The Democrats are desperately diverting attention away from their rigging the nomination fight by charging that Russia is interfering in our election. But there was a time when going to Moscow to help defeat the other party didn’t seem to disturb Democrats. In fact, with the help of friendly media, the entire incident has been sent to the memory hole. Once upon a time it was revealed, but nobody outside of the conservative ghetto remembers.

But Betsy Newmark of Betsy’s Page remembers: (hat tip: Instapundit):

As the Democrats struggle to turn the story of the DNC hacks into an attack on Trump by arguing that the Russians are behind the hack and that Putin is trying to help Trump get elected, let’s remember when a prominent Democrat actually went to the Soviets for help in defeating Reagan. In 1984 Ted Kennedy approached the Soviets who were then led by the former KGB head, Yuri Andropov, and tried to negotiate help in opposing Reagan. We found out about Kennedy’s efforts when Yeltsin opened up the Soviet archives in 1991. Sean Davis links to thestory as reported in Forbes.

Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy.

“On 9-10 May of this year,” the May 14 memorandum explained, “Sen. Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow.” (Tunney was Kennedy’s law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) “The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov.”

Kennedy’s message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. “The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations,” the memorandum stated. “These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign.”

This is open, self-initiated collaboration with a rival power, and there’s a name for that sort of thing, “treason.” But that word is not associated with any Kennedy (at least not since Joe was Ambassador to the UK) because of the studious ignoring of the story coming from the Soviet archives.

Compared this reliable evidence, the case against Trump is made of air. We don’t know who did the hacking, and the bits of code that supposedly incriminate the Russians could well be a false flag operation, as argued by intelligence expertMichael Ledeen. There is no evidence at all of any Trump business in Russia, and he has denied having any investments there. There is, in other words, nothing to connect Trump to the leaks, much less to Russia.

The amount of attention paid to the non-evidence of Trump versus the studied avoidance of the conclusive evidence of Ted Kennedy soliciting enemy collaboration against a domestic political rival is the epitome of our propaganda media.

The almost unthinkable has happened. In a clear sign that the global warming fraud has peaked and is on the decline, an actual government agency has been abolished, because it was dedicated to global warming.  Andrew Follett of theDaily Caller writes:

Britain’s new government abolished its Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) Thursday morning, ridding the country of its global warming bureaucracy.

Officials stated that the DECC has been abolished and U.K.’s environmental policy is will be transferred to a new ministry called the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Some former DECC’s functions will be outright abolished, while others will be handed back to the new ministry.

Follett provides good background on the failures of green energy policy in Britain that has led to this rejection of the mission of the agency.

The backlash against British wind power occurred when the country’s  government was already forced to take emergency measures to keep the lights on and official government analysis suggests the country could have insufficient electricity on a windless or cloudy days to meet demand. Brownouts and blackouts caused by wind and solar power have already impacted the U.K. (snip)

Government green energy taxes currently account for seven percent of the average household’s energy bill, according to the UK’s Office of Gas and Electricity Markets. (snip)

Polling indicates that energy prices were so high that 38 percent of British households have cut back essential purchases, like food, to pay their energy bills. Another 59 percent of homes were worried about how they are going to pay energy bills.

Governmnts needing to cut expenditures can find ample pickings in green energy subsidies and global warming bureaucracies.

They say that the July 4th weekend is a good time to take a break from the news and check out the Major League Baseball standings.  Based on today’s records, it looks like the Rangers and the Cubs will play each other in the World Series.

It is also a weekend to remember the greatest pitching duel of the last 60 years.  In fact, they even wrote a book about it: The Greatest Game Ever Pitched: Juan Marichal, Warren Spahn and the Pitching Duel of the Century!

Let’s take a quick look at the two pitchers.

Warren Spahn was an established veteran by the time this game started in San Francisco.  He came to Milwaukee with the Boston Braves in 1953.  He won 363 games, a 3.09 ERA and completed 382, or more than he won!

Juan Marichal was 25 and establishing himself.  He would go on to win 244 games with 2.89 career ERA, and he also completed more games (244) than he won.

I should add that future Hall of Famers Willie Mays, Orlando Cepeda, Willie McCovey, Hank Aaron, and Eddie Matthews took the field that night.  Add Marichal and Spahn, and the game featured seven of the greatest players of recent history.

My guess is that most fans expected another low-scoring night game at Candlestick Park.  However, they got the greatest pitching duel in modern baseball history:

At slightly past eight o’clock, Marichal took the Candlestick Park mound.

Four hours and 15 innings later, he was still toiling there.

And so was Warren Spahn–in a scoreless pitching duel.

The Braves had mounted a serious scoring threat in the top of the fourth inning. Marichal disposed of the first two batters before trouble arose.

The right-hander walked Norm Larker, and Mack “The Knife” Jones followed with a single to left, moving Larker to second.

Del Crandall hit a soft single to center that Willie Mays caught, then lasered to the plate to nail Larker trying to score. It had been a charmed half-inning for the Dominican pitcher.

Henry Aaron led off the frame with a drive to deep left field that Marichal said, the next day, he thought was gone.  Willie McCovey hauled the ball in a few feet from the fence, as Candlestick Point’s strong westerly winds knocked it down.

McCovey nearly ended the game in the bottom of the ninth. The Giants’ left fielder smoked a pitch deep to right field, just missing a home run–or so said the first base umpire. Local beat writer Curly Grieve expanded: “McCovey was so enraged when Chris Pelekoudas called the blast a foul that momentarily it appeared he would push the arbiter around the outfield and wind up ejected in the clubhouse. McCovey, [manager] Alvin Dark and [first base coach] Larry Jansen surrounded Pelekoudas, claiming the ball left Candlestick fair. Pelekoudas stuck to his call, which took courage.”

“I followed the ball all the way out but evidently the umpire didn’t. It was at least three feet fair when it left the park. I think the umpire was watching where it landed and made his call on that. As hard as I hit the ball it didn’t have a chance to curve before leaving the ball park,” McCovey said after the game.3 When he stepped back into the batter’s box, a miffed McCovey grounded out to first base, with Spahn covering. After a two-out single by Felipe Alou, Orlando Cepeda popped up to third base, and the scoreless game moved into extra innings.

With two outs in the top of the 13th, Braves’ second baseman Frank Bolling singled off Marichal, ending a string of 16 batters in a row retired by the Giants’ workhorse since a walk to Aaron in the eighth. Bolling was left stranded by the next hitter, Aaron, who popped up to first baseman Cepeda in foul ground.

Marichal was scheduled to bat third that inning. Cepeda later recalled the moment in a 1998 memoir. Manager Alvin Dark asked Marichal if he had had enough. Cepeda remembered Marichal barking at Dark, “A 42-year-old man is still pitching. I can’t come out!”  Dark accepted — or was startled into acceptance by Marichal’s ardor — and let him bat. Marichal flied out to complete the inning, and the game pushed forward.

The Giants made a strong bid to get Marichal a win in the lower half of the 14th. With two outs, they loaded the bases on a double, walk and error by Denis Menke, in at third base for Eddie Mathews. But Spahn then coolly retired Giants’ catcher Ed Bailey on a fly to center, ending the inning and extending the deadlock.

Marichal went back out for the 15th time and retired the side in order. Likewise, Spahn put the Giants down cleanly in the bottom of the frame. The pitchers had recorded 90 outs through 15 innings of gritty pitching, neither yielding a run.

In the 16th, Marichal allowed a two-out single to Menke, and then registered his 48th out of the night on Larker’s comebacker to the mound. It was Marichal’s 227th pitch.

When the Giants hit, Spahn retired Harvey Kuenn on a fly out. That brought up future Hall of Famer Mays, still hitless on the long night. Now, Mays drove Spahn’s first pitch through the teeth of the wind in left. The ball cleared the fence, and with that, a masterfully-pitched game dramatically ended. Marichal was the exhausted victor; Spahn, the valiantly defeated.

“I’ve been around a long time and that’s the finest exhibition of throwing I’ve ever seen,” Henry Aaron assessed. “It may be 10 years or even 20 before you see another its equal.”

Only once, in the more than half-century since, has one pitcher thrown as many innings in one major league baseball game as Marichal did that night against Spahn.

After the game, Spahn’s teammates greeted their aged warrior–the last player to enter their clubhouse because of an interview session–with their own tribute.

Quoting Spahn’s fellow starting pitcher Bob Sadowski, writer Jim Kaplan described it: “When Spahn arrived, everyone stood, applauded, and lined up to shake his hand. ‘If you didn’t have tears in your eyes, you weren’t nothing,'”

Over the 16 innings, Marichal allowed eight hits and four walks and struck out 10. Spahn, who threw 201 pitches of his own, yielded nine hits, walked only one (intentionally), and fanned a pair. Both men made their next scheduled starts five days later, the Sunday before the All-Star Game. Spahn complained of a sore elbow, which apparently flared up enough to cause him to miss two starts later in the month, but he pitched through it to lead the 1963 National League with 22 complete games.

Today, we call it a quality start when a guy goes six innings.  We count pitches and start talking about it around 100.

Years ago, Marichal and Spahn battled each other until Mays ended the game with a homer.  They didn’t quit; they just kept going and going.

It was more than a pitching duel.  It was a demonstration of character and work ethic.  We could use a bit of that these days.