Muddy Waters

When the paved road ends, you've reached Blue Hill. Only dusty gravel paths twist by this cluster of scrapwood shacks tucked among the pine and hardwood trees that blanket the southwestern Mississippi hills. The two- and three-room houses are little more than rotting wooden floors and walls too weak to inhibit the stinging winter winds. This is a rural ghetto, where life is as hard today as it was generations ago, where people still depend on the forest and dark soil to feed them when the money runs out. Electricity is a luxury that few can afford, and - until now - running water has been little more than a dream.

Talk about river sharks! It is wonderful that Camden County has a minor-league baseball team by that name. It's less wonderful that it has politicians roaming like predators around its riverfront. The all-Democratic Camden County board of freeholders is pulling a political power play that is holding up Camden-side construction of the cross-river tram to Philadelphia and could jeopardize related waterfront development in the troubled city. The freeholders are refusing to turn over rights to an underwater patch of land to allow construction of the $26 million aerial tram connecting Camden to Penn's Landing.

Emerson Eisele's two-acre pond gets nasty. Sediments from upstream make it shallow. Manure creates high levels of fecal coliform bacteria. And thick algae often kill the fish. He has complained to local authorities, who complained to county officials, who said the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection was responsible. The department in response inspected the problem and concluded last year that landowners upstream were complying with land-use laws. Eisele, who lives in Upper Pittsgrove, Salem County, does not know where to turn.

It would seem obvious: Democratic Senate candidate Robert P. Casey Jr., who opposes abortion, believes Roe v. Wade should be overturned. "You can't say you have the position I have and not believe that," Casey said in a recent interview about the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that made legal abortions available nationwide. But some antiabortion Democrats - including Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Ron Klink, the party's nominee in the 2000 Pennsylvania Senate race - have parsed their position when confronted with the question: Do you believe Roe v. Wade should be overturned?

The Supreme Court is most prolix when least principled. On Monday, the court produced 1 pound 14 ounces of opinions about abortion. It's mostly pseudo-constitutional reasoning traces back 19 years to 57 words by which the court severed its original abortion decision from the Constitution: "The right of privacy, whether it be founded in the 14th Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or,...

THIS JUST IN: Rivers often cross state boundaries. In fact, some rivers actually are state boundaries. So if hazardous waste were dumped into the Delaware River in, say, Trenton, some of it would almost certainly find its way to Philadelphia. And we likely would have a problem with that. When it comes to water quality, we're all in this together. That's why the Clean Water Act - which sets and mandates the enforcement of national standards for water quality - has been essential to protecting the environment for nearly four decades.

In South Jersey, the word dredge has become a political fireball, conjuring up images of 50-foot piles of contaminated muck on the Delaware River's banks. Elected officials, from U.S. senators to council members in the smallest municipalities, have spoken with one voice: "We don't want it here. " A proposed $311 million project would deepen the river channel from 40 to 45 feet, the first such change since World War II. Over four years, hydraulic dredges would suck up 33 million cubic yards of river bottom for 108 miles, from the Delaware Bay to Philadelphia.

The inside-the-Washington Beltway brouhaha over the nomination of former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld as ambassador to Mexico is threatening the political equivalent of a traffic jam backing all the way up to the Schuylkill Expressway. Some pundits fear the bloody confirmation battle pitting GOP moderate Weld against the leader of his party's right wing, North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms, could unintentionally stall the widely anticipated posting to Italy of Philadelphia's U.S. Rep. Tom Foglietta.

At long last the Supreme Court managed to stake out some of that elusive common ground in the ongoing abortion wars. On Monday, they issued a ruling that both sides could attack. Randall Terry, chief guru of pro-life's Operation Rescue hated this decision. And so did Kitty Kolbert, lawyer for the pro-choice forces. Standing on the Supreme Court steps, a sputtering Terry said that the three justices writing for the majority "have stabbed the pro-life movement in the back and reaffirmed the bloodshed.

Citing pretrial publicity, a Montgomery County Court judge agreed yesterday to import an outside jury to hear the case of a Delaware County man charged with third-degree murder in July in what has been called a fit of road rage on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Defense attorney Rob Donatoni said yesterday that his client, Douglas Heavlow, 58, had been so "vilified" and area residents had been so saturated by inflammatory media coverage that "jury selection in this case . . . would not be a bad dream, it would be a nightmare.