Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/317385
GregStevens,Publisher Chip Thompson, Editor EDITORIALBOARD How to have your say: Letters must be signed and provide the writer's home street address and home phone number. Anonymous letters, open letters to others, pen names and petition-style letters will not be allowed. Letters should be typed and no more than two double-spaced pages or 500words. When several letters address the same issue, a cross section will be published. Email: editor@red bluffdailynews.com Phone: 530-527- 2151ext. 112 Mail to: P.O. Box 220, 545 Diamond Ave., Red Bluff, CA 96080 Facebook: Leave comments at FACEBOOK.COM/ RBDAILYNEWS Twitter: Follow and send tweets to @REDBLUFFNEWS Isaythathumorcanbe elusive. Any reader who has moaned or groaned over my jokes at the end of each col- umn will so at- test. One man's meat is another man's poison. And that's just the men. Women can laugh at my stuff or be totally offended. The missus, for example, is the arbiter around our house as to what is funny, what is not and what is offen- sive. An example might be a bit of poetry told to me many years ago by the late Walt Forbes — I wrote of Walt in The Passing Parade on Wednesday. He re- cited a poem about a free roam- ing urinating dog named "Tige" which was titled "Tige, the Di- abetic Pup." The missus took an instant dislike of it because diabetic folks would find it of- fensive. I argued that it would lose its punch line by removing the offending word because the premise of the poem was that Tige was "the pisser of his age" and went around town showing off to the city dogs his prodi- gious fetes of…well, you get the idea. So…I dropped that bit of doggerel and printed a watered down version of it. However, Joel Stein, in TIME, stated he had read a recent book titled "The Hu- mor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny." It was written by Peter Mc- Graw, a professor at the Univer- sity of Colorado, in which the author stated his "Benign Vi- olation Theory" which states that something is funny when it lands in the overlap between shock and acceptability. In con- clusion the author warned that if a person does not take risks with his material and perfor- mance, his humor potential will decrease. However, bear in mind that McGraw has never met the missus. If he were to do so and attempted a joke in her presence, I would urge him to drop the "shock" aspect of his presentation if he were looking for approval. ••• And speaking of humor, here is a great shaggy dog type joke: A police officer pulls a guy over for speeding and has the follow- ing exchange with the driver: Officer: "May I see your driv- er's license?" Driver: "I don't have one. It was suspended when I got my 5th DUI." Officer: "May I see the owner registration for this car?" Driver: "It is not my car. I stole it, but come to think of it, I saw it in the glove compartment when I put my gun in it. I put the gun there when I shot the woman owner and stuffed her in the trunk." Hearing this, the officer calls his captain and soon the car was surrounded by cops. The captain then took charge. Captain: "May I see your driver's license?" Driver: "Certainly captain, here it is." Captain: "Whose car is this?" Driver: "It's mine. Here is my registration." Captain: "Slowly open your glove compartment and show me the gun." Driver: "I don't own a gun." Captain: "Would you mind opening the trunk?" Driver: "Sure, here it is. It's empty." Captain: "I don't understand it. My officer says you told him you did not have a license or a registration slip, but that you had a gun in the glove compart- ment and a body in the trunk." Driver: "Yeah…and I'll bet he told you I was speeding, too." ••• Sightem: A familiar street walker was pushing his pur- loined shopping cart and stopped at the corner of Main and Walnut where he pushed the button to activate the light for his safe passage across the in- tersection. However, when sev- eral cycles went by without the "walk" sign flashing, he ob- served that autos that come into the intersection at an angle and don't activate the green light will often back up and re-align their car to the metal plates in the ground. A light flashes on over his head and he backs up his shopping cart, straightens it out and re-positions it at the curb. The "walk" sign just happens to go on then and he has solved an- other of life's problems. ••• Headline in the Enterprise Record: "Annexation effort gets a boost in Southside." A further reading indicates the writer is talking about annexing part of the Southside Oroville area into the Oroville city limits…not the annexation of Northern Cali- fornia. ••• Here's a heads up for absen- tee voters: I have it on good authority that when you mail in your ballot, one first class stamp is sufficient even though if you weigh it, it may show a mark over the one ounce limit ••• Last week's quiz was promptly answered by N. Rick via e mail and R. Ranberg by phone who knew that Doc Holiday's given name was John (or James) Henry, Frankenstein's was Vic- tor and the DiMaggio brothers were Joe, Dom and Vince. This week's quiz: Name the only one of the 7 Dwarfs that was beardless, the first names of the Duesenberg brothers of auto fame, and do any concert grand pianos have more than 88 keys? RobertMinchisalifelongresident of Red Bluff, former columnist for the Corning Daily Observer and Meat Industry magazine and author of the "The Knocking Pen." He can be reached at rminchandmurray@hotmail.com. Robert Minch Laugh and the world laughs with you Cartoonist's take If there's anything the flat- earth knuckleheads hate more than science, it's a president who is poised to act on the basis of that science. And executive ac- tion is imminent. Roughly two weeks from today, President Obama and the Envi- ronmental Protection Agency will crack down on the power plants that spew carbon. Their goal is to actually do something about manmade climate change warming, by targeting America's top source of greenhouse gases. Makes sense to me. At a time when 97 percent of scientists say that humans bear major respon- sibility for melting glaciers, rising seas, increased coastal flooding, and worsening storms, our top elected leader intends to act. The power plant crackdown will be historic, and, ideally, Con- gress would've signed off on it. But because Congress has pre- dictably burned its bridges - thanks to right-wing ideologues, politicians in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry and terrified red-state Democrats up for re- election - Obama rightly decided that executive action was the only way forward. Heck, somebody in public of- fice has to govern in the national interest. No other issue so thoroughly ex- poses the fatuous, blinkered nature of domestic politics as it is prac- ticed today. Politics is all about win- ning the next election. It's focused like a laser on the short-term; even worse, the climate change dialogue is distorted by Koch brothers cash and the conservative infauxtain- ment complex (which in turn nur- tures the trolls). Back in March, House Republi- cans voted to block the imminent power plant crackdown (a mean- ingless gesture, as usual), calling it "one of the most extreme reg- ulations of the Obama adminis- tration." Meanwhile, red-state Democratic senatorial candi- dates, like Mark Begich and Ali- son Lundergan Grimes, have dis- tanced themselves from crack- down. Indeed, as political analyst Ronald Brownstein wittily puts it, "Miami will likely be underwa- ter before the Senate can mus- ter enough votes to meaningfully confront climate change." So Obama's only choice was to circumvent the legislative stale- mate, to ignore the political exi- gencies of the next election and think long-term. And it's not just about us. China and America are the globe's top carbon polluters, but in 2012 they agreed, along with other nations, to negotiate a new international climate change treaty by 2015. We'll have more credibility in the negotiations - more ability to persuade other nations to crack down on carbon - once we can demonstrate that we're working to do that at home. This summer, prepare for the predictable loony rhetoric about how Obama is behaving like a ty- rant or whatever, along with law- suits from right-wing legal ea- gles who claim that the EPA's ac- tion is unconstitutional. But the Supreme Court, by a 6-2 vote, sig- naled in April that the agency (created in 1970, in a law signed by Republican Richard Nixon) has wide latitude to curb air pol- lution. The court OK'd an EPA rule that requires coal plants to curb smog and soot emissions that drift across state lines. Justice Scalia dissented, de- claring in one fabulous passage that the EPA smog rule sounds like "a Marxist concept," and we'll surely hear that kind of rhetoric when the climate change crackdown is announced. We'll also hear a lot about its dire "job- killing" potential - from the very private enterprise enthusiasts who usually extol the dynamic adaptability of the private sector. So let 'em all rail; it's the price we have to pay for progress. And, for Democrats in particular, it's worth losing a few 2014 elections if it helps us win the future. Or at least take some responsibil- ity for it. Dick Polman is the national po- litical columnist at NewsWorks/ WHYY in Philadelphia (newsworks. org/polman) and a "Writer in Resi- dence" at the University of Philadel- phia. Email him at dickpolman7@ gmail.com. Dick Polman Standing up to the climate deniers Another view Behind the green curtain is where my world began to end. It was where my innocence was forever washed away in a por- celain pan filled with developer. Grainy images brought into strong relief on white paper that would become forever etched on my soul. It all began at the age of eight when my mother enrolled me in an after school program. My parents were divorced at that time, both with demanding ca- reers, and the time we spent to- gether was subject to the re- quirements of their jobs. An af- ter school counsellor began to take a close interest in me, teaching me how to throw a foot- ball and providing the attention I so desperately craved. Hugs turned into long em- braces, and soon the counsellor began to compliment me on my body. Not long after that the sex- ual abuse began. I became trapped in the web of a paedophile that used psy- chological blackmail to cocoon my young mind in fear. He would drive me into the mountains and ask me to take my clothes off as he took photographs. Later, as he stirred the fruits of his evil in- tent inside a white pan, he held the image up and as smiled at me as he said, "Wouldn't your mom like a copy of this? " It has been over 60 years since that day and still the pain- ful memory of the man who stole my innocence haunts me. It be- came the secret that quietly de- voured every moment of hap- piness that occurred in my life and the burden I would bear to protect my parents. I was terri- fied that if they found out about the pictures it would devastate them. I blamed myself and in- ternalized anger that no child should ever experience. That bottled up cache of emo- tion would release itself at points in my life. As a boy I remember smashing my bike with a ham- mer when the chain came off, and as an adult taking a sledge- hammer to a 1965 Oldsmobile at my father's ranch when the bat- tery died. As I hammered away I saw only the face of my abuser, and I cried for the wounded child within me who would never know happiness. The advent of the Internet has created the unwanted side affect of an explosion of child pornog- raphy. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports that, "State and local law enforcement agencies involved in Internet Crimes Against Chil- dren Task Forces reported a 230 percent increase in the number of documented complaints of on- line enticement of children from 2004 to 2008." The National Center for Miss- ing and Exploited Children Child Victim Identification Pro- gram was created in 2002. As of December of 2013 it has re- ceived 2.2 million reports of sus- pected sexual exploitation and researched 104 million videos and images depicting child por- nography. In 2012, fifty year-old Peter K. Lindsley was sentenced to 114 months in prison in Texas for distribution of child pornogra- phy. An examination of his com- puter yielded 68,000 explicit im- ages, the majority of which in- cluded infants. According to Ryan C. W. Hall, MD, and Richard C. W. Hall, MD in their 2007 article, "A Pro- file of Paedophilia: "Studies and case reports indicate that 30 to 80 percent of individuals who viewed child pornography and 76 percent of individuals who were arrested for Internet child por- nography had molested a child." Victims of child pornography are subjected to a continuous cy- cle of abuse, and as each image is viewed, their innocence is sto- len all over again. The Supreme Court recently ruled that victims are entitled to restitution from anyone who possesses an image of them that meets the criteria for child pornography. Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter have agreed to form a database of the most horrendous images of child abuse. The database would be in the hands of Thorn: Digital Defenders of Children, the charity founded by Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher. Google is also pioneering tech- nology to "fingerprint" images of child pornography so they can be tracked across the web with- out having to view them. The United States Department of Justice Child Obscenity and Ex- ploitation Section (CEOS) fights the war against child pornogra- phy in conjunction with the FBI and States Attorney's Offices around the country. They are aided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and other organizations that tirelessly try to stop this plague from consuming another child's innocence. If you suspect a child is being victimized or find any form of child pornography please call the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children Cyber Tip line at 1-800-843-5678. If we all work together we can save the next child from a lifetime of pain and suffering. I have finally found happi- ness and I thank God for my wife and family and for giving me the strength to heal and reclaim the childhood that was so ruthlessly stolen from me. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of "The New Reagan Revolution." Send comments to Reagan@ caglecartoons.com. MICHAEL REAGAN AND JEROME ELAM Innocence stolen and unbridled abuse Robert Minch OPINION » redbluffdailynews.com Friday, May 23, 2014 » MORE AT FACEBOOK.COM/RBDAILYNEWS AND TWITTER.COM/REDBLUFFNEWS A4