Weekend Reading Roundup (Dig Deeper Edition)

Excellent piece in the Sunday Inquirer about North vs. South (Jersey) dredging. And, wouldn’t you know it, seems as if the Kumbaya contingent is in the wrong.

Compared with the levels of dioxins, mercury, and PCBs that lurked in the North Jersey harbor, the Delaware navigation channel is practically pristine. …
[O]ver the years, the annual maintenance dredge removed to keep the channel at 40 feet has been used for such projects as the Palmyra Cove Nature Center and as fill to build what is now the Susquehanna Bank Center in Camden.
Going five feet deeper will improve – not damage – recharge of the drinking-water aquifer in the Delaware River, Shinn said. The deepening will not harm oyster beds which are in shallower water, not the channel, he said. “Dredging, as it’s done today, has much less impact than 20 years ago.”

Among the other highlights:

Officials and experts interviewed say that New Jersey’s beef is also about protecting port interests in the north, and that New Jersey elected leaders see the Delaware River deepening benefiting Pennsylvania more than the Garden State.
In addition, they say, politicians see more voters among environmental supporters than among the port and maritime workers in Camden, Gloucester City, and Paulsboro.

With President Obama wanting to double U.S. exports in the next five years, Wakeman said, the ports of North and South Jersey should be working together. South Jersey has the space, the labor, and could receive goods for export from the Midwest.

Even New York questioned investing in its harbor deepening because much of the port is on the New Jersey side, until a New York Shipping Association study showed just as many New Yorkers had jobs tied to the port as did New Jersey residents.
The same is true in South Jersey. “It’s a region,” said Wakeman, who also ran dredging operations for the Army Corps in San Francisco. “People go back and forth to where the jobs are. Political boundaries are really passé.”

Someone’s crying, Lord. Kumbaya.

In other news:
— The Holy War continues to grow with one side enabling happy-fingered priests to talk their way into good graces while the other wonders why holy men are permitted to molest 200 deaf children.
— I can’t read more than two paragraphs by Stephen A. Smith in a sitting. Something about me respecting the value of well-written words. But if his headline is any indication, he grabbed a good hook on the McNabb vs. Favre societal epidemic. (That said, you can’t blame me if you choose to read deeper than I did. I renounce all responsibility.)
— Duchess the Phoenix Orangutan turns Fiddy!
— And finally, a stellar Week in Review section in this week’s NY Times. Topics: Today’s American rage; a reasoned explanation about how the Vatican’s response to the raft of shit it brought on itself is true to historic form; how the biggest part of this past few weeks could be the American President getting fitted for Big Boy Leader Pants; and, finally, Frank Rich’s stunningly spot-on break-down of how the Tea Party momentum is race-based …

To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance.
The apocalyptic predictions then, like those about health care now, were all framed in constitutional pieties, of course.