Common Sense Evaluation

It is only fitting for Mr. Whipple to die on World Toilet Day.

‘Mr. Whipple’ of Charmin Fame Dies at 91

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Dick Wilson, the actor and pitchman who played the uptight grocer begging customers “Please, don’t squeeze the Charmin,” died Monday. He was 91.

The man famous as TV’s “Mr. Whipple” died of natural causes at the Motion Picture & Television Fund Hospital in Woodland Hills, said his daughter Melanie Wilson, who is known for her role as a flight attendant on the ABC sitcom “Perfect Strangers.”

Over 21 years, Wilson made more than 500 commercials as Mr. George Whipple, a man consumed with keeping bubbly housewives from fondling the soft toilet paper. The punch line of most spots was that Whipple himself was a closeted Charmin-squeezer.

Wilson also played a drunk on several episodes of “Bewitched,” as appeared as various characters on “Hogan’s Heroes,” “The Bob Newhart Show,” and Walt Disney productions.

The first of his Charmin commercials aired in 1964 and by the time the campaign ended in 1985, the tag line and Wilson were pop culture touchstones.

“Everybody says, ‘Where did they find you?’ I say I was never lost. I’ve been an actor for 55 years,” Wilson told the San Francisco Examiner in 1985.

Though Wilson said he initially resisted commercial work, he learned to appreciate its nuance.

“It’s the hardest thing to do in the entire acting realm. You’ve got 24 seconds to introduce yourself, introduce the product, say something nice about it and get off gracefully.”

Dennis Legault, Procter & Gamble’s Charmin brand manager, said in a statement that Wilson deserves much of the credit for the product’s success in the marketplace. He called the Mr. Whipple character “one of the most recognizable faces in the history of American advertising.”

After Wilson retired, he continued to do occasional guest appearances for the brand and act on television. He declared himself not impressed with modern cinema.

“The kind of pictures they’re making today, I’ll stick with toilet paper,” he told The Associated Press in 1985.

Procter & Gamble eventually replaced the Whipple ads with cartoon bears, but brought Wilson (as Whipple) back for an encore in 1999. The ad showed Wilson “coming out of retirement” against the advice of his golfing and poker buddies for one more chance to sell Charmin.

“He is part of the culture,” his daughter said. “He was still funny to the very end. That’s his legacy.”

He was born in England in 1916, the son of a vaudeville entertainer and a singer. He moved to Canada as a child, serving in the Canadian Air Force during World War II, and became a U.S. citizen in 1954, he told the AP.

In addition to Melanie, Wilson is survived by his wife, Meg; a son, Stuart; and another daughter, Wendy.

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Anyone with common sense knows that gun control is a bad idea. It is amazing that for three decades the people in Washington D.C. have faced some of the most restrictive gun control laws in the country and it is still considered a major murder capital. The place where people need guns the most to protect themselves from violent crime has been one of places where the exercise of that right has been restricted.

Effectiveness of D.C. gun ban still a mystery

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Three decades ago, at the dawn of municipal self-government in the District of Columbia, the city’s first elected mayor and council enacted one of the country’s toughest gun-control measures, a ban on handgun ownership that opponents have long said violates the Second Amendment.

All these years later, with the constitutionality of the ban now probably headed for a US Supreme Court review, a much-debated practical question remains unsettled: Has a law aimed at reducing the number of handguns in the District made city streets safer?

Although studies through the decades have reached conflicting conclusions, this much is clear: The ban, passed with strong public support in 1976, has not accomplished everything the mayor and council of that era wanted it to.

Over the years, gun violence has continued to plague the city, reaching staggering levels at times.

In making by far their boldest public policy decision, Washington’s first elected officials wanted other jurisdictions, especially neighboring states, to follow the lead of the nation’s capital by enacting similar gun restrictions, cutting the flow of firearms into the city from surrounding areas.

“We were trying to send out a message,” recalled Sterling Tucker, the council chairman at the time.

Nadine Winters, also a council member then, said, “My expectation was that this being Washington, it would kind of spread to other places, because these guns, there were so many of them coming from Virginia and Maryland.”

It didn’t happen. Guns kept coming. And bodies kept falling.

Opponents of the ban, who won a March ruling in which the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit declared the law unconstitutional, said in a legal filing that the District’s “31-year experiment with gun prohibition” has been a “complete failure.” Meanwhile, D.C. officials, who have asked the Supreme Court to reverse the March decision, say the ban is a legally permissible public-safety measure that has saved lives.

Which side is correct depends on whose social science research is accurate. Although the city points to research indicating that street violence would have been worse without the law, opponents of the ban cite studies to the contrary.

“It’s a pretty common-sense idea that the more guns there are around, the more gun violence you’ll have,” D.C. Attorney General Linda Singer said.

“One of the difficult things is, you can’t measure what didn’t happen,” Singer said. “You can’t measure how many guns didn’t come into the District because we have this law.”

But you can measure the violence that did occur, using the bellwether offense of homicide to chart the ebb and flow of crime in the District since the ban was enacted. And the violence here over those years was worse than in most other big cities, many of them in states with far less restrictive gun laws.

When they imposed the ban in 1976, then-Mayor Walter E. Washington, a Democrat, and the council were reacting to public concern about crime, which began rising across the country in the mid-1960s.

The ban aroused anger on Capitol Hill. And in a different year, Congress might have scuttled the law, as it was empowered to do. But with a presidential election just a few months away, members were reluctant to debate gun control.

The law required all existing handguns, rifles, and shotguns in the District to be re-registered, then kept disassembled or with triggers locked.

In 1977, the first full year of the ban, the city recorded 192 homicides. The total rose to 223 in 1981, then fell to 147 in 1985 – the lowest annual homicide toll in the District since 1966. At the time, the rate for the country also was trending down.

Which turned out to be the calm before the slaughter.

The advent of the crack market and the unprecedented street violence it unleashed nationwide sent homicide rates soaring in the latter half of the 1980s. Not only did the number of killings surge in the District, the homicide rates here also far exceeded the rates in crack-ridden cities where handguns had not been banned.

In the peak year, 1991, the District reported 482 homicides.

Almost as sharply as violence in the District increased, it declined through the 1990s, a drop researchers attributed to the burning out and aging of a generation of crack dealers and users. Again, the shift reflected national trends.

Yet the gun culture on the city’s mean streets during the crack epidemic has not abated, police statistics show. Even as the homicide toll declined in D.C. after 1991, the percentage of killings committed with firearms remained far higher than it was when the ban was passed.

Guns were used in 63 percent of the city’s 188 slayings in 1976. Last year, out of 169 homicides, 81 percent were shootings.

Meanwhile, periodic ATF reports have documented that firearms, flowing in from elsewhere in the country, remain available on D.C. streets – exactly what the ban was designed to prevent.

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Screw Harry Reid!

God bless America again!

Qaeda chased from last Baghdad bastion

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An armed Sunni group has ended Al-Qaeda’s tight two-year grip on north Baghdad’s volatile Adhamiyah neighbourhood and is now in control, an AFP correspondent witnessed on Friday.

A local militia calling itself the “revolutionaries of Adhamiyah” took over the Sunni district on the east bank of the Tigris on November 10 in a swift and audacious raid that sent Al-Qaeda fleeing from its last stronghold in Baghdad.

On Friday, members of the “revolutionaries of Adhamiyah” controlled main roads into the neighbourhood as well the square housing the famous Abu Hanifa mosque where Saddam Hussein made his last public appearance before fleeing Baghdad in 2003 as US-led forces invaded the country.

A Sunni bastion encircled by Shiite districts, Adhamiyah had been one of the most dangerous areas of Baghdad, under the tight control of Al Qaeda “emirs”.

The AFP correspondent said the neighbourhood was calm with the streets taken over by men wearing dark grey shirts and toting light weapons, Kalashnikovs and machine guns.

There was no sign of any Iraqi police or soldiers as militiamen, most of them in their early twenties, manned makeshift checkpoints, demanding at gunpoint identification from all motorists and passersby.

They were operating without hindrance by the US military, who were patrolling the streets in armoured vehicles.

Occasional sporadic shots could be heard but despite the volatile atmosphere many traders opened their doors and the faithful went quietly to the Abu Hanifa mosque for Friday prayers, lending a semblance of normality to the district.

“We got rid of the groups of murderers who assassinated people in the streets with impunity”, the leader of the group, Abu Abed, told AFP at his headquarters in Adhamiya — a disused library near the mosque.

“We, the sons of Adhamiyah, decided to fight the terrorists and to chase them out of our district,” said 35-year-old Abu Abed, a baby-faced man whose eyes were hidden by dark glasses.

Abu Abed said his group had seized control of Adhamiyah “in less than two hours” with only around 50 men in a “surprise attack” very early on November 10.

“The Al Qaeda fighters fled when they saw us and took refuge in the bazaar, and then in Kam (in the northern part of Adhamiyah). Thank God we overcame them and we now control the entire zone.”

Three Al Qaeda combatants were killed while 15 were taken prisoner and handed over to the Iraqi security forces, according to Abu Abed, who said only one of his group had died “as a martyr.”

“Our men seized 11 car bombs and discovered several clandestine bomb-making workshops,” said the chief of the “revolutionaries of Adhamiyah”, surrounded by armed bodyguards.

“We fought alone,” he stressed. “Nobody helped us — neither government forces nor the American army.

“Our only support, material and moral, come from our brothers in the Sunni Endowment who provided us with money, weapons and ammunition,” added Abu Abed, referring to the body which manages Sunni religious sites across Iraq.

He said that the US military had offered to aid the group should there be a massive counter-attack by Al Qaeda, which so far had not occurred.

“We were 50 at the start, we now number more than 1,000. If God wants it, we will soon be 1,500.”

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