Jazlin Coley is a Drake University graduate, educator, and community activator who now serves as Director of the Crew Scholars Program at her alma mater. She is committed to redefining what belonging looks like in higher education and embedding identity, equity, and care into its core. Currently pursuing her PhD in Education, Jazlin’s research and practice focus on harm in belonging practices, institutional accountability, and the cultivation of spaces where students—particularly those from marginalized backgrounds, can lead and thrive.

I met Jennifer Konfrst my first year at Drake University, long before she became House Democratic Leader or a candidate for Congress. Back then, I was a first-generation college student, new to Iowa, unsure of my footing, and truthfully—unsure if I belonged. Jennifer was assigned as my faculty mentor through the Crew Scholars Program, a leadership initiative for students of color. She didn’t have to take on that role; she volunteered for it. And she showed up. Every Thursday.

Some of our meetings ran long because I was navigating personal and academic challenges and needed a space to vent. Jennifer listened without judgment, asked hard questions, and reminded me that my presence on campus mattered. She balanced humor and humility with a kind of grounded honesty that’s rare in higher education, or in politics. She saw me as a person before she saw me as a student.

Gary Berkland is the Belmond-Klemme School Board president.

I’m a lifelong Iowan, a Vietnam veteran, a small-town lawyer, and yes—a registered Republican. I’ve voted for plenty of Republicans over the years, but this election, I’m proud to be supporting Democrat Zach Wahls for the United States Senate.

That might surprise some folks, but it really shouldn’t. Zach represents the kind of leadership both parties used to value: honest, practical, and grounded in Iowa common sense. He’s part of a new generation that’s more interested in solving problems than scoring partisan points, and that’s exactly what our country needs.

Abbey Paxton is the owner of Storyhouse Bookpub in Des Moines.

In 2021, I opened an independent bookstore in downtown Des Moines. My husband, also a small business owner, and I have had two children since moving back to Iowa in 2020, and we work full time running our businesses. 

Like many other small business owners and self-employed Iowans, our family resides in the gap between barely affordable, mediocre, private individual health insurance and Medicaid—a gap that will only widen after the most painful provisions of the Republican budget reconciliation bill (the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”) are fully implemented.

Every Iowa member of Congress voted in favor of the bill, which makes historic cuts to Medicaid while providing big tax breaks for the wealthy and new tax loopholes for big corporations like health insurance and prescription drug companies. 

I can’t remember when I met Claire Celsi. It was years before she decided to run for the state legislature. Our paths crossed often at Democratic events, and we knew many of the same people in progressive circles. I valued her take on the latest news and her thoughts about blogging, since she had kept an online journal during the 2000s.

Claire was generous with her time as a volunteer for many Democratic candidates, starting with Tom Harkin’s first U.S. Senate race in 1984. She was one of the early organizers of the West Des Moines Democrats, back when that suburb leaned strongly to Republicans. She managed Mike Huston’s Congressional campaign in 2000 and worked hard in 2017 to help Renee Hardman defeat an incumbent to win a West Des Moines city council seat. (Hardman is now the Democratic nominee to succeed Claire in Iowa Senate district 16.)

Josh Hughes described how Claire was the first “grown up” to take him seriously as a Democratic activist. She enjoyed spending time with people of all ages. Josh took this picture near the Surf Ballroom in August 2018, when he and Olivia Habinck were leaders of the College and Young Democrats of Iowa, and Claire and I carpooled with them to the Iowa Democratic Wing Ding.

John and Terri Hale own the The Hale Group, an Ankeny-based advocacy firm focused on older Iowans terriandjohnhale@gmail.com. Dean Lerner is an attorney and former Director of the Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals dean@kelinsonlaw.com.

With the passing of State Senator Claire Celsi, Iowa has lost the elected official who cared the most and worked the hardest to improve quality of care for residents of Iowa’s nursing facilities.

We collaborated extensively with Claire on aging and nursing home issues. She was as her friends and colleagues described her: tenacious, passionate, a truth-teller and a fighter.

Kurt Meyer writes a weekly column for the Nora Springs – Rockford Register and the Substack newsletter Showing Up, where this essay first appeared. He served as chair of the executive committee (the equivalent of board chair) of Americans for Democratic Action, America’s most experienced liberal organization.

Lines written by Samuel Coleridge 200 years ago, in 1825:

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair—
The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing— […]
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.

It’s an early reference to “the birds and the bees,” (although Coleridge inverts the order), a familiar euphemism for a conversation parents should have with their children. But the poet also mentions work and hope, relevant to this ramble since major doses of both are needed for society to address a serious birds’ and bees’ situation—literally the birds and the bees—and their rapidly diminishing populations. 

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.

As I write this column, the United States government is still shut down. Federal employees are not getting paid.

No, wait, that’s not quite true. Most federal employees are not getting paid.

Who’s still receiving a paycheck?

That would be President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, members of Congress, and federal judges. The Constitution requires that they be paid no matter what. Their staffs—and those amount to many thousands of people—are continuing to work, but without receiving their salaries. They’ll be entitled to their back pay once the government reopens.

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. 

The nation’s founders got right to the point when they laid out how to treat the First Amendment freedoms of religion, speech, the press and the rights of people to assemble and to petition the government. They used only 45 words, without asterisks.

Their simple words should lead to simple conclusions. Yet, recent Iowa cases illustrate why people in general, and educators specifically, are perplexed about what is protected and what is not.

Some legal background:

Diane Porter of Fairfield first published this post in September on My Gaia, an email newsletter “about getting to know nature” and “giving her a helping hand in our own backyards.” Diane also maintains the Birdwatching Dot Com website and bird blog.

On the first full day of fall, the Blue sage (Salvia azurea) of my garden is in full bloom. Flower spikes are head high. Some are deep blue, others paler. The ones I love best are the color of an Iowa summer sky.

Down in the heart of each flower, the petals narrow and form a well. Inside, a drop of nectar pools. It is ready for a visitor, someone whose flight is powered by sugar, someone who will pollinate the blossom.

Usually it’s a bumblebee who comes. It lands on the ruffled platform of the lower petal and pushes its head into the flower, probing for sweetness with its tongue.

Charles Bruner, Ralph Rosenberg, and David Osterberg jointly wrote this piece. All of the authors served with Paul Johnson in the Iowa legislature and remain active in Iowa politics and policy. They serve on the board of the Johnson Center for Land Stewardship Policy, which worked with Curt Meine in the development of We Can Do Better.

A land comprised of wilderness islands at one extreme and urban islands at the other, with vast food and fiber factories in between, does not constitute a geography of hope. But private land need not be devoted to a single-purpose enterprise. With a broader understanding of land and our place within the landscape, our Nation’s farms, ranches, and private forest land can and do serve the multiple functions that we and all other life do depend upon.

That quote is from Paul Johnson’s introduction to the USDA National Resources Soil Conservation Services’ 1996 America’s Private Land: A Geography of Hope, which is even more relevant today than when he wrote it and shepherded that publication. 

Paul Johnson (1941-2021) was a pivotal figure in American conservation, dedicating his life to bridging the gap between agriculture and environmental stewardship. A new book of Paul’s writings has just been released.

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.

As my wife and I, both spry seventy-somethings, walked the state capitol complex sidewalks to the No Kings rally on October 18, I couldn’t help but notice the gathering crowd and remarking, “I’d feel better about this if the majority of people here didn’t have grey hair.”

photo by Dan Piller from the No Kings rally outside the Iowa state capitol

I put down the seeming preponderance of the Medicare set at the Des Moines rally to Iowa’s elder-leaning demographics. But the next day, Fox News and the right-wing echo chamber used the apparent senior citizen majority of the No Kings crowds elsewhere as their prime talking point. The rallies were impressive in their numbers, but nonetheless may be remembered as the Last Hurrah of a generation with enough wit to make clever signs.

Bill Bumgarner is a retired former health care executive from northwest Iowa who worked
in hospital management for 41 years, mostly in the state of Iowa.

In my reading over the last couple of weeks, I came upon the following dialogue that someone referenced from Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises.

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

That exchange came back to me as I participated in a No Kings gathering in Spirit Lake, Iowa on October 18.

Some 25,000 to 30,000 Iowans were among the millions of Americans who protested President Donald Trump’s abuses of power on October 18. Despite the grave threats that brought people to the rallies, the prevailing mood was upbeat at the two “No Kings” events I attended. That’s consistent with news reports and anecdotal accounts of a “festival atmosphere” in cities and towns across the country.

I took most of the photos enclosed below in Indianola, where more than 300 people lined a busy street in the late morning, or at the early afternoon rally outside the state capitol in Des Moines. Hand-made signs vastly outnumbered professionally printed signs, capturing the protesters’ passion, creativity, and humor.

This is an image of a reimagined Iowa state flag with rainbow Pride stripes.

Pam Mackey Taylor is the Director of the Iowa Chapter of the Sierra Club.

Every three years, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) conducts a Triennial Review of its water quality standards. Part of the review is a determination of what changes need to be made to Iowa’s existing water quality standards.

The agenda for the Triennial Review was simple. The DNR intends to focus on the following topic areas related to water quality standards:

• Tribal reserved rights
• Antidegradation
• Human health criteria
• Chapter 61/Surface Water Classification document cleanup
• Use attainability analysis
• PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, sometimes called “forever chemicals”)
• Lake nutrients

After digging into these topics during the review meeting, what jumped out was the lack of investment the State of Iowa and the DNR have made in water quality and improved water quality standards over the last two decades. 

Al Charlson is a North Central Iowa farm kid, lifelong Iowan, and retired bank trust officer.

As Congressional Republicans and their very high income core supporters entered 2025, their highest priority was the extension and expansion of the 2017 income tax cuts. They told us so.

Back in January 2024, Senator Chuck Grassley told Semafor reporter Joseph Zeballos-Roig why Senate Republicans would not support an expanded child tax credit, which the House had approved by a bipartisan vote of 357 to 70. Grassley explained, “I think passing a tax bill that makes the president look good mailing out checks before the election means he could be reelected and then we won’t extend the 2017 tax cuts.” (There was nothing in the 2024 bill about mailing out checks.)

In any event, the heart of this summer’s budget reconciliation measure, which Republicans called the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” was extending and expanding the 2017 income tax cuts.

Robin Opsahl covers the state legislature and politics for Iowa Capital Dispatch, where this article first appeared.

The Iowa Revenue Estimating Conference on October 16 lowered its estimates for the state’s tax revenue in fiscal year 2026 by $375 million compared to predictions from March of this year.

The panel, chaired by Iowa Department of Management Director Kraig Paulsen, approved changes to the revenue estimates in light of recent economic shifts and tax policy changes like the federal “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the budget reconciliation measure President Donald Trump signed in July. The nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency reported the state’s revenue in fiscal year 2025 was $198 million below the panel’s March forecast because of the impact of federal tax law changes.

Paulsen said the new REC estimates account for both the reduced state revenue due to federal tax policies, the impacts of the state’s 2024 acceleration of previously approved income tax cuts, as well as economic factors like rising unemployment rates and China’s move to import soybeans from South American countries instead of U.S. producers.

Nature nerd Emily Bredthauer took most of the pictures enclosed below between August 30 and October 4, 2025 in Story, Marion, and Dallas counties.

I feel so blessed when I come upon a plant I don’t recognize. It’s like a gift from the Universe, inviting my curiosity to be satiated by the endless wonder of the natural world.

In late August, Lobelia inflata was a gift from my rain-soaked sacrament—the very small lavender-colored flowers caught my eye amongst the bevy of bright green. 

Gerald Ott of Ankeny was a high school English teacher and for 30 years a school improvement consultant for the Iowa State Education Association.

When I look at the picture of the Des Moines Public Schools board of directors, I think of the Kingston Trio’s song “It Takes a Worried Man.” In the midst of a crisis, we’re all worried. it’s the last line of the refrain that buoys me: but I won’t be worried long.

It takes a worried man to sing a worried song, oh yes
It takes a worried man to sing a worried song
It takes a worried man to sing a worried song
I’m worried now, but I won’t be worried long

One last word about Dr. Roberts

I recommend Jason Benell’s recent Bleeding Heartland essay, previously published on his Substack newsletter, The Odd Man Out. He gives us a different, eye-opening perspective on the case of the Des Moines Public Schools’ former superintendent, Ian Roberts.

The columnist Chris Espersen shared her perspective in the Cedar Rapids Gazette on October 12. Espersen is a Des Moines parent, a close observer of Roberts, and has had many opportunities to see his student-whispering magic up close. Espersen saw the same potential that then-Des Moines School Board president Teree Caldwell-Johnson must have seen when she recommended that Roberts be hired.

Wayne Ford is the executive director of Wayne Ford Equity Impact Institute and co-Director of the Emmy Award winning Brown and Black Forums of America. He is a former member of the Iowa legislature and the founder and former executive director of Urban Dreams.

The news cycle today is filled with headlines declaring that Elon Musk may become the world’s first trillionaire. His wealth, tied to Tesla, SpaceX, and other ventures, rises and falls daily with the stock market. This possibility captures attention, raises eyebrows, and sparks debate about inequality in the modern age.

But history reminds us to pause. Long before the stock exchange existed, long before Wall Street tracked fortunes, there was a king in West Africa whose wealth was so extraordinary that no number could capture it. His name was Mansa Musa, and his crown jewel was the legendary city of Timbuktu.