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If anyone missed this over the holiday, it's a very heartwarming story about actor Jack Klugman's real legacy and how he managed to roll obstructionist Sen. Orrin Hatch: Jack Klugman’s secret, lifesaving legacy:

The actor Jack Klugman died on Christmas Eve at age 90. Klugman was best known for his roles as the unkempt sportswriter in “The Odd Couple” and as the crusading medical examiner on “Quincy, M.E.” the wildly popular 1980s medical drama. Few people remember it today, but he also played an instrumental role in passing critical health-care legislation, the Orphan Drug Act, through Congress in the early 1980s, using “Quincy” and his own celebrity to roll Sen. Orrin Hatch (R), who was blocking the bill.

Klugman’s unlikely star turn in Washington stemmed from a 1980 hearing by the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment on the problem of developing treatments for rare diseases. The problem was that many terrible diseases didn’t afflict enough people to entice pharmaceutical companies to develop treatments. Hence they were ”orphan” diseases. They included Tourette’s syndrome, muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis, spina bifida, ALS and many more. The situation was especially tragic because scientists who discovered promising treatments often couldn’t interest drug makers, who didn’t see potential for profit.

The issue of orphan diseases was so obscure that only a single newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, sent a reporter to the hearing (and the Times only did so because a local boy suffering from Tourette’s testified). But the article caught the eye of a Hollywood writer and producer named Maurice Klugman, who himself suffered from a rare cancer and also happened to be Jack Klugman’s brother. Maurice Klugman wrote an episode of “Quincy” about Tourette’s and the orphan drug problem.

Go read the rest at the link above. RIP Jack Klugman.

From Democracy Now -- Chalmers Johnson, 1931-2010, on the Last Days of the American Republic:

The distinguished scholar and best-selling author Chalmers Johnson has died. He passed away in California on Saturday afternoon at the age of 79. During the Cold War, he served as a consultant to the Central Intelligence Agency and was a supporter of the Vietnam War, however, later became a leading critic of U.S. militarism and imperialism. He wrote the book, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire in 2000, which became a bestseller after the 9/11 attacks. He went on to complete what would become a trilogy about American empire. Today we re-air part of our last interview with Chalmers Johnson from 2007.

Full transcript at Democracy Now's site.

And here's more from Meteor Blades at Daily KOS -- Open thread for night owls: R.I.P. Chalmers Johnson:

Chalmers Johnson died Saturday. He was 79. If that name doesn't ring a bell, you've missed out on a tour de force in the realm of political science. What he wrote in the final 10 years of his life resonate even if his warnings are still being widely ignored.

Fortunately for us all, a decade ago Johnson moved away from his groundbreaking writing on the Japanese economy - a field in which he challenged and then overturned conventional wisdom - into another arena that the gatekeepers thought they had closed off discussion on: modern American imperialism. In a devastating set of four interwoven books, the first volume of which was published shortly before the September 11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., Johnson laid bare the pernicious impacts of U.S. foreign policy.

Other writers had explored and excoriated that policy and done so with more detail and sharper barbs than Johnson in an era when writing the very word "imperialism" in the same sentence as the "United States" was enough to get both scholar and amateur a trip to obscurity and discredit. That, of course, was before the neoconservative denizens of the Project for a New American Century openly embraced both the term and its reality as a legitimate foundation for 21st Century American intervention abroad. But Johnson put it all together with a fresh eye in a fresh way.

One at a time, his four books written over a 10-year period wound up on the shelves of critics of the Iraq war and U.S. foreign policy in general. They are Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire; The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic; Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope. Having received my undergraduate degree in international relations a zillion years ago, I can only lament that no recognized authority who we studied had put it together the way Johnson did, operating outside his area of expertise with passion and clearheadedness.

Much more there so go read the rest. R.I.P. Chalmers Johnson.

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From John Nichols at The Nation -- Mourn Granny D.; Then Organize for Clean Politics:

Doris "Granny D" Haddock, whose 3,200-mile walk across the United States at the age of 90 drew thousands of activists into the movement for political reform, has died Tuesday evening at the age of 100.

The Dublin, New Hampshire, grandmother's death came ten years and ten days after she finished the remarkable two-year walk, which she undertook to promote the passage of campaign finance reform legislation (in particular the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform law). Read on...

I made a mash up from the HBO documentary Run Granny Run back in November of 2007 which we posted at C&L. I thought I'd share it again today. R.I.P. Granny D. You'll be sorely missed.

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I thought it was distasteful enough that Chris Wallace asked Juan Williams to have to explain why Ted Kennedy wasn't given the "Jesse Helms" treatment by the New York Times in their obituaries of the two men, but it also turns out that he was showing NewsBusters a little love as well. I'm glad Media Matters reads NewsBusters, so I don't have to.

Also, I'm sure I won't be the only one that thinks Chris Wallace or anyone at Fox complaining about "media coverage" is laughable on its face.

Wallace: I also want to talk about the "media" coverage of Ted Kennedy's death this week. Not only the amount of it, which was extraordinary, but also the tone of it, and I want to put up the first paragraph of The New York Times obituary on Ted Kennedy's death. This is the first paragraph this week.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a son of one of the most storied families in American politics, a man who knew triumph and tragedy in near-equal measure and who will be remembered as one of the most effective lawmakers in the history of the Senate, died late Tuesday night.

Now, here's the first paragraph of the Times' story on the passing of Jesse Helms last year.

Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina senator whose courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Friday.

Bill Sammon, I'm sure some people will be offended that I'm even making the comparison between these two men, but that is a frightening difference.

Sammon: It is and there are two ways to rectify that double standard. One would have been for the New York Times to find something nice to say about Jesse Helms substantively, other than this mossy drawl. The other, if you're going to go the, and I think that's the preferable way to do it, because you want to, when someone dies, you want to find something nice to say.

The other way if they wanted to be fair would, they would have had to put something in Ted Kennedy's about Chappaquiddick, about his demagoguery Robert Bork, the, you know, lunch-counter America, the back alley abortions, all those kind of things, but they didn't, so either way you do it it's unfair, and that was a striking example.

Wallace: Juan, do you think that there's a striking difference in the way those two men were sent off?

Williams: Well, I think you should be nice to people at the time of their death in general, no matter what their sins, but in fact I think it was good journalism. I think in fact that if you look at the public impact that Jesse Helms had on the country, it was to stand in opposition to civil rights and all the gay rights and all this. If you look at the public impact of Ted Kennedy...

Wallace: But wasn't he for something?

Williams: Yeah! He was for stopping those things and that's what the lead said. I don't have any problem with that and in fact Chappaquiddick has been mentioned prominently throughout this whole period.

Sammon: Not in that lead.

Williams: Not in the lead but in the story. It's not like anybody's hiding Ted Kennedy's flaws. We know them.

Of course, par for the course, it's always alright to politicize a eulogy if you're a Republican. From our own Jon Perr-- Jesse Helms and the Partisan Eulogies of George W. Bush:

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