By Jeffrey Page

Six days after she inhaled the spores, Kathy T. Nguyen was dead, the only New Yorker to die in the anthrax attacks that terrorized the nation in the weeks after 9/11. From the time she took sick on Oct. 25, 2001 until her death six days later, the press usually referred to her as little more than a lonely woman living in a rented apartment in the Bronx.
 
Last week, the FBI announced the conclusion of its nearly decade-long investigation into the anthrax terror with a finding that an Army biologist, who committed suicide in 2008, mailed the spores that infected 22 people and killed five. And even last week, Nguyen was mentioned in news accounts as “a hospital employee.”

In 2001 I was a reporter at The Record in Hackensack. In the fearful days after the 9/11 attacks, when anthrax spores were mailed to senators and news organizations, my editor and I agreed that no one should go to her grave with just a job title as her obituary. This is what I learned about Kathy Nguyen.

Who was she? Nguyen was one of the few Asians living in Crotona Park East, a mostly Puerto Rican neighborhood. One of her neighbors, Ana Rodriguez, recalled that she and Nguyen cooked for each other in their own ethnic styles. “She used to make me Vietnamese wonton soup and I used to cook Puerto Rican for her,” Rodriguez said. “She was a beautiful woman. She didn’t socialize or go out a lot.”

Others said she was an easy touch for neighbors in need of a few dollars and that she most likely died with some money owed her.

Gina Ramjassingh and Kathy Nguyen had become best friends when they worked at a downtown clothing factory. Nguyen was in charge of distributing patterns and fabrics to Ramjassingh and the other seamstresses. The two friends used to go out to the movies on Friday nights, and for a while, Ramjassingh lived in Nguyen’s building on Freeman Street until she got married and moved to Queens.

Kathy Thi Nguyen was born in Saigon in 1940 and raised by an uncle after her parents died, Ramjassingh said. She married a man who was later killed in the war; Ramjassingh didn’t know on which side he fought. Nguyen told her friend she had owned a tavern in Saigon and that she got on well with the Americans.

Nguyen and her husband had a son. In one of the mysteries of her life, Nguyen turned her son over to a cousin – the son of the uncle who had raised her – left Vietnam, and traveled to the United States. Her priest and most of her friends said this was around 1979. She sent money to her cousin for the care of her son. Later she got word that her son had died, Ramjassingh said.

After she became a U.S. citizen Nguyen married a man in California. Ramjassingh said Nguyen told her this was a marriage of convenience to a Chinese man who wanted quick citizenship. After he got his papers, he disappeared.

Eventually, around 1991, Kathy Nguyen left the clothing factory and got a job as a stockroom clerk at Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital. In the next 10 years of her life, she established an exemplary attendance record at the hospital, and it was this devotion to her employers that might have contributed to her death.

On a Thursday in late October, just 44 days after Sept. 11, Nguyen experienced chills and muscle pain. The next day, she still felt very sick, but instead of getting herself to a doctor or an emergency room, she insisted on going to work because in her decade at Manhattan Ear and Ear she had never called in sick.

On Saturday her condition worsened.

On Sunday she had shortness of breath, a bad cough and chills. A friend took her to the emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital where she was admitted when her illness was diagnosed as inhalation anthrax, the most serious form of the disease.

She had reduced liver function on Monday and had trouble breathing on Tuesday. On Wednesday, she died.

Because Nguyen was unconscious much of the time during her illness, authorities never interviewed her. Where could she have contracted anthrax? They searched her apartment, examined her mailbox, her workplace. Nothing. Then they checked her clothing and found a few spores on a coat. One line of reasoning at the time held that she might have picked them up on a crowded subway train. Or maybe a benign letter addressed to her had come in contact, in the vast postal system, with an envelope containing anthrax spores on its way to someone else.

There are no public monuments to the memory of this lost New Yorker save her gravesite in the Holy Cross section of St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx.

A lonely woman? Kathy Nguyen had no family left, but 400 people crowded into St. John Chrysostom Roman Catholic Church for her funeral mass. They were her friends, neighbors, co-workers, and even her landlord, officers of her union, Local 1199 of the Health and Hospital Workers, and officials of the hospitals where she worked and where she died.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

A friend of mine says President Obama could arrange for the Second Coming and he’d still be dismissed by a certain racist element that can never forgive or forget his blackness. She’s probably right, and I’m reminded of a column by Maureen Dowd last September when the president appeared before Congress to talk about health care. It was the night Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted “You lie” at Obama, and Dowd observed that she heard one more word that went unspoken: “Boy.”

I recall seeing a picture of a roadside sign – “Zoo has an African lion, White House has a lyin’ African” – and was angered by the coded message. I listen to the idiotic rants about Obama’s birth and wonder what planet these people live on. Surely it is not earth.

Reasonable people want this good and decent man to succeed – in the wake of the eight dark years of Bush. We elected him; he is our president. But I suspect that in addition to that Second Coming, he could come up with a cure for cancer and a plan for world disarmament and some people would still regard him as the black guy in the White House.

The right wing has done a number on him and just 13 months into the Obama administration, there must be a gnawing in the Democratic stomach, something hinting that the political makeup of the nation could change in November, and that the change could be painful and long lasting. Obama is the target of course, but truth be told, with some of his moves this past year, he has contributed to what could be the undoing this year of the Democratic majorities in Congress.

Questions.

Was there a good reason why Obama had to have a health care bill in his first year? Couldn’t he have waited 18 months? Maybe two years? Shouldn’t he have known that dramatic changes would scare a lot of honest people without axes to grind and that maybe they might have needed more time to understand what the changes were all about?

Remember how John Kerry frittered away the summer of 2004 before responding to the Swift Boat lies about him? Shouldn’t Obama have known that you don’t wait for slander to go away. You strike it and kill it in its tracks. Why didn’t he move quicker and more forcefully during the summer of 2009 to take on the Tea Partiers and their lies about health care?

Remember the guy who said he didn’t want government getting involved in his Medicare? Liberals snickered at his ignorance. But why didn’t the White House understand that that one man represented millions more with legitimate worries about medical care? Obama could have – should have – seized the moment, convened a Town Hall meeting, invited only older, more conservative people to ask questions and let them get answers from the president himself.

Why didn’t Obama make mincemeat out of Limbaugh when Limbaugh said he hoped Obama would fail? Doesn’t the nation fail when the president fails?

Why did Obama delight the political right by appointing a treasury secretary who hadn’t paid his taxes? Did he think this would go unnoticed?

Why did Rahm Emanuel use the expression “fucking retarded” to describe a plan he didn’t like? “Stupid” wasn’t good enough? Emanuel played right into Palin’s hands. Surely I wasn’t the only person to remember that her son Trig is one of 400,000 Americans with Down Syndrome. Their families, neighbors and friends constitute an awful lot of people to piss off.

Aside from the fact that Robert Gates is far more appealing than Donald Rumsfeld, could someone explain the difference between the wars with Bush as commander-in-chief and the wars with Obama as commander-in-chief?

How did the Obama Administration manage to schedule the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed for downtown New York without first conferring with the mayor, the police commissioner, the governor?

Fallout.

Scott Brown gets elected in Massachusetts and some Democrats are relieved because they still have 59 votes. So they need to get just one Republican senator to vote with them. Good luck to that. And, uh, fellows, among that group of 59 are such great Democratic stalwarts as Joe Lieberman and Arlen Specter, plus several Blue Dogs. Enjoy your majority.

Kennedy of course is gone. His son Patrick is quitting the House.

Some polls suggest Barbara Boxer may have a rough re-election this year. I don’t recall the last time she had to struggle.

Republicans, sensing blood, are falling all over one another for the right to challenge Rep. John Hall.

Dodd, Bayh and Byron Dorgan are leaving the Senate. And Beau Biden, Joe’s son, decided not to run for his dad’s Delaware Senate seat, which once he could have had just by yelling “Gimme.”

Is anyone willing to bet on the future career of Harry Reid?

Who would have thought that one year after the Bush nightmare ended, there would appear in Minneapolis a huge billboard showing a picture of a smiling George W. Bush and the words “Miss me yet?” Miss Bush? That’s impossible, right?

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but don’t push me.

That said, there’s something very strange occurring in the country these days. Prevarication Central at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee seems to be doing its Orwellian best to rewrite history. They want us to believe the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Virginia didn’t occur on George W. Bush’s watch. Clearly they want the nation to believe the lie that Two-Gun Bush was so tough that America’s enemies knew that to mess with him was to risk destruction. It’s also possible that since Bush did such a masterful job of wrecking the economy, the GOP would like history books – and voters in the next election – to distance him from the catastrophe of 9/11. One disaster is enough.

On three occasions in the last three months, prominent Republicans who have served in elective and appointive positions in government have suggested the impossible – that the attacks must have taken place late in the administration of Bill Clinton, which ended eight months earlier, or very early in the administration of Barak Obama, which didn’t begin for another seven and a half years. How this is possible is never explained.

If such patent nonsense had come from the mouths of three people outside politics I could accept that they simply didn’t know what they were talking about. But it’s worse than that. This lie about the terror-less Bush administration was spread by three educated people who know better.

— “We had no domestic attacks under Bush; we’ve had one under Obama,” said Rudolph Giuliani during an interview by George Stephanopoulos last Friday on “Good Morning America.” Giuliani studied political science at Manhattan College and law at New York University. No domestic attacks under Bush? Has he forgotten the rubble of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001? Has he forgotten Richard Reid, the lunatic who tried to blow up a plane with explosives hidden in his shoes? Has he forgotten the anthrax attacks that killed five people including Kathy Nguyen, 61, of the Bronx – one of his 7 million constituents?  

— “We inherited a recession from President Clinton and we inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation’s history,” said Mary Matalin in December. Matalin, 56, was an adviser to Vice President Cheney. She graduated from Western Illinois University, where she majored in political science, and from the Hofstra University law school. We “inherited” 9/11? Is she mad, comatose, or just a resident of another planet?

— “We did not have a terrorist attack during President Bush’s term,” said Dana Perino in November. Perino, 37, was Bush’s last press secretary. She is a graduate of the University of Southern Colorado, where she majored mass communications, two of whose requirements are getting the facts and telling the truth. She has a master’s degree in public affairs reporting from the University of Illinois at Springfield. No attack under Bush? Nice try, but ask the families and friends of the 3,000 people murdered on Sept. 11 who was running the show. Ask the people aboard American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami who subdued Reid. Ask the friends of Kathy Nguyen, who died miserably of inhalation anthrax just 50 days after Sept. 11.

You have to be pretty cynical about the intelligence of the American people to look into a television camera and spew the drivel that came from Giuliani, Matalin and Perino. Not that they were challenged by their interviewers – who just let these falsehoods slide.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Here comes Uncle Grump, the governor of New York, to tell you that those extra pounds you’ve gained over the years may have come from drinking Cokes, Dr. Pepper and all those coffee concoctions that come in bottles and seem to end in “cino.”

Watch out, because now that he has unveiled a $134 billion budget proposal – with a built-in deficit of $7.4 billion – Grump also has a plan to generate $465 million in new taxes. Guess who pays.

Governor Paterson’s idea is a new play of an old theme. The state needs cash. So he describes a particular product, usually a popular one – this time it’s sugary soft drinks, but on occasion it has been cigarettes – as dangerously unhealthy. Government to the rescue. So since the product in question isn’t beneficial to you, government taxes it but hopes that because you like it so much you’ll ignore the health warning, keep buying it and pay the additional tax on it.

The insincerity is staggering.

Paterson wants to tax sodas and some other sweetened drinks at the rate of a penny an ounce. A six-pack of Coke would cost you an additional 72 cents.

The Times-Union in Albany quoted State Health Commissioner Richard Daines praising the soda tax because it reduces obesity, saves on future health care costs, and pulls in that $465 million a year. Daines called it “a triple play.” Of course he forgot that he’s talking about a legal substance that millions of New Yorkers enjoy every day.

Question 1: If Paterson and Daines are so concerned about the public’s waistline, why don’t they insist that the penny-an-ounce tax be imposed on sugar sold by the pound at supermarkets? How about a tax on the syrup you like to pour on your pancakes at your favorite breakfast place. And you know that Irish coffee you enjoy on cold winter nights, or the rum and Cokes, rye and gingers and 7& 7s you occasionally sip before dinner out? Tax them, too. Whoa! Paterson isn’t that concerned about obesity. (In case you missed it, we elect a governor in 279 days.)

Question 2: Why are Paterson and Daines not asking that other products be taxed due to their ability to make people gain weight? How about a penny an ounce on butter? A penny an ounce on hot dogs made with lots of fat? A penny an ounce on the sale of cheese Danish? A penny an ounce on salt? And why doesn’t Grump call for an additional tax on wine, not because it makes you gain weight but because it’s a product with a label warning that women who consume alcohol while pregnant run the risk of having a baby with birth defects. You don’t see an alarm like that on a can of root beer.

Answer: Because taxing such things as butter would make a governor, whose popularity is already in question, even more politically vulnerable. One important rule of politics is that you can’t annoy too many constituencies at the same time.

For now, the talk is only about taxing soda. You know, the stuff that kids like and whose consumption ought to be controlled by their moms and dads, not the state. If Paterson is concerned about children gaining weight, he should direct Daines to launch a public awareness program and notify the public of its availability and leave parenting to parents.
Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

I’ve never understood the logic of United Way. Operating through voluntary payroll deduction at several places I’ve worked, their pitch was that if I agreed to turn over, say, $10 a week to United Way, United Way would do me the honor of using my $500 a year to support various charitable endeavors.

It made no sense to me and I never participated. Why support the middle man when I can cut him out? United Way has rent, salaries and other administrative expenses to pay. Guess where that money comes from. United Way of Dutchess County, for example, spends about 8.2 percent of its revenues on administration, according to an online charity watchdog called charitynavigator.com. This means my $500 would really amount to $459 for people in need.

Since this column is ultimately about Haiti, I should note that Doctors Without Borders spends 1.1 percent on administrative expenses.

I acknowledge that the people who run United Way have to make a living. I acknowledge it, but I don’t support it. Instead of paying them to distribute my charitable donation, I can choose which causes I want to assist and contribute directly to them. This is not complicated; I do it every year.

Now comes word from the Huffington Post and MoveOn that as Americans contribute huge amounts for Haitian relief following the earthquake – and making many of those donations on plastic – the credit card companies are getting rich.

Huffington reports that such credit card contributions are subject to the same “administrative fee” that credit card companies collect from airlines, rental car companies, your local liquor shop, department stores and every other business we patronize with our plastic charge cards. In the case of charitable giving, the banks’ cut is 3 percent.

So here it is again, the uncharitable fee imposed for offering charity. Make that $500 donation on your credit card and understand that the recipient agency gets only $485. Through this 3 percent cut of the action, banks and credit card companies rake in an estimated $250 million a year.

If you devised a scheme to withhold 3 percent of your donation and chalk it up to your own administrative expenses, you’d be ridiculed by friends and shunned by strangers. But when banks do it, it looks great in their annual reports and makes for a great announcement at their shareholder meetings.

Now, during the Haitian catastrophe, Huffington reports that Visa, Master Card, American Express and Discover are foregoing their 3 percent fees – until the end of February. As if to suggest that the rehabilitation of Port-au-Prince and the rest of the Haitian western half of the Island of Hispaniola will be complete in another 39 days.

I called Visa and was told by a customer service rep that donors can have the 3 percent fee waived just by asking. I wonder how people know about this. Then I called Visa’s public relations office to ask about this, and they sent me a copy of a press release in which Visa essentially congratulates itself for donating $200,000 for Haitian relief. Not exactly the question I’d asked.

Remember your checkbook?

A modest proposal: If you want to help the Haitian people, leave your plastic in your wallet. Instead, write a personal check to the charity of your choice and know that your donation – $500, $50, or $5 – remains intact.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Now’s the time for certain Senate Democrats exhibiting bizarre behavior to be relieved of leadership positions and to give the party back to fair-minded people.

Last month it was Charles Schumer, our genius senator from New York, calling a woman flight attendant who displeased him “a bitch,” and getting away with it. There was some critical talk for a day or so, and then all manner of Schumer’s sexist streak – what would he have called a male attendant? – vanished, like it never happened.

And now, a new book quotes Schumer’s Senate colleague, Majority Leader Harry Reid, commenting in 2008 on Barak Obama’s appearance and voice in light of his presidential aspirations. Obama is a “light-skinned” black man, Reid said. Why do I get a sense there was more to this than sheer observation, and that Reid was suggesting that such a lighter skinned African-American would be a better fit for the Democratic ticket than a dark-skinned African-American?

Reid also noted that Obama has “no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.” (Good god, did the Democratic majority leader of the United States Senate really just refer to a “Negro dialect?” In this, the 21st century?) Reid was saying that Obama’s “Negro dialect” allowed him to sound one way when speaking before the NAACP, another while addressing a reunion of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and a third while appearing before the (non-existent) National Council of Debate Enunciation. I walk away from this thinking that Reid was really saying that Obama can sound pretty white when he thinks it’s necessary.

Obama has acknowledged such varying tones, but hold the thought for a minute because Reid’s concerns seem a little one-sided. If Reid ever took note of the fact that Hillary Clinton’s artificial southern drawl was evident when she campaigned in the south but is nonexistent now when she meets with Hamid Karzai to discuss the legitimacy of the Afghan election, I missed the story.

And if Reid has wondered about that blackboard-squealing Texas drawl of President George W. Bush – who grew up in New England, attended Yale, moved to Texas and only then developed the accent – I apologize but I never saw that story either.

Democrats, having given Schumer a pass by their silence last month, now are falling all over themselves defending Reid. Dianne Feinstein of California, noting that Reid apologized to President Obama and that Obama accepted his regrets, said enough is enough. Let’s move on.

Well, wait a second. You don’t have to be Obama himself to be mortified by Reid’s drivel about “Negro” skin color and speech patterns, and you didn’t have to be the flight attendant to be outraged by Schumer’s sexual slur aboard that airplane. Decent Americans will reject such drivel.

I hate the political tit-for-tat that amounts to: The other party did it and didn’t have to pay a price so why should we? The Republicans are using this line and it’s tiresome. Several have interrupted their field day against Reid with remembrances of the pressure exerted on their own majority leader, Trent Lott, to step down eight years ago when he spoke glowingly of Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential bid on a segregation-forever platform.

Lott resigned as majority leader, but Reid is showing no signs of giving up his leadership post, leading Senator John Cornyn, R-Texas to sniff about a double standard. Cornyn was quite wrong.

Granted, Reid spoke the words of an idiot, but what he said was a far cry from Lott’s worshipful recalling the days of the height of Jim Crow – 54 years after the fact.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

In Zest of Dec. 15, I wondered whether the pay of New York’s state senators should be withheld when they ignore the public and basically go out on strike as they did last spring. Now, some readers have joined the discussion.

First, a quick review. The senators got into a hissy fit over who was going to run the Senate. They said this was an ethics issue lest anyone conclude that it was a political matter. Then they basically closed down for a month when the warring sides could not reach an agreement. Even when Governor Paterson ordered the Senate to convene to do the people’s business, a move within his power, the distinguished ladies and gentlemen of the Senate would assemble in their chamber, have the clerk call the roll, and with a quorum present they’d entertain a measure to adjourn. This they did time after time.

Despite such behavior, we pay our senators $79,000 a year, making them among the highest paid state legislators in the country.

The Dec. 15 Zest piece suggested that Paterson dock the senators’ pay when they refuse to report for work, and that if Senate members had a problem with that, they could sue. Wouldn’t it be fun to listen to a senator or two, or all of them, swear to be truthful, sit down in the witness chair, and tell the sad story of how much good they do and how they are suffering without a paycheck. Would some even threaten to quit if they didn’t get their salaries? Not likely.

From one Zest reader comes the caution that 62 senators suing for their pay would be a very expensive, time consuming proposition. He also notes that a salary for senators is guaranteed in the state Constitution. And there it is, Article III, Section 6: “Each member of the legislature shall receive for his or her services a like annual salary, to be fixed by law.” Which means that that $79,000 could be un-fixed by law. Of course it would take a legislator or two with conviction to introduce such a measure.

Do you know of any senator willing to do it? I don’t. But let the word go forth: The people are looking for a few radicals in the legislature to head up a cause. Any takers?

Another reader thinks the senators deserve to be paid but says, “It’s time to enact a law that says members of the Senate and Assembly must earn salaries no larger than the salary of the average person whom he/she represents.” I didn’t do the district-by-district math, but I learned this month that the $79,000 base pay for state legislators is 48 percent higher than the average pay of $38,000 for all New Yorkers. This, according to Census data. They even get paid to cover the cost of getting to Albany. Does your boss give you money to get to and from work?

The reader ends with a nice populist flourish: “Let these [senators] learn how to wash their own cars, clean their own houses, mow their own lawns, and shop using coupons.”

Contempt for the Senate gets juicier with a suggestion by a reader named Steve that our elected politicians get merit pay instead of a standard salary for all. After all, many of these men and women have jabbered for years about the need for merit pay for teachers.

“Let our political leaders produce something useful before being paid,” Steve says. “If any of them don’t like such an arrangement, they would be free to seek employment elsewhere.” To which I would add: They don’t even have to give two weeks notice.

What do you think will happen on Election Day in 11 months? Despite the disgust people felt for their senators during their springtime power play, a man in Warwick believes people will complain about the Legislature all the way to the polls, where they will decide that their own individual senators are not such bad guys after all. And nothing will change.

I think he’s probably right – unless people are as angry as they claim to be.

Best wishes to all for a happy new year.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

In 2006, Senator George Allen, the noted conservative from Virginia, was happily sailing along toward election to a second term. There was even talk about his making a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.

But in a campaign stop, he saw a young Indian-American man taping his speech, and sarcastically introduced him to the crowd. Twice he referred to the man as “macaca,” which may be a historic European mispronunciation of macaque (ma-KAK), a genus of monkey that inhabits North Africa and South Asia. But enough of science. “Macaca” is a racial slur used by certain ignoramuses to describe dark-skinned people.

“Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia,” Allen addressed the man. If anyone needed an introduction to the real world it was Allen. The man, S.K. Sidarth, was born in California, raised in Virginia and was working for Allen’s opponent, Jim Webb. The last time anyone checked, this was legal.

The press had a field day with Allen, as well it should. He lost the election to Webb.

Last week, Senator Charles Schumer, the noted liberal from New York who’ll probably seek a third term next year, was aboard an airliner in Washington with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand for the flight to New York. Both were on their cell phones. A flight attendant, a woman, went over and told them they would have to end their calls so the pilot could get the trip started.

There were words; Schumer’s an important guy. But he and Gillibrand ended their calls, and as the attendant walked away, Schumer turned to Gillibrand and muttered a one-syllable description of the attendant.

“Bitch.”

The slur that will not die, and used here by a powerful member of the United States Senate against someone with no such power, someone doing her job.

It’s likely the story would have ended there, but a Republican party staffer was on board and heard Schumer reveal something about himself that a lot of us didn’t know. The GOP aide made the appropriate phone calls. It took a while, and Schumer finally apologized. But his regret reeked of phoniness.

Follow this chronology and statement. The flight was on Dec. 13. Schumer was so stricken by his use of this particular slur that he didn’t say a word about it until it was reported by politico.com on Dec. 15. His apology came on Dec. 16. Did Schumer go before the cameras and recite it? He most certainly did not. After all, he’s a senator.

Instead, he sent an aide out front: “The senator made an off-the-cuff comment under his breath that he shouldn’t have made, and he regrets it.”

The Times reported that Schumer called the flight attendant to apologize – also after the politico story appeared.

One of the things we learned about Schumer in this smelly episode is what he did not do. A moment after he uttered the word “bitch,” Schumer didn’t slap his hand over his mouth, apologize to the flight attendant then and there in front of all the passengers who heard the slur, and ask her for forgiveness.

Schumer’s 20 million constituents need more information.

–Who was the last woman member of the Senate Schumer called a bitch? Or does he reserve that title for ordinary people who displease him? 

–What would Schumer have said if the flight attendant had been a man? Especially if the man had been six or eight inches taller than the senator?

–Does Schumer dismiss other groups with other slurs? You know the words; I’m not going to catalogue them. Or are women special?

George Allen’s political career tanked after “macaca,” but so far there doesn’t seem to be too much outrage over “bitch.” We know what this incident says about Schumer. Does the relative silence about it say something about the rest of us?

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Technically, this column is a mixed metaphor. Bear with me.

Somebody in Albany had the good sense to take a look at the state’s cash on hand and discovered it was $3 million – or about 15 cents per person. This is cutting things pretty thin. You know what 15 cents buys nowadays.

Governor Paterson understood the impossibility of this situation. No state can operate with such a threadbare treasury, especially if it wishes to sell bonds and even more especially if that state happens to be New York, the state of Wall Street, the financial capital of the world.

As a result, Paterson decided to withhold about $750 million in aid to the state’s municipalities and school districts. He said he wasn’t cancelling this assistance, but deferring it for now. He said he expects to be sued over his action, but so far he’s standing his ground. We shall see for how long.

So, as the state of New York teeters on the brink, let the howling from various interests begin. By the way, have you heard anything constructive from members of the State Senate or Assembly about the state’s wretched financial condition?

If the usual recipients of state aid are unhappy now, wait until the suspension of this assistance works its way down to the unhappiest people of all – the taxpayers. Schools and local government won’t be closed – and, in fact, we wouldn’t want them closed – but with cuts in aid to school districts and municipalities, it’s you, me and the guy next door who’ll be socked with higher taxes to make up the difference.

We’ve got to have that money to educate the children because the kids are our future and had nothing to do with making the current crisis, right? We’ve got to fund law enforcement agencies to keep ourselves safe, right? We have to fund Medicaid for poor people, right? We must continue funding our libraries, right? We want to make sure homeless people don’t freeze, right? We want the state parks to remain open for our enjoyment, right? It’s not even winter yet, but we want our highway departments fully staffed and equipped when the next snow falls, right? We’ve got to pay our municipal workers, right? We have to feed hungry people, right?

We’ve got to pay salaries to our elected officials, right? Uh, wait a second; hold that last thought.

Let us agree that it’s payback time. Remember earlier this year when the 62 members of the State Senate proved their incompetence as they forced the end of important legislative business by closing the Senate for a month? Remember how those ladies and gentlemen yammered about what they called “reform” and what the rest of us knew was lust for power?

Those geniuses in the Senate owe 20 million New Yorkers for their bipartisan temper tantrum, and so a modest proposal.

Governor Paterson could more than double the state’s cash on hand by withholding the $4.9 million that the 62 senators get every year. (Each receives $79,000, with members of the leadership getting a little more; would you believe it?) In this way, he could defer only $745,100,000 to the schools and towns. It’s a pittance in the great scheme of things, but wouldn’t it make you happy to know the senators are suffering some of the pain that we’re all feeling?

Let Paterson be sued. It would be refreshing to put a couple of members of the State Senate in a witness chair, under oath, and have them describe what it is they actually do to merit a salary 48 percent higher than the pay most of their constituents get.

The extra money won’t help New York much. But making life a little difficult, maybe a little embarrassing, for the members of the State Senate might be a lot of fun. Make them hire attorneys. Make them go to their in-laws for a loan to tide them over until they get a check from whatever it is they do when they’re not being senators.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Big changes are coming to Warwick.

Almost directly across the road from one supermarket on Route 94 will be a second supermarket, and there will be other new businesses along 94 just outside the Village of Warwick. Add to this the existing retail shops, car dealers, garden shops, machine rentals, etc. and you can understand three major concerns.

One is traffic. A second is the effect of new development on the downtown commercial area of the village. A third is the changing nature of the town and village. Some people say enough is enough. Others are OK with it.

Last month, a man began his letter to the editor of The Warwick Advertiser with a provocative thought: “I wonder how different Warwick would be if the residents back in, say, 1960 had decided ‘no more development.’”

He ended with a rhetorical question, and his answer to it. “Would Warwick be a better place? I don’t think so.”

And so, a modest proposal: Replace the word “Warwick” with the word “Wallkill” and read the letter again. Make other changes if you wish. Here’s how it sounded when I tried it:

I wonder how different Wallkill would be if the residents back in, say, 1960 had decided “no more development.”

Would Wallkill be a better place? I think it would.

Then I called Glenn Doty, who was the managing editor of The Times Herald-Record when I got a job there in 1972. Glenn grew up in Warwick, lived much of his adult life in Middletown, and today lives in Walden.

I asked him to imagine it was 1960 again and that he was driving south on Route 211 from Scotchtown, through the Town of Wallkill, and into Middletown. What was it like? What did he see?

“It was farm country,” Glenn said. “You’d pass several farms on your way into the city of Middletown. And when there wasn’t a farm, you’d see acres of vacant land.”

The area had yet to be discovered by developers, a group of people who salivate at the very thought of vacant land. Route 211 was a country road, not the endless strand of malls, stores, restaurants, burger places and traffic-light-after-traffic-light it would become.

“It was quiet,” Glenn said. “There wasn’t much traffic at all.”

He recalled the first rumblings of development. It was a decision by Ed Lloyd to open a large – by early 1960s standards – supermarket on 211 about halfway between Wisner Avenue and the site of the present Orange Plaza.

“Ed Lloyd was running a grocery store in Middletown at the time and decided to expand out into Wallkill,” Glenn said. “Everybody thought he was crazy.”

As they say, crazy like a fox.

Aprés Lloyd, le dèluge. In came Orange Plaza. In came the Caldor mall. In came the burger places. In came the sit-down restaurants. In came Sears and Sullivan’s, J.C. Penney and Green’s, Thom McAn and Steinbach’s. Later, in came the Galleria, which put Orange Plaza out of business for 10 years or so until it reopened. (Lloyd also opened a supermarket in Warwick; it eventually became the Shop Rite that exists today on Route 94.)

With the massive commercial development, in came more and more traffic until 211 couldn’t handle it anymore. And in came the traffic lights. And in came the traffic jams. Then, in came the expansion of Route 211, which used to be a two-lane road. And with the widening, in came even more traffic.

As Wallkill’s commercial base expanded under the slightly purplish haze of carbon monoxide, the central business district of Middletown suffered terribly. (Now, it’s finally coming back, however slowly.) Not only did Wallkill’s development injure the city, it even caused much of its own rural character to vanish.

In the future, when someone suggests that Route 94, Kings Highway, Route 17A and County Route 1 be widened to make travel to Warwick easier to reach, remember Route 211 – in 1960 and now.

And when it is further suggested that town and village officials make it easier for developers to build a couple of swell malls – let’s say another few Gallerias – remember the Town of Wallkill – in 1960 and now.

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A Clarification: In a rush to file last week’s blog, I noted – without attribution – that threats against President Obama’s safety were running 400 percent greater than against the previous few presidents. Without citing a source, this could have left the impression that it was an official Secret Service statistic. In fact, it comes from a book about the Secret Service and was disputed by Mark Sullivan, the director of the Secret Service, in testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com