May 15, 2011

COLUMBUS: The Mississippi River keeps spreading over more farmland. Two spillways, at Morganza and Bonnet Carre, were opened to help save Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Land in Arkansas and Missouri has already been flooded on purpose. The government does not have an easy decision, whether to drown out thousands of acres of crops already growing in order to prevent flooding of thousands of homes and industries down river.
Just like in 1927, the Red Cross is already there. They need your donations.
Meanwhile in the Midwest it keeps on raining. And where they need rain, in Texas and western Oklahoma, the wheat crop is dying from drought.
The government is about to run out of money. Treasurer Geithner is gonna have to keep paying the interest on our debts, but he can cut back on other spending. I suggest he look up the salaries of people who have been added to the payroll in Washington, DC, since the 2008 election and hold those checks awhile.
If the debt limit news ain’t bad enough, we learned this week that Social Security and  Medicare will run out of money sooner than predicted. We’ve got to work longer and stay healthy or the whole country will drown, not just the Mississippi Valley.

Historic quotes by Will Rogers: (on the Flood of 1927)

“I don’t really believe that 80 or 90 per cent of the people realize just what flood disaster means, and what type of people it is that lost most by this particular horror.
The poorest class of people in this country is the renter farmer, or the ones that tends the little patch of ground on shares. He is in debt from one crop to the other to the store keeper, or the little local bank. He never has a dollar that he can call his own.
Then when you talk about poor people that have been hit by this flood, look at the thousands and thousands of Negroes that never did have much, but now it’s washed away. You don’t want to forget that water is just as high up on them as it is if they were white.     What gets my Goat is hearing constantly, “Why don’t those people move out of there? There are floods every year.” How are they going to move? Who is going to move ’em? Where are they going to move to, and what are they going to do when they move there? … Wait till a calamity hits where you are, and then they can ask, “Why don’t you move?”” WA #230,  May 8, 1927

(At Baton Rouge) “I have flew over more water today than Lindbergh did, only this had housetops sticking out of it.” DT #270, June 2, 1927

 “A Navy flier took me for hundreds of miles over nothing but a sea of water and housetops.  If you have never seen a flood you don’t know what horror is… Spillways is the only thing they can build, so these smartest of Government Engineers told me. They can’t get the levees any higher and save it. They have to put in some way of relieving the river of part of the water. It’s got to be done.” WA #236, June 19, 1927