Romney’s steadfast stand for a bad idea

By Jeff Jacoby

Boston Globe Columnist
http://www.boston.com/                        
May 18, 2011

MITT ROMNEY has been stalwart in his defense of the individual mandate — the obligation to buy health insurance that is at the heart of both the law he signed in Massachusetts in 2006 and the federal version President Obama enacted last year. Ironically, his firmness on this issue may cost him more dearly with Republican voters than his reputation for conveniently reversing past positions ever did.

In his Ann Arbor speech last week, the former governor declared that RomneyCare “was right for the people of my state,’’ and that regardless of the political fallout, he was not about to “just stand up and say this whole thing was a mistake.’’ He repeated the argument he has made for years — that an individual mandate is a matter of “personal responsibility.’’ Since federal law requires hospitals to provide urgent care to anyone requiring it, Massachusetts needed a way to prevent uninsured free riders from using hospital emergency rooms to get medical care at public expense. Making insurance compulsory for those who could afford it, Romney says, was the solution to the free-rider problem.

But if that theory is valid in Massachusetts, it’s valid everywhere. Romney’s rationale for an individual mandate is all but indistinguishable from Obama’s. “There’s always going to be somebody out there who thinks they’re indestructible and doesn’t want to get health care,’’ the president has argued. “And then. . . they get hit by a bus, end up in the emergency room, and the rest of us have to pay for it.’’

On the surface, this free-rider justification may sound plausible. Start digging into it, though, and it quickly falls apart.

To begin with, just because a 25-year-old law requires hospitals to provide emergency care to all comers, why does it follow that another law must force every citizen to buy insurance? Clearly there are other ways to compensate hospitals for the “free’’ care they supply to the uninsured. To mention only the most obvious option, the government could reimburse the cost of that care directly.

On the other hand, if the individual mandate’s purpose is to prevent free riders from shifting the cost of their emergency care to others, all it should require is enough insurance to cover a trip to the emergency room. Instead, both RomneyCare and ObamaCare require everyone to be covered for numerous benefits going far beyond emergency care. In Massachusetts, health-care policies must include services ranging from fertility treatment to orthotics to hospice care. Those mandates drive up the cost of insurance, but have nothing to do with keeping uninsured deadbeats from showing up in emergency rooms.

Supporters of the individual mandate often imply that going without insurance and being a free rider are one and the same. They aren’t. In his January opinion striking down the ObamaCare mandate as unconstitutional, federal Judge Roger Vinson pointed out that the uninsured impose no economic costs on anyone unless at least four other conditions are met: (1) they get sick or injured, (2) they seek medical care, (3) they can’t pay for their treatment, and (4) they receive no assistance from relatives, friends, or private charities. Yes, some people who don’t buy insurance end up saddling others with higher taxes or premiums. But only some.

Meanwhile, five years of the RomneyCare mandate have done nothing to reduce the crowding in Massachusetts emergency rooms. In a survey by the American College of Emergency Physicians in March, three-fourths of the respondents reported seeing an increase in the number of emergency-room patients. That confirmed earlier state data showing a 9 percent rise in ER visits between 2004 and 2008.

It is true that fewer Massachusetts residents are uninsured. But most of the newly insured aren’t paying their way: They’re being subsidized by taxpayers. The cost of those subsidies will hit $830 million in 2011, and it is growing by 5 percent a year. Simultaneously, health care premiums in Massachusetts for people paying market rates are among the highest anywhere — and climbing.

The individual mandate, Romney continues to insist, “was right for the people of my state.’’ The evidence so far says just the opposite. The mandate didn’t solve the free-rider problem and it made other problems even worse. RomneyCare has proven to be a grave mistake. Expect ObamaCare to do the same.

Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.

Harmon Killebrew was a treasure

Hall of Famer remembered by generations for long home runs, humility, kindness.

By Jim Caple
http://espn.go.com/mlb/
May 18, 2011

Before there was Joe Mauer, before there was Kirby Puckett, there was Harmon Killebrew, a quiet but powerful block of a man who led the Upper Midwest in annual goosebump production by slamming home runs as far as the eye can see -- and you can see a long way in Minnesota.

"When Harmon and the Twins moved to Minnesota in 1961, I was 5 years old. When they went to the World Series in 1965, I was 9 and more aware,'' St. Paul native Paul Molitor said. "I got to go to one game a year on my birthday and I collected all the Coca-Cola player bottle caps. I loved all the Twins but Harmon was the guy. He was the guy I pretended to be when I played baseball in the backyard and No. 3 was the number I wanted to wear when I played Little League.

"Not many people are able to have the chance to be friends with their boyhood hero but I was lucky. And I couldn't have picked a better man. The fact that Harmon played baseball -- it's like the cliche about the Hall of Fame: That he was a Hall of Fame player is way down on the list of what made him special. He was one of the most unassuming, humble men. He was a great ambassador for the Twins and a great ambassador for baseball.

"And that's why, for a lot of people, this has been a tough time.''

Killebrew passed away Tuesday morning at the age of 74 after a battle with esophageal cancer. The Hall of Fame slugger who hit 573 career home runs (11th all-time) had been fighting the disease since December. After all treatment failed, he decided to enter hospice care to surround himself with family and friends.

According to one famous story, when Killebrew was a boy growing up in Payette, Idaho, he and his brother were playing baseball with their father in the yard when Harmon's mother yelled to complain that they were ruining the grass. "We're not raising grass,'' his father yelled back, "we're raising boys.''

However much grass was ruined, it was for a good cause. The Washington Senators signed Killebrew to a $30,000 contract after he graduated from high school in 1954. Under the existing bonus baby rules, the Senators were required to keep him on the major league roster for two years. Killebrew spent two seasons on the bench (batting only 93 times) before getting needed experience in the minors in 1956-58. He returned to the majors in 1959. That was his first real season in the majors and he led the league in home runs (42). He led the league another five times over the following 11 seasons. In the 12-season span from 1959-70, Killebrew averaged 40 homers -- back in the days when 40 home runs were a lot.

Although Carl Yastrzemski famously won the Triple Crown in 1967, he and Killebrew tied for the league lead in home runs that season with 44.

When the Senators moved to Minnesota in 1961, Killebrew instantly became the face of the Twins and was easily their most popular player. An 11-time All-Star, he finished in the top four of MVP voting five times, winning the award in 1969. That season, he hit 49 home runs with 140 RBIs (still Twins records), and scored 106 runs, walked 145 times and had a .427 on-base percentage in leading the Twins to the division title. Minnesota was swept in the ALCS when the Orioles walked Killebrew six times in the three-game series.

Former Twins catcher Earl Battey once said that the team without Killebrew was "like dressing up for a formal affair with a white tie and tails and then wearing muddy shoes.''

But eventually the Twins did put on those muddy shoes. The last season Killebrew hit 40 home runs was 1970. By 1974, his numbers were down to .222 with 13 home runs, and the Twins released him. He signed with the Royals, hitting .199 with 14 home runs before retiring.

His nickname was Killer, but that was simply a play off his last name and as much of a misnomer as calling a bald guy "Curly.'' Killebrew was one of the nicest, gentlest men you could ever meet in baseball.

His 573 career home runs are more than Mickey Mantle hit and more than all but four players had hit at that point (only Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, Willie Mays and Frank Robinson had more). Killebrew's stroke was so powerful that many -- including Harmon -- believed it was the basis for major league baseball's logo, though the designer said that isn't the case.

Killebrew's nickname was "Killer," but that was simply a play off his last name and as much of a misnomer as calling a bald guy "Curly.'' He was one of the nicest, gentlest men you could ever meet in baseball.

"There are so many Harmon Killebrew stories that are all positive. There was not a negative with Harmon. There can't be. Can't be,'' Bert Blyleven, his former teammate, said. "That's what I'll miss most about Harmon. Not his playing but his personality and the way he treated people.''

Former Twins media relations director Tom Mee said Killebrew treated everyone "as if they were his next-door neighbors.'' Blyleven agreed: "If you came over for milk, he would give you milk. He would give you coffee. Whatever you need. Harmon was that type of guy.''

"He didn't differentiate how he treated other people based on their status or social standing,'' Molitor said. "Whether you were an 18-year-old minor leaguer or a clubhouse worker, you got the same Harmon. And that was a pretty good Harmon to get.''

"I didn't have evil intentions but I guess I did have power,'' Killebrew once said.

Boy, did he ever. And what was most impressive about his power is that it came from such a compact body (in "Ball Four,''Jim Bouton refers to him as "the Fat Kid''). While he had massive upper body strength -- in perhaps his most extraordinary show of power, he was able to extract a $125,000 salary from Twins owner Calvin Griffith -- Killebrew was short by today's standards. He was charitably listed as 6-foot on his Baseball Reference page. Seeing him later in his life when he was shorter than that, it was astounding that he had been capable of so many tape-measure home runs -- his longest was estimated at 520 feet.

"I have that same feeling when I see guys like him or Hank Aaron compared to the sluggers we have today,'' Molitor said. "McGwire, Sosa, Bonds. Whatever your feelings about them, there is just a totally different physicality. And it adds to the lore of Harmon as a hitter. He was known for his towering home runs -- it seemed like he didn't hit many low line drives -- and he hit them so high and far the ball looked more like a Titleist than a Rawlings.''

"He was a lumberjack type of a player,'' Blyleven said. "He was 5-11 but he was burly chested … just naturally strong. He had that short, compact swing and when he hit the ball, it just jumped off the bat.''

Killebrew's bat thundered but he was about as loud and ostentatious as an acre of corn growing on Minnesota farmland. Paul Dickson's "Baseball's Greatest Quotations'' is a 524-page collection of quotes about and related to baseball. Reggie Jackson has five pages of quotes. Mickey Mantle has six pages of quotes. Even Henry Kissinger, Groucho Marx and The Chicken are quoted. There is not a single quote by or about Killebrew. He hit 573 home runs, won an MVP, took the Twins to their first World Series and is in the Hall of Fame, but he apparently never said anything memorable enough for the book.

"It's because he didn't say anything controversial,'' Mee said. "He would give a direct answer but not necessarily the one the writer was looking for. He didn't belittle any pitcher. He didn't belittle any fielder or management. He just gave a direct, fair answer."

Indeed. Asked by a Sports Illustrated writer in 1963 whether he had any unusual hobbies, Killebrew replied, "Just washing the dishes, I guess.''

That personality fit in superbly in Minnesota, where fans don't much care for people who call attention to themselves. And despite that final season with Kansas City and coaching jobs with other teams, Killebrew will always be associated with the Twins, who retired his No. 3. He was a broadcaster for the team for several years and frequently appeared at spring training to provide instruction to Minnesota players.

"He epitomized the history of the Minnesota Twins,'' manager Ron Gardenhire said. "Harmon and Tony Oliva. He's a Hall of Famer and one of the kindest people you could ever meet in your life. And we want our players to emulate him. There aren't too many people who met Harmon and walked away disappointed. He means everything to the organization.''

The Twins have been hanging his No. 3 jersey in their dugout ever since he announced he was entering hospice care and entering the final days of life.

You can still see the fold-down seat where Killebrew's longest home run landed an estimated 520 feet from home plate some 44 years ago. Take the Killebrew Drive exit to the Mall of America, built on the original site of old Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington. Park your car, enter the mall, go inside to the amusement park at the center, look up three stories to the southeast wall and you'll see the seat attached above the Paul Bunyan Log Chute ride. It's an appropriate spot. Harmon Killebrew, Paul Bunyan … both strong men who produced prodigious feats while swinging a hunk of wood. Bunyan chopped down entire forests. Killebrew chopped down opposing pitchers, hitting home runs and bringing Minnesotans to their feet applauding with joy.

Photos: AP, Neil Leifer/SI

An era passes with a graceful giant

Call him an Everyman. Call him a gentleman. But Harmon Killebrew lived up to the lofty expectations thrust on stars in baseball's golden age.

by JIM SOUHAN
Minneapolis Star Tribune
http://www.startribune.com/sports/twins/
May 18, 2011

Think of the phrases we use to praise modern-day athletes. They possess "killer instinct." They "stick the dagger" into the opponent. They display "swagger" and "athletic arrogance."

When Harmon Killebrew passed away in Arizona on Tuesday, the sporting world may have lost its foremost gentleman. The greatest Twin did not require false machismo to become one of the greatest home-run hitters in baseball history. Harmon Killebrew did require pressure to exhibit grace.

Will we ever encounter his kind again?

Killebrew's era predated steroid scandals and sporting paparazzi. When he played, players often lived in middle-class neighborhoods. Even if a current player possessed Killebrew's Everyman attitude, he would be distanced from much of society by the invisible fencing of wealth and fame.

Naivete and nostalgia are often weaknesses. In remembrance of Killebrew, allow those of us who grew up watching him and his peers a moment of sepia-toned remembrance.

I spent part of my youth living near Baltimore. One of my strongest memories is of a midseason game the Twins played against the Orioles.

Baltimore third baseman Brooks Robinson was my boyhood idol, in part because of his fielding brilliance, in part because he looked so average. Brooksie, with his skinny arms and hangdog face, could have been your middle-age neighbor, had your middle-age neighbor been granted superhuman hand-eye coordination by a higher power.

A line drive would head down the third-base line, and Robinson's hands would move faster than a Times Square con artist's, and suddenly the ball would be bouncing into Boog Powell's outstretched glove for another improbable out, and you got the feeling that as soon as the game ended, Robinson would resume mowing his lawn and shopping for a toupee.

One night, Robinson and the Orioles faced the Twins at old Memorial Stadium. When Robinson left the field with his team, he was replaced at third by a player who looked less likely to become a Hall of Fame ballplayer -- a short, thick, balding player, who looked like a neighborhood butcher playing for the local slow-pitch softball team.

Then Killebrew plodded to the plate, launched a home run deep into the left-field bleachers, dropped his bat, watched the ball fly and started his slow navigation around the bases.

"Oh, he would watch the ball," Tony Oliva said. "He would hit it so far, so high, and he would stand there and watch it.

"Pitchers would throw at him, hit him, for doing that, but I never saw him react. He would just take first base like nothing happened."

I did not grow up in Minnesota following Killebrew, but I know what it is like to have given my young heart to a great ballplayer when baseball was king, when we erected pedestals for our favorite ballplayers and left them there for eternity.

While it may seem inelegant to compare deaths, I believe that it hurts us more when we lose a great baseball player than when we lose other athletes.

Great baseball players, especially in Killebrew's prime, were not occasional visitors to our homes. They were uncles, cousins, friends.

They were there every day in the morning paper. They were on television more often than any other athletes. They were the people you followed late at night, with a transistor radio tucked under your pillow, turned down just far enough that your parents could pretend you were sleeping.

Someday, another player may replace Killebrew as the greatest Twin of all time. It is unlikely that another player will ever become so universally beloved and admired.

We called him "the Killer," but that nickname matched the man only when a fastball was headed toward home plate. In life, he was the most gracious of the all-time greats, the most likely to leave someone he just met feeling privileged to shake his hand.

Jeff Idelson, the president of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, once told me that the two Hall of Famers who most enthusiastically embraced their roles as icons, and most enthusiastically embraced the public, were Robinson ... and Killebrew.

I was lucky enough to see them play the same position in the same game. I was lucky enough to meet both, to confirm Idelson's assessment of the men.

In life, Killebrew did us a great favor. He allowed us to believe that the ballplayers we idolized in our youth were worthy of our affection. He never let us down.

Jim Souhan can be heard Sundays from 10 a.m. to noon and weekdays at 2:40 p.m. on 1500ESPN. His Twitter name is Souhanstrib. • jsouhan@startribune.com


Slugger put Minnesota on baseball map in 1965

by PATRICK REUSSE
Star Tribune
http://www.startribune.com/sports/twins/
May 18, 2011

Orlando, FL, USA — A 1965 file photo showing Minnesota Twins baseball player Harmon Killebrew. (AP Photo/File)

Calvin Griffith gained permission from the American League to move his Washington Senators to the Bloomington prairie in October 1960. We had a great old time at Met Stadium in those earliest summers, with slugger Harmon Killebrew as the hero among heroes.

The Killer would hit more than 40 home runs in his first four Minnesota seasons, and lead the league with 48, 45 and 49 in 1962-64. He hit those 45 in 1963 despite missing the first 20 games after knee surgery.

And yet it was 1965, a season in which Harmon would miss several weeks after the All-Star break because of a dislocated elbow, when our pride in the Killer and in our major league status reached its zenith.

There would be a World Series, but before that there would be an All-Star Game in Minnesota. The date was July 13, which meant the corn in the fields visible from the Met's second deck would be knee-high and rustling in the summer breeze.

Talk about a reason to celebrate -- the greatest players in the greatest game were going to gather in our favorite erector set.

We were big league.

Officially.

And to make it more fantastic, the '65 Twins, after hints of strength in earlier seasons, sprung from the gate, moved into first place in the 10-team American League on Memorial Day weekend and started opening a gap.

The dreaded Yankees, AL champions in five consecutive seasons and 14 of the previous 16, were at the Met for a four-game series that preceded the All-Star Game. They arrived trailing the Twins by 12 1/2 games, and still we could not believe the Yankees truly were dead.

Not until Sunday -- when Killebrew hit a two-run home run on a 3-2 pitch with two outs in the ninth for a 6-5 victory. Ray Scott's call of that at-bat, and that blast, lives in Twins lore. Harmon's homer gave the Twins three of four in the series, a five-game lead over Cleveland and Baltimore and a 14 1/2-game separation from the Yankees.

The Killer's homer had us ready to burst with excitement, and then two days later, the All-Stars were here, and the burst was with pride.

The National League brought the greatest assembly of talent on one team in baseball history. There were 11 future Hall of Famers, and that doesn't count Pete Rose, the all-time hit king.

Juan Marichal, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson and Don Drysdale took care of 19 of the required 27 outs for the National League. Roberto Clemente, Frank Robinson and Billy Williams were the NL's backup outfielders to Willie Mays, Henry Aaron and Willie Stargell.

The NL ripped starter Milt Pappas and then one of our six Twins, Mudcat Grant, for five runs in the first two innings. The 46,706 ticket holders (including me) feared humiliation for our overmatched league on this humid afternoon.

It didn't count in the standings, but Minnesota needed Harmon -- to save face -- as much that afternoon as at any time.

The lead was 5-1 entering the last of the fifth and Cincinnati's Jim Maloney was on to join the future Hall of Famers in throwing bullets. But Detroit's Dick McAuliffe hit a two-run homer, and then Harmon came up with Brooks Robinson on base, and hit a two-runner to make it 5-5.

The Killer circled the bases inside one of the great dins ever heard at a ballgame in Bloomington.

The NLers eventually won 6-5, but Harmon had made the day for us, and he would later say: "That was really a big thrill, hitting it before the hometown fans."

Such a thrill, in fact, that when sculptor Bill Mack contacted Killebrew about the bronze statue that would sit on Target Field's plaza, and asked for a photo, Harmon said he had just the one.

And he sent along the newspaper photo of him getting full extension on the swing that sent the Maloney pitch into the Met's bleachers and tied the 1965 All-Star Game at 5-5. It was that swing, that big, uppercut finish, that Harmon -- early in his 70s -- tried to duplicate during studio sessions with Mack.

Harmon has gone, hopefully to a Field of Dreams, but if you're too young to remember that All-Star home run, don't fret it. You can see the Killer take that swing 365 days a year, in downtown Minneapolis, in bronze.

Patrick Reusse can be heard noon-4 weekdays on 1500ESPN. • preusse@startribune.com

The Gentleman Called Killer

By Joe Posnanski
http://joeposnanski.si.com/
May 16, 2011

The gentleman the sportswriters somewhat desperately called “Killer” was just 23 years old in 1959 — but by then Harmon Killebrew already had played parts of six seasons in the major leagues. Six seasons. He was of that peculiar bonus baby time, when owners (as owners tend to do) went looking for convoluted and spectacularly destructive methods to control their own spending. Certainly, they might have controlled spending by not spending as much money. But that was deemed unrealistic.

And so, in those days, if a team signed a player for too much money, it had to carry the player on the big league team for two years. This of course, was to discourage owners from paying players too much money — it would be like corporations deciding, as a cost-cutting measure, that if they spent too much money on a college graduate, they would be forced by law to make him or her a vice president.

Harmon Killebrew had been recommended to the Washington Senators by an actual senator, Idaho Republican Herman Welker, who would mainly be known to history for two unrelated things:

1. Being so closely allied with the reckless demagogue Joe McCarthy that he became known as “Little Joe from Idaho.”

2. Recommending Harmon Killebrew.

The Washington Senators, the baseball team, took Welker’s advice and sent out former third baseman Ossie Bluege to see Killebrew play in a few Idaho sandlot games. Killebrew, as legend goes, responded by getting 12 hits in 12 at-bats, including four homers and three triples. The Senators owner Clark Griffith giddily signed Killebrew for $30,000 — the team’s first bonus baby.

And so Killebrew was a part of the team. He made his major league debut six days before his 18th birthday. Here is a fun little baseball trivia question that might win you a bar bet: What position did Killebrew play in his major league debut?

Answer: The great but not particularly swift Harmon Killebrew debuted as a pinch-runner.

He got just 15 plate appearances that first year, and 89 plate appearances in his second. He hit his first big league home run five days before he turned 19. He hit the home run at Griffith Stadium off Billy Hoeft, with his Senators down 13-0. He hit another one two days later off of George Zuverink, but that pretty much summed up his achievements that second year. In 89 plate appearances, Killebrew hit an even .200 and was promptly sent to Charlotte for more seasoning.

The point is that by 1959, Harmon Killebrew was no phenom. He had been up and down so many times that his name was achingly familiar to Senators fans (and this was right in the prime of the Senators’ “First in war, first in peace, last in the American League” glory). Killebrew had hit .224 in 280 plate appearances scattered over his first five seasons. He is the only Hall of Fame player to get fewer than 500 total plate appearances in his first five years. This is not to say that anyone in the game had given up on Killebrew’s future. It’s more that his promise had dulled. Albie Pearson won Rookie of the Year in 1958; people were more excited about him.

But the truth is that Killebrew was just 23 years old, and he had not been given that gift that every great player, without exception, needs: a chance to play. In 1959, the Senators gave him that chance. Why not? They put Killebrew at third base and kept him there. At the end of April, his average was hovering in the low .200s. He had crushed a long homer off Jack Harshman on Opening Day, but he only had three homers by the end of the month. He had also committed the first of what would be 30 errors.

Then, the blossoming of Harmon Killebrew happened. It was not gradual. It was instant. On May 1, 1959, Harmon Killebrew hit two home runs at Briggs Stadium in Detroit. There were fewer than 2,000 people in the stands — the Tigers were dreadful; they had lost 13 of their first 15 games. Killebrew homered in the second inning off a good young pitcher named Jim Bunning. In the 10th inning, with the score tied, Killebrew hit another homer off Bunning.

The next day, still in Detroit, Killebrew hit two more homers. He hit the first in the first inning off Jerry Davie. He hit the second off George Susce with the Senators up 12-3.

Two days after that, he homered in Chicago off Claude Raymond. After two more dry days, he again hit two home runs, this time at Yankee Stadium. He hit the first off Bob Turley, the other off Johnny Kucks. People were beginning to notice a bit now. On May 12, back at home, he had his fourth two-homer game in less than two weeks — off of Detroit’s Frank Lary and Ray Narleski.

On May 17, in the second game of a doubleheader, he had his fifth two-homer game, one off Bob Shaw, the other off Turk Lown.

That made 11 homers in 17 games — including five two-homer games — and suddenly Harmon Killebrew was a sensation. Well, it wasn’t really sudden. It was like Mel Brooks said: “It only took me 20 years to become an overnight sensation.”

Still, it felt sudden. Reporters started to look more closely at Killebrew. They found that he had a little bit of the Heartland folk hero in him. His grandfather, Culver Killebrew, was said to be wrestling champion of the Union Army and, according to his great granddaughter Diane Killebrew Holt, he was able to stand flatfooted and jump over a horse. Harmon’s father, Harmon Sr., whom everyone called Clay, was a college football star who played professionally with the Wheeling Steelers. Teammates, coaches and reporters told countless stories about Harmon’s amazing feats of strength. They saw him hit home runs while breaking bats. They saw him lift up teammates like they were large pillows.

Naturally, the reporters began to call him Killer. The nickname, in many ways, was an absurdity. “Killer” fit Killebrew the way “Jazz” fits Utah or “responsible” fits government. He was so quiet and gentle that, when one reporter asked him if he had any hobbies, Killebrew said, without apparent irony, that he liked washing dishes at home. He had married his high school sweetheart, and they were raising a family, and there was just nothing violent about his nature. As Barbara Heilman wrote in Sports Illustrated: “You can’t look an abstraction of amiability in the eye and call it ‘Killer,’ day after day, no matter how hard it hits.”

But what else could they call him? Sure, the reporters, perhaps overeagerly, also tried “Charmin’ Harmon,” “Harmin’ Harmon,” “Bombin’ Harmon,” “Hammerin’ Harmon,” and so on. But when you have a man named Killebrew who hits home runs, “Killer” is inescapable. Plus, it fit so much better into headlines.

Killebrew’s amazing home run stretch in 1959 more or less carried on for the next dozen years. It was his fate to play baseball in the worst hitting era since Deadball, and yet from 1959 through 1970 — 12 years dominated by pitchers — Killer hit a home run every 12.7 at-bats. Up to that point, only Babe Ruth had hit home runs so often. Forty-five times in his career Killebrew hit two homers in a game. Six times he led the league in home runs. Eight times he hit 40-plus homers in a season.

He was a low-average hitter — he spent a career fighting to make more solid contact — but he was a ferocious worker, and he developed remarkable plate discipline. “If it isn’t a strike, don’t swing,” he said years later when asked his philosophy of hitting. He led the league in walks three times, and despite those low batting averages, from 1966 through 1971 he led the American League in overall on-base percentage (.401). He wasn’t fast or particularly nimble, and so playing defense was always a challenge, but he played five different positions, and he played hard, and observers will say he wrestled first base to a draw.

As a hitter, he was ahead of his time. His high-walk, big-power numbers would anticipate the 1990s, when various factors — steroids not being the least of these, though weight training and advances in diet and so on played their role — would give many players the superhuman strength of Harmon Killebrew. At the time, though, Killebrew was different. He was larger than life.

And, as a person, he was endlessly gracious. When word spread late last week that Harmon Killebrew was no longer going to fight the esophageal cancer that had struck him, that he was ready to accept his fate, there were a thousand stories told of Killebrew’s small kindnesses, bits of advice he gave to players, moments he took to talk with fans, compliments he gave to umpires, smiles he offered to anyone who caught his eye. Killebrew died on Tuesday. He was 74 years old. He will live on in baseball’s record books, of course, for his 573 home runs and a homer hit per 14.22 at-bats (a better ratio than Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams and Sammy Sosa — this though he played in a pitcher-dominated era) and his place in the Hall of Fame. But wouldn’t we all want to be remembered for making countless people’s days brighter?

The irony of calling him Killer was brought up many times throughout his life, though it is also true that Harmon Killebrew was intentionally walked more times than any other American League player in the 1960s. So the nickname isn’t that crazy. At the plate, he was a killer. His short, quick swing was the very image of power — so much so that for years it was said that the MLB logo was drawn in his image. The man who created the logo said that it was not Killebrew. But it looks like him. And it should be him.

People sometimes throw around the concept of a hitter being feared. Mostly, it’s kind of nonsensical. Baseball players generally don’t fear each other. But in a peculiar way they did fear Harmon Killebrew — or anyway, they feared what he was capable of doing at his best. Which leads, finally, to the story of George Brunet. He had quite a life. He was an American League pitcher, a lefty, who grew up on the Upper Peninsula. He struck out more than three thousand batters in the MINOR LEAGUES, which is a record, and he threw 55 shutouts in the Mexican League, which is a record, and he might be best known for his role in Jim Bouton’s Ball Four as the quirky lefty who did not wear underwear because that way, as he said, he didn’t have to worry about losing them.

Brunet also pitched 15 years for nine different teams in the big leagues. His battles with Harmon Killebrew were particularly interesting. In one game, in 1966, Brunet intentionally walked Killebrew three times — twice with a man on second base, and once with runners on second and third.

Well, it just so happened that the Twins did not score any of the times that Killebrew was walked, which seemed a pretty good deal to Lefty Brunet. That’s especially true because they faced each other four days later … and Killebrew homered. Less than two months later, they again matched up … and Killebrew homered. Four days after that, they faced each other again … and Killebrew homered again.

And that was when Lefty Brunet decided that he had seen quite enough of Harmon Killebrew. For the rest of his career, when George Brunet and Harmon Killebrew crossed paths, Brunet worked very hard to walk the Killer. And then finally there was the last time they faced each other, Aug. 22, 1970. That was Harmon Killebrew’s last 40-homer season, and it was Brunet’s last full season. They had faced each other 62 times — sort of a mini-marriage — and Brunet had won some (Killebrew hit only .250 against him) and Killebrew won some (he walked 22 times and mashed four home runs) and this was the last act. The score was tied 4-4, it was the fifth inning and there was nobody on base.

George Brunet intentionally walked Harmon Killebrew. He then coaxed Rich Reese to hit into a double play to end the inning. When asked about the decision to intentionally walk Killebrew with the bases empty — it was the third time he had done that — Brunet returned with a question of his own: What would you do?

Twins great Killebrew dies

by LA VELLE E. NEAL IIIThe Minneapolis Star Tribune
http://www.startribune.com/
May 17, 2011

Washington, DC, USA — Harmon Killebrew, the Washington Senators slugging third baseman, doffs his cap as he shakes hands with President Dwight D. Eisenhower before the start of the Boston-Washington game, May 29, 1959. At center is Calvin Griffith, president of the Senators. The chief executive was a spectator at the game. (AP Photo/Harvey Georges)


Harmon Clayton Killebrew, an iconic Minnesota Twin known for his prodigious home runs and humble demeanor, passed away Tuesday morning at his Scottsdale, Ariz., home at the age of 74 after a nearly five-month battle with esophageal cancer.

Killebrew was the face of the Twins franchise for 14 seasons after the franchise moved to Minnesota from Washington, D.C. before the 1961 season. He is 11th on the all-time major league home run list with 573, of which 475 were hit wearing a Twins uniform. He has the eight highest single-season totals in Twins' history. And he became the team's first MVP in 1969 and its first Hall of Fame inductee in 1984.

Killebrew became so popular that a root beer was named after him. And his home runs were such a drawing crowd that then-owner Calvin Griffith made the slugger the team's first $100,000 player in 1971.

Killebrew retained strong ties with Minnesota right up to his passing, making several appearances in the Twin Cities each year, and since 2006 making an annual trip to the Twins spring training camp.

"That was probably as good as a moment you can have as a manager, to say you were rubbing elbows with Harmon Killebrew,'' said Twins manager Ron Gardenhire.

Killebrew was diagnosed with the cancer during the last week of December, 2010, and vowed to do all he could to fight the disease. He made enough progress with chemotherapy and radiation treatments that he was allowed to visit camp in mid-March.
Although noticeably a few pounds lighter, Killebrew moved well and seemed to be his old self. He spoke of attending the home opener on April 8 and returning for his annual charity golf tournament June 29-30, which coincided with his 75th birthday.

Alas, he made neither.

"When you go through something like this, you're not really sure of what to expect," he said in March. "The thing that's really been an effect on me is how many people have reached out to me. That's one thing I want to say is to thank all of the people who sent cards and letters and e-mails and all of the well-wishes. It's really been overwhelming and special.''

Powerful build

Killebrew played in one of the game's golden eras, with the likes of Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Ernie Banks, Mickey Mantle and Frank Robinson. Killebrew's monstrous home runs set him apart even among his future Hall of Fame peers.

He was only about 5 feet 11 but was 220 pounds -- a burly man with strong arms and stronger hands. He shook hands with such force that it would leave the recipient's hand tingling. But it was those arms, wrists and hands that gave Killebrew a terrific power stroke. His blasts would sail high into the air and carry and carry until they landed beyond the fence.

"Growing up in Southern California, for some reason my favorite players were Willie Mays, Carl Yazstrzemski and Harmon,'' Hall of Famer George Brett, a teammate of Killebrew on the 1975 Kansas City Royals, once said. "If Harmon had hit lefthanded, he would have been Babe Ruth. It wasn't just the number of home runs he hit, but how far they went and how high they went. He hit the highest home runs I had ever seen.''

Minneapolis, MN, USA — This April 3, 2010, file photo shows former Minnesota Twins baseball player Harmon Killebrew posing with a statue of him unveiled near Target Field in Minneapolis. Killebrew, the Twins slugger known for his tape-measure home runs, died Tuesday, May 16, 2011, at his home in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 74. (AP Photo/Andy King, File)

Killebrew was born in Payette, Idaho, near the Oregon border. He claimed to have gotten his strength from hustling 10-gallon cans of milk during the summers as a youth.

His power was obvious the first time a scout from the Washington Senators saw him playing in the Idaho-Oregon Border League. In three games Killebrew got 12 hits in 12 times at bat. The Senators, obviously convinced, made him a $30,000 "bonus baby," so Killebrew put down the milk cans, packed up and headed for the nation's capital -- where he essentially wasted two years.

Baseball rules at the time stipulated that any player receiving a bonus of $4,000 or more would have to spend at least two years on the major league roster, a pre-free agency rule intended to keep teams from paying outrageous signing bonuses. Killebrew played in just 47 games over his first two seasons, hitting four homers -- none in his rookie year of 1954. After the two-year period ended, Killebrew, not even 20 years old, yet, was sent down to the minors.

"Mainly, I had to learn patience and the strike zone and concentration,'' Killebrew said later. "Those were the big things.''

He spent parts of the next three seasons in the minors before returning for good in 1959, when at age 22 he led the American League with 42 home runs.

Killebrew could have made upwards of $20 million a season in today's game. When he led the league in homers in 1959 he was paid $9,000. Killebrew was among the players who had to moonlight during the offseason for extra cash. As a contestant on the TV show, "Home Run Derby," Killebrew tried to outslug his contemporaries for the extra money as well as the publicity.

He hit 31 homers in 1960, then packed up and made the move with his teammates to the Twin Cities before the 1961 season.

No fan of the cold

Killebrew admitted numerous times that he wasn't excited about making the move to Minnesota, a place he figured to be cold and unforgiving. Upon arriving, he realized that his views on the weather were accurate. It was cold, but the people were warm and friendly.

"I loved the fans because they were down-to-earth Midwestern people,'' Killebrew said. "The people in the Upper Midwest were the same kind of people I grew up around in Idaho.''

Killebrew was named the first Twins captain in 1961. He smashed 46 homers that first season in the Twin Cities. His totals the next three seasons: 48, 45 and 49 homers. In 1965 he helped lead the Twins to their first World Series, which ended in a seven-game loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers. He was named to the 1967 American League All-Star team at first base, becoming the first player in All-Star history to be named at three different positions (third base and outfield were the other two).

He was named the American League's most valuable player in 1969, when he drove in a career-high 140 runs and matched his career-best with 49 homers. But by 1971 Killebrew was clearly on the decline, batting knee problems and chronic pain in his big toe. In three seasons from 1972 to 1974 Killebrew produced only 44 home runs.

Griffith offered Killebrew $40,000 to return in 1975 as a player-coach. He would have pinch hit and tutor the younger hitters. Instead, he signed with the Kansas City Royals to be their designated hitter.

He appeared in 106 games, hit 14 homers and drove in 44 runs while batting .199. Kansas City released Killebrew after the 1975 season, and he decided to retire. In retiring, he left behind a legacy of 400-foot home runs and being one of the game's true gentlemen.

Brett called Killebrew "one of the nicest guys I have ever met in the game.''

Minneapolis, MN, USA — Minnesota Twins' Harmon Killebrew smashes his 49th home run of the season, Oct.1, 1969 against the Chicago White Sox, a two-run blast in the first inning of the American League game in the Twin Cities. Killebrew 's homer gave him 140 RBIs. Chicago took the game, 4-3. (AP Photo)

Former Twin Torii Hunter remembered Killebrew as a mentor, not only on the field but off. Hunter said Killebrew looked at his autograph several years ago and deemed it illegible.
``I had a doctor's signature,'' Hunter said. ``I had a, 'T' and an 'I' and a dot-dot. He said, `What the hell is this?' '' Killebrew told Hunter that if kids found that baseball, they would start throwing it around the park because they couldn't read the signature. He gave Hunter advice the former Twin still follows today.

``He said, `If you play the game this long, make sure people know who you are,' '' Hunter said. ``Harmon was a tremendous player, but is an even greater man."

Financial problems

After retiring Killebrew went home to Ontario, Ore., where his house sat on a ridge next to the Snake River. From the living room, he could see over the river, into Idaho and his boyhood home of Payette. It seemed like a happy ending to a distinguished career. But life away from baseball wasn't as rosy. He battled serious financial, family and health problems.

He was a victim of fraud in a failed luxury-home development in Rancho Mirage, California. A car-leasing company in Bloomington, Minn., failed. In 1993, he filed for bankruptcy after a car dealership in Ontario, Ore. failed. He owed four banks more than $900,000. He couldn't make the $2,500 monthly payments on his Oregon dream home, and the mortgage company foreclosed. He owed the IRS money for personal taxes and for the auto dealership.

By the late 1980's he was living in a rented condominium in Boise, Idaho.
He borrowed $100,000 from Griffith in the mid-1980s, and more money from Hall of Famers Reggie Jackson and Warren Spahn.
``It's been a living hell. You have a lot of those days when you feel you're at the bottom," Killebrew said in a 1989 interview. "You get to feeling that sometimes you're out on that island by yourself. I don't feel anger, more sometimes frustration, sadness is another, loneliness is another one. . . . Stressful? That's an understatement."

Killebrew eventually admitted that he knew little about the auto dealing business, but always remained upbeat that he would solve his money problems. But other problems awaited.

He separated from his wife, Elaine, in 1989. The couple had five children. In May of 1990, Killebrew complained of pain in his neck and back that turned out to be a collapsed lung. In August, he still didn't feel well and needed surgery to remove a large abscess from behind a lung. Surgeons removed 1 1/2 inch of a rib, which left a four-inch hole in his back. The area became infected, limiting his ability to walk. He dropped 40 pounds and was sent home with odds against surviving.

He was given intense hospice care, and made a miraculous recovery. He remarried and began representing VistaCare, the hospice-care company that nursed him back to health.

"Hospice is such a tremendous thing,'' he said in a November 1999 interview with Sports Illustrated. "Patients seem to reach an inner peace. Society doesn't like to deal with death, but it is a natural part of living.''

Killebrew, in recent years, had held an annual charity golf event in Phoenix, Ariz, and one in the Twin Cities. He continued to make public appearances right up until he was diagnosed with cancer. It was news when he missed the 2010 TwinsFest to have his gallbladder removed.

"What's amazing is that every time I go back [to the Twin Cities], how much people, even the young people, seem to know about me,'' Killebrew said in a 1999 interview. "It was a wonderful place to play.''

Today's Tune: Jason Isbell - Decoration Day (Live)

Appropriate activity for Genocide Day

By Melanie Phillips
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/
http://www.melaniephillips.com/
Sunday 15 May 2011

Israeli soldiers guard along the border fence as Druze resident of Majdal Sham stand on the hill looking after mainly Palestinian protesters crossed from Syria into the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights close to the Druze village of Majdal Shams on May 15, 2011, to mark Nakba day. Bloodshed broke out as Palestinian refugees across the region marched on Israel's borders in a mass show of mourning over the 1948 creation of the Jewish state known in Arabic as the 'Nakba' or 'Catastrophe.'(Getty Images)

Today Israel faced invasion from three borders: thousands tried to storm the borders from Syria, Lebanon and Gaza, along with Arab rampages in east Jerusalem.

A number of people on the Syrian and Lebanese borders have been killed in these violent clashes, although in a still confused situation the IDF say at least some of these were killed by Lebanese forces. In addition, one Israeli was killed and several others injured in Tel Aviv, as an Arab truck driver smashed his vehicle into a bus and several cars. And in East Jerusalem, two policemen were run over and two Arabs injured when the police stopped a number of Arabs to check their papers.

The reason for this concerted onslaught was that today was the anniversary of what Arabs call the 'nakba or ‘catastrophe’, their word for the foundation of the State of Israel when five Arab armies tried to snuff out the nascent state and failed. ‘Nakba day’ is thus a restatement of the goal of eradicating Israel from the face of the earth. Its proper name should therefore be Genocide Day.

The invasion was organised by Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah. None of this should have come as the slightest surprise: a campaign calling for a Third Intifada to be launched on Genocide Day ran on Facebook for weeks before it was eventually taken down.

Naturally, those behind the invasion promptly accused Israel of violence. Hezbollah claimed Israel had violated human rights (Jihadi Fanatics for Human Rights? These people have missed a vocation in stand-up comedy). Hamas claimed that today’s events were

‘a turning point in the Israeli-Arab conflict’ that proved the Palestinian people and Arabs were committed to ending Israeli occupation

by which it is seen to mean, explicitly in the context of the symbolism of today, the ‘occupation’ to be ended is of the entire State of Israel by the Jews. And Hamas’s newly-minted effective partner in would-be genocide, Mahmoud Abbas, stated that

those killed in clashes with the IDF on Sunday were martyrs to the Palestinian cause,

doubtless just like those terrorist murderers of Israelis whom Abbas regularly glorifies by naming squares and public places after them.

And of course the western media will also sing from the Hamas/Abbas/Hezbollah songbook. Here’s Omni Ceren on the Commentary blog, explaining both the significance of Genocide Day as a restatement of the aim of eradicating Israel, and the instant response by elements of the western media in misrepresenting what happened.

See also, for example, this tendentious headline on the BBC News website:

Israeli forces open fire at Palestinian protesters.

Don’t you just marvel at that word ‘protesters’, which conjures up the image of a kind of re-run of Tiananmen Square where innocent and heroic individuals are mown down by brutal and repressive tyrants.

And here’s the Associated Press, which despite the fact that the driver in Tel Aviv shouted ‘Allahu Akhbar’ and ‘Death to Jews!’ as he smashed into several vehicles including a bus, nevertheless reported this attack as a

traffic accident.

As for the most serious of all these incidents, the invasion by thousands from Syria, this can be seen as a cynical attempt by Assad to divert attention from his own slaughter to date of upwards of 800 Syrian protesters – a fact which generates far less attention in the west than Israel's attempts to defend itself against attack.

Ironically, there is even some evidence that some of these Syrian invaders were in fact not protesting against the State of Israel but rather attempting to flee from Syria into Israel as a refuge from the tyrannical violence being perpetrated against them by Assad.

Before the Big Lie of Israeli ‘human rights abuses‘ today picks up more steam as it travels round the world, here’s a useful round-up with some telling video coverage by Honest Reporting. But there is also this sombre warning from Daniel Pipes:

I predicted a few weeks ago that Arab upheavals might inspire Palestinians to shift "away from warfare and terrorism in favor of non-violent political action. That could include massive non-violent demonstrations such as marching on Israeli towns, borders, and checkpoints."...

But, being Palestinians, they could not resist resorting to violence, thereby perhaps undercutting the whole effort. According to an account in Yedi'ot Aharonot, the Syrians trampled the border fence, hurled stones at Israeli troops, wounding ten, and left Israel by early evening, shouting out ‘We'll be back’ to the applause of local villagers.

Syrian subjects crossing en masse onto the Golan Heights without Israeli permission has never (to the best of my knowledge) happened before. And, of course, in totalitarian Syria, this sort of occurrence requires government approval. While one can ascribe this protest to Damascus's wanting to divert attention from its own internal problems, it also fits into a larger picture.

Danny Danon, a leading Likud politician, portrayed the four-sided challenge as a rehearsal for September, when the Palestinian Authority expects the U.N. General Assembly declare a sovereign ‘Palestine.’ I go further and predict that this cross of civil disobedience and low-grade violence will be the Palestinians' favored tactic for some time to come. I also predict that it will fail if, as today, a death toll ensues. But it can do real damage to Israel if the leadership manages to keep the crowds non-violent.

This may have also been what Israel’s Defence Minister Ehud Barak was getting at when he warned of this mass assault upon Israeli sovereignty:

‘we are just at the start of this matter and it could be that we'll face far more complex challenges.’

There does indeed appear to be no end to the ingenuity of those who, inflamed and encouraged by a west consumed by the political equivalent of auto-immune disease, believe that their infernal goal is now within their grasp.

Duke of Generosity: John Wayne’s Kindness Cost Him Financially and Won Over Political Opposites

by Stephen Schochet     
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/
May 16, 2011

“Maybe I should be in a position where I don’t have to work; but I’m not.” — 69 year-old-old John Wayne, three years before his death.

John Wayne, a.k.a Duke Morrison (he was nicknamed Duke after an Airedale dog that he owned during his youth) was arguably the most popular movie star that ever lived. Yet when it came to personal wealth he trailed far behind some of his contemporaries such as Cary Grant and Fred MacMurray. In addition to bad business management and three broken marriages, some of Wayne’s financial woes were brought on by his incredibly generous nature. His goodness shone during the making of the1953 western Hondo when Wayne arranged for some private detectives, who were trailing him, to be freed from a prison in Camargo, Mexico. Never mind that Wayne’s second wife Chata had enraged him by hiring the investigators to find incriminating information to use in their upcoming divorce proceedings. The local officials in Camargo were thrilled to have the revenue generated from a John Wayne picture being made in their town and were willing to use extreme measures to keep their top tourist attraction happy, but the Duke refused to let men rot in jail for simply doing their jobs.

Unlike most celebrities John Wayne didn’t immediately dispose of fan letters asking him for money. He read each request carefully, sometimes agonizing over them, to discern their legitimacy. Duke would send complete strangers cash so they could visit sick friends, or help finance a kid getting braces. Once, while hospitalized, Wayne got to know a less-well-off fellow patient; after Duke was discharged his new friend was visited by one of Wayne’s representatives who told him his medical bills would be covered.

In 1960 a burglar found Duke’s Encino, California address with a movie star map and broke into the home while its owner was watching TV. Reacting quickly, Wayne ran down to the basement and grabbed a shotgun. He chased the crook into the backyard and said, “Hold it. I got you covered.”
He yelled to his wife Pilar to call the police, which she had already done. The robber was cuffed and about to be taken off to jail when he asked to speak to his intended victim. “Mr. Wayne?”
“What do you want, punk?”

“Well, I came here in a taxi. My driver is still outside. He didn’t know I came to rob you. Could you take care of him, Mr. Wayne?”

The Duke swore under his breath, but after the police hauled the bad guy away, John went outside and paid the cabbie.

Duke would routinely walk into bars and exclaim,” Drinks for everybody on me!” Wayne stated different reasons for his grandioseness. He needed to diffuse any potential challenge from a drunk who might want to prove his manhood. (The six-foot-four actor claimed in an interview that he was never in a bar fight, even during World War II when he was heavily criticized in some quarters for not enlisting.) Wayne also maintained that is was necessary for him to be a big tipper, lest some bartender or waiter tell a reporter otherwise, and ruin the star’s reputation. When all was said and done, the Duke was a man who loved to raise a little hell; for the most part friends remembered him as a kindly drunk.
Once, Duke got totally imbibed during a poker game with animal trainer Rudd Weatherwax. Rudd mistakenly assumed that an inebriated Duke would be an easy mark; soon Wayne owned Rudd’s car and his dog. The softhearted actor felt guilty and gave back the canine; in his later years Wayne may have more easily been able to afford retirement if he would have maintained ownership of Lassie.

On another occasion Duke’s pal, entertainment journalist and unabashed liberal James Bacon (It was exclusively through James Bacon that ultra-conservative John Wayne first revealed to the world that he had lung cancer) did an expose on the biggest drinkers in Hollywood. The far and away winners in Bacon’s informal contest were John Wayne, and his fellow movie cowboy Gene Autry. Wayne later chastised Bacon for inaccurate reporting. “How dare you say Gene Autry drinks as much as I do! Why that piker couldn’t carry my ice!”

James Bacon was not the only left-winger to admire and like the Duke. Katharine Hepburn admitted she loved leaning up against Wayne when they costarred in Rooster Cogburn (1975) and was thrilled when he playfully kissed her on the lips in front of some reporters. Gossip columnist Sheila Graham couldn’t stand to be in the same room with Duke when he forcefully put forth his right wing philosophy, yet loved how Wayne went out of his way to keep old friends employed, and wistfully wondered what it would have been like to be married to him. Lauren Bacall, who expected to clash with Duke over politics, found him to be warm and friendly, and was impressed that he was one of the first people to pay respects after her husband Humphrey Bogart passed away in 1957. Mark Rydell, who directed Duke in The Cowboys(1972) was shocked that Wayne was a far nicer man than many of Mark’s fellow liberals in Hollywood. Rydell delighted in telling the story of how one night he dined with Wayne and the icon came back from the restroom with sopping wet pants. Wayne resignedly explained that it happened all the time,” Some joker is standing next to me and says Oh my God, you’re John Wayne and then he turns . . .”

In 1959 Duke managed to have a civil encounter with Soviet Union Premier, Nikita Khrushchev. The Communist leader enjoyed meeting Wayne, admired his movies, stated he rescinded the order his predecessor Josef Stalin had given to have Wayne assassinated, and later sent Wayne a giant crate full of Russian vodka for Christmas, which Wayne’s secretary had nervously opened after determining it didn’t contain a bomb. An interpreter helped ease diplomatic relations between the world’s top red and America’s screen hero. Khrushchev had laughed when he heard the translator say Wayne would buy him a drink on the day the Soviet Leader ruled America. What the Duke, far from impressed by any Communist even the head one, actually said, with a smile on his face, was,” I’m going to knock you on your bleeping ass.”

'An Inconvenient Truth': A Fifth Anniversary Tribute

Special Report

By Mark Hyman on 5.17.11 @ 6:08AM

The American Spectator

http://spectator.org

This month is the fifth anniversary of the release of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. The documentary film became a sensation among the political left, the easily impressionable segments of the public and a majority in Congress that was all too eager to enact legislation to solve the global crisis.

The film won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature and the audio version received a Grammy. For his efforts to save the planet, Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize. This is a very good haul for a film that grossed a rather paltry $23 million in domestic box office receipts.

There is no denying that Gore and his film deserve the lion's share of the credit (or blame) for launching the wild hysteria to combat "manmade global warming" that swept the nation in 2006.
The U.S. House of Representatives created an entirely new committee "The Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming" because "global warming is an urgent problem that requires action now" such as hastening the nation's "transition away from a fossil fuel-based economy."

Congress passed legislation banning incandescent light bulbs by 2014. Americans will soon exclusively use CFL (curly-fry light) bulbs that will keep a home as dimly light as a Third World hospital room.

On several occasions Congress was unsuccessful in enacting "cap and trade" legislation that would be a financial windfall for some groups but would also kill thousands of American jobs. Common sense prevailed as the legislation failed to move in Congress but, the Environmental Protection Agency has threatened to implement the legislation via regulatory edict.

After the film was released, a number of strange bedfellows jumped onto the manmade global warming bandwagon. In one public service announcement, Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich, who sat together on a sofa like a pair of love-struck lab partners before they were to head off to the senior prom, demanded a solution to global warming.

A year later the always-evolving Gingrich would abandon his newfound fossil-fuels-are-evil buddies and publish a book titled Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less in which he advocates pumping as much oil from the ground as is humanly possible.

Going Green became the catch phrase. There was a rush to purchase hybrid vehicles such as the two-seat Honda Insight, the impractical compact that is not much larger than a circus clown car, and the overpriced Toyota Prius that has been plagued with numerous battery and service problems.

The Discovery cable network launched Planet Green channel whose star celebrity is Ed Begley, Jr. That's right, who? That came on the heels of NBC Universal airing "green" theme programming on its stable of cable and broadcast channels during the month of April. Even Time magazine offered a "Going Green" column. Green expos, exhibits, conventions and bazaars popped up around the country. Green was in.
Not content with his role as Chicken Little, Gore went on to co-found a "carbon credit" company that has made him millions. He even used the carbon credit service for himself. He deems his extravagant, high-energy use home as being "carbon neutral" because he purchases "carbon offsets." From himself.

This review comes five years after the film's original release but, I confess the timing is only a mere coincidence. My primary goal in watching the film was to determine if I was correct in what I remembered of my 2006 viewing. I began to have doubts.

That is because practitioners of manmade global warming hysteria have attempted to correct me again and again in recent years by claiming Gore's film was not about manmade global warming but, instead, was about "climate change." I had been told this so many times that I had begun to doubt what I saw five years ago.

The catch-all phrase "climate change" happens to be politically convenient because it allows manmade global warming enthusiasts to deposit every single climate event (highs, lows, and the status quo) into their CSI evidence bag as proof that man -- particular Western man and more specifically, American society -- is evil and is the cause of most of the world's ills.

Gore tells us so in the film. He said, "We are still, by far, the worst contributor to the problem." Why can't Americans be more like the Chinese he asks? For example, he claims they build more efficient automobiles and "Chinese scientists are right on the cutting edge" in environmental matters. Maybe Gore has confused East German and Chinese automobile ingenuity.

In his 1992 book Earth in the Balance, the basis of An Inconvenient Truth, Gore fell back on his Malthusian beliefs that there are far too many people for a healthy world to support. "[W]e have been producing increasing quantities of CO2 , and we are now dumping vast amounts of into the global atmosphere," he wrote. Gore then reminded us that the "human lung inhales oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide, and the engines of civilization have, in effect, automated the process of breathing." (No matter how many times I read that statement I have no idea what it means.)

He reinforces this point in the film by emphasizing that population growth places profound pressures on the planet. Surprisingly, he did not plug the Chinese's one-child per family rule as another brilliant advancement by the Asian nation.

I heard the phrase "global warming" (or "manmade global warming") in An Inconvenient Truth on 24 occasions. "Climate change"? Not so much. In fact, I only heard the phrase twice. Even if I missed a "global warming" here or a "climate change" there the fact-of-the-natter is the film is all about global warming. Score one for my memory and zero for the revisionists.

While watching the film, one has to practice (in the words of Hillary Clinton) the "willing suspension of disbelief" in order to accept many of Gore's claims and the nexus he insists is between world events and manmade global warming. For instance, he says, "Global warming not only paradoxically causes more flooding but also more drought." He argues global warming will cause drought in one region and flooding in a neighboring region. Huh?

He asserts polar bears are an endangered species. They aren't. And he states, "Within the decade there will be no more snows of [Mount] Kilimanjaro." The blame rests with manmade global warming he claims. But this isn't true either. Kilimanjaro's mountaintop temperatures never rise above freezing. The ice pack is not melting away due to increased temperatures but is disappearing due to sublimation in which frozen ice converts directly into water vapor. This is caused by solar radiation. And it has been occurring for more than a century or about 125 years before I bought my SUV.

Gore claims an increase in mosquitoes is due to manmade global warming but he conveniently ignores that worldwide bans, led by American environmentalists, against the very effective mosquito-killing insecticide DDT most likely played the largest role in increased mosquito populations.

He recounts a trip to the Antarctic where a researcher shows him an ice core sample from a glacier and then points to the exact spot in the sample that coincided with date of when the U.S. Congress passed the 1963 Clean Air Act. As he explained in Earth, "[E]ven a small reduction in one country's emissions had changed the amount of pollution found in the remotest and least accessible place on earth." Really?
There are dozens of other errors, misstatements of fact, and bizarre claims in An Inconvenient Truth, which makes the film title even funnier when one thinks about it.

In the film, Gore appears to be just as focused on resurrecting his moribund political career as he is on spreading his alarmism regarding manmade global warming. His opening on-camera statement is, "I am Al Gore. I used to be the next President of the United States." One doesn't get the sense this was delivered Rodney Dangerfield-like in that "I don't get no respect" vein that is intended to elicit belly laughs.

The film includes clips of network news announcements that Gore won the 2000 Florida vote followed by Florida election officials examining dimpled and hanging chads from punch card ballots. Liberals still whine that the U.S. Supreme Court stole election victory away from Gore and gave it to George W. Bush even though a gaggle of liberal newspapers reluctantly reported that ballot recounts firmly gave Bush more votes than Gore.

The film does carry Gore's statesman-like comment that he eventually accepted the high court's ruling in Bush v. Gore. "While I strongly disagree with the court's decision, I accept it. I accept the finality of this outcome," he said.

Still, Gore delivers slights and tosses insults at Bush and other prominent Republicans including Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Senator Jim Inhofe (R-MO). (Inhofe is a leading Congressional skeptic of manmade global warming claims.) Gore portrays a grade school science teacher as bordering on incompetent and then adds, "The teacher went on to become the science adviser in the current [Bush] administration."

He alleges Bush broke a campaign promise to combat a cause of global warming. "In 2000, my opponent pledged to regulate CO2 and that was not a pledge that was kept."

Gore disciples might experience a case of déjà vu over that statement. In Earth, Gore made an identical claim but that time it was directed against the first President Bush. "George Bush declared in one speech that he would, if elected, exercise leadership on global warming and 'confront the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.' It was, as we now know, an empty promise."

Gore comes across as someone delivering little digs to his audience throughout the film as if to say, "Don't you feel guilty for not electing me President?" Unfortunately for the former Vice President, while Americans like a good sport they have little patience for sore losers and pouting martyrs.
Portions of the film have a campaign feel. The film is peppered with little vignettes about Gore's personal life that appear to be attempts to engender sympathy for the man. He discusses the day his son was struck by an automobile and the boy's hospital stay, which was the epiphany that it was Gore's duty to combat global warming. "It brought into clear focus the mission that I had been pursuing for all these years."

In Earth, Gore described his global warming alarmist mission in historical terms. "It is already clear that our information about the global environmental crisis does fall into a discernable pattern. For many, this pattern has become painfully obvious. But for others, it is still invisible.… Galileo was charged with a form of subversion for describing a pattern he saw in the"

In the film, Gore also mentions the 1984 death of his sister Nancy after she lost her battle to lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking cigarettes. He tp://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/06/al_gores_convenient_fiction.html"> offers that tragedy as the seminal event that caused him and his family to end tobacco farming. His sister's death also figured prominently in his 1996 Democratic Convention speech in which he claimed that after her death he committed his "heart and soul into the cause of protecting our children from the dangers of smoking."

However, a decade earlier during his 1988 run for the presidency Gore apparently had not yet received word that Nancy had died of lung cancer four years earlier. He told a group of tobacco farmers that he was a proud tobacco farmer.

"Throughout most of my life, I raised tobacco. I want you to know that with my own hands, all of my life, I put it in the plant beds and transferred it. I've hoed it. I've dug in it. I've sprayed it, I've chopped it, I've shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it."

The appearance of the film two years before the 2008 presidential election is eerily reminiscent of the release of Gore's Earth in the Balance just as he and Bill Clinton had paired up for the presidency. It has become routine for presidential candidates to release a book prior to the election.

While Gore implores Americans to make sacrifices in order to tame global warming, he would make no such sacrifices himself. He routinely crisscrosses the country in executive jets although the film contains images of him dragging a wheeled carry-on in an airport terminal as he is presumably headed to the middle seat of row 27 on some Priceline.com flight to save the world.

Meanwhile, Tipper keeps the fires burning in chez Gore where monthly utility bills are twenty times the national average.

As we learn through his actions, sacrifices are not meant to be made by Gore. Or any of his fellow liberals, for that matter. For example, Gore made an appearance in Berkeley, California in October 2006 to rally support for Proposition 87. Prop 87 was a measure aimed at reducing domestic oil consumption.

He arrived at his Berkeley speaking engagement in a Toyota hybrid, accompaniedby a motorcade of three motorcycles, two limousines and Dodge Ram pick-up truck. Seven vehicles were used to transport this one very important guy. Fuel conservation isn't for them -- just everyone else.

About the same time, his fellow travelers behaved similarly. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) denounced low mileage vehicles at a press conference outside a Capitol Hill gas station before hopping into her staff-driven, 18-mpg Chrysler LHS luxury car for the two-block ride back to her office.

Former Congressman Harold Ford, Jr. (D-TN) appeared on MSNBC to criticize gas guzzling trucks and SUVs in spite of the fact he was driving a 15-mpg Chevy Tahoe.

Senator John Kerry (D-MA) co-signed a letter to the Bush White House demanding a reduction of oil use in the U.S. even though he jets around in a $48-million Gulfstream G-V jet that burns 750 gallons of fuel an hour.

I honestly had a difficult time completely watching An Inconvenient Truth a second time. First of all, I already know how the story ends. Second, I had to restart the film from the beginning four times. I kept getting interrupted each time I tried to watch. Once was because I was asked to take out the trash and recyclables. The other three times were because my nine-year old son wanted to demonstrate some magic tricks.

In retrospect, the interruptions seem so appropriate.

Mark Hyman hosts "Behind the Headlines," a commentary program for Sinclair Broadcast Group.

Book Review: Erik Larson’s “In the Garden of Beasts”

By Philip Kerr
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
May 13, 2011

The great thing about the Nazis . . . hmm. No, that isn’t going to work, for all the obvious reasons. Surely there are no good things about the Nazis, I hear you say.

Well, there is one good thing, and it is this: In an age of moral relativism, we can all agree that the Nazis were evil and that the Western Allied forces opposing the Nazis were good. (I say “Western” Allied forces because I don’t think one can argue that the Soviet Union could be described as a force for good.)

With the Nazis you have a proper villain: Adolf Hitler. You have some heinous crimes, and here you can take your pick: the Holocaust, waging aggressive war, etc. You have a story arc that even the dumbest studio exec can understand, with a beginning, a middle and an end, and gosh, they’re even in that order. You have some unlikely hero figures: Churchill and Roosevelt, though not, I think, de Gaulle. And, best of all, at the end of the story, the villain is completely destroyed. Good triumphs over evil in a series of epic battles that Tolkien might have imagined. Victory is total. Everyone — even the long-suffering population of Germany — is glad. Ding-dong! The witch is dead.

These story archetypes are almost Jungian, which perhaps accounts for why the Nazi period is so beloved of publishing. This might also explain why Erik Larson, the author of several successful works of popular history such as “The Devil in the White City” and “Isaac’s Storm,” has now turned his attention and considerable talent to the subject with his latest book, “In the Garden of Beasts.” And to bowdlerize a remark of Dr. Johnson’s, one is not surprised to find it done, but to find it done so well.

Over the past 20 years I have published eight novels about the Nazi era. During that time, I have seen an explosion of interest in the Nazis, and the further away that period gets, the more it fascinates us.

I am an avid consumer of books about Nazism — there must be 200 on my shelves — and it seems to me that they are becoming more plentiful. Coming now and in the next few weeks are at least two important new works of nonfiction about the Nazis besides Larson’s, from Austrian historian Gerald Steinacher and British historian Frederick Taylor. At the same time, the books are becoming more reader-friendly. History books have to work much harder than they did of old. It’s no longer enough that they are authoritative and well-researched — they have to be entertaining, too. As entertaining as a novel, perhaps.

Of course this is quite a tall order. But Larson fills it admirably. “In the Garden of Beasts” at times seems derivative of a 1940 memoir, “Through Embassy Eyes,” by Martha Dodd, one of the main characters of his tale. Much of the material is the same, but we can forgive that because Larson fills in everything that Dodd herself felt obliged to leave out: It’s not every U.S. ambassador’s daughter who becomes a spy for the Soviet Union.

We can also forgive Larson because his book reads like an elegant thriller — and certainly better than the elegant thriller, “Sowing the Wind,” that Dodd wrote. I found Larson’s book to be utterly compelling, and while I was reading it there were several occasions on which I had to stop and check to make sure it really was a work of nonfiction. It is — and marvelous stuff. You really couldn’t invent it in a novel because no one would believe you.

“In the Garden of Beasts” is, in the main, the story of William Dodd, a mild-mannered academic from Chicago, who to his own and everyone else’s surprise was appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt as America’s man in Nazi Germany. Dealing with the Nazis’ violence and lies provedevery bit as tricky as dealing with State Department snobs and anti-Semites. Dodd was cut from coarser academic cloth than most of his privileged Ivy League underlings in Berlin, and much to their amusement he brought to his appointment none of the Croesus-size private wealth of previous ambassadors, wealth that would have enabled him to entertain on the kind of scale to which they were accustomed and which they thought was only appropriate.

Most unforgivably, it seems that Dodd tried to make do on his ambassador’s salary of $17,500 per annum; he even brought over to Germany his old car from the States and drove it around the city himself, instead of acquiring a chauffeur-driven Mercedes limousine like most other ambassadors to the court of Adolf Hitler. In the monocled, disdainful eyes of his staff, poor Dodd was letting the side down by not putting on a show for the Nazis.

Larson describes Berlin very well, especially before and after the infamous Night of the Long Knives, when, in the stifling summer of 1934, the Furher consolidated his power over Germany with a series of political murders. But for my Reichsmark it’s Martha’s story that’s the most interesting.

Beautiful, intelligent, willful and highly sexed (a perfect heroine), no sooner had Martha arrived in Berlin than she was conducting affairs with several leading Nazis, including Ernst “Putzi” Hanf­staengl, who at one stage tried to persuade her to become Hitler’s mistress. Repelled by Hitler’s halitosis and his even more revolting Weltanschauung, Martha found herself drawn to a very tall man at the Russian Embassy who became her lover, her mentor and, later on, her spy master.

British intellectual E.H.Carr, in his famous work of historiography “What is History?,” advised one to study the historian before one begins to study the facts he has assembled. What bees does he have in his bonnet? Carr asks. “When you read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing.”

Larson is a journalist, not really a historian at all. Nothing wrong with that. And really the only buzz about Larson that should be of interest to anyone is that he’s written an excellent and entertaining book that deserves to be a bestseller, and probably will be.

Philip Kerr’s latest novel is “Field Gray.”