By Jeffrey PageThere’s no end to reports of significant dopiness in the morning paper, and this is what occasionally happens. You see a story under a headline blaring stupidity and you give it a read. Your first response: This can’t be right. So you read it again. And guess what: It’s right.

Case in point. I came across this headline in the Cape Cod Times last week. “Police: Prostitutes hold pooch for payment.”

It seems a guy hired two women from an “escort service,” but didn’t pay them, which is not to say there was no charge. Having received no payment for professional services rendered, the women reportedly made off with Ladybug, a Yorkshire terrier owned by the man’s mother, who is 84 and who loves that Yorkie dearly. When she grew most upset over the disappearance of her dog, the son went after it and was told by the women that it would cost $1,000 to get Ladybug back.

Later, in true free-market zeal, the women said Ladybug’s ransom had just been increased to $2,500.

The most amusing part of the story was the man’s claim that while he had engaged the services of escorts in the past, he had no professional connection with the women who were holding his mom’s dog.

This had not been resolved by the time I left to return home.

Here’s a case you might have seen a while back about a judge in Pennsylvania – no, not the one who’s doing 28 years in prison for sending young defendants to a privately run jail from which he received almost $1 million; what is it with some of these Pennsylvania judges? – but the one from District Court in the Village of Intercourse who was charged with disorderly conduct for handing out little trinkets to show what a witty guy he is.

The Associated Press and local papers reported that he jammed condoms into acorns that he had hollowed out – you with me on this? – and then presented the stuffed acorns to women in the state capital of Harrisburg. The judge, 18 years on the bench, said it was meant to be a joke. He was charged with violating judicial conduct standards, Reuters reported.

The judge said he meant no offense. Reuters noted that, as he handed the acorns to women passersby, he told them: “They make a nice afternoon snack, try them. I’ll be here tomorrow. Let me know what you think.”

The unintentional joke was played out in court when a panel of judges dismissed the charges against their fellow judge.

But never mind free-market escorts and a judge with a wild and crazy sense of humor. Check out Jeffery Jones of Paterson, N.J.

In the grim days following Hurricane Irene, Jones was a busy man. Irene had been merciless in her visit to Paterson, the third largest city in the state and among the poorest, and Jones was putting in long hours and helping where he could.
Jones, in fact, is the mayor of Paterson.

As a result, any dictionary editor worth his salt would agree that Jones’ picture could be used to illustrate the word “chutzpah,” the Yiddish word translated in polite circles as “impudence” or “audacity” and “cojones” or “brass balls” in less refined places.
Weren’t the 150,000 Patersonians surprised when The Record reported that, included in the nearly $800,000 in overtime pay given to cops, firefighters, and other municipal workers for their labor during the storm and in its aftermath, was an item of $6,144 paid to Jones.

Not a fiortune, but certain people are always on duty and do not qualify for time-and-a-half. Among them is the president, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the mayors of just about any American city. You grant premium pay to someone working on a highway project, not to an elected politician.

Chutzpah? Jones’ salary is $120,000 and even he saw the light – after word of his overtime pay appeared in the paper – and reimbursed the $6,144 to the city treasury. He said he had no idea how he got paid for about 100 hours of overtime labor.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

Sarah Palin ... time to come clean

By Jeffrey Page
All during the birther escapades I waited for one honest Republican with a big name to step forward and say it was an outrage to hound President Obama into spending even as little as a minute a day dealing with the place of his birth.

I waited for a Republican with guts to say the birthers were loony, and to remind the nation that no other GOP candidate or possible candidate – not Newt or Michelle, not Ron or Mitt, not Sarah – had been asked to prove where they were born. (The question of John McCain’s birth in the Canal Zone was resolved quickly during the 2008 campaign.)

But the silence was profound, and then in April along came Palin speaking about Donald Trump’s personal crusade – using his very own money! – to prove that Obama was not what he seemed. “I appreciate that The Donald wants to spend his resources in getting to the bottom of something that so interests him and many Americans,” The Sarah was quoted by The Times. “You know, more power to him.”

Finally, Obama released his Hawaii birth certificate – I wish he had had the nerve to tell the birthers where to stick their doubts – and the issue seems to have died down. Doubtless it will be revived when the 2012 campaign gets started in earnest.

However, thanks to Joe McGinniss, many Americans have questions about Palin’s background.

McGinness, in his new book “The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin,” declares that before her marriage to Todd Palin, Sarah Heath had a one-night stand with Glen Rice when Rice still played basketball for the University of Michigan and she was a television sports reporter. After her marriage to Todd, Palin carried on an affair with her husband’s business partner, says McGinness, who further alleges that Palin smoked marijuana with a college professor and snorted cocaine from the top of an oil drum.

Palin has some explaining to do. Or some law suits to file. Anything less is a cop-out.

Allow me to employ some birther logic. First of all, she says she was born in Idaho in 1964, but how do we know this is the case? We don’t. Isn’t it possible that Palin was really born in her later home state of Alaska, especially when you remember that Alaska only became a state in 1959, a mere five years before Palin was born. Meaning that maybe – just maybe – Palin is not really the 47 years old she claims, but 52 and that she was born in Alaska when Alaska was just a territory?

It’s time for Sarah Palin to come clean and produce her birth certificate. A marriage certificate would be nice as well – just to be on the safe side.

And in the matter of a fling with Rice, Palin claims to be a believer in birth control through abstinence. So obviously, she owes it to the American people to assure us that if she had sex with Glen Rice, it would have occurred without benefit of condom because you know those condoms; they make everything so easy.

Palin must call a news conference on the subject of her premarital and marital sex lives. What an opportunity to clear the air and reassure her followers.

Of course, standing before all those reporters, Palin might be asked about McGinness’ assertion that she carried on with Todd’s partner. Since she has not provided evidence that she did not have this affair it stands to birther-reasoning that she’s guilty until she satisfies America that she is not.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

Thanks to readers who responded to Zest of Orange’s invitation to submit recollections of Sept. 11, 2001.

Lee Gittler Steup and her future husband had checked into a rented beach house on the Jersey Shore. They suffered no personal casualties in the attack the next day, but almost lost the friend who was to be best man at their wedding. Here’s her story.

In a particularly surreal moment, we watched as a reporter stood in front of a tower, recounting the event. Suddenly another jet liner appeared over his shoulder, low in the background. I expected to see it pass behind the tower, but it never came out the other side.

“Another plane hit the other tower!” I screamed at the television receiver. And the reporter, unaware of what had just happened, went on with his newscast. Later came a report that a plane had hit the Pentagon.

I’m sure all the blood drained from my face. I lunged for the telephone and called both my grown children to tell them. Tell them what? That we weren’t in the Trade Center or the Pentagon? They already knew that. That they should head for shelter? They were already in an area unlikely to be targeted for attack. My mind groped for some words. I hadn’t expected to get through to them, but I called so quickly that the phone lines hadn’t yet jammed. I blurted out something comforting, listened to their voices and then, somewhat comforted, went back to the TV.

In lower Manhattan, Michael’s lifelong friend Jeffrey had gone into a cafe on the ground floor of one of the towers for some coffee. He pondered using the Trade Center restroom, but decided to wait and instead boarded the ferry to his job on Ellis Island. From the boat, he watched the second plane hit the second tower.

The ferry was ordered back to the dock and the passengers started looking for other transportation. Then the towers began to fall and the dust clouds rolled down the streets and avenues like giant bowling balls. Jeffrey ducked into an office a few blocks away and avoided the worst of the contamination. He was one of the people who walked miles to finally find a way home late that night.

Much later, after the towers had tumbled into ruin and thousands of people had vanished in the deadly dust, we went out. Long Beach Island was silent. People with ashen faces walked the streets like the living dead. Up in the sky, a fighter jet circled like a hawk.

We were in a war zone.

We have never returned to Long Beach Island. It had been Michael’s family’s tradition every summer, but in 2001 that tradition ended. We tell people that we can no longer afford to vacation there, but it’s not the real reason. We don’t go back because we have seen how easy it is for tragedy to penetrate even the most enjoyable of places. We have watched the world change, not for the better. And we have learned how powerless we really are to control events in the world and in our lives.

Jean Webster spent many years living in Grahamsville before she and her husband, a native Mainer, moved to Portland, where she continues to write. She received first word of the 9/11 attacks in a phone call from California.

Where was I on 9/11?

I will relive that day, and the days that followed, forever. A New Yorker from birth, I was living in a lovely seaside community on the coast of Maine. Shortly after the first pictures came on television, my cousin from California called and was surprised I hadn’t heard.

I turned on the TV and sat for the rest of the day crying, watching, talking to New York friends and relatives, and of course to my children, who both live far away. That’s the first thing we all think of when tragedy strikes – I have to talk with my children.
My son in Dallas called and we talked, but finally he told me he had to turn off the television and pay attention to his 2-year old daughter who was getting freaked out by what she was seeing. I got through to my sister on Manhattan’s east side later in the day, and she was all right but understandably stricken.

I missed my husband’s presence all day long. He was running errands for our store, and we didn’t get to talk until he got home later in the day.

One of the most shocking revelations was that two of the terrorists, including the ringleader, Mohamed Atta, had gone through the Portland Jetport that morning. We live in Portland in the winter, and when we returned to that house, all I could think was that those two men had gone through our little city to try to destroy America.

The American flag appeared everywhere in Portland; on houses, stores, restaurants, cars, trucks.

I remember having to get away from the television days later, when I could no longer stand seeing those planes hitting the Twin Towers, or watching the smoke, the destruction.

I remember sitting on the front stoop of our house in a city whose skies were eerily quiet, trying to absorb what had happened, and what it would mean to us as Americans.

We knew about people who were lost in the destruction – relatives of friends. The closest was our brother-in-law’s brother from New Jersey, who was helping a co-worker down as the stairs beneath them crumbled.

I will never forget.

Send responses to jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
Where were you?

I was at The Record of Hackensack when one of the other reporters noticed smoke pouring out of the World Trade Center, which was visible from the newsroom. Much of what happened after that has remained crystal clear for the first decade. I believe it will remain so.

For weeks after the attacks, the routine was simple, straight to the point. We arrived on time (unheard of, previously), got our assignments, complained less than usual, went out and interviewed people about their losses, their close calls, their shock, their plans for the future, their concerns about sudden widowhood and about children left fatherless or motherless.

Some of the assignments were gut-wrenching, such as my talking with a woman from Clifton who repeated for me her last phone call with her husband who was 90 stories up at the Trade Center. “Can you get out?” she said. “I don’t know,” he said. He told her he loved her. She told him she loved him.

We made our deadlines. We filed our stories early in the evening and went home to get some rest because tomorrow would be just as busy. The adrenaline flow seemed to slow in the quiet of the car and I had a chance to realize how easily I could have been on assignment in the World Trade Center when the planes hit. I thought about death and about my great fear of falling. I thought about my wife, my daughter, which brought me to tears and I couldn’t stop when I thought about the unspeakable numbers of dead, and about all the wives and daughters.

Chances are you know where you were, what you were doing, on Sept. 11, and that you’ll never forget.

Will you tell Zest of Orange where you were on that late summer morning? Heading to work? At your desk already? Working in your yard? Shopping at the supermarket? Having a cavity filled? Planning a late vacation?

How did you hear about the attack? What were your thoughts as the airplanes crashed, one after the other?

Did you lose anyone on Sept. 11?

Did the attack change you? Has it changed the way you relate to the world?

Send us some of your thoughts and recollections – signed or unsigned, your choice – for a 9/11 file here at Zest of Orange.

Post to jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
That Michele Bachmann is an ignoramus can no longer be in doubt. But now she has proven herself to be a merciless ignoramus.

Once, we would have laughed at the thought of a presidential candidate asking the press to investigate Congress to see which members were pro-American and which were anti-American. Once, we would have laughed if a candidate declared that not a single study existed to show that carbon dioxide is harmful.

It’s time to stop laughing. It’s also time for some of her Republican colleagues to call her out. More on this later.

Bachmann now is hinting that God himself caused Hurricane Irene and the earthquake the week before in order to catch the attention of free-spending politicians. Here’s her full quote, uttered on a campaign stop in Sarasota, Fla.: “I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake. We’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here? Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we’ve got to rein in the spending.’ ”

How dare she blaspheme by suggesting that God is an American? (“We’ve got to rein in spending?”). How dare she suggest that God is a fiscal conservative thus hinting that if you happen not to be a fiscal conservative, you’re somehow on the wrong side of the Almighty?

But wait. With Bachmann, the story never ends, and this one reveals her dark side. When she was finally challenged, she issued an “explanation” that insults the intelligence of anyone reading it.

“Of course she was saying it in jest,” Bachmann had her campaign press secretary say.

Jest? With 43 people dead in Hurricane Irene?

Jest? With billions in property damage resulting from the storm and the quake? With countless lives ruined? With pictures of people, their hands over their mouths, wondering how to re-start, where to start first, where to get the cash needed to re-make their lives? With millions of people still without electricity days after the winds subsided?

Jest.

A fair question now, about one year before the Republican nominating convention, is whether any of the other GOP candidates or possible candidates will label Bachmann’s crazy assertions for the trash that they are.

Mitt Romney seems like an obvious choice since Massachusetts took a beating at the hands of Hurricane Irene. Maybe John Huntsman, who sounds pretty smart much of the time. Of course there’s Newt Gingrich who fancies himself the GOP intellectual in residence. How about Giuliani, the self-styled patron saint of New York? Or how about the in-again, out-again George Pataki who doesn’t seem to have much to lose at this point.

I doubt any will.

But until one says what has to be said, Bachmann will continue her one-woman freak show. Think back, it was Michele Bachmann who famously stated that she found it “interesting” that the great swine flu epidemic of the Seventies occurred when the Democrat Jimmy Carter was president. What’s really interesting is that the flu outbreak occurred when the president was the un-Democrat Gerald Ford.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
I read Shawn’s piece this week on what to do with my home grown tomato harvest. Let me tell you about my tomato harvest.

A while back, during our weekly breakfast of eight guys from Warwick, my friend Bill said he had brought along several tomato plants. He’s a serious gardener and had too many plants so he was giving some away.

I took one.

Now, you’ve heard of people with green thumbs. I do not have a green thumb. All I have to do to make a rose wilt is inhale its perfume. If I want to kill a pepper, or even a zucchini, I just have to look at it. You get my point.

“Just plant it and give it water,” Bill had said.

I planted it and gave it water. I bought one of those metal things that supports tomato plants. I put an old piece of fencing around it to keep the deer away. You must admit, this was dedication.

Watch for the yellow flowers, Bill had told me. From those flowers would come delicious, juicy tomatoes.

I didn’t get many flowers, and those that appeared just fell off.

Finally, a little green thing emerged from the one remaining flower. I gave it water. I spoke to it in a civil manner.

The tomato got redder and bigger, though not very big. When it showed no sign of getting larger I picked it, took it to the kitchen, washed it, sliced it, and put it on a provolone cheese sandwich. My crop was delicious.

All one of it.

Next year? Zucchini. I’ve heard they’re pretty indestructable.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Suit: Black.

Blouse: Conservative gray.

Spinach on teeth: None.

Hair: Coiffed.

Accessories: Pearl necklace and earrings.

Drool dripping from mouth: None.

Expression: A bit of a smile; slightly wide-eyed and gazing slightly upward.

Leakage from nose: None.

So what is Michelle Bachmann complaining about? Critics of her Newsweek cover picture have concentrated on her eyes and expression. The picture has been described as showing someone who is “wild-eyed,” “a lunatic,” “enraged,” “nuts.”

I don’t get it. To me, it’s a picture of an assertive, hopeful, dressed-for-business woman whose politics I loathe. Do better pictures of her exist? Of course. Were there more flattering pictures shot in the same session as the one that made it to the cover? We’ll never know. And the question: Is Newsweek somehow obligated to ask the subjects of its articles which pictures they want the magazine to use? Ask Hillary Clinton about that.

Of Bachmann’s cover shot, there can be no question: This is Michelle Bachmann and, for better or worse, this is what she looks like.

I don’t recall any of Bachmann’s friends coming forward to take Newsweek to task for the bad-cop shot of Clinton it used for its cover just three months ago. Clearly unflattering. She looks not like a cop — and not like a secretary of state — but like a hired thug with squinty, dangerous eyes. If she was angry about the picture, she was too much of a pro to mention it.

But of course the fight is not just over Bachmann’s picture. There’s the caption: The Queen of Rage. And here, I think Newsweek has a problem. First, with two important exceptions, I don’t know of any woman in public life who’s been described as the queen of anything. That excludes Elizabeth II, but Newsweek wasn’t trying to compare Michelle Bachmann with her. The other was the late Leona Helmsley who, among other things, declared that “only little people pay taxes,” who bequeathed millions of dollars to her dog, and who was described by everyone as “the queen of mean.”

Was Newsweek making that comparison? How could it not have been? After all, the magazine described Clinton as “Obama’s Bad Cop” with all the coded messages that “bad cop’ brings with it.

Another problem for Newsweek is one of pure piggish sexism. The National Organization for Women wisely asked if Newsweek ever described a man as “the king of rage.” It did not.

What are your thoughts on this?

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
President Obama was in Chicago for his birthday celebration and of course made some remarks to a friendly hometown crowd. Some parts of his appearance made me yearn for the days of the 1980 campaign when Ted Kennedy challenged Jimmy Carter – the incumbent – for the nomination.

Because, surely I’m not the only one having nightmares about such expressions as “President Perry” and “President Bachmann.”

No one takes on an incumbent of his own party, right? But Kennedy, sensing weakness and opportunity, announced, and it quickly got ugly. “If he runs, I’ll whip his ass,” Carter said. No one believed he could do it. After all, there Jimmy Carter was sitting in the White House, wearing his cardigan and informing us of the malaise he decided had overtaken us. He had a 28 percent approval rating, an average national misery index (sum of unemployment and inflation rates) of a nasty 16.26, the U.S. embassy in Tehran packed with 52 American hostages, and a failed attempt to rescue them.

But he swept Kennedy – who didn’t help his own cause when he stumbled on the question of why he wanted to be president – in the early Iowa caucuses by a margin of about 2-1 never even mentioning Chappaquiddick. And Ted was done.

So was Carter. Sure, he whipped Kennedy, which everybody sort of knew he would. And then of course Ronald Reagan whipped Carter. Everybody sort of knew that was going to happen, too.

Hence a question: Is there someone among the Democrats this year who’s going to challenge President Obama and thus maybe prevent the advent of a President Perry or a President Bachmann?

President Obama says he wants to work with the GOP opposition. It seems everybody but the president understands that the Republicans don’t want to work with him; they want his head. They don’t want to be his friend or work partner. Why doesn’t President Obama understand this? Has he forgotten a telling comment by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell? “The single most important thing we [Republicans] want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” McConnell said last year. Read it again: The single most important thing.

You have to give McConnell credit. He doesn’t obfuscate. But why is it that I understand this and President Obama does not? He keeps talking like there’s a chance the Republicans will see the light and work with him. They will do no such thing. When they got together to work on a deficit compromise, the GOP made sure that not an extra nickel would be extracted from millionaire taxpayers. Obama? He got a nice birthday card.

Parts of the birthday trip to Chicago were wrong as wrong can be.

Will someone inform the president that when he uses a teleprompter at an informal event – a birthday bash, for crying out loud – he not only looks ridiculous but plays right into the hands of the Limbaugh crowd, who’ve been mocking his use of teleprompters since Day One.

One of Obama’s quotes at his Chicago party gave the Republicans a great sound bite. Doubtless you will see the following in GOP campaign commercials next year. It’s President Obama speaking in Chicago about the night of his election: “And we knew the road ahead was going to be difficult, that the climb was going to be steep. I have to admit I didn’t know how steep the climb was going to be.”

Didn’t know?

He didn’t know that the climb involved the 4,189 U.S. service personnel killed in Iraq up to two years ago, another 1,049 in Afghanistan?

He didn’t know the climb involved the loss of 2.6 million jobs in 2008 alone?

He didn’t know the climb involved an unemployment rate hovering in the neighborhood of 7 percent, the highest since 1993?

Well, he should have known. And if he didn’t know in 2008, he shouldn’t have mentioned his ignorance in 2011.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
Let me say here, high up, that I was taken to task recently by a Zest reader, Duane Small, when I chided all sides in the debt limit fight for their inability to understand and employ the concept of compromise. To which Mr. Small responded: “Why is it, when one side has offered to give up almost everything it believes in, and the other side has offered to give up nothing, everyone who writes about it blames both sides for not compromising?”

An excellent point. I wish I had grasped it when I was writing that previous Zest piece.

The fight is over – for now at least – and the barking among House and Senate Republicans and Democrats, the president, the speaker, and the Tea Party is finished – for now at least. In the sudden quiet and calm, we recall:

That if anyone had even a scintilla of doubt, the Republicans have proved they really are the friends of that most oppressed class – America’s poor and struggling millionaires – and pass along to the rest of us the responsibility to pay to make the country work.

That Exxon, which reported second-quarter profits of nearly $11 billion, will continue to receive tax breaks.

That the fight over raising the debt ceiling will be reignited sometime in 2012.

That President Obama, wishing to prove himself above the fray, is a lousy compromiser because his idea of meeting the other side half way to conciliation is to wave a white flag.

That if the Republicans can resist nominating one of their resident goofballs, and if the nation is still saddled with high unemployment in 15 months, President Obama’s gone.

That President Obama could have done himself a lot of good by dropping the good manners, calling a news conference and declaring to Boehner and Cantor and McConnell, “Get stuffed, boys, the answer is no. Let’s settle it in the parking lot.”

That if the Democrats continue their current way of doing things, anyone betting on the future of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is a sucker.

That maybe what rational people need is a tea party of their own, an organization that will stand defiantly before groups of voters with its own one-word responses. Tax cuts for millionaires? “No.” End of discussion. Spending on social programs? “Yes.” End of discussion. You don’t like us? “Trust us, we’ll do more for you than the Republican protectors of millionaires.”

That the enormous agreed-upon cuts in federal spending will prolong the national economic lethargy and high unemployment by depriving people of government jobs rebuilding the infrastructure, which is in tatters.

That it’s time to make the links by, for example, informing decent people of the connection between Michele Bachmann and Joe McCarthy when she declares: “I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out: Are they pro-America or anti-America?”

That for all the yelling in the debt limit debate, we’re about right where we were when it began. And that’s no place to be.

Jeff can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
Here’s a message for Obama and Boehner, for Cantor and Reid, for Pelosi and for all our local geniuses who are driving this debt limit issue to a brink that could be catastrophic on a grand scale and dangerous on a personal level.

It’s about your constituents. You remember us, right? You remember your last campaigns when you went out and swore that there was nothing – nothing! – more gratifying in the world than the privilege – privilege! – of representing us in Congress, of providing leadership in the White House.

Here’s another message: Control your blather. No one buys it. We don’t like being used as the little white balls in your never-ending game of partisan ping pong. If you believe you can get away with this brinksmanship on the debt limit, you should start checking the want ads. That privilege you treasure could be withdrawn in 17 months.

Listen, we’re the 60.1 million people receiving Social Security to the tune of $60 billion a month. Most of us don’t use that money for vacations in the south of France. It goes right into the economy to pay for groceries and gasoline, a movie ticket, the rent, a new tire for the car, the morning paper, taxes to keep things moving. Eventually, it is this spending that will rescue the economy.

Do you – Schumer, Gillibrand, Hayworth, Hinchey, the lot of you – understand this, or have your $174,000 congressional salaries and other personal wealth made you blind to what ordinary people must deal with every day as you play your political games. The fact is that your congressional pay is almost six times as much as the per capita income in New York. Fact is you don’t know much about us.

We’re also the 4.1 million veterans receiving $46 billion a year in various benefits for having served the nation. Much of that money goes into the economy as well.

And we’re the rest of the population, just plain sickened by what we see you doing.

Are you really going to watch the nation go into default, and watch your constituents miss a check or two all because you were too dumb to get off your butts and come to an understanding with the other side?

Every one of us who you represent understands what “compromise” means. Why can’t you? Or doesn’t it matter because you know that no matter what you do, no matter how much your people suffer, you’ll get your checks when we do not?

So here is what I want of you. Actually, here is what I am demanding of you as you posture and totter.

If Social Security and Veterans Administration checks fail to go out next week because you helped the nation run out of money, you must issue an immediate press release announcing that you will forego your salaries until we – the ones you go to for votes every few years – receive ours first.

Even later, when the crisis eases, you must not cash your paychecks for the periods when the government shut down. If you have an ounce of honor, you will endorse those checks and send them to Food Bank of the Hudson Valley (195 Hudson St., Cornwall-on-Hudson, N.Y. 12520).

To do less is to lose my vote.

Zest readers, do you agree?

Jeff can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.