“A lot of you all know who I am because I experienced the worst day of my life on national TV,” former Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn told around 350 Democrats in Clear Lake on August 14.

The keynote speaker typically rallies the crowd at the Iowa Democratic Wing Ding, an annual fundraiser for county party organizations across northern Iowa. Dunn held the room’s attention for more than 30 minutes, drawing plenty of applause—as well as laughs with zingers about President Donald Trump, U.S. Senators Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley, and Republicans in general.

But Dunn warned his audience early on, “I’m not here to give some rah rah speech.” He delivered some of his most powerful lines in a subdued voice.

By speaking candidly about his own struggles and doubts, Dunn offered a path forward—not only for Democrats who are ready to fight back, but for those still trying to pick themselves up off the floor.

Wayne Ford represented part of Des Moines in the Iowa House and is the founder of the nonprofit organization Urban Dreams.

Opening scene

During Urban Dreams’ 40th Anniversary Celebration on July 30, 2025, the organization unveiled a commemorative plaque in my honor in the Urban Dreams Community Courtyard on 6th Avenue — the same neighborhood where my journey in Des Moines truly began. This event brought together former and current staff, clients who have benefited from Urban Dreams’ programs, directors past and present, community leaders, elected officials, and other friends from across Iowa.

It was more than just a celebration of my past work; it was a public reaffirmation of my recommitment to Des Moines, the state of Iowa, and the causes that have defined my life.

Shawn Gallagher is President at Adcraft Printing Company, Inc. and Main Street Alliance member.

Politicians including U.S. Senator Joni Ernst and Representative Ashley Hinson (IA-02) joined a few business owners in Cedar Rapids for an August 12 round table to celebrate President Donald Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” as a win for small business. It should be noted that organizers choose the participants for this kind of press event, which ensures that the media in attendance hear only the desired opinions.

I wish I could share their optimism. But as someone who runs a small business here in Cedar Rapids, I see this law for what it really is: a bad deal dressed up in campaign-season talking points.

Myron Gookin was appointed as an Iowa District Court judge by Governor Terry Branstad in August 2011. He served as Chief Judge of the Eighth Judicial District, covering fourteen counties in southeast Iowa, from January 2022 until his retirement, effective July 2025. He posted the thoughts enclosed below on Facebook on August 9. Facebook users had shared the post more than 8,000 times as of August 15.

Thank you for taking a few moments to read this. I’ve hesitated to post this. I don’t intend to offend anyone, but understand I may. I will not respond to comments but I believe in free speech and will not deny anyone the right to respond. It’s hard to believe we’ve reached this point. It saddens me. Yet, I believe there is hope.

I grew up an Iowa Republican. I worked to get Republicans elected. I hosted fundraisers in our home for Republican candidates. I gave money to Republican candidates. I voted for Republicans. I was appointed an Honorary Colonel in the Iowa Militia by a Republican Governor for my service to the State of Iowa, largely due to my Republican efforts. I considered running for public office someday as a Republican. I was part of the Republican team.

Then, things started to change. The party moved farther and farther right. It became radicalized by people who had lost sight of truth, justice, equality and (ironically) doing what is “right”. It lost sight of our country’s history and the necessary, continuing struggle to “form a more perfect union”. Most important to me, it lost sight of the essence of Christianity—it more and more loudly claimed to be Christian, yet more and more ignored Christ’s core teachings and example of pulling together for good and loving our neighbors as ourselves.

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.

The Democratic presidential race for 2028 appears to be wide open today. No shortage of obvious hopefuls, with another batch who are probably mulling it over. More will pop their heads up in the weeks and months to come.

Here’s one who deserves serious consideration: George Clooney. I’m not joking, and this is not whimsy.

Melissa Wubben lives on a farm in Warren County.

Since childhood, I have had a keen interest in the plants and animals that share the planet with us. Whether I was learning to identify “weeds” while walking beans on our family farm or dreaming about seeing particularly pretty birds as I flipped through my mom’s bird identification book, nature provided ample opportunities for education and appreciation.

Later, my fascination with nature turned toward conservation, and my husband and I started our farm with a desire to integrate conservation and agricultural practices.

Our journey began with the purchase of a small flock of sheep in 2012, the first year of severe drought that would last for several years. I began reading about pasture management, soil and water conservation practices, and anything else applicable that I could get my hands on. Eventually, this research led me to native plants.

Steve Corbin is emeritus professor of marketing at the University of Northern Iowa and a contributing columnist to 246 newspapers and 48 social media platforms in 45 states, who receives no remuneration, funding, or endorsement from any for-profit business, nonprofit organization, political action committee, or political party. 

The month of August is widely recognized as the ideal time for relaxation and rejuvenation. The U.S. House of Representatives began its summer recess on July 25, while the summer break for the U.S. Senate began on August 4. Members of Congress are not due back in Washington, DC until September 2.

This four to five-week respite should give our elected delegates time to reflect on their achievements since President Donald Trump’s second administration started on January 20. One hopes the break with give our legislators time to consider how they’ve come up short in representing their 340 million constituents by honoring the principles of the U.S. Constitution, which they took an oath to uphold and defend.

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. 

One of the frustrations of being a former newspaper editor is no longer having a few dozen reporters to pursue answers to questions going unasked and unanswered each day.

Two of my go-to questions were “why?” and “why not?” And my favorite open-ended query to a newsmaker was “explain this to me.”

I never believed newsmakers owed me answers to the questions I or my reporters asked. I was curious by nature. But the most important purpose, I sometimes reminded reluctant newsmakers, was the thirst for information John Q. Public and Jane A. Citizen had about the topics at hand.

All of this is a preamble to help you understand why I am a frustrated consumer of news and information now that I no longer lead a team of information gatherers.

Here are some examples of this frustration in real life:

Larry McBurney is a Democratic member of the Iowa House representing part of Urbandale.

Governor Kim Reynolds’ “Delivering Opportunities for Greater Efficiency” (DOGE) Task Force plans to recommend moving new public employees away from the Iowa Public Employees’ Retirement System (IPERS) and into a 401(k)-style defined contribution plan. It’s being sold as a modern update, but the truth is this change would devastate Iowa’s public workforce. It’s a solution in search of a problem, and it targets one of the few benefits still keeping people in public service.

Let’s be clear about the reality for public employees in Iowa. Public sector wages are already 17.6 percent lower than in the private sector. Even after factoring in benefits, public employees still earn 14.5 percent less than their private counterparts.

Peggy Huppert retired in 2023 following a 43-year career with Iowa nonprofit organizations, including the American Cancer Society and NAMI (National Alliance for Mental Illness) Iowa. She is a board member of LIFT Iowa and a long-time progressive political activist.

In September 2023, about 30 longtime Iowa Democrats came together on a Sunday morning to share their grief and anger about the political state of their world. Although they suspected things would get worse before they got better—they could not have predicted how very much worse—most are optimists by nature and, as such, desperately sought a path forward. And they found it.

In that room on that day, LIFT IOWA PAC was born.

Chris Jones is a fisherman who lives in Iowa City. He writes the Substack newsletter The Swine Republic, where this post first appeared. 

Secretary of Agriculture is one of seven executive offices Iowans see on their off-year voting ballot. The Iowa legislature created both the office and the Department of Agriculture (now IDALS) in 1923.

It may seem curious that we have a statewide election for the administrator of a department that employs less than 2 percent of the state government workforce and represents a private industry that is only Iowa’s third-biggest and one with a declining share of the state’s Gross Domestic Product. All sorts of economic sectors are bigger than agriculture; for example, health care now nearly doubles Ag’s GDP in Iowa.

But we have to remember that in 1923, almost 40 percent of Iowa’s population lived on farms. It’s well below 10 percent in the present day, when only 67,000 people in Iowa list farming as their primary source of income (2 percent of Iowa) and many farmers don’t even live on the farm. GMO has made crop farming so easy that some Iowa farmers also farm in Kansas and the Dakotas and probably other states as well.

A person could wonder why we all don’t vote for a Secretary of Teachers, or a Secretary of Bartenders or Hairdressers or Truck-drivers.

Diane Rosenberg is executive director of Jefferson County Farmers & Neighbors, where this commentary first appeared.

Recently, a friend asked how the Iowa state legislature or governor have impeded the work of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and other agencies in cleaning up air and water borne toxins that may be causing Iowa’s increasing cancer rate.

After eighteen years of working on confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) issues, a whole laundry list of impediments rolled off the tip of my tongue.

Numerous studies link high nitrate levels to a variety of cancers. And this major agricultural state has the second highest rate of cancer in the nation and is one of two states where the number of cases is rising.

Water quality is in the news this summer. High nitrate levels are affecting drinking water in Central Iowa, a new Polk County water quality report links 80 percent of nitrate pollution to agriculture, and too many beaches are unswimmable just when we need to cool off in this blistering heat.

Given all that, I thought this is a good time to spotlight some of the ways I see our state government failing us.

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.

Sometime back in the 1990s I watched an interview with George Wallace, the four-term former governor of Alabama and a four-time presidential candidate.

He was in his mid-seventies at the time. In physical decline, Wallace was wracked with Parkinsons and the ongoing effects of an assassination attempt in 1972 that forced him to use a wheel chair for the last 26 years of his life.

Yet the pain that was most pronounced in that interview was his sincere regret related to his prominent role as a leading segregationist of the 1960s. Wallace was the man who stood in the “schoolhouse door” in 1963 to unsuccessfully try to prevent the admission of two Black students to the University of Alabama.

Edward A. Wasserman is a 53-year resident of Iowa and a professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at The University of Iowa. The views expressed in his piece are his own and do not in any way reflect those of his employer.

Many concerned citizens are asking themselves this pressing question: How have we come to this point in U.S. history where we are reversing prior progress in civil rights, dismantling vital federal agencies, attacking esteemed universities and their faculty, and embracing an imperial presidency? In fact, these events haven’t suddenly and inexplicably arisen. There are many times across several decades—and vivid personal proclamations—that help explain the origin and evolution of these unsettling trends.

Jo Hain lives on a farm in Cerro Gordo county and likes to explore and photograph nature.

I was in my garden a couple years ago and I noticed some plants coming up. Looked like catnip to me, so I left it alone. It got taller and no longer looked like catnip.

Then I thought it was Stinging Nettle, so I didn’t want to touch it. I used my plant app and it said it was American Dragonhead (Dracocephalum parviflorum).

Plant apps are useful but not always correct. So I did look it up and, yes, it was American dragonhead. I posted it to the Iowa wildflower enthusiasts Facebook group. Someone confirmed it there as well.

Cami Koons covers agriculture and the environment for Iowa Capital Dispatch, where this article first appeared.

More than 500 individuals gathered in Des Moines on August 4 to hear what comes next following the release of an in-depth water quality report commissioned by Polk County. 

Another 500 watched online, to hear years worth of research on water pollutants and key steps forward at the individual, watershed and state levels. 

One speaker said it was the first step in an effort to keep the report from just “sitting on a shelf.”

“They spent over 4,000 hours on research and compiling data,” former Polk County administrator John Norris said. “Their work now empowers us as citizens and voters to demand action be taken to make our waters safe.” 

Emily Boevers is an OB-GYN practicing in Iowa. She lives in Waverly with her husband and children. This essay first appeared on the website of the Iowa Coalition for Reproductive Freedom.

On June 28 of last year, when the Iowa Supreme Court reversed and remanded the prior permanent injunction on a near-total ban on pregnancy termination, the majority utilized the rational basis test, which means the fact that this law inflicts harm on individual rights doesn’t matter. The court held the law is constitutional if it is rationally related to a legitimate government interest.

And so, when the law went into effect on July 29, 2024, women in Iowa were taken back in time, relegated to lesser citizens by the state, and placed squarely behind men and fetuses in their rights.

Now, only two of five clinics previously providing abortion in Iowa remain open for care. Of note, this is a barrier to women, particularly low-resourced women, receiving cancer screenings, contraception, treatment for infections, and a safe place to seek information, not only abortion care. Very pro-life, and especially poignant to reduce care for women that are already struggling to make ends meet.

Tom Walton is an attorney in Dallas County.

Your American citizenship would turn on the subjective judgment of some Citizenship Czar as to whether you have been sufficiently supportive of a MAGA administration, if Vice President JD Vance and the Trump administration have their way.

On July 5, Vance spoke at a meeting of the Claremont Institute, a MAGA think tank. He delivered a shocking and exceedingly poorly reasoned argument for redefining what it means be an American citizen. The speech was backward, bewildering, and without basis in law or logic.

In his speech, Vance urged that we must “redefine American citizenship.” He suggested that “identifying America just with agreeing with its principles” is “not enough by itself.” Think of the oath that thousands of new American citizens take all the time:

When I saw former State Representative Joe Mitchell’s guest column in the Des Moines Register in late June, my first thought was, “What federal government job is he angling for?” His op-ed was an embarrassing piece of hagiography about Donald Trump—or as Mitchell put it, “the most consequential president ever.”

I got my answer on July 23, when the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced that Mitchell will serve as the agency’s regional administrator for the Great Plains, covering Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska.

Mitchell is a rising star again at the age of 28, when many ambitious politicos haven’t begun climbing the ladder. At every stage, he’s had help from the GOP establishment.

His comeback story shows how over-the-top public praise for Trump has become normal and expected behavior for even the most well-connected Republicans.

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. 

My family has called Davis County home for 185 years, all the way back to when William D. Evans and William Henson climbed down from their wagons in 1839 and 1840, a half-dozen years before Iowa became a state.

Evanses, Hensons, and their neighbors were on the town square in Bloomfield in 1877 when the cornerstone was nudged into place in the new county courthouse. Construction of the grand stone building with its soaring clock tower was a testament by those pioneers that this part of rural America, and the new county seat town, needed a home for local government and a fitting gathering space for meetings, speeches, elections and other civic events.

Voters demonstrated their faith in their local leaders when they authorized the building’s construction. The price tag came to about $60,000—the equivalent of about $2 million in today’s money.