By Jeffrey Page

There is talk in Arizona about secession from the United States, but little information about why.

It is a state that gets $1.19 in return for every $1 the 6 million Arizonans shell out to the federal government. This leads to another question: Why would anyone give up a sweet deal like a 19 percent return on investment? Why would a state wish to give up all that money Washington sends for education aid, highway projects, farm programs, and more.

Also, what recent events would cause a state to betray the nation? The failure of the Republican Party to impose a Tea Party agenda on the country? The reelection of President Obama?

In their naïveté, Arizonans clamoring to leave the union believe that this one-sentence demand will do the trick: “We petition the Obama Administration to peacefully grant the State of Arizona to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own new government.”

No. You don’t engineer a breakup of a nation and then ask the president to go easy on you. It doesn’t work that way. Last time some states seceded, 650,000 men and women were killed in the war to sew the nation back together. Still, as of this week, secession petitions have been signed by about 15,000 Arizonans. There are similar campaigns in some other states as well.

Another reason why secession is not easy becomes apparent when you do the math. Arizona’s share of the national debt, based on population, comes to $335 billion. Fairness dictates that they pay their share as they walk out on America.

The secession petitions are just one example of why Arizona’s view of the relationship between government and the governed is at odds with the rest of the country.

As you know, Arizona enacted a law giving the police the power to pull a driver over if a cop has reasonable cause to believe the driver is in the United States illegally. Probable cause includes whether the driver looks a little out of place.

You know exactly what this means and exactly who it refers to, and it is noteworthy that authorities in Phoenix have yet to report how many motorists who look Polish, look Japanese, look French or look Congolese have been stopped and asked for some kind of proof that they’re in the United States legally.

There’s another example of Arizona and the people.

In a move that puts the lie to Arizona’s reputation as a libertarian bastion, the state has made it legal for physicians to lie to their patients without fear of consequence. True libertarians do not stand between women and their doctors.

The statute declares that a patient (read: a woman) can’t take action against her physician (read: her OBGYN) for malpractice if the doctor discovers, for example, that her fetus is deformed but says nothing about it. Sensible people understand that this is a lie of omission. In Arizona, it’s OK.

Three’s a crowd, so why would a state wish to enter the patient-doctor relationship? Because, if the woman is informed that the fetus is badly damaged or deformed, she might choose to undergo a certain legal procedure (read: an abortion) as a matter of personal choice and privacy (see: Roe v. Wade).

If Arizona lawmakers can give a doctor the right to look into a patient’s eye and lie about the condition of her fetus, what’s to prevent physicians from downplaying serious medical conditions of poor, undocumented Mexican men, women and children? Some Latinos would grow sicker and sicker and possibly go back home to be cared for by family. And then Arizona could brand itself the champion of the ever-complaining Anglo population.

By Jeffrey Page

I really want to stop writing about Mitt Romney but he won’t let me. He’s like a character in “The Night of the Living Dead;” every time you think he’s done, he rises zombielike and presents himself all over again. Some people scream when he does this.

Some of Romney’s recent remarks suggest that it was fortunate he lost the election because he is either exceedingly cruel or exceedingly stupid, not a person most decent people would want making decisions in the Oval Office.

Example: Will you ever forget his informing us that he was dismissing nearly half the population as a bunch of crybabies always wanting something for nothing from the government – health care, food, housing and “you name it.” Then he said, “My job is not to worry about those people.”

That was then and you might have dismissed his bombast as the work of a desperate candidate. But with Romney it never stops, and his placing the blame on the other guy never stops either. Romney still doesn’t understand that one reason he wasn’t elected was that a majority of Americans simply didn’t trust him to represent their interests.

This week, he informed some big-money contributors that he had lost because President Obama offered certain “gifts” to African-Americans, Hispanics, and young people. Gifts? That would include such frivolity as forgiveness of college loan interest as a generation tries to find meaningful work. Only someone like Romney, whose income last year was about $22 million, would dismiss this deal on loan interest in the same breath as free contraceptives. Oh, that was another “gift” from Obama, Romney said, noting “Free contraceptives were very big with young college-age women.”

Still one more “gift” was young people being able to remain on parents’ health insurance to age 26, something else you might now understand when your income is $423,077 a week.

Of course, he never mentioned the “gifts” he offered to some of his supporters such as making permanent the Bush Era tax breaks to people like himself – millionaires and billionaires – and fighting like hell against any new tax. That “gift” is all right; health insurance is not.

Gifts from Obama? How about young people not headed for college, but wishing to follow their parents into the American auto factories of the Middle West? Obama said we had to save the industry in order to save the economy; Romney said the hell with the car makers, let them go. That was $22 million speaking.

Mitt, I can’t write about you anymore, so please don’t say anything else stupid enough to get me started.

* * * * *

All right, the happy news out of Florida this week was that Congressman Allen West, a first-term Republican with a big mouth, had finally accepted the fact that he lost the election after waiting two weeks for a miracle that never came.

West is the member of Congress who delivered the dead-on impersonation of Joe McCarthy.

In 1950, McCarthy said he had a list of 205 State Department employees who were communists. (In a letter to President Truman two days later, McCarthy referred to his list of 57 Reds at Foggy Bottom, and never said what had happened to the missing 148.)

In April of this year, Allen West announced that 80 Democratic members of the House were communists.

Whoa! Then it turned out that West didn’t exactly know they were communists. Instead, he said he “heard” that they were communists. But Brave-Heart West, always alert to a possible communist conspiracy, declined to name any of these enemies of the state or turn their names over to the FBI. Nor did he call for an investigation into how these 80 scoundrels had reached the floor of the House.

And finally, he said the 80 people he had in mind were members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and oh yeah, they aren’t communists after all.

This is the same Allen West who said that President Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi should “get the hell out of the United States of America,” the same Allen West who said, “I will not allow President Obama to take the United States and destroy it,” the same Allen who said the president is a Marxist.

Now all the votes have been counted and Allen West, this national embarrassment, believes that no recount could do him any good, and come January, he’ll be gone.

By Jeffrey Page

The warm and fuzzily named American Family Association sounds like the kind of outfit just about anyone would be happy to join, but it turns out that AFA is, as Tallulah Bankhead once described herself, as pure as the driven slush.

This story begins with the annual observance of the decade-old “Mix It Up at Lunch Day,” the clunky title for a program designed to urge students to accept one another without regard to race, religion, disability or – horror of horrors! – sexual orientation.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which originated the Mix It Up at Lunch Day as part of its Teaching Tolerance program, asks schools to encourage students to have lunch for one day – next Tuesday, Oct. 30 – with someone they’ve avoided in the past. There’s no assigning of lunch tables or lunch mates, just kids deciding to sit with someone new for a while, or deciding not to.

Somehow the Sanfordville School in the Warwick district wound up on the law center’s list of participating schools, but the principal, Roger Longfield, told the Times Herald-Record this is not the case. “We’re not participating. We already have our kids mixed up,” he said.

Instead, the Sanfordville School will be decked out in a Halloween motif.

What is the American Family Association and why does it vehemently oppose Mix It Up at Lunch Day?

To call AFA a right-wing outfit is to slander true conservatives. AFA has a lot of weird positions on a lot of issues, but its foremost concern is the bid by gay men and women to be treated as fellow citizens. The Mix It Up at Lunch Day program is, AFA claims, nothing more than part of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “nationwide push to promote the homosexual lifestyle in public schools.”

Do I exaggerate about the AFA’s benighted worldview? A man called Bryan Fischer, the American Family Association’s director of issue analysis, has written: “Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine, and six million dead Jews.” Get it? The holocaust was all Marlene Dietrich’s doing.

It doesn’t stop with gay people.

Fischer’s libel of African-Americans was beyond the pale and will not be repeated here. He lumped all Muslims together as security risks and said that, without exception, they should not be allowed to serve in the military. He said many Indians suffer from poverty and alcoholism because they have refused to adopt Christianity and instead “cling to the darkness of indigenous superstition.” And with no attribution, he declared that “homosexuals are rarely monogamous and have as many as 300 to 1,000 sexual partners over the course of a lifetime.”

In addition to vilifying and slandering the people it doesn’t like, the American Family Association likes to call boycotts.

It boycotted Google because of the search engine’s Legalize Love program on behalf of Lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender people. AFA called for the avoidance of JC Penney because Penney signed Ellen DeGeneres as its public face. For similar reasons, AFA wants consumers to pass on Levi’s, Cheerios, Pepsi and any number of other products whose manufacturers dare to portray gay people as human beings. At one point Fischer and his friends even wanted us to stop buying Oreos.

The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that more than 1 million school children participated in Mix It Up last year. Who is going to complain about a white kid and a black kid having sandwiches together? Or a Jew and a Baptist? Or – watch out, here is comes again – a gay kid and a straight kid? Students need to understand that they will not go through life meeting and interacting only with people like themselves.

What America could use are more programs that get people together and fewer that promote hatred and double standards of citizenship.

By Jeffrey Page

There he goes again. Mitt Romney, who never allows the truth to stand in the way of what looks like a lethal blow against an opponent, told a whopper at the Tuesday night debate. But he was caught. And I am left wondering what it is about the protocols of presidential politics that seems to require a debater to say, “Governor, that’s not true” rather than “Governor, that’s a damned lie.”

This time, the issue was Romney’s shameless – and ultimately fact-less – politicization of the attack on the United States diplomatic mission in Benghazi.

Romney smelled blood in the water. He would nail President Obama for not responding quickly enough to the attack and specifically for failing to label the assault – in which four Americans including the ambassador to Libya were killed – an act of terrorism.

For weeks before the debate, he hinted that Obama somehow had dismissed the incident as the spontaneous actions of demonstrators enraged by the making of the 14-minute movie “The Innocence of Muslims,” which maligns the prophet Mohammed, rather than as a planned act of pure terror.

Now, the fact is that you know the truth about Obama’s behavior after the attack, I know the truth, the president certainly knows the truth, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton knows the truth, and anybody who was paying attention on Sept. 12 knows the truth. Maybe even Romney knows the truth, or maybe he’ll say anything, do anything, suggest anything – anything at all – to get elected.

It took too long for Obama to conclude this was an act of terror?

As it turns out, President Obama and Secretary Clinton appeared in the White House Rose Garden the day after the attack on the Libyan mission to express their sorrow to the families of the dead, their anger at the killers, their concern for American-Libyan relations, and their resolve to bring the killers to justice.

And there it was. “No acts of terror,” Obama said, “will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.” Poor Mitt.

At the debate, Romney was flabbergasted when the question of what the president said and when he said it, was raised. “I think [it] interesting the president just said something, which is that on the day after the attack he went into the Rose Garden and said that this was an act of terror.”

Obama: “That’s what I said.”

Romney couldn’t believe it: “You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack, it was an act of terror, it was not a spontaneous demonstration, is that what you’re saying?”

A moment later, Romney, still confounded, said: “I want to make sure we get that for the record because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.”

Obama: “Get the transcript.”

In stepped Candy Crowley, the moderator: “He did call it an act of terror. It did as well take – it did as well take two weeks or so for the whole idea [of] there being a riot out there about this tape to come out. You are correct about that.”

This wasn’t good enough for Romney, or else he didn’t care about the veracity of his criticism of Obama. Or maybe it was Romney’s secret message to the American people in which he revealed his personal pathetic inadequacy. It’s Mitt Romney who has sworn that on his first day in office as president he would label the Chinese as “currency manipulators.” First day leaves little time for discussion and reasonableness.

The first debate revealed a lot about Romney. Tuesday night’s meeting confirmed it. There’s his casual relationship with the facts and the truth. There’s his constant smirk. There’s his contempt for authority, such as his interrupting the moderator to try and set his own rules of engagement. There’s his dismissal of the rules of the game. There’s his continual attempt to get the last word even when the last word is not his to get.

By Jeffrey Page

The presidential debates are long, boring, often off the topic, tedious, and mostly inconsequential – though Mitt Romney’s return from the dead after the first confrontation this year is nothing short of miraculous.

Clearly, we need a new system. Here are some modest proposals.

–The Pants-on-Fire format. Each candidate would be connected to a lie detector. The graphs, needles and other indicators of prevarication would be televised and appear beneath the candidates in their t-shirts. Off stage, a crew of non-partisan fact checkers with high-speed computers would check the candidates’ statements and responses. If the fact checkers need a little extra time, they would get it, and viewers would listen to the Ode to Joy while waiting. When it is determined that a candidate uttered a whopper – such as Romney’s saying there are 23 million people out of work when, bad enough, the official figure is 12.5 million – he would get a whipped cream pie in his face and a Bronx cheer.

–The Shut-Up-Already format. In this, the moderator (more on this role later) would have the authority to switch off a candidate’s microphone when it becomes clear that the would-be president is repeating himself. Redundancy would breed more than contempt; it would result in an otherwise articulate man yammering away in complete silence and looking pretty foolish. One microphone cutoff is the limit; if he bores the nation a second time, a man dressed as Bert Lahr appears and yanks him off the stage with a long wooden cane.

–The Stay-on-Message format. Ever notice how often the moderator asks a question and a candidate answers a different question? Example: The moderator asks, “What is your candid assessment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?” and a candidate, not wishing to get pinned down on that monster of a question, responds, “Well, Jim, I’d just like to say that when I’m in the Oval Office I will continue the tradition of pardoning the Thanksgiving turkey. The Easter Egg Hunt would be safe as well.” When a candidate begins answering a question that hasn’t been asked the moderator would get silence by switching off his audio switch.

–The Trivialize-the-Process-at-Your-Peril format. A siren would blare and red lights would flash if any candidate’s whose first words in the debate amounted to a personal trifle to his wife such as: “And so I just want to wish, Sweetie, you happy anniversary and let you know that a year from now we will not be celebrating it in front of 40 million people.” No, sir. Not with the nation in recession, at war, worried about health care, concerned about jobs, and angry about the complete inability of the president and Congress to speak the same language.

–The Face Code format. Candidates must give a damn about what they’re doing as they stand there behind the lectern and before the nation. Not only that; they have to look like they give a damn. If they appear bored to tears, they’re off the air. If they look like they you can’t be bothered, they’re off the air. Example A: George H.W. Bush checking his wristwatch as Bill Clinton spoke in a 1992 debate. Example B: Barack Obama doing a great imitation of a bored professor about to nod off in mid-sentence in the lecture hall. You want to be president? Show passion, even when you’re not addressing a friendly crowd.

–The moderator must be taller than the candidates. He must be tougher. He must take no abuse. And he must make use of his audio switch so that when a candidate talks over him he can get immediate silence and restore order on matters of time allotments and staying on subject. Any candidate who abuses or otherwise disrespects the moderator would have to sit in the corner for the rest of the debate and wear a dunce cap with the word “RUDE” in big yellow letters.

–The Or-Else-Settle-it-Out-Back format. No moderator. No audience. Just two seated candidates facing each other and talking about their programs and what’s wrong with the other’s plans. This would make the debates more civil because it’s not easy to suggest that your opponent is an ignorant ass when you’re alone in the room with him and he’s just a few feet away.

In this format, the candidates would agree – on camera, before the nation – to abide by time rules. They would also take a cue from feminist consciousness raising: No interrupting. When one candidate says something that’s wrong or a lie, his opponent jots it down and rebuts on his own time.

I think that in this arrangement, the candidates would be better behaved and stick closer to the truth. Then again, probably not.

By Jeffrey Page

My birthday’s not for another 10 months but this week I received a most thoughtful gift from the government. It was a day with almost no mail. Actually there were two items, a bill from the plumber, which I expected, and a card from the American Symphony Orchestra inviting me to Bard College for a concert that will include a performance of a concerto for tuba. I’m not going.

But this is not about music for tubas.

It’s about the fact that every morning, the letter carrier drops off a packet of mostly sheer trash. I almost always know when he arrives because there is so much mail coming in that I hear a distinctive thump as it’s delivered.

Does this happen to you?

You look through the day’s delivery in the naïve belief that there’s something important in there, something interesting – maybe a letter of acceptance from a magazine, maybe a check, maybe a note from a nephew on the West Coast – but no. Important things rarely arrive. I remember when the mail was fun, when you might get a letter from a friend or a favorite aunt. This hasn’t happened for decades. Nowadays the important stuff is a bank statement; almost all the rest is trash.

Every so often a credit card company with which I have an account wonders how I’m doing, and, in the event I’m not doing well, they include a sheet of six personalized checks. All I have to do is fill one out and sign it, and presto! An instant loan. I think this is a little too casual a way of getting one’s hands on some needed cash.

Do you get those sheets of stickers with your name and address on them? The charitable organizations that send them must believe that using a pen to write my return address on an envelope is just too burdensome. Often they get the names and titles wrong anyway, such as “Mrs. & Mr. Page, Jeffrey” (complete with ampersand and strangely placed comma).

I usually write shopping lists on the backs of used envelopes, but sometimes a charity sends me a little pad marked “shopping list.”

Don’t get me wrong; I give to certain charities. But I’m tired of having to open their pitches all year long when, as I have informed them, I have no intention of donating on their schedule, but on my own. They ignore me, and the pitches keep coming. Sometimes they call to ask me how much I’m kicking in this year, and the caller sounds put-off when I say he’ll find out when I send it.

I get autumn catalogues, winter catalogues, spring catalogues and summer catalogues from high-end stores and usually ignore them and their grand prices. And I get holiday catalogues from any number of museums whose prices are outrageous.

I don’t respond to any of these ads, but the postal trash just keeps piling up. Without exaggeration, I think I receive about a dozen invitations a year to subscribe to Optimum. The one that arrived today – addressed to “Our Neighbor,” which is odd since I’m in Orange County and they’re in Nassau County – says their latest special offer ends on Oct. 15, but I know the come-ons will continue after that. They always do.

Do you get pitched by outfits supporting victims of certain diseases and the scientists trying to put an end to those illnesses? I do. I am contacted by groups advocating for homeless people, sick people, and hungry people. I have empathy for all, but when these letters come day after day, week after week, I spend a lot of time tending to this junk and get weary. I go through the stuff and withdraw anything with my name and address and put it through a paper shredder, whose contents I add to the recycling barrel for later pickup and disposal.

Once, I let a membership in an environmental organization lapse and was bombarded with paper asking me how I could have forgotten to re-join. It took a year or so, but the paper finally stopped coming.

Nan Hayworth is relentless. I think she sends me more mail than she sends her favorite uncle. This morning I received a flyer from something called Friends of Nan Hayworth – they didn’t identify themselves – telling me that her opponent, Sean Patrick Maloney, is a bum.

The next piece of mail was from the very same Sean Patrick Maloney telling me what a great guy he is.

I get new-car ads all the time, and sometimes I get brochures from garages about bargain basement prices for oil-changes.

Maybe I can put a stop to this paper blizzard. This week I called the Direct Marketing Association (212-768-7277) to ask that my name be placed off-limits to direct mailers. I was sent to a website – www.dmachoice.org – and advised to look for a link called “get started.” It takes a while for the mailings to stop.

I’ll let you know how I make out.

By Jeffrey Page

Listen to the words of a man whose income two years ago was $22 million and then tell me he has a scintilla of understanding of what it’s like to be an American of ordinary means.

“Well, we do provide care for people who don’t have [health] insurance,” Mitt Romney said on his now-famous interview on “60 Minutes.” “If someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care.”

In fact, Mitt Romney doesn’t know what people do when they have heart attacks. He doesn’t know if people sit in their apartments and die. He doesn’t know if they call 911 and ask for an ambulance. He doesn’t know which side of town gets the better service.

Romney’s misplaced optimism comes at a time when the nation is losing emergency medical services. The Journal of the American Medical Association reported a study last year showing that “From 1990 to 2009, the number of hospital [emergency departments] in nonrural areas declined by 27 percent, with for-profit ownership, location in a competitive market, safety-net status, and low profit margin associated with increased risk of [emergency department] closure.

I don’t think Mitt Romney could possibly be so rosy about treatment in a hospital’s emergency room if in the last two years he had read a report by the American College of Emergency Physicians, which found the average time patients spend in the emergency room is four hours, seven minutes.

Romney doesn’t know this because he doesn’t know anyone who depends on the emergency room for treatment of a broken arm, a raging fever, a dose of Lyme disease.

Many years ago, I was living in Flushing and awoke one Sunday morning at about 2 o’clock with an excruciating toothache. Take it easy; I’m not about to sit here and suggest that my toothache compares in any way with someone’s having a heart attack. And I’m not going to tell you that a toothache is anything like the pain of labor or the pain of a kidney stone.

But it hurt like hell. My wife drove me to Queens General Hospital, about a 15-minute ride from our apartment. An admitting clerk took my name, asked me what the problem was, and told me to take a seat. I remember asking if I could just have a pill for pain while I waited and of course this was out of the question. So I waited.

People staggered in to that emergency room with all kinds illness and injury. So I waited. I absolutely understood and accepted the fact that my emergency paled when compared with some of the others playing out before me. Still I was annoyed that the process had to take this long.

My annoyance subsided about an hour after I registered with the arrival in the ER of a man whose shirt was drenched with blood. The staff went into high gear and they got this man off his stretcher, onto a gurney and whisked him away, presumably to emergency surgery.

I turned to my wife. At this rate, the ER triage might get me some pain medication in a year or so. It was time to go home.

Now, Mitt Romney is saying not to worry if you don’t have health coverage. Just direct your feet to the nearest emergency room.

But back in 2010, when that four-hour ER stay was reported, Dr. Angela Gardner, the then-president of the American College of Emergency Physicians declared: “Hospital emergency departments continue to close, which reduces access to medical care still further. More patients plus fewer ERs equals longer wait times.

“Near one quarter of hospitals report periods of ambulance diversion because they are over capacity,” Gardner continued. “A longer ride to the hospital is not good medicine.”

Responding to Romney, Dr. Debra Houry, the vice chairwoman for research and associate professor at Emory University School of Medicine, told the Huffington Post: I know that not only is it ridiculous to imply that emergency rooms are a replacement for insured health care, but that our already overburdened system can’t even go on much longer as it is – underfunded, overcrowded and little understood.

Remember how Bill Clinton was ridiculed when he said he feels our pain? This week, in Westerville, Ohio, Romney informed an audience: “I’ve been across this country. My heart aches for the people I’ve seen.”

Does anyone believe him?

Jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

The most startling aspect of the Romney implosion is the degree of contempt he reserves for half the population of the country he would govern.

In essence, he dismissed 47 percent of Americans as a bunch of moochers standing around on Saturday night with nothing to do but demand a hot time in the old town, courtesy of the United States treasury. In a line that will live as long as Clinton’s search for what the definition “is” is, Romney told a bunch of fat cats at a $50,000 a plate dinner last spring that people of the 47 percent “believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, [and] believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it…. ”

Let’s see. That 47 percent would include older people, poorer people, sick people, wounded veterans, people who’d like better schools for their kids, hungry people, people who sleep in cardboard boxes in winter, farmers, federal employees who could use a raise. The list of carefree people having a happy time seeking government handouts goes on.

If that weren’t enough to ruin a billionaire’s day, this 47 percent paid no federal income tax last year, Romney says. Which, of course, is at worst a deliberate distortion of the truth, or at best sheer ignorance. The New York Times quoted from a report of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center indeed showing that 46.4 percent paid no federal income tax last year, but noted that most of those people were elderly or low income. However, most of those households paid payroll taxes, which fund Medicare and Social Security.

The inescapable irony in Romney’s complaint about poor people and taxes is his continual ducking of the question of how much income tax he himself paid – if he paid any at all – in the years leading up to 2011, when he had an income of $22 million, or $6,000 a day.

Regarding Romney’s upset with people needing help, we Americans are not so cold that we’ll ignore a man going hungry or a woman seeking emergency care for a sick child. This is what Romney calls entitlements. Is a man entitled to a meal? Of course he is. Is someone entitled to get a child seen by a doctor? By their very membership in the U.S. branch of the human race, they are entitled to such help. Do you agree?

And, to again use that word that Romney and his friends so despise, two people raising a child or two on $25,000 a year indeed are entitled to food and housing assistance precisely because this is America where we can and will help those who are struggling.

This is America where we try to get people off the streets when the temperature drops in winter. This is America where sick people get treated.

It’s America, where Romney the candidate said of the 47 percent, “My job is not to worry about those people,” leading any reasonable person to understand that Romney the President would say precisely the same thing.

After the tape of Romney telling his pals about the 47 percent, he found his face covered with a half dozen eggs and called a 10 p.m. news conference this week – he rarely speaks directly with reporters – to inform any and all that he wants it both ways.

–1. He stands by his dismissal of half the country.

–2. But his comments were “not elegantly stated.”

–3. Although he had been speaking off the cuff.

–4. In any case, he wishes “to help all Americans – all Americans – have a bright, prosperous future.”

–5. That’s all Americans in case you missed it.

Question: Does any member of the 47 percent believe him?

Question: Does any member of the 53 percent believe him?

Romney fails to understand the Declaration of Independence’s noting that “all men” – not just the ones whose daddies ran a big car company – are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And he doesn’t get it, that “life” is not merely the opposite of death but an ongoing qualitative term. No one enlisted in the Continental Army to fight for life the way it used to be.

Romney further fails to understand that in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, and promote the general welfare, as the Constitution claims as its raison d’etre, a nation and its leaders must be ready to stand with the poorest as well as the richest.

America gets it. Would-be President Romney does not and as a result, ought to do the country a favor and step aside. He’s not qualified for the office.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

It is 2012. We’re supposed to have advanced over the last 100 years. We’re supposed to be smarter, maybe even more compassionate. Workers are supposed to be better off. Management is supposed to be more enlightened. But I’m sitting here looking at The Times’s account of two clothing factory fires in Pakistan and the deaths of 300 workers, young people for the most part between 18 and 25.

I read, and reread, a line in the Times story – “Officials said panicked workers [of a garment factory] were trapped inside the multistory building, which had just one exit” – and something sounds familiar. The calamitous Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911 in downtown Manhattan was in a multistory building with one fire escape, two stairwells and lots of locked doors. The loss in the Triangle fire was 146, mostly young women who had immigrated from Italy and Eastern Europe to find a better life.

I keep reading and learn that that the garment factory in Karachi had 1,500 workers and one exit. Additionally, management had installed grills to stop employees from leaving through windows. The bosses didn’t approve of people going home before the end of their shifts.

And I think about the fearless Clara Lemlich and the feckless Mitt Romney.

Lemlich was a garment worker and union organizer who led a strike in New York in 1909 over working conditions and who declared at a meeting of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, “I have listened to all the speakers. I have no further patience for talk, as I am one of those who feels and suffers from the things pictured. I move we go on a general strike.”

For her courage and for the fact that the bosses’ hatred of her was matched by the adoration of thousands of clothing workers, Lemlich was attacked by thugs hired by management. Later she was blacklisted from work in the industry. Despite serious physical injury – she was just 5 feet tall but the lead attacker made sure to bring some help – and the difficulty in finding work, Lemlich never quit. She lived to the age of 97 and, as reported by the great Jim Dwyer of the Times, in her final years helped organized the workers in her nursing home.

And then there is Romney and another nice bowl of Pablum he serves up for anyone who will listen. Recently he uttered the standard right wing line about labor unions: “Over the years, unions have made extraordinarily important contributions to American society.” Which of course is not the whole story.

Labor didn’t make those contributions. Rather, Labor won those contributions, sometimes through calm, peaceful negotiations and at other times through the use of Labor’s only real weapon: the strike. As a result, in some cases, windows were unlocked, doors were allowed to swing open and shut. Workers could get out. Salaries went up. Medical insurance was offered.

“But today, the effects of unionization have changed in ways that need to be recognized,” Romney says at a campaign website. “Too often, unions drive up costs and introduce rigidities that harm competitiveness and frustrate innovation.” And he goes on to make the lame argument that union officials don’t care about anything except staying in business. As if to say that workers are the stooges of their union leaders.

What Mitt Romney, and others like him who had to struggle along on an income of $22 million last year, refuse to accept is that every time a union has won a concession for its members, there were two parties at the bargaining table. This is not complicated unless you don’t wish to understand.

If Romney can cite an example of Labor’s holding a gun to the poor oppressed skull of management, I will retract the following observation: Mitt Romney knows as much about the work life of ordinary people as another famous millionaire, Scrooge McDuck.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

If I want to avoid the truth I could be brazen and tell you No when the truth is Yes.

Or, I could dance the old soft shoe and hope you don’t suddenly realize you’re being duped.

Or, like Mitt Romney, I could just immerse you in delusional blather. Romney is great with blather.

His sentimental acceptance speech was designed to make us think of him as just an ordinary humble guy, that is, an ordinary humble guy with a 2011 income of $22 million. To do so, he employed one of the more unfortunate metaphors you’re likely to hear. “The soles of Neil Armstrong’s boots on the moon made permanent impressions on our souls…. ” he said, and then, with gooey ordinary humble-guy sincerity, he played the Armstrong card a few more times.

“Tonight that American flag is still there on the moon,” Romney said, not bothering to explain how he knew this or what this factoid was doing in a partisan political speech. “And I don’t doubt for a second that Neil Armstrong’s spirit is still with us…. ”

Question: Was that the unsubtle Romney’s elusive attempt to suggest, with the grace of a Ringling Bros. elephant stepping into a bucket, that the late Neil Armstrong was – or had been – on board the Romney bandwagon?

Question: Was it just me, or did you also hear that little catch in Romney’s throat? You know: that mawkish gasp he uses on special occasions, such as when he’s trying to connect himself to an American hero or when he’s talking about Little League and the need for Americans to find more time so they can coach their kids’ soccer teams.

More time for soccer? Is Romney of this Earth? Soccer, when many of us are striving to meet the mortgage payment or go out on interview after interview trying to land a job? Does Mitt Romney have any understanding of what’s going on out here? And, by the way, could he please identify the soccer team he coached.

He jabbers about “when your son or daughter calls from college to talk about which job offer they should take…. And you try not to choke up when you hear that the one they like is not far from home.”

Which job to take? Doesn’t Romney understand that young people with degrees in their pockets are not choosing between one job close to Mom and Dad and one job on another coast? Instead, they’re scrounging for whatever job they can find to put some money in their pockets and to start their living their lives. And many, instead of getting an entry position with a corporation or a law firm, are slinging burgers and living with Mom and Dad, whom they dearly love and who they’d like to get away from – ASAP.

Romney exhales heavily when “we see that new business opening up downtown. It’s when we go off to work in the morning and see everybody else on the block doing the same.” I’ve been wondering: Precisely which “block” does Romney live on?

But back to Neil Armstrong.

Blathering ever onward, Romney said Armstrong’s spirit embodies “that unique blend of optimism, humility and the utter confidence that when the world needs someone to do the really big stuff, you need an American.” Well, not if you’re talking about other big stuff such as the development of penicillin, the invention of the movable-type printing press, the formulation of aspirin, the use of paper money and the invention of the stethoscope. All done by people who were not Americans.

Maybe Neil Armstrong would have signed on to the Romney campaign. But he never signed and we’ll never know.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com