Sicko': Heavily Doctored

Is Michael Moore's prescription
worse than the disease?

By Kurt Loder

Michael Moore may see himself as working in the tradition of such crusading muckrakers of the last century as Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair — writers whose dedication to exposing corruption and social injustices played a part in sparking much-needed reforms. In his new movie, "Sicko," Moore focuses on the U.S. health-care industry — a juicy target — and he casts a shocking light on some of the people it's failed.

There's a man who mangled two of his fingers with a power saw and learned that it would cost $12,000 to save one of them, but $60,000 to save the other. He had no health insurance and could only scrape together enough money to salvage the $12,000 finger.

There's a woman whose husband was prescribed new drugs to combat his cancer, but couldn't get their insurance company to pay for them because the drugs were experimental. Her husband died.

Then there's a woman who made an emergency trip to a hospital for treatment and subsequently learned her insurance company wouldn't pay for the ambulance that took her there — because it hadn't been "pre-approved." And there's a middle-aged couple — a man, who suffered three heart attacks, and his wife, who developed cancer — who were bankrupted by the cost of co-payments and other expenses not covered by their insurance, and have now been forced to move into a cramped, dismal room in the home of a resentful son. There's also a 79-year-old man who has to continue working a menial job because Medicare won't cover the cost of all the medications he needs.

Moore does a real service in bringing these stories to light — some of them are horrifying, and then infuriating. One giant health-maintenance organization, Kaiser Permanente, is so persuasively lambasted in the movie that, on the basis of what we're told, we want to burst into the company's executive suites and make a mass citizen's arrest. This is the sort of thing good muckrakers are supposed to do.

Unfortunately, Moore is also a con man of a very brazen sort, and never more so than in this film. His cherry-picked facts, manipulative interviews (with lingering close-ups of distraught people breaking down in tears) and blithe assertions (how does he know 18 million people will die this year because they have no health insurance?) are so stacked that you can feel his whole argument sliding sideways as the picture unspools. The American health-care system is in urgent need of reform, no question. Some 47 million people are uninsured (although many are only temporarily so, being either in-between jobs or young enough not to feel a pressing need to buy health insurance). There are a number of proposals as to what might be done to correct this situation. Moore has no use for any of them, save one.

As a proud socialist, the director appears to feel that there are few problems in life that can't be solved by government regulation (that would be the same government that's already given us the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Motor Vehicles). In the case of health care, though, Americans have never been keen on socialized medicine. In 1993, when one of Moore's heroes, Hillary Clinton (he actually blurts out the word "sexy!" in describing her in the movie), tried to create a government-controlled health care system, her failed attempt to do so helped deliver the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives into Republican control for the next dozen years. Moore still looks upon Clinton's plan as a grand idea, one that Americans, being not very bright, unwisely rejected. (He may be having second thoughts about Hillary herself, though: In the movie he heavily emphasizes the fact that, among politicians, she accepts the second-largest amount of political money from the health care industry.)

The problem with American health care, Moore argues, is that people are charged money to avail themselves of it. In other countries, like Canada, France and Britain, health systems are far superior — and they're free. He takes us to these countries to see a few clean, efficient hospitals, where treatment is quick and caring; and to meet a few doctors, who are delighted with their government-regulated salaries; and to listen to patients express their beaming happiness with a socialized health system. It sounds great. As one patient in a British hospital run by the country's National Health Service says, "No one pays. It's all on the NHS. It's not America."

That last statement is even truer than you'd know from watching "Sicko." In the case of Canada — which Moore, like many other political activists, holds up as a utopian ideal of benevolent health-care regulation — a very different picture is conveyed by a short 2005 documentary called "Dead Meat," by Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg. These two filmmakers talked to a number of Canadians of a kind that Moore's movie would have you believe don't exist:

A 52-year-old woman in Calgary recalls being in severe need of joint-replacement surgery after the cartilage in her knee wore out. She was put on a wait list and wound up waiting 16 months for the surgery. Her pain was so excruciating, she says, that she was prescribed large doses of Oxycontin, and soon became addicted. After finally getting her operation, she was put on another wait list — this time for drug rehab.

A man tells about his mother waiting two years for life-saving cancer surgery — and then twice having her surgical appointments canceled. She was still waiting when she died.

A man in critical need of neck surgery plays a voicemail message from a doctor he'd contacted: "As of today," she says, "it's a two-year wait-list to see me for an initial consultation." Later, when the man and his wife both needed hip-replacement surgery and grew exasperated after spending two years on a waiting list, they finally mortgaged their home and flew to Belgium to have the operations done there, with no more waiting.

Rick Baker, the owner of a Toronto company called Timely Medical Alternatives, specializes in transporting Canadians who don't want to wait for medical care to Buffalo, New York, two hours away, where they won't have to. Baker's business is apparently thriving.

And Dr. Brian Day, now the president of the Canadian Medical Association, muses about the bizarre distortions created by a law that prohibits Canadians from paying for even urgently-needed medical treatments, or from obtaining private health insurance. "It's legal to buy health insurance for your pets," Day says, "but illegal to buy health insurance for yourself." (Even more pointedly, Day was quoted in the Wall Street Journal this week as saying, "This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years.")

Actually, this aspect of the Canadian health-care system is changing. In 2005, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled in favor of a man who had filed suit in Quebec over being kept on an interminable waiting list for treatment. In striking down the government health care monopoly in that province, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin said, "Access to a waiting list is not access to health care." Now a similar suit has been filed in Ontario.

What's the problem with government health systems? Moore's movie doesn't ask that question, although it does unintentionally provide an answer. When governments attempt to regulate the balance between a limited supply of health care and an unlimited demand for it they're inevitably forced to ration treatment. This is certainly the situation in Britain. Writing in the Chicago Tribune this week, Helen Evans, a 20-year veteran of the country's National Health Service and now the director of a London-based group called Nurses for Reform, said that nearly 1 million Britons are currently on waiting lists for medical care — and another 200,000 are waiting to get on waiting lists. Evans also says the NHS cancels about 100,000 operations each year because of shortages of various sorts. Last March, the BBC reported on the results of a Healthcare Commission poll of 128,000 NHS workers: two thirds of them said they "would not be happy" to be patients in their own hospitals. James Christopher, the film critic of the Times of London, thinks he knows why. After marveling at Moore's rosy view of the British health care system in "Sicko," Christopher wrote, "What he hasn't done is lie in a corridor all night at the Royal Free [Hospital] watching his severed toe disintegrate in a plastic cup of melted ice. I have." Last month, the Associated Press reported that Gordon Brown — just installed this week as Britain's new prime minister — had promised to inaugurate "sweeping domestic reforms" to, among other things, "improve health care."

Moore's most ardent enthusiasm is reserved for the French health care system, which he portrays as the crowning glory of a Gallic lifestyle far superior to our own. The French! They work only 35 hours a week, by law. They get at least five weeks' vacation every year. Their health care is free, and they can take an unlimited number of sick days. It is here that Moore shoots himself in the foot. He introduces us to a young man who's reached the end of three months of paid sick leave and is asked by his doctor if he's finally ready to return to work. No, not yet, he says. So the doctor gives him another three months of paid leave — and the young man immediately decamps for the South of France, where we see him lounging on the sunny Riviera, chatting up babes and generally enjoying what would be for most people a very expensive vacation. Moore apparently expects us to witness this dumbfounding spectacle and ask why we can't have such a great health care system, too. I think a more common response would be, how can any country afford such economic insanity?

As it turns out, France can't. In 2004, French Health Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy told a government commission, "Our health system has gone mad. Profound reforms are urgent." Agence France-Presse recently reported that the French health-care system is running a deficit of $2.7 billion. And in the French presidential election in May, voters in surprising numbers rejected the Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, who had promised actually to raise some health benefits, and elected instead the center-right politician Nicolas Sarkozy, who, according to Agence France-Presse again, "plans to move fast to overhaul the economy, with the deficit-ridden health care system a primary target." Possibly Sarkozy should first consult with Michael Moore. After all, the tax-stoked French health care system may be expensive, but at least it's "free."

Having driven his bring-on-government-health care argument into a ditch outside of Paris, Moore next pilots it right off a cliff and into the Caribbean on the final stop on his tour: Cuba. Here it must also be said that the director performs a valuable service. He rounds up a group of 9/11 rescue workers — firefighters and selfless volunteers — who risked their lives and ruined their health in the aftermath of the New York terrorist attacks. These people — there's no other way of putting it — have been screwed, mainly by the politicians who were at such photo-op pains to praise them at the time. (This makes Moore's faith in government medical compassion seem all the more inexplicable.) These people's lives have been devastated — wracked by chronic illnesses, some can no longer hold down jobs and none can afford to buy the various expensive medicines they need. Moore does them an admirable service by bringing their plight before a large audience.

However, there's never a moment when we doubt that he's also using these people as props in his film, and as talking points in his agenda. Renting some boats, he leads them all off to Cuba. Upon arrival they stop briefly outside the American military enclave on Guantanamo Bay so that Moore can have himself filmed begging, through a bullhorn, for some of the free, top-notch medical care that's currently being lavished on the detainees there. Having no luck, he then moves on to Cuba proper.

Fidel Castro's island dictatorship, now in its 40th year of being listed as a human-rights violator by Amnesty International, is here depicted as a balmy paradise not unlike the Iraq of Saddam Hussein that Moore showed us in his earlier film, "Fahrenheit 9/11." He and his charges make their way — their pre-arranged way, if it need be said — to a state-of-the-art hospital where they receive a picturesquely warm welcome. In a voiceover, Moore, shown beaming at his little band of visitors, says he told the Cuban doctors to "give them the same care they'd give Cuban citizens." Then he adds, dramatically: "And they did."

If Moore really believes this, he may be a greater fool than even his most feverish detractors claim him to be. Nevertheless, medical care is provided to the visiting Americans, and it is indeed excellent. Cuba is in fact the site of some world-class medical facilities (surprising in a country that, as Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar noted in the Los Angeles Times last month, "imprisoned a doctor in the late 1990s for speaking out against government failure to respond to an epidemic of a mosquito-borne virus"). What Moore doesn't mention is the flourishing Cuban industry of "health tourism" — a system in which foreigners (including self-admitted multimillionaire film directors and, of course, government bigwigs) who are willing to pay cash for anything from brain-surgery to dental work can purchase a level of treatment that's unavailable to the majority of Cubans with no hard currency at their disposal. The Cuban American National Foundation (admittedly a group with no love for the Castro regime) calls this "medical apartheid." And in a 2004 article in Canada's National Post, writer Isabel Vincent quoted a dissident Cuban neurosurgeon, Doctor Hilda Molina, as saying, "Cubans should be treated the same as foreigners. Cubans have less rights in their own country than foreigners who visit here."

As the Caribbean sun sank down on Moore's breathtakingly meretricious movie, I couldn't help recalling that when Fidel Castro became gravely ill last year, he didn't put himself in the hands of a Cuban surgeon. No. Instead, he had a specialist flown in — from Spain.

That Was No Lady -- That Was My Husband
By Ann Coulter

The Edwards campaign is apparently still running low on donations, so this week they went back to their top fundraiser: me.

I doubled the ratings of the lowest-rated cable news show on Tuesday by agreeing to go on for a full hour to promote my new paperback version of "Godless" -- a mistake I won't make again. As I was walking to the set, minutes before airtime, it was casually mentioned to me that Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, might call in.

For the first time in recorded history, the show's host did not interrupt a guest, but let Elizabeth Edwards ramble on and on, allowing her to browbeat me for being mean to her husband. (This delicate flower is very sensitive to rough words, having hired the Edwards' campaign staffer who wrote this: "What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit"?)

Say, did any TV host ever surprise Al Franken, Bill Maher or Arianna Huffington with a call by the wife of someone they've made nasty remarks about? How about a call to John Edwards from the wife of a doctor he bankrupted with his junk-science lawsuits?

I think I may have tuned out at some point, so I can only speak to the first 45 minutes of Elizabeth Edwards' harangue, but it mostly consisted of utterly dishonest renditions of things I had said on my "Good Morning America" interview this week and a column I wrote four years ago. (You can't rush Edwards' "rapid response team"!) She claimed I had launched unprovoked attacks on the Edwards' dead son and called for a terrorist attack on her husband.

These are bald-faced lies, and the mainstream media knows they are lies. Yet they were repeated ad nauseam on Wednesday by The Associated Press, the AOL pop-up window, CNN, NBC and -- stunningly -- the host of the lowest-rated cable show himself, who personally told me he knew the truth.

So for those of you who haven't read any of my five best-selling books: Liberals are driven by Satan and lie constantly.

Here is my full sentence on "Good Morning America," which the media deceptively truncated, referring to a joke I told about Edwards six months ago that made liberals cry: "But about the same time, you know, Bill Maher was not joking and saying he wished Dick Cheney had been killed in a terrorist attack -- so I've learned my lesson: If I'm going to say anything about John Edwards in the future, I'll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot."

The usual nut Web sites posted a zillion denunciations of my appearance on "Good Morning America" immediately after I appeared Monday morning. But it didn't occur to any of them to simply lie about what I had said. No, it took them nearly 36 hours to concoct a version of that quote that included the Edwards part, but not the Maher part, or what English language speakers call: "the point."

By tomorrow it will be: "Ann Coulter tried to kill John Edwards on 'Good Morning America'!"

Judging by his fundraising efforts so far, I gather most of you don't know who John Edwards is -- unless you're an overpriced hair dresser. He's the trial lawyer who pretended in court to channel the spirit of a handicapped fetus in front of illiterate jurors to scam tens of millions of dollars off of innocent doctors. According to The New York Times, Edwards told one jury: "She speaks to you through me ... And I have to tell you right now -- I didn't plan to talk about this -- right now I feel her. I feel her presence. She's inside me, and she's talking to you."

Let me also quote from campaign consultant Bob Shrum's book "No Excuses":

"(Kerry) was even queasier about Edwards after they met. Edwards had told Kerry he was going to share a story with him that he'd never told anyone else -- that after his son Wade had been killed, he climbed onto the slab at the funeral home, laid there and hugged his body, and promised that he'd do all he could to make life better for people, to live up to Wade's ideals of service. Kerry was stunned, not moved, because, as he told me later, Edwards had recounted the same exact story to him, almost in the exact same words, a year or two before -- and with the same preface, that he'd never shared the memory with anyone else. Kerry said he found it chilling, and he decided he couldn't pick Edwards unless he met with him again."

Apparently every time Edwards began a story about his dead son with "I've never told anyone this before," everyone on the campaign could lip-sync the story with him.

As a commentator, I bring facts like these to the attention of the American people in a lively way. Thus, for example, in a column about the Democratic candidates for president written in 2003, I pointed out that the Democrats refused to discuss the economy or the war, but had recently "discovered a surprise campaign issue: It turns out that several of them have had a death in the family."

Among several examples of Democrats talking about a death in the family on the campaign trail was this one:

John Edwards injects his son's fatal car accident into his campaign by demanding that everyone notice how he refuses to inject his son's fatal car accident into his campaign.

Edwards has talked about his son's death in a 1996 car accident on "Good Morning America," in dozens of profiles and in his new book. ("It was and is the most important fact of my life.") His 1998 Senate campaign ads featured film footage of Edwards at a learning lab he founded in honor of his son, titled "The Wade Edwards Learning Lab." He wears his son's Outward Bound pin on his suit lapel. He was going to wear it on his sleeve, until someone suggested that might be a little too "on the nose."

If you want points for not using your son's death politically, don't you have to take down all those "Ask me about my son's death in a horrific car accident" bumper stickers? Edwards is like a politician who keeps announcing that he will not use his opponent's criminal record for partisan political advantage.

Manifestly, I was not making fun of their son's death; I was making fun of John Edwards' incredibly creepy habit of invoking his son's tragic death to advance his political career -- a practice so repellant, it even made John Kerry queasy.

I'm a little tired of losers trying to raise campaign cash or TV ratings off of my coattails, particularly when they use their afflictions or bereavement schedules to try to silence the opposition. From now on, I'm attacking only serious presidential candidates, like Dennis Kucinich.

Copyright 2007 Ann Coulter

Timothy Olyphant, far different from Sheriff Bullock days, arrives at a "Die Hard" 4 premiere in Britain (AP)

Timothy Olyphant: A villain, only on the screen

The bad-tempered sheriff from "Deadwood" appears in "Live Free or Die Hard,"
the fourth installment of the Bruce Willis action franchise.

June 28, 2007

On the occasion of the release of "Live Free or Die Hard," the fourth installment of the Bruce Willis action franchise, the ace character actor ("Go," "Gone in Sixty Seconds") spoke about his latest turn at big-screen villainy, the future of his dearly departed HBO series "Deadwood" and his highly improbable gig as a morning-radio sports reporter.

Tell me about Thomas Gabriel, your role in "Live Free or Die Hard."

It's a cyber-terrorist plot, so he seems to be (a) very good with computers and (b) angry.

Would you describe him as a mastermind?

Yeah. [Laughs] I think that's part of the gig. He's the man behind the curtain, and kind of an enigma. It felt like the challenge was to try to humanize a character who was otherwise very inaccessible — literally, in that you really don't spend a great deal of time with him. When all was said and done, I was on the set for just a few weeks.

What's Gabriel's beef?

He used to work with the U.S. government in the cyber-terrorism department, and he warned the country that this was a [big] vulnerability. But he felt they pushed him aside and destroyed his life, so he just said, "I'm taking over the world." He seems to be overreacting, to be quite honest with you.

These summer-blockbuster villains have a tendency to do that, don't you think?

They do. And I'm going to go out on a limb and say he was probably a little off-kilter from the start.

The trailer makes it look like you and Bruce Willis spend most of the movie taunting each other over the phone.

Yeah! It's "Die Hard on the Phone"! That's the angle. We have very few scenes together.

Your film work suggests you have a particular taste for playing menacing villains. And yet for many you'll always be "Deadwood's" rigidly moralistic Sheriff Seth Bullock.

I've got no problem with that.

Yet even Bullock — the good guy — had a very dark side. He always looked one irritation away from gunning down a hundred people.

It was almost a thankless job because in a way the audience wants to go along with you, the audience wants to root for you, but you're sort of stiff-arming them. It wasn't until the third season that I felt like he became a bit more accessible.

What's the future of "Deadwood"? There's an ugly rumor the two-hour movies HBO promised aren't going to happen.

Quite honestly, I've always had a "don't hold your breath" feeling about it. I think the healthiest perspective for me, and perhaps for the people who enjoyed it, is God bless HBO for letting it exist for as long as it did.... It was really the greatest experience I ever had.

You have an interesting, uh, day job — reading sports for Indie 103.1 on its morning show. What's that about?

I'm still not sure. [Laughs] About a year ago I went to the station to do some press — I was a big fan of Joe Escalante's show — and, as far as I knew, sports was the only gig available. David Lynch later took the weather job.

Talk about surreal ...

Yeah. Every morning. He came in after me, riding my coattails. Frankly, I'm tired of it.

— Mike Flaherty

Ditka testifies to Congress:
'The system does not work'
NFL's disability benefits railed on in 2-hour hearing

By David Haugh
Tribune staff reporter

June 26, 2007, 11:02 PM CDT

WASHINGTON -- At one point during his five-minute testimony in front of a Congressional subcommittee Tuesday, Mike Ditka got so carried away with emotion he had to pause because he lost his place reading from a prepared script.

It didn't matter. Ditka spent most of his time speaking from the heart anyway, a big reason for the debate on NFL retirement benefits ending up on Capitol Hill in the first place.

"I'm not a newcomer in the game as some would like to say," an animated Ditka told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, chaired by Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.). "All we're here for is for the system to get fixed. The system does not work."

Nattily attired in a blue pinstriped suit, Ditka was one of eight witnesses the subcommittee heard during a two-hour hearing that helped legitimize a cause some have dismissed as just a bunch of old jocks whining.

Besides Ditka, the other former players who testified included Harry Carson, Brent Boyd and Curt Marsh, a former Oakland Raiders lineman who has endured 31 surgeries and the amputation of his foot as a result of his NFL career.

Dave Duerson, a member of the NFL Players Association's six-member retirement disability review board that came under heavy fire, sat in the gallery some 10 feet from Ditka—his former coach and recent adversary during a heated radio exchange.

The league, the game itself and the NFLPA took such a beating during the proceedings that somebody might have thrown a flag for piling on if the discussion had lasted much longer.

"I see disenfranchisement on behalf of retired players," Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass) said. "I think it would behoove the NFL or the NFL [Players Association] to start absorbing retired players to see that they are adequately represented."

Those in the small room of the Rayburn Building hoping to hear fire-and-brimstone from "Da Coach" were not disappointed: Ditka delivered. Even a couple of legislators could be seen suppressing smiles as Ditka, talking demonstrably with his hands, used a tone that implied the sense of urgency he brought with him to the nation's capital.

"If you make people fill out enough forms, if you discourage them enough, make them jump through enough hoops, they're going to say, 'I don't need this,' " the former Bears player and coach said, his voice rising. "This is ridiculous. They're frustrated. These are proud people. … The people today are not the makers of the game, they're the keepers of the game."

Ditka stopped to look down at his five-page script on the table. Three seconds of silence passed before he regrouped.

"Why are we in front of Congress?" he continued. "We feel something's wrong and it can be fixed. Why can't this be taken care of? That's all we're asking."

Later, during a question period, Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.) asked Ditka about his claim that there were 300 retired players seeking disability benefits but unable to get them. Acknowledging he might not have been correct on his estimate, Ditka quickly changed the subject and broke into a rant about the system.

"The responsibility has to go back to the league and the owners," Ditka said. "Come on, you … it's a bunch of red tape and bureaucracy."

Noting Ditka's fire, Feeney closed his remarks by saying, "I don't want to quarrel with coach Ditka."

To which Sanchez added, smiling, "I wouldn't recommend it."

This all came after officials from the NFL and NFLPA began the proceedings by methodically stating their claim that the problems have been misrepresented.

Dennis Curran, an NFL Senior Vice President who administers various benefit plans, testified the league had increased its retirement fund from $88 million in 1982 to $1.1 billion today and active players contributed $126 million in 2006.

Stating that the NFL "is proud of its benefits," Curran pointed out how the league has reduced pension qualifications from five years of service to three.

Douglas Ell, a lawyer representing the NFLPA in executive director Gene Upshaw's absence, followed up by reporting the league had increased pensions four times since 1993. Ell also praised the new "Mackey 88" plan helping dementia patients, introduced five former players in the gallery who had no problems obtaining benefits and left an impression the union had done nothing to deserve the flak from Ditka and Co.

Boyd, a former Vikings lineman who said he still feels the effects of concussions and suffers from clinical depression 25 years later, took the floor to refute the rosy picture Curran and Ell painted.

"Now that they have put the lipstick on the pig, I want to tell you what reality is," he said.

Boyd told how the NFLPA retirement disability board turned down his request for full benefits even though two doctors concluded his brain disorder was football-related. The board sent Boyd to a third doctor at Johns Hopkins, who disagreed.

When he encountered financial hardship as a result of his inability to work, Boyd said he received more help from Major League Baseball players such as Mark Grace, Rick Sutcliffe and other friends of agent Barry Axelrod than anybody in the NFL. He called the league's retirement policy, "delay, deny and hope I put a bullet in my head."

"The NFL was hoping I'd go away and die," he said.

Another compelling tale came from Cy Smith, the lawyer who represented the late Pittsburgh Steelers great Mike Webster. Smith related how the league denied Webster full disability before his death in 2002 despite an NFL-approved physician attributing Webster's head injuries and inability to work to the impact of football.

On behalf of Webster and his family, Smith filed suit in federal court to get a fair disability pension and won a decision that was upheld last December on appeal. When Upshaw was quoted a day later saying he would have done the same thing, it stuck with Smith.

"It would be terrific if I could say to you the NFL has learned a lesson, but sadly, I cannot," Smith told the subcommittee.

He made three recommendations: a 45-day review limit on disability applications that would reduce months and years of waiting, a mutual arbitrator deciding the fate of those applications instead of a hand-picked six-man panel and new union leadership.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), whose husband Sid Williams is a former an NFL linebacker, questioned why the NFLPA was only paying 317 retired players disability benefits totaling $20 million.

"In one of the most dangerous sports in history of mankind, only 317 are receiving disability?" Waters asked.

Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), after hearing all the testimony, called the situation "quite a tragedy."

When the hearing ended with the pounding of a gavel, Boyd leaned over to hug Ditka and said, "Thanks, coach."

Ditka just smiled, looking satisfied that the crusade had reached the lofty heights of Congress. Then he disappeared down a back hallway without comment, having said all he came to say.

Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune

Voices Heard, Sides Taken
NFL Disability Plan Testimony Stirs Passions on Capitol Hill

By Les Carpenter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 27, 2007

By the time the members of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law moved to their second round of questioning in Room 2141 of the Rayburn House Office Building yesterday, the lawyers sent by the NFL and the players' union looked ragged.

For almost an hour, lawmakers asked questions about the league's disability plan, listening to former players and a trial lawyer who leveled allegations of a rigged claims system, lengthy waits for news on benefit applications and repeated trips to doctors who seemed determined to reject their applications.

Then Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) a member of the Judiciary Committee but not the subcommittee itself, asked Douglas Ell, counsel for the NFLPA and the disability plan, how many players actually receive disability payments.

"317," Ell replied.

Out of how many, she asked.

Ell said there are roughly 8,000 retired players.

"In one of the most dangerous sports in the history of mankind, only 300 players are receiving disability payments?" Waters said, her voice rising.

Such is how it went for Ell and NFL senior vice president Dennis Curran. Waters wondered how the plan could spend just $20 million out of a $1.1 billion fund for disability and pensions. Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) repeatedly interrupted Ell's and Curran's answers before telling the men they should not rely on a board of three owner-representatives and three NFLPA-chosen representatives to make final disability decisions. He said they should instead choose professionals with no ties to either the league or the union.

The issue of retired pro football players and disabilities has been percolating for more than a year after many ex-players were angered by a statement by NFLPA Executive Director Gene Upshaw, who told the Charlotte Observer that he did not represent retired players. Although retired players do not choose the union's leader, the words rankled them.

Soon, stories came out describing players who had been denied benefits despite serious football injuries that left them unable to work, and with the complaints came old allegations that the union under Upshaw has become a pawn for the league.

Former Minnesota Vikings guard Brent Boyd, suffering from the lingering effects of concussions suffered while playing football, testified yesterday that he had been told by NFLPA official Miki Yaras-Davis that his doctors' reports and brain scans would not be considered because "the owners would not open that can of worms" by approving disability for a brain injury.

Before he began speaking, Boyd asked the subcommittee to be patient as he delivered his comments. "I do have brain damage; when under stress my brain gets less blood," he said, then added that he considered testifying before Congress to be a stressful activity.

Boyd complained that the plan required him to fly across the country to see a doctor in Baltimore, who Boyd said did not examine his brain and then rejected him for disability. "If this is not fraud and corruption, we need to remove fraud and corruption from the dictionary," he said.

In the face of the players' often emotional testimony, Ell and Curran stuck to defending the plan. They were testifying because Upshaw had planned to be out of the country this week and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who attended a rookie symposium in Florida on Monday, chose not to come. This left Ell and Curran to take the subcommittee's questions.

Later, Ell said much of the public impressions of the plan are the result of a lack of understanding of the policies. "You have very skilled trial lawyers misrepresenting the facts," he said. He added, for instance, that former Jacksonville Jaguars tackle Brian DeMarco, who attended the hearing despite a severe back injury, has not applied for disability despite the player's pleas for help.

Of the legislators gathered in Room 2141, Waters has perhaps the most interest in the subject of the disability plan. Her husband, Sidney Williams, is a former NFL player and she said she watched one of Williams's friends, former Redskin Jim Shorter, waste away several years ago. She said she called the NFLPA several times for help but was treated rudely. As his disability application was being considered she stormed into the retirement board's meeting in Santa Cruz, Calif., to plead his case. But he was turned down because he had taken early retirement, making him ineligible for the disability.

"I think the process is rigged and made to be confusing," Waters said after the hearing. She said she is looking into whether the NFL's antitrust exemption could be modified to let Congress control the disability plan.

As the room nearly cleared, Waters was approached by former Chicago Bear Dave Duerson, who is one of the union-appointed board members who makes decisions on disability claims. He told her the NFLPA was trying to create programs to help retirees. As he spoke, Bernie Parrish, the unofficial leader of the retired players seeking assistance, stepped in and alleged that the programs were doing little more than creating more money for Ell.

The 46-year-old Duerson and the 71-year-old Parrish began shouting at each other and were soon separated. As they were tugged into the hallway, Duerson wagged his finger at Parrish and said "you were probably one of those guys who never showed up for the [union] meetings."

Parrish, an NFLPA executive in the 1960s, was pulled away before he could respond.

From The American Spectator:
Our Founding Father
By Ben Stein

What would the world be like if there had been no William F. Buckley?

I can well recall even as a high schooler that Republicans were considered Midwestern stolid reactionaries with no ideas except to oppose generosity and kindness. I can well recall when being a conservative meant being without ideas and simply in opposition to those who had ideas. Or if conservatives had any ideas, they were just that them who had should continue to have and those who had not should rot.

Then came William F. Buckley, seemingly out of the forehead of Zeus. He said that conservatives had more ideas and better ideas than leftists. He said that conservatives' ideas comported better with the basic dignity of the human personality than did socialism. He said that man would not only be richer under conservative principles, but happier, more moral, and prouder of himself.

He said these things when the powers that be laughed at him. He said these things when the Revolution came (I have always thought George Wallace played an immense part in that Revolution, but then that's just me) and Americans started to realize that they, like the man who had been speaking prose all his life, really were a lot closer to Buckley's ideas of God and man than to Galbraith's. He spoke principles of human dignity, human service before the Almighty, respect for law, respect for life, and he was not afraid to speak them to whoever was running the show, Republican or Democrat.

When Democrats did the kowtow to the Soviets, Buckley was not afraid to say so. When Republicans did the same kowtow to wage price controls, he was also unafraid.

The amazing thing is that Buckley had these great ideas from Burke and Hamilton and Jefferson, and then, like a one man band traveling around the country in a bi-plane, he showed up at any county fair or cow college or Ivy League sanctum sanctorum where he could find a room, and talk and talk and talk. Always unafraid, never wearying.

He preached the human soul, exalted by freedom but always under God, and he preached it on TV for decades, in lecture halls. In his columns, in his books, in his commentaries, he never shut up about how pressing was the need for freedom. And thank God for it.

Like the late immortal Milton Friedman, he would never give up. He brought the often infantile, feuding, neurotics of the conservative movement together and lashed them into their finest work. And he always did it as a gentleman. And still somehow he sailed around the world, skied like a champion, was a stellar father and husband, and always came back for more.

Buckley made conservatism intellectually respectable, resilient, even sexy. He let us know that if James Bond could vote, he would vote Tory. (The old Tory, not the new, pro-Palestinian Tory.)

I am thinking all these thoughts because I am once again browsing through John Coyne and Linda Bridges' masterful Strictly Right, about Buckley and the whole conservative movement. I keep thinking that if we have a free republic instead of a socialist people's republic, credit first goes to our fighting men and women who offered up their lives. But right up there are the men and women who realized it was a battle of ideas, were not afraid to fight it, never retreated, and gave us the legacy of freedom.

The old saw used to be, "If you can read this, thank a teacher."

The more basic truth would be, "If you woke up in a free society today, spare a thought for William F. Buckley, a patriot and a founding father of freedom for all his life."

There never was a truer friend to the human spirit. Long may he wave and never waver.


Ben Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Beverly Hills and Malibu. He also writes "Ben Stein's Diary" for every issue of The American Spectator's monthly print edition.

From the Los Angeles Times
Where is the West's outcry?
Tim Rutten
Regarding Media

June 23, 2007

FOR a writer, Salman Rushdie has had a rather turbulent career.

Even by his standards, however, this has been quite a week for the Indian-born, British-educated Booker Prize-winning novelist, now a resident of New York:

Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for services to literature, he turned 60, and, across the Muslim world, a variety of jihad-minded fanatics and their essentially mindless apologists renewed their demand that Rushdie be murdered as soon as possible.

The Islamicists' antipathy toward Rushdie goes back 19 years, to when his fanciful novel "The Satanic Verses" was deemed by some of them to blaspheme Muhammad. There was a great deal of rioting and fulminating at the time, culminating in the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's pronouncement of a fatwa against Rushdie. As the Iranian revolution's spiritual leader said on Tehran radio, "The author of 'The Satanic Verses,' which is against Islam, the Prophet, the Koran and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death."

Rushdie survived by spending the better part of the next decade in what amounted to an "author's protection program" maintained by the British government. Several of his translators, however, were killed or wounded.

When news of knighthood spread last weekend, the flames of fanaticism rekindled. An Iranian group offered $150,000 to anyone who would murder the novelist. Effigies of the queen and the writer were burned in riots across Pakistan. That country's religious affairs minister initially said that conferring such an honor on Rushdie justified sending suicide bombers to Britain, then — under pressure — he modified his statement to say it would cause suicide bombers to travel there. Pakistan's national assembly unanimously condemned Rushdie's knighthood and said it reflected "contempt" for Islam and Muhammad. Various high-ranking Iranian clerics called for the writers' death and renewed their insistence that Khomeini's fatwa still is in force. Riots spread to India's Muslim communities.

Friday, the Voice of America reported that Pakistani "lawmakers passed a second resolution calling on British Prime Minister Tony Blair to apologize 'to the Muslim world' " and that, "on Thursday, a hard-line Pakistani cleric awarded terrorist leader Osama bin Laden the religious title and honorific 'saifulla,' or sword of Islam, to protest Britain's decision."

If you're wondering why you haven't been able to follow all the columns and editorials in the American press denouncing all this homicidal nonsense, it's because there haven't been any. And, in that great silence, is a great scandal.

Is there something beyond the solidarity of the decent that ought to have impelled every commentator and editorial page in the U.S. to express unequivocal support for Sir Salman this week?

Yes.



IT'S no coincidence that one analyst who saw that clearly was Flemming Rose, culture editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten and the guy who, not long ago, commissioned those cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad that convulsed so much of the Muslim world in obscurantist apoplexy. You may recall that most of the American news media essentially abandoned Rose and the Danes to the fanatics' wrath, receding into cowardly silence, as mullah after mullah called for the cartoonists' death, mobs attacked diplomatic and cultural offices and one Muslim country after another boycotted Danish goods.

In a column posted on the L.A.-based Pajamas Media website late this week, Rose began by reminding readers of legal scholar Ronald Dworkin's admonition that "the only right you don't have in a democracy is the right not to be offended," then went on to decry the pernicious consequences of a "misplaced respect for insulted religious feelings," now all too common in the West, including the United States. "This respect is being used by tyrants and fanatics around the world to justify suicide attacks and to silence criticism and to crush dissenting points of view," he wrote.

Rose also pointed to the United Nations Human Rights Council, which less than three months ago "passed a scandalous resolution condoning state punishment of speech that governments deem as insulting to religion." The council's decision went all but unmentioned in the American press, but Rose correctly argues that passage of such a resolution "means that the U.N. is encouraging every dictatorship to pass laws that make criticism of Islam a crime. The U.N. Human Rights Council legitimizes the criminal persecution of Sir Salman Rushdie for having insulted people's religious sensibilities…. The fact of the matter is that by adopting the resolution against 'defamation of religion,' the U.N. has tacitly endorsed the killing of Rushdie's colleagues in parts of the world where no one can protect them."

Hyperbole for the sake of argument?

Thursday, in an online piece titled "Dead Reporters and the Information Gap," the Los Angeles Times' Sonni Efron wrote that "The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 108 journalists and 39 media assistants have been killed in Iraq since the war began in March 2003. Reporters Without Borders puts the death toll at more than 180. Either way it's more than double the number of journalists killed during the Vietnam War (71 between 1962 and 1975, according to the Associated Press Saigon bureau)."

Why so little attention to this toll?

"Four out of five journalists killed in Iraq have been Iraqi," Efron wrote. "The chilling effect of death is impossible to measure, but surely every Iraqi journalist's death inhibits those who remain from holding the powerful accountable. Whether they are writing about government officials, the clergy or the death squads, or whether they are simply women who dare to speak in public, they know their own lives may soon be at risk. What is the societal cost of terror?"

Equally to the point, what is the societal cost of silence among those who have not simply the moral obligation but also the ability to speak — like American commentators and editorial writers?

What masquerades as tolerance and cultural sensitivity among many U.S. journalists is really a kind of soft bigotry, an unspoken assumption that Muslim societies will naturally repress great writers and murder honest journalists, and that to insist otherwise is somehow intolerant or insensitive.

Lost in the self-righteous haze that masks this expedient sentiment is a critical point once made by the late American philosopher Richard Rorty, who was fond of pointing out that "some ideas, like some people, are just no damn good" and that no amount of faux tolerance or misplaced fellow feeling excuses the rest of us from our obligation to oppose such ideas and such people.

If Western and, particularly American, commentators refuse to speak up when their obligations are so clear, the fanatics will win and the terrible silence they so fervently desire will descend over vast stretches of our world — a silence in which the only permissible sounds are the prayers of the killers and the cries of their victims.

Anti-Rushdie demonstration 1989

We've replaced Rushdie in hiding
MARK STEYN

A year or so after the Ayatollah Khomeini took out an Islamist mob contract on Salman Rushdie in 1989, the novelist appeared, after elaborate security arrangements, on a television arts show in London. His host was Melvyn Bragg, a longtime British telly grandee, and what was striking was how quickly the interview settled down into the usual cozy, literary chit-chat. Lord Bragg took Rushdie back to his earlier pre-fatwa work. "After your first book," drawled Bragg, "which was not particularly well-received."

That's supposed to be the worst a novelist has to endure. His book will be "not particularly well-received" – i.e., some twerp reviewers will be snotty about it in the New Yorker and the Guardian. In the cozy world of English letters, it came as a surprise to find that being "not particularly well-received" meant foreign governments putting a bounty on your head and killing your publishers and translators. Even then, the literary set had difficulty taking it literally. After news footage of British Muslims burning Rushdie's book in the streets of English cities, BBC arts bores sat around on talk-show sofas deploring the "symbolism" of this attack on "ideas."

There was nothing symbolic about it. They burned the book because they couldn't burn Rushdie himself. If his wife and kid had swung by, they'd have gladly burned them, just as the mob was happy to burn to death 37 Turks who'd made the mistake of being in the same hotel in Sivas as one of the novelist's translators. When British Muslims called for Rushdie to be killed, they meant it. From a mosque in Yorkshire, Mohammed Siddiqui wrote to the Independent to endorse the fatwa by citing Sura 5, verses 33-34, from the Quran:

"The punishment of those who wage war against God and His Apostle, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land, is execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land."

That last sanction apparently wasn't an option.

Britain got so many things wrong during the Rushdie affair, just as America got so many things wrong during the Iranian embassy siege 10 years earlier. But it's now 2007 – almost two decades after Iran claimed sovereignty over British subjects (Rushdie), almost three decades after they claimed sovereignty over American territory (the U.S. Embassy in Tehran). So what have we learned? I was with various British parliamentarians the other day, and we were talking about the scenes from Islamabad, Pakistan, where the usual death-to-the-Great-Satan chaps had burned an effigy of the queen to protest the knighthood she'd conferred on Rushdie.

I told my London friends that I had to hand it to Tony Blair's advisers: What easier way for the toothless old British lion, after the humiliations inflicted upon the Royal Navy sailors by their Iranian kidnappers, to show you're still a player than by knighting Salman Rushdie for his "services to literature"? Given that his principal service to literature has been to introduce the word "fatwa" to the English language, one assumed that some characteristically cynical British civil servant had waved the knighthood through as a relatively cheap way of flipping the finger to the mullahs.

But no. It seems Her Majesty's Government was taken entirely by surprise by the scenes of burning Union Jacks on the evening news.

Can that really be true? In a typically incompetent response, Margaret Beckett, the foreign secretary, issued one of those "obviously we're sorry if there's been a misunderstanding" statements in which she managed to imply that Rushdie had been honored as a representative of the Muslim community. He's not. He's an ex-Muslim. He's a representative of the Muslim community's willingness to kill you for trying to leave the Muslim community. But, locked into obsolescent multicultural identity-groupthink, Mrs. Beckett instinctively saw Rushdie as a member of a quaintly exotic minority rather than as a free-born individual.

This is where we came in two decades ago. We should have learned something by now. In the Muslim world, artistic criticism can be fatal. In 1992, the poet Sadiq Abd al-Karim Milalla also found that his work was "not particularly well-received": he was beheaded by the Saudis for suggesting Muhammad cooked up the Quran by himself. In 1998, the Algerian singer Lounès Matoub described himself as "ni Arabe ni musulman" (neither Arab nor Muslim) and shortly thereafter found himself neither alive nor well. These are not famous men. They don't stand around on Oscar night, congratulating themselves on their "courage" for speaking out against Bush-Rove fascism. But, if we can't do much about freedom of expression in Iran and Saudi Arabia, we could at least do our bit to stop Saudi-Iranian standards embedding themselves in the West.

So many of our problems with Iran today arise from not doing anything about our problems with Iran yesterday. Men like Ayatollah Khomeini despised pan-Arab nationalists like Nasser who attempted to impose a local variant of Marxism on the Muslim world. Khomeini figured: Why import the false ideologies of a failing civilization? Doesn't it make more sense to export Islamism to the dying West?

And, for a guy dismissed by most of us as crazy, Khomeini made a lot of sense. The Rushdie fatwa established the ground rules: The side that means it gets away with it. Mobs marched through Britain calling for the murder of a British subject – and, as a matter of policy on the grounds of multicultural sensitivity, the British police shrugged and looked the other way.

One reader in England recalled one demonstration at which he asked a constable why the "Muslim community leaders" weren't being arrested for incitement to murder. The officer told him to "f--- off, or I'll arrest you." Genuine "moderate Muslims" were cowed into silence, and pseudo-moderate Muslims triangulated with artful evasiveness. Sir Iqbal Sacranie, who went on to become leader of the most prominent British Muslim lobby group, mused about the Rushdie fatwa: "Death is perhaps too easy."

In 1989 Salman Rushdie went into hiding under the protection of the British police. A decade later he decided he did not wish to live his life like that and emerged from seclusion to live a more or less normal life. He learned the biggest lesson of all – how easy it is to be forced into the shadows. That's what's happening in the free world incrementally every day, with every itsy-bitsy nothing concession to groups who take offense at everything and demand the right to kill you for every offense. Across two decades, what happened to Rushdie has metastasized, in part because of the weak response in those first months. "Death is perhaps too easy"? Maybe. But slow societal suicide is easier still.

Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl in Michael Winterbottom’s movie.

“A Mighty Heart”
by Anthony Lane

June 25, 2007

How do you solve a problem like Angelina? Ms. Jolie is now more of a brand than a person, and she comes in six flavors:

1. The celebrity. Angelina Jolie is so famous that when she looks in the mirror her reflection asks for an autograph. The only publication in this country yet to feature her on its cover is The American Numismatic Magazine, and even that will change the moment she bends down to pick up a nickel.

2. The sexpot. In this she is unchallenged, and yet her timing is off by fifty years. When it comes to channelling her carnal appeal, no current film director has a clue; the guy she needs is Frank Tashlin, who guided Jayne Mansfield through “The Girl Can’t Help It” (1956) and “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” (1957), and whose eyeballs, if confronted with Jolie in the flesh, would pop out on cartoon springs and bob around.

3. The Brad handler. She took one look at the world’s most widely desired man and scooped him up with no more ado than a Parisian grande dame tucking a Chihuahua into her clutch bag.

4. The mother. Official estimates as to how many children Jolie now possesses, and from how many continents, change on a weekly basis. When not giving birth herself, she likes to order in. How this has affected Mr. Pitt is unclear, but his expression is sometimes that of a man who stepped out to hail a cab and got run over by a fleet of trucks.

5. The world saver. Jolie is a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Her father, Jon Voight, told the Biography Channel that “she’s developed into one of our great humanitarians.” This was clearly on the minds of political leaders when they met Jolie at a summit of the World Economic Forum in Davos two years ago. Half of them offered their entire foreign-aid budget for a chance to fetch her a mai tai.

6. Oh yes, the actress. This last talent, so often neglected, is displayed in her new film, “A Mighty Heart,” and without it the legend of Angelina Jolie would be little more than a vaporous joke.

The movie, directed by Michael Winterbottom, lies about as far from the trials of Lara Croft as is cinematically possible. Jolie plays Mariane Pearl, the wife of Daniel Pearl (Dan Futterman), a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal who in 2002 was kidnapped and beheaded in Karachi, Pakistan. The story begins on the day of his disappearance; as the horrors unfurl, we see Mariane replaying in her mind the moment when she bade her husband farewell—a wave and a smile, as he climbed into a cab. He was due to interview a Muslim cleric named Sheikh Gilani, but the arrangement was a trap.

Once Pearl has vanished, we follow the threads of rumor and report from the viewpoint of his wife, a cluster of friends, and the local police. The result, like many of Winterbottom’s films, lies an inch short of disarray; we can keep pace with the investigation, but only just, and that sense of splintering honors the unpredictability of the setting. We hurtle from the tracking down of taxi-drivers to the tracing of cell-phone calls and nocturnal raids on the homes of suspects; such momentum is undeniably but unpleasantly exciting, because we already know the outcome. However diligent the authorities’ chase against the clock, the clock will win. Promising leads hit a wall; when Mariane gets to see Pakistan’s Interior Minister, he blames the Indian intelligence services for having set up the abduction. Add the aggressive questioning of Daniel’s female colleague, Asra (Archie Panjabi), who happens to be Indian, and you get an itchy demonstration of regional mistrust.

Stronger still than the encroaching panic, however, is Mariane’s determination not to cave in to it. Those who saw her being interviewed at the time were struck by her preternatural serenity; her book, also called “A Mighty Heart” (2003), is Winterbottom’s principal source, although her title may be too noble for his manner—the dressed-down, on-the-fly approach that lends even his more formal endeavors, like “Jude” (1996) and “Code 46” (2003), an air of documentary. He is the very model of a modern moral filmmaker: not unromantic, exactly, and too impassioned for the scowls of cynicism, but baffled and perhaps a little bored by the traditional forms of romance. When his loving couples cling together—as they did, stickily, for “9 Songs” (2004)—Winterbottom loses interest. When they are yanked apart, as in “A Mighty Heart,” his own heart quickens its beat.

Mariane is French-speaking, with a Cuban mother, and Jolie is equipped with corkscrewed hair, tinted skin, and murmuring accent. We brace ourselves for a star turn, a hundred minutes of vanity project, but here’s the thing: it never happens. Jolie slips into the part, ducks in and out of the action, and generally plays second string to the onrush of events. Blessed with the world’s most recognizable mouth, she confines herself to a single, skeptical pout, as Mariane is reassured that “no one would ever want to hurt Danny.” Not so: he is an American Jew investigating Muslim extremists, and, as his wife knows, that makes him a marked man.

Only once does Mariane crack. Informed of her husband’s death and of its savage circumstances, she goes to her room, crouches over, and keens. It could be the howl from a Greek tragedy, except that our heroine is not disporting herself on a stage, majestic in her grief, but filmed from so close that you can count the knobs of vertebrae at the top of her spine. By this time she is heavily pregnant, and her screams are a terrible parody of birth pangs—an echo that Winterbottom makes explicit, without needing to, in the closing scenes. This hasty, high-intensity, barely consolable film is just the kind of tale on which he thrives—and, more surprisingly, on which Jolie will come to depend if she wants to keep her head above the tides of madness in which, partly on her own initiative, she has chosen to float. Will success spoil Angelina Jolie? Not yet. Can she help it? Yes, she can.

From The Washington Post:
A Mighty Shame
It's the Story of Our Search for Danny Pearl.
But in This Movie, He's Nowhere to Be Found.

By Asra Q. Nomani

Sunday, June 24, 2007

O n Wednesday, Jan. 23, 2002, I stood at the gate of my rented house in Karachi, watching my friend Danny Pearl juggle a notebook, cellphone and earpiece as he bounded over to a taxicab idling in the street. He was off to try to find the alleged al-Qaeda handler of "shoe bomber" Richard Reid in Pakistan. "Good luck, dude," I called, waving cheerfully as he strode off, a lopsided grin on his face. His pregnant wife, Mariane, stood smiling and waving beside me as the taxi pulled away. A gaggle of parrots swooped through the trees above, squawking in the late afternoon sun.

That was the last image I had of Danny until late last month, when a PR executive for Paramount Vantage pulled up to my house in Morgantown, W.Va., in a black Lincoln Town Car. She was carrying a DVD of "A Mighty Heart," the just-released movie, based on the book by Mariane Pearl, about the staggering events that unfolded after that innocuous moment in Pakistan: Danny's kidnapping and eventual beheading.

With my parents and a friend beside me, I pressed "play" on my DVD player and settled in to watch. Slowly, as the scenes ticked by, my heart sank. I could live with having been reduced from a colleague of Danny's to a "charming assistant" to Mariane, as one review put it, and even with having been cut out of the scene in front of my house in Pakistan. That's the creative license Hollywood takes. What I couldn't accept was that Danny himself had been cut from his own story.

The character I saw on the screen was flat -- nerdy, bland and boring. He's not at all like Danny, who wrote "ditties" about Osama bin Laden while he was investigating Pakistan's nuclear secrets and jihadist groups as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. On screen, he's warned three times to meet with Sheik Mubarik Ali Gilani -- the man with whom he thought he had an interview -- only in public. But off he goes, ignoring the warnings. The message: Reckless journalist.

That was nothing like the Danny I knew. As the credits rolled, I murmured to my mother, "Danny had a cameo in his own murder."

For me, watching the movie was like having people enter my home, rearrange the furniture and reprogram my memory. I'd known it was a gamble when I agreed to help with a Hollywood version of Danny's kidnapping, but I'd done it because I thought the movie had the potential to be meaningful. I'd hoped it could honor the man I'd worked alongside for nine years at the Journal by explaining why he was so passionate about his work as a reporter. I'd hoped that it would tell the story of the unique team of law enforcement agents, government officials and journalists -- of varying religions, nationalities and cultures -- that had searched for him. And I hoped it could spark a search for the truth behind Danny's death.

But the moviemakers and their PR machine seemed intent on two very different and much shallower goals: creating a mega-star vehicle for Angelina Jolie, who plays Mariane, and promoting the glib and cliched idea that both Danny and Mariane were "ordinary heroes."

I think Danny would have rolled his eyes at that.

In the prologue to her book, Mariane wrote to her son: "I write this book for you, Adam, so you know that your father was not a hero but an ordinary man." In a movie voiceover, that dedication becomes: "This film is for our son so he knows that his father was an ordinary man. An ordinary hero."

But there weren't any real heroes in the story of Danny's tragedy. Danny would have said he was just doing his job. When he went off that day in Karachi, he didn't give any impression that he thought what he was doing was especially dangerous. He just had a story he wanted to pursue and an interview he thought would help him. After he vanished, I don't think any of us, not even Mariane, did anything particularly courageous, either. We each had a duty to try to find him -- either as professionals or because of the bonds of friendship or family.

I know that movies need a dramatic arc and that there has to be room for artistic license in the telling of a true story, because reality is often so chaotic. I know that it's natural to search for a compelling narrative structure to make sense of tragedy and pointlessness. And I do believe that Danny's last moments, as he declared his Jewishness for his kidnappers' video camera, showed his strength of character.

But recasting a story just so we can tell ourselves that we've found a hero is too easy. It's the quickest way to convince ourselves that what happened wasn't such a bad thing, that it had redeeming value, that we can close the book on it and move on with our lives. We do it too often -- with television shows about ordinary people with extraordinary powers, with magazine features that extol the "heroes among us" and with our impulse to elevate every story -- think Jessica Lynch, ambushed and wounded in Iraq -- to one of heroism.

For me, "A Mighty Heart" and all the hype surrounding it have only underscored how cheap and manufactured our quest for heroism has become. Paramount even launched an "ordinary hero" contest to promote the movie. "Nominate the most inspiring ordinary hero," its Web site shouts. "Win a trip to the Bahamas!"

Lost in the PR machine and the heroism hoopla is Danny, whose death is at the center of the story. After all, as one person involved in the production candidly told me: Danny can't do interviews. So in the Associated Press review, he amounts to nothing more than a parenthetical phrase.

But Danny was not parenthetical. He deserves to be remembered fully. He was charming and charismatic. He was an outstanding investigative reporter with an irreverent streak. The year before he died, I'd taken a leave from the Journal to work on a book, and he faxed me an article from an Indian magazine that he thought would help with my research. "From your assistant, Danny," he scrawled across the cover sheet, in his self-deprecating style.

He observed the media machine with a contrarian, skeptical eye. In November 2001, after the war in Afghanistan had begun, he wrote to me: "I'm getting to Pakistan just in time for the lull between 'well, more bombings, more deaths -- who cares now?' and 'shit, it's December, we have to round out our prize packages' " with big articles for awards such as the Pulitzers. "Okay, no more cynicism from here," he signed off. "I'm going to be a father and must maintain an idyllic view of the world."

Danny had me teach him how to say "Do I look like a fool?" in Urdu so he could tell off Mumbai taxi drivers who tried to overcharge him. Once, shortly after arriving in Peshawar on an assignment, he wrote me: "I'm at the Pearl Continental, wasn't able to get a free room despite my argument that I was the owner."

Don't look for that personality in the movie. You won't find it.

I know I'm guilty of assisting in Hollywood's mythmaking. In the fall of 2003, I went with Mariane to the Los Angeles home of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, where we ate bagels and drank coffee by the pool while listening to their pitch for buying the movie rights to her book. When Mariane decided to sell, Warner Bros. Pictures sought my "life rights," too. I agreed to sell them, even though a friend told me that making a movie about Danny's death seemed exploitative.

A year passed. Pitt and Aniston got a divorce. Pitt and Jolie got together. The movie rights passed to Paramount Vantage. Paramount hired British director Michael Winterbottom. And a script emerged.

When I read it last summer, I felt as though I'd been punched in the gut. I sat across from British actress Archie Panjabi, who had been dispatched to my home in Morgantown to learn to play me. I lamented that none of the characters were fully developed, least of all Danny.

When I watched the movie last month, I was relieved that I wasn't a servant girl, as I felt an early script had it. So I wrote to a producer, "Thumbs up okay on my end." But I wasn't being true to myself. I was reacting to the power and seduction of Hollywood.

A few days later, when I saw the photos of stars in evening gowns and tuxedos floating down the red carpet for the Cannes premiere of "A Mighty Heart," Danny's not-quite-5-year-old son among them, I had that sinking feeling again. Other friends of Danny's said they did, too. It was so not Danny.

Worst of all, the pomp came at the same time as a chilling reminder of his death. On the night of the Cannes premiere, the Daily Times, a Pakistani newspaper, ran a photo of an emaciated man said to have been the owner of the plot of land where Danny had been held and where his remains had been buried. The accompanying story alleged that the man had been held in the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, then released to Pakistani intelligence authorities, who had recently dumped him at his family's home. The headline: "Most wanted man in Daniel Pearl case: Saud Memon dies."

On the eve of the movie's New York premiere earlier this month, I was in Phoenix at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference. I was there to announce the establishment of the Pearl Project, a joint faculty-student investigative reporting project at Georgetown University that will aim to find out who really killed Danny and why. It's my own way of honoring him. His story isn't over for me. I set up the project because -- despite a confession from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11 and of Richard Reid's failed shoe-bombing, that he killed Danny -- I believe we still don't know the real truth behind what happened to him.

After the conference, I had to decide whether to go to New York for the premiere or head back home. I went home. In my home office, I stood in front of a copy of the chart I had started in Karachi to make sense of everything that happened after that January day in 2002. At the center is a single name: Danny.

pearlproject@georgetown.edu

Asra Q. Nomani teaches journalism in Georgetown University's School of Continuing Studies.