Will Asian Carp assault Chicago, Lake Michigan similar to the way Godzilla terrorized Tokyo in the movies?

It has long been the fear of environmentalists that Asian Carp, a breed of fish considered particularly devastating to our ecology, is someday going to manage to work its way into Lake Michigan and the surrounding of the Great Lakes.

Have Asian Carp arrived at Lake Calumet? Photos by Gregory Tejeda

So it is with much trepidation that there is now evidence indicating that the Carp have made it past the electronic barricades further south near Romeoville (which the Army Corps of Engineers installed thinking that was the absolute solution to keep the Carp out of Chicago) and are now in existence in Lake Calumet.

FROM WHICH, IF they really have made it that far along the path, only now have to swim upstream through the Calumet River for about seven miles through Chicago’s South Side and will then be in Lake Michigan proper.

The Asian Carp, who initially were released accidentally into the Mississippi River somewhere down near New Orleans have managed to make it up across the nation, and across our state through the Illinois River and could now be about to take over the lake that is pride and joy to our Chicago.

Which, of course, will have many people eager to blame Chicago for letting the Asian Carp loose – even though one could claim it was the ineptitude of those who initially let the Carp loose down south who are truly to blame.

From Lake Calumet mouth to Calumet River … 

But the reality is that there’s nothing that can be done to undo the damage in the mighty Mississippi. But we can still hope that our officials can act in ways to bar them from Lake Michigan.

SO WHAT’S THE big deal about the Asian Carp? The fact is that the Asian Carp feed on anything and everything in their paths.

In doing so, they’ll devastate the ecosystems of whatever water supply they manage to get to. In a sense, everything that is alive and thriving now in Lake Michigan could wind up becoming barren, if the Carp make it that far.

And the reality is, we may well find there’s nothing we really can do to stop the Asian Carp from making the final stretch of their journey to Lake Michigan and all the other Great Lakes.

and up the river, past the Chicago Skyway bridge

If they’ve managed to work their way north from New Orleans to Chicago this far, what’s to make us think there’s anything that can be placed in their way during the final seven-mile stretch of the Calumet River?

NOW IT SHOULD be noted that the Asian Carp proper have not been found in Lake Calumet itself. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said last week that traces of DNA from Asian Carp have been found in the lake’s water.

The Chicago Tribune reported that the DNA could consist of evidence of skin cells, secretions and feces (just think, fish poop), and that those substances could well have been in the bilge water of the ships that pass through the area – if not the Asian Carp themselves.

Too bad the Asian Carp can't read signs!

It could be just genetic junk, and not the fish themselves that have made the lengthy journey from down south. Which means that rather than blaming Chicago for letting the Carp into the Great Lakes, we ought to be thinking in terms of whether or not Chicago will be “heroic” enough to prevent the trip from being completed.

I suppose we’re now on the lookout for the Asian Carp, which have been sited by the T.J. O’Brien Lock and Dam – located just south of the lake – to see if they’ve made it a few miles farther north to the lake proper, then well on their way to the “big” lake itself.

IT WILL BE intriguing to see what kind of last-ditch measures our federal and state officials (Gov. J.B. Pritzker has written to the Army Corps of Engineers offering whatever assistance the state can provide) can concoct to try to keep the Asian Carp out of the Great Lakes.

Will we see some new sort of technology devised to try to barricade off Lake Michigan? Or are we destined to see the same kind of electronic barricades erected at the mouth of the Calumet River headed into the lake as one last-ditch attempt to kill off any sort of creatures?

Will the Asian Carp be reminiscent of Godzilla films?

Is it inevitable that Lake Michigan (and the other Great Lakes) as we now know them are doomed? Or can they be saved?

It makes me wonder if we’re destined for some sort of story in our future resembling the old Godzilla movies – with the Asian Carp being a threat to our ecological well-being and threatening Chicago similar to the way the cinematic dragon-like creature used to terrorize Tokyo!

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Only 364 more days to Ill. Bicentennial, so I’m contemplating a journey

I know it’s a month early to be making New Year’s resolutions, but the fact that Illinois is now officially beginning the process of celebrating our state’s 200 years of existence makes me want to make one.

I hope to see (finally) the red dots at Ill. extremus

In my case, I want to make trips sometime during 2018 to Galena and Cairo.

NOW I’M SURE many who are reading this are wondering how rattled is my brain. What could possibly make me think those small cities at the far northwest and southernmost tips of Illinois are worth seeing?

It’s just that in my case, I have spent years making a joke out of the fact that I have never actually seen either of those Illinois municipalities. I’m a Chicago native who was educated in Bloomington and also lived and worked in Springfield.

And in my duties as a reporter-type person, I have visited much of the state of Illinois – which is in its own way a unique place.

Now for those who think the downstate (as in “not Chicago-area”) portions of Illinois are too radically different from us to take seriously, I’d say get real.

This flag will fly across Illinois

CHICAGOANS HAVE MORE in common with places like Peoria or Rockford or East St. Louis than we do overly-haughty Noo Yawkers who forget that Staten Island is more true to their image than Manhattan, or snooty Bostonians who think they have a monopoly on our American history (although I confess I enjoyed Boston the one time I visited it).

But the joke is that Galena and Cairo are the only two places of significance across Illinois that I’ve never had an excuse to be in – although I was close to Cairo on occasions when I had to visit the state corrections facility in Tamms (about 12 miles to the north of Illinois’ southern tip).

From the sesquicentennial of '68

I feel like I ought to complete the journey and say I’ve seen all of my home state. Life doesn’t go on forever.

And in a year when we’re supposed to be highlighting our state’s history, I can’t envision a better time to do so.

I KNOW SOME people will joke that Galena (about 3,200 population) is nothing but a batch of antiques shops, although it has a prime location near the Mississippi River (and is the one-time home of a future U.S. president Ulysses Grant, just like the Hyde Park neighborhood is for Barack Obama) and probably is something close to the vision of Illinois that the state’s founders had back on Dec. 3, 1818 – the date upon which Illinois officially became a state in its own right within the United States. Chicago’s post-Fire development is something no one ever would have dreamed of).

While I also know from experience whenever I’ve told Southern Illinois natives I’d like to see Cairo, they look at me like I’m nuts.

Largely because Cairo is the city they have fled out of their own racial hang-ups. Cairo, the city right at the point where the Ohio River converges with the Mississippi River to flow southward to New Orleans and into the Gulf of Mexico. A point I truly would be curious to see, even though I’m sure it will forevermore make me wonder why Cairo’s prime spot never developed into a major Midwestern city.

Which one should I check out first?

Cairo is a place that at its peak a century ago had a 20,000 population with black people living in segregated communities nearby. But it is now a city of about 2,600 people with an overwhelming majority of them being African-American.

NOT THAT I’M bad-mouthing Southern Illinois – heck, there are Chicago neighborhoods (particularly on the South Side) that used to be lily-white but where “white flight” was so thorough that the locals now have no clue white people ever existed there.

So these are thoughts I’m having as I contemplate Illinois’ intent to lead up to the actual state Bicentennial date next December. Those celebrations are kicking off with ceremonies Monday to be held at McCormick Place and at municipal buildings across the state.

Are these suggested sites?

There will be a noon-hour flag raising ceremony across Illinois where a specially-designed Bicentennial flag will take place. Let’s hope that this ceremony, and the assorted proclamations that municipalities have been approving in acknowledgement, aren’t the extent to which most people pay tribute.

For as one proclamation read, “Illinois Bicentennial is a once-in-a-lifetime invitation to fall in love with Illinois all over again, and together we can inspire pride in Illinois and show the world what makes this state so great.”

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All it takes is one to create a problem

I don’t doubt that most people give little thought to the concept of Asian Carp.
 

Not far from Great Lakes, where Calumets converge

For all I know, on the occasions they do think about it, they dismiss it as some sort of artificial emergency situation created by intellectual types who have way too much free time on their hands – perhaps similar to the doomsday we were supposed to face on Jan. 1, 2000.

IT DOESN’T SEEM that many people are getting all that worked up over the concept of the Asian Carp – a species of fish that Mother Nature never really intended to exist in this part of the globe. Maybe they think it's what you get when you order Chinese carry-out!

So the fact that scientists inadvertently let them loose into the Mississippi River and they have steadily worked their way upstream is a problem that those scientists get all worked up over. But which elicits a great big “Yawn!” from the bulk of us.

As things turn out, the Asian Carp have worked their way up the river and into Illinois – where they’re alive and thriving in the Illinois River. I recently stumbled across a news report that said the waters around Havana, Ill., have more Asian Carp than any other place on Earth.

Now why should we care about the Carp?

THE FACT IS that the eat everything in sight. They devour all the natural plant life that fish nature intended to be in the area would feed off of. As a result, the types of fish who “belong” wind up being threatened.

 

Lake Calumet a direct path to Lake Michigan

The potential exists for nature to be erased, and replaced with something glutton-ish that was never meant to be!

Back in 2010, an Asian Carp was actually pulled out of Lake Calumet – that isolated patch of area on Chicago’s far South Side that connects directly to Lake Michigan by the Calumet River.

And on Friday, the Asian Carp Regional Coordinating Committee said another Asian Carp was caught by a fisherman just south of the T.J. O’Brien Lock and Dam – which is near Lake Calumet – and clearly within the Chicago city limits.

 

ENVIRONMENTAL AND WILDLIFE types like to talk about those electronic gates they erected south of the city that supposedly kill off any Asian Carp that try to swim too close to Chicago or Lake Michigan. But it also seems at least two managed to figure out a way to get past.
 

Could the Carp someday swim past 95th St. bridge?

Which creates the possibility that many more also succeeded. For all we know, they have managed to get to Lake Michigan proper – and we just don’t know it yet. Or equally likely, they are going to continue to try and the day will come when we’ll have the Asian Carp feeding off the Great Lakes.

Now those who want to think of issues in a partisan way often want to place blame on the Asian Carp issue on Chicago itself. We are the city that back in the 19^th Century created the connections between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River.

Those connections were a large part of the reason why Chicago became the dominant Midwestern city so much larger than places like Detroit, Milwaukee or St. Louis.

ARE WE SUPPOSED to wither away and cease to exist because others allowed the Mississippi River to become tainted by the Asian Carp?

Now I’m not about to offer up the solution to keeping the Asian Carp out of Lake Michigan. It seems we’re doing what we possibly can thus far, and this may wind up being an issue of how things can always go wrong.

Fact that area fenced off causes many to give Calumet lake little thought. All photographs by Gregory Tejeda

All I know is that this issue is one we all ought to be giving greater thought to, rather than thinking of it as something that is occurring down around that lake many of us never pay attention to.

For if we do wind up facing the day of devastation to the Great Lake upon which our city’s existence is so reliant, it won’t be as “ho-hum” an event as it was the day after Dec. 21, 2012 – when the world didn’t come to an end as the Mayans allegedly once predicted it would.

  -30-

If Asian carp are a delicacy, does that mean aldermen have some value too?

It looks like the Asian carp have finally made it within sight of Lake Michigan – a thought that on a certain level has environmentalists quaking in their pants.

What's lower; Asian carp or aldermen?



But these carp are deceased. They have been stripped and cooked.

SO IT WASN’T that the dreaded species of fish that potentially could devastate the ecosystem of the Great Lakes managed to make it past all the barricades put up by man to keep them out.

It is that a Lincoln Park neighborhood restaurant served them up as foodstuffs to be eaten by people who attended the opening day of the Taste of Chicago.

Which means they were consumed by people standing in Grant Park, which is right at the downtown Chicago shoreline of Lake Michigan.

So if someone were to take bite of the Asian carp, decide they didn’t care for the taste, and decide to chuck it into the lake rather than a trash can, would that count as an instance of the species making it all the way into the Great Lakes?

I MUST ADMIT to getting a bit of a kick out of the idea, particularly after reading a Chicago Sun-Times report that included comments from an Illinois Department of Natural Resources official about how the only thing wrong with Asian carp as food is a “perception problem.”

The newspaper peddled the idea that the Asian carp could actually be regarded as a delicacy – we’re told that some people refer to the fish as “silver fin” to avoid the negative connotation.

Although it also seems that some people don’t distinguish between the Asian carp and the regular ol’ carp that have been slithering their way through the muck of the Great Lakes and the Chicago River for decades.

Personally, I don’t think that is as much an issue as the fact that the Asian carp only gets written about in the context of some dangerous species that threatens the life of Lake Michigan and its companion lakes.

IT PROBABLY HAS people thinking there’s something poisonous or hazardous about the species itself, and that coming into contact with it can be fatal.

Certainly not something turned into tiny White Castle-like sandwiches smothered in jalapeno chutney – as was done on Wednesday at the Taste of Chicago by people from Dirk’s Fish and Gourmet Shop.

Although that perception, in and of itself, is incorrect.

The problem with Asian carp is that they’re gluttonous. They devour everything in their path – including substances that provide life and nourishment to other species that are native to the Great Lakes.

THINK OF THE Asian carp as the equivalent of the new people in the neighborhood who throw loud parties and intrude on everyone’s solitude, yet never bother to invite you.

Yet they’re also sly enough that if you try calling the cops on them, they become peaceful enough to get the police to back off (just like the carp manage to leap over those electronic barricades that are meant to electrocute them if they get too aggressive in trying to work their way toward the Great Lakes.

Personally, a part of me accepts the fact that they’re going to make it someday. They first got introduced to this country as part of a fish “farm” in Mississippi not far from New Orleans and managed to escape.

Since then, they have worked their way up the Mississippi River and across Illinois to where they are now dangerously near the Great Lakes.

Just as vile, at times

THEY JUST CAN’T be stopped. Take out a few. And some more crop up in their place. Or so it seems.

It sounds almost as futile as federal prosecutors thinking they can completely eradicate crime and corruption from within the ranks of our local government.

Then again, the Asian carp are persistent and unstoppable, and greedily devour everything in sight without regard for how it impacts others.

When you phrase it like that, it makes the Asian carp sound just like a Chicago alderman. No wonder the species is a menace.

  -30-

Will we react in time to save Cairo?

Will a modern-day image of this old postcard depicting Cairo, Ill. and its position along the rivers be nothing but a sea of light blue?

I have never set foot in Cairo, Ill. That town at the far southern tip of the state where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers converge and where one literally is seven miles closer to Jackson, Miss., than they are to Chicago.

And now, I’m wondering if I’m never going to get the chance.

WILL IT TURN out that the time I was in Tamms, Ill., (about 12 miles to the north of Cairo), I will be able to claim I was in what will become the far southern tip of Illinois?

The aging southern city that resembles a ghost town in many parts is getting hit with heavy rains that are causing the two rivers that are the sole justification for its location to rise higher and higher.

The Ohio River at Cairo reached record-high levels on Sunday, and officials say it will continue to rise. Which has people thinking it is just a matter of time before the levees will give way and the rivers will wash away the city of some 2,800 people.

That has the Army Corps of Engineers thinking that the solution to the problem is to blow a hole in the levees that protect the Missouri side of the river from flooding. By letting farmland along the river overflow with water, they think it would ease pressure enough on the Cairo levees so that they will hold – and Cairo will continue to exist.

THE PROBLEM IS Missouri political people, who are determined to drag this issue out in the courts – even though the federal district and appeals courts have both upheld the desires of the Army Corps of Engineers as being justified and, quite possibly, the best way to cope with an ugly situation.

Missouri officials on Sunday tried unsuccessfully to get the Supreme Court of the United States to take the case under advisement, which meant that the Illinois attorney general’s office was busy this weekend trying to fight off the legal stalling tactics so that preventative action can occur.

There are those who are trying to portray this as selfishness by Missouri, trying to protect farmland instead of a city with actual people – even though Cairo officials this weekend gave the evacuation order and are trying to get everybody out of the area so as to reduce the potential for casualties should the river overflow.

I’m not quite sure I see it that simple.

BUT THIS COULD be a case where Cairo’s history, particularly from the late 1960s when racial tensions related to the demise of segregation as an acceptable policy for life in this society, is continuing to linger in its own weird way.

The historic fact is that when it became apparent that the old ways were gone and that the white and black populations of Cairo were going to mix (actually, Cairo proper was white, while black people were expected to stay in the unincorporated community of Future City located just up U.S. Route 51), many of the white people fled the area.

That is what gives us a modern-day Cairo that is overwhelmingly African-American, and ONLY 2,831 people in size. I’m sure there are many people who are fighting the Army Corps of Engineers’ desires who simply think that the people who remain in Cairo just don’t matter.

Or that we’re doing them a major favor by encouraging them to leave and letting the river overflow into Illinois – thereby forevermore eliminating the city that once was supposed to be a major shipping port in the United States because of its location on the two major rivers.

THE NATION'S HIGH court wound up deciding not to hear the case, letting the lower court rulings remain in place and allowing this to become an issue to be considered by the Army Corps of Engineers. Let's only hope the legal nonsense ended in time – because we really don’t know how much time there is left.

Various reports coming out of Cairo indicate signs that water is somehow seeping underneath the levee, which could weaken the structure and cause it to collapse. It is totally possible that the courts could make the proper rulings to give the Army Corps of Engineers the authority to decide for themselves how to fix this mess (which is one of their reasons for existence), only to have the levee collapse just before the court ruling is made public.

Will our political people get their act together in time to fix the disaster-in-the-making at Cairo? If they don’t, I’d think it is the kind of mess that is worthy of bringing down someone’s political career – and not just Missouri House Speaker Steve Tilley, R-Perryville, for bluntly saying that Missouri farmland was worth more than Cairo people.

Because someday I’d like to be able to go down to that part of Illinois (about the only part of the state I haven’t been to) and see where the rivers come together. I’d rather be surrounded by people when I do so, and NOT the ghost town-like remains of the city that so many of us became confused about when pronouncing.

  -30-

Is Chicago supposed to apologize?

It almost seemed like a double hit on the perception of Chicago, as provided in recent days by two of the nation’s prominent newspapers.

Both the New York Times and Washington Post published pieces of copy in the past couple of days that seem to put the Second City in a negative light – the Times ran a full-fledged editorial calling for the closure of the Chicago Sanitary & Ship Canal as the only way possible to prevent the Asian Carp from destroying the ecosystem of the Great Lakes.

MEANWHILE, THE WASHINGTON Post (the newspaper that recently decided to recall its Chicago-based correspondents on the grounds that it could cover our city from Foggy Bottom) published a story Tuesday about the record of Education Secretary Arne Duncan back when he was in charge of the Chicago Public Schools.

Among the points made by the Post is that school systems in Houston and Miami showed higher average test scores for their students than Chicago, while places like Atlanta and the District of Columbia showed larger gains than did our city’s school system.

The Post, so to speak, is less than impressed with Duncan’s performance in Chicago. Or at least they gave credibility to the thoughts of the Chicago-based people who were glad to see Duncan leave when Barack Obama became president. The Chicago Sanitary & Ship Canal has been around for more than a century, yet some out-of-towners are now anxious to give it full blame for the potential Asian Carp infestation into the Great Lakes. Photograph provided by Library of Congress collection.

The latter report struck me as a whole lot of hot air being given credence by the national capital’s local newspaper – which may reflect the mood among some D.C. insiders who are somewhat resentful these days about the degree to which adopted Chicagoan Obama chose his Chicago colleagues for several significant political positions in his administration.

LET’S BE HONEST – that’s part of the reason some people are so willing to see former Illinois Lottery Director Desiree Rogers twist in the wind because those two nitwits managed to sneak into a White House party.

So while I’m not necessarily a Duncan defender, a part of me can easily try to read through the Washington Post report’s lines to figure out how many of the educational accusations are mere political whining.

After all, I don’t think anyone seriously disputes that the Chicago Public Schools still have a long way to go in terms of improvement before they can be considered to be offering an adequate educational opportunity to city-based school children.

Somehow, it was the Times’ editorial that got on my Chicago-oriented nerves more than anything the Washington Post reported.

THE TIMES EDITORIALIZED about the Asian Carp problem – the one involving the fish that if they become a part of the Great Lakes ecosystem have the serious potential to devour the substances that other life forms in the lakes feed off of.

That would lead to a devastation of life in the Great Lakes as we have known it.

It also would be a blow to the regional economy, which relies on that canal to provide the contact between the Great Lakes (through Lake Michigan at Chicago) to the Mississippi River and which considers its construction one of the great engineering achievements of all-time.

Even the Times conceded that point, writing, “that would be hugely costly and poltiically difficult, given the importance of shipping to the region.”

NOW I’M NOT going to downplay the threat caused by the Asian Carp, which managed to get loose from Southern fish farms into the Mississippi River and have been swimming their way up north ever since.

I also realize that the electronic fences installed by the Army Corps of Engineers to try to keep the fish away from the Great Lakes are failing, and I don’t trust the once-proposed suggestion of dumping a substance that is toxic to the Carp into the canal.

Simply put, even though I’m not a biologist by profession, I’m skept ical of the claims that the substance would be harmless to human beings that came into contact with the canal.

But it just strikes me as being a little to simplistic to say that the only solution is to cut off the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds. In fact, it may be downright unrealistic to expect anyone to take such a suggestion seriously.

THIS IS A serious problem that requires more thought than just saying “close the locks” (that would cut off the two water bodies from each other).

And while I usually give some respect to the New York Times for putting together a news report that tries to keep the trivialization of public events to a minimum, this editorial just comes off as a little too smarmy.

It’s almost like someone on 42nd Street having too much trouble comprehending what is happening out in the great Midwest.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: The national newspapers are giving Chicago a touch of attention on educational (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/28/AR2009122802368.html) and environmental (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/opinion/29tue3.html) issues.

The Army Corps of Engineers offers its explanation of how it is trying to keep the Asian Carp out of the Great Lakes (http://www.lrc.usace.army.mil/projects/fish_barrier/index.html), while the Encyclopedia of Chicago recalls (http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/300018.html) the construction of the canal as part of a deliberate effort to connect the lakes to the Mississippi (while also giving us the side benefit of having our sewage flow down to St. Louis – rather than into the city’s drinking water supply.

Fat chance!

It’s the dream of any journalist who has worked his way to a point where he (or she) can express opinion and have a voice – something I write actually motivates somebody in authority to take a specific action.

Yet there are other times when a columnist or commentator (or an ever-anonymous editorial writer using the political pull of his particular newspaper) takes a stance that will create only one reaction – hysterical laughter.

THOSE ARE THE times when we take a stance that we know there is no chance that the people in power will go along with. If anything, they will use it as an example of how out of touch we writers are with the way things work.

What we’re usually trying to express is the way we think things should work, in hopes that we could motivate voters to dump on certain elected officials for taking such a hard-line stance in the opposite direction.

That has been the motivation behind some of the commentaries I have written and published at this site. And it obviously is the motivation behind editorials published Tuesday by two of the daily newspapers based in the Chicago suburbs.

For I don’t envision Cook County Board President Todd Stroger reading the Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, finishing their editorial, and coming to the conclusion, “They’re right. I am a liability. I should drop out of the Democratic primary.” IN FACT, I’D think there’s a better chance that the Times of Northwest Indiana, a Munster, Ind.-based newspaper, would have a better chance of persuading Mayor Richard M. Daley, if he read their Tuesday editorial that says Chicago should give up all talk of opening a casino within the city limits, on the grounds that Lake County, Ind., needs it more.
Which is to say that I seriously could envision Stroger and Daley getting together on Tuesday to compare editorials, to see which one they think has less of an understanding of the City Hall mentality (which pervades into the other half of the building used by Cook County government).

Like I said, these are cases of editorial writers attempting to use what influence they have to get people worked up against Stroger and Daley.

In the case of Stroger, that editorial was written more for those northwest suburban people who are the base of the Stroger opposition that will be determined to see him defeated in the Feb. 2 Democratic primary.

IF BY CHANCE he somehow survives that primary, they will come after him with everything they’ve got in the November 2010 general election. There are times I wonder if they’re more interested in dumping Stroger than they are getting a Republican elected as Illinois governor or U.S. senator?

They want to put the idea into peoples’ heads that Stroger could decide to just walk away, and that he is somehow politically (as well as personally) defective for not using such an option.

So when he remains on the ballot, his very existence will be considered a character issue. It is cheap. It is petty. But it may very well be effective in terms of stirring up opposition from some people who might otherwise wind up apathetic and decide to stay at home, rather than go out to the polls and vote for, “Anyone But Todd!”

What of the other long-shot editorial, the one related to casinos in Chicago?

IN THE INTEREST of disclosure, I should admit that I do some work for the Times of Northwest Indiana, although I have never had anything to do with the newspaper’s editorial page. Nor have I ever met the editorial page editor.

So the first indication I had that this issue would come up was when I read the editorial in the newspaper (for some reason, the editorial page portion of the website http://www.nwitimes.com/ was not updated) Tuesday morning.

I agree with the overall stance, but not for the reason the newspaper advocates.

The idea that an Indiana-based newspaper would take the stance of what is good for their particular county, rather than what would benefit the entire Chicago metropolitan area (which stretches into Indiana at that point) is predictable. It is parochial.

BUT WHEN IT comes to the long-expressed desires of Daley to have casinos of some form in the city, I have always thought that small-minded.

I always thought that Chicago’s greatness gave it access to opportunities (such as hosting an Olympic games) on a scale that most municipalities (even some significantly large ones like Cleveland or Detroit) can only dream of.

So why do we have a mayor who is so eager to take on an idea that was created by the Illinois Legislature to benefit obscure towns along the Mississippi and Illinois rivers that can’t come up with anything better on their own?

For that matter, they’re probably better suited to a deteriorated city such as Gary, Ind., where local officials want to move the licenses that allow for gambling boats on Lake Michigan to a land-based site just off Interstate 80/94 (which would give very easy access to gamblers from Chicago).

SO WHEN THE newspaper writes, “Chicago should build on its strengths, not sap the strength of its surrounding area,” I can chuckle along with the mayor and his proponents, who will dismiss the idea as just Hoosiers being overly parochial.

But when one thinks about it logically, shouldn’t it really be the mayor getting chuckled at for expending so much energy throughout the years on a money-making mechanism that was intended for places such as Metropolis (Pop. 6,540)?

Who’s really thinking like a rube?

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Todd Stroger needs to go! This editorial is more about making people upset (http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=321349&src=) that he won’t go away, than trying to sway the Son of John himself.

Nature more powerful than Communism?

Former Illinois Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka recently came up with a commentary that everybody ought to give a read.

She used her column published in the Riverside/Brookfield Landmark newspaper to recall the story of a doll that had been in her family for decades – one that was dressed in a Czech ethnic costume and had actually been slipped out of the country when Communists gained control of the government.

TO TOPINKA, THE doll represented the ideals of a people struggling to survive under a repressive regime, and she wanted to try to preserve that concept by donating the doll earlier this year to the Czech and Slovak Museum.

That museum is in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and is now under water from the severe flooding that has struck the Midwestern U.S. The doll that survived Communism likely was lost due to Mother Nature and the overflow of the Mississippi River.

I don’t even come close to telling the story as well as Topinka does. Her commentary (http://www.rblandmark.com/main.asp?SectionID=3&SubSectionID=46&ArticleID=3925&TM=72027) can be found in the west suburban newspaper where she is a regular columnist.

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