Former Texas Governor Rick Perry deviated from his stump speech yesterday when addressing the Eagle Forum in St. Louis, telling the audience that while God’s will “remains a mystery,” some things “have become clear. That is why today I am suspending my campaign for the presidency of the United States.” He didn’t need to spell out what has been clear for more than a month: Perry lacked the resources to pay for a full campaign staff and ranked too low in the polls to get on the main Republican debate stage.

I would never have guessed that a longtime Texas governor would have trouble raising enough money to be competitive through the early presidential caucuses and primaries.

You can read the full text of Perry’s speech on his campaign website. I enclose below what struck me as the most important passages. Without mentioning Donald Trump’s name, Perry warned against nominating a candidate who sounds just like the current GOP front-runner.

If Perry’s former Iowa campaign chair Sam Clovis had stuck it out, he would now be free to sign on with another candidate without looking like an opportunistic hypocrite. I am in rare agreement with The Iowa Republican publisher Craig Robinson: “loyalty shouldn’t be so rare in politics,” so “only sign on with a campaign if you are really committed to your candidate’s cause.”  

Today the four Iowans in the U.S. House split along party lines on several measures related to the multi-lateral agreement negotiated this summer to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

A resolution to approve the deal failed by 162 votes to 269 (roll call). Representative Dave Loebsack (IA-02) was among the 162 members (all Democrats) supporting the Iran agreement. Representatives Rod Blum (IA-01), David Young (IA-03), and Steve King (IA-04) voted no, as did all but one House Republican and 25 Democrats. Cristina Marcos reported for The Hill that “despite the defections, enough Democrats voted to support the deal to deprive the GOP of a veto-proof majority.” Keeping the no votes below a two-thirds majority was mostly a symbolic victory; President Barack Obama appears unlikely to need to exercise his veto power, now that Democrats have blocked a disapproval resolution in the U.S. Senate.

A few minutes after the first Iran-related vote today, House members approved by 247 votes to 186 a resolution “To suspend until January 21, 2017, the authority of the President to waive, suspend, reduce, provide relief from, or otherwise limit the application of sanctions pursuant to an agreement related to the nuclear program of Iran.” Only two House Democrats joined Republicans to support that measure. Again, the Iowans split along party lines.

Yesterday, on a straight party-line vote of 245 to 186, House members approved a resolution “Finding that the President has not complied with section 2 of the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015.” Marcos explained that the measure asserts “Obama didn’t provide Congress with all documents pertaining to the Iran deal in violation of the congressional review law passed earlier this year.” In May, Blum, Loebsack, Young, and King all supported the bill that cleared the way for this week’s Congressional votes on Iran. Bleeding Heartland compiled Iowa political reaction to the deal’s announcement in July here.

UPDATE: Added comments on the Iran deal from the Iowa Congressional delegation and the Republican Party of Iowa, which promised to make this vote a campaign issue against Loebsack in IA-02 next year.

He was Aylan Kurdi, a 3 year old boy with endless possibilities. Aylan was a baby boy before he was a refugee, and he could’ve been the next Norman Borlaug – not the next burden of the State. I say “refugee” because that’s the easiest word to use… Let’s not forget that they are people who need help who also happen to be refugees, not refugees who just so happen to be people.

I posted earlier about the refugee crisis here in Iowa. Obviously, the international spotlight has shifted towards refugees in Syria, in large part due to the lifeless 3 year old body of Aylan Kurdi, who tragically drowned during the dangerous journey towards a better life.

I was wrong to call the refugee situation in Iowa and around the world a “crisis,” but here’s why: A ‘crisis’ implies a sense of suddenness of a given situation. That is not the case. Syria has been falling apart for years, and the same goes for the dozens of other countries around the world where refugees languish in dangerous, understaffed, and undersupplied camps for well over a decade before they are resettled to a more peaceful, secure country.  

Outsiders reign supreme in Quinnipiac’s latest poll of “likely Republican Caucus participants” in Iowa. Click here for the polling memo and full results. After the jump I’ve posted a couple of tables from the release.

Donald Trump is the first choice of 27 percent of participants, with Ben Carson not far behind at 21 percent. Carson leads among self-identified “born-again evangelicals” in the respondent pool. Among all respondents, Ted Cruz places a distant third at 9 percent, followed by Jeb Bush (6 percent), Carly Fiorina, John Kasich, and Marco Rubio (5 percent each), Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, and don’t know/not answer (4 percent each).

Just a couple of months ago, Scott Walker led Quinnipiac’s Iowa poll with 18 percent support. The latest survey puts him in tenth place with 3 percent.

Adding today’s data to findings from other recent surveys, I believe we can answer the question Bleeding Heartland posed about the Wisconsin governor in March. Despite getting a decent head start here, Walker is looking like the second coming of Tim Pawlenty.

Any comments about the Republican presidential race are welcome in this thread.

I suppose it was inevitable that Representative Steve King would insert himself into the national debate over a Kentucky county clerk using her religious beliefs as an excuse not to do her job. King’s immediate reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on marriage equality was to urge states to “just abolish civil marriage, let’s go back to holy matrimony the way it began.” A couple of weeks later, he introduced a Congressional resolution saying states “may refuse to be bound by the holding in Obergefell v. Hodges” and “are not required to license same-sex marriage or recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.”

This past weekend, King lit up Twitter by saying of the Rowan County clerk who was jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses,

In 1963, we should not have honored SCOTUS decision to creat a wall of separation between prayer & school. Kim Davis for Rosa Parks Award.

On Tuesday, King doubled down in an interview with KSCJ radio in Sioux City: “Cheers for [Mike] Huckabee and [Ted] Cruz, whoever else has stepped up to defend Kim Davis. I think she deserves the Rosa Parks Award.”

Would you believe there was a time when King said calling for county officials to refuse to abide by a Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality was “no solution” in the battle to “protect marriage”?

This afternoon Democrats in the U.S. Senate blocked a motion to disapprove the deal the U.S. and five other countries reached with Iran in July. All 54 Republicans and four Democrats voted for the disapproval measure, which needed 60 votes to proceed under Senate rules. GOP leaders plan to return to the issue next week, but they are unlikely to change the minds of the 42 Democrats who upheld today’s filibuster. The U.S. House is expected to pass a disapproval motion, but without Senate action, President Barack Obama will not be forced to veto the measure.

Iowa’s Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst both voted for the bill that allowed Congress to weigh in on the Iran deal. Both were skeptical when the Obama administration announced the agreement. Yesterday and today, both delivered Senate floor speeches explaining why they oppose the deal. You can watch Grassley’s speech here and Ernst’s here. I enclose below full transcripts released by each senator’s office.

Incidentally, Ernst’s campaign committee is list-building off the issue. At the end of this post, I enclose an e-mail blast that went out minutes before the Senate voted.

UPDATE: Added below a statement Ernst’s office released after the vote.

Quinnipiac is out with a new poll showing 41 percent of likely Iowa Democratic caucus-goers favor Bernie Sanders, to 40 percent for Hillary Clinton, 12 percent for Joe Biden, 3 percent each for Martin O’Malley and undecided, 1 percent for Jim Webb, and less than 1 percent for Lincoln Chafee. Although several polling firms have shown Sanders ahead in New Hampshire, no previous survey has found him closer than 7 points behind Clinton in Iowa.

Quinnipiac’s poll surveyed 832 “likely Iowa Democratic Caucus participants” between August 27 and September 8, producing a statistical margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percent. Other Iowa polls in the field either during that window or a few days before it found Clinton leads ranging from 7 points (Selzer & Co’s survey for the Des Moines Register and Bloomberg Politics) to 11 points (NBC/Marist) to 25 points (Loras College) to 28 points (a Gravis Marketing survey that inexplicably included Elizabeth Warren).

Click here for the Quinnipiac polling memo and full results with questionnaire. The survey found “a wide gender gap among Democrats today as Sanders leads Clinton 49 – 28 percent among men, with 16 percent for Biden, while Clinton leads Sanders 49 – 35 percent among women, with 9 percent for Biden.” Clinton’s favorability rating of 76 percent is comparable to Sanders’ 78 percent and Biden’s 79 percent, but her unfavorable rating of 20 percent is much higher than that of Sanders or Biden (6 percent and 9 percent, respectively). Respondents rated Clinton higher for leadership qualities and “the right kind of temperament and personality to handle an international crisis as president.”

The Quinnipiac Poll’s assistant director Peter A. Brown compared Sanders to 1968 anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy, because he is “the candidate of the Democratic left, against his own party’s bosses and their prized presidential candidate […] Sanders has seized the momentum by offering a message more in line with disproportionately liberal primary and caucus voters.”

Many late summer wildflowers are loving the hot and wet weather we’ve had recently. I’ve noticed Jeruslaem artichoke, wingstem, and common sneezeweed thriving along trails in the Des Moines area.

This week’s featured Iowa wildflower is native to most of North America east of the Rocky Mountains and typically grows in wet habitats, including roadside ditches as well as higher-quality wetlands.

I took all of the enclosed photos of Common boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum) near the Windsor Heights bike trail, behind the Iowa Department of Natural Resources building on Hickman Road.

As a bonus, I’ve included at the end of this post some pictures of goldenrods with bizarre leaf clusters. I found them growing in Colby Park, near the other end of the Windsor Heights trail. Naturalist and photographer Leland Searles told me the strange foliage comes from a disease called aster yellows. Caused by a “bacterium-like organism called a phytoplasma,” aster yellows can affect some 300 different species, including common food crops and garden plants. Experts recommend removing infected plants as soon as possible, so keep that in mind if you see signs of aster yellows in your yard.  

Four Iowa Democratic county chairs made cogent arguments today for expanding the number of presidential debates before caucuses and primaries begin. In an accompanying statement, 27 local Democratic leaders in Iowa joined the call for more debates, starting sooner this year.

As usual, the Democratic National Committee failed to offer a compelling defense for their unprecedented and ridiculous policy limiting candidates to six officially sanctioned debates, starting in mid-October.  

Iowans elected school board members yesterday. Turnout remained depressingly low, considering the importance of public school governance. The Des Moines Register’s editors were right to call for moving school board elections to another time of year either coinciding with city elections in November or in the spring.

Nevertheless, thousands of highly engaged Iowa voters–including many Bleeding Heartland readers–got involved in their local school board races or followed them closely. This thread is for any comments about any election that attracted your attention.

I was thrilled to see Heather Anderson 36 votes ahead, according to unofficial results for the Des Moines School Board District 1 seat. On Monday, I heard longtime Des Moines School Board incumbent Dick Murphy had endorsed the other candidate, which strengthened my belief that Anderson can help change the culture of that board. Incidentally, her hard-working campaign manager was Finn Andersen, a former student in her classroom who is now in high school.

The returns from the Des Moines races pointed to the wisdom of shifting that school board to a combination of wards and at-large seats. More than 2,500 people cast ballots in the District 1 race (covering the west side), compared to fewer than 1,200 voters in District 2 (north side) and fewer than 600 voters in District 3 (east side). For many years, all the Des Moines School Board seats were elected at-large, and west-siders dominated the governing body. I share the widespread opinion that the phenomenon perpetuated inequities in Des Moines public schools.

John Deeth posted a detailed write-up of the Iowa City school board results. Turnout was a bit down from 2013 but still the second-highest recorded. The planned closure of Hoover Elementary has been a divisive issue for the community, reopening some wounds from the losing battle to save Roosevelt Elementary.

Congratulations to Drake University undergraduate Josh Hughes, who won the at-large seat on the I-35 school board. He must be one of the youngest Iowans elected to a school board in recent memory, and I hope others will be inspired by his example. Those who have recently experienced any district’s schools as a student will bring a different perspective to the table, compared to the parents who dominate most school boards.

Contradicting official documents released less than a week ago, Iowa Board of Regents President Bruce Rastetter announced yesterday that “he will seek $4.5 million in additional funding for the University of Iowa” during the 2017 fiscal year after all.

The three-sentence news release is intriguing on several levels:

1. The way it conflates Rastetter’s personal opinion with a shift in Board of Regents policy.

2. The unusual timing of a state government body announcing a policy change on a public holiday.

3. The unconvincing attempt to give newly-appointed University of Iowa President Bruce Harreld some credit for the conciliatory move.

4. The effort to spin a relatively small funding increase as a significant investment in the university’s “strengths” and “core mission.”

I always vote in school board elections, even non-contested ones, to prevent any stealth write-in candidate from winning. But until this year, I had never knocked on doors for a school board candidate. Nor have I endorsed a school board candidate at Bleeding Heartland before now.

Heather Anderson would be an exceptional voice on the Des Moines School Board. She is a creative thinker, hard worker, and good listener.

Anderson was one of five finalists for the Iowa Department of Education’s Iowa Teacher of the Year. She won the Iowa Division of the Izaak Walton League’s Teacher of the Year award. She won the Iowa State Education Association’s Excellence in Education Award too. None of those honors surprised anyone who had seen her in action.

Before either of my sons was assigned to Anderson’s classroom, I was aware of her efforts to enrich the learning environment at their elementary school. During the years she taught my sons, I continually saw her go above and beyond for her students and colleagues.

Watching her interact with children and adults in the classroom, on field trips, or at other school events, I saw how well Anderson relates to people with different temperaments and personality types. I think she possesses a rare combination of traditional intelligence (the “ability to learn, understand, and apply information and skills”) and interpersonal relationship skills (often called “EQ”).

Over the past decade, the Des Moines School Board has been too willing to go along with the recommendations of the superintendent, whoever he or she may be. I believe Anderson would provide a counterweight to what appears to be a “business as usual” board culture.

You can read more about Anderson’s background and comments from other supporters on her campaign website. The Des Moines Education Association, South Central Iowa Federation of Labor, and Central Iowa Building & Construction Trades Council have endorsed her candidacy.

If you live on the northwest side of Des Moines or in the Windsor Heights neighborhoods that are part of the Des Moines School District, I hope you will give Anderson your serious consideration for the District 1 seat. After the jump I’ve enclosed a map showing the district boundaries. Polls are open on Tuesday, September 8, from 7:00 am to 8:00 pm.

Happy Labor Day weekend to the Bleeding Heartland community! This is an open thread: all topics welcome. Click here for a brief history of the holiday.

For those wanting to enjoy the outdoors during the unofficial last weekend of summer, you may find some inspiration in the Iowa Department of Natural Resources’ list of fourteen “incredible hikes in our state parks and forests,” here and here. I’m embarrassed by how few of those parks I have visited, but I can highly recommend the walking trails at the Ledges and Dolliver Memorial State Parks.

Three more polling firms have released new Iowa caucus surveys since last weekend’s Selzer poll for the Des Moines Register and Bloomberg news. Highlights are after the jump. All recent polls put Donald Trump and Ben Carson well ahead of the rest of the Republican field in Iowa. Bernie Sanders has clearly gained some ground on Hillary Clinton, but other polls have found a larger lead for the Democratic front-runner here than Selzer did.

Eric Boehlert was quick to criticize the media for giving Selzer’s poll of Iowa Democrats such big play last weekend, even though it looks like an “outlier” in his view. I take his point, but the last time I said a Selzer poll appeared to be an outlier, I had to eat my words.

Before I get to the polls below, here’s one for the “campaigns don’t matter” crowd, who believe economic conditions largely decide presidential elections. The Moody’s Analytics model “now predicts a Democratic electoral landslide in the 2016 presidential vote,” with 326 electoral votes for the Democratic nominee and 212 to the Republican. Click through for more information on the Moody’s methodology.

Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller has informed 56 Republican state legislators that his office has neither “jurisdiction over transfers of fetal tissue” nor the “authority to investigate or demand information about the transfer of fetal tissue.” In a letter dated today, Miller noted that “Iowa does not have any state laws governing the transfer of fetal tissue,” which means that only offices of U.S. Attorneys are able to enforce federal laws in this area.

Last month, the GOP lawmakers asked Miller’s office “to investigate current and planned abortion operations within Iowa to ensure compliance with the law.” Their letter set out ten detailed questions regarding the disposal, donation, or possible sale of body parts following abortions. Miller directed the legislators to contact U.S. attorneys’ offices in Iowa if they “have reliable information that federal laws relating to fetal tissue are being violated.”

I enclose below the August 24 letter from Iowa House and Senate Republicans, today’s written response from Miller, and a two-page letter Planned Parenthood of the Heartland provided to the Attorney General’s Office regarding the lawmakers’ query. Planned Parenthood’s response noted that the organization “does not now, and has not in the past, participated in” any fetal tissue donation programs but adheres to “rigorous standards of care” and “compliance with all applicable laws and regulations” in every area of its work, including abortion services.

Many Iowa Republicans will be furious, not only because Miller will not act on their unfounded suspicions, but also because the Attorney General’s Office responded to their query in what appears to be a textbook late-afternoon, pre-holiday-weekend news dump.

Also worth noting: Iowa House Speaker-select Linda Upmeyer and incoming House Majority Leader Chris Hagenow did not sign the August 24 letter to Miller, but House Speaker Pro-Tem Matt Windschitl, incoming Majority Whip Joel Fry, and Assistant Majority Leaders Zach Nunn, Jarad Klein, and Walt Rogers did. Iowa Senate Minority Leader Bill Dix did not sign the letter, but Minority Whip Jack Whitver and Assistant Minority Leaders Rick Bertrand, Randy Fenestra, Charles Schneider, and David Johnson did.

The newly-appointed president of the University of Iowa, J. Bruce Harreld, said yesterday,

“I will be the first to admit that my unusual background requires a lot of help, a lot of coaching,” Harreld told reporters after the Iowa Board of Regents voted unanimously to give him the job. “And I’m going to turn to a whole lot of people that were highly critical and really tough on me the other day and ask them if they would be great mentors and teachers (to me). And I suspect and hope all of them will.”

Others are better-equipped to help Harreld adapt to a leadership role at a research university, a setting where he has never worked, aside from some adjunct teaching.

But having spent some time in academic culture, I offer Harreld this suggestion: stop passing yourself off as the sole author of published works to which others contributed.

I used to loathe the end of January. Around that time, anxiety-ridden managers would start suggesting that I help organize the Black History Month activities for February. Bless their hearts. They either genuinely felt our staff needed to be more conscious of the contributions African Americans made to society, or somewhere in their manager handbook, this was mentioned in the cultural sensitivity part.

Growing up, I was always slated to read the “I Have A Dream,” speech in class or chosen to explain how the Underground Railroad operated without physical tracks. Back in 1st grade, when our progressive music teacher wanted us to learn about soulful pop music, she wrote a play and cast me as Michael Jackrabbit, the moonwalking bunny with a culturally ambiguous face.

All of this was a version of tokenism that I had become accustomed to before I even knew tokenism was a thing. Tokenism is race and gender agnostic. No one is safe. Consider the exemplary woman who has broken into the good ‘ole boys club of corporate America, or the lone gay man at a job  brimming with tough guys and their laughable displays of machismo, or in my case, the prototypical black face in nearly every social group to which I’ve belonged. Anyone can become a victim of tokenism, but it will always befall the Only One in the Room, a phrase that I’ve borrowed from a recent NPR article. The article, “On Wyatt Cenac, Key & Peele, And Being The Only One In the Room,” describes situations wherein there is only one minority in a group, otherwise known as the last 20 years of my life. Life is hard for the token, and it’s hard for the Only One. When you are both at once, it feels like playing a game of chess while balancing on a high wire.

By a unanimous vote, the Iowa Board of Regents today named J. Bruce Harreld as the next president of the University of Iowa. Of the four finalists for the job, only Harreld had never worked in academic administration. Up to now, his experience at universities has been limited to some adjunct teaching.

I’m going on record now: this experiment will not end well.

Another Throwback Thursday post is coming later today, but I’ve been meaning to catch Bleeding Heartland readers up on Anesa Kajtazovic. She served two terms in the Iowa House, having stepped in following legal troubles for the previous Democratic incumbent in a Waterloo-based district. Kajtazovic did not seek re-election to the state legislature in 2014. Instead, she ran for Congress in Iowa’s first district, finishing fourth in the Democratic primary.

The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier reported in June that Kajtazovic had become executive director of the Family & Children’s Council of Black Hawk County, a non-profit “focused on child and sex abuse prevention, parenting education and other programming.” At this writing, the council’s website is down, but this note on the organization’s Facebook page summarizes various parenting classes, children’s programs, and family services offered in the Cedar Valley area. A few weeks ago, Holly Hudson reported for the Courier on Kajtazovic’s work for the Family & Children’s Council. I’ve posted excerpts after the jump, but I encourage you to click through to read the whole piece.

Our culture tends to glamorize success in the business world, rather than the non-profit sector. But I can hardly think of a more valuable way for Kajtazovic to dedicate her time and energy. The Family & Children’s Council is working on many of the most pressing issues related to children’s physical safety and long-term health. Vehicle accidents are a leading cause of death and serious injury; the council helps provide car seats to needy families and runs training sessions on how to use them properly. The council’s staff “visit well over 600 families [of newborns] a year in the hospitals,” according to Kajtazovic. That kind of outreach to parents of newborns has been shown to reduce child abuse. Social workers may also spot early risk factors for postpartum depression, helping women find resources if needed. Other staff or volunteers reach thousands of children in area schools with programs like “Take Charge of Your Body,” a curriculum aimed at preventing sexual abuse. Ideally, parents would teach their children about good touch/bad touch and similar rules. But since those conversations are not happening in many households, what a child learns at school about saying no, getting away, and telling an adult could be life-changing.

I don’t often feature vines for Iowa wildflower Wednesday, because I can rarely identify them. This vine is so abundant near the Windsor Heights bike trail that I was motivated to learn more. At first I thought it was Moonseed (Menispermum canadense), but the flowers didn’t match, and the vines are blooming now, rather than in late spring/early summer like moonseed.

Naturalist and photographer Leland Searles confirmed that this vine is Bur cucumber (Sicyos angulatus), “central Iowa’s only native cucurbit.” Sometimes called Star cucumber or one-seed burr cucumber, this species is native to most of North America east of the Rocky Mountains. The vine “produces both staminate (male) and pistillate (female) flowers on the same plant.” I enclose below pictures of both kinds of flowers, blooming on vines large and small.

This post is also a mid-week open thread: all topics welcome.

Two months after the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously ruled unconstitutional a proposed state ban on using telemedicine for abortions, the Iowa Board of Medicine and Governor Terry Branstad are at last ready to accept the court ruling as the final word on the subject.