Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

The trouble with trucks

State Transportation Commissioner Kris Kolluri is convinced that the state’s truck route hierarchy makes sense. He told the Princeton Packet that portions of some state highways — such as Route 31 in Ewing or Route 9 in Toms River, — have been excluded

because of dimensional conditions, Commissioner Kolluri said Tuesday. He said roadways identified with hazardous bridge clearances or narrow widths, less than 11 feet, cannot handle the larger vehicles.

“It is not a political calculus whether a road is prohibited or not,” Mr. Kolluri said. “My prediction is at the end of this process there will be less trucks not more on Route 206.”

That seems unlikely. The regulations are written in such a way that truckers will be allowed to claim the route they are using is the shortest distance between destinations, allowing them to get around the restrictions on what are really local roadways.

As I said in my Dispatches column yesterday, Routes 27 and 206 are residential and business thoroughfares that were not designed to handle big rigs. That’s why the people in South Brunswick, Franklin, Princeton and Lawrence are so concerned.

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

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

A weak compromise

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) explains why the compromise resolution on Iraq may seem to be opposing the president’s surge plan while actually serving to endorse it.

Unfortunately, the new Warner-Levin resolution that many Democrats are pushing is flawed and unacceptable. It rejects the surge, but it also misunderstands the situation in Iraq and endorses the President’s underlying approach. It’s basically a back-door authorization of the President’s misguided policies, and passing it would be a big mistake. Under the guise of constructive criticism, the Warner-Levin resolution signs off on the President continuing indefinite military operations in Iraq that will not address the fundamental political challenges in Iraq, and that continue to distract us from developing a comprehensive and global approach to the threats that face our nation.

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

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Gloom and doom, Part 2

The Bush administration has released a summary of its most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq called “Prospects for Iraq’s Stability: A Challenging Road Ahead” and the news is pretty bleak.

While some are saying the report is another nail in the coffin for the Bush surge — Spencer Ackerman at TPM Muckraker points to this paragraph to support its contention that the NIE is anti-surge:

even if violence is diminished, given the current winner-take-all attitude and sectarian animosities infecting the political scene, Iraqi leaders will be hard pressed to achieve sustained political reconciliation in the time frame of this Estimate.

I wish I could read it this way, but the overall tenor of the summary continues along a delusional path. It is very clear that its authors think that removing troops will lead to greater chaos — though the report makes it clear, as well, that greater chaos is coming regardless.

Basically, the NIE summary is a product of the muddled thinking at the national level, the kind of flaccid false pragmatism that allowed the ideologues to drive this car over the cliff in the first place.

Anti-surgers like myself would do well to be careful to avoid the kind of cherrypicking of the NIE that has characterized the administration’s approach to intelligence.

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

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Runner’s diary, Friday

Fourth run of the week was a decent one, though my pace lagged a bit compared to the rest of this week’s runs. Did three miles in about 27:30 after doing an upper body workout that sapped some strength.

Grand total for the week, therefore, is 17 miles. Next week, I’ll shoot for the same.

Today’s iPod selection: John Mellencamp’s Freedom Road.

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

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.