Johnson County Supervisor-elect Kurt Michael Friese is skeptical Republicans would react calmly if the shoe were on the other foot. -promoted by desmoinesdem

What you Republicans and the American political right are telling me is that if President Obama had nominated a no-foreign-service-experience businessman with close ties to, say, Saudi Arabia, as Secretary of State, you’d say, “yeah that’s cool, he’s the boss, after all.”

You’re saying that if Obama had more than a dozen allegations of sexual harassment and groping leveled against him, your response would be “hey, those are just accusations.”

If he had 2.8 million fewer votes than Mitt Romney, but won the electoral college thanks to about 80,000 votes in 3 states, your reaction would be “that’s how the system works.”

Your contention is that if he had tried to get security clearance for Sasha and Malia, we’d hear you saying that it’s important that his family know what’s going on.

The Iowa Board of Regents gave Iowa State University President Steven Leath a well-choreographed vote of confidence on Monday. First, Chief Audit Executive Todd Stewart took the board through highlights from his team’s review of ISU’s Flight Service, noting the “full cooperation” provided by ISU staff. Then a contrite yet defensive Leath took the floor. Still insisting he did not violate any policies or laws, the president admitted he could have shown “better judgment” and said he is “very sorry” about “things I should have done differently.” In particular, he “used the university planes more frequently than was absolutely necessary, and should have been more transparent about some of the use.” He promised to be “more thoughtful” and learn from this experience. The 12-page auditor’s report and full statement from Leath are enclosed at the end of this post.

Regent Larry McKibben was up next to thank Leath for his leadership and contribution to positive trends at ISU, adding that he hopes for more “great things” during the next five years. The chair of the Regents’ audit committee has never viewed what he called a “ding on an airplane wing” as grounds to change his opinion of Leath. His remarks before the regents went into closed session signaled that the overseers would neither fire nor severely sanction the ISU president.

After board members evaluated Leath’s performance, Board President Bruce Rastetter asserted that Leath had “eliminate[d] any questions about the personal benefit that he may have received by using the university aircraft,” having reimbursed the ISU Foundation for costs associated with some flights. He went on to say,

“Clearly, President Leath’s acknowledgment that he takes full responsibility for the issues identified in the audit and that he should have been more transparent about the use of the planes reassures this board, and I hope all Iowans, that the president deserves our continued trust and support,” Rastetter said. “Furthermore, the board believes the audit has put to rest any concerns about President Leath’s use of the aircraft.”

This Iowan is not reassured. The audit has big holes and failed to fully account for costs of Leath’s airplane habit.

Blair Lawton, candidate for Iowa Democratic Party chair, continues the series of guest commentaries about how to rebuild. -promoted by desmoinesdem

Over the past month, I have been traveling around the state to talk to party activists about what we as Iowa Democrats need to do in order to start winning again, and what role the state chair should play in that process.

What I heard is that the number one goal of Democrats from the state chair on down should be party-building. In this article, I’d like to offer three suggestions for what that could look like:

We need to support our county parties. Strong county parties are the bedrock of a strong state party.
We need a renewed focus on rural areas. One piece of that is setting the goal of contesting every legislative race.
We need to bring a lot more people back into the IDP. And that means making sure the party is a big tent that welcomes people who are new to the party.

Sandy Dockendorff continues the series of guest commentaries by candidates for Iowa Democratic Party chair. -promoted by desmoinesdem

I recently participated in a meeting with a couple of local legislators to discuss education issues and to provide information about our school district and the kind of help we could use from the legislature this year. Our school district has done this every year that I have been on the school board, though this year we had a new face – one of the new GOP house members.

In short, we advocated for Education with our legislators. We were specific on what we need from our legislators. We stressed that it is not all about the funding, but that the lack of funding does have an impact on student achievement. We pointed out that public education is not failing and provided proof. We told them it is important for our legislators and our government officials to speak about public education in a positive manner if we want our families to take education seriously. We even showed them a video about why it is important to change how we view education.

Advocating for issues is what I do. It is who I am. It is what drives me to be an active Democrat.

I am not alone.

Chris Laursen, an activist for many progressive causes and a Bernie Sanders delegate to the Democratic National Convention, shares his story from Standing Rock. -promoted by desmoinesdem

Are you tired of these motherfrackers? I am!

I have just recently returned home from my second trip to Standing Rock. And now, after some decompression and much needed sleep I feel as though I need to pen some of my thoughts and experiences. Here it goes.

Lieutenant Governor Kim Reynolds told Iowa reporters this morning that she expects to become governor after Terry Branstad steps down and will appoint someone else as lieutenant governor. At the same press conference, Branstad said the Iowa Constitution and state law are “pretty clear” that the lieutenant governor becomes the governor after the governor resigns.

However, a close reading of Iowa Constitution Article IV, Section 17 leaves doubt about whether Reynolds will become governor. The text states that the “powers and duties” of the governor’s office “shall devolve upon the Lieutenant Governor” in the event of a vacancy. That language differs from the U.S. Constitution’s directive that “the Vice President shall become President” in the event of a vacancy and “shall nominate a Vice President” subsequently.

The four previous times Iowa governors left before the end of their terms, their successors were called governor but did not appoint new lieutenant governors. Reynolds will certainly exercise the powers of the governor, but under the state constitution, she may do so from her current position and remain unable to name a likely 2018 running mate as lieutenant governor.

Many thanks to ahawby for this tutorial. -promoted by desmoinesdem

A Facebook friend of mine reshared a “story” from a site entitled “Don’t Tread On Me”. If that source does not give you pause then you should read on.

The post showed a picture of a man in a white lab coat being arrested with the tag line: “Busted: Trusted Top Scientist Who ‘Collects Data On Global Warming’ Caught Manipulating Results.” Having been relatively well versed in the literature and science behind climate change for about 27 years, I checked it out. Feel free to do so yourself.

Now, the tips for determining if it is fake news.

President-elect Donald Trump continues to assemble a cabinet full of people “who have key philosophical differences with the missions of the agencies they have been tapped to run.”

But arguably, the scariest news of the week was the political reaction to the Central Intelligence Agency assessment that it is “quite clear” Russia intervened in the U.S. elections with the goal of electing Trump.

Despite what one retired CIA officer described as a “blazing 10-alarm fire,” only four Republican senators have taken up the call for a bipartisan investigation of Russian interference in U.S. elections. For his part, Trump dismissed the CIA’s findings as “ridiculous,” while members of his transition team discredited the agency and leaked news that Trump will appoint a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin as secretary of state.

All candidates for Iowa Democratic Party vice chair are invited to make their case at Bleeding Heartland. -promoted by desmoinesdem

My name is Mika Covington and I am running for Vice-Chair of the Iowa Democratic Party because I want to give back to the party that has had my back in the fight for my civil rights and the fight for health care. I am running because I want to help rebuild the party.

My passion for politics stems from the fact that I know that if I want to have rights, I need to step up and fight for them. I am transgender, and I live with a very rare genetic disorder that causes many of my organs to fail, which means that I must have health insurance. Because of this, I know that I need to fight to build a strong Democratic Party because the Democrats are the only ones who have had my back.

I believe that being who I am and the life experiences I have gives me a unique experience to help lead and strength our party.

Saying he is the “compromise candidate” best positioned to unify the Iowa Democratic Party and bring back blue-collar workers who swung to Donald Trump, Bob Krause e-mailed Iowa Democratic Party State Central Committee members late Friday night to announce his candidacy for state party chair.

Krause served in the Iowa House during the 1970s and in recent years has been an outspoken advocate for veterans as president of the Des Moines-based Veterans National Recovery Center. He sought the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in 2010 and 2016, finishing a distant second in the 2010 primary and fourth in 2016. Krause also explored a candidacy for governor in 2014 before leaving that race to endorse Jack Hatch.

I enclose below Krause’s message to Iowa Democratic leaders, who will hear from contenders on December 17 and vote for a new chair in January. Krause’s comments about the shortcomings of the Vote Builder database echo frustrations I’ve heard from quite a few down-ballot candidates and activists.

The others seeking to lead the state party, in order of their official announcements, are Kim Weaver, Sandy Dockendorff, Blair Lawton, Derek Eadon, Kurt Meyer, Julie Stauch, and Mike Gronstal. Click here for background on each. Bleeding Heartland has published commentaries by Stauch, Meyer, and Eadon, and I hope to run guest posts by the other candidates soon.

UPDATE: Krause also posted an announcement video on Facebook late on December 9.

Progressive advocate Ruth Thompson warns how much Iowans have to lose if “Obamacare” is repealed. -promoted by desmoinesdem

With the new Administration and Republican led congress, The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is in peril. Republican leadership plans to use the Budget Reconciliation process to repeal at least parts of the ACA. They are expected to hold a vote in January that may include language to do just that. If this doesn’t happen in January, it will almost certainly happen by September, 2017.

The nonpartisan Urban Institute estimates that the partial repeal of the ACA would cause almost 70 million people Americans to lose health insurance. In 2016, 55,089 Iowans enrolled in health insurance coverage for 2016. US Census data show that the uninsured rate in Iowa in 2015 was 5 percent as compared to 9.3 percent in 2010.

In 2016, of the Iowans who signed up through the Health Care marketplace, 85 percent of them were eligible for an average tax credit of $303 per month and 70 percent could obtain coverage for $100 or less.

As to the impact to employers, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports that employer-sponsored health plans grew just 3.4 percent in 2016, extending a period of unusually slow growth since 2010. The White House Council of Economic Advisers reports that the average family premium in Iowa was $3,500 lower in 2016 than they would be if premiums had grown at the same rate as the pre-ACA decade.

Any day now, the internal auditor for the Iowa Board of Regents may complete his review of all plane trips on Iowa State University’s Flight Service since President Steven Leath came to ISU nearly five years ago.

Although Leath has promised to be “as open and transparent as possible” regarding his airplane use, ISU officials have steadfastly refused to clarify certain details about specific flights or university practices. Reporters probing facts not found on the “frequently asked questions” page keep getting the same runaround: ISU cannot comment, so as not to “jeopardize the integrity of the audit.”

ISU has also slow-walked some information requests related to the airplane controversy. Ten days since the university’s Public Records Office received my payment for one set of records, I’m still waiting for documents that were supposed to take only 3.5 hours to compile. The delay will prevent me from reporting on a potentially newsworthy angle before Todd Stewart sends his findings to the Board of Regents. Depending on when the material arrives, how long it takes to review it, and whether ISU answers follow-up questions promptly, I may not be able to publish before board members convene a special meeting to discuss the internal audit.

Leath complained last week about supposedly “vicious personal attacks” in media coverage of the airplane controversy. It’s not the first time he has claimed to endure “unfair” treatment by writers supposedly engaged in “distortions” and asking “inappropriate” questions.

In reality, “planegate” reporting has addressed Leath’s conduct and use of university resources, not his personal qualities.

Looking forward to later installments in this series. -promoted by desmoinesdem

Yesterday marked 100 weeks until the 2018 midterm elections. It seems like a long time from now, but it is only one number greater than the number of county Democratic organizations that need some serious rebuilding if we are ever to put a Democrat in Terrace Hill, Democrats in control of the legislature and in Iowa’s congressional delegation. The same number of weeks as there are members in the Iowa House of Representatives.

Starting next Tuesday, and ending at the 2018 elections, I am going to try to post a diary each week talking about the demographics and political statistics of each of Iowa’s 99 counties. Starting with the smallest county (Adams) in terms of population, to the largest (Polk). A bit of trivia: Polk County is 123 times the size of Adams County.

Jennifer Jacobs reported for Bloomberg last night that Governor Terry Branstad has accepted President-elect Donald Trump’s offer to become the next U.S. ambassador to China. Jacobs cited three unnamed sources, and an unnamed member of Trump’s transition team confirmed the news to the Washington Post this morning. I expect Trump to make the official announcement during his Thursday “thank you” rally in downtown Des Moines. (By the way, many central Iowa Democrats as well as Republicans received a robocall invitation to that rally, featuring Donald Trump, Jr.)

I wish Branstad well in his new adventure. He’ll have a lot to contend with: the president-elect’s recent overture to Taiwan was destabilizing; Trump’s threats to punish China for supposedly unfair trade and currency practices could spark a trade war; and horrific air pollution has made Beijing “almost uninhabitable.”

Kim Reynolds is the fifth woman to hold the office of Iowa lieutenant governor and will soon become the first woman governor in our state’s history. Branstad has been saying for years he wanted her to succeed him, and many Democrats expected him to step down before the end of his sixth term, to give her the advantages of incumbency going into the 2018 campaign. The domain KimReynoldsforgovernor.com has been registered since 2012, Mark Langgin pointed out today.

Reynolds will select the next lieutenant governor, and she may use that power to neutralize a potential rival, such as Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey. (Why Northey would agree to that arrangement is a mystery to me.) I don’t expect Reynolds to clear the field for the 2018 Republican primary, but as governor, she will be able to raise more money and possibly deter some ambitious people. Cedar Rapids Mayor Ron Corbett has been laying the groundwork for a gubernatorial campaign for years. I don’t know how many major donors would back him now that Reynolds will be the incumbent, though. Running a credible campaign against her would require millions of dollars.

Many Democrats were delighted to read this morning that Representative Steve King told The Hill’s Scott Wong he is thinking about running for governor himself. I suspect this will play out like the early months of 2013, when King attracted a lot of attention by saying he might run for U.S. Senate. I never believed then and don’t believe now that King will run for higher office. However, two recent developments may have changed the equation for him.

First, Iowa’s sharp turn to the right this November may have convinced King he has a chance to win a statewide election, which didn’t appear to be the case a few years ago. Second, he and Branstad are not on good terms. King was a leading surrogate for presidential candidate Ted Cruz, whom Branstad attacked shortly before the Iowa caucuses. Reynolds and many other prominent Iowa Republicans endorsed King before this year’s GOP primary in the fourth Congressional district, but Branstad didn’t join them. Adding to the insult, soon after King defeated State Senator Rick Bertrand in that primary, the governor’s son Eric Branstad hired some of Bertrand’s former staffer to work on Trump’s campaign.

Any thoughts about Branstad’s prospects in China or the 2018 campaign are welcome in this thread.

UPDATE: The Des Moines rumor mill sees State Representative Peter Cownie as a likely lieutenant governor choice for Reynolds. Further updates are after the jump.

Guest Post by Derek Eadon, Candidate for Iowa Democratic Party Chair

I have recently announced that I am seeking the position of Iowa Democratic Party Chair. The past few weeks have been filled with hundreds of conversations on what went wrong in 2016 and what we need to do moving forward. I think it is a good thing that we are having these conversations. The problems we saw this cycle were not unique to this election, many of them were years in the making. I have felt the same frustrations that many people are sharing about how our party has operated the last two cycles. And even though sometimes the conversations that have been had since November 8 are uncomfortable, and although we know more conversations will be coming that force us to self-reflect, it is important we have this discussion. We can do better.

Tactics, message, candidates, and operations can always be improved. There are great ideas being discussed and some past best practices we have chosen to ignore. There is one factor that will be harder to change, and it is one that we cannot lump in with the others: our party is not accessible enough to the people that we need the most.

During the first week of December 2015, an unexpected political scandal went out with a whimper as the Iowa Energy Center and the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research finally received the remittances the Iowa Utilities Board had collected on their behalf from gas and electric utility companies. For many years, the board had transferred those funds without incident, as stipulated by state law. But in her first year as Iowa Utilities Board chair, Geri Huser took the “unusual, perhaps illegal, step of withholding funding […].”

Huser’s power play was aimed at the Iowa Energy Center affiliated with Iowa State University. (Its leaders denied her unsupported claim that they had refused to provide sufficient financial information to the board.) Because funds for both centers are calculated and released at the same time, the unprecedented board action also delayed resources for the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research at the University of Iowa. Huser backed down a week after Ryan Foley of the Associated Press exposed the controversy to a wider audience.

Having heard nothing about the energy centers’ funding lately, I reached out this week to Iowa Utilities Board communications director Don Tormey. He sent documents showing that in accordance with the usual formula for splitting the remittances, the board disbursed $4,123,150.49 to the Iowa Energy Center and $727,614.79 to the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research. The board sent warrants (paper checks) using regular mail, as had happened in 2015 for reasons I still don’t understand. Before last year, the board typically transmitted those funds via wire transfer.

Communications staff at the state universities confirmed that the energy centers received checks in the mail last month for $4,123,150.49 and $727,614.79, respectively. Those totals comprise the remittances from utility companies but not the interest accrued on those funds. John McCarroll of Iowa State University noted, “In the letter with the check, IUB said they will be forward[ing] the interest payment in June 2017 as they close out the fiscal year. This is how they handled the interest in 2016.”

The board has faced criticism on other fronts this year after approving the Dakota Access (Bakken) pipeline and allowing its construction to commence this summer, when Dakota Access did not have all applicable federal permits. Pending lawsuits are challenging the board’s authority to use eminent domain for the pipeline, saying a 2006 Iowa law does not allow a company that isn’t a utility to condemn farmland. It would have been foolish for Huser to stir up more trouble by flexing her muscles at the energy centers’ expense again. Also possibly relevant: former Iowa Energy Center executive director Mark Petri, with whom Huser had tangled, left Ames this summer to take a new job as director of the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The Daily Kos Elections team has been filling in a spreadsheet showing “presidential election results for both the 2016 and 2012 elections according to the congressional district lines used in the 2016 elections.” A few points jumped out as I looked at the Iowa numbers, just added this week.

Let’s start with the bad news.

Laura Hubka chairs the Howard County Democrats and serves on the Iowa Democratic Party’s State Central Committee. -promoted by desmoinesdem

For the life of me I do not understand why we are still fighting and arguing about what happened last election cycle. Are we children? Are we never going to admit some stark truths because it does not fit our narrative?

The scale of Iowa’s unexpectedly large swing toward Donald Trump has been clear for nearly a month. But until today, we didn’t know how much early and election-day voters contributed to transforming Iowa from a bellwether state to one that voted much more Republican than the rest of the country, from a state the Democratic presidential nominee carried by nearly 6 points in 2012 to a state the Republican nominee won by more than 9 points four years later.

According to numbers released following the official state canvass, Hillary Clinton went into election day with a cushion less than half as large as Barack Obama’s early vote lead in 2012. Meanwhile, Trump’s advantage among election-day voters was more than four times as large as Mitt Romney’s.

Thanks to One Iowa executive director Donna Red Wing for explaining a little-known problem for transgender Iowans. -promoted by desmoinesdem

Amerigroup, one of Iowa’s private Medicaid providers, agreed last month to cover gender-affirming surgery for Andrew Evans, a transgender Iowa man and client of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

While we are happy Evans will receive the surgery he needs, we realize that it means only one thing: Evans’ surgery will be covered. The Medicaid provider refused to acknowledge the medical necessity of the surgery, instead agreeing to coverage in order to “amicably resolve” the situation. In plain English, they didn’t want to tangle with the ACLU.

Exclusions for transgender surgery and other trans-related health care continue. Iowa’s Medicaid ban on transition-related surgeries remains.