By Jeffrey Page
We’ve been talking for years about the dumbing down of America, and if you had any doubt that it was happening, all you had to do was tune in to the news on All Things Considered this week on National Public Radio.

ATC wasn’t reporting a story about the dismissal of Americans as a bunch of ignorant boobs. Rather, it was participating in it. I don’t go into this with a bias against NPR. I like NPR. But somebody in charge needs to remember what journalism is and also to understand that the American people are not a bunch of jerks.

The All Things Considered story in question was about the rise and fall in the price of housing from 2001 until now, as reported by the Case-Shiller Home Price Index.

There wasn’t much to the story, which was produced for ATC by Planet Money, other than that in the decade ending this year, prices in Dallas had just remained pretty much flat and wound up barely increased from 10 years ago. Prices in Miami did a little better but were down about 50 percent since their spike in mid-2006. And while All Things Considered announced this story as a report on the nation’s “faltering housing market,” Planet Money reported that home prices were increasing.

Actually, All things Considered introduced it as more than that. The anchor called it “a musical twist on the faltering housing market.” A musical twist? Those words about a story on the economy are cause for alarm.

To present this news, Planet Money, which National Public Radio described as “a multimedia team covering the global economy,” converted the yearly numbers to musical notes and then got a baritone studying at Julliard to sing the notes.

I imagine the assumption was (a) this’ll be cute or (b) the listeners are incapable of understanding simple math and somehow would be baffled when informed that home prices in this decade reached their peak by 2007. So Planet Money decided to turn an otherwise important story into a bit of musical-comedy. The baritone sang, and if you happened to have tuned in late and missed the introduction to the story, you might have thought you were hearing a crocodile in heat.

Aside from making the Case-Shiller findings a joke, Planet Money was so busy chortling over its baritone-as-reporting-medium that it never mentioned actual dollar figures. Prices are up in Miami? How much on average? They didn’t say.

Nor did the Planet Money story say why prices rose through 9/11 to a 2007 peak and then began their descent.

Nor did Planet Money ask Case-Shiller for its view on the future of the housing market.

Nor did Planet Money explain why it decided to focus on Miami and Dallas. What about New York? What about Phoenix? Seattle? Jackson, Miss.? Oklahoma City? The Planet Money reporters noted that the national figure was for 20 cities, but never revealed which ones.

In other words, there wasn’t much news in this news report. But the Planet Money report raises some important questions. Is this the kind of “journalism” we can anticipate as we proceed through the 21st Century? It was not so long ago when news was taken seriously, as an essential for an educated and concerned public.

What do you think? Am I overreacting?

Jeff can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
Still no response from Rep. Nan Hayworth on what seemed like a fairly straightforward question following her recent Town Hall declaration in Warwick. “I want taxes to be lower,” she said. “Our mission is to cut federal spending.”

Very courageous, but I thought there would be more to it than that. So I dashed off an email to Hayworth asking her if she would please be specific.

You say your “mission” is to cut federal spending, I said, so how would you do it? Specifically, which federal programs would you cut back? And by how much? And which programs would you eliminate altogether?

In a piece for Zest of Orange, I offered her some possibilities. Would Haworth eliminate the Veterans Administration? NPR? Maybe Farm aid? Or Yellowstone National Park? How about the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, which provides milk, eggs and cheese to poor women and to their children younger than 5? How about cutting Congressional salaries? Social Security? Medicare? Medicaid?

It’s so easy for politicians to stand up with a microphone and tell us how profligate we all are if we fail to agree that spending must be cut. But isn’t it astonishing how reluctant the pols – Republicans and Democrats alike – are when someone raises his or her hand and asks for a little preciseness?

Hayworth isn’t the only politician to take the easy way out by refusing to name the programs that would have to go. But she’s the one whose House web site contains this invitation: “Learn my views on spending cuts and debt.”

Now, that sounded promising. Maybe there would be some serious answers at last, something a little more substantial than: Spending is bad, not spending is good. But I was to be disappointed. If you want to learn her views, she responds with: “Spending cuts and debt affect us all and dealing with these issues are [sic] important to my work in Congress.”

That’s her “view?”

That’s it.

Only in Washington could 19 words be the definition of one’s “view” on anything.

In case you wish more than 19 words, Hayworth invites constituents to contact her Washington office. Well, I tried that in March and got no response when I asked that dangerous question about naming the programs she would kill.

Meanwhile, this from a friend of mine. “I called Hayworth’s office in Washington out of concern for the new bill that would severely cut Medicaid and Medicare in the future…. I told [Hayworth’s aide] that as a constituent this is of great concern to me.”

The aide took his name and phone number and promptly never got back to him.

Has this happened to you when you tried to contact Hayworth at her local office (845-206-4600), or John Hall before her, or Sue Kelly before him? Drop me a line here at Zest with your thoughts about being taken for granted.

Jeff can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
Rush Limbaugh and his clones would have you believe that the only Americans not outraged over public workers’ salaries and benefits are those very same public workers. Limbaugh spends three hours a day railing on and on and has nothing positive to say about the quality of the work these people do.

Of all people paid by taxpayers, Limbaugh focuses on the nation’s teachers and their unions. Teachers are pretty lousy at their jobs, he says with nauseating regularity. Of course, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but that’s never stopped him. Nonetheless, since there is a fringe of the nut-right that insists on seeing President Obama’s birth certificate, I demand to see Limbaugh’s report cards. Anyone as vicious as Limbaugh on the subject of teachers must have had a terrible first few years in school.

Show it or shut up, Limbaugh.

To listen to these radio observers you’d think that every school budget is an attack on middle class taxpayers and that every public sector worker is a schnorer (a Yiddish word, hard to translate, but basically an individual wishing something for nothing).

Do Limbaugh and the others ever actually venture out of the studio to do some basic reporting? Did any of them actually visit a classroom to observe what happens there? If they have, I haven’t heard about it. If they think they could last a day trying to teach a class of 20 fidgety first graders how to read, they’re mistaken because kids don’t respond to blowhards. You don’t order a kid to learn. You take your time and teach her.

Limbaugh, fulminating about public salaries is a joke. Cops, librarians, road crews and firefighters overpaid? Wasn’t it Rush Limbaugh who signed a contract for $400 million through 2008? Sure, he gets paid with private money, but spews his pollution five days a week on airwaves owned by the people.

As it turns out, he may not be speaking for all the people he thinks he represents.

I came across a most provocative headline in the Times Herald-Record a few days ago: “Chester district’s residents keen to save teachers, staff.”

The reporter noted that the message from residents to school board members was: Save our teachers, staff and principal. One woman in the audience wondered why an administrative position has to be cut. Though the Chester district is looking at the fangs of a $1.3 million reduction in state aid, the Record reported that many people at the meeting were willing to tough it out. After discussion of a 6 percent increase in the tax levy, one woman asked what would be lost with an increase of 8 percent.

The paper quoted a man who said an increase of 12 percent would cost taxpayers about $50 a month and indicated he could accept that. Of course an additional $600 a year is a steep hike for people on fixed incomes, but the startling thing about the meeting and the Record’s story was that, faced with cuts that will result in a lesser education for their children, some residents would be willing to pay the needed money.

A few weeks before that story, I was surprised to hear a report about a poll showing that most of the people of Wisconsin opposed the controversial new law (on hold by court order for now) that strips public sector workers of their right to bargain collectively. This, despite all the slanders heaped upon the state and local employees in Wisconsin. I suspect the meaning of this is not more complicated than an understanding that the people are smarter than the voices on the radio.

Have you had positive experiences with public workers? Care to share them with Zest readers? Send them along in the reply-box just below.

Note to Zest Readers: I wondered as I wrote this column if I had devoted entirely too much space to Rush Limbaugh. I checked and discovered I’ve only mentioned him in four pieces since April 2009, when Zest of Orange began. Still, Limbaugh is a never changing tune that I no longer wish to whistle. So, aside from the truly extraordinary, this is my last piece about him.

Jeff can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
I went to Congresswoman Nan Hayworth’s Town Hall meeting in Warwick over the weekend. She assured the audience that the federal government spends too much money and that this is why the nation is in such deep debt.

She complained that the government has been operating through deficit spending for the last several decades. How serious is this? Pretty dire, Hayworth said. In fact, a flyer entitled “The Facts About Our Debt,” which was created by the House Republican Conference and which was given to everyone in the audience, noted that the debt stands at $14 trillion, and that this amounts to a $45,500 “birth tax” for every kid born this year.

Read that again. Fact is that if you divide $14 trillion by $45,500, you learn that we can expect to have 308 million babies born in 2011. But just two years ago, only 4.1 million babies were born. Hayworth should get a bill passed to send the wizards at the GOP Conference to classes in remedial math and how to tell the truth.

No matter. Hayworth went on to explain the difference between mandatory spending and discretionary spending. The former is the money we spend on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The latter is everything else.

“We have a debt crisis because Washington spends too much, not because Washington taxes too little,” the mathematically challenged flyer said.

“I want taxes to be lower,” Hayworth said. “Our mission is to cut federal spending.” That might have sounded bold for a moment, but it was gutless because at no time did she say what it is she would cut or eliminate.

Come on, Congresswoman, be specific.

–Would you get rid of the Veterans Administration? VA hospitals? You could not be that cruel.

–The FBI? The Secret Service? How about the entire Justice Department so we can dismiss all those high paid U.S. attorneys and their staffs? Of course, this leaves unanswered the question of who would prosecute terror suspects.

–How about federal agriculture assistance? Oh wait, not with all the farms in Orange County and the rest of your district.

–Congressional salaries? What about the House of Representatives cafeteria? You’re in the House majority; will you propose a pay cut?

–The Army Corps of Engineers? Lot of griping about the corps after Katrina, right?

–How about the National Weather Service? Oops, farmers depend on this service.

–The Internal Revenue Service? Ha-ha! That’s a good one. Who would collect the taxes that you don’t want to spend on anything frivolous?

–Yellowstone National Park? After all, it’s just a big wilderness with some geysers.

–The Small Business Administration? Uh, better not; you’d have a lot of explaining to do to calm the Chamber of Commerce.

–The Food and Drug Administration? Hey, if people can’t figure out which products are impure, maybe they should just go take a class somewhere.

–The Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program that gets milk, eggs, juice and bread to poor women and kids under 5? Nah, no one could be vicious enough to do away with this. Could they?

Hayworth never addressed the question of what she would cut. So on Monday I sent her an e-mail and asked her. As soon as I get a response, I’ll post it right here at Zest of Orange.

Reach Jeff at jeffrey @zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
We’re fighting in Afghanistan. We’re fighting in Iraq. Now we’re fighting in Libya. But don’t get us wrong; we don’t want to be the world’s cop. Will there be a fourth?

Recently, the Arab League put out a call for someone to deal with Qaddafi, and the clear message was that “someone” did not refer to members of the Arab League. Then the UN called for a no-fly zone over Libya.

Before you could utter the oxymoronic “desert quagmire” there we were in the Libyan sky with the French and British.

Right or wrong – wrong, I think – the United States did nothing about the murderous Qaddafi for his role in the bombing of Flight 103 over Lockerbie, but here we are 23 years later, serving as the Hessian for the colonel’s unhappy neighbors.

So where next?

All you have to do to figure that out is get your hands on a globe, give it a good spin and stop the turning with your index finger. We probably can have a war wherever you’re pointing because chances are we already have troops there or nearby World cop? Not us.

Some Americans go to bed hungry. Some can’t afford the price of a prescription medication. Some send their kids to crummy schools. But we spend countless millions in posting our military in 149 countries on every continent. Some are embassy guards. All are combat-ready troops.

Not the cop of the earth? Really? Here’s some information you might find interesting from the Defense Department’s “Active Duty Military Personnel Strengths by Regional Area and by Country” as of Sept. 30, 2010.

–We have 9,646 troops in Italy, 1,379 in Djibouti.

–We have 16 in Romania, 8 in Albania, and 7 in Lithuania.

–We have 110 in Thailand. We have 133 in Greenland. We have 442 in Holland and 275 in Egypt.

–We have 11 in Ghana, 44 in the Bahamas. We have 22 in Nigeria, 19 in Somalia.

–We have 1,252 stationed in Belgium.

–We have 53,951 in Germany, 1,530 in Turkey, and 15 in Haiti.

–We have 1,240 in Spain.

–We have 10 in Slovakia, 8 in Slovenia.

–We have 9,229 in Britain, 36 in Liberia, 17 in Uruguay.

–We have 703 in Portugal, 24 in El Salvador.

–We have 15 troops in Kazakhstan, 11 in Kyrgyzstan, 6 in Tajikistan, 5 in Uzbekistan, 133 in Pakistan, 4 in Turkmenistan, and 105,900 in Afghanistan.

–We’ve got 34,385 stationed in Japan, 1,349 in Bahrain.

–We have 913 at Guantanamo Bay, 338 in Greece.

–We have 35 in Kenya, 47 in Russia. We have 23 in Argentina.

–We have 42 in Peru, 39 in Brazil, 28 in Mexico.

–Hell, we even have 127 in Canada, where I think they like us, and 17 in Venezuela, where I think they don’t.

–We have 6 in Malta, 130 in Australia, 35 in Israel, 555 in Qatar, 239 in Saudi Arabia.

–We have 39 in South Africa, 15 in Yemen.

–We have 403 in Honduras, 2 in Belize, 96,200 in Iraq, 14 in Bolivia.

–We have 16 in Vietnam.

–Figures for South Korea are hard to come by, but it seems we have about 30,000 troops there.

There are more, roo many to mention.

In several places – including Iran, Iceland, Somalia, Palau, Malawi, Liechtenstein and Andorra – we have no troops at all.

The remaining 1,133,699 troops are in the United States and its territories.

Jeff can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
Never mind the explosions. Never mind the fires. Never mind the leaked radiation drifting to the clouds and that a complete meltdown is possible.

Never mind all that because important voices are telling us – despite our complete understanding of the calamitous news of the last few days – that nuclear energy remains the way to go. And you have to wonder what these people have been reading during the days since Friday when, in fact, the world changed. Surely not the news out of Sendai in northern Japan.

The New York Times, after conceding that what happened in Japan amounts to the worst nuclear “accident” since Chernobyl in 1986, goes on to editorialize that nuclear power will remain “a valuable tool” for the United States.

“But the public needs to know that it is a safe one,” The Times notes, as though you might disagree with the paper’s astute observation.

Meanwhile, upstate, in the 20th Congressional District, the Saratogian newspaper reported that Rep. Chris Gibson’s support of nuclear power remains undiminished following the incident in Japan. “I want it done and I want it done safely,” Gibson declares as if to suggest you might be in the camp that doesn’t want it done safely.

Gibson wants to have a nuclear generator built in his district. “Energy is a passion for me because it can be a game changer for the economy,” Gibson, a member of Congress for 72 days, told the Saratogian.

Needless to say, The Times and Gibson are not alone in wishing for safe sources of energy. The problem, of course, is that Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now Sendai in Japan have shown us that essentially there’s no such thing as safety when it comes to nuclear power plants. What Gibson and the newspaper are forgetting is that certain forces, completely beyond anyone’s control, were the catalyst that set the Japanese reactor off.

Maybe the plant in Sendai would have survived for another 50 years had last Friday been like any other Friday in northern Japan. But there was the little matter of the earthquake, which measured 9 in intensity, one of the most severe on record.

So let us design a reactor to withstand a quake of 9.0. But if the next earthquake happens to measure 9.5, what then? Rebuild to make the plant safe from a magnitude 10 quake? And what do we tell the people who lose their families when that reactor is fatally damaged? That nuclear power is a valuable tool? That we want it done but safely? That energy is our passion?

When it comes to nuclear energy, the problems never end. The news is about Japan and fires and explosions, but have you seen a story about the other monster problem, that of safe disposal of nuclear waste?

And then there’s Indian Point. NBC reports that federal regulators are trying to figure out how vulnerable the nuclear plant in Buchanan is to earthquakes. MSNBC reported that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission found Indian Point the most vulnerable in the nation.

And then there’s terrorism.

One of these days we’re going to get serious and acknowledge that as nice and cheap as it would be to derive our energy needs from a stack of radioactive rocks, nuclear plants will always be a danger.

In the meantime, let’s stop fooling around. Because records are made to be broken, let’s design a nuke for Gibson’s district that’ll withstand a quake with a magnitude of 15. That should do it.

But some questions: Do you think Chris Gibson would move into a terrific new house next door, down the road or even within 20 miles of the plant? Would the Times editorial staff?

Would you?

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.