Author: hankkalet

Dead journalists do not a democracy make.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

November seems so long ago. That was when Democrats retook both houses of Congress, riding a wave of discontent over Iraq back into power.

So where do we stand now? We have a president buried even deeper in the grip of his own delusions — he continues to believe we can “win” in Iraq, though how winning is defined seems amorphous, and he’s still blaming foreign radicals for the violence, even though it is pretty clear that much of it is homgrown.

But this is not unexpected.

What is so troubling is that the new Democratic majority seems to be pushing inexplicably for a troop increase — both for the general military and as a temporary measure in Iraq.

Thankfully, Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), the incoming chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has raised a red flag on the increase:

“The time for a troop increase,” he said, “was about 3 1/2 years ago, when we initially went into Iraq.”

I don’t buy that things would have been different, but I am glad to see him stand up so forcefully on this. Let’s get the troops home, bring in the United Nations and the neighboring nations and see if we can stem the violence. Of course, we’ll have to hand over the checkbook to pay for it — but Colin Powell did warn the president.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

This couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy — well, OK, nice is not the issue. From everything we’ve heard, former State Sen. John Lynch was a nice guy, a real saint. But John Lynch was a corrupt politician, pleading guilty to accepting payments in exchange for using his position in the state Senate to influence the state Department of Environmental Protection on behalf of the Dallenbach Sand Mining company in South Brunswick. (Dallenbach was never named — just a sand-mining company in South Brunswick, which pretty much narrowed it down.)

So now, Sen. Lynch is going to jail — for 39 months — hopefully sending a signal to office-holders around the state that if you abuse the public trust, you will pay a price.

The judge pretty much summed up why the sentence in this case fit the crime (quoted in The Record):

“Mr. Lynch, you have done wondrous good,” U.S. District Judge Stanley Chesler told the 68-year-old Democrat, “but by your conduct here you have done horrendous harm.

“You had power, prestige and a substantial income through lawful means. So what prompted you to engage in a scheme to sell out your office is beyond me. There is no doubt that it wasn’t simply a slip — it was planned.”

The Star-Ledger, in its editorial today, was pretty blunt:

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Lynch embodies much of what is wrong with a New Jersey brand of politics that be gins with the principle of scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch- yours and ends with no itch unsatisfied.

And Bill Handleman, in a news analysis in The Asbury Park Press, called Lynch “the Moby Dick of political corruption in New Jersey,” adding that “Lynch got what he had coming to him.”

Now maybe the next crook will think twice before he sticks his hand in somebody else’s pocket. That’s the way the earnest young U.S. attorney saw it.

Next month Christie will have been on the job five years. During that time, he said, 100 public officials have either pleaded guilty to a crime or been convicted of one. “There has got to be a point in time when public officials get the picture,” he added.

I hope so. This state has earned itself a reputation as one of the most corrupt in the nation (though it appear far less dirty when compared to its own past history and some of the unsavory things that the GOP-controlled Congress has managed). And it is a special, bipartisan corruption that has hit nearly every level of government — the McGreevey administration, the state Senate and Assembly, Bergen and Hudson counties, municipal governments around Monmouth County and elsewhere.

And that only takes into account the obvious, illegal kind of corruption, leaving aside the standard-fare, legal variety — campaign contributions and political lobbying.

This legal corruption is more difficult to prove, of course, but the pay-to-play culture is just as damaging to government as the illegal kind, eroding confidence, adding millions to professional service fees (and tax bills) around the state and leading to government policy and actions that benefit contributors rather than the state’s citizens.

The answer? It’s manifold — increased enforcement (U.S. Attorney Chris Christie has done his part), tighter ethics rules elected officials and lobbyists, public financing of elections, an extensive ban on pay-to-play. All this will help, but it ultimately as Christie told Handleman, it maybe time that “voters … think about ‘electing better people and holding them more responsible.’ “

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

The title of Eugene Robinson’s column today in The Washington Post on the Iraq War and the calls to increase the number of American soldiers fighting pretty much says it all: “A ‘Surge’ in Wasted Sacrifice.”

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

I’ve almost given up on listening to the radio. Having grown up with the old WNEW in New York in the late 1970s, I find myself without a radio home. The reason is that my tastes are pretty eclectic, stretching from classic jazz (John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk) across the full rock spectrum through country and blues and folk and there are few stations that capture even a portion of that musical spectrum (WXPN out fo Philly comes as close as anybody, I guess).

I’ve written in the past about my own vision for a station that would play Jimi Hendrix and Nona Hendrix, The Beatles, English Beat and Beat Happenings, “Giant Steps” by John Coltrane and “Train in Vain” by The Clash.

But we’re beyond that, living in an age where the musical tastes of America are dictated by computerized playlists, sales figures and the incomprehensible logic of conformity. The idea is that if one band will sell — say The Backstreet Boys — then a carbon copy — 98 Degrees, say — will sell as well. In this kind of world, there is little room for the new and the quirky (say ArtBrut).

The situation, which is not new, has only grown worse in recent years, as this report from The Future of Music Coalition (I saw this in John Nichols’ blog). To sum things up:

Data in the report shows that station ownership consolidation at the national and local levels has led to fewer choices in radio programming and harmed the listening public and those working in the music and media industries, including DJs, programmers and musicians.

Key points included in report:

• The top four radio station owners have almost half of the listeners and the top ten owners have almost two-thirds of listeners.
• The “localness” of radio ownership – ownership by individuals living in the community — has declined between 1975 and 2005 by almost one-third.
• Just fifteen formats make up three-quarters of all commercial programming. Moreover, radio formats with different names can overlap up to 80% in terms of the songs played on them.
• Niche musical formats like Classical, Jazz, Americana, Bluegrass, New Rock, and Folk, where they exist, are provided almost exclusively by smaller station groups.
• Across 155 markets, radio listenership has declined over the past fourteen years, a 22% drop since its peak in 1989. The consolidation allowed by the Telecom Act has failed to reverse this trend.

It used to be that, when faced with dull radio, we could change the station, possibly find something worth listening to. That’s becoming increasingly difficult and, while satellite radio offers an out, it seems a violation of radio’s democratic spirit to ask us to pay. There is the internet, which has become my new WNEW, but it is limited — I don’t have a soundcard at my work computer and there are times I just can’t (or don’t want to) be near a keyboard.

I’m not naive enough to believe that altering federal ownership rules will drastically change things — too much of the bad has become entrenched in a new status quo — but breaking the near-monopoly that exists now has to have some positive impact.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick