Our editorial on the need to fix New Jersey’s broken system of election funding.
Channel Surfing, The South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
Author: hankkalet
Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.
The circus is in town
A morning at the circus — Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey at the Soverign Bank Arena in Trenton — with my nephews and their parents. A lot of fun, but not the circus I remember. No big cats — just house cats (very weird), some dogs and birds — but the circus is not about animals ultimately. It’s about spectical and the look on my nephew Joey’s face was worth the price.
Channel Surfing, The South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
Tomorrow in The Cranbury Press
Tomorrow’s Cranbury Press will feature stories on:
- Mayor Richard Pucci’s connections to John Lynch, including an editorial.
- The future of the Route 33 task force
- Farmland preservation in Monroe
- Rising college tuition and its impact on Monroe students
- Concerns about a bus stop in Cranbury
- The historic First Presbyterian Church of Cranbury
- The Postal workers food drive
- Students’ reactions to the new SAT
Get the paper on Friday and get the details.
Channel Surfing, The South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
Math lessons from the gas companies
Dispatches offers some thoughts on rising gas prices.
Channel Surfing, The South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
Another Mai Lai?
U.S. Rep. Jack Murtha is confirming a report from Time magazine that American troops deliberately killed civilians in November.
From Salon:
In March, Time described an incident in the western Iraqi town of Haditha — the worst alleged case of U.S. troops deliberately killing civilians in Iraq. Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 20, was killed in the early morning of Nov. 19, 2005, by a roadside explosive device. In the hours that followed, Marines searched three houses, killing a total of 23 people. According to Time, the Marine Corps’ initial report claimed that 15 civilians had died in the same blast that killed Terrazas — and another eight insurgents were killed after a subsequent firefight with Marines.
But Murtha contended Wednesday that the military’s initial report was wrong. “There was no firefight,” he said. “There was no IED [improvised explosive device] that killed these people.”
Rep. Murtha contends that the soldiers overreacted due to stress and the pressures of a war that has gone on too long. He blames the Pentagon for “stretch(ing) soldiers too thin.”
“These guys are under tremendous strain — more strain than I can conceive of — and this strain has caused them to crack under situations like this,” Murtha said.
The psychological strain Murtha described has been well documented. Veterans describe the violence of war as having a numbing effect on soldiers, making it possible to carry out otherwise unthinkable acts. This is especially true when a
fellow soldier has been killed. “Once you reach that point, all sorts of restrictions you may place on yourself are removed,” says Rion Causey, a medic in the infamous Army platoon known as Tiger Force, which may have killed as many as several hundred unarmed civilians in the central highlands of South Vietnam in 1967. Causey did not participate in the atrocities.
Channel Surfing, The South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
Hank Kalet 