Readers Write (July 4): Red River flood control, GMOs, sex offender program, the 2016 campaign

The Red River has been flooding during many springs in the area now occupied by Fargo since the end of the last ice age. When white settlers arrived in the area, some of them chose to build on the flood plain.

Their homes and businesses were repeatedly flooded, but they continued to expand onto the flood plain anyway, heroically sandbagging and defying the river. Now Minnesotans are being asked approve a project to divert much of the river around Fargo. ("Red River diversion moves to permit phase," June 30). The project would cost Minnesota $100 million directly, plus our share of $2 billion in federal funds. Since Minnesota's population is much larger than North Dakota's, we would pay a much higher portion of the federal money. In addition, about 2,000 acres of prime Minnesota farmland would be flooded.

What am I missing here? Why would Minnesota ever approve such a project? These people built on the flood plain in defiance of nature and logic. We should oppose this project with all of the political resources we have.

• • •

As government gets ready to spend apparently billions of taxpayer dollars to save some lucky people from the devastation of the now-common floods and at the same time start flooding some new homes and property not currently being flooded, it's easy to understand the controversy. Clearly they have no easy solution. But with all I have read about this, I don't understand why no one is talking about the real issue.

We have drained well more than 90 percent of western Minnesota's wetlands over the decades. Yes, more than 90 percent. If we still had those wetlands, how much of this floodwater would never end up in the Red River? At the same time, today — yes, today — we are tiling and ditching farmland just helping get the water to the river even faster than ever. In the last decade there has been more of this done than in the previous two to three decades combined. I know, I am out there every other weekend.

As a taxpayer, I hope government does a better job with our money than was done in the Devils Lake area during the last several decades, where one wrong decision was followed by another, each costing us millions/billions.

In other concessions to the biotech industry, the bill would:

• Tightly define genetic engineering so that all new untested biotechnology methods, such as CRISPR and gene editing, would be exempt from disclosure standards.

• Exempt foods refined to have the DNA removed from any GMO labeling requirements, such as refined sugar from GMO sugar beets, corn syrup from GMO corn and oil from GMO canola.

• Exempt milk or meat from animals fed GMO.

While Vermont's GMO labeling law calls for stiff noncompliance penalties of $1,000 per day per product, there are no such penalties under the Senate bill. The U.S. Department of Agriculture would have no authority to require recalls of products that don't comply with the labeling requirements.

There is no reason for Democrats to support this bill. Putting this issue in play could seriously hurt Hillary Clinton's chances of becoming president, since millennials care deeply about this issue and she needs their votes. Let the states, and the free market, sort this out.

The writer is Right to Know Minnesota board member.

Minnesota was in the national spotlight last week on "PBS NewsHour" — not for one of the many accomplishments we can be proud of; rather, it was as a poster child for our shameful failed sex-offender incarceration program (deemed unconstitutional by a judge). The featured "sexual predator" was a young man who at the juvenile age of 15 (himself having been sexually abused) engaged in criminal sexual behavior with other minors and now faces the possibility of life in prison. All because our legislators, responding to the outcry after terrible sex crimes, pandered to the worst fears of the public and began incarcerating all sexual offenders, no matter the age, as if they were predators who could not be reformed — in essence, as the judge found, locking them up, throwing away the key and calling it a "treatment program."

Thankfully, the court may bring some sanity and justice to bear by ending the program as unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment. Meanwhile, Gov. Mark Dayton reprehensibly defends it.

Recently, Hillary Clinton wrongly accused Donald Trump's supporters of having "xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, and all the other dog whistles Trump uses." These accusations are nothing short of stupid. Taking just the first as an example, those who want to enforce our nation's immigration laws and our border are not xenophobic, any more than those who want to enforce speed limits are automobileophobic. What part of "illegal immigration" do Clinton and the Democrats not understand? Of course we are against illegal immigration, as we are against anything illegal, as we should be. Consider the irony of Clinton running to be president (and thus head of the executive branch that includes the Border Patrol and federal law enforcement) and not being against illegal immigration.

• • •

Steve Chapman's July 1 commentary "Donald Trump's trade speech is an encyclopedia of errors" reinforces perhaps the greatest concern about a Trump presidency. The president cannot possibly possess enough knowledge to make his or her own decisions in all areas of governance without consulting expert advisers. Accepting this fact requires a modicum of humility. Apparently, Mr. Trump not only doesn't know what he doesn't know, his ego is ungovernable. As a result, he is unwilling to hear what others try to tell him about what he doesn't know.