Bruce Lear suggests a Democratic message resting on “four pillars that sustain small towns.” -promoted by Laura Belin

When I was a kid, my mom always warned, “Keep a screen door between you and the Fuller Brush Man.” Back in the day, Fuller Brush salesmen were mobile carnival barkers. They would literally get a foot in the door and then grow roots on the couch until Mom gave up and bought something.

They were fast talkers.

They weren’t from around here.

I am afraid that too many candidates now treat rural America like the Fuller Brush man of old. They barnstorm a small community without ever stopping to hear what makes the heart of rural America beat.

The U.S. House on December 3 passed a resolution disapproving of “Russia’s inclusion in future Group of Seven summits” until that country ends “its occupation of all of Ukraine’s sovereign territory, including Crimea, and halts its attacks on democracies worldwide.”

The measure easily surpassed the two-thirds vote needed under a suspension of usual House rules, with all 222 Democrats present and 116 Republicans supporting it (roll call). Iowa’s three Democratic members–Abby Finkenauer (IA-01), Dave Loebsack (IA-02), and Cindy Axne (IA-03)–all supported the measure. But U.S. Representative Steve King (IA-04) was among 71 House Republicans who voted no.

Rachel Junck‘s victory in the Ames City Council Ward 4 runoff election on December 3 was historic in two ways. The 20-year-old engineering major is the youngest second-youngest woman elected to any office in Iowa* and the first female Iowa State University student to win a seat on the council of our state’s seventh-largest city.

The outcome in Ames was also in line with a recent trend: candidates with strong ties in business circles have not performed as well in local elections in larger Iowa communities.

The state of Iowa cannot enforce the latest attempt to discourage and criminalize undercover reporting at livestock facilities. U.S. District Court Senior Judge James Gritzner on December 2 granted a request for a preliminary injunction against a law enacted in March, which prohibits “agricultural production facility trespass.”

Montana Governor Steve Bullock became the latest Democrat to end his presidential campaign on December 2, acknowledging in a statement that he “won’t be able to break through to the top tier of this still-crowded field of candidates.”

Like several others who have dropped out of the race, Bullock had a wealth of experience and was solid on many key issues for Democrats. He repeatedly vetoed abortion restrictions passed by the Republican-controlled legislature, yet somehow persuaded the majority party to expand Medicaid in Montana and take steps to limit the influence of dark money. He could have given President Donald Trump a hell of fight in a general election, having won re-election in 2016 even as Trump carried his state by 20 points.

State employees “did not follow the process in place” when they recently approved a request to fly the transgender pride flag above the Capitol building, Iowa Department of Administrative Services spokesperson Tami Wiencek told Bleeding Heartland.

Bleeding Heartland was first to report in June that the Hy-Vee corporation’s political action committee gave $25,000 to the Republican Party of Iowa prior to a fundraiser headlined by President Donald Trump and held at the corporation’s West Des Moines corporate venue. It was the PAC’s largest single recorded contribution.

That story by Gwen Hope received significant public comment online and prompted a press release in which Hy-Vee PAC’s executive director Mary Beth Hart asserted that the donation was “an important opportunity for our CEO to directly provide information about pharmacy-related issues […] to the President and his staff while they were in town.” While the contribution could have been designed to seek political favors from high-ranking Republicans, it also covered most of the Iowa GOP’s rental cost to use Hy-Vee’s facility.

In light of that revelation, some local Democratic groups distanced themselves from the grocery store chain, while others asked the company for contributions to balance the corporation’s Republican-heavy donation history.

On this Small Business Saturday, please consider investing in original reporting about Iowa politics.

All best wishes to the Bleeding Heartland community for a happy and restful Thanksgiving weekend!

If you cooked at home today, you may have some food to use up. Former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic nominee for president, is famous for making soup from the turkey carcass. Here’s his mother’s soup recipe. I’ve posted some of my favorite ways to use leftovers below.

This is an open thread: all topics welcome.

Katie Byerly closes out this year’s series of wildflower posts with an aster that blooms in the autumn. You can find her on YouTube at Iowa Prairie Girl. -promoted by Laura Belin

I was walking a narrow, heavily canopied trail at the Lime Creek Nature Center in Mason City when I first noticed Common blue wood aster (Symphyotrichum cordifolium).

Shoppers in the U.S. spent an estimated $160 billion on gift cards in 2018, up from around $90 billion a decade earlier. The holiday season is the peak time for those purchases.

State Treasurer Michael Fitzgerald has warned that much of the value will go to waste. Years ago, his office had a tool to help Iowans recoup the cost of unused gift cards. But state legislators had a different idea.

Good news for Iowans who care about ethics rules and money in politics: Mike Marshall will be the next executive director of the Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board.

While testifying before the U.S. House Intelligence Committee on November 21, former National Security Council official Fiona Hill urged Congressional Republicans not to “promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.” She was referring to the idea that “Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country—and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did.” Hill added, “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”

Meanwhile, “American intelligence officials informed senators and their aides in recent weeks that Russia had engaged in a yearslong campaign to essentially frame Ukraine as responsible for Moscow’s own hacking of the 2016 election,” Julian E. Barnes and Matthew Rosenberg reported for the New York Times on November 22, citing three officials familiar with the classified briefing.

Nevertheless, U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley persisted.

As evidence mounts that President Donald Trump abused his power by pressuring Ukraine to boost his domestic political prospects, Grassley has advanced the narrative that Ukrainian government officials interfered in the 2016 election to support Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump.

Republican members of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee used most of their speaking time during recent impeachment hearings to run interference for President Donald Trump. They attacked the credibility of fact witnesses, pushed alternate narratives about foreign interference in U.S. politics, and tried to shift the focus to the whistleblower despite extensive corroborating evidence.

The Iowan who served on the House Judiciary Committee when Congress considered impeaching President Richard Nixon recalls GOP colleagues who were open to discovering and considering facts about the president’s possible high crimes and misdemeanors.

Ten months after the Des Moines Register revealed that “Iowa’s flawed felon list has been disqualifying legitimate voters for years,” and five months after voting rights advocates warned that “Iowa’s voter list maintenance practices are arbitrary and unlawful,” Secretary of State Paul Pate announced an ambitious plan to clean up the felon database.

“The new steps to ensure the system’s accuracy include a manual review of all 90,000 files,” a November 20 news release announced. The goal is to complete the task before next year’s general election.

Several unanswered questions remain about the plan.

Janis Bowden clerked for Jo Ann Zimmerman in the Iowa House. Zimmerman went on to become Iowa’s first woman lieutenant governor and a member of the Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame. She passed away in October. -promoted by Laura Belin

I met Jo Ann Zimmerman in Dallas Center, Iowa. She was campaigning for the Iowa House as a Democrat.

Initially I was impressed by her obvious intelligence and demeanor. It did not take long to jump on board to help her campaign. Dallas Center was known as a hub of Republicans in the early 1980s, as opposed to the very active Democrats living in most of Dallas County.

Jeff Cox publishes the Prairie Progressive newsletter. -promoted by Laura Belin

We need a new New Deal. Who can deliver it?

The mainstream media likes to depict the Democratic Party as divided between centrists and progressives. An equally important divide is between defeatists who think that Donald Trump’s supporters have taken over the country, and optimists who look to a bright future for Democratic Party ideas.

An under-reported Iowa politics story this year has been strong Democratic recruiting for the 2020 state Senate races. Even though recapturing the Iowa Senate is likely to take at least two election cycles, given the current 32-18 Republican majority, Democrats have declared candidates in five out of six Senate seats the party lost in 2016.*

Other Democrats are actively campaigning in three Senate districts that were only nominally contested in 2016.**

As of this week, Democrats also have a challenger in an Iowa Senate district that is so heavily Republican the party did not field a candidate for the last election.

With four presidential contenders packed closely together at the top of the field and a majority of Democratic voters not yet committed to a candidate, televised debates could make or break several campaigns between now and the February 3 Iowa caucuses. As Dan Guild discussed here, debates have fueled breakouts for some lower-polling candidates in past election cycles.

If you missed the fifth Democratic debate on November 20, you can read the full transcript here. My thoughts on the evening in Atlanta:

I’ve wanted to write about Sawtooth sunflower (Helianthus grosseserratus) since the earliest months of Bleeding Heartland’s wildflowers series in 2012. Large colonies thrive at the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge near Prairie City. But for one reason or another, I’ve never managed to catch them at the height of their blooming period.

After I visited the refuge in early August, I was determined to get back there a few weeks later to capture the sawtooth sunflowers. Again, life got in the way, and I feared these prairie plants had eluded me again.

The first weekend in October, I called the refuge and spoke with a volunteer, who assured me that some sawtooth sunflowers were still blooming near the main parking lot. I took most of the pictures enclosed below there or near the Highway 163 ramp that leads to the refuge (exit 18).