Two Unusual Autobiographies -- Cheever and Ellroy

I have recently read two unusual biographies, unusual because of a specific theme which runs throughout each one. The first one is "Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a Drinker", by Susan Cheever. Susan writes so beautifully about her personal life that I found myself wishing I had known her in her prime. I'm quite certain I would have fallen deeply in love with her.

She quit drinking in the early 1990s as she was nearing 50. This happens near the end of the book, and she doesn't say much about her new life as a sober person. She says "I live a quiet life now", and she writes of how she finds meaning in life through her two children and her relationship with God. Her book is very moving, and an easy read at only 190 pages.

The second book is "The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women", by James Ellroy. Ellroy acquired an obsession with women at the early age of seven, after seeing his mother naked, and his whole life after that is consumed with that obsession. By the time the book was published, in 2010, he had finally acquired some peace and stability in a third relationshp, after two failed marriages, but a brief check reveals that he and Erika separated in 2012. Ellroy has not written of the breakup, but in her memoir, "The Big Hurt", Erika Schickel says that Ellroy was "someone whose intensity eventually became unsustainable".

Besides the addiction to women, Ellroy writes of his other personal quirks, like a dislike of travel and a preference for dark, enclosed places. Since reading this book I have checked out some of his novels, and I have noticed that many of his characters share the same traits as he described for himself in his memoir.

"The Last Manager", by John W. Miller

This is an excellent biography of Earl Weaver (1930-2013), the legendary manager of the Baltimore Orioles, published just this year. Weaver grew up in the 1930s in a working class St. Louis niehgborhood located less than a mile from Sportsman's Park, home at that time to both the NL Cardinals and the AL Browns. His father, a dry cleaner, had the contracts to clean the uniforms of both the Cardinals and the Browns, so Earl was in and out of major league clubhouses at an early age.

Earl avidly followed the "Gashouse Gang", consisting of Dizzy and Paul Dean, Joe Medwick, Pepper Martin, and Leo Durocher. This was a time when the Cardinals were known as "America's Team"; it was both the southernmost and westernmost MLB team, so it was the closest MLB city for the whole western half of the country.

Even as a boy Earl learnd to think through strategy decisions the managers had to make. His uncle was a bookmaker, so Earl learned to apply probability theory to basic decisisons like the sacrifice bunt, the hit-and-run, and the stolen base. It took many decades for the rest of the baseball world to catch up, as by the 2010s the new science of sabemetrics, developed during the 1980s, had finally become widely accepted in the baeball world.

Earl was a standout player in high school, and upon graduation his father contacted the Browns about signing his son, but was told he was a "class-A player, tops", because he "couldn't throw or run". The Cardinals were more positive, offerng Earl $175 a month plus a $1,500 bonus. Earl signed, making him a pro at age seventeen.

Earl spent thirteen years in the minors, never cracking the show. His best chance was in 1952, when he seemed set to make the Cardinals as a back-up second baseman. But 35-year-old Eddie Stanky had been hired as the player-manager, and Stanky chose himself over Earl as the back-up second baseman.

Earl started managing in 1956 while still a player. He managed eleven and a half seasons in the minors. He major legue managerial career began in 1968 mid-season when he took over as the Orioles manager. He retired after the 1982 season, but came back two years later for two final lackluster seasons. Despite the last two disappointing years, his lifetime major league winning perentage was .583.

Weaver was a managerial genius, prioritizing on-base average, strike throwing, and elite defense before these things were fashionable. He got the most out of his entire roster with masterful platooning, always working to get the right people in the right positions to excel. Miller's biograophy superbly captures the essence of Weaver's remrkable life.

Trump's Frivolity

Word came down this week that a federal appeals court has upheld a penalty of nearly $1 million against President Donald Trump and attorney Alina Habba, concluding they committed “sanctionable conduct” by filing a frivolous lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey. The three-judge panel which issued the unanimous opinion included a Trump appointee.

What is most significant to me about this ruling is that the appellate court concluded that the district court judge who originally ruled against Trump had properly considered Trump’s “pattern of misusing the courts” when deciding to sanction Trump and Habba. Trump has a long history of abusing the courts, and I'm encouraged to see that the court system is finally holding him to account.

None of the major news networks reported on this, as far as I know, and I had to find out through an article at politico.com. This is an area which the networks need to pay more attention to. People need to be made aware that if you file frivolous lawsuits in this country, you will be punished. We don't require that lawsuit losers pay the winning side's fees and costs, as the Brits do, but we do assess those fees and costs when the losing side has taken a positon which is not based on fact and law, and is not asserted in good faith.

"Detour" (dir: Edgar Ulmer, 1945)

This was a small-budget independent film, made for less than $100,000 in 1945 (equivalent to about $1,800,00 today). Since 1945 it has become a classic film noir, restored so that today's audience can enjoy it. It is now in the public domain, freely available to all.

The plot centers around a piano player who is hitch-hiking from New York to Los Angeles to join the singer he is in love with. The ending, in which the protagonist is picked up by the Highway Patrol, is completely bogus, made necessary by the absurd motion picture code of the time, which requried that nobody can be depicted as getting away with a crime.

The short run time of only 66 minutes adds to the appeal of this movie, as it does not require a large time investment on the part of the viewer.

Findlay Duplicate Bridge, 11/14/25

An eventful Friday afternoon at Findlay dupliate bridge. Ron and I got there in tme to catch the tail end of Jim's lesson time. He was talking about the Rule of Nine, something I'd never heard of. The Rule of Nine is a guideline for deciding whether to convert a partner’s takeout double into a penalty double by passing. You add together three factors: the level of the contract, the number of cards you hold in the opponents’ trump suit, and the number of honors you hold in that suit (counting the 10 as an honor). If the total is nine or more, you should pass and let the double stand for penalties. If it’s eight or less, you should bid instead. The application occurs most often after weak 2 opening bids.

And then it was time to play bridge. We had five full tables, meaning we woud be playing 27 hands. There were many interesting hands, with five slams bid and made. Ron & I scored 47 points, for a decent 43.5% of the possible points. Here is a hand-by-hand analysis of how we did.

Board 1. We set 3NT by one, but only got bottom board as the other N-S pairs got 100, 100, 150, and 200.

Board 2. We went down one at 6 spades. The bidding went 2 clubs, 3 spades, 3NT. 4 spades, 6 spades. I probably shoud have bid 4 clubs instead of 3NT. My jump to 6 spades was an impulsive move, based on my frustration at having missed out on several slams earlier in the session, and based on fatigue (it was the last round). Jo and John were the only couple that found the best contract of 6 clubs. But Jo graciously points out that, but for a bad trump split, 6S would have made and we would have had top board.

Board 3. Ron went down one at 3 diamonds for bottom board.

Board 4. I made 4 spades, tying for top board.

Board 5. We set 4 diamonds, again tying for top board.

Board 6. They bid 2S and made 4. One N-S pair (Mike & Arlene) bid the 4 for top N-S pair, while we tied with 3 others for top E-W pair.

Board 7. They bid 4S and made 5. We tied with 2 others for bottom board. One pair only made 4, while Jo & John bid the slam and went down 1.

Board 8. We bid 2NT and made 4. Ron inexplicably bid only 2NT after my 1NT opening, and with only 15 points I had to pass. We beat a pair who went down, but lost out to the others.

Board 9. I played 4S and made 5. Two others did the same, and we three tied for bottom board. Bob & Karen bid and made a minor suit slam, while Merrie & Richard bid and made 6NT for top board.

Board 10. We set 3NT by one, for 3 points.

Board 11. They bid 2H, making 3. Three N-S pairs only made 2, so got only one point.

Board 12. I played 2D, making 3. Same with 3 other boards. Bob & Karen made 3 of a major for top board.

Board 13. We set Jim & Kathleen's 3NT by one. Game was made at the other tables, so we got top board.

Board 14. I went down 1 at 4S, tying for bottom board. Ann & Nancy stopped short of game, while the other two pairs made game.

Board 15. I played 4 spades and made 5. This was top board as Jim & Kathleen failed to cash an outside Ace.

Board 16. Ron went down one at 3NT, tying us for bottom board. Clarence and Teresa were the only pair to bid and make a game.

Board 17. We set 3H by two, but our 100 points was bottom board, as the other boards were 120-170-200-200.

Board 18. Rom made 3NT. Two pairs did the same, while the other two made 4.

Board 19. They played 4H, making 5. Same with one other board, while two boards were held to 4. Bob & Karen bid slam and were set by Jo & John.

Board 20. They played 3NT, making 4. Same with three other boards, while Jim & Kathleen held their opponents to 3 for top board.

Board 21. I played 3C, making 4. Bob & Karen stole the bid from Jo & John and made a part score for top board.

Board 22. They payed 1NT and made 3. We got -150 points; the others were -110, -110, -140, and -170.

Board 23. We set 3H by one. The other N-S pairs all played Spade contracts, three gong down and one (Ann & Nancy) making it.

Board 24. I played 4H, making 6. Same result on all the other boards!

Board 25. I played 4NT, making 6. My 4NT bid was intended to be Blackwood, but I was told I should have used Gerber as NT had alrady been bid. Two pairs bid and made the small slam.

Board 26. We got top board as our opponents, Bob & Karen, played 3D and made 6. Slams were also made at the other boards, but only games were bid.

Board 27. Ron played 5S, making 7. Same result at two other boards, while two boards only made 6. Nobody bid the slam.

"The Last Crooked Mile" (dir: Philip Ford, 1946)

This movie was based on a radio play, and as such has all the characters found in those old-time radio dramas--the cynical, hard-boiled private eye, the beautiful and elegant dame, the long-suffering "girl-next-door" dame, and the usual collection of policemen, bankers, and insurance reps. The snappy dialogue keeps things interesting for the viewer throughout. The down side is the too pat resolution of the mystery, when the private eye reveals who the "bad guys" are, but how he managed to figure this out remains a mystery as there have been no hints during the movie. The short run time of 67 minutes is a plus.

Yesterday's Final Jeopardy Wagers

The scores yesterday going into Final Jeopardy were, from left to right, $22,800, 10,800, and 15,600. The champ wagered $8,401, the standard wager, ensuring the win if he got it right, even if the second-place guy bet it all. When he got the answer wrong and the second-place guy bet nothing, the champ lost.

Someone on the Facebook Jeopardy Fan Group posted that the champ's bet was a mistake. an absurd comment. The actual mistakes were made by the other two players. The secod-place guy could have safely bet up to $1,200, ensuring the win if he and the champ both got it wrong. The third-place player bet $5,000, but she should have bet $6,000, ensuring the win if she got it right and the other two missed it.

If the champ had figured that the other guy would make the sophisticated bet of no more than $1,200, then he could have ensured the win by betting no more than $5,999.

The 2025 MLB Division Series

Two of the four Division Series took four games to decidew with the other two going the full five games. Here is a summary.

Yankees-Blue Jays. The Yankees fell in four games to the AL East winner Blue Jays. The Jays were clearly the better team, a big failure for the Yankees who have had one of the highest MLB payrolls for many years. After the series, FOX commentator Alex Rodriguez countered criticism of Yankee manager Aaron Boone by saying that the fault lay not with the manager but with the front office. A-Rod said that the Yankees were "one of the worst constructed teams" he has ever seen, saying “They have three left-handed catchers, you have five DHs, you have a first baseman in and out". In a long response, fellow commentator Derek Jeter agreed with A-Rod's analysis. The Yankees have now gone sixteen years since their last World Series championship in 2009.

Dodgers-Phillies. The Ddogers also won in four games. After beating the Reds handily in two games in the Wild Card round, and then beating the Phillies in the first two games in this round, it looked like the Dodgers were a shoo-in. But the win in game two bordered on the bizarre. With no outs in the ninth and a Phillies runenr on first in a one-run game, the Dodgers perfectly executed a rare wheel play to get the runner at third. (More on this below.) And then two batters later Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman caught a bounced throw to first to get the third out and preseve the 4-3 victory.

The Phillies then bounced back to win game three in Dodger Stadium, and took the Dodgers to extra innings in game four. But with the score still tied 1-1 in the bottom of the 11th, the Phillies pitcher made the bonehead play of the year. With the bases loaded and two outs, he threw home on a comebacker, instead of taking the out at first. He seemingly forgot how many outs there were! His hurried throw home was wild, but the question arises of whether the runner would have been out with a good throw. The runner seemingly missed home, but that was only because the catcher was blocking the plate without the ball, which you're not allowed to do. None of the announcers or commentators have pointed out this simple fact. The runner missed the plate only because he stepped on the catcher's foot, which highlights the fact that the catcher was blocking the plate.

Mariners-Tigers. The Tigers bounced back from a deficit to force a decisive game five in Seattle. What transpired was a game which went 2-2 into the 15th inning! The Mariners finally broke through with a walk-off run in the bottom of the 15th, ending the longest winner-take-all game in MLB history, four hours and 58 minutes!

Brewers-Cubs. All five games were won by the home team, as the AL Central winner Brewers beat the Cubs three games to two.

Observations. Of the four teams which received a first-round bye, three advanced to the LCS. The Brewers, Blue Jays, and Mariners advanced, with only the Phillies losing. There is always an issue as to whether the first-round bye is an advantage or a detriment. During the past three years that the current system has been in effect, teams with the bye have won only six of the twelve series, so it doesn't seem to confer any advantage.

I was delighted to see the Mariners and Brewers advance, since neither team has ever won a World Series. In fact, the Mariners are the only team that has never even been to a World Series. I'm happy also for the Blue Jays for destroying the mighty Yankees. My only disappointment was the Phillies losing to the Dodgers. The Phillies owner has spared no expense in trying to win a World Series, and he and the great and loyal Phillies fans deserve a championship.

The wheel play executed by the Dodgers is a rarity thse days. This is because sacrifice bunts are relatively rare compared to past eras. The high for sac bunts during the deadball era was 2,785 in 1909, and the high during the liveball era was 2,097 in 1928. But these days the number runs in the neighborhood of only 750-800 a year. The reasons for this decline are twofold: one, modern analytics has frowned on giving away an out, so teams simply don't use it very often; and two, with pitchers not batting anymore there are fewer obvious bunting situations.

So why was the situaion in the Philies-Dodgers game considered such an obvious bunting situation that the Dodgers would decide to put on the wheel play? Castellanos was on second base, haivng just hit a double which pulled the Phillies from down 4-1 to down 4-3, with no outs. The analytics in play here are these: the run expectancy with a runner on second and no outs is 1.13 compared to .97 for a runner on third and one out, which seems to call for eschewing the bunt; however, the chance of scoring one run is 61.2% for a runner on second and no outs, compared to 66.3% for a runner on third and one out. The time-honored axiom says to play for the win on the road, which the Philies were, and to play for the tie at home. But the Phillies manager decided to play for the tie, for the good reason that his bullpen was better than the Dodgers bullpen, which had been notoriously unreliable.

Part of the Phillies' problem here was that they didn't have anybody left on the bench to pinch-run for Castellanos, so they were stuck with a slow runner on second. With a fast runner Dodgers shortstop Mookie Betts surely would not have trusted his ability to beat the runner to third in time to catch the ball and apply the tag to the sliding runner coming in from second.

Mookie Betts reasoned all this through and, in a meeting on the mound, called for his teammates to put on the wheel play in anticipation of the bunt. This meant that the third baseman would charge the plate to field the bunt, and the shortstop would move over to cover third. The first baseman also was going to charge, and if the ball wasn't bunted to him he would go to second to prevent the batter from taking second and getting into scoring position. When manager Dave Roberts joined the conference on the mound his players told him what they wre planning, and Roberts approved the plan. The Dodgers executed it perfectly, so credit to them for an inspired play. And special credit to Mookie Betts, who was in his first season playing the shortstop position.

The 2025 MLB Wild Card Round

Last year all four of the Wild Card round series ended in 2-0 sweeps. Not this year. The Dodgers blew out the Reds, 10-5 and 8-4, but the other three series were tied 1-1 after the first two days. And all featured tight, tense pitchers duels. Red Sox-Yankees scores were 3-1 and 4-3, Cubs-Padres were 3-1 and 3-0, and Guardians-Tigers were 2-1 and 6-1, with the latter game being tied 1-1 unitl the Guardians broke through for five runs in the 8th.

None of the gane threes turned out as I'd hoped, as the Cubs beat the Padres, the Yankees beat the Red Sox, and the Tigers beat the Guardians. Nonetheless, I am cheered that two teams that have never won a World Series are still in the hunt, these being the Mariners and the Brewers. They each received a first-round bye and wil be competing in the Divison Round starting later today.

The Twelve MLB Playoff Teams for 2025

It was down to the wire yesterday as it took the final game for the playoff slots to be finalized. The three nearby teams are all in--Guardians, Reds, and Tigers. The Guardians had a record comeback by coming from 16 and a half games down to nose out the Tigers for the AL Central title. They went 20-5 in September.

Here are the 12 who made the playoffs, ranked by the size of the metropolitan area they play in: Yankees (1), Dodgers (2), Cubs (3), Phillies (5), Blue Jays (7), Red Sox (11), Tigers (12), Mariners (15), Padres (17), Reds (23), Guardians (24), Brewers (26).

And here are the 12 teams ranked by total payroll: Dodgers (2), Yankees (3), Phillies (4), Blue Jays (5), Padres (9), Cubs (10), Red Sox (12), Mariners (16), Tigers (17), Reds (22), Brewers (23), Guardians (25).

It aoparent from these lists that the most impressive teams in 2025 are the Brewers, Guardians, and Reds, all three of whom made the postseason despite being in the bottom ten in both market size and payroll. The biggest loser, by far, is the Mets, who missed out on the playoffs depsite having the biggest payroll at $323M.

"Final Victory", by Stanley Weintraub

This book is a lively account of the 1944 presidential race between FDR, running for a fourth term, and New York Governor Thomas Dewey. What struck me in reading this book are all the similarities between 1944 and the recent 2024 election. Here are some of these parallels.

1. Health issues. By 1944, FDR's health had deteriorated badly. Everybody who saw him for the first time in awhile remarked about how bad he looked. Yet, FDR was determined to run for a fourth term, on the dubious proposition that he couldn't desert his country in a tinme of war.

After meeting with FDR for the first time in three years, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. said, "If I hadn't been warned by the stories of his illness, I would have been shocked beyond words. He stayed behind his desk, and his face was as gray as his hair...I was convinced he was far from a well man. He is thin; he has an unhealthy color. His hands shake violently when he tries to take a drink of water. His words were slurred, and he had memory slips about names and numbers."

Similarly, Joe Biden decided to run in 2024, even though he was clearly too old for the job. Biden's deterioration wasn't as obvious as FDR's was, as it was mental decline rather than physical decline. But it was the same obstinancy that FDR exhibited in his 1944 run.

The damage to the country was much worse in Biden's case, as his last-minute withdrawal from the race did not give his VP, Kamala Harris, enough time to build up momentum for her campaign, and we got stuck with the atrocious Donald Trump, who is doing his best to destroy the country. We got lucky with FDR, as his VP, Harry Truman, turned out to be one of our better presidents, following FDR's death less than three months into his fourth term.

2. Voter suppression. A big issue in 1944 was how the GIs in uniform were going to be able to vote. There were 11.3 million GLs, an estimated nine million of them of voting age. Republicans were doing their best to limit the ability of these service members to vote, on the (accurate) theory that most would vote for their Commander in Chief. Attempts to impose a uniform federal absentee ballot were killed by the coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats. So it was left up to each state to provide the mechanism for voting in that state's election, and at that time some states still had poll taxes, literary tests, and other means for denying blacks the ability to cast a ballot. In the end all 48 states provided for some sort of armed forces voting, and an estimated half of the service members eligible to vote actually did cast a ballot.

In recent years, up to and including 2024, the GOP has done its best to restrict votimg rights, just as it did in 1944. Battles over state voting procedures flooded the courts after the 2020 election, and likely would have occurred in 2024 had Trump again lost.

3. Soft on Communism. This became the main theme of Dewey's campaign as the election neared. In Boston he told the crowd that "In America a Communist is a man who supoprts a fourth term so that our form of government may more easily be changed", and he said that FDR had "only softly disavowed Communism". Many of these rants from Dewey and hs suporters were tinged with anti-Semitism.

Since 1944 the GOP "softness" allegations have morphed from "soft on Communism" to "soft on crime", or soft on terrorism". We hear many allegations today that the Democrats are not tough enough on crime, usually by way of arguing for longer sentences, no cash bail, etc. In the George W. Bush era we heard that the CIA must use torture to fight terrorism. In 2024 the affable and bumbling Biden was an easy target for all sorts of "softness" allegations.

4. Relatability. Thomas Dewey was a cold, aloof man, who did not like interacting with other people. FDR was just the opposite; he loved people. and was loaded with charm and charisma. The pithy quote from Oliver Wendell Holomes comes to mind; after meeting FDR, he famously described him as "third-rate intellect, first-rate temperament".

Dewey's aloofness might have caused his 1944 defeat to FDR, and it definitely did cause his 1948 loss to Harry Truman. Truman, a natural people person, made 356 whistle stops covering over 30,000 miles during the 1948 campaign, to only 50 for the lethargic Dewey, whose speches were so scripted and cautious that they energized nobody. On a scale of one to ten for relatability, Dewey was a zero.

There are very few elections since 1948 in which the less relatable candidate won. I can think of only three--1968, 1972, and 1976. It seems that after the back-to-back disasters of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, the electorate finally said "enough".

The burning question today is why the electorate continues to view Donald Trump as more relatable than the leading Democrats. My answer, simply put, is this: he speaks their language. The test I like to use is to imagine two steelworkers stopping off for a beer or two on their way home after a hard day's work. What sort of language would they use? They certainly would not say "unhoused" instead of "homeless", "food insecure" rather than "hungry", "undocumented person": rather than "illegal alien", or "existential threat" rather than just "threat". And they sure as hell wouldn't want their daughters to be run over on the sports field by biological males; and yet, when a Democratic Congressman expressed this sentiment, he was castigated by his fellow Democrats, with some even calling for him to resign from Congress! This illustrates how out of touch today's Democratic party has become.

The Trump campaign slogan which most resonated with the American people in 2024 simply said "She's for them, he's for us". This is why Trump won the working class vote 56%-42% (and 66%-32% for the white working class vote). Democratic policies are hugely more beneficial to the working class than the GOP's are, but it is the GOP which speaks their language, while the Democrats remain tone-deaf, using highfalutin language which does not resonate with voters.

Jimmy Kimmel Returns to Late Night TV

Jimmy Kimmel returned two nights ago to his ABC late night show after a one-week suspension for comments made after the Charlie Kirk assassination. The ratings were through the roof, as you might expect.

Amazingly, I woke up just in time to hear his monologue. When I had wakened up enough to turn the channel to an ABC station, Kimmel was just being introduced! I thought he struck all the right notes in his comments.

One of the questions now is whether the viewers of the 23% of the local stations still not carrying his show will demand that Sinclair and the other local station owners will relent. I think there is a good chance that the same sort of pushback we have seen on the national level may also work on the local level.

I'm still perplexed at why Kimmel's comments were considered to be so objectionable. His point seems to me to be twofold: one, that people were jumping to conclusions prematurely about the motivations of the Charlie Kirk shooter; and two, Trump's tone-deaf response to a question about how he was handling the death of his (supposed) friend.

I've always liked Kimmel, dating back to his days as Ben Stein's sidekick on "Win Ben Stein's Money", and then later, on "The Man Show". He always seemed to be genuine, personable, and witty. By all accounts he is a good guy, and treats his emoployees well.

Trump's Favorite Lies

President Trump visited the U.K. this past week, and in a joint press conference with PM Keir Starmer he regurgitated a litany of the lies he has been spouting in recent years. It is impossible to know whether he is intentionally lying or is just hopelessly delusional. In the end, I suppose it doesn't really matter which it is. Here is a rundown of these lies.

1. He repeated his usual lie that he won the 2020 election. Of course, he lost fair and square.

2. He said we have already solved inflation, when inflation is actually rising. It was up to 2.9 percent in August, up from 2.7 percent in July. It’s the highest since January. He said, as he has repeatedly, that he inherited the worst inflation in U.S. history. He didn’t. He inherited 3 percent inflation, just above what it is now, and way lower than in the late 1970s. It was about a 41-year high in June 2022 under President Biden, but it then plummeted toward the end of the Biden administration.

3. He repeated his favorite imaginary figure on U.S. aid to Ukraine, saying that we’re into that war for $350 billion. That figure is not even close to correct. A think tank that closely tracks the issue puts U.S. aid at less than half of the president’s figure.

4. He said again that China is paying a whole bunch of tariffs to the U.S. It is actually U.S. importers who pay those tariffs, often passing on the cost to U.S. consumers.

5. He also repeated some of his favorite old January 6 nonsense. He said it’s now clear that Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, rejected his offer of 10,000 National Guard troops on that day. In fact, there’s still no evidence that actually happened. He said, again, the January 6 House Select Committee deleted all its evidence, deleted all the records. In fact, in addition to a public report, it preserved a huge volume of evidence.

6. On immigration, he said he thinks 25 million migrants entered under President Biden. Even his 21 million figure from months ago wasn’t even close to true, more than double the truth, even if you don’t count the people who were quickly expelled from the country.

7. He repeated his claim that prisons in the Congo and Venezuela were emptied to release prisoners as migrants into the U.S. Neither he nor his campaign could ever provide any corroboration for that claim.

8. He again said that he had a role in resolving a conflict between the countries of Azerbaijan and Albania. Of course, he means Armenia, not Albania.

The Sad Case of Kevin Strickland

Kevin Strickland spent 43 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, making him one of the longest wrongfully imprisoned people in U.S. history. Strickland’s story is one of the most heartbreaking examples of wrongful imprisonment in American history. In 1979, at the age of 18, he was convicted of a triple murder in Kansas City, Missouri, despite maintaining his innocence.

His conviction rested almost entirely on the testimony of one witness, who later recanted and admitted she had been pressured by police into identifying him. There was no physical evidence tying Strickland to the crime, yet he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 50 years.

For decades, Strickland fought to prove his innocence. Advocacy groups, journalists, and even prosecutors later acknowledged that his conviction was a mistake. Still, appeals and petitions for his release were denied again and again, a stark reminder of how difficult it can be to overturn a wrongful conviction once it enters the system. Finally, in 2021, a judge formally exonerated Strickland, declaring that he had been wrongly imprisoned for 43 years.

Missouri law at the time did not offer him compensation, meaning he was released with little financial support despite spending more than four decades behind bars for a crime he did not commit. His case has since become a rallying cry for reform in wrongful conviction laws and compensation statutes across the United States.

Here are a few of my reactions to this travesty of justice:

1. The legal system needs to acknowledge that eyewitness testimony is inherently unreliable. No conviction should ever be allowed when it is based solely on eyewitness testimony. Any case relying solely or mainly on eyewitness testimony should contain a jury instruction in which the judge advises the jury that eyewitness testimony is inherently unreliable and should be evaluated with strict scrutiny. Especially problematic is an eyewitness identification of a stranger. This type of "evidence" has virtually no credibility, and the jury instruction should so indicate.

2. The case illustrates how important it is to not discriminate against black people serving on juries. in Strickland's first trial, the sole black juror voted against conviction, after which the prosecutor vowed that this wouldn't happen again. True to his word, the prosecutor eliminated every black prospective juror with peremptory challenges in the second trial, and Strickland waas convicted. It was a few years later that the Supreme Court, in the case of Batson v. Kentucky (1986), ruled that a prosecutor's use of a peremptory challenge in a criminal case-—the dismissal of jurors without stating a valid cause for doing so-—may NOT be used to exclude jurors based solely on their race. Unforunately for defendant Strickland, this ruling was not applied retroactively.

3. The case illustrates what a blatantly racist society exists in the state of Missouri. We northerners like to disparage the so-called "deep South" for its racism, but I've found that border states like Missouri are often the worst offenders. For example, Indiana in the 1920s had the highest Ku Klux Klan membership of any U.S. state. At its peak, the Indiana Klan boasted around 240,000 members, which represented nearly 30% of the native-born white male population in the state.

4. The denial of compensation by racist Missouri is an outrage. States need to ensure that some compensation is provided for those defendants who are imprisoned as a result of a wrongful conviction.

The Sad Case of "Phillies Karen"

The Smerconish poll today asks, "Agree/Disagree: Leave Phillies Karen alone." I am disheartened to see that 61% are voting for "agree".

Public misbehavior needs to be called out publicly. We seem to be drifting into a society in which misbehavior is becoming more and more overlooked with a dismissive shrug.

This woman got in the face of the guy and put her hands on him. If a man did that, the condemnation would be universal. But because it's a woman, 61% are now saying to move on!

If Phillies Karen would aopologize and give the ball back, then I would say it's time to move on. But absent that, let's hold her feet to the fire.

Some Thoughts on "The American Dream"

A recent Smerconish daily poll posed this question: "Do you think the American Dream-—that if you work hard, you'll get ahead-—still holds true, never held true, or once held true but does not anymore?" The result was 50% for once but no longer", 44% for "still holds true", and 6% for "never held true".

What I find objectionable is not the results, which are unremarkable, but the way the question is phrased. The term "get ahead" implies financial success, in particular, doing better financially than your parents. The implication here is that the "American Dream" consists of financial success.

I take issue with this forumulation. After all, noone ever lay on his or her death bed and said, "My only regret is not spending more time on my business". The very thought is ludicrous. No, success in life consists of many things, but financial success would be way down on the list.

The Real Use for "Identity Politics"

I never had any concept of what "identity politics" was all about, or how evil it was, until a bunch of hate-filled women accused me of being a misogynist during the 2016 campaign because I dared to criticize Hillary Clinton's campaigning style. If I criticized her, so their reasoning went, then I must be a misogynist.

Since then I have noticed many examples of this concept which has so polluted our politics. The right-wing MAGA folks are bellowing about how the recent school shooter in Minnesota was trans, as if that means trans people are evil. Another example of this identity politics nonsense.

Two books I've read recently prompt me to consider whether there might be a legitimate use for identity poitics. The distinction I wish to make is urban vs. rural. This might be an example of a useful distinction, as rural and urban folks do tend to see the world differently.

The first book which clued me in to this is "The History of the SS", by G. S. Graber. While most of the book is a straightforward, factual account of the SS, near the end the author reflects on the meaning of this ugly piece of 20th century history. He says that the history of the SS is "an inseparable part of that yearning seen on all sides today to return to a preindustrial age".

The author elaborates: "The vast changes that the Industrial Revolution caused, including the establishment of a gigantic urban proletatriat, made it impossible for the conserative, land-oriented men who formed the ideological nucleus of the SS to come to terms with the twentieth century. The city became for them the emblem of all that was unsound and morally abhorrent. And in the city, they believed, it was the Jews who contolled life. Here is the meeting place between the conservative reaction against modern life which typified the SS, and their anti-Semitism."

The second book is "Miracle at Philadelphia", an account of the Constitional Convention of 1787. Here again I will skip to the end, where the author describes the approval process. Each of the 13 colonies had conventions to consider whether to ratify the proposed constitution. The debate was largely between the urban representatives and the rural representatives. The rural folks (called anti-Federalists) couldn't support the idea of a federal government with power superior to that of the states. In the end, the constitution was duly ratified, but look at the closeness of the vote in the three key states: Massachusetts, 187-168; Virginia, 89-79, and New York, 30-27. We don't realize that the constitution which has worked so well until recently came close to never getting off the ground, because of the rural-urban schism.

I checked the voting patterns of the twenty most rural states in the last three presidential elections. They all (except for three New England states, and Georgia in 2020) went for Trump in all three elections.

I suggest that instead of harping on gender, race, ethnic group, sexual persuasion, or what generation we were born in, we should pay attention to the differences between rural and urban folks.

"Suspense" (dir: Frank Tuttle, 1946)

This is pure film noir. No big stars in it, a mediocre script, and a cheesy plot. Certainly not art, but a mildly entertaining diversion for 101 minutes. A classic love triangle, with some horror aspects thrown in during the last half.

The Hardball Challenge

The House member's idiotic statement that BP was shaken down is a subject other Republican politicians have been asked about. Even though the Republican leadership has disavowed itself of the idiocies of this particular Representative, Rush Limbaugh has endorsed it so no Republican wants to say Rush is wrong.

Chris Matthews of "Hardball" is so amazed by this reticence that he has offered a standing invitation to any Republican who is willing to come forward and say Rush is wrong, not just about this, but about anything!! It is just incredible to watch all the Republicans twist and squirm to avoid saying simply that Rush is wrong, about anything!

Whatever happened to the once-great movement of conservatism? Time was when there were princpled conservatives, people like Barry Goldwater, whose shining moments included speaking out for abortion rights, and speaking out for Nixon's resignation in light of the rampant corruption in his administration. These were the actions of a real conseravtive, not the lamebrain crap that passes for conservatism today. They were the actions of a movement fashioned after the great Edmund Burke, who spoke out against the war against the American colonies, and pursued the impeachment of Warren Hastings on principle.

The Espionage Act of 1917

President Woodrow Wilson signed the Espionage Act of 1917 on June 15, 1917, after the United States had entered World War One two months earlier. Wilson was adamant that the restrictions on free speech were essential to the success of the war effort.

The title "Espionage Act" has always been a misnomer, as very few prosecutions under the Act have involved spies working for a foreign power. The most prominent early prosecuton was against Eugene Debs for a speech Debs gave in Canton, Ohio on June 16 1918, protesting the United States involvement in World War One. Even though Debs was careful to couch his comments as being against the war, and not intended to encourage violation of the draft requirement, he was nevertheless prosecuted and convicted.

Debs lost his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, and began serving his ten-year sentence on April 13, 1919. What is shocking is that the Supreme court vote against Debs was 9-0, showing that the Court's recent decisions upholding the overreach of executive power is nothing new.

President Wilson was under tremendous pressure to pardon the saintly Debs, but at the time the war had not officially ended, because the Treaty of Versailles was still being drafted, and Wilson wanted to wait until the Treaty was finalized before he issued any pardons. But even after the signing of the Treaty he still resisted, saying that he wouldn't issue the pardon until his Attorney General had recommended this action. But then the AG made the recommendation, and Wilson still stubbornly refused. It was left to Wilson's successor, Warren G. Harding, to pardon Debs, which he did in December of 2021, after which he welcomed Debs to the White House.

Other cases through the years since have been similar to the Debs case, in that what was being punished was not espionage activity, but speech that should have been protected under the First Amendment. The most outrageous era in this regard was during the Obama administration, when no less than nine(!) whistleblowers were prosecuted. I will review five of these cases.

1. Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning. Manning, a U.S. army intelligence analyst, was convicted under the Espionage Act for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified military documents and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. His motivation was to show the misconduct and incompetence of the U.S. military in the wars in Iraq and Afghhanistan. He served seven years in prison before receiving a commutation to time served from Obama.

The Manning case was quite similar to that of Daniel Ellsberg, who was prosecuted for releasing "The Pentagon Papers" in 1971, revealing the incompetence and mistakes of the U.S. Vietnam War involvement. The Ellsberg case ended in May of 1973, when the trial judge dismissed the case for "gross governmental misconduct".

2. John Kiriakou. Kiriakou, a former CIA officer, was convicted for disclosing the name of a CIA officer involved in the agency's post-9/11 torture program to a journalist. He was also accused of leaking information about CIA activities related to waterboarding. Kiriakou pled guilty to violating the Espionage Act and was sentenced to 30 months in prison.

3. Edward Snowden. Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, leaked a vast array of classified documents revealing the U.S. government’s mass surveillance programs, including the collection of phone records and internet metadata. Snowden was charged under the Espionage Act and fled to Hong Kong and then Russia, where he was granted asylum. He has not returned to the U.S. and remains a highly controversial figure.

4. Reality Winner. Winner, a former NSA contractor, was accused of leaking a classified intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to the news media. Winner was arrested in June 2017 and charged with violating the Espionage Act. In 2018, she pled guilty to leaking the document and was sentenced to more than five years in prison.

5. Jeffrey Sterling. Sterling, a former CIA officer, was accused of leaking classified information regarding a CIA operation to expose Iran's nuclear program to New York Times journalist James Risen. Sterling was convicted in 2015 of violating the Espionage Act and sentenced to three and a half years in prison.

An examination of these cases reveals that they all involved whistleblower actions in the tradition of Daniel Ellsberg. These actions were designed to inform the public about what the government was doing, and none were done on behalf of any foreign power.

Conclusion: The Espionage Act of 1917 should be repealed, and in its place should be enacted an act more narrowly tailored to protect legitimate free speech activities. Judges should be required to be lenient in sentencing when the leakers are not motivated by anti-American sentiments. After all, the true patriot is not the person who supports the government right or wrong, but the person who wants to improve the government.

New News about the JFK Assassination

After 62 years of denials, the CIA has finally admitted that one of its officers had direct contact with Lee Harvey Oswald before JFK’s death. This release was done quietly over the 4th of July weekend, and so has not received the media attention it deserves. The revelation will inevitably re-kindle interest in the various conspiracy theories.

My conclusion from the reading I've done is that none of the the conspiracy theories have been confirmed. Indeed, author Gus Russo spent many years trying to prove a conspiracy, and he was unable to do so. His book, "Live by the Sword: The Secret War againt Castro and the Death of JFK" established the reasons for the assassination, which lie in Lee Harvey Oswald's determination to make a statement about our Cuban policy.

The question naturally arises, why did our government lie to us all these years? Part of it is LBJ's desire to downplay the cold war aspects of the assassination. For example, when the Dallas DA announced that he was looking into Soviet involvement in the assassination, LBJ called him up and told him to knock it off, saying "What are you trying to do, start World War Three?".

The CIA had good reason to cover up its activities prior to the assassination, in that its incompetence would be exposed if the pubic knew that Oswald had been under suspicion for quite some time. Indeed, the CIA had had Oswald udner constant surveillance during the week he spent in Mexico City prior to the assassination, attenmpting to get permission to move to Cuba. Given that, why wasn't Oswald under continuing surveillance after his return to the U.S.? Also, the CIA feared that a thorough investigation might have revealed the many assassination attempts against Fidel Castro during the Kennedy administration.

The Warren Repoprt was a huge cover-up from the get-go. LBJ's instructions were to disprove all the conspiracy theories and convince the public that Oswald acted alone, and the final report did just that. But what the report didn't tell us was that three of the seven members dissented from the conslusions reached, and issued a dissenting report, written by Senator Richard Russell. Warren promised Russell that the dissent would appear along with the majority's report, but he broke his word and issued the report without the dissent, which wasn't found until years later among Russell's papers at the University of Georgia.

LBJ himself later stated that "I never believed that Oswald acted alone", but his public reaction to the Warren Report was positive, since he didn't want the assassination to be blamed on an international conspiracy. The bottom line is that the Warren Commission was never told about the many CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, and so did not look into the possibility that JFK's death was a retaliation for those assassination attempts.

Besides the three dissenters--Senators Richard Russell and John Cooper, and Representative Hale Boggs--two other members, Gerald Ford and Warren himself, later expressed doubts about the Commission's findings. The only two to not express doubts were the two with ties to the CIA--Allen Dulles and John McCloy.

The CIA's involvement in foreign assassination remained secret until 1975, when Congress formed the Church Committee, a select Senate committee, chaired by Idaho Senator Frank church, charged with exploring govenrment abuses in the wake of the Watergate scandals. It should be kept in mind that the CIA's mandate is to collect and analyze foreign intelligence information. The Church Committee found numerous abuses of this mandate, including the following: 1) Operation MKULTRA, which involved the drugging and torture of unwitting US citizens as part of human experimentation on mind control; 2) COINTELPRO, which involved the surveillance and infiltration of American political and civil-rights organizations; 3) Family Jewels, a CIA program to covertly assassinate foreign leaders; and 4) Operaton Mockingbird, a program using CIA assets posing as journalists (the Church Committee found 50 journalists who had official, but secret, relationships with the CIA).

For our purposes here I will focus on number three, the foreign assassinations. CIA involvement in foreign assassination or coup d'etat attempts include the following: 1) Iran in 1953; 2) Guatemala in 1954; 3) Congo in 1961; 4) Dominican Republic in 1961; 5) South Vietnam in 1963; 6) Cuba, many attempts 1961-1963; and 7) Chile in 1973. All of these attempts have been well-documented, either by the Church Committee or by documents since released by the CIA.

The Kennedy administration's efforts to get rid of Castro were conducted under an operation termed "Operation Mongoose", headed by AG Robert Kennedy. Indeed, RFK was so obssessed with this that at one point he ordered a meeting in his office at 10 AM every morning of the Principal's Committee, consisting of the heads of the relevant agencies--CIA, FBI, Dept. of Defence, and others. Every morning he would ask, "What progress have you made since yesterday in getting rid of Castro?". Given these efforts, it's not surprising that when RFK heard his brother had beens shot, the first thing he did was to storm into the office of the CIA Director to ask him, "Did your people do this?".

Matthew 26:52 tells us of how Jesus rebuked Peter for attempting to stop the Roman soldiers with violence, saying “Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword." Sadly, JFK learned this lesson the hard way, and the country is vastly poorer today as a result.

Are CNN and MSNBC Dying?

The ratings for the second quarter of 2025 are in and it is not good news for the two liberal-leaning networks. Looking at the ratings for prime time shows, FOX averaged 2.63M viewers, while CNN had only 20% of this at 538K, and MSNBC had 38% at 1.01M.

Both of the liberal networks have seen recent changes in their prime time lineups. On MSNBC, Jen Saki has replaced Rachel Maddow in the key 9 PM slot, but her ratings have disappointed. She just doesn't generate the interest that the great Rachel Maddow did, with her immense storytelling ability. Both of the liberal networks have experienced serious ratings decline since the 2024 election.

On MSNBC's signature morning show, "Morning Joe", the co-hosts Joe and Mika are rarely both on anymore. This week they have both been off, with no word as to why. In another recent week, Joe was off all week, again with no word as to the reasons for his absence. I note that the network pre-empted the show last summer on the Monday after the Trump assassination attempt and Joe was furious, saying he would quit if this ever happened again. My best guess is that there is serious friction between Joe and Mika and the network, and the show's future is in serious doubt.

Over on CNN, Caitlin Collins does a good job in the 9 PM slot, but her ratings are not good. At 10 P.M. Abby Phillip hosts a panel show that could be good, but it is ruined by the presence of Trumop-lover Scott Jennings, a mean-spirited jerk whose presence on the show is like fingters on a blackboard. He constantly interupts others who don't agree with him, and when not interrupting, he sits there smirking at whoever is talking. CNN would do much better if it got rid of Mr. Jennings; I have to turn the channel whenever he is on. A pity, because Abby Phillip is a delightful presence, full of grace and poise and beauty.

A bad sign is that the PSA's on both of the liberal networks have been more and more frequent. A few days ago every third ad on CNN was a PSA for St. Jude's Hospital. This reflects an inability of the network to sell advertising, which means the financial viability of their shows is in serious jeopardy. The demise of the two liberal networks would leave FOX news in charge. NewsNation is an alternative whose audience is growing rapidly, but it is right-leaning also, though not as badly as FOX. NewsNation does have two excellent shows discussing legal issues, led by Dan Abrams and Ashley Banfield. But the network would have to get rid of the obnoxious clown Chris Cuomo if it wants to fully succeed. One thing I've noticed about NewsNation is that it seems to cover a wider variety of news than the other news networks.

The Coming Civil War grows Ever Closer

For the first time since 1965, yesterday a president has called out a state's National Guard without a request from that state's governor. In 1965, it was President Johnson calling out the Alabama's National Guard to protect the Selma civil rights marchers. In 1957, it was President Eisenhower calling out the Arkansas National Guard to enforce the court-ordered integration of Little Rock's school system.

What is different today is that for the first time the federalization of a state's National Guard is being ordered not to *enforce* basic human rights, but to *oppose* basic human rights.

The coming Civil War grows closer, and it looks like it might start in California and spread eastward from there.

My Ten Favorite "Seinfeld" Episodes

H. L. Mencken once wrote: "What is primarily needed, in order to write short stories of any dignity, is not a thimble rigging technic, but a capacity for accurate and original observation. The best short story writer, like the best novelist, is that one who observes the life about him with the greatest clarity and shrewdness, and sets it forth in the simplest and most understandable way. The materials of fiction are not to be got out of books, but out of life itself....The best short stories in the world teach nothing and preach nothing; they do not expostulate, and neither do they mourn; they simply set forth what has been seen and felt."

When I recently came across this passage, I immediately thought of the TV shw "Seinfeld". The rule of thumb for "Seinfeld" is "no hugging, no learning"; it simply seeks to depict the oddities and quirks of everyday life. The show has its roots in Jerry's standup comedy, which was developed while he was still in high school, keeping a notebook in which he chronicled the oddities of human behavior which he observed daily.

The show has become known as "a show about nothing", but Larry David has recently said that in the beginning the show set out to be a show about "how comedians get their material". Here are my ten favorite episodes.

1. The Yada Yada (S8, E18). This is my all-time favorite episode. There is so much going on that I had no trouble coming up with a 25-question trivia quiz about the episode. The title refers to the phrase "Yada Yada Yada" that George's girlfriend Marcy liked to user to shorten her stories, and during the episode the others started using the phrase also.

During the episode Jerry's dentist, Tim Whatley, memorably played by Bryan Crasnston, converts to Judaism and starts telling Jewish jokes. This offends Jerry, not as a Jew, but as a comedian. Jerry complains that "If Whately ever gets Polish citizenship, he'll have total joke-telling immunity".

Kramer and his midget friend Mickey meet two women at The Gap, but can't decide which each one likes the best. The matching shirts they bought are hilarious.

Elaine is a character reference for her friends Beth and Arnie, who are trying to adopt a child. Elaine tells the adoption agency that Arnie has a temper, and this scuttles the adoption. Elaine tries to make it up to her friends by dating the adoption official.

Kramer calls Jerry an "anti-dentite" for his disparaging remarks about dentists. In the final scene, in which Mickey marries Karen, one of the women he and Kramer had met, Karen's parents are played by Robert Wagner and Jil St. John. The Wagner character calls Jerry an "anti-dentite bastard".

Jerry cmes to the wedding with Beth, who by this time has broken up with Arnie. The episode ends with Beth telling an anti-dentist joke, and Jerry says "Yeah, dentists, who needs them", to which Beth replies, "Not to mention the blacks and the Jews".

Whatley was a character in four other Seinfeld episodes besides this one. These include "The Mom and Pop Store" (in which he hosts a party on the evening before Thanksgiving), "The Label Maker" (in which he is called a "re-gifter"), "The Jimmy" (in which he is discovered to have a Penthouse magazine in his waiting room), and "The Strike" (in which he gives charity donations as Christmas gifts).

2. The Contest (S4, E11). This is the most famous Seinfeld episode. It is this episode that first made me aware of the series, due to all the newspaper publicity leading up to the airing of the episode. The characters have a contest to see who can go the longest without "pleasuring themselves".

3. The Invitations (S7, E24). This is the episode in which George's fiancee, Susan, dies from licking the envelopes containing their wedding invitations. What makes the episode memorable for me is the stunning guest appearance of Janeane Garofalo as Jerry's girlfriend. She is just like Jerry, a fact which intrigues Jerry so much that he proposes to her, and then regrets this. They later have "the first totally mutual breakup in relationship history". Garofalo's guest appearance is one of the most memorable in the history of the show.

Kramer has a story line in which a bank has offered $100.00 if a customer is not greeted with a "hello". When a teller instead greets him with "hey", Kramer tries to claim the $100.00. The bank exective says "You got a greeting, it started with an 'h", how does twenty bucks sound?", an offer which Kramer snaps up immediately.

The Susan character was never remotely appealing, and the actress who played her never fit in with the show's cast. Her relationship with George was never believable, and her exit from the show was most welcome.

4. The Soup Nazi (S7, E6). Another memorable episode. The actual guy who the character was based on disliked the portrayal so much that he banned the entire "Seinfeld" cast from his restaurant! "No soup for you!"

5. The Apology (S9, E9). This episode features a guest appearance by the great James Spader, who is in AA and working the 12 steps. George is upset because the Spader character has not apologized to him for a perceived slight years ago, whivh George sees as a violation of step nine. The episode depicts three different types of 12-step programs--for alcoholics, for rageaholics, and then for germaphobes. The ending has Puddy and Elaine and one of Elaine's co-workers having supper at Kramer's apartment, and then recoiling in horror when they realize he prepared the food in the shower.

My favorite scene is when Kramer calls Puddy to ask for help in installing a garbage disposal in his shower. "Is David Puddy there?" "This is Puddy." "Puddy, this is Kramer." "Yeah, I know."

The David Puddy character appears in ten episodes, two in season six and then eight more in season nine. The appeal of Puddy is that he is such a simple man, a delightful contrast to the sophisticated Elaine character.

6. The Wife (S5, E17). In this episode Jerry and his girlfriend, played by the beautiful Courteney Cox, pretend to be married so that she can get a 25% discount on dry cleaning. Jerry initially loves being in this pretend marriage, and he seems happier than he has ever been. But eventually, he concludes that he is "not ready for a pretend marriage". Jerry has had many beautiful girlfriends, but none of them are as attractive as the great Courteney Cox.

7. The Race (S6, E10). There are two great themes in this episode--Superman and Communism. The episode starts out showing Jerry dating a woman named Lois, and she says "Boy, you sure like saying my name".

Lois is working for Duncan Meyer, an old high school classmate of Jerry's who still insists that Jerry got a head start in a race they'd run against each other in ninth grade. Jerry and George concoct a scheme wherein George will show up at Monk's, pretending that he hasn't seen Jerry since high school, and then confirm that Jerry did not get a head start in the race. Elaine is daitng a guy, Ned Isakoff, who is a Communist, and she is intrigued by the idea of dating a Communist. Elaine gets blacklisted from Hop Sing's, a Chinese restaurant, for refusing a delivery. But her boyfriend Ned wants to continue patronizing the restaurant, as that is where his father used to hang out after being blacklisted in the '50s. So he places an order, but when the delivery man sees Elaine at the apartment he also blacklists Ned.

Kramer and Mickey get jobs at a department store, Kramer as Santa and Mickey as his elf, but they get fired when Kramer starts spouting Communist propoganda to the kids.

George gets his hands on a copy of the "Daily Worker" from Ned, and is instrigued by a personals ad from a woman who said "appearance not imortant". When they talk on the phone, a secretary overhears the converation and suspects that George is a Communist. Far from being outraged, Steinbrenner likes the idea, and sends Geroge to Cuba to recruit ballplayers for the Yankees. When George meets with Fidel Castro, Castro blabbers on and on, just like Steinbrenner, and George quietly leaves the office.

Duncan and Jerry arrange to have a rerun of their ninth-grade race, but Kramer's car backfires and Jerry again gets a head start, while Duncan is left waiting for the actual starting gun. Duncan has promised Lois a two-week vacation in Hawaii if he lost, and so after the race she asks Jerry, "Will you come to Hawaii with me." Jerry says, in true Superman style, "Maybe I will, Lois, maybe I will." He then winks at the camera, the only time in the history of the show that the fourth wall is broken.

8. The Marine Biologist (S5, E14). This episode featuresd the longest sustained laugh in the history of the show, when George pulls out the golf ball that he took out of the whale's blowhole. Kramer then follows up with "Is that a titleist?".

9. The Junk Mail (S9, E5). What makes this espisode special is the guest appearance of Wilford Brimley as the Postmaster General of the United States, who travels to New York to meet with Kramer after Kramer decides he doesn't want his mail anymore. The meeting with Kramer is a take-off of Brimley's memorable role as the Attorney General in the Paul Newman movie "Absence of Malice".

10. The Finale (S9, E23&24). The Finale was an inspired episode which brought back an amazing number of secondary characters. Chief among these was Jackie Chiles as the lawyer for the four friends in their trial for violating the "Good Samaritan" law. Chiles, a parody of the O.J. Simpson lawyer Johnny Cochran, had previously appeared in three season seven episodes ("The Maestro", "The Caddy", and "The Friar's Club), and the season eight epiasode "The Abstinence".

Many "Seinfeld" fans have expressed their dislike of this epiosde. I feel sorry for them, as it seems they don't undertand that the episode is an inspired parody of "Inherit the Wind", the great movie abnout the Scopes monkey trial.

Larry David admitted they blew the ending when he ended "Curb Your Enthusiasm" with Larry getting a prison sentence for proividing water to a woman waiting in line to vote in Georgia, and then, when he was released on a technicality, he said "This is how we should have ended the final episode". But despite this drawback, the finale episode still ranks among the best, in my opinion.

On Birthright Citizenship

On President Trump's first day in office, he signed an Executive Order changing the rules for birthright citizenship. This Executive Order has been struck down by every federal judge who has considered the issue. The problem for Trump is that the Order violates the plain language of the 14th Amendment, which says that if you are born here, you are a citizen.

The substantive issue was not before the Supreme Court in yesterday's argument. What was before the Court was whether a single federal district court judge can issue an injuncton which applies nationwide.

All 21st-century presidents have complained about this. The problem is the judge-shopping which both sides have been guilty of. Conservatives file cases in red Texas, and liberals file cases in blue California, and the judges then issue injuntions which apply nationwide.

The problem for the Supreme Court justices is this: how do we fashion a rule which limits the ability of a single judge to issue these sweeping rulings? What the justices want to do is allow such a sweeping ruling when the issue is clear, as it is in the birthright citizenship case, but limit it in the more questionable cases. In their questioning yesterday, all of the justices recognized the problem, but none proposed a workable solution.

The problem with allowing a district court ruling to apply only to the litigants who brought the case to court is that every single aggrieved person would then have to bring their own lawsuit to obtain justice, a clearly untenable result. Amy Coney Barrett seemed to be joining the three liberal justices yesterday, but it is not clear what sort of ruling will command the support of a court majority. This is a hard case which will likely result in bad law.

"Pitfall" and "Nora Prentiss"

These are two film noirs from the '40s that I have watched online in the past two days. In both of these movies, we have a middle class white collar worker with a happy family life, who gets involved with a femme fatale, to disastrous consequences.

In "Pitfall", the happy family man is played by Dick Powell, who meets the femme fatale, played by Lizabeth Scott, in the course of his work, and he falls for her. She is not really a typical femme fatale, in that she is not portrayed as being particularly seductive; rather, she presents a wholesome image. In the end, he shoots a recently released prisoner but it is deemed to be self-defense, while the femme fatale is arrested for shooting the cad who has been stalking her. An interesting back story is that the script got the movie in trouble with the Hays Code, because the adulterer was not sufficiently punished for his errant ways. The director solved the problem by meeting with two of the Hays Code members, telling them he knew that they were both married and had mistresses!

"Nora Prentiss" starts with the main character being imprisoned, and the whole movie is then shown in one long flashback. He is a doctor who meets the femme fatale, played by Ann Sheridan, by chance when she is involved in a car accident. She is more like the stereotypical femme fatale, a lounge singer who can be quite seductive. There are more plot twists and turns in this movie than in "Pitfall", and we wonder throughout who the doctor has killed.

Both movies are rated 7.1 on IMDB, and that sounds about right to me, as both are entertaining, with believable characters. Both movies reveal the underlying tedium and pointlessness of the supposedly ideal American life, with the white picket fence, wife and kids, and days which are all way too much alike.

Three Cheers for Rory McIlroy (and for CBS)

Wonderful drama Sunday in the last round of the Masters golf tournament. Rory McIlroy led by two strokes going into the last round, but he promptly lost his lead to his playing partner, Bryson DeChambeau, when he double-bogeyed the first hole. He then fell behind when DeChambeau birdied the second hole. But McIlroy gamely fought back, and by the end of the front nine he had built up a four-shot lead.

McIlroy then stumbled, with two bogeys and a double bogey, and after the 13th hole he found himself tied with Justin Rose, who had started the day seven shots back. It looked like Rose had all the momentum and that Rory was done for. But McIlroy persevered, and hit some good shots on the last few holes. He missed a five-foot birdie putt on the 18th which would have won him the tournament, and a sudden death playoff ensued.

On the first hole of the playoff, a par four, Rory was closer to the pin after his approach shot, and he then sank his birdie putt for the win, after Rose had missed his. Rory then fell to the ground, crying uncontrollably.

McIlroy thus became the sixth player all-time to win the "career grand slam". He had the first three legs of it ten years ago, but this final leg had proved elusive. Something disastrous always seemed to happen whenever he got close during those frustrating ten years. But the waiting is all over now, and he joins Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, and Tiger Woods as the only winners of the career grand slam.

McElroy grew up in a working class Catholic family in Northern Island. His parents recognized his intense interest in golf at an early age, and they took on extra jobs to facilitate Rory's development as a golfer. McIlroy turned pro in 2007 at the age of 18, and won his first PGA Tour event in 2010, just before his 21st birthday. By the end of 2014 he had won three of the four majors, but then came a 10-year majors drought, broken Sunday in majestic style.

CBS had its usual superb coverage, with every shot looking like a painting, displaying the wonderful ambience of Augusta National. I never grow tired of the trees, the grass, the flowers, and the water, and CBS augments the stunning photography with intelligent, understated commentary. This was the 70th year CBS has covered the Masters, which it always calls "a tradition unlike any other", a phrase coined by Jim Nantz in 1986 and used every year since. I have been watching about as long as CBS has been covering it, and this final round was as exciting as any of them.

The Limits of Executive Power

This topic has been much in the news lately, so a review of the relevant history might be useful to get a handle on this issue.

The Articles of Confederation, adopted in 1777, provided for a very weak central government. It was essentially a confederation of thirteen autonomous states. By 1787 it was obvious a stronger central government was needed, one that could collect taxes and conduct foreign policy, and a constitutional convention was convened to propose needed improvements.

The convention early on adjourned into a committee of the whole, so that discussion could proceed unfettered. While this meant there were no official minutes, many of the delegates kept journals, and most regularly wrote home to their wives, so there is an ample written record of the proceedings. My main source here is "A More Perfet Union", by William Peters, which provides a detailed, almost day-to-day, account of the deliberations.

It was agreed early on that the central government should consist of three branches--executive, legislative, and judiciary. One of the main issues was the nature of the executive branch. Edmund Randolph, a delegate from Virginia, proposed a three-man executive, calling a single executive "the foetus of monarchy". Others argued for a single executive. I think here of the saying in the NFL that "if you have two quarterbacks, you have no quarterback". The idea here is that someone has to be in charge, the buck has to stop somewhere. Eventually the single executive was agreed to, by a vote of seven states to three.

Having settled on a single executive, the Convention then debated what the powers of that executive would be. One issue here was whether the executive would have an absolute veto on national legislation, an approach favored by Alexander Hamilton and James Wilson. Pierce Butler of South Carolina spoke eloquently against the absolute veto, observing that "in all countries the executive power is in a constant course of increase". Ultimately the absolute veto was voted down, and the ability of two-thirds of each legislative branch to override a veto was chosen.

A similar dispute arose when the issue of ratifying treaties was taken up. James Wilson and Rufus King of Massachusetts spoke against the proposed two-thirds requirement for Senate ratification, feeling that would give a minority undue power, but the two-thirds rule prevailed.

As an example of the truth of Butler's observation about executive power constantly increasing, we have only to track the increase over the years in presidential use of "executive agreements" rather than treaties. In "The Imperial Presidency", Schlesinger says that in 1930 the U.S. made 25 treaties and only 9 executive agreements, while in 1971 the count was 214 executive agreement and only 17 treaties. In other words, in 1971 Nixon entered into 231 agreements with foreign governments, and only submitted 7% of them to the Senate for confirmation! When a Senate committee subpoenaed a state department expert to testify on the difference between the two types of agreements, his testimony was characterized as "a treaty is something we have to submit to the Senate; an executive agreement is something we don't have to submit to the Senate."

While the Trump violations of presidential norms have been nauseatingly numerous, I want to focus on the issue of what happens when a president ignores court orders. Historically this issue has been framed in a way that stresses the duty of the Supreme Court to not get too far ahead of the electorate; hence the saying that "the Supreme Court follows the elections returns". I well remember my Constitutional Law prof lecturing on this point. He gave as an example Andrew Jackson's famous statement that "John Marhsall has made his decision, now let him enforce it". At the time the Nixon tapes case was in the courts, and the prof gave, as another example, what happens if Nixon would ignore a Supreme Court order to turn over the tapes to the Watergate prosecutor.

The Jackson issue needs some fact-checking. Historians now say that Jackson probably did not actually say this. The case, Worcester v. Georgia (1832), involved a dispute between the state of Georgia and the Cherokee Nation. The court ruled that the Cherokee Nation was an autonomous nation, not subject to the Georgia law at issue. While this ruling did not directly require any federal action to enforce it, the holding (or, perhaps, better described as "dicta"), did have broader application to other cases and was repeatedly violated by Jackson and other federal officials who consistently refused to honor the rights of Native American tribes.

While Jackson's abuses of federal power are certainly troubling, they pale in comparison to that greatest abuser in the history of the U.S. presidency, Abraham Lincoln. I won't repeat my prior critique, but here is how Schlesinger described Lincoln on page 58 of "The Imperial Presidency":

"Throughout the war, even with Congress in session. Lincoln continued to exercise wide powers independently of Congress. He asserted the right to proclaim martial law behind the lines, to arrest people without warrant, to seize property, to suppress newspapers, to prevent the use of the post office for "treasonable correspondence", to emancipate slaves, to lay out a plan of reconstruction. His proclamations, executive orders and military regulations invaded fields previously the domain of legislative action. All this took place without a declaration of war by Congress."

Schlesinger explains how Lincoln deliberately delayed convening Congress until July 4, 1861, in order to prevent Congress from stopping his illegal actions. Schlesinger says that "Lincoln ignored one law and constitutional provision after another. He assembled the militia, enlarged the Army and Navy beyond their authorized strength, called out volunteers for three years' service, spent public money without congressional appropriation, suspended habeas corpus, arrested people 'represented' as involved in 'disloyal' practices and instituted a naval blockade of the confederacy."

Ultimately the question comes down to how do we respond to serious abuses of presidential power. Resorting to the court system is no answer, if you have an administration which refuses to abide by court decisions. The real answer is that the people have to push back. In many countries this "pushing back" takes the form of mass protests in the streets, as has been taking place in Turkey recently. In our country the tradition is to push back at the ballot box, in town halls, and through targeted protests. This has been going on recently with respect to our current president. Especially noteworthy are the elections the past two weeks. Last week Democrats won a State Senate seat in Pennsylvania (in a district including Lancaster) that hadn't been won by a Democrat in over 100 years! And last week Democrats won the Supreme Court race in Wisconsin by ten points, despite Elon Musk's $25M spent in opposition.

Encouraging signs indeed!

"Hangmen Also Die" (Dir: Fritz Lang, 1943)

This is a very entertaining film set in Czechoslovakia during the 1942 Nazi occupation. The Nazi in charge of the occupation, Reinhard Heydrich (known as "The Hangman" for his brutality), is assassinated, and the Nazis are trying to locate the killer. They round up 800 hostages and vow to kill 40 of them every few hours until someone comes forward to identify the killer. The Czech underground resists, showing extraordinary bravery.

The movie starts with Heydrich being shot, and a woman directs the Gestapo the wrong way to puruse the killer. We are inroduced to other minor characters among the Czech citizenry, and they show up near the end of the movie as part of a masterful plot to frame a two-faced traitor. I had to watch it a second time to be able to match up the characters from the beginning to those at the end.

The dignified, soft-spoken professor is the heart of the story, wonderfully played by Walter Brennan. (I didn't realize the first time through that it was Brennan, but I recognized his voice the second time through.) When the professor is scheduled for execution, as part of one of the groups of 40, his adult daughter is allowed to visit him, and he dictates a letter for her to give to his 11-year-old son when the son was older. Part of that poignant letter was this: "Don't forget that freedom is not something one possesses, like a hat or a piece of candy. The real thing is fighting for freedom. And you might remember me, not because I'm your father, but because I also died in this great fight". If only we Americans were as united and diligent in the cause of fighting tyranny as these brave Czech patriots were!

Some of the Nazis are portrayed in a semi-comic way, but this adds to the entertainment value of the film, without detracting from the serious nature of the effort to identify the killer. Over two hours long, but worth every minute. Filmed in stunning black and white, as befits the grim subject matter it is depicting.

Historical fact check. Reinhard Heydrich was in fact in charge of occupied Czechoslavakia, and he was in fact assassinated in the Spring of 1942. At the time the movie was made the details of the assassination were not yet known. It eventually came to light that the Czech government-in-exile, trained by the British Special Forces, formed a grouop which parachuted into Czechoslavakia on December 28, 1941, and lived in hiding until shooting Heydrich on May 27, 1942.

Mencken Gets It Right on Lincoln

Commenting on the Gettysburg Address in 1920, H. L. Mencken wrote this.

"It is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburgh sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination--that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth.

"It is difficult to imgine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. The Confederates went into battle free; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision of the rest of the country--and for neearly twenty years that veto was so efficient that they enjoyed scarcely more liberty, in the political sense, than so many convicts in the penitentiary."

MLB Predictions for 2025

I was 26 positions off last year, two better than the year before. The AL West was again my best with only two off (I flip-flopped the A's and Angels). The AL Central was the worst with eight off, with the Guardians surprisingly finishing first, the Tigers and Royals tying for second, and the Twins dropping down to fourth. The White Sox were dismal, setting a record with 121 losses. The other divisons were four off.

And now we turn the page to a new year.

AL East: Yankees, Blue Jays, Red Sox, Orioles, Rays

The Yankees have been beset with Spring Training injuries, but I can't find another team to pick for first. The Rays have really gone downhill, and will be playing in a minor league park in 2025. I can't see a future for them in Tampa Bay, a city which refuses to support them.

AL Central: Guardians, Tigers, Royals, Twins, White Sox

I really don't think the Guardians are going to win their division again, but I don't know which team, the Royals or the Tigers, is going to edge them out for first. The Twins made no offseason moves to improve, and may even sink to last place, as the White Sox will surely be better than last year (they could hardly do worse!).

AL West: Astros, Rangers, Mariners, Angels, Athletics

The Astros burst into the upper echelon in 2017, and Jose Altuve became my favorite player. But then the cheating scandal hit, and now they are universally hated. But they probably have one more year left at the top of their division. Like the Rays, the A's will be playing in a minor league park in 2025, and this has to be demoralizing to their players.

NL East: Phillies, Mets, Braves, Nationals, Marlins

I have a strange fascination with the Phillies. Their owner has tried hard to build a championship team, and I applaud his efforts. Their fans, while notoriously rowdy (they once booed Mike Schmidt!), at least care about their team. Either the Mets or the Braves could win the divison, but I'm going with the Phils as a sentimental pick.

Like Tampa Bay and Oakland, Miami refuses to support its team. I don't know why MLB doesn't move these sick franchises. Florida has proven that it won't support MLB, and MLB needs to pay attention to this reality and proceed accordingly.

In 2003, a year the Marlins won the World Series, their average home attendance was only 16K, the third lowest in MLB, ahead of only the Rays and the Expos. The next year, as reigning World Series champions, it went up to 21.5K; better, but still the fifth-lowest in MLB. In 2012 the Marlins got a new stadium, and attendance per game went up to 27.4K, still only 18th out of the 30 teams. By last year, attendance fell back down to 13.4K, ahead of only the woeful A's.

NL Central: Cubs, Reds, Brewers, Pirates, Cardinals

The Cubs and the Reds have improved, while the Brewers have not, and hence I pick the Brew Crew to fall to third. The Cubs and Reds have two of the best managers in MLB, with Craig Counsell and Terry Francona, and I think these two fine managers will get the most out of their players.

The Cardinals have made no efforts to improve from last year. They have historically been the best-run franchise in baseball, so I give them the benefit of the doubt that they know what they are doing in deciding to build for the future rather than going after free agents. But that does not augur well for the coming year.

NL West: Dodgers, Padres, Diamondbacks, Giants, Rockies

The Padres are one of my favorite teams, playing in the best baseball city in the country. Hence I am picking them over the D-Backs for second as a sentimental pick. The Rockies have not improved, and surely will again finish last.

"The Real Lincoln", by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

This important book seeks to set the record straight regarding Lincoln's presidency. Historians tend to revere Lincoln as a great president, a view that DiLorenco exposes as totally ignorant.

After an introductory chapter, Chapter Two documents Lincoln's opposition to racial equality. Lincoln consistently argued that blacks were inferior to whites, and his opposition to allowing slavery into the new territories was based on his desire to keep the territories free of blacks. As a member of the Illinois legislature, Lincoln supported removing all of the free blacks from the state, and he supported a Constitutional amendment prohibiting free blacks from migrating into the state. A Republican U.S. Senator who Lincoln was close to explained that "We, the Republican Party, are the white man's party. We are for the free white man, and for making white labor acceptable and honorable, which it can never be when Negro slave labor is brought into competition with it".

The author debunks the idea that people in the North were friendly to blacks. He says that 'The overwhelming majority of white Northerners cared little about the welfare of the slaves and treated the blacks who lived among them with contempt, ridicule, discrimination, and sometimes violence." He quotes Tocqueville in "Democracy in America" as observing that "the prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known".

In the third chapter DiLorenzo writes about peaceful emancipation. He stresses that only in the U.S. was a war needed to free the slaves. In every other country, "slavery ended through either manumission or some form of compensated emancipation". He points out that slaveowners could have been compensated for their lost slaves, plus each emancipated slave given forty acres and a mule, for less cost than the horrific Civil War that Lincoln presided over.

In Chapter four the author writes about 'Lincoln's Real Agenda". From the time he entered politics in 1832 when he first ran for public office, Lincoln was always a Whig. DiLornezo writes that Lincoln was "almost single-mindedly devoted to the Whig agenda--protectionism, government control of the money supply through a nationalized banking system, and government subsidies for railroad, shipping and canal-building businesses."

The tariff issue is still relevant today, with Trump's policies currently under discussion. DiLornzo writes that "Convincing consumers that higher prices are in their best interest is an absurd proposition on its face, but clever protectionist propagandists have always taken advantage of the public's ignorance of economics to pull the wool over its eyes." Certainly apropos of what Trump is doing today.

In Chapter Five the author talks about the myth of secession as "treason". He points out that our country was born with an act of secession when we separated from Britain. The Declaration of Independence was based on the idea that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, and that whenever government becomes destructive of the peoples' rights, the people have the right to secede and form a new government.

The author describes how there was a strong secessionist movement in New England during the entire Jefferson administration and most of the Madison administration (1801-1814). I had previously known that opposition to the War of 1812 had led to a serious secesionist movement in New England, but the length of the movement was a surprise to me. The main point here is that all during this vigorous debate about secession in New England, the wisdom of secession was debated, but never was the inherent right of secession questioned.

The author describes how there were strong secesionist movements in the "middle states"--New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. These states contained three types of secessionists: those who wanted to join the Southern Confederacy, those who wished to form their own "Central Confederacy", and those who wanted to alliow the South to go in peace.

An analysis of 495 editorials from Northern newspapers during the late 1860 to mid-1861 time period shows overwhelming support for the right of the Southern states to secede. Horace Greeley aptly summed up the sentiment when he wrote that "We hope never to live in a republic whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets". Here again, duirng this whole secssion debate, never was the right to secede questioned. Lincoln's idea that secession was treason was something he made up out of whole cloth.

In Chapter Six DiLorenzo exmaines the question of whether Lincoln was a dictator. Certainly he was, as he shredded the Constitution, and committed all of the same abuses that King George III was accused of in the Declaration of Independence. He declared martial law and suspended habeas corpus, and ordered the arrest and imprisonment of virtually everyone who disagreed with his expreme views of presidential war powers. Chief Justice Roger Taney issued an opinion that the presidenrt had no lawful power to suspend habeas corpus, but Lincoln simply ignored it.

In May of 1961 a special election was held in Maryland to fill ten empty seats in the House of Delegates. Suspecting them of harboring secessionist sympathies, Lincoln had the candidates arrested and sent, without being charged with any crime, to military prison. Lincoln conitnued to interfere in Maryland poiltics, sending soldiers into the state to arrest and detain anyone opposing his war policies durng the regular November election.

Lincoln's suppression of the press was eqally despicable. When a list of more than a hundred Northern newspapers that had editorialized against going to war was published, Lincoln orderd his Postmaster General to deny mail delivery to those papers. His Secretary of State Seward had his own goon squad of secret police, which "scoured the countryside for the editors of any newspaper, large and small, that did not support the Lincoln administration's war policy and had them arrested and imprisoned."

In sum, nothing the current Trump administration is doing comes close to the evils perpetrated by Abrham Lincoln during his brutal presidency.

Chaper Seven documents the atrocities against civilians committed by Lincoln's soldiers, against all laws of war. The remaining chapters discuss the centralization of power in the national executive that Lincoln was responsible for. The author's Libertarian views cause him to give undue attention to this part of the story. I would have preferred more info on the evils of the war itself. He had already established in Chapter Four that Lincoln was a dyed-in-the-wool Whig who favored increased federal power at the expense of the states. And in Chapter Six he had already established Lincoln's dictatorial inclinations.

"In a Lonely Place" (dir: Nicholas Ray, 1950)

This film noir has Humphrey Bogart playing a Hollywood screenwriter, an unusual role for him. The characters are fairly one-dimensional, and we never really get to know any of them well enough to care about them.

Bogart brings a hat check girl home so she can tell him about a book he is supposed to read so that he can write the screenplay, but he is too lazy to read it himself. The girl then gets murdered on her way home from his apartment.

The police suspect him of murdering her, and in the process of the police investigation he gets to know, and falls in love, with a beautiful neighbor. It turns out Bogart has a Jeckyll and Hyde personality, capable of flying into uncontrollable rages.

The ending is rather unsatisfactory and unimaginative. I can't recommend the movie, though Bogart and his love interest, played by Gloria Grahame, are worth watching.

The Upheaval in TV News

Both CNN and MSNBC lost 50% of their audience during the first month after the November election, but in January they bounced back somewhat. Still, massive layoffs are taking place and both networks are reworking their lineup of daily shows.

Thankfully, MSNBC got rid of Joy Reid, who I found to be unwatchable due to her abrasive nature. It almost made me sick watching the other MSNBC hosts slobbering all over themselves last night expresing how tragic they thought losing Reid was. Give me a break!

Alex Wagner will still be with MSNBC as an analyst, but she won't be hosting at 9 PM anymore. Rachel Maddox bemoaned the loss of the two primetime anchors of color, an obnoxious example of political correctness which I could have done without. The fact that Wagner is more white than black adds to the ridiculousness of this whole over-emphasis on race.

CNN has really shot itself in the foot with their use of the idiot Scott Jennings as a Trump apologist. The problem isn't that he's pro-Trump, but rather that he comes across as totally obnoxious, constantly interrupting anyone he doesn't agree with, and never having a friendly word or smile for anyone else. Abby Philip, who I really love, is forced to have him on her nightly panel, which totally ruins the show for me. What a shame.

CBS made a drastic change to its evening news show, with disastrous results. Ratings have continued to plummet, and critics have universally panned the new format. A sad plight for the once-great CBS news department.

NBC, which took over from CBS as number one after the retirement of Walter Cronkite in 1981, has faced a decline in its flagship program, "Meet the Press", after the sudden death of popular host Tim Russert in 2008. There were disastrous replacements tried in David Gregory and Chuck Todd, until the network finally found a winner, Kristen Welker, in 2023.

The market is changing, and TV will never again be the primary place where people get their news in this country. Neither will newspapers, unfortunately.

Roberta Flack

I heard an interesting backstory this morning from Joe Scarborough on "Morning Joe" about Roberta Flack's great song, "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face". Her producer wanted her to do it faster and she insisted on doing the slow version.

The song went nowhere, but three years later Clint Eastwood heard the song and chose it to be part of his 1971 movie "Play Misty for Me". The song then took off and charted.

To me Roberta Flack represented the best of music in the 70s, the last decade in which pop music was special, before the depressing slide into country, disco, and rap. R.I.P. Roberta Flack (1937-2025).

"Contrary to Popular Opinion", by Alan Dershowitz

Alan Dershowitz was once known as one of the best attorneys in the United States. Unfortunately, he pretty much self-destructed after the turn of the century, when he became more and more obsessed with issues relating to the state of Israel, and less and less concerned with U.S. legal issues. His credibility was completely destroyed after he joined the Trump defense team in January of 2021 for the second impeachment case. He argued that proof of a crime was necessary for an impeachment to succeed, a pathetically weak argument, and the exact opposite of what he had argued during the Clinton impeachment in 1998-1999. To cement his dishonor, he lobbied President Trump for clemency for his past clients still in federal custody, and his efforts played a role in at least twelve clemency grants.

"Contrary to Popular Opinion" is a collecton of Dershowitz's newspaper columns during the period of 1988-1992, when he was still at the height of his legal abilities. The book is divided into five parts, containing a total of fifteen chapters.

Part One deals with the state of our legal system. Dershowitz writes that "Our judges, including Supreme Court judges, are among the least qualified in the democratic world today....Many judges are incredibly lazy, regarding their position as a kind of benign retirement from the rigors of law practice." He concudes that "There is no excuse for our present system of judicial selection, which focuses so heavily on rewarding poitical hacks. We are entitled to better."

In contrast to his low opinion of judges, Dershowitz gives high marks to juries. He likes the fact that jurors are "independent of the powers that be", and are thus free to vote their consciences.

Regarding the Supreme Court, Dershowitz bemoans the loss of Marshall and Brennan to reitrement, and oberves that "Big government is beginning to win nearly every case in which the rights of individuals are pitted against the power of governments". But he is enouraged that a centrist plurality in the Court may be emerging, consisting of O'Connor, Kennedy, and Souter.

Part Two consists of three chapters devoted to free speech issues. Dershowitz is a strong advocate of the first amendment's free speech provisions, and he skewers both the left and the right equally when either side calls for censorship of the expression of ideas from the other side. This book was publioshed in 1992, before the rise of the Internet, so it's possible Dershowitz may have moderated his zealous free speech views.

Part Three consists of three chapters on issues relating to individual rights. He says that the right-wing emphasis on increasing penalties and decreasing defendants' rights in the interest of achieving "law and order" is just plain wrong, and would result in no real decrease in violent crime, which is "primarily a function of factors beyond the control of the legal system". Regarding drugs, he thinks that decriminalizaton should be considered.

Part Four consists of four chapters on sex, life, and death. Abortion is extensively discussed, as the repeal of Roe v. Wade was on the table in several Supreme Court cases during this period. Capital punishment and the right to die were also burning issues.

But the issue Dershowitz devotes the most attention to is that of rape. His greatest ire is reserved for the rape shield laws, which protect the itentity of the alleged victim from being reealed. He sees these laws as a residue of outdated thinking that there is a stigma attached to being a rape victim. He points to the unfairness of the names of defendnts being made public, but not that of their accusers. He points out that if the name of an alleged victim is published, people who know her might come forward with information useful to the case. He repeatedly cites a case in which, once the name bcame known, it was discoverd that she had made eleven false rape reports in another state!

Dershowitz emphasizes that the presumption of innocence before trial is vitally important. He points out tht FBI statistics show that 8.6% of rape reports are unfounded, compared to 2.3% for other crimes. He correctly points out that we need to be extra skeptical about all "single-witness cases". His well-reasoned conclousion is that "Only when we come to realize that rape is a crime of violence, an aggravated assault, will we be able to treat it like other crimes of violence--both in court and in the media."

Part Five consists of four chapters on the rise of anti-Semitism. Here Dershowitz veers off away from the law and into politics, so I won't comment further.

The value of this book is threefold. First, it provides a useful historical snapshot of the burning issues during the 1988-1992 time period. Scond, we get the benefit of seeing how a gret legal mind analyzes some important legal issues. And third, the insights are provided in succinct two-page bites, never failing to hold the reader's interest.