Columnist.
With the recent passing of Arnold Palmer, yet another all-time great sports icon has left us in 2016. How ironic that three athletes, each of whom was the face of his sport in the 1960s — Arnold Palmer in golf, Muhammad Ali in boxing, and Gordie Howe in hockey — all have left us this year. Perhaps that is fitting. They deserve to be remembered together for their combined impact on the world of sports. Although I am a lifelong sports fan, I’ll confess to having only modest interest in golf. That interest, though, stems entirely from the winsome personality of Arnold Palmer. The combination of his sonorous drawl, charismatic smile, twinkling eyes, easy-going manner, modesty, genuineness, and gentlemanliness made it impossible not to be charmed by the man. Arnie was the hook that drew me to watch enough golf tournaments over the years to at least know who the outstanding players are in any given year.
“Hillary Clinton Proposes 65% Top Rate for Estate Tax” blared a headline in The Wall Street Journal. Since the current top statutory tax rate on estates is 40 percent, Clinton’s proposal is nothing if not audacious. I can’t recall Barack Obama, our most leftward president, ever calling for a 62.5 percent increase in tax rates for the rich. Going after inheritances and estates is textbook Marxism. That is not an exaggeration. The third plank in Karl Marx’s 10-point platform for achieving socialism through democratic means — see his 1848 textbook to communism, “The Communist Manifesto” — was the abolition of inheritances. To repeat: it was point three in Marx’s 10-point plan.
Charles Leerhsen’s “Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty” may be the most important baseball book in decades. It is historically significant in two respects: First, it is the definitive biography of the greatest baseball player from the deadball era and indisputably one of the greatest players of all time. No film footage exists of Ty Cobb playing baseball, so the only way to preserve the memory of this superstar of superstars is the written word. Second, this book corrects a great historical injustice, namely, the egregiously dishonest portrayal of Cobb in previous pseudo-biographies and in film. Leerhsen’s book was exhaustively researched; indeed, over the course of its 400-plus pages, it becomes clear that he tracked down far more original sources than anyone else who has written about Cobb, and in doing so, sets the standard for all biographers (not just of sports figures) going forward. “Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty” provides valuable insights into four areas: the deadball era, Cobb the man, Cobb the player, and the libelous treatment of Cobb after his death.
I have been writing for years that our government is essentially broke and the federal debt will never be repaid. Within this context, the Federal Reserve has been the great enabler of even more federal debt by its ZIRP policy. The Fed has opted for the slow-growth Japanization of the American economy as a lesser evil than letting interest rates on the national debt rise so as to precipitate a political crisis and potential default. As John Tamny points out in his book, “Who Needs the Fed?,” the Fed is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the private marketplace for capital; its primary role is to cram down interest rates on the federal government’s debt and keep our broke government solvent (absent rampant money creation).
Father’s Day invites us to ponder the father figures we have known — not just our biological fathers, but any man who has blessed us with fatherly action at some point in our lives.
I can’t believe that I’m writing an article about using the bathroom. But then, I can’t believe that at a time when our country is faced with immense challenges such as international Islamist terrorism and fiscal and monetary insanity in Washington, the current presidential administration is obsessing about who uses which bathrooms, going so far as to order public schools nationwide what their bathroom-use policy must be.
You may have heard about the Kentucky school district that ordered its administrators to scrub any religious references from its various Christmas productions. Most infamously, an elementary school in the Johnson County School District removed the lines from “A Charlie Brown Christmas” where Linus recites the Gospel of Luke’s account of the Nativity of Jesus Christ. This censorship was colossally silly — both because Linus’ speech is the dramatic center of the play, and because of the self-evident absurdity of staging a play with “Christmas” in its title and then deleting the key lines that explain what Christmas celebrates.
Don’t you love it when something heartwarming happens to you unexpectedly? That happened to me on October 1. My friend Ron invited me to go with him to Cleveland to see the game that night between the Indians and the Minnesota Twins. Neither of us had any connection to either of the teams (I’m a lifelong Tigers fan and Ron is a lifelong Pirates fan) but I had never seen Progressive (formerly Jacobs) Field before, so off we went.
The word “icon” is overused these days, but it surely applies to Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra, who passed away [Tuesday] at age 90. His playing career was iconic, and he transitioned into a cultural icon in his role as amateur philosopher and author of droll malapropisms. Yogi was a key part of the New York Yankees dynasty that dominated Major League Baseball in the 1950s and early 1960s. On a personality rich team that included fellow Hall of Famers Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, Berra was the most colorful and arguably the most accomplished, having won three American League Most Valuable Player awards (compared to two each for Mantle and Roger Maris), an all-time record of 10 world championship rings as a player (he won three more as a coach), and the distinction of having caught the only perfect game in World Series history — Don Larsen’s gem in 1957.
