Tens of thousands of employees at Iowa’s state universities will have their payroll taxes withheld as usual this fall, despite a recent executive order from President Donald Trump.

Trump moved last month to suspend payroll taxes from September 1 through December 31, 2020. Affected employees would see slightly higher paychecks for the next four months, but would have lower take-home pay from January through April 2021 as employers withhold double the amount for payroll taxes.

Josh Lehman, communications director for the Iowa Board of Regents, told Bleeding Heartland on September 9,

Dr. Greg Cohen has practiced medicine in Chariton since 1994. He was named a Distinguished Fellow by the American College of Osteopathic Family Physicians as well as Physician of the Year by the Iowa Osteopathic Medical Association in 2019. -promoted by Laura Belin

To the citizens of Lucas County and Iowa:

I haven’t hugged my children or grandson since March because of the COVID-19 pandemic. I have continued to go to work every day to provide medical care to the people of Lucas County and Southern Iowa. Sometimes I wear one mask. Sometimes two. Sometimes a gown. Sometimes two pairs of gloves. Sometimes safety glasses or a face shield.

Bruce Lear: The drive to throw the schoolhouse door open, even in coronavirus “hot zones,” has spawned some terrible ideas. -promoted by Laura Belin

In sports we call them unforced errors. In normal life we call them missteps. But in a pandemic, we call them deadly and foolish.

Unfortunately, the drive to throw the schoolhouse door open for business five days a week, eight hours a day, even in coronavirus “hot zones,” has spawned some terrible ideas in the name of trying to pretend, “I’m OK, You’re OK.”

Iowa is not OK.

State Auditor Rob Sand had “great news” to share with members of the Iowa House and Senate Appropriations Committees in May. Federal officials had agreed not to demand repayment for alleged overbilling, provided that Iowa changed its billing practices for future audits. The savings to the state would amount to tens of thousands of dollars for each fiscal year.

Documents Bleeding Heartland obtained through a public records request confirm that key Reynolds administration officials were on board with the reform plan, and Iowa Senate appropriators took it up in June as the legislature was completing its work.

The records also show that State Representatives Gary Mohr and John Landon refused to move the fix through the Iowa House.

What they don’t explain is why.

When Iowans begin voting on October 5, they will see nine tickets for president and vice president at the top of the ballot.

The most controversial campaign may be that of Kanye West, widely seen as a stalking horse for President Donald Trump and a gravy train for Republican campaign consultants. He has been knocked off the ballot in some states but survived two objections to his candidacy in Iowa last week.

West’s inclusion reflects well on Iowa’s ballot access policies but poorly on the Republican operatives who got his name in front of voters.

Ira Lacher asks, “Why do we continue to treat this president, who has lit a bonfire and thrown convention onto it, in a conventional manner?” -promoted by Laura Belin

The 2016 election was all about convention.

Donald J. Trump pledged he was going to “drain the swamp” — toss out conventions that had made government the enemy of “real Americans. ” And millions, who believed themselves the victims of an unfeeling, bloated, radical-liberal bureaucracy biased in favor of minorities and coastal elites, believed him.

Trump didn’t disappoint. He has fulfilled the wet dreams of conservatives by gutting many regulations on business, slashing the federal non-defense workforce and rolling back environmental protection.

But he also has thrown out almost every unwritten rule pertaining to the presidency since George Washington was handed the keys.

Preethi Reddi found that eight Iowa counties along the Mississippi River continue to have more COVID-19 cases per capita than seven border counties on the Illinois side. -promoted by Laura Belin

In May, Governor Kim Reynolds and the four other Republican governors who elected against stay-at-home orders prematurely published an editorial in the Washington Post titled, “Our states stayed open in the covid-19 pandemic. Here’s why our approach worked.”

Recent data contradict that bold title and point to a need for change in Reynolds’s less aggressive approach to controlling COVID-19 spread.

Governor Kim Reynolds provided many jaw-dropping moments at her latest news conference on September 2: from falsely claiming to have implemented “a lot of” the White House coronavirus task force’s recommendations to defending her “personal responsibility” mantra to misleading about why the state still doesn’t provide accurate COVID-19 testing data, to walking away from a reporter’s follow-up question.

But one exchange, more than any other, crystallized why Iowa is still one of the worst states for COVID-19 spread.

The agency handling payroll for Iowa’s executive, judicial, and legislative employees will not follow President Donald Trump’s recent executive order allowing payroll taxes to be deferred for the last four months of this calendar year.

Wendy Noce, the Centralized Payroll program manager for the Iowa Department of Administrative Services, announced the decision in a September 4 email to state entities.

The Iowa Secretary of State’s office has confirmed in writing what Secretary of State Paul Pate said last week: county auditors may place secure drop boxes outside government buildings, to make it easier for voters to hand-deliver absentee ballots.

Linn County Auditor Joel Miller has opted not to fight the state’s interpretation and will remove three boxes his office had set up near grocery stores in the Cedar Rapids area.

Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate has sent his statewide mailing of absentee ballot request forms to active registered voters, his office announced on September 4. “The forms include pre-paid, first class mail postage and an envelope to return the request form to the voter’s county auditor,” the news release clarified.

The secretary of state’s mailing will look like this on one side:

Paul W. Johnson is a preacher’s kid, former Iowa state legislator, former chief of the USDA Soil Conservation Service/Natural Resources Conservation Service, former director of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, and a retired farmer. -promoted by Laura Belin

In the early 1980s there was a serious farm crisis in Iowa. Land and commodity prices were falling, so banks were calling in farm loans and foreclosing on farmers who couldn’t pay up. Maurice Dingman was bishop of the Des Moines area during those years, and he was speaking up strongly for farmers who were suffering during this time. I was impressed by his defense of family farmers.

In 1987 David Osterberg and I were serving in the Iowa legislature–he representing Mount Vernon, I representing Decorah–and working on groundwater protection. Industrial agriculture sent their lobbyists to weaken our legislation, and newspapers were carrying stories about their fierce opposition to our work.

During this time, Bishop Dingman phoned us and suggested we have lunch together.

Emma Schmit of Food & Water Action and Adam Mason of Iowa CCI Action co-authored this post. Bleeding Heartland covered this year’s new “Ag Gag” law here. -promoted by Laura Belin

Iowans across party lines value clean water and air, vibrant rural communities, independent family farms and safe, affordable food. That’s why at Iowa CCI Action and Food & Water Action we organize for a better system of agriculture. Iowans also value transparency and accountability from our elected officials — We are driven by these core values. Our elected officials should be too.

But that’s not always the case. Some of Iowa’s elected officials fail to represent the interests of their constituents.

Update: Carver-Kimm amended her lawsuit in June 2021 to include the two claims originally filed with the State Appeal Board. She amended it again in August 2021 to add more plaintiffs and remove the third count related to First Amendment claims. You can read the latest version of the petition here. The case is scheduled for trial in the summer of 2022. Original post follows.

The Iowa Department of Public Health’s longtime communications director Polly Carver-Kimm filed suit on September 2, claiming she was wrongfully terminated, in violation of the state’s whistleblower law. Stephen Gruber-Miller first reported on the lawsuit for the Des Moines Register. I’ve enclosed below the District Court filing and Carver-Kimm’s parallel claims filed with the State Appeal Board.

Carver-Kimm was the lead media contact at IDPH for thirteen years before she was told to resign or be fired in mid-July. Her attorney, Tom Duff, has represented other well-known Iowans who have sued the state on whistleblower claims or alleging wrongful termination, including former criminal investigator Larry Hedlund (who had caught the SUV carrying then Governor Terry Branstad speeding) and former Department of Human Services Director Jerry Foxhoven.

The day she was ousted, Carver-Kimm told the Des Moines Register’s Tony Leys she was “embarrassed and saddened by the way the media has been treated during COVID.” She asserted that she was stripped of her duties and eventually removed for being too open with journalists seeking information about the pandemic.

Her court filing and an accompanying news release from Duff’s office are more specific about alleged violations of Iowa’s open records law.

While some summer wildflowers are easy to overlook, you can’t miss Trumpet vine (Campsis radicans) when it’s in bloom. Also known as Trumpet creeper, this woody vine is native to most of the U.S. but “can be weedy or invasive.” I haven’t seen it displacing native plants in Iowa, though.

A “favorite of hummingbirds” thanks to its large orange or reddish flowers, trumpet vine easily attaches itself to other plants, fences, or buildings.

I took most of the pictures enclosed below this week in Windsor Heights or Des Moines.

If you visit coronavirus.iowa.gov and view the graphs on the “case counts” page, you might expect to learn how many Iowans were tested for COVID-19 on any given day, and how many of those tests came back positive or negative.

You would be wrong.

Every day, records of hundreds or thousands of old tests disappear from the website. Consequently, it is impossible to reconstruct an accurate picture of Iowa’s testing numbers or positivity rates, either statewide or at a county level.

In the clearest sign yet that the business establishment is preparing for a Democratic administration in Washington, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will endorse 23 first-term House Democrats, including U.S. Representatives Abby Finkenauer (IA-01) and Cindy Axne (IA-03).

Alex Gangitano was first to report the planned endorsements for The Hill on September 1. Other political reporters soon confirmed the news.

Richard Lindgren reviews Senator Chuck Grassley’s probe of self-dealing by tax-exempt televangelists, which fizzled out with little to show for years of work. -promoted by Laura Belin

In a recent Bleeding Heartland piece, Laura Belin contrasted U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley’s aggressive attack on then-Vice President Al Gore’s use of a government telephone in 1997 to make fundraising calls to his silence after repeated and blatant Trump administration violations of the Hatch Act. This flouting of laws and norms culminated in President Trump pulling out all stops to use the White House grounds and hundreds of federal employees to publicly accept the 2020 Republican nomination for President.

In the internet gaming language of “leetspeak,” the notoriously frugal and “by the book” Grassley has repeatedly been “pwned,” (intentionally misspelled, but pronounced “owned”) which means to be embarrassingly dominated and defeated by another “gamer.”

Jeff Walberg: The diagnosis begins by attending to where the pain is and listening to the part of our collective body crying out “I can’t breathe.” -promoted by Laura Belin

If you find yourself dissecting fractured images of chaos to find the proof of racism (or its absence) in Kenosha or similar scenes, let me suggest taking your eye from the microscope and widening your view.

You’ll never find the cigarette that finally caused the cancer. But during a lifetime of smoking, any doctor can easily describe the fate you’re heading for. In that sense the cancer is already, always present. So too with systemic racism.

“Much of the spread that we’re seeing in Iowa continues to be tied back to young adults” between the ages of 19 and 24, Governor Kim Reynolds said during an August 27 news conference, where she announced a new proclamation closing bars in Polk, Dallas, Linn, Johnson, Story, and Black Hawk counties.

Reynolds noted that young adults are spreading coronavirus to classmates, co-workers, and others “by socializing in large groups” and “not social distancing.” She added, “While we still know that this population is less likely to be severely impacted by COVID-19, it is increasing the virus activity in the community, and it’s spilling over to other segments of the population.”

The official narrative seems designed to conceal three inconvenient facts. Reynolds didn’t follow expert advice that could have prevented this summer’s explosive growth in cases. For months, she discouraged young, healthy Iowans from worrying about the virus. And despite her “#StepUpMaskUp” public relations campaign, Reynolds has failed to practice what she preaches when attending large gatherings herself.