Hank Kalet

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

Are freedom and liberty the natural conditions mankind aspires toward, or are they learned constructs, erected over long years of struggle and reflection but not necessarily accepted by all?
The Bush administration has taken the divine approach, as Orlando Patterson, a Harvard academic, writes in a New York Times op-ed piece today — which has had a disastrous impact on our relationships with the rest of the world. The president, he writes, offered a “disastrously simple-minded argument,” saying that “all that is required for its spontaneous flowering in a country that has known only tyranny is the forceful removal of the tyrant and his party.”

It is this argument that has been central to the administration’s go-it-alone approach to foreign policy, the delusional assumption that the United States government is the keeper of the democratic flame and is therefore empowered to impose democracy around the globe.

Delusional, as I said, and dangerous for everyone — especially American troops and the people they have been asked to liberate, as the Iraq debacle shows.

The issue, as Patterson points out, is the Bush folks’ incredible hubris (my word, not Patterson’s), a hubris that has led to a “failure to distinguish Western beliefs about freedom from those critical features of it that non-Western peoples were likely to embrace.”

Those of us who cherish liberty hold as part of the rhetoric that it is “written in our heart,” an essential part of our humanity. It is among the first civic lessons that we teach our children. But such legitimizing rhetoric should not blind us to the fact that freedom is neither instinctive nor universally desired, and that most of the world’s peoples have found so little need to express it that their indigenous languages did not even have a word for it before Western contact. It is, instead, a distinctive product of Western civilization, crafted through the centuries from its contingent social and political struggles and secular reflections, as well as its religious doctrines and conflicts.

Does this mean that average Iraqis — or Sri Lankans or Liberians or Cubans — should be left to live their lives under the desperate circumstances that repressive regimes create? Of course not.

“Acknowledging the Western social origins of freedom in no way implies that we abandon the effort to make it universal,” Patterson writes.

We do so, however, not at the point of a gun but by persuasion — through diplomacy, intercultural conversation and public reason, encouraged, where necessary, with material incentives. From this can emerge a global regime wherein freedom is embraced as the best norm and practice for private life and government.

The recent history of repressive regimes has been, as Jonathan Schell has written often in The Nation and in his book, “The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.” Consider Ukraine and much of Eastern Europe.

More from Patterson:

The good news is that freedom has been steadily carrying the day: nearly all nations now at least proclaim universal human rights as an ideal, though many are yet to put their constitutional commitments to practice. Freedom House’s data show the share of the world’s genuinely free countries increasing from 25 to 46 percent between 1975 and 2005.

The bad news is Iraq. Apart from the horrible toll in American and Iraqi lives, two disastrous consequences seem likely to follow from this debacle. One is the possibility that, by the time America extricates itself, most Iraqis and other Middle Easterners will have come to identify freedom with chaos, deprivation and national humiliation. The other is that most Americans will become so disgusted with foreign engagements that a new insularism will be forced on their leaders in which the last thing that voters would wish to hear is any talk about the global promotion of freedom, whatever “God’s gift” and the “longing of the soul.”

Buried in this final quotation is something troubling — a defense of military solutions in advance of future military adventures — but the point is pretty clear: George W. Bush has burned too many bridges, making it impossible for the United States to function in the world. That, along with thousands of dead and wounded Iraqis and Americans, will be the ultimate legacy of this war.

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

Talking Points Memo offers an interesting take on the fading of John McCain’s presidential aspirations:

He’s been toadying to conservative orthodoxies for the past year. Something that makes him seem doubly non-independent and craven since it’s pretty clear he’s doing it just because he wants to be president. That is to say, he’s not like longstanding toadies like Bill Frist and others like him. He’s also embracing an extremely unpopular position on Iraq — a war that is extremely unpopular amongst independents. And of course he’s George Bush’s new best friend.

The idea that John McCain is going to stay the darling of self-identified independents and centrist Democrats while acting like a partisan right-winger and supporting a deeply unpopular war reminds me of those dingbat prognosticators who argue, in so many words, that now that the GOP has the racist vote sewn up all they have to do is get the blacks too and then the Dems won’t ever be able to win an election again.

People aren’t that stupid.

Why do we think John McCain is going to play like he did in 2000 after he’s turned himself into a gruffer version of George W. Bush?

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