Question for today - if the government does something bad and nobody notices, is it OK to ignore the bad behavior? I suppose that for most of us, it depends on who is in power at the time the bad behavior occurs. What if we neither know or care who is or was in power when said bad behavior began? Shouldn't we be interested in stopping the bad behavior? OK - enough double talk. We all remember the flooding of the rivers in the midwest 2 years ago. We all assumed that it was solely due to the heavy precipitation. There is something else that seems to me to have contributed to the damage.

For the first 50 years of my life, the Corp of Engineers have kept the level of the Mississippi river at nine feet to allow commercial traffic, i.e. barges, to move. I did not realize that a couple or three years ago, the Corp of Engineers decided that barge companies would make more money if the river were kept at a level of 13 or 14 feet. This brings up several questions -

Would the levees have failed if the river level were 4 or 5 feet lower?

Would the Rock, the Waupsipinicon, the Green, or the Iowa have been as high if the mighty Mississippi levels were kept at historic 9 foot lows instead of the higher levels? I know that the Rock river has consistently been much higher than ever before in the last 3 years.

Did somebody benefit? Can we follow the money? Can somebody follow the money? Because there are thousands of us who are suffering. I'm pretty sure that somewhere along the line there was some REALLY serious grease being spread.

Tap Tap Is this thing on? Is anybody there? Does anybody care?

Photo by Dan Goranson