Hank Kalet

Runner’s diary, Thursday

Another outdoor run, battling the thick, humid air. Mike and I trudged out and managed to get in four miles in an embarassing 41:59 — embarassing because I should be running that in about 36-37 minutes. But, alas, it was hot and I’ve not been on my game.

But four runs totalling 17 miles is a decent haul for the week, with another three-miler on tap either tomorrow or Saturday — if I can arrange it. We’ll see how it goes.

No music today (would have been rude to wear headphones, now, wouldn’t it?).

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The Blog of South Brunswick

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Dow Jones, Murdoch and media consolidation

Josh Silver — executive director of Free Press, an organizationformed “to engage citizens in media policy debates and create a more democratic and diverse media system” — offers a broader take on the Dow Jones sale that goes beyond Rupert Murdoch to the system that enables folks like him. He writes:

Above all, we ought to be most concerned with the health of our media system. Media consolidation, by its nature, diminishes the diversity of voices represented in our media or able to access to the presses and the airwaves. With fewer points of view available, those select few with an outlet increase their capacity to shape public opinion, politics and daily life. It is easy to make Murdoch a target, but this deal is not about one man so much as it is about a whole system of policies that creates a rich media but a poor democracy.

Some may say we should just let the market take its course. But today’s media system isn’t simply the evolutionary result of “market forces at work.” It’s the result of policies created by Congress and enforced by the FCC. Without those policies, Murdoch couldn’t have built his media empire. Only by restoring public input in the
policymaking process, can we reverse this trend and make America’s media a healthier place where a marketplace of ideas and the free market can co-exist.

We can’t change Rupert Murdoch. But we can change the policies that allow companies like News Corp. to control our media. We can create new policies that oster the kind of diverse, accessible and vibrant media that our country’s founders imagined and our democracy needs.

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

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Democrats caving on civil liberties

You’re kidding me, right?

The Democrats, elected to a majority as an antidote for six years of President Bush, are prepared to “expand the government’s authority to conduct electronic surveillance of overseas communications in search of terrorists,” according to The Washington Post.

The proposal, according to House and Senate Democrats, would permit a secret court to issue a single broad order approving eavesdropping of communications involving suspects overseas and other people, who may be in the United States. That order “need not be individualized,” according to a Democratic aide.

They are calling it a compromise, because it would keep the FISA courts involved unlike the administration’s plan, which would have granted the NSA “authority to intercept without a court order any international phone call or e-mail between a surveillance target outside the United States and any person in the United States.”

The administration’s proposal also would grant the attorney general sole authority to order the interception of communications for as long as one year, if he certified that the surveillance was directed at a person outside the United States.

Democrats are painting the move as protecting civil liberties — even Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont, who is as strong on civil liberties issues as anyone — but the compromise smacks of what the ACLU is calling “politics of fear.”

“The Democrats have pretty much gone along with what the administration has been pushing for, in terms of allowing them to change the program so dramatically as to allow quite a large amount of wiretapping of Americans without a warrant,” she said. (The Washington Post)

The Daily Kos offers a fairly pointed take on it, as well:

Even Rockefeller’s limited fixes, which keep all surveillance authority with the FISA court, gives too much to the administration. While the administration is “targeting” the people overseas and incidentally listening to the Americans on the other end, there is most likely nothing in the legislation to make them stop and get a warrant when Americans are involved. Rockefeller’s proposal again leaves it to administration guidelines to figure that out, in secrecy most likely, and we know what they do when no one is watching.

Hopefully the impasse over giving Gonzales control over the program will be enough to kill the entire proposal. FISA is and has been entirely adequate to answer the demands of legal surveillance. There is no need to give one inch to this administration on domestic wiretapping, of all things.

Stop this train before it wrecks completely.

I couldn’t agree more.

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

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Bad news from Iraq

More bad news from Iraq. From The New York Times:

Three bomb attacks in Baghdad today killed more than 65 people, as sectarian and militant violence continued to rage in Iraq.

The Shiite-led government that is trying to cope with the violence, meanwhile, suffered a political setback today, when the largest Sunni Arab political bloc in the parliament followed through on a threat to walk out of the coalition cabinet that is trying to unify the country.

The details in the story are harrowing — images of brutality and violence that we cannot conceive of here, nor should anyone, for that matter.

But things are going well over there, right?

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

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