Jersey smackdown, redux

It may soon be time to settle things in a steel-cage match.

The Newark Star-Ledger ran this story over the fold on today's front page. Craig Carton is threatening to use "the power of this show" to thwart Richard Codey's election bid if the governor doesn't apologize to him. And on the interior was this curiously-titled piece.

Taste be damned? Dubious assertion. Usually the jocks take aim at corrupt politics and silly government meddling; this involves some mention of the people forwarding the bad politics, but it can't be a remorseless Sherman's March or none of them would appear on the air. That isn't the case. Besides "Ask the Governor," the station has hosted call-in hours for the attorney general, Peter Harvey; more than one Commissioner of the Department of Motor Vehicles; the head of the Department of Banking and Insurance; and there are probably more that I cannot recall. (It's tough to find archives of this sort of thing on the NJ 101.5 website.)

In fact, the entire "taste be damned" artice really only focuses on Craig Carton. This probably isn't a good sign for Craig, though so far he's got the support of his management. But the paper also got a partial transcript of the remarks Carton made on Monday, and it's not pretty. (It's also not online.) Perhaps the worst part is, the other jocks have been fielding calls about this flapdoodle for most of their own programs.

UPDATE: You may remember that yesterday I argued that depression isn't insanity. There was this quote from the story that I'd like to reproduce here:

"A woman who comes home from the hospital and cries at a commercial, that's hormones and [it] should take care of itself," said Rosemary Smentkowski, a registered nurse in Monmouth County who works in obstetrics. "If you can't get out of bed in the morning and face the day, that's post-partum depression. People who harm their children ... have post-partum psychosis."

It's a mild satisfaction to know that I'm on solid ground there.

ITEM: This is a wider-reaching problem than I imagined. I would like some better clarification about the implication from the third paragraph, that depression is automatically a mental illness; obviously there's a difference between mild social problems and debilitating condition, similar to the specified differences in severity of post-partum depression in paragraphs 6-9. I suppose other articles do this, since the focus here is specifically post-partum problems, so I'll shut up now.