Gene Glazer

Gene Glazer, a former resident of Kendall Park and fellow-traveler politically, died earlier this week. His son Barry, a friend from college, said he continued the political fight until the end.

Here is a snippet of his e-mail to me:

He published his last letter to the editor last month and was planning on attending the National Veterans For Peace conference in St.Louis next week. He continued to write to local media expressing his concerns about the war in Iraq and a myriad of other social issues. He was certainly a man of conscience, of conviction, and most importantly of action. He passed peacefully in the company of family with an Impeach Bush/Cheney button on his hospital gown.

That certainly sounds like Gene. We need to keep up the good fight in his honor.

I’ll have a column in Thursday’s South Brunswick Post on Gene and I’ll try to pass along an obit and information on memorial services when I get it.

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

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Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Runner’s diary, Friday

I’ve been otherwise occupied today trying to keep my head above water before leaving the office on vacation for the week, so the posts are a bit late.

In any case, today’s run — inside on the treadmill — was hardcore. I pushed four miles in 34:36, pushing my pace faster and faster until I hit the three-mile mark and began the slowdown.

Music: A mix.

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

E-mail me by clicking here.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Village of the crammed

The Richardson Properties Corporation is still pushing its misguided plan to cram 240 apartments, retail space and a clubhouse ontoa 25-acre parcel in Dayton.

The alternative, says Russ Richardson, is a 350,000-square-foot, four-story office building, with 1,200 parking spaces. That, he says, is what the property is zoned for.

The council wasn’t so enamored with the plan — nor should it have been.

My sense is that Mr. Richardson is overstating what can be done with the property — once you factor in buffers and other issues, the office building is likely to be smaller than he says. Plus there are questions about the market for that kind of facility.

He says the best use is a village. He’s probably right — if by best use he means best use for him.

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

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Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

So much for independence at the new Journal

Remember the promise made by Rupert Murdoch that the Wall Street Journal’s independence would be protected? Remember that special committee that was supposed to act as a firewall between News Corp. and the Journal’s newsroom?

Read this (thanks to Steve at The Opinion Mill for catching this):

Instead, questions were immediately raised about the Special Committee when Reuters reported that one appointed member was not only a personal friend of Murdoch’s, but he also ran a computer education foundation that had received $2.5 million from Murdoch’s News Corp. That represented a rather obvious conflict of interest for someone who was supposed to be independent from News Corp. (More on that later.)

Worse, the Special Committee is going to be chaired by a far-right GOP yes man who not only faithfully regurgitates Republican talking points in print for a living, but who in early 2003 predicted the fighting in Iraq would be “relatively inconsequential,” and who months later declared that America had won the Iraq war in “a cakewalk.”

That’s who Murdoch has tapped to protect the Journal’s editorial integrity? Good luck. I mean, was Sean Hannity not available?

What’s more:

And sure enough, as currently spelled out, the committee’s duties seem to be mostly toothless. The committee will have only a “say” in the hiring of top editors. And as Editor & Publisher’s Mark Fitzgerald pointed out last week, “it appears that the [committee’s] enforcement amounts to the power to write a report and publish it in the Journal.” Fitzgerald also “didn’t see any mechanism that would permit a lowly reporter to approach this august committee with a complaint — let alone any guarantee that the journalist would not suffer any reprisals for being a whistle blower.”

What this means for the Journal is unclear, but doesn’t appear good. Murdoch may be willing to dump cash into the franchise, but it remains unknown how he actually plans to use his new toy.

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

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Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.