Reactions to the Chauvin Trial

As the Chauvin trial gets well into its second week, it is clear that the proseuction is making a strong case, and it would be tempting to be optimistic about a guilty verdict. However, I would caution all of my friends to not get your hopes up, because the defense has not yet presented its case. We should keep in mind that the officers who beat Rodney King within an inch of his life with their billy clubs were not convicted, so it seems doutful Chauvin will be.

One commentator expressed the opinion that most jurors make up their minds based on the opening statements of counsel. I would put the figure at closer to one-third, rather than most, but still a significant number. And another third makes up their minds based on whether they like or dislike the participants in the trial. The camera has not shown Chauvin, so I don't have an opinion about which direction this points to. If I could observe his demeanor, I think I could predict the outcome with a high degree of accuracy.

I will say that the video presented gives a very negative impression of Chauvin. He comes across as a cold, callous sociopath, who nonchalantly left his knee on the neck of Floyd for nine and a half minutes, even after Floyd had stopped resisting. It will be the job of the defendant's attorneys to humanize him, and present a reasonable explanation for his actions. If they can do so, the verdict will likely be not guilty. If not, we will likely see a hung jury.

MLB Moves Its All-star Game out of Georgia

Kudos to Major League Baseball for moving its All-Star game out of Georgia, in response to Georgia's efforts at voter suppression. The other major North Amercian team sports have All-Star games that are pretty much of a joke, but baseball's All-Star game has always been something special, so this move is significant.

Also due kudos are the Atlanta-based companies Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola for speaking out against the voter suppression efforts.

There is an ongoing attack on our democracy led by Republican forces who fear that they can't win an election if every eligible voter is allowed to vote. The restrictions on voting are seemingly endless, and these efforts must be resisted at every opportunity, else our precious democracy will be no longer.

Letter Cancelling My Newspaper Subscription

I have received a "Renewal Notice" advising that my current subscription expires on April 7th. Please be advised that I will not be renewing.

While I object to the weasel words "up to" in my Renewal Notice, my real reason for not renewing lies in the poor quality of your right-wing columnists. I love George Will--he is easily the most thoughtful and articulate columnist around these days, and he is, quite simply, the best in the country.

While Will is a true conservative, a position I respect, consider the likes of Cal Thomas, Mark Figley, Michael Reagan, and Christine Flowers. These columnists think not with their brains, but with their biases. And they can't write worth a lick.

Were I to continue to subscribe to your newspaper, I would be giving tacit approval to the brainless right-wing bias on your editorial page, and this I cannot do. Back in the early 2010s, you had some good Libertarian commentators like Thomas Sowell and others. These Libertarians had legitimate, principle-based views, and I respected them even though I didn't agree with everything about their philosophy. But those Libertarians are all gone, and in their place we have a bunch of no-talent hacks.

MLB Predictions for 2021

Good to be back to a 162-game season this year. I'm not following Spring Training as closely as I usually do, but I will still offer the followoing predictions.

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

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

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

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

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

AL West: Astros, Angels, A's, Mariners, Rangers

Impeachment and the (Idiot) Media

I continue to be quite upset at the way the idiot media continues to rant and rave about why the House Managers did not call witnesses. You may think "Idiot" is too strong a term, but bear in mind these are national correspondents we're talking abut, people who are at the top of their profession. They should know better.

All witnesses would have accomplished would be to delay the trial for weeks or even months. You would have to decide who to subpoena, then schedule depositions for those witnesses who were willing to honor their subpoenas, and then risk the danger that the witnesses would refuse to testify as expected. (Note how vociferously Senator Mike Lee was in objecting to statements he reportedly made. Others could have done the same.)

The way these things can get tied up in the courts is illustrated by the House Judiciary Committee's attempts to subpoena former White House Counsel Don McGahn. The Committee has been trying for two years to enforce its subpoena, and it is STILL tied up in the courts. Had the House Managers gone ahead with attempting to bring in witnesses, it would have turned the whole thing into a circus, and perhaps they would have even lost some of the seven Republican votes that they got. I really liked the way they methodically presented the case, and didn't use all of the16 allotted hours. Witnesses would not have accomplished a damn thing, other than pissing off the Senators.

Another thing the idiot media kept doing was referring to the Senators as "jurors". I would have thought this issue was settled during the most dramatic moment of the Clinton impeachment trial, when Senator Tom Harkin objected to the House Managers repeatedly referring to the Senators as jurors. Chief Justice Rehnquist ruled that he agreed with Harkin. The point here is that impeachment is a political process, not a legal process, and nowhere in the Constitution are the Senators referred to as "jurors".

The media made much of the fact that several GOP Senators were meeting with Trump's lawyers, as though there was something horribly wrong with this. Again, the attempt is being made to compare this to a judicial trial. What we ended up seeing in the question and answer period is that there was coordination in both camps with the Senators. It was obvious that the questions were submitted in advance. I was looking forward to the type of colloquies that we see in a Supreme Court oral argument, where the Justices press the attorneys for the side they disagree with. But here, questions were mostly friendly ones, where a Democratic Senator would submit ones to the House Managers, and GOP Senators to Trump's attorneys. The fact that many of the answers were written out and read demonstrates this.

"Abraham Lincoln's Execution", by John Chandler Griffin

The central thesis of this book is that Lincoln's execution was planned by Vice-President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. I'm somewhat dubious about the mostly circumstantial evidence of this conspiracy theory, so I'd like to focus on the more interesting parts of this remarkable book.

What is clear is that John Wilkes Booth did not die as the history books allege, but rather he lived under assumed names in various places in the South until January 13, 1903, when he died by suicide in Enid, Oklahoma. Those who knew Booth andf saw the body all said that the red hair of the body killed in 1865 showed that it was not Booth. Those who killed this person were out to claim a substantial reward, so had every reason to claim it was Booth. In 1994 an effort was made to exhume the body so that DNA testing could settle the matter. Booth's next of kin were in favor, but a judge ruled against this effort.

The Mary Surratt debacle is especially tragic. The military commission in charge of the court-martial initially voted against hanging her. Stanton was outraged, and pressured the commission to impose the death penalty. They then reached a compromise wherein they would vote for death, but then present a petition asking President Johnson to commute the sentence to life imprisonment. Johnson never acted on the petition, and there is some question about whether Stanton ever actually presented the petition to Johnson.

The saga of Mary's son, John Surratt, is perhaps the most interesting part of the book. He was in Canada at the time of the execution of Lincoln, and remained there with a series of Confederate sympathizers for several months. On Oct. 25, 1865, the State Dept. was informed that John was planning to go to Rome. Rather than aggressively pursuing him, the State Dept. rescinded the reward offer, and allowed him to remain free for a over a year. Eventually he was captured and brought back to the U.S., where he stood trial in a civilian court, the Supreme Court having prohibited a military court. He received a vigorous defense, and the jury hung 8-4 for acquittal, When he was retried, the government dropped the murder charge, and his counsel pointed out that the statute of limitations had expired on the lesser charges, so the judge had to dismiss the case.

We've Seen all this Before

In William Manchester's The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972, the author recounts how Hoover downplayed the Great Depression, and it sounded eerily like how Trump has downplayed the pandemic. Hoover looked on the depression as a public relations problem, and he treated it as a psychological phenomenon. Like Trump, he pretended the problem did not exist.

Specific statements made by Hoover sound just like Trump. In December of 1929, he declared that "conditions are fundamentally sound". Three months later he said that the worst would be over in 60 days. In May he said the economy would be back to normal by fall. In June he denied a request for a public works project, saying "The depression is over".

When men appeared on the streets selling apples, Hoover said that "Many people have left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples". When he was roundly criticized for this, he called his critics "unpatriotic". At one point he denied that people were starving, a demonstrably false statement which was promptly refuted by numerous journalistic reports.

Hoover's treatment of the bonus marchers which occupied Washington, D.C. in 1932 was especially despicable. He sent in the military to brutally drive them out of the city. Trump also wanted to use the military to combat the protesters in Portland and other cities, but he was unable to accomplish this, sending instead federal agents rather than troops.

And then there is the Joe McCarthy era. McCarthy's evil during his reign of terror far surpasses anything Trump has done. His lies destroyed many careers, and ruined many lives. People were blacklisted merely for being suspected of once being friends with a Communist sympathizer. How flimsy is that! And McCarthy had a 50% popularity, more than Trump has ever had.

The Douglas MacArthur sage is also informative. When Truman fired him, MacArthur had a 69% approval rating, compared to only 29% for Truman. Upon his return to the U.S., he gave a 34-minute address to a joint session of Congress, which was interrupted by applause 30 times. He was chosen to deliver the keynote address at the 1952 Republican convention.

But what is instructive is how fast MacArthur's star faded. Within ten days after his dismissal, his approval rating had already started to fall. He gave many political speeches to various state legislatures, but his hopes that the 1952 Republican Convention would turn to him for the nomination did not come to fruition, and after that little was heard from him. MacArthur had shown by his speeches that he was more interested in pursuing his private vendetta against Truman than in offering pertinent commentary on the issues of the day, and people grew tired of that. He lived out his last 12 years as a virtual recluse, holed up in the penthouse suite of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in NYC.

I was struck by a stat showing that by the end of November internet searches for "Donald Trump" had dropped to 1/8 of what they had been at the start of the month. His star is fading, and I expect (and hope) that once he leaves office he will fade just as fast as MacArthur and McCarthy did.