What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? Iowa’s deer hunting season began on Saturday. Dates, rules and regulations are on the Department of Natural Resources website. Hunters can use any kind of ammunition in Iowa, but non-toxic options like copper kill more effectively, leaving higher-quality meat without exposing humans, birds, or other wildlife to lead.

The overpopulation of deer has been on Senator Chuck Grassley’s mind ever since he was a passenger in a car that hit a deer in October. He is on a mission to lengthen the hunting season by raising awareness about the dangers of deer on the roads. After the jump I’ve compiled all of Grassley’s recent twitter posts on the subject. His comments about deer have attracted a cult following and typically get hundreds of “re-tweets.”

Disease related to this year’s drought has brought the deer population to its lowest level since 2003. In fact, statistics from the DNR and the Iowa Department of Transportation indicate that the deer-vehicle crash rate is “at its lowest level in 25 years.”

This is an open thread: all topics welcome.

Democratic candidate Susan Judkins halted the recount and conceded defeat in Iowa House district 43 today: “Questions about whether all absentee ballots were counted have been satisfactorily answered and I believe my narrow loss would likely stand even if all ballots were considered.” After the official canvass, Republican incumbent Chris Hagenow led by 22 votes out of nearly 17,500 cast.

A recount of the open-seat race in Iowa House district 63 concluded yesterday. Republican Sandy Salmon defeated Democrat Bill Heckroth by a little more than 100 votes out of nearly 16,500 cast.

And in a final disappointment for Iowa Democrats, Republican Mike Breitbach held onto a narrow lead over John Beard after a recount in the open Senate district 28. I’ve heard conflicting reports about the final margin, which is probably either 17 or 22 votes out of nearly 30,000 cast.

Both parties have won some close statehouse races in Iowa over the years, but this year Democrats lost most of the heartbreakers.

Republicans have a 53 to 46 Iowa House majority, with a special election in House district 52 coming up soon. Democrats have a 26 to 23 Iowa Senate majority, with a special election in Senate district 22 set for December 11.

Tom Sauser, a retired middle school teacher and New Hampton High School coach, declared his candidacy yesterday in Iowa House district 52. A special election to replace Democratic State Representative Brian Quirk will take place in early 2013. Bleeding Heartland posted a district map and voter registration numbers here.

After the jump I’ve posted Sauser’s campaign announcement, which includes a short bio. He was Quirk’s high school football coach. A lot of Iowa House members are current or retired teachers. They can be good candidates, because hundreds or thousands of potential constituents are former students or relatives of students.

I’ll be interested to see whether any Democrat from Floyd County seeks the nomination in this race. Both parties will hold choose candidates for House district 52 in special district nominating conventions.

UPDATE: Quirk confirms that he recruited Sauser, and Craig Clark of Floyd County says he will run in the special election, probably as an independent. Clark received about 29 percent of the vote as an independent candidate against Quirk this year. No Republican ran for the seat.

SECOND UPDATE: Governor Terry Branstad set the special election for Tuesday, January 22. That’s the week after the 2013 legislative session begins.

Iowa Department of Natural Resources Director Chuck Gipp is asking for $1.3 million in additional state funding to help his agency hire eleven new livestock facility inspectors for next year. Gipp has been affiliated with agricultural interest groups throughout his career. He just endorsed a strategy on keeping nutrients of out waterways that was “fiercely criticized” by Iowa DNR staffers with the most expertise on farm runoff.

Why would Gipp suddenly ask for more DNR inspectors? According to his own testimony, he’s trying to keep the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing Clean Water Act provisions against Iowa livestock farms.

Yesterday the Iowa House Democrats announced ranking members for all the standing and appropriations committees for the 2013 legislative session. Below I’ve posted the full list of House minority leaders and ranking members. Where relevant, I’ve noted changes since last year. House Democrats will start the session with 46 caucus members, because State Representative Brian Quirk just resigned his seat.

House Republicans named all the committee chairs earlier this week.

Talk about a bolt from the blue: State Representative Brian Quirk announced today that he is resigning from the Iowa House. His decision forces a special election in House district 52, where voters just elected the Democrat to his seventh term.

UPDATE: Added details on Quirk’s new job below.

State Representative Chuck Isenhart has formally asked Iowa Department of Natural Resources Director Chuck Gipp and Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey to extend the public comment period on Iowa’s latest water quality policy. Shortly before Thanksgiving, officials revealed a draft strategy “to assess and reduce nutrients delivered to Iowa waterways and the Gulf of Mexico.” The 45-day public comment period falls mostly during the holiday season.

Isenhart, the ranking Democrat on the Iowa House Environmental Protection Committee, pointed out that a 30-day extension of the comment period would allow for feedback from the Watershed Planning Advisory Council and from relevant Iowa House and Senate committees. The legislature’s 2013 session will open on January 14, ten days after the current public comment period expires.

Isenhart also suggested that an extension would be fair to stakeholder groups and members of the public who didn’t have the “privilege” of reading the draft nutrient strategy before last week. Stakeholders whose leaders got a “head start” on reviewing the policy before the official roll-out include agricultural commodity groups, the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation, the Iowa League of Cities, the Iowa Association of Business and Industry, and the Iowa Waste Water Association.

The full text of Isenhart’s letter is below. Last month Gipp denied a request to extend public comments on a complex air quality permit linked to a large fertilizer plant construction project.

More than 1,100 people attended the Governor’s Bullying Prevention Summit in Des Moines yesterday. To his credit, Governor Terry Branstad stayed all day to listen to speakers like Sioux City Superintendent of Schools Paul Gausman and Rosalind Wiseman, author of the book “Queen Bees and Wannabes.” The governor also announced a new hotline and website designed to help young people targeted by bullies.

I was unable to watch the livestream from what sounds like a fantastic event. After the jump I’ve posted a bunch of news and links about the summit as well as background on Iowa’s anti-bullying policies.  

The Russian expression “stepping on the same rake twice” means to repeat a stupid mistake without learning from the adverse consequences. That idiom came to mind when I saw that the Club for Growth and Senator Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund are already on the warpath against a strong Republican candidate in one of the 2014 U.S. Senate races.

As Republicans in Iowa and across the country ponder how to improve their chances in the next presidential election, bashing the Ames straw poll is all the rage.

Most strategists and politicians recognize that the Republican Party of Iowa needs to dump or radically reinvent its largest pre-caucus fundraiser, traditionally held during the August before the Iowa caucuses. But a few people can’t read the writing on the wall.

Iowa House Speaker Kraig Paulsen has announced who will lead all the standing and appropriations committees for the 2013 legislative session. Below I’ve posted the full list of Republican House leaders and committee chairs. Where relevant, I’ve noted changes since last year.

Democrats will hold a slim majority in the next Iowa Senate: most likely 26-24 or 27-23, depending on the outcome of one recount and one special election in December. But the experience gap between the two parties’ caucuses is wider than I’ve ever seen, and perhaps unprecedented.

Only five Republicans who will serve in the next Iowa Senate have more than four years experience in the legislature’s upper chamber. Most of the old hands aren’t on the GOP leadership team. By comparison, eighteen Senate Democrats have held that office for more than four years. Thirteen of those have served in the upper chamber for at least a decade.

Many newcomers to the Iowa Senate have helped oversee public-sector budgets and programs as county supervisors, mayors, or members of city councils and school boards. Nevertheless, new legislators have a steep learning curve because state government is more complex than local government, and Iowa House and Senate members consider a wider range of issues during a typical legislative session. Whereas eleven Senate Democrats previously served in the Iowa House, only three sitting Republicans came to the Senate with that background. If the GOP had gained control of the upper chamber in this year’s elections, they would have been forced to put quite a few rookies in charge of standing committees.

After the jump I’ve posted details on the tenure of all incoming Iowa Senate members, indicating members of each party’s leadership team and past service in the Iowa House.

What’s on your mind, Bleeding Heartland readers? I hope you had an enjoyable Thanksgiving holiday and will have time to relax this weekend.

For those who cooked a big meal yesterday, here are four ways to make soup from Thanksgiving leftovers (two using leftovers from roasting a turkey, one using sweet potatoes, and one using mashed potatoes). You can mix extra cranberry sauce with diced apples to make a pie.

Share your own favorite recipes or comments on any topic below. This is an open thread.

The Iowa PIRG Education Fund released its 27th annual report on dangerous toys today. The five most common hazards in products marketed for children are: lead, phthalates, magnets, choking hazards, and noisy toys.

You can download the full text of “Trouble in Toyland” here (pdf). I’ve posted the executive summary after the jump. U.S. PIRG has created this toy safety interactive website, which consumers can access on smartphones.

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida addressed a full house last Saturday while helping Governor Terry Branstad raise about a half-million dollars for his re-election campaign. Since Rubio is a likely presidential candidate  

A new study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that the gap between the richest and poorest Americans grew substantially during the last decade, both in Iowa and across the country. The authors used “the latest Census Bureau data to measure post-federal-tax changes in real incomes among high-, middle- and low-income households in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia at four points: the late 1970s, the late 1990s, and the mid-2000s – similar points (“peaks”) in the business cycle – and the late 2000s.”

Click here to read the full report and view data from each state. After the jump I’ve posted the key findings about income inequality in Iowa, where the average incomes among the richest 5 percent of households are 3.5 times as large as the average incomes in the middle 20 percent and 8.7 times as large as average incomes in the bottom 20 percent of households. Speaking to the Public News Service, Elizabeth McNichol of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explained why growing income inequality is bad for the economy as a whole.

Iowa officials formally unveiled a new strategy yesterday “to assess and reduce nutrients delivered to Iowa waterways and the Gulf of Mexico.” As the Des Moines Register’s Perry Beeman reported last week, the policy related to farm runoff was drafted without input from key Iowa Department of National Resources personnel. Instead, it closely resembles positions advocated by the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation.

The best time to roll out a policy that goes against the public interest is when few people are paying attention. Citizens will have only 45 days to comment on the new Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy. Most of the comment period falls during the Thanksgiving to New Year’s holiday season. More details are below.

Leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People urged Governor Terry Branstad yesterday to change Iowa’s extreme restrictions on voting rights for ex-felons and to address the huge race disparity in Iowa incarceration rates.

More than 100 scientists and researchers from 27 Iowa colleges and universities have signed a new statement on the relationship between climate change and weather extremes like the drought of 2012.

Iowa Senate Democrats caucused at the state capitol yesterday to choose their leaders for the next legislative session. As expected, Mike Gronstal remains Senate majority leader. The big change will be Pam Jochum of Dubuque as Senate president to replace Jack Kibbie, who retired last year.

After the jump I’ve enclosed background on Jochum and details on the rest of the Iowa Senate leadership team. Republicans elected leaders of their Senate caucus last week. Both parties will announce committee assignments before the end of the year.