By Jeffrey Page

First, a note of thanks to the many Zest readers who took a few minutes to respond to my questions about how the site is doing. Your notes were thoughtful, detailed, helpful and, most of all, encouraging. You say we’re doing a good job and that, for some of you, we’ve become essential reading. Thanks for that.

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Someday there will be a Hall of Fame of Asinine Public Comments and the People Who Utter Them. I hope never to be enshrined myself, preferring to be chairman of the admissions committee.

Here are some recent nominees for glory in the hall.

–It’s 2009, right? New millennium, new century, right? Civil War ended 144 years ago. Voting Rights Act in place since the Sixties, Civil Rights Act about as old. And oh yes, there’s a black fellow sitting in the Oval Office.

Well, it’s not 2009 in Tangipahoa Parish in Louisiana where the witless Keith Bardwell presides as justice of the peace. Bardwell is the judge who recently refused to issue a marriage license to Beth Humphrey and Terence McKay, one of whom is black, one of whom is white.

His denial was outrageously un-American enough. Worse was his bizarre reasoning. “I’m not a racist,” Bardwell said. Then, focusing on the children of mixed race couples, Bardwell declared: “I think those children suffer and I won’t help put them through it.” How do they suffer? He didn’t say. Put them through what? He didn’t say.

What he said was that he tries to treat everyone equally. And oh yeah, some of his best friends are black.

Humphrey and McKay said they intend to ask the Justice Department to investigate Bardwell’s brand of jurisprudence.

–In Grahamsville, Donald Daggett walked into the Tri-Valley high school packing a .38. This is against the law.

During a talk with the principal, Daggett mentioned that he was armed. The principal asked for the weapon and Daggett handed it over.

What might have happened had a kid seen the butt end of the gun, recalled a place called Columbine, and gone tearing down the corridors to warn classmates and staff that there was a guy with a gun in the school?

“It was a stupid mistake,” The Times Herald-Record quoted Daggett. “I never even thought about it.”

The school thought about it and called the cops. Daggett was arrested. Maybe he’ll think about it next time.

–Roman Polanski, 76, is still in a Swiss jail with U.S. officials seeking his extradition to face charges of having sex with a girl in 1977, when Polanski was 43 and the girl was 13.

A gaggle of Hollywood swells have flocked to Polanski’s defense. Oh come on, they say. It was three decades ago, they say. The girl was sexually experienced, they say. Polanski had a horrific childhood when the Nazis overran Europe, they say. He’s a great director, they say. He won an Oscar, they say. He’s an artist, they say.

Among the newest reasons for going easy on Roman Polanski is money.

His lawyers have appealed to the Swiss courts to ask that Polanski be freed on bail because he has several months more work to do on his latest movie. And if he doesn’‘t get this work done, he could go bankrupt.

Not only that, the attorneys sniff, if Polanski can’t finish the movie, his backers stand to lose $40 million. In keeping him behind bars, it’s likely the Swiss judges recall that Polanski was freed on bail in the United States in 1977 – after pleading guilty – and promptly fled to France, where he has been living ever since.

The legal team’s equating child rape and movie profits is obscene. If you buy the argument that Roman Polanski needs to be free so he can avoid bankruptcy, you might approve the same request from Bernie Madoff. And you wouldn’t do that, right?

Care to join me on the Hall of Fame’s admissions committee? Just drop me a line with the dumbest public comments you’ve come across.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Hello, anybody there?

I’m just checking to see if anyone’s reading Zest of Orange. Please note that this is not an official posting by Zest of Orange, but just by me.

Though I must tell you that some others in this little cabal are wondering the same thing: Are you there? Do you find us informative? Entertaining? Do you agree with what you see in Zest? Or do you think we’re totally off the mark? Any suggestions?

I did a quick check over the weekend at the Zest of Orange site and found that the Zest writers, photographer and artists have posted 125 columns, photographs and paintings since late May, when the site got under way. Since then, we’re received 120 comments. Not much of a dialogue – about one reader-comment per posting.

Common sense tells me that if readers have nothing to say about what they read, they must be bored. And God protect readers from being bored. The idea of Zest of Orange is to be sharp, witty, provocative and entertaining. I would hope we’re doing a pretty good job.

So, are you reading us? What do you think?

Let us know.

Thanks.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

There’s the kind of death where they put you in the ground. Another kind is where you survive unspeakable injuries that never heal.

Similarly there are judges who treat drunken drivers, and the misery they inflict, almost as a joke when they pass sentence, and those who understand that a drunk behind the wheel places everyone in danger and sentence accordingly.

Which brings us to Willie A. Thompson. In 1989, the third time Thompson drove drunk – at least the third time anyone knows about – he killed a cop with his car. He spent 11 years in prison for that. Last winter, in his eighth drunken driving arrest, Thompson slammed into trees and a fire hydrant, and for that, he’s been sent to prison for 15 years to life after telling the judge about his own troubles. “I’m very sick,” he was quoted by The Times Herald-Record. “I’m very sorry that things have happened the way they did.”

Thompson is 72 and indeed a sick man. It’s possible he’ll die in prison. He got his 15-to-life when he appeared before Orange County Court Judge Robert Freehill who concluded that the public needs protection from the likes of Thompson. Freehill deserves plaudits for sending him away.

Before anybody chirps, “But Thompson didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” allow me to introduce Barbara Rokas, whose dreadful injuries and terrible suffering demonstrate how drunken driving sometimes is not taken seriously.

In June 1990, Barbara Rokas was a first-grade teacher in Kearny, N.J. She estimated that in her 28-year career, she had taught 1,000 children how to read and do arithmetic. She loved her job and was good at it. She was on her way to confer with a colleague when she drove into the intersection of Stuyvesant Avenue and Chestnut Street. She stopped for the stop sign, then proceeded.

A teenager – 19 years old; too young to drink in New Jersey – came flying down Chestnut Street. He didn’t bother with such niceties as stop signs or brake pedals and smashed into Rokas’s car. His blood alcohol concentration was 0.19, almost twice the legal limit in 1990.

There was so much of Barbara Rokas’s blood on the pavement that an ambulance driver covered her face with a sheet. Then someone noticed that her hand moved. She was alive. And this is a catalogue of what that drunken driver did to her.

Because of him she needed 500 stitches to close her head wounds and many more to close other parts of her cut-up body.

He caused her to have brain damage.

He put her in a coma for 22 days.

He fractured her thighbone and broke her collarbone.

He paralyzed her entire right side due to nerve damage he inflicted through the fracture of her collarbone.

He left her deaf in one ear.

He left her with double vision.

He left her with severe memory loss.

He left her unable to get around without a wheelchair.

He left her with slurred speech.

Her injuries were such that when her husband went to see her for the first time in her hospital bed in Newark, her doctor issued a warning. This is what Bob Rokas said when I wrote about Barbara for The Record of Hackensack: “[The doctor] told me: ‘When you go in there, she’s going to look like she’s dead, but she’s not dead.’ He had his hands on my arms, sort of holding me up against the wall to make sure I understood what he was saying. I opened the door and went in. She was bald and her head was bandaged. I never saw anyone that color before. She was sort of yellow or orange. My wife.”

In fact, when her lawyers brought an action against the taverns that had served the 19-year old, they filled five pages with her injuries. This is what her lawyers wrote, “[She] has also suffered, and will continue to suffer, loss of the pleasures and pursuits of life and a diminution and impairment of her capacity to enjoy life.” Next time someone says, “But he didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” think of Barbara Rokas who remains one of the more courageous people you’re likely to meet.

She would need aides to help her live her life. It would take her two hours to get dressed in the morning and two hours to get undressed to go to bed. She required help to take a bath, comb her hair, brush her teeth, eat a meal.

Much, much later, if she and her husband wished to have dinner in a restaurant, people would stare at her and the very slow way she ate her meal. They would watch as one of her arms involuntarily slid along the table and pushed her plate away. 

“I have aides around the clock, seven days a week,” she told me in 2001. “My life is basically a zero.”

When the man who reduced her life to a zero appeared for sentencing, the judge likely knew that he didn’t mean to hurt her.

And so, for what he did to Barbara Rokas, the man would have to serve two months of weekend home confinement, the judge said.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

As Roman Polanski sits in a Swiss jail, fighting extradition to the United States to face a judge on his admitted rape of a young teenager, Whoopi Goldberg weighs in with one of the more bizarre quotes of the new century.

“It wasn’t rape-rape,” she said, as if to suggest that somehow it wasn’t really rape despite Polanski’s having pleaded guilty to it. Goldberg can know nothing about the crimes of Roman Polanski.

In this case, it was the 43-year old Polanski having his way with a 13-year old girl in 1977. Not rape? It defined rape. When it occurred, it carried an odd sentencing range: six months to 50 years. The story is that Polanski, in a deal, pleaded guilty to rape, had other serious charges dropped, and expected a minimum sentence. So Whoopi Goldberg notwithstanding, it was rape to Polanski, rape to the girl, rape to the judge, rape to the district attorney, and rape to Polanski’s defense team.

But when Polanski was seized with fear that the judge might slap him with major prison time, he fled to Europe, where he has resided ever since.

Polanski’s friends yammer about the supposed injustice of jailing him for something that happened so many years ago, and ask why the United States never went after him before. It doesn’t really matter because no matter how they slice it, the “something” was a rape committed against a kid.

And Goldberg neglected to discuss other facts of the case against Polanski, who was 31 years old when his victim was born. 

–The girl, Samantha Geimer, told the grand jury 32 years ago that Polanski drove her to the home of Jack Nicholson – Nicholson was not home – to shoot fashion photos of her. To get things started, Polanski gave her a Quaalude tablet and champagne and then suggested she take off her clothes and take a dip in the whirlpool bath. Then he took off his clothes and joined her in the water. They were alone, this middle-aged man and girl.

–CBS reported the following from the grand jury report: “The victim testified that after she left the whirlpool bath, Polanski told her to go to a nearby bedroom and lie down. Answer: I was going, ‘No, I think I better go home’ because I was afraid. So I just went and I sat down on the couch. Question: What were you afraid of? Answer: Him.”

–“He reached over and kissed me,” she said. “And I was telling him, ‘No,’ you know, ‘Keep away.’”

–He asked the girl if she were on any form of birth control. When she said she was not, he asked if she preferred anal intercourse. She said she did not. Then he had oral sex with her. When he was through, he had vaginal intercourse with her.

–“I was ready to cry,” she said. “I was kind of – I was going, ‘No. Come on. Stop it.’ But I was afraid.”

–Later, Polanski drove her home and advised her not to tell her mother or boyfriend about what he had done. She testified, “He said, ‘You know, when I first met you I promised myself I wouldn’t do anything like this with you.’”

–Polanski was indicted for furnishing a controlled substance to a minor, performing a lewd or lascivious act on a child under 14, rape by use of drugs, oral copulation, sodomy, and unlawful sexual intercourse with a female under the age of 18. All but the last were dropped in the plea deal.

Yes, Polanski and his family beat it out of Europe just before the Nazis inflicted themselves on his native Poland. Yes, he’s a renowned film maker. Yes, he suffered an unspeakable horror when Charles Manson’s gang stabbed his pregnant wife Sharon Tate to death in 1969.

And yes, Polanski deserves to do serious prison time for inflicting himself on a young girl. If what he did was not rape, there is no such crime. But you and I know there is.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

No one except political candidates takes endorsements seriously anymore. Are you going to be swayed because Bill Clinton flies into town to say nice things about some Democrat or because George W. Bush arrives on behalf of the Republican? Maybe years ago, but nowadays? I don’t think so.

Still, politicians seek out celebrities to bolster their campaigns, but sometimes fail to understand that certain endorsements are liabilities. The perfect example of this occurred last year when Barack Obama won the ringing endorsement of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Why anyone in his right mind would voluntarily acknowledge the backing of a minister whose most notable quote was “God damn America” is beyond comprehension.

Various Obama detractors – and supporters – raised a huge stink. It took Obama a little time but he finally broke with Wright and found a new church.

And so, we come to a little item in last week’s edition of The Warwick Advertiser about a campaign appearance in Warwick by Assemblyman Greg Ball. Ball is seeking the Republican nomination to oppose Rep. John Hall, D-19 in 2010.

And in the audience to lend support were none other than Rep. Peter King, the Long Island Republican who is the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, and Bernard Kerik.

That Bernard Kerik?

The same. Kerik is the former New York City police commissioner who President Bush nominated in 2004 to be his Secretary of Homeland Security. One week later Kerik, citing a potential problem regarding the immigration status of a woman who had worked in his home, withdrew himself from consideration. Later he would be indicted for failing to mention the nanny matter to White House officials conducting the vetting process on his nomination.

And, oh yeah, there was an allegation about a little matter of Kerik’s receiving $255,000 worth of renovations to his apartment from a contractor wishing to do business with the city. Apparently he forgot to mention that, too.  

Kerik would have more substantial problems. Later, he was charged with conspiracy, mail and wire fraud, and for lying to the Internal Revenue Service by forgetting to report the $255,000 as income.

In 2006, he pleaded guilty to illegally accepting that remodeling of his apartment from a contractor which, the city believed, had links with organized crime.

His withdrawal from consideration as Homeland Security Secretary was a great embarrassment to the Bush Administration, courtesy of Kerik himself, who was subsequently indicted for lying to White House investigators, and courtesy also of Rudolph Giuliani, who had pressed Bush to appoint Kerik to Homeland Security, and was Kerik’s biggest cheerleader.

There have been other bumps in Kerik’s road. Last winter, for example, The New York Times reported he had been indicted for allegedly failing to report $500,000 in income in 1999.

Something to bear in mind: As obnoxious as Wright’s comments were, he wasn’t indicted for anything and hasn’t pleaded guilty to anything.

What was Ball thinking when he accepted Kerik’s support? That the voters won’t notice the company he keeps?

Message to Greg Ball: They’re smarter than you think.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

By Jeffrey Page

Advisory: You will find the word “Woodstock” in this paragraph and the one that follows, but rest assured this is not more Woodstock nostalgia.

In the new movie “Taking Woodstock” there’s a close-up of The Times Herald-Record and under one of the headlines are the words “By Charlie Crist.”

For 60 years, starting in 1933, Charlie was a reporter for radio stations and weekly papers in the Mid-Hudson, as well as for The Times Herald-Record, which is where I met him. I was hired in 1972 for the Sullivan County Bureau where Charlie once had been the boss. Now he was working mostly out of Middletown though he’d often return to the bureau to use the phone or the teletype.

But first he’d push his glasses to the top of his head, loosen his bowtie, light a cigarette and ask, “And what have you fellers been up to?” Never “fellows,” always “fellers.”

Charlie worked hard. Mornings he would be in the newsroom in Middletown. Then he’d drive back to Monticello, where he lived, to have lunch with his wife Gladys. He’d usually have coffee with us at the bureau, bounce around Sullivan, Orange and Ulster looking for stories, have dinner with Gladys and head out again to meetings. His work was his recreation.

Every small town needs its local paper, and every paper needs a Charlie Crist, a guy who can walk into a bar, or a diner, or a VFW hall, or a church, or a hunting camp, or a meeting of volunteer firefighters, and know everybody in the room. These were the places he found the “real people,” as he called them, that he spent a career writing about. I think he knew every cop in three counties.

Charlie loved to gab with anyone who loved to gab. He and I talked a lot about hunting. “A feller’s got to eat,” Charlie said, and I agreed. I just never understood hunting for sport. “You’d deprive people of the hunt?” Charlie said incredulously. I said a sportsman should hunt a bear on the bear’s terms – wrestle it. Winner gets to eat the loser. “Jeffrey, my friend, that is dumbest thing I ever heard from you,” he said, and would remind me that my “problem” was that I grew up in Queens, not Pine Bush.

Everybody knew him. People would stop by the bureau just wanting to say hello to their man Crist. The firefighters may have loved him more than anyone else for his coverage of the creation of the Firefighters Burn Treatment Fund.

I don’t think he ever slept. Once, I got a call in the middle of the night from the Liberty supervisor, Francis “Stretch” Hanofee, telling me that there was a bad fire at a school for emotionally disturbed kids. I raced over. And there was Charlie. “Thought you’d never get here,” he said.

Another time, it was Charlie calling before dawn with something about a derailment just across the Delaware from Barryville. But we don’t cover Pennsylvania, I said.

“Oh, put your pants on. I’ll pick you up in 15 minutes,” he said.

Charlie was one of the Record reporters who covered the big show at Max Yasgur’s farm in 1969. Five years later he summed it up.

“Half a million naked kids and some music,” he said. Charlie wasn’t cool, just salt of the earth, a man from an earlier time.

I don’t think Charlie would understand what’s happening to newspapers today. What would he say about papers being run by people with no background in news, or by venture capitalists who sink some money in, take a lot more out and walk away, letting the papers wither and die?

Charlie, who died in 1993 at 78, had his share of lame brained managers, such as some alleged geniuses at The Times Herald-Record who strongly hinted in 1978 that it was time for him to pack it in. What did he do? He went back to the weeklies and beat The Record on a regular basis with stories about firefighters and veterans, hunters and cops and other “real people.”

Then he’d drop into the Record bureau, push his glasses up, take a cup of coffee, and ask “And what have you fellers been up to?”

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

I read about the “compassionate release” from prison of the mass murderer Abdel Baset al-Megrahi and, like a few billion other people around the world, I was nauseated.

Al-Megrahi was convicted for the 1988 bombing of Pan-Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie resulting in the deaths of 270 people. It took 12 years to bring him to trial. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a required minimum of 27 years behind bars.

Now, after eight years, he’s out and back home in Libya, freed by the Scots minister of justice, Kenny MacAskill, because Al-Megrahi has terminal prostate cancer and is not expected to live more than three months. Al-Megrahi was welcomed home as a national hero with flowers tossed at him by cheering crowds. The son of Col. Moammar Khadafy hugged him.

Compassion for al-Megrahi? There are people who can summon up such feelings for individuals like al-Megrahi but I’m not one of them. I’ve been opposed to capital punishment for as long as I can recall, and am saddened that the work of this one man made me believe that in his case the death penalty would have been appropriate. This is a man whose bomb killed 259 passengers and crew, plus another 11 people on the ground. If there’s been talk of compassion for the families and friends of the victims I haven’t heard it.

After I read the news of al-Megrahi’s release, I thought about Theo Cohen. Theo, you may recall, was the 20-year old woman from Port Jervis who was flying home on Flight 103. She was a theater major at the University of Syracuse and had just completed a semester in Great Britain.

To say I knew the Cohens – Theo and her parents, Susan and Daniel – would be an impossible stretch. But 11 years before al-Megrahi’s treachery, my wife, my daughter and I were at a picnic at a friend’s house in the hills over Cuddebackville. The Cohens were there, too. Daniel wrote science books for children. Susan was writing romance novels. Theo was about 9, my kid was 7. They played together on the grass.

And that was it. I don’t think I ever saw any of the Cohens again.

Then came Flight 103 and my admittedly tenuous connection to it. I remembered Theo and of course thought about my own daughter. How could any dad not? And how could I not wonder about the Cohens’ horror, first of not knowing, and then of understanding how their only child died?

The very idea of freedom for al-Megrahi is an abomination. Do the math and you come to the sickening realization that he served precisely 11 days in jail for each of the people he murdered. I think that if anyone deserves to die frightened, alone and friendless in a prison hospital, he does. I don’t often have such thoughts. It took the likes of al-Megrahi to bring them out.

What about compassion for the Cohens, I wonder, and for all the relatives and friends of everyone else on Flight 103? MacAskill said he based his decision to free the prisoner strictly on al-Megrahi’s health, though there are stories circulating that British-Libyan trade and oil may be part of the deal.

I wonder how MacAskill would explain his reasoning if he were seated across a table from Susan Cohen.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Here’s what I discovered at a packed public meeting on health care reform Monday night in Greenwood Lake.

First off, a large majority of those attending oppose the current proposed changes.

Second, there was a lot of misinformation, some genuine, some for effect. The host, Assemblyman Greg Ball, who wants to unseat Rep. John Hall next year, called for civility but at no time in the first hour did he step in to correct even the most blatant misstatements.

Not long after Ball’s message about civility, a woman brandished a sign declaring: “Pelosi’s doctor should implant a tongue depressor and wire her jaw!!” Which was no less civil than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s idiotic likening of some critics of health care reform to Nazis, a claim that infuriated any fair minded person.

A man said, “I resent the administration’s comparing me to a brown shirt or a Nazi.” This was an artful way of slandering President Obama because neither he nor anyone else in his administration made any such comparison. Pelosi of course is not in the administration.

People sounded angry, confused and scared, but mostly angry especially with Obama. One man unhelpfully called the current proposals an “obamination.”

“Your postal clerk will be your doctor,” another man said.

The words “socialized medicine” were used a lot. A man asked, “What is socialism?” and answered himself that under socialism you must justify the air you breathe. Then he said “socialism is worse then slavery” and quickly backtracked to stick in the disclaimer “as evil as slavery was.” Socialism doesn’t give a damn about people, he said, but at least in slavery the owners were concerned about the health of the owned and thus made sure they were well-fed and clothed.

We were told that “elitists” promoting health care reform want the rest of us to drive around in fuel efficient cars as they travel in SUVs and private jets. The elitists were never identified. Still, there were cheers.

A man said the actress Suzanne Somers was from Canada and can attest to the failings of the Canadian national health system because she and several members of her family have suffered with cancer. But Somers was born and brought up in San Bruno, Calif.

We were informed that government control of health care delivery will allow bureaucrats to kill old people, kill special needs people, kill premature babies, kill the sick.

Then came the line that the government can’t run the DMV but wants to control our health. Health care reform would put clerks and bureaucrats in charge. The DMV may make the final decisions on your health care and it could be a postal clerk who’ll be your doctor, sell you a sheet of stamps, a $25 money order and an appendectomy.

A major fear is the business about “death panels” being spread by Sarah Palin. Hers is the shameless lie that really scares the hell out of some older people: The government will decide when you’ve had enough treatment and pull the plug.

A man who said he suffers with pancreatic cancer, heart disease and diabetes – and who, by the way, says he’s 90 to 95 percent satisfied with his Medicare – said he doesn’t want government involved in his end-of-life decisions.

Some people were concerned that reform will subsidize health insurance for illegal aliens, but Hall says in his web site that the proposals specifically prohibit this.

Several other people called for tort reform but failed to address the question of what happens when they go for a kidney transplant and the surgeon removes the wrong kidney.

Some other things I learned were that a preponderance of the crowd were older people – I’m one of them – with concerns about what will happen to Medicare should health care reform come to pass. Obama puts the cost of reform at $1 trillion over 10 years. Does Medicare funding get reduced to pay for total reform? And if so, what happens to the quality of older people’s health care?

This issue is so complicated, so politically charged and ultimately so important that we have to slow things down. President Obama may want quick Congressional action but he can’t have it. Not when it’s clear that 300 million Americans need more time to understand what reform is about.

Hall wasn’t at Greenwood Lake. It was Ball’s political show.

But if these two guys want to be helpful, it’s time to stop playing to the converted. We need Hall and Ball to talk with each other. A Hall-Ball debate should be in a quiet room. It should be televised. It ought to have no moderator but just two men swearing to stick to the truth.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

In another display of official lunacy, the government (a) decided to conduct a study of telephoning while driving, evidently ignoring the fact that such studies have been going on elsewhere for more than 15 years, (b) discovered that – duh! – it’s not safe to yak on the phone while cruising to work, and, fearful of antagonizing Congress, (c) squelched its own findings.

In other words, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration came through in the clutch six years ago and reached a conclusion that was a surprise to absolutely no one and then pretended it did no such thing.

DWP – driving while phoning – is dangerous?

–You knew it and I knew it because we have, any number of times, observed the idiotic driving of people dialing ahead for a pepperoni pizza or making other very important calls. They veer from lane to lane. Often they seem incapable of comprehending that most uncomplicated expression, NO TURN ON RED. And they go when they should stop and stop when they should go.

–We knew it because there are certain truths in life – even if we can’t explain how we know them. Call it common sense or intuition: We know that if we don’t concentrate on controlling our 4,000-pound vehicles we could be killed. We know this the same way we know not to swim when we see dorsal fins and not to eat wild mushrooms unless we’re in the company of a world class mycologist.

–Oh, and of course let’s not forget that the danger of carrying on a phone conversation while tooling along, say, Route 17, isn’t exactly news.

In fact, the New England Journal of Medicine published a Canadian study showing that a driver talking on a cell phone was as likely to be in a crash as someone who was legally drunk. To state the danger quantitatively, researchers found that using a cell phone in the car quadrupled the chance of a crash.

The Canadians even found that the chances of an accident are not reduced when the driver uses a hands-free phone to order that pizza. It’s not the dialing necessarily, and it’s not the grasping of the phone necessarily that are so dangerous. It’s the very act of talking with someone who isn’t there.

That was published in 1997.

Other studies with nearly identical findings have preceded the outright bans of driving while phoning in Switzerland, Israel, Brazil and several other nations. All were noted in the American press.

If there’s anyone who still refuses to make the connection between driver-phoning and crashes, note The New York Times’s recent report that NHTSA’s 2003 findings – the ones that were nearly lost to the ages – estimated that 955 people were killed in nearly a quarter million phone-related accidents in 2002 alone.

The dangers of driver-phoning are known to all sensible people. What’s breathtaking is that NHTSA, an arm of the U.S. Department of Transportation, tried to hide its own report, a report that states the obvious. Congress was dead set against the agency dealing directly with the states on this matter of auto safety, even though auto safety is NHTSA’s mission.

To oppose Congress on this could have jeopardized the agency’s funding.

NHTSA’s finding might have remained locked forever in a file cabinet in Washington except that the Center for Auto Safety and Public Citizen got hold of it through the Freedom of Information act and turned a copy over to The Times.

Now the information is out there – as if you didn’t know it.

But the question remains: Why would Congress object to NHTSA’s dealing with its counterpart agencies in the 50 states? Forgetting for a moment that studies have continually shown the danger of driver-phoning, wouldn’t it make perfect sense for NHTSA and state transportation departments to remain in contact on such a crucial and widespread problem?

Cynics might wonder if the powerful telecommunications lobby had a role in Congress’ decision to put NHTSA’s findings on ice.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Maybe the numbers were on the high side this time. Forty-four public officials, including three mayors and a member of the Assembly, arrested in one day, most on charges of money laundering. But elected politicians in New Jersey betraying the public trust and stealing public money?

It will happen again. Over the course of a century it has happened before.

Some Jersey stories.

In 1971, John R. Armellino, the mayor of West New York, pleaded guilty to taking $1,000 a week to protect illegal gambling interests. Not just any gambling interests but those run by a gentleman named Joseph “Bayonne Joe” Zicarelli of organized crime repute.

The mayor did such a good job in carrying out his end of the bargain that West New York became known as the place to go in North Jersey if you were looking for a little action.

Armellino had come home from World War II a tragic hero. For gallantry in action on D-Day he was awarded the Silver Star. He also lost his right leg at Normandy. On his return home he entered politics. He was mayor for 20 years and ran his town like a dictatorship. If a critic got too vociferous at a council meeting, Armellino would snap his fingers and a cop removed the complainer. At which point, Armellino would calmly say, “Next to be heard.”

The mayor went to prison for four years.

In Jersey City, also in 1971, Mayor Thomas J. Whelan was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment. All Whelan did was come up with a way to provide for his old age. He and some other officials figured they could shake down contractors doing business with the city simply by suggesting that failure to pay up would force Jersey City to give its business to rival contractors – who would then have to pay. It wasn’t original and it wasn’t elegant, but it worked for a while and the Whelan group’s take was said to be more than $1 million.

However, one supplier got tired of being extorted and went to the authorities. It didn’t take long for Whelan and the others to be brought down. The mayor pleaded guilty and was sent away.

Tom Gangemi was another Jersey City mayor who had to leave office prematurely, but not for bribery, extortion or conspiracy. In 1963, two years after he was elected, the feds informed Gangemi that he had a serious problem. He had never bothered to become a U.S. citizen.

A Union City storefront bearing an immodest sign – “The William V. Musto Regular Democratic Organization” – was Billy Musto’s 18-syllable base of operations. This was where Musto, the long-time mayor, would spend time schmoozing with friends, drinking coffee, and meeting constituents. You needed a job? A loan? Maybe some food for the table? You had a complaint about a cop? For these you needed to see somebody with clout. That was Mayor Musto.

How popular was he? Popular enough so that one year he secretly gave financial support to a challenger because, as Musto said, it didn’t look good to run with no opposition.

And popular enough so that on May 11, 1982, Billy was sentenced to seven years in prison for municipal racketeering, and on May 12, 1982, he was reelected mayor. The guy he beat was his former protégé Bob Menendez who testified against him and who never claimed that the vote had been rigged. Today, Menendez is one of Jersey’s senators.

And so popular that when Billy was released from prison after serving three years, he went home to Union City to find that lampposts all over town were decorated with yellow ribbons and welcome-home signs. One said “The leader is back.”

They’re all gone now, these characters in the long, never-ending line of corrupt Jersey pols. But clearly, the game of greed, stupidity and betrayal goes on.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com