Rounds continuing personal vendetta against US military, getting schooled by corps

South Dakota's junior senator has been all short guy this week.

Recall South Dakota's quisling earth hater former governor Mike Rounds built a house in a swamp that flooded then received a generous self-reimbursement from insurance coverage underwritten by his own company knowing Lake Sharpe is filling with silt. He's been blaming the US Army Corps of Engineers for that fraud ever since.

Rounds has been grandstanding in Pierre trying to overcome his lack of effectiveness in the US Senate.

“A healthy, well-managed river is critical to the communities along it,” Rounds said in his opening statement. Paul Lepisto, a regional official for the Izaak Walton League, said the Missouri River is one of the most altered eco-systems on earth as a result of the six dams. [Watertown Public Opinion]

The corps might be finally getting through to the little guy. There is nothing healthy about six dams in a threatened ecosystem.

The risk to upper basin states and Indian tribes is that once water is regulated as surplus water, and once it is consumed by end-users, it becomes that much harder to later re-institute the original legal, as well as declared beneficial uses of the water. [David Ganje]

Lewis and Clark Lake is thirty percent full of toxic sediment. The impoundment is dealing with newly-discovered invasive species which are causing problems to equipment.

Despite run-off of about 115 percent of normal officials at the Omaha-based US Army Corps of Engineers again canceled the Spring pulse for endangered species habitat on the upper Missouri River.

Nearly a century of residue from Black Hills Mining District affects millions of cubic yards of riparian habitat all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Although the Oahe Dam was completed in 1962 sequestering most of the silt the soils of the Belle Fourche and Cheyenne Rivers are inculcated with arsenic at levels that have killed cattle. Endangered pallid sturgeon, paddlefish, catfish and most other organisms cope with lethal levels of mercury throughout the South Dakota portion of the Missouri River.

The closest Mike Rounds has ever gotten to military service is acting as commander-in-chief of South Dakota's National Guard.

The withdrawal of Jim DeMint elevated water warrior Senator Roy Blunt (earth hater-MO) to lead his assault from the lower Missouri River basin so the path leads right to Blunt's front door.

It's time for South Dakota's press to investigate the collusion between the state and polluters instead of pandering to the South Dakota Republican Party as it destroys watersheds by deconstructing the Waters of the United States rule protected under the 1972 Clean Water Act.