Last month, while writing about Iowa getting an “F” grade for its open-records law, I commented:

The Register’s editorial board writes a lot about open-records law, and I give them credit for that. Unfortunately, under Gannett’s ownership, the Register hasn’t devoted nearly enough resources to solid investigative reporting.

I wish the editors were assigning more reporters to dig into the information that’s already publicly available.

Former Register editorial page editor Gil Cranberg develops that thought in an op-ed for the independent weekly Cityview, which asks why journalists did not uncover wrongdoing at the Central Iowa Employment and Training Consortium (CIETC):

The “CIETC scandal” was truly scandalous – as we’re reminded by the trials that kicked off last week – but it’s a mistake to blame it on a lack of “transparency” or to make it a poster child for Senate File 2378. The overpayments to CIETC executives were hiding in plain sight. The state auditor found them, and made a fuss, without having to issue subpoenas. For all of the ink spilled about CIETC I’m not aware of any that was used to explain how and why the press missed the huge overpayments until many months later when the auditor cried foul.

Sure, it helps to have strong laws to let the sunshine in. But inexperienced citizens can only do so much to uncover wrongdoing. If sunshine laws are to be effective, they have to be implemented by a press with the staff and space to make people sit up and take notice.

Unfortunately, the press is deep into retrenchment mode. Notice how page widths have narrowed? That means less space for news coverage. It’s the rare paper that trumpets how many fewer reporters, copy editors and editors it has, but loss of staff is unmistakable.

In the same issue of Cityview, the author of the “Civic Skinny” column delights in noting that the Des Moines Register just got shut out of the Pulitzers again,

as it has been every year since 1991. What’s more, alack, no Gannett newspaper won a Pulitzer – or was even a finalist this year.

If you want to win a Pulitzer, it helps to put some resources into investigative reporting.

You can find statistics about sexual assault and resources for survivors and those who wish to become counselors at the website of the Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault:

IowaCASA’s mission is to unite people and organizations to promote a society free from sexual violence and to meet the diverse needs of survivors.

[…] Today, IowaCASA has 27 member sexual assault crisis centers serving survivors of sexual assault throughout Iowa. Eleven staff work on several initiatives including: technical assistance and training to member centers; civil legal assistance for survivors of sexual assault, including immigration assistance; improving responses to sexual assault within communities of color; a training initiative for assisting survivors with developmental disabilities; a national project providing peer-based assistance to other sexual assault coalitions; statewide sexual assault prevention; training for allied professionals; and public policy efforts at the state and national level.

If you or someone you care about is in danger because of an abusive situation, the site provides this advice:

Email is not a safe or confidential way to talk to someone about the danger or abuse in your life. To discuss a confidential issue please call our office at 515-244-7424 or the statewide Iowa Sexual Abuse Hotline at 1-800-284-7821 to be connected to a sexual assault counselor in your area.

I’ve put contact information for all member centers of the Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault after the jump.

Uh oh. The Des Moines Register is warning that “a new law that requires all Iowa youngsters to be tested for lead by the time they enter kindergarten could swamp state and local taxpayers in ways lawmakers did not foresee.”

House File 158 was passed last year as part of a campaign against lead poisoning, which health officials describe as one of the most preventable causes of learning disabilities and brain damage in young children. Statewide, more than 10,000 Iowans under age 6 had toxic levels of lead in their blood between 2002 and 2006. Thousands more likely went unnoticed, officials say, because they weren’t tested.

The new law is scheduled to take effect this fall.

“I like to describe these kids as canaries in the coal mine,” said Rick Kozin of the Polk County Health Department. “We let the kids get sick, and then we identify the problem homes.

“With this law, we’re going to find more canaries than we’ve ever found before.”

But health and housing experts say the ripple effect of the law could devastate public and private pocketbooks. Potential fallout includes:

A statewide shortage of inspectors qualified to check houses where lead-poisoned children live or play.

Huge bills, measured in tens of thousands of dollars, to clean or remove lead.

Unprecedented demand for temporary housing when lead-related work forces families from their homes.

“This could be overwhelming,” Polk County Supervisor Angela Connolly said.

While spending tens of thousands of dollars to deal with lead in a building may seem like a lot of money, consider this: children affected by lead poisoning are more likely to need costly special-education programs in school. That’s not a one-time cost, that’s every year they are in school.

Also, lead exposure has been linked to criminal activity. Research suggests that removing lead from paint and gasoline in the 1970s is one reason that violent crime rates in the U.S. dropped dramatically in the 1990s.

Building more prisons to house more criminals is extremely costly in human terms as well as monetarily.

If we remove lead paint hazards from homes, we will reduce exposure for all future children living in those homes, which will save us money in our education budgets and will possibly reduce crime far into the future.

Let’s not be penny-wise and pound-foolish in dealing with this problem.

[First, a cheap plug for my blog Senate 2008 Guru: Following the Races.]

Does it seem like there’s a new Republican scandal in the news every single week?  Well, that may be because there is.

That seems like an awful lot of corruption, scandal, hypocrisy, impropriety, and jail-worthy crime, huh?  A lot of corruption.  One might say an entire Culture of Corruption.