By Carrie Jacobson

I’ve been too busy lately, just too busy, and things have been slipping.

It’s OK,  it happens, but when it goes on for too long, it makes me a little crazy. It does truly feel like slipping, like being on a conveyor belt covered with oil, and doing a cartoon dance – whoops! whoops! WHOOPS! The world, with all its promises and commitments, is going by me faster than I can manage to go myself.

Of course, if it’s housework that slips, or yard work, cooking meals, or getting to the hair-cutter’s, that’s OK. But when it’s paintings, or work, or promises to friends, that’s not OK.

I wonder if this is part of what it feels like to get old — that you simply can’t get up the head of steam that you used to get up. That you can never catch up with the world, that it is always, and increasingly, going faster than you.

But now, the first big show of the season is behind me, and the next one is coming up — at the Wallkill River School gallery in Montgomery, starting April 1. The opening reception is April 14, from 5 to 7 p.m. Shawn Dell Joyce and I — both Zesters — are showing together.

Hope to not slip – and to see you there!

By Michael Kaufman 

Every time I listen to a speech by one of the Republican candidates for president I think of H.L. Mencken’s comment, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” Mencken died in 1956, well before the advent of cable TV, the internet, and the “information superhighway.” But somehow his words seem more applicable than ever. How else can one explain the strong support for Rick Santorum among women voters in Tuesday’s Republican primaries in Alabama and Mississippi?  

An article titled, “The Santorum Strategy: Why the Right Wins Even When It Loses,” posted earlier this week on the commondreams.org website by George Lakoff, provides a few clues. “The Santorum Strategy is not just about Santorum,” wrote Lakoff,  professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and author of Moral Politics, Don’t Think of an Elephant!, and other recent books. 

“It is about pounding the most…. conservative ideas into the public mind by constant repetition during the Republican presidential campaign and guaranteeing a radical conservative future forAmerica.” Lakoff warns progressives against taking Santorum and the other GOP hopefuls lightly, as some do now. “I am old enough to remember how liberals (me included) made fun of Ronald Reagan as a not-too-bright mediocre actor who could not possibly be elected president. I remember liberals making fun of George W. Bush as so ignorant and ill-spoken that Americans couldn’t possibly take him seriously. Both turned out to be clever politicians who changed America much for the worse. And among the things they and their fellow conservatives managed to do was change public discourse, and with it, change how a great many Americans thought.” 

The Republican presidential campaign has to be seen in this light.

“Brain circuitry strengthens with repeated activation,” says Lakoff. Language activates complex brain circuitry rooted in moral systems. “Conservative language, even when argued against, activates and strengthens conservative brain circuitry.” This he says is important when considering the role of so-called independents, whose brains can shift back and forth between conservative and liberal views. “The more they hear conservative language over the next eight months, the more their conservative brain circuitry will be strengthened.” 

Part of the Republican strategy, he says, is to get liberals to argue against them, while repeating conservative language. “There is a reason I wrote Don’t Think of an Elephant! When you negate conservative language, you activate conservative ideas and, hence, automatically and unconsciously strengthen the brain circuitry that characterizes conservative values.” 

This message is lost on those liberals and progressives who talk derisively about the Republican presidential race. Lakoff cites several examples, including Maureen Dowd who gleefully described the GOP candidates as “ridiculously weak and wacky.” 

“I hope that they are right,” says Lakoff. “But, frankly, I have my doubts. I think Democrats need much better positive messaging, expressing and repeating liberal moral values — not just policies….That is not happening.” He thinks this was a major factor in the thrashing the Dems received in the 2010 elections.

For example, says Lakoff, “Consider how conservatives got a majority of Americans to be against the Obama health care plan. The president had polled the provisions, and each had strong public support: No preconditions, no caps, no loss of coverage if you get sick, ability to keep your college-age child on your policy, and so on. These are policy details, and they matter.” The conservatives, however, never argued against any of those specific provisions. “Instead, they made a moral case against ‘Obamacare.’ Their moral principles were freedom and life, and they had language to go with them. Freedom: ‘government takeover.’ Life: ‘death panels.’ 

“Republicans at all levels repeated them over and over, and convinced millions of people who were for the policy provisions of the Obama plan to be against the plan as a whole. They changed the public discourse, changed the brains of the electorate — especially the ‘independents’ — and won in 2010.” 

Today, Democrats continue to miss the big picture. The extreme conservative discourse of the Republican presidential race has the same purpose, says Lakoff “and conservative Republicans are luring Democrats into making the same mistakes. Santorum….is the best example. From the perspective of conservative moral values, he is making sense and arguing logically, making his moral values clear and coming across as straightforward and authentic, as Reagan did.” 

The idealized conservative family, explains Lakoff, is built around a strict father, the natural leader, assumed to know right from wrong, whose authority is absolute and unchallengeable. He makes decisions about reproduction and he sets the rules. “Children must be taught right from wrong through strict, moral discipline. According to Lakoff, this concept extends onto the nation as a whole. “To be prosperous in a free market, one must be fiscally disciplined. If you are not prosperous, you must not be disciplined, and if you are not disciplined, you cannot be moral, and so you deserve your poverty. 

“For conservatives, democracy is about liberty, individual responsibility and self-reliance — the freedom to seek one’s own self-interest with minimal or no commitment to the interests of others.” According to Lakoff, the conservative populism personified by Santorum — in which poor conservatives vote against their own financial interests — depends on those voters having “strict father family values,” defining themselves in terms of those values, and voting on the basis of those values, thus choosing strict fathers as their political leaders.

 And as long as the Democrats have no positive moral messaging of their own, the strategy will go unchallenged and conservative populism will expand. “Moreover,” says Lakoff, “repeating the Santorum language by mocking it or arguing against it using that language will only help conservative propagate their views.” 

Democrats have been gleeful about the Santorum birth control strategy, taken up by conservatives in the House as a moral position that if you want to use birth control, you should pay for it yourself. Democrats see this as irrational Republican self-destruction, assuming that it will help all Democrats to frame it as a “war against women.” But according to Lakoff, the logic used by conservative populists, including many women, embodies some of the most powerful aspects of conservative moral logic: 

•Reproduction is the province of male authority.

•The strict father does not condone moral weakness and self-indulgence without moral consequences. Sex without reproductive consequences is thus seen as immoral.

•If the nation supports birth control for unmarried women, then the nation supports immoral behavior.

•No one else should have to pay for your birth control — not your employer, your HMO, or the taxpayers.

 Having to pay for your birth control also has a metaphorical religious value, says Lakoff: “paying for your sins.” And from this “slippery slope narrative,” the next step is that no one else should have to pay for any of your health care. And the step after that is that no one else should be forced to pay for anyone else….period. Everything should be privatized: education, safety nets, nursing homes, etc.  “It doesn’t take a village to raise a child,” Santorum is fond of repeating on the campaign trail. “It takes a family.”

 “That is what makes conservative moral logic into such a powerful instrument,” says Lakoff. Mock it at your own peril.  

Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.

Photography by Rich Gigli

The Incas called the potato “papas,” as they do today. Following is the Inca prayer that historians say they used to worship them.

“O Creator! Thou who givest life to all things and hast made men that they may live, and multiply. Multiply also the fruits of the earth, the potatoes and other food that thou hast made, that men may not suffer from hunger and misery.”

 

By Emily Theroux

Tuesday turned out to be another “scarlet-letter” day for American women fighting their way through the humiliating cultural thicket of the GOP “war on women.”

In Arizona, the state’s august Senate Judiciary Committee voted 6-2 to endorse a bill that would enable employers to require proof from women who work for them that any contraceptives covered by company health insurance policies are not being prescribed for them to prevent pregnancy. “Law Will Allow Employers to Fire Women for Using Whore Pills,” the Gawker website Jezebel.com proclaimed. This dubious act was proposed by Republican Senator Debbie Lesko, who insisted that her bill would enable us to keep our freedoms, because “we live in America; we don’t live in the Soviet Union.” The catch — and there’s always a catch — is that the “freedoms” she extolled are the religious freedoms of authoritarian men to oversee women’s reproductive health choices. (You can always tell, by the use of the word “freedom” in its plural form, exactly whose freedom is being preserved; the “s,” in the estimation of the Republican presidential candidates and their legislative cohorts, probably stands for “subservient.”)

In Missouri, Mitt Romney, who came up short in the two presidential primaries he hoped to win by pandering to Southern voters about “cheesy (sic) grits,” blurted out to a reporter, when asked how he would reduce the national debt, “Planned Parenthood, we’re going to get rid of that.” It’s going to be really entertaining to watch how the gaffe-prone Romney wiggles out of that admission. If he says he only meant getting rid of government funding for Planned Parenthood, wily “socialist” Rick Santorum is lying in wait to trip him up (and it’s true – Santorum really did use that terrible epithet, thereby violating Ronald Reagan’s cherished Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican”). Rick will claim that Mitt doesn’t loathe Planned Parenthood enough to wipe out the entire institution and every last one of its affiliates with Predator drones. If Romney lets his foolish proclamation stand, then women all over the country will rise up, just as they did during Komen-gate, and smite him at the ballot box.

In New York, where Newsweek/Daily Beast editor Tina Brown hosted her third “Women in the World” summit this past weekend, Hillary Clinton told the crowd that “extremists” are out to control women, “even here at home” in the United States. That caused agita Tuesday night at Fox News, where Megyn Kelly clashed with former Hillary adviser Jehmu Greene over the secretary’s remarks. Greene ticked off the rest of Kelly’s conservative panel by citing Rick Perry’s “vicious, vicious attacks on women’s health” (e.g., the Texas bill requiring that women seeking abortions first undergo mandatory ultrasounds) as evidence that a “war on women” really is being waged right here at home.

In additional “fair and balanced” news, Peter Doocy carped, in a story predictably titled “The Fairer Half,” about President Obama’s 2012 battle plan to woo women voters, a majority of whom helped elect him in 2008, back from the clutches of the valiant Republicans who spirited so many of them away during the strident Tea Party jousts of 2010. “Women are the ultimate swing voter,” Doocy quoted Republican political analyst Tony Sayegh. “They’re less ideologically rigid and they make very pragmatic decisions when it comes to who to vote for.”

Doocy added that Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant predicted before Tuesday’s primary that because women liked Romney so much, he would emerge the victor in the Southern primaries! “Fifty percent of the people voting in this primary will be women,” Bryant told Fox News. “Governor Romney has a great favorability rating with women, and I think a southern female professional woman is going to say: ‘That’s who I want to vote for.’ ”

So much for pre-game prognostication. A very different result on Tuesday night astonished Romney cheerleaders and cable news pundits alike. At 30 Rock, during the surprising aftermath of that day’s Republican primaries in dear old Dixie, poor Karen Finney found herself in a progressive pickle. After Santorum, the champion of the hour, figuratively told Mitt Romney to “kiss his grits” by winning both Deep South primaries, the ugly truth came out. Some 49 percent of the working women who voted in Alabama gave their electoral blessings not to Romney but to Santorum, who has been roundly excoriated by Democratic pundits like Finney, as well as much of the public, for his anti-feminist views and policy proposals. (Romney won only 20 percent of the votes cast by women who are employed full-time in Alabama, while Newt Gingrich won 23 percent.)

Finney’s reaction? She “shared her pain” on the air – something a woman is never supposed to do in public, as Hillary Clinton discovered just before the New Hampshire primary in 2008. During an exit poll analysis broadcast Tuesday night on MSNBC after both Southern primaries had been called for Rick Santorum, Finney declared, “This woman vote really hurts me!” – a sentiment for which she was pilloried the following morning all over the right-wing blogosphere.

A recent New York Times story indicates that the tide against right-wing misogyny may already be turning among women in America’s heartland. The reporter interviewed moderate Republican and centrist women in various regions of the country about whether they were still planning to vote for a Republican in the 2012 general election, as they did in prior years.

“ ‘We all agreed that this seemed like a throwback to 40 years ago’ said [Mary] Russell, 57, a retired teacher from Iowa City who describes herself as an evangelical Christian and ‘old school’ Republican of the moderate ‘ mold,” wrote Susan Saulny.” ‘If they’re going to decide on women’s reproductive issues, I’m not going to vote for any of them. Women’s reproduction is our own business.’ ”

There’s at least one problem with this hopeful outlook: As Saulny points out, not many of the women who turn out for Republican primaries call themselves “moderate” or “centrist.” In “flyover country,” do “wingnuts” truly rule the roost? I’m not sure, but you can count on this “lefty” to ruffle feathers about it until the day primary season is over.

Emily Theroux, a Middletown resident and former magazine editor at The Times Herald-Record, writes occasional political commentary on social media sites.

By Bob Gaydos

As Mitt Romney “root canals his way to the Republican nomination,” in the words of Time’s Joe Klein, I find it refreshing to look at some off-beat news stories that have nothing (so far as I can tell) to do with politics:

 

“LSD may help alcoholics stay off booze”

My immediate reaction to this headline I spotted on the web was, “No kidding.” Then it was, “Are you kidding me?” Followed by, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

It seems a couple of PhD’s from Harvard and the Norwegian University of Science went through data from old research on whether LSD could be effective in combating alcoholism and published an article in the Journal of Psychopharmacology saying, in essence, maybe. They said alcoholics given regular treatments of LSD were less likely to drink than those not given the hallucinogen, but the results seemed to be good for only three months. They suggested exploring weekly or monthly LSD treatments to counter this.

The story on the study noted that the reported success may have to do with the fact that LSD changes perception, with some patients saying they “felt they were given a new lease on life” and resolving not to drink. That’s what traditional recovery programs work for without the use of drugs.

The two authors of the scientific article wrote, “It is puzzling why this treatment approach has been largely overlooked.”

Geez, I don’t know. I’m not a PhD or anything, but maybe it has to do with the fact that when alcoholics drink to avoid the troubles of this world, they don’t want to be transported to a make-believe universe in order to escape. Or maybe that some people don’t think being on a steady LSD trip is a suitable alternative to addiction.

But hey, if you’re hung up on using LSD because of all that bad press it got years ago, the authors say other psychedelics might also work. They suggested mescaline, for one. No one noted whether any of the data was from personal experience.

Pat Robertson says marijuana should be legalized

This story struck my fancy not so much for the message as the messenger. Pat Robertson? Really?

Really.

The 81-year-old religious broadcaster, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, evangelical host of “The 700 Club,” said on his TV show recently: “I just think it’s shocking how many of these young people wind up in prison and they get turned into hardcore criminals because they had a possession of a very small amount of a controlled substance. The whole thing is crazy. We’ve said, ‘Well, we’re conservatives, we’re tough on crime.’ That’s baloney.”

He also told The New York Times, “I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol. If people can go into a liquor store and buy a bottle of alcohol and drink it at home legally, then why do we say that the use of this other substance is somehow criminal?”

Robertson said he’s never used marijuana and won’t crusade for legalization, but thinks the nation’s “war on drugs” has been a huge failure, costing taxpayers billons of dollars.

There has not been any rush to follow Robertson from other conservative political or religious groups, but he does have a sizable, loyal following, so he could influence future discussion on legalization of pot

Personally, I think Robertson on many occasions has been loopy. He seems stone cold sober on this one.

 

$2 million bail set for ’Madam Mom’

Wow, a real juicy sex story right here in the Hudson Valley. Anna Gristina, 44, of Monroe, was charged with one — note than, one — count of prostitution for allegedly running a high-end call-girl business on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. This has weird written all over it.

Start with the fact that Manhattan prosecutors appear to have come after the mother of four because she allegedly bragged, while under secret surveillance, of having police and wealthy clients protecting her and subsequently refused to give those name to prosecutors. They filed the one charge against her and a judge set $2 million bail, apparently assuming she had millions squirreled away to help her flee, even though he assigned her a court-appointed lawyer because she is indigent.

It goes on. Her real lawyer, who handles what he and she say are legitimate business dealings, offered to put up his $2.5 million Manhattan condo for her bail, because he says she’s penniless. She also apparently rescues pigs, who roam her Monroe property.

Now, somewhere buried in all this, I assume, is evidence of someone being hurt by something she has done, but I’m not finding it. If she indeed is running a call-girl business, matching willing females with willing and wealthy clients, she would be an entrepreneur in Nevada. You know, state’s rights and all that. This is not a sex slave ring story. Yes, Uncle Sam might want his cut of the action and, I would assume, if her alleged business were legal in New York, Gristina would pay her taxes or face the penalty. It’s only tax evasion now, if true, because a crime is alleged. A victimless crime. And because the prosecutors didn’t get to parade some big shots before the cameras.

 

Keep your nose out of our business

One for our fans of foreign news. In Egypt, al Nour, a conservative Islamist political party, expelled its parliamentarian, Anwar el-Balkimy, because he’d had a nose job. Some party members saw this as a sinful act. And you thought running against Rick Santorum was tough.

* * *

Comments on any of these stories are welcome and encouraged.

 bob@zestoforange.com

By Shawn Dell Joyce
In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I’d like to take a moment to remember the one of every eight Irish people who starved to death in the Great Potato Famine of 1840.

While there were many political reasons behind that genocide, one of the greatest preventable mistakes was monocropping, or the practice of planting the same potato variety in the same fields year after year. This made it easy for a blight to wipe out nearly an entire crop in one season, and decimate a country over three years.

A new independent documentary film called Fresh examines the American food system and how we are committing the same preventable mistake, along with many others, by placing all our proverbial eggs in one basket. Fresh points out that essentially two American corporations, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, process almost every bite of food we put in our mouths that we do not purchase from local farmers. The dangers in this are to our health, soil fertility, economic health of family farms, and the long term health of the environment.

You probably never heard of Cargill and Archer, or the farming practice that holds sway today, but you are directly and adversely affected by them this very moment. Their main products are high fructose corn syrup and soy bean oil, which are present in almost every food on supermarket shelves. You would be hard pressed to put together a conventional meal without one or both of these ingredients. The rest of their profit comes from converting government-subsidized commodity crops into animal products commonly known as meats.

Farmers, if they want to deal with these Big Ag corporations, must play by certain rules, which often include monoculture and using genetically modified seeds and chemical inputs that destroy human and environmental health. Fresh examines the fact that a medium size organic farm is more profitable than any size industrial agriculture operation (including CAFO’s or Confined Animal Feeding Operations). The film also suggests that feeding the world lots of high fructose corn syrup may not curb world hunger quite as much as creating localized food systems that feed local populations.

In other words, less emphasis on cheap food, more emphasis on nutrition.
Some areas in our country as well as other parts of the world are considered “food deserts” because you could buy a soda there but not a fresh apple. In these food deserts, cheap food reigns supreme in fast food restaurants, stores carrying mainly processed foods, but no fresh vegetables, fruits or organic anything. Such deserts are often in poverty-stricken communities like Native American reservations and inner cities where families must often choose between food and utilities.

Less extreme are areas where people are so acclimated to cheap food that they balk at the higher cost of local produce. This happens where people purchase groceries primarily in big box stores that pay farmers the cheapest possible prices for food produced with little regard for anything but a lower price tag. What we don’t pay for at the cash register, we leave as a “balance due” to future generations in the form of depleted soils, polluted lakes and streams, and lost livelihoods of small farms.

Fresh calls for good food, not cheap food, and a localized food system that feeds your body and the community, and preserves our planet. The film examines real farmers using polyculture farming methods to produce real food, and the real food eaters who love them. Come see Fresh and decide for yourself how to best feed our friends and neighbors here and around the planet.

The Wallkill River School of Art in Montgomery will offer a free screening of Fresh in honor of Earth Day on April 22nd at 3 p.m. Bring a local food dish to share (optional) and meet local grass farmers (meat producers), and spin farmers (veggie producers) while enjoying fresh apples and cider. RSVP 845-457-2787.

Shawn Dell Joyce is the director of the Wallkill River School of Art, and author of “Orange County Bounty,” a local foods cookbook. www.WallkillRiverSchool.com

By Jeffrey Page

He looks to be about 10 years old and already he has bags under his eyes, a condition usually reserved for people who have seen a lot or who are old. He sits on the ground, holding a red and white keffiyeh. Surrounding him are an adult in what appears to be an Adidas jacket, a kid about his own age, and two more adults, one with his arm on the boy’s shoulder and one stroking his hair.

Nothing helps. The boy, whose name is Ahmed, is bereft, crying, his mouth agape, a look on his face that says, “What happens to me now?” The event is the funeral of his father, Abdulaziz Abu Ahmed Khrer, a man you probably never heard of and likely never will hear about again. The boy is the focus of a picture taken by an Associated Press photographer that ran on Page 1 of the Times last Friday.

I looked at this little boy and found I was unable to turn the page. He was the living symbol of this wretched war that’s being waged by Syria against its people. His eyes held my eyes. Now, almost a week later, that copy of the Times is still on my desk, almost challenging me to walk by without spending some time trying to understand this little kid’s pain.

The father was part of an anti-government demonstration in the Syrian city of Idlib when he was shot dead by a sniper in the pay of the Syrian Army which, in turn, is in the pay and under the ultimate command of an ophthalmologist who happens to own the country, Bashar al-Assad, a man with his own children.

When the history of this war is finally written, Ahmed will be one of its great symbols. For this is a war that pits Assad, the Syrian president and son of the former president, against Abdulaziz Abu Ahmed Khrer and much the rest of the Syrian people.

In his mad bid to retain power, Assad has been the supreme commander of Syrian armed forces that that have killed an estimated 7,500 Syrian people in the last 11 months, a rate of about 25 a day. Additionally, as noted by The Times, the UN reports that 30,000 Syrians have run across whatever national borders were close at hand to escape the killing, and 200,000 others have been ordered to relocate within the boundaries of Syria.

And it gets worse. In order to put a stop to the escapes, the Syrian government has ordered the placement of antipersonnel mines near the borders with Turkey and Lebanon. Stay in Syria and risk death. Try to escape Syria and risk death. What must a man think when he looks at his family and tries to decide what to do next? What must a president think when he orders the use of such barbaric weapons not against an invader but against his own people who do not like him?

The world looks at pictures like the one of Ahmed and the world grieves, wrings its hands, makes threatening noise and ultimately does nothing. And so, the signal Assad receives is that he can get away with it.

But on the day when the snipers are gone and the summary executions are over, the people of Syria will demand justice. If the decent people of the world were smart they’d help make that day come a little sooner.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Bob Gaydos

So, I’m sitting around waiting for Peyton Manning to pick a new football team and hoping it’s anywhere but in the same division as his baby brother (who has delivered two Super Bowl championships to us Giants fans), and I can’t help but wonder why so many of those supposed sports “experts” — from local newspaper columnists to national newspaper columnists, radio talk show hosts, TV talking heads and call-in fans — don’t seem to grasp the significance of the other big story in football today. That would be the New Orleans Saints front office and coaching staff putting out hits on the best players on opposing teams.

To read or hear much of the commentary since the story broke, a non-fan might be led to wonder why some people — NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell for one — were making such a big deal over it. Isn’t football a violent sport by definition? Don’t players sign up to play knowing this? Haven’t professionals always prided themselves on hitting hard and making quarterbacks or running backs or receivers a little gun shy? Hasn’t it always been an unspoken code that if you know a player on the other team is injured, you try to aggravate that injury? Isn’t putting a bounty on knocking an opponent out of the game pretty much more of the same?

Yes, yes, yes, yes … and no.

The whole point of the Saints’ bounty system (and they have admitted to it) was to pay defensive players a bonus ($1,000 or more) if they knocked the star player on the other team out of the game. Wheeled off on a cart, preferably. About 20 players participated in a pool that reportedly reached $50,000. This is a league of supposedly college-educated (or at least college-attended) athletes who have a union to supposedly protect their health and well-being, both physical and financial. Their financial well-being depends on two things: 1. the continued success of the National Football League as a whole; 2. their ability to continue playing football without injury.

Until recently, when former players started suing the league for serious physical ailments (many concussion-related) long after they stopped playing, the NFL has not paid much attention to the physical well-being of its players. Hard-hitting produced big TV ratings. The NFL is worth billions today and many players have made millions because of the success of the league as a whole.

But think about it. What happens if Peyton Manning — four-time league MVP and widely regarded as one of the best quarterbacks in NFL history and playing for the first time after four surgeries to repair nerves in his neck — takes the field as quarterback for, say, the Miami Dolphins (sorry, Jets fans) and the defensive coach of their opponent has offered a $5,000 bonus to the guy who knocks Manning out of the game. Maybe another grand if he can’t walk off. For starters, that should be conspiracy to commit a crime and the crime itself, battery.

What if a coach playing against Peyton’s brother’s team has a bounty on Eli — the comeback kid and double Super Bowl MVP? Or maybe on his favorite receivers, Victor Cruz and Hakeem Nicks? And hey, what about that kid from Stanford the Colts plan to sign to replace Peyton at quarterback — Andrew Luck. How about two grand to welcome him to the NFL and maybe land on the injured cannot play list. Go down the list of stars in the league. Who would not be a target of a bounty? The Saints admitted targeting Brett Favre (future Hall of Famer) and Kurt Warner (potential Hall of Famer).

The macho pro football players who say this is no big deal are either defensive players, who have no fear of anyone targeting them, offensive players who are not game-changing stars and, thus, also not targets, or too dumb to realize that any business — and pro football is very big business — that knowingly allows its employees to seek to do harm to its most valuable assets and be rewarded for it, is on the road to self-destruction. What is a league without its stars?

This is, of course, to say nothing of the moral and ethical arguments that so many players, fans and commentators seem to think shouldn’t matter to the NFL. Is any behavior in the name of competitive edge to be considered acceptable? Would bounties be accepted in other businesses? Would it be OK, for example, for a copy editor from the New York Post, thinking about a bounty offered by his sports editor, to casually wander into the offices of the New York Daily News and slam a stapler down hard on Mike Lupica’s hands, making it impossible for the award-winning columnist to write?

Well, some might say, Lupica didn’t sign up to be physically attacked for his opinions, just verbally abused. But don’t ask me to believe any NFL star is OK knowing he’s playing a game in which some of his fellow union members are trying to intentionally injure him, and maybe affect his future earnings and physical health. (By the way, of the players who commented on the bounty, Eli Manning was sensible enough to say it had no place in professional football.)

As for the nonsense, that the defensive players aren’t trying to do permanent harm to opponents, it is naïve and delusional to think that any player spurred on by the thought of getting an illegal bonus for knocking, say, Tom Brady out of a game can somehow gauge his hit to be just enough to do less than permanent damage. Look at how many concussions were reported this year since the league got serious about penalizing unnecessarily rough hits or hits on defenseless players.

Whatever many players and fans think, the NFL cannot allow this kind of “incentive” to continue. It is a road to retribution and ruin. Goodell, who is looking to carve a legacy as the commissioner who created an entertaining, highly competitive and profitable enterprise must deliver major penalties to put an end to this illegal, immoral practice now. The Saints defensive coach who instituted the bounties should be banned from the NFL for life. The head coach, who knew about it, should be suspended for half the season. The general manager, who also knew about it, should be find $1 million and suspended for three months. The team owner should fire him. The player (Jonathan Vilma) who offered his own bounty of $10,000 to anyone who knocked Favre out of a playoff game, should be suspended for six games and fined $250,000. The team should lose future draft picks.

If Goodell comes down hard on the Saints, others will not follow their lead and the NFL will continue to prosper as an entertaining, competitive league that offers exciting athleticism and controlled mayhem every week. If he goes soft, some star player is inevitably going to be seriously injured by a nobody trying to make a name for himself and grab a couple of grand under the table. That’s mayhem dangerously out-of-control.

bob@zestoforange.com

By Emily Theroux

Earlier this week, a Facebook acquaintance posted a comment under one of my recent political rants that absolutely astounded me. Following Rush Limbaugh’s recent three-day “slut-shaming” of law student Sandra Fluke for daring to testify before a House subcommittee about the high cost of birth control for uninsured women, I stayed up very late Sunday night, venting about Limbaugh’s galling hypocrisy in the face of his own infamous excesses. The next morning, I discovered a single reply from a woman who had never posted anything more controversial on my page than occasional praise of my dog or my grandchildren.

“As a journalist,” she offered, “wouldn’t it be good research to go back and actually listen to his show and hear exactly what was said, rather than repeat what people thought he said? He made his point with humor, albeit he took it to the extreme. Like it or not, it made for some GREAT radio.” She then added a rhetorical question: “When did having babies become considered a disease?” and ended her reproach with a snarky personal remark: “And speaking of babies, post more photos of your beautiful grandbabies. That we can all agree on.”

After letting her post simmer on my Facebook wall for most of that day, she inexplicably deleted it just as I was about to post a heated reply. That gave me time to ponder whether to make any kind of retort at all. I decided in favor of responding because I really don’t think anyone who has listened to the degrading, vicious, defamatory things that Rush Limbaugh has said about women and minorities for the past 30 years can let his lies, grandstanding, and verbal projectile vomiting — or his apologists’ weak excuses for his behavior — go unchallenged this time.

I always research whatever I’m planning to post on a public forum, I wanted to tell her. I listened to what Limbaugh said so many times that it’s some trick I didn’t puke all over my keyboard. He repeatedly lied that Fluke testified about her own sex life and that she said she was having so much sex, she couldn’t afford to pay for her own birth control pills — indeed, so much sex that he didn’t see how she could still walk. I didn’t find this to be anything approximating “entertainment” or “great radio.”

I also carefully listened to Sandra Fluke’s testimony before Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s House subcommittee. Fluke never once mentioned her own sex life; she actually devoted most of her testimony to explaining the difficulty many Georgetown students have paying for birth control pills they are prescribed to treat medical conditions that have nothing to do with pregnancy. Fluke described at length the plight of another Georgetown student who had been paying out of pocket for oral contraceptives prescribed to treat polycystic ovarian syndrome and eventually lost one of her ovaries when she could no longer afford to pay for the medication.

I heard exactly what Limbaugh said for three days — every lie, every vile taunt, every nonsensical mathematical “calculation” (suggesting, for example, that by dividing his hugely exaggerated “cost” figure for birth control pills by the number of “coeds” enrolled at Georgetown University (all of them promiscuous, of course), he would arrive at an estimate that each female student who took birth control pills must be having sex at least three times a day! Never mind the fact that you don’t take any more birth control pills if you have sex three times a day than if you have sex once a month — or never).

I sat through every vile taunt, every slander, every obscenity, every ad hominem attack, every cruel characterization of women who use birth control, whom he portrays as slavering nymphomaniacs. Limbaugh’s “remarks,” if you want to call them that, were in no sense humorous, nor were they ambiguous. Whether he rattled on for three days to boost his ratings or to give the Republican war on women a “plug” — or whether he even actually believes the things he says — is immaterial. I say it’s high time he shuts his big fat mouth. I signed a petition yesterday to that effect; if I can find it again, I’ll post that on Facebook, too.

As for the mystifying bit about how liberals consider having babies “a disease” (which Limbaugh himself said on his radio show later that day), that’s disingenuous hooey. I certainly never defined the “diseases” birth control is used to treat as human embryos, simply because certain kinds of birth control function by preventing implantation of fertilized ova. What I said is that, in addition to preventing pregnancy, oral contraceptives are also prescribed to treat women who have any of a wide range of real diseases or medical conditions that have nothing to do with the prevention of pregnancy.

I also said that employers who refuse to provide health insurance coverage for oral contraceptives because they are opposed to birth control for reasons of faith or conscience do not appear to take their non-contraceptive applications into consideration. Maybe we need some new names for these drugs that would differentiate their various uses, so that while politicians and “entertainers” are lobbing this issue at their opponents for electoral or monetary gain, the rest of us would at least know what they were really talking about.

Finally, being advised to post more photos of my grandchildren on Facebook struck me as a little condescending. It felt like being told to hie myself back to the kitchen and keep my nose out of the business of menfolk — although my Facebook friend was probably just trying to end her criticism on a positive note by paying me what she considered a compliment.

Women, like men, may originally have been put on earth by God or nature to reproduce; if that is so, I think I have done an admirable enough job of it. But I was also born with a brain and have elected to use it. Rush Limbaugh made a point of punishing a woman who dared to do exactly that by spending three days “putting her in her place.” The problem with me — and I suspect, with Sandra Fluke — is that some of us don’t tend to stay put very well.

Emily Theroux, a Middletown resident and former magazine editor at The Times Herald-Record, writes occasional political commentary on social media sites.

By Jeffrey Page
I think Rush Limbaugh’s apology was no apology at all, and that decent people everywhere ought to make a list of the sponsors who have dropped from his program, and direct their business to them.

As you doubtless know by this time, Limbaugh used his nationwide radio show to slander Sandra Fluke, a law student at Georgetown University as a slut, a prostitute, and as a roundheel – a woman, my dictionary says, who yields readily to sexual intercourse. His tirade was the result of Fluke’s testifying before a congressional committee about the high cost of contraceptives to people with limited means.

Limbaugh was having none of it. “Your daughter… testifies she’s having so much sex she can’t afford her own birth control pills and she wants President Obama to provide them, or the Pope,” Limbaugh blathered. President Obama? The Pope? What is this man talking about?

Limbaugh, revealing a magnificent ignorance, likened Fluke’s request for affordable birth control to her asking taxpayers to pay her to have sex. Therefore, in Limbaugh’s twisted view of the world, Fluke is a prostitute. Sheer lunacy.

“What does it say about the college coed Susan Fluke,” Limbaugh asked his audience. And he couldn’t even get her name right. She’s not Susan.

Some sponsors quit, and a chastened Limbaugh decided he would apologize. Let’s parse his regrets.

“For over 20 years,” Limbaugh said, “I have illustrated the absurd with absurdity [Meaning that Fluke’s congressional testimony was “absurd,” a request for an inexpensive product to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease? How could such a request be called absurd?] three hours a day, five days a week. In this instance, I chose the wrong words [Which words would have been the right words? He doesn’t say.] in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke. [He describes a woman he has never met, never heard of, as a slut and a prostitute and then declares he meant no personal attack? If not a personal attack, what would he call it? He doesn’t say.]

Limbaugh then forgets about his insult to Fluke. He forgets about the disgrace he brought on himself, and speaks 118 words decrying the fact that here we are in a presidential election year and we’re talking about sex.

“My choice of words,” Limbaugh says, “was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices.” His words were not the best but he slithers out of saying which words would have been more appropriate. He smeared a young woman’s reputation and standing in an attempt to be – humorous? Humorous, as in a joke? That’s about as funny as making jokes about Limbaugh and Oxycontin.

An apology? It wasn’t even a good imitation of one.

Did you believe him?

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My friend Farber sent me a collection of witty bumper stickers, and I got the biggest kick out of this one: Annoyed by Immigrants? Tell it to the Indians.