiral refusing to shake it. The clear message here is that the Admiral admired Bligh's considerable navigational skills, but had disdain for Bligh's poor people skills. It's a good exmaple of how life comes to us not in black and white, but in varying shades of gray.

Bridge Results for 2025

Here, in alphabetical order by first names, are the Findlay results for Ron and me in 2025.

Ann & Nancy -3.5

Bob & Karen +2

Brent -3.5

Clarence -2

Dave & Gary +4.5

Dennis & Dan -1.5

Ed +1

Jim & Kathy -13

Jo -9.5

Johanne +4.5

Lester & Ruth -1

Merrie 0

Mike & Arlene +2

Ron Woofter +.5

Teresa +.5

Warren -1.5

"How the Right Lost Its Mind", by Charlie Sykes

In this book, written in 2017 in the wake of Trump's election, conservative commentator Charlie Sykes examines how "a movement that was defined by its belief in limited government, individual liberty, free markets, traditional values, and civility found itself embracing bigotry, political intransigence, demogoguery, and outright falsehood".

Sykes' account is not very interesting when he is pontificating on the history of conservatism. Where it comes alive is when he gives his personal story. Sykes grew up in the '60s as a liberal Democrat, supporting civil rights and oppsing the Vietnam War. His dad was also a prominent liberal activist. But his father was outraged at the violent student protests at the university where he taught. When strikers tried to shut down the student newspaper, where his father served as faculty adviser, a 17-year-old called him a "fascist pig". Sykes concludes that "left-wing politics came to be dominated by humorless and strident ideologues, who did little to hide their contempt for the older generation, bourgeois values, and for American culture in general."

As for Sykes himself, he graduated from college and became a newsaper reporter. He says that he "watched as the good intentions of the Great Society often failed to match the results, creating as many problems as they solved. Covering urban issues, I watched the multiplication of programs that had increasingly abstruse acronyms but seemed to exist for no other purpose than to satisfy a voter bloc and provide employment to various hacks and mediocrities. They did not discernably imporove any lives or fix any problems. As it turned out, bureaucracies made poor substitutes for famlies and neighborhoods and were often insensitive to their unintended consequences they left in their wake." This strikes me as a fair commentary on the failure of LBJ's Great Society.

By the late 1980s Sykes' shift to the right was complete, and he became a talk radio host in Milwaukee in the early 1990s. Sykes refused to support the Trump campaign of 2015-2016, and he was vilified by his former listeners and supporters. Many called him a "cuckservative", a favorite epithet from the MAGA crowd. Sykes then ended his radio show at the end of 2016 to write this book.

One think that struck me was the significance he attributes to Rush Limbaugh's attacks on Sandra Fluke, who was a law student who advocated in 2012 for health insurance covering contraceptives for females. I remember this well, as at the time I would occasionally listen to Limbaugh, and I was listening when he called Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute", and when he said "If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it, and I'll tell you what it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch". I remember being outraged by this and I never listened to Limbaugh again.

But what I was unaware of is the retribution Limbaugh faced as a result of his despicable attacks on this young woman. Dozens of advertisers dropped him from their advertising, and he lost key stations in major markets throughout the country. Sykes says this was "a prelude to what would happen in 2015-2016", when allegations of Trump's abuse of women didn't seem as serious due to Limbaugh's normalization of this sort of behavior.

Sykes ends with advice to his fellow conservatives, but this will fall on mostly deaf ears in the current political climate. Some day conservatives will likely look back and realize the wisdom of Sykes's advice, and the foolhardiness of supporting Trump, but that's a long way into the future.

"Original Sin", by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson

This is the famous bok by CNN anchor Jake Tapper and his co-author, documenting the decline and fall of Joe Biden during his term as president. The point of the book is summarized in this passage: "What the world saw at Joe Biden's one and only 2024 debate was not an anomaly. It was not a cold; it was not someone who was under- or over-prepared. It was not someone who was just a little tired. It was the natural result of an 81-year-old man whose capabilities had been diminishing for years. Biden, his family, and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify an attempt to put an at times addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years."

Many Biden advisers talked with the authors and admitted that they had had serious concerns about Biden's ability to meet the challenges of a 2024 campaign. (This is similar to the many Republicans in Congress today who have serious problems with Trump that they are willing to talk about privately, but will not say publicly.) The excuse the Biden advisers use for not speaking out is that his decision-making ability was still intact. But this is only a part of being president; the other part is communicating the reasons for your decisions to the public. And Biden was a horrible communicator; he simply had no communication skills whatsoever as he neared the end of his term. It had gotten so bad that he often could not even complete a coherent thought, often getting lost in mid-sentence.

I've often wondered why Biden's advisers let him do that early debate with Trump. The book answers the question by saying that the polls showed the public had serious doubts about Biden's ablilty to serve a second term, and so the debate was planned to demonstrate that Biden was in fact up to the job.

After the debate Biden went on national TV to try to rehabilitate his image. Instead, he confirmed his incompetence when, in response to the simple question, "Did you watch the debate?", he answered "I don't think I did." Huh? You're not even sure whether or not you watched the debate? After this there was no question as to his lack of competence.

The Biden campaign had three highly respected pollsters on staff who were polling daily, and after the debate the polling news was even worse for Biden. The pollsters would report to the campaign leaders, but the word wasn't getting through to Biden, and the pollsters weren't permitted to meet directly with Biden. Finally, on Thursday, July 18th (three days before Biden left the race), the pollsters met with the top campaign aides. The message was that "A Large majority of voters do not believe that President Biden is mentally and physically capable of serving four more years, and the belief that he is too old to be president is a settled question in voters' minds." Biden, sick with Covid at the time, recognized that his staying in the race would have the effect of tearing the Democratic Party apart, and he withdrew.

What is so sad and pathetic is that both Joe and Jill Biden still believe to this day that Joe could have beaten Trump in the 2024 election. Talk about delusional! What is equally pathetic is the grudge held by the Bidens against Nancy Pelosi, for (implicitly) suggesting that Joe re-consider his run after the disastrous debate. Their resentment was so severe that when Pelosi broke her hip in Luxembourg in December of 2024 and underwent hip replacement surgery, neither Joe nor Jill called her to wish her well. So much for Biden as the great empathizer.

Biden's advisers knew he was going downhill and increasingly during his term they limited his press availability. His average of nine press conferences a year was fewer than every post-WW2 president except for Reagan and Nixon. By contrast, Truman had 41 a year and the first Bush had 36. (Had Biden done more press conferences he surely would have been better prepared at answering questions during the horrid debate.)

Biden's advisers even limited his availability to his biggest donors and supporters. At small gatherings of donors, Biden was using a teleprompter instead of the usual informal remarks. Imagine, a donor who had given as much as $500,000 for a meet-and-greet with the president had to settle for canned remarks read from a teleprompter!

What is tragic is that Biden's legacy will now be that through his hubris he gave us another disastrous four years of Trump as president. Had he kept his (implicit) promise to only serve one term, the Democrats might have settled on a worthy candidate who could have beaten Trump, and Biden would then have had a legacy of some accomplishments, putting him somewhere in the middle of all presidents in the rankings. As it is, he will be near the bottom, at least for the near future.