I’ve had it with Iowa’s welfare queens. Wells Fargo. Rockwell Collins. Pioneer Dupont. Chuck Grassley.

Yes, Grassley. The senator announced this week that he’ll apply for federal farm bailout money. Despite being worth $3.3 million. Despite working full-time as a U.S. senator since 1981. Despite his criticism of government assistance for the poor.

In an October 4 Des Moines Register story, Grassley said, “I would brag to you, actually, that this experience of mine — not being an absentee landlord but suffering what farmers suffer and being joyful when they are joyful — is a good experience for a senator from an agricultural state to have.”

State Representative Mike Sexton may continue to spend $400 each month in campaign funds to rent part of a building he owns, Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board executive director Megan Tooker has determined.

As Bleeding Heartland reported in August, Sexton stored campaign materials for free at his home for nearly two years after re-entering political life. While running for re-election to Iowa House district 10 in 2016, the Republican lawmaker began renting space for his campaign in one of two commercial buildings he and his wife had recently purchased. As of July 2018, the real estate company registered by Rebecca Sexton had received a total of $11,200 from the campaign.

I brought the matter to Tooker’s attention because although an administrative rule allows the use of campaign funds for office expenses, including rent and utilities, I had never seen an Iowa lawmaker or legislative candidate spend so much for that purpose. I questioned whether $400 per month reflected the fair market value for storage and office space in Calhoun County, as required by Iowa law. In addition, I thought the campaign expenditures might be construed as delivering a “personal benefit,” since the payments would either supplement the Sextons’ household income or cover part of the contract on the couple’s real estate investment.

Sherry Kiskunas is a Democratic activist and a local leader of Indivisible Iowa in Waterloo. -promoted by desmoinesdem

What has Representative Rod Blum actually done for Iowa’s first Congressional District? The evidence suggests not much.

The trails through Windsor Heights and western Des Moines have provided source material for dozens of Iowa wildflower Wednesday posts since 2012. Instead of featuring one species this week, I want to highlight how quickly some of my favorite wildflower-spotting grounds rebounded after North Walnut Creek and Walnut Creek flooded early this summer.

I took most of the enclosed pictures on either August 4 or August 18, about five to seven weeks after these areas had been underwater for several days.

Five weeks before the general election, the Republican Party of Iowa has begun airing television commercials to promote Senate Majority Leader Jack Whitver and State Senator Julian Garrett.

The advertising suggests that Republican internal polling shows Democrats Amber Gustafson and Vicky Brenner within striking distance in Senate districts 19 and 13, respectively. Democratic internal polling presumably shows competitive races too, since former President Barack Obama included Gustafson and Brenner on his list of Iowa endorsements this week. Only five state legislative candidates made the cut.

John Grieder is a Democratic activist in Waterloo. -promoted by desmoinesdem

The president is right. There, I said it. He is. President Donald Trump said something truthful. On October 2, 2018, President Donald Trump said it’s a “scary time” to be a young man in America. I agree with him. It’s absolutely terrifying. I’m 28 years old and I have never been more concerned about my government or my nation.

Potential legal challenges loom over every case District Court Judge Jason Besler handles unless Iowa Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Cady intervenes to ensure that Besler lawfully holds his current position.

Cady has not signed any document filling the Judicial District 6 vacancy, judicial branch communications director Steve Davis confirmed to Bleeding Heartland on October 2. Davis has declined further comment on questions surrounding the legality of Governor Kim Reynolds’ appointment of Besler.

Dan Guild previously analyzed House generic ballot polling and past wave elections. -promoted by desmoinesdem

We are now 35 days from the 2018 election. For most of 2018 there has been speculation about the Democrats taking the House. But until the last month the data on individual districts has been sparse, and predictions have been based on things like the generic ballot which is itself subject to significant error.

The table below lists the seats that will decide if the Democrats retake the House. It is based on the Democratic margin from 2016. If there is an incumbent running, his or her margin in 2016 is used, if not then Clinton’s margin is used. I have also included a running tally of the number of seats the Democrats would win if they won every seat in a particular group. For example if the Democrats every seat where the GOP margin was 7 points or less they would win 218 seats, exactly the number of seats needed for majority.

What the chart shows is just how protected the Republicans are as a result of gerrymandering.

John Norwood thinks “Polk County can be a leader in applying innovation to how we install, pay for, and scale our conservation infrastructure.” He is one of three candidates for two seats on the Polk County Soil and Water Commission, a non-partisan local board that decides how to use federal and state conservation funds. -promoted by desmoinesdem

Hello Polk County Neighbors,

Intense rainfall events like the one Des Moines and Ankeny recently experienced this summer are increasing in frequency, and their negative impacts on our soil health and water quality are being felt locally and downstream. Meanwhile, 100 year and 500 year flood events are happening with more frequency and causing million of dollars in damage.

I’m running for our Polk County Soil and Water Commission. My platform is to clean up the water and hold our soil in place. Remarkably, very little has been done in our county to address ag tile water, which is the primary source of nitrogen in our surface water, according to University of Iowa Experts.

Third in a series by Tyler Higgs, an activist from Clive, Iowa. He previously explored how to corrupt a school district and how to corrupt the Iowa House. -promoted by desmoinesdem

Let’s say you are a state senator with strong political aspirations and no moral compass. You can rise to power quickly, if you play your cards correctly. State Senator Charles Schneider (Senate District 22) demonstrated how it pays to sell out your constituents:

Iowa’s disastrous Medicaid privatization is becoming an important theme of Rob Sand’s campaign for state auditor. While Republican incumbent Mary Mosiman was slow to embark on a review of the program and won’t promise to release her office’s findings before the November election, Sand has pledged to thoroughly investigate the operations of managed-care organizations (MCOs), which now make health care decisions affecting more than 600,000 Iowans.

Carl Olsen is a longtime advocate for expanding access to medical cannabis in Iowa and maintains the Iowans for Medical Marijuana website. -promoted by desmoinesdem

On Thursday, September 20, the Iowa Board of Pharmacy moved to dismiss my petition for the religious use of medical cannabidiol, in Olsen v. Board of Pharmacy, No. CVCV056841 (Iowa District Court, Polk County).  The Board says the petition should have been filed with the Iowa legislature instead of the board.

The problem with the board’s position is that the legislature has given the board the duty of recommending changes in the schedules of controlled substances and medical cannabidiol is a controlled substance in Iowa.  There is also an existing exemption for the religious use of peyote, a Schedule 1 controlled substance.  Iowa Code § 124.204(8) (2018).

U.S. Senator Joni Ernst has cultivated an image as a politician who is deeply concerned about sexual assault. Her official website has a whole page dedicated to the issue.

But as Senate Republicans appear ready to ram through Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation for the U.S. Supreme Court, Ernst has not demanded any thorough investigation of the allegations against Kavanaugh. On the contrary: she is ready to reward his aggressive, evasive performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee with a lifetime seat on the high court.

Late summer in Iowa is peak time for tall plants with large, yellow flowerheads, including Jerusalem artichoke, Maximilian sunflower, prairie sunflower, common sunflower, cup plant, compass plant, wingstem, and today’s featured plant. Cutleaf coneflower (Rudbeckia laciniata) is native to most of the U.S. and Canada. Sometimes called green-headed coneflower, tall coneflower, or golden glow, this member of the aster family thrives in wet habitats such as “bottomland forests, moist meadows in wooded areas, woodland borders, moist thickets, sloughs in partially shaded areas, low areas along rivers, partially shaded river banks, calcareous seeps, margins of poorly drained fields, and pastures.”

I took most of the enclosed photos near bike trails that run along Walnut Creek in Des Moines or North Walnut Creek in Windsor Heights.

Alexandra Rucinski is a patient advocate for Planned Parenthood and an activist for sex education and reproductive rights. -promoted by desmoinesdem

I was talking to my now fiance; we’d been together for a bit at this point, and we were talking about sex. Out of the blue, I asked him if he was beginning to have sex with someone, and then they changed their mind and asked him to stop, would he stop?

He very quickly responded that yes, he would immediately stop and that if he didn’t stop, that was rape.

That was the moment it clicked inside my head that what happened to me that summer day wasn’t ok. I couldn’t bring myself to call it rape yet, but that was the first time someone told me that not stopping was wrong, that not stopping was a violation. No one had ever said anything like that to me before.

Laural Clinton is a member of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement’s racial justice team and the mother of Jared Clinton, who was the passenger in a recent racial profiling video released to the public. -promoted by desmoinesdem

Racial profiling. It’s a tough topic to discuss. But for us in the Black community, racial profiling is a reality we deal with every day–when we go to the store, when we drive our cars, when we eat at restaurants.

As a mother of three Black sons, I am intimately familiar with this issue.

Anyone who has followed Iowa politics during the past decade must read Tim Alberta’s profile of former State Senator Kent Sorenson in the latest edition of Politico Magazine. “Kent Sorenson Was a Tea Party Hero. Then He Lost Everything” is fascinating from beginning to end, so I strongly encourage clicking through to read the whole piece.

Having covered Sorenson’s legislative career and intensely disagreed with nearly everything he stood for, I was genuinely moved to learn how his outlook has changed over the past few years. Some passages that caught my eye are after the jump.

Laura Hubka chairs the Howard County Democrats, is vice chair of the Iowa Democratic Party’s Disability Caucus, and is the first district liaison to the party for the Veterans Caucus. -promoted by desmoinesdem

I decided to go to Obama.org just to check it out after looking at one of President Barack Obama’s posts on Twitter (my heart jumped and sank at writing that last statement). It was full of videos from the campaign in 2008. Almost all of it from Iowa. Young people, music, chanting and all the excitement of what could be. The hope, the change, the light in the peoples faces. I had to fight back the tears.

I feel like something inside me has faded. A light inside me is dim. I am afraid that the winds of change from 2016 have blown out my candle. I keep trying to light it but it is like lighting a wet wick. I can’t seem to find a hot enough fire. My heart literally aches.

Des Moines attorney Gary Dickey has asked the Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board to reconsider its recent vote to dismiss his complaint related to free private plane flights provided to Governor Kim Reynolds and her family last year. The Reynolds campaign received prior approval from ethics board executive director Megan Tooker that the flights could be declared as an in-kind campaign contribution and would not be considered a violation of Iowa’s gift law.

David North, CEO of the Sedgwick corporation, covered the cost of travel to and from Memphis on December 30, 2017. In a complaint filed last week, Dickey asserted that the Reynolds campaign “underreported the fair market value” of that private jet service. If the board does not reconsider its decision, Dickey plans to appeal the agency’s action to district court.

Johnson County Supervisor Kurt Friese wrote this commentary before The New Yorker published new sexual misconduct allegations about Brett Kavanaugh on September 23. -promoted by desmoinesdem

Let’s get this out there at the outset: I am a person of tremendous privilege. I may not be at the very top of the privilege ladder, but as a college-educated, straight, white cis male who attended both public and private schools during my upper middle class suburban upbringing, as a successful business person, and now as an elected official, yeah, I’m up there.