Rick Morain is the former publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, for which he writes a regular column. This essay first appeared on Substack.

Last week the United States and its people soberly remembered the stunning terrorist attacks that weaponized jetliners to kill thousands of people in the American homeland on September 11, 2001. Their deaths constitute the most tragic effect of the episode, and they continue as open wounds for family and friends of the victims.

The attacks also generated a number of other consequences for U.S. leaders at the time and in the following months and years, as well as for U.S. government agencies and their practices, American attitudes, and our relations with other nations. It’s hard to overestimate the importance of the 9/11 effects, many of which continue to drive our thinking and actions yet today.

Nick Covington is an Iowa parent who taught high school social studies for ten years.

The culture war battles we fight over our public schools are fundamentally disagreements about American values: what does it mean to be an American, and in whose image do we build our public schools?

“When Americans start fighting over their schools, you can be fairly sure of one thing: it probably isn’t really about school.”

— Jennifer Berkshire & Jack Schneider,

The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual

From working as Assistant Secretary of Education in the George H.W. Bush administration to laying the foundation of the modern conservative education reform movement, Diane Ravitch—a one-time champion of No Child Left Behind—spent most of her life as a Republican with conservative values. The story of her life, as told in her 2025 memoir, is the story of the American Century. As today’s culture war on “wokeness” and “leftist indoctrination” targets diversity, equity, and inclusion in schools, Ravitch’s memoir makes a powerful case study for teaching these core American values.

Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes openness and transparency in Iowa’s state and local governments. He can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com. This essay first appeared on his Substack newsletter, Stray Thoughts. 

You would think a school district readily knows its A-B-C’s.

Not the Des Moines Public Schools — at least not when informing the public what its 6,600 employees were paid during the academic year that ended June 30.

Yes, grade school teachers still call roll in alphabetical order. And next spring’s high school graduates will walk across the stage as their names are announced, starting with the A’s and moving through to the Z’s.

But when publishing a list of its employees in July and how much taxpayers paid each one, the Des Moines Public Schools’ alphabet started with Tiara S. Ziegler. Next was Pia Marcell Stites, and the list continued in an anything-but-organized manner.

Jay Brown is a retired physician in Ames.

The enemy of authoritarianism is community. Our country needs more community. Now there’s a simple way to resurrect childhood friendships in the battle against President Donald Trump and his efforts to ruin our beloved country.   

Hallways.vote is a free website that uses public voter and public donation data crossed with high school yearbooks. The result allows the user to effortlessly find former classmates who share their convictions.

Kathie Obradovich is editor in chief of Iowa Capital Dispatch, which first published this article.

A coalition of Iowa organizations launched a campaign on September 9 opposing the November 3 ballot issue that will ask Iowa voters whether to amend the state constitution to require a two-thirds majority vote of lawmakers to raise state personal and corporate income taxes.

Fair Taxes for Iowa’s Future, which includes labor unions, progressive nonprofits and others, is planning an informational campaign opposing Amendment 1.

Anne Discher, executive director of Common Good Iowa, said people’s first impression of a law making it harder raise taxes tends to be favorable. But, she said, “When you actually talk to people about the tradeoffs that are required, the equation gets a lot more complicated. The more we talk to people about this amendment, the less people like it.”

Dave Miglin serves as treasurer on the Broadlawns Board of Trustees.

Polk County voters have an important choice to make for Broadlawns Medical Center, our county’s public hospital and one of the region’s most essential community institutions. At a time when health care is changing quickly and public hospitals face increasing pressure, Broadlawns needs steady, experienced, community-minded leadership. That is why voters should vote to return Emily Webb and Emily Westergaard to the Broadlawns Board of Trustees (labeled on the ballot as “County Hospital Trustee”).

Hospital trustees do not make headlines every day, and that is exactly why their work matters so much. They are responsible for asking hard questions, protecting the hospital’s mission, supporting safe and high-quality care, and ensuring that decisions are made with the long-term health of the community in mind. The best trustees bring judgment, preparation, independence, and a deep respect for the people who rely on the hospital in moments of vulnerability.

Julia Rendon is a retired minister in the United Church of Christ. As a member of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, she has shamed businesses into paying their workers back wages, shone a light on predatory lending practices, and pressured the governor to reinstate the summer food program for kids. As a Christian, she believes that every person matters and everybody should have a voice in our life together, which is why she is working for free and fair elections in November. 

As we head into the November election, we can’t take our strong history of free and democratic elections for granted. Not even here in Iowa. 

Take Joey Norris for example. 

Joey volunteered in the 2024 election counting absentee ballots in Montgomery County, a job he took seriously. So, he was surprised to get kicked out of the counting room after voicing concerns over how ballots were being counted. Among other problems, multiple ballots were initially improperly rejected. Joey correctly pointed out they should be counted. He walked away without incident. 

Fast forward to this July. A year and a half after the fact, Joey faces a felony charge for first degree election misconduct. After posting bail, he is awaiting his trial scheduled for October. 

Chip Albright is a lifelong Midwesterner with rural Kansas roots and urban Iowa branches, an independent singer-songwriter, storyteller, and strategist seeking beauty and truth in this wild & wonderful world. Visit chipalbrightmusic.com for music and more.

Since I wrote “If It’s Turek, That’s Terrific!” earlier this year, I have witnessed Josh Turek up close and personal on many occasions. The more I see and hear him in action, the more I believe he is the resilient leader and pragmatic policymaker we so desperately need representing the people of Iowa in Washington, D.C.

My first personal interaction with Josh Turek was when an unknown number with a “712” area code rang my phone back in April. It didn’t say “potential spam,” so I went ahead and answered it. Josh was on the line— he heard the song I wrote about his candidacy and wanted to personally thank me for my efforts and support. He was in the midst of a heated race with Zach Wahls for the Democratic nomination but he made time for me — a single constituent with a simple folk song. We chatted for a spell; the whole experience was quite genuine.

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He can be reached at BruceLear2419@gmail.com 

It’s 36 counties covering 21,546 square miles across northern and western Iowa. It’s the state’s largest Congressional district, but often overlooked, neglected, and forgotten by politicians and pundits.

Iowa’s fourth district is treated as fly-over country—except by the 801,546 people who call it home. I’m one of those people, and I vote.

Why is this huge area ignored?

Dan Piller was a business reporter for more than four decades, working for the Des Moines Register and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He covered the oil and gas industry while in Texas and was the Register’s agriculture reporter before his retirement in 2013. He lives in Ankeny.

A visitor to Iowa’s two largest university campuses might see the expanded football stadiums complete with private luxury suites whose games attract billion-dollar television contracts, gleaming indoor practice facilities and athlete residences, dining halls and training centers that would rival a fine resort. And they might well wonder why anyone would think Congress needs to pass a “Protect College Sports Act.”

It turns out that college sports needs to be saved from itself. The culprit is that old bogey; money.

Why some want Congress involved with college sports

The 69 universities in the so-called “power conferences” that call themselves “big time” apparently don’t have a clue about how to govern themselves, despite their location on campuses that hold what are supposedly our best minds. Where private, for profit professional sports have endured their various crises with strongmen commissioners, college sports long has long been run by parochial, oligarchical interests that have resisted central control.

Former Des Moines Register assistant sports editor Ira Lacher writes about the games and business of sports for various newspapers and magazines.

“Are you not entertained? Are you not entertained? Is this not why you are here?” 

The quote is from the 2000 film Gladiator, which followed a deposed Roman nobleman’s quest to avenge the executions of his wife and children. But it could easily be applied to the modern gladiator sport: American football, which brought in about $14.5 billion in revenue in 2025.

According to recent polling, Americans consider football our most popular sport by almost a 2-to-1 margin over baseball. Regular-season NFL games averaged 18.7 million viewers in 2025. By contrast, the top non-NFL telecast last year, a typical episode of the CBS series Tracker, averaged a mere 11 million.

Those who have examined the sport academically understand that unlike gladiator contests, football is hardly a death dealer: Only one NFL player, Chuck Hughes, of the Detroit Lions, died during a game, in 1971.

But players get hurt. Seriously hurt. 

Katie Byerly of Cerro Gordo County is also known as Iowa Prairie Girl on YouTube. Her video about wild parsnip is at the end of this post.

I don’t use the word hate often. If you asked me if I liked black licorice, I would say “I don’t like black licorice.” I know I wouldn’t say “I hate black licorice.” Hate is a strong word, and I avoid using it. But I’m going to use it here: I hate wild parsnip!

Charles Bruner is a former Democratic Iowa legislator (1978-1990), was the founding director of Iowa Child and Family Policy Center (1990-2015, now Common Good Iowa), and is national director of the InCK Marks Initiative’s Child Health Equity Leadership Group.

I am pretty certain all of this year’s Iowa Democratic candidates for the U.S. House and Senate would have voted for the Affordable Care Act in 2010, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, and the Build Back Better Infrastructure Act of 2021. I am pretty certain they all would have voted against the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025.

I am also sure all Republicans running for Congress in Iowa this year would have done the exact opposite. (Representatives Ashley Hinson, Marianette Miller-Meeks, and Zach Nunn did vote that way on the bills that coincided with their tenure in Congress.)

I am sure of it because all of those votes were on strict party lines. The Tax Cut and Jobs Act and One Big Beautiful Bill Act did not even seek any bipartisan support, as Republicans approved them through the budget reconciliation process.

“Not enough people know the story about how this court got captured by a bunch of creepy right-wing billionaires,” U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse told hundreds of Iowa Democrats on August 29.

The senator from Rhode Island used much of his speech at the Polk County Steak Fry to describe what he and U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin—another featured speaker at the event in Des Moines—would be able to accomplish as leaders of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, if Democrats gain control of Congress after the November elections.

Rachel Bruns is a maternal health advocate in Iowa.

Earlier this year, I wrote a three-part series for the Des Moines Business Record’s Fearless publication titled “From Personal Experience to Policy Change: Fighting for Improvements in Maternal Health Care in Iowa.” 

With that series, I was excited to highlight, in part 1, promising practices at hospitals across the country that were making positive improvements in maternal health care – improving both patient satisfaction and outcomes. In part 2, I highlighted ongoing policy issues impacting maternal health, and in part 3, I examined the consequences of mistrust in medicine.

While I have had to step back from my engagement on maternal health advocacy, I am still paying attention, and there is a lot to pay attention to.

David Elbert is a former business editor and columnist for the Des Moines Register. He now writes about local history for DSM Magazine. 

The national debt recently passed the $40 trillion mark, which means your share is about $117,000, or roughly half the cost of a typical Iowa home.

The national debt nearly doubled in the past decade, which is more than twice the rate of inflation during those ten years.

The New York Times published an interesting chart recently that tracked the national debt as a percentage of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is a calculation of all goods and services produced annually.

Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes openness and transparency in Iowa’s state and local governments. He can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com. This essay first appeared on his Substack newsletter, Stray Thoughts. 

Novelist Charles Dickens poked his quill pen at government bureaucracy 175 years ago with his accounts about a fictionalized department he called the “Circumlocution Office.” 

“Circumlocution” often is used with disdain to describe writing or speaking that is intentionally vague, evasive, or overly wordy.

Sadly, the personnel departments in state and local governments in Iowa these days have become Circumlocution Offices of their own when officials describe why a highly paid public employee was fired.

The recent termination of a Polk County administrator illustrates the problem.

Kenny Slocum, the owner/operator of Light Touch Ecological LLC, features another good wildflower find in northeast Iowa.

I left my job with the Clayton County Conservation Board in March of this year to pursue private land restoration full-time.

It was a leap of faith. I had done some forestry work on the side for several years, and finally felt like I had gotten enough to interest, and enough spousal support, to justify leaving behind the relative comforts of government work and benefits.

Financial concerns aside, I also worried I would come to miss the places I had spent the last decade restoring. I reminded myself often in that work, when I would find a primitive shelter left by behind by boy scouts who haven’t learned leave-no-trace or a bunch of morel stumps indicating someone had found my honey hole, that these lands belonged to everyone and I must abandon feelings of ownership.

I wanted to work more with private lands, in part because my area of northeast Iowa appears to have both the need on the landscape, and the appetite among the landowners for more of the kind of healing work I find valuable.

But on the other side of that coin lies, often, much more degraded landscapes. None but the most dedicated landowners have the practical capacity to engage with the land as often as I could in my prior role, to say nothing of the hands tied by various cost-share programs, for better or worse.

Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.

To help get a grip on the turmoil of the day, please repeat after me:

“At long last, sir,” [At long last, sir]
“Have you left no sense of decency?” [Have you left no sense of decency?]

As many readers know, that was the question Joseph Welch asked of Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin at a Senate hearing on June 9, 1954.

His pointed question was overdue. It was Welch—an Iowan born in Primghar, and a graduate of Grinnell College—who finally held a U.S. senator accountable for fomenting fear of Communism into a time of national divisiveness and hatred. McCarthyism fed on the lies and innuendo heaped upon those McCarthy and his supporters deemed un-American.

Jennifer Breon is a Senior Iowa Organizer with Food & Water Action, the political and lobbying sibling organization of the national environmental group Food & Water Watch. She is based in Iowa City.

Matt Hildreth is the Executive Director of Rural Organizing, a national organization working to rebuild a rural America that’s empowered, thriving, and equitable. Originally from eastern South Dakota, Matt is based in rural Washington State.

Industrial agriculture’s public health crisis is on full display in Iowa. 

As residents of the state with the nation’s fastest-rising cancer rates, the most factory farms and highest waterway toxic nitrate concentrations, Iowans are desperate for change. If Iowa Democrats want to regain power this fall, they need to prove to voters that they are serious about solutions.

If they can get it right, new polling from Rural Organizing outlines the opportunity this issue offers Democratic candidates: Iowans are so fed up with high and rising cancer rates that fully 11 percent of Trump’s rural Iowa voters would consider voting for a different party over this issue. Indeed, recent Food & Water Action polling found that few issues are as concerning to Iowa voters as cancer rates and clean water.

Politics is so often a game played in the margins, with opportunities for flipping voters between parties few and far between. Democrats would be wise to seize this rare opening.