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What was a major-league town takes stock in itself

on Thu, 11/13/2025 - 00:39   by Anonymous

by Art Cullen, Iowa Capital Dispatch
November 7, 2025

First impression of Keokuk: beautiful and blighted, drained away with the currents of time at the confluence of the Mississippi and Des Moines rivers on Iowa’s southeastern tip.

You could forsake it were it not for the stubborn and resilient people who have laid claim to the place since 1837.

It was a major-league city with major-league ambitions. It was the Gate City to the river trade. It was a milling and foundry town. In 1875, the Keokuk Westerns played in the National League, compiling a 1-12 record and hanging up their cleats by June, never to play the Chicago White Stockings again.

The town boasted industrialists like J.C. Hubinger, a miller who had a huge mansion and amusement park overlooking the river and died poor in a boarding house. Now you could buy a manse along the river for $300,000. Forty percent of the historic brick buildings downtown are vacant.

Fiddling while we burn: We know what to do about climate change but who will do it?

on Fri, 09/01/2023 - 17:49   by Anonymous

by Art Cullen, Iowa Capital Dispatch
August 25, 2023

Here we sit sweating it out under a heat dome. It’s supposed to get hot in an Iowa summer, but like this? One heat dome after another. Then a shower just in the nick of time. They say it’s a sign of climate change — that seasonal extremes like a hot August day become more extreme, and linger.

Storm Lake was in a water emergency during RAGBRAI last month. City wells stressed by drought and thirst failed. They got fixed for the time being, but our water system is limping along in need of more improvement than we can afford. Our drinking water sources, underground aquifers, are in decline from increased pumping for humans, livestock and ethanol.

If you don’t think that we are burning up the planet, look around: Maui got toasted as people jumped into the ocean to flee the fire. LA does not get hurricanes, but now it does. Entire towns in Canada are evacuating from wildfires. The smoke gags the Midwest.

If you’re trying to grow wheat or run cattle near the Panhandle, good luck, pardner.

If climate change is not a thing, then what is all this?

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