Some people (namely me) never learn

Anybody know how to get a 33-year-old bumper sticker off a flat screen?

I'm so stupid! I vaguely remember cracking open a bottle of cheap Canadian whiskey last night, then something like, "Hey, y'all! Watch this!"

Should I just buy a new monitor?

One day, I swear, I will learn my lesson. You'd think I would have following the time I touched my tongue to the storm door when it was 15 below zero outside.

The doctor says that with one more surgery, I should once again be comfortable with the letter "S."

That's it! Lesson learned.

From here on out, I will stay away from the cheap Canadian whiskey and drink only the expensive stuff.

I told you so

A Revolution 21 tip o' the hat goes to Col. Robert J. Ruch, commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Omaha district.

It's not just anyone who can make your Mighty Favog look like a clairvoyant and prophetic Mighty Favog. In other words, I called it, and it was the good colonel who made it so.

I said that the Corps would "blame this mess near Hamburg, Iowa, on the levee having been compromised by damage from beavers or badgers (or something), then say Iowans should have inspected it better."

WHAT I KNEW was coming came to pass this morning in the Omaha World-Herald:

Downtown, a nearly 10-foot pile of dirt and plastic tarp surrounded the Blue Moon Bar & Grill.

The pub's wooden floors and pool table have belonged to Vicki Sjulin and her family since 1972. Dad runs the grill most mornings. Mom works behind the counter.

“It's been the local watering hole for a long time,” Sjulin said Monday. “Now it's just going to be a water hole.”

Sjulin said she planned to keep the business open as long as possible, until the local utility company cuts power. Frustrated residents poured in and out of the bar to discuss the rising water and their plans to escape them.

“People here are angry, and they want to know why we're at the point we're at,” she said. “This is a total man-made flood, in spite of the high snowfall and rain. Everyone's question is, who made these choices?”

Built by the corps in the 1940s, the levee sustained three recent minor breaches before Monday's incident broke a section one mile south of the Iowa-Missouri state line. About two hours after that breach, floodwater broke through a levee farther south in Holt County, Mo. Officials there planned to intentionally breach the levee downstream to take pressure off a secondary levee built in recent weeks.

“There is risk behind any levee,'' Ruch said. “That is assumed.''

Monday's rupture, however, was not an indicator of what landowners and residents along the Missouri can expect in coming weeks when higher flows arrive, Ruch said.

Ruch said the levee break came as a surprise because the levee had handled higher water during flooding last year.

He said a hole created by a badger or gopher could have eroded the integrity of the earthen structure.

THUS, the first part of my prognostication has been fulfilled. The second part -- blaming the locals -- will come to pass after the locals start taking sufficient shots at the Corps' "your guess is as good as mine" levees.

And isn't it the case that the badgers and gophers always take the fall whenever something bad happens? If I were a Wisconsin or Minnesota fan, I would be pissed.

Of course, I am no expert on the levee-eating capabilities of Wisconsin or Minnesota student athletes, or their furry inspirations. But I am pretty sure that gophers, badgers, beavers or muskrats -- not to mention Big 10 linebackers and tackles -- encounter virtually insurmountable difficulties in burrowing through asphalt, concrete or rock armoring on levees.

That, however, would leave the Corps (and the politicians who'd rather spend money on Wall Street and the military-industrial complex than on vital infrastructure) with no one or nothing else to blame when yet another "heck of a job" turns into yet another heck of a mess.

Meantime, I'm still trying to process the irony of George W. Bush coming to town Saturday for the opening of the College World Series. You think Michael Brown might be available, too?

A river runs rampant

Here's some video I shot Saturday of the Missouri River just upstream from Lewis and Clark Landing, as well as by the Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge in downtown Omaha.

In a couple of weeks, I won't have to climb down the levee hardly at all to reach the water's edge.

I recall that, a couple of decades or so ago, there was a movie called A River Runs Through It. In this spring and summer of high water and high anxiety from the top of the Missouri River watershed to the bottom, maybe we could call 2011's thriller A River Runs Through, Across and Over It.

Glub.

Learning it, loving it . . . living it?

The art of sandbagging (when the river's just too much and the levees are just too little) isn't something just any fool can do without a little learnin'. Of course, you'd be surprised at how many try, nevertheless.

This handy video from our neighbors to the southeast should make you an expert in about a quarter of an hour. Though the folks up in North Dakota add an important detail . . . your sandbags should point in the direction of the water's flow.

Remember, this is the age of the do-it-yourselfer. Unfortunately, in this country, this also extends to flood protection. Learn it, love it, live it.


HAT TIP: NET Radio.

When the levee breaks

Heck of a job, Corps of Engineers.

Watch the feds blame this mess near Hamburg, Iowa, on the levee having been compromised by damage from beavers or badgers (or something), then say Iowans should have inspected it better. Then watch me say that if the levee had been armored with concrete, asphalt or rock, the varmints would have had their work cut out for them . . . and the Corps would have nobody to blame but itself.

Eventually.

Just like in New Orleans.


UPDATE: Here, courtesy of the Omaha World-Herald, is the federally constructed pile of mud in the middle of the Missouri River formerly known as a "levee" this morning after the initial breach. Now, according to late reports, the break in the levee south of Hamburg is now at least 300 feet wide.

The upside of inundation

Sometimes, you just have to look at the bright side of things.

We will pause for a moment to allow Mrs. Favog to pick herself up off the floor after reading the previous sentence written by her pessimism-prone husband.


IN THE CASE of the Missouri River flooding in these parts, the upside of a bad thing is that the high water can be quite photogenic. Especially at night, when the light is just right and the reflections dance across the waves.

Going under on the Missouri

Here is the Missouri River at downtown Omaha on Saturday evening (above).

At right, here's the Missouri River at the same spot downtown as it was May 29.

But it's during the coming week, forecasters say, that the real water will start to hit the Omaha area. By the time the Mighty Mo stops rising sometime in the next month or two -- barring any big rains -- we're supposed to have 4 to 6 feet more water than this.

And it's supposed to stay that high all summer.

Can the levees withstand that much water for that long -- and levels above flood stage maybe until winter? No one knows; the Missouri River flood-control system never has had to withstand such a test.

WILL SOME TOWNS around here, particularly on the Iowa shore, go under? It's a distinct possibility.

Are we already having levee problems in spots? Unfortunately, yes we are.

Do I have confidence in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which built the flood-control system? Not since 2005 . . . I'm originally from Louisiana.

And in these parts, the feeling quickly is becoming widespread.

Do I think Levees.org -- the New Orleans group that's emerged as one of the chief watchdogs over the Corps -- should send somebody up here to take a look and have a listen? I think that would be useful both for us and for it, yes.

DO FOLKS who live on the bottomlands along the entire length of the Missouri need your thoughts, prayers and assistance now and for the foreseeable future.

Absolutely.

3 Chords & the Truth: Don't fear the cowbell

Don't fear the cowbell.

What we need in life is more cowbell, especially on 3 Chords & the Truth.

But if life gives us more than the cowbell can assuage -- like a visit from the Reaper -- we still have Plan B here on the Big Show -- run.

Run, run, run.

Run like hell, as a matter of fact. Whether it's from your own peccadilloes or the raging floodwaters, what I'm saying to you is run away, child. Running wild . . . now that's a plan.

But after all that runnin' 'round this world, if it all catches up to you -- well, in that case, it doesn't matter anymore. Hope to God I'm right on this.

THE ALTERNATIVE could be rather embarrassing.

That got me in trouble once with Mrs. Favog, not being right. I was in serious deep doo until I told her she was kinda kute. I have this look I give her.

If that fails, though, the only alternative is crying, waiting, hoping. Don't ask me why, I'm just the morning DJ on 3C&T.

Don't worry 'bout me, though. I'm just a stranger in paradise, falling in love with love.

BECAUSE, after all, we're all children of the sun. Or something like that.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Orlando cracks down on 'terrorists'

Who knew that Orlando, Fla., was the front line in the War on Terror?

But it is. The city that Mickey Mouse built is waging a brutal, years-long battle against homegrown al-Qaida, ruthless enemies of society and the state pursuing a relentless course of . . . feeding the homeless.

The repeated attacks on public hunger, in blatant disregard of Orlando's ban on feeding the animals homeless, have thrown central Florida into a state of panic and chaos, leading Mayor Buddy Dyer to use the phrase "food terrorists" to describe Food Not Bombs' vegetarian-chili ladlers.

ABC News outlines why Orlando is after Food Not Bombs -- part of the city's effort to create a nation of bombs, not food:

Members of the organization Food Not Bombs were in good spirits as they passed out corn on the cob, rice, beans and other vegetarian dishes to the homeless and hungry in an Orlando park. This cheer was interrupted when police officers on bicycles arrived and arrested five of the volunteers.

This is not the first time this scene has played out for members of Food Not Bombs.

Since June 1, a dozen members of the group have been arrested for violating a new Orlando city ordinance that prohibits sharing food with large groups in downtown parks more than twice a year.

The mayor of Orlando even branded them "food terrorists."

Food Not Bombs is an international political organization that protests war, poverty and the destruction of the environment, according to their website. The group meets to distribute food twice a week in downtown Orlando's Lake Eola Park.

They won a district court case to prevent the enforcement of the new ordinance, but the decision was overturned in the appellate court.

A spokesperson for the city of Orlando said that the ordinance had its origins in complaints from residents and business owners about trash left after the food distribution, public urination and concerns about crime.

THIS IS BECAUSE it would be so much more difficult for a couple of cops to patrol the feedings, keep order and prevent public peeing than it is to bring in maybe a dozen or so cops to raid a soup line, arrest all the servers, call in the paddy wagon and haul everyone off to jail.

But you gotta do what you gotta do. Because it's terrorism, you know.

Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer has been quoted calling the group "food terrorists." He told ABC's Orlando affiliate WTFV, "I think they are using food or the feeding of the homeless for different purposes."

Cathy Jackson, the executive director of the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida, agrees that motives may be more about self-promotion.

"The meal service that's being provided by Food Not Bombs is an unnecessary service," Jackson said. She says there are at least seven shelter operations within less than a mile and a half of Lake Eola Park that provide daily meal services for the hungry.

BUT ALL THOSE hungry people in Orlando -- the ones it's illegal to feed in public without a permit, and not more than twice in one spot in a year -- weren't at those shelters, now, were they?

The professionals weren't where the homeless were, either, and thus were not "connecting with those they are serving to channel them back into a direction of housing and self-sufficiency." But the "terrorists" were, and at least those homeless folk got a little something to eat.

If this were about more effective means of helping the homeless, we'd see a public-private push to find the homeless where they congregate and bring them to where the food and the counselors are. But the Orlando law -- like laws all across America just like Orlando's -- isn't about addressing our "least of these" problem.

It's about addressing our "Why do we have to encounter the 'least of these' and be troubled?" problem. But what do you expect in a Mickey Mouse city run by a bunch of rats?

Basically, it's always 33 A.D. somewhere, and somebody is always getting what Jesus got for doing what Jesus did.

Rome, sweet Rome

I am half of a Waltons family.

My wife and I both were devotees back during the television series' first-run days in the 1970s and early '80s, and we try never to miss our daily, syndicated trip back to Waltons Mountain today.

The only trouble is this: The channel where we get our nightly fix of Mama and Daddy, John-Boy and Mary Ellen, Jason and Erin, and Ben, Jim-Bob, and Elizabeth also features some of the worst low-budget commercials to ever curse a television screen. The only ray of light is that the faith-based INSP channel doesn't air Enzyte ads.

So, during commercials, I flip over to CNN or MSNBC. And something has become clear to me during these word-from-our-pathetic-sponsors interludes -- The Waltons represents programming far more serious and intelligent than anything on the cable-news channels.

TONIGHT, I kept cutting away from Jason fighting the Nazis in Germany in the run-up to VE Day to talking heads speaking in grave tones about Rep. Anthony Weiner's wiener. More precisely, I kept dropping in on Lawrence and Rachel and Eliot seeing the Republicans' attacks on a Democratic congressman and his junk, then raising them Sen. David Vitter's hooker problem and Newt Gingrich's scandal of the day from back in the day.

Then I would return to The Waltons and a world of homefront sacrifice and battlefield tragedy, circa 1945.

Ike and Corabeth struggling with keeping their customers in food and gas in the age of wartime rationing. Jason trying to hold a shellshocked soldier together as they hunted German holdouts. The shellshocked soldier coming to himself not in the service of killing, but in risking his life to avoid killing a young German infantryman who didn't believe the war was over. John-Boy, meantime, was falling in love with the prettiest woman in France, but ended up torn away from her when the war in the Pacific intruded, landing brother Ben in a Japanese POW camp and calling the first-born son back to Waltons Mountain . . . to his family.

MEANWHILE, on Piers Morgan Tonight, the worldly travails of Sarah Ferguson -- one of which was, apparently, being injected with so much Botox that the upper half of her face has ceased to move whenever she talks . . . which, as it turns out, is much too often.

Of course, one doesn't have to retreat to Waltons Mountain, 1945, to encounter ample tragedy, human drama, and existential gravitas. There's plenty of that today.

Americans find themselves at war, one way or another, in no less than four Middle Eastern countries. In fact, young Americans junior-high age and younger have no memory of a time when this nation was not at war in that region.

Those wars, during that time, have played no small role in bringing the United States to the edge of insolvency. So has a decade of living beyond our means. So has several more years of dealing with the economic collapse Wall Street's (and our) excesses precipitated.

Tens of millions of Americans now owe more on mortgages than their homes are worth. Tens of millions more are out of work. The economy continues to tap dance along the edge of a bottomless chasm.

Not that any of that matters when there are Republicans to bash and Democrats to paint as enemies of God and man. Not when we have Anthony Weiner's wiener to wield as an X-rated weapon in political combat -- which just happens to double as kinky infotainment in a country as polarized as it's been since 1865.

I WONDER how many of those condemning the congressman from New York are guilty of the same thing. I wonder how many of those defending him truly don't see what the big deal is, anyway.

I wonder how many see the whole sordid mess as just another excuse to engage in tribal warfare -- not over any grand principle, but just because they hate Them.

While Americans were otherwise occupied, we stumbled so far off track into decadence and internecine warfare that even columnists for London's left-leaning Guardian newspaper openly wonder whether their American cousins are standing at the crossroads of Britain, 1914 and Rome, A.D. 200. And still we cannot see the forest for the . . . well, never mind.

I suppose it is ever thus in societies a lot nearer The End than they think.

A one-llama town in Nebraska

A bank, a bar, a restaurant, a water tower and a college.

Oh . . . a museum, too.

That's about it when one considers Peru, Neb., population not much.

Then one day in April, a funny thing happened. A bus full of celebrities from the other Peru -- no, not Illinois . . . from the country in South America -- rolled into town. A tourism film ensued. One for the country in South America.

And, oddly enough, for the tiny burg in southeastern Nebraska.

The story has been all over the Nebraska press. A local band has become more famous in Peru than it is here.

Tourists from Peru, the country, are showing up in Peru, the teeny town in a corner of the Cornhusker State.


I wonder what the Peruvian expression for "Go figure" is.

You don't say?

Leave it to the government to state the obvious. Two years after everybody else.

But the Federal Communications Commission, in a report aimed at warning Americans that the proverbial horse has left the metaphorical barn -- but only after it's halfway to the next county -- says Americans are suffering a serious lack of local in-depth reporting.

I'd alert the media . . . if any were around anymore. In a sign that what the FCC says is true, this Associated Press article neglects to inquire why it is the feds took so long to "reveal" something so obvious, while later on regurgitating some boilerplate BS from the American Society of News Editors.

ANYWAY, here's some of the AP story, for what it's worth:

There is a shortage of in-depth local journalism needed to hold government agencies, schools and businesses accountable, the federal agency that regulates television broadcasters concludes in a new report.

The dearth of reporting comes despite an abundance of news outlets in today's multimedia landscape, the report says.

The report being released Thursday by the Federal Communications Commission is the product of an 18-month effort to explore the turmoil sweeping the traditional media business in the U.S. - particularly daily newspapers.

Newspapers have seen a sharp drop in revenue because of the weakening economy and a shift by advertisers to free or cheaper alternatives on the Internet. That has forced newspapers to cut staff and shrink their publications. The report says staffing levels at daily newspapers have fallen by more than 25 percent since 2001.

"A shortage of reporting manifests itself in invisible ways: stories not written, scandals not exposed, government waste not discovered, health dangers not identified in time, local elections involving candidates about whom we know little," the report says.

The report's recommendations include creating public affairs cable channels similar to C-SPAN at the state level, easing tax rules for non-profit news organizations and directing more federal advertising spending to local news media.

A little something from this blog in 2010

WHAT THE FCC report fails to mention is how its deregulation of broadcasting -- and Congress' removal of virtually all corporate ownership limits -- has contributed greatly to American radio's swift decline into ruin and irrelevance.

And virtually no news, in depth or otherwise, on the vast majority of stations.

Once again . . . heck of a job.

The idiot is coming! The idiot is coming!

I don't understand why the YouTube video ended before we got to Conan O'Brien's joke about Sarah Palin.

What? Really? That wasn't the straight video of her interview? It was edited for comedic effect?

Life is so much more complicated today in the post-satire era.

Don't want no, don't want no, don't want no GBTV

Glenn Beck's planned Internet pay-TV scheme might fly in Montana or Ohio or Utah, but I can't see it being the motherlode for him or anything.

It likely will be a load of something, though.

But Mr. Beck knows everything and I don't, and there are lots of tea partiers who have a strong hankerin' for loads of something -- the more fragrant the better -- so what the hell do I know?

HERE'S WHAT The New York Times is reporting today:

Glenn Beck is planning to charge his fans a monthly subscription for his daily talk show online starting this summer, as he makes the move from being a Fox News host to the owner of his own Internet network.

On Tuesday, Mr. Beck will announce a first-of-its-kind effort to take a popular — but also fiercely polarizing — television show and turn it into its own subscription enterprise. It is an adaptation of the business models of both HBO and Netflix for one man’s personal brand — and a huge risk, as he and his staff members acknowledged in interviews in recent days.

“I think we might be a little early,” Mr. Beck said of his plan for the Internet network, called GBTV, which will cost $5 to $10. “But I’d rather be ahead of the pack than part of it.”

The business decision by Mr. Beck’s company, Mercury Radio Arts, hinges on an expectation that more and more people will figure out how to view online shows on their TV sets through set-top boxes and video game consoles — and that they will subscribe directly to their favorite brands.

LIKE I SAID, maybe some people will pay for this. Others won't. Probably not enough for Beck to afford to up his meds.

All I know is that if I want to go and watch crazy, I can go back home to the Gret Stet of Louisiana and see all I want for free.

Amid thousands of jobless journalists. . . .

Here's today's edition of The Fred Preaus Report, our occasional look at what's shaking at my hometown newspaper, The Advocate of Baton Rouge, La.

Well, it looks like the fine folks at Red Stick's leading news source are holding fast to their principles . . . and the company motto of "Why try harder?" They also have been spending a lot of time asking one another -- or at least rumor has it that they have -- "Qu'est-ce que c'est le 'spell check'?"

Anyway, at least the "committe" in question diden't vot to maek bad speleng a felone. There's not enough prison cells in the world.

Somebody had to say it

It seems that this -- embodied in the tea party movement, the reigning conception of "conservatism," and those at the helm of the Republican Party today -- is America's "Ayn Rand moment."

And it is not a conservative meme being embraced by "God-fearing" conservatives all across the land, one that's absolutely pervasive across the country's Bible Belt. Instead, it is an absolutely radical one.

It is a movement devoted to turning traditional morality on its head, taking Darwinism out of the biology books and inserting it into the heart of civil society and relegating Father, Son and Holy Ghost to the ash heap of history . . . and the Sermon on the Mount with them.

It's deeply ironic, this embrace of a societal "fifth column" by all manner of folk most concerned about a fifth columnist in the White House. I'm sure Rand would have appreciated the irony, but I can't decide whether she would be horrified by the irrational embrace of objectivism by those she surely would deride as mediocrities and "second handers" or welcome the slack-jawed assistance.

It's rather like Homo sapiens taking a PAC donation from Neanderthals for Natural Selection.

You can't be a Christian and buy into Ayn Rand, too. Christianity and objectivism are mutually exclusive. This circle cannot be squared -- if you set out on a mission to "pick and choose" useful, non-contradictory parts of objectivism and the gospel of Jesus Christ to fashion into a blueprint for society, you wouldn't have enough of either to even rise to the level of incoherence.

And at long last, some folks (above) are calling Republicans and tea partiers on their sins against both God and reason. You not only can't be a Christian and a Randian, but you can't even be a conservative while making like Atlas and shrugging.


DON'T TRUST ME, listen to what Ayn Rand herself had to say about faith and society. She never wanted to "conserve" anything about society as Americans understood it; she wanted to blow it up and replace it with one of her own conception.

Take particular note of what Rand says starting at 4:15 in this 1959 Mike Wallace interview.

WALLACE: You put this philosophy to work in your novel Atlas Shrugged. . .

RAND: That's right.

WALLACE: . . . you demonstrate it in human terms in your novel Atlas Shrugged. And let me start by quoting from a review of this novel, Atlas Shrugged, that appeared in Newsweek. It said that you are out to destroy almost every edifice in the contemporary American way of life, our Judeo-Christian religion, our modified, government-regulated capitalism, our rule by the majority will. Other reviews have said that you scorn churches and the concept of God. Are these accurate criticisms?

RAND: Uh, yes. I agree with the facts but not the estimate of these criticisms. Namely, if I am challenging the base of all these institutions, I am challenging the moral call of altruism -- the precept that man's moral duty is to live for others. That man must sacrifice himself to others, which is the present-day morality.

WALLACE: What do you mean by sacrifice himself for others? This is now where we're getting to the point. . . .

RAND: One moment. Since I am challenging the base, I necessarily would challenge the institutions you name, which are a result of that morality. And now what is self-sacrifice?

WALLACE: Yes, what is self-sacrifice? You say you do not like the altruism by which we live. You like a kind of Ayn Randist selfishness. . . .

RAND: I would say that don't like is too weak a word. I consider (it) evil, and self-sacrifice is the precept that man needs to serve others in order to justify his existence, that his moral duty is to serve others. That is what most people believe today.

WALLACE: Well, yes. We're taught to feel concern for our fellow man, to feel responsible for his welfare, to feel that we are, as religious people might put it, children under God and responsible one for the other. Now why do you rebel? What's wrong with this philosophy?

RAND: But that is what in fact makes man a sacrificial animal. That man must work for others, concern himself with others or be responsible for them. That is the role of a sacrificial object. I say that man is entitled to his own happiness, and that he must achieve it himself, but that he cannot demand that others give up their lives to make him happy. Nor should he wish to sacrifice himself for the happiness of others. I hold that man should have self-esteem.

WALLACE: And cannot man have self-esteem if he loves his fellow man? What's wrong with loving your fellow man? Christ -- every important moral leader in man's history -- has taught us that we should love one another. Why then is this kind of love, in your mind, immoral?

RAND: It is immoral if it is a love placed above oneself. It is more than immoral, it is impossible. Because when you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately, that is to love people without any standard, to love them regardless of the fact of whether they have and value or virture, you are asked to love nobody.

IF THIS IS WHAT conservatives are buying into nowadays, is there nothing they wish to actually conserve? Is there nothing under heaven or on earth they don't wish to commodify?

What's next? Don't answer that.


WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, the father of modern conservatism -- when "conservatism" actually was "conservative" and not an ongoing, collective spasm of wild-eyed radicalism -- certainly knew the score.

He paints a picture of a woman who, come to think of it, may just be the personification of Tea Party America . . . Ebeneezer Scrooge with a penchant for grand pronouncements and purplish prose.

Listen, I can understand one having an Ayn Rand moment. As a young man, I had one myself.

But then you grow up. You realize that you're not half as exceptional as you once thought. You realize that you are not a self-contained, self-sustaining entity. You fall in love. You realize there may well be a God, and you are not Him.

And you realize that choices must be made. That the Randian circle cannot be squared -- not with God, not with your fellow man.

Finally, it comes to you with full clarity. You come to know this one thing:

If you're smitten with the works of Ayn Rand in your 20s, you're normal. If you're not over it by 30, you may be a monster.

When the levee breaks

We're days and days away from the highest water on the Missouri River, and already the levee near Hamburg, Iowa, has given way.

Does this Omaha World-Herald dispatch sound familiar at all, Brownie?

Two levee breaches just south of Hamburg, Iowa, prompted authorities in Fremont County to issue a mandatory evacuation order Sunday for residents in southern Hamburg.

The Fremont County Emergency Management Office said about 240 residents — roughly 20 percent of the town — were ordered out of their homes following the downstream levee breach in Missouri's Atchison County.

Record outflows from upstream reservoirs have swollen the Missouri River this year, adding considerable pressure to a vast system of levees erected along the river's banks.

Early assessments determined the second partial breach near Hamburg and the damaged areas are likely to fully breach as water levels continue to rise.

As a temporary measure to reinforce the levee to delay a full breach, the Iowa National Guard on Sunday was using a Black Hawk helicopter to drop 1,000-pound sandbags onto the affected part of the levee. Authorities had removed heavy equipment and workers from the area because of concerns about the levee's strength.

The situation in southwest Iowa reflects part of authorities' biggest concerns. Although the stream of river water leaking from the levee into nearby fields was minimal Sunday, authorities worry that part of a community's infrastructure could be inundated.

EVENTS OF the past six years may have caused me to become somewhat cynical, but I do believe I have figured out the government's approach to flood control across these United States:

President ___________ came down in a ___________

With a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand

The president say, ''Little fat man isn't it a shame

What the river has done to this poor cracker's land."

Heck of a job.

Simply '70s: Mary Hartman predicts 2011

Mary Hartman! Mary Hartman!

In high school, I was hooked on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman simply because it was the edgiest, cuttingest, wickedest (and most wickedly funny . . . when not wickedly painful) thing on television. In many ways, it was Monty Python meets Paddy Chayefsky.

And, come to think of it, this deeply satirical late-night soap opera was just about as prophetic as Chayefsky's Network that same year -- 1976. Here, we see a parody of public television that comes to resemble the modus operandi of today's alternate reality of cable news -- where infotainment uses real people as weapons (and cannon fodder) to fight ideological battles for the amusement of their viewers.

Except, of course, when they use real people as salacious chum to draw viewers like one might lure sharks.

Young Rev. Jimmy Joe Jeeter got off easier than today's average media consumer, I say.

3 Chords & the Truth: Light it up

We like the light . . . or so we say.

I know the Bible likes light, because it talks about it so much -- and so glowingly. Darkness, not so much.

Well. a large chunk of this week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth has to do with light. And how we sometimes talk a good game when it comes to light but would just as soon talk about light than be light.

Sometimes, what really worries those most obsessed with showing us "the light" is appearances. It's the old bait and switch.

IN THAT EVENT, the name of the Big Show would have to change to 3 Chords & Looking Good for the Neighbors.

This go around, we're gonna play one of the great gospel songs ever. It was written by a creative genius who often liked to crawl inside a bottle.

For that reason, some would like you to hear the song, but not the suffering soul who gave it to us by the grace of God. That's an example of putting keeping up appearances over seeing the light.

We don't do that here.

Hank Williams died a hopeless drunk. I may yet die a hopeless A-hole. But Jesus died so that there might be hope for drunks like Hank and A-holes like me.

MEANTIME, I propose that the saints and the sinners come over to my place, home of the Big Show, and we'll gather around the record player, have a hell of a time . . . and look for the light while we're at it.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Just give the man what he wants

I don't care if you don't got no crawfish lef', cher!

If da man come in and say he want da crawfish, you go and get da man some crawfish, y'unnerstand? You go an' get da man his mudbugs, Cap.

It is always better for da customer to be suckin' da heads rather than lickin' the toads. Especially when he packin' da heat.

THIS CAUTIONARY TALE about what happens to those who come between a political extremist and his crawfish comes to us via the Pensacola News Journal. Read it and heed it:

A manic shooter peppered a busy Ensley retail strip with assault rifle fire Sunday evening because a local seafood market ran out of crawfish, investigators said.

Larry Wayne Kelly, 42, of Pensacola is in county jail on $575,000 bond facing a slew of felony charges.

Kelly's lead-filled rampage erupted about 7 p.m. when Escambia County deputies received a flood of calls reporting a man speeding through Ensley, blasting an AK-47 assault rifle from the window of a pickup truck.

At one point, Kelly got out of the vehicle and fired numerous shots at the storefront of L&T Seafood Market on Pensacola Boulevard, about two blocks south of Wal-Mart, witnesses said.

Two hours earlier, Kelly allegedly called the seafood market to order crawfish and became "incredibly irate" when an employee said the store didn't have any, according to a Sheriff's Office report.

(snip)

Kelly claimed to be a "sovereign citizen," telling deputies he does not have to follow the law or obey law enforcement officers, deputies said. Also found in the truck was the book "The Sociopath Next Door."

According to a 2010 FBI briefing paper: "Sovereign citizens are anti-government extremists who believe that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or 'sovereign' from the United States. As a result, they believe they don't have to answer to any government authority, including courts, taxing entities, motor vehicle departments or law enforcement."

REMEMBER, ladies and germs, while the tree of liberty must from time to time be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants, it also must be regularly fertilized with the remains of boiled crawfish.

Experience a city fighting back

Sorry, Newsweek.

A city that can produce a lipdub deemed "the greatest music video ever made" by Roger Ebert can't be one of "America's dying cities." A dying city isn't just a matter of population losses; a dying city is one that has lost its spirit.

A dying city is one in which the civic culture has unraveled and no one is his brother's keeper.

A dying city has no answer to the question "Why try harder?"


IF THIS LIPDUB is any indication of Grand Rapids' mettle as a metropolis -- albeit a small metropolis -- it's a lot healthier city than Newsweek is a magazine. Is what I am submitting for your approval, as Rod Serling might have said.

Now, I'm not qualified to judge whether Ebert is correct in Grand Rapids having produced the best music video ever, but I'd say this one is at least in the ballpark.

Experience Grand Rapids, indeed!


HAT TIP: The non-profit media conglomerate formerly known as National Public Radio.

Happiest calories in Omaha

This is Zesto in the Florence neighborhood of north Omaha.

This is the spot on North 30th Street where calories go to make people smile.

Burgers, fries, shakes and malts -- they're all here, and have been for decades. As have decades of kids in Florence.

And their parents, too.

Welcome to a lazy Memorial Day in Florence, just shy of sunset. There's a world of malteds, burgers and banana splits in a simple frame building with a big sign on top.

There's a world of memories in there, too. Whole worlds of them. Inside that Zesto -- more properly known as "Zesto's" -- is the history of the lost youth of the Baby Boom in North O.

And Generation X in North O.

In there lies the joys and fears, crushes and heartbreak of the Millennial generation in North O. At Zesto's also resides the head of one gentleman (above) who -- apparently -- just can't get enough of the place.

Every summer, we hear ESPN announcers singing the praises of the south Omaha Zesto's delicacies during College World Series broadcasts. In Florence, one finds the same good food and the same tasty shakes and malts . . . albeit with one big difference.


The North 30th Street Zesto's doesn't jack up the prices at the first crack of the CWS bat.

Some traditions never get televised, and they just have to rely on the neighborhood clientele. That and generations of memories. And the hearts and minds they inhabit -- hearts and minds forever young, eternally refreshed at a hot-fudge fountain of youth.

Somewhere, it's always 1965. And if you're in 1965 right now, and if you're in Florence, my future wife seems to have lost her new transistor radio somewhere between 25th and Whitmore and the Safeway on 30th.

If you find it, drop me a line. I'll get it back to her.