Eric The Blue

Addendum re Piper

Ok, more on the Piper kidnapping.  Mike Bakalars, reader of this book, tells me that the seedy bar in question was known as Sportsman's Retreat.  It was in north Minneapolis, in the vicinity of Lyndale and Plymouth Avenues, and I'm pretty sure the retreating sportsmen slaking their thirsts were neither hunters nor anglers.  I was never there, though I do remember being at some disreputable establishments a half mile or so up the road.  One, now closed, was called Stand Up Frank's, and the joke was, after two or at the most three, no customer could remain standing.  On one occasion a female friend, after taking a sip of her "7 and 7," asked me to go to the bar for a glass of pop so that she could dilute her drink after choking some of it down.  I obediently complied, and was told by the bartender, "Tell her if she likes pop there is a machine next door."  When I told that story to a friend, he told me he was there once, in the winter, and some very dressed up lady--which would have been very unusual, like maybe there had been an article in one of the weeklies--asked the bartender whether he'd make her a hot toddy.  He was washing glasses and didn't even look up while answering, "Lady, these drinks are hot enough."  Someone else told me that for a period of time Frank's would, for the entertainment of their clientele, project pornographic movies on the undecorated walls of the bar. Hard to understand why, if that's true, anyone ever went to the Sportsman's Retreat.

Anyway, thanks to Mike's information, I googled something like "Piper kidnapping sportsman's" and was soon sunk in this long specimen of unusually interesting legal prose.  It's the decision of the appellate court ordering a new trial for the two men, Callahan and Larson, who had been convicted of the kidnapping in the fall of 1977.  It seems I got at least one detail wrong in yesterday's exposition: I said that Mrs Piper spent two nights alone in the woods, handcuffed and chained to a tree, when actually the first night one of the kidnappers stayed with her and even gave her some trousers and a St Olaf sweatshirt to keep her warm.  As a St Olaf alum, I probably should not have suggested that Callahan and Larson lacked the sophistication necessary to have pulled off such a complex crime.  They--if it was them--made at least one amateurish error, however: at some point on his ransom odyssey, the kidnappers made Mr Piper leave his own car and get into the same stolen Chevy Monte Carlo that they had used to transport Mrs Piper to Jay Kent State Park.  Thus when he later abandoned it at a suburban Holiday store, the authorities were able to subject it to a rigorous forensic examination that turned up a hair very like Callahan's and, from a scrap of a bag, a fingerprint very like Larson's.

But the kidnappers, if there indeed were only two of them, were not by any means hopeless bumblers, either.  It's hard to  disagree with the following from the decision ordering a new trial:

Finally, we offer the following observation.  The complicated manner of the ransom delivery involving several automobiles, possible monitoring by radio transmission, frequent stops, and the removal of the ransom money at the very point timed telephone signals were being relayed together with the fact that at least one kidnapper remained with Mrs Piper in the park until Friday night suggests the participation of more than two individuals in the crime . . . .

Yet the government only ever tried two people, and they were eventually acquitted. 

All the President's Men: a local angle

I watched on tv this evening All the President's Men.  I love the movie, and it's probably about my fifth viewing.  Now is the time for the cliché about "always discovering something new."  In the scenes shot around famous Washington buildings and monuments, the camera often dwells, just for a frame or two longer than seems natural, on the sightseers--kids on a school field trip, tourists standing in line.  If I noticed them before, it never occurred to me that some ironic commentary might be intended.  All the innocent, patriotic heartlanders come to pay homage to the sacred sites while "Woodstein" was figuring out who controlled the slush fund to pay the burglars and dirty-tricksters who worked for the Nixon administration.

I'd forgotten a local angle, too.  At one point in the movie, Woodward places a call to Kenneth Dahlberg, Midwest finance chair of the Committee for the Re-election of the President.  Dahlberg lived in Orono, Minnesota, a tony suburb of Minneapolis on the north side of Lake Minnetonka, west of the city.  In the movie, he sounds frazzled on the phone, and one feels that a guilty conscience about his part in the corruption is the likely cause.  But then he says he's upset because his neighbor has just been kidnapped, and locals of a certain age will immediately realize that he's referring to "the Piper kidnapping," one of the great unsolved crimes in Minnesota history.  On July 27, 1972, Virginia Piper, wife of Harry Piper--the family name is the Piper of the firm then known as Piper Jaffray & Hopwood--was kidnapped while gardening outside her home.  Apparently, that was the day that Bob Woodward called the Pipers' neighbor, Kenneth Dahlberg, to ask how a check made out to him for $25,000 had ended up in the possession of one of the Watergate burglars.  The kidnappers left typewritten instructions at the Piper home requesting the delivery of a million dollars in unmarked 20-dollar bills, according to precise instructions, the next evening, which was a Friday.  Against the advice of the FBI, Mr Piper got 50,000 twenties into a duffel bag and, unaccompanied and unsurveilled by law enforcement, drove a circuitous route to "a dark parking lot behind a seedy bar in the shadow of downtown Minneapolis."  He then went inside the bar to make a phone call in which he was to receive his next instruction, and while he was inside the bar the duffel bag holding a million dollars was removed from his car.  I don't know if the name of the bar is in the public domain, but if it is, and you are a Piper kidnapping aficionado, I'd love to know its name.  If it remained open for another few years, I may well have been there.  

So that was Friday night after the Thursday kidnapping.  I distinctly remember that I played golf with my dad and a neighbor at Gross Golf Course, in northeast Minneapolis, that Saturday: the neighbor and my dad talked about it all through the round.  That morning, a Twin Cities clergyman had received a phone call from a man who described Mrs Piper's whereabouts, and a few hours later--maybe while I was playing golf--she was found handcuffed and chained to a tree in the Jay Cooke State Park near Duluth.  She spent two nights alone in the woods.  

The twenties were unmarked, but their serial numbers were recorded, and only about $4000--a couple hundred bills--have ever turned up, mostly scattered around southern Minnesota.  About two weeks before the 5-year statute of limitations would have run, a couple of lifelong but small-time criminals--Donald Callahan and Kenneth Larson--were arrested and charged with the crime.  At trial, they were convicted, but two years later the conviction was thrown out on appeal and a subsequent trial resulted in their acquittal.  Lots of people doubt they had it in them to pull off such a crime and suspect they were either just the "muscle" or completely uninvolved.  In any event, the crime is officially unsolved, and some people believe there is, somewhere in Minnesota or perhaps western Wisconsin, a bag holding 990 k cash buried in the ground.  

Nixon and his men, however, are known to have been guilty.

Harmon at Fenway Park

Even if they hadn't been such wonderful games, watching the Twins play in Fenway against the Red Sox these last two nights has set my mind wandering--for example, to the baseball equivalent of alternative history, along the line of: What if Lincoln hadn't been assassinated and had lived to preside over reconstruction?  Me: What if Harmon Killebrew had played for the Red Sox?

You get the idea.  Laser missiles that are homers everywhere can get knocked down to the warning track--my daughter calls it the "worry trail"--by the Green Monster, but Harmon's moonshots would all have been over it.  On the other hand, a fair number of his long outs would have been, in Fenway, doubles or even homers.  I haven't been able to find a website that sets out player stats by ballpark, but I did find this relating to most homers by a visiting player at Fenway Park:

Babe Ruth  38
Mickey Mantle 38
Harmon Killebrew 37
Al Kaline 30
Alex Rodriguez 29
Joe DiMaggio 29

A couple of fast notes about this result.  The Babe had a bit of an advantage on account of having played his entire career before the league expanded beyond eight teams--keeping the schedule for the Yankees would have brought him to Fenway for eleven games per season, year after year after year.  Harmon would have played there nine times a season for most of his career, less frequently after 1968.  Note, too, that the Babe is the only left-handed batter on the list (Mantle was a switch hitter, the other four batted right-handed).  Fenway is not a homer haven for left-handed batters:  I happened to see, while clicking around to feed my curiosity, that of Ted Williams's 521 career homers, only 248--substantially less than half--were in home games.  (Williams batted left-handed and played his entire career for the Red Sox.)  Finally, there's quite a gap between Harmon's 37 and Kaline's 30; the Twin is alone at the top of this list with the two most celebrated American League sluggers, ever. 

It's also interesting that I found this information on, of all places, Twitter.  People who think they're smart like to run down social media sites, but they (social media sites) can be either sinkholes or highly useful.  I'm endlessly amused and entertained, sometimes even uplifted, by people I follow on Twitter.  Did you hear about the promiscuous violin maker?  Friends called him Straddle-Various.  I read that on Twitter this week.  In the uplifting category, someone tweeted:

my dad is dying and my friend brought me a brownie in bed and said remember u can call me in the middle of the night just to say Horrible Things!!!!  the most fucked up things u can think of!!!!!  then she told me some gossip and left for dance class.  100% pure love.

Girls go to college to get more knowledge . . .

 

. . . and boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider, I am told by my young roommates.  Maybe that accounts for the gender gap, currently more like a wide and deep ravine, in American politics.  In the most recent Quinnipiac poll, for example, male respondents disapprove of Trump's performance as president by only 51-45 percent, while women disapprove by more than 2-to-1 (64-31) .  The result of the "generic ballot" question is similar: by 46-44 percent men want Republicans to retain control of the House of Representatives, but women, by 57-32 percent, would prefer a Democratic majority.

For context, in the 2016 presidential election Trump carried men by 52-41 but Clinton prevailed, 54-41, among women.  Four years before that, Romney defeated Obama among male voters, 52-45, but Obama won women by 55-44.  

I know that some people explain these facts by talking about policies, the Republican "war on women" and all of that, but maybe like so much else it's less deep, simpler.  My guess is that Republican politicians just remind women of men they've known and disliked.  White, middle-aged or beyond, pasty, swaggery, persuaded for no evident reason of their seriousness, worth, and sex appeal.  "Men's men."  If you venture to disagree with one about the Second Amendment and guns, watch him draw himself up to his full height before asking, portentously, "Are you aware that the 'A' in 'AK-47' doesn't stand for 'automatic?'"  Hold your tongue, ladies, or you'll be subjected to the whole spiel!  (But they already knew that.)  Most women wouldn't want to be around these guys even if they agreed with them--which, mainly, they don't.  The whole Republican party gives off the vibe of a fellow who, to compensate for not having gotten laid in awhile, loves talking about military history and the many merits of the Glock 40 Gen 4 MOS that he carries to show who's boss.  

Granted, I understand that the most famous Republican has been quite the sexual conquistador.

 

Stand your ground?

 

Last Thursday, in Clearwater, Florida, a guy pulls up to a convenience store with his family.  He parks in a handicapped spot and, with the engine running, goes into the store with his 5-year-old to buy some snacks.  Mom stays in the car with two younger children.  While he's in the store, a guy with a conceal-and-carry permit walks up to the idling car and begins arguing with the woman about the parking spot--where's your handicap sticker, etc.  The fellow comes out of the store and, seeing his partner in an argument with a stranger over the parking spot, walks up to the man and shoves him.  The guy falls to the ground, pulls out his gun, and, as the unarmed convenience store shopper backs away from him, shoots him once in the chest, killing him.  (The sequence of events was captured by a surveillance camera and is shown in the news report embedded above.)

Since Florida is a "stand-your-ground" state, there apparently has been no crime committed.  The local sheriff will not charge the shooter, and experts believe the state attorney won't, either.  The shooter was "standing his ground."  So, to recap:

Guy goes out in public with his loaded handgun in his pants and initiates a dispute over a trivial matter.  When the dispute escalates into a physical confrontation, he shoots in the chest an unarmed man who is clearly backing away from him when the shot is fired.  A shooter, a victim, a corpse, but no crime.

Stand your ground?  More like a license to kill.

American stories: Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants"

Because the author, Ernest Hemingway, was born on this date, July 21, in 1899, at Oak Park, Illinois. He shares a birthday with the poet Hart Crane.

"Hills Like White Elephants" was one of the stories in the collection called Men Without Women, published in 1927.  There are two characters (not counting the woman who serves them drinks), identified only as "[t]he American and the girl with him," although the man later calls the woman "Jig."  So, a man with a woman, but all is not well.

Most of the words in the story are the dialog between these two people as they have a couple of drinks at a train station in Spain, somewhere between Barcelona and Madrid.  But there are two paragraphs devoted to describing the landscape.  The first opens the story:

The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white.  On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun.  Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep the flies out.  The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building.  It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes.  It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid.

This speaks of desolation, dirt, barren heat, a certain cheapness with flies.  It's "on this side," the other side being left for the moment undescribed.  The two talk for about three pages--the whole story is about five pages--and then the girl, Jig, unhappy with the conversation, gets up from the table and takes a short walk to where she can see across to the other side:

The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station.  Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro.  Far away, beyond the river, were mountains.  The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.

The opposite: life, fecundity, beauty. She feels the difference but "the American" is oblivious.  What have they been talking about?  She's pregnant, and he wants her to have an abortion.  Her feelings are complex, which distinguishes them from his.  Here is a portion of the talk at the station along the Ebro:

"It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig," the man said.  "It's not really an operation at all."

The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.  

"I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig.  It's really not anything.  It's just to let the air in."

The girl did not say anything.

"I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time.  They just let the air in and then it's all perfectly natural."

"Then what will we do afterward?"

"We'll be fine afterward.  Just like we were before."

"What makes you think so?"

"That's the only thing that bothers us.  It's the only thing that's made us unhappy."

It's the only thing that's made him unhappy.  Her dissatisfaction, we are made to feel, is in contrast thoroughgoing.  An abortion isn't a solution for her unhappiness.  "That's what we do, isn't it--look at things and try new drinks," she had asked a moment before, describing their rootless and hedonistic life in the moment of her revulsion from it.  And he replies, "I guess so."  

The story concludes: 

He picked up two heavy bags and carried them around the station to the other tracks.  He looked up the tracks but could not see the train.  Coming back, he walked through the barroom, where people waiting for the train were drinking.  He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people.  They were all waiting reasonably for the train.  He went out through the bead curtain.  She was sitting at the table and smiled at him.  

"Do you feel better?" he asked.

"I feel fine," she said.  "There's nothing wrong with me.  I feel fine."

I have emphasized the verbs "drank" and "looked" because I suspect Hemingway means us to connect them to--regard them as corroboration of--Jig's bitter summary of her life with "the American," traveling around looking at things and trying new drinks.  The word that stands out, however, is the adverb reasonably.  Hemingway spurns modifiers, and when his characters lean on them in dialog it's generally a sign of the author's moral disapproval.  If you strike the adverbs--sop up the oily come-on-- from the American's pitch to Jig, what's left is his reasonable self-seeking.  Everyone can understand him.  It's harder to say what ails Jig.  In one of her letters, the uncompromisingly devout Flannery O'Connor told a friend that Hemingway's best fictions are charged with an aching longing for what she called "Catholic fullness of life."  I think that's her way of describing why it's ridiculous for the American to have supposed that, while he drank an Anis at the bar, Jig got better and now "feels fine."  The dead fall of her false cheer is the last bit of desolation in this withering and despairing story.

 

All-star doings

 

I've almost survived all-star week, that mid-July hiatus from regular season baseball when the rhythm of my summer days is cruelly interrupted.  I caught a little of the game at a bar in Minneapolis's Lyn-Lake district, and it just holds no interest for me, though some of the sideshows are of even less interest.  The home run hitting contest?  The big boppers no longer compete, and, even if they did, so what?  The Pro-Bowl isn't very interesting either but at least they don't try to jazz it up with a punt-pass-and-kick competition.

The bar was the James Ballentine VFW.  Third Tuesday of every month, they put on a free comedy show that is a good time: nice room, big crowd, one heckler on Tuesday (and a comic who seamlessly incorporated her into his act).  There were perhaps a dozen stand-up performers, some better than others, the worst mildly amusing and the best really, really funny.  It's not the normal VFW crowd--less white, less straight, way younger.  One of the funniest comics let on about half way into his set that he was gay, which, notwithstanding my defective gay-dar, revealed nothing.  Afterwards, I went grocery shopping at the Uptown Cub, where just before midnight on a Tuesday there were more shoppers than you might imagine, almost all of them the age of an upwardly mobile young career-builder--the beginning and the end, however, of the demographic resemblance.  I felt nostalgic for my youth when, frequently with judgment clouded by Miller High Life (still just $3.75 for a bottle at the Ballentine VFW), I went grocery shopping in the middle of the night pretty regularly.  Safer than driving straight home!

With no Twins games going on the TV or radio, I'm right up to speed on our president's antics, his misadventures with double negatives and all the rest of the unusually shitty shit-show.  Where does he get off talking about the IQ of Maxine Waters?  (General principle: people who are obsessed with other people's IQs are usually not very smart themselves and almost invariably assholes.)  And what might Putin have on him?  I don't think it's anything relating to sex, a subject about which Trump would be shameless even if Christian evangelicals did not insist that he take one mulligan after another.  He's pretty touchy about his finances, though--and he's done business with a lot of shady characters, some of them in Russia.  So here is a theory, advanced by Adam Davidson, of The New Yorker, that fits the facts, insofar as they are known, and is moreover recommended by its relative banality.  The pee tape I reject on a principle that is a second cousin to "if it sounds too good to be true . . . ."

I've also been sunk in the USA trilogy, John Dos Passos's massive, kaleidoscopic portrait of America at the start of the twentieth century.  Last night, I finished the first installment, The 42nd Parallel, without ever forming an idea of the significance of the title.  I know Minneapolis is along the 45th parallel, so the 42nd is a little to the south, like at about Chicago and Des Moines, but the action of the novel is geographically diverse and includes Duluth, Seattle, San Francisco, Nevada, Chicago, Mexico, New York, Fargo, and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.  I hadn't known till a few days ago that a great work of American literature includes references to "Lake Harriet" (in Minneapolis, about a mile from my house), "the fairgrounds," and the amusement park that used to operate on an island in Lake Minnetonka.  I thought I detected Dos Passos nodding, however, when a truck route from the Twin Cities to Milwaukee goes through La Crosse.  

Well, anyway, I googled the significance of the title, and found this, which seems plausible.

UPDATE: Okay, I've taken the step of looking at a map, and, before the existence of I-94, it's not at all implausible that a route connecting the Twin Cities with Milwaukee would go through La Crosse.  

Trump and Putin in Helsinki

National Public Radio has posted a transcript of yesterday's Trump-Putin joint news conference in Helsinki.  I have just a few observations that are half a step or so off what is becoming quite a worn path.  

1. I watched it live and am surprised at the strong reaction.  Yes, it was outrageous, but Trump didn't say anything he hasn't said before--a hundred times or more.  Only the hypothesis regarding the 400-pound man lying in bed and hacking into the DNC was absent.  It is surprising, I suppose, that Trump, while sharing an international stage with Putin, lacked the wit to retire for one day his normal schtick meant for the consumption of MAGA hat owners.  But is it really surprising?  He's Trump.

2. I wouldn't be me if I didn't note that one of the golden oldies that he played on the Helsinki stage relates to his election victory and the electoral college.  From the transcript:

TRUMP: Well, I'm going to let the president answer the second part of that question.  But, as you know, the whole concept of that came up perhaps a little bit before but it came out as a reason why the Democrats lost an election, which frankly, they should have been able to win because the electoral college is much more advantageous for the Democrats, as you know, than it is to Republicans.  We won the electoral college by a lot.  306 to 223, I believe.

Actually, the whole question was directed to Putin, so naturally it didn't have anything to do with America's 18th-century election contraption or the magnitude of Trump's victory.  That he could not suppress the impulse to leap in with misinformation about a subject that Putin hadn't been asked about shows how dear this topic is to Trump.  Though it seems he must have endlessly and lovingly caressed every detail, he can't get anything right.  For one thing, his "score" is wrong.  (On election night, Trump won 306 electoral votes to Clinton's 232; when the electors later met, seven voted for neither Trump nor Clinton, with the result that the tally became 304 to 227.)  And what is the evidence for the claim that the electoral college "is much more advantageous for the Democrats, as you know"?  That "as you know" is wildly incongruous considering that Trump's electoral college win was achieved despite losing the popular vote by around 2.9 million.  In the last five presidential elections, the Democrat has received more votes four times, but has won in the electoral college just twice.  The evidence for the Democrats' great advantage must be quite subtle!

3. It always seemed odd and suspicious that Trump should have insisted on his meeting with Putin being private, with only translators present.  Now that we know what he said afterwards, for public consumption, the content of the private meeting--which lasted about 2.5 hours, more than an hour longer than scheduled--should be a matter of grave concern.  There is a tendency, unjustified by reason, to think that the whole truth can't be much worse than what is already known.  Maybe natural selection prefers optimism, because we always think we're getting close to the bottom of the hole. But what if we're not? Jonathan Chait has more on this disturbing question.

 

Cringing, hands covering ears

The president of the United States speaks:

This should shame the critics who keep complaining about how he doesn't study his briefing materials.

As an update, or coda, to my recent screed about the undemocratic US Senate, Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and contributing editor at The Atlantic, notes that in another 20 or 25 years 70 percent of Americans will live in the fifteen most populous states.  Assuming no structural reform occurs, 30 percent of the population will then elect 70 of the 100 US senators.

Two x fifty = minority rule

 

In my constant kvetching about minority rule in the United States, I have pointed out how Republicans control the executive branch despite having been outpolled in the land (antidemocratic tool is the electoral college) and have a near lock on control of the House of Representatives, winning a majority of the seats even when their candidates are outpolled by a significant margin in the land (antidemocratic tool is gerrymandered congressional districts).  That the Senate is presumably poised to confirm for the Supreme Court the selection of a president who lost the popular vote by about three million, after the same body refused to grant a hearing to the last Democratic president's nominee, raises the question of the source of the Republicans' control of the Senate.  Once again, it's not based on the votes of Americans.  

The culprit is in this case the fact that each state, no matter its size, has two senators.  California, with a population of 40 million, has two, as does Wyoming, which has a population of 580,000.  The combined population of the five smallest states is about 3.6 million.  So compared to the five least populated states (Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, and North and South Dakota), California has more than ten times the population and one-fifth the number of senators.  Suppose a vote in the US Senate breaks along party lines.  Then in these six states, senators representing about 41 out of 44 million citizens are Democrats, but the Republicans carry the vote, 7-5.  

It might be objected, with some justification, that California, being by far and away the biggest state, gives a false flavor to the calculations.  One way to gauge the effect, across all fifty states, might be to note that in the last presidential election the Democrat, Hillary Clinton, won the national popular vote by a margin of more than two percent despite losing in thirty of the fifty states.  Thus if we nationalize the most recent presidential vote, and give to the Clinton states two Democratic senators and to the Trump states two Republican senators, the result is a filibuster-proof majority for the party that received three million fewer votes! 

Since one-third of the Senate is up for election every two years, Paul Waldman, of the Washington Post's Plum Line Blog, has tallied the aggregate vote for US Senate in the congressional elections of 2012, 2014, and 2016.  The theory would be that the partisan alignment of the current Senate, with its Republican majority, was formed by the results of those three elections.  As he points out, it's not strictly speaking true: for example, Republican Jeff Sessions left the Senate to become Attorney General and was replaced by a Democrat, Doug Jones, who won a special election that occurred just last year.  Still, a worthwhile and illustrative exercise.   In those three congressional elections, Democratic candidates for the US Senate received 117.4 million votes, to 102.3 million votes for Republican candidates.  So Trump, who lost the popular vote by about three million, is going to have his Supreme Court nominee confirmed by a Senate whose Republican majority was attained despite a roughly 15 million vote deficit in the land.  

Of course it will be pointed out that it's the Constitution that allots two senators to each state without respect to population.  And that's true, though it's hardly proof that it was a good idea.  Why did the founders do it?  Well, the proposed Constitution had to be ratified by the states, which included ones with large populations (Massachusetts, Virginia, Pennsylvania) and those with small populations (Rhode Island, Delaware, New Hampshire, Georgia, South Carolina).  There were more smaller states, the principle of self-interest was born before 1787, and the smaller states were able to extract a devil's bargain--notwithstanding the merits of the case, which were expressed by Alexander Hamilton in the twenty-second Federalist Paper:

Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Delaware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina.  Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail.  Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of federated America.  But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common-sense.  It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third.

We're trained to think everything the Founding Fathers did was a stroke of genius, which is a pious falsehood, but, in their defense, at least some of them understood very clearly when they were about to shit the bed.

The Twins, Griswold, and Roe

 

I like to write about the Twins when things are looking up, and they've won their last four games, but they have also won just five of their last thirteen, and the five wins were all against the Chicago White Sox (1) and the Baltimore Orioles (4), teams with a cumulative record of 54-125.  Next up: three home games against the Kansas City Royals, whose record stands at 25-64.  So if the Twins were to sweep the Royals, they would then have won eight of their last sixteen games, ten of the sixteen having been against three teams with the three worst records in the major leagues.  They would have been 8-2 against those  teams and 0-6 against the others.  

I'm going to wait until their record for the season is above .500.  Since they are currently at 39-48, the chance of my ever broaching this topic again is low.

How about instead a little Supreme Court history while we wait for Trump to roll out his choice, reality TV-style, during prime time tonight?  The case of Griswold v Connecticut was argued before the court on March 29 and 30, 1965, and decided that summer (while the Twins were on their way to their first pennant).  You can listen to the oral argument here, at Oyez, which summarizes the facts and question raised by the case in the following admirably concise manner:  

Griswold was the executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut.  Both she and the Medical Director gave information, instruction, and other medical advice to married couples concerning birth control.  Griswold and her colleague were convicted under a Connecticut law which criminalized the provision of counselling, and other medical treatment, to married persons for purposes of preventing conception.

Does the Constitution protect the right of marital privacy against state restrictions on a couple's ability to be counselled in the use of contraceptives?

And the decision of the Supreme Court:

Though the Constitution does not explicitly protect a general right to privacy, the various guarantees within the Bill of Rights create penumbras, or zones, that establish a right to privacy.  Together, the First, Third, Fourth, and Ninth Amendments, create a new constitutional right, the right to privacy in marital relations.  The Connecticut statute conflicts with the exercise of this right and is therefore null and void.

The decision was 7-2 and the majority opinion written by Justice William O. Douglas (he had made the cover of Time when he was chairman of the SEC, before FDR put him on the Supreme Court).  The First Amendment bars any "law respecting an establishment of religion . . . or abridging the freedom of speech."  The Third Amendment bars the government, including in times of war, from quartering soldiers on private property without the consent of the owner.   The Fourth Amendment states that "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated."  The Ninth Amendment says, in its entirety, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Someone unburdened by a legal education might say that people had formed an organization intended to exercise a free speech right to give advice about contraception and that other people wanted to listen and perhaps put the advice into practice.  The government has to butt out because, while the authors of the Bill of Rights could not have foreseen the Connecticut statute, it's implausible to think they'd have tolerated it.  The government needs "probable cause" and a warrant to search your house but it can prevent you from getting information about contraception from an organization seeking to dispense it?  You don't have to quarter soldiers but you must not practice contraception?  The aversion of any religious sect to contraception cannot cover the difficulties, and the Supreme Court said No to Connecticut.  

I would have thought that the "butt out, government" aspect of the court's decision would appeal to conservatives, but mostly they hate it.  It seems that what they're really interested in is not principles but policy results, so their "principles" vary from case to case.  If the question is, say, whether the government can prevent corporations from secretly contributing huge sums of money to political candidates, in the reasonable expectation that they will be rewarded with government policies that benefit their industry, then "Government, butt out, we can do with our money what we want."  But when the question is whether the government can ban or restrict practices that go against their religious or philosophical beliefs, big government suddenly looks attractive.  Regarding Planned Parenthood's challenge to the Connecticut statute, their approach is to search the Constitution for a sentence such as, "No state shall adopt a law prohibiting access to, or information about, contraceptive methods."  Finding no such language, they conclude that the Connecticut statute is okay.  The limited government principle has been sloughed off and now they are "strict constructionists."

Lurking in the background, of course, is the abortion issue.  For the reasoning that underlies Griswold also supplies the scaffolding for the court's decision in Roe v Wade, which was decided eight years after Griswold with Justice Douglas, still on the bench, joining the majority opinion written by Minnesotan Harry Blackmun, who had been put on the court by President Nixon in 1970.  When in the context of Roe conservatives deride "constitutional penumbras and emanations," they are using the language of one decision to heap scorn on another.  Since contraception isn't the flashpoint that abortion is, it wouldn't help their cause if people felt that if Roe goes down, then logic requires that Griswold does, too.  So their conflation of the two is apt in a way that they might want to deny.  Along this line, it seems worth mentioning that many widely used contraceptive methods work, not by preventing conception, but by preventing the fertilized egg from implanting in the lining of the uterus.  Thus if, as we are told, "human life begins at conception," it follows that access to these contraceptive methods must be barred as surely as access to abortion--indeed, by the logic of most opponents of abortion rights, they are the same thing.

Scott Pruitt writes to Don

 

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's resignation letter to Trump:

Mr. President, it has been an honor to serve you in the Cabinet as Administrator of the EPA.  Truly, your confidence in me has blessed me personally and enabled me to advance your agenda beyond what anyone anticipated at the beginning of your Administration.  Your courage, steadfastness and resolute commitment to get results for the American people, both with regard to improved environmental outcomes as well as historical regulatory reform, is in fact occurring at an unprecedented pace and I thank you for the opportunity to serve you and the American people in helping achieve those ends.

That is why it is hard for me to advise you I am stepping down as Administrator of the EPA effective as of July 6.  It is extremely difficult for me to cease serving you in this role first because I count it a blessing to be serving you in any capacity, but also, because of the transformative work that is occurring.  However, the unrelenting attacks on me personally, my family, are unprecedented and have taken a sizable toll on all of us.

My desire in service to you has always been to bless you as you make important decisions for the American people.  I believe you are serving as President today because of God's providence.  I believe that same providence brought me into your service.  I pray as I have served you that I have blessed you and enabled you to effectively lead the American people.  Thank you again Mr. President for the honor of serving you and Godspeed in all that you put your hand to.

Your Faithful Friend,

Scott Pruitt

Gag me!  Commentators have been scurrying to merriam-webster.com in search of synonyms for "smarmy" and "obsequious,"an exercise that, judging by the wooden repetitions of forms of "bless" and "serve," Pruitt is not himself inclined to perform. 

"My desire in service to you has always been to bless you as you make important decisions for the American people"--this doesn't even mean anything, it's just a mash of words functioning as a verbal hand job.  Truly, I wonder whether some of the American people will wonder whether the last phrase--"all that you put your hand to"--may be explained as the author's unconscious recognition of what Trump is apt to use this letter for now that his handlers are keeping him away from playmates and porn stars.

Weekend update

With respect to Trump's Supreme Court selection, the vote-counting has begun before the nominee has been named.  On the Republican side, people are eyeing Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, two GOP senators who are on record as supporting abortion rights.  Since only 51 of the hundred senators are Republican, and one of them, John McCain, who is very ill, probably won't vote, a defection by either Collins or Murkowski would sink the nominee--if the 49 Democrats hold together.  But that's a big "if."  There are in the Senate five Democratic incumbents from states Trump won by at least 18 percentage points who are facing reelection this fall--Joe Manchin of West Virginia (Trump won by +42), Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota (+36), Jon Tester of Montana (+20), Joe Donnelly of Indiana (+19), and Claire McCaskill of Missouri (+18).  Three of these senators--Manchin, Donnelly, and Heitkamp--voted for Neil Gorsuch, the justice nominated by Trump to replace Antonin Scalia.  (Trump, ill-informed as ever, unless he was just lying, said at a recent rally in Fargo that Heitkamp, who already voted for Gorsuch, was certain to vote against anyone he nominates.)  If on the Republican side only the votes of Collins and Murkowski are in play, the Democrats' situation appears desperate.  It is also doubtful, in the unlikely event that the Democrats can somehow force a delay, that the makeup of the Senate will be less friendly to a Trump nominee after the midterm elections.

Over the weekend, however, Collins said: "I would not support a nominee who would demonstrate hostility to Roe v Wade."  Perhaps the devil is in the lawyerly diction, especially demonstrate, a weasel word that could allow her to equivocate after voting for the nominee.  We can be sure no one will say, in their confirmation hearing, that they would vote to overturn Roe.  But everyone on Trump's list has been vetted by the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation, so we can also be sure that all have demonstrated, to the satisfaction of these right-wing groups, their opposition to abortion rights.  The whole point of the list, which was compiled and released during the campaign, was to secure the votes of social conservatives who might otherwise be reluctant to vote for a self-proclaimed pussy-grabber from Manhattan who is plainly a serial violator of the commandment regarding adultery, etc., etc., etc.

Still, if Collins votes against Trump's pick, the chance that the nomination fails goes from very unlikely to quite possible.  For one thing, it would make it easier for Murkowski to join Collins in bucking her party, as she did on the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act.  This in turn would make it more likely that 49 Democrats remain united in opposition.  Is Heitkamp, for example, going to support a nominee who is unacceptable to Collins and Murkowski?  The Democrats are behind, and it's the ninth inning, but it's possible to get a rally going.

Turning from sports metaphors to actual sports news, I see that LeBron is headed west, to the Lakers. My view has been expressed by the comedian Mike Drucker: 

 

To anyone mad about LeBron going to the Lakers, it’s important to remember that nothing any of us do ultimately has any meaning because our entire civilization is nothing more than a brief spark in a mostly dark universe - not loved, not hated, but simply not remembered

— Mike Drucker (@MikeDrucker) July 2, 2018