Dean Lerner served Iowa as an Assistant Attorney General for sixteen years, Chief Deputy Secretary of State for four years, and about ten years as Deputy Director, then Director of the Department of Inspections & Appeals. He then worked for the CMS Director of the Division of Nursing Homes, and the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Iowa. He is a graduate of Grinnell College and Drake University Law School.

The unimaginable has now become commonplace:

Stripping health care from 56,000 Iowans.

Taking food assistance and safety nets away from Iowa’s children, seniors, and veterans.

Adding $3.3 trillion to the national deficit. And on and on….

Rick Morain is the former publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, for which he writes a regular column.

The United States system of government is one of the most complicated such mechanisms in the world. It’s a blessing and a curse.

A blessing, because it disperses power. That’s what the Founders intended with the Constitution in 1787, and it’s what has guided America since then. Federalism (dividing power between the national government and the state governments) and a tripartite national government (dividing power among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches) give everyone a piece of the power pie. Theoretically, at least.

A curse, for the same reasons. Dispersed power creates inevitable disputes over which entity holds the upper hand in innumerable cases every day. To borrow a term from former President George W. Bush, just who is The Decider?

When President Donald Trump gave Senator Chuck Grassley his “complete and total endorsement” during an October 2021 rally at the Iowa State Fairgrounds, he said one undeniably truthful thing about Iowa’s senior senator: “When I’ve needed him for help he was always there. […] He was with us all the way, every time I needed something.”

At the latest Trump rally in Des Moines, Grassley showed once again that the president’s assessment was on the money.

Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa journalist. He is the co-founder of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation and a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, where this article first appeared on The Iowa Mercury newsletter. His family operated the Carroll Times Herald for 93 years in Carroll, Iowa where Burns resides.

It hit me in the heat of the evening.

President Donald Trump models his stage style after none other than Frank Sinatra.

The swagger, the rhythm of the humor, the observations about women. (I heard Trump thank a female voter once at another event. He called her “doll.”)

A Trump speech like the one in Des Moines on July 3 takes cues from the famous Sinatra album/CD “Sinatra At the Sands,” in which the crooner ad libs in a swinging way, baby, between songs.

The Sinatra influence on Trump is uncanny — similar to what you see with Bill Maher’s opening monologues on “Real Time,” clearly inspired by Johnny Carson.

Trump came to Iowa to kick off the America 250 celebration: a slate of events scheduled for nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026.

The president addressed thousands at the sun-swept, scorched Iowa State Fairgrounds.

Here are ten takeaways from the event, which Iowa Mercury covered in person.

Steve Corbin is emeritus professor of marketing at the University of Northern Iowa and a contributing columnist to 246 newspapers and 48 social media platforms in 45 states, who receives no remuneration, funding, or endorsement from any for-profit business, nonprofit organization, political action committee, or political party. 

Peggy Noonan has been a conservative voice for The Wall Street Journal since leaving the Ronald Reagan administration as his primary speechwriter. Five of Noonan’s books have been New York Times bestsellers. Consuming every word of her weekly column keeps me politically balanced.

In Noonan’s June 14-15 column titled “America is losing sight of its political culture,” she characterized our 47^th president as America’s Mr. Tinpot Dictator. This term refers to a leader who acts like a dictator, often with delusions of grandeur and authoritarian tendencies. I decided to investigate how much Trump resembles a dictator.

Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.

Given the turmoil of today’s politics and environmental concerns, it’s time to revisit Okefenokee Swamp and attend to the wisdom of Pogo Possum. He sagely advised more than 50 years ago, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Cartoonist Walt Kelly wrote that line for the Pogo comic strip in 1971, as Pogo Possum and one of his cartoon companions, Porky Pine, surveyed the human despoliation of their wetlands home. The swamp covers almost half a million acres straddling the Georgia-Florida border; the cartoon depicted it as awash in discarded furniture, a bath tub, a car half sunk in the swamp and other tons of trash.

Al Charlson is a North Central Iowa farm kid, lifelong Iowan, and retired bank trust officer.

I had to send Senator Chuck Grassley a quick email to thank him for starting my day with a chuckle. In the latest edition of his email newsletter “The Scoop,” he commended the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that federal district courts do not have the authority to issue universal injunctions blocking the Administration’s Executive Order. Grassley declared the decision “a victory for checks and balances.”

Checks and balances? Since Grassley and his Senate Republican colleagues voluntarily abdicated their Constitutional authority, responsibilities, and prerogatives, we no longer have a functioning constitutional representative democracy. We essentially have a king.

Of course, the biggest show in Washington, D.C. has been the around-the-clock push to pass a budget reconciliation bill. Republicans want to get the One Big, Beautiful Bill (also known as a Big Ugly Mess) to President Donald Trump’s desk for a reality TV style triumphant bill signing on the Fourth of July. The days-long Senate debate ended on July 1 with a dramatic tie-breaking vote by Vice President J.D. Vance. Grassley and Iowa’s junior Senator Joni Ernst voted for the bill, along with all but three of their GOP colleagues.

Congressional Republican leadership have characterized the bill as Trump’s domestic policy agenda. That’s misleading at best. At its core, this legislation is the Senate Republican leadership’s tax cut agenda with enough of Trump’s ideas and MAGA bumper stickers attached to keep his support base on board.

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He can be reached at BruceLear2419@gmail.com 

It was a hot mid-August day in 1979. School hadn’t started, but football had. Sweat trickled down my back as I struggled to make a no window, tiny, drab space come alive. The room remained dead, and I was dead tired.

Just as I was going out, I almost collided with the superintendent coming in. I’d met him once, and I had no desire in a sweat soaked shirt to meet him again.

“I’m glad I caught you. I was wondering if you’d run the scoreboard for the game on Friday.”

John Kearney is a retired philosophy professor who taught at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has lived in Waterloo, Iowa for the past six years.

After twenty-eight years of distinguished service, ABC national correspondent Terry Moran is out of a job. He was recently informed that his contract with ABC will not be renewed. The network determined that Moran’s late-night post on X about White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller violated journalistic standards.

Moran’s June 8 post described Miller as “a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred. He’s a world-class hater. You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.”

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He can be reached at BruceLear2419@gmail.com 

When my three-year-old granddaughter and I took walks, she’d suddenly stop and stare at a long narrow stick, an uncoiled hose, or a piece of rope. Her hand would tighten in mine, as she crouched for a better look. After a minute or so she’d solemnly pronounce, “not a snake.”

She wasn’t sure what she was looking at, but after careful study, she knew what it wasn’t. We can learn a lesson from a tiny granddaughter looking at life on a walk. She didn’t try to make the new object fit into her understanding, but she needed assurance about what it wasn’t.

It’s difficult making sense of the political chaos engulfing America. It’s hard to name it. It’s easier to look and say, “not normal.”

Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.

On June 1, 1950, U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith (a Republican from Maine) delivered a speech that she called her “Declaration of Conscience.” She targeted fellow Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and the fear, hate mongering, and divisiveness that was tearing the nation apart in McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade to make America great again.

Seventy-five years after Smith showed courage and patriotism, Republican Senator Joni Ernst took the opposite path. She mocked an Iowan who cried out against GOP legislation and MAGA efforts that divide the nation today.

Dan Piller was a business reporter for more than four decades, working for the Des Moines Register and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He covered the oil and gas industry while in Texas and was the Register’s agriculture reporter before his retirement in 2013. He lives in Ankeny.

World War II is still The Good War.

The celebration last month of the 80^th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in May, 1945 was the latest rush of World War II nostalgia, joining a similar timed anniversary last year of the D-Day landings in Normandy in June, 1944, and the 85^th anniversary of the British evacuation from the disaster at Dunkirk in early June, 1940.

World War II still draws audiences. On American television, “Band of Brothers” remains a streaming sensation with a companion “Masters of the Air” released this year. Subscribers with enough channel power regularly call up Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” (1998) and Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” (2017), both of which had enjoyed strong theater runs.

It’s not hard to see why Americans have maintained a nostalgic obsession with the Allied victory in Europe in 1945. The European theater included the ancestral homelands of most Americans. The vanquished Nazis could be loathed without reservation and their end came without an unexpected shock that the atomic bomb provided for the defeat of Japan in the Pacific. Unlike the glorified truce of 1918, the victory over Germany in 1945 was decisive and total, not subjected to the “stab in the back” ruminations that fed later Hitlerian resentment.

Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes openness and transparency in Iowa’s state and local governments. He can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com. This essay first appeared on his Substack newsletter, Stray Thoughts.

If an opinionated old guy from southern Iowa delivered the recent commencement address at the United States Military Academy, my message would have contrasted with the one given by another opinionated old guy, one from Queens, New York, by way of the White House.

When I was a newspaper editor, I sometimes told the staff they needed to run a belt sander across an article to remove rough spots before publication. So it was with President Donald Trump’s speech to 1,000 new Army second lieutenants at West Point in May. His staff needed to take the Oval Office belt sander to his message.

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He can be reached at BruceLear2419@gmail.com 

Over time, essential items seem to vanish and are quickly replaced by new technology. Home phones gave way to cell phones now found in most 5^th grader pockets.

Video tapes and CDs died and were resurrected as movie streaming and digital music. Once a badly folded map gave directions. Now, we talk to GPS, and it orders us, “Make a U-turn as soon as possible.”

Politics isn’t immune either. Principled conservatives disappeared and have been replaced by enablers.

Two Iowa jurists have signed on to an amicus brief calling for a federal court to dismiss the indictment against Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan. Federal prosecutors charged the judge with concealing a person from arrest and obstructing an official proceeding after she allegedly helped a defendant in her courtroom avoid immigration law enforcement. She has pleaded not guilty and moved to dismiss the charges.

Former U.S. District Court Judge Mark W. Bennett and former Iowa Supreme Court Chief Justice Marsha Ternus were among the 138 retired judges who signed the brief, filed on May 30 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. The signatories served on courts in 24 different states or were appointed to the federal bench by Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George H.W. Bush. Their brief argued, “The government’s indictment of Judge Dugan represents an extraordinary and direct assault on the independence of the entire judicial system.”

In early May, Judge Bennett and Justice Ternus signed an open letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, which condemned the Trump administration’s various attempts to “intimidate and threaten the judiciary.”

Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes openness and transparency in Iowa’s state and local governments. He can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com. This essay first appeared on his Substack newsletter, Stray Thoughts.

Last week, the Pentagon accepted the emir of Qatar’s gift of a Boeing 747, a $400 million bauble donated for our president to enjoy by a monarch whose family has ruled the tiny Mideast nation for more than a century.

Our commander in chief said the United States would be stupid to reject the donation—a present he hopes to use as a temporary replacement for Air Force One. The key word there: a temporary replacement.

Controversy clouds this gift for a couple of reasons. And Iowa’s public gift law—which deals with freebies much less ostentatious than the Qatari jet—provides important context on the controversy.

President Donald Trump marked Memorial Day on May 26 with an all-caps rant about “scum” who allegedly “spent the last four years trying to destroy our country,” and “USA hating judges” he characterized as “monsters who want our country to go to hell.” It’s becoming a regular thing for Trump to use this day as another excuse to settle scores with political opponents.

Most people in public life understand that the holiday originally known as Decoration Day is intended to honor Americans who died during military service.

The Iowa National Guard posted a video on May 26 to illustrate the training that goes into offering military funeral honors at approximately 1,400 services in Iowa each year. Sgt. Lorenzo Lopez of the Iowa Army National Guard’s Military Funeral Honors team explained the various roles and steps, and how team members focus on being “precise” with their movements.

“President Trump was right about everything—build the wall, end catch-and-release, and stand with law enforcement,” wrote Attorney General Brenna Bird in a May 21 post on her campaign Facebook page. She was near the U.S. border with Mexico, at a press conference organized by the Republican Attorneys General Association.

The Iowa Attorney General’s office didn’t release a statement about the trip before or afterwards, and didn’t post about it on Bird’s official Facebook or X/Twitter feeds.

That makes sense, because Bird didn’t go to Arizona to perform any official duties. The trip was the latest sign that she is desperate to secure President Donald Trump’s endorsement as she considers whether to run for governor in 2026.

Bill Bumgarner is a retired former health care executive from northwest Iowa who worked
in hospital management for 41 years, mostly in the state of Iowa.

Prior to retiring at the end of 2023, I worked in hospital leadership for 41 years. For the last 24 years of that time, I served as president at two hospitals in rural Iowa.

I’ll be quick to my point and blunt. When President Donald Trump or any Republican member of the U.S. House or Senate tells you that their Medicaid budget plans are strictly focused on cutting waste, fraud and abuse, they’re lying.

All four Iowans in the U.S. House voted on May 22 to pass a federal budget reconciliation package combining massive tax cuts with deep spending cuts on health care and food assistance.

The early morning vote on the “One Big Beautiful Act” (adopting President Donald Trump’s preferred phrase) followed an all-night debate. House leaders rushed the vote before the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) could analyze a manager’s amendment released on the evening of May 21, which made many substantive changes to tax provisions and deepened the planned Medicaid cuts.

House members approved the measure by 215 votes to 214, with two Republicans joining all Democrats to vote no, and one Republican voting “present.” The one-vote margin means U.S. Representatives Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01), Ashley Hinson (IA-02), Zach Nunn (IA-03), and Randy Feenstra (IA-04) each can claim to have cast the deciding vote to cut taxes. They did it without waiting for a nonpartisan analysis of the costs and impacts for their constituents.

This vote will likely become a central theme for Democratic candidates in Iowa’s 2026 Congressional campaigns—and the governor’s race, if Feenstra becomes the GOP nominee. Within hours, Congressional challengers Travis Terrell (IA-01), Sarah Trone Garriott (IA-03), and Jennifer Konfrst (IA-03) blasted the vote in social media posts and fundraising emails. A video of Miller-Meeks running away from Social Security Works executive director Alex Lawson as he presses her about Medicaid cuts has gone viral on several social media platforms and will surely be seen in television commercials.

Tens of thousands of Iowans will lose their health insurance, food assistance, or both if the “big, beautiful bill” becomes law. Meanwhile, the package would raise the debt ceiling by $4 trillion and add at least $2.3 trillion to the deficit (or perhaps $3.2 trillion) over the next ten years.

Rick Morain is the former publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, for which he writes a regular column.

Have you ever heard someone refer to an “emolument” in a context other than the U.S. Constitution? Probably not. The word is somewhat archaic, and rarely appears other than as a reference to a gift provided to a public official, especially the president. It came into its own during President Donald Trump’s first term, when Democrats accused him of violating the Constitution by accepting gifts from foreign powers, particularly in the form of paying high prices to stay in a Trump hotel.

Now the same president is once again front and center in an emolument discussion. In this case it’s a luxury plane worth hundreds of millions of dollars, which the U.S. Air Force accepted on May 21 as a gift from the Emirate of Qatar.

Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.

Within a few hours on May 4, the news media offered two provocative perspectives on President Donald Trump, one from The New York Times the other from NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Subscribers to the New York Times could consider the paper’s 24 pages of text and photos containing critiques of Trump and his cabinet. A bit later, they and the rest of us could view the second perspective on TV.

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He can be reached at BruceLear2419@gmail.com 

In grade school, there’s always one kid who needs to be first. He cuts the line for lunch, with a hard shove. In class, even if he doesn’t have a clue about the answer, his hand shoots up first. At recess, if he’s not picked first, the only game played is All Star wrestling.

He owns the big box of crayons, the one with the sharpener, and he guards it. He doesn’t share. If your green crayon is a nub, and you ask to borrow one of his four, his answer is always, “They’re mine.” His sharpener isn’t communal.

The grown-up version cuts you off with a high-speed veer into another lane avoiding a construction zone. He steals the last parking spot while you’re inches from pulling in. He flashes a smirk.

What happens when the adult version isn’t cutting you off in a construction zone, or stealing a parking place, but elected to lead the most powerful country in the world?

Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes openness and transparency in Iowa’s state and local governments. He can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com.

You may be experiencing whiplash this spring just trying to track the Iowa legislature’s zigzag movements. It comes from what some might charitably call a lack of consistency on a key theme.

A set of bills from the Republican majority at the capitol illustrates this inconsistency.

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He can be reached at BruceLear2419@gmail.com 

Author’s note: This is the long play version of a speech I gave during the May Day Rally in Sioux City, sponsored by the “Siouxland Good Trouble Makers.” It rained during my speech, so I did an abbreviated version. Here is the full text. An estimated 150 people attended this rally.

This crowd gets my blood pumping! On this May Day, let’s remember the International Worker slogan of 1905: “An injury to one is an injury to all.” It was true then. It’s true now. 

If one person is denied due process, equal justice is on life support. When the richest man in the world waves around a chain saw gutting essential programs, run by essential workers, and when a president imposes reckless tariffs, America bleeds. 

Rallies like this one are the tourniquet that stops the bleeding. Today, our collective voices speak truth to power. This isn’t about political red or blue. It’s about right and wrong. 

Two Iowa jurists are among more than 150 former state and federal judges who wrote to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi this week “to condemn the Trump Administration’s attacks on the judiciary,” including the April 25 arrest of Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan.

Former U.S. District Court Judge Mark W. Bennett served in the Northern District of Iowa from 1994 to 2019, when he retired. Former Iowa Supreme Court Chief Justice Marsha Ternus served on Iowa’s highest court from 1993 through 2010, the last four years as chief justice. She left the bench after Iowa voters did not retain her and two other justices in the aftermath of the court’s unanimous Varnum v Brien ruling on marriage equality.

Rick Morain is the former publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, for which he writes a regular column.

It usually takes a while for specific changes by the federal government to work their way down to the local level. But after about 100 days of President Donald Trump’s second term, executive orders have begun to directly tighten the screws in Greene County.

Three examples:

President Donald Trump’s first 100 days back in the White House have brought the U.S. an economy weakened by tariffs, a depreciating dollar, and the worst stock market performance during a new presidency since 1974. Trump now has historically low approval ratings, even on his handling of the economy—which had long been his strongest public opinion metric. Economists and market analysts increasingly see a recession likely to come this year, and consumer confidence just dropped to its lowest level since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But to hear U.S. Representative Ashley Hinson tell the story, the country has experienced “100 days of WINNING under President Trump!” The Republican from Iowa’s second Congressional district told reporters on May 2 that the president is “ushering in the new era, the golden age for our economy.”

Whether she’s speaking to a national television audience, her social media followers, the press, or a hostile town hall crowd, Hinson is working hard to demonstrate her loyalty to Trump.

Her tight embrace of a polarizing president could hurt her with swing voters in 2026 but may be essential for her 2028 ambitions.

Jesse Parker is a concerned Iowan and military veteran from Dallas County.

After Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in August 2021, nearly 900 Afghan refugees immigrated to Iowa.  Some of them recently received notices from the federal Department of Homeland Security, instructing them to self-deport out of the United States.

According to the director of Afghan Partners in Iowa, these people are experiencing tremendous fear given the wording of these emails:

“It is time for you to leave the United States […] Do not attempt to remain in the United States — The federal government will find you.”

“It’s not about left/right, Democrat/Republicans, it’s about doing the right thing,” Kevin Techau told me on April 17, the day he launched his campaign for Congress in Iowa’s second district. “I think my record supports that that’s been the direction of my career.”

IA-02 wasn’t on either party’s target list in 2024. But Techau has potential to mount a serious challenge to three-term U.S. Representative Ashley Hinson.

This analysis assumes Hinson will run for re-election to the U.S. House. Although she has been mentioned as a possible candidate for governor, I doubt she would roll the dice on a statewide primary, where she would probably compete against a Republican with closer ties to President Donald Trump.

That said, if Hinson did seek another office in 2026, Techau’s prospects would improve dramatically. With rare exceptions, it’s easier for the party out of power to win an open seat than to defeat an incumbent. Hinson outperformed the top of the Republican ticket in 2024 and goes into this cycle with high name ID and more than $2.2 million in the bank, whereas a new GOP candidate would be starting from scratch.

U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley has avoided public criticism of President Donald Trump’s cabinet members. But in an unscripted moment this week, he questioned why Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had texted family members about a planned military operation.

The New York Times reported on April 20 that Hegseth “shared detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15 in a private Signal group chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer.” Among other things, the defense secretary texted “the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets targeting the Houthis.”

Grassley’s office didn’t release any statement about the new controversy, nor did the senator mention it on his social media feeds. But Raccoon Valley Radio news director Coltrane Carlson raised the topic during a Q&A session published on April 25 and shared in the senator’s weekly newsletter. You can listen to the relevant segment here, which begins at the 4:23 mark of the full recording.

Nicholas Cocozzelli is an economic analyst and founder of the Inequality Focus Substack newsletter, where this piece originally appeared.

John Deere, a major employer for Iowans, has faced severe criticism for its recent series of layoffs in the Hawkeye State. The agricultural equipment company announced in February it would be laying off 119 workers at its plant in Ankeny, Iowa. The Ankeny plant employs roughly 1,500 workers total. Over the past year, Deere has made roughly 2,000 job cuts at its plants across the state.

Deere has blamed a struggling farm economy for these cuts, but has been criticized as seeking a cheaper labor market in Mexico. Last year, when the company announced layoffs in Dubuque, Deere confirmed that it was “…shifting some production from its Dubuque Works facility in Iowa to a new facility it is building in Ramos, Mexico.”

According to Industrial Equipment News, production of mid-frame skid steer loaders and compact track loaders will be relocated from the Dubuque facility to Ramos. The Des Moines Register also noted that Deere faced scrutiny for outsourcing some lines of production from other plants across Iowa, specifically in Waterloo and Ottumwa, to Mexico.

“The working class has been working their ass off every day to survive and make ends meet for their families,” Nathan Sage told me this week. Making working people’s lives better is the driving force of his U.S. Senate campaign.

At least four Democrats are thinking seriously about running against two-term Republican incumbent Joni Ernst. Sage was the first to make it official, on April 16.

Sage discussed his background, beliefs, and reasons for running in an interview with Bleeding Heartland the day before his campaign launch. The full video of our exchange is at the end of this post.

Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes openness and transparency in Iowa’s state and local governments. He can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com.

A constitutional showdown taking shape in southern Iowa’s Decatur County could put taxpayers on the hook financially to defend the county’s efforts to silence a critic of public officials there.

The Institute for Justice, a national nonprofit law firm, wrote to Decatur County Attorney Alan Wilson last week expressing its concerns about Wilson’s recent threat to Rita Audlehelm that she could be sued for defamation for her comments in a letter to the editor published in the Leon Journal-Reporter.

Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.

Three faiths have major religious observances around this time of year.

The oldest one is the Jewish Passover (Pesach) which began on April 12 and ends at nightfall Sunday, April 20.

That Sunday is of course Easter Sunday, marking the end of the Christians’ Holy Week in celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. 

The Islamic Ramadan, the ninth month in the Islamic calendar, began at sundown on February 28 and ended at sundown March 29. For practicing Muslims, Ramadan is a month for fasting, prayer, giving, and self-evaluation.

Although President Donald Trump and his supporters have proclaimed that God saved him from assassination to “Make America Great Again,” Trump has little in common with the core principles of those three faiths. On the contrary: we find unending contradictions between his behavior and religious values.

Jason Benell lives in Des Moines with his wife and two children. He is a combat veteran, former city council candidate, and president of Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers. A version of this essay first appeared on his Substack newsletter, The Odd Man Out.

Elon Musk isn’t the problem. Donald Trump isn’t the problem. The problem is Republicanism and our broken political system.

Across the country and here in Iowa there have been protests targeting Elon Musk and the company he owns, Tesla. Protesters point out—rightfully, in my view—that Musk echoes fascist tendencies from the 20^th century with his glorification of Nazi imagery, sympathetic speeches to neo-Nazi groups both domestically and abroad, and his gleeful charge into dismantling the federal government. People have written articles and giving interviews exclaiming how much a problem Musk is for the United States. 

The argument goes something like this: “Elon wasn’t elected, yet he wields tremendous power to dismantle the federal government, and we do not like an unelected billionaire doing all of this damage!”

Yeah, that is true. Americans didn’t elect Musk, and one person shouldn’t have that much power to destroy the state. By all accounts, he seems to be a terrible human being who craves attention and respect while treating others poorly and abusively. Turning away from that type of person is morally good.

Rick Morain is the former publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, for which he writes a regular column.

Rarely, if ever, have Iowa’s members of Congress found themselves situated to alter the course of America’s economy. But right now they can, and one of the six in the delegation has already taken a first step to do so.

Last week, President Donald Trump imposed harsh tariffs on every nation in the world that trades with us. He did so by fiat, something he claims empowerment to do without so much as even consulting Congress. The Republican majorities of 53-47 in the Senate and 220-213 in the House have remained almost unanimously acquiescent.

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign has a staffer on the ground again in Iowa. No, the senator from Vermont isn’t getting a head start on the 2028 caucuses.

In an April 3 telephone interview, Evan Burger described his focus and early work as Iowa organizer for Friends of Bernie Sanders.

Dan Piller was a business reporter for more than four decades, working for the Des Moines Register and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He covered the oil and gas industry while in Texas and was the Register’s agriculture reporter before his retirement in 2013. He lives in Ankeny.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins’ March 31 visit to Iowa had the appearance and vibe of a high-ranking officer sent to the front line to boost the troops’ morale before the next assault.

Rollins visited all the strategic strongholds of Iowa agriculture: an ethanol plant, a hog farm, a feed processing operation, and a suitably big (Republican-leaning) farm operation just west of Des Moines, handing out plenty of morale-raising attaboys to the soldiers in the trenches.

But even as Rollins addressed the “Ag Leaders Dinner” in Ankeny—assembling some 500 people and Iowa’s agricultural royalty such as Governor Kim Reynolds, U.S. Senator Joni Ernst, and Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig—Iowa’s economic earth was beginning to shake.

Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes openness and transparency in Iowa’s state and local governments. He can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com.

Growing up in the 1950s, Evans family vacations seem typical by rural Midwest standards: car trips to the Ozarks, the Black Hills, Nauvoo and New Salem in Illinois, or St. Louis for a Cardinals baseball game.

But one memorable summer trip, around 1960, occurred when we motored north through Minnesota to Canada, the only foreign country my parents ever visited and a place more exotic than the Wisconsin Dells. 

Exotic? Absolutely. This trip required us to stop at the border and clear a Canadian customs check.