Iconic Daredevil Evel Knievel Dies at 69
By MITCH STACY – 49 minutes ago

CLEARWATER, Fla. (AP) — Evel Knievel, the red-white-and-blue-spangled motorcycle daredevil whose jumps over crazy obstacles including Greyhound buses, live sharks and Idaho's Snake River Canyon made him an international icon in the 1970s, died Friday. He was 69.
Knievel's death was confirmed by his granddaughter, Krysten Knievel. He had been in failing health for years, suffering from diabetes and pulmonary fibrosis, an incurable condition that scarred his lungs.
Knievel had undergone a liver transplant in 1999 after nearly dying of hepatitis C, likely contracted through a blood transfusion after one of his bone-shattering spills.
Longtime friend and promoter Billy Rundel said Knievel had trouble breathing at his Clearwater condominium and died before an ambulance could get him to a hospital.
"It's been coming for years, but you just don't expect it. Superman just doesn't die, right?" Rundel said.
Immortalized in the Washington's Smithsonian Institution as "America's Legendary Daredevil," Knievel was best known for a failed 1974 attempt to jump Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered cycle and a spectacular crash at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. He suffered nearly 40 broken bones before he retired in 1980.
"I think he lived 20 years longer than most people would have" after so many injuries, said his son Kelly Knievel, 47. "I think he willed himself into an extra five or six years."
Though Knievel dropped off the pop culture radar in the '80s, the image of the high-flying motorcyclist clad in patriotic, star-studded colors was never erased from public consciousness. He always had fans and enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in recent years.
His death came just two days after it was announced that he and rapper Kanye West had settled a federal lawsuit over the use of Knievel's trademarked image in a popular West music video.
Knievel made a good living selling his autographs and endorsing products. Thousands came to Butte, Mont., every year as his legend was celebrated during the "Evel Knievel Days" festival, which Rundel organizes.
"They started out watching me bust my ass, and I became part of their lives," Knievel said. "People wanted to associate with a winner, not a loser. They wanted to associate with someone who kept trying to be a winner."
For the tall, thin daredevil, the limelight was always comfortable, the gab glib. To Knievel, there always were mountains to climb, feats to conquer.
"No king or prince has lived a better life," he said in a May 2006 interview with The Associated Press. "You're looking at a guy who's really done it all. And there are things I wish I had done better, not only for me but for the ones I loved."
He had a knack for outrageous yarns: "Made $60 million, spent 61. ...Lost $250,000 at blackjack once. ... Had $3 million in the bank, though."
He began his daredevil career in 1965 when he formed a troupe called Evel Knievel's Motorcycle Daredevils, a touring show in which he performed stunts such as riding through fire walls, jumping over live rattlesnakes and mountain lions and being towed at 200 mph behind dragster race cars.
In 1966 he began touring alone, barnstorming the West and doing everything from driving the trucks, erecting the ramps and promoting the shows. In the beginning he charged $500 for a jump over two cars parked between ramps.
He steadily increased the length of the jumps until, on New Year's Day 1968, he was nearly killed when he jumped 151 feet across the fountains in front of Caesar's Palace. He cleared the fountains but the crash landing put him in the hospital in a coma for a month.
His son, Robbie, successfully completed the same jump in April 1989.
In the years after the Caesar's crash, the fee for Evel's performances increased to $1 million for his jump over 13 buses at Wembley Stadium in London — the crash landing broke his pelvis — to more than $6 million for the Sept. 8, 1974, attempt to clear the Snake River Canyon in Idaho in a rocket-powered "Skycycle." The money came from ticket sales, paid sponsors and ABC's "Wide World of Sports."
The parachute malfunctioned and deployed after takeoff. Strong winds blew the cycle into the canyon, landing him close to the swirling river below.
On Oct. 25, 1975, he jumped 14 Greyhound buses at Kings Island in Ohio.
Knievel decided to retire after a jump in the winter of 1976 in which he was again seriously injured. He suffered a concussion and broke both arms in an attempt to jump a tank full of live sharks in the Chicago Amphitheater. He continued to do smaller exhibitions around the country with his son, Robbie.
Many of his records have been broken by daredevil motorcyclist Bubba Blackwell.
Knievel also dabbled in movies and TV, starring as himself in "Viva Knievel" and with Lindsay Wagner in an episode of the 1980s TV series "Bionic Woman." George Hamilton and Sam Elliott each played Knievel in movies about his life.
Evel Knievel toys accounted for more than $300 million in sales for Ideal and other companies in the 1970s and '80s.
Born Robert Craig Knievel in the copper mining town of Butte on Oct. 17, 1938, Knievel was raised by his grandparents. He traced his career choice back to the time he saw Joey Chitwood's Auto Daredevil Show at age 8.
"The phrase one-of-a-kind is often used, but it probably applies best to Bobby Knievel," said U.S. Rep. Pat Williams, D-Mont., who grew up with Knievel. "He was an amazing athlete... He was sharp as a tack, one of the smartest people I've ever known and finally, as the world knows, no one had more guts than Bobby. He was simply unafraid of anything."
Outstanding in track and field, ski jumping and ice hockey at Butte High School, Knievel went on to win the Northern Rocky Mountain Ski Association Class A Men's ski jumping championship in 1957 and played with the Charlotte Clippers of the Eastern Hockey League in 1959.
He also formed the Butte Bombers semiprofessional hockey team, acting as owner, manager, coach and player.
Knievel also worked in the Montana copper mines, served in the Army, ran his own hunting guide service, sold insurance and ran Honda motorcycle dealerships. As a motorcycle dealer, he drummed up business by offering $100 off the price of a motorcycle to customers who could beat him at arm wrestling.
At various times and in different interviews, Knievel claimed to have been a swindler, a card thief, a safe cracker, a holdup man.
Evel Knievel married hometown girlfriend, Linda Joan Bork, in 1959. They separated in the early 1990s. They had four children, Kelly, Robbie, Tracey and Alicia.
Robbie Knievel followed in his father's footsteps as a daredevil, jumping a moving locomotive in a 200-foot, ramp-to-ramp motorcycle stunt on live television in 2000. He also jumped a 200-foot-wide chasm of the Grand Canyon.
Knievel lived with his longtime partner, Krystal Kennedy-Knievel, splitting his time between their Clearwater condo and Butte. They married in 1999 and divorced a few years later but remained together. Knievel had 10 grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

"I think my songs reveal whatever they reveal, they say certain things about who I am, whereas Will Smith singing "Gettin' Jiggy With It" reveals certain things about how he is. Like for one thing that he doesn't mind singing a senseless song." - Elliott Smith

I saw this coming a mile away-

Gyllenhaal tapped for Namath film
'Zodiac' star to play Hall of Fame quarterback
By MICHAEL FLEMING


Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Namath was the first football player to find rock-star status.Universal Pictures will turn the life of Joe Namath into a feature film, with Jake Gyllenhaal playing the Hall of Fame quarterback.
David Hollander will write the script once the writers strike is over. Mad Chance's Andrew Lazar will produce. Jimmy Walsh, who runs Namanco Prods., exec produces.
Walsh said he and Namath OK'd the movie after a long pursuit by Lazar, a strong take by Hollander and the belief that the athletic Gyllenhaal was the right actor to play him.
While other quarterbacks racked up bigger lifetime stats, Namath became the first football player to achieve rock-star status. The pic will tell the story of how the golden-armed kid from Beaver Falls, Pa., became Broadway Joe, the New York Jets quarterback who became a '60s cultural figure.
When Namath emerged from Bear Bryant's football program at the U. of Alabama, the upstart American Football League was the stepchild to the powerhouse National Football League. Sonny Werblin, who'd left MCA after the Justice Dept. broke up Lew Wasserman's company, knew the value of star power and was determined to use it when he bought the Jets. He outbid the NFL, paid Namath a record $400,000 salary and turned him loose on New York. The handsome nonconformist became a sensation, on the field, in nightclubs and on Madison Avenue as the first star to become a magnet for commercials.
After backing up his guarantee that the Jets would beat the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III, Namath put the AFL on equal footing with the NFL, paved the way to a merger and helped establish football as a TV sport. He accomplished all of this on knees so bad that draft board doctors refused to send him to Vietnam for fear that they would give out on the battlefield.
"Most of the stuff you saw in 'Forest Gump,' Joe lived through all of it," said Walsh, who first met Namath on the Alabama campus and has worked with him ever since. They witnessed the struggle for civil rights in Alabama, the sexual revolution and Vietnam.
Gyllenhaal, who is coming off "Rendition" and "Zodiac," is currently shooting the Jim Sheridan-directed "Brothers" with Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman and will follow that by teaming with Doug Liman on an untitled project at DreamWorks that revolves around a moon expedition.

Dogs Still Bite MenA new poll shows a dramatic shift of opinion about the Iraq war, the Associated Press reports:

People are evenly split over how well the military effort in Iraq is going, with 48 percent saying it is going well and the same number saying it isn't, according to a survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. In February, shortly after [President] Bush announced he would send additional troops to the country, only 30 percent said things were going well. . . .
While 16 percent of Democrats said in February that things were going well, that figure has grown to 33 percent. . . .

Overall, 43 percent said the U.S. is making gains against the insurgents, up 13 percentage points from February. The percentage of people seeing progress reducing civilian casualties has more than doubled to 43 percent, while the number seeing results in preventing civil war is 32 percent, almost double the February level.

But the headline reads "Poll: Public Still Favors Iraq Pullout," and the AP leads with this non-news:

The public increasingly believes the U.S. is making military progress in Iraq but still wants President Bush to remove American troops from the country as quickly as possible, a poll showed Tuesday.

The "narrative" is everything, isn't it?

CNN's senior business correspondent Ali Velshi had an interesting question for viewers this morning.
Before telling viewers that consumer confidence is at the lowest level in two years, Velshi asked if the media have anything to do with it.
"Do you think we're feeding this thing? Do you think we're fueling this sort of misery?" asked Velshi on "American Morning" November 28.
A question for Newsbusters readers: How would you answer Velshi's question?

The Business & Media Institute has found that the media certainly don't reinforce the soundness of the economy when things are going well. BMI's "Bad News Bears" study that looked at one year of reporting, found that 62 percent of network (ABC, CBS, NBC) economic stories focused on negative news. Those stories were also given more airtime.

Ask a question … any question!

Auburn University’s Foy Information Line, 334-844-4244

Students at Auburn University in Alabama, armed with the Internet and, as a last resort, reference books, will answer any question you can conceive of, 24 hours a day, Monday to Thursday (during the school year). The hot line started in the 1950s as a resource for students at Auburn who were trying to locate campus services and find information about grades or course schedules. Over the years, it has evolved into a no-holds-barred information database. It is one of the nation’s longest-running services of its kind. It’s technically the “Foy Information Line,” named after the Foy Student Union building that the phone service operates from, and it is free for anyone to call. They’ve gotten questions from callers as far away as Australia, about questions ranging from how many Oreos it would take to circle the globe to what’s the longest nontechnical word in the English language? It’s perfect for when you can’t get to Google. The hot line operates 24 hours during the week and until 9 p.m. on weekends.

Opinionjournal.com

Giuliani to America: Get Real
WASHINGTON--This column makes no secret that we are favorably disposed toward Rudy Giuliani. Friday found us at the Federalist Society's annual National Lawyers Conference, where Giuliani delivered a 45-minute address. His speech has drawn a fair amount of commentary, but what most struck us was something he said toward the end:


I get very, very frustrated when I . . . hear certain Americans talk about how difficult the problems we face are, how overwhelming they are, what a dangerous era we live in. I think we've lost perspective. We've always had difficult problems, we've always had great challenges, and we've always lived in danger.
Do we think our parents and our grandparents and our great grandparents didn't live in danger and didn't have difficult problems? Do we think the Second World War was less difficult that our struggle with Islamic terrorism? Do we think that the Great Depression was a less difficult economic struggle for people to face than the struggles we're facing now? Have we entirely lost perspective of the great challenges America has faced in the past and has been able to overcome and overcome brilliantly? I think sometimes we have lost that perspective.
Do you know what leadership is all about? Leadership is all about restoring that perspective that this country is truly an exceptional country that has great things that it is going to accomplish in the future that will be as great and maybe even greater than the ones we've accomplished in the past. If we can't do that, shame on us.


This is exactly right, and we hope Giuliani keeps hammering home the point. In the conservative circles in which we usually travel, we hear far too much depressive, alarmist talk.

November 23, 2007 --

NOW that Norman Mailer has passed on, the big question is: Who gets his Legos? The incendiary novelist built a 15,000- piece "City of the Future" with two pals in his Brooklyn apartment - but where it will go next, nobody knows. Our source mused, "Imagine what a one-of-a-kind artistic creation by one of last century's most acclaimed literary figures would be worth at Sotheby's. But how would you get the damn thing out of his brownstone without breaking it up? You could reassemble it by hand, but that wouldn't be quite the same thing as something actually assembled by the master, would it?"

Published on NewsBusters.org (http://newsbusters.org)

Iraq News Too Good for Even NYT To Ignore
By Mark Finkelstein
Created 2007-11-20 07:22

The President's escalation strategy has failed. We need to stop refereeing this civil war, and start getting out now. -- Hillary Clinton, statement [1]of August 23, 2007

As many had foreseen, the escalation has failed to produce the intended results. -- letter [2]to Pres. Bush from Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, June 12, 2007

That's not a cement mixer you hear. It's the collective Dem gnashing of teeth. Things have gotten so bad -- meaning good -- in Iraq that now even the New York Times is reporting it. Have a look at Willie Geist -- sitting in for Joe Scarborough -- opening today's "Morning Joe" by holding up the paper's front page to display its headline: "Baghdad Starts to Exhale as Security Improves."

Willie had a jocular take on the item.

WILLIE GEIST: Guys, we have to start [little reluctant there, perhaps?], front page of the New York Times, what amounts to basically state propaganda [said facetiously] for the war in Iraq on the cover of the New York Times, "Baghdad Starts to Exhale as Security Improves." We're also seing that kind of coverage on the front page of the LA Times [4]. The New York Times piece talks about families returning to their homes, weddings in public, liquor stores opening -- the kinds of things we didn't see in the last several years.
David Shuster, serving as a panelist today, considered the political implications.

DAVID SHUSTER: This is great news for a lot of people. First of all for the Iraqis. But secondly when you look at the politics of this, Mika and Willie, this is great news for John McCain because it validates his position all along: if we had just gone into Iraq "heavy," with several hundred thousand troops instead of 150,000 or whatever we went in, that perhaps this would have happened sooner. McCain has been the one saying all along "look, we needed to have a heavier footprint. Now that we have it, things are getting better." So it's huge political news for him but it's also just great news for the Iraqi people, so at least this gives them an opportunity to start returning to Baghdad.

The panel went on to agree that the next crucial step is for the Iraqi government to seize the moment to make political progress. Geist wrapped things up nicely.

GEIST: When the New York Times prints a front-page exposé, essentially, about the improvements in Baghdad, that's big news anyway you slice it.
My two cents say that while this is indeed sweet vindication for McCain, it probably will be insufficient to turn his electoral fortunes around . But how long will it be till we hear Hillary reminding people that, after all, she did vote to authorize the war?

Source URL:http://newsbusters.org/blogs/mark-finkelstein/2007/11/20/iraq-news-too-good-even-nyt-ignore

Links:[1] http://clinton.senate.gov/news/statements/details.cfm?id=281256&&[2] http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=070613203802.7yla5iav&show_article=1[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/world/middleeast/20surge.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin[4] http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq20nov20,1,4897130.story?coll=la-headlines-world&ctrack=1&cset=true

http://stumptownconfidential.com/index.php?blogid=1&archive=2007-10

Great website with Portland history/trivia

Sorry for lack of content- started new job today and shopuld be posting soon!

tomp@bradsontech.com

A Wall Street Journal on the United Nations’ blind, toothless nuclear watchdog, Mohamed ElBaradei: Those U.N. Super-Sleuths.


"So Mohamed ElBaradei finds it “distressing” that neither Israel nor the U.S. shared information with him about an apparent Syrian nuclear program before Israeli jets destroyed it on September 6. Imagine that: Not everyone is prepared to entrust the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency with their national security.

For the past year, Mr. ElBaradei has been running an independent foreign policy from his IAEA perch. People tell him he is “doing God’s work” — or so he tells the New York Times. In August, he announced a nuclear agreement he had reached with Iran’s mullahs, without consulting his political superiors at the agency. Even the Europeans protested that one.

The agreement made no reference to the U.N. Security Council’s demand that Iran suspend its uranium enrichment program, a demand Mr. ElBaradei himself dismisses as moot. The agreement also allowed the Iranians to dribble out information on the dozen outstanding questions the IAEA has yet to resolve.

Mr. ElBaradei has coasted on the IAEA’s reputation as the authoritative source of information on the world’s nuclear secrets. Yet this is the same agency that was taken by surprise by nuclear projects in Libya, North Korea and Iraq in the 1980s. And now in Syria, which in September was voted co-chair of the IAEA’s General Conference."

Another great Hitchins essay

fighting words: A wartime lexicon.

Isolationism Isn't the AnswerJihadists aren't in Afghanistan—or Iraq—because we are there.

By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Nov. 5, 2007, at 1:11 PM ET

http://www.slate.com/id/2177482/

Newsbusters

Former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow received a Freedom of Speech Award on October 16 from The Media Institute.
During his acceptance, Snow made some statements about liberal bias in the press, as well as the condition of the media industry, which fully explain why this event, as well as his address, went virtually unreported.


"The First Amendment, as others have noted, serves as the foundation for the enterprise, and supports reporters in their quest for truth .- or at least for serviceable facts that in time might lead them toward some reasonable facsimile of truth.
We also hear that the First Amendment is under siege. I think that´s true. I don´t believe anyone here would disagree with the proposition that the quality of public discourse isn´t what it once was or that it presently achieves levels of excellence and depth that it desperately needs to reach.
Yet, while it may be tempting to blame the usual suspects — the government, interest groups, angry factionalists — those forces frequently have always tried to restrict the free flow of ideas, and they always have failed.
They´re not the culprits here. Instead, there´s a new and unexpected menace on the block:
The media.

Political rhetoric has turned nasty, childish, and very personal, especially on Capitol Hill, and Americans are sick of it. Hotheads seem to be enjoying a false spring of fame. And members of the mainstream press are scratching their heads and asking, “What´s going on here?” Why are the nation´s newspapers hemorrhaging readers? Why are the television networks losing viewers? Why has cable news suddenly hit still water? What is going on? Don´t Americans care about the news?
Well, of course they do: The problem is, they don´t think they´re getting news — and they´re right.
[...]
Reporters and editors for three decades have sneered at accusations of bias, as if the claim were novel — it is not — unthinkable — it is not — or false — which it also is not.The major media organs in this country have become purveyors of conventional wisdom— generally, conventional liberal wisdom.
The Roper Organization conducted a poll after the 1992 election and discovered that 93 percent of Washington political reporters voted for Bill Clinton. Only 2 percent identified themselves as “conservative.”
Subsequent surveys have indicated a similar spread in party affiliation, which makes the Washington Press Corps the most reliable Democratic voting bloc in the nation.
This is not a smear or a criticism. It is a fact, and it´s worth examining. My theory is that liberal — Democratic — sympathies flourish among reporters for very practical reasons. Democrats ran every major institution in Washington for 62 years — between 1932 and 1994. That´s the longest string of effective one-party rule in the history of democracy. Reporters knew that to get news, they needed to cultivate the people who made the news — who shaped legislation, who passed the laws, who peopled government departments and agencies — in other words, the people who really pull the levers in Washington. They needed to know elected officials, staffers, bureaucratic gnomes — the vast bulk of whom were Democrats.

And what about conventional wisdom? For months, the media avoided asking about progress in Iraq. Despite repeated reports from the field that Iraqis had turned against al Qaeda, the news seldom made it into newspapers, and almost never on front pages. Last week, the military reported that civilian deaths in Iraq had hit their lowest point since 2003. U.S. and Iraqi deaths and casualties similarly had declined. So what led the paper the next morning? Stories about Blackwater. The statistics that put the war in perspective were relegated to the back pages of the Washington Post and in some publications, to oblivion.
A vigorous press must be one in which reporters challenge their own sympathies and assumptions as aggressively as they challenge the sympathies and assumptions of others. Unfortunately, that too seldom happens, with the consequence that opinion-mongering has driven out straight news.
[...]
Reporters nevertheless find themselves under constant pressure to accumulate and disgorge factoids, so they can be the first to recite them on camera, publish them online — and, of course, leak to Drudge.
Conflict stories provide a second source of low-hanging fatal fruit. Example: Harry Reid calls the president a liar. Reporters get word of the insult on their blackberries. They demand an immediate response from the White House press secretary.
This is not a hypothetical scenario. It happens all the time. I have stood at the White House podium, watching reporters unholstering their blackberries and looking at urgent communications from the home office. Within moments, the questions come like hurled fruit:
Everyone wants to know about some utterance or event that took place or were reported after the briefing itself began — things about which I knew nothing, including the larger context. The point of such questions isn´t to get content and context right: It´s to play gotcha— to make public officials respond to insults and insinuations rather than ideas and facts.
Exactly. As a result, what we are routinely offered isn't news. Not even close. But that's what today's journalists strive for:
In short, media organizations have been seduced by process, conflict and polling stories, and along the way have sacrificed the tradition of looking for creative ways to understand and explain the world. They have become hostages to the easy and shallow stuff and strangers to stories that touch people´s hearts and characterize their actual lives.
Indeed, journalists seem to have developed an elitist contempt for the daily concerns of viewers, listeners and readers — and the public has noticed. This explains the across-the-board slippage in newspaper circulation, and viewership of broadcast and cable news.
[...]
I´ve raced through a lot of issues here, but you get the point: The media have embraced practices and policies that actually erode First Amendment freedoms and weaken the practice of journalism itself.

The democratic media provide new tools for examining our world, new competitors for reporting about that world, and new reminders to the press establishment that markets really do work — and people want better than they´re getting.
I come not to bury journalism, but to celebrate and challenge it. It´s a cliché that every crisis presents an opportunity, but it´s true: The democratization of the media is a good thing. We now face competition from all quarters — including from people who have specialized expertise that journalists lack. We ought to welcome the new participants in the game and learn from them. They should do the same with us.
There´s an old boast in the business — that the job of a journalist is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The thing is, we never realized that we were becoming The Comfortable — with good pay, job security, and access to movers and shakers all around the world. We need to cast off our coziness — venture away from safe stories and presumptions and into the wilderness of new topics, new ideas and new sources of information.
In that quest lies the possibility of fulfillment and joy — and the hope of keeping alive the text and the spirit of the First Amendment."

American Gangster

A University of Oregon “peace group” called the Pacifica Forum is planning to remember the Nazi atrocity of Kristallnacht this year with two days of speeches and conferences led by a neo-Nazi Holocaust denier. Yes, really.

Here’s another story concerning what appears to be a trend: purported “peace activists” promoting Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. In this case, a University of Oregon peace organization called Pacifica Forum, which was founded and is led by a retired professor and a retired administrator from that university, is marking Kristallnacht with two days of speeches and conferences this weekend conducted by Mark Weber director of the Holocaust denial group Institute for Historical Review. Weber, the former editor of the National Vanguard, the main publication of the neo-Nazi National Alliance Party, has spent the past 30 years as a professional advocate of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism. His opening lecture on Friday is entitled: “Free Speech vs. Zionist Power”. Advertisements for the event feature the image of a snake in the shape of a Star of David with the legend “The Israel Lobby: How Powerful Is It?” November 9 marks the 69th anniversary of Kristallnacht, which is considered by many historians to be the beginning of the Holocaust.

(Pacifica Forum schedule available here.)