Hank Kalet

OK. I spent a half hour last night watching the unwatchable, The O’Reilly Factor, a show so smarmy and contrived, so condescending and boorish that I was almost ashamed that I had it on in the den.

Why, you ask, would I subject myself to something like that?

The answer is that we had gotten word that the bloviator himself was going to spend some time talking about a fight that took place at South Brunswick High School that was video’d by a student and posted to YouTube.

Police said that two girls, one 14 and one 16, lured a 16-year-old girl to a secluded area of the building where she was attacked by the 16-year-old as the 14-year-old filmed the attack with her cell phone. (See story in today’s South Brunswick Post.)

The fight is an example of the growing aggressiveness of the culture — which is evident in everything from music and film to politics and our roadways. But what explains this harshness?

That’s where Bill O’Reilly comes in.

O’Reilly blames everything that is wrong on a liberal culture — what he calls the Secular-Progressive worldview. The SPs (of which I am a proud member) are responsible for gansta rap and violent movies, biased media coverage and just about everything that has gone wrong, will go wrong or should go wrong in the world today.

O’Reilly’s argument is curiously similar in nature to the harsh, controlling edicts made by the ayatollahs in Iran, but couched in a sense of victimhood that is bizarre for someone so close to those with the big wallets and access to the lever of power.

In any case, O’Reilly used the SBHS fight to address the issue of girls fighting (click on “Watch Bill’s Most Ridiculous Item” and then click on “Video Visens” to view his report), linking it to his warped view of the world — i.e., that the Hollywood elite is to blame, etc, etc, etc. The girls are more violent because they are being subjected to violence from the radio and TV and video games.

It is a circular argument that many buy, but that lacks hard evidence. Studies that purport to show causation between violent television or video-game content have been flawed, relying on a basic supposition that props up all of these arguments — the notion that violent content creates violence behavior.

My argument — equally as circular — always has been that art and culture follow behavior, are a reflection of what is happening and not the engine driving it. Or not necessarily.

I don’t know what has led to this perceived increase in girl fights (perceived because there is no way to actually quantify it). But I know that Bill O’Reilly is full of hot air.

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

The governor and state Legislature are making a huge mistake. Rather than taking a hardline stand against public corruption by forcing public employees who violate the public trust to forfeit their pensions, they are ready to place the entire issue on the contract negotiating table.

It’s a foolish move, as state Sen. John H. Adler (pictured), D-Camden, points out in an op-ed today in the Star-Ledger (unfortunately not available online).

Adler has sponsored to bills (here and here) that would strip pensions from public employees — elected and appointed — who violate the public trust. The bills would help curb rampant abuse by public officials — see Lynch, John, and others — helping to restore trust and eliminate what essentially is a corruption tax on New Jersey residents. In November, Adler offered the following statement:

“For too long, the abuse of power in New Jersey has been a factor in skyrocketing property taxes. Waste and fraud increase the cost of government to taxpayers who are looking for a break from soaring tax rates. We need to put strong penalties in place, to protect public dollars and the public trust in their elected representatives.”

Gov. Jon Corzine and the Legislature, however, have watered it down. A bill sponsored by state Senate President Richard Codey and Assemblywoman Nellie Pou would to remove many of the pension reforms proposed by the special Joint Legislative Session from the table, preferring to address most of them at the negotiating table.

Admittedly, negotiations could be the best way to handle some elements of the pension reform proposal — addressing the cost of health benefits, for instance — but the bulk of the changes proposed should be enacted through statute, including a ban on double-dipping (one official holding two offices, like Monroe Mayor Richard Pucci) and the Adler bills, which are designed to put an end to abuses like the ones that resulted in former state Senate President John Lynch getting 39 months in jail on Tuesday.

That’s the point that Sen. Adler, who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, makes in his Ledger op-ed, criticizing the two-tiered approach being substituted.

It is abusurd to have different corruption penalties, including jail time and pension forfeiture, depending upon whether the corrupt official is or is not in a union.

He wants his bills past as a “clear and unequivocal statement that we are fed up with public corruption and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

Penalties should be the same for all public officials. Public integrity should always be non-negotiable.

Wednesday’s Courier-News offered the same take:

(W)hat’s to negotiate about taking pensions away from crooks? That’s something legislators should require of everyone earning taxpayer money, officials and workers alike. And there’s no reason not to begin with the public officials right now in getting those mandates in place.

Yet the forfeiture requirement was taken out of the pension reform bill being considered by lawmakers last week. Instead we’re still left with a pension board that decides if a corrupt official should lose the pension. In other words, the board provides another layer of bureaucracy to protect the criminals.

This seems a logical critique — even to someone like me who is very pro-union. Double standards are never good for anyone and would only further the erosion of trust in our government that has helped the right in its push for extreme deregulation.

It’s an unacceptible situation. As Barretta used to say, if you can’t do the time then don’t do the crime. New Jersey needs to make sure that crime by public officials does not pay.

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

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